14 January 2010
waves
Lordy… As I finally get ready to show my At Sea work next month, the waves are all around me. Tonight at the Drawing Center in Soho is Sea Marks, with drawings by three artists, partly inspired by the sea. Just now I saw this review by Donald Kuspit of paintings by John Millei. They look gorgeous.
I’m gonna take a break and read Rachel Carson and see if I can’t finish this show…
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1 January 2010
sacred failure for the new year
Although I have recently been avoiding most Art mags – more out of laziness and poverty than principle – I have become quite a fan of Proximity Magazine. Issue 6 has just come out, with another interesting piece on photography by Rod Slemmons, and a lovely bit on excess and sacrifice by Noah Berlatsky. He is speaking of Batille’s notion of the world’s excess – its “accursed share” – and his recounting of the old Native American custom of potlatch as a way to gain rank above one’s enemies by giving away the greater gift. Artists, he suggests, are the closest contemporary practictioners of potlatch, sacrificing their work and selves to counteract the excess in the world, but often too willing to trade in their gifts just for money or more base exhibitions of status.
And yet…
Addendum: The Top 20 Most Powerless People in the Art World
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29 December 2009
Romeo, O, um, Romeo
Another beautiful celebration of failure, from NPR
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29 November 2009
the collective unconscious
This morning I am rather obsessed with samesies *, convinced it supports some of my favorite ideas about the ubiquity of photography and the unremarkable occurrence of photographic genius…
20 October 2009
more failure and fakery
Begin here for Erroll Morris’ wonderful accounts about past and present photographic falsehoods. What’s amazing to me is that there is no doubt about the “truth” that the photographs which he discusses aimed to illustrate (that there was a severe drought in North Dakota in 1936; that Iran was developing longer-ranged missiles.) But the arguments and accusations have flown due to the details of the images themselves, and how they were made. Maybe someday people will finally divest themselves of these childish notions of Truth and Reality…. but until then, we photographers have an awful lot of power.
Part One of "The Case of the Inappropriate Alarm Clock", on the FSA photography program
…and so much more
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10 October 2009
on failure, distilled
As the story goes, William Henry Fox Talbot sought to invent Photography because he couldn’t draw. Having failed at making a decent landscape using the camera lucida, he wished to get Nature to “paint itself”. Through years of trial and error, Talbot managed to produce some of the first lasting photographic images only to have his singular discovery trumped by the superior work of a better-funded Frenchman. As he raced to show his earlier discoveries, he was thwarted by minor mis-steps and a summer of bad English weather, and barely eked out some flawed and faded photographs in time. Nevertheless, this was the birth of the Art.
If Photography is born from failure, then surely it must have always carried failure in its genes. Even as it laid claim to representing nature more perfectly than ever before, many of its earliest critics noted the odd and empty world of the camera, or the deathly pallor and embalmed stare of its once-living subjects. As the technology grew faster, better and more detailed, the technological advances of Photography were matched by greater critical and philosophical concerns over its connection (or lack thereof) to Truth and Reality, and its further political uses in the world. To many it was a Science not an Art, and represented the Death of Painting, the End of Art, and the rise of a frightening Modernity.
Despite the ever-increasing challenges to its claim on truth, Photography still manages to hold onto its privileged position in representing the contemporary experience, perhaps even more so by its unique connection to Failure. What better way to express a growing disconnection to the natural world? When the Modern photographers aimed to distill Photography to its essence, they inadvertently latched on to exactly the way in which photographs failed in their initially stated purpose, to show Nature as it was. The tiny rectangle of the world caught on the film plane was judged only as Composition (all the better if tilted or skewed…) That miniscule slice of time captured by the shutter became “The Decisive Moment”.
But no matter how much we know about the failure of Photographic Truth, a gut feeling confirms the photograph’s tenuous connection to its referent. A photograph of a dead body simply feels different than a drawing of one. That unavoidable sense of “that was there” makes even false magic tricks seem possible, and the missing figure so much more the greater loss. Even Talbot’s little stained scraps of paper – the ghosts of his home and garden – contain a bit of time preserved, not just gone. That early Photography was Photography born whole, just baby steps from drawing, yet already the perfect medium through which to show a very real sense of loss, absence and indeed Failure.
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