I have been taking my own summer break from new research, and in the meantime I have been working on compiling my long term work on the Newtown Creek into book form. It has been a really helpful process that has forced me to consider the different ways to organize and edit the work- and to see how drastically editing choices can change the viewers experience and understanding to the images and place. Putting the work into book form has also really allowed me to include different kinds of imagery- rather than a small edit where things “look” a certain way, I am able to add layers of richness with these different images.
I have entered my collection, Newtown, into Blurb’s annual Photography Book now competition. You can see the book digitally here, and support me by voting for my book!
And for those interested, there is another recent article in the Times about the Newtown Creek, which you can read here. There is a pretty cool aerial image showing the mouth of the Creek and East river, as well as part of the Newtown Creek Nature Walk.
I have been toying with the idea of revisiting the Newtown Creek project since moving back to New York last winter. I made work in the area for some time, but never fully felt as though I completed the project- a result of time and access. I have been sharing this work with a lot of people, and I have received some really helpful feedback which has inspired me to finally flesh out this series of photographs.
I began yesterday with a bus tour sponsored by the Newtown Creek Alliance and Working Harbor committee. The tour focused on places to gain access along the creek, as well as providing the group with a pretty great supplemental history lesson about the communities in Brooklyn and Queens surrounding the waterway. I really did not know what to expect, or what I was looking for. The last time I spent any amount of time on the creek was over a year ago; since then the Newtown Creek has been proposed as a Superfund site (I am not totally clear yet whether this has been fully approved) resulting in more awareness of the area. Additionally I thought that many of the EPA and city projects (Newtown Creek nature walk and other park projects) would have potentially gained some momentum, providing greater access to the waterfront.
Through the duration of the trip, my nostalgia for my time spent in this part-industrial, part pre-industrial (or post, depending on your perspective) landscape was selfishly comforted by how little had changed here. There have been no developments on any of the Parks projects, at least one little sweet dock had been demolished, and despite growing awareness of the environmental state of the Newtown Creek through the Superfund process- as well as through the more high profile horror of the Deepwater spill/leak – there has been little movement by oil companies to clean in this area.
It’s worth noting here that: I have a fair amount of research ahead of me, as I do think there have been some larger, less visible changes at the creek, so perhaps I will have more positive changes to report later…along with photos.
Our tour guides and historians for the day were Bernard Ente of the Newtown Creek Alliance and Mitch Waxman of The Newtown Pentacle. Below is a short video with Bernie for Thirteen:
As far as photographing: I was really re-invigorated by visiting the creek with great guides and a different mindset. My series til now has predominately included swaths of landscape with few variations. I suppose at the time this was with some intention; I only included one image of the water itself for fear of being too pointed. This was an oversight- much like the inability to capture smell, and the impact scent can have while standing at points on the waterfront of the Newtown Creek, I believed images of the water here would be redundant (like the smell, I had adjusted to the way oil and sludge floating on the surface appear visually). This time I tried to pay particular attention to the different tones and viscosity of the water at different points of the creek, and record them. I also approached this experience more loosely, searching for a different overall tone. The film looks good, I have LOTS to wade through!
An Exhibition of Work By:
Irgin Sena
Matt Kaelin
Christopher Rivera
WEDNESDAY JUNE 30, 2010/ 6-9PM
HUNTER COLLEGE MFA BUILDING 4TH FLOOR
450 w 41 STREET BETWEEN 9 AND 10 AVE.
—————-
Irgin Sena
Irgin Sena’s recent work explores the potential that seems to be contained in the relationship between language and the act of repetition.
What kind of time and space is created by this performative act?
When and how can this time and space be activated?
Works on paper, video and sound are employed.
Matt Kaelin
00-60, (2010)
With a digital clock and a Telex Caramate slide projector, Matt Kaelin’s 00-60, (2010) investigates the subjective nature of time.
Christopher Rivera
System 8
Education, as one of the main tools used for the learning process, imposes different types of relationships between humans and opens universal and infinite ways within this process. Philosophical and practical learning come together in the same situation.
In this performance a fighter (student) and his trainer (master) are removed from the gym, taking their training and learning process out its context — out of the training space and into academic space.
I am familiar with Anne Collier’s work, but never spent much time with it until seeing Collier’s exhibition at Anton Kern Gallery in January. The sparse, formal images began to intrigue me. What I had viewed before as a simply straightforward imagery, in this viewing, became a riddle (or perhaps more accurately, I felt as though there were layers of meaning inscribed in the images that I could not fully grasp). Upon leaving, I purchased the catalog and forgot about it.
Recently I got around to reading an the interview with Collier in the catalog, and I found it to answer questions I had about her work, while providing me with some insight in my own research.
Anne Collier was born in Los Angeles, California, completed her Master’s in Los Angeles, and currently lives in Los Angeles. Her work is the product of a ongoing, long term investigation which seems to continue to build on itself. Upon looking at much of her work, formal images that include records, magazines, and books or pages, as well as images of the ocean and, in one case, Dodger stadium, Collier “the artist” feels one step removed. The work is cool, academic, and sometimes unapproachable.
But because her images do include familiar objects (many that have cultural, personal meaning) and text, they start to ask questions and speak to each other, making connections. The tears on the record cover not only speak to all the records behind the stack, but also to the eyes in another image, and the self-help cassettes. For me this then starts to become about emotion and senses (something I have been considering), despite the cool exterior.
