Artist's Statement

I've been sick as a dog all this week, so writing is about all I've gotten done as far as MFA work is concerned. For those lucky few of you who visit my blob (heh, nice typo...I mean BLOG of course), you get the preview of my artist's statement for January. Subject to change, prices may vary by location.


"These tintype portraits and landscape photographs on glass seem to represent two disparate bodies of work, but both are grounded on a similar foundation: an exploration of memory, history, and nostalgia.

Using the rural American folk art tradition of painted photographic portraits in the 19th century, the series of tintypes could very well represent missing portraits of my own family, since I have very limited family connections and hardly any portraits to speak of. However, these images are of mannequins in an antique store near my home. They have been carefully photographed and framed with the same reverence as a real family member would be treated, with full knowledge of their artificiality. Locks of hair from the wigs worn by these mannequins (some wigs made from real human hair, others not), artificial flowers, real dried flowers, and other objects and decorations have been included with the tintypes in antique wood and plaster frames. By intentionally mixing artificial, “modern” products with objects identified as antique, I am attempting to comment on the temporal qualities of remembrance and the still photograph’s inability to be an accurate record of memory. The mannequin photographs here have no more, no less memory embedded into them than a portrait of a real human, even of a family member. Further, the reading of nostalgia in these works is skewed by the fact of their artificiality, and helps to lay bare the deceit which nostalgia holds. The simpler time one may long for while viewing these works is just as artificial as the figures in the photographs.

The liquid emulsion images on glass also use what might be termed an antiquarian photographic process to explore how memory and history are recorded in the landscape. I have made a series of landscape images in a variation of the panorama format, using a half-frame 35mm camera. These overlapping photographs depict Civil War battlefields at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Not only is this the place where over 7,500 soldiers lost their lives during three days in July, 1863, it is also where I spent the first twelve years of my life. My visit here in October of this year was only the second since my childhood, and the first where I had a true knowledge and sense of the historic events that happened there. These photographs are the beginning stages of a further investigation into the ways a landscape evolves from a space to a Place; that is, how a landscape records both a personal history and a natural and human history on a grander scale, and becomes important to understanding the human condition. By printing the landscape images on glass, I not only make a connection to photographic processes used during the Civil War era, but the ephemeral, translucent qualities of the images allow them to be read as a palimpsest, making possible the layering of images to allude to the passage of time and the constant evolution of memory and the landscape. Further adaptations of this project may include other photographs from different time periods or enlargements of maps from the region."

It's snowing right now

...and that's just wrong. What's even wronger (is that a word?) is that we went shopping at the local mall yesterday ("local" around here means 35 miles away) and many of the stores are playing Christmas music already. It's not even Thanksgiving yet. One holiday at a time please!

As the residency gets closer and my nervousness increases, I'm trying to coalesce my ideas for the particular projects I'm working on so that I can put together a decent artist's statement. My statements tend to be overlong, rambling essays, so I reallly need to make this one more consice. Right now there are two main projects I'm pursuing: one, the mannequins, seems to be progressing nicely and I pretty much know what direction I want to head towards. The other, the Gettysburg Landscape project, is in its infancy. The panoramas on glass, or whatever I end up showing in January, are just sketches really: sketches that I have no idea how I'm going to display! They need to be spaced slightly away from the wall, which means that they'll either have to be suspended somehow or I'll have to build some sort of base for them and put them on a pedestal (which as we all know, are scarce in the AIB building). Anyhoo, I digress. Here are some quick notes on the two series which will hopefully help me build a statement that makes sense:

Mannequins

• from the rural American tradition of 19th century portrait photography
• possibly represents a series of "missing family portraits" for myself, since I have little family communication and very few pictures of family members
• mannequins treated as "real," however with full knowledge of their artificial quality
• represents the artificiality of memory, and photography's inability to be an accurate record of memory
• comments on nostalgia through process and subject matter (reflective nostalgia)
• painting on tintypes acts as palimpsest - erases information underneath to assign further layers of time and thought
• addition of artificial flowers and hair placed in authentic 19th century wood & plaster frames further complicates the separation of reality and artificiality
• notions of fetish in early portraiture
• related artists: Morton Bartlett, Mark Ostermann, Jayne Hinds Bidaut, 19th century tintype parlor photographers

Landscapes

• interest in landscape as a record of human and natural history - on grand scale and also personal history
• the idea of "place" as importance to the human condition
• landscape as memory (using Gettysburg, a landscape noted for its history and near my old hometown, as an example)
• using a type of panorama format to investigate issues of space and composition in landscape art
• images printed on glass to allow for layering of images (histories and memories) and also to connect to photographic techniques used during the Civil War
• interest in maps and mapping, possible element to be introduced to series
• comments on nostalgia through process and subject matter (reflective nostalgia)
• related artists: Matthew Brady, Masumi Hayashi, Sally Mann

That's what I've got so far. Thoughts?

Critical Theory!!

Whoops! Apparently this month's thought paper was, according to Louise, supposed to relate my work to the Critical Theory reading done last semester! Well, damn! I guess I'll have to write another paper!! Bear with me...

My Kid Could Paint That

Here is a link to an NPR story about the movie, My Kid Could Paint That. I can't wait to see this film. I wonder if it's as good as, Who the !#*? is Jackson Pollock?

more panoramas

See more of these below the November thought piece post. These are just scans from the negatives, displayed in a pretty fashion.

Thought Piece for Nov. 1

You Can’t Go Home Again:
A Personal Investigation of Place and Landscape

Note: upon re-reading this paper just prior to submission, I realize that there are a multitude of themes and ideas expressed here, none of which are fleshed out to a satisfactory level. I believe this is because I write this soon after my trip to Gettysburg, at a time when I am still trying to make sense of all of the thoughts I had while there and just upon my return. I make this statement so that the reader knows I am aware of these issues and that I fully intend to explore them in more detail in the near future.

In mid-October of this year, my fiancée and I took a trip to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, the site of one of the most pivotal and bloody battles of the American Civil War. During the three-day struggle there in early July, 1863, nearly 51,000 soldiers in the Northern and Southern ranks, and one lone civilian, became casualties. The reason for our journey to this place which is often referred to as hallowed ground was twofold: Sarah, my fiancée, is an ardent Civil War buff who spent our three days there vigilantly attempting to find each of the over 1,400 monuments and markers scattered around the battlefields. For me, the main reason for the visit was to try to take a trip back into time; not back to 1863 and the time of the battle, but to the 1980s when I was a boy growing up in a town adjacent to Gettysburg. Except for a very brief return to the area in 2003 for my grandmother’s funeral, I had not explored Gettysburg and my old hometown since I was twelve years old. I wanted to know if this place, one of the most visited and studied landscapes in America, retained not only the history of significant human events, but my own personal history as well.

