Lies, crimes, and stereotypes…pulp is the kingdom of the obvious and exaggerated, the sensational and the predictable, peopled by detectives, werewolves, and robot girls.
In pulp loves comes in two flavors; saccharine sweet and raunchy porn. Pulp means paper; or rather, the mulch from which paper is made. And it is this relationship to the physical that is the key to pulp, as genre and as critique. Pulp can be a painting, but not art. A book, but not literature. A movie…but not cinema. But then why are we bothering with this shit? Why look at, read, or watch pulp at all? Or at least, why admit it? Horror films, sex exploiters, and monster movies…are usually avoided by heavyweight histories.
Like crates of oranges with their brightly colored labels, these films are always instantly identifiable. The allusion to oranges is oddly appropriate. Pulp is everything that gets strained out to make juice. But where pulp ends and juice begins is completely a matter of taste…taste, and the width of your straw.
The suckers with the widest straws are artists. The artist can exploit the rawness of even the most elevated cultural material. Like archivists, they make meaning by selection; like B-movie moguls, they embrace appropriation; and like librarians, they manipulate content through context. In her project Untitled Polaroids , Haris Epaminonda turns her camera on her private library, photographing photographs from the pages of books; the result is a series of images that reads like a gauzy travelogue of a trip to a vintage encyclopedia.
A similar journey is evident in the works of our own Babak Radboy, whose textual still lives are scattered throughout this issue—spoils of his recent excavation of Beirut bookstores, informed by his complete ignorance of Arabic and a keene eye for conspiracy. And all of it printed on the thinnest, cheaper paper we could find. This fall, Okwui Enwezor offers his own rethinking of the biennial format with a three-part exhibition.
