Vince Aletti: The Drawer
Format:Paperback
Publisher:MACK
Published:5th Oct '22
Currently unavailable, our supplier has not provided us a restock date
American critic and curator Vince Aletti has been collecting photographs printed on the pages of magazines and books since the 1970s. For the very first time the hundreds of tearsheets, newspaper clippings, gallery announcements, and other ephemera stacked in a drawer of an antique flat file in his East Village apartment have been documented in the new book The Drawer. The seventy-five multi-layered compositions created by Aletti are a celebration of the beauty of photography and the printed page, as well as testimony of the author's unique ability to voice the complexity and variety of desire, personal and collective histories, and the power of art to reflect and shape who we are.
The Drawer is a lavish affair that pays homage to the magnificent expanse of broadsheets in their prime. Like buried treasure, the images from Aletti's collection are priceless gems that spark memories of a beautiful, sexy, glamorous past when printed matter ruled the planet.--Sara Rosen "Blind"
The Drawer gives a vivid feel for these images as physical, printed matter. It makes you want to sift and dig.--Dan Fox "Frieze"
Together, these images form a history of homoeroticism. Good enough to lock away, The Drawer is even more irresistible to open.--Evan Moffitt "Aperture"
Aletti's assemblage captures a portrait of the man himself. It's a window into his tastes and passions, and a look at what moves him.--William Van Meter "Artnet"
Flexing a kaleidoscope of genres, eras and subjects, all juxtaposed and overlapped with rhythmic intuition, The Drawer's pages offer up some wonderful associative games for both the eyes and mind. Photobooth strips next to pages from 50s movie magazines; erotic pin-ups next to Antonioni film stills. However, this is no cabinet of curiosities, but rather, as Vince calls it, a "diary", giving voice to a variety of histories, memories and desires.--Alex Merola "i-D"
The Drawer reads like an astounding catalogue of male beauty. One in which presentations of masculinity are experienced through a homosocial gaze.--Millen Brown-Ewens "Dazed"
Warburgian juxtapositions of high and low, iconic and unknown. Mapped out over the course of a single afternoon, the book is a meditation on how images shape desire, a remedy to the cold calculations of the algorithm, and the wordless memoir of a great and grateful eye.--Zack Hatfield "Artforum"
ISBN: 9781916041271
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
144 pages