Response: Conscientious Blog, Art as Transformative

Joerg Colberg sees photography as transformative art: HERE

Colberg's recent post on this issue is something that we as photographers should always keep in mind. Confoundedly, I have witnessed contemporary work that seems to ignore the transformative nature of the medium (actually, the work doesn't ignore the transformative nature, the artist does). While in this post-post-modernist era our awareness of the image as construction exists, there is often a disconnect between the truth about how this medium can irrevocably change a subject. I have heard many artist discussions which completely ignore the transformative nature all together, some will argue it is about the document, but that characteristic in and of itself is a transformative one, it suggests archives, museums, and evidence; all spaces where a subject becomes still, silent and helpless. I suppose that is the death that Barthes identifies.

NYT Article on Fairey's Obama 'Hope' Poster

via NYT

Oopsey! Looks like Shepard Fairey is in for it with the upcoming court battle over fair-use from the AP photograph he used as a template for creating his Obama 'Hope' Poster. Initially, I had been under the impression that Fairey had used a photograph that had been created to mimic the original image, which would have perhaps given him a stronger case under fair-use, particularly in photography. However, it turns out he lied to the court about where the image originated causing his counsel to withdraw from representing him, not a good sign. To be honest, AP has so much money behind it, the mere thought of a lawsuit from them against any individual is enough to make one shake in their boots. Unfortunately, it looks like Fairey really dug his own grave lying to the court while filing a counter-suit under those false pretenses. Not sure how I feel about this suit, appropriation has been something in the art world for quite some time, Sherry Levine anyone?, I am curious how this is going to pan out.

Are You Happy with the Shape of Your Bikini Wax?

A response to an article I just read:
Are You Happy with the Shape of Your Bikini Wax? by Gloria Feldt

This article got me thinking, because I just read another article on this topic earlier in the week, about how women are more unhappy today than supposedly 'before'. Also, this was written by my second cousin (mother's cousin) so shout out to her too, though the article itself has nothing to do with art, it is focused on the female as consumer, which is totally relevant.

I just turned in the following long-winded comment, but it felt goooood...

The issue of woman as consumer is an issue at the heart of post-modernism and which has become an essential element in much art that came afterwards. This concept of consumerism as identity has been at the heart of the feminist art scene since Cindy Sherman's ‘Film Stills’ and Joan Jonas's 'Organic Honey', both artists were commenting on how the over-saturation of media forced confusing issues of identity onto women. Granted, identity was an issue long before the 70s, however it was the proliferation of media that evolved alongside the feminist movement that created a confusing and even hypocritical dichotomy between the opportunities available for the contemporary woman. One, the opportunity within media, i.e. visual culture, was inevitably reduced to the woman as object, while the opportunities that became available outside of this reduction, such as in the workplace or the home, gave the woman the ability to be something other-than this object. Because of media’s reduction of femaleness to a product of consumerism, women never had the chance to escape that reduction as our culture is completely and irrevocably saturated with imagery; the only way to fight this assumption is to avert our eyes, a precarious proposition.

I don’t think it is that women are unhappy about opportunities they gained through feminism, (as I often read in oblivious commentaries online) I think women are unhappy about media’s transparent position that a woman should still have the same absorption with personal presentation and being an object of sexual desire as she should saving the world.

We are not blind, women are unhappy because the media is propagating a stereotype that no-one wants, a stereotype that suggests that ‘being’ is only skin deep.

Other Artists Represent'n Fashion

via

Well, it looks like Anna Gaskell isn't the only artist on the fashion scene.

A handful of New York artists were chosen to appear in the J. Crew mens catalogue this season, including Ryan McGinness and Vito Acconci. J. Crew's site offers interviews (sort of) and links to the various artists' studios which I must say, upon looking at their spaces, I am quite jealous of.

Any thoughts?

Anna Gaskell in Gap Ad?

