Relational Aesthetics and Other Expanded Fields

Nicholas Bourriaud, "Postproduction," "Altermodernity," "The Radicant," "From Relational Aesthetics"

Let me play a little bit of the devil's advocate here...

To start off I will state the obvious, that this week was all about Relational Aesthetics and the metamorphosis that art has taken over the course of the last century, especially concerning Postmodernism and the "Post" which follows Postmodernism. As defined by Bourriaud Relational Aesthetics encompasses "a set artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space." It seems to me that throughout the entirety of the readings this week the idea of "Relational Aesthetics" is talked about in reference to the "new wave" of art or contemporary conceptual art. That the time for originality in art is at an end and now, as artistic, our responsibility lies in appropriation of an archive of already existing imagery and how, by recycling this imagery, we can begin to talk about cultural, ideologies, and political/social change. Only in this way may we, as artists, and our work remain relevant. After letting this idea sink in for a while I became very depressed. The history of art is so vast, its many works so varied, and its meanings go deeper into the human psyche of the past, to me, with more power than any other form of historical evidence. How is it that I have been born into an age when artistic practice has capped its ability to create and now we are demanded merely to respond and reuse?

This "depression" got me thinking...couldn't all art; past, present, and future, be considered part of Relational Aesthetics? Weren't the small statues of ritualistic worship from prehistory and response to the cultural and religious standards of their time? And the elaborate pots of Greece and hieroglyphics in Egypt a recording of the political and social happenings of those particular civilizations? The High Art of the Renaissance seems to me to be a direct response to the religious dominance and the unabashed bourgeois control over the people during that period of time. I cannot be lead to believe that artistic works of the past are any less relevant than the most avant-garde performance piece of the present and not just for reuse by a contemporary artist. All artwork that is created, whether it is original or appropriated, is a direct response to our current condition. We have never lived in a vacuum, even under the heavy oppression of monarchs of the Dark Ages. We are creatures of our own condition so it is our condition that we consistently represent to ourselves through the means of artistic practice. No experience is personal or universal, that is what makes us unique. This idea that we must only create artwork that can responds to the universal condition of humanity is kind of funny to me because it sounds a lot like how a mass productive Capitalistic ideology would want us to think of our individual creativity and how should be used. It sounds more like rules and stipulations and less like a natural evolution of artistic practices.

To end, I would just like to say that I don't think that Modern/Postmodern/Post-Postmodern art is in any way irrelevant or wrong, but that it is informative of the ideologies that surround us just like the artwork of the past informs us of their condition, no matter how beautiful or "aesthetically pleasing" we may think it to be and write it off as such. Just because something is ugly and loaded with philosophies and academic words does not make it more important than the aesthetic object; both are loaded with the human condition and both are a visual peek into the time-line of human history.

The Aftermath of Postmoderism

Raymond Williams, "When was Modernism,"
Toni Ross, Art in the 'Post-Medium' Era: Aesthetics and Conceptualism in the art of Jeff Wall

As the titled suggests in "When was Modernism" Raymond Williams central dialogue is focused on pinpointing the moment, decade, movement, person, etc. that birthed this idea of Modernism in the ideology of society. First, Williams breaks this idea of modernism into the evolution of several key movements within art and literature; the Romanticism, Realism, Impressionism, and Cubism. Finding threads and flaws in each movement respectfully Raymond comes to the conclusion that Modernism is dependent on the revolutionaries involved within their respective movements; "the earlier novelists, it is widely acknowledged, make the latter work possible; without Dickens, no Joyce."
Further on he goes on to attribute an ideological, cultural and social, shift at the time (brought upon by Industrialism) as a key factor for ushering Modernism into the limelight. It wasn't just thoughts of Freud and his defining of Psychoanalysis, but it the key to Modernism lies within shifting attitudes toward aesthetics and an integration of visual advertisement within the Western culture. These attitude shifts and birth of the mass, visual advertisement was a direct result of the technology of this time. Williams cites the invention of photography, cinema, Radio, television, reproduction, and recording as a catalyst for these ideological changes and the importance of the image within the dominating culture of the time and how important a critique of these images were.


Art in the "Post-Medium" Era: Aesthetics and Conceptualism in the Art of Jeff Wall by Toni Ross was a little harder for me to unpack. She is most clearly and obviously concerned with aesthetics. Like Williams, she understood the importance of the attitude-change on aesthetics within this new Industrial/Post-Industrial world and how this change was directly linked with Modernism. Ross digs down deep in an effort that seems to defend aesthetic beauty from its criticizers, to elevate the beautiful into a state of importance and relevance. She does this, very eloquently, through her description of the Sublime and the creation of "The Thing." She uses the work of Jeff Wall to illustrate her idea that while the moment of "beauty for beauties sake" has passed, the beautiful still holds sway over the conceptional and can be just as valid as abstraction. Beauty and aesthetic are still ingrained and very much a part of the present cultural ideology and to ignore its power over everyday life and its role within our history would to be doing ourselves a great discredit. I think she verbalizes this argument most clearly in her ending quote, "...the medium comprises both an aggregation of historical codes and expectations, and the aesthetic, sensory registration of their failure. By sustaining the minimal illusion of an internal excess of symbolization, the work begs a reaction foreshadowed in Kant's account of aesthetic judgement: to speak of the singular within present constructions of social reality."

The Blasé Attitude vs. Get A Studio! The theory of work

The flaneur, the slacker, and the lazy...let's take a walk...OR, Why Virginia Woolf was right about getting a room of your own.

