At The Word Works, we translate a lot of the text in the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography's exhibition catalogues. Interacting in another forum with a friend who has become an avid landscape photographer, I mentioned that we are now working on the catalogue for an exhibition dedicated to Pictorialism, an art photography movement that began in the late 19th century in Europe and flourished in Japan in the early 20th century. The debates that surrounded Pictorialism and the Modernism that overlapped with and eventually replace it are, to me at least, eerily reminiscent of recent anthropological debates about ontology, postmodernism, and the representation of the other.
As part of that conversation I wrote,
The late 19th and early 20th century debates over whether and how photography could be art might be an interesting topic to explore here. As I understand it, and this is only the roughest of sketches, it involves a complex interaction between developments in photography and developments in art. In brief, the usual story is that the invention of photography threatened painters traditional monopoly on mimesis, the accurate reproduction of nature. The painters responded with various avant-garde movements that shifted their "art" from accurate reproduction to expression of subjective vision and feeling. Art photographers initial response was to produce photographs that emulated contemporary trends in painting, as these evolved from staged tableaux to landscapes and portraits, that early on tended to be heavily touched-up at the printing stage. These Pictorialist approaches provoked a Modernist response that demanded "straight," i.e., not touched-up, black and white (no pigments allowed) approach in which gradation and contrast in light and rhythm in form were held up as epitomizing artistic vision. 
A whole lot in these debates concerns questions of interest to the philosophers among us: Is the ideal an eye so clear that it faithfully reproduces the world around us, an eye with a vision of its own that it projects onto reality, or a complex mixture of reproduction, modification and manipulation whose mechanisms are still not very well understood but increasingly the subject of, in particular, neurological research.
All sorts of cool stuff to look at, too.

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Comment by Alexander Lee on February 10, 2011 at 1:10am

@John

 

Thanks, I will put these works onto my reading list.

Comment by John McCreery on February 9, 2011 at 4:41am
Alexander, you have pretty much anticipated what Becker has to say. IMHO, Tricks of the Trade  is a great read and, as the title suggests, full of tricks for helping us think about things from different angles. If you are particularly interested in the art question, Becker is also the author of Art Worlds, in which he tackles many of the questions you raise.
Comment by Alexander Lee on February 8, 2011 at 9:41am
No rush.  I haven't read that book but if I may venture an approach it to address that issue, would be that if art is defined by what people say it is... then to understand art as a phenomenon we should understand why people would claim art is art... be it an aesthetic statement, an answer to a question in the market-place (like putting corporate art in a business park) or to define socio-economic boundaries...  It may be a more useful question to ask, how does art function (for/in society)?
Comment by John McCreery on February 7, 2011 at 1:21pm
Alexander, thanks for the stimulation. I will get back to you in a few hours or days, when the current rush of work in my inbox subsides a bit. For what its worth, my own response to the question is a sociological one adapted from Howard Becker's Tricks of the Trade. Let us say art exists when people say that it does. It then becomes an empirical problem to explore the conditions that affect their judgment. No one answer may be correct for everyone; there is nothing more notoriously common that disagreements about what is and isn't art. But that what makes the problem so interesting.
Comment by Alexander Lee on February 7, 2011 at 11:06am
I'm not sure why my comments are cut off.  Is there a limit as to the number of characters available to me when I comment?
Comment by Alexander Lee on February 7, 2011 at 11:06am

A way of untangling this message may be found in Joan Copec's article The Body as Viewing Instrument, or the Strut of Vision from Lacan in America in which she describes how traditional Western Art assumed a subject as res extensa nec...essary to the viewing itself... placing the view qua subject in an extended field which determined itself as an objective field through the synthesis of a viewer against an absolute horizon.  Taking this as a model, it may be interesting in this way to flip the artwork around and say 'what does art say about who we are' and let it suggest for us a kind of subject in a socially transformative sense rather than to see the artwork itself as the end product.. which is a kind of something that happens anyway when people try to talk about meaning in art.

