Junk for Code

photography and abstraction

The heroic narrative of modernist abstraction painting, is structured around the destruction of mimesis and representation, the militant gesture of the avant garde opposing the market system, and the separation of medium for purposes of defining "core" attributes is fundamental. It has remained in place, despite its deconstruction by the mixed media experiments, return to figuration, the eruption of language into the visual field and the undermining of the hegemony of the museum/gallery system by artists and critics working within postmodernism.

Modernism---ie., the investigation by art of its own nature----continues to live on after its aesthetic autonomy and self reflexivity came up against art's grounding in the social and economic world. postmodernism. The heroic modernist narrative has also remained after the moment of postmodernism, even though painting has lost its dominant position in a visual culture and abstract painters are now working in a residual rather than emergent tradition. What if we push that narrative into the background and look at abstract photography?

Gary Sauer-Thompson, abstraction, 2009

Abstract photography has had a resurgence, judging by the number of abstract photography Flickr groups. For years it had the status of second-class art , the pitiful case of one art form aspiring to the dignity of another. Photography that emulated the abstraction of modernist painting has been treated with a dismissive gesture. Abstract photos were once seen as a betrayal.

No longer. There is too much happening and it has its own weight. What we see is that the modernist ideals and institutions of photography as an autonomous discipline with distinct boundaries - the condition so beloved by modernists - lives on after postmodernism. Self reflexivity within postmodernism means a questioning or a contesting from within the modernist tradition, not a standing outside, since it works within the very traditions it attempts to subvert.

For instance, we can question and rethink modernism's purist break with history from within the abstract tradition.

photography and presence

Many have argued that the realist movement in painting (eg.,Gustave Courbet) is related to a positivist aesthetic which is grounded in the appearance of the camera. This aesthetic rejects the imagination as nonobjective and prone to falsification because o fits subjectivity. The camera describes what one sees--the actual or the historical as presence. It is documentary evidence purporting to provide truth in the form of enlightenment about specific material histories. It threatens the supposed desire for truth in painting. This is standard art history account.

Deleuze and Guattari accept that the photograph is rooted, a territorializing record of a material and fixed moment. They oppose maps to photographs and urge us to to make maps not photographs.

Gary Sauer-Thompson, Young Street Car park, 2009

Yet the camera frequently produces a blurred image (a ghostly shape) that contains speed, movement and displacement within the stasis. The ghostly shape is the ghostly presence. Hence we have the imprecision of representation: we have obscurity not enlightenment. A camera obscura. So photography immaterializes or deterritorializes of hard objects and material objectivity.

Rather than being rooted, a territorializing record of a material and fixed moment of a set of phenomena, photography is a continual re-mapping of that history and its ghostly other.

Archibald Prize 2009: finalists

It's Archibald Prize time again. The finalists have been announced. The commentary has begun. My personal preference on first viewing is:

Guy. Maestri, Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu, Archibald Prize finalist, 2009

In The Australian Christopher Allen says that:

Guy Maestri's Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu would also be far more powerful in life size, but then he would have to include the figure, or at least the torso. Composition would then become an issue, instead of being evaded in the close-up head format; but it would also make it a more expressive work.

Maybe. This is a person who lives in visual darkness as he performs his music on stage. So the blackness and harsh light are appropriate. It is a powerful picture as it is.

Anyhow I just like the guy's music:

maybe

It was beautiful one day. Utopia beckoned. Then it was devastating the next as the global economy nosedived, due to the crash in financial markets. We are in the process of waking up from capitalism's dream. The boom is over. You can tell from the way many of the development sites in Adelaide have ground to to a halt and become fenced holes in the ground. Soon the boarded up shops will appear.

Memories return. We have been here before--in the 1980s. Difficult times. A moment of danger

The financial press says that the Chinese are starting to buy up Australia's resource companies and assets. Will they buy up the car companies as well? Business is saying no to climate change and emissions trading schemes.

Photographers in the cultural industry will do it tough as the advertising dollar disappears. Art photographers are going to have to think in terms of dialectical images to awaken us from our slumber. Maybe.

