A couple of weeks ago, before my Mac went off to be repaired, I went to the Bank Street Art Gallery in Sheffield to look at Tanya’s Shades of New York exhibition. The exhibition itself was very interesting, though not what I had in mind after seeing the East 100th Street exhibition a few weeks earlier, but that’s a good thing. Two slideshows formed the exhibition, one featured a mostly architectural view on the “city” (rather than specifically being identifiable as New York, at least to my eyes). The other was an abstract slideshow on the New York marathon, taken from above.

The more interesting for me was the architectural view. This featured a number of black and white photographs of the area around East 100th Street, and I was struck by the lack of people in this collection, especially after the earlier exhibition which was almost exclusively of portraits. The slideshow was accompanied by some fairly haunting music which added to a sense of sobriety, of somberness. The other thing that the music achieved was to provide a “flow” to the images as they transition. This is something that I’ve never really considered with my own work, I don’t tend to use slideshows although obviously Change featured the video. It’s something that appears to be gaining popularity though.

The fact that these photographs were drawn from the same overall body of work as East 100th Street proves to me that two completely disparate views can indeed be drawn from the same body of work. The curatorial view is obviously very, very important in order to get the message across. A different curator, with a different message, be that political or whatever, can give completely different meaning to a sequence of photographs. This then ties into my own YOP portfolio, Into the Valley; it wasn’t until very late in the portfolio that I finally decided on the narrative that I was going to give the work. The narrative that I’ve chosen is very different to what I discussed first with Alan and then José, and it was really only Clive’s input that made me see what I have been trying to say all along.

In amongst looking at the exhibitions, there was some very interesting discussion with Tanya, and with John the creative director at the gallery, and with fellow students Stan and another John. Gareth from OCA even joined in later on. Much of the discussion centred around what the Bank Street gallery did, how they decided on what they would display and how to get work in there. Much of what goes on display in the gallery is privately funded; they hire rooms out to students or to people who want to put on their own exhibition. The price of a room was surprisingly little and it might be something to look at in the very near future.

As we were leaving, Gareth asked me the question “how would you feel for somebody else to curate your work?” Well, that’s a difficult question. There needs to be huge amount of trust in the curator and to get that trust you really need to know the curator. Having seen what he did with Tanya’s collection, drawing less upon the people photographs, I’d feel more comfortable, but it must still be a unnerving experience...

When I look at Davidson’s photographs, I feel they’re generally dark and voyeuristic. I see the photographs of a social documentary photographer who is looking to the ‘Other’, making political photographs with a desire to drive a degree of change. His photographs show a gritty side of E100th Street, reinforcing what I would anticipate having been the outsiders view of the area - I’m too young to know for sure, my impression (rightly or wrongly) is based on the way it has been painted by cinema. I see Tanya’s photographs as being different, and with a different agenda although still pushing to inform the viewer about the area.

For a start, the images shown in the gallery tend to be much airier, gone are the dark and gritty interiors, replaced by much lighter rooms as we can see in the photograph below:

This airiness will come from various sources; from the renovation of the area and contemporary interior design fashions, through to the desire of both the photographer and the family in question, who are shown sitting within their home. This gives rise to an important difference to the two projects, and to a fundamental reason why I don’t believe Tanya’s work is copying Davidson’s (this question was raised in discussion). Davidson went in and photographed what he saw. Yes, there are posed photographs but I find it hard to believe that the people in question will have always wanted to present themselves in such a manner (here, for example), and this goes back to what I meant when I said I found his photographs to be voyeuristic, and a perceived connection to the “beggar photography” of Walker Evans et al in the 1930s. Tanya, on the other hand, appears to have collaborated far more with the subjects, they have posed as they wanted. I understand Tanya asked for them to leave their home as it normally is, but that they’d (naturally) been given a tidy up before she arrived with her camera; this reminds me somewhat of the Stranger series by Shizuka Yokomizo - people who have a certain pride in themselves may not want to be seen amidst their normal everyday clutter, respectability takes over. In this respect, I also felt a connection with the family portrait series by Thomas Struth…

This collaboration and Tanya’s association with the people and the block mean that the photographs are far more sympathetic than anything done by Davidson. Tanya looks to have gone in with a view of full disclosure of why the photographs have been taken, with Davidson I’m not so sure. Certainly, I consider it unlikely that his subjects ever saw the exhibition or the book of his photographs, visiting a gallery like MoMA used to be the reserved for the upper classes and back in the late 60’s I guess the history of racial segregation in America will have further ensured this be the case - Davidson’s photographs were taken in the time around when Martin Luther King was shot. If we consider that Tanya is bringing Davidson’s project up to date, she has done it with the eye of an insider, rather than an outsider, and has shown life on the block far more positively, and from a different subjective viewpoint. I said that Davidson wanted to drive a degree of social change, Tanya’s photographs go towards illustrating this change has happened (and is still happening?) and therefore can be seen to have its own political agenda; to illustrate to the viewer that the block is not what it once was, and it does this well.

Looking at the photographs themselves, outside of the historical context, there’s an undeniable quality in the printing. The lighter tones in the rooms are at times incredibly delicate, and what looks from a distance to be devoid of detail can actually be home to some subtle shading. It would’ve been very easy to lose all this, and I know from experience how hard it can be to get the results that are wanted. The composition of the photographs is very interesting; by allowing the people to recede into their environment, you actually get more of a feel for their personality and for what it is they hold to be important. Without this context, it’s possible for people to put up a façade but when viewed within the sanctity of their own home, it’s possible to get to grips with them better. This is especially true when comparing the semi-formal family shots with the views of the children on their own in their bedrooms, away from the presence of their parents, the children’s own personality and exuberance comes to the fore. In some ways it’s a shame these pairings weren’t obvious from the sequencing in the gallery.

This leads me on to a couple of slightly negative points I picked up on from the exhibition. The sequence is one, and the presentation is the other. There’s also a further slight “niggle” for me - I understand from what was said that Tanya picked out the 13 prints to be displayed, and on the whole this was perfectly fine, she picked out those photographs with people as the subject of the photographs, I just found the photograph of the guard to be a little out of place. The same with the “gang” of youths, but less so (this image served as a good anchor point to the Davidson work, especially sited as it was above the book of his photographs). Having seen the 18 sent for assessment, I believe the inclusion of one or two of the location shots would have been beneficial, to further anchor the interior shots. As it was, “home” could’ve been pretty much anywhere, the feel for it being E100th St was lost. Having said that, it will have been incredibly difficult to edit the work to the original set whilst keeping what you want to say intact, and cutting back further can dilute the narrative, and I think this has happened. Or maybe it’s just a slightly different narrative now, and hence why the exhibition was titled “I call this place home” rather than “E100th Street” or similar. It shows the strength of the body of work that various edits can be pulled from it and still be meaningful. Anyway, I’ve not questioned Tanya on the reasons for her selections yet, but I will be doing…

Putting aside this niggle about the guard, I’m not so sure that the order in which the images were hung in the gallery was the best. It certainly differs from the more cohesive sequence of the full 18 photographs on Tanya’s blog. The edit has changed, so perhaps it’s unfair to compare them, but Tanya showed a number of relationships in her sequencing (family groups, hand gestures, etc.) which have been lost by that put together by the curators at Bank Street Arts. Other than an attempt to alternate square and rectangular frames, is there a natural flow to the images? I’ve not grasped it if there is.