 

I suspect that looking at art in terms of neurology is much trying to see epistemic limits in Windows 7 Home Premium based on a computer's hardware limitation.  Not impossible but perhaps missing the 'the picture' as it were.  The reductive wet-dream of defining art per physical or neurological visual-cues may be too much like mistaking an icon on your desktop as being the exact same thing as bits in your motherboard registry.

 

Now isn't that funny?  I start off dissing systematizing art as meaning and end up stating that art should be understood in terms of meaning.

Comment by Alexander Lee on February 7, 2011 at 11:05am

I think we can take from the notion of 'territorialisation' and 'double articulation' straight out of Deleuze and Guattari's 1000 Plateaus an understanding of the nature of recording, painti...ng, sketching, etching and even composition for the different areas of visual art... that in each of these kinds of activities, at the most simplest there is a 'machinic index' from which a selection of materials and movements are made available, intermixed and splayed on a 'territory', territorialising.  That internal processing then reveals itself a 'snapshot' of a process which is codified so it is a single 'thing' whose frame delineates its borders.  

For instance, in a recording there are a variety of forces which interface and 'bring that recorded moment' into being -- of which it is an instance of the history of recording, a history of that kind of medium, of a device(s) created by market demand, demand for this kind of viewing, the socio-economics of how and why these activities occur, the personal history of the people involved and how they lead to this moment or how this moment fit into their personal constellation -- and it is in this sense that every single visual art piece is a slice of self-referential reality... even if the status of 'art' demands in the very traditional modernist sense that we forget about how it came about and see it 'as intended by the artist'.  This approach may not be correct as when we try to talk about art in terms of reality, we could end up losing art.  Likewise, to talk about reality in terms of art, may be more of the same.  In a very unhelpful way, everything is part of everything else... Everything is real...in its own way...

 

A way of untangling this message may be found in Joan Copec's article The Body as Viewing Instrument, or the Strut of Vision from Lacan in America in which she describes how traditional Western Art assumed a subject as res extensa nec

Comment by Alexander Lee on February 7, 2011 at 11:04am

Sorry for not responding sooner.

 

This is an interesting topic but it's hard to find a place to start.. but just a few thoughts.

 

One of the temptations when trying to figure out 'what do we do with art' is to talk about visual art in terms of meaning -- but that's such a quagmire.  People usually equate art with meaning, probably because art is meaningful -- to them.  W.J.T. Mitchell wrote several books exploring this area, looking at people like Nelson Goodman and theories like semiotics to try and codify a system by which social meaning and images can be tied together.  (For this reason I think his books, like Picture Theory, while interesting, are ultimately failures as they never reach his desired theoretical plateau of consistency).  SO rather than approach this topic in terms of meaning, it may be better to approach it from Deleuze and Guattari's postition of 'how art' rather than 'what art'.

 

It's true that photography is a mechanical way of recording of light.  How we deliberately alter the mechanics or frame what light gets recording is what makes something a composition.  But then, in a surface or medium, any kind of interaction is a 'recording' -- and if it consistent in some way, then it is mechanical.  One can think of Kafka's story The Penal Colony.... or of mechanical interaction of molecules as being significant in some way -- even artistic.  There are blog communities of people who photograph the urban ruins and abandoned factories, the most outstanding of these reveal the rich texture of rust, decay and random mayhem -- the result of decades of social and environmental unrest.  These are all perhaps tangential when the conversation is about the mind's eye -- but I think we can take from the notion of 'territorialisation' and 'double articulation' straight out of Deleuze and Guattari's 1000 Plateaus an understanding of the nature of recording, painti

Comment by John McCreery on February 2, 2011 at 6:41am

Lawrence Helm, whose photographs and subsequent discussion stimulated this blog, sent me the following link to a YouTube video that both documents an unusual natural phenomenon and is also an advertisement intended to lure visitors to Yosemite National Park in late  spring off season, when the park has relatively few visitors. The cinematography employs artistic effects, but is  it art? And is asking this question part of anthropology, which does, after all, concern itself with the ways in which different peoples perceive and represent the world around them?

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