Crit: Tony Fouhse: Fragment #3

David reviewed this book for us a while ago, and I have been sitting on my copy for a good long time while I get over this horrific cold. But at least here I am.

I've been working my way through an older edition of Hanson's text on Art History, which mainly covers European Art History, but I'm still learning a lot in spite of it all. One of the big things I've learned is that for most of history Art has been about illustrating a pre-existing story.

I like to say "it's all comics! It was always comics!" and that's not far off. Ancient Art illustrated maybe a hunt, whether one that happened or one that was hoped-for, who knows. Later Art told stories of myths and legends, battles and kings. It all existed to support a story that everyone already knew, at least in outline. Trajan's Column illustrates Trajan's career, preserving it, filling in the details for people who only knew part of it, or whatever. You can't actually see a lot of it, because it's very tall, so it's not obvious who the story is for.

A painting of the Annunciation tells the story of the angel coming to tell Mary that God has a little job for her. Perhaps the painting comments on the story, illuminates it, whatever. But people know that there's a girl, there's the angel, there's no Jesus hanging around, probably an Annunciation.

The stories exist beforehand, the Art recapitulates it.

The idea, specifically, that Art should "stand alone," that it should somehow contain within itself its own meaning, is very very new and in fact fairly dicey. This is the Art that I, and presumably most of us, have been brought up to think of as Real Art. The idea is that we, as normal members of society, ought to be able to look at the thing and make meaning from it, quite apart from any specific pre-existing story.

This is really really hard, and maybe an untenable position. It's certainly something I struggle with.

Photographs, as I have remarked endlessly, do actually have an easier time with this, acting as as portals to another place and time. The meaning we make of a (ordinary, essentially documentary) photograph is to imagine the story that contains the frozen moment of time. This action is, I have long maintained, fundamentally how we interact with (ordinary, essentially documentary) photographs.

This does lead us to the essential problem with photography as art, though, which is that maybe this isn't Art in the modern sense at all. Maybe it's just documentary storytelling. Is there any meaning beyond the fairly literal story one tends to fill in around the reality presented inside the frame? Is that Art? Does that do the Art thing of enlarging us, of making is feel, or evoking some kind of quasi-spiritual response, or whatever else it is that you might want Art to do to you?

Which leads us, ever so slowly, to Tony's latest book.

David gave you the rundown on the structure of the thing, so let me just amplify that its a very very simply constructed book but exquisitely made. There's a precision to it that I like a lot, and which completely eludes me in my own efforts. It's a really really nice object.

It's also unambiguously Art in that modern sense. It's not leaning on any previous story, it's not illustrating anything. It is self-contained, or at least capable of being self-contained (it also contributes to the larger ongoing project.)

This book has crystallized something that's been noodling around the edges of my brain for a while now. It's possible for a photograph to be a highly inadequate portal to another time and place, and that can be a really good thing. None of Tony's recent photos really fit my preferred model for a photo, none of them really "transport you to a place" in any meaningful way. They're too narrow. They're a peephole into somewhere else, a peephole you cannot really pass through. You're given a fragmentary, up close, view of something that you can't understand, that you're not meant to understand.

The term I've used in the past is "semiotically rich"; there are photos that beg to be interpreted, which are rich in signs, but which decline to offer you any help.

A photo of a dog running down the street dragging its leash invites the question "where is the owner?" and it places you on the street, looking back up the street for the owner. It's a portal.

Tony's photos are a something else. A bunch of wires. A fuzzy photo of a hand. An open can. They invite no single coherent question, they transport you nowhere. The questions are vague and multiple. You're invited to interpret these things, but there is no specific guidance.

There are plenty of photographs of nothing out there. The MFA community seems fully devoted to making these things, and they's not at all what I'm talking about. A photo of a non-descript signboard, a random field, a highway overpass, no. Those are not semiotically rich.

What I mean is what might be technically called a floating signifier. These are photographs that urgently signify, they are half of a "sign," but what they signify is left open. They're not complete enough as photos to give you the signified, the referent, you have to make that up yourself.

In groups, they behave like a tarot card spread. Just as the Death Card or whatever you like signifies with urgency, but leaves open what exactly it signified, so do Tony's photos. The spread, however, can be interpreted in some depth, although ambiguity never really leaves the scene. You can construct not a reality into which one is transported, but nevertheless a larger meaning of sorts. A "vibe" if you will, a sensation, and emotional state.

In a lot of ways Tony's latest reminds me of Frédérick Carnet's "last first day" which you can still access by way of this link (you'll have to click a little), and a little of my own thing, Jesus Fucking 2020. I don't mean that they're the same in content (although there are overlaps, possibly this method lends itself to a certain darkness) but that they're the same in terms of method. Katrin Koenning seems to do the same sort of thing, but in a lighter tone (although her latest work seems to be leaning increasingly dark, sigh.)