This alternating sequence then leads into the other negative issue for me. The way the prints were framed and mounted. As can be seen from the images above, the photographs were in a silver frame (not an issue for me in itself) with an off- white mount board with a black one beneath it (or white facing on a black core, I’m not sure which). Personally, I don’t like this. I’ve done it in the past, but now I’d steer clear of it, opting instead to keep it simple with a single colour. I’d probably also have opted for a larger mount (which admittedly means a larger, more expensive frame) and possibly also to keep the frame dimensions the same; in some instances the bottoms of the frames were at different levels - certainly on the right wall as seen in the room shot at the top of the post. Then there was the “little” thing of the brass frame mounts - the frames were silver, so please use silver ones, or paint them to match the wall! The postcards and artistic statement also felt a little disjointed from the rest of the exhibition, and would’ve been quite easy to miss. These things will no doubt be due to the fact that Tanya lives in NYC and was not on hand to organise things, financial constraints and also I guess in part because of the relationship of control between Tanya, OCA and the gallery, not to mention the learning curve of setting up an exhibition. It sounds like I’m being really picky, but having noticed things like this, there’s a dull fear for when (if?) I ever get into another show myself.

These points aside, it was a really good experience to see the work of a fellow student on the wall of an exhibition space and a huge honour for Tanya to lead the way with her OCA degree show. The work in itself was excellent, and sets a high bar for the rest of us to try to meet. The actual study visit itself was also one of the more accessible ones in that there was a small number of students and a small number of prints to look at, so everyone would see them all and this then lead to good discussion. Everyone could be involved, and they were, from those who had been with OCA for just a few weeks to those of us who had been around the block and approaching the end of the degree pathway. An excellent initiative from Gareth and co, and I look forward to seeing where future events might pop up, for all of the creative disciplines.

Moving on from Bank Street, there was another student show on at Sheffield Hallam. Now, I’m not going to go too deep into what I thought here, other than to say I was underwhelmed. Having seen this, it makes me wonder whether the negative comments I raised against the presentation of Tanya’s work were completely unjustified. All I can hope is that others will see my own work in a better light than what I saw in this group show...

+++UPDATE+++
I’ve had a bit of a discussion with Tanya and it’s actually been documented that Davidson encouraged his subjects to go to see the exhibition, so I was wrong on that point. Tanya provided a link to an article on the weareoca site, but it’s currently unavailable. I guess it will come back soon though.

It’s basically some twigs/branches resting against a graffitied wall, and I think it’s actually the human-ish forms drawn on the walls that draw me in. I find them quite disturbing in the way that the loom over the faces at the bottom of the wall. I suppose they’re quite reminiscent of the ghosts that feature in the work of Miyazaki Hayao. I don’t find them scary or horrific, just disturbing in a quite mesmerising way. It’s quite interesting that this work has gone back to not featuring any people in it, all of the previous series post the Evans-esque documentary work (at least the examples displayed) had done. Ballen talks of looking inside his own head, and things are starting to get quite lonely.

The photographs are becoming more “still life” in nature, and I now start to draw stronger connections to the artwork of Dave McKean, an illustrator and artist who’s work I first saw 20-odd years ago when he provided the covers for the Sandman collection of comic books. The Sandman story (written by David Gaiman) was rich in the occult and supernatural, the main character being the lord of dreams (hence “Sandman”). There’s obvious links here with the sub-conscious and the inner workings of the mind. This link is especially strong for me when you compare the home image on McKean’s website with a still from the Die Antwoord video, I fink u freeky. Is this particular instance Ballen or Die Antwoord, I don’t know for certain (Yolandi Visser has worn those contacts in other photographs I’ve seen), but I can’t help but think it must be Ballen. Incidentally, watching the video on a large screen is a very different experience to watching it on the web, viewed larger there’s a lot more to be seen, details that are difficult to catch on You-Tube.

Asylum seems to be heading in the direction of a more traditional surrealism (if there is such a thing), and as such it feels a little more accessible and less troubling. Again, I find myself thinking of Dali and a host of other surrealist photography images, the artists names of which I can’t recall. I’m not sure if it was the return to a tradition or an overload of the work, but at this point I was beginning to feel ambivalent towards it. It interested me less than I really expected. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy seeing the work and pulling back some of the various layers of the images, drawing links in my own mind with the work of others that may or may not be intended by Ballen, I did. Just not as much as I thought I would. Was this overload, or was it a response in my head to the hype that has surrounded the work in recent weeks? I’m not sure at this point. In the same way I’m often disappointed by Oscar winning films on first watching, I’ll know what I really feel in a few months when I look at it again, and to this end I’ve ordered a career spanning book of his photographs from Amazon, rather than one of the monographs featured in the exhibition (although Outland is also in my shopping cart, just in case).

It’s largely down to the pose, but the coloration from the film does make it feel more like a fashion shoot, something a little LaChappelle maybe? You can see there’s a look in his face that I guess indicates he’s seen things, and done things for that matter, that I would rather not know about. You only really get this from stepping up to the photograph though - this was printed smaller than the others in this part of the gallery, and from a distance I thought he looked maybe a little effeminate. This might have been the colours playing with my expectations though, affecting my more superficial first glance. Mosse has used a large format field camera in this series, so there’s no covert image taking, this has been posed and I wonder whether the directions for the pose came from Mosse with cognisance of the fact that there would be a good chance the colours would be so, or whether the man had taken up his finest military painting stance? The former would smack of taking advantage of an unknowing subject…

Another image in this first room was of a group of men looking to the right of the frame, this times with their fatigues rendered a much greyer tone, and the background of a grassy hill rendered in a saccharine pink. All of the men except the one on the track seem to be more interested with what Mosse has omitted from the frame - do they look towards a leader giving orders for some raid or other operation? Or could it be more sinister, an execution perhaps? If this would be the case, the men are all looking disturbingly relaxed and casual, but is this a numbed reaction, or a scared one? Of course I could be putting far too much into it, and their actually in a queue for lunch… It all reminds me of the “excluded elephant” that Errol Morris talks about in his book Believing is seeing, and how the choice of framing has a huge influence on how an image might be interpreted - here there is much left open for the viewer to work with, rather than say with the photograph of General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing the VC prisoner during the Viet Nam war. In that image, it’s straight documentary (which Mosse is not, although it might be easy to fall into that frame of mind), and with more selective framing, the whole image changes, i.e.

instead of...

