Relational Aesthetics

Relational Aesthetics seem to be reactionary to modern art. The idea that times have changed and so has and should art practices. The fundamentals that appear to make up Relational Aesthetics are very broad yet narrow at the same time. The idea that the new goal is to not have a goal. Some combination of defining sets of non definition. Objects are allowed to just be what they are. I believe these ideas are an attempt at opening up art to be inclusive as opposed to the high-brow exclusiveness of Modern Art. The idea of connecting people to the practices of the everyday and also doing those things together is very apparent. Relational Aesthetics also calls for a more sensory approach to art, the way it is seen and even touched, the works draw heavily from interaction therefore demanding it during its consumption.

I believe photography is related to Relational Art however it takes a specific kind of photograph to confidently label as such. I believe a photograph would most easily be placed in this realm if the photograph is simply the means of showing what occurred. Something performance based that was done perhaps in public so to make a certain point. The photograph as proof seems to be its easiest connection.

"Systems Everywhere" NEW TOPOGRAHICS AND ART OF THE 1970S, Greg Foster-Rice / An Archival Impulse, Hal Foster

In Foster-Rice's essay the main discussion revolves around the New Topographics exhibition. Attention is placed on a few of the critics or commentators about the exhibition that used words about the work that would allude to its connection to minimalism. However, many practitioners and critics who dealt with non-photographic mediums argued that Minimalism, as a majorly sculptural movement would not place even the most minimal 2 dimensional paintings within. Regardless of this disagreement, Foster-Rice recognizes the two movements have similarities with their "structural and strategic characteristics that reflect a broad shift in contemporary artistic practices". This shift is from the idea of the art as object to this idea as the art being a system. The transformation was envisioned in the hopes that art would have a new relationship to the social. Bringing the real world experience back into what informed art.

"Systems Everywhere"- 1960-70's artist began to respond to the complexities of the time. Work began to take shape in the response to American affluence post WWII and the Cold War as the city grew less crowded and the sub-urban landscape exploded. "an experience of the human altered landscape as a system determined by issues of construction, habitation, and abandonment within the natural landscape".

"Toward a Systems Aesthetic"- Foster-Rice explains that the negative change in societies use of the land becomes a heavy influence in the work of the New Topographics photographers. The use of pictorialist landscape photographs in the late 1800's early 1900's were a way of placing the humans hand gently on the landscape. Train tracks gently followed curves of glorious mountains and pristine streams. The New Topographics, as if shifting 45 degrees in perspective, show the interaction of man and landscape as opposing forces that are colliding rather than strolling side by side. Foster-Rice continues with a concept that applies this shift from the pictorialist representation of landscape as a way of placing the viewer back into the environment of which is being viewed in the photograph. "Rather than separate art from experience, their work sought to see art as an analogue for experience, in which photography played a central role".

Photography as a System-Foster-Rice summarizes John Szarkowhi, "that fine-art photographs should be thought of as pictures that summarize moments in time but considered distinct from the actual experience and social significance of that time."

Procedural Method- The procedural aspect to the New Topographic photographers was a method that was in response to traditional and formal aspects that previously defined fine-art photography. The procedural is to make an image that is not based on an aesthetic response. It was to recognize variables and then keep them constant.

George Baker, Photography's Expanded Field

George Baker's introductory sentence - "I begin not with a negative, nor with a print, but with a screen." The wording of this, although, describing a photographically based project is a way that Baker is attempting to draw attention to the major point of this essay. The sentence plays on our understanding of photography, the way it is used, its once objectivity, and its now shift into new applications. He understands contemporary art as something "in crisis, or at least in severe transformation." Baker believes that the photographic practice still holds its earlier function although artists are now choosing to accompany or incorporate other forms with their work. It is still said though that something of the photographic effect still "survives" even through a transformation of traditional photography in a digital world. I think this is partially related to the loaded and learned referential agency of the photograph, for example the photograph of me and Russel Kirsch acting and presented as proof that I met him and the exchange happened in real life. The postmodern era is written as one that was attempting to expand the field of art and photography although Baker states that it was never really essayed on or "concretely expanded". Baker justifies his intention's of mapping this expansion on the basis that if the object of photography is "definitively slipping away" because of its expansion then we need to understand what that meant to the makers of art and photography in the past 25 years and how that has influenced the art makers of today. Baker proposes that the mapping of photography's expanded field be started by the "tearing" of "oppositional extremes". This is in connection to the idea of stasis and not-stasis, narrative and not-narrative, and the relationship between them all.





Bakers mapping shows the expansion as a way of broadening the application of forms and materials that are taken from culture and or influence it.

