Junk for Code

photographic histories

The dominant school of the history of photography in Australia is a nationalist historiography that is based on the coherent evolution of photographic artists and an autonomous photography. The classic text is Gael Newton's 1980s Silver and Grey: Fifty Years of Australian Photography 1900 - 1950.

Newton's modernist text is a national history of good art photographs that counters the Eurocentric mode of historiography of Beaumont Newhall, which concentrated on Germany, France, Great Britain and the US. Australia was, and is, on the fringes on this modernist discourse and Silver and Grey is a kind of repressed or disenfranchised discourse that seeks to become incorporated into the "universal" modernist narrative of art photography.

This Newhall school --as it is known--- is a decontextualized history that concentrates on the artistic quality of the photographers. It represented a shift in the historical photographic object from technical developments to the autonomous images themselves that were produced by a canon of photographers considered as artists. All the rest is sociology. The judgement as to which photographers were considered to be artists was done by the historian.

Gary Sauer-Thompson, Ari, 2008

How can there be a coherent evolution --eg., from Pictorialism to Modernism--when a large number of artist photographer have consciously adopted the blur or focusschmocus as a contemporary form of photographic aesthetic?

Is this Newhall model of photographic history-- a history of forms or styles --- in crisis? Has it run out of puff? Do we need a new model of the history of photography? Why not a history of images? If we see photography as a representation to be deconstructed, then this opens up the multiplicity of photographic practices and the diverse social uses of photography.

Michael Jackson: Billie Jean

I've taken a lot more interest in Michael Jackson's musical videos than either his music or dancing. He made made the look of pop as important as the sound. The Jackson-Landis Thriller (1983) collaboration combined a hit song with dance choreography, all within the framework of a combined werewolf and zombie horror story. The makeup effects of Rick Baker, and the “rap” of Vincent Price were added to the mix and the result became a pop culture event. Jackson has left a rich music video legacy.

But he was known as a song and dance man, and for the quality of his pop songs and his moonwalk dancing, before his work became saccharine and kitsch and became a well-known exhibit in the celebrity zoo. "Billie Jean" is a well-crafted pop song from the classic Thriller album in 1982. It was the first video by a black artist to be aired on MTV:

His music is seen as a significant event in pop music in the 1980s. Jackson, however, was never just about the good pop music or disco and r&b or being a fallen, narcissistic Peter Pan idol. He was also "King of Pop" (self-proclaimed) because of his street dancing.

Jackson's performance of "Billie Jean" during the May 1983 NBC broadcast of the Motown 25 special:

This is about the sexual body that trangresses the stereotypes of masculinity. Steven Schapiro at The Pinocchio Theory says:

In a certain sense, Michael Jackson’s diffuse expression of sexuality, which so many people have found disturbing, because it doesn’t fit into any normative paradigm, is the “line of flight” along which he continued to singularize himself, to a point beyond which universalization was no longer possible. It has a sort of negative relation to the deployments of sexuality in American popular culture today, where an evident explicitness and overtness of expression are purchased at the price of an increasingly narrow and normative range within which such expression is permissible, or even thinkable. You can be as raunchy as you want to be, as long as you remain even closer to the pre-established stereotypes of masculinity and femininity than was required in the pre-”sexual liberation” times of the 1950s. Michael Jackson’s refusal, or inability, to give more than rote lip service to this requirement, is the aspect of his persona, or expression, that is least understood today, and that desperately needs to be more fully explored.

As Poetix says this a disturbing sexuality---somehow subtracted from “adult” sexuality, not altogether asexual but not identifiably (or actionably…) sexual either.

Michael Jackson: media star

Michael Jackson, who emerged from the Motown soul sound, may be dead but he is resurrected by the media. He is now everywhere, just like the 1980s when he was singing and dancing--- the time of the disco Off the Wall (1979) and Thriller (1982) and the subsequent television appearances and live tours. This is celebrity culture and a media circus has surrounded Jackson in our commodity-mediascape.

Morten Moreland

As Paul Morley says in The Observer:

death had allowed the myth of Jackson to surge into life, and his career got the focused injection of publicity he had recently been unable to generate consistently without dangerous self-sacrifice. The 24-hour news channels couldn't believe their luck, all this archive, tension, scandal, revelation, mourning, scorning and gossip. Jackson played a massive, needy part in shaping an entertainment universe which now largely consists of constant gossip about the antics and eccentricities of damaged celebrities, and his death was confirmation that the presentation of round-the-clock news certainly when it comes to popular culture is little more than formally presented, gravely delivered, hastily assembled tittle tattle.

Jackson had become a physical wreck, was deeply in debt from spending more than he earn, and probably incapable of the comeback he had planned a marathon of marathon 50 shows in London in order to clear his debts.

As K-Punk points out the extensive marketing of the corporate star machine and the video clips (especially the movie-like Thriller video), which helped to transform visual culture has ensured that Michael Jackson the legend is a spectacle.

It has also has shaped the way we think about identity and popular culture. Annalee Newitz observes:

Among the many things about Jackson that caught the public's imagination in the 1990s was the way he turned his body into a kind of science fiction story. He became an enhanced human, using plastic surgery and pharmaceuticals to change his face and seemingly his race as well. He became whiter than most white people, and his pale bandaged skin became his trademark. Jackson was a post-human celebrity...

