Seattle Art Museum just opened a show of photographs by Amy Blakemore. There was a gallery talk by the artist and SAM’s Marissa Sanchez (a former student of the artist) last Thursday.
As an aside, SAM’s photography gallery is really a hallway on the 3rd floor. It’s a nice hallway, broad and with good light. I suppose the traffic through it is good since it leads to the Jacob Lawrence gallery. It’s a whole lot better than no space dedicated to photography (which is what SAM had until the new building opened) but it’s still a hallway.
I had not seen Ms. Blakemore’s work except in reproductions. Two photographs I had seen in a magazine are in the show. One is of an airplane on its landing approach. There is an out-of-focus tree in the foreground and the out-of-focus airplane is near the upper left corner of the frame. The colors are muted, mostly blues. The second is a photograph of a huge folk-art or advertizing statue in Houston. It, too, is partly ocluded by out-of-focus trees. I went to the talk to see some real prints and with the hope of gaining some insight her work. Unfortunately, the hallway was crowded and noisy so I only heard about half of what she and Ms. Sanchez had to say. I wanted to ask her some questions but gave up.
Ms. Blakemore is an artist and teacher based in Houston. Her prints are square, roughly 20 inches on a side, from 120 negatives, some color, some black and white, all from a collection of original Diana plastic cameras. She was originally trained in “the documentary tradition” (which she referred to as the documentary tradition) at UT Austin but switched to plastic camera work while doing a fellowship at Houston’s Museum of Fine Art.
She noted that she does not work in projects and that is easy to believe. Her show at SAM is a few portraits, a few landscapes, a few still lifes, a few street photographs ….
Alas, I didn’t see a single print that I found compelling. I still fail to respond to the two prints I had seen in reproductions. Ms. Sanchez called out a portrait as one of her favorites in the show. It is a color image taken at close range near sunset in warm, nearly orange light. The subject’s blurry head and shoulders are a bit off to the right in the square frame, she looks directly at the camera.
Here is an excerpt from her artist’s statement (ArtDaily, September 5, 2010):
… Amy Blakemore compares the act of taking pictures to the experience of serendipitously gathering broken bits and lost objects during a long walk. …
She wanders around with her camera and photographs what catches her eye. I do that, too.
Blakemore’s photographs have maintained a tantalizing sense of interrupted or incomplete narrative –
She wants you to be intrigued and make up a story to go along with her photographs. I want that, too.
what at a glance may appear to be a banal mise en scène becomes with further inspection a mysterious and psychologically penetrating view of the world we live in.
I’m sorry but they remain banal mise en scenes to me no matter how hard I stare at them. This is my complaint with conceptual art – if the viewer doesn’t get it then there’s no way to get it.
Blakemore's work is in part defined by her embrace of low-tech cameras with limited range of focus.
What is “limited range of focus”? Her work is certainly "defined" by the Diana. It seems to me that her work is about the toy camera as opposed to interesting photographs that happen to be taken with a toy camera. Nick Hansen did the latter – I own three of his prints. Diane Stefanich does the latter, too.
Her use of such idiosyncratic tools can bring a number of unpredictable irregularities to her compositions, including partially blurred passage and a compressed depth of field that, at times, becomes vertiginous.
What is “blurred passage”? What is “compressed depth of field”? I don’t see “vertiginous” in her prints.
At the same time, her compositions are rigorously composed.
I can believe “carefully” but what does “rigorously” mean in this context?
Through skillful printing techniques she coaxes a remarkably nuanced palette in both black and white and color, and she manipulates the idiosyncrasies of her photographs,
Now I can get behind this statement! Ms. Sanchez noted that Ms. Blakemore is a master printer and I find that very easy to believe. Making 20x20 prints from Diana negatives sounds like a challenge at best and several of the prints were wrung out of negatives that I wouldn’t have a prayer of printing.
capturing the ways in which memory at once records and distorts visual information.
Well, memory certainly both records and distorts visual information but these prints don’t read that to me.