In speaking about her work, Collier discusses wanting to be “autobiographical without being narcissistic”, and that her work “may be simultaneously empty and full”. In exploring my own work, these ideas (particularly the former) are like keys. I am approaching my work more intuitively and less project-based than I ever have. In this sense, there will likely be an autobiographical element. While that is not initially very interesting to me personally, I am seeing through Collier that there is room for exploration that is autobiographical, but still more universally experienced.
Additionally, Collier speaks of finding a balance between the personal and what she has terms “forensic aesthetics”.
I have also included a couple of her “Aura” portraits below. While this seems to have been a side project, it fits seamlessly into her ideology. While these are mass produced, a likely sales pitch for Polaroid to unload some unsound film, they ask us to consider science as it relates to spirituality. I have included them because of my own investigation into “Aura” and the possibilities of capturing something invisible on film.
Anne Collier does not have a website, though you can see some work here and here.
Carter Mull is an LA based artist. Mull uses pulls from contemporary culture and news (as it intermingles) making photo-based work which is heavy handed in its manipulation to abstract and question his subject, making material and process a focus of his work. In his talk he spoke of finding the depth within a two dimensional surface, and the possibilities or limitations of that depth in photography.
While I found his work interesting, I felt a disconnect between his ideas and process. Overall, I found what he was speaking about to be more complex and engaging than his work (which I have not yet seen in person…this can and should alter one’s perspective).
He does not have a website, though he is represented by Rivington Arms, which also lists texts on Mull.
I was able to have a studio visit with Mull while he was at Hunter, which was pretty helpful. I had both Newtown Creek work and new work up in my studio, and I was able to get some fresh feedback on both bodies.
The first thing Carter said upon walking into my studio was something to the effect of, “You seem to have a sense of what is going on with contemporary photographic trends.” I mention this because much of our conversation seemed to return to these contemporary trends/ genres and their well-trodden paths (in my case for this visit it was “the german landscape” and “the sub-Williams”). This comment was interesting to me for several reasons:
(1) Particularly in the case of the “sub-Williams”, there is a specific genre question being asked (with the landscape work the question may be more specific to the place/ subject rather than “genre”), and in this area of well-trodden, what is my personal inquiry?
(2) Is there something wrong with entering an area that has been (thoroughly) explored? Is it possible to find an area that is entirely *new*? Again, this leads me to believe I have to find the personal questions (specific vs. universal?)
(3) How can I (and is it important to) use these different genres as a means to ask a greater question? Can I photograph the same subject matter from multiple genre perspectives? Why? How can I get inside of these spaces? And…I guess this is the first time someone has told me I am easily able to move between different kinds of genres; while I find this to be a pro and con, I am still processing what the greater benefit to my conceptual practice here is.
Carter gave me some good insight not so much through direction, but through selection. He spoke about images he found to work more effectively; in the case of the new work these were images that I am also more drawn to, both through the conception of them and outcome. Because each stemmed from its own exploration (not from trying to piece together a puzzle), they seemed to resonate.
He referenced an exhibition termed “Romantic Conceptualism”. This is a source to research of course, but the term romantic conceptualism struck me. or emotional conceptualism.
This idea carried when referring to the Newtown work. He selected images where the light played a more emotional role, or the subject was more amorphous. One of these images was the Oil on Water, which I have found to be the most overt. I think this gives me a way back into this work to consider its soul or emotional/ personal weight: How can others who don’t know this story become engaged or find their own story?
Another suggestion alongside research was finding my archive of information (i.e. source images and info that are fueling my thought potentially outside of the theoretical) and buling on that as reference.
Overall, this was a great visit in terms of re-engaging me in all of this work, and opening up it’s possibilities.
My first critique at Hunter was a couple of weeks ago. This coincided with my first tutorial meeting (Studio visit) with Brian Wood. I have taken (probably too much) time to digest these meetings, as they were quit different than my previous experiences at VCU. I am hoping my notes here will help me move forward in this work (or with making work in general), as I feel like I have lost some of my momentum in the shift.
Critique: The beginning portion of my critique was very quiet, which is something I was prepared for. The work I hung was (most) of what culminated from my semester in Virginia; the majority of the people that spent time looking at the work had watched it develop to some degree, and those who critiqued me on first look all got a healthy intro into my intent. SO, in this situation I anticipated that there would be a more difficult entry into the work by my peers. This is a long term concern of this work, but specifically now where there are many gaps (both for me and the viewer).
Once the group began talking about the images, I feel that they were able to de-construct them, putting together the parts of the puzzle that are accessible, while also finding elements I had not considered:
-the imagery is related to the senses: sight, touch, sound (?), smell, taste -depicting sensory through 2 dimensional means; how can that be made more successful? -quantity could flesh out problems: bring out humor, make stronger connections; currently reads as introduction -how does “haziness” (dbl. exp.) fit in? -rabbit= object/ cat= portrait -subject of work: -experiencing something through the perspective of a camera, how that narrows the world rather than expanding (note: contract and expand) -selective categorization, mechanisms of display mediate interpretation -element of metaphysical -where are these objects? what is the space they are in: vacuum/ void; doesn’t feel empty, feels full -presenting normal objects as ambiguous leads the viewer to re-analyze the situation or object -be more aware of installation/ space usage, consider the wall as your basis -use of diaristic: an object a day? -break down puzzle to reform -a cigar is just a cigar? -linguistic references: a fork in the road, a fork in the eye -presentation can provide an entry point: strategy
Overall I am pleased at what people we able to derive from looking at this work, though I think outside of a classroom situation it’s probable that a viewer would not dedicate quite as much energy to figuring out this work. Again, I one of my challenges will be finding an entry point for the viewer.
