“The function of portrait painting was to underwrite and idealise a chosen social role of the sitter. It was not to present him as ‘an individual’ but, rather, as an individual monarch, bishop, landowner, merchant and so on. Each role had its accepted qualities and its acceptable limit of discrepancy. (A monarch or a pope could be far more idiosyncratic than a mere gentleman or courtier.) The role was emphasised by pose, gesture, clothes and background. (…)

The satisfaction of having one’s portrait painted was the satisfaction of being personally recognised and confirmed in one’s position: it had nothing to do with the modern lonely desire to be recognised ‘for what one really is’. (…)

It seems that the demands of a modern vision are incompatible with the singularity of viewpoint which is the prerequisite for a static-painted ‘likeness’. The incompatibility is connected with a more general crisis concerning the meaning of individuality. Individuality can no longer be contained within the terms of manifest personality traits. In a world of transition and revolution individuality has become a problem of historical and social relations, such as cannot be revealed by the mere characterizations of an already established social stereotype. Every mode of individuality now relates to the whole world.”

— John Berger, “The Changing View of Man in the Portrait” in Selected Essays.

Images in order: August Sander, Young Farmers, Westerwald, 1914; Alex Dellow, Teddy Boys, Tottenham 1954; Robert Frank, Newburgh, New York, 1955; Alec Soth, Josh Joelton, Tennessee; Bryan Schutmaat, Perry, Cascade, Montana

@6 days ago with 96 notes
#Art #Photography #Portraiture #Theory #Criticism #John Berger #August Sander #Alex Dellow #Robert Frank #Alec Soth #Bryan Schutmaat 

From “Nine Years, A Million Conceptual Miles”

“With the final death throes of traditional editorial photography as a means to earn a living, there was a shift of emphasis in the realms of documentary photography and photojournalism, away from the pages of magazines and newspapers and into museums and galleries and the pages of photobooks. Few knew how digital capture or postproduction would impact independent and artistic photography. And I suspect that no one anticipated the extent to which digital dissemination would increase the number of independent photographers and the potential to self-publish. If anything, the schools of and growing market for contemporary art photography seemed content with digital photography mimicking its analog predecessors’ conventions and not particularly interested in deciphering what might be uniquely digital characteristics, in either its aesthetics or its channels of dissemination.

Watching these developments, I’ve oscillated between feeling we are on the cusp of seeing unimaginably brilliant, liberated, and different iterations of photographic ideas in a wholesale digital world and being worried that we may be marking the cynical end of a once-central visual medium that is now being put out to a niche pasture.

My own drama over this problematic cultural paradigm doesn’t stem from a sense of photographic practice per se becoming redundant in its capability for social and cultural awakening. Far from it. Instead, it comes from a genuine concern that the very mechanisms of the medium’s dissemination—publishing houses, museums, commercial galleries, and art schools—that could be seen as having won the good fight to legitimize photography as a contemporary art form with its own medium-specific history are becoming part of the problem. These structures, with their gamut of agendas, unwittingly risk placing a stranglehold upon the evolution of the medium.

It may be stating the obvious to say that no one person—indeed, no institutional matrix—is powerful enough to hold back the momentum of creative change or its full cluster of mitigating factors. The ecosystem of image making continues to evolve, and does not require the validation of art galleries and museums. What is at stake is how the mainstream instruments of “photography as culture” can deal with the arrival of the first wave of independent photographic practice that does not look like or model itself upon the separatist story of photography that institutions have already told.”

— Charlotte Cotton.

@1 month ago with 21 notes
#Photography #Criticism #Charlotte Cotton #Aperture #Institutional critique #Art 

"

…the out-and-out confrontational confidence of the totally ignorant is, in my experience, gendered. Men explain things to me, and other women, whether or not they know what they’re talking about. Some men.

Every woman knows what I’m talking about. It’s the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world. It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men’s unsupported overconfidence.

I wouldn’t be surprised if part of the trajectory of American politics since 2001 was shaped by, say, the inability to hear Coleen Rowley, the FBI woman who issued those early warnings about al-Qaeda, and it was certainly shaped by a Bush administration to which you couldn’t tell anything, including that Iraq had no links to al-Qaeda and no WMDs, or that the war was not going to be a “cakewalk.” (Even male experts couldn’t penetrate the fortress of their smugness.)

Arrogance might have had something to do with the war, but this syndrome is a war that nearly every woman faces every day, a war within herself too, a belief in her superfluity, an invitation to silence, one from which a fairly nice career as a writer (with a lot of research and facts correctly deployed) has not entirely freed me.