I'm glad I went to the talk -- I think -- but I don't understand why her photographs are important enough to merit a show in a major museum.
Sunday, September 5, 2010
Monday, August 30, 2010
Monoblog?
Every year some periodical (NY Times?) has a contest to create new words by changing one letter in an existing English word.
I can never think of a good one but this is close. I'm adding a single letter.
"Monoblog" - a blog that is read only by the author.
That's what I seem to have here, a monoblog. Oh, well. I write the entries mostly to get my thoughts in order anyway.
.... Still it would be nice ....
I can never think of a good one but this is close. I'm adding a single letter.
"Monoblog" - a blog that is read only by the author.
That's what I seem to have here, a monoblog. Oh, well. I write the entries mostly to get my thoughts in order anyway.
.... Still it would be nice ....
“After you say ‘It works’….”
Our young friend, Ed, is a passionate fan and promoter of the graphic novel. The notion of the graphic novel either as an art form or as a literary form has puzzled me for some time. Some time ago Ed twisted my arm until I read “Understanding Comics” by Scott McCloud (Kitchen Sink Press, 1993). McCloud wrote it, cleverly enough, using the concepts that he is explaining in each chapter.
“Understanding Comics” cleared some of the fog and gave me a good understanding of the techniques used to make text and art work together to tell a story.
It did not convince me, however, that the graphic novel was a form that held any interest for me. I’m not a big fan of the superhero genre or the zombie/vampire/horror genre and those seems to dominate the graphic novel titles. The only one I had even tried to read was Art Spiegelman’s “Maus” (several editions) when it was newly published but had to put it down – it was very well done and effective but it gave me nightmares.
Early this year I read of a series of graphic novels commissioned by the Louvre. There will ultimately be eight titles in the series. I believe that only two are published so far. The Louvre’s requirement to various artist/writers is simple – the Louvre must appear as a significant element in the plot. The announcement I read was for “On the Odd Hours” by Eric Liberge (NBMComicsLit, 2010 for the English edition). The premise, the “hook” if you will, of this book is that all museums secretly employ a special curator whose duty is to care for the souls of the artworks in the museum. The protagonist in “On the Odd Hours” is the young intern to the Louvre’s such curator. This sounded so appealing that I promptly ordered a copy.
Arnold Newman, the famous portrait photographer says: “After you say ‘It works.’ (or ‘It doesn’t work.’) then you can discuss the details.” (my addition in parentheses.)
“On the Odd Hours” doesn’t work. The drawings are very good indeed. Set among the art in the Louvre it certainly is visually rich. The hook is wonderful. But it doesn’t work. The text and the artwork don’t work well together. The graphic layout fails to convey the passage of time and space in many places (at least to me). The plot isn’t visual – it depends too much on understanding the protagonist’s situation, history, and mental state – difficult to express in graphic novel format. It should have been much shorter or much longer – the plot as presented is too short to be a novel but too complex to allow full development at its current length. I keep thinking what a wonderful short story Ray Bradbury could have written over the basic idea. Which also led me to ponder which of the Ray Bradbury short stories would be well-served by a “graphic novel” format. “The Dragon” certainly. There is a recent edition of “The Homecoming” that is already in very close to graphic novel format.
But I digress. After another long talk with Ed (who had not seen “The Odd Hours”) he suggested that I read “Bone” (Jeff Smith, Cartoon Books, 2004) as an example of a graphic novel that he felt works very well. He had to think a while to come up with one that was not a horror, zombie, or superhero plot. “Bone” is a straight-ahead heroic-quest fantasy, complete with a hapless but loveable protagonist who finds his courage, a dim but faithful sidekick, a wise grandmother, a beautiful princess estranged from her heritage, sundry monsters and villains, an evil force to be overcome and even the occasional dragon.
Ed was right. “Bone” does work very well and I enjoyed it even though my taste for fantasy isn’t very keen either. I would not have read it in a text form. It would have been just another fantasy potboiler and, in fact, I doubt that it would have been published.