This business of nudging you to interpret the tarot spread is what makes this format shine as an example of the modern conception of Art. There's no underlying story, the thing stands alone, but it does urge you into what a nerd would call a "dialog" with the work, It urges you to find you emotional response, it urges you into the Art-state in which you are enlarged, or made to feel something. The MFA photos of nothing don't have a story, but neither do they urge you into any response, they're dead objects that cannot be bothered to signify, because the people who make them have no idea what that would even mean. They just know they're supposed to photograph boring shit.

I'm kind of excited by this, because it's brought into focus something that has been, apparently, nagging at me. This is a thing I have noticed but not been able to make sense, of. It's a thing that I like a lot, but which doesn't fit into my (previous?) model for How Photos Work.

Guest Post 2: David Smith reviews Tony Fouhse's latest

David comes through again! While all things are possible, I have no particular ambition to turn this into a "guest posts only" blog, but I'm certainly not saying much these days. I'm ruminating on some things, though, so check back occasionally if it moves you to do so.

Here's David:


Review of Tony Fouhse’s New Book, “the middle of nowhere”
I’ve been following Tony Fouhse’s photographic output for the past several years, and let me say this at the outset: he’s the real deal.

For those who haven’t been keeping up, Tony is a professional photographer with an impressive cv of publications, official portraits & such under his belt. You have but to flip through his website to know what we’re dealing with. A few years ago (iirc), Tony retired from professional assignments and commissions, and turned to artistic pursuits, leveraging this rich experience to craft deeply personal statements. Tony unleashed, you might say.

I’m interested in Tony’s work, because I recognize in it a dark vein of visual ideas that are, at least superficially, similar to ones I’m drawn to (Tony strikes me as a more rounded individual who, I’m pretty sure, would rather we not dwell on this characterization). His expression is nuanced, ambiguous, and broadly recognizable. This last bit is crucial in distinguishing his take from those who cosplay gratuitously morbid themes for gravitas.

His latest cycle of personal work consists of an email newsletter “Hypo,” chronicling his at times choppy progress, “the middle of nowhere” (the book), and an installation at a show in his hometown of Ottawa. He calls this cycle “Current,” publishing numbered “Fragments” at irregular intervals.

I confess that successive newsletters made me feel skeptical about the outcome. The whole thing is really experimental. The images posted in newsletter ‘Fragments’ (samples of work in progress) are sketchy. Sketchy, it transpires, is the point. This wasn’t self-evident, and I didn’t know what to make of it — a sound strategy to build and sustain interest in the project, if intentional.

“the middle of nowhere”

Last May, Tony showed me a preview copy of the book. Else based on the newsletters, I probably wouldn’t have bought it, or ever seen it. I’m one of those dumb bastards who thinks if I’ve seen it online, I’ve seen it. Thing is, I’m a tactile person. I grew up on crafts during that era (1970s). Pottery, weaving, the whole nine yards. And I fell in love with Tony’s book after handling it for a few minutes. I have one of Tony’s previous books, “Endless Plain,” which I reviewed here. That one was commercially printed, and the physical object is itself a bit meh. This is different.

Tony printed, trimmed, bound, and published this book himself. No middle people, no machine-minders. His choice of humble materials is interesting: plain brown cardboard cover, and some thin, uncoated inkjet paper, printed on two sides in monochrome black. The process imparts a slightly strange but pleasant, velvety texture and weight to the pages. The volume is small, yet it feels substantial.

The images were all shot close to home, according to one of the newsletters. I mentioned the whole project is experimental, unlike anything Tony has previously done (afaik). He ain’t repeating himself. His previous monochrome book, “While I Slept,” was also experimental, in that he used an autonomous, low-resolution ‘game’ camera to capture images at random intervals *while he slept*, that he then selected, did stuff in post (I guess), and had commercially printed.

“the middle of nowhere” builds on that. For this round, Tony shot the source images in more or less conventional fashion with a hand-held digital camera, dispensing with two of my theoretical objections to “While I Slept” — they aren’t random, ‘found’ source images, and the photographic quality is way better.

While drawing up an outline for this review, I wrote down a string of adjectives from my first take of the book. Ghostly. Death & decay. Emaciated. Troubled. Scars. Exhausted.

Pretty grim, right?

Inkjet printing uses dithering rather than half-toning for tonal/colour reproduction. Although it is easily capable of sharp, continuous tone prints, Tony’s process imparts a subtle grainy softness in which photographic detail is subsumed, but not entirely lost. A great deal is implied. This is the ‘secret sauce’ that unifies what might be considered a night owl’s portrait of a (fictional) shabby, mixed-zoning neighborhood.

