In the olden days, when photo books were mostly just show catalogs, when Robert Frank roamed America, and so on, photo books were uncomplicated things. You balance two things: 1. connecting each photo with the next one, graphically and/or thematically, and 2. maintaining a fairly steady flow of overall meaning. Walker Evans had an idea of America which came in two parts, and the his book American Photographs reveals that idea to us. One assumes that, first, the show did, and then the show catalog, which we know as the book.
Ditto Robert Frank, for a somewhat different vision of America, and without a show.
Naturally, this evolves, along multiple paths of evolution. On some paths of evolution, interconnections between photos get more complex, we're not just going from one to the next, citations go back and forth across the whole book. On some paths, meaning becomes looser, more amorphous, more open to interpretation.
In recent years we see people eschewing everything we know about photography. The cliche is desperately avoided, MFA students back away from the old cliches into their own, new, cliches. The meaning inherent in a single photo becomes more and more tenuous as the referents we're used to are discarded. As often as not the superficial interconnections between photos grow in to a dense thicket of graphical and subject references, but this thicket does little to reveal meaning. A, B, and C are tied together by X, suggesting that X is important, but we're no further forward on why X matters.
I have already drawn an analogy with abstract painting, which I continue to think is apropos.
I have no particular objection in theory to these kinds of experiments. Change is good, right? We shouldn't just go ahead and make the same things over and over.
Anyways, the natural result of this kind of experimentation is that artists find themselves riding a razor edge. They're pushing away from what was, where meaning was clear, where we have a vocabulary of tropes to lean on, where we know what's going on. They're striving for something new, something apart from that cozy and understandable world.
Sometimes they push too far, and the result is gibberish. Sometimes they don't push far enough and the result is sort of trite. That narrow groove where the work is meaningful but interesting, new, challenging, is not a groove that's easy to hit.
The failure we're seeing today (and, who knows, maybe in every era we saw the same) is that the critical apparatus surrounding the activities of art-making are not up to the task of telling the artist whether they hit the groove or not. The critical response to an artist's work seems to be almost completely independent of the work itself.
Criticism has abandoned the art almost completely, to focus on the artist. Colberg appropriates photos of women, photos he did not take, of women he does not know. This is ok not because of any properties of the work, but because we know Colberg is a good guy. He dutifully wrings his hands in the proper ways, on the proper schedule, so we know that his work is good. Prince, doing the same work, but resolutely failing to signal his politics suitably, is a bad guy and therefore his work is bad. Obviously it's not just Colberg/Prince, this approach to criticism is near-universal, from amateur photography forums to exalted European Biennales.
There is even, kind of, a theoretical basis for this. You hand-wave vaguely at "context," remark that you cannot meaningfully examine a piece of art in isolation, and hope nobody notices that you've palmed the ball.
But palm it you did. It doesn't matter which cup the mark chooses, the ball won't be there.
Wednesday, March 11, 2020
Tuesday, March 10, 2020
Some Notes
Our friend Jörg Colberg relates a story in his latest about how he bought some snapshots at a flea market, scanned then, reworked them to suit his own vision, and then published one of them — a photo of a woman, natch.
This is a man who is on the record complaining about Richard Prince doing, well, exactly the same thing. This is a man who is Very Concerned about the Macho Cult of photojournalism, which simply acquires people's likenesses and uses them for its own purposes without concern for the subjects of the photos.
Now, I am considerably more willing to allow that these kinds of things are OK. I rather think people are much too precious about ownership of their copyrights and their likenesses. The point, here, though, is that Colberg does not think this. The point isn't even necessarily that he's a huge hypocrite, it's perfectly possible that he can explain some subtle, or not so subtle, difference between his actions and the things he abhors.
The photographic community, from the rankest amateur camera-fondler to the most stratospherically austere critic, is extremely fond of laying down diktats. As in all human endeavors, they are rather fonder of enforcing them on other people than on following them themselves. I have been forced, by a modest program of self-examination, to take up a nearly libertine attitude on the grounds that I do and would like to do a lot of stuff photographically. It has not always been comfortable.
--
The book Colberg refers to is available from the editor's web site, for $US75, US customers only, at the link he provides. This is fascinating on two fronts.
The first is that the editor's storefront does not name the publisher, which is Schilt, nor the fact that it can be purchased for 60 euros (about $US70) from the publisher. The second is that buying from the editor/author is going to run you about $14 more. The publisher will ship it free, Ms. England wants $9, and she's charging about $5 more for the book in the first place. And she's no help if you're not in the USA anyways.
If you're in the USA you probably oughta buy from Ms. England anyways. Throw the author a bone, eh? But if you're not in the USA, or you'd prefer to pay list price, Schilt will sell you a copy. Use this link.
--
In other news.
I stumbled across The White Pube the other day. Ignore the front page and poke around the navigation links on the top. This thing is the work of two former art students, both women of color, who are making a credible play to be the new enfants terrible of art criticism. You can read some of the reviews for yourself.
The content of the reviews is fairly boring and quickly becomes entirely predictable. The art world sucks, white people ruin everything, we need a new criticism which, evidently, mainly involves the critic talking about herself, a quick nod at the art which either sucks because white people or, occasionally, is ok. This is, of course, catnip to the art world. It's so important that we have these conversations etc.
What I am fascinated by is the cant they have devised for themselves. They have small handful of tics: The use of "n" for "and" as in we went to the show n had drinks later, the use of lowercase "i" as the pronoun, occasional use of "im" for "I'm" and occasional use of single letters for words where the meaning is clear, the bar was c so we had to go next door to the bar that was open.
This, plus a sort of breathless pace, and a sensation of run-on sentences gives the flavor of hip youth, a sort of texting/social-media vibe.
If you look closer, though, a most interesting thing reveals itself. There are no spelling errors. If you perform the simple substitutions to undo their tics (replace "n" with "and" and so on) the whole thing turns in to tolerably well written and perfectly normal English, albeit a bit prolix, a bit self-centered, and a lot boring. Indeed, you note that they only insert the tics occasionally, usually "and" is spelled "and" and "I" is capitalized.