Christoph Morlinghaus

I have a lot of respect for architectural photographers as can be seen by the work of Don Brice in Adelaide. This work takes a special eye and discipline to create pictures that can make the architecture sing, keep the architect happy, and create pictures that can stand on their own as images. This is especially so when it comes to spiritual spaces such as churches and temples.

Christoph Morlinghaus, Untitled - Pilgrimage Church 2005, Optical C-Print

In this interview Morlinghaus,a Germanborn, New York based photographer, says that he is a traditional photographer: meaning that he shoots with an 8×10 camera and color negative film, using the light that is already there, works with a 5-20 minute exposure time and prints, or contact, his own negatives without the use of a computer. His work is impeccably crafted, has its roots in Die Neue Sachlinchkeit and Bauhaus formalism, and has an eerie or uncanny feel.

If Morlinghaus finds beauty in Modernism's architectural forms, then the eeriness comes from there being no people in these pictures of the built environment. The churchgoers are conspicuous by their absence and so we can infer that the buildings appear to be abstracted from life.

Christoph Morlinghaus, Untitled - North Christian Church 2005, Optical C-Print

Its odd--this work explores the use of space as constructed locations, as means of spiritual experience. But the spiritual experience requires people and, as there are no people, so the built form is the spiritual experience--the forms’ graceful interplay of light and concrete effortlessly transposes light into sweeping realms of infinite space.

bringing nature into history

William Cronon is an environmental historian concerned reading landscapes as place, time and memory. This is different to an environmentalism that shares with its Romantic predecessor a view of capitalist-urban-industrial society and cultural modernity as being in opposition to nature: nature is stable, balanced homeostatic, self-healing, purifying and benign whilst capitalism is unstable, destructive and in disequilibrium.

So if nature as wilderness is our salvation, then there is the need to protect wilderness. This underpins a lot of wilderness/landscape photography.

Gary Sauer-Thompson, Port Adelaide estuary, 2008

Instead of trying to escape from history into nature, the task is to bring nature into history, thereby challenging the very foundations of environmentalism. History is telling stories or constructing narratives about our past. The past is a story to be told in terms of place, time and memory. We are reading landscapes by understanding both their natural history and also their cultural and human history.

History is not the past but the stories we tell about the past. Things and events in the past exist whilst environmental history is the story we tell about those things that actually happened.

Is Adelaide architecture boring

A common judgement is that Adelaide architecture is boring. By that is meant modern--contemporary-- architecture in Adelaide, not the heritage of colonial architecture which is well loved as heritage that must be preserved. The implication is that Adelaide is caught up in a cultural time warp or is an architectural blackhole, despite the recent boom. That boom has just ended, judging by all the holes in the ground that carrying the lost promise of the new.

It is true that design and architecture are not a fundamental part of the economic equation nor a central cultural export in South Australia. The creative industries are treated with indifference as the future of the state is deemed to depend on the mining of uranium at Olympic Dam

Francesco Bonato argues in The Adelaide Review that there is a quaint desire to hold onto all those symbols of a bygone era as embodied in those old Victorian homes in all those quaint old turn of a previous Century suburbs.

Who can argue against that? Especially when that architecture is dark inside and very energy inefficient.

These inner city townhouses are cheapily built and have nothing to do with sustainable design--they are very poor in terms of being a green building. But they are colourful and the slabs of colour is something different.

Bonato, who has made much of the notion of regionalism and the importance of our identity and by inference, Adelaide's relevance as a place, adds in relation to the inherent uturally conservate taste for the pre-modern that:

Maybe part of the problem is we are pretending to be a capital city, when we really are a regional centre. A case in point is the massively successful slow food movement. How is it that the two South Australian conviviums are known as the Adelaide Hills and Barossa Valley - what happened to the role of our City? Anecdotally, the Barossa Valley is better known internationally than our capital city! The other defence is that Sydney and Melbourne simply have more money. Well, that simply doesn’t cut it either with Tasmania seemingly more successful than South Australia over the years in the awards at national level - maybe ‘convict’ and ‘culture’ is interchangeable?

