Posts Tagged ‘image’

Monday, July 5th, 2010

AfterSherrieLevine.com is a website by Michael Mandiberg.

It consists of scanned versions of Sherrie Levine’s After Walker Evans photographs (which themselves were appropriated versions of “original” Walker Evans’ photographs) as well as a section of texts, including a statement by Mandiberg, and a series of appropriated texts written by or involving Levine.

The titles of the individual photographs refer to their url (e.g., AfterSherrieLevine.com/1.jpg).

In each one of these photographs, one views, at first glance, a black & white, Great Depression-era documentation of either a figure, a group of figures, an architectural detail, or a barren landscape in a rural, economically-distressed area.

These images were initially created by Walker Evans and received attention for providing documentary evidence of the way in which the Great Depression impacts “the common man” as well as creating a myth around the figure of Evans as a roving, Whitman-esque bard of the photographic medium.

However, in the context of Mandiberg’s website – aftersherrielevine.com – one views another layer to these photographs, consisting of Levine’s intervention into them.

As photographs of photographs taken by Levine, their value resides less as the documentation of poverty or as a sign of the mythology surrounding Evans and more as empty simulations of these qualities.

In the perceived wake of Modernism, the heroic potential of autonomous artists or autonomous works of art was challenged as artists such as Levine sought to demonstrate the impotence of these ideas in the wake of the massive increase in social image consumption due to technological reproduction.

She writes:

The world is filled to suffocating. Man has placed his token on every stone. Every word, every image, is leased and mortgaged. We know that a picture is but a space in which a variety of images, none of them original, bend and clash.

*****

Photographs which are framed as “of photographs,” it is thought, demonstrate this very condition of an “image world” and, as such, contain no illusionary cult value in and of themselves; on the contrary, they demonstrate the negation of this value.

Now, of course, Levine’s re-photographs are not purely theoretical objects; they exist in major museum collections and are widely exhibited, thus, complicating any claim to Levine’s negation of the idea of the “artist as genius” or of the original work of art.

And this is where Mandiberg’s intervention into Levine’s work comes in.

By scanning the photographs from the same Walker Evans book which Levine herself used, uploading them to the Internet and marking them as “After Sherrie Levine,” Mandiberg demonstrates that the very self-mythologizing and cult-value which Levine ostensibly critiques is, in fact, highly present in her own work.

Though her work was a critique of the authority of the hero-artist as produced by art history, this critique is arguably as well known in contemporary art discourse as Evans’ original work.

As art discourse paralleled the accomplishments of postmodern artists, these artists and their works paradoxically become art historical landmarks

It should be said, though, that Mandiberg’s insight here was not lost on Levine herself.

Several years after the production and exhibition of her After Walker Evans series, Levine suggests in an interview with Jeanne Siegel (which Mandiberg turns into a one-act play available to read on aftersherrie-levine.com) that her own thinking about the work is transformed.

She claims:

In the beginning, there was a lot of talk about the denial in the work and I certainly corroborated in that reading, but now it’s more interesting for me to think about it as an exploration of the notion of authorship. We do believe that there are such things as authorship and ownership. But I think at different times we interpret these words differently. It’s the dialectical nature of these terms that now interests me.

*****

This dialectic of critique and confirmation is further developed in Mandiberg’s project as he includes with each of the high resolution images in the project a printable “certificate of authenticity” which is to be signed by the person who printed it out.

This gesture allows Mandiberg to acknowledge his own images’ potential for cult-value while also distancing this value from economics as the person viewing the work is free to print out and “officially” certify it by their own hand.

By versioning Levine’s work on the Internet and self-reflexively accounting for the fact that his own critique is itself subject to objectification and fetishization, Mandiberg’s project expands the picture drawn by Levine – one not of a struggling farmer, but rather of the process of image dissemination.

One views here a version of a version of a work of photography which is itself a version of another work (say, of portraiture or landscape in 19th century painting) and one views this version not as an endgame, but rather as one more notch in a chain of versions extending into the past and the future.

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Wednesday, May 26th, 2010

“The ink wasn’t dry yet on their divorce papers before he was shacking up with you-know-who.”

In this sentence, there’s an idiom – “the ink wasn’t dry yet” – which does a nice job of creating a picture of a temporal event – a relatively short temporal event – by thinking of this event in terms of observable material phenomena – ink drying on paper.

One could say, “It didn’t take that many days after their divorce before he was shacking up with you-know-who,” but, in so doing, one loses the image of time as material; it lacks the bite of the previous sentence in which time is given the same oppressive materiality as an object in space.

Here’s another example:

“We’ve each said things we don’t really mean, so let’s let the dust settle and talk this over in the morning.”

Again, one could say here, “We’ve each said things we don’t really mean, so let’s wait a couple of hours and talk this over in the morning,” but, in so doing, one might lose something of the imagistic power which the idiom “let the dust settle” affords the sentence.

