I was really excited by all of the Bourriaud readings this week because they felt liked they related very closely to how I’ve been making work lately, especially his ideas about appropriation vs the readymade and the role of the artist as being someone who is particularly good at surfing the culture or a kind of a semionaught – a term I really love. For me I think the idea of the role of the artist as not being so much someone who generates work or things in general is very apt. I think the project of originality is not so relevant in a culture where the stream of things being generated is already too great. This idea of the semionaught is to me someone who can interpret, make meanings from, and guide through the cultural rain. I really liked all the DJ analogies he made too because this idea of remixing, programming and play listing culture is exactly what I see me role as in my video mash-ups. The possibilities are really exciting and so are the difficulties. For one thing if you consider that the material of the artist is culture itself then you already have too much material and for another an appropriation and readymade practice is tricky in a litigious and copyright obsessed society. The idea of ownership is nebulous, ridiculous, and frustrating for everyone. I’ve also been reading this David Shields book that tackles many of the name issues in an interesting way.

Some questions about the readings over the past semester:

1. Lacan and Jeff Wall. Seriously confused here. I understand the argument Ross is making in theory, I think, about beauty creating desire and this leads to Lacan’s theories about desire as creating subjects etc. But where does Wall fit in here?
2. I was wondering about Crimp’s advocacy of lateral appropriation and distaste for historical appropriation, is this at odds with Rancier’s advocacy for borrowing operations from separate media? This strikes me as a kind of historical operation.
3. Any ideas about where photography’s expanded field will expand to from here? Is there a relationship between technology and the expanding of the photographic field? Digital, networks, etc?
4. Thinking about exuberance and exhaustion and the pressure to perform how are we to incorporate this into our art making. Should we more consciously defying the pressure to perform? Is it too much of a risk?

Perhaps I’m a little distracted lately from my impending graduation/emancipation and all that it entails for me but this Toni Ross article is not really making any sense to me at all. I understand that Wall breaks with notions of the avant-garde in the 1980s by doing realism, and history painting tableaux etc, and he incorporates his insane knowledge of the history of painting into what seems like every inch of every photo. Yet, its still really tough for me to think of him as avant-garde because I’m a baby and he was already old school feeling to me when I started art school. Also everyone in his pictures looks really 80s out too… Ok but I understand his realism project and his history of painting project and I also understand how influential those projects have been for the next 25 years. And I think I understand Jameson’s ideas about how aesthetic theory is not good under post-modernism because everything is just too charmingly aesthetic these days. Right so far so good. And I get the beautiful and the sublime and how they are different, but what do all these things, plus the Lacan stuff have to do with Jeff Wall? I am so lost.

This weeks articles really hit home in practice department for me because two of them I thought really addressed things that pertain to the young artist working in graduate school. The studio and the pressure to perform,

First on the issues of the studio… we don’t have any! If I could change one thing about this school it would be to give everyone individual studios. I agree pretty much with Buren that the studio is a important and special place for a work of art. There will always be a defining relationship between a work and where it was created and each space the work enters afterward will change its meaning and value. I’m not as hostile to the curator as Buren seems to be, I have no problem having my work be at their whim, but I’m young. I suppose part of the problem with this article is that he is writing about such a tiny percentage of artists here: those artists who have their ideal studios and sell work from them. My studio is my apartment. Really just a desk with a computer for editing video. If I had more space I would hang prints, install video projections, maybe a couch would be nice. The studio is important because I think most artists need a comfortable space to think and work in. Buren mentions the importance of having unsuccessful work and half finished sketches laying around. I think its important that work that works and work that fails be near to each other. This is the problem with the none-studio of Columbia, its hard to fail privately which leads to less risk taking. To me the artists studio and the artists career is much more about making due that theorizing what the studio means to maybe 1% of artists.