The whole convict stuff needs to be dumped as a furphy. The starting point is that Adelaide is a both a capital and regional city, just like Darwin or Hobart. It is regional because it has been bypassed by the flows of global capital. So it exists on the margins of the global economy.

The modernist buildings in the CBD --eg., the Telstra and the old State Bank building---- are brutalist in style and are seen as bad. So they should be, So let's just jump into the postmodern.

Cape Willoughby

I'm in Victor Harbor for the weekend. It's cool and overcast. It is such a welcome change from the draining heat in Adelaide. No rain though. Nor is there any likelihood of any. Just the promise of more heat.

I've been going through my film archives early this morning:

This picture was taken on holidays in Kangaroo Island a couple of years ago with the Rolleiflex TLR. It was on that trip that I started using a digital camera; an innocent who did not appreciate the pictorial turn in our culture, or the way that images had become important commodities, even prior to their fetishization as desired or hated objects.

The rock formation is the common or the trivial or the ordinary that preserves the illusion of wilderness in an island reshaped by farming within empire (as in British imperialism) that conquers wilderness and global tourism that seeks wilderness. These are rocks as things. Just things. Objects. Presented with little by way of a modernist gesture to the art object. It is more fossil than totem, with its spectre of individual and species death: a petrified imprint of of a lost form of life.

racist cartoons

Racist cartoons in the mainstream press in Australia are few and far between. The New York Post's Sean Delonas recent cartoon is troubling at best given the historic racist attacks of African-Americans as being synonymous with monkeys.

Sean Delonas

The cartoon also refers to a 90kg chimp called Travis who was fatally shot this week after an attack on his owner's friend 55-year-old Charla Nash, who remains in hospital with critical injuries to her face and hands.

The New York Post has been criticized since the beginning of Murdoch's ownership for what many consider its lurid headlines, sensationalism, blatant advocacy and conservative bias. It adopted the sensationalist "tabloid journalism" style of his Australian and British tabloid papers.

At its most benign, the cartoon suggests that the stimulus bill was so bad, monkeys may as well have written it. Most provocatively, it compares the President to a rabid chimp. The incorporation of race into politics is bound to be controversial.

The Best American Comics 2007

Comics are now appearing in bookstores as graphic novels and in museums as art and are seen as one of the more alive arts currently extant.

Chris Ware, panel in Jimmy Corrigan

Chris Ware in the Introduction to The Best American Comics 2007 says:

Art in the twentieth century (at least in the West) all but stomped out the idea of storytelling in pictures. Before that, a narrative, whether religious, military, or mythological, practically formed the raison d’etre for visual art’s existence. Altarpieces, through repeated sequential images, told the story of the Stations of the Cross, and giant tapestries and paintings recounted battles and victories for citizens and subsequent generations to admire and fear. But as the notion of art as essentially conceptual sprouted and eventually grew all over the previous century’s museum walls and museum-goers’ eyes, paintings or drawings that “showed something” were increasingly dismissed as sentimental, or, even worse, “illustrative.” There’s a certain logic to this, especially if the urge is toward reducing a medium to its absolute barest skin-and-bones essentials in an attempt to discover its innate truth. Unfortunately, the truth of painting and drawing is that they’re actually really great for showing things. (Music, on the other hand, isn’t; think of how clunky and disturbing a concrete sound like a car horn is when introduced into a melody line that otherwise seems to be perfectly capturing the ebb and flow of the heart; I don’t think it’s wrong to think that certain art forms might be better at one thing or another.) Comics, on the third hand (and at about the same time all of this was in full swing in the world of visual art), were showing things, lots of things: rape, murder, and other violence—so much so that in the 1950s comic books were forced to self-censor as activist Fredric Wertham suggested that the corruption of American youth could be directly traced to such pictured acts of horror

Ware adds that ironically, while intellectually dismantling the reasons that people made pictures in the first place, art historians and art theoreticians also fell all over themselves telling us that we lived in an increasingly media-saturated world, an imagecentric, visually overstuffed, nonverbal, and distracted commercial culture barely able to discern what was real from what was advertised. He reckons to a certain degree they were right.