This is a delightfully weird style. It occurs to me that the intent is not to, in fact, write like a teenager, but to give the flavor of writing like a teenager. This is perfectly adult writing given a light gloss of teen to pep it up and give the writers a gloss of speaking authoritatively for their demographic.
I find the whole effort hilarious. On the one hand, they disdain the authority of the contemporary art world's authoritative figures, professing to a sort of anarchist system of equality, while at the same time claiming an authority of their own.
They strike me as a couple of moderately posh British girls (but see comments below, I am Just Wrong) (although I am no expert on accents, they remind me rather too much of Priti Patel for comfort) who are making a bold play to land in cozy positions in the Art Establishment. This is rather like Tony Soprano's rise to power, which began when he executed a carefully calibrated robbery of a Mafia poker game, a robbery calibrated to establish him as a man to be reckoned with, but not a man who needed to be eliminated.
I could be wrong, of course. There's a good chance that they're just fuckin' around enjoying themselves, and they might also be honest-to-god anarchists genuinely trying to find a new critical voice.
Their writing, while stylistically very fun, is crashingly boring in terms of content. It reads like a lovingly copy-edited tweaker rant, always on the same topic, over and over.
Give 'em a read! Tell them I sent you!
This is a man who is on the record complaining about Richard Prince doing, well, exactly the same thing. This is a man who is Very Concerned about the Macho Cult of photojournalism, which simply acquires people's likenesses and uses them for its own purposes without concern for the subjects of the photos.
Now, I am considerably more willing to allow that these kinds of things are OK. I rather think people are much too precious about ownership of their copyrights and their likenesses. The point, here, though, is that Colberg does not think this. The point isn't even necessarily that he's a huge hypocrite, it's perfectly possible that he can explain some subtle, or not so subtle, difference between his actions and the things he abhors.
The photographic community, from the rankest amateur camera-fondler to the most stratospherically austere critic, is extremely fond of laying down diktats. As in all human endeavors, they are rather fonder of enforcing them on other people than on following them themselves. I have been forced, by a modest program of self-examination, to take up a nearly libertine attitude on the grounds that I do and would like to do a lot of stuff photographically. It has not always been comfortable.
--
The book Colberg refers to is available from the editor's web site, for $US75, US customers only, at the link he provides. This is fascinating on two fronts.
The first is that the editor's storefront does not name the publisher, which is Schilt, nor the fact that it can be purchased for 60 euros (about $US70) from the publisher. The second is that buying from the editor/author is going to run you about $14 more. The publisher will ship it free, Ms. England wants $9, and she's charging about $5 more for the book in the first place. And she's no help if you're not in the USA anyways.
If you're in the USA you probably oughta buy from Ms. England anyways. Throw the author a bone, eh? But if you're not in the USA, or you'd prefer to pay list price, Schilt will sell you a copy. Use this link.
--
In other news.
I stumbled across The White Pube the other day. Ignore the front page and poke around the navigation links on the top. This thing is the work of two former art students, both women of color, who are making a credible play to be the new enfants terrible of art criticism. You can read some of the reviews for yourself.
The content of the reviews is fairly boring and quickly becomes entirely predictable. The art world sucks, white people ruin everything, we need a new criticism which, evidently, mainly involves the critic talking about herself, a quick nod at the art which either sucks because white people or, occasionally, is ok. This is, of course, catnip to the art world. It's so important that we have these conversations etc.
What I am fascinated by is the cant they have devised for themselves. They have small handful of tics: The use of "n" for "and" as in we went to the show n had drinks later, the use of lowercase "i" as the pronoun, occasional use of "im" for "I'm" and occasional use of single letters for words where the meaning is clear, the bar was c so we had to go next door to the bar that was open.
This, plus a sort of breathless pace, and a sensation of run-on sentences gives the flavor of hip youth, a sort of texting/social-media vibe.
If you look closer, though, a most interesting thing reveals itself. There are no spelling errors. If you perform the simple substitutions to undo their tics (replace "n" with "and" and so on) the whole thing turns in to tolerably well written and perfectly normal English, albeit a bit prolix, a bit self-centered, and a lot boring. Indeed, you note that they only insert the tics occasionally, usually "and" is spelled "and" and "I" is capitalized.
This is a delightfully weird style. It occurs to me that the intent is not to, in fact, write like a teenager, but to give the flavor of writing like a teenager. This is perfectly adult writing given a light gloss of teen to pep it up and give the writers a gloss of speaking authoritatively for their demographic.
I find the whole effort hilarious. On the one hand, they disdain the authority of the contemporary art world's authoritative figures, professing to a sort of anarchist system of equality, while at the same time claiming an authority of their own.
They strike me as a couple of moderately posh British girls (but see comments below, I am Just Wrong) (although I am no expert on accents, they remind me rather too much of Priti Patel for comfort) who are making a bold play to land in cozy positions in the Art Establishment. This is rather like Tony Soprano's rise to power, which began when he executed a carefully calibrated robbery of a Mafia poker game, a robbery calibrated to establish him as a man to be reckoned with, but not a man who needed to be eliminated.
I could be wrong, of course. There's a good chance that they're just fuckin' around enjoying themselves, and they might also be honest-to-god anarchists genuinely trying to find a new critical voice.
Their writing, while stylistically very fun, is crashingly boring in terms of content. It reads like a lovingly copy-edited tweaker rant, always on the same topic, over and over.
Give 'em a read! Tell them I sent you!
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Saturday, March 7, 2020
Simplicity
I've stumbled across two separate projects that strike me as similar, recently. Paul Graham's Mother and Deanna Dikeman's 27 Goodbyes. The former is a MACK book containing 18 (I think) more or less identical photographs of the photographer's mother, and the latter is a blurb book and (probably in a different form?) a MACK First Book Shortlist winner containing a group (27, one assumes) of similar photos of the photographer's parents waving goodbye to her over the years.
