Notes From Nowhere

Strange things are going to happen to you if you read too many art blogs. When I woke up this morning, this is what I remembered from a dream I had:

I am walking down the Westside of Manhattan. Or was it the Potsdamer Platz? Everybody in sight has a beard and is hunched behind his large format camera, importantly taking very innovative pictures of empty parking lots, gymnasiums and other predominantly drab scenery. There are also a few female photographers, and they mostly take pictures of themselves, or of homeless people (who in turn take pictures of them), or their girlfriends, or what seem to be their relatives. I go to the Supermarket to buy some water, but the cashier is occupied with adjusting her camera and photographing price tags. Walking home, the doormen (behind their cameras) ignore me. I read up on some blogs, and all the people I just saw have already posted their images. Others have not posted images, but their views on politics, the arts, their dogs, digestion… just about everything, and always extremely insightful. There is also some poetry. The only blogs that are not by photographers are by gallery owners, easily to be recognized by being even more insightful. Suddenly I feel terrified: Is there a world outside this? Who is paying taxes? Who is making laws, who executes them? Who is doing the editing? Who can count to five on his own, without making a poem out of it (or a painting)? That’s when I woke up, stumbling to my computer…

Speaking of poems, here’s one for the suffering artist (by Charles Bukowski, I’m sure he wouldn’t mind):

”
something

I’m out of matches.
the springs in my couch
are broken.
they stole my footlocker.
they stole my oil painting of
two pink eyes.
my car broke down.
eels climb my bathroom walls.
my love is broken.
but the stockmarket went up
today.

”

I remain convinced that art and art criticism are two entirely separate fields that have almost nothing to do with each other. The one bit of overlap that I see are artists who happen to have gone through a couple of college classes in aesthetics, and have, for better or worse, picked up a certain tone (it’s an intricate mix of being the ‘lost artist soul’ and being totally grandiose, hard to achieve if that’s not been ingrained into your nature at a young age). My impression is based, in part, on the experience of reading and writing artist statements and the like, feeling that the expectations for these kinds of things are somehow shaped by the ‘other world’ – the world of art criticism. My sense is that art criticism, at its best, is a creative endeavor in itself – an exercise in expressing the *experience* of art. But that seems to have strangely little (if not to say nothing) to do with the artist, or what goes on in his or her mind when creating an image.

With this caveat, I want to point you to an essay by Charlotte Cotton on “The New Color: The Return Of Black-And-White”, published at Tip Of The Tongue. Personally, I’m not sure if I even like the question whether black and white is ‘back’, or in some way better than color. But, of course, Charlotte Cotton’s questions are more sophisticated. In part they seem to be about her own history of relating to art. One gets the sense that the elusive black-and-white image, which emulates the ways in which vision is partial and momentary, is dearest to her heart. And that there is some regret about the way these kinds of images fade into the background when legions of artists, like an army running through the day, go for bold (or subtle) color, and XX-large C-prints of empty parking lots. So there’s a sweet kind of nostalgia in her writing, to which, I guess, both worlds can relate.

What I share with Charlotte Cotton is the amazement at the uniformity of much recent work in color (oh, the temptation to moralize!). The discussion forum linked to the article has some interesting entries to that end too. A snippet from the essay: “[…] With an art market that remains suspicious of the more economic and likely artist-made inkjet print, the potential for new color languages for photography are slow to emerge. A career-oriented art photographer (and maybe this is the first generation of artists who can consider it a “career”) sticks very close to the now well-traveled path of contemporary color photography’s aesthetic homage and partial remembrance of, for example, gorgeous Kodachrome, or the beam of an enlarger. In a career-oriented era, perhaps this strategy is wiser than trying to beat a path through the resistance to presenting imagery in other ways and forms that actually respond to the potential of digitization. Of course I feel bemused at why a nascent art photographer would be so openly conservative as to adhere to apparent conventions, and at my most pessimistic, I wonder if there’s too much “trying-to-be-like” Eggleston, Shore, et al., and too little “creative-departure-from” the stellar standards that they have set […]”