Senior Seminar Reading Response # 3

Critique Handbook

I honestly didn't feel this reading to be all that helpful; in fact it mostly just served to make me more nervous for my crit today. Much of what the author had to say has already been addressed one way or another in my art classes throughout high school and college. I could recognize the types of crits, instructors, etc that I had come across so far in my experience, but I found the reading to be not much more than a simple index of what could  go on during a critique. Surprise! Crits are terrifying. 

The most interesting part to me was the very end, with the list of questions about Art and what you (the reader) think about its place in society and your place in the art world. I found myself giving multiple answers to many of the questions, because art isn't one monolithic thing in our culture. It is many things, sometimes contradictory things. It's investigation/exploration, it's presentation of "beauty" (whatever that is), it's socially conscious, it's frivolous, and more. 

This exercise made me think of my man Oscar Wilde, and his preface to Picture of Dorian Gray, which he added to the work after its initial criticism. Wilde turns his eccentric wordplay to the subject of art and society, and is thoroughly confusing, provocative, humorous, and cheeky, as always.

The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.
The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.

The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass. The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium. No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything. Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art. From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor's craft is the type. All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself. We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.

All art is quite useless.

Shadows

One dynalite and some Photoshop

Two Dynalites and umbrellas

Murder at the Gallery

Two Calumet lights with snoots and shutter drag

In-Class Color Gels

With Two Dynalites, Softboxes, and White Seamless Backdrop

Blue Gel Only, Fill

Green Gel Only, Fill

Green and Red Gels 1

Even Lighting

Green and Red Gels 2

Even Lighting

Blue and Red Gels 1

Blue Key Light and partially blocked

Blue and Red Gels 2

Blue Key Light

Thinkings 001

From <http://modernism.research.yale.edu/wiki/index.php/La_Figlia_Che_Piange>

"No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists…. The existing monuments [of art] form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered… the past [is] altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.^[1]

Eliot emphasizes both the way that tradition shapes the modern artist and the way that a “really new” work of art makes us see that tradition anew."

La Figlia Che Piange

1917

Stand on the highest pavement of the stair— 
Lean on a garden urn— 
Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair— 
Clasp your flowers to you with a pained surprise— 
Fling them to the ground and turn      
With a fugitive resentment in your eyes: 
But weave, weave the sunlight in your hair. 
 
So I would have had him leave, 
So I would have had her stand and grieve, 
So he would have left         
As the soul leaves the body torn and bruised, 
As the mind deserts the body it has used. 
I should find 
Some way incomparably light and deft, 
Some way we both should understand,         
Simple and faithless as a smile and shake of the hand. 
 
She turned away, but with the autumn weather 
Compelled my imagination many days, 
Many days and many hours: 
Her hair over her arms and her arms full of flowers.
And I wonder how they should have been together! 
I should have lost a gesture and a pose. 
Sometimes these cogitations still amaze 
The troubled midnight and the noon's repose.

Photoshop Airbrushing Exercise

^ Liz and Maddie Unedited ^

^ Liz and Maddie Edited ^

The Homework Debacle

Senior Seminar Reading Response # 2

Criticizing Photographs, Chapter 3

by Terry Barrett

We as photo students are in a unique position in our society, I think, in two ways. First, we recognize that photographs are subjective--as stated in the article, there are no "innocent cameras"--and as such photos are almost never as "factual" as the general population is led to believe. There are many non-photographers that also recognize this, especially in terms of Photoshop manipulation (although as pointed out in the article there are many more subtle ways a photo can be biased or manipulated). The second and more specialized way we are unique is that we not only recognize that these manipulations are common, but we have the training and knowledge to actually make them happen ourselves. That's actually a pretty powerful thing, I think. It's one thing for a cultural observer (i.e. anyone ever) to bemoan the fact that photos are taken too literally in our society; it's another to actually understand the history and workings of photography and be able to use them to your advantage. 

I really like Harry Callahan's work, and the 1947 Eleanor with her arms over her head is actually one of my favorite photographs by him. I also found that part of the article to be one of the most interesting, comparing these different views of the Eleanor photographs. I've been aware for a long time of the objectifying nature of the female in Art, most obviously the female nude, especially after watching John Berger's Ways of Seeing in my freshman year here. However I hadn't thought about it exactly in terms of these photographers, including Callahan, "capturing" and "displaying" their wives--it's a provocative statement that I haven't made my mind up about yet. 

My favorite and most inspiring or thought-provoking lines:

- "What do these (YOUR) photographs mean? What are they about?"

- "Photographs as metaphors"--this is something I've been thinking about in my work.

- Cindy Sherman: "The cultural constructions of femininity"

- Plausible or implausible, reasonable or unreasonable interpretations of work versus better or worse interpretations--put another way, informed/educated interpretations versus uninformed/uneducated

- "...subterranean content that kind of leaks out, that I don't intend…"--Sandy Skoglund

Lighting In-Class Portaits

Using one, two, and three Alien Bees and whiteboard reflectors for various effects.

Senior Seminar Reading Response # 1

In the Making by Linda Weintraub

At first I was overwhelmed reading this article. It can be shocking to see spelled out just how many options there are in the art world, from the search for and definition of an artist's self, to the inspiration of an idea, to the methods used to carry out the work. But eventually I found it to be helpful and almost comforting to read a thought-out, logical listing of the million iterations possible for a working artist. I have a lot of different interests and goals, and I'm aware that art making has a massive number of possible definitions; I often feel pulled in so many different directions that it's hard to pick just one, or even a few. I guess my organizational, list-making side appreciated that someone laid out all these categories on paper. 

The section on the artistic “self” was particularly interesting to me, probably because at the moment I happen to be grappling with the question, what do I want to present to the world as “my work.” To me, the answer to this question deeply involves the development of identity. I thought the explanations of “wego” and the construction of a semi-false or completely fantasized identity were the most fascinating to think about—I'm personally not interested in representing a particular group or creating some kind of alter-ego in my own work, but I love the idea of both of these as a concept or incentive for making art.

I would have liked Weintraub to include examples of work or artist names with her analysis. Presenting artists who identify specifically with a type she is describing would have helped illustrate her point as well as become a really interesting catalogue of diverse artists to study.