Shooting Wide Open

Art veterans among you are probably over-familiar with this, but I have to work it out for myself.

Abstract works are more purely visual – having a preference means having a preference for the colors and negative space, lines and curves in one particular piece, not a preference of subject matter. If you like to look at things, really look at things, they’re wonderful, but if you need to focus on something human, something more object-oriented, then they’re horribly tedious and boring. Personally I like to approach abstract works on a more purely visual basis than try to find figurative objects. It’s kind of a pet peeve of mine when people say something like “it’s like a beach!” Not that that’s not a legit reaction; I just prefer the more purely visual.

Prof. Morten Hansen was lecturing about space and depth in abstract modern paintings, about Malevich and Barnett Newman, and I thought, hmmm, I’d never considered abstract paintings to be particularly spatial. But then I remembered the Marden retrospective as well as a couple of other works at SFMOMA in 2006. Unfortunately, all the pieces I mention are essentially in-person pieces, but I’ll try to talk about them anyway.

Tom Wesselmann, Picasso

Some works that actually have three-dimensional objects protruding out of the canvas, like Tom Wesselmann’s Still Life 30, looks relatively flat, even in person, whereas something like Picasso’s Seated Woman (1927), if you stare at it long enough, has a strange multi-dimensional feel to it despite being simply lines and shapes. I think Wesselmann was going for a more subtle effect of “hey, something’s off here” rather than a real sense of depth, but before seeing those two things, I’d never thought particularly hard about it.

There was also a great if thinly populated Marden retrospective. Guess single-color canvases draw very few people, but I thought that gathered together, there was an odd peace about them. I don’t know how they play on their own, in the midst of other works, but together there was a coherence to each series as well as the line of his career – together, you could notice things like the fact that his colored lines tend to be neat whereas the grey lines tend to be smeary in many works. You could see the progression from single lines on single colored canvases to his more recent gargantuan Propitious Garden of Plane Image. The six panels covered almost an entire wall and each panel alternately using five of six total colors, the sixth serving as background. I loved staring at how different each color looked on a different colored background, seeing the different colors pop out. I’d like to imagine there is also a line of the background color wriggling invisibly about in the background.

Brice Marden

Something about abstract art is weirdly escapist and hedonist.

I can’t believe I just spent a night writing this instead of scanning while watching Big Love (awesome show), but I’ll take some solace in the fact that I got Joerg to put the word “chipmunk” in a subject title.

First off, let’s clarify a bit. Don’t read too much into the chipmunks! I was looking for an excuse to show the Star Wars chipmunk. I admit the images and text in my posts aren’t always closely wedded. It’s fair to say that if I don’t mention the photographer by name in the body of the post, the image(s) aren’t very tightly connected to the ideas in the text. Sometimes I do it to break up the monotony of the text and give readers a few easily identifiable landmarks. I’m going to do this right now. Since this discussion includes La Pura Vida, let’s take a look at Bryan Formhals’ work as we proceed, shall we?

Bryan Formhals

KILLING THE CHIPMUNK

So. Our chipmunk is not an example of public art or vernacular art. Art is not the point, which is precisely my point. It is just an example of someone putting together a group of other people’s images for public view, an example of how photography is used for different purposes that don’t necessarily need to be art-related to be ultimately beneficial to the art photo community. Having a public that is excited about photography in all its forms is a good thing for art photography in general in my mind. The issue for me is not whether Flickr is full of snapshots or if artists use it. I agree with Bryan over at lapuravida that it’s very difficult to define what Flickr is since, like the net, it is just an empty template into which individuals can pour anything. I have no doubt that this is mostly true:

flickr it’s just a massive thing. Nobody can just diss it like that. Probably a quarter or half of the photographers we’ll talk about in the future are now or have been there at some point. I think that the whole thing is just starting. Now it has been brewing for a while, and the first photographers and curators are getting out of it into the world. Those exhibitions, books, etc. will have nothing to do with flickr, but flickr has just been the yeast in the process. You’re not looking at it to find the best of the photographers that you already know. You’re looking at it to try to figure out who out of those millions of users you’ll know in a decade.
- Joni Karanka

However, I’m making a broader statement that we should look at Flickr neither as the breeding grounds for new artists or a pool of vernacular photos for artists to draw on, but as a forum for generally getting the public excited about photography in a way that museums can’t. This is done by the interaction, the large number of searchable photos and also the presence of working fine artists, amateur fashion photogs, sports fanatics and what have you. You can be inspired by photos in the MOMA, but you can’t do anything about it, not really, in the MOMA. Flickr on the other hand, is an open DIY invitation. You see something you like, well, sign up and join in. That’s not to say that the point of museums or galleries isn’t to get people excited about and doing photography, but Flickr is built so that interaction and passive gazing occur in the same space.