“An object or place achieves concrete reality when our experience of it is total, that is, through all the senses as well as with the active and reflective mind. Long residence enables us to know a place intimately, yet its image may lack sharpness unless we can also see it from the outside and reflect upon our experience.”[1]

Perhaps because I have moved frequently in my life, I have a longstanding interest in what a person considers home and how their surroundings can affect their lives and memories. Before our journey to Gettysburg, I decided to do some research on how more intelligent people than I define space, place, and landscape. I began by reading Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience by geographer Yi-Fu Tuan. When he speaks of places and spaces in his book, he refers to two different and very specific things. He states, “‘Space’ is more abstract than ‘place.’ What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value.”[2] Place is important because it signifies security and familiarity. Our homes, the towns we live in, the landmarks we visit regularly whether they be a supermarket or a state park, are places that become concrete in our minds because we have lived with them. Spaces, or the vast expanses of area we do not have such an intimate relationship with, have importance too; they represent the freedom that the human body requires. A space is a different kind of comfort, one that lets us know we are not trapped.

Children experience place and space, and also time, quite differently than adults. This has to do with the development of the child, including age, size, and basic understanding of his or her physical presence and surroundings. Tuan states, “Feeling for place is influenced by knowledge, by knowing such basic facts as whether the place is natural or man-made and whether it is relatively large or small. A child five or six years old lacks this kind of knowledge. He may talk excitedly about the city of Geneva or Lake Geneva, but his appreciation of these places is certain to differ radically from that of an informed adult.”[3] I experienced a phenomenon like this during my recent visit to PA when stopping to look at the house I grew up in. As a child I believed the hillside our house was on to be huge. Taking a sled down the hill in the winter was akin to riding the world’s largest roller coaster. Now as an adult when I look at the house it appears to be resting on top of a tiny molehill. For a moment I even thought I was at the wrong house because I was expecting the hill to be much larger. The battlefields at Gettysburg were more than anything else a playground for me when I was a child. My mother took me there as sort of a “day off” for us, where we would walk around the woods, scramble around the large boulder field of Devil’s Den (my favorite part), climb some monuments and viewing towers, and explore some of the more interesting tourist traps in town, such the Civil War Wax Museum. While I understood in a vague sense that an important event happened here and I knew some of the facts, none of that was important to me at the time. Yi-Fu Tuan’s comment about a feeling for place being influenced by knowledge comes into play here. I appreciated areas of the battlefield at Gettysburg not on a knowledge-based, historical level, but on a sensual level. I still remember the fond experience of working my way in between the boulders at Devil’s Den, and had a similar wave of thrill wash over me when doing the same thing during my trip this fall. However, this time the experience had a broader context than it did when I was a child. I could now imagine Union and Confederate soldiers scrambling around this area as artillery rounds exploded around them. I could envision the land before the battle, just another quiet patchwork of fields and pastures indistinguishable from any other farmland by anyone but the local residents. And I could analyze how this place has been immortalized (and commercialized) since the war. These ideas mixed in with my personal memories of the place from my childhood and the ways in which the region has changed since, and has made untangling these threads of thought and time quite a complex process.

The concept of time can be compared to a landscape, and a landscape is affected, physically and in a person’s mind, by time. As discussed, a child’s understanding of landscape is skewed by lack of knowledge. Attributes as simple as a place’s size can be misread by children. Similarly, a child’s idea of the passage of time is different from an adult. According to Tuan, “To the young child time does not ‘flow’; he stands as it were outside it, remaining at the same tender age seemingly forever. To the grown person time rushes on, propelling him forward willy-nilly. Since small children are seldom able to reflect on their experiences and describe them, we need to make use of the recall and observations of adults.”[4] While I would have liked Tuan to be more specific about what he means by “small children” (as an educator of children of a broad range of ages, I find that many are quite able to speak of their experiences in rather eloquent ways; in fact, they are often more honest about their feelings than adults), I agree with his assertion that children experience time in their own way. To children up to adolescent age, the world is in a state of present. Tuan paraphrases playwright Eugene Ionesco’s description of this phenomenon thusly: “At the age of eight or nine, everything for him was joy and presentness. Time seemed a rhythm in space. The seasons did not mark the passage of a year; rather they spread out in space…At fifteen or sixteen it was all over. He was in time, in flight, in finiteness; the present had disappeared. There was nothing left for him but a past and a tomorrow, a tomorrow that he was already conscious of as past.”[5] My own childhood in Pennsylvania was fraught with particular characters and events that I do not wish to trouble the reader with here, nor do I want it to be the focus of any artwork produced while exploring the theme of landscape and place. I feel I must make mention of it in a nebulous manner, though, for the reader to understand why I was so compelled to return here as an adult. I experienced the rocky divorce of my parents here, and also had a very difficult time socially in school. Being bullied and teased were part of a regular daily routine for me, and for various reasons I did not build up the social defenses to combat it properly. Upon returning to the area this October, I was not sure what to expect. I thought perhaps that highly charged memories of troubling childhood moments would flood back, but they didn’t. While many places were familiar and I could even point at nondescript areas along the roads and paths and say, “that happened here,” I never felt overly emotional about it. There were no butterflies in the stomach, and no movie-style childhood flashbacks. Even when driving by my old elementary school I had no strong emotions flood over me. This was a bit surprising, and left me somehow disappointed at the time. Does this mean that my childhood experiences have no meaning to me any longer? Or does it mean that through the passage of time and my own development into adulthood – now with a fiancée, a house in the country, pets, and many of the elements that I think of as being a complete “home” – I have been able to start putting my old view of the past away and start thinking of it in new contexts?


“Memory is stratified. If we have seen a place through many years, each view, no matter how banal, is a palimpsest.”[6]

In her book, The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society, Lucy Lippard discusses the idea of place while providing a multitude of examples of contemporary artists who use their work to highlight social, cultural, and political issues regarding the landscape. According to her, “The changing landscape is created by the replacement of some people, the displacement of others, and the disappearance of ways of life paradoxically envied by those who have come to emulate them but, by their very arrival, actually destroy them.”[7] This can be a large-scale phenomenon, such as the near-obliteration of Native Americans and the subsequent romanticizing of their cultures in our own pop culture. The change can also be more subtle. In the 1980s Gettysburg was what one might call a “tourist trap,” with its fair share of chintzy souvenir shops and family attractions adjacent to the battlefields. However, the surrounding landscape was relatively lightly populated with acres of sprawling farmlands. Upon my visit this October the touristy nature of Gettysburg had not changed, but the area around it was quite different. Due to the increased difficulty that family-run farms have found in staying financially afloat and the recent “real estate bubble,” many of those acres of farmland are now subdivided and supporting planned communities. The towns near Gettysburg, including my former hometown Littlestown, are growing. And of course, wherever people settle there will also be a need, or call, for businesses. Gettysburg is now home to an outlet store mall and a multitude of chain retail stores that were not there when I was growing up. There has even been a recent attempt by a businessman to build a casino on the outskirts of town (those plans have all but been squashed, though, by a large group of local people and historians who did not wish the area to be harmed by such a business).

