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).

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.

A2—Photographing the unseen

My work covers a number of the “unseens” that I identified as I began to think about this assignment: the past, the dead, missing people and secrets. Every family has its share of those and mine is no different. I know very little about my father’s branch of the family so, over the last few years, I have begun to unearth what I can through official records and archives in the UK. If it were left only to the physical evidence left to me—that is, the few objects in my possession—I would know very little about the people who came before me.

I present images of those objects here in the way that a museum or archive might, described simply and following archival technique (Online Museum Training – Photographing Collection Items. [s.d.]). I have done this because that is how I have come to read the pieces: for me, they are akin to museum artefacts in that they are from the past, are on display and are divorced from their original context. Individually, they might be read as objets trouvés, “objects or products with non-art functions that are placed into an art context and made part of an artwork” (History of the Found Object in Art [s.d.]).

Taken together, however, the objects form a collection that I try to fit with some difficulty and much imagination into a narrative about the people who owned them. In my mind, they hint at aspects of the daily lives of my paternal grandfather, grandmother and great-grandmother over a period of some 60 years, all before I was born. Without more detail and context, however, I realise that any interpretation I make contains a lot of projection and speculation.

And that is interesting to me. If I as a direct descendant am not able to tease out much of the context and narrative of these pieces, viewers with no personal connection are free to construct an even broader range of interpretations. We might all be able to view the pieces as signs, but it is unlikely we would all agree on what they signify (Hall, 2007, p.10). Would others’ narratives about the lives of my unseen family be any more or less valid than mine?

How would I know? Would it matter?

Item 1-1. Embossed silver cigarette case. Made by Frederick Field, Birmingham. No date.

*Item 1-2. Detail of cigarette case showing embossed initials.*

*Item 2-1. Board slipcase containing pocket Book of Common Prayer and Hymns Ancient and Modern.*

*Item 2-2. Frontispiece of Book of Common Prayer with handwritten inscription, 9 January 1891.*

*Item 3-1. Cardboard booklet with commemorative sticker on cover.*

*Item 3-2. Booklet, showing handwritten inscription and Sunday School stickers, 1915–1916.*

*Item 4-1. Kodak Six-20 folding Brownie camera.* Manufactured circa 1951–1955, London, UK.

*Item 4-2. Side view of camera, unfolded.*

*Item 5-1. Wooden presentation box containing 6-piece, stainless steel cutlery set.* No date.

References

ARTifacts as ART and Inspiration (s.d.) At: http://www.SandraMcLeanArts.com/artifacts-as-art-and-inspiration.html (Accessed on 23 September 2019)

Hall, S. (2007) This Means This, This Means That: a user’s guide to semiotics. London: King.

History of the Found Object in Art (s.d.) At: http://www.artspace.com/magazine/art_101/the-history-of-the-found-object-in-art (Accessed on 23 September 2019)

Mary Mary Quite Contrary (s.d.) At: http://www.marymaryquitecontrary.org.uk/ (Accessed on 23 September 2019)

Museum in a Box – Crawford College of Art & Design (s.d.) At: https://crawford.cit.ie/museum-in-a-box/ (Accessed on 23 September 2019)

Online Museum Training – Photographing Collection Items. (s.d.) At: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUgG7HEpvyo (Accessed on 21 September 2019)

Readings—Barthes

In “The Death of the Author,” Roland Barthes’ (1977) main point is that it is impossible to know who is speaking in a text: is it the writer? a persona the writer has adopted? a character created in the text? a reliable narrator? other? The “death of the author,” is not so much the literal death of the individual who wrote the piece, but the impossibility of knowing whose voice is being expressed. This stands counter to any interpretation of the text that relies on divining authorial voice or intent. Instead, Barthes asserts, meaning is created as a kind of performance between the text and the mind of the reader.

The most immediate implication of this is that since meaning depends upon the interaction of text and reader, no text has a final ‘correct’ meaning—what Barthes refers to as a ‘theological’ meaning or the “‘message’ of the Author-God.” Every text is capable of bearing as many meanings as there are readers. And Barthes means this to be just as sweeping a claim as it sounds: “literature […] liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases—reason, science, law.”

This approach to meaning implies that, as the author ‘dies,’ attention shifts sharply to the role of the reader as the co-creator of potential meanings.

“Rhetoric of the Image” (Barthes and Sontag, 1989) begins with a discussion of how many commentators deny that imagery fits the category of a ‘language.’ The notion of a visual language is denied from both sides at once: by those who point out that images offer only a “rudimentary system” when compared with speech, and by those who see images as containing an “ineffable richness” of meaning.

To put these positions to the test, Barthes draws on advertising imagery because of its clear “intentionality.” He analyses the test image in terms of its textual content as well as in terms of the visual signs (signifiers and signifieds) that he finds in it. Barthes speaks of images as being ‘polysemous’—capable of many meanings—and identifies two key ways in which text and image may function together:

anchorage—the text interprets the image and aims to reduce its polysemy; or
relay—the text and the image work in a complementary way.

I wonder, though, if there is not a third way that text and image could affect one another: is it not possible that the image could serve as an anchor for text? Couldn’t a powerful image shape or limit the way its accompanying text would be interpreted? It seems to me that irony and sarcasm could run in both directions, telling the viewer that the accompanying text (or image) was unreliable and might be read opposite to the way that it might otherwise be understood.

Barthes ends the article with some brief ideas on what might constitute a ‘rhetoric of the image.’ Barthes suggests that the form of visual rhetoric might be similar to that of spoken rhetoric (drawing on the techniques and terminology of classical rhetoric), but that the content would need to differ. If there is indeed a visual rhetoric at work in images, whether with or without text, they would function as persuasive communications designed not to describe or portray a reality, but to shape one for the viewer. And if Barthes’ argument holds true for the world of advertising, it may be applicable beyond that world.

If so, that raises questions for me:

When looking at a given image, what reality or realities does it create for the viewer/me?
How does the image try to persuade? To what end?
How effective is the persuasion for different viewers? For example, what role does culture play in the creation of the meaning? How do different viewers ‘read’ an image?
How might this apply to the images that I create?

References

Barthes, R. (1977) Image, music, text. Hill and Wang.

Barthes, R. and Sontag, S. (1989) Selected writings. Fontana.

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