Jeff Smith’s drawing style, his use of the drawings and the text, and his means of suggesting passage of time and space are straight out of “Understanding Comics”. “Bone” was written in installments over several years so I suppose that the evolution toward sophistication of the drawing style could be just from the passage of time but I think it was more conscious that that. As the story jelled and worked its way into a more complex world, so did the drawing.
OK – so a graphic novel can work. The issue with “The Odd Hours” is not that the graphic novel can’t work; rather that this particular graphic novel doesn’t work.
Friday, June 18, 2010
Why me? (Is anybody out there?)
In my initial post on this blog, I answered "Why not me?" That's still the best reason I can advance. I tend to write stuff down a lot so a great deal of what I post here comes more-or-less directly out of my journal. However, it would be entertaining to know if anybody other than me ever looks at it. If you do (and you're not me) please leave a "Yup, I read it." comment or something.
Photography show at "the hutch"
If you need a reminder of how beautiful a black and white silver print can be, may I recommend a visit to the Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle Arnold Building on their main campus near Lake Union
- 7 Ansel Adams prints, including the best print of “half dome” I’ve ever seen and a beautiful “aspens vertical”.
- 4 Brett Weston prints
- 5 W. Eugene Smith prints, including the iconic “walk” and “row houses” and one that I had not seen “waiting for survivors, Andrea Doria” that is my new Gene Smith favorite.
- 7 Edward Weston vintage prints including “Shell, 1926” that is absolutely breathtaking
- 1 Max Yavno
- 3 Andre Kertez but none of the icons
- 1 Robert Doisneau – a print I had never seen from one of my favorite photographers
- 1 Clarence John Laughlin
- 1 Josef Karsh – the portrait of Pablo Casals playing his cello
- 1 Henri Cartier-Bresson but not one of the icons
- 2 Ilse Bing but not particularly distinguished ones
- 1 Robert Mapplethorpe – a still life
- 1 Aaron Siskind
- 1 Jerry Uelesman
- 1 Josef Koudelka – the icon of the skyrocket launch
- 1 Jean Claude Gautrand – and here I thought he was solely an editor and curator.
- 1 Stella Simon
- 1 Tina Freeman – “the window,
- 2 Michael Smith
- 1 Stephanie Dinkins
Good grief, there are a lot of museums with less to show than that! All but a small handful of these prints are ones that I knew from books and only the last four names are ones with which I was not familiar. What a feast.
Sunday, May 23, 2010
Term Limits for Curators?
A short postscript to the last post “Why I’m not …”. Yet another interesting comment from Mr .Wride was that he had been looking at a whole lot of photographs for many years – “probably more than is good for me”.
A year or so before Marita Holdaway closed Benham Gallery I talked to her shortly after she returned from the portfolio review at the biennial PhotoLucida. I asked her if she saw anything that she thought was really outstanding. Her reply was that she had looked at thousands of portfolios over the past 20 years and “it takes a lot to get my attention.”
One of Susan Sonntag’s essays concerns the desensitizing effects of long-term exposure to photographs of violence. Maybe overexposure desensitizes one in other ways, too. Maybe we need term limits for curators, gallery owners, portfolio reviewers.
My musician/mathematician friend, Fritz, (mentioned in an earlier post) made the conscious decision not to become a professional musician after he heard a professional violinist lament that one of Brahms’ symphonies was “sooooo long.” His response to himself was “I never want to feel that way about a Brahms symphony!”
Maybe that makes my path of waiting for a half-century or so until retirement kicks in (as Ted Orland postulates) seem more reasonable. I sure haven’t lost the delight in seeing well-done photographs or drawings or paintings – even if they aren’t from the cutting edge. (Or maybe I’m just rationalizing.)
Saturday, May 22, 2010
Why I'm not at Tim Wride's Saturday workshop.
