new installment: photos i like

Some of these I'll be posting with some explanation, some not (like this one):

Sebastiaan Bremer, Still life with Shark on the Bosporus, 2007, mixed media, 47 x 47 inches. Image via: Shark week on AFC.

IMG MGMT at Art Fag City

Kazuo Kadonaga, Glass No.4Cs. 2004. Reprinted from Petra Cortright's gRAdIeNtBOW-2-your-masters.

I'm a big fan of Art Fag City's series IMG MGMT, where AFC invites artists to publish visual essays on the blog. The first one I saw and went for was Petra Cortright's gRAdIeNtBOW-2-your-masters, an overloaded sequence of gifs, rainbows, text symbols, jewels, and art, laid out as lines of text. Really it reads more as a musical sequence, where motives and themes repeat, mutate and coalesce--the flashing jewel at one point segues into flowers and rainbow-colored forms, all to end in a series of art images featuring AIDS-3D, Cory Arcangel, Kevin Bewersdorf, and Olafur Eliasson, among others. Anyway, I like it--it's an exciting cross of art production, curation, and art blogging which highlights the sometime-similarities between the two practices.

Jon Rafman, the IMG MGMT artist of August 12, expresses these intersections (among other things) rather accessibly in his textual and visual exploration of Google's street view. I'm not going to bother explaining the post, I think Rafman does a good job with that already, but will simply copy a portion of it here as a teaser:

... Street View collections represent our experience of the modern world, and in particular, the tension they express between our uncaring, indifferent universe and our search for connectedness and significance. A critical analysis of Google’s depiction of experience, however, requires a critical look at Google itself.

Initially, I was attracted to the noisy amateur aesthetic of the raw images. Street Views evoked an urgency I felt was present in earlier street photography. With its supposedly neutral gaze, the Street View photography had a spontaneous quality unspoiled by the sensitivities or agendas of a human photographer. It was tempting to see the images as a neutral and privileged representation of reality—as though the Street Views, wrenched from any social context other than geospatial contiguity, were able to perform true docu-photography, capturing fragments of reality stripped of all cultural intentions.

This infinitely rich mine of material afforded my practice the extraordinary opportunity to explore, interpret, and curate a new world in a new way. To a certain extent, the aesthetic considerations that form the basis of my choices in different collections vary. For example, some selections are influenced by my knowledge of photographic history and allude to older photographic styles, whereas other selections, such as those representing Google’s depiction of modern experience, incorporate critical aesthetic theory. But throughout, I pay careful attention to the formal aspects of color and composition.

Within the panoramas, I can locate images of gritty urban life reminiscent of hard-boiled American street photography. Or, if I prefer, I can find images of rural Americana that recall photography commissioned by the Farm Securities Administration during the depression. ...

2588 N Hutchinson St. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

2104 S Lamar Blvd, Austin, Travis, Texas

. . .

58 Lungomare 9 Maggio, Bari, Puglia, Italy

apologies!

sorry lolcats via icanhascheezburger.com

I haven't been posting much recently as I've been really really busy. I'll return to this soon--clearly I need more self-discipline. In the meantime, however, I hope anybody in Austin will consider coming to see a show I've curated at the Creative Research Lab on Manor, Half & Half. It's a two-part show, each part running for two weeks. I co-curated last year's version of the show here, the essay can be found on the CRL's website (caveat: I think I'm a better writer now than I was a year ago).

An adapted cut-and-paste version of the press releases below:

Half & Half

A summer exhibition in two parts, featuring a collaboration between past and present graduate students from the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin.
------------------------------------------------
Part 1:
RECEPTION: Saturday, July 25th, 2009, 6-9 pm
LIVE INTERACIVE PERFORMANCE: Jennifer Remenchik, 7 pm
EXHIBITION DATES: July 25th to August 8th, 2009
GALLERY HOURS: Tuesday - Saturday, 12-5 pm