Then the pressure to perform! I really liked this article because I think for people in the creative economy performance its thesis is exactly right. Also while in graduate school you are under to perform as well as compete. Careerism, grades, reviews and the like can make me forget very quickly that I’m here to actually make art sometimes. This is what is most frustrating that we are always performing and always being judges by standards we have no control over. This is why I love the “I can’t in the key of I can”. It is a way to resist without giving up, to take back some power. To disrupt my judges by giving them what I don’t have and they don’t want. I think this takes the form for me of showing them work that I haven’t figured out yet, that I know they won’t like. This often takes the form of a really early edit of a video piece where I’m still not sure what I’m doing. I’m giving them what I don’t have a (finished piece, a complete thought, an idea of what I’m doing) and what they don’t want, a half baked work. I also love the latency argument, the idea that meaning can grown and change over time. I think there is a lot of pressure to get things all at once, right away and that if something doesn’t reveal itself right away, all at once, easily it is a kind if a failure. I also like the idea of failure as a way to resist performance pressure. Not to fail on purpose but to be open to failure as being valuable, important, and nothing to be ashamed of. Often it feels like the stakes are too high too quickly in performance culture and all failure is a referendum on personal worth.

Lastly I really like how the article talks about the I care. It reminded me of a David Foster Wallace quote I really like:

“If you can think of times in your life you’ve treated people with extraordinary decency and love, pure uninterested concern, just because they were valuable as human beings. The ability to do that with ourselves. To treat ourselves the way we would treat a really good, precious friend. Or a tiny child of ours that we absolutely loved more than life itself. And I think it’s probably possible to achieve that. I think part of the job we’re here for is to learn how to do it. I know that sounds a little pious.”

http://mocp.org/exhibitions/2003/05/the_furtive_gaz.php

While reading this weeks articles I think I still had the quote Allan Sekula used to open Reading the Archive stuck in my head by Godard and Gorin “The invention of photography. For whom? Against whom?” Except this week when I started with Laura Mulvey’s essay I thought the gaze for whom? Against whom? Meaning I didn’t really follow her Freudian argument about castration anxiety and the idea of the cinematic gaze being male. I understand the argument (although by that logic it seems castration anxiety could be used to explain really almost anything) and I even agree that the cinematic gaze is mostly masculine (not male) and the cinematic operation she describes used to portray female characters either actively or passively are certainly still prevalent I kept thinking that it was also a very limited view that considered gender and desire in a very binary way I was thinking what about women who enjoy looking at women, men looking at men, etc

… but then I read the Butler article and it sort of turned Mulvey on its head. I’m still trying to parse the relationship between these two articles because I don’t think butler rules out the possibilities of a male or female gaze but she certainly does complicate it. Since gender is preformed a woman could have a male gaze (and also castration anxiety?) a man could be objectified (assaulted by this gaze) etc.

And then! Olin comes in and makes sense of everything for me in her article that was (lets be honest, for this weeks readings, a breath of fresh air where clarity of writing is concerned) most interesting to me in the way that it tried to considered the gaze in a positive and affirming way. To this point it seemed to have such a bad connotation and I think as a photographer I was feeling some serious guilt about my own scopophelia. However I think Olin is right on about the Walker Evans image. The gaze there is an equal exchange, the plea of Thou shalt not kill, etc. But I was also thinking couldn’t a sexualized “male” gaze be an equal exchange? I guess my thought was, is it such a bad thing if people enjoy being visually objectified? If they willingly consent to it? Couldn’t the Kruger text read “Your gaze lovingly caresses the side of my face, and that makes me feel good”? I liked that Olin was arguing for a wider interpretation of the gaze because I think that the experience of looking and being looked at can be everything to terrifying, to thrilling, to boring etc. and it all depends on the context.

I was thinking about the Abromovich performance at MoMA right now “The Artist is Present” where she sits at a table and looks at whomever sits across from her. This idea that looking can be a mutual, artistic, and what seems to me very thrilling experience is interesting. There is no other communication just sitting and looking and yet it seems like such a more embodied experience, it seems to involve much more than just vision. It made me think that the separation between vision and the other sense the Fried seemed to be arguing for is just… wrong. Here is Marina and her long lost lover Ulay. So Cute!