I was thinking about the work of Columbia instructor and photographer Brian Ulrich. Ulrich's photographs revolve around consumerism and the ways in which Americans interact with shopping, consumer goods, and the locations where these relationships are performed.


Image is from www.notifbutwhen.com

His project Copia is broken down into "chapters". In his most recent body titled Dark Stores, Ghost Boxes and Dead Malls Ulrich has been photographing the locations that were once thriving shopping centers that are either barely keeping open or have completely imploded.




I am placing this body of work within Baker's expanded field because of Ulrich's use of found signage that once brilliantly hung as signage for bustling stores and had transitioned into non functioning words that were on their way of crumbling as the buildings they hung in would eventually be knocked down or re-purposed. The signs are installed along side the photographs to make an installation that Baker would most likely place on the plane of the "Talking Picture" narrative/stasis section of Bakers map. The photographs with the signage to me presents a sort of narrative that is carried even farther because of artifacts such as the signs that are physically presented in the installation. The stasis exists int he fact that the installation is not moving but this is a part that I am a little unclear about. I feel that somewhat the signage can actually transition the photographs into not-stasis because of the fact that something tangible from the world that the photographs show is now brought into the same space as the images? Does this sharing of the real world and the depicted one change the experience into one that does not reflect stasis?

INTERNET PHOTOGRAPHY

Jason Evans is raising some serious questions about the use of internet/photography as a means of art making. He is essentially wondering why photography on and or for the internet is not being used more inventively. Evans sees the internet as an amazing gallery for photography if you are solely looking for an audience. However, very importantly, in the response to his essay, the type of "audience" is questioned. What level of interest is in the audience, how engaged is the view of the work, and to what intention did the spectator arrive at the photograph? Evans sees the internet as a valuable tool to photography. He places analog and digital on "different sides of the same coin". He also raises a very interesting point about the tangible being involved when making work and how that experience is still extremely important and remains mostly intact within the meaning of the work even after the image becomes intangible. Evans desires to see photographers push at this idea more. I concur with the response that talks about how this shift in art making will eventually happen but it is just not time for it yet. I think its beginning to take shape as the changes within the photographs, the market, the materials (or lack there of), and the communication between them all becomes more visible.

Lev Manovich Lecture

Lev Manovich gave a very interesting lecture last week. I know many of you were there. Hopefully I wrapped my head around his work in some way that makes sense and can be discussed. First of all it was very refreshing to hear a non-photographer present their work. His ideas offered a new way of thinking about visual culture.




Using software that Lev and his team created, massive amounts of images can be sampled and or grouped in ways that show patterns that are arranged through some sort of filter of predetermined criteria. The image above is a sampling of moments that visually occurred on a screen while a popular video game is being played from beginning to end (around 100 hours). To Manovich the arrangement and the gradual change in color is in some way connected to the culture that the game is created by and for. As he began to explain this I was a bit disconnected from believing him. It seemed like a grand statement to make without much "real" connection to culture because It seemed that too many variable were in play. Who came up with the game? How does the market of video games influence its aesthetic? Can a direct connection really be made? By the time I got done writing down a few cynical questions Manovich began to explain that this data isn't to be placed in the frame work of making specific statements about visual culture. The work to him is actually a way of dealing with the data. He is creating these pieces as a way of opening up the discourse about the media that surrounds us. Its about a new way of thinking about images, one that relates to the surge of images that already exist and is exponentially growing. Manovich also discussed that within the process, because the software could not handle arranging a frame for every second of the 100 hour game, they had to test to see what frame rate would grab the capture. To me this is one part that makes it art. A specific aesthetic is desired that is also influenced by technical limitations. Manovich is left with the overall control of how the final image looks. He controls how far from the source the piece is "zoomed into" and "zoomed out of".

Photography and The Digital Image

I never thought I would find a relavent way to show this off but here is a photograph of me and Russell Kirsch and his wife taken last year. Russell led the team working for the US National Bureau of Standards that in 1957 made the first digital scan of a photograph.






Fred Ritchin writes in "Into the Digital" from After Photography (2009) that the influence of digital has and will continue to undoubtedly change photography. Ritchin begins his argument by explaining the way digital is titled. Names like "mouse" and "apple" are used in the language of digital to create a connection to the real world when the objects are obviously not alive or the same as their actual meaning. The automobile is also used to illustrate a way of thinking about photography turned digital. The automobile still uses words like horses to describe the power of the engine. Horses obviously coming from the horse and buggy which was once the main mode of transportation. Like the word horses sticking to the automobile, the words of analog photography stay with digital. To think about a way that digital will change the viewer, Ritchin reminds us how the automobile includes all of its comforts and luxuries as well as the construction of massively expansive and webbed networks of concrete road systems that change the landscape world wide. I think its also important to bring up the idea that because the digital is infinitely and consistently reproducible, the original loses its meaning. Ritchin correlates this to the ipod or digital music file compared to vinyl recordings. The experience of the sequence of an album now has the option of being shuffled at random which changes the way the album as a body is received. It also changes that experience uniquely form person to person. What I believe Ritchin is getting at is that our perception of the physical world is completely mediated by the image. Once the world is photographed and distributed, we live through the representations as opposed to actual personal experience.