(image available from wikipedia)

This is a quick and dirty edit, but with the prisoner out of frame, it’s just a man firing a gun, what at has to be invented. Similarly, with Mosse’s photograph, the fact we can’t see what the group of men see makes the viewer fill in the detail based upon what they understand about the situation in the Congo - as the article from the Guardian states, there were 5.4m deaths in 9 years, and 400,000 rapes in one year - are they looking at one of these atrocities? Or just queueing for lunch? One thing though, the one man looking at the camera draws the viewer in, they’re questioned - “what are you looking at?” - in much the same way as Olympia, although without the male as viewer undertone and replaced with something a little darker.

Something else of interest here, and in contrast with the images upstairs; I didn’t see captions for these images (was I just being unobservant? I didn’t think so). Anyway, looking at Mosse’s website there’s a caption for the images, and the photograph I’ve been talking about above is called Colonel Soleil's Boys, North Kivu, Eastern Congo, 2010. Now, perhaps I’m reading too much into the caption, but to call these soldiers “boys” seems to be a little irreverent, the assumption I have of them is that they will all be killers, and are at least young men not the child soldiers of some of the other photographs. Is the term “boys” something that has been given by Mosse? Is it a term that the Congolese would use? “Les garçon du Colonel Soleil” doesn’t sound right to me, but then I’m no expert. Does this then hark back to European rule over the African countries? Much was said by Barthes on this sort of thing, and many others too. Watching Simba - Mark of the Mau Mau a couple of years ago it really struck me the way the English used the term “boy” when speaking of the Kenyans, and so I guess the Belgians may have used “garçon” in the same way. Either way, I wouldn’t use such a seemingly derogatory term to describe a group of armed men…

Moving to the second room, the images were generally smaller, with one exception - a photograph blown up to life sized proportions of a youth in fatigues and with a Kalashnikov looking directly into the lens and so at the viewer. Again, thoughts of Olympia came to mind, but now the youth seems to plead with the viewer - this isn’t the face of a hardened killer (or at least this is how it seemed), but of a boy ( and I use the term without any derogatory connotations ) who would rather be playing with his friends, etc. This is easily the most compelling of the images because he is looking to the viewer in the way that he is. The coloration of the foliage forms a stark contrast, isolating the figure and therefore focusing the viewer on him, and then to his plight as a child soldier. And that’s what the use of this military film does. It focuses the viewer, makes them look again because the colours are so abstracted, so unlike what we are used to seeing - black and white is one level of abstraction, and we are used to that, but the pinks and purples of Aerochrome are something else.

I mentioned before that Mosse is not a documentary photographer, but this then asks various questions - is he trying to make war, death and atrocities seem frivolous? To the casual observer coming in to the gallery from the street, the photographs might seem like some garish fashion shoot in places, or like badly colour-popped photoshop images. The aesthetic certainly turned me off from the article in Aperture, and I guess it would do the same to others.The apparent campness of Février doesn’t install the horror of conflict. But then, as I said, this is not documentary. The use of the gamut might also seem very gimmicky, much like the use of toy camera iPhone apps in reportage, but in some ways this is the very opposite of the likes of Hipstamatic, which can be seen to bring disparate images together with a common algorithm for the aesthetic feel of the images, Mosse on the other hand has gone the opposite way. These images are pretty unique.


Simon Norfolk on the other hand uses a traditional aesthetic; black and white photographs displayed in simple black frames and with a good white mount. Moving clockwise around the room, the first ten ( ish ) images could easily be “simple” landscapes, perhaps the square format and horizon composition of some is non-conventional - straight through the middle or right at the bottom of the frame - but they are not obviously of conflict and genocide sites. A line of trees is very reminiscent of the work of Michael Kenna for example ( no idea who came first… ) and a view of Auschwitz may easily pass as a New Topographics style image showing an industrial presence in the landscape. Some will recognise the chimneys for what they were, but I did not. Not without the aid of the caption. That’s the major thing about this exhibition for me, called For most of it I have no words, a collection of photographs drawn from the Open Eye collection. The caption means so much to these images. Some explanation is required, even if it is just the opening statement and one or two words to state the location.

There was one image I found really quite powerful, and it is the one shown on the Open Eye exhibition page (linked above) of the stairs. Without having read the caption, my mind went to the stairs in my old school, which were similarly worn by years of passing feet. Reading the caption and the realisation that the left hand side of the stairs were far more heavily worn than the right, the knowledge of what this represented came home. Many Jews will have walked that staircase on a one way journey to their deaths. A sombre thought, intensified by the black and white nature of the photograph and the shaft of light from above illuminating those worn stairs; symbolising a divine light is the way I read it.

Some of the images were more ‘obvious’ in their horror though, notably those from Cambodia featuring collections of human skulls. Whilst horrific in their own right, I can’t help but feel that we, as a modern viewer and consumer of media images, will have become insensitive to this material, and in some cases find it a subject of morbid fascination rather than disgust. The photographs introduce a distance between the atrocity and the viewer, and black and white is a further level of abstraction. The photograph of the teacher training college is a case in point for me. A dog wanders through the centre of the photograph, at the back of which you can see, when closely inspecting the photograph, a mound of skulls. You can’t count the skulls, there’s so many, but if 5 skulls is more horrific than 1 skull, is 20 more so than 10? At what point do we cease to see and quantities becomes blurred, almost irrelevant? I personally find it far more disturbing to put the horror to an image myself, rather than be shown it. It works in a cinematic sense, it’s more suspenseful or scary when you don’t know what is happening than when the scene is overly graphic, and I find it the same here. My mind can be a dark place - which probably leads quite nicely into my next planned gallery visit to see the work of Roger Ballen in Manchester next month.

This could raise all sorts of questions about Simpkin, he’s obviously got quite a singularly obsessive and addicted personality in order to pursue this project for so long. Has he actually done anything else in his life? Looking at his website, it’s all pretty much about celebrity, and he says he doesn’t care for it! The work could be said to be self-absorbing, egotistical and a little disturbing, after all, there’s a case for him being a serial stalker. And to put on an exhibition (and book) with hundreds of photographs of yourself surely feeds your ego!

It is fascinating though, and he’s an engaging speaker. No matter what you say your views are on celebrity, some of the stories and escapades he told would pique your interest. And I challenge anyone to visit the exhibition and not go “Wow, he’s had his photograph with xxx”. So, beyond being a comment about Simpkin and his personality, this is undoubtedly a narrative on modern culture in general, the celebrity game and the commodity of it all, especially after Simpkin has become better known for what he does, and the PR guys actually want Simpkin to take the photographs. Parr refers to it as “art”, I think more of a ‘narrative”, but the two are interchangeable these days anyway.

Simone Lueck’s “The once and future queens” is perhaps a more traditional form of photography to be found hanging in a gallery. The large sized portraits depict older women from LA, dressed and posed in a glamorous way, recreating images from the golden days of Hollywood.