While I am glad to have an audience follow my train of thought, I am unclear about my own direction. Much of the way I was working before was intuitive, and the meaning, while present in creation, was uncovered as images were added and through writing. Now, because I have kind of a basis to work from, I am finding myself being too cerebral. It’s important for me to be more intentional in my choices, but also loose enough to experiment and work with some level of intuition (and failure). Where I am partially hung is escaping the white ground as my “go to”.
Some image ideas: -used paper coffee cup -chinese take out container (maybe. this feels heavy handed, but I am interested in why that feels more heavy handed to me than the coffee cup?) -cigars -smoke/ dust/ clouds….I have to think about that more in terms of both photography and object. -photographing auras -MIRROR. I keep forgetting the mirror! Maybe of a my camera?I think the mirror is important -also maybe a throw away, but they just discontinued tri-x film, so I may photograph some -florist: the arrangements on the street, re-shoot of the front/back, the florist sign in my hood (“My Florist”) -re-incorporation of the empty sign?
I am still interested in the portraits as well, whether they are related or not. I do think I want to take them out of the studio set though.
What other sensory elements? and “symbols”: (-wedding cake) -ipod/ cassette/ how to photograph sound? what signifies listening? -glade smelly plug in things or other false smells, pref to coincide with blue flowers. What is the history of these products? Incense? -research the history of sensory modifiers….
Studio Visit, Brian Wood: My studio visit with Brian was somewhat introductory, and also (as any one person’s perspective) contradictory to my some of my prior experience. Most of our conversation was about animals, animal consciousness, extraterrestrial senses, respect, etc. He challenged me to re-visit this work and find what was most important to me as a way to transcend beyond “me”. I have had difficulty with the animal work, and ultimately was unwilling to try many of the suggestions offered to me however, I never figured out where I was in that work. I shy away from animal rights conversations with intention, and place the animals on a white field to extract emotion or association, which serves to maybe do the opposite. Brian did not spend really any time addressing the other work presented, and so I am left to re-examine my interest in animals simultaneously to my other investigations. I do see connections between, but have yet to find a tangible avenue. At this point I do not see an active pursuit of animal portraits, but perhaps more research into animal behavior and…metaphysics as they apply to any of this work.
Trilling, Lionel. “The Heroic, The Beautiful, The Authentic.” Sincerity and Authenticity (The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures). New York: Harvard UP, 2006. This chapter discusses differences in the role of the artist, art, and audience reception. In doing so it examines beauty and its relation to “pleasing” vs. “pleasure”. While the discussion is rooted in literature, the essay makes interesting connections between what the audience views as “sincerity” from the author, and therefore instills their faith in the hand of the artist.
“The ”sincere” person is neither fool nor cynic. He knows the world is not always perfect. Not always. The ”always” is a vital qualifier if you are a ”sincere” person, because it allows for the possibility that sometimes the world is, indeed, perfect.
To be ”sincere” is, among other things, to believe in the possibility of life’s perfect moments, and it is this belief that keeps scientists toiling in the laboratory, poets slaving at the typewriter, young people treading to the marriage altar and television commercials pouring through the parlor.”(Russell Baker, NYT, op.ed.)
After looking back at some of the images I have created over the course of the semester, I have begun to think about ideas of, not really “honesty” of images, but of sincerity of the author, the object, the image, and the photo (as Object). I think there are a lot of different things happening in the imagery I have chosen, yet I see a link. This could possible be one of the links: - the blue flowers as a failed token of sincerity - the binoculars as a copy of reality - the bunny as an object we contrive for our needs (another kind of failure) -”the tears of things”: how do these objects hold feelings (of melancholy) and represent failure (and simulacra: i guess a failure of “real” in this case?)
Shimon’s visit with me heavily focused on the cats. While I had some other objects and landscapes on the wall, many were living in contact sheet form on my hard drive at the time of the visit. I think (felt?) he saw most happening there, and focused our discussion there. This was really helpful, and he had some great suggestions that will (over break maybe?) propel me back into ‘catland’, but was also hard for me to get back into because I am thinking so much about other ideas. I like this ability to bounce from idea to idea and develop many at once, perhaps connecting them eventually.
Main ideas of this meeting were ‘How would this work change if the cat were the photographer?’ I have thought about this, and experimented with my own shifts in perspective, but he literally suggested: make the cat the photographer. Attach a camera to it. Attach a camera to an object it “hunts”. Photograph as though being hunted. These suggestions remind me of Sam Easterson, though I think the suggestions extend beyond Easterson’s project (through concept and practice).
We talked about how to find the space that teeter’s between cute (domestic) and creepy (wild). This conversation was of particular help, because I have not, at this point really understood that point of transition and what it could mean, what questions it raises, and how it could change the portrayal.
