Tutor Feedback – Assignment Two (Pre-tutorial)

I have (thankfully) passed Assignment two.

I have received my written feedback from my tutor, in an annotated version of my assignment (here) and a feedback form (here).

I felt that I struggled with this assignment. I had difficulty coming across an explanation (that I could understand) for Modern VS Modernist VS Modernism etc. However, I tried my best and did as much research on the terminology as I could. My tutor has suggested a book of key terms called “Keywords” by Raymond Williams, which I am going to try to source if I can. I hope it will help to clarify things a little for me.

There were two errors pointed out to me by my tutor which I was surprised to see, only to find out that they were IT errors on my part; One was referencing the wrong name in-text. The author is Enright, R., which I correctly entered in my Bibliography, but in-text I referenced “Robert, E.”. This has brought my attention to my inability to correctly proofread my own work. I might try to ask my family to proofread after I have written in the future. My tutor pointed out that I had re-stated the same point twice in my assignment, which again points to proofreading. I hope to resolve this in time for my next assignment.

The second error was related to my Blog, where my Category posts were not showing under my Category tab on my blog, and therefore it looked like my Research & Reflection category was empty, when it in fact was not. This has been resolved, after contacting WordPress for help.

I will be speaking with my tutor next week for verbal feedback, and I hope to clarify whether or not I should re-write Assignment Two based on the feedback. I am hoping to pass External Assessment at the end of the year, but I am feeling quite anxious about it at the moment.

Exercise 3.1

Can you see a connection between Emerson’s remarks and the view expressed by Searle in chapter one? Where do their views overlap and where do they differ? You could address this in three columns – one for each author either side of a column of similarities. The differences will be those points that are not similarities.

For this exercise, I used the passage printed in course-work by Emerson, compared to John R. Searle’s “The Construction of Social Reality”, 1995

EMERSONSIMILARITIESSEARLE
Human need to categorise/discover their worldEmerson’s mention of “restless curiosity” / Searle’s reference to an “observer-relative” world“Observer-relative features exist only relative to the attitudes of observer’s. [buried cities, mummy pits, Egyptian characters]”
“shall we see a less venerable
antiquity in the clouds and the grass?”		Natural phenomena are often ignored in favour of histories that have meaning for the observer“we do not speak of better and worse stones, unless of course we have assigned a function to the stone”
“An everlasting Now reigns in Nature that produces
on our bushes the selfsame Rose which charmed the Roman and the Chaldaean”		Nature exists whether it has use for us or not“Intrinsic features don’t give a damn about observers and exist independently of observers” 
“the oldest work of
man is an upstart by the side of the shells of the sea.”		We are only just beginning to understand our world, where nature has existed (without our involvement) for much longer“except for those parts of nature that are conscious, nature knows nothing of functions”. “the world (or alternatively, reality or the universe) exists independently of our representations of it”. “Except for the little corner of the world that is constituted or affected by our representations, the world would still have existed and would have been exactly the same as it is now”

After death

I came across an interesting article this morning on artnet about an exhibition of personal photographs which were found posthumously.

The photographer had been a commercial photographer, described as quiet and “average”. The photographs were found to contain personal images of the photographer identifying as a woman, whom he called April Dawn Allison.

What was interesting to me about the article was the question “should we be looking?”. Although the author doesn’t explain how the photos came in t o the possession of this curator, it feels almost inappropriate to me. Not, obviously, the content or the skill demonstrated in the photographs themselves but because of the concerted effort at keeping them private by the photographer himself. They were captured on Polaroid to avoid external processing, he apparently didn’t introduce April to friends or colleagues, no-one else appears in the photos. They are extremely powerful to look at and definitely speak to us as observers, with very strong emotions; but that emotional connection between photographer and subject – in this case – was not intended to be seen.

It’s interesting to me that this question is raised, stated, displayed as the museum nevertheless holds the exhibition and it reminds me of my recent feelings about over analysis in art studies. Do we as artists lose all right to privacy when we choose to display one area of our lives? When does the choice end – is it after death? Are contemporary artists forced to share more than their work, share part of their lives and inner thoughts in order to be “seen”; especially in the age of social media?

The article is here if you want to read it. I would love to hear your thoughts, if you feel like commenting below.

Exercise 3.0

Do you think Sokal was right to publish the article? Give reasons in a short paragraph.

Yes, I do. I think that Sokal was trying to draw attention to a problem that he saw in the world of science and academia; where research is over-done to the point of exhausting the subject. If you research, and analyse, something for long enough it eventually starts to contradict itself. He wanted to address this problem via a medium that would reach the largest audience within the communities he wished to address.