A quiet, somber minimalism is at work. An image that stands out for me is an empy sardine can with lid peeled back, on a surface covered by cuts and scratches with “from heaven” and “blood” written on it. The subject has no intrinsic interest, nevertheless the composition gives it an edge. There is much visual variety in this short, 26-page book. The roles and motivation of its denizens are difficult to infer from their gestures, expressions, and situations. A glassy-eyed dog bares an enormous fang. A newborn baby stares out apprehensively. A morbidly thin person pulls up their pants. An old woman floats face up in a bathtub, eyes closed.

Perhaps they are all ‘nowhere.’ Or perhaps they are Tony Fouhse’s private somewhere, his familiars, tenuously connected to the outside world by wires strung across the sky, lying about broken in tangled masses. The book is at once troubling, and consoling.

Disclaimer: These are my own musings and characterizations of “the middle of nowhere,” and I claim no special insight into Tony’s intentions for the project. See it for yourself.

Guest Post! The Manhattan Art Review

Our good friend David Smith is at it again. He's been on me to pay attention to The Manhattan Art Review forever, and whenever I do dip in it's well worth it. Somehow, I never stick with it, probably because I am a worthless dilettante. Here's a link, which I don't think David included? TMAR.

Without further ado:

The Manhattan Art Review

The terrain of Manhattan, the putative 'center of the art world,' is uneven. It has ups and downs; it is cluttered with stuff. Stuff to gaze at, stuff to trip over, stuff to kick around. Whole lotta stuff.

Sean Tatol, art critic, sole prop. of The Manhattan Art Review, has been clambering around this terrain for a few years now, issuing periodic status reports on his blog, along with a steady stream of snide, cryptic, and/or inspirational social media posts. I did say uneven.

The latest brings us sad news: the young 'uns are confused and uncertain. How to be 'cool'?

'Coolness' is the defining, driving force that animates this hermetically-sealed snow globe of an art world engine, according to Sean. Much like the whole American southwest, Manhattan 'cool' overheated, and now it's gone and dried up!

He leads the blog piece with a dour pronouncement, "It's a truism to complain that the arts are currently in a uniquely aimless and uninspired state." The Manhattan gallery scene, you see, is synonymous with 'the arts,' and who could argue with that truism? He continues: "downtown is where many (most?) of the new things in art have emerged from for close to a century now for whatever reason." Yes, the new things.

This is all part of a preachy preamble to his usual slate of brief reviews, some a couple of paragraphs, some a couple of sentences, of current Manhattan (what else) gallery showings. And what a dismal execrable bunch these sad pitiful bastards are [*] :

"the work is wholly conventional in its nostalgia for a time when a brushstroke was an exciting problem, namely the 1940s."

"[Run] as fast as you can past Mary Stephenson's sickly paintings of plates"

"confuses self-absorbed experiences of personal significance with something that matters in the real world"

"the sadistic endurance tests of Warhol's early films and Lutz Bacher's post-Warhol game of artfully manipulating the systems of cool. I love both those artists..."

I like Sean's writing. It's clever, and sometimes insightful. He brings knowledge, an ample vocabulary, and opinions. I'm mildly interested in the goings on in Manhattan galleries from week to week. He's performing a public service! His blog, for now, is free to read.

As a visual artist, reading Sean makes me feel humbled and pensive. Am I doing the same wrong thing, even though I will never show in a Manhattan gallery? Then I look at the evidence of the shows, what may be seen of them online, and I think: maybe not.

Will Sean eventually become old (ugh), jaded, and power-mad, like the lead character in the film, "The Critic" ? 

Stay tuned!

* Not all of them, no. Sean has friends, helpfully identified amid the mud, the blood, and the beer (apologies to Johnny Cash). Sean has Manhattan clout, ergo Sean has Manhattan friends. And guess what? Some of them are artists! Nothing wrong with that.

All Art is Political!

The sentence "all art is political" is a popular one to complain about, from the "why can't art just be pretty" crowd, and I recently ran across one such where some random guy wanted to know what was political about a Rothko. This led to a curiously disjointed hilarity, with about half the replies gesturing vaguely at the connection between the CIA and Abstract Expressionism, and the other half more or less just sneering vaguely.

Everyone agreed, though, that "all art is political" and anyone who doesn't think so is an idiot and a rube.

This phrase has been attributed to lots of people, but it seems to have become common usage in the latter half of the 20th century, although playwright Elmer Rice puts the phrase in the mouth of a character in 1935. The first half of the 20th seems to have preferred "all art is propaganda" which means something a little different. Hilariously, the "political" version is often (?) attributed to Toni Morrison, who phrased it as "all good art is political" in 2008, which is a bit late and also she's talking about "good art" to give herself an escape route — if it turns out not to be political, well, perhaps it's just bad.

But what does the sentence mean?

