I have a friend who asks at the end of a shoot, “Did you make art today?” “I think so” was my typical response because I’m never sure what I do with my camera will ever be considered art exactly.  Thinking back, it’s probably because I’ve assessed too many contact sheets and digital proofs filled with prosaic visual records.

Classically, visual attention can be registered in seconds when viewing photos. See it, scan details, like it (or not) – turn the page – on to the next. On the web we’ll hit the fwd button like a flip book. The occasional extraordinarily recorded event will slow this down. Let’s call that pace “significant attention”.

An extraordinary event brilliantly recorded will hold your attention for a minute or two. Art of the “fine” variety, however, must hold your significant attention everlastingly.

The last half of my photography life has been an obsession with reducing detail. Less is more but not always easy in commercial applications. If you’ve ever tried to get away with dead black shadows, blown highlights and partially obscured product you know from what I speak.

“Music is the space between the notes” – Claude Debussy

I thought of this quote before discovering someone much more intelligent said it first.  I was at a show listening to bluegrass virtuosos play so fast that it was hard to discern a space between notes.  It made me realize that there was only one interpretation possible.  There were no spaces for me to think or feel anything but the energy of their content.”  – From a post dated – Dec. 17, 2009.

The objective is to gain significant attention as long as possible ahead of an inevitable boredom strike. Offer enough detail to entice an empathic exchange; leave room for interpretation for with no space between the notes boredom strikes fast.

Instinctively, owners of the iPhone Apps Hipstamatic and Swanko Lab know this.  Instant analog art automatically obscures enough detail to give your most pedestrian recording significant attention. It’s what’s behind the craze; easy, fast, shareable, instant art – sometimes of the fine variety.

Both Apps are grab bags of washed out highlights, muted blotchy colors, unpredictable tonal shifts, lens flair, dark edges, dust spots, scratches and numerous “add in” color effects; like shuffling through an old shoebox of treasured snaps 20 years premature.

Samples from the Hipstamatic Flickr Display:

What is the street artist’s intent? Anti-social pop art with an extreme satirical point intended for consumption across all socioeconomic barriers, or is it hype driven brandalism by an artistic terrorist bent on pulling one over on a naïve culture?  Tagging is clearly vandalism but the line of intent is vague and does mere intent define vandals as artists?

Exit Through the Gift Shop is an extremely thought provoking film by Banksy, one of the more notorious street artists in the UK. I was no more than tenuously aware of Banksy or street art beyond the mundanely obvious, but the fascination button has been pressed.

My fascination is not as much with the art as it is with its place in culture; it’s acceptance or failure, it’s hype driven value and its democratic canvas. I relate stronger to the street artist than I do with his work.

Street art can be beautiful but from my extremely limited surveillance, so far I see its beauty as mostly unconventionally embedded in the “of the people essence” found in the act. Yet street art crosses over and when it does the artist is there to embrace success in the most conventional way; think Shepard Fairey. Which brings us back to intent; was the original intent to gain lucrative artistic notoriety through cheap illegal stunts?

Shepard Fairey (who has a role in the film), for example, was ready to lie about the origin of his work to bolster personal profit. It drives the innocence of illegal art into the ground like a paper airplane; beautiful in its short flight.

In Banksy too, there is a contradiction to his art: a street rebel but also a gallery artist and book publisher making a strong living and building his brand legacy; he’s a (s)pray-on provocateur seen from multiple angles.

The film is filled with anti-heros but the main character is more like an anti-anti-anti hero; he bites back. I’ll pass on to you the favor from a friend who guided me last week by repeating one of the loudest lines in the film:  GO!

“There are no accidental masterpieces in painting, but there are accidental masterpieces in photography” – Chuck Close

Here we go – Déjà vu all over again – into the world of vernacular photography. Like colloquial speech is to literature, vernacular photography is any type that isn’t intended as art: keepsakes, advertising, forensic, documentation for records, passport photos, etc. It was made possible by George Eastman when he invented The Kodak Camera and roll film.

The modern disparity is found in history; more specifically – there is a history.  When you bought The Kodak in the late 1880’s there was no strong artistic tradition; no best practices for the flock of newcomers.  Someone first introduce smiling for the camera. “Say Cheese” was unfamiliar.

It’s 1890, photography is suddenly accessible. There is always more film to be had, it wasn’t messy, and it was fun. There is no need to be serious, this isn’t art.

The camera can produce art with little more participation from the photographer than a button push.  The medium is generous and extremely democratic. Yet the product result of a button push can be elevated to an art often by accident.