Here is my disclaimer. I don't know what art is. I don't know what art isn't. I mistrust anybody who asserts that he or she does. What I do know is that I see a lot of what is displayed as art and I read a lot about what is regarded as art. A lot of what I see and read about I understand and like -- or understand and don't like -- or don't understand. There are semi-permeable and constantly shifting membranes between these groups. Regard the remainder of this post with an appropriately sized grain of salt.
A second disclaimer. The editor that blogspot supplies drives me crazy. Stray line spaces and bullet points with no text are artifacts. Please ignore them.
A couple of evenings ago I went to a talk at Photographic Center Northwest in Seattle by Tim Wride. Mr. Wride is the former curator of photography at LACMA and is now an independent curator, writer, lecturer, and founder of the No Strings Foundation. According to their website, the No Strings Foundation “is committed to providing direct assistance to photographic imagemakers in an effort to facilitate and enhance their creative opportunities and endeavors.” Sounds like a good idea to me.
His talk on Wednesday evening, “What’s up in photoland” was a warm-up for a half-day program on Saturday or a full day seminar on Sunday about looking at photographs (other peoples and your own) critically. Apart from being a bit puzzled myself about “what’s up in photoland” the evening talk seemed like a good way to find out if I wanted to spend the money and, especially, the time to attend one of the weekend programs.
Mr. Wride is certainly an articulate, passionate speaker and it is a treat to hear somebody stating his views about art directly and in plain English. Moreover, I agree with much of what he had to say. The short summary of “what’s up in photoland”:
Contrary to the buzz that the sky is falling, art photography is alive and well but not yet acclimated to the “new normal”.
• The art photography market circa 2008 was bloated with both less-than-spectacular work and less-than-discriminating collectors who were buying it like dot-com stocks.
• The bubble burst in 2009 along with the economic bubble that was providing the money for it.
• He believes that a significant regrouping in the art photography world is now happening with the second-rate work disappearing (or at least diminishing in quantity), far fewer people making any semblance of a living in art photography and collectors becoming more discriminating. Cynically, I read the latter as “buying more of what I suggest or promote.” Ironically, his No Strings Foundation has failed to attract investors/supporters.
• One result of the burst bubble is that there are a lot of people who were making a living at art photography then who aren’t doing so now. His opinion, that I share, is basically “good riddance”.
• A second result is that a good deal of work, much of it “second rate”, is being donated to museums. Some of this will wind up in permanent collections and, in coming years, be regarded as representative of what was was up in photoland in this decade. Well, that’s true – and that is what was up.
Mr. Wride then presented a list of what he regards as red herrings in recent art photography:
• Blurry doesn’t make it art. It just makes it blurry.
• Big and colorful doesn’t make it art.
• Using toy cameras doesn’t make it art.
• Depth of field doesn’t make it art. (I’m not sure what he means by this. I suspect he is referring to the use of swings and tilts to create an implausible relationship between fore/mid/background. If that is it, he’s my man.)
• Euro-installation doesn’t make it art. (I had never heard this term. My interpretation of how he described it is “hanging work very high or low, hanging it in random groupings …”)
• Good art direction doesn’t make it art.
I hasten to add that he was not suggesting that the presence of any of the above precludes it from being art, either. Instead he was disdainful of the use of them, or any other technique, as a gimmick; an attempt to find the Photoshop “Cntrl-P for profound” key postulated by Ted Orland. I would add to his list:
• Beautiful doesn’t make it art, but neither does banal or ugly.
• Spectacular print quality doesn’t make it art but neither does disregard or disdain for print quality.
• Important doesn't make it art, but neither does trivial.
He then suggested that one opportunity facing us is to reconsider the work of underappreciated photographers from recent history. His list included:
• The pioneers of modernist photography: Ralph Gibson, Wynn Bullock, Minor White.
