New Ice

(Allan Kaprow : "Fluids, 1967" : Pasadena Art Museum, California : Julian Wasser )

What if I were to tell you that this photograph is actually more powerful than the concept piece?

Professor X to Professor Y

Track Lap 4

Friday, while taking a break from studio work to eat lunch I re-read what I believe to be an extremely relevant essay to think about with what is happening right now in Contemporary Art, especially in Photography, and here is why…

“Like a practitioner of origami, Demand folds paper and cardboard of every imaginable color and texture to create full-scale environments. He builds his sets with ingenious skill, constantly checking the perspective, angle, lighting, and other technical details. Yet, despite their illusionism, Demand’s staged tableaux reveal the mechanisms of their making. Minute imperfections – a pencil mark here, an exposed edge there, a wrinkle in the paper – are deliberately left visible. The lack of detail and cool, uniform lighting expose the whole as a construction. Once they have been photographed, the models are destroyed.”

- Paper Moon by Roxana Marcoci, an introductory essay to Thomas Demand’s 2005 MoMA publication

Track Lap 3

Back to lectures – the two times which the crowd elicits laughter during Taryn Simon’s first Ted talk, about her bodies of work An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar & The Innocents, are at the mention of the Playboy for the Blind and the actual scale of the Death Star II. The rest of it is filled with silence and hard facts, which float around the photographs as she speaks aloud.

I wonder how guilty the audience feels when they chuckle at those moments? Did they come for the entertainment or for the insightful knowledge? Which gives the photograph its significance?

My cousin’s son, Taylor, asked me over the summer which was more important Star Wars as a movie or a documentary film about a soldier in the military? I quickly answered back with the prior and let my self-consciousness tear itself apart for the rest of the day. 

Cinema can offer a type of escape, I’m careful about blocking that door.

We always long for freedom but responsibility remains ever present...

If you Google search her name there are so many celebrity style pictures of Taryn Simon looking beautiful that it begins to shift the weight of the striking and thought provoking images she is notable for creating with Photography. I find that stunning, but perhaps it’s merely a subjective observation.

Harry Callahan – Eleanor, 1948

Sexuality is quite a peculiar issue to bring into your Artwork when you wish for it to have an authority, to be seriously considered and respected with other types of intellectual discourse. However, there are instances when a gallery owner fantasizes about an artist, a collector dreams about a model, and the publisher demands control over all of which.

Trust issues, Taryn should have elaborated the memory confusion section with that. It’s an important aspect of her work that remains unspoken, even in later lectures.

The business of subtly expressing yourself comes with a few disadvantages, I know. At times we’re lead to believe that we must simply become mirrors.

Track Lap 2

Speaking of Lucas, I thought why not post this telephone shot of his Towards a Warm Math book (published by Hassla – David Schoerner) that I got signed a few years back at Griffin Editions. It was a nice event, tons of other artists talking to each other, in fact that’s where I met Christian Patterson for the first time (Happy Birthday Christian).

Track Lap 1

After listening to the lecture and following discussion in the previous post, my mind would not stop repeatedly coming back to Schjeldahl quoting a very old but infamous Baudelaire saying about getting drunk, and adding that one of his fears were those in life who became “drunk on virtue”…

It seems quite an odd fear for a critic of Art simply because it is also what that type of person gravitates toward, simply put - they want/need other human beings who ascribe substantial merit and worth to themselves as well as their own personal pursuits.

You need us to rebel against and challenge you, while we (even though we don’t always admit it) enjoy suitable critique in order to stay in check. I do not desire only applause or heckling, I like when there are people who can “get it” to a certain extent, see the various references, talk about the unique qualities that show progress, and without a doubt it’s best when that person is well aware of the artist’s history in the medium (or mediums) and how these new patterns align with a continuation of motifs and iconography.

Educate yourselves where Art is concerned so when you go into a space and there are twenty or so examples big and small of younger & older people blatantly influenced by artists like myself and Lucas Blalock, you can stop for a second and wonder why?

Case in point – the very recent Annual Call for Entries at the Philadelphia Photo Art Center, which was juried by Lesley Martin and Andy Adams.

Start

I’ve been working on a pretty tedious photograph over the last few days and while keeping busy it’s been nice to listen to a few podcasts and lectures from the past couple of years that people have recorded – this one specifically is really great: http://vimeo.com/26294782 (you can also download the podcast if you want). Peter Schjeldahl is hilarious and remarkable at staying upbeat while simultaneously hammering into just how much respect all of this type of creation deserves. The way he is able to make clear delineations between curatorial practices and the vision of an artist in their own unique work is definitely a point that’s been seeing tough times recently and it’s good to hear it set in stone here. 

Peter Schjeldahl: 11/18/2010 from MFA Art Crit on Vimeo.