This is a photograph of a piece by Walead Beshty. He has taken one of his photo grams and then edited the actual code that makes up the information of the image. This is somewhat of a piece that is related to Ritchin when he is discussing the change of analog to digital and how the image is now made up of code as opposed to a continuous tonal object.




Jorge Ribalta sees the take over of digital making photography more "molecular". Essentially he is saying that the image has become "increasingly disposable" and that the print is no longer needed because of the preview. The explosion of photography is happening in a way that is now non material which connects it to the visual culture that is using it. However this shift according to Ribalta effects the photographs ability to work as an index and can no longer be viewed as reality. The idea of photography as document is dead because the photograph no longer can be viewed as having the ability to also maintain realism. "Photography without realism is irrelevant photography, literally dead since it has lost its historical mission and its ability to create opinion and induce social transformations". Ribalta believes that we must reinvent realism in the photograph so to "reterritorialize photography" and that will have the "potential of new articulations between art, social science, and politics.

Dzenko is looking at this in a much different light. He believes that the digital images still holds the ability to represent reality and that the viewer has maintained a belief in this function. He does however discuss the digital image as index and how that relies more so on a physical criteria of materiality. Dzenko believes that the fears of what digital would do to the viewers trust in photography are off because the development and introduction of digital was done so in a way to mimic analog that the viewer will continue to "be rooted in previous social uses of photography".

I feel that the use of digital does have its challenges but I do not believe that within my work it creates anything problematic for the viewer. I shoot film and then output digitally. I also feel that it is within the subject matter that I shoot and the kinds of images that I make I am in a way able to detour around issues within the digital argument. I do not shoot images that tend to have elements or clues that would make the viewer question the reality within my images. I tend to use more formal strategies like lighting and composition to draw the viewers attention. I suppose that any viewer of any image can have the internal question of weather or not the image is real but I would be surprised if that would be the first thing someone would ask me about one of my images, artist or not.

Testimonty - Azoulay and Zreik, Picturing Violence - Reinhard

Azoulay uses Laub's work to illustrate the civil contract of photography because of the way Azoulay feels the images read. Laub's photographs are described as having the ability to offer the viewer clues surrounding the subject or subjects that inform the viewer in a way that causes some sort of connection. The use of pairings of subjects that look similar causes the viewer to further more enter the images and notice more closely the subjects differences. The photographs showing the victims who narrowly escaped death that are physically wearing marks of the event they faced pull the subject out of the political arena and sets them in a more humanitarian place. A position that is more so looking at the idea of life and death as opposed to class or culture or religion. The text used in the series written by the subjects is Laub's attempt of defining the affected group instead of using it to divide the two sides of the conflict. This way of thinking is how Azoulay sees the civil contract functioning in a way where the viewer can engage with the subjects in the images without being bombarded with the push and pull of perhaps taking one side of the conflict as right or wrong. A way in which the viewer can "watch" to understand this is what the subjects are going through right now instead of "looking" at the photograph and only responding to the theatricality of an image that is blatantly assigning protagonist and antagonist.



Reinhardt's essay beings with the idea that images of violence and people in despair rarely achieve their aim. Photographs are rare to incite enough response that physical things are done to benefit the subjects or situation in the photographs. Its so amazing how in the beginning Reinhardt lists off a serious of phrases that load a specific memory of a photograph that is representative and unforgettable of recent suffering.




About the Abu Ghraib photograph it is interesting to think about the uses of such images and by who. It is discussed that by showing some one being tortured it is causing a perpetuation of humiliation but at the same time if the person in the photograph decides to reveal themselves then the image become iconic of what they experienced. How ever with the man who did come forward that was not the real person in the famous photograph, he still was able to capitalize on the power of that image.