The battlefields of Gettysburg are changing at a rapid pace as well. In recent years there has been a push to restore the battlefields to how they looked during the 1860s. A large steel lookout tower that loomed over the town was demolished recently because it was an eyesore to many and was visible from nearly every major battle site. Now the National Park Service is busy working on the battlefields themselves. As a child I remember Devil's Den and the area behind it sprouting with many trees and bushes. All of this is being cleared away to make it look like the pastureland of 150 years ago and to give visitors a better sense of what the soldiers would have seen. I think I understand the reasoning, but it still strikes me as odd. They're making artificial pastureland. No cow or horse is ever really going to graze here again. It's almost as if the land itself has become a reenactor of the Civil War. It is an oddity because it is one of the few cherished landscapes in America, or the world, that is being restored not for environmental or conservation purposes but for the purpose of preserving a very particular point in time – three days in 1863, to be exact – in which a fleeting, albeit bloody, human interaction occurred. Ironically, there has been no talk of removing the hundreds upon hundreds of marble and granite monuments, which of course were not original elements of the land during the battle. It reminds me of a story about the folk art painter Anna Mary Robertson (“Grandma”) Moses, who was once commissioned to paint a historical scene of a Revolutionary War battle in Bennington, Vermont. Amidst the buildings and small soldiers in red and blue coats she painted, she also included an image of the Bennington Monument, a pillar-like object in the center of town that was erected later to memorialize the battle. Grandma Moses was ridiculed for this anachronism to the point where she felt compelled to make a second painting of the battle, minus the monument.

While in Gettysburg I photographed the battlefield landscapes – roads, monuments, and sometimes tourists included – with a small 35mm half-frame camera. This camera takes twice the usual number of pictures on a roll of film by chopping each 35mm frame in half. I have found that the camera is quite useful for making interesting “panoramas” of the landscape. By simply panning the landscape in front of me while winding and shooting, I create a series of images that I believe give, in a sense, a more accurate view of how a person views a landscape than what a traditional panoramic camera can produce. Panoramic cameras focus on a continuous stretch of landscape; from end to end, the image maintains its visual integrity without focal or spatial interruptions. While effective and interesting, these images do not represent a landscape as it is seen by the human eye. Peripheral and stereo vision prevents eyes from being able to record an entire landscape in focus at once. The eyes focus on one particular point at a time, scanning the scene and stitching the landscape together in the mind. The half-frame camera method that I am using to record the landscape mimics this “stitching” by presenting the scene in sections. Objects within the landscape repeat between frames, further revealing the effect of stitching and also elongating the scene, making it appear more sweeping than it is in true life. If one were inclined, the viewer could also interpret the separate images as soldiers in line for battle.


“If place is defined by memory, but no one who remembers is left to bring these memories to the surface, does a place become noplace, or only a landscape?”[8]

What began as an investigation of my own history has evolved into a curiosity of how the landscape records the history of events, large and small, and how our Western sense of what a landscape is can influence memory and behavior. This can be shortened to the basic question of, “How is a landscape remembered?” I intend to explore this question, using the recently-made photographs of Gettysburg as a starting point. I will be printing these images on sheets of glass using liquid photographic emulsion, leaving open the possibility of viewing other images through these “transparent landscapes,” creating a palimpsest of sorts. Perhaps these other images will be photographs of my new home in upstate New York, photographs of landscapes I took as a child, or reproductions of photographs taken by Matthew Brady and Timothy O’Sullivan in Gettysburg shortly after the 1863 battle. As research is continued and feedback is received from professors and fellow artists, I will begin to make my decisions.




[1] Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), 18.
[2] Ibid, 6.
[3] Ibid, 32.
[4] Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), 185.
[5] Eugene Ionesco, Fragments of a Journal (London: Allen & Unwin, 1952), 55; paraphrased in Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), 186.
[6] Lucy R. Lippard, The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society (New York: The New Press, 1997), 33.
[7] Ibid, 43.
[8] Lucy R. Lippard, The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society (New York: The New Press, 1997), 23.

panoramas

Here are some of the panoramas from the Gettysburg trip. These are simply scans from the negatives, placed on a black background I made up in Photoshop. I plan to print these separately on pieces of glass, and then displaying them.....somehow.

Whoever first said, "you can't go home again..."

...deserves a big, fat, wet kiss for being absolutely right. Sarah and I came back from our trip to Gettysburg, PA, on Monday. We spent three days there; Sarah courageously tried to find all the monuments scattered around the battlefields (there's over 1,000 of them, and Sarah's a Civil War nut. She may even someday join those wacky reenactors), while I photographed and tried to drum up old memories. I grew up in Littlestown, right next to Gettysburg. It's where I lived with my mom and grandmother, while my father came to pick me up every other weekend and take me to Harrisburg. Mom and I used to go to the battlefield a lot, which at my age was more like a playground. I loved to scramble around the boulders at Devil's Den, not even giving a thought to the people who died there 120 years prior. I also visited the house I grew up in (now painted a different color and minus the multitude of trees that once nearly obliterated it from view from the road) and, for the first time, my grandmother and grandfather's grave. Grandma died in 2003, and I never met my grandfather. He died back in the 60's.

I wasn't sure what to expect going back. I thought maybe that highly charged memories of an often rocky childhood would flood back, but they didn't. While many things were familiar and I could even point at nondescript areas along the roads and paths and say "that happened to me here," I never felt overly emotional about it. No butterflies in the stomach. No movie-style childhood flashbacks where I zoned out for minutes on end. I was, at best, at peace with it all, and at worst, just plain neutral about the whole thing.

Maybe part of it is because the area around Gettysburg has changed since I was a kid. The town has always been pretty commercial and tourist-oriented, but now it's also homogenized. Many of the outlying farms are divvying up their land and selling it to developers, so there's a whole slew of those ugly, lifeless, residential communities springing up. Littlestown is not so little anymore. A McDonald's is being built near the center of town. The school I used to go to, and where I had a rough time with bullying as a kid, has expanded - a lot. Overall the area just seemed to have lost some of its quietness and originality, real or imagined.

