Sam Vale - Latent: A Hidden History

This is an absorbing piece of work that has been made to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the 1967 Sexual Offences Act. The theme for the piece is the non-representation of Gay males in the historical archive - an aspect commonly referred to as part of 'LGBTQ hidden histories'. Vale looks at SEAS (South East Archive of Seaside Photography) looking for potential Gay male cues in the black and white photographs and blows them up into larger scale pieces.

Latent: A Hidden History

Because of historical cultural and political stances Queer people were hidden from mainstream society (and still are to a certain extent as public displays of affection are usually frowned upon). The artist searches for "fleeting moments that were unintentionally recorded" in the archive. These 'Queer-by-proxy' moments (two men standing together, a look in passing, a hand idly resting on a shoulder) are used as metaphors for the real situations that cannot manifest themselves in open society and therefore are not recorded in the historical archive; and even if they were are sometimes omitted or removed for dubious reasons of taste, decency, and embarrassment.

I'm reminded of the work of William E Jones in "Killed: rejected images of the Farm Security Administration" in looking for potential LGBTQ moments rejected and hole-punched through by the FSA editor Roy Stryker:

"Killed" write up

"Latent: A Hidden History" comprises of two parts. The first set of images are the magnified elements that contain potential but ambiguous Gay male identities; the second is the original photograph from which the extraction came, showing a tiny blank space highlighting the notion of hidden Queer histories. This juxtaposition creates a visual dynamic between the two elements that is quite powerful in explaining the process of oppression over the "Other" in a Paternalistic and dominantly Heterosexual society.

I've only seen this work online but enjoyed analysing the ambiguous images and comparing them to their original photographs. There is a sense of living 'some kind of life' in the shadows; unlike my LGBTQ Holocaust body of work, which at times feels like I am making work purely about suffering - about what was done to them, rather than the people themselves. This is because of the limited personal accounts and descriptions that exist - they tend to detail the atrocities and not much about the individuals.

As I write this it occurs to me that I need to re-read "The Men With the Pink Triangle" with a view to extracting something more humane from the text that could prompt me to create visual metaphors about individuals and not suffering. I think this would possibly add a balancing element to the work without detracting from the main thrust of my intent.

Alain Resnais - Night & Fog

This short documentary film was recommended to me by fellow OCA student, Stephanie. The film is mainly black and white stills of the Holocaust juxtaposed against colour shots of the camps taken in the 1950s. As viewers we already bring to the work our preconceived ideas of the holocaust - exposing the dark side of our humanity in a wider political and social context. For me, I was surprised not so much by the mass graves and piles of bodies - we are used to seeing them in the context of the Nazi machine, moving people through its mass extermination system; what struck me was some of the individual images that hint at the barbarity and torture just for the sake of it.

Flicking back and forth between the original stills and the colour scenes of the camps (they had been empty for around ten years when the documentary was made) shows how the horror can so easily be overlooked and erased from memory if we are not careful. It is important to remain vigilant to the possibilities that we can so easily turn to evil deeds under the right circumstances.

"There are those who look at these ruins today
As though the monster were dead and buried beneath them.
Those who take hope again as the image fades
As though there were a cure for the scourge of these camps.
Those who pretend all this happened only once,
At a certain time and in a certain place.
Those who refuse to look around them,
Deaf to the endless cry."

Alain Resnais, Night & Fog. (1954).

Thoughts - Reading an archive - Alan Sekula

The use of archive images is widespread. As Alan Sekula points out these images are often taken out of context and re-purposed. Sometimes this is a good thing as the images can have polysemous meanings that the original photographer or curator may not have seen or intended. But there is also a danger that archives can be used to maintain a point of view that is inherently biased. Images that were made for propaganda purposes (including commercial work) can be removed from context and used as an historical document of fact. This can be very dangerous if these images start to appear to show a version of history without their original context.

In an archive all images become equal; or as Sekula more eloquently states:

"Visual differences can be homogenised out of existence when negatives first printed as industrial glossies and others printed on flat paper and tinted by hand are subjected to a uniform standard of printing for reproduction in a book. Thus the difference between a mode of pictorial address which is primarily 'informational' and one which is 'sentimental' is obscured. in this sense, archives establish a relation of abstract visual equivalence". Sekula ().