All of the sudden, that stretch of time becomes an object – an accumulation of dust following a confrontation – and, thus, becomes more dynamic than a reference to the passage of time through standardized time units – minutes, hours, etc. – which are decidedly more difficult to picture concretely.

The idioms in which time is pictured as an entity with its own materiality and its own objective weight on one’s experience are often powerful because they nudge one towards the intuition that time is as much a material as space (albeit a very different kind of material).

In Damon Zucconi’s Grey series, which consists of (as of right now, anyway) eight images created using a digital scanner and varying amounts of naturally-occurring dust and light leakage into the scanner, the artist invests himself in a similar experimentation with the material representation of time.

As viewed through his website, he presents, to begin with, a series of four images composed of dark shades of grey, accented by bursts of horizontal white bars, and pools of off-white specks that remind one of the scratches, hairs, and other noise of poorly preserved celluloid films.

In the fifth instance of the series, one views a similarly dark grey field which, likewise, contains traces of light leakage and dust and, then, an additional bright burst of orange/tan (almost fleshy) light which extends vertically in the upper right corner of the work.

In the following two instances of the series, a dark grey to black field is crossed by a series of rhythmically ordered straight horizontal lines of varying colors.

And, then, in the most recent instance of the series, one views another dark grey to black field upon whose entire right edge bursts a bright white streak of (almost cosmic) light whose own inner edge is a shade of bright green.

Now all that said, in each of these instances, one views the varied constellations of formal elements just mentioned – yes – but one also views something else – a unique picture of materialized time.

One views the changing amounts of dust and light recorded in each particular image which, in turn, are records of particular lengths of time.

Each formal variation here is due to an experimentation with time – whether it be the amount of time allotted to accumulate dust on the bed of the scanner or the amount of time allotted to accumulate light flares of varying degrees of strength.

Thus, as one reflects on a given formal element in the work, one is nudged towards reflecting on the time which each of these elements records.

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Monday, February 8th, 2010

Digital imaging software converges as much previous visual media as it can handle – painting, photo, film, video, animation, printmaking, newspaper, etc. – and creates automatic simulations of gestures that read as these media.

For instance, the “film grain” look or “sun flare” effect or the “spray paint” tool.

These digital effects, though, take on their own visual look that is distinct from what they imitate.

Similarly, digital imaging software has created to a suite of effects that are derived from analogical functions, but have gained their own uniquely digital feeling, such as the ubiquity of the “rounded corners” look familiar to users of Macs or Web 2.0 applications, or the jagged, hard-edged look that comes from a rough usage of the “lasso” tool in Photoshop, or the uncannily smooth, but hollow lines created in the Maya 3D imaging software.

With this is mind, Poster Company (the duo of Travess Smalley and Max Pitegoff) have created a series of digital paintings that throw all of these digital affects and effects – both in reference to functions analogical and digital – into a stew of action painting, untutored Photoshop fiddling, glitchy Quicktime files, 8-bit vampire castles, Matisse, Leger, Lichtenstein, soft film footage of lunar landings, Terminator 2-esque liquid-metal, Kandinsky, late 60’s psychedelia, ”cheesy” public-access video effects, etc.

Each of these “posters” contrasts effects with each other, which allows the viewer of the work to see each of the effects as an effect. Typically, an effect or a digital aesthetic is viewed in the context of giving some other message. It is meant to disappear. Here, though, the effects are divorced from any context and allowed to be viewed as chunks of visual language bouncing off of other chunks of visual language. This is not to say that the posters are a mess. On the contrary, the artists are able to create powerful, often eye-popping compositions from these materials in the same way that an artist like Rauschenberg used the trash on the street near his studio to create his combines of the 1950s.

When they showed this work at Foxy Productions, the artists focused on quantity as much as quality.

The first thing one notices upon walking into the room in which their work was exhibited is that there are a lot of posters – too many, a surfeit.

However, it comes very close to working because they play this overwhelming output against the formal skill and care going into each individual image and the whole thing holds together.

One oscillates between the feeling of being overwhelmed – both inside and outside of the posters – and the focus on a particular image or gesture, which resonates and harmonizes the work.

I say “comes very close to working,” though, because there is something going on in their process which does not come across in the gallery show:

Performance.

If there is, in the end, a power to what Poster Company is doing, it resides in the project’s continuous devotion to daily production.

The question “what is a digital painting?” is here better phrased as “what is digital painting?”

The significance of their work lies not in the individual compositions, nor in the volume of output (although these elements are undeniably crucial for the full execution of the work to occur), but rather in the performance of the work.

I’m not sure how one would convey this in the gallery without being gimmicky, but it, nonetheless, seems to be a dimension of this work (and work like it by artists such as Harm van den Dorpel and Charles Broskoski) that needs to be explored.

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