Syntactically, it means that art (whatever that is) is inevitably somehow related to power. It depends, as Bill Clinton might say, on what "is" is.

Rice's play puts the line into the mouth of a man who, if I read the notes correctly, feels that Art is a tool of revolution, a tool for creating a classless society. This is not, I confess, a position that makes a lot of sense to me. Berger's "Art and Revolution" which talks about Neizvestny's work as a specific and deliberate tool of anti-Soviet revolution, but this seems to be about a specific body of work rather than a blanket statement about the nature of Art? It's been a while since I read it, and there may be some broader statements buried in it.

Some people clearly mean that art makes some sort of statement about power, this is what Toni Morrison meant in 2008 (she clarified.) The earlier "propaganda" form, as used by people like Orwell, makes this more definite (but see below on Orwell specifically.) "Propaganda" is a noun, "political" is an adjective. What "is" is is inherently clearer in the noun case than the adjective case.

To be fair, a lot of people seem to buy into the "well, Art is a social thing, and society is shaped by, steeped in, the political, so Art is political" and this is what they say. This is a dumb thing to say, and is transparently an effort to rescue the sentence from being meaningless. Everything human is political in this sense, you might as well say "furniture is political" and if you did these people would probably say "yes! Yes it is!" and then we can move on with our lives.

When Morrison was saying is that all art in fact makes political statements. Art directly makes comment on, passes judgement on, the power structures that shape human society. This is a very bold statement, and is on the face of it pretty obviously false unless we extend "political" so far as to make the thing meaningless (see above.) Morrison's remark in full attempts to rescue itself by remarking that art which neglects to comment is, in fact, commenting in favor of the status quo. This is the po-mo shuffle "if it doesn't talk about X, it points to X by the very absence of X in the text and is therefore about X" which reduces trivially to "everything is about everything" and again we can just move on with our lives.

The fact that Morrison simultaneously temporized in a completely separate direction by qualifying her subject as good art suggests to me that she knew she was on pretty shaky ground here.

Orwell, saying that Art is propaganda, makes a more credible point. His remark applies mainly to novelists (he's talking about Dickens) and while he says "Art" it's not at all clear that he's thinking about painting. His assertion is that Art (novels) are a product of society and therefore bear, inevitably, the marks of that society and as a subset of that, the power structures of it. He seems to be laying the thing out the other way around. He's not asserting that all Art explicitly talks about politics, but rather that the politics around the Art (novel) can be observed in the thing. This is pretty reasonable and while nearly tautological, is to my eye a mildly interesting remark.

To summarize:

• Art might be a tool for political change, a tool of revolution. But surely not all art.
• Art might comment or judge politically, which is either "not all art" or po-mo nonsenes.
• The political context of Art might be read in the piece. Ok, no complaint.
• Art is just like every other human thing and is political because. True, but uninteresting.

It is certainly true that a very great deal of art is and was political! Loads of it! There are entire swathes of human history in which the role of Art was pretty exclusively to glorify some power structure! Frequently, Art made and still makes pretty pointed negative comments on existing power structures (Aristophanes was making fun of politicians more than 2000 years ago!) Today, people make portraits of Trump out of cheetos, and that's definitely a political statement.

But, to be honest, I don't see any specific reason that any specific piece of Art necessarily makes a political comment. It is in fact possible for Art to simply be pretty (maybe that's not very good art, but whatever) and it's definitely possible for Art to be merely emotionally evocative, to move the spirit, to enlarge the soul, blah blah blah, without making any specific political comment.

Consider also that politics changes around a piece of Art. What would it mean to notice a beautiful piece, which made a powerful and clear political remark, the content of which is now lost to us? All those Ancient reliefs on various objects and buildings told stories, often political, and I doubt that we even know what many of them are referring to. Are the mysterious ones still political? Maybe they're just pretty? Or evocative?

Being able to discern the local politics in a piece of Art, well, that makes sense and resolves the question of changing politics: Art always bears the marks of the politics surrounding it's making, and possibly, like a mirror, reflects the politics of the moment in which we examine it. But there is no necessary statement in a piece of Art.

You might say "all saddles are equestrian" which is interesting, especially if you just dug up a thing that might be a saddle at an archeological site. These people rode horses! Saddles, however, do not specifically extoll the virtues of horses and, as a rule, have nothing to say about equestrianism. A saddle that decorated with an inscription reading "I fucking love horses!" is, in addition to being a saddle, also equestrian in a different way.

RETVRN! RETVRN!