Henri Lartigue is a great example of amateurism (he made a living as a painter) producing occasional brilliance while the majority of his large quantity of work reached art status merely through our draw to nostalgia. His work represented the vernacular of his time until they became documents of longing. His playfulness with photography brought us a new type of art.

Photographic artwork is rife with nostalgia – it seems impossible to take a serious fine art photo of something new. Our homesickness for the past lifts everything old to an artistic prospect; signs along old Route 66, peeling paint, abandoned warehouses, old general stores – even old people become fine art when recorded by a camera more frequently than those of living less than 4 years.

Mom at Museum - Hipstamatic Photo

An iPhone App called the Hipstamatic Camera gives us democratized digital nostalgia – “digital photography never looked so analog”.  Its whole purpose is to replicate faded films exposed through second or third rate optics.  The result is instant art.  I posted snapshots on Facebook and got excited comments eager to discover my magic tool.  Old meets new; our nostalgia is now digitized. Is camera art done if a digital “look” never passes for future nostalgia?

Gradually the camera became more generous; more accidental master-pieces are posted to Flickr sites. The beauty of old processes before The Kodak invention are now the sandbox of vernacular photography; Déjà vu all over again.

Below is a segment from a BBC presentation on The Genius of Photography.  It’s thought provoking in that we get a glimpsed reminder of how similar the introduction of The Kodak is to the adoption of digital imaging by the vernacular picture taker.

If you want to continue the series The Genius of Photography by the BBC go here.

Permission To Suck Manifesto – Law #2: The boss is the problem; the puzzle to solve, the idea to create, the crowd to excite, or your soul to satisfy.  Don’t piss off the boss.

I think maybe we are fortunate to be living a global transformation.  You’re trying to find solid ground and if you’re lucky you won’t find it too soon or if you’re Raghava KK you move on as soon as the ground stops shifting.

I am convinced that those creatives whom greatness finds, find a way to tell a personal truth through whatever medium they choose: comedy, teaching, cartoons, painting, music, writing, film or whatever.  This is the meaningful challenge especially as the meaning of our truth changes.  If you’re standing here, it moves over there.

Not everyone is equipped to succeed early or late, and by succeed, my characterization is to discover your personal truth and to be fearless enough to consent transformation as your truth evolves.  Those who appear successful – by my description – may in reality be dismal failures.  Conventional success can be found regardless.

Raghava KK – at least for now – appears to be in sync with his truth as he follows it where ever it talks him.  He has an inspiring story.

Raghava KK writing about living in NYC: Brooklyn Bound R Train

Akin to my own recent past, this city, I came to learn, is the epicenter of change. Its transformative powers are so subtle and so strong that one lives and dies several deaths here. The rigor that this city demands is a ritual that, only through participation, allows one to experience transformation. Personal transformation thus becomes the subject of my exploration.

Raghava KK – Fine Art Website

Simplicity makes me breathe easier.  Complexity assaults me because I’m not close enough to what’s important or it overwhelms me because I haven’t stepped back far enough.  Stepping back aids organization while moving in requires elimination of extraneous noise.

Boneyard Confusion

In a recent “art adventure” we drove to South Carolina to visit Bulls Island near Charleston.  On the northern tip of the island is Boneyard Beach; a stretch littered with weathered trees long succumbed to salt and sea.  Erosion has left tree ruins stranded on the beach or in the surf predictable with the tides.  Its feeling is one of a surreal natural apocalypse.

I was born with, what they called at the time, a lazy eye.  The treatment was performing a minor operation on the eye muscle then patching the good eye to strengthen the weak one.  The result was a fix cosmetically but it caused my depth perception to suffer; my eyes never learned to work together since they were literally separated at birth.  While I don’t really know what it would be like to see in three dimensions I believe that my 2D view has caused me to be a fierce proponent of visual simplicity.

Approaching the beach was like entering a tree junkyard, I knew there was a lifetime of images to be found but none so obvious that I could start my typical point and shoot frenzy.  Boneyard Beach is pure visual complexity that’s often found as one wanders through natural beauty; your neither close enough nor distant enough to avoid an ambush of at least 3 out of 5 senses.

A Stab at Simplicity

I had given myself five hours on one day to find a few black and white images so I began searching through the confusion.  A few years ago, now President of The Rhode Island School of Design, John Maeda wrote The Laws of Simplicity.  I put these two into service immediately:

Law no. 1: The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction.

Law no. 2: Organization makes a system of many appear fewer.

Followed by,

Law no. 5: Simplicity and complexity need each other.