Archive

Reading Sekula over spring break was a really interesting experience because it made my try to consider everything as an archive, or at least try to. Some things were easy menus, newspapers, the internet and the like all presented pretty straightforward cases for being archives. Then I started thinking that almost anything can be an archive depending on how one thinks of the criteria or defines the parameters of an archive. I was thinking of a folder I’ve kept on my computer called “pics” that I’ve had pretty much since the I first got the internet in 5th grade. In it I’ve kept almost every snapshot, news photo, celebrity photo, or any image that I’ve ever thought I might want to look at again. Its sort of funny because I pretty much never look through these pictures and I suppose the parameters of this archive would be anything I saw online that I thought for a second I might want to one day look at again. It is organized chronologically because that’s the way I set up the folder but it works in almost exactly the way Sekula describes as far as abstracting context, changing meaning and re-making the meaning of everything to be somewhat antagonistic to whatever its next to. I also think of it as something of a bizarre self portrait because the images do very literally reflect my visual interests. There is lots of friends, lots of family, lots of pictures of my beloved Steelers, and more than a few images of pretty girls who I have no idea who they are.

As far as archives in art I kept thinking about Christian Boltanski and the archives he manipulated and made. I think the most interesting and haunting to me is Sans Souci, a book of images he made from photographs of young Nazis on vacation and relaxing and smiling. The idea that something evil is absolutely haunting and I have to say after having seen it I can’t really look at any family album the same way again. You sort of always know when you look at a photo that you really cant tell anything about the person from it but that a normal looking person could be so menacing is rather terrifying

One quote from this weeks readings stood out to me as kind of summarizing all my feelings about everything we have encountered in this class, and perhaps just everything ever. It was from Jameson’s Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. It comes during a section where he is urging us not moralize the postmodern condition, which he points out is very difficult, nearly impossible. “We are somehow to lift out minds to a point at which it is possible to understand that capitalism is at one and the same time the best thing that has ever happened to the human race, and the worst.” I suppose for me this sentence, and the non-judgmental stance of the section of the essay, was at odds with my conceptions of critical theory of postmodernism. By this I mean that every invocation within art-discourse experience about postmodernism is chalk full of moral judgment, usually someone either for or against likening postmodernism or its destruction to a moral imperative. I found Jameson’s words acutely summed up my own feelings towards capitalism quite powerfully. I reap the benefits and suffer the indignities of late capitalism equally on a personal level and on a global level I can understand its glories and evils in nearly equal measure. That said I will be needing to read his section on mapping again before class, I got bogged down pretty badly there.

On Douglas Crimp’s Appropriating Appropriation I had some sympathy towards his argument but he also did something I find really frustrating among art historians which is making a case that is weak and then cherry picking examples as marshaled evidence for his thesis. For example in his polemic on Ghery and Graves his argument that Ghery’s appropriations were lateral and therefore good and Graves were historical and therefore bad seemed to oversimplify some aspects of creation to. I’m not sure how to articulate this clearly but I’m not sure that historical appropriation is the only thing, or has anything to do with why I don’t Like Graves’ buildings. On the flip side I don’t like any of Ghery’s buildings either and if I did I doubt its because I suddenly saw the intellectual beauty of corrugated steel as loopy siding. This is always where postmodernism arguments lose me (well not only here) that they always seem to hinge on architecture as the best or first or quintessential case study for proving some paramount fact. I suppose I don’t understand architecture very well (my fondness for the Harold Washington Library should be proof enough of that.) When I look at Grave’s Art Center in Minneapolis I am disinterested in what looks to me like too much a tamed Ellsworth Kelly or Joseph Albers painting. I don’t mind the historical appropriation, I just don’t like the way it was done.

Likewise with Ghery its not that I have strong feelings for lateral appropriation one way or the other it just seems like using everyday construction materials to make self consciously beautiful forms for super high minded structures gives me a difficult to articulate feeling of trying too hard.

So when he talks about Robert Mapplethorp’s historical appropriation as being somehow lesser than Sherrie Levine’s wholesale and lateral appropriation my reaction was something like, but who cares? Mapplethorp’s images are rich to me for their reaching back into the past for visual style and the elegance and beauty he executes his images with further add to this. Also I really like Sherrie Levine but I suppose I don’t see the practices as being as opposed to each other as some. This Mapplethorp reference to this Munch print is my favorite.

