The Most Art: First Followup
Feb. 22nd, 2013 02:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rinueBelatedly, I am going to talk about my photo project with the ICA Boston last month.
Full instructions here. Quick summary: Take a self portrait. Then take a self portrait as someone who is not you. Then take a portrait that is halfway between the two. Examine the results. Which one is the most Art? Why?
For purposes of the ICA event, I was behind the camera. This was necessary for workflow. However, I functioned mostly as an adjustable-height fixed tripod and camera timer, often providing a verbal 3-2-1 countdown; the subject of the photo was completely in control of things like pose, facial expression, and costume. I provided a box full of hats, wigs, and props, which the subjects were invited to use or not use as they saw fit. They were briefed about the three photos while in line (a fast-moving line) and could see examples; they were thus able to plan ahead slightly.
It was a family day at the museum, so we took a 50/50 split of individual portraits and family portraits. There was very little difference in process; the only change in my behavior was the inclusion of the phrase "how do you relate to each other?" at the end of my first-photo patter. Otherwise, it went something like this: "Be you. Be who you are. Stand how you stand. Make the facial expression you make. Feel how you feel. Project who you are, the you that is most you."
Instructions for the second and third photos were much more terse: "Now, be not you, however you want to interpret that. Stand a way you wouldn't stand. Feel a way you wouldn't feel" and "Now be halfway in between the first and second photo. Be yourself but not yourself." The second photo usually involved a lot of dressing up and selecting props, and took the longest. Usually three or four elements would be tried and discarded before the final choice. (There was a mirror provided, but this was mostly unused: "feel" seemed to be the key determinant.)
Once the photos were taken, they were printed on a single sheet of paper, in black and white, in order. Upon retrieving and reviewing their photos, subjects were invited to share their thoughts on which were the most Art, sometimes with the clarifying question "which photo most belongs in a museum?" They could place their thoughts on the voting wall using post-its. Votes clustered around "me," "not me," and "halfway," but could be placed partway between.
Drafting tape was available so subjects could post their photographs on the voting wall as evidence if desired; these postings could be temporary, if they wanted to display their photos while they visited the galleries, but wanted to take them home when they left. There were also crayons and markers for drawing directly on the voting wall or on the photos.
Because of the setting of the exercise (the Institute of Contemporary Art), many parents used the opportunity to talk to their children about Cindy Sherman. However, I was attempting to address something larger and more subtle: the continuing and perhaps increasing ghettoization of photography in fine art circles.
You and I would probably argue that the value of a photo is its quality as an image: maybe how it's framed or lit, or maybe what the image evokes. However, this provides an insufficient barrier to entry, where fine art is concerned. Commercial images are luciously photographed and work hard to evoke strong desire in the viewer, but their aim is not artistic. (Shame on you, MFA, for your recent Mario Testino exhibit.) This is analogous to an actor in a car ad, who delivers a performance rather than portraying a character. In other words, something done artfully is not necessarily Art.
As you can imagine, the art/not-art question gets sticky, particularly if you believe, as I do, that art is partly constructed by the viewer. This is what Duchamp was getting at with his readymades. If I put a sealed cardboard box in the middle of a room with a sign reading "the most valuable piece of art in the world," I am perhaps inviting the viewer to imagine what is in the box, or perhaps making a statment about the beauty and utility of cardboard boxes, or perhaps suggesting that we go to such lengths to protect beautiful things that no one can see them. Or I'm making a joke. How you interpret what I've done matters quite a bit. And who I am matters as well: do you have a reason to trust that I am getting at something rather than wasting your time with garbage?
This is exactly why contemporary art arouses viscerally negative responses in many viewers: they do not trust that the artist is getting at anything. (Therefore it is ugly, doesn't make sense, could be done by my kid, etc.) Even I, who love contemporary art, am often made angry by what I think are lazy pieces, where I am bringing all the meaning to the table and the credited artist has only a shallow understanding of his own subject. This is made all the more delicate by the fact that, in many respects, the difference between highbrow and middlebrow is whether it makes us question our comfort or orientation.
Contemporary art curators are made or broken by their ability to draw a line between art and not-art -- between a cardboard box and a piece of art that takes the form of a cardboard box. Photographs, as it happens, are not that different from cardboard boxes, not in an era where everybody has half a dozen digital cameras. Your kid probably can take a good photograph. It may be by accident; it may suggest a meaning the kid didn't intend, doesn't see, and couldn't replicate.
