neonascent

In an attempt to clarify the scope of the Dirty Suzie project, I have been reading around photographic theory. I have just finished reading a paper by sociologist Howard S. Becker entitled Visual Sociology, Documentary Photography, and Photojournalism: It’s (Almost) All a Matter of Context on the theme of genre distinctions. Becker is well-known for the clarity of his writings, and has been active in varied areas of sociology such as criminology and sociology of art.

Initially I though the paper would be helpful in examining issues of intent and attempted objectivity in photography, but ended up being shocked by many of his statements.* His conception of art is one shared by a fair few academics, and so hopefully my critique of it will have a larger scope than just this paper.

He claims that the differences between photographs of different genres do not really lie in the photographs themselves, but in the way they are presented. To a certain degree it is reasonable to believe this, especially as a sociologist, as these genres are social constructs. However, it is my opinion that these photographs are not neutral within the context of linguistic structuring - the contents of the image itself forms meanings through a constructed visual language.

He goes on to state that the context-based difference between otherwise identical “art” and visual sociology is that art photographs

…[Withhold] the minimal social data we ordinarily use to orient ourselves to others, leaving viewers to interpret the images as best they can from the clues of clothing, stance, demeanour and household furnishings they contain. What might seem to be artistic mystery is only ignorance created by the photographer’s refusal to give us basic information (which, it is likely, the photographer doesn’t have).(Becker)

This is a brazen and spiteful claim that seems to stem from intellectual elitism and misunderstanding of the aim of the artist. The real power of the image in art is that it leaves an interpretive window that the viewer can negotiate within. A picture of a street child by a visual sociologist may tell the viewer exactly the circumstances it was shot in. We can immediately position the demonstrative intent of the image and categorise it neatly. However, it is the ambiguousness of the under-determined art photograph that forces the audience to position the street child simultaneously in a 3rd world country and a western ghetto, as protagonist and victim, and to form their own significance out of the images unique relationship to their life-experiences. The artistic photograph manages to come in under the ideological radar – not didactically spoon-feeding the viewer – while hopefully making the viewer aware of the operation of their own assumptions.

Finally, Becker seems to think that sociology’s reluctance to use photography as a tool just stems from its aping of more “scientific” subjects who shun photographs, and a methodological purism. He points to visual anthropology and a few recent visual sociologists as signs that it can be effectively wielded by the savvy sociologist to pass information about society. He does not argue against sociologists who claim photography only provide a framed, subjective perspective on an event, but claims these same sociologists fail to

…Take the next step, which would be to see that every form of social science data has exactly these problems, and that none of the commonly accepted and widely-used sociological methods solves them very well either.(Becker)

While it may be true that there are inherent problems with attempting objective exposition of a society, these sociological methodologies go as far as possible towards engaging with them, while acknowledging their weaknesses. The photographic image involves a level of emotive charge that is as much its strength in art as it is its weakness in sociology. The ease of reading of a photography speaks of the operation of deeply conditioned assumptions. In pointing to the similar weaknesses in accepted sociological methodology Becker seems to be saying “It’s already broken, so photography won’t do any harm.”

It is the problem of attempted objectivity within any fundamentally fictional project that has urged me to disclaim the documentary intent of Dirty Suzie:

…The documentary style is just a normative convention: Like the white-painted walls of a gallery, we attempt to create a emotively/ideologically/contextually neutral space which actually doesn’t exist. Use of such conventions in effect just brushes evidence of a subjective photographer under the carpet. Likewise, the whole Anthropological endeavour has not really survived in the light of post-modern theories (I.e. Anthropology as construction of Fiction), and seems oh so anachronistic.

As artists we are creators, and producers of meanings and new signifier-signified configurations. Unlike tottering, safari-hat-wearing Victorian gentlemen, we do not have to try and pretend we are objective, but can actively engage in our so-called “subjects”. We must not be afraid to get stuck in and leave our mark!

After all, “it is always the instantaneous reactions to [the photographer] that produces a photograph”1 in the same way that our recording of a subculture will no doubt have an effect on its constituent community.

* After a brief explore of Wikipedia, I realised that my surprise at Becker’s opinions was perhaps less warranted. It turns out that Sociology of Art is in no way engaged with the discursive body of art theory, but concerns itself with describing what society calls art.

1 Reprint from U.S. Camera Annual 1958, U.S. Camera Publishing Corp., New York, 1967, p. 115, in Tucker and Brookman, p. 31

• Link to Becker’s paper

Via Philwilson.org:

A fantastic Firefox plugin is available that lets you perform common tasks usings gestures of your mouse. As an example, holding down the right mouse button while dragging up opens a new tab, dragging left or right moves back and forward within your history.

This may remind anyone who has played Black & White of the fun spell-casting interface that game had. The ability to create your own custom gestures (nothing to do with insulting finger movements) means that there is already a library of interesting commands shared.

• Gesture Plugin
• Extra gestures

Here is my latest completed work, which was featured in the Transilfacturalising exhibition.

Exploring the subjectivity of time, which has become hopefully clearer to most after the delay of daylight saving time for the sake of the Commonwealth games. While it is presented as a device for measuring time, and it functions admirably as one, it also serves no use. It does not count in seconds, and does not divide into collectively referenced unit. The 70s sci-fi faux-futuristic style also speaks of some Distopia/Utopia that could operate on this scale.

LED lit 5-digit mechanical counter than progresses with a satisfying “click” roughly every 2.5 seconds. The base exhibits a faint green halo.

Tech side: It used to use one of my trusty PIC16F84 chip, which triggered a sound chip. I decided it was more elegant without, and so it uses 555 timer chip. I have it in my room at the moment, and the “click” acts as a momento mori to reduce procrastination. Images are accessable through the dedicated Flickr set.

