Kill! Kill! Stabbity-Kill!

[compilerbitch]

I'm currently reading a book on art theory, specifically relating to criticism of photographs. It really quite severely gets my goat. In fact, it's pissed my goat off so much that she's going to strap a rocket launcher to her back and then go out hunting postmodernists.

It brings a bit of context to something I found deeply disappointing on my most recent London trip. doseybat and I visited the Photographer's Gallery, near Leicester Square. Other than a few badly displayed, though decent, prints upstairs in a poky little 'print sales' room, I have to say that the exhibition spaces were full of, well, crap. There wasn't a single decent print in there. Most of the walls were filled with an exhibit of 'found' photographs -- basically gone-wrong discarded passport photographs mostly. There were a few interestingly manipulated prints, but the interest was in the idea, rather than the execution. Another exhibit consisted of 15 or 20 black and white prints of a variety of wooden lookout towers, many of which were badly focussed, with blown highlights, plugged shadows or both. There was nothing to recommend the compositions either -- they were simply bad photographs. In the entire exhibit, nearly every print seemed to be glued or blu-tacked to the wall. It was clearly all meant to be a postmodernist rejection of modernist/realist photographic sensibilities*, but all it succeeded in doing in my case was have me wondering about the gallery management, thinking to myself, 'what the hell were they thinking?'

I am trying to understand photography at a deeper level, but I'm not at all sure that this stuff really helps. I suppose it never hurts to know your enemy, but I can't see myself going in that direction. It would seem to have about as much point as spending a year travelling the great sights of this planet, making thousands of amazing images, then exhibiting a wall-sized print of the directory structure of my hard drive. I'm not sure I'm a modernist/realist/f-64 devotee exactly, because I find their ideas a little too restrictive, but I'm sure-as-hell not a postmodernist.

* which sounds awfully impressive, but is probably bullshit. I feel like a full-fledged art critic after spending an hour reading that book...

Comments

[vanessapyjamas.livejournal.com]

Thats a really interesting reply. I'm not an art theorist, in my field/s (legal and social theory) postmodernism isn't alwayy understood as an active rejection of modernism, but as a consequence or product of the increased social complexity that characterises 'modern' society. Postmodernism for me is a concept not a movement and it isn't capable of rejecting anything.

The theorist I engage with most, Niklas Luhmann, wrote a paper called 'Why does society describe itself as postmodern?' (Cultural Critique, Spring 1995, pp.171-186) in which he argued that postmodernism is a concept whcih floats free from social reality, in that society is clearly still stubbornly modern, so describing it as postmodern seems bizarre. What postmodernism does do is offer a frame within which we can draw distinctions between progressive modernity (which might correspond to the ambition of photographers to produce increasingly realistic images) and anxious, self critical modernity (which is I think an observable phenomenon and leads to people doubting the usefulness of assertions of aesthetic excellence and engaging with found art and the like). The two things are not in any sense inevitably in opposition. They are deeply interlinked. Postmodernism frames the distinction between the two as being historical. Social systems theory (Luhmann was a systems theorist) might see the problem in terms of two competing systems applying meaning to the same art (or not-art) object. The distinction we observe is a choice. But it would seem incoherent to me for any postmodernist to assert that the images created by Ansel Adams are not valid/worthwhile/skilful/beautiful art. They might however suggest that the aspirations of the f/64 group to pure photography exclusive of other art influences are naive.

On a related note, this reminds me of a discussion I had with Joe's Dad who is a photographer, about video art. He was lamenting the fact that in terms of image construction so much of it is rubbish, because it is either not technically accomplished or lacks any kind of visual imagination. For me the shortcoming of video art is that so little of it engages with what it can achieve (exploiting the narrative potential of moving pictures to the maximum) and focusses instead on either conceptual projects which might (as some one said above) just as well be presented as an essay, or on trying to ape still photography, which is pointless. I am sure Joe's Dad is right about the technical rubbishness of video art, but as a non-technical person who is really interested in stories and theory crap, thats not the first thing I see. For the same reason I doubt I would see what you see as wrong with the Ansel Adams prints, because I lack your critical eye. Similarly, it never occurred to me that the found works at the Photographers shouldn't qualify as photography (although I do see your point), but I think it is worth considering that for many of the audience, the provocation they offer is the point, and not the technical or aesthetic quality of the images on display.

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

Provocation in art is (usually) a good thing, in my opinion. It is necessary to give the tree a shake every so often. But provocation that in and of itself transcends the art that communicates it only really impresses me when the art itself holds up to scrutiny in its own right.

I don't actually find that the f/64 group's art theory fits me that well either. Though my style does, seemingly, usually end up resembling work from that movement (it's not actually deliberate, it just seems to always end up that way), I do also like to do things that would be anathema -- my CGI-manipulated images might well have a similar look in terms of sharpness, depth of field and composition to my 'straight' photography, but conceptually the images are anything but -- they are quite deliberately contrived to be something that could never possibly be photographed conventionally.

[vanessapyjamas.livejournal.com]

What would it take for the art to stand up to scrutiny in its own right AND transcend the medium? I can't think of any historical instance of the two occurring contemporaneously.