I also liked the Art Since 1900 chapter on the legacies of photo conceptualism. I had never really though of people like Rosler and Sekula as being politicized versions of Ruscha and Baldassari but that argument makes a lot of sense. I do sort of artists in those terms a lot though, like Gonzalez Torres as a more soulful and political version of Minimalism or Jenny Holzer as a more poetic or energized version of Mel Bochner. Well that’s not fair, I love Mel Bochner, but you know what I mean.

Ok so now on to the image as text, I would like to try to analyze something a little on the tricky side but it is something I have been thinking about pretty much constantly since I first saw it a few weeks ago at the Whitney. The Piece is called “We Like America and America Likes Us” by an anymous artist collective called the Bruce High Quality Foundation. Already we have two references at least, the title of the piece a reference to Joseph Beuys’ performance from 1974 called “I Like America and America Likes Me” where he traveled from the airport by ambulance to an art gallery that he shared with a coyote for three days, befriends the animal, performs some rituals, and then travels back to Germany, getting to the airport again, in an ambulance. The Bruce, in BHQF is reportedly a reference to Bruce Nauman, but I’m not sure of that. So the piece is a sculpture a found object that is a part ambulance part hearse. It is all white, its healights are on and on its windshield is a video projection.

The projection is a mixed bag of American movies, television, youtube clips, and news footage from the past 25 or so years, These references are chaotic and fast paced and beyond that is a female voice over that reads a long kind of Whitmanesque letter to America. The letter addresses America as a partner in every kind of relationship, from loving, to abusive, from lover, to parent and child etc. The language slips in and out of genders and goes for over half an hour. Here are some parts I found transcribed.

We like America. And America likes us. But somehow, something keeps us from getting it together. We come to America. We leave America. We sing songs and celebrate the happenstance of our first meeting – a memory reprised often enough that now we celebrate the occasions of our remembrance more often than their first cause.

We wished we could have fallen in love with America. She was beautiful, angelic even, but it never made sense. Even rolling around on the wall-to-wall of her parents’ living room with her hair in our teeth, even when our nails trenched the sweat down his back, and meeting his parents, America stayed simple somehow. He stayed an acquaintance, despite everything we shared. Just a friend. We could share anything and it would never go further than that.
No one really knows how love begins. A look on his face one time after we’d made love – a text message too soon after the last one. When did we become a thing to hold on to rather than just something to hold? We didn’t know America was in love with us until it was too late. Maybe we couldn’t have done anything about it anyway. America fell in love with the idea of us, with some fantasy of us, some fantasy of what America and us together would be, before we had a chance to tell him it could never work, we weren’t ready for a relationship, we weren’t comfortable being needed, we didn’t have the resources to be America’s dream.
It wasn’t easy letting America down. As we stuttered through our rehearsed speech we watched the change on her face. We could see the zoom lens of her attention clock away. We could feel ourselves receding back into the blur of the general population.

There was a time we thought we were nothing without America. When she left, we realized all the excuses we’d been making. All the problems we’d been trying not to address. We drunk dialed our memory of America just to hear what we were thinking. We worked late and we told ourselves we had to, that the work came first, that this was an important time in our lives and that love could wait. Just wait a little longer and we’d fix everything, we’d say. Solving the America problem, our lack of attention, our disinterest in sex, our never being home, our thinking of her as a problem – it would have to wait.

So why I’m having such a tricky time reading this piece as text is one, there is literally a text in it, which may break the rules a bit for this assignment but the text is at once very poetic and beautiful and also very generic. For example I am able to understand the different passages because I know them, or I understand the situations they evoke from my lived experience (“No one really knows how love begins, a text message too soon after the last one.”) but mostly I know these sentiments through American popular culture. The workaholic, and the abusive parent or disinterested lover are things I know from texts like television and movies which are the things that are playing on the windshield. It made me question how I know about love and if American popular culture isn’t completely responsible for every part of it. And is it a hearse there till kill the culture or an ambulance there to save it? Which should it be?