The battlefields are even changing. In recent years there has been a push to restore the battlefields to how they looked during the 1860s. As a child I remember Devil's Den and the area behind it sprouted with youngish trees and bushes. That has all been cleared away to make it look like the pastureland of 150 years ago and to give visitors a more "authentic" view of what the soldiers would have seen. I think I understand the reasoning, but it still strikes me as odd. They're making artificial pastureland. No cow or horse is ever really going to graze here again. It's almost as if the land itself has become a reenactor of the Civil War.

So anyway, while there I used my half-frame camera (it takes half-size pictures on a roll of 35mm film; you get twice pictures for your dollar! And of course this highly practical camera is Russian) to make "panoramic" images of the battlefields. This was done by standing in one place and making a series of images as I panned the scene in front of me. You can see some earlier versions of this technique in a blog post I made a couple of months ago. I like the jerky look of the panoramas, the way the horizon sometimes jumps or objects are seen twice between photos. To me it's a more realisic way of seeing a full landscape than an official Panoramic camera records it. Your eyes can only focus on one point in a scene at a time. To get a sweeping view, you need to pan it with your eyes, looking at it in sections while your mind "stitches" them together in a way. Try it sometime. Look outside. Where are your eyes focused? What else in that scene is just part of your blurry peripheral until you move your eyes to the left or right?

I have no idea yet how or if these panoramas (I'll hopefully scan the negatives and post some images soon) will play into my work, and how or if I'm going to connect them to my memories and my feelings. No doubt, though, it will be a part of a larger monthly paper down the road. In the meantime, it's back to daily life in upstate NY, filling our heating oil tank with $700 worth of fuel, and taking care of two kitten brothers who were mysteriously orphaned on our doorstep. We've named them Calvin and Hobbes.

Maybe it IS pre-emptive kitsch...

...in a way. Looking back at my thought paper for the month, a quote by Roger Scruton stands out:

“Through family, religion, and the forms of public life, we shield ourselves from the horrific vision that surrounds us—the vision of ourselves as fakes."

In a way, I am creating a "vision of ourselves as fakes" by using mannequins as sort of stand-ins for real people. Does this fact automatically make my work

a.)true kitsch
b.)preemptive kitsch, or
c.)some kind of comment on kitsch that avoids either one?

Let's hope that C is the right answer!

And now for something non-MFA related...

This just made me so in-the-pants happy that I had to relate it to anyone else who likes Radiohead or just hates the way record companies make us shell out 18 bucks for a new CD: Radiohead is releasing their new album, In Rainbows, as an mp3 download from their site. Ok, that's cool, but get this - you pay whatever you think the album is worth. Want the album for $18? Ok. Wanna spend 37 cents instead? Go for it. How about downloading it for free? Well, you can do that too. If this doesn't change the way record companies do business, nothing will.

Check it out:
http://www.inrainbows.com

Thought Piece for October 1st

This is a long one.

Nostalgia and Kitsch: An Investigation


In my first thought paper for September, I began to arrange my thoughts on how nostalgia is (or is not) related to my artwork, specifically the series of mannequin tintypes that I am producing. Geoffrey Batchen’s book, Forget Me Not, was referenced extensively as it not only gave a clear explanation of how nostalgia is related to memory, but it also provided examples of 19th century photographic portraiture that spoke to an aesthetic sensibility that I strove for in my work. When speaking to my MFA advisor regarding this paper, I was given some extremely helpful criticism. First, I neglected to provide a clear and in-depth definition of what nostalgia is. Second, my advisor brought up a word that had been mentioned during the June residency in regards to my tintypes, but up until now I had no clear understanding of its implications. That word is kitsch. Both nostalgia and kitsch have largely negative connotations; both play a significant role in the world of contemporary art; and as I have discovered, these two terms often overlap when being discussed.


“Nostalgia tantalizes us with its fundamental ambivalence; it is about the repetition of the unrepeatable, materialization of the immaterial.”
-Svetlana Boym

Svetlana Boym’s book, The Future of Nostalgia, contains a treasure trove of information about the roots of nostalgia, and explains in depth how its effects have permeated so much of modern thought. Nostalgia, from the Latin for “return home” (nostos) and “longing” (algia), was coined in 1688 by Johannes Hofer, a Swiss doctor who was struggling to understand why Swiss soldiers stationed abroad were suffering from mysterious symptoms of fatigue and indifference to their surroundings. Nausea, loss of appetite, cardiac arrest, and suicidal tendencies surfaced in the most extreme cases. However, when asked to talk about their homes in the Alps, the soldiers would snap out of their lethargy and talk at length about fond memories of favorite sights, sounds, and smells from the homeland. Cures for this disease of the imagination included leeches, opium, and most effective, a trip home to the Alps (Boym, 3-5). During the American Civil War, nostalgia in soldiers was seen as “a shameful disease that revealed a lack of manliness and unprogressive attitudes (6).” Interestingly, nostalgia in this case was a symptom found mostly in soldiers of a rural background. Civil War military doctor Theodore Calhoun wrote, “The soldier from the city cares not where he is or where he eats, while his country cousin pines for the old homestead and his father’s groaning board.”

In her book, Boym contends that the modernization of society from the 17th to the 19th centuries, in the forms of industry and capitalism, changed the focus of nostalgia from merely the loss of an idealized physical home to “the loss of an enchanted world with clear borders and values (8).” As distances became more quickly and easily crossed thanks to technological advances, the concept of time also changed and became more complex. Trains pulled freight farther; telegraph lines allowed for near instantaneous communication between time zones (which, incidentally, were invented to allow for ease in creating shipping schedules for the railroads). The cogs began to move faster, and society had to learn to keep up. This idea of modernity was translated into art as well, most notably by Charles Baudelaire in his 1860 essay “The Painter of Modern Life.” In it, the modern artist is urged to record what is happening at the moment, especially in the cities, where progress is swifter and more noticeable. Nostalgia in effect became the ideological opposite of progress; as the latter looked optimistically to the future’s broad horizons, the former yearned for a past that could never be attained.