Robert Smithson, "A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey,"
Daniel Buren, "What is a studio?,"
Max Weber, "Asceticism and the Spirit of Capitalism"
Jean Baudrillard, "Ethic Labour, Aesthetic Play,"
Jan Vanwoert, "Exhaustion and Exuberance: Ways to Defy the Pressure to Perform"



"A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey"
The focus that Robert Smithson hopes to unravel in his photographic and written journey into the heart of his hometown Passaic, New Jersey is one of the effects that time and history play within our perception of aesthetic sensibility.
"Time turns metaphors into things, and stacks them up in cold rooms, or places them in the celestial playgrounds of the suburbs."
Smithson speaks of his present day Passaic as a "ravaged present that almost appears to be part of the past." That the eternal city of Rome lives on in the burnt out shells of suburbia wasteland. Stripped of its grandeur, its aesthetic, its sacred monuments and mirrored back on itself the historical is twisted and demented into the polluted steams, worn parking lots, and unused sandboxes. The quote from the text that baffles and delights me most is where Smithson talks about this idea of the future...
"I am convinced that the future is lost somewhere in the dumps of the non-historical past..."
Does he mean that, in the end, the monuments of our past glorious cities are not what shape our future but in the junk beside the road? "In the false mirror of our rejected dreams." In the past over, the ugly and grotesque that within time is transformed into a metaphor of what lies behind us and what exists before us?

"What is Studio?"
The idea that the Studio and Museum/Gallery are in conflict with one another while also acting as the crutch that either supports itself upon is an interesting one and what I believe to be the core argument for Daniel Buren in "What is Studio." I guess deep down this realization is one that I can relate to and that I understand, but before this reading had never given great thought to. The studio is vital to artistic practice because it is a private place where personal struggle, history, thought, etc can manifest unscathed (or seemingly so) by the outside institution of the Museum, the prejudiced eye of the public. It is not until the artist voluntarily welcomes the public until its sacred space does it become a place of consumption and distribution. This talk of the studio space and its function within the grand sphere of artistic success got me thinking about the photographers studio; what is it? Where is it? Is a photographers studio always a room? The darkroom? The digital lab? Is it where I store my prints? To me a studio is somewhere where creativity is unhinged and where reality blurs into the "mirror of our rejected dreams" that Smithson speaks of. After much thought I decided that my own personal photographic studio exists within a particular person, my niece Juliana, who I have been photographing for 6 years now. It is interesting to consider that when exhibiting my work that I am in fact opening her up into the world public opinion and consumer culture. This is something that I have come to realize that I really need to understand and grapple with in order to be aware of the weight of this realization.

I digress...

"Exhaustion and Exuberance: Ways to Defy the Pressure to Perform"
Cutting to Jan Vanwoert's essay on performance and exhaustion, I am struck dumb by the resonance that Jan Vanwoert's words have upon me in my present state. I almost feel that this text was written specifically for me, specifically for now. Within the realm of academia the pressure to perform is unabashed, demanded of you openly between students and teachers alike. The expectations of academia are structured set for a specific amount of production and information to be generated within the course of a week, a class, a year. I feel utterly exhausted and berated with this structure of performance that I have constructed for myself in response to what I feel those who are there to teach me are expectant of me and my work. I know that over the course of three weeks I better have at least 9 rolls of 12 frames exposed and 12+ prints on the wall when my critique week rolls around. I better know right then and there what it is I took away from last critique and how I applied that to the images I'm showing for this critique. What are you interested in? Who inspires you? Why should we care? Make us care. What is in this images? Make a choice. Sometimes I feel as though I perform so much I've lost complete sight of what it is I was trying to say in the first place or even myself. I've gotten so used to and so good at performing I'm not quite sure if I really know myself beyond the performer any longer. I know it is said to "not make photographs for critique," but how else would they have me do it and would that satisfy?

I am finished writing. I am exhausted and too tired to perform. I can't because I can, I can because I care.

Race, Postcolonialism, Globalism, and the idea of the other...

Gayatri Spivak, "Who Claims Alterity,"
Coco Fusco, "Racial Tim, Racial Mark, Racial Metaphors," in Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self



Both the readings this week by Spivak and Fusco were concerned with archetypes that have been created by the Cultural Apparatus' we have existed in since the dawn of civilization and how through social injustice, colonialism, political ambition, and a desire to control the masses these methods for controlling have become magnified. For Spivak she is most concerned with the ideology of class while Fusco focused on race. Both these constructed instance of society seem to be made for the purpose of defining the "other." For the class, race, religious affiliation, etc in power this "otherness" could be used to create differences between their own bourgeois culture and those of the lower mass. Although these ideologies of race, class, gender, etc were used as a means for control I believe they now hold their own power within our present day culture; a power that has run rampant and can no longer be wrangled with even those residing in a ruling class position. Presently we have created so many other modes of control for defining the "other" and for lulling the masses that these archaic archetypes have been exposed for what they really are, but because we have begun to identify ourselves within them instead of only relating them to alterity they will not suffer to be broken down and discarded. This is where our problem lies; how do we break free from what is so ingrained within our perceived essence without tearing us apart in the process? These modes of alterity and stereotype have festered like a tumor upon the body of humanity and where once a benign growth hindered now a cancerous mass grows. This is precisely why I believe Spivak speaks about the alteration of history and how we must undo this hallucination.