• The feminist photographers of the 70’s, Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, Judy Dater, Kiki Smith, Diane Niemier (my addition)
• The New Topographic school, the Bechers, Nicolas Nixon, Stephen Shore, Robert Adams
• The postmodernists, Victor Burgin, Philip Lorca-Dicorcia, Sherrie Levine, Paul Berger
• At least one more group that I can’t recall
Mr. Wride closed his talk by discussing where he felt art photography was going from here. During this discussion he dropped an obita dicta – words said in passing that give the game away. He regards art photography as primarily idea-based rather than image-based – as conceptual art. He openly stated that an exciting visual was not enough to get the work over his threshold - that visual interest is neither sufficient nor necessary. Aha! That explains a lot about his list of underappreciated photographers.
For example, Ralph Gibson’s preference is to show his work in books. In my opinion, book reproduction does not show his work well. His “The Somnambulist”, for example, is weighted (so Gibson says) with deep layers of meaning that I have never seen. Perhaps it is solely my problem but if a conceptual artist wants to convey an idea, it is wise to leave the door open a crack so I can get in. On the other hand, when Benham Gallery showed Gibson’s work I was blown away by some of the work from The Somnambulist. It still isn’t my favorite book but I can now look at it with some appreciation for what he was about.
Far be it from me to demean the socio-political value of the work done by the feminist photographers of the 70’s. It was and is important, valuable and memorable in the same way as the anti-nazi agitprop of John Heartfield. However, part of his admiration for the feminist photographers of the 70’s was that they were struggling against the current (true) and largely forced to wedge their art into a life dominated by making a living and raising a family (true). I see that as not fundamentally different from the situation of, say, Ralph Eugene Meatyard who had a day job, a family, and wedged his art into weekend photography and a yearly paroxysm of printing for a couple of weeks.
The New Topographic work has always struck me in two ways. Both of these ways include appreciation of spectacularly well-done prints. Some, like the Bechers, are of spectactularly well-done prints of spectacularly banal subjects – seen one European water tower, seen ‘em all. Others, like Stephen Shore, Robert Adams, and some of Nicolas Nixon, are of spectacularly ugly landscapes. These are, in my opinion, important as environmental statements but no more new and different than photographs of spectacularly beautiful architectural subjecs or landscapes.
Next I must confess yet another bias. I believe that it was Ralph Hattersly who wrote, “Above all, post-modern art is post-audience art.” It reminds me of the heyday of “cool” jazz during which the disdainful musicians would turn their backs to the audience during a performance so that they would not be distracted. After audiences stopped coming, cool jazz fizzled out. Similarly, it seems to me that most post-modern art is directed at a spiralingly smaller audience – the same people who know anything about, say, Paul Berger’s work are largely the same people who know everything about his work. I’m an exception; I know something about his work. He may be a pivotal figure in the recent history of photography but his work certainly eludes me. The ideas that he attributes to his work aren’t visible even after reading his statements. An artist/poet/filmmaker friend (one of whose short films is in the collection of NY/MOMA) described Berger’s first book “Seattle Subtext” as “another academic screwing around with a camera and a Xerox machine”. My opinion isn't quite that harsh.
In general, I have a lot of trouble with photography as conceptual art. It has always seemed to me that photography is very good at showing what something or somebody looked like at a particular time and place and that photography is very bad at expressing an idea. Words have the edge there.
A second obita dicta was Mr. Wride’s statement that “Photography is a very big place, just as is painting. There are painters that paint houses and painters that produce art. If you want to produce art you better belong to the art world.” What I heard from that and the context surrounding it was “you better produce work that is different from what I saw yesterday or last year or you are more like a house painter than an art painter.” That is a noble goal but not one that can be achieved by pursuing it directly (back to the list of Cntrl-P activities). A local photographer whom I shall not name once openly told me that he was looking for a new angle that would make him famous. He hasn’t found it yet. Edward Weston once commented on a contemporary “He doesn’t have to try to be different. He is different.” That’s more like it.
A third obita dicta was his expressed disdain for those who “have some other career and then decide that they want to be a photographer.” Perhaps that’s why he didn’t include Ralph Eugene Meatyard in his underappreciated list.
So ….. since I am one of the untouchables who had another career, since my work is not new and exciting, since my work is ostentatiously visual and not intellectual – I chose to stay home this weekend and play in the darkroom. I am currently on a lunch break from doing so and Mr. Wride’s Saturday workshop is in progress.