There is more than just one type of nostalgia. According to Boym, people who are nostalgic can be broken down into two separate types: reflective nostalgics and restorative nostalgics. Boym states, “Restorative nostalgia puts emphasis on nostos and proposes to rebuild the lost home and patch up the memory gaps. Reflective nostalgia dwells in algia, in longing and loss, the imperfect process of remembrance (41).” The author posits that restorative nostalgics do not realize they are nostalgic; they believe that they are seeking out truths. Restorative nostalgia can, for example, show itself as a kind of blind patriotism to country, a held belief that a beloved nation or system of government is threatened by outsiders who wish to tear apart its “perfect” order. Stains on the government’s record, like a past racial persecution or unjust war, are ironed out or glossed over to protect the nostalgic view that everything in the past was wonderful, and in order to restore the “homeland” it must be brought back to those glory days. Restorative nostalgia is akin to revisionist history, and Boym even makes the connection of this kind of nostalgic to conspiracy theorists (43).

Reflective nostalgics, on the other hand, do not take themselves so seriously. While they may long for a time and place in the past, they understand and delight in the fact that memory is fragmentary and that time is fluid. States Boym, “the focus here is not on recovery of what is perceived to be an absolute truth but on the meditation on history and passage of time (49).” Humor and irony are allowed to penetrate reflective nostalgia, unlike restorative nostalgia, and it is also much more focused on the individual and his or her own understanding of time and space.

There is no doubt that I am a nostalgic, just as there is no doubt that much of my artwork carries a nostalgic tone. It is also clear after reading Svetlana Boym’s book that I fit her definition of a reflective nostalgic more so than that of a restorative nostalgic. I am not tied to a more perfect ideal of the past that I am attempting to resurrect, and I certainly do not carry a blind faith that our nation was built on a foundation without imperfections. Before I began my MFA residency, I had considered myself a realist. That is, I felt I understood that both tradition and progress had their importance, but I had distrust for those that held too much reverence for one over the other. Without understanding the past, how can one do right for the future? Without thinking about the future, how can one act responsibly in the present? And without acknowledging the absurd and unique qualities of history and time in the first place, how can one truly appreciate the world around him?

________________________________________


“Serious artists are inevitably aware of kitsch: they fear it, are constantly on guard against it, and if they flirt with kitsch it is with a sense of risk, knowing that all artistic effort is wasted should you ever cross the line.”
-Roger Scruton

As stated, there were some comments at the June AIB residency by students and professors that my series of mannequin tintypes perhaps contained elements of kitsch. This was echoed during a phone conversation with my advisor just this past month, although both of us were a bit unclear on the precise meaning of this very charged term. To investigate, I began where any studious, intellectual student would begin his research: Wikipedia. The website defines kitsch as “a term of German origin that has been used to categorize art that is considered an inferior copy of an existing style. The term is also used more loosely in referring to any art that is pretentious to the point of being in bad taste, and also commercially produced items that are considered trite or crass.” Famed critic Clement Greenberg wrote an important essay in 1939 titled Avant-Garde and Kitsch, in which he states, “Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations. Kitsch changes according to style, but remains always the same. Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times. Kitsch pretends to demand nothing of its customers except their money -- not even their time.” To Greenberg, kitsch referred to realism in art, regardless the medium. Michelangelo paintings, Hollywood movies, and any kind of readily available commercial art – comics, tap dancing, Tin Pan Alley music – all fell into the category of kitsch. The only way to elevate art beyond kitsch, according to Greenberg, was to make it abstract or completely non-representational in the model of artists like Picasso, Mondrian, and Kandinsky. Paint should be about paint, and should not pretend to be anything else.

In 1999, British philosopher Roger Scruton wrote an essay titled Kitsch and the Modern Predicament which responds to Greenberg’s original essay and updates the meaning of kitsch in art for a contemporary audience. His first argument is that Greenberg’s faith in non-representational art as a remedy to kitsch turned out to be misguided: “take a stroll around MoMA, and you will encounter it in almost every room: avant-garde, certainly—novel in its presumption, if not in its effect—but also kitsch, abstract kitsch, of the kind that makes modernist wallpaper or is botched together for the tourist trade on the Boulevard Montparnasse.” However, Scruton agrees with Greenberg’s postulation that kitsch is a phenomenon of capitalism and, in a broader context, the Enlightenment and people’s loss of a religious faith. He states, “Faith exalts the human heart, removing it from the marketplace, making it sacred and unexchangeable. When faith declines, however, the sacred loses one of its most important forms of protection from marauders; the heart can now more easily be captured and put on sale…the Christmas-card sentiments advertise what cannot be advertised without ceasing to be: hence the emotion that they offer is fake." A kitsch object has a sentimental value that has been sold and is now empty, caused by commercial enterprise and absence of faith.

By the 1960s, Scruton argues, artists armed themselves against kitsch with a brand-new weapon: preemptive kitsch. Scruton states, “The worst thing is to be unwittingly guilty of producing kitsch; far better to produce kitsch deliberately, for then it is not kitsch at all but a kind of sophisticated parody... preemptive kitsch delights in the tacky, the ready-made, and the cut-out, using forms, colors, and images that both legitimize ignorance and also laugh at it.” Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons are good examples of artists who intentionally use kitsch in an attempt to embrace it yet circumvent its pitfalls. Probably the best, most recent example of this strategy is Damien Hirst’s outlandish For the Love of God, a platinum-cast human skull studded with over 10,000 pure diamonds. The piece contains all the right elements for kitsch: it is garish, highly overdone, absurdly pretentious, and the title of the piece itself is a double entendre which acknowledges the kitsch quality of the object while at the same time taking a lighthearted jab at religion in general by referring to God and death. In reading Scruton’s essay it is clear that he has a strong dislike of kitsch, but he offers no clear answers on how to avoid its traps. In the end he simply states, “Through family, religion, and the forms of public life, we shield ourselves from the horrific vision that surrounds us—the vision of ourselves as fakes. That is perhaps why we should value kitsch. It flows all about us and warns us that we must tread carefully and be guided by those who know.”

