From the comments:
Brendan McCauley, (aside from complimenting my photography, which I hearby propose be mandatory) recommends http://fjordphoto.org/ and I whole-heartedly agree. There is some great work on there — and a lot of it.
Ben notes that the paintings of Edmund Wyss are interesting. They are fantastic, actually. I saw a show of his last spring of his paintings of tape recorders and cameras. His paintings are both disconcerting in their accuracy and reassuring for giving us such solid, beautiful machines. I’d like to say that they’re a philosophical manifesto of sorts, but I’d then have to know what I was talking about.
John suggests “NOOOOooo” as an appropriate reaction to the recent (but unfortunately long-anticipated) announcement that: Due to marketplace conditions, Polaroid has discontinued almost all of its instant analog hardware products. Polaroid has also made the difficult decision to cease manufacturing of instant film products in 2008. I’ve got a bunch of cameras that are going to make dealing with this problem difficult indeed. My 180 might have to get a facelift.
From the weekend:
Eric soundly beating everyone at poker. I still can’t believe that getting drunk wasn’t a good strategy. Go figure.
Tony triumphant after deciding passed-out-Michael was his new play castle.
A selection of uncorrected, uncropped, not cleaned images in no particular order from my recent scanscapades. I love Pratt’s Imacon so much.
I started going through some of my 35mm work from the last few years. I’ve had a really hard time accepting anything less than 6×7cm for sharpness and size capabilities. On the other hand, I’ve learned a little more about cropping (something I just did not do until very recently), and have been able to look at some of my 35mm work in a different way. I think I’m shooting better work now all the same, but there might be something to do with a few of them.
The last week I’ve been visiting Chelsea quite a bit, and I’ve seen some really great stuff. Today I saw Guy Ben-Ner’s Stealing Beauty at Postmasters, which was a very intelligent video piece involving him, his family, and several IKEA stores around the world. They record a narrative - almost a soap opera - involving the definition of property and the invocation of a “children of the world unite” manifesto delivered by Ben-Ner’s pre-adolescent children - which all takes place - without permission - on different furniture display settings at different IKEAs. The film is brilliant in its discontinuity: each scene could be recorded on 4 or 5 different sets of furniture, all showing price tags in different languages, depending on what country’s IKEA they were in.
This show was described to me as “cute,” while I was with my History class at the Hans Haacke show at Paula Cooper (which is also very good, but needs historical context I think - the photographs are amazing). I do have to admit, there is a certain innocence in much of Ben-Ner’s production: brief camera directions in Portuguese, obviously overdubbed sound, and a weirdness with which he and his family utter their dialogue. But, cuteness aside, this particular work seemed less bitter and more hopeful than the usual critique of capitalism and materialism. (And there is very little innocence in Haacke’s critique of the same thing, but much more aestheticism.)
The best show I saw all week was Mike Disfarmer’s Women at Stephen Kasher Gallery. As such straightforward-seeming historical documents, the artist’s agenda seems to fade away (or remain “merely” documentary) and these people - these Americans - are revealed in images in a way that is neither awkward or graceful, but very piercing.
I’ve been spending a little time on 4chan.org/p (for some reason) and found a link to Matt Stuart’s website. Very funny without being too mean - this work is hard to pull off and I really like it.
HP’s slimming function is just… uh… I can’t even think of something funny to say. Damn. I think this actually depressed me.
From the artist statement for a body of photographic work by Alison Jackson called Confidential:
This work is about simulation. Creating a clone or a copy of the ‘real’ on paper. It is not a fake, it takes the place of the ‘real’ for a moment, whilst looking at the image. The aim is to create likenesses of icons, where in the image, the simulations of icons, ‘threatens the difference between ‘true’ and ‘false, between ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’. The ‘real’ subject becomes not necessary. The photographic image or the icon is more important and more seductive. It doesn’t matter to the viewer if the portrayal is not the ‘real’ - as long as it looks like him or her - it creates a temporary confusion. This is the confusion the work searches to create. We think we are looking at something real, but we’re not. They are false images of look-alikes of the real thing.
I think the photographs are much more interesting than the artist statement’s attempt at handling the concept of simulacra. Even though she uses “real” people - celebrity look-alikes - instead of digitally manipulating the images, a lot of the photographs kind of come across as one-liner political cartoons. Jackson’s videos also seem to read more as comedy sketches (albeit still in the realm of social or cultural criticism).