After finishing The Originality of the Avant-Garde by Rosalind Krauss I was struck by most by how second nature all her arguments seemed to me already. Meaning, mostly well I read the article I thought to myself on any number of points she was making, of course! Of course! Take for example all the problems with authenticity and originality she finds in Rodin’s work. (Small tangent: when I first saw The Thinker in an art book as a child I recognized it because my grandmother had a pair of The Thinker shaped book ends on her shelf. Naturally I assumed she was rich.) Locating the original of a cast sculpture is maddening, like locating an original photograph. Anything that tries to claim originality or authenticity already strikes us me phony because it has to make that claim in the first place. In other words nothing that has ever struck me as really original ever had to have someone tell me it was. That claim is always tied to market value of the work. Why is a vintage Dorthea Lange worth so much more than a library of congress print? Scarcity, of course. That Krauss chose not to pursue the idea of the original and the importance of the original as being inescapably linked to the art market struck me as a little odd. Labeling something as original is an important way of increasing its desirability and thus capital. I’m sort of fond actually of how goofy the whole enterprise of editioning photographs is. I mean the idea that someone will only print seven or ten of an image as a way to increase value is so deeply antithetical to the very nature of photography that it strikes me as so nakedly capitalistic that it’s a bit funny. The value becomes so imaginary and arbitrary that you sort of want to pinch someone and say “you realize this emperor is completely naked right?” That’s the thing is that everyone does realize this too and I’m not saying it’s a bad this, its just a little silly. In a capitalist society artists must increase their capital, I mean I made a video of appropriated digital footage that exists online ad infinitum into an edition of three DVDs…

I digress. So in the article I also was really interested in the idea of the grid, or specifically how Krauss has theorized it. I never thought of it as something that resisted language but I understand why Krauss describes it that way. A grid truly can have an all-at-onceness that language cannot. When she talked about the grids silence in opposition to narrative I pictured taking every word from a novel and assembling them as a grid. A novel speaks when you read the words one at a time, but all at once the language is inaccessible. The grid does not privilege sequence and is thus silent. I was thinking here of Hanne Darboven and how her grids overwhelm one by presenting so much information is a relatively equal was as to be impenetrable to language. Here are some shots of her incredible installation at Dia Beacon.

I was also thinking of Hans Haacke’s Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social System, as of May 1 1971 as a grid that tells a story, a narrative grid that would go against Krauss’ theory. After all a grid can be used to organize a narrative as well as silence one, think of course, of a comic book. Haacke’s piece is somewhat narrative but it also uses the grid to present its evidence of injustice all-at-once and give the impression that it is over whelming.

Lastly I was thinking about some of my favorite grids and copies without originals by Félix González-Torres. Especially his piles of paper that the public can take from as they like and are infinitely replenished by the museum or gallery. I wonder if they are editioned… I know his piece Perfect Lovers is editioned as three plus one artist proof but this one hanging in the office of the Renaissance Society is rumored to be an authorized exhibition copy. Also anyone with two matching clocks can have a pretty amazing forgery of this piece.

Katz's Corn Beef
Tino during the dancers changeover

Banks Violetta

Tillmans

March 03

This week’s readings by Greenberg and Debord on kitsch and spectacle got me thinking a lot on the value of entertainment in art. In many ways I think what these articles were talking about was a certain wariness or distrust of any form of art that is too entertaining. The definition of entertaining being something along the lines of something that is easy to get absorbed in and once absorbed holds attention in such a way that is very pleasurable, causes no distress, and makes the experience of time seem to move faster. By this very definition, entertainment is very popular, if not incredibly addictive. However, according to Greenberg and Debord, this is art, or it cannot reach a very high level of art. Their definitions of art seem to demand more from a viewer than simply their attention. The avant-garde is by its nature, very challenging to its audience. It requires thought and critical interaction on some level that is less pleasurable than simply being told a really exciting story. This is also the value of the avant-garde, that it can edify you, change you in some way, where mere entertainment can only reinforce what you already know because it deals in conventions and themes you are already comfortable with and know well. I suppose I am most interested in the middle area that Greenberg talked about (Stienbeck?) between high and low culture. Of course this is all before Warhol etc. made careers and set the course of art on blurring the line between avant-garde and kitsch but I feel Greenberg had some inclination that this middle area was important. After all the avant-garde is full of risks, one is that it will be misunderstood if it is too difficult and another is that it will be ignored if it is too boring. As an artist I find this especially daunting because I am constantly at odds with my dueling impulses to be avant-garde, to push myself to experiment, to be difficult and my other impulse to be more kitsch, more entertaining, to appeal to the widest audience possible. After all, to be ignored in the hyper competitive art world, where there is so much entertaining, beautiful work everywhere is a big risk.