________________________________________


Kitsch and nostalgia are both based in sentiment. Nostalgia most often plays off of genuine sentiment and longing, while kitsch bastardizes the sentiment and makes an inferior copy out of it. In The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym cites an example of Russian author Vladimir Nabokov attempting to tiptoe around the trapdoor of kitsch while retaining a narrative relating to nostalgia. Nabokov’s memoirs relate the story of Mademoiselle O., his Swiss governess, who on her first trip to Russia remained strongly nostalgic for her home in the Alps, to the point where she recreated a Swiss-style home in her Russian dwelling. After the Russian revolution in 1917, Mademoiselle moved back to Switzerland but instead of quelling her longing for her homeland the move made her nostalgic for Russia. She began to decorate her Swiss home with Russian trinkets. Boym states, “The only place Mademoiselle could call home is the past – mainly, the past that she framed for herself.” In describing the setting of Mademoiselle’s mountain home, Nabokov writes about a mountain lake in which he sees a swan flapping its wings. He recognizes the swan as a ready-made metaphor for Mademoiselle’s longing for a perfect home, or love, that doesn’t exist, but he doesn’t want to be trapped by this overdone, sappy, kitsch sentiment by simply plugging it in to his writing. Instead, he describes the swan as “an aged swan, a large, uncouth, dodo-like creature, making ridiculous efforts to hoist himself into a moored boat.” According to Boym, “Nabokov interrupts all the clichés and poetic references to the swans of other times” by describing the swan in such an unflattering manner (278-280). He escapes kitsch while retaining an ironic, reflective nostalgia in his examination of Mademoiselle’s constant longing for something and somewhere else.

Are the mannequin tintypes that I am producing and displaying at AIB appropriately labeled as kitsch by those who have done so? After this investigation, I must say that they are not. Firstly, I am not creating work that tries to "legitimize ignorance and also laugh at it," as Roger Scruton puts it. In other words, I'm not trying to make preemptive kitsch. The tintypes, in their process and in the manner which they are painted and framed, speak to and are influenced by an American folk art tradition but they are by no means an attempt to poke fun at the ignorance of such artists. In fact, my feelings for this type of work are the exact opposite of derision; I find them engaging, charming, and very interesting (in fact, instead of kitsch I would say that there is a quality of camp in my work. In Notes on Camp, Susan Sontag defines camp as “a kind of love, love for human nature. It relishes, rather than judges, the little triumphs and awkward intensities of "character.") Further, I don't feel that the tintypes I'm making are an "inferior copy of an existing style," though others may disagree. I am not trying to be sentimental, especially for sentimentality's sake, and I sure hope that my art isn't "pretentious to the point of being in bad taste," as Wikipedia puts it. I intend for my tintypes to remind viewers of the art of the 19th century and the sentimentality that existed there, but my hope is that viewers find more than just that in the work. I want to connect the subject matter to more modern ideas of memory and remembrance, some of which I mentioned in my last thought paper. As such, I intend to do more than repeat empty conventions and formulas of the past.

It is clear that reflective nostalgia will be a crucial aspect of whatever final project(s) I end up preparing for my MFA thesis next year. More and more the notions of time, place, memory, and home are resting on the forefront of my mind, especially in the midst of yet another moving of my possessions to a new abode. My fiancée and I are currently preparing a 1930s farmhouse in upstate New York to be our permanent residence, beginning October 1st. Then, in mid-October we will be taking a trip to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where I spent my childhood. We plan to visit, among other things, the Civil War battlefields, the house I grew up in, and my grandparents’ graves (which I have never been to). I have no allusions that I can “go home again” by making this trip; I want to experience, and try to later relate in artwork, the various strands of time and history that exist in this area I once lived in. Battles of national history will intertwine with personal battles of my childhood, and I plan to represent these threads by examining the landscape and notions of place and space as they change during a person’s lifetime. However, this is a subject for another though piece.

Just an observation...

One of the eeriest things about moving to a new place is the "echo" of the old one. When most of the substantial bits of furniture - the bookshelves, the dressers, the desks - are taken out of a room, it changes the acoustics. Suddenly sounds bounce off of the walls in a way they didn't before, back when they were insulated by parts of your life. An audible emptiness...ugh. I can't wait to get the rest of the stuff out and get settled in the new place.

Kitsch Camp

It is far better to be considered Camp than Kitsch; this is what I have discovered so far. I did some digging on Wikipedia and also read two essays: Susan Sontag's Notes on Camp and Roger Scruton’s Kitsch and the Modern Predicament. First, the Wikipedia definitions:

Camp: "an aesthetic in which something has appeal because of its bad taste or ironic value."

Kitsch: "art that is considered an inferior copy of an existing style. The term is also used more loosely in referring to any art that is pretentious to the point of being in bad taste, and also commercially produced items that are considered trite or crass."

And here is how Wikipedia delineates between the two:
"Camp versus Kitsch: Much like the closely related notion of kitsch, camp has traditionally been viewed as hard to define. The terms 'camp' and 'kitsch' are often used interchangeably; both may relate to art, literature, music, or any object that carries an aesthetic value. However, 'kitsch' refers specifically to the object proper, whereas 'camp' is a mode of performance. Thus, a person may consume kitsch intentionally or unintentionally. Camp, however, as Susan Sontag observed, is always a way of consuming or performing culture 'in quotation marks.'"

So, Kitsch refers to an object, whereas Camp refers more to a mode of performance. It is also clear, by reading Sontag's and Scruton's essays, that it's much better to be considered Camp than Kitsch. From Sontag:

"Camp taste is a kind of love, love for human nature. It relishes, rather than judges, the little triumphs and awkward intensities of "character." . . . Camp taste identifies with what it is enjoying. People who share this sensibility are not laughing at the thing they label as 'a camp,' they're enjoying it. Camp is a tender feeling."

And from Scruton:

"Kitsch is omnipresent, part of the language, and a seemingly inevitable aspect of cultural democracy. It is the debased coinage of the emotions. Kitsch is advertising, just as most advertising is Kitsch. It is an attempt to turn value into price, the problem being that its subject matter has a value only when it is not pretended and a price only when it is. Hence the market in emotion must deal in simulated goods."

Camp and Kitsch both deal with the sentimental, but while the former embraces it as "so bad that it's good," the latter is seen as purely pretentious, empty, and cliche. John Waters of Hairspray and Pecker fame truly loves the tackiness, the Camp, of things. People who watch Mystery Science Theater 3000 do so because the films they show transcend "bad" and become more entertaining than some "good" movies out there. People who deal in Camp find true enjoyment in it. Kitsch, however, often has less luck in finding people that are sympathetic to its qualities.

Roger Scruton, a British philosopher, proposes that Kitsch actually came about because of the Enlightenment and people's loss of faith: "Faith exalts the human heart, removing it from the marketplace, making it sacred and unexchangeable. Under the jurisdiction of religion, our deeper feelings are sacralized, so as to become raw material for the ethical life, the life lived in judgment. When faith declines, however, the sacred loses one of its most important forms of protection from marauders; the heart can now more easily be captured and put on sale. Some things—the human heart is one of them—can be bought and sold only if they are first denatured. The Christmas-card sentiments advertise what cannot be advertised without ceasing to be: hence the emotion that they offer is fake."