Law no. 7: More emotions are better than less.

And finally,

Law no. 10:  Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful.

The last two are the hardest to achieve in my opinion.  I want my viewer to feel as much as I felt on Boneyard Beach.  To do that in a flattened abstract version of reality is hard; good art is hard.  To achieve #7 we need #10 – searching for what is meaningful takes every ounce of wisdom I own.

John Maeda talks about simplicity in an entertaining TED presentation from 2007.

Visit MaedaStudio.com

The lucky among us experience an occasional connection with surroundings that – while nearly impossible to describe – is characterized by a feeling of oneness. New Age craziness aside, the mystery of that feeling resembles a moment of creativity responsible for propelling artists of all breeds to suffer their creativity.

Those gloriously tactile instruments of color were my first link between creative brain and reality of hand.  Finger painting is communication without the need for speech.  Give me a tool and I’ll create something of beauty that brings your attentiveness.  Suddenly I’m in the world of making things and traveling a path of mysterious surprise.

Whoa – sidetracked.  Praise, ego, competition, notoriety, sex and dreams of fame or money contaminate my hand to brain connection.  The drive moves from satisfying diversion to desperate need.  Still, it’s a measurement of being that advances my craft beyond mere peer.

What’s the point; a value christened “Art Money” or is it simply a factory work replacement?  Art wants to be fine – that is – without contamination.  Pure art contains curiosity, emotion, a reach for spirituality, communicating self, and is an implement of survival.  Art money terminates fineness and puts survival at risk.  If our culture faced destruction what could be salvaged?

Artists (in the broadest sense) are historically respected because they create astonishing stuff.  To be sure, art isn’t technique – it is finger painting.

“If it moves you to attentiveness it is art, if it doesn’t it’s something else.” – Milton Glaser

Milton Glaser, Inc.

Appreciation of an object by aesthetic judgment comes from discriminatory taste, emotional empathy and intellectual passion honed as a result of experience and deep consideration.

Warhol believed art is contextual; put something in an artistic location and it becomes art.  This agrees – somewhat – with Tolstoy who maintained that artistic value is one of viewer empathy not the consequence of a creator’s intent.  If true,  it must follow that artistic creativity is in direct proportion with an ability to engage the audience’s aesthetic sensibilities.

Defining art has never been all that controversial;  it’s the “good” part that carries the debate.  New tools have made discernment tougher still. It’s not all that hard to make the work appear good through imitation or mechanized craft and then assert its worthiness.

Straightforward printed reproductions of famous paintings are not in themselves kitsch, but objects that adapt high art images from one medium to another are paradigmatically kitsch, for instance ….. repainted versions of historical masterpieces that are adapted to the aesthetic expectations of the modern eye (a copyist once told an interviewer that his paintings of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa improved on the original by ‘taking a bit of the chill out of her expression’). – Denis Dutton

Like a TV Dinner that exceeds expectations; gourmet isn’t gourmet if you must peal back foil.  A sofa sized reproduction enjoyable enough for a downtown Marriott or a Barry Manilow cover band singing “Mandy” is part of the modern Kitsch experience.  A printed photograph made to look like a painting using the latest digital tools updates the modern Kitsch experience; there is a heavy draw of nostalgia and comfort while avoiding surprises except for how it was made. “Wow, that’s a photograph?”

Ironically, more and more gallery portrayals display pride that the artist used “real film” for a show, in a clear attempt to move the work to higher ground.

Generally the Modern Kitsch experience is possible when:

1. There is no distinct author of self expression, or no individual placing value on copyright.
2. It’s primarily the artifact of money and desire with the solitary aim to comfort and please.
3. It’s point of view is pure nostalgia, void of conflict , not disruptive or avant-garde.
4. The artwork’s creation is perfunctory or only modestly mindful; a spurious exercise designed to entertain.

Historically, Kitsch has been reserved for gaudy shallow inauthentic efforts that, in spite of a dubious origin, maintain an air of pretension.  And while this remains true, high design within easy reach has moved the needle – Wal-Mart is boasting a new aesthetic – the Kitsch experience is demanding expanded territory.  What looks like Italian handmade tile was a gratuity for subscribing to a magazine and drop shipped from China.  The new commodity position of creative artifacts is diminishing authentic uniqueness.  In its place is a modern Kitsch experience with both fine and applied faux art that – while no longer as overtly gaudy as a black velvet Mona Lisa – perpetuate a shallow inauthentic effort precariously indistinguishable from a higher aesthetic.