In the context of the landscapes we talked about the concept of the ‘double portrait’. This was specifically regarding the landscapes, but I found it relevant on multiple levels: actual portraits (based on my conversation with Nigel); animals and their different symbols and readings; landscapes (as I am pairing them), and finally in the kinds of groups and associations I am building. I found this to be the most interesting blip in our conversation, and the one I will more immediately research and determine the linkages in my thoughts and images. I guess I have never really heard or ‘double portrait’ as a specific genre; Roni Horn and stereoscope come to mind…but further research is needed.
Schwenger, Peter. The Tears of Things: Melancholy and Physical Objects. Minnesota: U of M Press, 2006. This book investigates language and object, the relationship and context between the two and our relationship to them through a series of essays which range from “Words and the Murder of the Thing” to “Still Life: a User’s Manual”. I chose “The Dream of Debris”, which discusses the arbitrary nature of narrative (through a discussion of dreams), and the components and context of making the arbitrary connect.
“Various physical objects referenced by the text have now been translated into mental debris, a debris, to be sure, that the reader is constantly trying to fit together without being in possession of a master plan. The associations evoked during that attempt often dart into personal memory and beyond into unconscious.”
If the reader/ viewer is constantly trying to fit this “mental debris” into a context that is shaded by their own experience and knowledge (consciously or otherwise), how can we create work that extends beyond personal knowledge and bias? Is it possible to suspend our belief systems when viewing language or objects (photographs in this case as objects) in a truly neutral way, allowing the object/ language to stand on its own?
“The work is on the one hand assembled out of narrative fragments to create an apparent structure of meaning. On the other hand, the momentum of meaning must be delayed enough so that the plot’s machinery falls apart, from moment to moment returning to narrative debris.”
Is it intuitive to want to link objects and words into narrative? The above quote seems to argue an in between space of tension (which earlier in the essay is described as “seduction”) that keeps the viewer engaged; is this tension the best we can hope for to escape the narrative?
Rhopography rhopos, meaning trivial objects, small wares, odds and ends. Rhopography is then “the depiction of those things which lack importance, the unassuming material base or life that ‘importance’ constantly overlooks.” (Bryson 61)
“Rhopography works against the idea of greatness…it asserts another view of human life, one that attends to the business of daily living, the life of houses and tables, of individuals on a plane of material existence…”
“…reverse this worldly mode of seeing by taking what is of least importance in the world- the disregarded contents…and by lavishing there a kind of attention normally reserved for what is of supreme value. This process can be followed in either a ‘descending’ or ‘ascending’ scale.“
Both of the above quotes are taken from: Bryson, Norman. Looking at the Overlooked. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990.
I was originally trying to come up with a word about looking and ways of looking. I had discussed “gaze”, which I find both interesting and difficult (for me too much feminist baggage; not going unnoticed since I am inherently coming from some kind of feminist perspective, though not the focus or intent of my research and ideas), and somehow during research morphed to ideas of personification. This came from the sense that I am making an argument that we ascribe human qualities to everything around us. I won’t go out of my way to argue against this, particularly in the case of animals, but I also feel that this not the crux of what I am thinking about.
I have chosen rhopography because it is very much rooted in looking, specifically at things we often pay little attention to. While I don’t know that the work I have done this semester fully subscribes to this, ‘rhopography’ and the surrounding ideas are more in line with my thinking. I have chosen artists that I see has both utilizing the ‘ascending’ and ‘descending’ views; I have chosen a couple of artists working with portraiture in a specific way. I am interested in the potential to develop the argument that people can portrayed as “trivial objects” and thus also be view utilizing this ‘ascending’ and ‘descending’ scales, thus equalizing humans with objects.
Lucas Blalock Blalock studied at Bard for his BFA and seems to describe himself as part (or a new generation of) the New Topographers. While his newer work is primarily not landscape based, his ideas seem to translate to this newer studio/ photoshop work. I selected him because of his current subject matter- objects, people, and photoshop.
“…In turn, the camera came to be seen as an instrument to objectively measure the world around us, thus implying a “truth” value to the photographic image. Only in the last thirty years—feasibly bench marked by Sontag’s On Photography (1977) and sped along recently by digital technologies—has this most prized attribute of the photographic image come under attack. In contrast, this work is an attempt to bring into question the measuring properties of the photographic machine. I am not arguing that the camera does not record but that our experience of the world is not inherently photographic. The manipulation of these images is a form of erasure…”
Within this statement, it seems that ways he is altering our way of ‘looking’ is meant to challenge our heightening, not specifically of these objects, but of our understanding of them as ‘truths’ rather than manipulations. If this is the case, I particularly like that the choice of objects is specific, but is also within the realm of ‘odds and ends’. Why these objects rather than something more grand to bring out attention to the manipulations of the hand? His treatment of his human subjects is similar to that of his objects, and as such I almost wonder less about them then of the inanimate counterparts; the objects have secrets that we begin to see through use of mirrors, photoshop, or simply placement…it’s arguable if the people are as interesting, or they are blocked from our vision in some way.
untitled (apples and wood), 2009 and all aspects simultaneously, 2009 Blalock, Lucas. I Believe You, Liar. iceberg, iceberg, iceberg: New York, 2009.
Dear Ms. Patty Pacifica or Current Resident,
I like to think of cooing. it is among the warmer thoughts. especially nice in French which seems a warmer language except when it’s not. Isn’t it funny how cold warm things used badly become. I would accept your TV if you had it, but seem truly and earnestly (to my own embarrassment) more interested in truth than fact and all that uninterrupted information would bring us back to the palimpsest (a screen) and a possible becoming tedious because the volume controls of strangers – even friends and lovers – are always different from the ones internal. It’s probably better if I listen to your speakers instead of getting greedy for headphones, or serialized programming.