Of specific interest to me right now are one or more coherent groups of humans on this planet, mainly far too online, some of them Venture Capital Adjacent, which is to say they either have the attention of, or want to have attention of, the relative newcomers (idiots) in the Venture Capital Industry, by which I mean Marc Andreessen and people like him. These coherent groups of people want us to "return" to various traditional things they deem good. The idiom of choice here is RETVRN, adopting a pseudo-Roman spelling, to indicate an affection for the Roman ways. Let us set aside the fact that the Romans would be incomprehensible to these people, but only in the brief moments before the Romans ate them.

These people hate modern art and modern architecture, but they're basically just anti-woke and they're pretty sure they don't like pomo, although they have no idea what it is.

The point here is that these aren't just fat ignoramouses in the bar griping about Modern Art, they're a coherent group of fat ignoramouses who talk to one another and are mildly influential in the tech industry (although they appear to be mostly unemployed themselves.) These guys like Renaissance painting and Gothic cathedrals and neoclassical sculpture and.. well that's about it. They mostly dislike things. But they fucking love those things. Just ask them about that thing where the sculptor does wet/sheer fabric over skin in marble. You will immediately learn that they've never been to a museum. They don't know that shit is everywhere and apparently it's fairly straighforward to execute.

But let's drill into Renaissance painting and art a bit, since I'm clumsily doing a little painting these days. Stand by for clumsy paintings!

There's a guy, a painter, who's loosely associated with these groups of people on the twitters. He paints in the Renaissance style. Kinda. His methods are I think modern, but his results are Renaissance-ish. He does nudes and still lifes. Mainly, he seems to sell large nudes to collectors, sometimes (one suspects "mostly") nudes of young men to signifcantly older men. One might be forgiven for imagining that he's selling paintings of twinks to old fags. Now, to be quite direct: I approve of this. Old fags should be able to festoon their walls with young twinks, and I am pleased as anything that they can. Also, this is very very Renaissance. There might be nothing at all more Renaissance than legitimizing soft porn through expensive bespoke painting.

But none of this gossip is what I'm actually interested in.

What's interesting to me about this kind of "realistic" painting is how it works. The artistic point is carried in some meaningful way by the subject rather than the method. Michelangelo's figures look heroic because the figure they represent is holding themself in a heroic way. The model looks heroic, and thence the painting. The painting is as direct a translation as is reasonable of the model, whether the model was real or imagined. Despite the fervent desires of the RETVRN idiots, Michelangelo's genius does not lie in his mastery of the human form, but in his grasp of the expressive possibilities of the human form.

This style of painting, and the passion for it, led in a fairly straight line to the development of photography which imediately turned around and murdered the style of painting. Nobody paints this way any more, except for a few niche guys catering to niche audiences. When photography summarily executed this kind of painting, there came a swift and vigorous change in painting, and to my eye a good one.

In the Renaissance, painting was the best way we had to render a "real-looking" representation of whatever the thing was in 2 dimensions, suitable for a wall. And, in Europe, this was what people were interested in. So far so good. Along came photography, and was instantly better at that job. This is well-understood to have liberated painters to find something else to do.

The thing I am interested in is barely less obsolete than Renaissance style painting, namely a kind of half-assed Impressionism.

A Renaissance painting laboriously reproduced more or less exactly what the eye sees, optically, and then allows the viewer to re-generate a percept from that which, we hope, more or less resembles the percept they would have generated if they'd seen the thing itself. Impressionism seeks to more or less directly paint the percept that the painter's brain generated while looking at the thing itself. More broadly than strict Impressionism, the painter can build a heirarchy of what's important. They can paint the eyes in detail, because they are entranced by the eyes. The rest of the face might be just a sketch, and the trees in the background, fuck 'em entirely. Just a blob of green is fine. Look, trees, who gives a shit? Look at those eyes!

Cézanne and Rodin are two artists I currently admire greatly, and they both made a lot of work which gives the appearence of being made very very quickly. Whether it was or not, doesn't matter. They're Impressionists, and they appear to be hurrying to nail down the Impression. Berger said of Cézanne that he painted the moment that you saw whatever it was (well, he said something like that) and that seems as good a characterization as any.

Also, making things very very fast appeals to me, since I have the attention span of a goldfish. The idea of spending 100s of hours on a painting strikes me as utter madness. I simply haven't got it in me. I've developed an approach to goache which involves walking by the painting every now and then and dabbing at it for a few moments, and I do that for a day or two, and then I stop at which point the painting is done I guess. This is kinda like my wife. She's prettier. You might notice that her hair is barely gestured at, and honestly, I don't think it matters at all, her hair is not the point.

Here we have a painting I made of a sculpture, and the attentive viewer might note that the background is not exactly rendered in detail. I am in fact very very happy with the background, because it evokes exactly the feel I wanted, but it's basically a wash with a few scribbles on it.

