Mar
17

Open Eye Study Visit

The Crystal World, 2011, Richard Mosse, digital c-print RIM11.018. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, NY

Having read people’s reviews of the Study Visit to the Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool I decided I should share my thoughts on the day. I am a newbie to OCA and whilst I am starting with the Visual Culture module, I have a long-time interest in photography but no previous art-related background. I feel that I may have a different approach to viewing/understanding art/photography than many other students.

Firstly let me say that I read the articles and watched the suggested video on the pre-event email.

My initial reaction as I entered the first room containing Richard Mosse’s work was “Wow!” The huge image on the far wall (above) gave me the feeling that I get when I discover something new, something I don’t understand but I really want to know more about, what…when…where…how…why?. Its otherworldliness seemed in places to be almost 3D. I was transfixed by the sheer beauty of the landscape, and I returned to this image several times during my time there.

The Open Gallery is a very small space to show large works, and the Richard Mosse prints numbered (I think) twelve. They were a mixture of  landscapes, villagers and soldiers but they all carried the pink hue of the Kodak Aerochrome film that he used.

We were told to bear in mind that he is not primarily a photojournalist, and indeed in an interview with Aperture magazine,  Mosse recalls his commission in Haiti for Time magazine, and appears to struggle to understand what they wanted from him there. It was two photojournalists who explained to him that they just wanted him to put his slant on the aftermath of the earthquake instead of just providing the usual newspaper money shot. So do we therefore class this as documentary photography? Do we really have to consign it to a particular box?

With not really knowing how I should deal with these images I found it difficult to form an opinion. I think there were too few images to really get your teeth into the project.

Breaking for coffee I still couldn’t come to a conclusion and it has taken me a further few days of reflection and further reading to collect my thoughts.

Whilst I have some sketchy knowledge of the DRC and its turbulent history, based mainly on Tim Butcher’s travelogues and images from the likes of Alvaro Ybarra Zavala and Don McCullin, the displayed Mosse photographs didn’t for me thrust the horror in my face. If you removed the four pictures containing soldiers, there was little to hint at the political instability and fear that hangs over the intensely beautiful landscape and its people. Even those pictures containing soldiers were less shocking to me than coming face to face with armed police in an airport or tube station. It is perhaps a sad reflection on our times that the media has desensitised us to pain and suffering caused by disaster and conflict unless it happens on our own doorstep. That being said, flicking through Mosse’s book (and looking at what was on show at the Shainman Gallery in NY), there is far more to Infra than what was on show in Liverpool and some much more unsettling images to reflect upon.

After the event, watching an interview Mosse did for the Shainman Gallery, I sort of got the impression that the transition from film to digital photography and the demise of Aerochrome was the impetus for this project, and that the  Congo fitted the requirement of the film. Mosse stated that this was the last chance he had to use the discontinued stock, and so after acquiring what he could he looked for a location. The chlorophyll in living plant matter reflects infrared light whereas other mediums absorb it to various degrees, therefore allowing aerial surveillance to pick out potential targets from the vegetation. It would be no use going to back to Iraq or Syria, he needed a place to make the most of the film but also a narrative to pull the project together.

Several years ago I was given a 1925 Kodak Vest Pocket folding camera that intrigued me to find out whether it still worked and I spent some time hunting down some 127 film to put through it. I had no long term plans to use the camera, I just thought that if I could still get some film and patch up the bellows then I should take the opportunity to experience the camera. It may be a very small comparison to draw but in some way it helps me to understand something about Mosse’s desire to use Aerochrome to show the Congo in a way other than the traditional black & white, before it was too late.

A point was made regarding what is usually “unseen” but which is now highlighted in these photographs. I can only just begin to imagine the mental torment as well as the physical violence suffered by these people and the secretive nature of these guerrilla forces moving silently through the undergrowth now exposed in vivid pink but maybe there is more to this that I don’t yet understand? The “unseen-ness” gets lost on me when I look at the day-to-day photographs, houses built on a lava flow, an excavator or a group of people extracting a Rav4 that has slid off the road. If you took these photographs in isolation they just look like people going about their daily lives.

Mosse used two cameras, a custom built 10×8” likely used for the landscapes and posed shots and the 6x7cm Mamiya for the more dynamic shots. The group shots remind me of Roger Fenton’s Crimean war photographs, everybody gathering round in front of this foreigner and his strange wooden box .  I feel that there are many things that probably deserve consideration and reflection that I just didn’t notice in this work and perhaps if I look at these images in two years’ time or in greater number I will see different things and maybe form different opinions.