Beauty is comforting and we are drawn to comfort, but one job of the creative mind is to move us away from comfort even if not so abruptly that we reject the newness of it out of hand; the expression of familiarity and surprise together.

Benedetto Croce (1866-1952) suggested that “expression” is central in the way that beauty was once thought to be central.

Visual metaphor is not only the staple of advertising but the backbone of all art.  James Geary points out in his TED presentation (embedded) that metaphor is when we perceive X = Y.  Analogy is a close cousin but its equation has no equal sign only an implied one.  Though, in our struggle to understand visual abstractions, I believe we search for metaphor rather than analogy.  We adore closure.

“That is, with visual metaphors, the image-maker proposes food for thought without stating any determinate proposition.  It is the task of the viewer to use the image for insight.”
(Noël Carroll, “Visual Metaphor,” in Beyond Aesthetics. Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001 via About.com)

All art is abstract albeit some more than others. Once we accept this (and all sane people do) a metaphor is attached; it’s how sense is made of conceptual form.  This shape is your sister but that is a house; your sister is not a house – that would be analogy.  It then becomes obvious that visual metaphors also link to feeling.

A well executed visual metaphor leads the viewer without providing a conclusion.  Providing a conclusion turns art to pure craft.  Elegance turns trite when all visual clues are familiar and no interpretation is possible beyond that provided by the artist.

James Geary.com

James Geary’s Blog

[Biography via Wikipedia]

James Geary is an American-born, London-based writer and the former Europe editor of Time.^[1][2]

His most recent book is Geary’s Guide to the World’s Great Aphorists which he claims to be the largest collection of aphorisms in the English language, and follows on from his previous volume on aphorists and aphorisms, The World in a Phrase (published in the UK – but now out of print – as We Are What We Think). The World in a Phrase has also been published in Brazilian Portuguese – as O Mundo em una Frase – as well as Korean.

Previous literary efforts include a popular science book called The Body Electric, a survey of cybernetic projects attempting to replace or enhance human biological senses (also published in Spain as El Cuerpo Electrónico^[3], and two much earlier books of poetry written while he was a student in San Francisco, 17 Reasons Why and Words for Refrigerator Doors.

Geary publishes a blog about aphorisms, “All Aphorisms, All The Time”, via his website.He is also a regular speaker at literary festivals^[4] where he gives a largely unscripted lecture on aphorisms which includes his juggling routine.

Among his journalistic credits, apart from his work at Time, Geary is Editor at Large for Ode magazine^[5] and writes online for The Huffington Post, Salon.com and the Certified Financial Planner Board of Standards, Inc’s Newsletter.

There will be a day when “take a photo” means that we run home with electronic reality in a box so we can rummage through it at our leisure, try this focal length or that depth of field, and find the precise moment that we’ll label our still photographic masterpiece.  Editing is a big part of shooting yet something will remain uncaptured unless we learn to pay attention.

“He’s famous not for his flower pictures, but he is famous for his objectionable sexual representation” – Louise Bourgeois, Artist

That said Louise, it’s not hard to find the uniqueness of Mapplethorpe’s work whether it’s a flower, a penis or a portrait.  Along with other greats like Richard Avedon, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evens, Robert Frank, Irving Penn, Helmut Newton – Mapplethorpe is the reason good photographers shoot the way they do and that will remain so into the foreseeable future.

He’s right on the edge, bridging the gaps and exploring the paradox. The best description I’ve gathered from many sources is that R.M. civilized the shock of sex, violence and race – localized our fears, lust and hopes with ambiguous well crafted works.  He succeeded in such a powerful way that it’s spawned countless derivatives – my own work being no exception.

“It’s about ME trying to see things.  I’m amazed it shocked – I’ve been through the experience.”  – Robert Mapplethorpe

Shocked we were.  Controversy started in Washington DC when an ICA [Institute of Contemporary Art] funded Corcoran Gallery of Art exhibition was cancelled 10 days before a scheduled opening in 1989, thus thrusting Mapplethorpe’s work into Congressional Debates over what tax payer money should and should not support.  The controversy over censorship and the artistic freedom continues in Washington at the expense of NEA funding.

Biography [via Mapplethorpe Foundation Website]:

Robert and Patti at Coney Island

Robert Mapplethorpe was born in 1946 in Floral Park, Queens. Of his childhood he said, “I come from suburban America. It was a very safe environment and it was a good place to come from in that it was a good place to leave.”