And just to show you what someone who's actually good at painting does, here's a Millet:

Millet wasn't even an impressionist, he was Barbizon. This thing was painted after the advent of photography, but before Impressionism proper gets going. Notice that Millet doesn't do eyes. He doesn't give a single shit about eyes. He's interested in the set of the body here, and very little else. He's painting the exhaustion of the laborer, the mood. The perspective is pretty Renaissance as far as that goes, but the proportions are wonky and Millet simply doesn't care about a hell of a lot of the details.

Anyway, RETVRN is a bunch of dumb shit, and Renaissance painting isn't something we should be taking seriously these days. Paint it all you want! Buy it, sell it, go crazy! If it makes you happy, I absolutely endorse any and all of it. But in a meaningful way, it's not a serious thing. If you seriously want to do the thing that Renaissance Painting does, you should just use a camera.

On Magic

I've been painting a lot.

I'm going to borrow an idea from Flusser, and then probably make a terrible mess of it. The idea is magic, and I'm borrowing it from his essay on photography. The underlying idea he's talking about is of a culture, usually an ancient one, that treats time as cyclic. Everything repeats. The sun rises and sets. Winter is followed by spring. The animals migrate, and so on. Flusser is interested in how such a culture transitions to a linear one, one of endless progress, where time is viewed as a straight line. He identifies writing as a technology that underlies this change, but that probably doesn't matter here.

You can name the linear time approach as Modernism, or Manifest Destiny, and probably a 1000 other names. Currently we have a lot of idiots in the tech industry describing the same idea as accelerationism.

In the world of cyclic time we have a lot of what I am going to call ritual magic in which some repetitive and usually tedious activity is done for probably unreasonably long, producing, sometimes, a result. A rain dance is ritual magic. You dance for days, and sometimes rain happens. Agriculture is also ritual magic. You dig a furrow with your stick. Then you dig another one. And another one. You plant a seed, you plant a seed, you plant a seed. Some months later, sometimes, food happens.

Washing dishes, sweeping the floor, doing laundry, painting a picture. These are all ritual magic. You manifest clean dishes, clean floors, clean clothes, or a picture, through a series of boring repetitive steps that go on far too long.

Modernism, the human urge to progress, constantly seeks to press the boring steps of ritual magic into a machine. We seek to rid ourselves of the tedious, the repetitive. The "work" of a human should only be the novel parts of the task, the decisions which differ every time through. If you repeat a step, you should automate that step.

We've been doing this forever. Prayer wheels, which specifically automate the tedious work of prayer, have been around for almost 2000 years. Agriculture has been automated more and more, since its inception (anyone who has done agriculture can appreciate this trend, farming is terrible.) Picture making has been automated with the camera, and now with generative AI.

Rather than manifesting a picture by tediously applying pigment to a surface one daub at a time, the camera largely reduces the process to one of making a small number of decisions. Mostly, you're making the choices that are specific to the picture at hand. Generative AI eliminates virtually all of the remaining repetitive tasks (setting up lights, setting up the tripod, checking batteries, blah blah blah) and reduces picture making almost completely to "what is specific to this task, what is novel."

Modernism is built around what is knowable. If you can know how a task manifests its result, you can build a machine to do the task (in principle.) You can automate picture making, farming, dishwashing. You cannot automate a rain dance, because you don't know how it works. You literally do not know the "mechanism" and so cannot "mechanize" it. In a meaningful way, there is no mechanism to know, but see below. Nevertheless, at some level, humans don't really distinguish between rain dances and agriculture. You do the thing over and over and over, and sometimes a result occurs.

It's "ritual magic."

The modernist version, in which the repetitive tasks are shoved into a machine, let's call that "technical magic."

A camera is technical magic, a painting is ritual magic. More or less. There's probably no strict line between technical and ritual magic, but there's definitely two big lumps at the ends of the spectrum.

Once you get your arms around this framing, you see it absolutely everywhere. Walking versus driving. Cooking versus ordering out. Religion versus secularism. It's all the same thing.

The observation I'm working my way around to is that people like ritual magic. We like the results of it, and we like doing it. It tickles something inside us.

Receiving a hand-written letter hits differently from a typed letter hits differently from an email. A home cooked lasagne is different from a restaurant lasagne, and is meaningfully "better" even if the latter is objectively better. If we have to do a lot of ritual magic, it's less fun. Ritual is boring and difficult.

Modernism struggles to insert itself here. Modern affluent people often look for ritual in modernist ways. They want to find themselves by traveling to South America and taking drugs in a clean and well ordered retreat. Nobody wants to just wash the goddamned dishes.

I think it's safe to say that the results of ritual magic are generally appreciated. You might not like my painting, but you appreciate the work of making it. What people generally try to dodge or dress up is the work of ritual magic. We want to use technical magic to produce the result of ritual. At this exact moment, we have a ton of people who are trying to use generative AI to become artists, to make art. It's not so much that the pictures suck, although they do, it's that there is an inherent conflict between ritual and technology. You cannot use technical magic to produce ritual results. You have to do the work.

