The Everyday?

Fried really didn't get into "The Everyday" but rather went on tangents about how amazing Jeff Wall's photographs are, but alas, here's what I've gleamed from chapter three of Why Photography Matters As Art As Never Before otherwise known as "The Book With a Never-Ending Title":


Fried's discussion of the Wittgenstein in chapter three, specifically "disinterestedness", finally names what I have been seeing in some contemporary photography. A disinterested, or "cool" point of view, sterile. Examples:

Image from Alec Soth's Niagra

Image from Brian Ulrich's Copia

Image from Matt Siber's Floating Logo series

Fried and Wall comment on the wetness and dryness of the photographic medium. Water creates and destroys in photography. In film processes, liquid chemicals make the latent image appear, yet if the camera comes into contact with water, especially electronic cameras, they are ruined. Water is primordial and symbolic, but the "inherent coolness" of the photographic medium can make sterile images. I see a lot of photographers with little emotion, or "wetness", in their images. These are only a few examples, but here are some contemporaries to compare to:

April 2004, from Paul D'Amato's We Shall series

From Terry Evans' Canada to Texas series

From The Dog and The Wolf series by Laura Letinsky

But is photography itself inherently cool? Compared to what? Painting? And is it sterile or disinterested because of the mechanics and the science of it? That starts to sound like early arguments against photography as art, when it was used to document "truth" (which some people still believe) and since it it used a mechanical device it wasn't valid as an artistic medium. Wall and Fried say that these, wetness and dryness, are at play in photography. Maybe a balance between the two is what makes successful photographs. What about those that aren't using photography in the sense that we have come to know it? I feel like the further away we get from the "inherent coolness" of photography, really the further we get away from making perfect images, I think the more wetness is put back into the medium, especially in this digital age. Wetness to me is emotion or the indescribable. Here are some current photographers that are working outside of what photo students are taught (especially at Columbia) is the perfect print/photo/whatever:

by Curtis Mann

by Curtis Mann

by Ryan McGinley

by Ryan McGinley

by Ryan McGinley

Cool-Warm-Hot....if we're going to use temperatures to compare the dryness to wetness of these photographs.


I may come back and postulate on the inherent coolness of photography later, but as for now, on to the everyday.


Fried titles this chapter "They Everyday" and yes, the everyday is everyday until it is made into a work of art and then it is the looking at life as it's happening and seeing it as "God's masterpiece." Why is this? Well, Fried doesn't really explain, he just kisses Jeff Walls ass some more and I'm tired of reading about how brilliant the man is, can we use some other examples Fried? Anyways these are the things I got from Fried:


Composition and light have a lot to do with making the everyday less "everyday"... DUH.

He compares Wall's photos to Elinga (and really Vermeer) paintings, people absorbed in their daily activities, which would otherwise be dull, except he light and composition make it visually appealing and we read into the image more. This is the same with Wall's Window Cleaning, without the light an composition (and arguably the historical context of the building), the image would just be an "insipid photograph" that might have meant something to the artist at the time, but does not translate to others.

This idea is interesting, the "insipid photograph of a piece of scenery which is interesting to the person who took it because he was there himself, but which to a third party looks at with justifiable coldness; insofar as it is ever justifiable to look at something with coldness," a quote from Wittgenstein. Is this why we don't like looking at other peoples vacation pictures? Because we didn't experience it ourselves? Then if we have never experienced something in an image, can we not relate to the photograph? Take Brian Ulrich's Copia image above, if we had never been into a Target, or any massive retail store before, would be be able to get its humor? I think not. So no one has ever noticed the light on their wall at x time of day, then do they understand Uta Barth's light studies? Uta Barth is also an excellent example of the everyday and that once it becomes a work of art, it transcends the "everyday".

Uta Barth and to draw a bright white line with light

Fried also mentions "a common place about photography...is that it depicts surfaces and traces on surfaces,"which it undeniably does. This is interesting, but I can't wrap my brain around what this could mean...is it bad? Does it matter?

Then there is an image from Wall (again!), on page 87, that establishes itself as resistant to being beheld, which is another interesting idea. What does it mean to be beheld? Who hold the power in that situation, the object or the viewer, the looker or the looked at? If this image is resistant to being beheld, because of it's darkness and close tonal values, then the content of the image, logically, is also resistant to being beheld. Fascinating! I love it when the actual artwork object and the medium and the way the print comes out or the materials used reflect what the actual content or subject matter of the work.

Things I'm still thinking about and will probably post about later:

Unaware of being beheld

Voyeurism?

