Exercise—The archive

Does their presence on a gallery wall give these images an elevated status?

Yes, certainly. An artist has selected the images, built a show around them, displayed them in a gallery and invited others to view them—this imbues the photographs with significance. The fact that people were willing to attend the show and buy the works demonstrates that what once had little or no value, has now gained in value.

Where does their meaning derive from?

The meaning of the photographs derives from a number of sources, but the gallery presentation may be the most important. The new context for the images changes the way that they will be viewed: they will be seen as a collection (although they did not originally belong together); they will have status because someone else has granted it (artist, gallery, media reports, other viewers); and they will be seen as art rather than simple, personal photographs (the mere act of hanging on a wall will go a long way to attracting the ‘art’ label).

When they are sold (again on eBay, via auction direct from the gallery) is their value increased by the fact that they’re now ‘art’?

I would expect that the photographs will gain appreciably in value (both artistic and monetary). They may have sold for a pound or two before—or not at all—but their new notoriety and ‘art’ status gives them a cachet that will raise their prices.
I would also expect that the competitive nature of human beings in an auction will further increase the selling price of the photographs. Few people knew or cared about them when they were first offered up on eBay, but the potential market has increased in size and no one likes to feel that they have lost an opportunity to a rival bidder. The aggressive behaviour of bidders I have witnessed in eBay auctions often inflates the cost of buying even ordinary items. And these are no longer ordinary items.

Reference

Question for Seller – Nicky Bird (s.d.) At: http://nickybird.com/projects/question-for-seller/ (Accessed 28/01/2020).

Visit—Àbadakone | Continuous Fire | Feu continuel

Àbadakone (Algonquin for “continuous fire”) is the second exhibition “in the National Gallery of Canada’s series of presentations of contemporary international Indigenous art, features works by more than 70 artists identifying with almost 40 Indigenous Nations, ethnicities and tribal affiliations from 16 countries, including Canada.”

According to the National Gallery, “the title Àbadakone was provided by the Elders Language Committee of Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg. They felt that its connotation of a fire within each artist that continues to burn would be an appropriate title for the second presentation of this ongoing series of exhibitions showcasing Indigenous art from around the world.”

Indigenous art and culture is drawing a lot of attention in Canada and other countries dealing with the history and ongoing impacts of colonization of the “New World” by European powers.

I found the exhibit exciting as it opens up a broad range of discussions that are important not only for Indigenous people, but for anyone who has an interest in place, identity, the construction and evolution of culture, and the importance of narrative for creating and bearing meaning. The introduction at the entry to the exhibit indicates that the broad theme behind its curation is one of “Relatedness, Continuity and Activation.” In brief, this refers to the interconnection of all things, the links across time and generations, and “how an artist animates a space, an object, or an idea through performance, video or viewer engagement.”

(All images taken on my cellphone.)

For me, there were several threads that ran through the exhibit, particularly the challenges of:

colonization;
industrialization;
globalization;
environmental degradation;
technology;
migration; and
tradition.

Without taking anything away from the specific issues and questions facing the Indigenous artists who created these works, it seems to me that many of the challenges are also faced by non-Indigenous people. As a result of the challenges I’ve listed above, very few of us can simply take for granted the place where we stand, the identities we have inherited, the histories that have shaped us or the futures that lie before us. In a time of profound uncertainties, it will be important to draw selectively on our knowledge of the past, on our best understanding of our times and on the most promising paths forward. It is fascinating to see that while Postmodernism rejected meta-narratives, we continue to need overarching stories to interpret the past, create meaning in the present and have hope for the future.

Àbadakone has given me a number of ideas for the theme / concept I would like to explore for C&N A5 (“Making it up”), and perhaps even an approach for realising my ideas. I see Indigenous artists opening long-overdue conversations and I think we will all do well to participate in them honestly.