"

Men Explain things to Me, by Rebecca Solnit, April 2008.
@2 months ago with 21 notes
#Culture #Criticism #Rebecca Solnit #Cultural criticism #Guernica magazine #TomDispatch.com 
“Black “soldiers” – or are they “the native dwellers”? – clean up after those to whom “the task of burying the dead” have “possibly” been called away. This image is Gardner’s only acknowledgement that the Union forces included former slaves, and it presents them in the most menial of roles. The image resonates beyond text and frame, its grim ironies and bizarre revelations suddenly flashing before us the “remains” Holmes wished to bury from view: decomposing flesh and bleached bones attended by those very humans whose claim to humanity gave cause to the horrors of war. In a gesture so simple it eludes the author of the text, the two grand invisibilities of the war appear together as one image: death as decomposition and dissolution; blacks laboring in once pastoral fields, reaping an even grimmer harvest than that imagined by “Harvest of Death” The grim image and its equivocal text shows with even grimmer irony how the victors cleansed the war of troubling debris and in the fading replications of the photograph found evidence of a gorgeous whole, the desired sacredness of a bleached cultural memory.” — Allan Trachtenberg Through a Glass, Darkly: Photography and Cultural Memory

“Black “soldiers” – or are they “the native dwellers”? – clean up after those to whom “the task of burying the dead” have “possibly” been called away. This image is Gardner’s only acknowledgement that the Union forces included former slaves, and it presents them in the most menial of roles.

The image resonates beyond text and frame, its grim ironies and bizarre revelations suddenly flashing before us the “remains” Holmes wished to bury from view: decomposing flesh and bleached bones attended by those very humans whose claim to humanity gave cause to the horrors of war. In a gesture so simple it eludes the author of the text, the two grand invisibilities of the war appear together as one image: death as decomposition and dissolution; blacks laboring in once pastoral fields, reaping an even grimmer harvest than that imagined by “Harvest of Death” The grim image and its equivocal text shows with even grimmer irony how the victors cleansed the war of troubling debris and in the fading replications of the photograph found evidence of a gorgeous whole, the desired sacredness of a bleached cultural memory.”

— Allan Trachtenberg Through a Glass, Darkly: Photography and Cultural Memory

@2 months ago with 30 notes
#Photography #Criticism #Allan Trachtenberg #Alexander Gardner #Documentary photography #History #The American Civil War #American Suburb X 

“Modern art engaged historical forms, often in order to deconstruct them. Our new art tends to assume historical forms — out of context and reified. Parodic or straight, these quotations plead for the importance, even the traditional status, of the new art. In certain quarters this is seen as a “return to history”; but it is in fact a profoundly ahistorical enterprise, and the result is often “aesthetic pleasure as false consciousness, or vice versa.”

This “return to history” is ahistorical for three reasons: the context of history is disregarded, its continuum is disavowed, and conflictual forms of art and modes of production are falsely resolved in pastiche. Neither the specificity of the past nor the necessity of the present is heeded. Such a disregard makes the return to history also seem to be a liberation from history. And today many artists do feel that, free of history, they are able to use it as they wish.”

— Hal Foster, “Against Pluralism” in Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (1998)

@1 week ago with 13 notes
#Art #Criticism #Theory #Hal Foster 

"

Mandatory newness—and oceans of commentary on it—is an old problem. It’s now coming into its second century. After the March to Abstraction came the March of Ideas, when art became, in Harold Rosenberg’s words, “a species of centaur—half art materials, half words.” Yet the art world is still thriving, the papers report. The money is still flowing. The parties still glitter. New artists are declared important and great. And sometimes, they are.

But how hard it must be now for an artist when it seems that not only has every material form and format imaginable been tried to express Truth and Beauty but every idea has now also found material form. I watch in awe as artists rise to face that challenge, and even more so when they succeed. But sometimes I feel like I’m witnessing the strain. All artists respond to their inner life and the outer world and other art in some mix. These basic ingredients have not changed. But too often, after leaving a contemporary art exhibition, having hungrily wanted a powerful aesthetic experience, I wonder why I was left cold. It could be that I am not versed enough in the ideas of the centaurs to see the intellectual beauty. It could be, I remind myself, that most art in most times is just so-so; there never was an age of the ubiquitous masterpiece. But it also feels, sometimes, as if an edge has become the only ante to be exhibited at all. As if the edge has become the whole point.