As to. . . all of this is more lonely than sad but I am starting to relish this energy of impossible languages and unbridgeable gaps. The failures are all we have and I am no nihilist! I BELIEVE YOU, LIAR!! Light, sad? ‘luc’ is particle and wave both at the same time. I am torn. can you explain?
Thank you kindly,
Lucas Blalock
Hans Gremmen & Jaap Scheeren I chose this pair specifically because of one project:
“We were wondering if it was possible to create a 3D-colour seperation. We tried to do this with a bouquet of fake flowers. We made 4 still-lifes: one in Cyan, one in Magenta, one in Yellow, one in Black. We made photo’s of this still lifes and printed them over each other. In theory it would have been the start-image, but in practice it became “fake flowers in full colour”.”
K, Y, M, C, and CMYK, 2009 I chose to include this project because I think it, again, challenges our way of looking. Perhaps this is too much rooted in ‘looking’ in photographs or photography as a construct, but the idea that there was meticulous care in creating these sculptures (again- art objects- so the care involved is greater than that of a vase of flowers) heightens these objects. The project, outside of being an exercise or photographic experiment, asks why this subject? What is its importance? The ‘vase of flowers’ is working on the ascending scale, because of the looking, recreation, and re-photographing. Colberg, Joerg.Review: Dutch Seen at Museum of the City of New York. June 16, 2009. http://www.jmcolberg.com/weblog/2009/06/review_dutch_seen_at_museum_of_the_city_of_new_york.html
Jaap Scheeren’s photography I found most provocative (even though “provocative” might not be the right word). I have the feeling, that it will confuse many people. It certainly is very playful, and it engages the viewer. Using an assorted group of slightly weird characters, some fur coats, a stuffed beaver bought on Ebay, a red plastic fish and more, Jaap Scheeren set out to “bend time, bringing the past and the present and the past to the present.” Mission accomplished!
Corin Hewitt
Untitled #70, January 4, 2009 from Seed Stageand Untitled #59, January 2, 2009 from Seed Stage
‘Seed Stage’ is an installation merging performance art, live theater, and an investigation of ideas about still life. Redefining the notion of the artist-in-residence, Hewitt physically moves about the Whitney’s Lobby Gallery space for a period of three months and one day.
During this time, the gallery space will be in constant flux with the artist engaged in the creation of a work that is at once an environment and a performance. Hewitt manipulates materials, both homegrown and store-bought, questioning notions of what constitutes the art object through a process of constant transmutation. This is Hewitt’s first one-person exhibition at the Whitney. Tina Kukielski, senior curatorial assistant at the Whitney and organizer of the exhibition, notes: ‘Hewitt’s methods include cooking, sculpting, heating and cooling, casting, canning, eating, and photographing both organic and inorganic materials. The result is an intimate examination of the cycles of transformation and transience.’
I found Hewitt’s work while researching another artist, and was reminded that I saw this exhibition. I never saw Hewitt within the space, and understood it therefore as an installation; one that I could not contextualize with the name “Seed Stage” until now reading more about it. I have included him here because his investigations deal heavily with materials of everyday life. In another work, Legacy, Hewitt casts a 21-foot rainbow out of sweepings of debris, dirt, and trash collected over a week period. It is these kinds of works that Hewitt, while questioning materiality and ‘what constitutes and art object’ he is also hovering between this ‘ascending’ and ‘descending’ of these objects: They seem to manifest as clutter and he makes not effort to hide what is ‘trash’, but he is also spend immense amounts of time investigating and creating work out of it, inclusive of a ‘rainbow’ which would not be symbolically associated with trash.
Ann Woo Ann Woo is interesting to me in that, there is not a lot written about her work (and not any that I cold find written by her), but she is written about with some frequency. The overall sense is that her audience is drawn to her imagery and the way that she links seemingly disparate images. “…there is a consistency in Woo’s photographic vision that never subjects any one person, object or landscape to more scrutiny than another” (The Exposure Project). I agree with this statement, perhaps just intuitively. I have clearly chosen two images to represent her work that have a similar palette, and I do think that she uses color to make connections in her images, but overall I think it is the treatment of these subjects that reproduces them in a way that they carry equal value.
I don’t necessarily read her imagery as dealing with rhopography, but again, the heightening of the common and the democratizing of the portrait seem to thread her work together.
9/38 and 11/38, 2008 (I don’t think these are actually the titles, but are demarcated this way on Woo’s site)
As stated above, I really could not find much written about Woo, just snippets on blogs and her exhibition history. Here is her website: http://www.annwoo.com/
Matthew Brannon Matthew Brannon is maybe an oddball inclusion here, but his work is so much about objects that we use as status that are at the same time disposable I felt it was work inclusion. Additionally, his methods and style (of graphics and advertising) further our conceptual questioning. Brannon, either through combination of imagery, or through the combination of image and text questions the viewer relationship to common objects, such as a banana peel, a mug, a wrist watch, and a pack of cigarettes. While these objects individually may be trash or sacred, together they fit a type; we could imagine who this person is. The text in his pieces often dismantles our read.
