WEEK 3
Shape of light Exhibition talk by Sarah Allen.
The distinctness about this exhibition was it’s pairing with art works from the same era and its chronological journey that takes the viewer through shades of black to grey to white rooms to signify different decades starting at approximately 1910.
Some pairings were as follows:
Wassliy Kandinsky: Hoepffner
Braque:Dubreuil
Lewis:Coburn
Brancusi:Steichen
Mondrian:El Lissiztky
I found the pairing of Mondrian with Maholy Nagy to be an interesting one. Sarah Allan identifies new perspectives in these two artists work. She referred to ‘naval perspective or from the naval’ a term coined by Rodchenko to describe the standard ‘straight on shots being produced in the 1920s describing the camera usage and more to the point the type of camera available up until this point used was a single or twin lens at naval height mounted on a tripod or slung around a neck to reach the navel. This era gave way to thinking a little differently about photography. Rodchenko, a painter, turned to photography to express his unrest with conventionally rendered trees/landscapes from the naval for hundreds of years.
New ways of producing photographic works were being explored. Artists in Europe and America were forming their own groups to support each other. The idea of cameraless photography was strong in the 1920s with the productions of Vortographs from the 1916 by Alvin Langdon Coburn. The idea that an image produced without a camera was also a photograph became accepted in this period. Man Rays Rayographs produced around 1920s were also accepted as a type of photograph.
A quote from Maholy Nagy. The main instrument of the photographic process is not the camera but the photosensitive layer. (1)
It is interesting to hear Sarah Allen speak about this pairing and learn more about how this exhibition might pave the way for a more integrated path for photography being accepted as an art form when we talk about Photographic Abstract Art and Abstract Art.
The two paths were clearly identified by Sarah Allen as separate in history. I feel that this is what this show identifies. The two were happening simultaneously yet they were separated by definition in history.
“The distance between them varying but never touching” Francis Morris Tate Curator (1)
At each moment key paintings and sculptures from Tates collection bring the exhibition to life, so that even if photographers interested in pure abstraction shared little in terms of process with the painters of their time, we can identify a shared language with the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock or the optical complexity of Bridget Riley. (1)
The exhibition also acts as a touchstone for The Sense of Abstraction show which was held in MOMA in New York in the 1960s. Many production archives are included in the show.
Gottfried Jager paired with Bridget Riley brings language and understanding that photography is a valid art form.
Since the time of the romantics it has been widely admitted that the painter should not only paint only what he sees before him, but also what he sees within him. (1 chapter 2)
Painting no longer had to be descriptive, it could express and translate the richness of the life of the mind through colours.
In particular I was interested in what Sarah Allen, assistant curator, said about Abstract Art not being separate to Abstract Photography they were a part of the same movement and yet for some reason I think that were split into two different ways. This exhibition realigns this idea and defines photography as an art form within the realms of Abstract Art.
There are definite crossovers as well. Barbara Kasten works within both painting and photographic mediums. This brings the fusion and understanding closer and more real.
Sarah Allen also said that Photography has to find means of reduction rather filling a painting with paint. The idea that photography starts with reality and then creates something from it is unique to Photography.
I was also interested in the work that Man Ray presented to MOMA NY for their show entitled
A Sense of Abstraction. Man Ray threw a polaroid camera around a studio to capture some photographs and asked the gallery to print them and mount them. This action gave the MOMA the control over how they were presented. He called them ‘Unconcerned Photographs’.
Was it perhaps that Man RAY wasn’t really interested in how they were displayed. Was the action of production all that Man Ray was interested in? Was he an artist less concerned about where the work would end up. Even so Man Ray said….He was trying to do with photography what painters were doing ,but with light and chemicals. Instead of pigment, and without the optical help of a camera. The total lack of interest in the polaroids he supplied to the Moma for the show might hint at his disdain for the art critics of the period. Man Ray had firmly set up camp in the alongside and in collaboration with Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp was as one of the three artists who helped to define the revolutionary developments in the plastic arts in the opening decades of the 20th century, responsible for significant developments in painting and sculpture. Duchamp has had an immense impact on twentieth-century and twenty first-century art; and he had a seminal influence on the development of conceptual art. By World war 1 , he had rejected the work of many of his fellow artists (such as Henri Matisse) as retinal art, intended only to please the eye. Instead, Duchamp wanted to use art to serve the mind.