Subjectivity: Psychoanalysis, Identity Formation, Feminist Critique

Jacques Lacan: "The Mirror-Phase"
Judith Butler, "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory"
Jonathan Weinberg, "Things are Queer"
Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"
Margaret Olin, "Gaze"

Jacques Lacan: "The Mirror-Phase"
Jacques Lacan's interest lies in the relation of the "realized self" within the reality that contains it. He seeks to explain stages in the development of conscious by dividing them into two, the Imaginary and the Symbolic. "The [Symbolic] concerns the subject's entry into, and formation by the world of language. The [Imaginary] involves a pre-linguistic stage of consciousness focused around the visual recognition of images." It is through the mirror-phase, or the realization of the ego through the reflection of the individual, that signifies an identification and transformation into a recognized I. Before this Mirror-Phase we can only see ourselves as fragmentations of the body and without consciousness, but once we see ourselves as an image a representation of our body, only then can we begin to fully come to consciousness and become an individual. Thus our entire concept of reality, individual, and consciousness is centered around imagery and representation; we only know ourselves through our reflection.

Judith Butler, "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory"
"One is not born, but, rather, becomes a woman."- Simone de Beauvoir
I feel that this one statement quoted by Butler into her text clearly symbolizes the main point in dealing with her ideas of Phenomenology and Feminist Theory. Butler explains that gender is not something that is innate with us, but is a construction formed within the cultural apparatus. She explains that there is a vast difference between sex and gender; that sex is specifically the genitalia, while gender is the expected performance of the idea of sex. She speaks in terms of quotations of "the body is an 'historical idea' rather than 'a natural species'" and that "...any gender, is an historical situation rather than a natural fact." So even though sex is something of the body and is physical we conform even our bodies into an historical idea/situation by the fact that we can only define our sex within the terms of the constructed gender.

Is the construction and performance of gender a form of survivalism? Did we develop these specific constructions of what it means to be "man" or "woman" through the means of continuing the lifespan of our species? And if so is this survivalist tactic outdated?

Jonathan Weinberg, "Things are Queer"
In "Things are Queer," the main concern for Jonathan Weinberg is the role that "queerness" manifests within the realm of reality and its historical relevance to the ideas of sexuality and gender. He uses the work of photographer Duane Michals, specifically his series Things Are Queer, to begin to formulate an opinion that "The queer [...] is not a matter of specific sexual identities but of the world itself. The world is queer, because it is known only through representations that are fragmentary and in themselves queer. Their meanings are always relative, a matter of relationships and constructions. [...] things themselves are not queer, but rather what is queer is the certainty by which we label things normal and abnormal, decent and obscene, gay and straight." The idea of homosexuality does not fit within the construct of gender or the cultural definition of sex, therefore it was deemed as something abnormal, amoral, obscene, wrong, queer.

Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"
Laura Mulvey utilizes film to begin to dissect the role that men and women play within out society. In its most simplistic terms Mulvey equates the male to the spectator and the female to the spectacle; men are voyeurs who continuously look upon the female for her abnormal and terror-inducing castration and therefore lack of a penis. The phallus has gained its power within society and across culture only in its degradation of the feminine; without the absence of it within one form of humanity its presence cannot hope to hold such importance. "The function of woman in forming the patriarchal unconscious is twofold: she first symbolizes the castration threat by her real absence of a penis and second thereby raises her child into the symbolic." By merely existing within this patriarchal society she a symbol of the power of the penis and the weakness its absence creates; no words have to be spoken to her offspring her mere being is a lesson more powerful than words. She goes on to explain male unconscious as "two avenues of escape from [...] castration anxiety: preoccupation with the reenactment of the original trauma (investigating the woman, demystifying her mystery), counterbalanced by the devaluation, punishment, or saving of the guilty object[...]; or else complete disavowal of castration by the substitution of a fetish object or turning the represented figure itself into a fetish so that it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous..." Mulvey then directly relates this to film, as the film gives the male (the spectator) exactly the power to do this. Because the male is more often than not cast as an active protagonist that the audience, or spectators, can directly relate him to while the female is frozen within her role as mere icon, or something to be viewed (the spectacle). These two avenues of consciousness are then transferred onto her easily through the methods of voyeurism and fetishistic scopophilia.

How are we then to change this? If the phallus holds so much power and that power is based solely on the woman as the manifestation of absence of the penis (or power) then isn't the power really within the woman? For without her the power of the male (or phallus) would cease to exist. But, how do we break this power without destroying ourselves?

Film Still of Mia Sara (as Lily) in the movie Legend where she brings about "darkness" by disobeying Jack's (Tom Cruise) command not to touch the unicorn. Thus her disobedience brings about the apocolypse which is then only righted by Jack as the "knighted savior" who rescues both Lily (who is captured because of her beauty) and the world.

Drawing of the confrontation between Eowyn and the Witch King in Lord of the Rings where before she delivers the final blow the Witch King says, "No man shall kill me" and Eowyn states, "I am no man, I am a woman." Thus the man-made prophecy is fulfilled that only by not being a man may she posses the power to do anything of worth. Her action of striking down the Witch King is only defined by her lack of a penis.

Archives, Research, and Practice

Walker Evans. Photographic archive of the American Dustbowl during the Great Depression, The Farm Security Administration, lower class Americans of the 20th century

August Sander. Made it a goal of his to create an archive of "citizens of the 20th century," archive of the the German population in the 20th century, cultural archive of the German people of the 20th century.

"The camera is integrated into a larger ensemble: a bureaucratic-clerical-statistical system of intelligence. This system can be described as a sophisticated form of the archive. The central artifact of this system is not the camera but the filling cabinet."