Reading—The Aesthetics of Affect

My tutor suggested this reading as part of the feedback I received following A2. It is not an easy piece to navigate, but the argument seems to run as follows:

Contemporary thinking about art has neglected its aesthetic dimension and has not sufficiently taken into account its special nature of being both “a part of the world […and…] apart from the world” (O’Sullivan, 2001: 125).
The interpretive frameworks of Marxism and Deconstructionism have viewed art from two poles: a historical approach based on the time of the work’s production (Marxism) and an ahistorical approach that views the work with little or no regard for its creator or origins (Deconstructionism).
Although each approach has something to offer, both locate the import of the work in reason while “[a]rt, whether we will it or not, continues producing affects” (126).
By “affect,” O’Sullivan does not mean something transcendent—or “beyond experience”—but something “immanent to experience”. Rather than being carried out of oneself, one is involved in “an event or happening” (126–127).
Art invites us into a happening by showing us things we would not, or could not, otherwise perceive. A simple way of doing this is through the use of technology, such as very long or very short photographic exposures. More profoundly, O’Sullivan (referencing Georges Bataille) asserts that art functions as a “mechanism for accessing a kind of immanent beyond to everyday experience; art operates as a kind of play which takes the participant out of mundane consciousness” (127).
In this way, art does not invite us to a transcendence beyond ourselves, but works “to switch our intensive register, to reconnect us with the world. Art opens us up to the non-human universe that we are part of” (128). Further, art is “[l]ess involved in knowledge and more involved in experience, in pushing forward the boundaries of what can be experienced (130).

Response

I wound up enjoying O’Sullivan’s article once I had had the chance to digest it. I think that there is a lot to be said for mounting a defence of “affect” as a way to approach art (how does it make me feel? does it bring me something different or new?) given that, for many people, there is an expectation that we will think our way through it (where does it come from? how does it mean? what does it signify?). I think that this may be particularly true in the developed world and that we may have cut ourselves off from other or more complete ways of appreciating the art around us. It seemed a little ironic to me, though, that O’Sullivan makes such a cerebral appeal for the importance of feeling.

I was also surprised by the extent of the religious language and metaphor in the text, from the contrast of transcendence and immanence to the use of terms such as “sacred” and “incarnation.” I imagine that many readers might either move past these quite quickly or categorize them as “spiritual, but not religious” (as the common expression goes). For someone with academic training in Christian theology, however, much of the language O’Sullivan uses has particular resonance and it would be interesting to map his usages against those of a theological aesthetics.

Without having time to do that now, I will limit myself to one question that occurs to me: if we follow O’Sullivan’s emphasis on the place of affect, is it necessary to make such a sharp delineation between immanence and transcendence? For example, if we are to take the concept of incarnation seriously (and it is O’Sullivan who raises it), Christian theology sees it as the very place where immanence and transcendence actually meet—in the person of Jesus.

I don’t expect at all that this is how O’Sullivan will develop his thought, but it is suggestive and meaningful to me. I will likely return to it in my thinking as I work through the OCA program.

Reference

O’Sullivan, S. (2001) ‘The aesthetics of affect: Thinking art beyond representation’ In: Angelaki 6 (3) pp. 125 – 135.

Reflection—documentary photography

Before beginning work on Part 1 of CAN, I suppose I had the idea that there were still distinct fields called ‘documentary photography,’ ‘photojournalism’ and ‘art photography.’

At the same time, I knew that there was some degree of blurring between the categories because of the attention paid to many Instagram accounts where individuals ‘document’ their lives in images that are presented as candid but clearly required a lot of work to set up. A similar approach appears in the work of photographers like Kevin Mullins, for example, who brands himself as a ‘documentary wedding photographer‘ and mentions that his approach goes under a number of names: “wedding photojournalism, documentary wedding photography and reportage wedding photography.” His approach is “completely candid” and all “about weaving the images together to tell the tale of your wedding day.” This results in photographs that are presented as a neutral and natural witness to an event while leaving nothing to chance and creating a narrative to please a paying client. No matter how unobtrusive Mullins is, however, everyone at the wedding will be aware that he has been hired to take pictures of them.

