Julião Sarmento - Some Art Sites of Recent Historical Interest in America 2013-2018 - MER. Books 2019

Some Art Sites of Recent Historical Interest in America 2013-2018 opens with a photograph of a modern-day Gap storefront. Underneath three lines of text read, “J.L. Mott Iron Works, 118 5th Avenue, New York, New York, Where Marcel Duchamp bought the ‘Fountain’ in 1917.”

Composed of thirty-two glossy pages of image and text, Some Art Sites presents the viewer with a photographic inventory of the former locations of notable cultural production and exhibition. Flipping through the pages, the viewer is confronted with an all-too-familiar urban landscape of fashion retailers, fast-food chains, condos, and parking lots with the disquieting impression of witnessing an obituary catalogue to the twentieth-century American avant-garde. Through wry juxtaposition of image and text, artist Julião Sarmento turns a critical eye on the architecture of consumerism and the changing landscape of the American cultural metropolis via the cartographic lens of modern art history.

68p - EN - 28x22cm - softcover - mint condition