Similarly, the Simon  Norfolk work displayed upstairs failed to invoke any particular response from me other than finding it somewhat shameful that I view images of genocide with a certain detachment. I feel I have no direct connection with Rwanda nor Cambodia nor the Holocaust and a question to whether this state of apathy was a “generation thing” was put forward, but while I can’t vouch for what has been taught in schools for the last 25 years, I believe it is hard for somebody of my age (41) to have no knowledge of or recognise images from, these horrific events of the last century. The blame, as I mentioned previously, may lie partially with the media providing a near constant stream of  graphic images from every occurring catastrophe, desensitising us to the misery of those whom we do not know, living on the other side of the world and also partly to ourselves for fuelling the media with our seemingly insatiable desire for what has been termed “disaster porn”, that difficulty to tear yourself away from 24hr News channels because of morbid curiosity more than genuine concern. I have a genuine interest in photojournalism and documentary photography and over the last twenty years I have seen many images that cannot now be unseen, images that will stay with me for the rest of my life. I don’t wish that I hadn’t seen these things, instead I wish that I didn’t have to see these things. Man’s inhumanity to man and the sight of dying children still moves me to tears, I am not totally devoid of emotion. I don’t close my eyes to things that are happening in the world, but after I while I do think that you get hardened emotionally to the same sort of images.

When asked to pick what I thought was the most “powerful” image in the room, I really struggled. I fully understood the horrors that some these images represent and how they can affect others but I suppose, sadly, to me their power has been diluted by the thousands of similar images I have seen before.

Maybe one of the reasons why I am so intrigued by photojournalism and photojournalists, could be the seemingly emotionless detachment from the subject that they have. I know that this, in reality, is not genuinely the case, as CNN reporter Anderson Cooper said in his book, “Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival”, “I’m not shocked anymore by the bodies, the blunders. You can’t stay stunned forever. The anger doesn’t go away, but it settles somewhere behind your heart; it deepens into resolve.” I don’t think I could ever do their job, I know I wouldn’t be able to deal with it emotionally, so that I think at least shows my heart is not completely cold.

Apologies, this was meant to be a few lines about a study visit but has rambled on somewhat. To sum up, I thought that a  few of Richard Mosse’s images were some of the most amazing images I have seen but I came away disappointed that there were so few of them and because of that I felt somewhat short-changed (if you can when it is free?). I totally didn’t get the video installation, and again the Simon Norfolk images didn’t do it for me either.

The study visit was good however, and it is interesting to hear other peoples thoughts and to talk with fellow students, whether their ideas are the same as yours or not. So from this angle, it was a good day out and I look forward to the next…if I’m allowed back after writing this…

Feb
26

I’m still here…

Tuesday sees the last printing session for our A2 Photography, and seeing that I have six “finals” already that I couldn’t decide between I don’t think I’ll complicate things by printing any more. This means that I have about four weeks remaining after this one to finish my work folder, fill in the required forms and mount the prints. I have decided not to take the BTEC course in September, I’ll miss it, but truthfully I’d rather crack on with the degree work and just mess around at home now that I’ve got the massive Durst enlarger set up in the spare bedroom darkroom ;o)

So come the end of next month I’ll be back here, posting like there is no tomorrow…

Dec
05

Project 6 – Photography – The new reality

The object of this project was to read “Photography versus Painting” by Osip Brik, take notes and comment on the points highlighted below.

I had previous knowledge of Osip Brik through the reading of “I, Love : The Story of Vladimir Mayakovsky and Lili Brik” and was aware of Osip’s relationship with artist Aleksander Rodchenko and the lengths that he went to in order to promote the work of his friends and fellow Futurists, Rodchenko and poet Mayakovsky. It was therefore with interest that I read the article, originally entitled “The Photo-Frame versus Painting”1 and published in Sovetskoie Foto in 1926.

The essence of the article is a Futurist view of how photography should be accepted as the new tool for reality in art, consigning painters to the role of “picture makers” whilst also publicising the work of his friend, Rodchenko. Brik highlights several reasons to why he considers this to be the case, including precision, speed and cheapness of photography over that of traditional painting.