Ok, I discovered this ad yesterday while watching ‘The Office’ on hulu, I almost walked out of the room as it ran, and then Anna Gaskell’s name floated across the screen and all I could do was sit dumbfounded at the fact that I was watching the Anna Gaskell sit on a stool and talk about her work; suggesting that her lifestyle as a fine art photographer somehow correlates with the Gap image.

At first, I was just really confused, if you are familiar with Anna's work, a bodysuit of denim just doesn't come to mind when considering her subjects and photographs.

Actually, all her work tends to draw on the dementia of constructions within storytelling, highlighting the plight of female subjects being manipulated and pulled apart by other female characters. Gaskell's photographic series By Proxy investigates the re-imagining of a world as from a mother suffering Munchausen syndrome by proxy. Her Wonder and Override series fragments and reconstructs imagery inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, but by avoiding the literal nature of Carroll’s story, Gaskell’s imagery suggests that one has gone down the ‘rabbit hole’ so to speak and there really is no way out. The settings she chooses often include over-embellished interiors that both suggest and highlight the entrapments of domesticity sickly entwined with the need for story-telling and narcissism. In these spaces the anonymous characters interact through ambiguous scenarios that could be interpreted as either playing with one another, or tearing one another apart; as with an image in which hands are reaching into the frame and tugging at the tights of a little girl. Often using candlelight as her light source within these decorative interiors, Gaskell manages to have a conversation with the past histories of women and domestic space, while considering the contemporary issues of women's plight in motherhood and childhood: both subjects often neglected in contemporary culture where childhood has all but disappeared and motherhood no longer carries the accolades of the past.

Gap's entire image just seems to deny ignore all the investigations that have taken place within Gaskell's photographic work, I just don't get it.

I suppose she looks the part.

Colette Fu

Ok, so while I've been crawling the internet looking for RIT MFA Alums to add to the RIT MFA blog, I came across this artist Colette Fu on the EnFoco's website. Her work is really quirky, which I like, and her pop-ups are pretty amazing. While the site leaves something to be desired, her pieces are an interesting juxtaposition of popular imagery and objects, of absurdly menacing miniature scapes. I do love absurdity, especially when it is completely unapologetic. ManRay in 3-D? I don't know how to describe this work, which is probably why I respond to it.

Her china blog is crazy too, it's like National Geographic on a binge. See it HERE!

Actually, upon spending a bit more time with these images, Colette's work also reminds me of Daniel Gordon's work, although the subjects are disparate, the approach and imagery seem somehow related.

Yeah, that's right, I just plugged an artist from RIT's rival program... Yale.

(un)natural worlds

Via RIT MFA Blog.
I just had to re-post this as John and Stefan are alums of RIT's MFA program, and Dornith and I share an Alma Mater with Rice University...it's a small world... seems entirely relevant to this show. All the work is pretty interesting, Texas doesn't get enough respect.


Via
A group show of photographic art from seven contemporary artists, curated by John Aäsp, is currently on display at the Rockport Center for the Arts:

"The unnatural, that too is natural." -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Join seven contemporary artists using photographic processes to create worlds of intrigue, curiosity, and personal vision.

On view September 9-October 10, 2009.

This show, includes work from Dornith Doherty, Susan Dunkerley, Charles Lindsay, Stefan Petranek, Ansen Seale, Trish Simonite, and Sterz. Stefan Petranek is another RIT MFA Alumnus who also teaches here in SPAS. The imagery for(un)natural worlds extends the gamut of aesthetics and ideologies concerned with the connections between science and visual languages used in our representations of the spectacle that is Nature. I am sad that I won't be home in Texas to see this show, but the artists' sites are definitely worth taking a look at. Enjoy!

John Aäsp is currently Curator and Visual Arts Director at Rockport Center for the Arts on the Gulf Coast of Texas, where he also serves as co-director for the Rockport Film Festival.

a brief review of the show is HERE at Glasstire.com, under Rockport.