Sontag & Azoulay

This weeks read was fantastic, it gave some insight on a few issues I have been thinking about for a while. I have often thought about how an image works when a photographer is showing an issue, something outside of themselves that is affecting the subject negatively. How can putting photographs on a wall physically do something? I suppose on a surface level it could be used as a means to raise money. This could be helpful. But what about when the photographer is "raising awareness". It appears that these types of exhibitions are more so the photographer "raising awareness" about themselves and not the issue they attempted to photograph. I can remember two consecutive exhibitions at Roosevelt's Universities Gage Gallery:




A Procession of Them: The Plight of the Mentally Disabled
Photographs by Eugene Richards



The first of the two exhibitions was a group show. Photographs of sobbing family members after loosing a loved one because of violence and even a man lying face down in a pool of blood with a gaping bullet hole in the back of his head. Extremely moving photographs yet nothing to do with them. I understand that awareness of violence is important but how does showing these horrific images at a place like Roosevelt in down town Chicago influence the people doing the killing in Guatemala?

The second exhibition was photographs by Eugene Richards of facilities that are used to keep people with mental disabilities. Terrible living quarters and young people who seem to barely be fed let alone given access to any sort of treatment. Nothing within the exhibition noted that any sort of foundation or movement was connected with Eugene's efforts of making these images to help make the situation better for the people photographed.

I believe that these are examples some where in between Sontag and Azoulay. Perhaps a little closer to Sontag. The images allow for the viewer to stop, look, and then exit the gallery. Perhaps a fleeting moment transpired where the viewer feels for the people involved but then we are obligated to exit the gallery and go on about our day. I believe Azoulay is looking for a way to re-establish the role of the viewer by drawing attention to the relationship between photographer, the photographed, and the spectator. This is an attempt to re-sensitize the viewer, educate them, in a way that the relationship of the photograph to the real world is connected. As wonderful as Azuolay's thesis is, I still feel that the general public is much less interested in doing things as they are being entertained by them. That is to say what Azoulay calls the wealthy viewers of the world.

Chapter 5

thomas struth's museum photographs





Chapter 5 revolves around the description and analysis of three photographic projects by Thomas Struth between 1989 and 2004. Micheal Fried dissects them in chronological order although this order seems to be a heightened way of concluding with the more successful latest body Audience. Fried's main argument in this chapter is about the relationship between the spectators in Struth's photographs and the setting they are in. The first body discusses the relationship to the audience of paintings and how the spectators exist in a different "world" than the paintings they are viewing. The second discusses the way Struth's Pergamon Museum photographs are staged and what that means to the audience and how that affects the way the work was reviewed critically. And lastly Struth's Audience photographs are spoken as a mix of the successful working parts of the two previous bodies of work.

The first project which Fried refers to as the "classic museum photographs" are large format color photographs of spectators, generally from behind, viewing famous paintings. Fried begins the section by noting that commentators often say that Struth is trying to put the audience on the same level as the subject within the paintings. Fried quotes art historian Hans Belting saying that we look at painting and photography with different eyes however when faced with looking at both in Struth's photographs the separate eyes are transformed into a way of looking at photography the same way we view painting. Fried continues by saying that most reviews of the museum photographs have centered around the idea that Struth is intertwining photography and painting and that looking at Struth's images you are engaging in a revealing of the lack of boundaries between the two mediums. Of course Fried is in disagreement with the critique he chooses to exemplify. Belting's reading is the opposite of Fried's. Fried believes that Struth has deliberately left inside the frame certain things or people that formally are disconnected from the paintings. Essentially that the photographs do not place the audience of the paintings inside of them. Belting states that Kunsthistorisches Museum 3, Vienna, 1989 shows the white haired man having a conversation with the sitter of the painting which is him continuing the idea that Struths work connects the photographs to the paintings.



Fried responds that the sitter within the painting does engage the audience when viewed completely frontally. However Struth has shot the photograph at a very steep angle from the work therefor inversely creating less of a connection of the museum spectator and the sitter in the painting. Fried is trying to explain how the man within the photograph is actually not having a conversation.

Between 1996 and 2001 Struth made work at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. Fried does not describe the second set within the framework that he uses to read the first set. With the second series Fried is not as interested with the otherness of the spectators in the photographs and the sitters in the paintings. Because these works are all staged by Struth, Fried has a different group of previous critique to help shape this section of the chapter.



The spectators were arranged because general viewers would all have headphones on and would be moving around too quickly for Struth's large format camera to capture well. Fried uses a critique of the Pergamon work by Peter Schjeldahl to help grapple with the topic of how sitters react to staged versus unexpected image making. Schjeldahl writes that self consciousness of being photographed causes the subject to be unnatural and therefore unsuccessful. He also claims to have had this reaction to the work on a purely responsive level before even finding out that they were staged. Another critique of the work calls Struth's images as "Faking". Fried states that the reviewers personal distaste with the work did not go as far as to consider why they disliked the stagedness. "("Where poses are not expected" is the crucial qualification: it is as if, faced with seemingly straight photographs dealing with absorptive themes, viewers unthinkingly crave the seduction of the human subject' expected obliviousness to being beheld.