Part 2:
RECEPTION: Saturday, August 15th, 2009, 6-9 pm
EXHIBITION DATES: August 15th to August 29th, 2009
GALLERY HOURS: Tuesday - Saturday, 12-5 pm
------------------------------------------------
Creative Research Laboratory
2832 East Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.
Austin, Texas 78702
http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~crlab/
------------------------------------------------
FOR MORE INFORMATION: please call 512.322.2099, or email crlab@uts.cc.utexas.edu; Xochi Solis, Gallery Assistant Director, Creative Research Laboratory. For information about the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin, contact Carolyn Porter at carolynp@mail.utexas.edu or 512.471.3379.
-------------------------------------------------
The Creative Research Laboratory (CRL) introduces a summer adventure starring: a coked-up vacuum cleaner, a severed beached whale, a bevy of romance novels, and the surging waters of Niagara Falls. It’s Half & Half, the love child of the artists and art historians of the University of Texas Graduate School. The studio art from fifteen graduate students is split into two exhibitions curated by art and art history graduates. Each show runs for two weeks, with the first part opening on July 25th, and the second part opening on Aug 15th.

This show marks the eighth consecutive year of collaboration between Department of Art and Art History graduate students on a summer exhibition at the CRL. This select group of work represents a wide range of media including painting, sculpture, photography, and video.

Part 1 featured artists are Kate Abercrombie, Sonya Berg, Sam Dahl, Scott Eastwood, Santiago Forero, Robert Melton, Marya Spont, and Jeff Stanley.

Part 2 featured artists are Kristina Felix, Bethany Johnson, Teruko Nimura, Alejandro Sanchez, Tim Schmidt, Christina Weisner, and Richard Yanas.

Curated by Kara Carmack, Ariel Evans, Bonnie Gammill, and Lauren Hanson.

The opening reception of Part 1 on July 25th will feature a live interactive performance by guest artist, Jennifer Remenchik.

The Creative Research Laboratory (CRL) presents a year-round schedule of exhibitions, featuring work by students and faculty at The University of Texas at Austin. The CRL is located in East Austin at 2832 East Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard, inside Flatbed World Headquarters. There is ample free parking and bus service available on Capitol Metro's route 18. The activities of the Department of Art and Art History and the Creative Research Laboratory are free and open to the public.

two online series/exhibits I'm into

Josh Poehlein, Celebration of a Million Views (Modern History Series). c. 2007

Jörg Colberg (who mentioned the Modern History series pictured above in his blog Conscientious) recently curated an online exhibit of tintypes for Fraction, an online photography magazine. Colberg selected twenty tintypes from his personal collection, all portraits, and most, apparently, bought off eBay.

A tintype is a photograph made by creating a direct positive onto glass backed by a blackened sheet of metal. Though the photograph is a negative, it appears positive due to the darker plane placed behind the glass. Compared to other early photographic techniques, tintypes were cheap and quick to prepare, allowing customers to have their photographs within minutes of having their likenesses taken. The tintype process was the most popular photographic process from by the time of the Civil War until the invention of the reloadable amateur camera by Kodak. All that is to say is that there are many tintypes available on eBay, since they last forever (being metal), and so many were taken.

Unknown Photographer, Unknown Subject. Date unknown, tintype.

One of my favorites from Colberg's collection is the photograph above. I like the darkness of the woman's hat against the light backdrop; just as I love the painted sea scene behind the couple. There is a staged-ness to the tintype that I enjoy. It's funny to me, looking at this, and thinking about the common interpretation of the photograph as a document of a moment. The tintype above is clearly not that--though to be fair, I should mention that this most often applied to documentary photography. But still. The painterly-rendered trees and pavilion in the background and the stiff pose of the people as they sat for the camera speak to photographs as staged and framed. Colberg writes:

... the first thing you have to do is look past people's hairstyles or clothes. The waves of nostalgia for past decades notwithstanding, people in the past are always dressed in a funny way. Once you are at the point where you can look at tintypes as photographs of real people, they start to reveal a richness that even after looking at them for quite a while now still surprises me. And that is what this little show is about.