Unlike Man Ray, Maholy Nagy focussed mainly on light which would, as a new creative means be used light autonomously, like colour in a painting and sound in music. (1 page 19)
In 1922 Steiglitz produced a series of black and white images of cloudy skies from his residence in lake George initially entitled ‘Songs of Sky’ then ‘Equivalents’. They are not strictly speaking abstract, since they show concrete and recognisable elements. Their significance lies beyond their apparent simplicity.
They are in fact the equivalents of the artists emotions his ‘inner resonances’ of the chaos in his world and his relationship to that chaos.
Abstraction which had previously seemed incompatible with the realist precision of photography, thus became a movement in the history of photography that began and still continues to measure itself against painting.
In the debate that drives Abstract Art and Photographic Abstract Art at different speeds we still have many critics measuring the validity of Photography as art form by questioning the reproducibility which is something that is shared by other mediums such as sculpture and video installation.
Minor White wrote to the curator(Grace Mayer) of the 1960 show in MOMA and said this:
‘For myself I feel these photos of mine that you have chosen are not abstraction in any sense whatsoever. True they resememble paintings that go under this title but this is coincidental not intentional, my own work however stems from what Stieglitz meant by The Equivalent. These pictures have more relations to Ink Blots than to Abstraction. I use them as mirrors to show me the state of inner growth of myself.
Equivalence
White was greatly influenced by Stieglitz's concept of "equivalence," which White interpreted as allowing photographs to represent more than their subject matter. He wrote "when a photograph functions as an Equivalent, the photograph is at once a record of something in front of the camera and simultaneously a spontaneous symbol. (A 'spontaneous symbol' is one which develops automatically to fill the need of the moment. A photograph of the bark of a tree, for example, may suddenly touch off a corresponding feeling of roughness of character within an individual.)"
In his later life he often made photographs of rocks, surf, wood and other natural objects that were isolated from their context, so that they became abstract forms. He intended these to be interpreted by the viewer as something more than what they actually present. According to White, "When a photographer presents us with what to him is an Equivalent, he is telling us in effect, 'I had a feeling about something and here is my metaphor of that feeling.'...What really happened is that he recognized an object or series of forms that, when photographed, would yield an image with specific suggestive powers that can direct the viewer into a specific and known feeling, state, or place within himself."
While rocks were photographed, the subject of the sequence is not rocks; while symbols seem to appear, they are barely pointers to significance. The meaning appears in the mood they raise in the beholder; and the flow of the sequence eddies in the river of his associations as he passes from picture to picture. The rocks are only the objects upon which the significance is spread like sheets on the ground to dry.
Steinert went on to remind his readers that writing directly into space with light was the sovereign means of a medium whose name literally translates as light writing (photo-graph) is testament to the importance of establishing that its sense of abstraction was as natural and inexhaustible as its obligations to objectivity, description and ‘evenness of focus’ Steinert
1:Baker, S., L'Ecotais, E., Mavlian, S. and Allen, S. (n.d.). Shape of light.
Lewis Baltz rightly cited photography as the only deductive art form.He said every other art that I can think of begins with the topic tabula rasa or a blank A4 sheet or a theatre awaiting dancers and lights. Photography begins with a world that’s perhaps over full and needs to sort out from that world what is meaningful.
In the period between the 1960 to 1980s there is shift to intergrate with other mediums.We clearly see two channels playing out one of the darkroom alchemy and one of straight or documentary photography producing images of the real world transformed to look abstract.
Běla Kolářová née Helclová (24 March 1923 in Terezín – 12 April 2010 in Prague) was a Czech artist and photographer.
Běla Kolářová belongs to the generation which touched off an iconoclastic revolution and "rearmament" in Czech art during the 1960s. This new wave hit the scene with a program of objective tendencies, proclaiming that art can exist as a process, concept, method, experiment and language, or as something "concrete"—such as a found and designed object.Kolářová’s training is in photography, and her role in the 1960s reversal was associated with this medium from the beginning. As with many of her contemporaries, she arrived at the conclusion that it is not possible to photograph the world, i.e. to use classic methods of representing reality.