Polanoid in Adelaide

In my late afternoon urban explorations in the Adelaide's CBD yesterday I came across a couple of Polaroid enthusiasts doing double exposures in black and white using a Polaroid ProPak. I saw the picture as it was developing on the concrete ledge in the car park. It was visually sophisticated work in terms of graphic design-- part of the image was shot with the camera upside down. The couple also had a SX70.

Intrigued, I mentioned Paper Cameras and they said that they uploaded their work on Polanoid.net. Alas, no names were exchanged in the brief encounter before I moved on as a ragpicker Situationist photographer.

Gary Sauer-Thompson, chairs, Adelaide CBD, digital, 2009

In digging around Polanoid early this morning I've discovered that the screen or nickname of the photographer I encountered at the Young Street carpark is onmybike. His excellent work on Polanoid.net can be seen by using the search engine for Adelaide Australia, and then viewing the portfolio under views on It is Polaroid art.

Syd Winer, aka onmybike, Flipped 1, Polaroid

But who is onmybike? Little information is offered about the identity of onmybike apart from a link to HeadQuarters Studio; a subsequent link to the work of Sam Oster at Silvertrace; and then to the Center for Creative Photography in Adelaide.

Digging further uncovers the identity of onmybike as Syd Winer, who teaches at the Centre for Creative Photography, and has a substantial body of work.

Update
The context of post was my ongoing uncovering of local photographers, established art photographers such as Mark Kimber and local bloggers in Adelaide--eg., Mathew Lim's Light Documents--- I neglected to include the photographers at juxapostion.com or Don Brice.

In building on previous searches for a constellation of creative photographers in the local visual culture---eg., Mark Kimber, Danielle Walpole and Vitamin this digging begins to disclose a small circle of creative photographers in Adelaide.

space: Messier 101 galaxy

NASA's Great Observatories are continuing Galileo's legacy with stunning images and breakthrough science from the Hubble Space Telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope, and the Chandra X-ray Observatory.While Galileo observed the sky using visible light seen by the human eye, technology now allows us to observe in many wavelengths, including Spitzer's infrared view and Chandra's view in X-rays. Each wavelength region shows different aspects of celestial objects and often reveals new objects that could not otherwise be studied.

NASA, Messier 101 galaxy, image of the day

This image of spiral galaxy Messier 101 is the visible light view from the Hubble Space Telescope.Composite images allow astronomers to see how features seen in one wavelength match up with those seen in another wavelength. It's like seeing with a camera, night vision goggles, and X-ray vision all at once.

visual representation

In concluding Picture Theory WJT Mitchell raises the issue of representation.Representation s usually understood as this object (a picture) that seems to stand before us, a thing standing for something else.

Mitchelll says that we can usefully think of representation as a kind of activity process, or a set of relationships. We can understand this not as a homogeneous field of grid governed by a single theoretical principle, but as a multidimensional and heterogeneous terrain, as a collage or patchwork quilt assembled over time out of fragments.

Gary Sauer-Thompson, rusting grid, Adelaide, 2009

This patchwork quilt that is torn, folded, wrinkled, covered with accidental stances and traces of the bodies it has enfolded. Mitchell then says that this allows us to see the structure of representation as a trace of temporality and exchange, the fragments as mementos, as "presents" represented in an ongoing process of assemblage, of stitching in and tearing out.

Larsen B iceshelf

The Larsen B ice shelf was stable for up to 12,000 years, essentially the entire Holocene period since the last ice age. Between 2002 it collapsed from warm currents eating away the underside of the shelf. The 200-meter thick ice-shelf had become a "hotspot of global warming", and it only took three weeks (or less) to collapse.

Helmutt Rott, the Larsen B Ice-Shelf, Antarctica, Astronomy Picture of the Day

It's all gone but the mountains. Most of the sprawling landscape of ice that lies between the mountains has now disintegrated

Mathew Montieth: Czech Eden

Mathew Montieth is a Brooklyn-based photographer who graduated from the MFA program at Yale in 2004 .He has released a book of photographs from the Czech Republic entitled Czech Eden (2007), that was made over 11 months from September of 2001 to July of 2002, while Montieth was living in Prague on a Fulbright Fellowship.