There really is something for everyone on Flickr. I think we actually all agree on this point. You can find your own level – if you want to post family snapshots and limit your interaction to your own family and friends, you can. If you want to grow up to be just like Dave the Strobist, you can. And so on with fashion, wildlife, landscapes, sports, street, fine art, etc. The percentage of photos that fall into these different “genres” on Flickr probably mirrors the percentage of photos in these genres in the larger world in general. So in that view, fine art is in fact still a small slice of the pie. That’s no surprise.

I threw a monkey wrench into my own argument by tacking on that last paragraph, which was really a lead-in for another issue, and the unfortunate choice of the word “curate.” Edit and group are more accurate terms. I am talking broadly about the skill of parsing sequences or series of images, which is related to the skill of parsing images much as parsing sentences is a step up from parsing words.

Bryan Formhals

KILLING THE TROLLS

I do agree with Joerg that the bulk of the discussions on Flickr tend to be about gear, how to be a pro and technique, and are laced with trollish remarks. But those remarks are really just a part of everyday life. Let’s not pretend that every discussion we have in person with a sizable group of people is rational and orderly and even-tempered. It’s just that all the snitty little remarks get recorded permanently which makes them that much more intrusive, but at least on the web you can just skip over comments made by trolls. In real life you actually have to listen to them, or deal with their blather.

Though you get the inevitable pointless ones, I like the comments function. It’s the easiest thing we have these days, and it’s getting better. I can’t think of a site off the top of my head, but now there are ways for a community to render trollish comments invisible by collective vote. This way, you end up with only the comments that most people find worthwhile and you don’t really need one moderator to do this intensively – only everyone to click a helpful/unhelpful button as they’re reading. Of course, this only works with sizeable communities, but actually, I bet it’d work okay if you even had ten loyal readers who regularly voted, depending on how sensitive your visibility threshold is.

Misunderstandings of tone and intent happen a lot online, but part of this comes out of a limitation of technology. For example, there’s gotta be a way to pull these related blog posts together into a more easily readable and respondable (?) form so that I don’t have to open 10 tabs to keep up, without removing them completely. But we’re not quite there yet. I’m hoping the more modular, data-oriented semantic web will make some of this easier. I think you guys are arguing on different planes, about different points. When it comes to the subject of Flickr and the vernacular we all have some easily pushed buttons that when the subject pops up, we tend to harp on. I do it. This is not just a feature of web discussions either.

In my experience, the majority of conversational exchanges over course of a typical day are likely pretty inconsequential, unless you are the lucky bastard that lives among people who have idea diarrhea. I’m missing the smalltalk gene, so I wish the day consisted of one intense debate after another, but realistically, I’ve learned that there’s no way to expect that from other people. It’s just not feasible anywhere, so I’ve developed a tolerance for offhanded remarks, smart alek comments and the inevitable snarky intrusions.

Bryan Formhals

CIVILIZED DISCOURSE: AN EXAMPLE

Actually, I use Flickr now more for the forums than for the pictures. There are groups where more civilized heads prevail. I favor Utata. The pool is pretty typical Flickr. The group’s strength is how well it’s run. Many people have been there for years, so they’ve gotten to know each other, which always helps keep the trolling down. Aside from basic civility, rules are few – there are no genre, gear, or theme restrictions. There are weekly participatory exercises/assignments. Greg writes up a new fine art photographer twice a month – look at this formidible list! It is not comprehensive, but it is nothing to scoff at, considering he used to do it every week in addition to picking some of the assignments, publishing said assignments, culling feature photos for the Utata website proper, writing the occasional text for the front page and being active in everyday discussions, sometimes stepping in when things take on a nasty tone. He shares these tasks with other mods. Behold, a collective with 16 moderators, 17,000 members and nearly 9,000 discussion topics that hasn’t fallen into complete chaos.