"

Garry Sernovitz, writing in n+1 magazine in his essay “Edge and the Art Collector”
@2 months ago with 35 notes
#Art #Criticism #n+1 magazine #Gary Sernovitz #Cultural Criticism #The Art Market #Institutional critique 

“The problem is the medium’s literalness, so the photographer is not only trying to go beyond subject matter and find subject, she has to take her audience with her. Most people, and this can include people quite sophisticated and well versed in other arts, assume that if the photograph is of a white horse, the photographer is talking about white horses rather than loneliness or loss, or any number of apparently unlikely subjects, as well as the more obvious metaphors like strength or grace. Of course, the ultimate task for any photographer is to talk about the most unlikely things and the white horse, in short, to tell the subject’s tale as well as her own. And that, I feel, is what Susan Lipper has done with conspicuous success.”

— Gerry Badger, writing in his essay “Far from New York City: The Grapevine Work of Susan Lipper”, in The Pleasures of Good Photographs. 

“In 1994, when work from Grapevine was shown in the group exhibition Who’s Looking at the Family? at the Barbican Art Gallery, Lipper’s photographs were, inevitably, regarded as documentary—a photographer’s mapping of a specific location and community. Grapevine was seen, almost universally, as a social commentary on a way of life—analysis of a community, who would, inevitably, be seen as ‘other’—poor, different, chaotic, dysfunctional. Lipper saw her work very differently. For her, photography was an expression of the self, a way of manifesting the imagination through the mapping of elsewhere. The series was embedded in both a photographic magical realism and a Carveresque sense of the absurdity of dysfunction.”

— Val Williams, writing in her essay “Susan Lipper: Collisions of Experience” as originally published in Photoworks, May 2009

Photographs selected from the epochal work Grapevine, by Susan Lipper. There’s an excellent interview with her by Sean O’Hagan at The Guardian.

@2 months ago with 75 notes
#Photography #Susan Lipper #Gerry Badger #Criticism #Documentary photography #The Guardian (UK) #Sean O'Hagan 

"Art is a true account of the activity of the mind. Because consciousness, in Husserl’s formulation, is always consciousness of something, art thinks ever of the world, cannot not think of the world, could not turn its back on the world even if it wished to."

from “On Writing” in Not-Knowing by Donald Barthelme.
@3 months ago with 26 notes
#Art #Philosophy #Donald Barthelme #Edmund Husserl #Postmodernism #Criticism 
6 days ago
#Art #Photography #Portraiture #Theory #Criticism #John Berger #August Sander #Alex Dellow #Robert Frank #Alec Soth #Bryan Schutmaat 

“Modern art engaged historical forms, often in order to deconstruct them. Our new art tends to assume historical forms — out of context and reified. Parodic or straight, these quotations plead for the importance, even the traditional status, of the new art. In certain quarters this is seen as a “return to history”; but it is in fact a profoundly ahistorical enterprise, and the result is often “aesthetic pleasure as false consciousness, or vice versa.”

This “return to history” is ahistorical for three reasons: the context of history is disregarded, its continuum is disavowed, and conflictual forms of art and modes of production are falsely resolved in pastiche. Neither the specificity of the past nor the necessity of the present is heeded. Such a disregard makes the return to history also seem to be a liberation from history. And today many artists do feel that, free of history, they are able to use it as they wish.”

— Hal Foster, “Against Pluralism” in Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (1998)

1 week ago
#Art #Criticism #Theory #Hal Foster 
From “Nine Years, A Million Conceptual Miles”

“With the final death throes of traditional editorial photography as a means to earn a living, there was a shift of emphasis in the realms of documentary photography and photojournalism, away from the pages of magazines and newspapers and into museums and galleries and the pages of photobooks. Few knew how digital capture or postproduction would impact independent and artistic photography. And I suspect that no one anticipated the extent to which digital dissemination would increase the number of independent photographers and the potential to self-publish. If anything, the schools of and growing market for contemporary art photography seemed content with digital photography mimicking its analog predecessors’ conventions and not particularly interested in deciphering what might be uniquely digital characteristics, in either its aesthetics or its channels of dissemination.

Watching these developments, I’ve oscillated between feeling we are on the cusp of seeing unimaginably brilliant, liberated, and different iterations of photographic ideas in a wholesale digital world and being worried that we may be marking the cynical end of a once-central visual medium that is now being put out to a niche pasture.

My own drama over this problematic cultural paradigm doesn’t stem from a sense of photographic practice per se becoming redundant in its capability for social and cultural awakening. Far from it. Instead, it comes from a genuine concern that the very mechanisms of the medium’s dissemination—publishing houses, museums, commercial galleries, and art schools—that could be seen as having won the good fight to legitimize photography as a contemporary art form with its own medium-specific history are becoming part of the problem. These structures, with their gamut of agendas, unwittingly risk placing a stranglehold upon the evolution of the medium.