Allan Sekula, "The Body and the Archive"
Allan Sekula, "Reading an Archive"
George Baker, "Photography's Expanded Field"

This quote from Allan Sekula's "The Body and the Archive" lingers with me the most out of the densely packed information contained in the readings this week. To me this quote adequately illustrates photography's relationship to the archive; the necessity that both have for one another. Photography makes the archive possible and, in turn, the archive continues to bring relevance to photography; through the many technological, conceptional, stylistic, social, cultural, etc changes that have caused the importance other forms of representation and expression to dim to a mere flicker. This relationship is, at its best, abusive. On one hand photography and the archive work to heighten each others relevance within reality while continuously threatening to destroy one another (amidst their role in the destruction of the reality they so wish to be relevant within). In the beginning photography rocked the representational art world that existed at its birth, changed the public fascination with resemblance and lessened the importance of the powerhouse that was painting by supplanting it with its superior (and cheaper) means of "truthfully" showing reality to those who existed within it. In doing so photography became a theoretical object, threatened by its own representation to itself and teetered on the verge of losing its own future. That is where I believe the archive came into play and pulled photography from the whirlpool that it had created for itself. The archive gave power back to the photograph, beyond merely representing what was pictured within the image, the photograph then began to represent entire groups of people, overarching ideas, historical periods, cultures, etc (I'll even go so far as to suggest that maybe photography and its role with the archive gave birth to art history as we know it today). The archive is the filing cabinet which takes a group of scattered seemingly unrelated images of people, places, things that float in a vortex of non-importance, beyond their power to show the viewer what is contained within the frame, and organizes these photographs into groups that hint at ideologies, philosophies, histories, etc. within the culture apparatus (or within reality) so that rather than just see one can begin to understand how the world is organized and how, beyond the physical, ideas, histories, philosophies, and other non-physical forms are recognized.

But, like I said before, even though photography is seemingly heightened by the presence of the archive it was photography that created a need for the visual archive. What first comes to mind is the function and response that was created by photography in the 19th century; "The private moment of sentimental individuation, the look at the frozen gaze-of-the-loved-one, was shadowed by two other public looks: a look up, at one's "betters," and a look down at one's "inferiors." Not only was photography showing the viewer something, allowing them to see and reflect on what was in front of them, but the photograph made it possible for judgment to be passed and the physical knowledge of how someone from "high class" society might differ from someone from a "lower class," could be realized and thus fanning the flames of class struggle. At this time the archive was of great importance within the police system of identifying and organizing criminals and it was through Jeremy Bentham's proposal of The Panopticon that the (criminal) archive and (19th century) photography came together to uplift one another into higher realms of significance.

There was one example that Sekula used to illustrated the dialectic relationship between photography and the archive that very coherently explains and embodies what I have been struggling with in the paragraphs above and that was his comparison of Bertillon and Galton. "Bertillon's nominalist system of identification and Galton's essentialist system of typology constitute not only the two poles of positivist attempts to regular social deviance by means of photography, but also the two poles of these attempts to regular the semantic traffic in photographs. Bertillon sought to embed the photograph in the archive. Galton sought to embed the archive in the photograph."

Besides the dialectic relationship which exists both within my idea and in Sekula's example I am particularly interested in the idea of embeding the archive in the photograph and I find myself returning to a previous post where I illustrated Barthes idea of a "Text" with a photograph. Peneolope Umbrico's Suns from Flickr is the archive existing within the photograph, or in this case within the finished piece. Like Galton's work Umbrico composites photographs, but in her work the photographs are found and then stitched together into one large overwhelming piece that archives a cultural and worldly ritualistic obsession with photographing the sun, as well as an archive of visual physical representation of the sun itself.

The Post

Hal Foster, "1984" from Art Since 1900
Frederic Jameson, "Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism"
Jean Francois Lyotard, Into to The Postmodern Condition
Douglas Crimp, "Appropriating Appropriation"

It seems to me that the only intelligent discourse that we are capable of performing as human beings is that of resemblance. Everything else is mimicry, representation, mirror, resemblance. Through our own obsession we have broken everything in this world to representation of representations. As ancient beings we struggled to etch the world around us on the walls of the caves we sought shelter in; our faith in gods who held the stars up in the sky, kept the ground from breaking apart...we were made in their likeness and image. Our need to represent evolved into drawings on the pottery we used for practical means in every day life, to statues which adorned our places of ritual and worship, to the finely crafted paintings of the Renaissance, and many other instances within our timeline. Photography changed everything because of its ability to represent perfectly what was in front of the lens, but even that did not fully satisfy. We sought to represent reality to itself and to appropriate our own existence. Succeeding we destroyed reality only to recreate it as a "hyper-reality" where image became more sacred than touch. What does it even mean anymore to see something; something directly in front of you, something that you could reach out and touch? Is the image of a rainbow or the physical rainbow in the sky more valid; more important? Do questions like these even matter in this hyper-reality...

In Jean-Francois Lyotard's Introduction to The Postmodern Condition he opens with "[s]cience has always been in conflict with narratives." And I wonder what exactly he means by that, is it that science opposes myth and story. What narrative does not eventually turn into fable; what was once thought science begin to morph into a narrative. Can we continue to take the world around us and photograph it, paint it, form it into words and put it into little boxes and claim that we have found the truth, or is it just a couple of hundred of years that separates science from the fable and vise versa? I am not claiming that science is not truth or valid, because to me personally I consider it very truthful. But, if the truths of the ages (from 10,000 B.C. to 1776 A.D.) have succumbed to fable what would kept science of the 20th century from doing so as well? It is in this desire of representation that we begin to deconstruct our reality again and again and in ways never thought imagined. "I will use the term modern to designate any science that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse [...] making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative; such as the dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth" and "I define postmodern as incredulity towards metanarratives [...] to the obsolescence of the metanarrative apparatus of legitimation corresponds, most notably, the crisis of metaphysical philosophy and of the university institution which in the past relied on it." So it is to my understanding through Lyotard that postmodernism is a representation of modernism to itself; postmodernism holds the mirror up in from of modernism to reveal its faults, flaws, and message.