Right now there’s a discussion on vegetarianism and slow food, and not long before, there was heated debate over the new development in the Shepard Fairey case (started by yours truly, no less). All sorts of bizarre things pop up. (Cloaca Machines or blink reminder glasses?) I think the amateur/hobbyist nature of the group makes it more laid back and pleasant. I look into more hardcore groups and there are just too many ideological debates for me. Utata is just a nice place to ask a question without being jumped on and picked apart. All this civility might make it too nice for some, but I think it’s a nice place for a beginner to explore without feeling the need to jump on either side of any given argument. The natives are friendly and funny. The group doesn’t have everything but of course, you can supplement with other groups, even start your own.

I think of it has most successful long term relationships – not every moment is fire or peace or happiness, but you know what, it works. 1/6th of the time is really awesome, 3/6ths is good, 1/6th is annoying little things that as much your problem as his, and 1/6th is some serious problems to work through. But what have you got to complain about? 5/6ths of the time you’ve got no problems, you’re not going to break up. (Loosely spun off a study that showed that couples who were negative to each other for more than 1/6th of their interaction time tended to break up.)

But I digress. It takes time to find a community that you’re comfortable with. The thing about the web is that even though it’s a different medium, all the same rules pretty much still apply. You need to reach out to others for others to become interested in you. It takes a while before people respond to and get to know you. Disagreements will arise and there will be drama. It takes time and effort before you really get anything truly rewarding out of it, and at some point, especially if you’re interested in fine art, it’s more efficient to leave Flickr for the world of the blogs and online magazines to see the work you’re most interested in.

I can imagine that if I had been as savvy about what was available online in the blogosphere then as I am now, it might’ve been harder to dig through Flickr, but at the time I was feeling my way around, I had a lot to learn from a wider range of photographs, and I didn’t mind looking at everything I could get my eyes on. I managed to find my way to some contacts whose work I admire (Li Wei, Mu Ge, Lung S. Liu, among others) and it’s a lot easier to hop into a crowd familiar with the history of photography from this point.

Bryan Formhals

NEW WORK, UNFINISHED WORK

One great and unique thing about Flickr – the work keeps pouring in. When I’m learning, I personally feel the need to look at a lot of photos, and sometimes the work featured on portfolio sites and blogs is too periodic. Once or twice a year, if that, photographers release new work. I simply need to look at far more than that to speed up the learning process, and Flickr is perfect for this. All photographers are connected to a web of other photographers, so if I ever feel that I’ve exhausted my pool of contacts, I can trawl my contacts’ contacts or favorites to find new stuff. Also, as someone trying to figure out my own optimal process, it’s better to engage with a group of people who are constantly showing new work rather than a finished, edited portfolio. It helps me feel motivated to shoot new stuff and I get to see the editing process to some extent, of other photographers. This is something that is entirely missing from the museum and artist website models of seeing work.

I suspect that one of the main reasons Flickr isn’t always taken seriously is a practical one – do you want to show potential colleagues and employers outtakes or work that you might ultimately decide isn’t good enough? For art directors or buyers I can see how this is the main problem – streams are just a mash of personal snapshots and serious work (if there is a distinction to be made). Do the snapshots make employers nervous about ability? Or perhaps mostly it’s just a matter of not having the time to look through hundreds of photos. One complaint I do have about Flickr is that for a photo sharing site, it sure doesn’t give you versatile options for display.

Bryan Formhals

A little later in the week I want to address the issue of elitism vs populism and more importantly, our tendency to make these classifications in the first place, but I felt we had to shoo that chipmunk out of the room. It’s gone now, poor thing!

Simmons and Belonax

Remember that Art in Storefronts initiative? The chosen artists have been announced, and the most interesting to me is Simmons and Belonax’s “Everything is Okay” neon sign installation proposed for Central Market St, not the least because there is a mock-up photo.

There is also Market St poster plan for next year that includes some work by Bihn Danh. One can only hope daguerreotypes are involved, but maybe that’s asking too much for street posters. The project is described as:

The final series, by artist Bihn Danh, called The Wonderful Life of Gardening, will be installed from April 5 to July 1, 2010. This series incorporates photographic collaborations with San Francisco gardeners, including some of those who tend garden plots under the San Francisco Recreation and Park’s Community Garden Program.