Unfortunately with mass globalisation and the fast moving pace of information it feels that media organisations are less inclined to strictly verify the source of images as much as they used to.

Thoughts: Photography chpt 2 - Visual Culture

I would agree with the point of view that Howells makes for photography as an art form in chapter 3 of Visual Culture. By analysing a series of work made by a photographer the intent can usually be seen or worked out. It therefore follows that if an artist's intent can be ascertained then the photograph is more than just its subject matter; which seems to be the main thrust of arguments against photography as an art form. The mechanical recording and output of a subject onto paper (or digital media) is just part of the process; though this is usually focused on (naively or wilfully?) to the exclusion of all the other artistic intentions and choices that have to take place before and after the clicking of the shutter. Also, it is interesting that whenever arguments such as the element of chance or lack of control over subject are made to exclude photography, (because of lack of intent) it is 'straight' photography such as 'street' or 'documentary' that is used to bolster the argument - conveniently forgetting all about other modes of photography such as constructed. That is because to look at these other areas the argument of lack of intent would immediately fall flat.

Thoughts - Poststructuralism and the language of photography

After several readings I still don't fully grasp the intent of Roland Barthe's "The Rhetoric of the Image". It will take a few more readings I think. The concept of a 'sign' containing 'signifiers and signifieds' is straight forward enough and the examples used make a lot of sense when it comes to deconstructing an image. I can also relate to the poststructuralist notion that a sign can be polysemous (my favourite new word). Poststructuralist thinking, in similarity to the Postmodernist view, believes that art is intertextual. Cultural, sociological, and lived experience are all tools used to perceive artworks in a particular way. The artworks originator and the individual viewer cannot claim definitive authority over it. There is commonality of experience and there is difference - all are valid. In this respect I liked Barthe's description of a 'floating chain' of signifieds' that are waiting for the viewer to anchor around an image. The viewer (through individual intertextual experience) selects a signified sign and makes sense of the work to counteract the "terror of uncertain signs". Barthes (1977).

This, I think, is the gist of what Barthes was writing about although I will definitely need to re-read some more.


Barthes, R. (1977) The Rhetoric of the Image.

    

Thoughts & Notes - The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism: Douglas Crimp

Thoughts:

What relevance does Postmodernism have to my practise? Well I use aspects of critical theory when I think about making work. I think about authenticity and representation of minorities. I particularly make work that deals with the concept of the hidden history or patriarchal notions of presented reality. I make work in the 'directorial' style as Crimp describes it.

'Creating one's fictions through the appearance of a seamless reality into which has been woven a narrative dimension.'  Crimp (1980).

As well as pushing a LGBT identity minority aspect I try to show that what is presented is not always real. Photography is a power tool often used by the Patriarchy to represent the masses. It is not real in the sense that it 'presents' a view of the world that contains the inherent bias of the originator. I suppose this could be considered a Postmodern viewpoint. The message is more important to me. I'm not particularly concerned with authenticity - although I haven't done much in the way of appropriation work - my calendar for G&M springs to mind.

In Crimp's essay it was interesting to read his thoughts on Richard Prince's appropriation art - the Marlborough cowboys. I think this is the first time I've properly understood about the notion of a copy without an original. Crimp also touches on Sherrie Levine and the rephotographing of Edward Weston's work. Levine's explanation to a friend who said that 'they only make me want to see the original' makes perfect sense to me. The original is about something else entirely and as Levine pointed out that  'of course, and the originals make you want to see that little boy. But when you see the boy, the art is gone.' These ideas around visual culture can be so difficult to grasp sometimes. Sometimes they are under our noses and so obvious that we can't see them. At other times they are elusive and slippery.  