Blindness

Blind from within

Resistant to being beheld

Staged

Theatrical

Performed

Antitheatrical motif= subject walking away from viewer

(anti)Theatricality, Absorption, and the Beholder

Thoughts on criteria for successful art:

-Layers of meaning, so that if one person can't relate to a certain aspect of the work, they can relate to something else in the piece

-Questions should arise when looking at the work, one should feel challenged by the art or one should think about their own experiences in relation to the art

-"When we can't get to the words, maybe that is when the piece works for you" or the indescribable (quote from Roger Ballen at the Photography Lecture Series 9/15)

This isn't everything, but it's some things to consider when creating art. I'm writing this here because of Michael Fried's epigraph,"Each answer remains in force as an answer only as long as it is rooted in questioning," a quote from Heidegger's essay "The Origin of the Work of Art". I don't think art sets out to answer questions, but to propose questions. At least, I think, contemporary art sets out only to raise questions. I think a work of art can be nice to look at, but unless it makes you question something, it cannot stand out as contemporary.

I think and organize my thoughts in lists and bullet points so:

1. Absorption/Theatricality

Tierney Gearon's The Mother Project 

Kelli Connell's Double Life

There are several ways to take a portrait:

     1. Where the subject is looking at the camera, therefore looking at the viewer, therefore confronting the viewer

     2.  A. Where the subject knows they are being photographed, but are actually involved in an activity 

          B. Where the subject knows they are being photographed, but are performing for the camera

          C. Where the subject knows they are being photographed, and are being directed by the photographer

      3. Where the subject does not know they are being photographed, thus creating voyeuristic quality, or a "documentary"or exploitive quality because they subject might be showing "real" or "true" emotion, action, etc.

In Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills, Sherman is "performing"in that she is setting everything up for the camera, yet is anti-theatrical because she consciously avoids exaggerated emotion and makes the viewer believe the character she has created is absorbed in whatever is happening in the scene. Adelaide's ideas, take this scenario: you see someone you know on the bus, and you are watching them for a while before you make eye contact and you know they have seen you, but they go back to whatever it is they were doing before. You cannot visibly tell the difference between before their seeing you and after. So, are they performing? Or did they not remember who you were? You cannot know. We cannot tell whether Gearon's image was set up or whether or not the people in the image know they are being photographed. We can assume, because we know how Kelli Connell creates her work, that the image is set up so that the subjects are absorbed in the scene, so they are performing. How does this change our perception of the work?

2. Tableau

to this (Penelope Umbrico)

From this (Margaret Bourk-White for LIFE mag)

Most art photography was printed at a size that could be easily reproduced (think Cartier-Bresson, Margaret Bourke-White) and when they were hung in galleries, they were matted and framed. Then in the 1970's, the photograph becomes wall sized, Fried uses Jeff Wall's 7 foot-wide transparencies as an example. The size confronts the viewer but draws you into the image, yet the amount of visual detail distances the viewer simultaneously. The way art photography was looked at drastically changed, not only was the content important, but the actual size and scale of the piece mattered as it never had before. When they were matted and framed, they were easily digested,  Detail that is important to the work is lost in smaller reproductions, much like in paintings, and the "ephemeral" quality that Walter Benjamin talks about is absolutely important. Photographs become objects in tableau form, one must go to a gallery to see it, not stay at home on the internet or look at it in a magazine.

Content, but also presentation matter. And for some pieces, the presentation is vital, I think many, if not all, works of art photography now consider their presentation as heavily as their content. Would Penelope Umbrico's sunsets be as powerful matted and framed? Of course not, the ideas behind the photographs would be lost. 

More on this at a later date.

Contemporary:

"...at once criticism and history, judgmental and non-judgmental, engaged and detached--in ways that would have been incomprehensible to me only a short time ago"

Everything at once!

Musings on contemporaneity, labels, time, hipsters, and Facebook.

     Are we approaching an era without labels? Or do we have so many labels that they become moot? I have been contemplating this for a while, after hearing my friend say, in March, that she thinks we're nearly past categorizing people as straight or gay. I've been thinking about this and how it relates to relationships, gender, race, political ideals, music, film, and art. Terri Smith's piece made me think about this in relation to our contemporaneity.

     In a class this week, my professor made us pick one woman we most identified with between a selection of 6 one-dimensional characters. She went on to explain, after we all had difficulty choosing one woman, that no one is that one-dimensional, that we are complex. This idea struck me as I was reading Smith's section about political and religious leaders uniting under labels and banners, but that within these factions are more factions, that one set of political ideas cannot satisfy the constituency and thus it creates hostility among believers. We are complex, and we are in a strange and complex time, and I do not think labels or categories can fulfill anything or anyone. There are so many labels and factions that they are no longer really signifiers of anything. Take the label "indie," what does that really mean now? Does it even have value as a category for film or music? Or take "rock", you can list Van Halen, the Beatles, Bon Iver, and Nirvana under that category, which is why there are a million other qualifiers before "rock", "alternative" rock, "classic" rock, but even classic rock can be anything between Elvis and Styx. Which is why I think we're at a point that labels, categories, maybe even periodization has become moot. Art now is just art, even photography as art isn't just "photography" anymore. It's installations, video, mixed media and photographic art no longer fits under the banner of just "photography" but maybe needs to use the more broad term of "art".