If you serve someone takeout as if you cooked it yourself, you might get away with it but you'll know, and anyways you probably won't get away with it and now you've fucked up a relationship.

Humans have many ways of "knowing" things. The first is more or less rational, we follow chains of causes and effects, modus ponens and all that stuff. Philosophers like to get fancy about this, but roughly speaking we "know" about the world of stuff we can hit, or drown in, or set on fire. At the same time, though, we also like to "know" things through a process of feeling, of "faith" if you will. You can pretend that this is silly, but it's damn near universal. Humans have some sort of built-in affinity for mysticism. Maybe it's just our natural pattern matching mental machinery gone amok (we danced last year, and it rained, let's dance again) or maybe there's something meaningfully "real" that we cannot know by hitting stuff. Those questions are outside the scope of these remarks, and it doesn't matter for our purposes here.

Technical magic is essentially executed by moving from the epistemology of mysticism to the epistemology of rationalaity. If we can identify the parts of the ritual that are, in the terms of the rational way of knowing, are efficacious, then we can insert that ritual into a machine. The rain dance "doesn't work" in those rational terms, if you measure things you find that in the terms of rationality, of cause and effect, of science, rain dances do not produce rain. In mystical terms, in the faith-based way of knowing, rain dances work fine, however. To say "rain dances don't work" is to commit to the modernist epistemology, the way of knowing which leads to linear time, to progress, to science, and also to manifest destinty, colonialism, and so on.

You're welcome to reject mystical epistemologies! I have no particular dog in this hunt. But the day-to-day manifestation of those ways of thinking are rituals, and humans have a potent affinity for ritual. To acknowledge that you love getting a hand written letter more than you love an email is to reject modernism, and to embrace a kind of mysticism. The hand written letter is objectively inferior in every way, it's hard to read, it's slow to create, it's slow to deliver. It has literally no advantages, and yet, we like getting them.

To enjoy a painting is in a sense to reject modernism, and to embrace a mystical approach to the world. Again it is in every way inferior to a photograph, except some vague and contested "sense of artistry" or whatever the hell you want to call it. Whatever it is that you see in a painting as an advantage is essentially rooted in an epistemology that is not modern.

The only practical thing that comes out of all these ruminations that I've been able to find is this: don't think of washing dishes as a chore, but rather an an act of ritual magic which manifests clean dishes.

Beyond that I think it's useful to acknowledge that we, as humans, like these ritual things both as doers and consumers. We like at least the idea of cooking a meal from scratch, and we certainly like eating it. We should also realize what we're about, and not muddle up ritual magic with technical magic. The point is the process. If you cheat at the ritual magic and actually execute it technically, you're doing it wrong by definition.

If what you seek is food, by all means order out. If what you're actually looking for is the warmth of the human condition, buy some onions and whatnot, and cook.

Or, you know, make a painting.

What it looks like

Anyone who's taken any meaningful number of photos and looked at them has likely experienced the sensation that, while a photo looks like the thing, it doesn't look like the thing. This is the gap between the optical reality of whatever it is, and the so-called percept, the impression the thing makes on your mind. If you take a picture of a wrench or something, a "record shot," it probably works out ok. If you take a picture of a sunset, or a city street, or a child's expression, you're likely to experience the gap between optics and perception. Arguably this is the challenge of quite a bit of "serious" photography.

This phenomenon can turn up, to a degree, at the very moment of pressing the shutter.

I don't know about you, but I have certainly experienced this sort of a thing a lot: a long process of fidgeting to set up a shot, tinkering and moving and thinking and looking, and then at the moment of shutter press instantly realizing "no, that's not it." This is a deeply stupid thing which I hate, and have labored to train myself out of, but it's also quite real. Something about the shutter press itself tends to drop away perception, leaving you somehow more open to the optical reality in that instant.

I am vaguely developing a theory that this might be what Garry Winogrand was on about when he said “I photograph to see what the world looks like in photographs.” This may or may not be the exact quotation, and it's possible he said much the same thing many times, I don't know and it doesn't matter. My point here is that perhaps what he was actually doing was not never getting around to making the all-important contact sheets. Perhaps his work was done at the shutter press. Perhaps all he needed was that moment of pure optical seeing, and that satisfied him.

If you pay attention, you might have noticed that in this sense we live in a society that is filled with Maiers and Winogrands. Millions of people with a phone record photographs of myriad objects and scenes, photographs they may never look at again. I don't know about you, but I have frequently experienced someone scrolling through their photos, 100s or 1000s of them, to show me something they just remembered. "I saw this weird cat" or "there was a guy riding a bike with a hat" or whatever. There are two things here that seem noteworthy: first, that we collectively now record random visual facts that we recall later in conversation, and second that we record 1000s of other visual facts that we will never recall later.