Mathew Monntieth, from Czech Eden

In this interview with Shane Lavalette in his journal Montieth said that he had became captivated by how images take on meaning based on the sequence, order, and relationship to each other.

Mathew Monntieth, from Czech Eden

Though “Czech Eden” is named after an officially protected park in the Czech Republic, a place known for its vertiginous sandstone formations and remarkable natural beauty. However, few of Monteith’s photographs depict this preserve. Instead, most were taken in or around Prague, in his friends’ homes, on the streets, or in small towns where it is as likely to find a centuries-old castle as an ominous nuclear cooling tower looming large.

Montieth says:

The question of believability in photography intrigues me: of what is reality and what is created. Photography is subjected to the misconception that a photograph depicts what is, rather than what was seen. Much as a fiction writer describes a world that is recognizable and true, yet made up, the story is a fabrication based on a reality. I hope Czech Eden is understood in this manner. You might be able to find pieces of what I have described in the pictures of places and people, but the subjects would appear altogether different if you traveled to the Czech Republic. “Documentary” attempts to record an actuality. The photographs in the project, while made from the real world, are subjective and put in an order meant to create something independent, something that is not merely referential, or rooted in reality.

He adds that though photography appears to depict reality with precision, it is, at the same time, a subjective view or an alteration of reality. By exploring this relationship, I learn about the way the world works, how things are put together.

changes

I'm in the process of finishing my full time policy work that involves extensive working in Canberra so that I can devote more time and energy to my photography and writing. With full time paid work the creative work is squeezed around the edges. So I.m beginning the process of change to make the shift to part time work.

Gary Sauer-Thompson, chair, Adelaide CBD, 2009

Though the change means a reduced income and less travel it will give me more time to work on the photographic projects that have been begun and to build on them. A the moment I cannot do more than take the shots, process them and put them on my Flickr stream and Rhizomes1. I just don't have the time to do more than that.

Hosang Park: A square

Korean photographer Hosang Park has a series entitled A Square, which consists of bird's-eye views of the small, over-landscaped parks that seem to accompany modern apartment towers all over the world. As Park says these "parks" are too small to serve their ostensible purpose: as open space for recreation and places "to make discussions or take a rest."

Hosang Park, Jangan-dong, from the A Square series

Park explains that he took these photos while he was living on the 13th floor of Jugong Apartment in Chang-dong, Seoul. He and his hundreds of neighbors experienced their park as a a patch of eye candy – visual respite from the concrete and tarmac of their surroundings. I

Hosang Park, Banghak-dong, from the series A Square

They are a placeholder for the possibilities of a park as these spaces are empty. There are no people in the pictures.

bush fires + climate change

Australians understand that they cannot control bushfire and that they have to live with fire. it id now acepted that Australia is a fire-prone land with the wet and dry cycles setting the scene for massive fires. Climate change has nudged the temperature in southern Austrlaia up a degree, turning the 44s into 45s and the 45s into 46s. There are more of these scorchers, more intense heatwaves and the rainfall is projected to decrease.

Alex Coppel, bush fire smoke+ sun, 2009

The indications are that the frequency of the megafire fronts will increase during the 21st century, if the climate projection models are correct. That does mean more controlled burning and a rejection of the European view that fire is something messy to be removed from the cultivated landscape. The utilitarian vision of Australian lands has collapsed in favour of one that supports environmentalism and preservation.

Bushfire is the site of the culture wars that has seen the bush pitted against the city, the land managers against the fire fighters, the fire ‘professionals’ against the volunteers, the foresters against the environmentalists.

M Smith, burnt cars, Victoria

Stephen Pyne in The Still-Burning Bush argued for the following narrative. Australia was shaped by Aboriginal fire-stick farming; colonisers sought to suppress fire but eventually were forced to adapt to it; the resulting fire-stick forestry was a singular achievement of science and administration; new environmentalism has unraveled fire-stick forestry; active burning needs to be at the centre of the new approach based on the twin pillars of fire-stick ecology and risk management.

megafires in Victoria

An indication of the devastation of Saturday's mega fires in the South Gippsland area of Victoria, Australia. A Flickr group of public images. As Stephen Pyne pointed out in his seminal Burning Bush – A Fire History of Australia bush fires are part of our national culture and we have a vigorous fire politics.