While I read the article, I found that most of the content was over my head. I did pick up on a tone of sarcasm, or mockery, within it; excessive referencing, detailed explanations of references, the use of convoluted language (maybe this is common in articles about quantum mechanics?). My feeling is that Sokal was using the methods of scientific analysis to mock the theory of scientific analysis – isn’t that a Modernist approach? I also feel that he is right – obviously I cannot comment on whether his theory makes any sense in terms of physics and scientific theory, but I have felt – strongly – since starting this course that the academic world has become a mass of overly complex “theories” and analysis, of art – which I think is and should be one of the most subjective subjects there is. While I understand the need to trace the history of art, even possibly to identify styles and periods and their relation to culture, I have found a lot of what I have been reading to be a sort of “writing theories for the sake of writing theories” – not for the sake of art. Perhaps this is what Sokal was trying to get at; that these journals – who obviously publish anything, if he was able to get this sarcastic piece published – are catering to the masses, who are really just repeating one another’s research back to each other to confirm or deny their own opinions.

I did enjoy some of the lines from the article though:

“Scientific “knowledge”, far from being objective, reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power relations of the culture that produced it”  (Sokal, 1994)

“that the truth claims of science are inherently theory-laden and self referential; and consequently, that the discourse of the scientific community, for all it’s undeniable value, cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives, emanating from dissident or marginalised communities”.  (Sokal, 1994)

“science alters and refashions the object of investigation” (Sokal, 1994)

When you read the first passage did it seem suspicious?

Yes, it did. Particularly the line “the radical democratization of all aspects of social, economic, political and cultural life.” seemed a little “out there”, even for a subject that I know little about.

Has anything else you have read so far in this course book seemed suspicious? Briefly say what and why:

I wouldn’t say suspicious. I would say that some things I have read have not sat well with me; they seem to go against my feelings or against my beliefs; more uncomfortable than suspicious. For example:

“The modern crowd, as the throng of people drawn to the spectacle of modern life, is a central feature of what we now call modernity. The things we take for granted whenever we go into a city centre – gazing in shop windows, being carried along by the stream of pedestrians, distracted by this or that advertisement or spectacle, all the while pursuing our individual interests – amount to the experience of modern life.” p.g. 45. I feel that this must be incorrect; surely there were many markets, town squares, throngs of people without a singular “event” to bring them together in ancient Greece, for example?

“some of Manet’s paintings include figures with rather deadpan faces. Olympia, The Bar at the Folies Bergere and The Balcony are some of the better known ones. Seen together it appears that Manet was painting a sense of disengagement, alienation or anomie
brought on by modern life, this being one of the reasons he is thought to be the first
modernist painter.” p.g. 46. This seems like nonsense to me – perhaps I am being too harsh, but surely it is non-sensical to apply feelings to figures that have been painted many years ago, without the input of the artist? Maybe he just liked to paint still faces? Maybe he struggled with painting emotions as well as he would like; maybe he just thought they were beautiful to look at as they were? I feel as though a lot of art history and theory places too much emphasis on what we think the artist meant/thought rather than the painting itself; but maybe that’s just me.

REFERENCES

Sokal, A. (1994). Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity. 2nd ed. [ebook] New York. Available at: https://physics.nyu.edu/sokal/transgress_v2_noafterword.pdf [Accessed 4 Jul. 2019].

Personal Reflection on Assignment 2

I really struggled with this one.

The question itself appeared quite straightforward, however part of the assignment suggests that we review Thierry DeDuve’s essay which is described as “demanding”. To be honest, this went completely over my head. It is way too complicated for me; in fact it really put me off the whole assignment and as a result it was late being uploaded.

I just feel that as part 1 of year 1 with OCA, this essay itself is much too advanced without any previous knowledge. As I have said before, there is no preparatory course for UVC, or entry requirements, and as such I came into this programme with zero knowledge of theory or philosophy or even timelines of art. And yes, it did encourage me to research by myself and I found so much useful and interesting material, BUT some areas really, really need a lecture. Or a tutorial, or somewhere where the detail of such a massive work can be explained to the students in an easier format, where one can ask questions real-time etc.

I do feel like I’m making and excuse here, and most likely because I feel I did badly on this assignment, but I have had this feeling a couple of times over Section 1 and Section 2 of the course and I think I will be supplying it as feedback to OCA at the end of the year.

I am awaiting my feedback now.

Assignment 2

Look at Allan McCollum’s work Plaster Surrogates shown at the beginning of this chapter and explain its relationship to Modernist art and theory.

Plaster Surrogates are copies of the original Surrogate Paintings that McCollum made in 1978. The originals were made from wood and museum board, glued together and painted in multiple layers to imitate paintings in frames. The Plaster Surrogates are made from gypsum, cast in the mould of the original Paintings and then painted with layers of mono-chrome paint (McCollum Series Descriptions).