      One realization and funny connection I made in the "Contemporaneity" essay: on page 697, she quotes and postulates about art historians or critics that put any contemporary works in a canon of sorts ruins it's relevance in current art discourse. I am going to relate this to "hipsters" because once the work of art is mainstream, it isn't cool anymore. Or I should say that once the work of art is popular or recognized, it's "kill[ed] off precisely that power to persist and to attract future critical interest".

      Smith also goes on about characteristics of the contemporary: Modern vs. Contemporary and the idea of time.  Modern is looking at the past and consciously trying to break from it and become "the future" while contemporary is questioning and focusing on the present while still considering the past. I also thought this quote was telling of the age of globalization, technology and social media:

"We have not had the same past, you and ourselves, but we shall have, strictly, the same future. The era of separate destinies has run its course. In that sense, the end of the world has indeed come for every one of us, because no one can any longer live by the simple carrying out of what he himself is."
(quoted from Cheikh Hamidou Kanes novel Ambiguous Adventure)

We can no longer lose track of anyone because of social media and google. If you have an internet presence, anyone can find you. That long-lost friend you had in kindergarten before you moved to Saudi Arabia--they just requested you on Facebook. Ten year high school reunions are going to become irrelevant since, oh hey, they've been Facebook stalking you since you graduated. There are no more "separate destinies" because we are all so interconnected in the digital and global age. Everything is instantaneous. However, as with everything, there is going to be a reaction against the "contemporary". And maybe we'll be able to be a person that someone thinks about and wonders, "Hey, whatever happened to so-and-so?" again.

SO MANY FASCINATING POINTS! This post is going to go on forever.

Contemporaneity is also characterized by paradoxes (as illustrated in my illustrations). One I found interesting in Smith's essay is:

"In a mediascape characterized by such contrary forces as instant communication of key decisions by poitical leaders and the capacity to demonstrate against them within the same news cycle, the power to force everyone forward in broadly the same direction has been lost....Multiple temporalities are the rule these days, and their conceptions of historical development move in multifarious directions."

Ok, so that isn't a paradox. But, it is notable because of the plethora of ways we can get information and how we get that information colors our views about the information. Our beliefs about one particular event can be completely altered as instantaneous as the event unfolded or information was given. Example: as soon as Obama gave his speech to congress about the American Jobs Act last week, there were criticisms and analyses of it. Fascinating! The wonders of the internet. How does this relate to art? It seems to me that these three readings say that Contemporary Art is all things at once. It confronts, yet distances. It is about the present, yet considers the past. It "is in or with time, even being in and out of time at the same time". It is beyond periodization, yet here we are, periodizing. To sum up here is the best concluding quote from Terri Smith:

"...contemporaneity consists precisely in the constant experience of radical disjunctures of perception, mismatching ways seeing and valuing the same world, in the actual coincidence of asynchronous temporalities, in the jostling contingency of various cultural and social multiplicities, all thrown together in ways that highlight the fast-growing inequalities within and between them...No longer does it feel like 'our time' because 'our' cannot stretch to encompass its contrariness. Nor, indeed, is it 'a time' because if the modern were inclined above all to define itself as a period, and sort the past into periods, in contemporaneity periodization is impossible."

This is kind of a "duh" moment for me because it seems obvious that, of course, we all have different ways of seeing the world. Of course I don't think or see the world the same way as the person next to me. Of course everything is grey, not black and white. We must realize that there are multitudes of ways to approach the world.. We all come from diverse backgrounds that shape our views. Periodization is impossible because there is no banner of beliefs that any artist in the contemporary era can stay under for very long. We are in an era that is everything at once.






Side notes and things I should elaborate on later:

Yes! Let's reconcile within a framework of respect for difference! Let's be accepting and consider others and their otherness.

       I have in my notes that the Terri Smith essay also made me think of the decline of galleries as a viable option for artists to sell their work... I can't find where I made that connection right now, but I'll come back in and edit this when I remember.

Will come back and cite and edit things later in the week.

Contemporaneity

Michael Fried and Ariella Azoulay Book Reviews

Questionnaire on 'The Contemporary'

Image from Gregory Crewdson's Twilight Series --Fiction as a metaphor for reality

Mall 2010, Lori Nix--Fiction as a metaphor for reality

Robert Rauschenberg is too damn cool.

Erased de Kooning by Robert Rauschenberg

Sabina Ott originally told this story in class my first year in Chicago:

"Rauschenberg and Willem de Kooning were friends, and Rauschenberg asked for a drawing from de Kooning. Rauschenberg erased the drawing, framed it, titled it, and exhibited it and that is how Erased de Kooning came to be."

Art movements are reactionary, and Robert Rauschenberg basically said "Fuck you" to Abstract Expressionism by erasing the drawing of a famous Abstract Expressionist and exhibiting it, thus beginning the Conceptual Art movement. This is one of my favorite art history stories and Rauschenberg is one of my favorite artists. Conceptual art: the idea takes precedence over the aesthetics of the piece.