A second disclaimer. The editor that blogspot supplies drives me crazy. Stray line spaces and bullet points with no text are artifacts. Please ignore them.
A couple of evenings ago I went to a talk at Photographic Center Northwest in Seattle by Tim Wride. Mr. Wride is the former curator of photography at LACMA and is now an independent curator, writer, lecturer, and founder of the No Strings Foundation. According to their website, the No Strings Foundation “is committed to providing direct assistance to photographic imagemakers in an effort to facilitate and enhance their creative opportunities and endeavors.” Sounds like a good idea to me.
His talk on Wednesday evening, “What’s up in photoland” was a warm-up for a half-day program on Saturday or a full day seminar on Sunday about looking at photographs (other peoples and your own) critically. Apart from being a bit puzzled myself about “what’s up in photoland” the evening talk seemed like a good way to find out if I wanted to spend the money and, especially, the time to attend one of the weekend programs.
Mr. Wride is certainly an articulate, passionate speaker and it is a treat to hear somebody stating his views about art directly and in plain English. Moreover, I agree with much of what he had to say. The short summary of “what’s up in photoland”:
Contrary to the buzz that the sky is falling, art photography is alive and well but not yet acclimated to the “new normal”.
• The art photography market circa 2008 was bloated with both less-than-spectacular work and less-than-discriminating collectors who were buying it like dot-com stocks.
• The bubble burst in 2009 along with the economic bubble that was providing the money for it.
• He believes that a significant regrouping in the art photography world is now happening with the second-rate work disappearing (or at least diminishing in quantity), far fewer people making any semblance of a living in art photography and collectors becoming more discriminating. Cynically, I read the latter as “buying more of what I suggest or promote.” Ironically, his No Strings Foundation has failed to attract investors/supporters.
• One result of the burst bubble is that there are a lot of people who were making a living at art photography then who aren’t doing so now. His opinion, that I share, is basically “good riddance”.
• A second result is that a good deal of work, much of it “second rate”, is being donated to museums. Some of this will wind up in permanent collections and, in coming years, be regarded as representative of what was was up in photoland in this decade. Well, that’s true – and that is what was up.
Mr. Wride then presented a list of what he regards as red herrings in recent art photography:
• Blurry doesn’t make it art. It just makes it blurry.
• Big and colorful doesn’t make it art.
• Using toy cameras doesn’t make it art.
• Depth of field doesn’t make it art. (I’m not sure what he means by this. I suspect he is referring to the use of swings and tilts to create an implausible relationship between fore/mid/background. If that is it, he’s my man.)
• Euro-installation doesn’t make it art. (I had never heard this term. My interpretation of how he described it is “hanging work very high or low, hanging it in random groupings …”)
• Good art direction doesn’t make it art.
I hasten to add that he was not suggesting that the presence of any of the above precludes it from being art, either. Instead he was disdainful of the use of them, or any other technique, as a gimmick; an attempt to find the Photoshop “Cntrl-P for profound” key postulated by Ted Orland. I would add to his list:
• Beautiful doesn’t make it art, but neither does banal or ugly.
• Spectacular print quality doesn’t make it art but neither does disregard or disdain for print quality.
• Important doesn't make it art, but neither does trivial.
He then suggested that one opportunity facing us is to reconsider the work of underappreciated photographers from recent history. His list included:
• The pioneers of modernist photography: Ralph Gibson, Wynn Bullock, Minor White.
• The feminist photographers of the 70’s, Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, Judy Dater, Kiki Smith, Diane Niemier (my addition)
• The New Topographic school, the Bechers, Nicolas Nixon, Stephen Shore, Robert Adams
• The postmodernists, Victor Burgin, Philip Lorca-Dicorcia, Sherrie Levine, Paul Berger
• At least one more group that I can’t recall
Mr. Wride closed his talk by discussing where he felt art photography was going from here. During this discussion he dropped an obita dicta – words said in passing that give the game away. He regards art photography as primarily idea-based rather than image-based – as conceptual art. He openly stated that an exciting visual was not enough to get the work over his threshold - that visual interest is neither sufficient nor necessary. Aha! That explains a lot about his list of underappreciated photographers.