The third and final set of Struth's images that are looked at are in a series called "Audience". The images were produced in Florance, summer 2004. These images are of spectators facing almost head on to Struth while he stands behind the red rope or barrier that surrounds very large pieces of sculptural work. The photographs do not have the object within them that the audience is looking at.



Fried is essentially saying that someone how Struth has created images that do appear as if the viewer and the sculpture they are viewing have some sort of communicative relationship. Fried attributes this to the shear mass of what they are looking upwards at and also how some of the viewers are addressing the sculpture and some are directly addressing the viewer of the photograph.

Freedom Fried

I couldn't think of anything else clever to play off of Micheal's last name (although I am aware its not pronounced fried as in my favorite way to prepare chicken).



Anyway, the biggest idea that stuck with me throughout the weekend after reading Introduction and three beginnings as well as listening to Walead Beshty was a reminder about a photograph being an object. I have also started thinking about the words we use to describe photographs and we use the word image a lot. But Walead Beshty reminded me that image is not a physical thing, or an object. Image is a reflection of something, an idea of what something looks like or what it is associated with. Although, I suppose in a sense image is something that exists within a photograph, and a photograph can obtain for the viewer an image of a person, place, ect. (I need to think about this one a little more)




The reading, as everyone else who has posted already states, is the introduction to Micheal Fried's Why Photography Matters As Art As Never Before as well as chapter 1 three beginnings. The intro describes Frieds background and his relationship to photography. The three beginnings dissect the modes of thought that structure the way the book was written. The first beginning uses connections between Suigimoto's theater photographs, Cindy Shermans film stills, and Jeff Walls movie audience to discuss ideas about viewing distance, theatricality, and finally relating back to the importance of considering the work made by other artists as a way of understanding and placing meaning on your own or another artists work. This is brought on by Fried's observation of Suigimoto's lack of describing his work within any frame of connection to the work done by other photographers. The second beginning revolves around the period when photography starts being considered "Art" photography which is marked by a larger scale of presentation for photography and to be on the wall, framed, in an attempt to be viewed by the traditional way spectators viewed paintings. The third and final beginning is exemplified by three texts. In extreme summary the first boils down to a discussion about absorption (of subject and viewer), and truthfulness. The second text is a tale involving voyeurism and that what is changed once viewed. Lastly, words of Susan Sontag provide ideas about photography's abilities and inabilities of showing war. Its a back and forth between showing something horrific and then the viewer being passive of proactive. In which case, the contemporary display of loss is usually dealt with by an active mental response and a passive physical one.

Differentiation of Modern, Postmodern, and Contemporary

I chose to use a simple lay out of text to visualize a differentiation between modern, postmodern, and contemporary.

Contemporary can be thought of as the new modern because it is a product of modernity. As if modernity while looking to the future ran into itself while time traveling. This interaction with itself through the years of postmodernism joined to create the contemporary. I know this reads as a bit of a stretch but it seems logical that if a movement is so fixated on the future than at some point there is a moment of self recognition placed in the now.

In Terry Smiths Contemporary Art and Contemporaneity it is explained that remaining parts of modernism and postmodernism are embedded within the cultures of art makers and observers which shapes the idea of contemporaneity. Modernism and postmodernism allow for the differentiation of the contemporary.

"tiring juggernaut" refers to the DIA:Beacon which is commenting on its want to hold on to modernity and "swarming of attack vehicles" in relation to Documenta 11 which is compared to the place where culture meets contemporary art. DIA:Beacon holds tight to the history of a clunky and much less connected world while Documenta 11 is the collective effort of an entire group of swarming vehicles that come from a networked but diverse people. It is decolonization and the start of globalization that Smith really pin points as the back bone of contemporary. These entities create the mass influx of ideas as well as a place for them to be harnessed and developed.


Reviews discusses Fried's book as pertaining to the spectators distance to an image and Azoulay's engages with the idea of the ethical responsibility of a photographic spectator. The works are however paralleled for they both discuss the ideas that revolve around the photographic spectator. Fried presents the idea that contemporary photography as art does not directly address the viewer therefore does not solicit a response. Azoulay's book about the obligation of a viewer discusses the responsibility of a spectator when confronted with a loaded depiction of loss or destruction. This book is about how images confront viewers yet its civil power is lost when the viewer remains only a spectator. Essentially the power of an image is lessened by passiveness.