Dates: Saturday, 20 November–Wednesday, 15 December 2010
Location: AA Gallery, Architectural Association School of Architecture, 36 Bedford Square, London (map here)
FREE. No RSVP necessary.
Gallery hours: Monday to Friday, 10 am–7 pm; Saturday, 10 am–5 pm
Private view: Friday, November 19, 6:30 pm
Organized by Cabinet
A cut and a slice is there any question when a cut and a slice are just the same.
A cut and a slice has no particular exchange it has such a strange exception to all that which is different.
A cut and only slice, only a cut and only a slice, the remains of a taste may remain and tasting is accurate.
A cut and an occasion, a slice and a substitute a single hurry and a circumstance that shows that, all this is so reasonable when every thing is clear.
—Gertrude Stein, What Happened: A Play (1922)
Seeing is a matter of surfaces. It’s for this reason that both vision and representation are continually haunted by the problem of insides and outsides—the relationship between the external and what lies within. A merely perceptual matter? If only. It has crept on us—the ocular paradigm of post-Cartesian metaphysics gradually sublimed this pervasive visual anxiety, creating in the process our basic metaphors for critical inquiry itself: “superficial” propositions, “trenchant” analysis, the joys of insight.
With these matters in mind (and a whetted blade in hand), the editors of Cabinet magazine have organized an exhibition on “The Slice,” that clean incision that forever links the sharp knife to the keen eye. Moving across historical moments and disparate fields, this exhibition examines the peculiar traditions that link visibility to the swift saw. From the cutaway view to the geometry of projection, from the microtome to the CAT-Scan, from the surgeon’s scalpel to the sadist’s guillotine, the slice can reveal a secret order, spill lurid innards, and open new views.
Download a PDF of the catalogue for this exhibition here
See press on “The Slice: Cutting to See” in Architecture Today’s blog, BMJ, and the Independent.