It is a natural disaster probably made worse by climate change.

Photo: Wayne Taylor

There are 20 major burn patients at The Alfred hospital and all of the bushfire victims at the hospital have burns to more than 30% of their body. Many have burns to their feet and hands inflicted as ran or crawled through fire to escape. Some also have burnt airways from smoke inhalation.

Rick Rycroft, One wall remained standing at a church in Kinglake, 2009

Standard fire control policy is now one of controlled burning. This is not supposed to replicate wildfire conditions. It is meant to create a ‘‘cool’’ burn, which removes leaf litter, elevated bark and the under-storey but doesn’t scorch the forest canopy. Ideally, it is possible to obtain a mosaic effect within a landscape, which leaves some patches unburnt. Fuel reduction burning is not a panacea. It is certainly not without risk in its own right since a controlled burn can escape containment lines and get away.

The debate about whether or not to fight fire with fire goes back more than a century, and is rooted in American and European forestry management that excluded fire from national parks and state forests. However, the options are stark: leave the bush unburnt and face an inferno, or burn it off and reduce the risk.

ladder + trolley

This picture is seeing what I would not normally see, or pass quickly by on a walk with the dogs without paying any attention to. I would even miss it on my urban explorations (dérive) with the poodles in which I would let myself be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters I find there:

We have experienced a heat wave in Adelaide these last two weeks with temperatures around 43 degrees during the day and 33 degrees at night. So photography has been minimal. During that time I just explored the urban area around where I live in the city, just as the sun is going down. As the surfaces of the city were very hot I moved very slowly. So I was seeing what I would not normally see.

People would begin to come out on the streets around 7.30-8.00 pm mostly to go to air-conditioned restaurants. Few hung around the streets, let alone explored the streets. The severe heat meant a different kind of letting-go since walking was difficult. This form of dérive often took place within a deliberately limited period of an hour, or even fortuitously during fairly brief moments.

The city felt and looked different.

heat wave passes

The heat wave has finally broken in Adelaide. It is cool and overcast on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula coast.There is no rain to moisten the parched land, or to save to the dying European trees in Adelaide. Adelaide's experiment as an English city appears to be over.

Matt Golding

That is the colonial heritage---a little English town in spite of the vast differences in climate. Adelaide has never recognized itself for what it is --a city on the edge of the desert with high temperatures and little water. Maybe climate change will cause a rethink.

images of violence

This is a very expressive image of a violent region----Israel and Gaza in which the cycle of violence is endless and any "victory" or peace is written in the human blood of innocents.

Stavro

Are these images effective? What do they say to us? Do we need to account for the powerlessness of such an image as well as its power. Can we talk in terms of something missing? Does it participate in the life it professes to stand for?

It is an image of a form that is feared and despised -----an afront to those whom it challenges --the Israeli nation-state. It's sign of resistance is seen as an abomination that needs to be mutilated: a graven image that needs to be smashed as a false image to use old religious language. Thus iconoclasm.

graffiti + broken window

Imaginative aesthetic subversions of public spaces currently span the globe ---from London's The Decapitator, Spain's Jorge Rodriguez Gerada, the Adbusters collective and the likes of Shepard Fairey and Banksy. The ethos is that streets were the new art schools and galleries.

One of the best examples is the work Poster Boy, a guerrilla artist who twists ads and billboards. It melds two artistic subcultures: street art and culture jamming. ) The New York subway has an especially rich heritage from the graffiti boom of the 1970s and 80s to recent installation work using sound and air. Culture jamming developed as a more precisely targeted assault on corporate communications, satirically inverting branding and advertising techniques.

