St Louis, MO
3/21/15 3:56 PM
“All the beds I have never slept in, Artstor Vol. 1” is a hefty compendium by Lauren Cardenas, apparently produced by typing search terms like “bed” into the art historical database. (Some images do not seem to fit a suitable search term, suggesting that Cardenas is attempting the impossible task of combing its hundreds of thousands of images manually.) Each of the book’s 600-plus pages is tagged with one of five colored sticky notes, stirring the viewer to propose categories for them. Here are mine: idealization (yellow), death (purple), love (orange), reality (pink) and emptiness (blue). Identifications decided, thence appear artworks that challenge them, belonging to more than one category at once. A lovely Berthe Morisot painting of a young woman getting out of bed is flagged yellow but must also be pink, and maybe orange. A wondrous Persian miniature of a mother nursing her son is flagged pink but seems to be orange and yellow, too. These and other works by Cardenas evince many concerns, but common among them is the question of storage and access, less of objects than of the precious intangibles they contain.
—Lori Waxman