The word “surrogate” is important in this piece; according to the Oxford Dictionary, a surrogate is “a substitute, proxy, replacement, stand-in”. In this case, they are created as a “substitute” for a painting. Plaster Surrogates then, are replacements for the replacement pictures, cast in gypsum and replicated many times over. If the Surrogate Paintings were replacements for “real” artwork, then the plaster versions take on a whole new meaning in terms of cultural significance, bringing together the modern concept of mass production and the cultural significance that pictures have to people. As McCollum put it himself, “I was interested in what our needs are in looking at a painting, I don’t know if it’s a human need but there is something that drives us to want to make them and to look at them.” (Robert, E., 2001). How has our culture, and particularly the culture of abundance, affected our need to make and look at pictures, to keep hold of our past.

From a Modernist perspective, the Plaster Surrogates are pushing the boundaries of and rejecting the standards of art in the past, as a modernist artist would be expected to do. They are an exploration in new ways of expressing the culture of art. Since the surrogates do not actually contain any pictures within their frames, they allow the viewer to create their own meaning around them, while calling to attention the type of framing and placement that would have been common in an “every day” household – making the “everyday” more visual in art was another part of modernism, as the “everyday” became the subject rather than religious or historic figures and scenes (MoMA, online).

Their placement can be changed depending on the location and the exhibition, but their shape and their multitude call to mind the hallways and living rooms of most homes, where pictures of meaning and significance are kept on display for those who live there and those who visit. They are part of the identity of the home. Since these surrogates are blank, except for their paint, identity can be placed upon them by the viewer without the artist dictating to us what emotions we should feel. What I found interesting was that they are all in portrait; as if they could hold the image of some loved one long passed. McCollum also mentions this in his interviews, when asked if it was his intention to create the surrogates that still held “personality”; “that was my intention: to choose the portrait shape rather than the landscape shape. It’s the shape of canvas we use in depicting a person”. He stated that he did not want to “make a specific painting and have that represent all paintings” he wanted to represent what paintings mean to people, individually. (Allanmccollum.net, 2019).

All of my research so far on Modernism has been focused on Painting. As deDuve wrote in The Monochrome and the Blank Canvas, “sculpture never had to fear it’s proximity to painting” and therefore I hadn’t approached sculpture in my studies. With Plaster Surrogates, the artwork really straddles the boundaries between painting and sculpture. They are sculptures of paintings; in fact they are copies of sculptures of paintings. How does this affect their association with Modern Art and Theory?

Greenberg’s theory of modernist art says that it is “the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticise the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence” (DeDuve, 1996). With that in mind, I find myself questioning whether McCollum is using sculpture to criticise sculpture, or using sculpture to criticise painting, or if he is criticising at all. The answer is that he is working slightly beyond the boundaries of Greenberg’s theory; I think, as he uses the methods of both sculpture (plaster, casting) and the methods of painting (layers of paint) to ask questions of us about the role of images in our culture.

Another facet of this work is the monochrome. In the image above, there are 96 pieces which are all painted varying tones of black or white. While it might appear “mass produced” in that way, they are actually all individual pieces that look similar, but are never exactly the same. I think that this speaks to us of humanity in general; even in the birth of the Modern age, with mass production and mass consumption, we are all still individual people at the end of the day. The Tate Museum talks about monochrome in modernist art as having two purposes; the first was to communicate “spiritual purity”, exploring the ideas of total abstraction, nothingness and a dissolution of material differences. The second purpose is to reduce the art to it’s simplest form so that “the focus of the piece would be on its pure physical elements” (Tate, 2019). I think that the latter applies most to Plaster Surrogates as it reduces the form of the sculpture to a simple piece on which the audience projects their own meanings and feelings. Having different colours, brighter colours, would influence the feeling of the audience, whereas the monochrome colour scheme allows the audience to experience the pieces separate from any inferred meaning.

In reading deDuve’s The Monochrome and the Blank Canvas, I came across a paragraph by Greenberg in which he discusses the modernist push towards creating depth in flat surfaces by adding layers of flatness on top of one another, and using the actual surface (as multiple levels of “flatness”) to claim that their work was still painting, when in fact he considered it “bas-relief”. (deDuve, 1996). MCollum’s Surrogates, for me, also seem to be both painting and sculpture – still flat, in a sense, especially in colour, but also layered flatness. Since MCollum’s work “straddles painting and sculpture and…therefore, cannot be modernist in the Greenbergian sense because it is interspecific rather than specific” (deDuve, 1996). However, this quote was taken from Greenberg’s essay “Towards a Newer Laocoon” which was written in 1940, and McCollum’s work was created in 1988. The theory of modernism constantly changed over the years, being challenged and defended over a number of years, and so I don’t think that it would be fair to apply that standard to McCollum’s work.