A Kitsch object has an empty, or expired, value. Scruton references critic Clement Greenberg in his essay, stating how Greenberg was crucial in moving the art world towards abstraction, Modernism, in the 1930s by proposing that realism had become cliche and empty - in effect, Kitsch. Scruton, writing in 1999, updates this theory with his assertion that Post-Modernism is actually "Preemptive Kitsch." When the avant-garde abstract paintings of the first half of the 20th century began being copied and pasted on the walls of corporation boardrooms and assimilated into advertising, the Post-Modernists either took quick steps to try to prevent their work from ending up in the same category, or they created work that was "intentionally" Kitsch. Some artists that fit the latter category include Jeff Koons, Andy Warhol, and Damien Hirst. As Scruton puts it, "The worst thing is to be unwittingly guilty of producing kitsch; far better to produce kitsch deliberately, for then it is not kitsch at all but a kind of sophisticated parody. (The intention to produce real kitsch is an impossible intention, like the intention to act unintentionally.) Preemptive kitsch sets quotation marks around actual kitsch and hopes thereby to save its artistic credentials. The dilemma is not: kitsch or avant-garde, but: kitsch or "kitsch." The quotation marks function like the forceps with which a pathologist lifts some odoriferous specimen from its jar."

As you can see, there's no real love for true Kitsch, as there is for true Camp. Which brings me to my work. There were a few people at AIB, just a few, who seemed concerned that my mannequin tintypes were leaning towards the category of Kitsch, and it's something that Jesseca mentioned during our phone conversation (although we were both a little unsure of its exact definition, hence the spark for this overlong blog post). As sometimes happens, I can sort of see both sides of this argument. Here's why:

• I'm using an artistic (or photographic) process that is no longer in use. It is outdated.
• I am intending to make an ironic comment on photography and the Western belief that photographs contain truth and can enhance memory.
• I'm working more in the spirit of a folk artist than a fine artist, at least in my use of process and materials.

If I was forced to put my work into one or both categories of Camp and Kitsch, I could deal with Camp. I have a bit of a camp-y personality anyway. I enjoy and have a fascination with things that are "so bad they're good." I watch Mystery Science Theater 3000. I used to very proudly drive a Geo Metro and brag about it. I dig the band Journey. And I do like the fact that tintype photographers in the 1800s were "bottom of the barrel" street vendors.

However, I do not create "junk" and display it in a gallery simply for irony's sake, and I'm not creating work that tries to "legitimize ignorance and also laugh at it," as Scruton puts it. In other words, I'm not trying to make "preemptive kitsch." Further, I don't feel that the tintypes I'm making are an "inferior copy of an existing style," though others may disagree (I was a bit disheartened when I bought the instructional DVD by John Coffer on how to make tintypes, and he stated that the "modern tintype" kits would not allow an artist to create High Art, that only the traditional way, his way, would be deemed as such). I'm not trying to be sentimental, especially for sentimentality's sake, and I sure hope that my art isn't "pretentious to the point of being in bad taste," as Wikipedia puts it.

I intend for my tintypes to remind viewers of the art of the 19th century and the sentimentality that existed there, but my hope is that their thoughts don't stop there. I want to connect the subject matter to more modern concepts, some of which I mentioned in my thought paper this month. As such, I intend to do more than just repeat conventions and formulas of the past.

more colored tins

More colored tintypes, once again using a combination of oil paint, gouache, and india ink.

Thanks to Jesseca for a great phone call last night! Per your request, I will be using this blog over the next few days/weeks to make clearer my definitions of nostalgia, kitsch, camp, and memory, to see how each of these fits in/doesn't fit in with what I'm doing.

.

Also, here's a section that I added to my thought paper when I sent it to Jesseca, but it's not included in the version I posted below. Thanks to Mary Mayer for the suggestion to add something a bit more personal to my paper!:

.

"Addition as erasure; artificial as real; fiction as truth – these are the themes that are being explored in my tintypes, which I am now hand-coloring as well. I am creating loving portraits of beings that have no memory, and no way of relating their history. However, I have a history with these antique store mannequins that I can share. I have known of them and have “visited” them for ten years now, and I believe that I have photographed these mannequins more than the real people that have been close to me over the years. As a child taking pictures, I photographed landscapes almost exclusively with a tiny Kodak Disc camera, and even into college most of my work was centered on nature, not people. For most of my life I felt a slight distance from other people for reasons hopefully to be explored in later artworks and “thought papers” such as this. Photographing the mannequins was one method I found of exploring the human form minus the human interaction. This “fear” of interaction, for lack of a better term, is no longer as much of an issue as it once was, but the interest in the mannequins has remained."

More colored tins

Oil paint, gouache, and india ink have been applied to these.

Thanks to Fawn for a great meeting yesterday!

It's stinking hot today...more blog posting when it's cooler.

Paper #2, "Rough Draft"

So here's what I've written so far for my second paper due Sept. 1 (yeah, I know it's a little early, but I've had a lot on my mind with these pieces, and frankly I've had more time to write lately than to make artwork). It feels a little disjointed to me right now, and there's some themes that I didn't add, including the idea of fetish, because it seemed like it might be overload for one paper. Please please please give me any thoughts, questions, and comments you have before Sept. 1 so I can make improvements! I'll try to do the same for anyone else who posts their papers!

Here goes:

In centuries past, the feeling of nostalgia was considered to be a neurosis caused by a swelling of the brain. At some point around the turn of the 19th century, it became a marketable industry. How was it that nostalgia made the sharp turn from feared, irrational thought to longed, embraced emotion? Is it possible that the proliferation of photography, with its promise of truthfully recording the present (which immediately becomes the past) was paramount in the change? It seems likely, especially since photographs created during the first sixty years or so of the craft’s existence appear to people today to be steeped in nostalgia, practically regardless of the subject. Many find it practically impossible to look at old photographs or even old-looking photographs without injecting a healthy dose of bittersweet longing for the past into them. This can be a problem for the fine art photographer. A majority of the fine art world of today views nostalgia in a similar way to those who lived centuries ago: with distrust bordering on disdain. Therefore, it is imperative that any artist working in early photographic processes or a process that harkens back to old photographs must deeply understand and deal with this phenomenon.

This is not to say that any trace of nostalgia within a piece of artwork is a cancer that must be surgically removed. It does, however, mean that the artist must be careful not to get “caught up” in it; or if he does, be able to defend it. My own artwork up to this point has been in danger of being lost in the sea of nostalgia, which is fine for marketing to the masses at craft fairs and sidewalk art shows, but it does little to further my own artistic development and intellectual voice. Taking pictures of “old things with an old process,” as one of my professors at Lesley put it, can only take me so far. I must begin to find some inner meanings in my work. Why, for instance, am I so interested in the mannequins at a large antique store near my home that I return to photograph them repeatedly? Why am I printing these images with a process similar to 19th century tintypes? And if I am insistent on continuing to produce these images, how do I use them to create fine art that will speak to more than just pure nostalgia?