The first strikes me as the visual analog of other social interactions "I heard a joke" or "let me tell you this funny story" or "I had such a frustrating time at the bank today." We, or at least some of us, now integrate purely visual phenomena into this normal flow of human interaction. "I saw a weird dog, let me show you." This constitutes an extension, and modification, of the ways we interact, and that's interesting. McLuhan would probably make something of it. A culture that does this is somehow different from one that does not.

The second one, though, that's Winogrand again. Somehow, people are recording visuals without much expectation of ever looking at them again. They may rationalize it thus, but in reality their phones simply have far too many photos to ever meaningfully be used to salt later conversation. Their actions, the taking of so many photos, point to something else just as the same actions point to something else in Winogrand and in Maier.

I theorize that they're looking at the world in a photographic way. For whatever reason, some people are interested in what the world looks like in photographs, in the sense that they savor that moment of the shutter press, that moment of pure optical seeing. They find value, I submit, in that moment and that way of seeing the world.

As a person who, after a fashion, draws, I am coming to understand that there are more ways to see the world than I imagined.

When you draw things from life, you observe the subject in a completely different and new way. You have to notice the details, the relationships between this bit and that bit, and so on. You notice how large the gap between the bottom of the nose and the top of the lip is, whether the eyes tilt up or down at the outer corner, and so on. A lot of very very small things.

If you learned to draw the way I did (which I think is essentially the modern approach to teaching drawing) you do a lot of exercises and whatnots to "see" optically, to step around the perceptual layer, and to see just as the camera sees. This can, in theory, be the end of it. My technical abilities, and I suspect virtually everyone's technical abilities, simply aren't good enough to make that work. At some point you have to develop a kind of dual vision, combining the perception with the purely optical vision. Only then can you really bring whatever it is to life on the page.

My problem is that I'm simply not accurate enough to take a purely optical approach. There are some savants who can do it this way, but I'm pretty sure they're very rare and that normal working artists work just like I do. That is, they combine a perceptual vision with the optical one, using the percept to make adjustments to the drawing. "No, her face is a little more round" or "it's a bit darker under the bridge" or whatever. In this way, interestingly, the drawing comes out aligned with the percept. The problem of "it's correct, but the thing doesn't look like that" literally does not occur. If the drawing doesn't look like the thing (which happens a lot!) it's a technical problem. You've simply failed to put the right bits in, and leave the other bits out, or you've muddled up an important relationship. It happens!

It goes beyond simply leaving out the inconvenient power lines that are the bane of all landscape photographers. You're leaving out everything that doesn't support the perception, and emphasizing the things that do. The drawing is in some sense (perhaps aspirationally) optically correct, but nevertheless it constitutes a rendering of the perception and not of purely optical vision.

Drawing, and more specifically the teaching of drawing, teaches one to see the world in a more camera-like way, but also forces the intrusion of a lot of details that people like Winogrand may have never noticed. Winogrand saw the pretty girl, and then he saw her through the viewfinder, and then he saw her again at the moment of the shutter press. Winogrand saw the girl in, probably, at least three meaningfully different ways, and still he likely never noticed the gap between nose and lip, and could not tell you about the tilt of her eyes. There are a lot of ways to look at a girl, or at a rock, or a bird, or a sunset.

Drawing is a giant pain in the ass, and you have to bring a pencil everywhere. A phone, though, everyone's got a phone. Everyone can see the world that way, now. Literally anything that's even slightly eye catching can be examined in that "shutter press optical truth" fashion, and as a side effect, the captured frame can be recovered later if you like.

I never really understood the desire to see the world that way. I've never taken photos without the intention of eventually generating a photograph, probably on paper. This is kind of standard photographer philosophy, right? "It's not done until it's printed!" kinds of sneering are commonplace. That you are not a real photographer unless you print is, for all practical purposes, unquestioned dogma. Thus it is that we find Winogrand and Maier such mysteries: "why oh why didn't they print? It is beyond understanding!!!"

It's possible, though, that just as I see the world through the eyes of a (ham-fisted) guy-who-draws, and it's genuinely fun, that Winogrand and Maier and 100 million other other people are finding pleasure in seeing the world through the eyes of someone-who-photographs.

Whatever it is that's going on, what is certain is that the action of photographing occurs many orders of magnitude more often than the "making of a photograph" in the traditional sense. Statistically, the percentage of photos that are made with the intention of printing them, or even sharing them, or even showing them to a single other human, rounds to 0.0. Something is going on here, and the traditional views of photography simply are not relevant to whatever that is.

I don't think I'm really part of that? I still take photos for downstream purposes, never just for the action of doing it, but I am certainly the odd one out here.