In Reagan's America Jackson flees his blackness by wanting to become white--- a line of flight that is a response to the everyday racism of American culture and society. This becoming-white is what I find so haunting because the man who made black music mainstream shunned his own black appearance.This becoming-white is also tragic, since Jackson became in Steven Schapiro's words "a kind of grotesque parody of whiteness, a zombiefied, living-dead simulation of whiteness."

Murray-Darling Basin: claypan

This picture is part of the River Murray project. It's truth content refers to the bad agricultural practices of stripping the land of trees, which in turn, causes the salty underground water to rise to the surface.The clay pan is a salt pan.

This picture throws off the cosmetics of the beautiful, which from the perspective of an idealist aesthetics, is an ideological and sentimental representation of nature as in itself free from the scars of damage and disruption inflicted by the force and violence of technological mastery over nature.

The Snowy Mountain Hydro Scheme, which provided water for irrigated agriculture and Adelaide as well as power for Sydney, was an example par excellence of the technological mastery over nature in Australia.

A salt pan is the end point of this mastery by the commanding subject with its rational autonomy and reason, since it signifies the presence of death of the land from a rationalized domination of an enlightening reason. There are no bird songs here. So a photograph about the lower lakes area of the Murray-Darling Basin needs to avoid the quest for reconciliation between man and nature favoured by idealist aesthetics. The notion of beauty in this aesthetics is one of a sensuous shining forth of a unified higher meaning aimed at the reconciliation of contradictions. Sstill photography has been largely replaced by commercial images with their glossy emulsion regarded as bodilysurface, a “skin replacing the appearances of resemblance”.

Hence, such a photography needs to appeal to the sublime and dissonance. The sublime shatters and disunites; it signifies a painful operation of holding subject and object; it expresses as it were, a fracturing of the nature and society which ordinarily is hidden from the work of identitarian reason.Consequentl;y, an aesthetic modernity implies a negation of the triumphalism of instrumental economic reason, and the confidence in a universal reconciliation mastering nature to achieve utopia..

The Snowy Mountains Hydro Scheme would achieve utopia by making deserts bloom with liquid gold.

Richard + Linda Thompson

The song below is from Hokey Pokey, the followup to Richard and Linda Thompson's classic 1974 debut, I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight.

"Hokey Pokey (The Ice Cream Song)" is upbeat and playful piece, and as its riff refers back to Chuck Berry, it is more on the rock side of the folk and rock amalgam. Hokey Pokey the album was made before the Thompson's self-imposed three-year retirement in order to join a communal Sufi Muslim sect. What I enjoy about these earlier albums are the use of horns, accordion, and ancient instruments.

Leunig: homeless

Friday morning humour---a Leunig cartoon:

Leunig

The homeless are now a permanent part of the Adelaide CBD--especially the Adelaide parklands as this provides a space for them, especially Aboriginal people, to pitch a temporary camp until they can access emergency housing. Often a small tent city becomes established--the latest was near the Victoria Park racecourse--- and there is often an itinerant community in the West Parklands.

If homelessness has been increasing over time in Australia, it is also a serious population health in that the extremely poor health experienced by homeless people represents the severe end of the spectrum of poor health from inadequate housing and health hardware.

Seacliff Beach

A different side of Adelaide. This rustbelt capital city in a state experiencing the decline in manufacturing, has a string of beach suburbs on its western aspect. These show a different and more attractive face of Adelaide:

Normally the light is far too bright for me to photograph along the beach suburbs during the summer months along the beach suburbs. The palm tree helped.

The beach indicates a solution to the water crisis that Adelaide is experiencing. The shortage of water from a dying River Murray (due to overallocation of water licences, drought and climate change) can be addressed by a desalination plant at Port Stanvac.

battles around the image

The Battles around Images: Iconoclasm and Beyond issue of Image and Narrative explores the different strands of the image/text relationship.

W.J.T. Mitchell, in this interview in the issue, distinguishes between postmodernism and the pictorial turn. Of the former he says that postmodernism has always struck him as a temporary place-holder, one that served important polemical and critical purposes in the 1970s and 80s, but has now itself been consigned to a relatively brief historical moment. This moment is being replaced by the return to the picture. Of the pictorial turn he says:

The notion that we live in a culture dominated by images, by spectacle, surveillance, and visual display, is so utterly commonplace that I am sometimes astonished at the way people announce it as if they had just discovered it. My aim has been to subject this commonplace to critical and historical analysis, to question whether and where and to what extent it is true, and what it means...To some extent I think of the "mass" version of the pictorial turn as a perennial and recurrent phenomenon, the turn as a cultural "trope" that recurs whenever a new image technology, a new medium, or new apparatus of spectacularization or surveillance comes along. Thus, the invention of artificial perspective, or alphabetic writing, or moveable type, or photography are accompanied by a sense that a "pictorial turn" is occurring, one which is often seen as threatening traditional modes of knowledge and behavior-or (more characteristically within modernism) threatening an atavistic return to tribalism, irrationality, superstition, illiteracy-the entire repertoire of stereotypes associated with idolatry and (let's not leave out) ideological mystification.

The most popular critical discourse is an iconology that resolutely set its face against the image that gives voice to pervasive iconophobia and iconoclasm.