A curator could include such a photo in an exhibit of "found art." But that exhibit had better be surrounded by things with provenance, things that prove the gallery or museum is serious - things that provide a context, a web of support that gives their determination of artistic merit some foundation. If a curator can't keep the signal-to-noise ratio under control - art cardboard versus trash cardboard - she'll be looking for a new job soon.
One of the surest ways to prove something is intentional is to make the process laborious. Another is to spend a lot of money to create it. As a result, the photos you see in art museums tend to either be pieces in which the photo is merely evidence of a months-long exploration of one thing or another, or they were taken with extremely expensive and esoteric equipment.
Maybe the photographer built his own camera, and exposing a single image takes 3 days, so that all the spaces look soft and deserted. Maybe the photo has been printed on silver leaf instead of paper, cleverly interrogating the use of silver halide in the film stock and conveniently using a precious material. Maybe the photo subject lives in a remote village in the Amazon that cannot be reached by plane, giving us a valuable window into a life we would never see, and proving the photographer had the time and resources to mount an expedition to a remote village in the Amazon that is not accessible by plane.
You see a lot of very large prints, because they are more expensive to make. The photo from your point-and-shoot digital camera is going to look pixelated and grainy if it's bigger than 4"x6". A digital camera that can produce large-format images is probably going to run you $5000. Even this is perhaps too accessible; if you can produce an alumben print, or something, which cannot be done commercially, requires dangerous chemicals, and risks destroying your image, you are cooking, because your image is not easily replicated, and is oh yeah expensive to make.
I feel for the curators. If you've ever been in a position to hire someone and been flooded with resumes, you know you start by coming up with some cutoffs. Maybe you reject from the outset anyone without a college degree, or without the right college degree. Maybe you make sure you're only reachable by paper mail, not electronically, to weed out the people who won't spend $10 at Kinko's. Not all those people are losers. One of them might be the best fit for the job. But you don't have time to read every resume carefully, give an interview, and deliberate. You have to hack it down to the likelies. A curator has to run a museum; she doesn't have hours to browse flikr for a nobody with a good eye.
However - and you may see where I'm going with this - there is an area of photography that involves a very long process and a lot of money, which is nevertheless looked down on by galleries as "not our thing." I am speaking, of course, of filmmaking. If you see a short film in an art museum, which I'm sure you have, it was almost certainly made by a painter with an MFA in painting, not a film school grad. And it shows. It fucking shows. It's insulting. It's the reason I can't really get behind Cindy Sherman.
I like her work. She's a total badass. But the cult of Cindy Sherman lauds her by claiming her work took a non-art thing, film stills, and made them art and made them subversive. Whereas I think plenty of film stills were already art and already subversive.
The art world is not on board with this.* They may like films, and do show films; in fact, a film fesival was running as part of the family day, and I helped pick the films for it. Their outreach may involve film clubs and film classes; I have taught such things and likely will again. But film is seen as a compromised artform, largely because despite what auteur theory insists, a professionally-made film is not the work of a single artist with a single vision.
And in fairness, given the amount of money film requires, and its duplicability (a film is sold many times over to millions of ticketgoers, rather than once to a collector), it is by its nature a hybrid of art and entertainment. And it has its own channels of distribution - cinemas, DVDs, websites. (Notably, the Cremaster Cycle cements its fine art status by not being available for home viewing in any form, and by showing, with very few exceptions, exclusively in museums - not cinemas.)
I can also, unlike the curator, spend my whole workday browsing flickr, pinterest, facebook, and tumblr, where I can discover unknown artists with good image-making skills. In contrast, there are not buildings in every neighborhood where I can go look at the latest sculptures and whole-room installations. So I'm not actually all that mad at a curator for focusing on that stuff instead; they're getting my back. But this is perhaps a market-focused decision rather than a pure examination of the dividing line between art and not art.
Which is a very long way of saying museums and photographs have a complicated relationship, which filters down to how people view photographs, and how people experience their own photographs.
It is not terribly surprising that there were not as many votes for "me" as there were for "not me" and "halfway." First of all, costumes are fun. Secondly, "not me" and "halfway" obviously involved more process, and they were more manifestly the authors of those portraits - they deliberated about their process, and it perhaps let them see themselves in a new light. It also takes a certain amount of guts to say "an unembellished photo of me is the height of art." Then again, part of it may be that in the first photo, most of them had not yet relaxed into the exercise, and did not take full advantage of its expressive opportunity.
But there were votes for each category, and votes on each of the margins. Many of the judgments were gut reactions along the lines of "it's fun" or "I just like it." Incidentally, some of the posing, especially in group portraits, was great, particularly in the "halfway" photos, where you could see the genuine affection between the people playing these roles. For all it's silly playfulness, it had an emotional core that was quite moving.
