Shooting Wide Open

A shot from work in progress. Click for larger view.

Plus, excerpts from a couple of interviews we’ve been reading:

Time-Space-Existence: A Conversation with Wolfgang Laib (PDF)

WL: I know that some people think I am an apolitical nature romantic who sits in the meadows and takes no interest at all in social relationships. But a politician has influence today, at most he influences tomorrow, but culture and art exert influence over centuries. This sounds very naive to some people because they claim that matters are decided on entirely different levels – in politics, in economics – and art plays absolutely no role. But this is not hte case if you look at matters over longer periods of time. You can see it from the past: ultimately art and culture, not wars and confrontations, have stimulated change in people. Wars may have shoved this or that boundary or shifted the balance of power back and forth, but art and culture have carried mankind further, brought them somewhere else, and it has always been this way. I am still of the opinion that – and this may sound insanely naive – art changes the world.

When I see the best and most beautiful figures at the Metropolitan Museum, they have been scrubbed, and everything important about them has been polished away. This is what art historians consider good, the purely material form – but what is really important is gone. By contrast, there is the way that people in India treat these figures every day, how all kinds of things are poured over them, like milk and honey, and how the figures turn black from the votive lights and incense.

Dirty Toys: Mike Kelley Interviewed

MK: One of the big lies of Modernism is that certain changes in aesthetics would change culture completely, forever. Instead, I think it’s a continuous process – art may not effect lasting changes, but by changing certain representations, art changes ideas about things. If you make certain notions of behavior hip enough so that enough people want them, then the culture has to accommodate those behaviors. Things might flip back, but at least it shows that the possibility of change is there.

If you haven’t seen/heard it already, Komar and Melamid did a faux-scientific survey of what elements of music and subject matter people want and don’t want in songs and assembled the Most Wanted Song as well as the the Most Unwanted Song. Of course, the unwanted song turns out to be more interesting than the wanted song, which is pop pablum. Kids singing about holidays and Walmart has never sounded so good.

Here they are if you’re too lazy to click on the links, though due to upload constraints, these are sub 128 kbps.

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In Vancouver, an artist collective called Instant Coffee is doing a show called Light Bar:

Instant Coffee presents Light Bar, a full-spectrum light bar installation and venue for light therapy, light lectures, light shows, light reading and light rock. Instant Coffee’s Light Bar is an ongoing art project that investigates the potential and power of light. The artists come to this idea through necessity; living in Vancouver, where the rain can seem endless, the negative effects of the lack of sunlight on individual psyches and the large social milieu feel at times paramount. The use of light as a therapy or as a remedy for SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) is commonly and effectively used by individuals, but for Light Bar, Instant Coffee puts it to the test in small or large group situations.

A couple of less intense things today, thanks to Utata. First, is there anything strange about these portraits by Brandon Voges? At first it seems like he caught the subjects at slightly distressed or unflattering moments, but there is something just off about the way they all have puffy cheeks and open mouths and upturned eyebrows. Turns out they’re all upside down portraits. As in the subject was upside down. At that point, I marvel at how much hair product they used…

Nikki Graziano

Then, seen in Wired, this is what happens when you love math functions and photography.

Frederick Sommer

Speaking of photobooks, Joel showed the work of Frederick Sommer, who does everything from painting on cellophane negatives to cut paper objects, and pulled out The Box, which is a little clear plastic box of unbound cards with titles printed on one side and reproductions of photos, collages and cut paper on the other. A sort of greatest hits box. I thought it was great, since you get something that’s easy to store and not easily damaged since it’s protected by the box, and if you wanted to display them, you could do it on a rotating mix and match basis. The pieces themselves are a little more hardy too, since they are heavy cards rather than flimsy prints, so it’s easy to lay them around on a table and pick some up without feeling like you’re going to ruin someone’s valuable print.

FYI, there is also a Son of the Box. Unfortunately both are hard to find or extremely pricey at this point, but I wonder what the production costs on doing something similar with contemporary work would be.

From the Panorama, “Junot Diaz in conversation with Dave Eggers”:

JD: I think more than anything, my basic lesson as an artist has been humility. So when I get a bunch of stuff, like “Do you want to come to this thing, do you want to come to that thing?” I say to myself “Do I want to go to this because I want applause? Do I want applause to make up for the fact that my mommy never held me enough? Or is this something where I feel I can be of service, is this an event where I can be of service?” That’s the way I choose.

He also talked about age and the relatively low amount of options open to those starting out when older. He’s talking about writers, but it pretty applies to photographers.

Young people are more isolated from adults than they’ve ever been. Unless you’re an adult who is getting paid to somehow be involved with young people, chances are most adults have no contact with young people that they’re not related to. And the isolation is kind of a structural and it’s very deep and it’s very visible. When I came to the US, they hadn’t gotten this whole thing that, you know, strange adults were gonna rape and kidnap you, they hadn’t convinced us of that yet. Strange adults were someone you could possibly talk to – we hadn’t yet been divided by fear. The reality is that most of the raping, abuse, and attacking of young people was happening inside their families, but hey no matter, it was easier to convince people to be scared of strangers.

DE: I wonder what you think about whether the MFA programs in general are doing enough. Because I’ve had some frustrating experiences where I’ve written recommendations for former students of mine and young writers of color I’ve met along the way, and the results haven’t always been so good. A lot of MFA programs, they’re not interested in a nontraditional learner, or someone from abroad, or someone not from a polished academic background. it makes me furious sometimes.

JD: What’s scary about MFA programs is that there’s a huge amount of privilege these universities hoard. And what’s fascinating is that if you actually look at the profile of writers doing an MFA program, they look nothing like the rest of our society. They’re almost always between the ages of twenty-three and twenty-seven, so it’s almost never people with families. I think for me the biggest problem is that, again, if it doesn’t look anything like the rest of our country, what the fuck is going on? I don’t only want to read writing from twenty-six-year-old hipsters. I include myself in that category, for real. It’s like, sixty-something percent of the adults in this country have got kids. I would love to see that kind of age range represented, because I feel like it would deepen our literary tradition. And it’s not like MFAs control the bulk of everything that gets written. But it’s a lot of money and a lot of privilege that they do control. So I’m like you, I think that at least a third to half of all MFA seats should be reserved for people with families. Our literature would change in ways that would challenge all of us.

It’s that I feel like if these kids are not in a classroom with a couple of forty and fifty- and sixty-year-old people who have children, I feel like everyone loses. And the literature itself loses that as well.

Do we assume certain things about talent and youth? Or is the system set up so that a young person who doesn’t have a livelihood is favored over an adult with a living-wage day job?

And the state of the arts in America?

Audience member: My son wants to apply to MIT next year; he told me that his goal in college is not to take a single English class. How do you approach students like that?

JD: I think that at this moment we belong to a country that marginalizes and trivializes the arts. For all the lip service this country gives to the arts, I feel like your child is in some ways voicing the real code of this country, which is, like, “Can I avoid this totally irrelevant, superfluous practice?” If you live in this country as long as I have, you become really prepared to deal with that. I guess my faith is always the same: exposure to the arts, especially that passionate, compassionate exposure to the arts, always seems to melt the pharaoh’s heart. And that doesn’t mean that you’ll win every person, but out of every ten, if you win one, you’re doing more than some of our highly funded arts organizations do. I don’t blame a young person who spends his entire life soaking in anti-arts culture for not liking the arts. I believe that so much is the way this gets distributed in people’s head, seen at an unconscious level.