I find the images to be tinged with sadness, but perhaps that’s of my own creation. Certainly Mara, who poses in several of the photographs, seems to be having fun, enjoying the opportunity to play make-believe in what must surely be the world capital of fantasy and glamour. I guess the collaboration with Lueck (and she is keen to point out that it is collaboration, with the women picking their own clothes and setting their own scene) may have been deeply therapeutic for the women who will, in all probability, be coming to terms with ageing, and particularly feminine ageing, in Tinseltown.

I’m not by nature a huge fan of portraiture, certainly I don’t like taking portraits myself, but there was much to be read into these photographs, and it was all very enjoyable. There was something to be said about presentation here though; the images were all glass fronted and reflections were a major issue, certainly nearer to the large windows.

The layering effect might be interesting in its own right, but sometimes it’s nice to see the image on its own…

The final exhibition in the Open Eye was a number of artefacts from Parr’s own collection of “painted photographs”. Yes, once again Parr is proven to have an odd but nonetheless interesting taste in things to collect.

These historical items are a little surreal but complement perfectly the subject of celebrity, as they are celebrity photographs (poodle excepted) that have been altered and re-used for a different purpose. We don’t see the final ‘after image”, just these remnants from a process no longer in use because of the power of Photoshop. Yeah, interesting from a photographic history perspective…

Not sure why I did this really, but I did so here it is.

I also went to a couple of other places - the Museum of Liverpool (not impressed by Mike McCartney’s photographs though) then to the Tate where there was some significant works by well known artists that I was quite happy to see. I’ll not comment too much here, they’ve been spoken about by people far more eloquent and informed than I am. I will say however that the photographs by Gillian Wearing were disappointing, this one in particular was blurred when blown up to exhibition sizes!

This sculpture by Don Brown was exquisite though - so delicate, although perhaps disturbing in its subject matter.

Finally it was off to the Slavery Museum for 42 women of Serra Leone, which I found to be too centred on the caption - I took longer to read these than look at the image, and sometimes the image and caption didn’t particularly match. I’ll say something more about this in another post though.

from Si Barber’s Flickr stream

from the Big Society website

This has a more institutionalised respect and tradition, not the societal respect shown in the other. It’s also pretty much timeless as the photograph has no obvious means of being dated; the dress uniform of the soldiers is probably much the same as it has been for decades, although no doubt an expert in the matter might notice a certain issue of boots or something. The “Poundland” image is more placeable through the shop, the fashions of the people lining the street, etc. There was a brief discussion about which would be used in the press, with some division of opinion, but it would depend on whereabouts in the press and the message being communicated - it could really be either.

As Gareth pointed out, there was also a family bond in the small group of people following the hearse, with the connection between the younger man on the left of the group (a brother perhaps?) and the older man (the father?) to his right. An interesting image that shows that there’s often a need to look deeper into an image, moving past the first impressions to reach a deeper understanding. This was true of several of the images here, but is becoming increasingly more difficult to do with the constant stream of visual information to which we are subjected on a daily basis. I will add the following image though, taken from Si Barber’s Flickr stream which shows the tags assigned:

from Si Barber’s Flickr stream

The tags are “funeral, poundland, £1, soldier, death, dead, war, casualty” - they say nothing about this bond that can be seen, or the respect being paid by the people on the street. Just the death of a soldier and £1. Was this a case of the reader “owning” the image more than the photographer, with Si Barber having lost control of the meaning of his work? It would appear so: I’ve posted a question on his Flickr image, and he responded with acknowledging the reader makes their own mind up, but summed up with “However I suppose to me it says something about the way a society can regard life as being very cheap.” This image can be argued to say as much about the death of the author as the death of Private Hendry.

There were other images that were discussed at length, those of the sex workers being one of the prominent discussions, particularly of the ethics in running such images. The women were paid to pose as they would do if Si was a punter, and how would we approach such a project should we choose to run it? Would we do like Si and pay for the image (as I believe Philip-Lorca DiCorcia did with “Hustlers”, but I’m not sure on this), or use some other technique? Sniping with a long telephoto, or snap and dash, or getting under the skin and using gatekeepers, etc. Also, would we show them online, in a book or even in a gallery? It was no coincidence that these images where in a room that could be seen from the street, should you pause and look through the windows.

from the Big Society website

Another image discussed was of an older lady with a “do not resuscitate” tattoo, a strong image that showed a determined and outwardly upbeat woman who has made her choice about life and death. The image was in stark contrast to the adjacent photograph of a woman apparently in a care home petting a lamb. This other woman did not come across as in control of herself, perhaps largely due to the setting itself (plastic chairs and sheeting on the floor) but also because of her pose at the time the photograph was taken. Maybe this was a split second view on the woman, but it did come across as markedly different to its neighbour. Yes, a strong juxtaposition of images.

from the Si Barber’s website

from the Si Barber’s Flickr stream

Also interesting to compare is the image of Joy from the Big Society exhibition with that on his Flickr stream, which has either been left unprocessed, or far more subtly done.

from the Si Barber’s Flickr stream

Less dramatic? Certainly. A little more human? Yes, I think so. The image from the exhibition is in keeping with many there in the style of processing, which is quite bold and vibrant.

The last image we discussed that I think needs a mention (there were many interesting and provoking images there) is that of the Coke can crack pipe. Obviously there is an historical connection between Coca-Cola and drugs (not sure if it’s all just an urban myth though), but the thing that I think needs to be mentioned is the orientation of the image in the gallery, which was vertical, as opposed to horizontal on the website and in the book. I read them differently, with the vertical image almost being a defiant celebration - the can held aloft, almost as the Statue of Liberty does with the torch. Horizontally, it’s perhaps more of an offering…

from the Big Society website

A thoroughly enjoyable visit, and an engaging exhibition. I’d like to thank Si for giving me permission to reproduce his images here, his responses on Flickr and also for posting the book of the Big Society out to me so quickly.

Si’s websites:
www.sibarber.co.uk/
www.flickr.com/photos/si_barber/
www.thebigsociety.me.uk/

I suspect the 500 photographs don’t need much of an introduction, all the photographs are of identically framed faces, showing just eyes, nose and mouth. Some time ago I commented on the Steve McCurry ‘Portraits’ book suffering because I found it all a bit “samey”, a bit formulaic. This should be the case here, and to some extents it is, but here there is a little something extra that I find more rewarding. Sure, it’s easy to flick through sections of the book without paying particular attention, and I guess it’s unreasonable to expect an in depth inspection of each and every photograph in a single sitting: there’s 500 of them, but that’s not the point anyway, these aren’t singular images, it is without doubt a collection of images. And one that takes repeated viewing.

I’ve read that the framing and monochrome printing that averages any racial colouring makes the faces unified, and hence the title of the book. To a degree I can see this, although with the Taschen imprint there are pretty clear differences for colour, although not as great as they could have been if printed more “normally”, and certainly they’re more unified than if they’d been in colour.