There’s also a bit of strangeness brewing. As, I assume, a part of the SF Planning Dept’s plan to prettify the Mission (I heard about this in the Mission Dispatch, and it certainly explains the construction on Valencia St), the SF Arts Commission announced the winning proposal for a Valencia St installation as Michael Arcega‘s, but it was a close one between Arcega and Brian Goggin. Apparently one of the jurors on the deciding panel voted with a fraction, and when he was told he couldn’t, threw the deciding vote to Mike. I’m not really sure what was going on behind the scenes, but Goggin saw an opening, and with some mobilization he has won a revote. Not sure when it is happening since I only heard about this today, but if you’re a local, you might want to take a look at the two proposals and let Mary Chou (Mary.Chou [at] sfgov.org) know if you, as a community member, have any views.

Personally, I think Mike’s proposal is a lot more functional and meaningful as a part of the daily activity of the community, though it looks like Goggin has more experience in street installation. In the interest of full disclosure, I have to say that he was the TA to one of my art classes a while ago and I am swayed by the fact that the work he showed us in class was very interesting. Not to mention he is a nice guy! So if you have thoughts, shoot off an email. Who knows if community messages will make a real difference, but it can’t hurt, especially since one of the main goals of all these projects is to build a few spots where it’s pleasant for people to hang out and to make the area more pedestrian friendly.

UPDATE: From Kate Patternson of SFAC:

There is a lot of misinformation flying around about the recent Valencia Streetscape Public Art Project artist selection process. Here are the facts:

Essentially, when the panel met and originally voted it appeared that Michael Arcega had the highest score and was declared the winner. However, afterward the staff reviewed the votes and realized that there was an error in the scoring, which invalidated all of the votes. In order to rectify the situation, we are going to redo the last selection panel meeting and all original project finalists will be included. This has nothing to do with any particular artist, it is simply a mistake, which we are going to correct.

The final selection panel meeting is currently scheduled for October 14. More information will be posted soon.

Remnants of a GNC, 24th St.

An “attractive display to draw potential renters” sets off an alarm or two, but Art in Storefronts sounds like a good little project with a local focus if you can make a new piece in time. They seem to be more receptive to multimedia installations but if you print large, I’d imagine it would work. More info is available in the application form available from the SFAC website. The run-down:

- Deadline to apply: Aug. 14, 2009
- Applicants may be an individual or an artist collective / organization.
- Applicants must be based in San Francisco.
- You may apply for more than one neighborhood, each with a separate application.
- Only new artwork made specifically for this project will be considered.
- Proposals must respond to the history or unique character of the neighborhood.
- Priority will be given to artists that live or work in the neighborhood.
- Selected artists will be given $500 to cover artwork production expenses and time.

Installation
Sept. 1-20: Central Market (From 5th to 9th), 10 storefronts
Oct. 1-23: Bayview (3rd St from Evans to Williams), 3 storefronts
Oct. 1-30: Tenderloin (Taylor from Market to Ellis), 3 storefronts
Oct. 1-Nov. 20: Mission (24th Street Corridor from Mission Street to Potrero), 3 storefronts

The project will run through January 2010.

Elijah Gowin

I came across the phrase “use vs exchange value” while reading New York For Sale that triggered the memory of a brief moment in the De Young museum. My friend and I were looking at a slit drum from an indigenous culture and suddenly I felt incredibly sad that the instrument will likely never make a sound for an audience again. We’ve preserved only the object, not what it represented or its cultural function. Have we missed the point? Museums are supposed to give us a sense of the lives of others, of past peoples, but how worthwhile is this shallow understanding if it’s based only on objects and appearances in someone’s life instead of the experience of it?

This sort of museum display is comparable to old fashioned zoos where animals were caged in bleak concrete cubes and no attempt was made to situate them in any semblance of their natural habitat. It’s the same mentality of an object for itself as a visual curiosity instead of placement within a context, complex understanding of its functional role. The object or animal is assigned a false cultural or monetary value rather than its true functional value. So instead of adding something to the lives of visitor, to the local community, the object sits in a sterile display, serving mostly as an investment that bolsters the institution’s stats and draws more paying customers. The museum is such a pleasant experience – the lighting and displays look so nice, and the objects are inanimate and incapable of eliciting sympathy, that the comparison seems a bit loopy. But I think it holds.