It is true that these tintypes become richer when we look at the sitters as real people, of flesh and blood, that sat to have themselves recorded. On the other hand, though I like connecting to the past, I also like the weirdnesses of their dress and demeanor, and how these temporal distances make those of us in the present aware of the images' surreality.

Something else I'm into today is Josh Poehlein's Modern History series (artist's website here). From Poehlein's statement on the series:

Modern History is a series of collages assembled exclusively from screen grabs of Youtube videos. This is a work in progress and the site will be updated as I finish new pieces.

I am offering large printable files to anyone interested at no cost. Computer files are the most easily reproducible information on the planet. In this particular case I see no reason to imbue a false sense of preciousness on the work. The information I gathered to create the collages is publicly availaible, and the collages themselves are no different.

Josh Poehlein, Stump Speech (Modern History Series), c. 2007.

The images themselves are arresting. In Stump Speech above, a man raises his pointing index fingers out towards the sky; an action mirrored by the upward thrust of the mountain in the distance, and the large sweep of sky with one figure flying or falling across it. The focus, like the faces of the crowd receding towards the mountain, goes towards the sky and its lone falling or flying figure. It's ambiguous what exactly is going on--we can't tell if the man in the sky is hurtling down towards the earth or rising above it.

The ambiguity of that figure is, I believe, due to how Poehlein composed these images, and how the images themselves evidence their construction. As mentioned in his quote above, Poehlein made these by combining screen shots from YouTube videos. Each aspect is arrested motion. Poehlein also left the the square edges of the screen shots. If you look at the sky in Stump Speech you see that the artist constructed the image from many squares of various sizes in myriad shades of blue. It seems pixellated and obviously a digital image--it keeps the eye active, moving between screens of various degrees of focus. The entire image, though it is stilled video shots, maintains a sense of motion.

I also like that Poehlein is making these cinematic collages available to anybody who asks for them, refusing to "imbue a false sense of preciousness to the work." What this means is that you can print one out at any size desired; you can frame it and put it on your wall or print out two hundred copies, make them flyers, and post them all over town. There's no artistic ownership insisted upon, just as with many YouTube videos. Not only do the images themselves reference their source, but so do Poehlein's distribution tactics.

the document is a hidden monument | reading notes: Paul Ricoeur, "Archives, Documents, Traces" 1978

Below: E.E. Cummings. Valentine to Marion Morehouse. n.d. E.E. (Edward Estlin) Cummings Collection, Harry Ransom Center.
* I did not realize, when I pulled this image off the HRC's website, that coeur is French for "heart," but I enjoy the passing coincidence.

Yesterday I started reading Paul Ricoeur's "Archives, Documents, Traces," as part of my exploration of theoretical issues of the archive. I will connect this to photography at some point--there are, of course, connections therein--but today's post is mainly reading notes and context.

Ricoeur, who died in 2005, was a French philosopher whose main body of work concerned itself with developing an anthropology of the "capable person;" that is, the fundamental capabilities and vulnerabilities (what we can or cannot do) that shape and are shaped by our daily existence. Though Ricoeur emphasizes an attempt at a more complete understanding of the self, he maintains that there is no comprehension of the self without comprehension of the environment (as opposed to Descartes' claim towards self-knowledge independent of worldly knowledge).

More information on Ricoeur and his greater body of work is available on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy online (henceforth SEP), and more biography via Wikipedia. "Archives, Documents, Traces," is part of Ricoeur's exploration of memory and history, which came out of his other explorations on identity, narrativity, and time (all of these being tied together. You can read more about each of these in the online SEP what an excellent resource).

Ricoeur begins "Archives, Documents, Traces," by arguing that the trace is a necessary part of historical practice. It is what connects us to our past. It is a way to connect temporal perspectives dissociated by Heideggerian phenomenology and is necessary for every production of historians' practice that reply to aporias (doubts, paradoxes) of time. Ricoeur's methodology from hereon is elegant, as he unpacks the meanings of archives, then the documents they hold, and then the notion of a trace. He finally asserts the importance of traces, which are our sole connections to the past. So:

ARCHIVES

According to Ricoeur, who considered two definitions of the term and how they overlap, there are three principle characteristics of archives:

1. They reference a document (record); archives are an organized body of documents.
2. They are related to institutions. Archives result from institutional activity; they are produced or received by the entity for which the documents in question are the archive.
3. Institutions put documents into this set with the goal of conserving or preserving them. Some records are saved, some are thrown away--we discriminate in what we choose to preserve or not.
   