What I can see from the repetition of images though is a different form of unification - we’re all built the same, give or take. The repetition of these facial ‘points’ shows that this is the case. Older people have larger noses than younger, some people have broader noses, others have freckles or spots, there are differences in this stream of similarity. This also brings to mind something said by Kanemura Osamu: “though repetition (I aim to) discern significant differences within the subject...” (Tucker, 2003, p268). And yes, this is where my fascination comes, through the differences that this attempt to show ‘one’ identity highlights. We may be the same, but we are all also different. I might not be explaining myself well here, but I know in the back of my head what I mean!

One thing I would like to do here is to merge the images. A video would be the obvious choice, and so perhaps a little less interesting because it is so obvious (although I have hinted at this when I did a similar exercise but with a single person). An image merge might be more interesting. I can’t bring myself to detach the pages from the book though!

Bibliography
Tucker, AW. Friis-Hansen, D. Kaneko, R. Takeba, J. (2003) The history of Japanese photography. Houston. The Museum of Fine Arts.
Ohara, K (1997) One. Cologne. Taschen (only referred to as “this edition”)

I’m drawn to a square layout of maybe 9 or 16 (25 might be too many) of this type of image, different people and either all colour or black and white (still to experiment). This is the first exercise in the book, and yes it has me thinking and playing around with stuff that perhaps I wouldn’t have done...

Obviously, I’m still in the first few pages, but I found it so interesting that I had to mention it on here. maybe it should come in as recommended reading?

Saturday was spent at the Format Festival in Derby, and before going on any further I must say that thanks are due to Gareth, Jose and Clive for organising the day and elucidating on some of the questions that came to mind. It was just a shame there wasn’t a bit more time, not that I would have managed it - it was a 14+ hour day out for me anyway, thanks to train delays and what have you. Not too sure Jose would have lasted either...

Before I go headlong into rambling insanely about what I saw there, I need to confess that I didn’t take notes. I had fully intended to do so, bringing my OCA Black and Red and a pen, even scribbling some thoughts on Nakahira Takuma (and therefore Moriyama Daido) on the train across to Derby. However, once at the exhibition, the notebook remained resolutely in my pocket and I enjoyed the discussions with various people far too much to be distracted with note-taking. Maybe I’ll regret this at some point, but maybe not...

The visit consisted of 4 venues, the first being QUAD. After walking through into the downstairs gallery, the first thing that struck me was the darkened viewing area - this was no white walled gallery location! It wasn’t black, but it was comfortably dark. For some reason, I tend to walk around gallery exhibitions anti-clockwise, and I’ve really no idea if this is going against the grain or not (at the Irving Penn exhibition last year it did mean I was travelling backwards in time). The first set of work was by Giacomo Brunelli, whose work I saw a larger collection of at the Photographer’s Gallery in London last year. I still like the wild dog looking like it’s coming through the fence...

The next group of images was very interesting, and sparked a certain amount of discussion with Jose, Stan and Penny (and a few others who dropped in and out, sorry - I don’t remember everyone’s name...). Anyway, the work was entitled Tales from the Data Stream and was by Nate Larson and Marni Shindelman. The discussion centred mainly about the way the images were viewed as they were tightly arranged in a 4x3 grid, mounted onto to board and not framed and with a black text bar across the bottom featuring the tweet that drew them to the location (the photographs are taken from the geo-tagged location embedded in the tweet). There were a number of ways in which the ordering of the images were interpreted: was it down to location, or the date taken? Was there a natural/manmade alternation? Was the top row showing diagonals into the photograph, the middle row all very planar and the bottom row connected with windows and looking? Or something else? In the end, I wasn’t sure as each option seemed pretty valid. As for the photographs, interesting although not particularly awe-inspiring. This is not a negative comment though - the photographs were of the mundane and everyday so awe-inspiring wasn’t the intention. The images are still thought provoking, and the concept is interesting with the interplay between text and image. There’s also images that remind me of my Night Walk series, which can only be a good thing...

WassinkLundgren showcased an interesting way of displaying their work (a series showing Chinese people picking up empty bottles) in that each of the images was a spread from their (“award winning”) book - a blue page and a photo page made up that spread. The images were arranged in a grid on a single wall. Personally, I think this suffered somewhat as the upper row of photographs were difficult to look at, they were just too high. Perhaps 2 longer rows at a more comfortable height instead of the 4 rows used would have been better? This decision would have been down to available gallery space, and it would be interesting to know what the photographers thought of this.

Peter Dench’s England Uncensored was a video installation. My first thought was “Martin Parr Lite”. Perhaps this is a little cruel, but unfortunately if you choose to photograph England in this way, then there’s going to be comparisons and Parr got there before and he is a tough act to set out to follow. That’s not to say the photographs were not up to scratch or anything, there were some good observational images that showed exactly what it was intended to show - I thought the old couple snogging in the tram shelter in front of Blackpool Tower interesting, perhaps because it showed a different view instead of the easy targets of some of his other images. Saying that, is the “kiss me quick” mentality of Blackpool considered an easy target even if from this angle? He’s made it on to my list of photographers to track on the basis of what I saw. [UPDATE: I’ve just heard a podcast with Dench when it was revealed that his inclusion in the exhibition was pretty much an afterthought, there was no wall space left hence the video presentation. He did say that the 15 second display was a little too long...]

The next set of images was small and to the point. Four photographs of people running on the streets (of New York, I’m guessing) by Jeff Mermelstein. The photographs are tightly cohesive on a singular theme, even with this small number of images, the theme is undisputed. Whether or not a series of 20 images would begin to feel a little tired is another matter though... The photograph of the chap in mid air, looking at his watch in front of the red tour bus (here) is a perfect moment captured, I like it a lot - it’s something we’ve probably all done at some stage, so we can relate to it, but it’s also humorous.

Street view: a series of unfortunate events by Michael Wolf came next. When I first came across this idea, I thought it was an interesting and original application of appropriation art (the Rickard images I used in UVC assignment 2), now in a very short period of time I’ve seen a few different artists doing the same thing, albeit in slightly different ways. Having said that, I’m thinking of using it as part of my research in YOP should i chose to follow the Boring Postcards idea... Presentation-wise, I’m not sure about this installation; the images seemed to be placed randomly all over the place. Now, I know there’s not a hard and fast rule about placing images in rows, grids or whatever at a gallery, but this was not really to my liking. Yes, it had the effect of leading your eyes around the images in a certain way, because they weren’t in a grid, there was no real compunction to compare images side by side or to read it in an array, so the eye moved around. Still, I’m not so sure I’m a fan. As an aside, it looks like this style of random installation is becoming popular in the home too, judging by what I saw at Focus (I didn’t like it then either).