Are there things good or bad? I dunno, I found Graham's thing to be boring and stupid, but I dare say that if you spent some time with it various differences would reveal themselves and perhaps some sort of meaning would congeal around them. I have observed before that there is a risk of seeing meaning in practically anything if you simply stare at it long enough, and sort of induced pareidolia. Dikeman's project has more charm and pathos to it, but the pictures are, again, awfully similar. The parents age, Graham's mother does not.
These are both projects aiming at a kind of simplicity.
This is really really hard to pull off.
If you're writing a novel with Dickensian scope, there's a lot of ways to save yourself. Your clunky writing can be covered by a sprawling plot, or interesting characters, or whatever. You're working in a bunch of dimensions, and as long as you do well in a few of them, you can be merely adequate in the rest.
If, on the other hand, you're writing a children's book, let's say one of those things with one line of text per page and a picture, there's a hell of a lot less room for failure. You have to hit a precise note of wit, of rhythm, of charm. You can't flub anything, you've got one dimension and almost no content to work with. I have read a lot of these things in the last decade, and there's a lot of terrible work. I made this up, but it is typical of the worst stuff.
Mouse and Owl are friends. Mouse was hungry. Mouse found a nut. Mouse shared her nut with Owl. Mouse and Owl are friends.
No rhythm, no wit, an insulting story, and blunt moral stupidly delivered. A child of three would justly hate it.
The genius of Dr. Seuss was that he could reliably hit that note of rhythm and wit. Seuss is not alone here, but he continues to tower over virtually anyone else trying it out. When I wrote a few of these things to entertain my kids I did not attempt rhythm or rhyme, I simply made fun of stuff. The result is better than the worst by far, mainly because I left out the moralizing, but I'm no Seuss.
The Seuss estate published some posthumous material, and it is, I have to say, fascinating to see. The good doctor knew this difference between good and bad, and while his rejects are still better than, say, my stuff, they are distinctly lesser. It emphasizes, to my eye, the dizzying heights that his terribly simple little books scaled. This stuff was hard even for him.
The point here is that simplicity is hard. Simplifying your project may seem like a great idea, because, simple, right? It is not. A simple project has to be perfect to avoid failure, and maybe you haven't got perfect in you. Maybe you're got gallons of very good but no perfect. I certainly contain no perfect, although from time to time I persuade myself briefly that there is some adequate.
Are there things good or bad? I dunno, I found Graham's thing to be boring and stupid, but I dare say that if you spent some time with it various differences would reveal themselves and perhaps some sort of meaning would congeal around them. I have observed before that there is a risk of seeing meaning in practically anything if you simply stare at it long enough, and sort of induced pareidolia. Dikeman's project has more charm and pathos to it, but the pictures are, again, awfully similar. The parents age, Graham's mother does not.
These are both projects aiming at a kind of simplicity.
This is really really hard to pull off.
If you're writing a novel with Dickensian scope, there's a lot of ways to save yourself. Your clunky writing can be covered by a sprawling plot, or interesting characters, or whatever. You're working in a bunch of dimensions, and as long as you do well in a few of them, you can be merely adequate in the rest.
If, on the other hand, you're writing a children's book, let's say one of those things with one line of text per page and a picture, there's a hell of a lot less room for failure. You have to hit a precise note of wit, of rhythm, of charm. You can't flub anything, you've got one dimension and almost no content to work with. I have read a lot of these things in the last decade, and there's a lot of terrible work. I made this up, but it is typical of the worst stuff.
Mouse and Owl are friends. Mouse was hungry. Mouse found a nut. Mouse shared her nut with Owl. Mouse and Owl are friends.
No rhythm, no wit, an insulting story, and blunt moral stupidly delivered. A child of three would justly hate it.
The genius of Dr. Seuss was that he could reliably hit that note of rhythm and wit. Seuss is not alone here, but he continues to tower over virtually anyone else trying it out. When I wrote a few of these things to entertain my kids I did not attempt rhythm or rhyme, I simply made fun of stuff. The result is better than the worst by far, mainly because I left out the moralizing, but I'm no Seuss.
The Seuss estate published some posthumous material, and it is, I have to say, fascinating to see. The good doctor knew this difference between good and bad, and while his rejects are still better than, say, my stuff, they are distinctly lesser. It emphasizes, to my eye, the dizzying heights that his terribly simple little books scaled. This stuff was hard even for him.
The point here is that simplicity is hard. Simplifying your project may seem like a great idea, because, simple, right? It is not. A simple project has to be perfect to avoid failure, and maybe you haven't got perfect in you. Maybe you're got gallons of very good but no perfect. I certainly contain no perfect, although from time to time I persuade myself briefly that there is some adequate.
Friday, March 6, 2020
Something to look at
This is, allegedly, a kitchen:
Specifically it is a kitchen (one of several, I think) in a home owned by Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, a home styled by the design firm Axel Verdoort (famous for their sleek minimalist design aesthetic.)
We can notice a few things. The design uses no trim, no moldings. There are no upper cabinets, only a narrow shelf holding a few dishes which match the colors of the kitchen. The color palette is tones of ecru, and green, and that is the totality of it. There are strong converging lines pointing directly at the view out the window, which looks oddly structural, like a not very good impressionist painting. One way to consider the picture is that it's entirely designed to frame the view out the window, which, while formal, doesn't seem worth that much effort.
But back to the kitchen. The styling is maniacal. The cupcakes match the color scheme. The whole thing is intended to create a sense of spaciousness, and of minimal "clean" lines.
What it is not is a useful kitchen. The sink under the window is at least 6 feet from anything else. The kitchen island is at least 6 feet across. Trying to cook anything in this mess is going to be a nightmare of endless hiking back and forth. There's no visible splash guard behind the sink. The single narrow shelf for, apparently, bowls is placed at roughly where the back of the first or second shelf of a standard over the counter cabinet would be. Not out of reach, but also not great for Kim who is 5' 3" tall.
Is this intended as an entertainment space? Setting aside the issue of whether Kanye and Kim are really "chatting with friends while baking pies" kinds of people, the aesthetic is not welcoming. It is far too austere. There's nowhere to sit. Kim and Kanye live largely on the road anyways. They are busy, global, people.