Week 3

Barthes’ Third meaning is interesting to me, especially after heaving read Camera Lucida, because you can begin to see how he is starting to lay the groundwork for his Studium/Punctum dialectic. What struck me most about the texts these weeks in comparison to Camera Lucida was how structured his arguments are and how he seems to be attempting to devise a system for distilling meaning from photographs. His approach verges on scientific although, already in the third meaning you can see how confounded he becomes by that which is obtuse, and difficult for him to describe. (I also has had some questions about his second meaning and the work of symbolism in images in relation to the intention of the image maker and the interpretation of an audience and how widely these things may differ. In other words, whos meanings are being addressed here? Do symbols the author intends but the reader does not understand revert back to first meaning? To studium?) By the time Barthes writes Camera Lucida he seems to abandon this rigors approach to image interpretation and comes up with an almost completely intuitive strategy for finding meaning in images. He leaves the structure he is trying to create here and goes completely based on feelings, in a very fluid way that allows him to double back on his ideas. I kept wondering of there was something to learn here, especially since we read Camera Lucida first, about how to think about the meaning of images. Of course as a practical matter charting the levels of meaning of a photograph is absurd and so much of what is most important about photographs to Barthes seems to resist being put into language, it is experiential. If even Barthes is left to the mercy of his emotions, and longings, and lusts when interpreting photographs what chance to I have to do any better?

Week 3

So after reading the two Benjamin articles this week I’m thinking a lot about the role of the artist in society. The Author as Producer was very provocative in its resoluteness that the Platonic ideal of the artist was unreasonable. This was pretty much the opposite of the premise of Andrea Friaser’s article last week that argued strongly in favor of the autonomous artist (while also acknowledging that it was really possible.) Then I also found myself referring back to the Motherwell reading from the first week that seemed to argue for a middle ground between the artist as political servant and the artist as necessarily independent and autonomous. Of course, not even Motherwell is convinced that such a middle ground could exists, he is just saying that for it to even be possible the artists must completely believe in its possibility.

So I will try to unpack this a little starting with Benjamin. He states that in Author as Producer and in Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction that art that doesn’t serve revolutionary causes is antirevolutionary, reinforcing capitalist structures, and essentially it aestheticizes politics, which is fascist, can only end in war, and war is bad unless you are that batshit futurist he quotes at the end of Art in the Age who seems to really love war. But these were all written in the 1930s, in the throws of the great depression, and between the wars. I suppose capitalism must have seemed pretty bad then, and it by no means seems perfect now, but one wonders what sort of politics (if any) the artist should serve today. I suppose I make what would be called political art now and I can’t really figure out if my work serves a politics or not. I think if anything it is the hopelessly pragmatic political agenda of critical theory mixed with Plato’s autonomous artist. Meaning I start from this place where I want to be radical and didactic and thrash after evil or something, but then I take a step back and whatever I’m thinking about becomes to complicated to react decisively to so I just make my work try to ask questions and then maybe if I can mange it, also be beautiful (which makes me feel a little guilty, always.) But I think for now this is ok, because the world as it exists, just seems too complicated, to entangled and messy for artists to believe in one kind of politics. It all seems to great to be encompassed by one theory.