My favorite comment on the voting wall was: "The halfway photo is the most art, because it is hardest hard to be yourself and not yourself." I am not holding this up as the right answer, because there is not a right answer, or more accurately, I believe the right answer changes with each photo set. But this answer (1) sounds like even my phrasing, so clearly I have downloaded myself into an anonymous child, and (2) is a very accurate expression of what it takes to be a good actor, and why it is valuable. Anonymous kid: You are meant to be a director.
The only thing that made me sad was that some parents asked whether they needed to pay to be able to take their photos home, which struck me as strange at first - they're black and white printouts on low quality paper, part of an art exercise in which the subjects provide the execution and the meaning. Of course they can keep their own photos. But then I remembered that many "family friendly" locations, including theme parks and the Rainforest Cafe and the Boston Aquarium do exactly that - take your photo badly at the beginning and try to sell it to you when you leave. Always leaves a bad taste in my mouth at exactly the moment I was thinking I'd like to come back.
(Incidentally, I was not taking bad photos. I was taking flattering photos. Partly this is about knowing where to stand. Partly this is about timing. Partly this is about relaxing your subject - that speil I gave to set the stage during photo 1, which was serious but also funny.)
As for my own vote this time around: The most Art photo in the example I posted at the beginning was the photo of me as myself. It has a truth and liveliness to it that is missing from the other two photos. It is, in fact, what I would consider a highly successful portrait, that people who know me well would recognize as an expression of my central nature, and that people who don't know me well might find surprising and intriguing. In the second photo, I am playing a role I would never cast myself in; it is obvious I have no insight into this person. The third photo is worst of all: enough like me to seem like it might be a real portrait, while telling you a lie about who I am - presenting someone I would not want you to mistake for the real me.
Interestingly, this was also the response my friend Kate Wootton had to her self portraits; she is, like me, an actor/director, with a particular background and training around the question of photographic truth. The similarity of our reactions may be a coincidence, or a result of our training (at wholly different institutions in different countries), or it may mean that self-portraits make the difference. But it may also mean that actors understand, more than the general population, how much thought and construction goes into seeming like yourself.
I will be conducting the exercise again at the ICA on April 27.
* The MoMa is something of an exception. They have a massive film department which they take very seriously.
Full instructions here. Quick summary: Take a self portrait. Then take a self portrait as someone who is not you. Then take a portrait that is halfway between the two. Examine the results. Which one is the most Art? Why?
For purposes of the ICA event, I was behind the camera. This was necessary for workflow. However, I functioned mostly as an adjustable-height fixed tripod and camera timer, often providing a verbal 3-2-1 countdown; the subject of the photo was completely in control of things like pose, facial expression, and costume. I provided a box full of hats, wigs, and props, which the subjects were invited to use or not use as they saw fit. They were briefed about the three photos while in line (a fast-moving line) and could see examples; they were thus able to plan ahead slightly.
It was a family day at the museum, so we took a 50/50 split of individual portraits and family portraits. There was very little difference in process; the only change in my behavior was the inclusion of the phrase "how do you relate to each other?" at the end of my first-photo patter. Otherwise, it went something like this: "Be you. Be who you are. Stand how you stand. Make the facial expression you make. Feel how you feel. Project who you are, the you that is most you."
Instructions for the second and third photos were much more terse: "Now, be not you, however you want to interpret that. Stand a way you wouldn't stand. Feel a way you wouldn't feel" and "Now be halfway in between the first and second photo. Be yourself but not yourself." The second photo usually involved a lot of dressing up and selecting props, and took the longest. Usually three or four elements would be tried and discarded before the final choice. (There was a mirror provided, but this was mostly unused: "feel" seemed to be the key determinant.)
Once the photos were taken, they were printed on a single sheet of paper, in black and white, in order. Upon retrieving and reviewing their photos, subjects were invited to share their thoughts on which were the most Art, sometimes with the clarifying question "which photo most belongs in a museum?" They could place their thoughts on the voting wall using post-its. Votes clustered around "me," "not me," and "halfway," but could be placed partway between.
Drafting tape was available so subjects could post their photographs on the voting wall as evidence if desired; these postings could be temporary, if they wanted to display their photos while they visited the galleries, but wanted to take them home when they left. There were also crayons and markers for drawing directly on the voting wall or on the photos.
Because of the setting of the exercise (the Institute of Contemporary Art), many parents used the opportunity to talk to their children about Cindy Sherman. However, I was attempting to address something larger and more subtle: the continuing and perhaps increasing ghettoization of photography in fine art circles.