So what is this thing? Why would anyone build this thing?
Well, first of all this sort of clean austerity is rather chic in advertsing for kitchen wares. Strong converging lines is absolutely a thing, although mostly the high end brands opt for at least a slightly warmer look, a little more cozy, usually with some people. Sometimes it's a supermodel leaning against a $12,000 stainless steel stove, wearing 5 inch heels and not even slightly pretending to cook.
Anyways, Kim and Kanye's kitchen shows off no appliances, and indeed does not appear to contain any. The point of the picture is austere spaciousness, with a nod toward contemporary kitchen photography.
I conclude that the point of this thing is to be photographed.
Look at the view out the window. It's a layered composition of yellow green/green/yellow-green again. Perhaps it was pasted in during post, or perhaps someone actually arranged plantings to look like this. The important thing is that from anywhere else, it looks different. Whatever was done, it was done to create that painterly "view" from this spot and this spot alone. I'm sure it's very nice from other angles, but just look at where the tree is placed. It is placed exactly where an amateur painter would stick it.
Obviously this whole thing is simply signaling. Kin and Kanye talk a good fight in the Architectural Digest article about how the home was built for their family, for their kids, for living in with their kids, but there is literally no evidence of anything even remotely kid-friendly here. The parts we get to see (which, to be fair, are maybe a couple hundred square feet of many thousands of square feet) are unlivable.
What is interesting to me is how purely visual this display is. Of course Kim Kardashian would build a house designed for instagram, and she has.
Specifically it is a kitchen (one of several, I think) in a home owned by Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, a home styled by the design firm Axel Verdoort (famous for their sleek minimalist design aesthetic.)
We can notice a few things. The design uses no trim, no moldings. There are no upper cabinets, only a narrow shelf holding a few dishes which match the colors of the kitchen. The color palette is tones of ecru, and green, and that is the totality of it. There are strong converging lines pointing directly at the view out the window, which looks oddly structural, like a not very good impressionist painting. One way to consider the picture is that it's entirely designed to frame the view out the window, which, while formal, doesn't seem worth that much effort.
But back to the kitchen. The styling is maniacal. The cupcakes match the color scheme. The whole thing is intended to create a sense of spaciousness, and of minimal "clean" lines.
What it is not is a useful kitchen. The sink under the window is at least 6 feet from anything else. The kitchen island is at least 6 feet across. Trying to cook anything in this mess is going to be a nightmare of endless hiking back and forth. There's no visible splash guard behind the sink. The single narrow shelf for, apparently, bowls is placed at roughly where the back of the first or second shelf of a standard over the counter cabinet would be. Not out of reach, but also not great for Kim who is 5' 3" tall.
Is this intended as an entertainment space? Setting aside the issue of whether Kanye and Kim are really "chatting with friends while baking pies" kinds of people, the aesthetic is not welcoming. It is far too austere. There's nowhere to sit. Kim and Kanye live largely on the road anyways. They are busy, global, people.
So what is this thing? Why would anyone build this thing?
Well, first of all this sort of clean austerity is rather chic in advertsing for kitchen wares. Strong converging lines is absolutely a thing, although mostly the high end brands opt for at least a slightly warmer look, a little more cozy, usually with some people. Sometimes it's a supermodel leaning against a $12,000 stainless steel stove, wearing 5 inch heels and not even slightly pretending to cook.
Anyways, Kim and Kanye's kitchen shows off no appliances, and indeed does not appear to contain any. The point of the picture is austere spaciousness, with a nod toward contemporary kitchen photography.
I conclude that the point of this thing is to be photographed.
Look at the view out the window. It's a layered composition of yellow green/green/yellow-green again. Perhaps it was pasted in during post, or perhaps someone actually arranged plantings to look like this. The important thing is that from anywhere else, it looks different. Whatever was done, it was done to create that painterly "view" from this spot and this spot alone. I'm sure it's very nice from other angles, but just look at where the tree is placed. It is placed exactly where an amateur painter would stick it.
Obviously this whole thing is simply signaling. Kin and Kanye talk a good fight in the Architectural Digest article about how the home was built for their family, for their kids, for living in with their kids, but there is literally no evidence of anything even remotely kid-friendly here. The parts we get to see (which, to be fair, are maybe a couple hundred square feet of many thousands of square feet) are unlivable.
What is interesting to me is how purely visual this display is. Of course Kim Kardashian would build a house designed for instagram, and she has.
Thursday, March 5, 2020
Make of me a Good Report
Imagine that you are walking down the street. A man, a stranger, approaches, walking in the other direction. He makes brief eye contact and passes on. It occurs to you suddenly that he is going to relate this encounter to his friends later. He is going to tell them something, you don't know what, about you, about this momentary encounter. You hope, probably, that he will make of you a good report. You hope he will make you look good.
The same aspiration would arise if we suddenly understood that an observer intended to paint us, to draw us, to write a story about us.
The critical point here is that we do not have these epiphanies. It does not occur to us that this stranger or that will be making a report on us, although most of us do it to someone else routinely. I saw this guy downtown today..
The presence of the camera changes that. We are immediately, acutely, aware that someone is going to report on us. They're taking.. oop, now they've got a picture of me. Our aspiration to be reported on positively instantly makes itself known. This, combined with the residual mystical feelings of the camera as soul-stealer, may make us nervous. We want it to be a good picture, and we know, because we're not visually illiterate and because the power of the photograph is finite, that the picture will not make as good a report of us as we desire. It will, likely, fall short.
Some people, a few, perhaps the vain, quite like the experience. It is as if the thrill of being gossiped about outweighs the possible content of that gossip. These people are not the majority.
Published the other day in the LA Review of Books: "Migrant Mother: Dorothea Lange and the Truth of Photography." The author spends a depressing amount of time pointlessly and badly arguing that Lange's claim — in a story we already know to be wrong — that she spent only 10 minutes shooting Florence Owens is false.
But what the author really wants to bang on about is how false the picture is, and how awful Lange was to take it, and so on. The usual nonsense.