When we can no longer be contented with representing just objects that we observe in reality but with the invention of photography we have been seduced by the representations of ideas, faith, art, culture, etc to themselves. The reasoning between why we believed that artistic practices and everyday life are separate from one another are beginning to crumble because of this obsessive nature to always need to represent some thing in reality to some thing else (when we could no longer have the physical we turned to the metaphysical, the philosophical, the political, etc). What I first thought to be a simplistic, almost pitiful, reaction to the world around us has evolved over time (and through my understanding in writing this blog) into a highly intelligent approach to figuring this structure, this cage, that we have created for ourselves. Art is the ultimate form of resemblance and it is only through it that we can begin to tell of the texture and color of the bars which surround us. But, in a way we have created our own monster; art is a response to objects in life, then to ritual and religion, then dictated by politics, to a weapon used against the ideological apparatuses that have erected all around us, and finally to reality itself whereas it is true if we merely turned things upon themselves...objects, ritual and religion, politics, the cultural apparatus, and reality are merely responding to art itself.

Theories of Originality

The Concepts of the original and the copy. Was originality simply a modernist illusion?

Jean Baudrillard, "The Hyper-realism of Simulation"
Rosalind Krauss, "The Originality of the Avant Garde"

In "The Originality of the Avant Garde" Rosalind Krauss begins by discussing Rodin and the controversey that arose through works of art he created recast after his death. Many people would view this "violation" of the artist as a meaningless repetitious "fake," but as Krauss points out in further discussion within the essay; Rodin himself would not have considered a finished sculpture an "original" had he done it himself, alive and well. For Rodin, who as Krauss pointed out may not have done all his sculptures himself in the first place, it was the actual cast which was the original and the "finished product" which came out of it, merely a repetition of the original itself, a representation of design, imagination, and idea which Rodin formed into physicality through his cast. His sculptures were meant to be repetitious of the original, that was their very purpose, all of his artwork were "multiple copies that exist in the absence of an original" because the original was not available; to display merely a casting in an exhibit would have meant showcasing something incomplete, it is the cast and action of creating a multiple as well as the copy in full form which completes his idea. Rodin was essentially working in a medium that was meant for reproduction.

But, what form of art is not a reproduction and/or representation of if not reality, then at least an idea. As Krauss goes on to explain even Abstract and Avant Garde artwork there may not be a clear resemblance of reality within the work, but a representation of an idea, such as that of the grid. Not only is the grid an unoriginal idea but it is also repetitious by nature; which for the Avant Garde artist that realization would have been a hard pill to swallow. By trying their hardest to avoid resembling reality like the photography, painting, etc. of the past the Avant Garde artists had recreated one of the most basic concepts ingrained in human nature (continuously repeating it in their artwork) that was defined by its repetitious nature; seems kind of ironic that in an effort to get away from it, they only simplified the idea of repetition and resemblance. And because of this notion then originality is unattainable because if a work of art is not made for repetition and multiplicity then it is made for resemblance. Through a repetitious medium an original is unobtainable and when artwork is made in the realm of resembling ideas and/or reality then originality cannot be grasped. So can the unoriginal have an original and can an original be original?

The grid utilized in Greek architecture...

...and simplified in Mondrian.

In "The Hyper-realism of Simulation" by Jean Baudrillard he fully breaks down the notion of reality and explains its destruction through imagery and art. It seems that the idea to advertise and project is somehow ingrained in us naturally; before the mass printing press or photography existed the entire human race was always set on advertising or representing our reality to ourselves, almost as if it would make reality more "real" and concrete. I think this need for representation is almost like the idea of religion: a coping mechanism created by us as a way to deal with our existance and our place within what exists, "reality." With the invention of the mass printing press and then photography this urge heightened and the means to represent our reality was refined. We no longer merely resemble reality and our place within it, but we have gained the power to recreate it; thus reality becomes hyper-reality. Through hyper-realism what is decidedly imaginary becomes blurred as does the idea of the "real." Through repetitious media, such as photography, we no longer needed to see or touch an object to know of its reality or existence, that was dictated to us by its image within advertisements and books. Now with the birth of photoshop and other aspects of the digital environment we can create new realities for ourselves; "reality is stranger than fiction." I question what exactly this means for not only myself as an artist, but as a human being. Have we reached our ultimate level of resemblance and advertisement or is there still yet another avenue that would not only destroy reality and blur the lines between fact and fiction, but perhaps make the imagined a reality?

(Our new reality. Fictitious and imaginary standard of beauty that is unattainable, brought to us by a medium that is thought to only depict what is real and manipulated into a fantasy by the digital environment. For some who viewed this advertisement this ideal became their reality and was not longer rooted in the imaginary)

Art as Popular Culture; Art as Critique of Popular Culture

Is art the conscience of culture?
Clement Greenberg, "Avant Garde and Kitsch"
Rosalind Krauss, "Reinventing the Medium"
Guy Debord, excerpts from the Society of the Spectacle (Chapter 8)
Richard Hamilton, "For the Finest Art, Try Pop"

Riding upon the melancholy, hopeless wave that I felt from last weeks set of readings; of our inability to separate ourselves from the structure of our culture as a bourgeoisie controlled apparatus and industry, one that consumes everything in its path and mutates it for its own means I felt a little lost as an artist. But, though my understanding of the readings assigned for this week I have come to have a more optimistic outlook on myself as an individual and for the art industry as a whole.