The notion of idolatry almost always involves a distinction made between proper uses of images (performed by "people like us") and improper uses of images (performed by "people like them"- whoever they might be). It often has religious roots involves the destruction of images because it is assumed that images have power. Michell ads:

I think that many of the modernist master-narratives (say of Marxism, psychoanalysis, or of modern art and philosophy) were iconoclastic in very fundamental ways. They tended to treat images as the object of destructive critique, of critical operations that would dispel their power, eliminate them from consciousness, and smash them once and for all. Ideology critique, for instance, was consistently portrayed as a practice of emancipation from a false consciousness depicted as a repertoire of seductive and false images. Ditto for psychoanalysis and its relation to imagination and fantasy. The history of philosophy, from Plato's banishment of the artist to Richard Rorty's "linguistic turn," resolutely set its face against the image. As Wittgenstein put it, "a picture held us captive, and we could not get outside of it." Heidegger thought that modernity had trapped humanity in an "age of the world picture," and that philosophy (or poetry) might find a way out of it.

Iconology is the default critical position. Martin Jay's 1993 book, Downcast Eyes, was a fundamental breakthrough in putting the anti-ocularcentric philosophical tradition under a magnifying glass.

Murray-Darling Basin: drying

Bit by bit the evidence indicates that the southern region of the Murray-Darling Basin is undergoing a significant drying event.

There is increasing evidence that a real shift in weather patterns has occurred over south-eastern Australia that is causing a generally warmer and dryer environment.This drying is expressed in less rainfall, less run-off, less river flows and now evidence of less water replenishing the groundwater systems.

Gary Sauer-Thompson, Lake Albert, June 2009

With the consistent reduction in the amount of rainfall over the Murray-Darling Basin since 2001 we have seen reduced run-off from the catchment areas into the dams, reduced flows in the rivers and streams, drying out of the floodplains and wetlands and of course reduced amounts of water being used for irrigation.

What we don't see in this drying process is the reduced amount of water that slowly moves from the ground surface through the upper soil layers into the underlying aquifers feeding the groundwater system. In the absence of fresh water the dairy farmers around the lower lakes are tapping into the salty ground water.

Leonard Cohen

I watched a DVD of a tribute to Leonard Cohen entitled I'm your Man. The movie, produced by Hal Willner, was based on a January 2005 tribute show at the Sydney Opera House titled "Came So Far for Beauty".

I didn't enjoy the interpretations of Cohen's songbook apart from Martha Wainwright's "The Traitor" and "Suzanne" by Nick Cave, Perla Batalla and Julie Christensen. Another high note was the performance by Leonard Cohen and U2 of "Tower of Song" at the end of the movie. This was filmed specifically for the movie, in New York in May 2005. It highlights that Cohen, in spite of his technical vocal limitations, is as gifted a performer as he is a songwriter.

I missed Cohen on his recent visit to Australia. But I found this excerpt from Leonard Cohen's Live in London Concert, which was recorded live on July 17, 2008 at London's O2 Arena:

The Canadian singer had returned from a Buddhist monastery to discover that his business manager had stolen his retirement money. The two-disc set recorded live at London's O2 Arena was part of the tour to help rebuild his retirement.

This is Cohen performing A Thousand Kisses Deep from the same London concert:

There is a CD of the London concert --and a DVD.

photography's identity crisis?

In the Introduction to Photography Crisis of History the editor Joan Fontcuberta writes that photography arrived at the year 2000 beset by an apparent crisis of identity:

The vertiginous technological changes all around us, together with the political and economic context that underpins these, have transformed the genesis and the nature of the photographic image to such an extent as to legitimate every uncertainty as to its current status....The whole ethical and aesthetic basis has been subverted.The landscape is decidedly unrecognizable, so unrecognizable that some, the most radical are now speaking of the death of photography, whole others, more moderate, introduce a new and necessary ambiguous category: that of post-photography.

The reference is to the metamorphosis of photography based on the grain of silver to the pixel, which Fontcuberta argues is a screen that conceals the evolution taking place in the whole framework that provided photography with a cultural, instrumental and historical context.

Gary Sauer-Thompson, Morton Bay tree trunk, Adelaide parklands, 2009

I have to admit being initially puzzled by this kind of commentary since I found that the shift to digital makes it easier and cheaper to do photography. Digital technology is liberating in that it opens up spaces that enable a public presence to work that was never there in a pre-digital world --eg., photoblogs, e-books and magazines, digital exhibitions etc.

However, Fontcuberta is referring to the whole framework that provided photography with its cultural, instrumental and historical context. This is described thus:

In photography two facets have necessarily coexisted, perfectly fused and inseparable: on the one hand, the image as visual information; on the other, the physical support or medium, its objective dimension ..... all through the course of history certain social uses or certain focuses have privileged one component or the other; in the realm of the archive, for example, the information aspect prevails, while in that of the museum, in contrast, it is the objective aspect. What digital technology does is to accentuate the divide between image and support,between information and object. To say it in other words, digital technology has effectively dematerialized photography, situating it in new configuration that will prohibit its access to certain past territories and promote the exploration others.

Fontcuberta says that issues of meaning now take precedence over issues of representation. In the realm of artistic expression digital photography should be unfavourable to certain developments of a formalist nature while accentuating others of a narrative and conceptual nature.

Lay Flat and the crisis of experience

Lay Flat: Remain In Light is an American print publication devoted to promoting the best in contemporary fine art photography and writing on the medium. It is edited by Shane Lavalette, and Chicago-based photographer Karly Wildenhaus and its online presence is links to the work of those photographers featured in Lay Flat.

