Loren Munk


An Attempted Documentation of Williamsburg 1981-2008

2008-2011
Oil on linen
60 x 72 inches
http://www.lorenmunk.com
The James Kalm Report


< Artists + Writers


Loren Munk born 1951, lives and works in New York

“There are interesting parallels between Munk’s project and the work of the French historians associated with the journal Annales. Like Fernand Braudel or Lucien Febvre, Munk doesn’t wish to reduce the past into a narrative of great events but, instead, taking geography as an organizing principle, he wants to build up a fuller sense of history by registering the lives of those who may have been left out of official chronicles but whose presence nonetheless contributed to the culture of their moment. Munk’s approach also has affinities with the methods of the innovative literary scholar Franco Moretti, who has found new ways of understanding the history of the novel through the use of maps and statistics. By mapping the locations of characters in novels by Jane Austen or Balzac, Moretti has discovered hitherto unnoticed patterns that have much to tell us about society of the time and about how novels work. Another side of Moretti’s research has to do with tracking the distribution of books, with equally interesting results. Moretti studies, as he puts it, ‘space in literature’ and ‘literature in space.’  Something similar might be said about Munk, who is concerned with ‘space in art’ (structuring his paintings around cartography) and with ‘art/artists in space’ (tracking down the locations where art has been made and exhibited). It is, I think, a mark of his achievement that even for viewers who know well the streets he charts, and maybe even remember some of the long-shuttered galleries he memorializes, the experience of looking at one of Loren Munk’s painting is like a venture into unknown territory: you feel lost in a city, a life, full of infinite possibilities. That’s also something that painting can do, sometimes.”

– Raphael Rubinstein, “Reconnoitering: the Cartography of an Art Enthusiast,” Flecker Gallery, 2015