We hear, again, how disappointed the family was in the picture, how Owens was uncomfortable with her iconic status, and how the picture showed only a narrow slice of Owens, a slice the family felt was a negative one. It is surely true that the family felt Lange had made a bad report of their mother, and they felt accordingly cheated by that. At any rate, this is what they genuinely feel now, and recall feeling then, decades after the fact. Let us try not to forget that memory is a bit plastic, and there are things that are simply lost forever, like tears in rain (as Roy would tell us.)
The standard pitch by academic types is that people are routinely tricked by the idea of the photograph. People expect it to reveal truth, completeness. If photographed, a person expects that the photograph will show they truly and completely, well maybe with the naughtiness hidden. The photographer is therefore a trickster and a cheat, because as only all us super-duper erudite types know, the photograph is a big fat liar.
The standard pitch is garbage. Everyone knows that the photo is a slice, a narrow slice. Open a popular magazine and ask anyone does Taylor Swift always look like that? and they will laugh and assure you that the opposite is true. Everyone knows, fairly well, what the boundaries of the photograph are. Everyone expects to be disappointed by photographs of themselves, it's a cliche. What is unusual is to actually like a picture of yourself.
What Florence Owens and her family experienced was that same old disappointment, which is rooted in the aspiration to be reported on well. The photograph has nothing much to do with it, it is the report which matters. The camera is only the unmistakable harbinger of the report to be made. Had someone walked about the place and then written a piece about "Florence Owens, destitute pea picker, nursing her baby in full view of the public, looked like nothing if not a filthy savage" they would have been just as incensed, albeit over a shorter interval of time.
In fact, the photograph makes a wonderful report of Florence Owens, she looks like an amazing human being. This does not matter much to the family, who see her only as poor. I get it, to be forever hitched to the wagon of poverty is no delight. There is surely a strange conflict here, a desire to tell the world "that's my mum in the famous picture!" but also to deny it, lest the stigma of poverty get on you.
Anyways, the idea that the Owens family was somehow misled here, was tricked, was cheated, is I think dicey at best.
They are disappointed, in the same way that we are disappointed by the photo on our driver's license, albeit on a larger scale. We do not expect the driver's licence to reveal our wonderful qualities, we expect it to be just what it turns out to be. There is no trickery here, there is disappointment. That disappointment is real, justified, and practically universal among the photographed.
Dressing this disappointment up as trickery strikes me as a scam to justify a puritanical impulse to wag a finger and tell people not to photograph other people.
The same aspiration would arise if we suddenly understood that an observer intended to paint us, to draw us, to write a story about us.
The critical point here is that we do not have these epiphanies. It does not occur to us that this stranger or that will be making a report on us, although most of us do it to someone else routinely. I saw this guy downtown today..
The presence of the camera changes that. We are immediately, acutely, aware that someone is going to report on us. They're taking.. oop, now they've got a picture of me. Our aspiration to be reported on positively instantly makes itself known. This, combined with the residual mystical feelings of the camera as soul-stealer, may make us nervous. We want it to be a good picture, and we know, because we're not visually illiterate and because the power of the photograph is finite, that the picture will not make as good a report of us as we desire. It will, likely, fall short.
Some people, a few, perhaps the vain, quite like the experience. It is as if the thrill of being gossiped about outweighs the possible content of that gossip. These people are not the majority.
Published the other day in the LA Review of Books: "Migrant Mother: Dorothea Lange and the Truth of Photography." The author spends a depressing amount of time pointlessly and badly arguing that Lange's claim — in a story we already know to be wrong — that she spent only 10 minutes shooting Florence Owens is false.
But what the author really wants to bang on about is how false the picture is, and how awful Lange was to take it, and so on. The usual nonsense.
We hear, again, how disappointed the family was in the picture, how Owens was uncomfortable with her iconic status, and how the picture showed only a narrow slice of Owens, a slice the family felt was a negative one. It is surely true that the family felt Lange had made a bad report of their mother, and they felt accordingly cheated by that. At any rate, this is what they genuinely feel now, and recall feeling then, decades after the fact. Let us try not to forget that memory is a bit plastic, and there are things that are simply lost forever, like tears in rain (as Roy would tell us.)
The standard pitch by academic types is that people are routinely tricked by the idea of the photograph. People expect it to reveal truth, completeness. If photographed, a person expects that the photograph will show they truly and completely, well maybe with the naughtiness hidden. The photographer is therefore a trickster and a cheat, because as only all us super-duper erudite types know, the photograph is a big fat liar.
The standard pitch is garbage. Everyone knows that the photo is a slice, a narrow slice. Open a popular magazine and ask anyone does Taylor Swift always look like that? and they will laugh and assure you that the opposite is true. Everyone knows, fairly well, what the boundaries of the photograph are. Everyone expects to be disappointed by photographs of themselves, it's a cliche. What is unusual is to actually like a picture of yourself.
What Florence Owens and her family experienced was that same old disappointment, which is rooted in the aspiration to be reported on well. The photograph has nothing much to do with it, it is the report which matters. The camera is only the unmistakable harbinger of the report to be made. Had someone walked about the place and then written a piece about "Florence Owens, destitute pea picker, nursing her baby in full view of the public, looked like nothing if not a filthy savage" they would have been just as incensed, albeit over a shorter interval of time.
In fact, the photograph makes a wonderful report of Florence Owens, she looks like an amazing human being. This does not matter much to the family, who see her only as poor. I get it, to be forever hitched to the wagon of poverty is no delight. There is surely a strange conflict here, a desire to tell the world "that's my mum in the famous picture!" but also to deny it, lest the stigma of poverty get on you.
Anyways, the idea that the Owens family was somehow misled here, was tricked, was cheated, is I think dicey at best.
They are disappointed, in the same way that we are disappointed by the photo on our driver's license, albeit on a larger scale. We do not expect the driver's licence to reveal our wonderful qualities, we expect it to be just what it turns out to be. There is no trickery here, there is disappointment. That disappointment is real, justified, and practically universal among the photographed.
Dressing this disappointment up as trickery strikes me as a scam to justify a puritanical impulse to wag a finger and tell people not to photograph other people.