I am not sure about the dismantling. I am still ‘thinking’ about ‘looking’. As such Brannon’s work is quite different. I like that it still utilizes a form of still life, and is so different then the other work I have been looking at within this realm (not that I think he is really referenced as making still life work, too graphic, but I think this is not an inappropriate read).
In his writing, Mr. Brannon has carved out a niche between classic Conceptualism, with its cerebral, perceptual musings, and the fragmented borrowing of Language poetry (and perhaps even the crime fiction of Jim Thompson). Mr. Brannon also owes plenty to Mike Kelley, Richard Prince and Barbara Kruger, artists who have mined the depths of mainstream consumer culture and employed text in their works.
But where irony has been a mainstay for Mr. Prince and Mr. Kelley, with the artist standing apart from mass culture and commenting on it like a disinterested viewer, everyone is implicated in Mr. Brannon’s work — even the contemporary artist who wants, as much as any American, an iPod, organic produce and someone perfect to love him.
Two posters without text particularly recall Ms. Sampe’s textile designs and include items from a sushi dinner, depicted as colorful geometric motifs and laid out against pink and light-blue grounds. In the upper corner of one poster is an abstracted but identifiable image of an American Express card, a reminder that tasteful objects and our desire for them is tied to the world of commerce and advertising.
In this context, referencing mid-20th-century visual culture — and especially design, with its populist, utopian view toward outfitting the world with attractive, modern accessories — seems particularly appropriate. Mr. Brannon generally avoids specific historical markers, mixing contemporary images with styles from the past, but he throws up a tiny flare in one work: a letterpress print with an abstract motif — a large, unbounded square filled with smaller black and yellow squares — that simply reads, “JFK International Airport.” The work serves as a terse nod to an age when everything seemed possible, even flying to the moon.
Cheyney Thompson Thompson was known in the early 2000s for his paintings of 2x4s and bricks. More recently Thompson has continued play with ideas of representation in his painting, in the case below through making large scale paintings of crumpled, photocopied, blank paper. This work was originally exhibited in a show where Thompson was playing with representation in terms of how we view as well as in terms of “gallery representation”. This play makes the work less about the objects (whether it be bricks or paper), and more about wit and maybe even tricks in some ways. Again, while this is in one way much different than what I am thinking about, he is still using this ‘debris’ which he is, particularly through painting, offering an ‘ascending’ value. Where I am most interested is that by pointing at the absurd he is able to comment or question everyday systems; these subtleties are what makes the work interesting.
This exhibition acknowledges the gallery’s base-line functions as a place to show, sell and store art. It centers on four large, pale representational paintings of pretty much nothing; they are based on smudged and wrinkled paper that was put through a photocopier numerous times, then blown up and carefully rendered in shades of gray and cream. Sometimes they suggest a close-up of surf or rumpled fabrics. They bring to mind Warhol’s Shadow Paintings or something by Rudolf Stingel, until you get close enough to see the paint-by-fractions care with which they were executed.
Meanwhile, ”Tables Displaying Properties of an Image” spells out the paintings’ condition: the light to dark palette and availability for purchase.
The eight tables are of the lightweight folding variety favored by street vendors; they extend from the front of the gallery to the storage space in back, evoking a train of flatbed railroad cars and a path from light to dark. The 16 panels of their bisected tops are literally photographs of nothing that progress from white to nearly black, paralleling the tones of the paintings.
On view in different parts of the gallery are five constellations of five framed photographic offset lithographs, each showing the storage shelves visible in the back space. Each image is a slightly different tone of gray (blue, green, mauve) and shows the contents of the shelves in slightly different arrangements, as they might change during a workday — along with the daylight itself.
Mr. Thompson is an artist with radical intent who can’t help but make beautiful objects; this gives his work a clarity and restraint that softens, and even conventionalizes, the harshness of his thought. His dedication to painting combined with his refusal to follow it blindly is very compelling, but his distrust of it needs to become as explicit in his canvases as it is in the contexts he creates for them.
Rodney Graham I have chosen Graham based on the works of his I have chosen. In the 70′s and 80′s, Graham made large scale, large format images of trees. The detailed images were then hung upside down as the final product. This small move- an inversion- forces the viewer to look more closely at a tree, one they may have passed by many times (albeit Graham’s choices of trees seem to be pretty majestic). Looking more closely, the trees begin to look like the root systems we imagine for them. Most importantly, the images are represented the way the appear in the camera obscura; this perhaps is the punctum?
The Torqued Chandelier was a video loop made of chandelier spinning one way until the rop was torqued and then unspinning. The video is again shown inverted, this time on its side. It is possible in this case to imagine that this is the descending scale view.
I am interested more so in the simplicity of the tree (not that both bodies are complex in practice…), in that a simple shift in the image entirely changes its read. Additionally, it is a photograph about photography.
“Napoleon Tree” and “Torqued Chandelier”
Johnson, Ken. “A Mercurial Conceptualist who Remains an Enigma”. The New York Times, November 4. 2005
Before that, Mr. Graham, 56, dabbled in genres and multiple media in ways that seem intellectually and technologically impressive – geeky, you could say – but vaguely pointless. Preoccupied by the camera obscura in the 70′s and 80′s, he erected a room-size version aimed at a tree in a rural field. Then he conceived an urban project that had a camera obscura elevated on a high platform and directed to where a newly planted tree would eventually grow and come into focus. (These are displayed in the exhibition in model form.)