REFERENCES

DeDuve, T. (1996). Kant after Duchamp. [ebook] Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, pp.The Monochrome and the Blank Canvas pg 200 – 281. Available at: https://www.academia.edu/32937246/Thierry-de-Duve-Kant-after-Duchamp-1996.pdf [Accessed 29 Jun. 2019].

Enright, R. (2019). Allan McCollum | Robert Enright | September 2001. [online] Allanmccollum.net. Available at: http://allanmccollum.net/amcnet2/album/enright.html [Accessed 1 Jul. 2019].

Allanmccollum.net. (2019). McCollum Series Descriptions. [online] Available at: http://allanmccollum.net/allanmcnyc/descriptions.html [Accessed 1 Jul. 2019].

Moma.org. (2019). MoMA | What Is Modern Art?. [online] Available at: https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/themes/what-is-modern-art/ [Accessed 1 Jul. 2019].

Tate. (2019). Monochrome – Art Term | Tate. [online] Available at: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/m/monochrome [Accessed 1 Jul. 2019].

Lexico Dictionaries | English. (2019). surrogate | Definition of surrogate in English by Lexico Dictionaries. [online] Available at: https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/surrogate [Accessed 1 Jul. 2019].

Dorothea Lange and Photography

I was doing a little bit of research today on Dorothea Lange and her photography and came across an interview she did with Richard K. Doud in 1964.

Having read through the transcript, I have copied below a couple of phrases that I think are important turns of phrase, or descriptions of her work, or just interesting tidbits!

the great visual importance of what’s in people’s snapshots that they don’t know is there. I mean, what great photographs that there are in snapshots. I’d say that many great photographs are in people’s top drawers, with deckle edges, you know, pictures of their relatives, and they never see them in any way but personal. 

Here

I had made some photographs of the state as people
– Here


*In answer to the question about modern photography and why it is not as successful at engaging the audience’s emotions:

…..that is the importance of recognizing that we have that problem, that we share it with millions of others. It takes a lot to get full attention to a picture these days, because we are bombarded by pictures every waking hour, in on form or another, and transitory images seen, unconsciously, in passing, from the corner of our eyes, flashing at us, and this business where we look at bad images- impure. I don’t know why the eye doesn’t get calloused as your knees get calloused or your fingers get calloused, the eye can’t get…
We are misusing the language of picture, and I tell you, it’s an exploited medium. It is not a developing medium; it’s being destroyed.
– Here

Exercise 2.4

For a picture of your own choice say how the image indicates a point of view for the spectator and say why you think the effect is rare in the cinema but common in photography.

Does the painting or photograph represent eye-contact between someone
in the picture and ourselves. What films have you seen where characters treat the camera as another person.

For this exercise I chose one of my favourite photographers, Dorothea Lange. While she has many stunning photographs to choose from, the below photo seemed to fit this exercise.

Dorothea Lange, Ex-Tenant Farmer on Relief Grant in the Imperial Valley, California, March 1937

In this photo, the man at the centre makes – what feels like – direct eye contact with the spectator. The photographer was obviously at eye level with this man when the photo was taken, and he was clearly engaged with her at the time. As a spectator now, this emotion transfers through his eye contacts to us, and I personally felt a very strong connection with him. I think he felt quite proud to have his photo taken, even in such dire circumstances as the title suggests; he is well dressed, he has kind eyes and there is a “feeling” from him that suggests a friendly nature. I also think that the other two men not looking at the camera makes the central figure so much more engaging. They are also both standing slightly behind him. Although the man on the left is slightly taller than the central figure, his white hat makes him appear shorter, while the bowed head of the man to the right also contributes to this. I like to think that, because it was taken in 1937, this photo is less “retouched” or at least less “digitised” than modern photography, and I think that adds an authenticity to this eye contact.

I think that this kind of connection, this kind of one-on-one emotional connection between the spectator and the subject is unique to photography. In cinema, for example, the image is always moving. It is rare to see this one snap moment of connection and be able to look at it again and again without the disconnect that would have happened just after in real life. In Cinema, this moment just blends in with the longer scene of eye contact with the spectator – even though this happens very little. Most cinema is produced with a narrative intent – to tell a story to a person who is slightly disconnected to it. Cinema does invoke emotions in the spectator, but it doesn’t feel the same as the emotions you get from looking at Lange’s photo above. It is false, scripted, they are looking at the camera, not at the spectator.

Films I have seen, in which the characters treat the camera as another person would be:

Titanic – when Rose and Jack are dancing, the camera takes turns at being each character

The Muppet’s Christmas Carol – pretty much the whole movie is engaging the camera as the audience.

Braveheart – there is a wonderful scene where the love of his life looks at him and eye contact is made, however the camera takes the place of William Wallace and therefore we, as spectators take his place also.

REFERENCES:

Dorothea Lange