CCS BARD

The sky should be perfectly blue, a block of color really, to emphasize how ideal the location is. There should be no unseemly distractions; if any are present in the picture they should be removed. The point is to flatter the local landscape, architecture, and points of interest. These are the kinds of postcards that will sell.

With this in mind, my task at hand appears to be: look at a box, take stuff out of a box, put it back into another box. The essential translation from screen to screen to screen–makes me wonder who decided that image containers would be parallelogrammatic (deep down I know the answer to this, but its not as interesting as I’d like it to be). There is an act of translation taking place though, and what motivates it is the seemingly banal/benign appearance of the postcard.

Fischer’s biographical ‘facts’ fuel these pictures, his mercurial temperament and eccentric relationship to the reality of social constructs. The decisions that befell him may one day reveal a great logic, the same logic that shamans of indigenous cultures have in their relationship to the Earth. It is a logic that passionately defies ordinary knowledge, by its own momentum in the search for Truth. Through this logic, contact with the invisible world of Truth is as important as any ‘real world’ reward or material gain. It is the logic of disciplined poets and those who are reasonable enough to demand the impossible.

• Pete Deevakul

Using images culled from various specific google image searches and an interest in the legend and persona of Bobby Fischer, Pete Deevakul constructs often surreal and absurd images of endless possibility.

Initially, Deevakul would find actual physical locations to shoot, taking with him a mannequin resembling Fischer and setting up scenes of him playing chess. Fischer desired to play total silence, to allow for complete concentration, and this led Deevakul to search out pictures of anechoic chambers. From there he began trying other search terms such as “vintage color advertising”, “edge of the world”, “vortex”, and “TWA terminal”, among others; constructing odd narratives from free associations.

Deevakul prints the images the size of drug store prints or picture postcards, both becoming increasingly obsolete, as people turn to digital media to document their lives and share their experiences. He is in a sense reversing this movement, taking images from the Internet and using them to create tangible, unique objects. These objects, unlike the images on the Internet, are vulnerable to the destruction of Deevakul’s potential “cataclysmic disaster”. Each picture presents a different potential landscape for a lone Fischer to play, a glacier, a modernist interior, the edge of a cliff; all of them generated from specific terms plugged into a google image search.

THE BULLETIN BOARD
The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College is the third venue to host Matthew Higgs’s (Curator and Director of White Columns) bulletin board project. CCS and Higgs collaborated to begin a bulletin board program at Bard in the fall of 2007 with the understanding that the graduate students at CCS would curate it. The bulletin board is an enclosed glass case divided into three panes by aluminum bars. As of January 26, it has migrated from outside of the CCS Library to its new location in the Bertelsmann Campus Center, adjacent to the billiard tables.