The institutional character of the archives is tantamount: "Archives constitute the documentary stock of an institution that produces them, gathers them, and conserves them. And the deposit thereby constituted is an authorized deposit through some stipulation added to the one that sets up the entity for which the archives are 'archives.'"

DOCUMENTS

The term document comes from the Latin docere, which is more about teaching. This is no longer the emphasized definition of the term, as our contemporary understanding of "document" emphasizes that it is material proof, evidence: "If history is a true narrative, documents constitute its ultimate means of proof. They nourish its claim to be based on fact."

Ricoeur emphasizes that any trace left by the past becomes a document for historians as they know how to interrogate its remains. Historians, in turn, are guided by the theme they've chosen to lead their investigation. Like archives, historians choose and discard documents based on their usefulness to a particular investigation:

As I said in Part II, in volume I [of Time and Narrative], the search for documents has continued to annex zones of information more and more distant from the type of documents lying in already constituted archives; that is, documents that were conserved because of their presumed usefulness. Any thing that can inform a scholar, whose research is oriented by a reasonable choice of questions, can be a document. Such critical inquiry at this level leads to the notion of involuntary testimony, Marc Bloch's 'witness in spite of themselves.' Rather than calling into question the epistemological status of documents, it enlarges their field.

According to Ricoeur, documents were for some time linked to the ideas of the monument; the term archives was designated by the term monument. The development of positivist history--wp: "Positivism is a philosophy which holds that the only authentic knowledge is that based on actual sense experience. Such knowledge can come only from affirmation of theories through strict scientific method"--marked the triumph of the idea of the document over the idea of the monument, because a monument is obviously final, an in situ commemoration of an event judged worthy of entering into the collective memory. It cannot be reread according to the will of the historian. A document--even though it is collected and not inherited--seemed more objective than a monument. Writings in archives are/were felt to be more like documents than monuments.

BUT because documents are collected and chosen--some thrown away and others preserved--the document is, in fact, a monument. The way we use documents as proof, as material evidence, means that they serve a specific and edifying purpose. Ricoeur expands:

Must we, then, give up seeing in contemporary historiography, with its data banks, its use of computers and information theory, its constituting of series (through the model of serial history), an enlargement of our collective memory? This would be to break with the notions of a trace and the testimony of the past. However difficult the notion of a collective memory may be, particularly when it does not carry its credentials with it, to reject it would be to announce the suicide of history. In fact, the new science of history for our collective memory rests upon an illusion of documents that is not fundamentally different from the positivist illusion it thinks it is combating. The data in a data bank are suddenly crowned with a halo of the same authority as the document cleansed by positivist criticism. The illusion is even more dangerous in this case. As soon as the idea of a debt to the dead, to people of flesh and blood to whom something really happened in the past, stops giving documentary research its highest end, history loses its meaning. In its epistemological naïveté, positivism at least preserved the significance of the document, namely that it functions as a trace left by the past.

TRACE

Ricoeur believes that it is our connection to the past, the trace, that gives historical research its power. This is a connection that is a "flesh and blood" link and a part of our collective memory. To disregard out debt to the past, as Ricoeur says in the quote above, is to deny history its power and meaning. History always acts as a critique of social narratives and a rectification and enlargement of collective memory. Documents and monuments, then, are both traces--to treat documents as objective material evidence is to deny the agency of the people and institutions that produced them.

The new use of data (stored in and manipulated by the computer) gives birth to new forms of scholarly activity. Ricoeur, writing in 1978, saw the advent of computer technology as leading to an enlargement of our collective memory in its encounter with the monopoly exercised over speech by those in power. This is perhaps true--though I do not mean to view the internet through rose-colored glasses--certainly we have more agency and resources in tracking down information, and the means to track down that information is available to more people.