Art can be used as a weapon against the Culture Industry and Ideological Apparatuses of our society by creating works that directly reference our understanding and acknowledgment to this structure in which everything in our lives is contained. We may not be able to be free of these structures, but by utilizing various artistic mediums to illustrate our awareness of this predicament we can turn it back on itself and use the cycle of Culture Industry for our own purposes.

In "Reinventing the Medium" by Rosalind Krauss she specifically equates a "reinventing" of all art to photography and that through its obsolescence all other medium changed from mere resemblence to awareness. I believe that Krauss uses the word "obsolecence" to define the idea that photograph's reference to the world it captures is also a reference to itself, therefore it is obsolete because it is continually referring to itself while referring to itself. This obsolescence is what transformed photography into a theoretical object and "in becoming a theoretical object, photography loses its specificity as a medium," once again the cyclical nature of photography is highlighted in its essence and purpose. Photography has become more than aesthetics and historical relations, it is a theoretical object that has transformed the preconceived notions found within all mediums. After the introduction of photography in the 1800s, painter during the early 1900s responded to photography's superior method of resemblance by creating paintings which referred to the very aestheticism of painting, its method of being as a physical technical form; painting was referencing itself to itself much like photography has the innate capacity to do. And although this has been viewed by many, including Clement Greenberg in "Avant Garde and Kitch," as an unproductive period of time for painting I believe that it was vital for the medium to show it's awareness of the photographic medium by this shift towards aestheticism and obsolescence so that it may transcend beyond itself and become reinvented as relevant instance within society.

It is this mode of transformation and evolution highlighted in "Reinvention of the Medium" that we must be aware of and use when creating works of art so that we may use the structure and Culture Industry system to sustain artistic forms and combat the dumbing down, repetitious, and "kitschy" modes of the Culture Industry and Ideological Structure. We must take back kitsch and use it for our own means as discussed in "Avant Garde and Kitsch" to make it less useful for the bourgeoisie (ruling class) and to turn its impact against the cyclical structure that the Apparatus and Industry has created by using the idea of the politeriate as a collective whole, as a "mass" against ourselves. We will then use their "kitsch" against them. In recent contemporary art it has been Pop Art which I feel that has been the most useful in utalizing this method against the Industry/Apparatus and it is the idea of the "Happening" which may reinvent it anew. As long as we continue to cycle ourselves, reinvent, and evolve with the overarching culture structures we will be able to contend with its overpowering domination of the idea of the individual and in some instances, keep ourselves one step ahead.

Suns from Flickr by Penelope Umbrico (Text)

Regarding Roland Barthes essay "From Work to Text" I have selected a series of photographs titled Suns from Flickr by Penelope Umbrico to illustrated what I fell is the best representation of "Text" within a photograph.

Art and Ideology: CRITICAL THEORIES: The Frankfurt School/Materialist Aesthetics

In all the readings for this week; Theodor Adorno's "The Culture Industry Reconsidered, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" by Louis Althusser, and Meyer Schapiro's "The Social Bases of Art," the social and cultural instances within reality in which individuals (and artists) must function under were discussed.

Firstly in "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" Althusser revisits Marxism to bring to light the Apparatuses and class struggles that exist in all levels of reality and how our understanding of these is the key to realizing the role we play within the State Apparatus and how we can recognize the "obviousness" and "truth" of our existence. He begins by separating and defining the differences and connections between an Infrastructure and Superstructure; "the infrastructure, or economic base ([...] productive forces and the relations of production) and the superstructure, which itself contains two "levels" or "instances": the politico-legal (law and the State) and ideology ([...] religious, ethical, legal, political, etc)." The first of the two "levels" of the superstructure is that Repressive State Apparatus which entails "the Government, the Administration, the Army, the Police, the Courts, and the Prisons, etc.; the "public" sphere that "functions by violence." The second instance is what Althusser calls an Ideological State Apparatus, it is the private and institutionalized aspects of society which include (but are not limited to) the religious, educational, family, legal, political, etc. The main differences between these two apparatuses lies in singularity of the Repressive verses the plurality of the Ideological and the fact that one is in it's essence about violence while the other is concerned with ideology; "a 'Representation' of the Imaginary Relationship of Individuals to their Real Conditions of Resistance." What struck me the most in this reading was the cyclical nature of this relationship between Superstructure and Infrastructure and then again between Repressive and Ideological. The Ideological State Apparatus is what we see the proletariat as having most control over and yet is nothing more than an illusion to an allusion which the Repressive Statue Apparatus directly influnces through the control that Infrastructure or economic base (in which the ruling class holds the power to) has upon the Repressive SA and thus the Ideological SA as well. Value systems, ethics, cultural norms that we hold as individual expressions and ideals are then set not by a universal whole, but by the ruling class that currently holds power over the Repressive State and controls the economic base.

In the seemingly opposite political and social instance in Theodor Adorno's "Culture Industry Reconsidered" this idea of the power belonging to the ruling class that the "masses" are oblivious to and that all things done, even the most meaningful selfless actions, are merely a means for profit; "...they sought after profit only indirectly, over and above their autonomous essence." I believe that Adorno is speaking of the ruling class when he talks of the "culture industry" and its concern and functioning in relation to the "cultural masses." Again nothing of the individual is free from the culture industry, not even our entertainment; for this example he cites of American Film Industry as producing pictures which "take into consideration the level of eleven-year-olds...[and] in doing so they would very much like to make adults into eleven-year-olds."