I suppose I am a child of prosperity, so this must influence my view, but I come down on the side of Fraiser (for now.) The artist must be as free as possible, must not know the result of their pursuit when they undertake it, and must be brave enough to risk the dangers of autonomy in order to make anything meaningful. Benjamin’s “Producer Artist” does not sound at all like an artist to me but more like an activist, a revolutionary. Not an un-noble thing to be by any means, but if you are too sure of your politics there is no room for growth in your art.

Grad Student Deconstructs Take-Out Menu

Week 2

So I just finished reading Camera Lucida and I have a lot of thoughts that I was trying to keep track of while I read. I suppose first I kept thinking about how in class this week Debra asked if we could all agree that photographs produce knowledge. It’s obnoxious to disagree about the first thing you are asked to agree on but I kept thinking about the word knowledge. When Barthes wrote about the studium I kept thinking that it wasn’t so much like knowledge he was describing but it was more like information. Photographs defiantly produce information, and these given elements described as studium, were more or less the undisputable information the photograph was generating. Information, in my mind, is more neutral than knowledge. It is free of belief or desire or agenda. Then I kept thinking at was this information that was producing knowledge, the things Barthes knew to be true beyond doubt, the things that were true to him. These were what he called the punctum, as in he knew his mother existed in that winter garden photograph. Yet the photograph did not generate that knowledge, Barthes did. Perhaps my amendment to out initial giving would be that photographs produce information, and we through our interpretations turn that information into knowledge. I think in this way knowledge making as an active process, it happens, and us reading it make it happen. It is also less objective, and on a personal level completely uncontestable. Who, for example, could argue against the punctum of the winter garden photograph? This intensely personal and subjective aspect of punctum has come to distress me a bit. I can’t really describe it except to use the example of finding a song you really really love and playing it for a friend. You want so badly for your friend to love the song the same way you do, to feel punctured in the same way, and when they don’t its more than disappointing its isolating, its lonely. Maybe I am reading to much into this but Barthes seems very lonely towards the end of Camera Lucida, I picture him alone, going through old photographs. I wonder if he ever showed anyone the winter garden photograph or just kept it to himself.

Ranciere pick up on many of these themes, specificly citing studium and punctum in the introduction to The Future of The Image. I found this chapter difficult but interesting, especially when he comments on the duel poetic of photography being the tension between what the photograph can tell us, the information it gives, and what it keeps silent. I kind of interpreted this idea of silence as being what unknowns a photograph can evoke. For example in a photograph of a man sitting with his chin on his fist we know he is sitting and thinking, but it keeps very secret what he is thinking. I am also still fairly confused about the differences between Ostensive Images and Metamorphic Images. So I tried to make a ven diagram:

Changing gears pretty hard now I want to quickly address the Fraiser and Kaprow article. I really like the Kaprow, and have encountered this writing before as an undergraduate. His no rules, try everything new, down with art/long live art spirit was really inspiring to me as a photo student in Rochester and was the cause of me bringing in a sculpture/puzzle/doohicky Tylenol PM Bottle I made into a photo class. The photo class hated the admittedly not very good piece I brought in but I have to say Kaprows writing holds up for me. Even though it verges on nihilisticly hippied out in some ways for me because of its kind of “everything is good no matter what if you try hard believe” subtext I love the idea of thinking of how to push boundaries in all directions. Especially in the graduate school environment where safety is highly over valued I appreciate Kaprow’s spirit. I do wonder about the legacy of this kind of work. Aside from the work of Sehgal, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Michael Asher and a few others this legacy of the happening or the environment doesn’t seem to have the radical formlessness that Kaprow imagined. Installation art has become pretty mainstream, with its own sets of rules and conventions that I am kind of awed by the art world ability to integrate the radical into the mainstream.

In the Fraiser article I was most interested in the idea of artistic autonomy and how in some ways this is really impossible. After all, how many artists are really in the service of only themselves? Most want recognition and for this they sacrifice some autonomy in order to make their work more palatable to galleries, museums, grant givers etc. In more subtle ways I think even considering audience at all can undermine autonomy, for example I like one thing but I worry about how my class will see it in critique so I change it a bit. I wonder if an artist can consider audience and reception and still remain autonomous or if these things are really purely at odds.