Anyway, that is all for now--I've been brewing this reading notes post for a few days and it's time to move on. This will be one of the first parts of a further exploration of the archive, both a theoretical exploration as well as a physical one. Soon I will start on visits to the Harry Ransom Center's photography collection, to write on one object I find there, once a week. Also, questions on documents, monuments, and how historians marshall their evidence seem to be coming up a lot recently in the various talks and lectures I've been to, so these issues will resurface again in the space of this blog.

Ricoeur, Paul. "Archives, Documents, Traces," in The Archive. ed. Charles Merewether. London and Cambridge, Massachusetts: Whitechapel and the MIT Press, 2006.

archive collapse

The building holding Germany's largest municipal archive, in Cologne, collapsed on Tuesday, March 3, killing--as far as I can tell--two people and destroying the majority of the records in the only archive left undamaged by WWII. From Der Spiegel:

Cologne's history goes back more than 2000 years, when it was the Roman city of Colonia. In the Middle Ages, the city's prime spot along the Rhine River made it one of northern Europe's trading powerhouses, part of the Hanseatic League and a gateway between France and Germany. The Historical Archives contained extensive documentation from the city's Hanseatic period, as well as the archives of other Hanseatic League members, invaluable for historians looking at Europe's economic development.

The sheer numbers -- in total, the building had more than 18 kilometers of shelves -- reflect the rich history of what was once Germany's largest metropolis. The archive's collection of original documents included thousands from Cologne's golden age. The founding charter of the University of Cologne, signed in 1388, was inside, along with the documents that established Cologne as a free imperial city under Emperor Friedrich III in 1475. Two of the four manuscripts in the hand of Albertus Magnus, considered the greatest German theologian of the Middle Ages, were kept in the archive's rare books collection.

For historians trying to reconstruct the past, the greatest loss may be the more quotidian papers: Tens of thousands of receipts issued by the city government between 1350 and 1450, for example, or the 358 volumes of decisions and minutes of the Cologne City Council dating back 700 years.

... There may be no way to recover the lost collections. Large parts of the pre-1945 documents were put on microfilm and stored in a bunker in the Black Forest, but [...] the microfilm is of poor quality. And the post-war collections -- including records from the Cologne Art Association used to track the provenance of artworks -- have no back-up at all.

I'm interested in the theoretical implications of an event like this. This is a sudden and irrecoverable void in our past--what does it mean? Any documents available in the Cologne Archive are now only available if another researcher has already written and/or published an article using those texts.

Also, emphasizing the last sentence of the quote above, I'll note that the records used by the Cologne Art Association used to track artworks' provenances were not backed up at all. This is a big deal, given that historians are still trying to locate and authenticate artworks which were lost, looted, or destroyed during WWII. Lynn H. Nicholas wrote compelling book on this subject: The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe's Treasures during the Third Reich and the Second World War. Basically, we have a lot of objects whose histories, narratives--that is, their identities--are gone. More later.

photography in the abstract at the lora reynolds gallery (austin, tx) [review]

Sandra Hamburg, 07.06.05 12:55am, 2007. Black and white silver print, 40.5 in. x 41.

Image via the Gavlak gallery website.

A week or so ago I headed to the Lora Reynolds Gallery in downtown Austin to catch the last day of the Photography in the Abstract show. Curated by NYC-based independent curator Maureen Mahoney (never heard of her before), the exhibition included photographs by Doug Aitken, Walead Beshty, Margaret Bourke-White, Henry Callahan, Liz Deschenes, Roe Ethridge, Tamar Halpern, Sandra Hamburg, Robert Heinecken, Rainer Judd, André Kertész, Christian Marclay, László Moholy-Nagy, Barbara Morgan, Mark Morrisroe, Peter Piller, Eileen Quinian, Gerhard Richter, Lucas Samaras, Arthus Siegel, Aaron Siskind, David Smith, Wolfgang Tillmans, Andy Warhol, and James Weiling.