Poster Boy, street art, subway

The intolerance to street art (as opposed to urban art inside galleries) comes from graffiti seen to be bringing with it a "general atmosphere of neglect and social decay, which in turn encourages crime". The tacit reference is to the "Broken Windows theory", first popularised in a 1982 article in the Atlantic Monthly by criminologists George Kelling and James Q. Wilson. The idea is that minor signs of disorder, like graffiti, litter and broken windows, can give the dangerous impression that law has broken down in the neighbourhood; crime, so it's claimed, follows.

Kelling and Wilson href="conjured a vision of untended neighborhoods quickly reduced to crime-infested wastelands. First local boys rob a passed-out drunk on a lark; then muggers start robbing anyone who looks like he might have a few big bills in his wallet. Residents begin to view their neighborhood as unsafe, and retreat into their homes-or to the suburbs-abandoning the declining neighborhood to criminals.

Many Australian capitol cities, including Adelaide, have rebuilt their policing around the theory. They hold that small crime can have a big meaning, which is true, but the work of many street artists has more to do with the expression of youthful creativity and experimental culture in our over the last decade. Irrespective of the work's artistic merit, the "general atmosphere" it creates is one of vibrancy and possibility, not of "decay" or "neglect". It's more like a sculpture in a park than a broken window.

world as picture

Pictures are ways of worldmaking not just world mirroring. In modernity as Heidegger argued, we live in the age of the world picture by which he mean that in our technological world the world has become a systematized represent object of techno-scientific rationality and consumer culture: We live in a world pictured as consumption:

Barbara Kruger, Buy me

If this is one way to interpret the pictorial turn, then in a digital world, pictures are a second nature that human beings have created around themselves. We live enframed by pictures. The advertisements are really saying "Buy me, I'll change your life" to us, and what we're being sold is not real-world products but simulacra like "the social construction of a happy life". Happiness is consumption.

after the pictorial turn

In the last section of Picture Theory W.J.T. Mitchell asks some interesting questions:

What is the role of art and imagemaking in a public sphere that is mainly constituted by forms of mass spectacle and the mediatization of experience --the world as a theme park...What forms of resistance are likely to be efficacious in an era when traditional oppositions (avantgarde versus mass culture, art versus kitsch, private versus public ) no longer seem to cultural or political leverage.

The world we live in after the pictorial turn is a society of spectacle and surveillance; one in which a large section of the population is increasingly hostile to symbolic violence against religion and sexual taboos; and one where films are becoming moving billboards for corporate advertising.

One general answer is to create alternative creative public spheres or spaces to those of the dominant cultural institutions (art galleries, museums) that are becoming social spaces and to the mass media (television on public screens, billboards). This is the position of Not Quite Art, which advances the argument that ‘memory art institutions’ exist in a reality where they are no longer the sole arbiters of collective memory; nor are they necessarily well placed to collect the burgeoning diversity of contemporary digital culture and cultural expressions of a DIY culture.

Traditionally this was represented in terms of a ‘mainstream’ and an ‘underground’, but this duality has been laid to rest by networked culture with the internet and user generated content. And the memory institutions are changing as they go online.

altfotonet: first exhibition/issue

The first issue of altfotonet.org is up, though s2art is calling it the first issue. It was curated by s2art from the concrete canvas Flickr group. This image of mine was included in the exhibition:

Gary Sauer-Thompson, concrete and shadow, Adelaide, 2008

However, the altfotonet Flickr stream is going well, and the blog is now up and running. So is the work selected from theconcrete canvas an e-zine or an e-exhibition? It is unclear at this stage. Both forms of publication are a mixture of picture and text and no doubt, the differences between these forms, will eventually be sorted through. I'm inclined to think of the concrete canvas body of work in terms of an e-exhibition at this stage.

More importantly, what we have here is an example of low budget DIY creative activity that is outside the normal cultural life that is dominated by the conservative mainstream major institutions in a digitally networked world, since it bypasses the traditional way that creative visual activity has been produced. It is a niche culture in the arts marketplace and there has been a democratization of curation.

There are many pockets or niches of contemporary DIY and experimental digital art (including comics, graphic novels, films video art, music, photography) as the market has fragmented and the art galleries/museums are no longer the gatekeepers--the channel through which culture passes---as Lost At E Minor attests. This is a portal into a different contemporary creative world ------eg., photographers.

