"One might posit that these ‘blank’ pages (I prefer the word ‘blank’ to ‘empty’ to describe them) have a relationship to Heideggerian ‘danger’ – the risk that we might be unwilling to acknowledge that blankness is a claim made on us. Or perhaps it is more akin to what Cavell describes as Keaton’s species of comedy that accepts human limitations, thus ‘denying neither the abyss that at any time might open before our plans, nor the possibility, despite that open possibility, of living with good if resigned spirits, and with eternal hope’. One does not know when or where that open possibility might present itself since it is part of the patterning of life – its ‘layout’ so to speak. Thus that opening is not something we fall into but rather that we confront in the ordinary task of turning the pages of Ruscha’s books. If there is any ‘danger’ here it is not one of ‘plunging’ down to the levelling-off of the ‘fallen’ everyday and mere indifference, but rather that we might want to rise above this ordinary condition, and thus fail to acknowledge that the everyday world – blanks and all – is our world."
— Vinegar, Aron. “Ed Ruscha, Heidegger, and Deadpan Photography.” Art History 32.5 (2009): 866-7.
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