In 1963, Mapplethorpe enrolled at Pratt Institute in nearby Brooklyn, where he studied drawing, painting, and sculpture. Influenced by artists such as Joseph Cornell and Marcel Duchamp, he also experimented with various materials in mixed-media collages, including photographs cut from books and magazines. He acquired a Polaroid camera in 1970 and began producing his own images to incorporate into the collages, saying he felt “it was more honest.” That same year he and Patti Smith, whom he had met three years earlier, moved into the Chelsea Hotel.

Mapplethorpe quickly discovered the satisfaction of taking Polaroid photographs in their own right and indeed few Polaroids appear in his mixed-media works. His first solo gallery exhibition, “Polaroids,” took place at the Light Gallery in New York City in 1973. In 1976, he acquired a Hasselblad medium-format camera and took to shooting his circle of friends and acquaintances—artists, musicians, socialites, pornographic film stars, and members of the S & M underground. He also worked on commercial projects; he created album cover art for Patti Smith and Television, two of several musicians with whom he would eventually collaborate, and shot a series of portraits and party pictures for Interview Magazine.

In the late 70s, Mapplethorpe grew increasingly interested in documenting the New York S & M scene. The resulting photographs are shocking for their content and remarkable for their technical and formal mastery. Mapplethorpe told ARTnews in late 1988, “I don’t like that particular word ‘shocking.’ I’m looking for the unexpected. I’m looking for things I’ve never seen before … I was in a position to take those pictures. I felt an obligation to do them.” Meanwhile his career continued to flourish. In 1977, he participated in Documenta 6 in Kassel, West Germany and in 1978, the Robert Miller Gallery in New York City became his exclusive dealer.

Mapplethorpe met Lisa Lyon, the first World Women’s Bodybuilding Champion, in 1980. Over the next several years they collaborated on a series of portraits and figure studies, a film, and the book, Lady, Lisa Lyon. Throughout the 80s, Mapplethorpe produced a bevy of images that simultaneously challenge and adhere to classical aesthetic standards: stylized compositions of male and female nudes, delicate flower still lifes, and studio portraits of artists and celebrities, to name a few of his preferred genres. He introduced and refined different techniques and formats, including color 20″ x 24″ Polaroids, photogravures, platinum prints on paper and linen, Cibachome and dye transfer color prints. In 1986, he designed sets for Lucinda Childs’ dance performance, Portraits in Reflection, created a photogravure series for Arthur Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell, and was commissioned by curator Richard Marshall to take portraits of New York artists for the series and book, 50 New York Artists.

That same year, in 1986, he was diagnosed with AIDS. Despite his illness, he accelerated his creative efforts, broadened the scope of his photographic inquiry, and accepted increasingly challenging commissions. The Whitney Museum of American Art mounted his first major American museum retrospective in 1988, one year before his death in 1989.

His vast, provocative, and powerful body of work has established him as one of the most important artists of the twentieth century. Today Mapplethorpe is represented by galleries in North and South America and Europe and his work can be found in the collections of major Museums around the world. Beyond the art historical and social significance of his work, his legacy lives on through the work of the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. He established the Foundation in 1988 to promote photography, support museums that exhibit photographic art, and to fund medical research in the fight against AIDS and HIV-related infection.

See More:

Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith short video

Photography of Robert Mapplethorpe 9 min. Video

Mapplethorpe Foundation Website

Read more:

“Just Kids” – Patti Smith:  Book Review

Digital is edging out analog because it democratizes craft. We’ve greased artistic expression and access to talent with the speed of friction-free physics. Evidently neither technology nor egalitarianism does anything to stir the soul. Common sense leads us to expect an artistic tornado of stunning art. It’s a numbers thing.

The Moog Synthesizer had switched on Bach yet Moog Music isn’t an enduring listen. Rauschenberg erases beauty thus inspires – or provokes – the heart of an artistic movement. The contrast lies in communication – one way or two way; a cry for attention or a deep conversation, hobby or conviction.

Art is poetry when “poetry” is an emotionally rewarded aesthetic banter with our senses. Reduce craft to a one button push, the poetry now includes a lackluster effort to engage – similar to a street passing of two indifferent relations. There is no strength in laziness. A case for the enduring slog: Willem de Kooning to Rauschenberg, “I want to give you something very hard to erase.”

Genius lies in understanding that art involves the consumer’s world view, the context in which it is consumed, the collaborative nature of the work and the commitment of the artist. With his erased de Kooning, Rauschenberg proves that great art works don’t necessarily involve the tools of great skill. Our democratized digital renaissance proves similar; great tools don’t necessarily produce works of great art.