Do you think that Brik’s article points to a practice that was taken up by photographers or other artists to any great extent?

Brik’s article certainly resonates with the feeling of the Futurist movement, however as we know now, Futurist painting took its own direction and ultimately influenced what would become Constructivism, Surrealism and Dadaism. Painters didn’t exactly throw away their brushes and pick up a camera in any great number that I am aware of, but what they did was to abandon trying to reproduce reality and start to make pictures. I think that this change separated what was a painting and what was a photograph and what they both represented. Additionally, Brik said that photography deserved recognition as an art form, in the same way as painting did and while this may now be the case, it has been a fairly slow process to get to the amount of gallery wall space that photographers today cover.

Do you find any resonances with Brik’s ideas in contemporary discussions of photography and painting?

I see similar comparisons in discussions revolving around digital photography versus film. Ten years ago, digital SLR cameras were still around the 6 megapixel mark and speaking to wedding photographers at the time, they seemed split between film and digital, some of the older photographers going as far as to say that digital would never equal film for its quality. Now ten years later you would be hard pushed to get your wedding shot any way other than digital, and with manufacturers producing cameras of 40-80 megapixels digital is certainly the norm. Whilst some die-hards still only shot film, it seemed that film had become consigned to the likes of art students and enthusiasts (like myself). It is interesting however that as the quality of the digital image has improved there has been a surge in the sales of low quality film cameras such as Lomo and Holga almost to the extent that you could call the style of “Lo-fi Photography” a new movement countering the ease and preciseness that photography with the modern digital camera creates.

Find and annotate two examples of images that demonstrate the impact of photography on painting. How do these images acknowledge the shift in visual culture that came about with the advent of photography?



After the Bath (Woman Drying Herself) c. 1896 Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas

Painting : http://www.philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/74314.html?mulR=14335|3
Photograph : http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/artObjectDetails?artobj=47047&handle=li

Degas is well known for his drawings and painting of horses and ballet dancers. His early galloping racehorses were painted in the traditional outstretched leg style of earlier painters such as George Stubbs, however after observing Eadweard Muybridge’s work in photographing movement in both animals and humans, he broke with tradition and used Muybridge’s photographic plates as reference and started painting galloping horses in a more realistic manner. His use of photographs was not limited to just horses; indeed he embraced the medium, and at the age of 61 bought an early Kodak box camera and captured models holding positions that he would later use in his paintings.2

Degas painted more than one variant of this scene, along with several other depictions of women drying themselves after taking a bath. There are many examples of Degas shooting dancers holding pose and subsequently using part of them or a combination of several to construct a scene in a painting, but this is a clear example of him reproducing the image almost identically.

Degas was an innovator, and wanted to depict his models as anatomically correct as possible along with recreating the feeling of movement. He saw the benefit of photography as a tool to enhance his painting by capturing the finest details; it was perhaps too early to really consider what the camera could achieve in the long run in art terms, and while he is generally classed as an Impressionist, his attention to detail and drive for accurate reproduction of life, puts one foot firmly in the Realist camp.

Smirk (2009), Alyssa Monks (http://alyssamonks.com)

Photorealism grew out of the Pop Art movement of the late 60’s and early 70’s to counter the emotional free reign and spontaneity along with an often nihilistic direction of Abstract Expressionism3. The Photorealist’s put emphasis on the finished image instead of the process of creation in a move back towards a methodical way of painting.

This recent painting is by Alyssa Monks, and is part of a series of work depicting women bathing. In an interview with Flavorwire 4 Monks explained that she painted directly from the photograph, but often similarly to Degas, changed or invented details that were not present in the original shot. She goes on to say that “There’s no way to make it exactly like a photograph. I’m not interested in that and I’ve never been a photo-realist. Part of the challenge is to figure out what to use from the photo and what to invent.” This direction fits with the Hyperrealism movement, a sort of break-away group from Photorealism, where exact duplication of the real is not the idea, but instead creating something that looks so believably real but in fact does not actually exist.

Looking at the work of such artists as Monks and fellow Hyperrealist Chuck Close, it is hard to imagine that this form of painting would have ever existed without the invention of the photograph. The subjects, the settings, the angles, the light, the detail…all what we now expect when we look at a photograph. This type of image is now fairly ordinary; however with the efforts of the Hyperrealists it becomes extraordinary.