For another project he employed a photographer to take pictures of majestic, isolated trees with a large-format camera. He then hung the elephantine black-and-white pictures upside down, like camera obscura images. Seven are presented in the exhibition, which has been organized by Grant Arnold of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Jessica Bradley of the Art Gallery of Ontario and Cornelia Butler of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.
Less visually compelling but more consequential for Mr. Graham’s later career are works on paper involving the manipulation of literary texts and sheet music. For example, he had the beginning of a 19th-century romantic novel by Georg Büchner called “Lenz” typeset on five pages. The pages are built into a free-standing, revolving brass framework that enables you to keep reading because the last sentence on the fifth page reads into an earlier page; hence the title, “Reading Machine for Lenz.”
These early efforts are intriguing but tedious; they require a good deal of sympathetic concentration.
Brian Graf I chose to include Brian Graf specifically because of the project I am including. Like several of the photographers I am including he (1) has a history of making landscape photos, and is exploring an entirely different mode of working and (2) there is a lot of interest in him (i.e.decent web presence), but not much written. I wonder why this is? Is this because it is early career artists? Or is the work kind of a flash in the pan?
Anyway, Graf has several series on his site, earlier ones focusing on landscape. In particular his Garden State series focuses on two specific miles on the Jersey Turnpike. I mention this because, while the photos depict many things, there is a sense of looking at the trash and function of things on the highway (the debris, I guess). Thinking of my own way of working, I wonder if this interest in what we pass over in our day to day world is a natural precursor to the things we discard or take for granted.
This series of photograms is of plastic shopping bags. It is the title Roadside Wildflowers that contextualizes it for the viewer. I find this to walk the line of this ascending/ descending scale, as if you read the title (this is how it is set up on the website, I am sure in an exhibition it would function differently) there is curiosity, heightened maybe by some romantic sense of wildflowers and travel and escape. Once you see the images, there is a moment of disorientation before you realize what they are. I would not say the images themselves heighten, but they err more closely to the ascending scal by giving them the space to be looked at and considered.
Roadside Wildflowers, 16×20, C-Prints, year not noted.
Lawrence Weiner I am including Lawrence Weiner for maybe a slightly different reason, though I would still argue he is exploring some aspect of ropography in his work; I’ll come back to that.
In a different text, I was reading about how it is our inclination (better yet, the only way we know) to try to link objects into a narrative, regardless of how disjointed those objects may be. If given a list of the words that represent those objects, we would do the same, even with the understanding that is was an incongruous list (perhaps this is the underlying premise of Foundmagazine; we want desperately to make stories out of people’s scraps that define them…).
SO. With this in mind, could Weiner’s resurrections of colloquialisms function as “debris”? And could other disparate language allow the view the space to examine the words without the surrounding context or the context the viewer brings with them? OR, still yet, are the images in our minds created by the text the true subject of the text, therefore the art is not the text, but in our own creation (the text becomes the debris, the imagined image the “hieghtened” object)?
Unknown and Balls of Wood Balls of Iron, 1995 Smith, Roberta. “The Well Shaped Phrase as Art.” The New York Times, November 16, 2007. The show consists primarily of cryptic yet suggestive phrases in large letters, splayed across walls, ceiling beams and occasionally floors, that conjure up various physical situations but often leave to your imagination the objects or the scale involved. “A Turbulence Induced Within a Body of Water” could be hands splashing in a bathtub or a tanker churning waves behind it. “Encased By + Reduced to Rust” evokes a crumbling object, but it could also be a soul or an artist’s talent. (And there is that twist of “rust” where you expect “dust.”)Mr. Weiner is rightly seen as a founding figure of Postminimalism’s Conceptual arm, which includes artists like Douglas Huebler, Robert Barry, Joseph Kosuth and Sol LeWitt. But he might better be described as a language-based sculptor. He folds together the skills of a Russian Constructivist graphic designer, a Socratic philosopher, a Dada-Fluxus joker, a Concrete poet and a Madison Avenue ad executive with an astute sense of both semiotics and public display. And his penchant for starkly plain typefaces and for stacking phrases up walls like Judd boxes, combined with his emphasis on language’s visual and spatial qualities, also gives him a few Minimalist bona fides.Possibly the first earthwork, “Cratering Piece” continued to haunt Mr. Weiner after he returned to New York. His paintings became more sculptural, until one day he started carving a block of stone from the Brooklyn Bridge. Soon he became engrossed in just moving the block around on the table he built for it. He began to see art as a simple physical interaction, and this realization inspired him to write out similar interactions with objects. His basic unit of visual expression was set: the short, well-shaped phrase that could nonetheless operate on several levels at once — physical, interpersonal, metaphorical, spatial and even political.
Because Mr. Weiner’s words are mutable, appearing in one state and then another, they are not only continually remade but also renewed. In this way he subverts the notion of linear development and reflects a desire that his work not be — as one piece puts it — “Distorted by the Assumption of a Direction.” The visual nature of his art has changed with his ideas about scale, typeface and punctuation, and the addition of balletic loops, like the one that suggests the trajectory of a leaping fish in “Taken to as Deep as the Sea Can Be.” Driven by the joy of language and quite a bit of humor, Mr. Weiner’s ebullient work asks tough questions about who makes or owns art, where it can occur and how long it lasts. It reminds us that while art and money may have been inextricably entwined throughout most of history, art’s real value is not measured in strings of zeros, high-priced materials or bravura skill, but in communication, experience, economy of means (the true beauty) and, yes, the inspired disturbance of all status quos.