She therefore invented her own method and technology, the artificial negative. She pressed small objects into layers of parafin on small pieces of celophane, or she actually applied small fragments of natural and artificial materials. Instead of choosing the world that it is possible to photograph and represent as an exterior appearance, she chose the world that is possible to accept, to appropriate as an assemblage of material fragments, using light to transfer them into an autonomous picture on the sensitive surface of photographic paper. The intention of her cameraless experiments was to tame the light and confine it with a form. Be it a few hairs or any object that happens in our hands. Later Kolarova removed the need for objects altogether, using only light to create form.
Five by Four is one of several meditative grid assemblages Kolárová made in the mid-1960s. Through her use of ordinary domestic materials, she inserted a feminine vocabulary into the nascent conceptual art scene in Prague, where the home she shared with her partner, the artist and poet JiYri Kolár, became the center of a progressive artistic and intellectual community. The couple was affiliated with the Kriovatka (Crossroads) art movement in Prague, which, in opposition to Soviet-sanctioned Socialist Realism, oriented itself toward the international avant-garde and its strategies of abstraction.
In the later part of Kolrova life she opted for complete control of her mages by producing images in the laboratory type environment of the darkroom.
She hung her works in groups or diptychs. This structure of series or the sequencing of pieces acknowledge how she saw her work as objects that took on new meaning when seen in relation to one another. This seriality is central to Koloravas work where order and repitition are used to create a visual language giving new meaning to discarded everyday objects.
Pit Kroke was another artist who crossed over from painting, drawing into photography.
Abstraction in Photography could be defined through the framework of two seemingly opposing categories. The first identifies the darkroom as a laboratory space for experimentation, creating works that are records of things that do not exist in the real world. This idea embraces the photography’s capacity to produce as well as record or reproduce, an idea central to the New Vision championed by artists such as Maholy Nagy and Man Ray. This was also reintroduce in the later half of the 20 century by artists Pierre Cordier ,Gottfried Jager, Bela Kolarova, Floris eussuss, Alexander Vitkine and Monika Von Boch.
Vitkine
The second category of Abstraction was grounded in in the traditions of documentary or straight photography producing images from the real world and transformed to look abstract as promoted by Lewis Balz, John Hilliard, Ellsworth Kelly, and Edward Ruscha. These two categories are not finite when trying to think of a definition of abstract photography and there were definite overlapping or even artists working with interdisciplinary mediums. Barbara Kasten was one of the artists in this period between 1960 -1980 who used many mediums to express herself. In this period the arts are mixed and excepting of each other, this is the time periods most redeeming feature the use of multi media. It paved the way for more acceptance of photography in contemporary circle.
Kasten was an interdisciplinary artist working in this time period. She was very eloquent in describing her works and theorising them due to her time at art school.
Kasten is especially conscious of the similarity of her work to painting. She talks like a painter and is concerned with the formalists ideology of painters with considerations of composition boundary surface rhythm and texture. The images that she uses are recognisable as rocks or fibre but they serve as abstract elements of line and form
Gottfried Jager was looking at photography and defining his theory on generative photography.
Jager was attempting to remove the unexpected human element from the act of making and instead program an idea that would continue in perpetual motion until told to stop.
This thinking was in fact pre the digital/computer age and can be seen as a precursor to digitally generated images.
Kelly Ellsworth
Kelly transformed chance compositions observed in the world into minimalists paintings. He surveyed the landscape for volume and shapes created by light and shadow. His process echoes modernists ideas championed by Albert Renger Patzsch and his commitment to New Objectivity, finding form and beauty in the ordinary.
Kelly went on to say that he wasn’t interested in the texture or that it is a rock but in the mass of it and its shadows. The viewer is not presented with or more importantly does not see a rock but instead a mass of light and shadow created by the tone and contrast of the photographic medium. This defamiliarization of everyday objects is crucial to understanding how a photograph of the real world can present an abstract view of the world.
Dating back to the surrealists , scale and context have been used to make the familiar look unfamiliar.
Lewis Balz wanted his images to question and reveal, he was also fascinated by the commonly dichotomy of photography as both document and art stating that of course photographs despite their verisimilitude are abstractions their information are selective and incomplete.(1) Balz also saw his photographs as objects not producible objects. He also experimented with the idea of presenting his serial images as one work. This idea of one piece made up of several works was first theorised by Rodchenko in his essay ‘Against the Synthetic Portrait, for the snapshot’
Balz invites the viewer to think about the space both space outside the frame and the importance images viewed in sequence. Since this Ed Rushca has used the idea of seriality with ‘Twenty six gasoline stations’ He produced 17 books between 1060 and 70s..Rusha says that producing the books were more advanced as a concept that the paintings I had been doing. Rusch was interested in the mundane forcing people to take note of the infrastructure and built environment.