For example, Ralph Gibson’s preference is to show his work in books. In my opinion, book reproduction does not show his work well. His “The Somnambulist”, for example, is weighted (so Gibson says) with deep layers of meaning that I have never seen. Perhaps it is solely my problem but if a conceptual artist wants to convey an idea, it is wise to leave the door open a crack so I can get in. On the other hand, when Benham Gallery showed Gibson’s work I was blown away by some of the work from The Somnambulist. It still isn’t my favorite book but I can now look at it with some appreciation for what he was about.
Far be it from me to demean the socio-political value of the work done by the feminist photographers of the 70’s. It was and is important, valuable and memorable in the same way as the anti-nazi agitprop of John Heartfield. However, part of his admiration for the feminist photographers of the 70’s was that they were struggling against the current (true) and largely forced to wedge their art into a life dominated by making a living and raising a family (true). I see that as not fundamentally different from the situation of, say, Ralph Eugene Meatyard who had a day job, a family, and wedged his art into weekend photography and a yearly paroxysm of printing for a couple of weeks.
The New Topographic work has always struck me in two ways. Both of these ways include appreciation of spectacularly well-done prints. Some, like the Bechers, are of spectactularly well-done prints of spectacularly banal subjects – seen one European water tower, seen ‘em all. Others, like Stephen Shore, Robert Adams, and some of Nicolas Nixon, are of spectacularly ugly landscapes. These are, in my opinion, important as environmental statements but no more new and different than photographs of spectacularly beautiful architectural subjecs or landscapes.
Next I must confess yet another bias. I believe that it was Ralph Hattersly who wrote, “Above all, post-modern art is post-audience art.” It reminds me of the heyday of “cool” jazz during which the disdainful musicians would turn their backs to the audience during a performance so that they would not be distracted. After audiences stopped coming, cool jazz fizzled out. Similarly, it seems to me that most post-modern art is directed at a spiralingly smaller audience – the same people who know anything about, say, Paul Berger’s work are largely the same people who know everything about his work. I’m an exception; I know something about his work. He may be a pivotal figure in the recent history of photography but his work certainly eludes me. The ideas that he attributes to his work aren’t visible even after reading his statements. An artist/poet/filmmaker friend (one of whose short films is in the collection of NY/MOMA) described Berger’s first book “Seattle Subtext” as “another academic screwing around with a camera and a Xerox machine”. My opinion isn't quite that harsh.
In general, I have a lot of trouble with photography as conceptual art. It has always seemed to me that photography is very good at showing what something or somebody looked like at a particular time and place and that photography is very bad at expressing an idea. Words have the edge there.
A second obita dicta was Mr. Wride’s statement that “Photography is a very big place, just as is painting. There are painters that paint houses and painters that produce art. If you want to produce art you better belong to the art world.” What I heard from that and the context surrounding it was “you better produce work that is different from what I saw yesterday or last year or you are more like a house painter than an art painter.” That is a noble goal but not one that can be achieved by pursuing it directly (back to the list of Cntrl-P activities). A local photographer whom I shall not name once openly told me that he was looking for a new angle that would make him famous. He hasn’t found it yet. Edward Weston once commented on a contemporary “He doesn’t have to try to be different. He is different.” That’s more like it.
A third obita dicta was his expressed disdain for those who “have some other career and then decide that they want to be a photographer.” Perhaps that’s why he didn’t include Ralph Eugene Meatyard in his underappreciated list.
So ….. since I am one of the untouchables who had another career, since my work is not new and exciting, since my work is ostentatiously visual and not intellectual – I chose to stay home this weekend and play in the darkroom. I am currently on a lunch break from doing so and Mr. Wride’s Saturday workshop is in progress.
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