For this week’s fiction piece, “Escape from Spiderhead,” by George Saunders, we published a colorful
For this week’s fiction piece, “Escape from Spiderhead,” by George Saunders, we published a colorful grid of images by Bill Armstrong, from his series “I Modi.” Armstrong told me that his process involves “appropriating images, subjecting them to a series of manipulations—photocopying, cutting, painting—and then photographing them extremely out of focus.” For this series, he explained, his source was a collection of obscure Renaissance erotica: In the 1520s, Pietro Aretino, a Renaissance poet, satirist, and friend of Titian, published the “Sonetti Lussuriosi,” a book of sixteen explicit poems accompanied by erotic engravings by Marcantonio Raimondi. Raimondi’s engravings, in turn, had been taken from a series of drawings by Guilio Romano called “I Modi” (“The Positions” or “The Postures.”) Aretino’s book was banned by Pope Clement VII and Raimondi was imprisoned. All copies of the book were said to have been destroyed, and little has survived save a few fragments in the British Museum. However, as might be expected, over time, many myths, stories, and alleged copies of “I Modi” have surfaced. The most famous and widely circulated, perhaps, is a 19th century edition produced by Jean Waldeck, a French engraver and explorer, whose fabulous story was that he had found it in a Mexican convent. Here’s a slide show of the individual images in Armstrong’s “I Modi.” -- source link
#photo booth#george saunders#bill armstrong