If blurring between categories happens because of the borrowing of techniques, another blurring happens when documentary photographs show up on gallery walls. One of the most obvious examples of this is in the work of Don McCullin, whose photojournalistic images of war zones and urban poverty entered the art world years ago. It is strange, then, to read that McCullin does not see himself as an artist:

I’m in a very funny place: I’m in an art gallery and yet I’m a photographer saying I don’t want to be an artist. The reason I’ve agreed to be involved, apart from the honour of it all, is that if I leave my photographs in yellow boxes in my house, no one will ever see the work I’ve done that condemns war, famine, starvation and tragedies. It’s a great opportunity to release the propaganda of all the evil things I’ve seen in the world, which are not humanly right. So that’s my justification in putting my work, as a photographer, in an art gallery. But I’m not an artist.
Don McCullin in Bond, J. (2019).

Similarly, McCullin rejects any description of his work as ‘iconic’ because “in a way it turns my photography into a kind of compositioned work that borders on the art world. But I like to keep photography really pure. I’m a bit prickly about this art stuff.”

Whatever McCullin’s views of his identity or the purity of his photography, three decades of representation by Hamiltons Gallery—whose clients include Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, Helmut Newton and Robert Mapplethorpe—along with a retrospective exhibit at Tate Britain, would qualify anyone else as an artist.

Given the above, I would now see ‘documentary photography’ as an orientation to image-making that may exist in the mind of the photographer and communicated through the use of a particular set of visual conventions, but as a distinction which holds up less and less in practice. I think this is an issue both of ‘narrative’—as approaches and techniques to creating images are blurred within the photographic frame—and of ‘context,’ as photographic images created in one set of circumstances are regularly viewed in many different settings.

In short, the lines between documentary, reportage, photojournalism and art photography seem fluid to me and the terms themselves may no longer be very useful.

Reference

Bond, J. (2019) Don McCullin on why he is showing at Tate Britain even though he is ‘not an artist’. At: https://www.theartnewspaper.com/preview/tate-britain-celebrates-reluctant-artist-don-mccullin [Accessed 7 July 2019].

Don McCullin. (s.d.) At: http://www.artnet.com/artists/don-mccullin/ [Accessed 7 July 2019].

Don McCullin. (s.d.) At: https://www.hamiltonsgallery.com/artists/don-mccullin/ [Accessed 7 July 2019].

Wedding Photographer shooting across the UK and Europe. (s.d.) At: https://www.kevinmullinsphotography.co.uk/ [Accessed 7 July 2019].

Research point—Documentary and art

Paul Seawright’s Sectarian Murder series challenges the boundaries between documentary and art by deliberately blurring them. The locations of crime scenes he depicts are abstracted in several ways: time has passed since the events in question; there is no discernible evidence of a crime in the frame; we are told that the accompanying text has been redacted to remove any reference to the religion of the people involved; and the images have been framed and lit in a way that makes them visually interesting and appealing (rather than being strictly ‘descriptive’ as one might expect from a photojournalistic approach). Ultimately, there is no way of knowing if Seawright has shot a location associated with the crimes described in the accompanying texts or if he has fabricated a scene.

The core of Seawright’s argument is that the construction of meaning is not done by the artist but by the viewer and that the distinction between art and journalism is how quickly a piece “gives up its meaning.” I think this is true to a degree—in that there is no way to predict how a reader or viewer might understand the text or object in front of them—but it suggests a greater distance between the artist and the work than is actually the case. Given that Seawright has chosen a particular light, angle of view, framing and explanatory text, it seems a bit disingenuous for him to absolve himself of guiding the viewer toward meaning. The viewer is still free to come up with his or her own appreciation of the work, but the artist has already pointed the viewer in a particular direction. The range of possible understandings is not wide open but has been somewhat restricted.

If we accept the starting point of this course—narrative is what happens within the frame and context is everything outside it—then we must also see that there is an interaction between the two. Defining a piece of documentary photography as art immediately alters the context of the photograph and will influence how its narrative is read by the viewer.

References

(2018) Catalyst: Paul Seawright. At: https://vimeo.com/76940827

Sectarian Murder. At: http://www.paulseawright.com/sectarian