Tuesday, March 3, 2020
Cindy Sherman
I went to see the Cindy Sherman show in Vancouver this weekend. I guess it's a kind of retrospective.
The show is essentially chronological, and fairly completist. There's a video of a childhood book project, there's student work, there's Untitled Film Stills (UFS), and then onwards to color work organized as as collection of series, which you walk through in order. There's a wall-blurb for each series, presumably distilling the critical consensus around each. There is a complete set of Untitled Film Stills, and at least 3 or 4 prints from each series mentioned. Whether there are series completely unrepresented here, I do not know. The work spans 1975 or so until the present, we're looking at several hundred prints here.
There are something like 100 prints of very early work, all smallish black and white pictures. As time passes, the prints get larger and larger, until in the present time we see a lot of essentially life size or larger full-body portraits. Sometimes there are two or more Shermans in the frame, life sized, with a fair bit of space around them. These things are big.
The show is hung like garbage. In several cases its not clear what photos a given wall-blurb refers to, and some photos are sprinkled throughout that could belong to one of several different series that are blurbed and (mostly) grouped at the end. Frequently, examining a photo involves dancing around reflections and glare. The wall-blurbs themselves are borderline gibberish, but I suppose that is to be expected.
Knowing that prints of several of these objects have sold for millions of dollars imparts a slight sense of awe. It's a little like seeing a Monet show, although attenuated to the tune of a couple of zeros.
Anyways, with a little effort you can sort it out and start to make some sense of Sherman's career.
The magic quality that Sherman has is the ability to evoke a kind of recognition. In the Untitled Film Stills you recognize the movie. Kind of. It's not Breakfast at Tiffany's it's.. it's... what is it? You can't quite put your finger on it. Eventually you realize that there is no single film she's drawing from, that there is nothing to recognize, and yet you feel that powerful tip-of-my-tongue sensation. She is showing you the distinctive look of the thing, the tropes, the posture, the framing, and so on.
After the UFS it's a bit more hit and miss, but you do often have that same recognition, usually of people. I know her, she's that famous.. who is she?
Unfortunately, Sherman starts and ends with that sense of recognition. Well, she's also quite funny, but "funny" doesn't shift Art, so there's a lot of energy expended pretending that Sherman isn't just being funny.
She does this recognition in, I think, two distinct ways, although UFS arguably constitutes even a third.
The first approach is more direct. You recognize a specific thing, or you feel you do. I know that film, that person. In this case we are recognizing essentially media tropes, elements of cinema or public personas. The second, different, approach is recognition of a type or mood. Sherman has several series (Centerfolds, The Pink Robe, and a couple of others) which appear to be experiments with color and mood. In them she is generally portraying an otherwise generic woman-as-victim. We do not recognize the woman or her specific circumstances, but we do recognize the mood, the general kind of woman and the kind of situation in which she finds herself. We are recognizing here something more real, and less media (although the media surely colors our idea of what a woman in trouble looks like.
The trouble with Sherman is that all she's got is this thing we might call quotation. She started out quoting (or, if you prefer, paraphrasing) cinema. Later on she did various grotesqueries paraphrasing pornography and fairy tales, and for the last 20 or thirty years she is quoting (or wilfully, humorously, mis-quoting) specific types of people. This ability to create recognizable and yet not recognized (if you will permit me the glibness) pictures makes her quotations especially wonderful. But they remain quotations.
Archetypal are some magazine cover triptychs from her early work. Three copies of the same magazine cover: the original, another with Sherman's face made up to resemble the model (very well, by the way) pasted in to replace the model's face, and a third the same except Sherman is making a silly face. The antecedent, the quotation, the witty mis-quote. This is her constant theme.
These quotations are generally credited to her as "critque" which is largely bullshit. When she makes a grotesque of pornography, she is, well, let me quote from the wall blurb:
Which, well, OK. I'm certainly not going to argue that pornography is deep and profound, it is pretty empty in some important senses. But let us see what the wall blurb has to say when she does the same thing for fairy tales. After some blather about media and violent themes in cinema and television drama and the forces of depravity in the contemporary world, we end with:
I mean, which is it? She's doing much the same thing in both places. She's quoting, in humorous/ridiculous ways the visual language of porn, and of fairy tales. Perhaps it's the fairy tales that actually conceal the striking emptiness, and it's porn that's the mirror. How on earth are we to know?
The critics are, obviously, just blathering. They are seeing Shermn more or less blandly quoting this thing or that thing, and applying to her work their own ideas. Pornography bad, therefore obviously this is a harsh deconstruction of its badness. Fairy Tales are um, damn it, violence in television is a thing so something something.
When I quote Brad Feuerhelm, let's say this doozy:
if I just put it out there, you could guess that I am mocking Brad (I am) because you know me. Perhaps you, like me, think Brad is a dunce, you'll examine this dogshit with fear and lust, and realize that it is as usual gibberish. If, on the other hand, you were a fan of Brad (i.e. another dunce) and found this quote in some random context, you likely would not notice that it is gibberish and would interpret the act of quotation as something other than mockery.
To make a quotation unambiguously criticism you have to add something to it, you have to say "and therefore, the whatever-it-is is dogshit."
There are a few things in the Sherman show that the critical apparatus is unable to get a handle on. There are some pictures of Sherman decked out as this clown or that clown, and the wall blurb contains 31 words on the series, and concludes that clowns are vaguely sinister. The critics have no idea what the hell is going on, and so, for once showing wisdom, fall more or less silent. I like the clown pictures almost the best of the lot, because they are so patently Sherman having fun and not trying to lard the work with to signs and portents for the critics to gnaw on. And, lo, she has evidently thwarted them here! Yay!
The single most interesting thing I noticed in the exhibit is how thoroughly different the Untitled Film Stills are from the rest. In these pictures she is engaged in full-body acting, in a fully realized scene, to recreate various feminine movie character types. I think you can argue maybe successfully that there is critique, comment, here, simply because she made a whole lot of them and one can readily see how limited the available character types are. This was a rather in-vogue discussion at the time (Mulvey invents "male gaze" in 1975, Sherman shoots these things 1977-1980). It's just quotation, but a great deal of it, perhaps to make a point.