Interestingly, Lay Flat includes texts, one of which is entitled The Crisis of Experience. It is written by Eric William Carroll and is concerned with the relationships between direct experience, memory and the act of photography. Carroll says that:

Mary Ann Doane notes how time, through photographic and cinematic technologies, has become atomized. This in turn allows for a more rapid consumption/experience of time, while simultaneously preserving minute details—what Doane refers to as the contingent. As a result, the photographic archive falls back onto itself in a great irony—everything is being saved (whereas previously the archive was a place for things of value/worth) and yet our experience of time is so fast we rarely have a chance to revisit our recordings. It is the great catch-22 of photographic technologies. We spend time and money archiving our lives, only to find out that either we don’t have time to revisit them, or the technology we saved them on has become obsolete. It is a bittersweet irony that photography’s supposedly essential drive is to preserve, when in fact the technology that is driving photography is producing material just as ephemeral as the moments it claims to record.

I don't know what Mary Ann Doane has written on photography and the crisis of experience in modernity, as her work is primarily concerned with film and gender. A latter text is concerned with temporality, contingency, and the way that time became intimately allied with its new technologies of representation (photography, cinema) and their relationship to archivabiltiy and storage. The paradox for Doane is that temporal continuity is conveyed through "stopped time," the rapid succession of still frames or frozen images.

Carroll's argument here is unclear. Maybe the tacit argument is something along the lines that what is archived is not so much a material object as an experience – an experience of the present. Is it a problem that photography is producing material just as ephemeral as the moments it claims to record?

Firstly, "record" or "document" is misleading. It implies from the subject as disembodied objectivity of the “classical” disembodied monocular gaze situated outside the scene it surveys (ie., Descartes) to an embodied subject with the capacity to manage and interpret modernity's influx of images, its constant flows of commodities, money, signs. Secondly, photography in the early 20th century has represented means ‘the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent’, and these ephemeral images were often linked within a series or book in order to step beyond the ephemeral.

What then is meant by the 'crisis of experience' in relation to the act of photography changing experience? Carroll says:

The ‘crisis’ here that Barthes, Doane, Stewart, and to some extent, myself, are trying to argue, is that a photographer, in choosing to document an event rather than participate in it without a camera, is trading her subjective memory of the experience for a photographic/material one. The problems arise when the photographer attempts to revisit the experience, but is only left with a longing nostalgia for one of several reasons; A.) The tempo of our lives has increased to such a speed that one cannot spare time to revisit the documents, so they sit in a box in the attic B.) The photographs in the box will most likely fade and the memory cards that the images are stored on will become obsolete in a matter of years and C.) If time is found and the images are still viewable, re-visitation of the photographs recall only the absence of the ‘original’ moment—its unrepeatability—of which the image is only a quotation.

We do have the binary opposition between pure, unmediated experience and representations such as writing and photography. I would have thought that the act of photography was part of the experience as well as a fragmentary interpretation of events and objects. That experience is mediated by a particular culture frame and a history of images.

Per Kirkeby + neo-expresionism

The Danish artist Per Kirkeby, was trained as a geologist, was a member of Fluxus and his paintings in the 1960s were inspired by pop art. He is Denmark's best-known contemporary artist and his neo-expressionst abstractionist work show the ongoing strength of that painterly tradition, even if we consider the easel picture to be a dying form.

Per Kirkeby, The Siege of Constantinople 1995, Oil on canvas.

In American art historical terms the Neo-Expressionists rejected the restrictions against imagery and gestural treatment set by their Minimalist and Conceptual teachers and contemporaries, and revived the formal elements of German Expressionism and Abstract Expressionism.

n their work the Neo-Expressionists took up a variety of cultural-mythological, nationalist-historical, erotic, and “primitivizing” themes. Georg Baselitz, Sandro Chia, Jörg Immendorff, Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi, Anselm Kiefer, Markus Lüpertz, A. R. Penck, and Julian Schnabel are among the primary figures of Neo-Expressionism. It was interpreted as a revival of traditional themes of self-expression in European art after decades of American cultural dominance.

Per Kirkeby, Nikopeja II 1996, Oil on canvas

Neo-expressionism has a lot to do with the marketability of painting on the rapidly expanding art market, celebrity, the backlash against feminism, anti-intellectualism, and a return to mythic subjects and outmoded individualist methods.It represented a return to traditional painting styles after the multimedia experiments of the 1960s and '70s, and they were harshly criticized for playing into the conservative expectations of a bloated New York art market, which was perceived as looking for new heroes to promote.

I'm interested in this pictorial form because of the marked turn by digital photographers to abstraction as neo-expresionism suggests a narrative and emotional intensity.

Cultural conservatism + art

I heard John Armstrong, Philosopher in Residence at the Melbourne Business School, being interviewed by Paul Comrie-Thomson on Counterpoint yesterday as I drove to Victor Harbor. Armstrong had written a book on civilization--- Search of Civilization: Remaking a Tarnished Idea -- and my ears picked up when art was bought into the discussion.

Gary Sauer-Thompson, Suzanne, B1, South Australia, 2009

What did the cultural conservatives have to say about contemporary art I wondered? Their standard account, as reported in the media, has been to reject most of it as vulgar trash whilst rubbishing postmodernism. Do they accept modernism, or is their position a pre-modernist one? What is their aesthetic theory? So I turned the radio up.

Conservatism's standard cultural meme holds that the rot set in (moral decline) around 1968 with the embrace of positive expressive freedom that challenged a deeply conservative culture and the rise of the grim leftism of neo-Marxists, poststructuralists who inhabit the art world and the academy. This cultural conservatism is little more than '60s backlash.