Wouldn’t it be nice to hear what that drum sounds like? To have either an audio recording of an controlled demonstration or even better, one day of the year when the community is invited to hear/see the drum played live. That’s asking a lot, but in this day and age we probabbly have the technology to make a 3D scan of the drum and reconstruct it from similar materials. Then the original artifact remains intact and we can play the replica at will!

How much fun could we have handling exact replicas of history museum items?

4,592 tons.

Matthew Pokoik

I love images which speak for themselves. There can be no doubt as to what specifically most of Pokoik’s Global City is about, at least in my mind. When I see our modern commercial world photographed like this, I automatically react with a tremor of fear for the future, but I don’t doubt that many people have a very positive reaction to this profusion of color and product. Visually speaking, I don’t blame them. What I worry about though, is the unavoidable glamorization of subject matter, regardless of how critical it is, through placement on wall, in a magazine, in any public form that has any hint of salesmanship and promotion to it. We might have a different reaction to these images if we found them in a textbook, which primarily serves the subject matter rather than itself.

Would our attitudes toward consumption and exporting consumerist habits to the rest of the world change if fashionable mainstream media were drenched in such imagery? Photographs like Pokoik’s are relevant in the most direct way, and I’d like to think that, displayed in the right places, they would make a difference. They deserve wider circulation than in the art world, which is, after all, more ambiguous, and focused on the aesthetic side of things and therefore work is somewhat at risk of being looked at in terms of style rather than subject matter. Call something an expose or document and it’s one, call it art and it’s a whole other ballgame, isn’t it? I suppose part of the blame falls on the mainstream journalism community which seems to stay away from work without a very clear message. Ambiguity is scary!

Makes me wonder how people reacted to Courbet or the socially-realist painters back in the day.

If you haven’t seen the short films of Adam Pescadero, also known as PES, he uses everyday materials in a very fun way. Western Spaghetti here has supplanted Kaboom!, which you can see on his website along with other shorts, as my favorite.

I just finished a film, Still Life, by Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhang Ke, which tells the parallel stories of two people trying to find their relatives as a result of displacement caused by the Three Gorges damn project and development in southern China.

The actual Chinese title of the film (San Xia Hao Ren) literally translates to “The Good People of Three Gorges,” which hints at the content of the film, but “Still Life” would be a very fitting subtitle. It is a very visual, photographic film full of very slow pans and shots that are so static and quiet they literally look like photo stills. It only occurred to me afterward that the element of time makes films like this so much more effective than photo essays at capturing the true drawn-out drudgery of poverty. There is a terrible and misleading tendency in some works to glamorize the camarderie of menial laborers or the sometimes quirky makeshift trappings of poverty that is completely lacking here. The poverty in this film is not the “we’re poor but full of energy and find happiness in what we can” type that goes down easier and to some extent appeases our guilt a little. Instead, Jia avoids the “salt of the earth” archetype and shows poverty as an endless, back-breaking and monotonous grind in which a person is forced to risk his life for a bit of money.

He also shows a glimpse of the flip side of development in the second half of the film, but the success of developers is only spoken of and unseen, and the film for the most part follows the story of the rural working poor.

Be warned that this film is deliberate and almost infuriatingly slow-paced. There’re virtually no dramatic events certainly not the kind of soundtrack that tells you what to feel. The plot, one that is utterly without twist or gimmick, unfolds very slowly, and though each person’s journey is very important in their lives, the plot as a narrative device is subservient to the context in which it takes place. The real impact of the film comes from the accumulated force of the little details like the offhand comments made by incidental characters and small moments like the Euros-to-RMB magic trick at the beginning of the film, which pass without direct commentary.

I didn’t like Jia’s earlier film, The World, which deal with similar themes but felt a bit too forced in its unusual setting to me. The more involved plot drew my attention away from the social issues hovering near the surface. Still Life feels much more true.

It’s unclear what proportion of the cast are actually professional actors. A few of the main characters certainly are, but the flat, inscrutable expressions on the faces of some of the minor characters lack the clear intent to show found in the character acting I’m accustomed to. In fact, the idea for the movie came out of an hour-long documentary on a Chinese painter travelling to the Si Chuan area to paint (included on the DVD), and in that short you can see some of the sequences that were ultimately included in the feature film. In an interview (also on the DVD), Jia Zhang Ke states that within days of arriving in the Three Gorges area, he knew he had to make a film there.