In the UFS photos, she consistently looks like Cindy Sherman in a wig. Because she has not yet settled on her later technical methods, she is not able to so alter her face. Therefore she leans on other, less artificial-looking, methods to evoke her signature sense of recognition. Following UFS she did a couple of other things which are much more like her later work (focus on Sherman just sitting/standing there, in a made background, she fills the frame and emotes rather than acts) but in which her technical methods are not as fully realized.
The Centerfolds, Pink Robe, and a few other items mentioned above fall here. Sherman is emoting in the role of woman-as-victim, but is not trying to look like any particular physical type. She is content to look like herself, and embody a role. She does these things well. I would not say that she is much of a colorist, while these things over the decade or so that she did them are color studies they are invariably unappealing, almost ugly. These kinds of things wrap up in in the 1980s, though, and Sherman settles in to her groove of media quotation and mis-quotation more or less permanently.
Apart from UFS and the handful of color-study series, all the pictures are of the same type. Sherman glommed on to a bit of technique very early (I think we might see it first in the magazine covers). for the last 30-35 years perhaps, she has been lighting herself with two equally sized lights, one on each side, a little out front. This, I think, flattens her face out and allows her to draw on whatever contours she likes. She turns her face into a visually flat canvas, upon which she paints a new face.
It is startling to see the same lighting pattern so ubiquitous, over so many decades. Even when she is making fake old-masters paintings, there are the two highlights, the flattened face, the painted-in shadows indicating contours that do not exist. It is especially weird when she is quoting paintings from those eras when light was so central -- her light is completely wrong for the style, although Sherman as the model generally nails it.
Eventually she uses painted backgrounds, and in the series she made for Chanel a few years ago, the Cindy Sherman figure is blended into the background, the edges of her figure disintegrating into digital paint strokes to fit the painted scene in which she "stands." Everything is merely a canvas upon which paint of one sort or another is applied, and always, always, the two parallel catchlights in the eyes, one a little left and one a little right.
Sherman is clearly have a great deal of fun. She might well be having a go at social criticism, but it's not particularly evident in the work. I think she just shoves in some stuff for the critics to play with, and lets them figure it out, and meanwhile she's dressing up as a dinosaur and saying RARRRRRRR a great deal, because who doesn't want to dress up as a dinosaur and say RARRRRRR?
I kinda liked the show, but honestly, after a couple hundred pictures of Cindy Sherman, it gets a bit thin. She doesn't have an enormous range, and while she does the thing she does very very well, one feels that she has rung the changes on all of it, and perhaps there's not much more to say here. Perhaps she was kind of done around 1990 and has been fuckin' around enjoying herself every since. Which is all very well, but the work isn't super interesting any more.
It's fun, it's witty, but it's just so goddamned BIG and there's just so MUCH of it.
The show is essentially chronological, and fairly completist. There's a video of a childhood book project, there's student work, there's Untitled Film Stills (UFS), and then onwards to color work organized as as collection of series, which you walk through in order. There's a wall-blurb for each series, presumably distilling the critical consensus around each. There is a complete set of Untitled Film Stills, and at least 3 or 4 prints from each series mentioned. Whether there are series completely unrepresented here, I do not know. The work spans 1975 or so until the present, we're looking at several hundred prints here.
There are something like 100 prints of very early work, all smallish black and white pictures. As time passes, the prints get larger and larger, until in the present time we see a lot of essentially life size or larger full-body portraits. Sometimes there are two or more Shermans in the frame, life sized, with a fair bit of space around them. These things are big.
The show is hung like garbage. In several cases its not clear what photos a given wall-blurb refers to, and some photos are sprinkled throughout that could belong to one of several different series that are blurbed and (mostly) grouped at the end. Frequently, examining a photo involves dancing around reflections and glare. The wall-blurbs themselves are borderline gibberish, but I suppose that is to be expected.
Knowing that prints of several of these objects have sold for millions of dollars imparts a slight sense of awe. It's a little like seeing a Monet show, although attenuated to the tune of a couple of zeros.
Anyways, with a little effort you can sort it out and start to make some sense of Sherman's career.
The magic quality that Sherman has is the ability to evoke a kind of recognition. In the Untitled Film Stills you recognize the movie. Kind of. It's not Breakfast at Tiffany's it's.. it's... what is it? You can't quite put your finger on it. Eventually you realize that there is no single film she's drawing from, that there is nothing to recognize, and yet you feel that powerful tip-of-my-tongue sensation. She is showing you the distinctive look of the thing, the tropes, the posture, the framing, and so on.
After the UFS it's a bit more hit and miss, but you do often have that same recognition, usually of people. I know her, she's that famous.. who is she?
Unfortunately, Sherman starts and ends with that sense of recognition. Well, she's also quite funny, but "funny" doesn't shift Art, so there's a lot of energy expended pretending that Sherman isn't just being funny.
She does this recognition in, I think, two distinct ways, although UFS arguably constitutes even a third.
The first approach is more direct. You recognize a specific thing, or you feel you do. I know that film, that person. In this case we are recognizing essentially media tropes, elements of cinema or public personas. The second, different, approach is recognition of a type or mood. Sherman has several series (Centerfolds, The Pink Robe, and a couple of others) which appear to be experiments with color and mood. In them she is generally portraying an otherwise generic woman-as-victim. We do not recognize the woman or her specific circumstances, but we do recognize the mood, the general kind of woman and the kind of situation in which she finds herself. We are recognizing here something more real, and less media (although the media surely colors our idea of what a woman in trouble looks like.
The trouble with Sherman is that all she's got is this thing we might call quotation. She started out quoting (or, if you prefer, paraphrasing) cinema. Later on she did various grotesqueries paraphrasing pornography and fairy tales, and for the last 20 or thirty years she is quoting (or wilfully, humorously, mis-quoting) specific types of people. This ability to create recognizable and yet not recognized (if you will permit me the glibness) pictures makes her quotations especially wonderful. But they remain quotations.