An analytic philosopher defending civilization as a concept would have to do better than engage in polemics in the cultural wars through playing a part in the The Australian's campaign against political correctness. Armstrong says:

A lot of the background to contemporary art excitement is the idea that we're trying to cast off some sort of burden of oppression and regimentation and we need this sort of dramatic freeing process. I think that would have been a very, very good project around about 1901. In fact that project, the project of liberation, has, at least in sophisticated parts of the west, actually been completed a long time ago. Our great tasks now, it seems to me, are to find stable and serious principles of order, harmony, depth, beauty, human dignity and so on. And I think that that really requires a very, very different take on what the role of art might be, and I'm hoping that artists will catch up with that a bit more.

After modernism, a return to classicism (ie., symmetry, proportion etc rather than the content of antiquity) is being advocated here in opposition to modernism. Armstrong goes to say that in relation to the ethos of the modernist avant-garde's ­project idea of the role of high culture being one to provoke and distress the ruling class:

The project that got a lot of people interested in the transformational power of art was really a 19th century one. It really got going in France in the second half of the 19th century where there seemed to be a very, very entrenched dominant class but also owned traditional art. There was a struggle against that, that struggle was completely successful. I think that by the end of WWII that project was completely finished, it was completely achieved. But for some reason that attitude to art has kind of survived and continues as a myth and so generates a very unhelpful sense of what art is for.

So cultural conservatism reconnects art to beauty without mentioning religion or Christianity.Hence we have beauty as a harmony of form reflected in the imagination. It is not obvious that after modernism we need to adopt a classicist aesthetic--we could, for instance, turn to the neo-baroque. Armstrong goes no further in saying why we should work to find stable and serious principles of order, harmony, depth, beauty. Nor did Paul Comrie-Thomson ask him. It was enough that the contrary position had been spelt out--- works of art are essentially beautiful objects.

To dig deeper into why this is so, we can turn to Roger Kimble's The End of Art at First Things, where he points out that cultural conservatism holds that traditionally, the goal of fine art was to make beautiful objects. Beauty, as it were, affirms its place in an integrated ontological order; as the radiance of being. Art without beauty is, if not exactly a contradiction in terms, is at least a description of failed art, if not a perverted art. Kimble says:

Without an allegiance to beauty, art degenerates into a caricature of itself; it is beauty that animates aesthetic experience, making it so seductive; but aesthetic experience itself degenerates into a kind of fetish or idol if it is held up as an end in itself, untested by the rest of life.

Beauty animates aesthetic experience? Aesthetic judgment is about the experience of beauty. Why not horror? Or unity? Secondly, is the beautiful woman central to an aesthetic experience? Glamour and beauty are used to sell products in the mass media or promote entertainment events. Think Hollywood, the modern fashion magazine with its directional and explicatory shots, and the sophistication and assurance of female imagery employed in advertising and commercial media.

Weekend pet pics: Agtet

It is a cold and wet Sunday in Adelaide today. So there is next to no chance for me to begin to do any of the large format urbanscape work that I had planned to do with the old and battered Linhof 5x4 Technika field camera.

Instead we have a portrait from my personal life taken from the archives:

Gary Sauer-Thompson, Agtet, Sturt St Adelaide, 2008

For those interested, the photo was shot on a medium format camera---a Rolleflex 6006 with a Zeiss Distagon 40m lens. I had just bought the camera and I was learning how to use it.

The personal makes a break from the more theoretical posts of late. A bit of light relief, actually, from the heavy going. I do need to lighten up.

As an aside, as the photography world moves to digital and there are less and less large format shooters, large format equipment is dropping in price across the board, including Linhof's Technika's. Most Technika users these days are fine art photographers who prefer ground glass focusing for careful composition.The digital storm sure has left analog opportunity in its wake. Does this then creates a niche market in the analogue space?

Robert Heinecken

Robert Heinecken's Recto/Verso photograms were made without the use of camera or film. A single page from a mass-circulation magazine was placed in direct contact with color photographic paper and exposed to light. The resulting image superimposes the visual and verbal information from the front and back of the magazine page. No collage, manipulation, or other handwork was employed. In some cases, his approach is a simple juxtaposition of two advertisements; in others, a single picture is created from multiple images overlaid.

Robert Heinecken, from the series Recto-verso, Cibachromes, 1989.

His stance at that time could be termed "deconstructive subversion," for he would use advertising photographs for raw material which would be manipulated by various means to arrive at social commentary. Often he would choose images of behaviors that had roots in a collective fantasy that could be exploited to sell a product. He would seek an ironic response to the imprisoning nature of advertisements, especially those that focused on the sexual attraction between men and women.

Much of Heinecken's work recontextualizes imagery he appropriates from the mass media. He uses photography against itself by inverting the medium, turning it inside out, to reveal just how it goes about its business of persuasion. In the decade of the 1980s, decadence and narcissism inhabit the same space as spirituality and family values.

By placing commercial images into aesthetic contexts, translating images from one medium or process into another, or by juxtaposing, layering, or sequencing images, Heineken exposes the covert, simplistic, and often demeaning messages that are grafted onto commercial and editorial graphics.

Provocation and desire, the mainstays of media's working vocabulary, are evident in this series of images as elements of a different text, one which instructs the viewer to read images more incisively.