Jeff Wall I know, Jeff Wall. I have not, surprisingly, looked at Jeff wall this semester, and feel like it is important to revisit (there is so much happening in his work, I think I find new relevant things with each viewing). After briefly discussing Picture for Women the other day, I thought I would revisit the work, applying my own research to the re-looking.
In Picture for Women Wall is initially referencing painting (specifically Manet’s, “The Bar at the Folies Bergères.”), but through his own interpretation he is making the image more openly about the ‘looking’. It is a photograph about photography (in one way) and calls into question the observer and observed. Because the construct is accessible to the viewer, the camera becomes the subject, the woman and Wall perhaps the objects. We are the camera; this gives camera importance.
In his “Diagonal Compositions” Wall is still referencing painting, this time of abstraction. Wall is “abstracting” the space, but still including objects, such as a bar of soap or mop bucket, which ground the images in “reality”. The objects he chooses truly are the debris, the overlooked, ‘the unattributed, anonymous poetry of the world’ (Wall). As such, we are back to narrative. Is there enough information? Does it matter, we still imagine who’s bar of soap this is…Or is it possible to contextualize them as abstractions (like the paintings they reference) that include these objects, therefore ascending their value as contributors of creation (or the ‘poetry’ themselves)?
Lubow, Arthur. “The Luminist”. The New York Times, February 25, 2007.
Photography has always involved waiting. When the technology was young, slow-acting emulsions required both photographer and subject to wait motionless for the image to register. The introduction of fast film changed the way a photographer must wait. In the tradition of documentary photography that arose, the photographer is understood to be waiting for the right convergence of subject, lighting and frame before clicking the shutter — waiting for what a master of the genre, Henri Cartier-Bresson, famously called “the decisive moment.” Lee Friedlander, another great street photographer, compared this anticipatory state to the hunting alertness of a “one-eyed cat.” The metaphor of the hunt has seeped into the essential language of photography. You don’t click, press or squeeze a picture; you shoot one. Walker Evans wrote of his “subway series,” the portraits of unaware New York train passengers that he began in the late 1930s: “I am stalking, as in the hunt. What a bagful to be taken home.” And Diane Arbus’s friend and mentor Marvin Israel said after her death in 1971: “The photograph is like her trophy — it’s what she received as the reward for this adventure.”
One thing that Wall knew for certain when he took up the profession in the late 1970s is that he would not become a photojournalistic hunter. Educated as an art historian, he aspired instead to make photographs that could be constructed and experienced the way paintings are. “Most photographs cannot get looked at very often,” he told me. “They get exhausted. Great photographers have done it on the fly. It doesn’t happen that often. I just wasn’t interested in doing that. I didn’t want to spend my time running around trying to find an event that could be made into a picture that would be good.” He also disliked the way photographs were typically exhibited as small prints. “I don’t like the traditional 8 by 10,” he said. “They were done that size as displays for prints to run in books. It’s too shrunken, too compressed. When you’re making things to go on a wall, as I do, that seems too small.” The art that he liked best, from the full-length portraits of Velázquez and Manet to the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock and the floor pieces of Carl Andre, engaged the viewer on a lifelike human scale. They could be walked up to (or, in Andre’s case, onto) and moved away from. They held their own, on a wall or in a room. “If painting can be that scale and be effective, then a photograph ought to be effective at that size, too,” he concluded.
However, judging from the record of his three decades of work, which is the subject of an exhibition opening today at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (and traveling later to the Art Institute of Chicago and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art), I suspect that what Wall found most unsatisfying about photography when he took up a camera was its marginal position in the art world and in art history. There was an established roster of great photographers and classic photographs, which embraced, among other things, the uncannily empty Paris streetscapes of Atget, the formally inventive New York skylines of Alfred Stieglitz and the austere Hale County studies of Walker Evans. The canon led right up to the street photography of Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander. “I couldn’t get into ’60s art photography — Friedlander, Arbus and Winogrand and Stephen Shore,” Wall says. “These guys were in a photo ghetto. They were into their own world, with photo galleries and their own photo books.” Ambition also colored his thinking. For an energetic young man, what appeal was there in a genre whose practitioners seemed to have already taken their best shots?
A Quick Thought: I feel like many of the artists, specifically photographers, I chose are making work that, at least in part, is about photography. I am wondering if this has more to do with the ‘looking’ than I think. There is part of me that is intuitively choosing these subjects that have to do with the construct or human manipulation and interpretation, but there is as much a part that is choosing subjects around how a camera looks at subject/ how we use photography (or mechanisms) to look (or experience, via Sontag). So this exercise in some way may launch me into yet another direction…though making photos about photos is……..hmmm…..
I have been taking my own summer break from new research, and in the meantime I have been working on compiling my long term work on the Newtown Creek into book form. It has been a really helpful process that has forced me to consider the different ways to organize and edit the work- and to see how drastically editing choices can change the viewers experience and understanding to the images and place. Putting the work into book form has also really allowed me to include different kinds of imagery- rather than a small edit where things “look” a certain way, I am able to add layers of richness with these different images.