So are we then being actively dumbed down to the level of children? And for what means? Is it to keep us "asleep" in an "illusion of an allusion" to what reality really is and who exactly is pulling the strings within "true" reality and to what end does this realization give us? I am intensely interested in the possibility of being free from these Apparatuses, these cultural industries, but as anyone-ever-in the course of history been completely void of a "ruling class" or at the very least their influence on individuality and reality. Is that a possibility or is it something ingrained in our nature; much like hunger, sleep, and breathing. For me this is a very scary thought and it brings me finally to the last reading "The Social Bases of Art" by Meyer Schapiro.

Throughout my reading of Schapiro I was most concerned with his most clear and important point through the paper where "he brings a social-historical form of explanation to bear on the current conditions of artistic practice." Questions of whether or not art is a true form of individuality in this "imaginary" construct of reality began to intrigue me and I wondered on what level does art fall into and can it transcend beyond the apparatuses and cultural industry to give pure autonomy. I know that in many instances that have and are occuring in the art world have a direct relationship to an economic base and are part of the Ideological State Apparatus through private institution, i.e. museum, galleries, collectors, etc., than in at least on some level art cannot be separated from this overpowering illusion and fake reality of the destruction of the individual. But, should art be completely separate from it? It appears to me that to do the most good for the individual and maybe in at least to fight back against the bourgeoisie oppressive state that art would have to function, on one level or another, within the oppressive industry, apparatuses, etc. Do I believe that some art is created particularly for the oppressive ruling class as a means to generate a similar instance that culture industry projects upon the masses, like a tool of illusion and allusion? Yes. But, can some works of art be made to combat this? Is there a photograph, painting, performance, etc. that while remaining completely aware of it's relation to the cultural industry, social base, and state apparatus can function as a means to "shake us awake" from the enslavement that we are, on so many levels, unconscious of? I'm not sure I have witnessed this possibility, but I hope others have.

Art as Sign: Semiotics/Structuralism

In the excepts from Myth Today, "From Work to Text," "The Photographic Image," and "The Third Meaning," by Roland Barthes I found that what I thought to be his main concern is what differentiates one type of artistic expression from another.

In "From Work to Text" it is literature that confounds (or delights) him and how one would begin to categorize a work of literature from that of a Text; "...an irreductible [...] plural," one that "can be only in it's difference (which does not mean its individuality), its reading is semelfactive [...] and nevertheless woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages [...], antecedent or contemporary, which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony."

In "The Photographic Image" Barthes is most interested in the photographic "paradox" or how no image can be merely object, objective, or analogon; but is always faced with a connoted message that the viewer (or society) brings to a photograph that "communicates what it thinks of it." At first he seems to struggle with the idea that a photograph, its very nature, is a message without a code, an image with only denotation. He uses the press photograph as an example to illustrate this idea and touches upon the three aspects which make up a press photograph; the emission (staff of newspaper), a channel of transmission (the newspaper), and its point of reception (the public who reads the paper). But, further on in "The Photographic Message" Barthes begins to question his idea that a photograph consists solely of a denoted message; "In front of a photograph, the feeling of "denotation" [...] is so great that the description of a photograph is literally impossible; to describe consists precisely in joining to the denoted message a relay or second-order message derived from a code which is that of languae and constituting in relation to the photographic analog, however much care one takes to be exact, a connotation..." So therefore, although the photographic image seems to be created specifically to carry only a denoted message even it cannot get away from the connotation, or what the viewer brings to the image.

"The Third Meaning" goes on use the artistic practice of film (specifically in some of the still frames of S. M. Eisenstein) to illustrate another way of classifying and categorizing the image and its practice. The stills are divided into two levels: informational and symbolic which give way to a "third" meaning, the obtuse. Like the punctum from Barthes Camera Lucida, the third meaning is an aspect of the image that gives way to an inexplicable devastation, an infinity of language, an emotion or relevance that is specific and autonomous for each viewer; an experience that cannot be expressed in words, but is merely felt.

In everything that Barthes talks about, whether it is the excerpts from Myth Today to Camera Lucida Barthes struggles with the elusive trait which breaths life into imagery and is essentially completely dependent on the subjectivity of the individual viewer. It is something which separates reality from life, what describes artistic invention and yet it is inevitably undefinable because its poignancy is dependent on the individual; for one image may contain a punctum or an obtuse meaning to one person and yet be completely absent to another. Perhaps artistic practice exists only in the notion of its absolute wraith-like quality; like smoke curling it is something beautiful to watch but impossible to truly touch.

Modern: Blurring Boundaries/Bauhaus Machinic Design Utopia

Art as ritual

Within the readings this week I found that I was most attracted to the idea that photography was an active participant, if not the sole reason, for the shift in definition and framework for the idea of "pure art." This was first touched upon by Rancierre in his "The Future of the Image;" "To resemble was long taken to be the peculiarity of art, while an infinite number of spectacles and forms of imitation were proscribed from it. In our day, not to resemble is taken for the imperative of art, while photographs, videos, and displays of objects similar to everyday ones have taken the place of abstract canvases in galleries and museums." I believe that here Rancierre was making the bold statement that photography actually changed the very essence, meaning, and framework of what art had become.

Art as ornament

Before works of art were made to resemble reality, to mimic it as an attempt to capture the very essance of reality, but with the birth of
photography this exploration was made obsolute by the photographs ability to reproduce and resemble reality in an almost perfect sense. Therefore art was forced into a metamorphosis of sorts to keep its relevance intact; paintings became more abstract, focusing on themes and ideas that could not be seen, but thought and spoken...the very notion of conceptual art seems to have stemmed from the invention of photography itself.