One set of images I enjoyed looking at and making up a narrative for each was those by Martin Kollar (from Nothing Special). There were 4 or 5 photographs that the more you looked at them, the more bizarre the situation seemed, a dog standing on the awning of a building on a deserted street, a man wearing his underwear picking fruit whilst in the background people gather around a crashed lorry, or a man’s legs sticking from a manhole. The photographs are in a deadpan style, which makes the actual scene within them feel even more absurd. A really interesting series of photographs displayed in a very matter of fact way, an aesthetic I really appreciate at the moment. This could be a photographer worthy of looking at in a little more detail later on.

Will Sander’s photographs probably didn’t get the attention they perhaps deserved as there was a small crowd in front of them when I got to them, so I moved on (see the photo at the top). I didn’t come back to them due to the lack of time, and perhaps also because the random display put me off. They did get some good reviews from other students in the lunch time discussions though, so with hindsight I should have made time. Also, with further consideration, the apparent randomness of the display does reflect the apparent randomness of the quirky events he looks to have captured (leaping dogs, an old person in an electric wheelchair stopped by a wall, etc.). Context is important with display as well...

Meyerowitz was given a cursory glance - time was slipping away and the half dozen-ish photographs were not new to me. What was interesting was the white frames and no matt approach; I was aware that the classic black frame/off-white matt combo was losing that ubiquitousness that has pervaded for some time, but I must say I do like it. Maybe I will start to experiment with other things now. I guess I should do!

Jun Abe’s photographs sparked some discussion, or rather one of his images did, that of a row of people standing below a traffic light. The people are subject to strong shadow, yet the post for the traffic light is not. To me, it feels like the figures and background are from separate photographs and have been brought together in a composite. This is street photography though, so this is unlikely to be the case, a more likely explanation being some form of processing, whether in the darkroom or on the computer. Whatever, it certainly forms an interesting image.

I found the images by Polly Braden to be quite poetic. I particularly liked the large image with the woman on the bicycle. The colours were, in general, quite muted but with a few green accents that really caught the eye. The wooden frames were nice too, as were the variety of sizes, although I’m not sure why the sizes were chosen for the particular images. Sometimes it would be really nice to have some notes form the photographer to explain some of these things... One thing that I found really unusual was there was a print at very low level. To me it almost felt like a poor relative to the others just because of this position - if it is so far away from the viewer’s eye, is it really worthy of looking at? Maybe it was there to give a reward to those that made the effort.

I didn’t get to look at all of the exhibition as time passed quickly. One thing I wished I’d found time to look at was a long strip by Frederic Lezmi which received universal praise from those that had looked at it. I briefly thought about buying the book, but at a whisker shy of €100, it’s a little beyond my budget for a book of images I didn’t get the chance to look at first.

Lunch beckoned at this point, and good discussions progressed throughout the break, from the questions asked by Jose about Peter Dench’s work and how the English saw it (shame I didn’t get Jose’s point of view though) to how different cultural perceptions can exist, including how the photographs are read directionally based on the way the language is written (left to right, top to bottom or right to left).

Assuming my memory does not leave me (ahhh, the notebook should’ve been used), I’ll add some thoughts on the other exhibitions in the next few days.

Bruce Gilden "Head On", presented by British Journal of Photography from Olivier Laurent on Vimeo.

After Gilden, it was the iN-PUBLiC members, and to be honest what I thought was a mixed bag of photographs. There was some really nice stuff, from Andy Morley-Hall, Nick Turpin, Jeffrey Ladd and Nils Jorgensen. There was also an image by Amani Willetts that I had to bring in the tutors to discuss. The photograph featured a number of people walking in a section of street, some fully in the frame, others cut off. It just seemed so mundane, and yes we stood there a while looking at it, trying to decipher it - the composition, the narrative and what have you. In the end, Clive said we were too mundane to understand the mundane (tongue firmly in cheek I hope) and Jose admitted he wasn’t particularly a fan. Looking in the book 10 years of in-public, Willetts’ entry declares a liking to present photographs that ask more questions than they answer, and it was certainly the case here!

There was also an exhibition of work by an Iranian woman photographer, Mehraneh Atashi. I admire her for pursuing her craft in what would appear to be a hostile environment for a woman, but I just didn’t gel with the photographs. It’s not the reflection/double exposure style thing that was the problem, rather I think it was the images being layered. I don’t know. They just didn’t work for me.

I’m struggling to get more down at the moment, writing it all up was almost as draining as the day itself!

Would I go back next year? Most definitely.

Would I want to spend more time there? Possibly, although I must say it’s a balancing act between seeing what is on offer and reaching mental (and physical) saturation. I was knackered at the end of the day. Perhaps age is catching up with me...

Would I go on another OCA event? Without a doubt.

(ignore the colour casts - quick and cheerful...)

In looking now, I’m suddenly unsure whether the majority of prints were the same size, I think they were (using positions of plugs as a guide). Certainly the one differently sized print on the second wall was larger than the others. Why was this one larger? I’ve truly no idea. And interestingly, the larger picture is reproduced smaller than the rest in the catalogue.

The photographs are quite mundane and formal, but I like that in a photograph, it makes me more interested in seeing what we sometimes overlook, what people sometimes ignore in search of the more traditional idea of beauty or magnificence. In addition, these photographs also look at the concept of surveillance as well as confinement, certainly the first wall of images do, with the relationship drawn between the monitor and what is in the room, together with the privacy screen for body searches and also obscuring the toilet facility in the monitor image.

Edmund Clark also uses variety of scale in his images. Starting to look at his exhibited works, the first image is 30.4 x 25.4cm whilst the later ones measure 152.4 x 121.9cm. The difference is significant. The large size didn’t really do anything for me, they didn’t give me a “wow” response, and in many ways it felt like they were large so as to be “art”, rather than “photographs”. Not for me, this one.

Darwell’s Dogs in Cages was for me though. I like dogs, and the series pulled at the heart strings (again something I will talk about on YOP). The work certainly fits in with Darwell’s approach to photography and his style, with some of his vast portfolio anyway. The use of selective focus informs primarily about the cage, the animal almost becoming subtext although an important one. The photographs are about being imprisoned, the fact that it is dogs questions the adage “man’s best friend”, although the insertion of a caged man between those of the same dog pacing it’s cage within a triptych also then questions incarceration in general.

The presentation of Darwell’s images is large, although not as large as Clark’s, which which it shares a room. The chromogenic colour (fancy name for C-Type)photographs measure 76cm square and are without frames, being mounted on some form of board (not sure what, and didn’t think that fingering the mount would go down too well with the gallery staff). The walls here were painted a grey colour, not the standard white, and as such acted as a frame in itself. Perhaps it also made the series feel sombre than it would have done on white.

Ben Granville photographed prisoners being transported in the back of prison vans, putting the camera to the small windows to take the photograph and illuminating the inside with flash. The resulting photographs are candid, raw and in many respects, “happy accidents” - there’s certainly an element of luck in what is captured. In keeping with this slightly hap-hazard means of capture, these prints were simply tacked on to the black walls with pins. as a means of presentation, I believe it worked, and I guess it is akin to the editorial selection processes that will have been involved in their original purpose as journalism.