Heinecken decided that in the wake of the media explosion that had come to characterize contemporary life, enough photographs already existed. Rather than make more, he would manipulate existing ones.

His art became an attempt to clarify, reveal and sometimes confound the subliminal social, political and artistic codes they contain. Heinecken was among the first to consider himself an artist who used photographs, not a photographer who made them.

John Wood: beyond pure/modernist photography

I know very little about John Wood, an American photographer and printmaker who taught at Alfred University in southern New York from 1955 to 1989, who currently has an exhibition entitled John Wood: On the Edge of Clear Meaning” at the Grey Art Gallery, New York University. It is a retrospective, spanning his career from the early 1960s to the present and is also a a book.

Wood's roots are in the Institute of Design in Chicago, established by the Bauhaus-trained artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and so he consistently challenged traditional photography, often incorporating painting, drawing, and collage as well as cliché verre, solarization, and offset lithography:

Wood “Cooling Tower,” left, and “Cactus,”right,1989

Wood is part of the experimental expressivist American tradition which held photographic description alone would not necessarily unveil the potency of a subject and which stepped beyond the gelatin silver aesthetic or modernist fine print aesthetic and its classical range of tonal values.This tradition, which is centred around subjective expression, imagination, hand-altered, or manipulated photography and constructed photographic images, broke with the modernist dictum that no artistic medium should take on attributes of any other medium.

There is a related exhibition --John Wood: Quiet Protest at the International Center of Photography--- which explores political and social issues of the day through thoughtful photo montage pieces that exist in marked contrast to more traditional documentary photography:

David Wood, My Lai Massacre, ca. 1965

David Levi Strauss in the introduction to the exhibition catalogue says that:

Historically, 'purity' is not a term that has often been applied to the work of John Wood. In photo-historical terms, Wood is thought of as one of those renegades who went against 'pure photography' by incorporating drawing, painting, collage, and every other technique he could get his hands on (not to mention explicit political content), into his practice, thus ushering in the multi media of the 1960s that caused a crisis in 'straight photography.' Long before it became the signal medium of the avant-garde, collage was a folk art, practiced by children, lovers, and grand-mothers.

Strauss adds that from the perspective of our pluralistic present, those once furiously enforced and ferociously defended divisions seem quaint. Today, those and most other boundaries have dissolved and digital imaging has normalized 'impurity' and made the combination and alteration of different kinds of images commonplace.

my life

This is my life, unfortunately. Long hours spent in front of the computer. Suzanne, my partner, thought the Leunig cartoon was so apt:

Leunig

It's not that bad. I do go to bed! I have also moved from being a casual photographer--- point-and-shoot who saw photography to be a window to the concrete world--- to a passionate enthusiast, shooting in RAW for easier editing, some times adding geotags for a richer experience, and sharing photos in an online gallery. Morever, the computer as a digital darkroom is much better and healthier than the chemical darkroom.

The definition of photographic truth during the 1930’s was dominated by the notion that a photograph was an automatic process that could neutrally act as a stand-in for the viewer. Today the idea that a photograph can be a neutral container of facts seems naïve. We have come to realize that photographic meaning can be determined by how a photographer chooses to integrate content and compositional structure and that truth is not solely dependent on a literal transcription of reality.

making strange

Traditionally, photography has been seen as a mere reflector of surface appearance or as producing images of reportage which ostensibly provide empirically verified and verifiable information.The counterpoint to this naturalism, or realist art forms modeled on the traditional truth claims of photography, is the Romantic conception of the photographer as seer, using their imagination to transcend empirical reality and express inner truths.

Gary Sauer-Thompson, labyrinth, 2009

In the early twentieth century the Russian formalists offered another conception of photography that undercut these traditional (19th century) conceptions of photography ---the adoption of bizarre perspectives and point of views to make normal things and relationships look strange. This has the effect of heightening our perception of an habitually understood object or concept, thereby enabling us to see things differently.

Viktor Shklovsky developed the concept of ostranenie or defamiliarization in literature in "Art as Technique". He invented the term as a means to distinguish poetic from practical language arguing that poetic language is fundamentally different than the language that we use everyday. he explained the idea of defamiliarization thus:

The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar’, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important.

In other words, art presents things in a new, unfamiliar light by way of formal manipulation. Defamiliarization can be understood as generating différance and the the production of textual and visual meaning.

Art photography after modernism can retain its realist aesthetic by dumping reportage and shifting to 'making visible' socio-economic structures and relationships which are not immediately given in sense perception. So it can represent those essential societal relations that would otherwise remain hidden from view. This is what Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin argued.

Pink Floyd: Goodbye Blue Sky

This is the animated cartoon sequence by Gerald Scarfe for Goodbye Blue Sky from Pink Floyd's film version of The Wall directed by Alan Parker that I mentioned in this post. Unlike Quadrophenia this is an example where the film complements the music instead of diminishing it.

Though the concept of music and film is about the increasing distance between rock artists and their fans and a burned-out, drug-addicted rock star who wastes away in front of the television. He builds “the wall” around himself, brick by brick, and slowly goes insane. This segments looks back to the bombing of London of the rock singer's childhood.

