레이블이 Arts인 게시물을 표시합니다. 모든 게시물 표시

2016년 10월 23일 일요일

[Voicer] Typo: The Fonts of Fashion

from: http://www.voicer.me/archives/18704

2014년 12월 20일 토요일

[The Guardian] Photography is art and always will be by Sean O' Hagan

Photography is art and always will be

Sean O'Hagan

Do Jane Bown, William Eggleston and Diane Arbus not sing on a gallery wall? Photography critic Sean O’Hagan hits back at Jonathan Jones’s damning claim that photographs cannot be considered fine art

• Jonathan Jones: why photography is not art

Still intensity … Samuel Beckett. Photograph: Jane Bown

22,759

Comments

468

Imagine, if you will, the following scene. I pop into the National Gallery to view the 2014 BP National Portrait Award and look in bemusement at the exhibition, which is mostly comprised of rather old-fashioned paintings. It’s an uninspiring show, a hotchpotch, as are most exhibitions drawn from open submissions. Inexplicably enraged by this, I rush home and pen an article claiming that painting is dead and that it looks anachronistic, indeed stupid, on a gallery wall in the 21st century. Not only that, but I then extrapolate that all painting is dull and stupid – Caravaggio, Rubens, Picasso, Hockney, Richter, the lot.

Robert Frank in America. — Iowa, 1956. Photograph: Robert Frank

In November, our art critic Jonathan Jones went to see the wildlife photographer of the year show at the National History Museum and the Taylor Wessing prize at the National Portrait Gallery – an open submission award known for its eccentric shortlist, usually featuring people with their pets. Quite why he chose to visit these two shows eludes me. Did he think they were art photography exhibitions? He castigated both, as I, a photography critic, would probably have done had I the energy to kick a few dead horses.

I did not respond back then for two reasons: the “photography is not art” debate is so old it’s hardly worth revisiting, and the idea of using a wildlife award show as a yardstick just seemed bizarre. But, alas, he has repeated his claims this week,discussing a rather boring photograph by Peter Lik, which sold for £4.1m, becoming the most expensive photograph in the world. To which my response is: so what? It’s global capitalism – obscenely rich people with more money than sense. Or taste. For Jonathan, though, “This record-setting picture typifies everything that goes wrong when photographers think they are artists”. No it doesn’t. Here are a few artists who use photography: Cindy Sherman, Jeff Wall, Gillian Wearing. Here are a few photographers, off the top of my head, whose work is art: Julia Margaret Cameron, Edward Steichen, William Eggleston, Nan Goldin, Robert Frank, Stephen Shore, Diane Arbus, Paul Graham, Hiroshi Sugimoto. Their work sings on the gallery wall. Their work makes you look at the world differently.

Photograph by William Eggleston, 1972. — Biloxi, Mississippi, 1972. Photograph: William Eggleston. © Eggleston Artistic Trust. Courtesy of The Wilson Centre for Photography

Several things are wrong about Jonathan’s reasoning, not least that he still thinks painting is in some sort of competition with photography. How quaint. He also seems to think that all photography is derivative of painting. This is plainly not so. A great photograph by William Eggleston, though he claims to be influenced by abstract painting, occupies its own space, makes its own rules.

A group of Kalutara peasants, 1878. Photograph: Julia Margaret Cameron/Royal Photographic Society

Jonathan writes that photographs look better on a computer screen than in a print. Some do, but most do not. Has he never stood in wonder in front of a Julia Margaret Cameron portrait? I doubt it. Has he ever seen a painting or drawing of Samuel Beckett that possesses the stillness and intensity of the great photographic portrait of Samuel Beckett by John Minihan or Jane Bown? I expect not.

He makes no distinction between types of photography, and seems unaware, that photography has changed utterly since Henri Cartier-Bresson. Look at the politically charged conceptualism of Broomberg and Chanarin, the playful invention of a fictional series by Joan Fontcuberta, the wonderful artists books made by the likes of Cristina de Middel or Viviane Sassen. Photography is as vibrant as it has ever been - more so in response to the digital world, which Jonathan mistakenly thinks has made everyone a great photographer. It hasn’t. It has made it easy for people to take – and disseminate – photographs, that’s all. A great photographer can make a great photograph whatever the camera. A bad one will still make a bad photograph on a two grand digital camera that does everything for you. It’s about a way of seeing, not technology.

Why damn photography because of the excesses of the auction houses and mega-rich collectors? Do we measure the health of contemporary art by the price paid for Hirst’s vulgar diamond skull? Or a Jack Vettriano? I have seen some idiotic installation pieces over the years, but that doesn’t mean that all artists who make installations are idiots and their work dull and stupid.

If anything is anachronistic, it’s the “photography is not art” debate. Warhol’s Polaroids and Ruscha’s deadpan photography books put it to bed years ago. I wish Jonathan had come with me to a group show I saw at Purdy Hicks this year called Natural Order. There were some good paintings and uncannily detailed drawings, but Awoiska van der Molen’s nightscapes made on long exposures in the volcanic islands of La Gomera and La Graciosa were breathtaking in their stillness and sense of mystery. So strong that everything on the walls around them seemed muted. I think that’s what art does, right?

