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.