New Blog

I started a photo blog on tumblr, where I will try to post one original photo a day.

http://lettuce-bear.tumblr.com/

Venice Biennale 2013

This year's Irish representative at the Venice Biennale is the Kilkenny born photographer Richard Mosse. Mosse's contribution will consist of a a “highly ambitious eight-channel multimedia installation on the subject of the ongoing conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo”.
The photographs will be printed on a huge scale- some are over two feet wide-  which adds to the visual impact of the rich magenta's and crimson brought out by his use of infrared film. Quite appropriately, the film was originally intended for military surveillance. Mosse is quoted in Popular Photography: “I was interested in [the film’s] original purpose as a military tool, but I was also drawn to its peculiar color palette. I wanted to use it as a way of thinking through this conflict and the rules and conventions of war photography.”

While the pure beauty of the landscapes could be used to accuse Mosse of aestheticizing his troubling subject matter, the detachment from the scenes of war, and the fact that none of the images actually represent any scenes of violence, but are taken rather during peacetime show his awareness of the inability of art to sufficiently address such issues. Mosse is not a documentary war photographer, and it is not his intention to draw our attention to the horrors of the conflict, or to highlight any specific war crimes, but rather to comment on the impotence of the artist in such a position. His use of colour awes and overwhelms us with its beauty, but it also renders it subject unfamiliar, challenging our previous conceptions of what war in a place often associated with darkness and the primitive should look like.

For all its associations with military surveillance, the photographs are still very, well, pink. This has a curious effect particularly on the images of soldiers, that perhaps would not occur if the intensity and reversals of colours came out in greens or blues. They make these hardened, sometimes scarred men look almost camp; particularly in the portrait General Février, North Kivu, Eastern Congo, 2010 (above). The uniform is cast a washed out greyish pink, while the beret becomes a stylish accessory, complimented by the gradiating shades of pink foliage in the background. It could almost be from a fashion feature on military style, were it not for the downcast, subdued  eyes of the general, and the very real gun in his hand. It also reminded me of the poartriats of African men in Kehinde Wileys' work, their strong macho stances contrasting with the decorative backgrounds and contemporary fashion. As with Wiley's portraits, Mosse avoids a sense of frivolity; the images are too emotionally loaded, the expression in the subject's eyes too direct for that.

                                             Kehinde Wiley Willem van Heythuysen, 2005


More of Mosse's works and photographs can be viewed here: http://www.richardmosse.com/

Beat Memories

I had the pleasure of working at the Contemporary Jewish Museum last week for the opening of Beat Memories: The photographs of Allen Ginsberg. As well as the main exhibition, there was a curator's talk, a stunning performance of Ginsberg’s poem “America” by Conspiracy of Beards’ musical director Daryl Henline. There was also a zine making corner, a typewriter petting zoo, a bar and readings by local poets.

Ginsberg is one of the most prolific photographers and chroniclers of his group of friends and co-conspirators. Whether or not his photographers can be classed as 'art' is a rather contentious issue, as he originally intended them as snapshots of his beat family, and they were stashed away in storage and forgotten about for years until the 1980's, when with the encouragement of other artists and photographers he began to print many of the undeveloped negatives. This was also when he began writing the inscriptions beneath the images, as a record of what it was he was seeing when he originally took the photos, and what he saw now, years later. Ginsberg is not just any casual picture taker though, and some of the portraits, such as a young Gregory Corso dressed like a Romantic hero in cape and staff crouching in the dust filled confines of a stairway attest. There is a definite self-consciousness to many of the pictures, and the writings under the images add another dimension to the images. Ginsberg is after all, a poet, even if he began to fancy himself a photographer with the encouragement of photographers Robert Frank and Berenice Abbott. As his written commentary on the images expanded, he had to increasingly print the photographs smaller in order to allow more room for his writings. I think this is what tells where his allegiance lies. The words do more than annotate the contents of the picture, they are given equal prominence. It was during this time that Ginsberg conducted a series of talks about 'snapshot poetics' or 'photographic poetics' drawing connections between the two mediums. He gives directives to the photographer/poet in which he states: “Ordinary mind includes eternal perceptions. Notice what you notice. Observe what’s vivid. Catch yourself thinking. Vividness is self-selecting. And remember the future.”

Whether you view it as a profoundly personal record of a generation of writers and characters, or as pieces of art to be promoted alongside Ginsberg's poetry, the pictures are still moving and interesting interventions into the divisions between words and image, photography and poetry.