And I see what you mean about your own art, you are doing something quite edgy in terms of exploiting the technology to the limits for reasons that aren't necessarily about enhancing the image or achieving a specific effect - kind of technique for techniques sake. Which sounds dismissive, but I don't mean that, the more I think about your photographs the more I find that a provocation in its own right. Hmmmmm.

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

I don't consciously set out for my photography to be a provocation, but I do have to admit that -- for whatever reason -- it does seem to have that effect on a proportion of people. Perhaps it is more provocative than I realise to use all this extreme-tech gear to, in effect, produce photographs that look like they might have been taken in the 1930s. Also, I think black & white photography is a bit of a sacred cow -- it seems to be OK to do the occasional B&W conversion from DSLR images so long as you're not seen to be too serious about it (because, of course, modern photography is all about colour). It's also OK if you want to go the traditionalist silver-gelatin, wet darkroom route. But what I do doesn't fit either of those moulds, so I piss off the DSLR crowd (which tends to be equipment-obsessed on the whole) by severely out-gearing them, and I piss off the traditionalists by being seen to reject their approach.

There are plenty of existing examples of art being provocative yet still standing on its own merits, but I think that this approach isn't quite so common in the visual art world. It's happened quite a bit in music -- pretty much every time a new genre is established, really. Debussy apparently had huge problems in being attacked by critics, yet his music is clearly really quite astonishing, though his use of nonstandard scales and chord progressions was very unconventional by the standards of his time. More recently, you have Frank Zappa, who spent most of his career satirising contemporary rock music (not to mention the music business), yet his own musicianship and that of his band was truly legendary. "Just like a penguin in bondage, boy." Then, of course, we have the likes of Helmut Newton and Mapplethorpe, both of whom created beautiful-yet-shocking images (though I'm not sure either of them really pushed the boundaries of their art, more the boundary between pornography and art if anything).

[vanessapyjamas.livejournal.com]

I think what I find provoking on reflection is wondering what it is you are trying to achieve. Is it an ultra pure form of photography, in which you exploit every last thing a digital camera can give you. What you are doing doesn't seem anchored in anything conventional I can think of relating to image composition. I was very puzzled when you posted about the consistently frosty reception you get from other photographers, because despite my monumental lack of expertise, even I can see you are producing some great stuff, especially the CGI stuff. But maybe this is why 'experts' feel uncomfortable with your work, whilst I like it, because I don't know enough to see how wrong it is.

And I agree that art which provokes is often technically great. And maybe greatness is always provocative. But the point about Debussy is kind of what I was getting at; he was reviled in his own lifetime for being so unconventional that people couldn't hear what was great about him. Just as Ruskin saw Whistler as 'flinging a pot of paint in the publics face'. This doesn't mean provocation equals greatness, but it does suggest that our ability to asses the technical merits of a work are often tied up with a big wodge of preconceptions about what amounts to proper art. If something really transcends existing conventions about a medium, the audience is left floating free with no clear anchor to help them hear or see what makes it good. Whict I think means you have much more in common with the person exhibiting bonkers found art, than with the person who is interested in aping Ansel Adams and nothing more.

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

You are probably right that I have more in common with Joachim Schmid. I suspect we'd probably have a lot to mutually whine about!

What you are doing doesn't seem anchored in anything conventional I can think of relating to image composition.

Interesting comment -- I certainly don't use any 'rules' of composition in the sense that people are taught never to put the horizon through the middle of an image and that things should be structured on a rule of thirds and so on. Typically, I see an image in my head, and just go about setting up the camera to capture the scene, then when I get back I spend ages in Photoshop tweaking things so I can get back to my original visualisation.

Thinking back to the photo club that pushed me out, it is certainly the case that many of my photographs don't really fit any of their categories very well. On the night they wouldn't let me enter Sliced into their 'creative' section, the competition was actually won by a picture of a banana that someone had messed up with the liquefy tool in Photoshop. It wasn't bad, actually, but it (and the other entrants in that section) didn't really bear any resemblance to what I'd done. My image looks like a straight photograph -- a studio 'product shot' -- of something that can't possibly exist. It tells a visual story, albeit a weird and possibly disturbing one. Thinking about what you said and looking back, I think it was just too much for them conceptually, though at the time I thought they were reacting to my use of CGI elements.

On the Luminous Landscape forum, where I also posted Sliced, someone actually said, in effect, that my image had no merit because of it's use of CGI, and (I kid you not) this was because the second and third Matrix movies sucked. I think that there is a perception that CGI is trivial; that it's not really art because it's too easy to accomplish. You just push a button and it happens, right? All the same objections that people had to photography-as-art, effectively. CGI is far harder than photography, actually -- you have to be at once an engineer, materials scientist, sculptor and a bunch of other things that there aren't names for, whilst also still having to do the same lighting and photography tasks that any studio photographer also has to address. Seeing CGI used in photography is extremely rare, however, probably because photography is traditionally a solitary activity, so the chances that one person would have the means and motivation to use it *and* the equipment and software necessary are inevitably going to be reduced -- this is quite different to the movie industry with its vast budgets, where teams of often literally hundreds of people work on the CGI elements of the final cut.

Stuff them all! I'll show them. [fx: insane cackling laughter] One day, when I rule the world, bwahahahahaha (etc.)