Ref:

1 The Struggle for Utopia: Rodchenk, Lissitzky, Moholy-Nagy 1917-1946, Victor Margolin, Google Books.

2 Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement, Ann Dumas, Co-Curator, Royal Academy of Arts (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/europe/uk/london/8826967/Exhibition-in-focus-Degas-and-the-Ballet-Royal-Academy-of-Arts.html)

3 Abstract Expressionism: The Politics of Apolitical Painting, David and Cecile Shapiro, Prospects Volume 3, October 1978, pp 175-214, Published online by Cambridge University Press 30 Jul 2009

4 Exclusive: Alyssa Monks Talks about her Bathing Beauties, Laura Fenton, Flavorwire, 15-04-2009 (http://flavorwire.com/17668/exclusive-alyssa-monks-talks-about-her-bathing-beauties)

Nov
30

Lazy…no, just busy.

Unlike this lazy bugger, I’ve been busy with work and trying to sort my A’Level project. Self-portraiture is as difficult as I thought it was going to be, but… I’m getting there and it will soon be Christmas…

Just finishing my Visual Culture Project 6, and plan to get 7 and the first assignment sorted over the next two weeks.

It’s a grey seal by the way, at Donna Nook last week.

Oct
22

Project 5 – Art as commodity

Reading Marx’s “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof”, I am able to respond to the project’s questions with the following notes.

We can view certain artists as “brands”, in the same way as we see other commodities. We witness (or even are a part of) the queues camped outside Apple stores for the latest multimedia devices or outside bookshops for the latest Harry Potter novel. In the same way, the frantic auction house bidding wars that see work by Jeff Koons or Damien Hirst fetch record amounts of money exist because of our “fetish” for owning that which we believe will bring us happiness, make our life better or ultimately make us more money.  The “branding” of these artists such as Koons, Hirst or even Warhol has enabled them to pretty much pre-sell whatever they produce(d) as every collector wants to have a piece of theirs in their collection. This was particularly evident with the Middle-Eastern and Russian mega-billionaires of 2008 paying extraordinary amounts at auction that resulted in 32 pieces by Hirst fetching over £1M and 18 pieces by Koons fetching over $1M  that year.1

As we know, commodities go down as well as up, and while worldwide auction sales of contemporary art grew more than 10-fold between 2003 and 20082, by 2009 the bubble had burst and along with the collapse of Lehman Bothers, the prices tumbled, meaning that in 2009 while only 9 works by Koons passed $1M, only a single piece by Hirst reached the £1M mark.

Traditionally many artists produced work for themselves, their friends or just to pay the bills and survive, such as the Bohemian artists of the 19th Century. Most of these never got a chance of fame, at least not in their own lifetime, however there is now a new breed of artist, fuelled by the media and given the right outlet can become rich without the hardships that their predecessor’s endured. Once noticed and in demand, the pressure is on to satisfy the market’s thirst and often this can no longer be achieved by the artist alone.

Andy Warhol’s  “Factory” churned out silkscreen prints and underground movies, and kick-started what we see today with artists such as Koons, Takashi Murakami, Hirst and other brit-artists Tracey Emin and Gavin Turk. While artists have always had assistants, the post-Warhol “factories” take this to a new level. While Emin mostly employs assistants to do the day-to-day office work such as answering the phone and dealing with paperwork, they also help out with the artwork, likewise Turk employs helpers and fabricators on a fairly small scale. Murakami boasts around a hundred employees in his studios in America and Japan, Koons has a couple of dozen more than Murakami, but Hirst lead the pack until recent economic downturns and a change of direction meant that his workforce was cut by over half, down to around seventy.3

Ref:
1 ArtNet via
Scott Reyburn . (2009). Koons, Hirst Prices Drop 50%; May Take Next Decade to Recover. Available: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aDeSqB_txtGI. Last accessed 22nd Oct 2011.

2 Artprice via
Scott Reyburn . (2009). Koons, Hirst Prices Drop 50%; May Take Next Decade to Recover. Available: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aDeSqB_txtGI. Last accessed 22nd Oct 2011.

3 Sean O’Hagan. (2009). The art of selling out. Available: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/sep/06/hirst-koons-murakami-emin-turk. Last accessed 22nd Oct 2011.

Marx, Karl. (1867). The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof. In: Engels, Frederick Capital. Moscow: Progress Publishers

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