Beat Memories is on view May 23–September 8, 2013

Helen Almeida

How have I never come across this artist before? A friend put up an image of her Inhabited Painting from 1975. The image immediately stuck me, the view over the shoulder of a woman in a mirror. But is it a mirror? The brush  in her hand is the point at which the two bodies of the one woman meet, and this is where it gets complicated. Not a mirror image quite, but a painting then? The thick blue line frantically scribbled over the head of the first larger (the ‘real’) woman suggests she painted. And not just painted, but erased. Here the brushmark works to obscure the figure, not reveal it. The one we would normally associated as being the ‘real’ person, the one over whose shoulder we look as we face her reflection in a mirror, is the one that is transitory, whose identity is not only hidden but scratched out. And that title ‘Inhabited Painting’, at first you presume the one who inhabits is Almeida’s reflection. As if the reflection is within the painting. But wait, the reflected woman is the one doing the paining. The blue strokes emanate from her brush, wiping out the figure outside the mirror.  So maybe she is the one who is not real then, the one over whose shoulder we look. But then, that would put us inside the mirror. And suddenly, the viewpoint is reversed. We, the viewer of this photograph/reflection/painting are the ones that are reflected. We are the ones that inhabit the painting, not Almeida. And this sudden dizzying revelation, and the winding labyrinth of thought that led me here leaves me thirsting for more. 

So I go on a Google hunt. And all I manage to pull up is one flimsy Guardian article which informs me that Helen Almeida is a Portuguese artist from the early 1960s who was inspired by the neo-concrete movement in Brazil under the leadership of Helio Oiticica and Lygia Clark. She embraces their desire to liberate color into three dimensional space, experiments with breaking the confines of the canvas. Her work was performative, which she recorded in black and white photography. Her use of the colour blue is reminiscent of Yves Klein signature Blue, yet she denies any reference to him. A denial to be taken with a pinch of salt in my opinion, who can reject such a blatant parallel? The author of the article agrees with me: In the work Study for inner improvement (1977) we see a sequence of photographs where she looks like she is eating blue paint. She had, it appears,  protested Klein’s use of women as objects. Insert the concept of anthropophagy (cultural cannibalism-consuming other cultures as a way of asserting independence) which was a popular ideology at the time. Chewing up Klein’s blue thus becomes a liberating act for women and artists. So far, so good. 

Her performances were often private; her husband architect Artur Rosa photographed her. Can they still be called performances then? Experiments maybe? This raises the whole realm of performance art and the problems of documenting it. But her images are too clearly defined to fall into this category. They might have originated as performance, but they are still Paintings. She names them so herself. Some other pieces included her dressing us in white with white canvas attached to her body and walking through her garden, taking the canvas for a walk. Or attaching single strands of horsehair to a drawn line in the ink to make the line look like it is lifted off the page. She also slashed the canvas (inspired by Italian artist lucio Fontana) and was photographed trying to slip through the slit. 

Jessica Lack, the author of the article claims a political motivation these performances were “Not just about physical liberation, but psychological emancipation also”. She grew up in Portugal under rightwing regime of Antonio slazar. The concept of a neo concrete movement appealed to her generation of artist in Portugal.

And after that I quickly hit a brick wall. Most of google’s results are in French and don’t lead anywhere interesting. Similarly is my search in the public library. I get one hit when searching her name in the catalog, it is: Making Callaloo : 25 years of Black literature, 1976-2000 / edited by Charles Henry Rowell. Ok, back to the internet. Aventually I manage to download an essay from an exhibition catalogue by one Filipa Oliveira, it is even in English. 

 “Over the last forty years, Helena Almeida has developed a body of work, which started with the process of exploring the limits of painting, transforming ideas and experiences into images. She combined the photographic image with the drawn line and the paint mark in compositions that examined space and drew attention to the surface of the work." Filipa Oliveira

The inside of the outside of the inside

The outside and the inside are inseparable.

The world is wholly inside and I am wholly

Outside myself

Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception

Oliviera has a little more information for me. She began her career as a painter. Interested in surfaces, she tries to rupture the plane of illusion, challenging the object itself. Her works “exploded” or “expelled” into a new dimension, or else deconstructed the constituent parts of painting. The frame shifts away, the canvas falls, leaving the stretcher visible (revealing the support structure, the inner workings, the organs of the object) deconstructing the separation of inside from outside. This makes me think of Deleuze’s body without organs, in a grotesque inversion. Merlau-ponty called it chiasma. She is both work and object, author and embodied subject. They are inseparable. 