Archetypal are some magazine cover triptychs from her early work. Three copies of the same magazine cover: the original, another with Sherman's face made up to resemble the model (very well, by the way) pasted in to replace the model's face, and a third the same except Sherman is making a silly face. The antecedent, the quotation, the witty mis-quote. This is her constant theme.
These quotations are generally credited to her as "critque" which is largely bullshit. When she makes a grotesque of pornography, she is, well, let me quote from the wall blurb:
Sherman's images debunk the conventions of pornography and ridicule its visual language as a sham that conceals a striking emptiness.
Which, well, OK. I'm certainly not going to argue that pornography is deep and profound, it is pretty empty in some important senses. But let us see what the wall blurb has to say when she does the same thing for fairy tales. After some blather about media and violent themes in cinema and television drama and the forces of depravity in the contemporary world, we end with:
Sherman's use of artifice distances her images from these media sources. Even so, Fairy Tales hold up a mirror to the inescapable fact that such dark forces exist.
I mean, which is it? She's doing much the same thing in both places. She's quoting, in humorous/ridiculous ways the visual language of porn, and of fairy tales. Perhaps it's the fairy tales that actually conceal the striking emptiness, and it's porn that's the mirror. How on earth are we to know?
The critics are, obviously, just blathering. They are seeing Shermn more or less blandly quoting this thing or that thing, and applying to her work their own ideas. Pornography bad, therefore obviously this is a harsh deconstruction of its badness. Fairy Tales are um, damn it, violence in television is a thing so something something.
When I quote Brad Feuerhelm, let's say this doozy:
When one gets to speaking on “photographic seeing” what I am proposing is a way in which those attributes along with the rigour of what the subject may or may not be to an outside audience is endemic of the whole.
if I just put it out there, you could guess that I am mocking Brad (I am) because you know me. Perhaps you, like me, think Brad is a dunce, you'll examine this dogshit with fear and lust, and realize that it is as usual gibberish. If, on the other hand, you were a fan of Brad (i.e. another dunce) and found this quote in some random context, you likely would not notice that it is gibberish and would interpret the act of quotation as something other than mockery.
To make a quotation unambiguously criticism you have to add something to it, you have to say "and therefore, the whatever-it-is is dogshit."
There are a few things in the Sherman show that the critical apparatus is unable to get a handle on. There are some pictures of Sherman decked out as this clown or that clown, and the wall blurb contains 31 words on the series, and concludes that clowns are vaguely sinister. The critics have no idea what the hell is going on, and so, for once showing wisdom, fall more or less silent. I like the clown pictures almost the best of the lot, because they are so patently Sherman having fun and not trying to lard the work with to signs and portents for the critics to gnaw on. And, lo, she has evidently thwarted them here! Yay!
The single most interesting thing I noticed in the exhibit is how thoroughly different the Untitled Film Stills are from the rest. In these pictures she is engaged in full-body acting, in a fully realized scene, to recreate various feminine movie character types. I think you can argue maybe successfully that there is critique, comment, here, simply because she made a whole lot of them and one can readily see how limited the available character types are. This was a rather in-vogue discussion at the time (Mulvey invents "male gaze" in 1975, Sherman shoots these things 1977-1980). It's just quotation, but a great deal of it, perhaps to make a point.
In the UFS photos, she consistently looks like Cindy Sherman in a wig. Because she has not yet settled on her later technical methods, she is not able to so alter her face. Therefore she leans on other, less artificial-looking, methods to evoke her signature sense of recognition. Following UFS she did a couple of other things which are much more like her later work (focus on Sherman just sitting/standing there, in a made background, she fills the frame and emotes rather than acts) but in which her technical methods are not as fully realized.
The Centerfolds, Pink Robe, and a few other items mentioned above fall here. Sherman is emoting in the role of woman-as-victim, but is not trying to look like any particular physical type. She is content to look like herself, and embody a role. She does these things well. I would not say that she is much of a colorist, while these things over the decade or so that she did them are color studies they are invariably unappealing, almost ugly. These kinds of things wrap up in in the 1980s, though, and Sherman settles in to her groove of media quotation and mis-quotation more or less permanently.
Apart from UFS and the handful of color-study series, all the pictures are of the same type. Sherman glommed on to a bit of technique very early (I think we might see it first in the magazine covers). for the last 30-35 years perhaps, she has been lighting herself with two equally sized lights, one on each side, a little out front. This, I think, flattens her face out and allows her to draw on whatever contours she likes. She turns her face into a visually flat canvas, upon which she paints a new face.
It is startling to see the same lighting pattern so ubiquitous, over so many decades. Even when she is making fake old-masters paintings, there are the two highlights, the flattened face, the painted-in shadows indicating contours that do not exist. It is especially weird when she is quoting paintings from those eras when light was so central -- her light is completely wrong for the style, although Sherman as the model generally nails it.
Eventually she uses painted backgrounds, and in the series she made for Chanel a few years ago, the Cindy Sherman figure is blended into the background, the edges of her figure disintegrating into digital paint strokes to fit the painted scene in which she "stands." Everything is merely a canvas upon which paint of one sort or another is applied, and always, always, the two parallel catchlights in the eyes, one a little left and one a little right.
Sherman is clearly have a great deal of fun. She might well be having a go at social criticism, but it's not particularly evident in the work. I think she just shoves in some stuff for the critics to play with, and lets them figure it out, and meanwhile she's dressing up as a dinosaur and saying RARRRRRRR a great deal, because who doesn't want to dress up as a dinosaur and say RARRRRRR?
I kinda liked the show, but honestly, after a couple hundred pictures of Cindy Sherman, it gets a bit thin. She doesn't have an enormous range, and while she does the thing she does very very well, one feels that she has rung the changes on all of it, and perhaps there's not much more to say here. Perhaps she was kind of done around 1990 and has been fuckin' around enjoying herself every since. Which is all very well, but the work isn't super interesting any more.
It's fun, it's witty, but it's just so goddamned BIG and there's just so MUCH of it.
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