Finally, Jürgen Chill’s work. I like this a lot, and it’s not immediately clear how it was achieved, although a read through the exhibition booklet reveals they were taken using a boom and composited from a number of frames. In approach, this is creating an objective plan view on the room. It’s very matter of fact, and devoid of any apparent emotional input from the photographer. There’s a graphic something about the work, and also a strange god-like feeling that the top down view gives. Looking closer and actually inspecting the photograph brings out all sorts of little details of the space, another form of surveillance that the rooms normal occupant must no doubt be subjected to. All of these little details inform of the sort of person living there, and how they have responded to institutional incarceration.

Over at CUC, I was disappointed to find a number of the galleries closed off, with only the Mohamed Bourouissa collection Peripherique and the combined Paul Graham, Tish Murtha and Marketa Luskacova exhibition open. Bourouissa was the subject of a discussion over on weareoca some time ago, looking at the apparent documentary nature of the photographs, which is not claimed in any way (the associated exhibition text actually points out that they are posed). Personally, I feel that the term “documentary” and “document” would need to be clearly defined. The photographs are documents, albeit of a re-enactment. What they might not be is journalistic images in the traditional sense. It all comes down to semantics.

Back to the work, they were all large and both mounted and framed in white - another “unusual” choice by traditional standards, but it’s not the first time I’ve seen this. I quite like it, but I’m not sure it would be ‘right’ for my own photographs at the moment, but we will see how things develop - hopefully I’ve got a good few years ahead of me...! Now, with the staged nature of the images, Jeff Wall comes to mind, but these are not in the same style at all, not in terms of sheer quality anyway. I don’t mind this, and it certainly isn’t a negative comment, just something I’m noticing more and more. I think it’s marking a departure from trying to emulate the like of Wall and Gursky as well as possibly could with a DSLR, and perhaps embracing more the non-technologically “pure” aspects of photography evident in the Japanese photographers I’m currently searching through. I’m noticing more positive uses of colour noise for example. A corner has been presented to me, and I’m peeping around the corner...

The trio of photographers looking at Thatcherite Britain (Graham, Murtha and Luskacova) presented an interesting vision on the era. It was also interesting to see that the images, shown in groups with one from each photographer, mixed colour and black & white, landscape and portrait. It worked, it was cohesive, and it certainly didn’t make me think “eek”, other than in response to previous comments from tutors on not doing it. Maybe this is something else that’s actually changing. it just needs to be thought about, rather than being random (even if it sometimes seems random).

On writing all this, it’s apparent to me that I’m concentrating perhaps a little to much on how the images are presented, rather than the images themselves. This is something I’m looking at at the moment, so only to be expected. Maybe next time I’ll make more notes on the images themselves.

Before my recent trip to Paris, I did a quick spot of research on what was showing at the moment, and I came back with Richard Prince, Claude Cahun and Charlotte Perrand on a short list I came up with. One the Sunday I was having a bit of a wander and on the spur of the moment headed off down an old arcade and at the end there was a (closed) shop selling old black and white prints, but in the window there was a poster for Itinérances (roaming/wandering), an exposition by Moriyama Daido and William Klein, et al. All thoughts of Prince, Cahun and Perrand left my mind as I sought out directions to the Polka Gallery. I found it, but as it was Sunday, it was closed.

Needless to say, I was back on the Tuesday (Monday was closed too, but I was at Le Bourget anyway), waiting outside the gallery before it opened! Rather than rush straight to Moriyama and Klein, I gave Massimo Siragusa the once over as he was in the first room. To be honest, I don’t know what to think of his work. The photographs were all of Paris, and quite typical scenes in Paris at that. They’re also all quite unusual in the way they look: almost overexposed but with a full range of tones (at least there are blacks present). Maybe washed out would be a better way of putting it? I’m not sure how it’s done, and I’m not sure whether I like it. And the trees looked a little funny. There’s detail there, but it’s often quite a flat detail, and some of the darker colours are a little noisy, which is noticeable at the sizes they were printed to (one example was 40x87cm). Perhaps it was all done by sliding the histogram centre point to the left, lightening the image but retaining the extremes? Something else I noticed was the framing, and also the printing quality on one of the images (here), there was inkjet “speckling” present. Now, I’m not sure if this is the right term, but you could see the dots made by the printer in the clouds - my R800 does this and I hate it for it, I won’t use it for printing “real” photographs, only for stuff for the notebook. With the framing, this wasn’t a “technical” problem, just something I noticed - the frames were white, with the photograph “floating” in the centre space without a matte. Dust settles and is really noticeable in the rebated space. Mmmm. Anyway, the images were interesting, but as I say, not sure if I liked them, something nagged at the back of my mind about them...

Off to the Moriyama next, and the downstairs room at the gallery held about 20-25 prints of Moriyama’s work, some printed slightly bigger than A4 and framed in black with an off white matte, some a little larger then some much larger works, up to 1.5mx1m framed in black but full bleed - no matte. I was surprised to see them this large, especially as they’re all taken in 35mm, but I suppose his signature style doesn’t need the finest level of detail; the contrasty grain worked well at these proportions. The selection of images on show was interesting, ranging from the extremely well known such as the dog (Aomori, 1971) to the more obscure, although maybe they’re all in the book The world through my eyes.

There was one photograph in particular that I really liked: Nagano, 1972. The dark bands to the top and bottom were really effective at framing the blur of trees. Why do I like it? To be honest now that I look at the jpg on the Polka website, it’s not so obvious, but standing in front of the print, it put a huge smile on my face. I guess it’s the grain and “texture” that you get looking in close (it was 60x90cm) that is really lost when looking on the screen. This ties in with various discussions that have been going on recently about working your images to suit the intended presentation method. With these images by Moriyama, without doubt the intended method is the printed form - let’s ignore the fact it’s a film print from 1972. This works as a print, full-stop. I had been having thoughts of rebellion against the large printing aesthetic that is happening in the “art” photography world, thinking that perhaps it would be good to do some small scale prints, but seeing this exhibition has given me a hankering for printing large again. It’s just a shame I can’t really afford it at the moment!

Other prints seemed to take the high contrast style even further, perhaps because there’s less grain. Osaka, 1997 for example almost feels like it is only black and white: there’s very little grey in there. Blown up to 1x1.5m, this makes for a very impressive print. What the subject actually is feels almost secondary, it’s the contrast that makes this photograph really “sing” - I can imagine the city noises, the dampness of the air, etc. For me, this is coming from that contrast, or at least it is amplified by the contrast. I try to visualise the photograph in colour, and this effect diminishes.

Klein was a disappointment. His photographs of the London crowds at Will and Kate’s wedding just didn’t float my boat. Maybe it was the subject matter, as I’m not what you would call a staunch supporter of the royals (although I do find Struth’s recent portrait of Lizzie and Phil quite interesting in approach). Or maybe it was because I looked at his work after Moriyama’s that it didn’t gel with me. It didn’t have the best exposure in the gallery either - they images were presented as montages. Maybe it’s because he’s an (almost French) American trying his hand at what comes across as almost being British contemporary photography. As I said, for whatever reason, it just didn’t gel with me. Certainly not up there with his New York work.