Back we go to Inhabited Painting, because this is more than just one work, it is her manifesto, it sums up her aim and method and purpose as an artist. Trying to inhabit painting. To do this, she must deconstruct it first. At this point in her career she abandons painting entirely, for photography. Her subject is the same-rethinking the limits of painting and drawing. And yet her choice to do this through photographs is interesting. Is she suggesting that photography is better at this then? That photography is the tool with which to deconstruct painting? A photograph is even more two dimensional than a painting. It shows its organs less, the process of its makings are left in the darkroom, in the trays of chemical and sheets of negatives. The image aspires even more to a self-constructed reality. But perhaps this is not what she is getting at. She could simply be suggesting that paintings limits are better explored though another medium. 

Some historical context then: Almeida is working at a time when painting was declared dead and ideas and concepts declared the successor, Sol le Witts paragraphs on conceptual art had been written in 1967. Bu the 1970s performance art was at its height. Cindy Sherman’s film stills were made in 1977. Photography is seen a valid form of documentation of art that is about ideas, about subverting aesthetic tropes, and challenging art historical paradigms. Almeida is exploring how to continue painting without doing it literally, the era of the document and the statement and the performance. 

Then we come to her use of series: Spatial concept, uncovered interiority and depth to painting, or demonstrating the opposite-the inexistence of something beyond the surface of the canvas? A new condition for the medium: liberating it from the syndrome of the frame and allowing painting to escape its ontological contingency: that of painted surface (that of surface) -new way of thinking about the medium. So says Oliviera. But this argument seems better suited to Allan Kaprow, The Legacy of Jackson Pollock and his yard full of tires than it does to Almeida’s psychologically charged self-portraits. 

But are they self-portraits? Despite the obscuring dashes of blue paint, Almeida doesn’t seem to be trying to hide or obscure her identity. Nor is she playing a role, as Cindy Sherman is. And yet, would these images be so powerful if the subject were, say, her husband? After all, shouldn’t the artist be the one taking the photographs, rather than appearing in them? Oliviera declares that this is because Almeida is not interested in themes or techniques, but in the elements, the paint mark and the line. And this requires the physical presence of the artist in the image. “It is through her body that object/actor, photography, and painting/drawing intertwine.” Photography then is the means not the end. Like the documentation of performance art. Her photos leave in the irregularities in grain and texture and are not the polished finished products of high art. Does this make it just documentation? Part of process, another step in the whole work then, from enactment to paper? Or the final work? Oliviera reads in the influence of cinema. Enacting plots. Still from films. Each image is temporal, depicting a suspension of action that comes to life in spectator’s imagination. She is compared to jean luc Godard. This argument sags in the middle. It doesn’t hold up. After all, who can say film stills in the late 1970’s and not talk about Sherman? And Almeida’s images do not contain a plot. Certainly not Godard. But if you had to draw the comparison to cinema, then some of the eerie doubling does perhaps recall that infamous female double in Bergman’s Persona, the psychological intensity. Not just the split self, but in other works, such as the Study for Inner Improvement she tries to eat the paint. To take it into her, to ingest her own process, her own art, and to become whole with it. Or is she? Like with Inhabited Painting, the opposite could also be true. She could be attempting to vomit it up. When the act of painting is no longer enough, the body must discharge it.  As the series progresses, the blue covers her body completely. But we are not finished. A hand appears, to push this self-effluence aside. The artist is not conquered or overtaken by her own creation. The body re-emerges. 