Notes:

• Postmodernism represents a specific breach with Modernism, with those institutions that are the preconditions for and shape the discourse of modernism: 
• The museum.
• Art History.
• Photography - in a more complex sense because modernism depends on both its presence and absence.
• Postmodernism is about art's dispersal, its plurality. The plurality of copies.
• 1979 young artists beginning to exhibit in New York. The genesis of their concerns were what had been pejoratively labelled the 'theatricality' of minimal sculpture and the extensions of that theatrical position into the art of the 1970s.
• The aesthetic mode that was exemplary during the 1970s was performance art - all those works that were constituted in a specific place and for a specific duration; works for which it could be said literally that you 'had to be there'; works, that is, that assumed the presence of a spectator in front of the work as the work took place, thereby privileging the spectator instead of the artist.
• presence - the being there necessitated by performance.
• The kind of presence that is possible only through the absence that we know to be the condition of representation.
• Representation - signs, symbols for something else.
• Third definition - the notion of presence that is about being there, being in front of, and the notion of presence that Henry James uses in his ghost stories, the presence that is a ghost and therefore really an absence, the presence that is not there, I want to add the notion of presence as a kind of increment to being there, a ghostly aspect of presence that is its excess, its supplement.
• Postmodernism
• Jack Goldstein - Two Fencers
• Robert Longo - Surrender
• The peculiar presence of this work is effected through absence, through its unbridgeable distance from the original, from ever the possibility of an original. Such presence is what I attribute to the kind of photographic activity I call postmodernist.
• This quality of presence would seem to be just the opposite of 
• what Walter Benjamin had in mind when he introduced the notion of aura into the language of criticism.
• Aura has to do with the presence of the original, with authenticity, with the unique existence of the work of art in the place in which it happens to be.
• The withering away of the aura, the disassociation of the work from the fabric of tradition, is an inevitable outcome of mechanical reproduction.
• The impossibility of experiencing the aura of such pictures as the Mona Lisa. Its aura has been utterly depleted by the thousands of times we've seen its reproduction. No degree of concentration will restore its uniqueness for us.
• It would seem though, that if withering away of the aura is an inevitable fact of our time, then equally inevitable are all those projects to recuperate it, to pretend that the original and the unique are still possible and desirable. And this is nowhere more apparent than in the filed of photography itself, the very culprit of mechanical reproduction.
• Aura possible in some photographs - so called 'primitive' phase - era before 1850 and commercialisation of photography.
• The aura in these photographs then is not to be found in the presence of the photographer in the photograph in the way that the aura of the painting is determined by the presence of the painter's unmistakable hand in his or her picture. Rather, it is the presence of the subject, of what is photographed, 'the tiny spark of chance, of the here and now, with which reality has, as it were, seared the character of the picture'.
• So for Benjamin the connoisseurship of photography is an activity diametrically opposed to the connoisseurship of painting. It means not looking for the hand of the artist but for the uncontrolled and uncontrollable intrusion of reality. What reality? The photographer's version?
• The absolutely unique and ever magical quality not of the artist but of his or her subject. It is the artist (photographer) that captures and distorts reality to provide these moments! 
• Benjamin thought it misguided after the commercialisation of photography to simulate the lost aura through the application of techniques imitative of painting.
• Sherrie Levine - re-photographs of Edward Weston's son.
• Sherrie Levine - Edward Weston - son - praxiteles - classical sculpture.
• 'they only make me want to see the original'
• 'of course, and the originals make you want to see that little boy. But when you see the boy, the art is gone.'
• The desire that is initiated by that representation does not come to closure around that little boy, it is not at all satisfied by him. The desire of representation exists only insofar as it can never be fulfilled, insofar as the original always is deferred. It is only in the absence of the original that representation can take place.
• And representation takes place because it is always already there in the world as representation.
• It was Weston of course, who said that the photograph must be visualised in full before the exposure is made. Levine has taken the master at his word and in so doing has shown him what he really meant. The a priori Weston had in mind was not really in his mind at all; it was in the world, and Weston only copied it.
• a priori - relating to or denoting reasoning or knowledge which proceeds from theoretical deduction rather than from observation or experience.
• Nature poses as the antithesis of representation. 'having been there'. The presence of deja vu, nature as already having been seen, nature as representation.
•  Levine's photographs
• photography as art spectrum. The furthest reaches of straight photography. The photographs she appropriates operate within that mode but also because she does not manipulate her photographs in any way.
• The opposite end of the spectrum is the photography that is self consciously composed, manipulated, fictionalised, the so-called directorial mode, in which we find such auters of photography as Duane Michals and Les Crims.
• The strategy of this mode is to use the apparent veracity of photography against itself. Creating one's fictions through the appearance of a seamless reality into which has been woven a narrative dimension.
• Cindy Sherman
• her photographs function in this mode in order to expose an unwanted aspect of that fiction. The fiction of the self.
• Her photographs show that the supposed autonomous and unitary self, out of which those other 'directors' would create their fictions is itself nothing other than a discontinuous series of representations, copies, and fakes.
• she is created in the image of already known feminine stereotypes; her self is therefore understood as contingent on the possibilities provided by the culture in which Sherman participates, not by some inner impulse.
• as such her photographs reverse the terms of art and autobiography. They use art not to reveal the artist's true self but to show the self as an imaginary construct.
• there is no real Cindy Sherman in these photographs; these are only the guises she assumes. And she does not create these guises; she simply chooses them in the way that any of us do.
• Mass advertising - whose photographic strategy is to disguise the directorial mode as a form of documentary.
• Richard Prince steals the most frank and banal of these images, which register, in the context of photography as art, as a kind of shock. Their rather brutal familiarity gives way to strangeness, as an unintended and unwanted dimension of fiction reinvades them. By isolating, enlarging, and juxtaposing fragments of commercial images, Prince points to their invasion by the ghosts of fiction.
• Prince is showing emerging fictional narratives created by the viewer?
• Focusing directly on commodity fetish, suing the master tool of commodity fetishism, Prince's rephotographed photographs take on Hitchcockian dimension; the commodity becomes a clue. It has, we might say, acquired an aura, only now it is a function not of presence but of absence, severed from an origin, from an originator, from authenticity.
• In our time, the aura has become only a presence, which is to say, a ghost.