It may be stating the obvious to say that no one person—indeed, no institutional matrix—is powerful enough to hold back the momentum of creative change or its full cluster of mitigating factors. The ecosystem of image making continues to evolve, and does not require the validation of art galleries and museums. What is at stake is how the mainstream instruments of “photography as culture” can deal with the arrival of the first wave of independent photographic practice that does not look like or model itself upon the separatist story of photography that institutions have already told.”

— Charlotte Cotton.

1 month ago
#Photography #Criticism #Charlotte Cotton #Aperture #Institutional critique #Art 
"

Mandatory newness—and oceans of commentary on it—is an old problem. It’s now coming into its second century. After the March to Abstraction came the March of Ideas, when art became, in Harold Rosenberg’s words, “a species of centaur—half art materials, half words.” Yet the art world is still thriving, the papers report. The money is still flowing. The parties still glitter. New artists are declared important and great. And sometimes, they are.

But how hard it must be now for an artist when it seems that not only has every material form and format imaginable been tried to express Truth and Beauty but every idea has now also found material form. I watch in awe as artists rise to face that challenge, and even more so when they succeed. But sometimes I feel like I’m witnessing the strain. All artists respond to their inner life and the outer world and other art in some mix. These basic ingredients have not changed. But too often, after leaving a contemporary art exhibition, having hungrily wanted a powerful aesthetic experience, I wonder why I was left cold. It could be that I am not versed enough in the ideas of the centaurs to see the intellectual beauty. It could be, I remind myself, that most art in most times is just so-so; there never was an age of the ubiquitous masterpiece. But it also feels, sometimes, as if an edge has become the only ante to be exhibited at all. As if the edge has become the whole point.

"
Garry Sernovitz, writing in n+1 magazine in his essay “Edge and the Art Collector”
2 months ago
#Art #Criticism #n+1 magazine #Gary Sernovitz #Cultural Criticism #The Art Market #Institutional critique 
"

…the out-and-out confrontational confidence of the totally ignorant is, in my experience, gendered. Men explain things to me, and other women, whether or not they know what they’re talking about. Some men.

Every woman knows what I’m talking about. It’s the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world. It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men’s unsupported overconfidence.

I wouldn’t be surprised if part of the trajectory of American politics since 2001 was shaped by, say, the inability to hear Coleen Rowley, the FBI woman who issued those early warnings about al-Qaeda, and it was certainly shaped by a Bush administration to which you couldn’t tell anything, including that Iraq had no links to al-Qaeda and no WMDs, or that the war was not going to be a “cakewalk.” (Even male experts couldn’t penetrate the fortress of their smugness.)

Arrogance might have had something to do with the war, but this syndrome is a war that nearly every woman faces every day, a war within herself too, a belief in her superfluity, an invitation to silence, one from which a fairly nice career as a writer (with a lot of research and facts correctly deployed) has not entirely freed me.

"
Men Explain things to Me, by Rebecca Solnit, April 2008.
2 months ago
#Culture #Criticism #Rebecca Solnit #Cultural criticism #Guernica magazine #TomDispatch.com 
2 months ago
#Photography #Susan Lipper #Gerry Badger #Criticism #Documentary photography #The Guardian (UK) #Sean O'Hagan 
“Black “soldiers” – or are they “the native dwellers”? – clean up after those to whom “the task of burying the dead” have “possibly” been called away. This image is Gardner’s only acknowledgement that the Union forces included former slaves, and it presents them in the most menial of roles. The image resonates beyond text and frame, its grim ironies and bizarre revelations suddenly flashing before us the “remains” Holmes wished to bury from view: decomposing flesh and bleached bones attended by those very humans whose claim to humanity gave cause to the horrors of war. In a gesture so simple it eludes the author of the text, the two grand invisibilities of the war appear together as one image: death as decomposition and dissolution; blacks laboring in once pastoral fields, reaping an even grimmer harvest than that imagined by “Harvest of Death” The grim image and its equivocal text shows with even grimmer irony how the victors cleansed the war of troubling debris and in the fading replications of the photograph found evidence of a gorgeous whole, the desired sacredness of a bleached cultural memory.” — Allan Trachtenberg Through a Glass, Darkly: Photography and Cultural Memory
2 months ago
#Photography #Criticism #Allan Trachtenberg #Alexander Gardner #Documentary photography #History #The American Civil War #American Suburb X 
"Art is a true account of the activity of the mind. Because consciousness, in Husserl’s formulation, is always consciousness of something, art thinks ever of the world, cannot not think of the world, could not turn its back on the world even if it wished to."
from “On Writing” in Not-Knowing by Donald Barthelme.
3 months ago
#Art #Philosophy #Donald Barthelme #Edmund Husserl #Postmodernism #Criticism