This is where I begin to agree with Oliviera: It is not about self-portraiture but authorship. She is able to be herself, another and neither. Uses herself as an object, and empty vessel, as she uses the horsehair, the blue ink, or stool from her studio. Materials manipulated to purse her formal and conceptual interrogation of the image. Not autobiographical because she is not herself in the images. “Her images usurp a tautological desire for meaning that the immediate and pseudo-transparent nature of photography seems to allow. She takes on a mask –without ever recurring to disguises or makeup – in order to be photographable.” If not intimacy with the woman then, it is intimacy of a different kind. A bodily intimacy. That of organs, and bodies, of discharge, and hair and blood and paint. One exhibition is titled “Inside Me”. Almeida swallows paint, weeps it, teases the line, is crossed by it. She literally and poetically inhabits it. And yet for all this bodily physicality, we are never wholly confronted by the mess of it. The photograph stands always between us and her actual body. As does the paint, as does the lines of horsehair. In the photograph, her body is transformed into light, chemicals and paper. Clean and crisp, the least bodily representation of reality of all. Even the mess of chemicals it takes to produce a photograph are long out of sight. Through turning herself into a photo- she is the exact opposite of body art, of embodying the painting, she flattens herself out, intertwines herself with the flatness of the work; by turning herself into exposed light on a page, she is denying her body. Even though at first she seems to being the tradition of feminist body artists Hannah Wilke or Francesca woodman or Eva Mendez, she is actually the opposite, even when she abandons the horsehair and the blue paint-her body is the mass molded by the artist. The photograph pretends to document an action: be that the traversing of a canvas, promenading through a garden or eating pigment. Yet she refutes an association between her work and performance, preferring the concept of theatricality. She prepares with drawings, not rehearsals. Drawings create a cartography of the work; attest to the artificiality of each gesture. There is no “action” no before or after. The gesture is formulated, it doesn’t occur in reality (the falsity of photographs, suggesting or promising factual evidence that doesn’t exist) no improvisation or randomness. No particular audience, just the camera and the photographer. 

All of this brings me a little closer to the questions then that Almeida poses. I feel I know a little bit more about what she is not. But despite all my wrestling with Oliviera’s interrogation of her work, and the scant biographical details provided by Lack, I still don’t feel satisfied. I haven’t gotten to the heart of this artist yet, or even to have begun to chip the surface of her stunning body of work. My search is frustrated for today. Until I have access to some decent university libraries (and this elicits my old thoughts about universities as modern day churches, the institutions that guard the knowledge for a very high price) or until I learn French, I will have to make do with just looking at the images, and trying to unravel the knots of questions on my own.

 

Filipa Oliveira

Helena ALMEIDA: Inside Me, Kettle’s Yard, 2009

Jessica Lack    

Artist of the week 59: Helena Almeida guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 7 October 2009 13.05 EDT  

On Quitting

On Quitting

This post is one of the most beautiful things I've read in a long time.

From the way the words are arranged on the page, the various sizing of the typeface, the mad black scribbles outside the margins, to the thoughts contained within it; issues of identity, place, race, academia and subscribing to the 'successful life', it is a work of art in itself.

Besides introducing me to the word precarity (which sums up so much of my own mental state at the moment its a bit of a revelation to be able to put a word to it), it says the unsayable in regards to the academic life. As someone grappling with the possibility of going back to university and pursuing my graduate studies, it is both a relief and a terror to hear somebody else say that they are opting out of it. Somebody who is well set on the track to tenureship and success too, and not just a struggling Phd student who fails to get funding or any teaching posts. Because a Phd is not just about the research, the hours spent sitting in a library perusing fabulously obscure books on areas of human knowledge most people don't even know how to spell. It is manipulating the politics of the individual institution, and trying to communicate your own enthusiasm to too many first years who just want to get out of a stuffy lecture hall and into the pub, and it is constantly hitting the right people up for acknowledgements and networking at conferences and the constant battle for funding, defending your private interests to public bodies. And not to mention the mental struggle of actually sitting down and writing your own research for hours each day, wrestling with the words as they appear and erase, appear and erase, crawling oh-so painfully across your computer screen. The toll the dragging out of words from a brain jumbled with thoughts and ideas can have on your daily functioning. And yet we are led to believe it is worth it, Universities own all the books you know. Something I find out to my increasing frustration each time I go to look up more information on an artist I encounter, and all I can pull up is the scantiest of wikipedia entries, and the link to one or two exhibition catalogues in French.

So to have another person so succinctly describe all the feelings I fear are waiting at the other end of the long road to those two letters at the beginning of my name, is both terrifying and a huge relief. It doesn't solve my own personal dilemma, but it makes my future seem a little less black and white, and a little more human. And I applaud the author's own bravery, in putting his mental health above all the weights of social, academic and peer pressure.

