Buzzard

Erica Baum

2009 · Inkjet print · Photographs

Baum uses books and language as objects to be manipulated and transformed through photography. In Buzzard two disparate sections of text are brought into a chance alignment that can be read in multiple directions. They also fit into the modernist tradition of concrete poetry (examples include Stephane Mallarmé's A Throw of the Dice and the “cut-up” technique of William Burroughs and Bryon Gysin), with the play of verbal and visual signs becoming the raw material of the work of art that is a carefully calibrated mix of chance and intention. The act of scavenging that the title suggests is also purposefully ambiguous, referring not only to the artist's picking over of a dying world but also to the rapacious way in which a rapidly advancing digital culture colonizes how we process information and perceive reality.

Artist

Erica Baum

Date

2009

Medium

Inkjet print

Department

Photographs

Credit line

Purchase, Marian and James H. Cohen Gift, in memory of their son, Michael Harrison Cohen, 2012