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Lot Essay
“Danh Vo’s cardboard shipping boxes start in the recycling piles, after a product has completed its economic arc. Collected and flattened, they are sent to Thailand where gold leaf is applied... They return reborn and revalued by their surface rather than their contents. The gold is a visa signaling a new mobility, and an empty container previously filled with Evian or Budweiser, for instance, gets recharged.” (J. Simon, quoted in Danh Vo: Go Mo Ni Ma Da, exh. cat., Musée d’Art modern de la Ville de Paris, Paris, 2013, p. 82)
This work is part of a 25 part series, based off of Nathaniel Bowditch’s alphabet, published in 1802 in The American Practical Navigator, which excludes the letter “J” in its mapping of the world’s time zones by longitude. Each letter spans a portion of the world radiating from 0 degrees, the prime meridian (Z) east until the international date line at 180 degrees (M), then continued to mark the portions west of the 0 prime meridian from N onwards. Meaning, the alphabet doesn’t go around the globe in normal succession but marks the origin of east and west at 0 degrees. Therefore “U”, for example, is counted as 120 degrees west of the prime meridian (Z), four segments (V, W, X, Y) from the international date line (M) rather than four segments from the prime meridian. “J” was chosen as the excluded letter of the Latin alphabet as it was deemed to be the only letter that most cultures cannot pronounce. Thus, this series is comprised of 25 letters, each marking both an intercontinental section of the globe as well as a time to which all inclusive countries theoretically are set.
This work is part of a 25 part series, based off of Nathaniel Bowditch’s alphabet, published in 1802 in The American Practical Navigator, which excludes the letter “J” in its mapping of the world’s time zones by longitude. Each letter spans a portion of the world radiating from 0 degrees, the prime meridian (Z) east until the international date line at 180 degrees (M), then continued to mark the portions west of the 0 prime meridian from N onwards. Meaning, the alphabet doesn’t go around the globe in normal succession but marks the origin of east and west at 0 degrees. Therefore “U”, for example, is counted as 120 degrees west of the prime meridian (Z), four segments (V, W, X, Y) from the international date line (M) rather than four segments from the prime meridian. “J” was chosen as the excluded letter of the Latin alphabet as it was deemed to be the only letter that most cultures cannot pronounce. Thus, this series is comprised of 25 letters, each marking both an intercontinental section of the globe as well as a time to which all inclusive countries theoretically are set.