"In all eras there have been artists who have aspired to encyclopedic
summation of the world, to find a form to accommodate the mess," as
Samuel Beckett once put it. The Renaissance marked the juncture at
which it became impossible for any one person to have read every book
in existence (just as books became widely available for the first
time, ironically); today it would be a feat even to count the number
of toothpastes in your average grocery store. Andreas Gursky's
photographs are merciless in their vertiginous will to make every
last tube of toothpaste count, to compel every constituent into
legibility. His optical fanaticism is not an effect of specific
consumerist critique so much as a desire to set before the eye what
was deemed too much for the mind, pressing the extreme surfeit of the
world's contents against its limits. For this volume, Gursky has
chosen more than 150 works from his fund of photographs, reaching
back to his student days at the Folkwang Hochschule Essen and his
studies with Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf.
The earliest exposures here include the Desk Attendants series and
other unpublished photographs, and the most recent images were
conceived especially for the book. Every single exposure in Gursky's
encyclopedic morphology is a vital piece in the puzzle, which, over
the course of his 28-year career, has amounted to an encyclopedia of
the unencompassable.
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