You and I would probably argue that the value of a photo is its quality as an image: maybe how it's framed or lit, or maybe what the image evokes. However, this provides an insufficient barrier to entry, where fine art is concerned. Commercial images are luciously photographed and work hard to evoke strong desire in the viewer, but their aim is not artistic. (Shame on you, MFA, for your recent Mario Testino exhibit.) This is analogous to an actor in a car ad, who delivers a performance rather than portraying a character. In other words, something done artfully is not necessarily Art.
As you can imagine, the art/not-art question gets sticky, particularly if you believe, as I do, that art is partly constructed by the viewer. This is what Duchamp was getting at with his readymades. If I put a sealed cardboard box in the middle of a room with a sign reading "the most valuable piece of art in the world," I am perhaps inviting the viewer to imagine what is in the box, or perhaps making a statment about the beauty and utility of cardboard boxes, or perhaps suggesting that we go to such lengths to protect beautiful things that no one can see them. Or I'm making a joke. How you interpret what I've done matters quite a bit. And who I am matters as well: do you have a reason to trust that I am getting at something rather than wasting your time with garbage?
This is exactly why contemporary art arouses viscerally negative responses in many viewers: they do not trust that the artist is getting at anything. (Therefore it is ugly, doesn't make sense, could be done by my kid, etc.) Even I, who love contemporary art, am often made angry by what I think are lazy pieces, where I am bringing all the meaning to the table and the credited artist has only a shallow understanding of his own subject. This is made all the more delicate by the fact that, in many respects, the difference between highbrow and middlebrow is whether it makes us question our comfort or orientation.
Contemporary art curators are made or broken by their ability to draw a line between art and not-art -- between a cardboard box and a piece of art that takes the form of a cardboard box. Photographs, as it happens, are not that different from cardboard boxes, not in an era where everybody has half a dozen digital cameras. Your kid probably can take a good photograph. It may be by accident; it may suggest a meaning the kid didn't intend, doesn't see, and couldn't replicate.
A curator could include such a photo in an exhibit of "found art." But that exhibit had better be surrounded by things with provenance, things that prove the gallery or museum is serious - things that provide a context, a web of support that gives their determination of artistic merit some foundation. If a curator can't keep the signal-to-noise ratio under control - art cardboard versus trash cardboard - she'll be looking for a new job soon.
One of the surest ways to prove something is intentional is to make the process laborious. Another is to spend a lot of money to create it. As a result, the photos you see in art museums tend to either be pieces in which the photo is merely evidence of a months-long exploration of one thing or another, or they were taken with extremely expensive and esoteric equipment.
Maybe the photographer built his own camera, and exposing a single image takes 3 days, so that all the spaces look soft and deserted. Maybe the photo has been printed on silver leaf instead of paper, cleverly interrogating the use of silver halide in the film stock and conveniently using a precious material. Maybe the photo subject lives in a remote village in the Amazon that cannot be reached by plane, giving us a valuable window into a life we would never see, and proving the photographer had the time and resources to mount an expedition to a remote village in the Amazon that is not accessible by plane.
You see a lot of very large prints, because they are more expensive to make. The photo from your point-and-shoot digital camera is going to look pixelated and grainy if it's bigger than 4"x6". A digital camera that can produce large-format images is probably going to run you $5000. Even this is perhaps too accessible; if you can produce an alumben print, or something, which cannot be done commercially, requires dangerous chemicals, and risks destroying your image, you are cooking, because your image is not easily replicated, and is oh yeah expensive to make.
I feel for the curators. If you've ever been in a position to hire someone and been flooded with resumes, you know you start by coming up with some cutoffs. Maybe you reject from the outset anyone without a college degree, or without the right college degree. Maybe you make sure you're only reachable by paper mail, not electronically, to weed out the people who won't spend $10 at Kinko's. Not all those people are losers. One of them might be the best fit for the job. But you don't have time to read every resume carefully, give an interview, and deliberate. You have to hack it down to the likelies. A curator has to run a museum; she doesn't have hours to browse flikr for a nobody with a good eye.
However - and you may see where I'm going with this - there is an area of photography that involves a very long process and a lot of money, which is nevertheless looked down on by galleries as "not our thing." I am speaking, of course, of filmmaking. If you see a short film in an art museum, which I'm sure you have, it was almost certainly made by a painter with an MFA in painting, not a film school grad. And it shows. It fucking shows. It's insulting. It's the reason I can't really get behind Cindy Sherman.