• Link to Flickr Set

Via we make money not art:
A robotic painter that creates images using interesting Colour-as-pheromone behavioural programming.

I recently had an idea of a project called (something along the lines of) iPollock, using a robotic painter to produce similar Abstract Expressionist paintings. The twist was that instead of using batteries, it would be powered via a model-aeroplane-engine-based generator fuelled by hard liquour.

(I suppose it’s possible we could add greater verisimilitude to the project in v2.0 by creating another robot called the iKrasner, that iPollock periodically whacks with a specially designed appendage.)

Image Fatigue, The Australian: “In a culture saturated with visual images and increasingly cynical about their manipulation, photography is losing its status as an art form, writes Sebastian Smee.“

Sebastian Smee makes a daring attack at photography as a contemporary artform. For the sake of my photography artist friends, and to see if he had a point, I was compelled to take a look.

Smee suggests that photography is losing its positioning as an artform for two reasons. The first is an apparent saturation of images in our society:

Photography has finally become just another way of making images. So easy is it to produce these images that our culture has reached saturation point. Just think of all the wedding photos, baby photos, holiday snaps, news photos, fashion shots, forays into art, scientific photos, police records, studio portraits, passport photos and party snaps that come into existence every day of the year, all across the globe.

In short, I think this is bunk. Guy Debord has presented a compellingly convincing account of modern society completely consisting of the “spectacle” in the form of abstracted images. The very existence of so many genres of photography speaks of both the power and directed and mediated use they hold in our world. It seems all to obvious that in a world of images, the only way to express anything is also through images. Subverting our perspective of the world based on our acceptance of these images just seems all the more possible.

The second is based solely on Smee’s definition of Art. I’m not sure if he attempts to obscure his endeavour to authoratively define Art - it certainly doesn’t work. There is indeed so much argument over what art is, that it is ludicrous to try and slip his own definition in and base the rest of the article on it.

Here we go with his idea of art: First it must involve the required amount of effort to produce. If it doesn’t take sufficient artistry to create, then it isn’t art. This is often heard as the “My five year old nephew could do that” argument.

According to this way of seeing, it turned out that not all that much artistry did need to be involved in the making of a great photograph. It was in the nature of the medium to be interesting, if we would just let it.

I’d like to point out that there are many who would believe we can all be artists and - due to their unjaded capacity to wonder at the world - perhaps especially children. Likewise, Andy Warhol and his Popart posse has certainly engaged with ease-of-creation along with level of artistic input through mass-production and mass-appropriation, and managed to come out on top of the “What is Art?” debate.

His second Rule of Art is implicit in the argument against photographs/snapshots of the everyday as art.

A certain eye could be brought to the process of selection, certainly, but even there the random and the arbitrary could be just as fertile ground as the carefully composed, the congested with meaning. But of course, the mind easily tires of randomness.

…Which, I’d venture, is why our minds are urged to find meaning in the apparently meaningless. And so he doesn’t like this. For him, art must present a solid, concrete meaning and signification. He states the following as a question, but I’d suggest your reading would be more accurate to his intent if read it as a statement:

What is art, after all, but a dream of significance, of some things mattering more than others, a concentration and distillation of the great, formless everything that surrounds us into something more meaningful?

This certainly sounds like he wants art to present some kind of Grand Narrative, explicating those essential and important parts of existence for our appreciative understanding.

I sense that these two criticisms are connected, at least in the type of art that they discount. I would suggest there is value in an art that presents everything as meaningful: The whole world as necessary and interesting and worthy of awe. Just because it is impractical in our daily drudge to constantly boggle at the beauty of light interacting through your office window, or the swirls in your morning coffee, or the shear amazingness of existence, doesn’t mean it isn’t valid.

I have a strong feeling though that Smee’s insistence that photography has lost it’s former magic, stems from a personal issue with the modern photographic process. He uses the notion of photography’s “medium’s inherent aptitudes, its original, fragile relation to reality” many times in his article, mostly to say that contemporary artists are failing to take advantage of them, but never manages to go further into what these are… at all. What is obvious from his closing is what will break this fragile relationship:

[Of the work of the few contemporary photogs he likes] The liberties they take can be breathtaking: artificial staging, deliberate obscuring and ghostly distortion of the image. But somehow (primarily by resisting the siren call of digital manipulation) they manage to hang on to photography’s precarious connection to reality.

And so we see: He doesn’t like digital editing. Of course there are philosophical issues with the ability to completely “falsify” an image, but these have been entrenched in photographic theory for much longer than the existence of our present day digital technologies. There are also issues, emphasised by Smee’s insistence on artistic effort in photographic production, on the ease of duplication of digital technology, against which I would point again to Warhol. In my mind, this distrust of digitisation is tantamount to “When I were a lad, photographs could be trusted”.

While I will ambivalently confess to liking art that says something, I’m happy to accept this in the form of an expression of wonder, or even a self-reflexive engagement with art discourse. Of course now we enter a completely different world, and one that Smee doesn’t even begin to touch on: the difference between Art, and what the commercial art world will call Art for the sake of attracting an audience. It may very well be that, as Smee insists, photography is loosing its hold on the second.

Haruka is the Official Illustrator for our Dirty Suzie project. She is also the artist responsible for the 100 Hugs project.

I managed to grab this (slightly photoshopped) picture of Haruka at the end of a Kabuki photoshoot she was doing for Blessi. She was just removing her makeup when I stopped her for this (hopefully not too clichéd) split identity look.

Sunday 30th saw a fantastic march of undead Zombies through Sydney, starting at Town Hall and lurching its was to Circular Quay. It was great fun, and stupified many Sydney locals and tourists.

Harrah.

Some event pictures will be up when I can grab them off my housemate.

pictures via Tegan’s flickr set.