Thoughts & Notes - The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Walter Benjamin

Thoughts:

I think that Benjamin's viewpoint on the destruction of aura of original artworks due to mechanical reproduction is certainly a valid one. His article was written in 1936 when the influence of mass mechanical reproduction on public consciousness was starting to take effect. From the perspective of 2016, we are so swamped with reproduced images of original artworks, from so many varied sources, that the process is normalised - with the amount of artwork reproduced for advertising and to sell product it is hard to imagine life any other way. When every major exhibition has a gift shop with reproduced postcards, posters, framed prints, key rings etc, it is hard to see how the aura of an original work cannot be affected. But with that said, we still flock to the exhibitions to see major pieces of work. To take home a small reproduction does not seem to have majorly affected the revered original in any way. Benjamin's states:

'To pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura, is the mark of a perception whose 'sense of the universal equality of things' has increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from a unique object by means of reproduction.' Benjamin (1968).

I think that Benjamin's 'sense of the universal equality of things' is the process that is taking place here. The 'aura' around original artworks does have the potential to be destroyed - but it hasn't been. We have become so familiar with mechanical reproduction that we no longer think of it as anything special. If the intent of the work can still be ascertained then it hardly matters if the work is a reproduction or not. In fact when the work is seen in different contexts this can provide new juxtapositions and allow new readings on a piece of work. A Post-Structural viewpoint would be that there are many different interpretations of a piece of art that are dependant on context and knowledge and brought to the image by the viewer. The theory behind Post Structuralism has flourished in a culture that has assimilated original artworks through mechanical reproduction. The process has allowed for a shift in perspective that starts with theorists and is gradually assimilated into mass cultural thought systems.



Benjamin, W. (1968). The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Illuminations. New York: Schocken.