This counter network outside those of the dominant networks of the established cultural institutions is a rhizomatic world of connectivity.What we have is a more haptic 'on the ground' local mapping of connections. The frame is not a boundary per se as it opens to the world outside.

recession fuelled art

Marcus Westbury of Not Quite Art has a theory of why and how Adelaide is the least interesting cultural place in all of Australia. Presumably, that means Adelaide is conservative and has little in the way of an interesting, innovative culture; is thin on low budget DIY creative activity; and that there is little artistic innovation and initiative since cultural life is dominated by the conservative major institutions. If Adelaide is the least interesting cultural place in all of Australia in Westbury's view, he has not put his theory as to why this is so in the public domain.

Westbury also has a theory that each phase in the economic cycle creates a different set of cultural possibilities and problems and that different times and different economic conditions create different cultures and different people. He says:

Looking at a post boom Melbourne it is easy to forget how much of what i love about this city is the product of the last great recession of the early 90s. It’s laneway bars, it’s smart graffiti, it’’s living CBD, it’s distinctive inner suburbs of eclectic shops and retail strips, it’s creative community are not the product of arts agencies or central planning but of the fertile ground, cheap space, and hard working initiative of a decade ago. The city is a rich ecology not created through central planning but grown in economic detritus and forged in the harsh and searing furnace of hard times.

I too love Melbourne for similar reasons. Well, Adelaide went through rustbelt hard times from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s and no vibrant, low scale experimental artistic culture emerged here, as it did on Melbourne. Nor has there been a great emphasis on the cultural industries from the governing ALP political class. Adelaide is where the issues and ambitions of our professional companies and major cultural institutions are still mistaken for those of the creative community as a whole.

So why did a vibrant artist culture develop in Newcastle and not Adelaide? There's plenty of cheap unused space in the CBD; there are several art schools and it has a tradition of embracing modernism. But it doesn't have a billboard public art program; its graffiti artists are persecuted, its art photographic culture is small and insular, and it has been slow to embrace Web 2.

What happened to Adelaide's creative culture then? How come this former rustbelt industrial town did not see the emergence of a thriving creative space with flexible spaces for emerging artists of all persuasions?

Ralph Hotere

Ralph Hotere, who lives at Port Chalmers on the Otago Harbour, is seen as a founding figure, half a century ago, of today’s burgeoning contemporary Maori art movement and is one of New Zealand's leading painters.

Ralph Hotere, Untitled, circa 1964

The influence of traditional Maori art and of international stylistic movements are evident in his work and he often works with a range of found materials and objects typifying rural New Zealand life - including corrugated iron, nails, polished steel and wood.

Ralph Hotere, This Might Be A Double Cross Jack, 2004, Litho-drawing

Red, black and white are the colours characteristic of Hotere's practice . In Maori culture these colours are symbolic of blood, darkness and light - and are an important feature in Maori creation myths.

In the 1960s, Hotere was inspired by the work of American artist Ad Reinhardt, whose ‘black paintings’ prompted Hotere’s own series with this title. Hotere often takes the poems of New Zealand poet Bill Manhireand transformed it into a visual experience. That interaction between painted and written expression is a technique that Hotere has used since the 1960s. His compositional format recalls that of Colin McCahon (1919– 1987) who also incorporated words and numbers in his art works.

Colin McCahon: landscapes

Colin McCahon has appeared on junk for code before. As pointed before he is recognized as one of New Zealand’s foremost modernist painters. He differed from the general practice of other New Zealand painters and contemporary photographers in that he did not use New Zealand's landscape merely for its splendid pictorial beauty.

Many of his regional North Otago landscapes have been simplified down to almost bare unadorned shapes; abstractions that I find visually appealing:

Colin McCahon, North Otago landscape , 1967

However, McCahon's writings indicate that he did not subscribe to the formalist purity of non-figurative abstraction.

Colin McCahon, North Otago landscape, 1969

If the landscape is a recurring theme in the McCahon's work, McCahon viewed the landscape as having spiritual qualities and by the 1940s characteristically represented it laid bare and stripped back to its essential geological elements.