The face in the wall, Judge Arse, the teacher working his class of children through a mincing machine, and the goose-stepping fascist hammers remain just as striking today as they were when seen for the first time in the 198s Pink Floyd mounted their most elaborate stage show in conjunction with the tour of The Wall, which remains a milestone in rock history. Roger Waters later re-created the Wall show in 1990, amid the ruins of the Berlin Wall.

remembering

Whilst plugging away at the River Murray project I remembered travelling around to the location where Lake Alexandrina and Lake Albert join when I stayed at Poltalloch Station. The location is called The Narrung Narrows and it had an old ferry, a disused lighthouse and ruined shepherd cottages.

I remembered Point Malcolm as an interesting space-- one where clouds, cliffs and sea meet:

Gary Sauer-Thompson, near The Narrows, 2009

I had taken a few photos with a Lecia at the time. That was before the beginning of the transition to new, lower limits on water use in the Murray-Darling. I had wanted to return and explore the location now that the lower lakes were shrinking. The Narrows now had a wall and a pumping station to pump water into Lake Albert, so as to keep it from drying out, and exposing the sulphuric acid soil to the surface.

I figured that Point Malcolm would be a good location to see how much both lakes had changed as a result of insufficient freshwater in the Murray-Darling Basin to support the sufficient environmental flows to the Lower Lakes.

Gary Sauer-Thompson, pumps, The Narrows, 2009

My judgement is that the Lakes need water. As the freshwater is not available--- due to overallocation of irrigation licences, resistance of state governments to water buyback and trading, drought and climate change – this only leaves the seawater option. Coastal lakes are simply a better option than dry, dead lake beds.

Update
Though Rudd has vowed to spend $3.1billion on irrigation licences in the hope of repairing the river system to help Adelaide's water supply crisis and save the Lower Lakes in South Australia, there is not enough water in Lake Alexandrina to continue to pump water into Lake Albert to keep the surface covered.

What is the next step for Lake Albert? Bioremediation?

Pink Floyd: The Wall

I watched a DVD of Pink Floyd's The Wall last night. This is a 1982 film by British director Alan Parker based on the 1979 Pink Floyd album The Wall.

The screenplay was written by Pink Floyd vocalist and bassist Roger Waters and it traces the life of the fictional protagonist, Pink Floyd, from his boyhood days in war-torn England to his self-imposed isolation as a world-renowned rock star, leading to a climax that is as questionably cathartic as it is destructive.

It was the cartoon imagery by Gerald Scarfe, (the the film designer and animator), that I found the most impressive, not the music. The collaboration between Scarfe and Waters should be ed celebrated eg., the animation sequence depicting the German bombing campaign over England during World War II, set to the song "Goodbye Blue Sky".

Venice Biennale

The Australian presence in the national participations at the 2009 Venice Biennale is centred on Shaun Gladwell the video artist, and a group exhibition of early career artists ---Vernon Ah Kee, Sean Cordeiro, Claire Healy and Ken Yonetani--entitled Once Removed curated by Felicity Fenner.


Shaun Gladwell, Apology to Roadkill 2007, Videography: Gotaro Uematsu, Photography: Josh Raymond

Gladwell is presenting Maddest Maximus in the Australian Pavilion. Influenced by his experiences in Australia’s landscape of the outback, and Mad Max movies, this work is a suite of five videos accompanied by sound and photographic works.

The Apology To Roadkill part of Maddest Maximus refers back to the cinema classic Wake In Fright (1971) and to a tradition of Australian landscape painting, such as Sidney Nolan's Desert And Drought paintings from 1949-53, which represented the Australian landscape in terms of the 'dead heart' and as the 'otherness' of European landscape.

The video stands against the heroic attempts to impose the artist on the landscape or to speak of himself as a stranger within it. It is not a story of resistance and eventual mastery of nature that is narrated, but one of cooperation, mutuality and care.

intensity

Deleuze's philosophy can be regarded as a response to the 'insufficiency of the faculties of perception', a means to address 'reality' or things which 'do not explicitly strike our sense or consciousness'.

Deleuze uses the concept of 'intensity' to describe elements at the limits of perception.They cannot be e directly perceived. Rather they can only be felt, sensed or perceived in the ‘quality’ they give rise to.--- eg the 'intensity' of a single colour.

Intensity for Deleuze and Guattari refers to movement being permanent to matter itself rather then being a force that moves the objects from the outside. They held that art by necessity exposes the viewer/listener to an impersonal, differential flow of life that is felt rather than understood or comprehended.

In Deleuze's view, art ruptures extensive or everyday perception because it draws attention to singular 'intensities' (such as the vibrancy of a colour). Art draws attention to this virtual flux. It transforms recognisable feelings (affections) and perceptions into impersonal affects and percepts: forces of sensation that are unrecognisable or a-signifying.

Deleuze suggests that the aim of art is to invent new affects and, therefore, to create new possibilities for perception and experience

censorship

Anne Higonnet in Pretty babies in Eurozine says that when it comes to representing children, art and law are on a collision course and photographers are in the dock:

Art and child pornography law have been set on a collision course since the eighties. Until then, censorship laws in most western countries were on the decline. A growing cult of the child, however, reversed the trend. And that was in the era of analogue imagery. During the last decade, as digital technology has transformed visual communication, the conflict between art and law has only grown worse.

Photographers are targeted because censorship law is all about the reality effect of photography. Among pictures, the law claimed, only photographs are of or about real people and have real effects on real people. Law after law declared a trenchant distinction between the puny persuasions of the verbal and the impact of visual presence.