Notes:

• The mechanical reproduction of works of art and the art of the film have had repercussions on art in its traditional form.
• The most perfect reproduction lacks the originals presence in time and space because of the unique history to which it was subject, including changes to its physical condition and ownership.
• The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity.
• confronted with its manual reproduction, which was usually branded a forgery, the original preserved all its authority.
• This is not so for mechanical reproduction. Two points: 1. process reproduction is more independent. Process reproduction can bring out those aspects of the original that are unattainable to the naked eye yet accessible to the lens. Photographic reproductions using enlargers or slow motion can capture images which escape natural vision. 2. Technical reproductions can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach of the original itself.
• The situations into which the product of mechanical reproduction can be brought may not touch the actual work of art, yet the quality of its presence is always depreciated.
• Its authenticity is interfered with.
• What is really jeopardised when the historical testimony is affected is the authority of the object.
• "That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art." (Monet tea towels).
• The technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition.
• Copies substitute a unique existence for a plurality of copies. (We all experience art in different ways. The art image on a tin of biscuits, a book, a poster.)
• In permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced. (Our different contextual experiences.)
• These two processes (process reproduction & technical reproduction) lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition. (The beholder may have no knowledge of the vast tradition of painting when looking at a famous image on a biscuit tin.) (Like knowing bits of Shakespeare without ever having read any.).
• Contemporary mass movements: Their most powerful agent is the film. Its social significance, particularly in its positive form, is inconceivable without its destructive cathartic aspect, that is, liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage.
• During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity's entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense perception is organised, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well. (The way art was perceived and painted over time - the vanishing point, perspective. Some cultures do not have words for blue so cannot perceive it.
• Aura - example: if, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch. It rests on two circumstances, both of which are related to the increasing significance of the masses in contemporary life. Namely, the desire of contemporary masses to bring things 'closer' spatially and humanly, which is just as ardent as their bent toward overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction. (their?) Benjamin sees himself as not part of the 'masses'. Some 'othering' going on here.
• To pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura, is the mark of a perception whose 'sense of the universal equality of things' has increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from a unique object by means of reproduction. (Increasing sense of the universal equality of things!)
• The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception.
• Tradition itself is thoroughly alive and changeable.
• Example: ancient stone statue of Venus. Greeks made it a venerable object. Middle Age clerics viewed it as an ominous idol. Both of them confronted with its uniqueness, its aura.
• It is significant that the existence of the work of art with reference to its aura is never entirely separated from its ritual function.
• The unique value of the 'authentic' work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value.
• This ritualistic basis, however remote, is still recognisable as secularised ritual even in the most profane forms of the cult of beauty.
• The secular cult of beauty, developed during the Renaissance and prevailing for three centuries, clearly showed that ritualistic basis in its decline and the first deep crisis that befell it.
• With the advent of the first truly revolutionary means of reproduction, photography, simultaneously with the rise of socialism, art sensed the approaching crisis, which has become evident a century later. 
• At the time art reacted with the doctrine of l'art pour l'art, that is with a theology of art. (art for art's sake? Modernism? Abstract Expressionism?). 
• Negative theology  - 'pure art' denying social function of art and any categorising by subject matter.
• For the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.
• To an even greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. (photographic negative - to ask for the 'authentic' (print makes no sense).
• The instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice - politics. (ritual (religion) and politics are one and the same thing - power and control.)
• Works of art are received and valued on two different planes: cult value & exhibition value. Ceremonial objects destined to serve in a cult. What mattered was their existence, not being their being on view. With the emancipation of the various art practices from ritual go increasing opportunities for the exhibition of their product.
• With the different methods of technical reproduction of a work of art, its fitness for exhibition increased to such an extent that the quantitative shift between its two poles turned into a qualitative transformation of its nature.
• By its absolute emphasis on its exhibition value the work of art becomes a creation with entirely new functions, among which the one we are conscious of, the artistic function, later may be recognised as incidental.
• This much is certain: today photography and film are the most serviceable exemplifications of this new function.
• In other words like the object initially revered for its magical properties that later became thought of as works of art, today's film and photography may in the future have entirely different values placed on them.
• For the entire spectrum of optical, and now acoustical perception the film has brought about a similar deepening of apperception.
• Psychopathology of everyday life - This book isolated and made analysable things which had heretofore floated along unnoticed in the broad stream of perception.
• Evidently a different nature opens itself to the camera than open to the naked eye - if only because an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored by man.