Condition Report

Abstract

This introductory essay approaches the problem of form as a problem of value and, more precisely, of the aesthetics of valuation. Building on the scene of exchange outlined by Denise Ferreira da Silva's “modern ethical scene of value,” the essay approaches Hannah Palmer's installation Ghost Pools, which marks the location of two segregated pools in East Point, Georgia, reinterred in the early 1980s, by refusing to compare or equate them, and attending instead to their repressed informalities. Avoiding the equation of value that sustains most formalist readings, this essay instead “reads for informality.”