Tombe //Aaron Levy Ed. 50 (handmade) 29 pp., 9 color reproductions Velour paper cover, hardware bindings. Photographs by Aaron Levy; Interview with Kristen Gallagher. Here for an excerpt.	"Viewing the caesura from its side, refusing the play the game that monuments play, Aaron Levy has brilliantly produced in _Tombe_ a guide to remembering that will not stylize historical tragedy. The pictures of a ruin - familiar yet unclear - are enacting a process of perceptual dementia; at a certain point a central room, especially when printed in color and taking on a rosy-yellow Sabbath eve glow, looks ever so much like a synagogue. (A fuzzy analogical mneumonic: think Hungary 1944 projected onto any contemporary eastern American city.) The safe havens among spaces are gashed; closing them does not entail clarity, the clairfying act of language. One gets the sense, as Levy puts it in his conversation with Kristen Gallagher, "there could be something comforting to this, but the process is all too slow." Like an Ashberyian letter that never arrives although we know it is coming, and (notwithstanding Levy's ambivalence about modernism) like Williams's rose in the act of becoming obsolete, _Tombe_ explores the limits to which we can fill gaps we know will widen." - Al Filreis, Fri, May 4, 2001 "Until conceptualized, an art practice does not exist in time (to paraphrase Aaron Levy, in _Tombe_). This assertion speaks -- literally, it will turn out -- to a limit Levy locates in the artistic medium (photography, in this case). The limit in question is variously associated with tradition, form, history, memory, the subject. The concerted imperative of the artist and his community is to breach, by realizing, such a limit. Thus in _Tombe_, conversation breaches -- even substitutes for -- photographic image. In the relations and interstices between logos and image, the real erupts as a command: tombe (fall)! We fall, at once into the real, seduced, and away, repelled. "Art" and "life" fail us, yet in doing so, conceptualize their limit. It is here. Tombe." - Louis Cabri, Fri, May 4, 2001 "You open the book and the book opens you. You will not close it without a fall: something has fallen, or is still falling from you, from your mind, from your eyes. It could be a brick, it could be a ladder, it could be a letter. Since it is impossible to translate, let us write with holes and stones. But tombe is a verb, an imperative doubling as a singular noun. Following Aaron Levy's lead, let us free fall into the paradoxical grammar of death and reach into the gaps and crevices of the allegorical landscape it deploys. These singularly performative fault lines provide the visual equivalent of Antonin Artaud's inner "focal collapse", an "essential and fugitive erosion in thought" (letter to Jacques Rivière, January 29, 1924), the unthinkable dark room of a thought from which we are trying to awake." - Jean-Michel Rabate, Fri, May 8, 2001 To download this eBook, visit the E-Library. Required: free adobe acrobat reader.