I like her work. She's a total badass. But the cult of Cindy Sherman lauds her by claiming her work took a non-art thing, film stills, and made them art and made them subversive. Whereas I think plenty of film stills were already art and already subversive.
The art world is not on board with this.* They may like films, and do show films; in fact, a film fesival was running as part of the family day, and I helped pick the films for it. Their outreach may involve film clubs and film classes; I have taught such things and likely will again. But film is seen as a compromised artform, largely because despite what auteur theory insists, a professionally-made film is not the work of a single artist with a single vision.
And in fairness, given the amount of money film requires, and its duplicability (a film is sold many times over to millions of ticketgoers, rather than once to a collector), it is by its nature a hybrid of art and entertainment. And it has its own channels of distribution - cinemas, DVDs, websites. (Notably, the Cremaster Cycle cements its fine art status by not being available for home viewing in any form, and by showing, with very few exceptions, exclusively in museums - not cinemas.)
I can also, unlike the curator, spend my whole workday browsing flickr, pinterest, facebook, and tumblr, where I can discover unknown artists with good image-making skills. In contrast, there are not buildings in every neighborhood where I can go look at the latest sculptures and whole-room installations. So I'm not actually all that mad at a curator for focusing on that stuff instead; they're getting my back. But this is perhaps a market-focused decision rather than a pure examination of the dividing line between art and not art.
Which is a very long way of saying museums and photographs have a complicated relationship, which filters down to how people view photographs, and how people experience their own photographs.
It is not terribly surprising that there were not as many votes for "me" as there were for "not me" and "halfway." First of all, costumes are fun. Secondly, "not me" and "halfway" obviously involved more process, and they were more manifestly the authors of those portraits - they deliberated about their process, and it perhaps let them see themselves in a new light. It also takes a certain amount of guts to say "an unembellished photo of me is the height of art." Then again, part of it may be that in the first photo, most of them had not yet relaxed into the exercise, and did not take full advantage of its expressive opportunity.
But there were votes for each category, and votes on each of the margins. Many of the judgments were gut reactions along the lines of "it's fun" or "I just like it." Incidentally, some of the posing, especially in group portraits, was great, particularly in the "halfway" photos, where you could see the genuine affection between the people playing these roles. For all it's silly playfulness, it had an emotional core that was quite moving.
My favorite comment on the voting wall was: "The halfway photo is the most art, because it is hardest hard to be yourself and not yourself." I am not holding this up as the right answer, because there is not a right answer, or more accurately, I believe the right answer changes with each photo set. But this answer (1) sounds like even my phrasing, so clearly I have downloaded myself into an anonymous child, and (2) is a very accurate expression of what it takes to be a good actor, and why it is valuable. Anonymous kid: You are meant to be a director.
The only thing that made me sad was that some parents asked whether they needed to pay to be able to take their photos home, which struck me as strange at first - they're black and white printouts on low quality paper, part of an art exercise in which the subjects provide the execution and the meaning. Of course they can keep their own photos. But then I remembered that many "family friendly" locations, including theme parks and the Rainforest Cafe and the Boston Aquarium do exactly that - take your photo badly at the beginning and try to sell it to you when you leave. Always leaves a bad taste in my mouth at exactly the moment I was thinking I'd like to come back.
(Incidentally, I was not taking bad photos. I was taking flattering photos. Partly this is about knowing where to stand. Partly this is about timing. Partly this is about relaxing your subject - that speil I gave to set the stage during photo 1, which was serious but also funny.)
As for my own vote this time around: The most Art photo in the example I posted at the beginning was the photo of me as myself. It has a truth and liveliness to it that is missing from the other two photos. It is, in fact, what I would consider a highly successful portrait, that people who know me well would recognize as an expression of my central nature, and that people who don't know me well might find surprising and intriguing. In the second photo, I am playing a role I would never cast myself in; it is obvious I have no insight into this person. The third photo is worst of all: enough like me to seem like it might be a real portrait, while telling you a lie about who I am - presenting someone I would not want you to mistake for the real me.
Interestingly, this was also the response my friend Kate Wootton had to her self portraits; she is, like me, an actor/director, with a particular background and training around the question of photographic truth. The similarity of our reactions may be a coincidence, or a result of our training (at wholly different institutions in different countries), or it may mean that self-portraits make the difference. But it may also mean that actors understand, more than the general population, how much thought and construction goes into seeming like yourself.
I will be conducting the exercise again at the ICA on April 27.
* The MoMa is something of an exception. They have a massive film department which they take very seriously.