Sally Mann, Last Light

The old fear of images has found a new form of expression with the rise of digital photography, computers, image alteration software, and commercial colour printers. This gave artists the technical means to explore the imaginary worlds of children, our memories of childhood, and the fantasies we have about childhood and to sample old classics from children's literature as well as canonical images of children in the history of all visual media.

The law, which initially drew a logical distinction between pictures that proved an actual child had been sexually exploited and those that did not, collapsed with digital imagery. An imaginary person is the same as a real person. Higonnet says:

Yet despite the subjectivity of virtually all interpretation, child pornography law persists in attacking pictures, rather than in pursuing cases of actual abuse against real children. If you can prove that a photograph was made by forcing a real child to commit a physical sexual act in front of the camera, then by all means hunt down and prosecute the adults involved in those acts. Pictures could be used instrumentally as evidence, instead of becoming the crimes themselves. Prosecute actions. Let the pictures go.

She says that in the secular West, the ideal of childhood sexual innocence has become sacred. It cannot be questioned in any way, shape or form. In such a climate the fashion industry's selling of swim suits openly make pictures that involve children's or adolescents' bodies or their sexuality. Yet nothing is done to make them illegal, even though these expose children's bodies to give us simple pleasures justified by a costume.

Blair French: about photography

Daniel Palmer is part of the ARC research project team for Genealogies of Digital Light along with Sean Cubbitt and Les Walking He is the editor of Photogenic: Essays, Photography, CCP 2000–2004, which seemed to be based on an earlier lecture series. Disappointingly, there is nothing online from the lecture series or the book. Though Photofile's two decade history makes it the longest lasting magazine on serious photography in Australia, it still has no online presence.

So I will turn to the work of Blair French, the author of Out of Time: Essays Between Art and Photography, and executive director of Artspace in Sydney. In Broadsheet vol 35 no 4, published by the Contemporary Art Society in Adelaide, he says:

Although founded within and by an early-1970s milieu focused upon modernist understandings of both art and documentary photography, the Australian Centre for Photography had become central to the development of various constructed, appropriationist, socially activist and theoretically rhetorical practices highly influential within the field of contemporary art (more generally in Australia from the early 1980s onwards).

He adds that it is interesting that almost a decade later, the terms upon which such divisions were assumed have themselves been eroded by a typically early twenty-first century ‘third way’.

This ‘third way’ generated out of a coalition between the overwhelming presence of photography across all spheres of life and cultural activity—the ultimate success of photography as the dominant structure within mass visual culture—and the broader forces of globalisation. I would argue that in the face of the flattening out of all photographic practice to an amorphous mass of imagery assessed simply in terms of visual attraction and content, the issue of whether any single image is based in ‘traditional’—modernist—photographic practices or in post-conceptual contemporary art practices, when treated in isolation is in and of itself irrelevant.

He adds that what is needed is the proper detailed tracing of historical genealogies for examples of contemporary practice needs to underpin a further process of critical discrimination:

It is crucial that this process entails consideration of the image’s relationship to the broader representational and cultural economies out of which it emerges and within which it circulates. Unfortunately, however, this quite basic form of critical analysis is resisted by a photographic culture advancing representational homogeneity under the guise of accessibility, responding to an insistent demand for distraction, entertainment and instant representational gratification and in thrall to the spectacle culture of the mass market.

I'm not sure how one would do that ----the image’s relationship to the broader representational and cultural economies out of which it emerges and within which it circulates.

dialectical images?

Is it possible for photographers to work in terms of dialectical images? These would be images that embody contradictions within them because they are sediments of history:

The concept of dialectical images is associated with the work of Walter Benjamin, particularly his Paris Arcades project and begins with photography reflecting on history in which n rescue and redeem these desires and impulses from within a tradition in which “progress” and “catastrophe” are deeply intertwined. Benjamin sifts through the ruins of the arcades to see in their decay the traces of failure alongside the traces of hope; and above all, how the two are dialectically related in the visual culture of commodity capitalism. For Benjamin, the dialectical image is one that has “movement at its interior. ”

The general understanding of a dialectical image for Benjamin is that evanescence—the decay of material reality as it is lived in time—is accurately transfixed; and yet, in being so held back from time, it is sublated in a sense of acute historical crisis. Benjamin's concern is to dissipate the illusion of continuity in history, and that it is possible only if the past and the present are polarized, that is, if the past puts in critical condition the present.

Benjamin's specific point of view is to seek the future in the past by deciphering the history of culture in which in which traces of the past continue to persist within the ever-changing present. This involves “brushing history against the grain” so that we can awaken from the dreamworlds of commodity culture.

Pat Brassington

Pat Brassington is Australia’s key surrealist working with photo media. The series A little waltz consists of prints of a man (an atypical subject for the artist) who is nude and contorted in sometimes impossible gymnastic moves. The images are slightly blurred and at times reveal incongruous elements or improbable shadows.

Pat Brassington, In Marble Halls #1, 2003, from A little waltz, Pigment print

They are photos of rather small moments, small thoughts and unspoken feelings. In seemingly prosaic rooms, objects or actions become unsettling and ambiguous. Chris Drew in says in Islands (No 112, 2008 ) that Brassington's:

work conjures unnameable feelings and strange stirrings: ‘fragments of memory’, disturbing dream imagery, dis- and re-membered bodies, and strange erotic scenarios all claustrophobic and familial – both adult and childlike at once.

Many don’t look less like photographs and more like subtle, exquisite, finely wrought drawings and often we are placed in the position of a voyeur.