There is also the excrutiating sequence when the painter visits the widow and children of a worker killed on the job during their stay. He brings them photographs of the man that they had taken, as well as brightly colored gifts for the children which seem entirely out of place in the damp grey room full of drably dressed poor people. One of the gifts is a neon pink Snow White backpack for the daughter. What a telling moment – out goes their livelihood and in comes Disney.

The gifts jog my memory of Nachtwey’s story of a man in southeast Asia who lived by the side of railway tracks, without property and without dignity. Donations poured in after viewers saw Nachtwey’s photos and the man was able to move his family into a proper room. Not to discount the impact of single donations, but both these incidents make me wonder if we’re really that simple-minded in our thinking. Instead of giving more support to organizations that attempt to solve the problem at its source, to curb the social ills that create these circumstances, we tend to focus on individual cases and on treating the symptoms, as it were. It’s like trying to patch thousands of burst water pipes. Wouldn’t it be better if we just developed a type of pipe that’s not so prone to bursting? But I suppose it’s an apt metaphor – the infrastructure of those old pipes is not so easy to disassemble and replace.

I initially meant to post a little paragraph letting you guys know about the film. Instead, this has turned into a good sized review with full-on soapbox action! But my long-windedness aside, you should really check the film out, especially since it’s, aside from a couple of incongruous computer effects, eminently watchable for photographers and filmmakers. (Some scenes seem to recall other movies – the end of Fight Club, the panning dinner conversation in Greenaway’s The Draughtsman’s Contract…)

William Gedney

I’ve been digging through Duke Library’s Gedney collection looking at all the contact sheets. I love seeing other photographer’s contact sheets, the sense they give of the photographer’s approach of a subject, the momentary reactions to the scene rather than the well-considered edit afterwards.

I took advantage of SFMOMA’s monthly free day and was promptly turned off by their semi-interactive show The Art of Participation. Only at an institution like MOMA would a show with the word participation in its title include signs that say “Do not touch” and staff who sternly ask people to “step behind the line.” To be honest, I’d rather there be a physical railing between the work and I than some invisible barrier that I’m not too sure of. I feel like I’m constantly being watched and that’s not my idea of a fun time viewing art.

Some pieces were interaction friendly while others were historical and off limits. You could tell what was which by observing other people, but to be sure, you had to glance at the sign. Personally, I want to look at the work first before reading any (preferably no) signs, so this was a bit deflating, like somebody scraped the icing off the cake. I walked into a dark room with a circle of vintage microphones, and the staff member encouraged me to participate by demonstrating speaking into the mics and virtually jumping around the room. I gotta give her some credit for doing her job enthusiastically, but by that point, I was in no mood to join in. Participation is a choice isn’t it?

However, I’ve never seen so many young people having fun there before (I think there may have been a school trip). Definitely a welcome change from the usual hovering in dead silence. Maybe I’m just a grumpasaurus.

On a positive note, it was the first time I’d been there after they changed their photography policy, and it felt right to see people snapping away on their digicams and big honkin’ DSLRs. My idea of art is something you can take with you, in a manner of speaking, and look at, think about again, share with others. So being able to take photos for personal use in an art museum feels very natural.

Inhabitat

I saw the following two videos and couldn’t wait to share.

The first is a very innovative project that straddles the line (point?) between art, design and technology. Theo Jansen makes wind-powered, almost self-animating creatures move on legs powered by what he calls a reinvention of the wheel. If you watch the second half of this video, he shows footage of a 3 ton metal creature being pushed along by one man. I think this is an invention that will definitely have many applications down the line. He also shows the creature detecting environmental conditions like high wind or water and taking measures on its own to deal with them. And all built with cheap materials like plastic tubes, plastic ties and lemonade bottles. It can even “store” wind in the bottles for later use!

The second is a fun bit of street art by Joshua Allen Harris, who installs inflatable garbage bag creatures on subway grates on New York streets so that when a train passes, the creature comes to life.

I wish there were more art projects like this – simple but inventive ideas that you can experience in everyday life without going into galleries and museums where art is cordoned off and you’re reprimanded for approaching it. It’s not abstruse – everybody gets it and is cheered by it!