Art as resemblance

Osip Brik furthers this idea of photography as the revolutionary keystone of contemporary art in his essay "Painting verses Photography." Brik even ventures so far in "From Picture to Calico-Print" as to suggest an irrelevance for "easel-painting" within the shadow of photography's ability to produce accurate depictions of reality, utilizing it's advantages of "precision, speed, [and] cheapness." Paintings must then be created for a purpose other than "delighting the eye" and existing purely as aesthetic objects to be viewed and appreciated for only by their physical resemblances to reality. To survive painting had to become actively aware of the word happening around it, to the present concerns and political issues, etc. and address them through their media. Only by this exploration and invitation for the viewer to become actively involved in a thought process that went beyond merely looking could painting take it's authority back.

Photography as superior resemblance

This transformation was not mutually exclusive. There are only so many ways to reproduce an accurate copy of an object, person, place, etc before everything is reproduced and the reproductions of reality themselves begin to deteriorate the thing itself, it's "aura;" as Walter Benjamin refers to it in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Photography had to then take the same step forward as painting did, into a realm of the conceptual, to emphasize the sayable as much as the visible.

Art as concept

According to the writings of Walter Benjamin and Adolf Loos art was not just confined to resemblances and reproduction, but was utilized in ritual and ornament. It is not the function of ornament in art that interested me, but the idea of art used for the purposes of ritual and how we have moved beyond ritual in present times into the power of exhibition. For me, creating art as a means for ritual practice is in direct relation to the conceptual goals of artists today. In ritual the work of art is transcended from it's physical presence into a spiritual essence, much like the present political artwork that involves the viewer in a journey of awareness and reform. Photography too had it's hand in challenging the notion of transcendence in art. Before photography, it was ritual that granted works of art the ability to transcend themselves while ornament and resemblance were still rooted in aesthetic. In this post-photography contemporary world the process and idea of "look, see!" became more relevant and therefore created a need for exhibition, where transcendent art is no longer made for the private or select few of a cult, but for a larger "mass" of people.

Art as Experiance

In our first week of Contemporary Photography Seminar: Theory, Criticism, and Practice we were given five readings, with the overarching idea of Art as Experience. Our readings consisted of Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes, "The Future of the Image" by Jacques Rancierre, excerpts from The Practice of Everyday Life by Mihel de Certeau, Allan Kaprow's writings from Assemblages, Environments, and Happenings, and "How to Provide an Artistic Service: An Introduction" by Andrea Fraser.


Within these readings I found a common thread pertaining to what is necessary to create a work of art and what role photography specifically takes within the world of art. Each reading underlined a need for our experience, an engagement, and our active participation with a work to art as active creator and as a viewer to decipher what it means to create a work of art. There must be a conscious intention in what we create as well as a need to investigate, as a spectator, the image and come to discover an "Other" (as Rancierre discusses) that speaks in volumes greater than what we can physically see. Photography is an excellent example of how this works because it is, at it's birth, arguably a direct depiction of reality and must therefore transcend what we understand and know of the subject (person, place, thing, time, culture, society, race, etc.) into an "Other." "Photography became an art by placing its particular techniques in the service of this dual poetics, by making the face of anonymous people speak twice over--as silent witness of a condition inscribed directly on their features, their clothes, their life setting; and as possessors of a secret we shall never know [..]" (Rancierre, 15) A photograph, made for the purposes of art, must then move beyond what we can see on the flat service of a piece of photographic paper into the unseen and to the implications that we place upon it by actively viewing the image.

For my own example I have selected an image, The Necklace, 1999, from Alessandra Sanguinetti's body of work "The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and the Enigmatic Meaning of their Dreams." Utilizing Roland Barthe's method of looking at photographs in his book Camera Lucida, in accordance with my previous ideas of how an artistic photograph is made, I must first come to grips with what is physically in the image, it's "reality," the studium or appreciation to the objects, people, place, etc. present within the photograph. This is a photograph of two young girls, roughly around the same age, who share a relationship of some sort, whether that be of sisterhood or of friendship. They appear to be of a particular ethnicity (Hispanic) from a particular geographical area (South America), and have parents of a similar economic class (Working). I can also continue to journey into the photograph by studying the quality of light (late afternoon/ early evening) which gives the image a specific frame in time. What they wear (the plastic jewelry, the patterns on their dresses, etc.) and their physical features let us know that this photograph takes place in contemporary time. Their gestures and interaction would lead us to believe that an intimate moment is being shared, either through conversation or through "play-acting" or "dress-up." At this level of scuntity the photograph is interesting and engaging as many photographs are because of their ability to capture time and encapsulate a moment that has past and can never be lived through again. But, it is the punctum; the sting, wound, little hole that leaves its permanent bruise and impression upon the viewer and allows an image to transcend itself into the "Other" (that which is outside of reality). The punctum is a detail that is essentially subjective, it can be different for every different person who is actively viewing an image, but the affect is the same. The punctum for me is as the title suggests, the necklace. I can feel the texture of those particular beads around my neck, between my fingers, and instantly I am transported into a stillness, a moment and memory where an emotion I cannot place bubbles to the top of my consciousness like pure ecstasy. I begin to understand the weight of the gesture that is given from one sister in the photograph (in blue) to the other (in red). It is pure love, affection and consequently full of self-loathing, envy, jealousy, and resentment. The photograph no longer belongs to Alessandra Sanguinetti, nor to Guille and Belinda; but it that instant it is transported into the Other, the non-reality, into the stillness where it no longer exists, but represents an internal narrative. In this way I take from The Necklace, 1999 as much as it gives to me and I have come upon an entirely new image that I did not see when I first looked.