2013년 12월 5일 목요일

Cretto nero, Alberto Burri

Alberto Burri, Cretto nero, 1976
Selected by Yra

2013년 7월 8일 월요일

Jasper Johns, America

The large MAP represents an addition to Jasper Johns repertoire of imagery. The previous year, Rauschenberg had given Johns a schematic American map of the sort used in a school notebook, and Johns had painted over it; he used those proportions to paint the larger map.

Paint drips are prominent feature of this MAP; they are much more striking than in previous paintings, and remind us of the role of accident in the creation of his work. In ordinary life, such drips usually imply a mistake, or sloppy indifference. and there is a persistent theme in modern art, a theme of using chance events, which the viewing public has often mistrusted.

Duchamp, who employed chance in his working method, once said: "Your chance is not the same as my chance." He meant that the outcome of probability events is actually an expression of the artist's subconscious. This idea that you control what you do not control may at first seem surprising.

Johns' own view is not so no-minded:"There are no accidents in my work. It sometimes happens that something unexpected occurs - the paint may run - but then I see that it has happened, and I have the choice to paint it again or not. And if I don't, then the appearance of that element in the painting is no accident."

Some observers are put off by ideas such as these. The artist does not seem to be struggling to bring forth a preexisting vision, but rather is engaged in a process where the outcome may or may not conform to the initial idea, and where accidents along the way are incorporated. The idea of following a process in artistic creation makes people uneasy; the idea of a struggle - birth pangs - is much more acceptable.

Thus the cliché that the artist is never satisfied with his work, that it never turns out to be what he "had in mind." The usual explanation for this state of affairs assumes that imagination has a richness beyond what the fingers can actually perform, and so disappointment inevitably follows. Much has been written about the eternal striving of the artist to reproduce the wondrous visions in his brain.

©This artwork may be protected by copyright. It is posted on the site in accordance with fair use principles

copied from http://www.jasper-johns.org/index.jsp

2013년 6월 7일 금요일

The Exhibition of Contemporary Russian Photography, Seoul

http://www.photovisa.ru/news/69?locale=en

Contemporary Russian Photography: From Mystery to Poetry and Back
Photography and Media Art based on Photography

within the 5th Seoul PHOTO 2013, Seoul, Korea
April 4 – 7, 2013

Artists:
photography
Andrey Chezhin
Kir Esadov
Vadim Gushin
Kmeli-Suneli Art Group (Viktor Khmel & Elena Sukhoveeva, Sergey Lutsenko)
Nikolay Kulebyakin
Igor Kultyshkin
Gregory Maiofis
Alisa Nikulina
Petr Rakhmanov
media art based on photography
Nikita Pirogov
Olga Tobreluts

and
Special Project
Maria Kozhanova: Russians play Cosplay (photo)

Curator:
Irina Chmyreva

Preparing the first presentation of Contemporary Russian Photography in Seoul, we focused on poetical traditions and mythology, on tradition how to visualize invisible, nevertheless the point of visualization is a part of religious or philosophic or poetical worlds, which are not separated but very often are the same, just differently named in different epochs.

The collection of Contemporary Russian Photography: from Mystery to Poetry presents the last three generations of photographers who works on the fileds of fine art photography and contemporary art. The tradition of fine art photography is deep and wide in Russia, we can say that such world-known names like Alexander Rodchenko (who’s experiments in 1920s changed the meaning of modern art and document photography) destroyed the border between art and reality, between new forms of art and fine art traditions. Contemporary Russian photographers, who works on the field of fine art photography (which is art of pure photographic language, photographic methods explanation and the art of print in the photography) combines the experience of two hundred years of photographic technology and thousands years of history of arts. There are some examples of early video-art and last years of its development, that direction which is mostly close to photography (like in art of Nikita Pirogov) and photomontage (Olga Tobreluts, she is pioneer of Russian video-art in early 1990s), because for both of these artists photography and video are the two tools of their self-expression. Among others, in this collection there are famous names since early 1990s – Andrey Chezhin, Nikolay Kulebyakin and Vadim Gushchin, new stars like Gregory Maiofis and Igor Kultyshkin (their careers started up in late 1990s-early 2000s). Mostly these names presented Moscow and St.Petersburg, two main cultural capitals of Russia. But ten years ago the first Russian provincial artists exhibitions were highly covered by international press, it was a sign of expending of cultural space, what was artificially bordered by Soviet and post-Soviet press in two main cultural cities. The represenatives of that cultural expanding is the Khmeli-Suneli group. Their art is balancing on the line between photography as an art and conceptual contemporary art of messages.
This first group show of Russian photography in Korea consists the youngest names, which became to be familiar in last three/four years: they are Alisa Nikulina, Kir Esadov, Maria Kozhanova, Petr Rakhmanov, already named Nikita Pirogov – for whom we are looking as a future for nowadays.

Organizers of the exhibition:
ROSIZO Center for Museums and Exhibitions of the Ministry of Culture of Russia,
IRIS Foundation,
Garage Center for Contemporary Culture,
Project In Support for Photography in Russia.

COEX complex, halls A,B, Seoul, Korea

the Romantic Movement