editions and publications

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  fig. 1 Poster for the complete exhibition
  
  In January 1975, while visiting Luang-Prabang, in Laos, de vries published, and put up at various points in the town, a poster which advertised the whole of the town as an exhibition of itself: exposition complète de luang-prabang. As the poster indicated, this was an example of 'poésie actuelle' - 'actual poetry': the town constituted, or was in the continuous act of constituting itself, as a work of art it was, like everything else, in the condition of poiesis, a perpetual becoming. The poster declared that this exposition comprehended all the aspects of the townscape and all the objects, living and inanimate, of the region, and that it was open for all, every day for all time.
• It was, of course, 'a part of reality' as a document of itself, something to be seen and walked through, experienced in all its aspects, nothing excluded. The exhibition of Luang-Prabang treated the entire town, in a manner of speaking, as a 'readymade', a found object whose renomination as an 'exhibition' redirected and changed the intensity of attention paid to it by taking it out of the world of politico-geographical administration and placing it within the magical domain of art.
• In 1976 de vries created the catalogue incomplet[e] d'exposition complète de luang-prabang: a random sample of my visual chances, 18.1.1975. This contains a copy of the poster with thirty-five black-and-white photographs taken on the day in question, each of a view, selected at random, of something, somewhere in the town. The sample of the visual chances is random in that the selection is taken from an infinite number of possible photographic opportunities, each itself related to a similarly infinite number of visual opportunities, the 'visual chances' of the title. Hence the necessarily incomplete nature of the catalogue, which is in any case something quite different from a 'documentation' in the manner of those orthodox conceptual art presentations that offer a textual and photographic record, or the poignant archaeological relics, of an art action or an event. The Luang-Prabang catalogue, it might be said, replicates (or enacts, or imitates) the relation of the experiencing subject to the inexhaustible, unending source of his experience: the world itself. As an art work, the catalogue is itself also a demonstration of the ancillary relation of art to the primary reality - the poésie actuelle - of nature and its objects (Luang-Prabang being here properly regarded as a part of nature).
• The exposition of Luang-Prabang was an elaborated version of a particular type of work that de vries had begun to make at least two years earlier. This was the use of photography to document the randomness of a great deal of the subjective experience of seeing. The act of seeing - if that is an appropriate phrase for something that happens to us as much as something we do - is ineluctably private: no one else can see through our eyes. Even a shared sighting, of an object or an event looked at simultaneously with someone close by, is actually made up of two quite distinct views, and every such individual view is informed and shaped by a unique personal history of seeing and looking. 'The eye is part of the mind' (as Leo Steinberg expressed it), and 'thus nature presents every ... person with a unique and unrepeated facet of appearance. And the Ineluctable Modality of the Visible ... is a myth that evaporates between any two works of representation.' We make the world ours as we move through if busily editing out much that presents itself to the potential of seeing.
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