Referencing:
1:Baker, S., L'Ecotais, E., Mavlian, S. and Allen, S. (n.d.). Shape of light.
This research was undertaken to try for me to understand my position within the world of Abstraction.
The Shape of Light exhibition and in particular the talk given by Sarah Allen has given clarification to me in terms of why I do this.
My work is produced as a reflection of myself and my thoughts while shooting. I am not trying to depict anything. I find solace in others notions of abstraction or rather I am inspired by others. Some key moments or revelations from the exhibition are ….
Photography begins with a world that’s perhaps over full and needs to sort out from that world what is meaningful. Lewis Balz.
The idea that photography starts with reality and then creates something from it is unique to Photography. Assistant Curator Sarah Allen.
And again when Duchamp said:
I wanted to use art to serve the mind.
I use them(photographs) as mirrors to show me the state of inner growth of myself. Minor White
Steiglitz said:They are in fact the equivalents of the artists emotions his ‘inner resonances’ of the chaos in his world and his relationship to that chaos.Ecample of equivalents below.
Ellsworth Kelly said that he wasn’t interested in the texture or that it is a rock but in the mass of it and its shadows. The viewer is not presented with or more importantly does not see a rock but instead a mass of light and shadow created by the tone and contrast of the photographic medium. This defamiliarization of everyday objects is crucial to understanding how a photograph of the real world can present an abstract view of the world.
These ideas help me to validate my position as an artist using photography as the medium.
Week 3
I recently booked a 1:1 lesson on building an instagram account and engaging with other 'instagrammers' mostly to increase my engagement and use instagram as a mini gallery.I found that the bespoke session which cost less than a good print at Metro helped to focus on what I needed.
https://www.instagram.com/megan.ringrose/ (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.
As a result of the meeting I identified……
1: That an account that focussed on my work and nothing else was needed.I do have other accounts that dabble in my personal life.
2: Some scheduling work would be wise in terms of work flow.(An app) these also allow for a lot of hashtags to be copy and pasted.
3: There is a definite artistic focus on the last nine photographs (the golden square)
4: The timing of the posts is crucial depending on your audience and their activity.
5: Regular house keeping should be done to pare down the look of the last nine photographs.
6: Devise a logo that effectively uses the small icon instagram provides in the bio.
7: Description of you must be precise and focussed on your audience.
I have been experimenting with different hashtags as well.
#contemporaryart (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.
20,201,091 posts
#art (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.
413,681,997 posts (this I am told is far too broad)
Yes I agree about over doing the hashtags. I've also been experimenting with less hashtags.
Thanks,
Megan
This challenge was by far the most engaging for me:
As a result I managed to grow my Instagram followers from 92 to 250 over the course of the module. The best thing that came from it was the fun and engagement from others including some really great artists.
Instagram is, I think a classless, platform. By this I mean it can be accessed by anyone and everyone with now stigma or elitism attached.
#SOMETHINGORNOTHING
I photo bombed the V and A and Tate Modern in London with posters asking people to follow the hashtag
Interestingly it wasn’t a big viral hit but I did have fun asking people to follow the hashtag.
I have had some positive feedback from fellow MA student comments on the idea. #somethingornothing went from 30 likes to 374like over the module.
I like to come up with alternative ways of making something interesting and I hope to use this strength in my coming FMP.
MY RESPONSE….
My response to this exercise was to Photobomb The V and A and The Tate Modern on one specific day.
I used the hashtag #somethingornothing I had a lot of fun creating the posters and engaging with the public.I even had Jesse answer the call to follow the hashtag.(somewhat confused) The photos of the poster all over the two museums were then posted with this hashtag.
Anyway the upshot from this exercise was that it made me think outside the box in terms of self promotion. For that I am hugely grateful.This particular hashtag did have a 200% increase over the next few days after posting so in terms of success I am happy with that,especially as it was not a paid promotion.I left the email element out of this assignment for fear of someone stealing my email!
P.S.I wasn't thrown out of either venue!