Prune Nourry’s work is a mixture between sculpture and photography/videography - she sculpts and then she records people reacting with her sculpture, which deal with the subject of fertility and a falling ratio of women in India. The sculptures which blend the forms of the cow and women certainly attracted interest on the streets, and the photographs show the faces of those seeing them. This video gives an interesting insight into what the people of India make of the statues, rather than just how I read her photographs...

HOLY DAUGHTERS - Men without women from Prune Nourry on Vimeo.

After looking through the show, I decided to pick up a copy of the Polka magazine, partially because it contained photo’s from the show, but also because it would be good french practice ( ! ) Anyway, flicking through the magazine I saw an advert for Tokyo-e, an exhibition at Le Bal featuring another of the Provoke legends, Takanashi Yutaka, together with Kitajima Keizo (who studied/worked with Moriyama) and Watabe Yukichi. I’ll post some notes on this visit later, but all that was missing was something by Nakihara Takuma, the third of the Provoke trilogy, and sure enough, in the bookshop at Le Bal, there was For a language to come. It was a touch pricey at €90, but I took a few minutes to flick through the pages.

It felt like a very complete few days.

This was taken in Hiroshima, and in looking at Iwasaki’s profile, I see that he is from that city. Has this hill and tower structure I saw and photographed also been an inspiration to Iwasaki? Maybe, or perhaps this sort of thing is quite prevalent. Either way, his sculpture triggered memories. It communicated with me.

Another of his installations initially looked as if there was a pile of fluff in the corner of the gallery, an oversight from the cleaners. But no, in this pile of fluff were further towers, constructed (I believe) from hair.

Ok, this poor photograph from my iPhone really doesn’t do it any justice. You can however see the levels of intricacy involved - yes, those are normal hairs on the floor around the towers. This particular work looks so fragile, it could be easy to see this being swept away by a clumsy viewer or even just by the passing flow of air caused by people visiting the exhibition, perhaps this reflects the recent tragedy in Japan?

Kitty Kraus’ performance/installation piece had already run its course, and all I got to see was the aftermath. The patterns made by the melting of frozen ink by the warmth of the light bulb embedded within the ice cube are completely random, and no two installations could ever be the same because of chaos theory: so many variables will affect the way that the ink runs and pools. Looking at the black shapes is akin to looking at the clouds and seeing animals and other shapes, the mind can run wild. In this I see a genie emerging from a lamp, with the light bulb being that lamp...

Moving further upstairs, Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ installation is a stack of posters of an image of water. I didn’t understand the relevance of this at the time, but on reading further into the meaning of this, apparently the intention is that these posters will be taken away by visitors. The stack is transient, keeping with the idea of change, of impermanence.

There was also an audio piece being played in the gallery, one of two exhibits from Katie Paterson. The sound was of the piano playing 4’33” of Moonlight Sonata by Beethoven - the length being a nod towards John Cage I would wager. I didn’t notice anything unusual in this, but the music was organic, it was being transmitted and reflected off the moon in morse code, before being converted back: the transmission is prone to error, with dropouts, etc. so that a new piece of music is created by chance. That’s the theory anyway, personally I didn’t notice it, but I’m a luddite who is unfamiliar with Beethoven’s work so any imperfections would wash over me. A shame really.

Patterson’s other work, the confetti canon, is only fired at certain times of the day, so I didn’t get to see this.

Whilst all of these exhibitors are totally different in form - intricate sculpture, melting ice painting, poster stack, music transmission and confetti canon - they are intrinsically linked by the idea of impermanence and change. A visit to the show last Friday will have shown a different exhibition, or at least the exhibits in a different state of being. Paterson references John Cage, but I believe all of the exhibits are broadly consistent with the idea of Fluxus, and I find it odd that the show notes don’t even mention the movement.

Crazy Mad was very different, and I’ll cover that in a different post.


+++UPDATE+++
I was watching TV earlier and Man Ray’s Dust Breeding was shown - I couldn’t help but think how similar in idea this was to the work of Iwasaki, what with the random formation of dust and the introduction of pencil ‘lead’ - albeit drawn lines as opposed to sculpture. Surely Iwasaki took some inspiration from this...

The overall effect is an assault on the senses, the eyes swimming around the various colours which both complement and clash with equal measure. As Archer states in the exhibition notes “”I like to concentrate so hard my eyes are watering.” Personally, I’m not so sure that it’s the concentration that makes the eyes water, rather the colour palette being used!

I’m not a painter, although I’ve done a bit in the past, so it was interesting to see the application methods used. in places the paint (acrylic) is thick and lumpy on the canvas, adding an interesting texture, other places it’s thinner, around the edges between colours, the white of the canvas even shows through. In a way, this put me in mind of adolescent painting, even of painting by numbers - certainly the block colour is reminiscent of this type of painting (does it still exist?) Now, I know that sounds negative, but really it isn’t. I think that’s actually the point. The images are all of “childish” things, and done in a child-like style. I’m sure that the exhibition will be very much a trip down memory lane to some.

Overall, the exhibition worked well within itself, and I’m glad I went to see it, I’m just not so sure I’d be inclined to go again as the subject matter isn’t one that appeals to my (mucho macho and ever so slightly English) sensibilities. ( ! )

The content shows a computer generated figure wearing generic fatigues reacting to explosions and the like which cannot be seen (reading the blurb, the actions are based on the movements of US soldiers reacting to mortars). As with much of the work I’ve been looking at recently (the Constellations show at Cornerhouse, for example), this is about change - the figures actions are constantly evolving. It’s also pomo - the figure is simulated, and is described as somewhere between documentary and fiction - the actions are motion captured in real time, but the sequence enacted by the virtual figure is apparently random, or at least based upon some algorithm.

Interesting to see something like this in the street - it brings the art to the people so that it is seen by those that would normally never dream of going into a gallery. Similar I suppose to some of the street photography on display in Derby earlier this year. It gives you something to talk about whilst doing your shopping...

Let’s just say it put a smile on my face - I have sold work before, but never this way. It feels like the work has been justified somehow.

Anyway, looking around it was interesting to see that all of the photography had been sold together with a few paintings, but not necessarily the paintings I’d expected to sell. As part of this exhibition, the curators of the exhibition, together with the nearby Platform Gallery and (I think) someone from the Arts Council NW had chosen a handful of pieces to be rewarded with solo exhibitions - none of these selected works had been sold, and yes, I found this a little strange - I found the work interesting anyway, and one seemed to be a favourite of a number of people... Is this indicative of a growing interest in photographic art? After all, there’s been a number of record breaking sales recently (Sherman and Gursky). And no, my sale was not in this league, before anyone asks!