Bernd and Hiller Becher, or Borges, the attempts an archive expand to questions of what use? What use is a photo of every wasserturm. Every image of the world. There is too much water in ivory towers. Eventually their flood replaces the land, light houses occluding everything else, the territory replaced with its map scaled to consequence, beamed directly to your hand, interest. There is darkness elsewhere, dragons. We're not even sure there's art anymore, only documentation covering the land, creating the land. Where do you stand in it? Where we're going we don't need roads, or the 90s. There's a Before CAD and an After Daily. We used to like art until it became its image. But it's a necessary project, a good one possibly.
I walked into Micheal E. Smith's show at Clifton Benevento, ten years ago exactly, where Mr. Clifton himself greeted me and gave me a tour. It ended with him grabbing the car console and spinning out the whole world around us. Him still smiling.