Take me Away

How often do we venture into our public buildings? Our court houses, and civic centers and city halls? Except for the occasional tourist with an interest in the grand architecture that boasts an individual city's wealth, locals rarely enter these doors. It was with this thought that I went to San Francisco's City Hall to see Take Me Away, an exhibition of photographs organized by the San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries.
The SFAC "makes contemporary art accessible to broad audiences through curated exhibitions that both reflect our regional diversity and position Bay Area visual art production within an international contemporary art landscape. By commissioning new works, collaborating with arts and community organizations and supporting artist’s projects, the SFAC Galleries programs provide new and challenging opportunities for contemporary art to engage with a civic dialogue." at least according to the mission statement posted on their website. Sticking a rather interesting and diverse photography exhibition into the basement of one of the more overlooked public buildings in the city does not strike me as the best way to make contemporary art accessible. You could perhaps argue that they are attempting to draw attention to the city hall itself, and open its doors to a wider audience. But this theory doesn't hold up when you actually go in search of the show itself. After a rather impressive wander through the great domed hall and up the sweeping staircase, I had to ask where I could find the photographs, as there was absolutely no signs or advertising.
They were located, I discovered after much searching, in the basement. A long, cold corridor with low ceilings and atrociously bad lighting. Not the ideal venue for any kind of art display. I'm not sure whose bright idea it was to turn this disused room into a gallery but it felt like they had ran out of better venues and stuck it down there out of the way in a moment of panic or oversight.
Which is a shame, because the show itself was surprisingly impressive.

A juried photography exhibition comprised of over 100 works by regional photojournalists and fine artists.  Photographers were encouraged to "reflect on both real and imagined spaces one might visit in order to leave the everyday. The chosen works represent a myriad of places to escape, ranging from virtual space to locations as close as home". In advance of the call for submissions, the jurors selected three established Bay Area photographers to present larger bodies of work. David Gardner’s series about people who trade stability for life in a motor home will sit beside Alice Shaw’s renowned series People Who Look Like Me, which depicts the artist stretching her own identity in order to look more like another person. Rebecca Horne’s domestic scenes contribute an unsettling and fantastical vision of daydreaming gone awry.  "The exhibition ultimately examines human connections to respite, adventure, and fantasy, through ideas and spaces related to escapism."
Actually, the three featured artists I found to be some of the least interesting. Gardner's series of full time nomads was a simple visual documentary of a minority class of people. It read like an August Sander catalogue of a class of people with little insight or artistic merit. The photographs themselves were not particularly striking, and the subject matter, while highlighting an alternative lifestyle and underground movement of people, were emotionless and did little to reveal the personalities of the subjects or give insight into their day to day lives.
Similarly, Alice Shaw's series was an interesting idea whose novelty soon wore off, large colour prints of the artist standing beside a series of people that in some way resemble her, they  are in the style of simple snapshots, but on a much bigger scale. The variety or race and gender in the series shows the mutability of resemblance. There is something to recognize in each person the photographer stands beside, but I think the choice of presentation, and aesthetic style lets the series down somewhat.
Rebecca Horne's series had a little more depth, close up images of ordinary objects they are an investigation into questions of the phenomenology  of everyday objects. they unusual viewpoints, often from below such an item as a pot on the stove or a table top made me think of the angle of view that children have, and how a simple change of perception can so profoundly affect the way we encounter our physical environment.

By far the best work for me was Adam Katseff's Landscapes. Large framed black images behind glass, with the glare from the fluorescent lights on the glass at first they looked like flat blackness, without any photographic image. As you look for longer, the picture emerges, huge mountainscapes and forests, photographed at night with long exposure times, they give more of a sense of the sublime beauty of nature than any painting or colour photograph I have ever seen.

Another work of note was that of Meghann Riepenhoff, whose Eluvium dealt with the physical nature of photography, the process of exposing light in the darkroom to create a physical impression in a piece of paper. Instead of using a camera, she simple covered the paper with sand and then manipulated it into shapes with her voice, the titles describe the vocal action she took to produce the effect. Yelling, screaming, crying, singing, whispering, produces a series of blue and black abstract shapes that are reminiscent of landscapes and call to mind the efluvium after which the series is titled. I found it an interesting parallel between emotion and nature, with the human voice playing the part of wind in the manipulation of soil deposits.

 

Altman Siegel Gallery

My review of O the sleeping bag contains the body but not the dreaming head at Altman Siegel gallery. Work by Alice Channer, Anicka Yi and Aaron Flint Jamison.
http://www.artslant.com/sf/articles/show/34771