Quite a mouthful of artists and historical eras (1930s til now) to place in three small rooms; the gallery only displayed one or two photographs from each artist. One of my favorites was Sandra Hamburg's kaleidoscopic 07.06.05 12:55am (above), where the artist fragmented a female nude on a black circular surface, and superimposed starbursts atop (this can be done using a starburst filter). I like it simply because it makes me think of disco--I like the sparkling lights superimposed on the nude female with her head thrown backwards. The circle format--like a disco ball--probably added to my interest. I have a soft spot for artworks that I think would work in a dance club, like Pontormo's Deposition from the Cross (right)--imagine this altarpiece projected on the wall behind some DJ!

But I digress, and in a rather un-art-historical way. I admit I should talk more about these two works, maybe even compare them, but that's not really the point of this post. And honestly, with the diverse set of artists and modes of working in the abstract displayed at the gallery, there wasn't much to take from the Photography in the Abstract.

Jacopo Pontormo, Deposition from the Cross. c. 1525-1528.
Oil on wood, 313 x 192 cm. Santa Felicita di Firenze, Florence.

Another favorite was Walead Beshty's 2006 Two Sided Picture (YY) (below, left). Here, Beshty folded photographic paper and exposed it to light, resulting in a prismatic and sculptural image of soft and melting color. I also enjoyed Kertész's Polaroid January 26, 1980 (below, right); some sort of city/landscape altered perhaps by a movement of the Kertész's hand.

Left: Walead Beshty, Two Sided Picture (YY). Fujicolor Crystal Archive Type C, December 14th 2006, Valencia, CA. Color photographic paper, 14 x 11" unframed. Right: André Kertész, January 26, 1980. January 26, 1980, SX-70 Polaroid. 3.5 x 4.25"

Mahoney's exquisite taste showcased a range of different photographic approaches to abstraction: starburst filters, folding paper, moving the body while exposing film are but three possibilities. Rachel Cook for ... might be good began her review of the Lora Reynolds show by stating that Mahoney started with a series of questions:

is the most authentic abstract photograph made by light only? When can a representational photograph be considered abstract? Could a photograph of something in the world that looks abstract be considered truly abstract, when it is the subject and not the process that is abstract?

Cook ends by stating that curator and photographers approach a yet more fundamental question:

Together, the works in Photography in the Abstract raise a fundamental question: isn’t every photograph an abstraction of reality? Mahoney’s answer is yes. The very title of her exhibition resists the classification of “abstract photography” and replaces it with a broader conception of abstraction in photography. Some critics might classify some of the contemporary works in Photography in the Abstract as “abstract photography,” but Mahoney’s exhibition successfully suggests that these artists aren’t thinking about abstraction per se. They’re thinking about photographic processes and the material and optical qualities of the photograph. Abstraction is merely an after-effect.

Per Cook, Mahoney's curation suggests that photographers working with abstraction are exploring the technical processes of photography. This is as every photographer does, and hence all photography is an "abstraction of reality." Sure, I mean, one could argue that every artwork is an abstraction, since "reality" is neither fully apprehendable nor fully representible.

I like Cook's explanation of the show as about process and material, and photographers engaging in a discussion of those through their work. After I saw the show, and before I read Cook's review, I felt that the individual photographers and histories were underserved in such a broad-ranging but small exhibition, and I found the premise simplistic. To be frank, I am still troubled by this.

Each of these photographers had a whole host of ideas, processes, and materials that they engaged with and to say that "photographers play around in the darkroom" seems obvious. For me, Photography in the Abstract ultimately showcased a tension between taste and idea-oriented curation. The organizing premise was so simple that what became interesting--besides pretty pictures--was Mahoney's selection, not the historical and artistic processes that went into the individual images.

Fair enough, the show appeared at a gallery and not a museum. The gallery is a place more suited for admiring and purchasing the image rather than studying and understanding. Unfortunately, the press release and the title of the exhibition made big of the curatorial idea, which cued the viewer to expect philosophical and intellectual engagement with these images but did not deliver it.