At the June MFA residency I was directed by more than one person to the book, Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance by Geoffrey Batchen. It has ended up being an indispensable resource for me, breaking down in very clear, concise prose the relationship between photography and memory. Batchen’s book is important because it takes a rare serious look at portraiture photography of ordinary people in the 19th century and how these images were used and embellished by their owners with the intention of enhancing their memories. Unfortunately for these people, according to Batchen and Siegfried Kracauer, the German critic he cites, their attempts to bring people “back to life” through photography were invariably futile:

“Photography captures too much information to function as memory. It is too coherent and too linear in its articulation of time and space. It obeys the rules of nonfiction. Memory, in contrast, is selective, fuzzy in outline, intensively subjective, often incoherent, and invariably changes over time – a conveniently malleable form of fiction.”

A photograph is able to answer the questions “what” and “where,” at best. It may be able to show a viewer what a person’s face looks like at a particular age, what kind of clothing they wore, what some of their surroundings were like. It may even allow a viewer to recall a treasured memory of an interaction or conversation with the person in the photograph; it cannot, however, contain a memory itself. The question “why” cannot be accurately answered by a photograph, and even “when” is an answer that can’t be trusted. It is always, therefore, the viewer’s job to create a history for or memory of the subject in the photograph. This is where nostalgia rears its potentially ugly head.

In Forget Me Not, Batchen instructs the reader to “think back to childhood. Can you remember it? Or do the images that come to mind resemble the photographs you have been shown of your childhood? Has photography quietly replaced your memories with its own?” I would answer yes and no to this question. Photography, especially the family snapshot, tends to capture only one side of the subjects’ lives: the happy moments, the events and times that people want to remember. How often are the bad times we experience, or even simply our mundane daily rituals, rushed to be captured on film? I have vivid memories of sad, painful moments of my childhood that were not photographed, nor would anyone have thought to photograph them. Photography is particularly susceptible to nostalgia, I believe, because of this. We expect to see a positive view of life in portraits and candid snapshots; our minds are trained this way at an early age, when our parents and grandparents sit us down to look through the album of “family memories.” We sit, look, and long for a pleasant past that didn’t really exist. “Why can’t our lives be more like the people’s in these pictures?”

With my series of mannequin tintypes, I am currently attempting to make an ironic comment on this phenomenon of “created memory.” I was told often during the June residency that it was difficult to tell if some of the portraits I created were of real people or mannequins. Some people got the impression that the mannequins were coming to life; others had the exact opposite response, believing that these were real people who had seemed to turn artificial. Geoffrey Batchen makes an interesting comment in his book that helps me relate 19th century portraits to the work I am producing: “In early photographs, it seems, if one wanted to look lifelike in the eventual image, one had to pose as if dead. Not surprisingly, the resulting portraits have all the animation of a wax effigy.” Exposure times for photographs during a good part of the 19th century were quite long – in some cases so long that sitters would have their heads supported by clamps to keep the final image from being blurred. The resulting poses were often unnatural and lifeless. In an attempt to inject more “reality” in these old ambrotypes and tintypes, they were often hand-colored by the photo studio that took them. A mixture of media, including transparent oil paint, India ink, and wax crayon or chalk pastel, was used to coat the image’s surface. Some contain a minimum of color: some rose in the cheeks, a bit of gold on buttons and jewelry. Other photographs were almost obliterated by color. A person’s face might be colored using transparent paint, while the rest of the image is drowned in opaque ink and crayon to the point where it resembles a folk art painting. In these, Batchen argues, “the epistemological presence of the photograph is strengthened by its perceptual absence. These images, so simple at first glance, exploit a complex form of palimpsest; they could be said to offer ‘an erasure which allows what it obliterates to be read.’”

Addition as erasure; artificial as real; fiction as truth – these are the themes that are being explored in my tintypes, which I am now hand-coloring as well. I am creating loving portraits of beings that have no memory, and no way of relating their history. However, I have a history with these antique store mannequins that I can share. I have known of them and have “visited” them for ten years now. As time passed they moved from room to room; their clothing changed; a hand shifted from desk to sofa. They inhabit the bizarre world of the antique store, watching over objects that once had a useful purpose in a home but now are in a historical limbo, waiting to be adopted or destroyed. I do not consider the mannequins to be “friends” of some sort, but I do think of them fondly, and I look forward to seeing them when entering the store and breathe a slight sigh of relief when I turn a corner and find one standing “where I left it” the last time I was there. The feeling may have something to do with a human’s desire to see faces and bodies in all places and objects. James Elkins states in his book, The Object Stares Back, “The face is definitely the object I see best. I see the most in it: in fact I see far more than I am aware of seeing, more than I could ever describe or list. It is the site of the most nuanced looking of which I am capable, and I am lucky if I see anything else in the world with a tenth of the concentration that I train on faces.”

Of course, I could look into the eyes of an antique store mannequin until the cows come home and would not find any true understanding or meaning behind them. The same is true of 19th century photographic portraits. We have as much information about the people in these photos as we do of a mannequin standing in front of us. We must create a history for them using the clues we see and potential memories we have. Viewers of my tintypes are welcomed to bring their own histories and memories to the works. They can find nostalgia in them if they like, but to do so they must grapple with the knowledge that the subject in the photograph is not real, and following that, that photography itself plays in inherent untruths. As Geoffrey Batchen says, “memory…is both artifice and reality, something perceived, invented, and projected, all at once.”

New Colored Tins

Slowly getting better at this. I still need more colors, though. I ordered some, and I also ordered some gouache so that I can hopefully run over some of the backgrounds in opaque paint to see how that affects the image.

New Tintypes

Here's the new batch of tintypes I produced. I'm happy with most of them. Some need to be redone to fix slight problems, but overall they pretty well match the previous tintypes I've made. As before, some of these read pretty quickly as mannequins, while others manage to reach that in-between level of human/dummy that I like. The girl with the teddy bear could give me nightmares, and the man in the striped shirt looks real until you get to his very squared-off haircut.

So the big question, the one I've been trying to answer this month, is what does this all mean? What the hell am I trying to say with these slightly spooky images of mannequins? The more I study 19th century portrait photography and some of the more recent theory regarding the work of this time period, the more I think that the pieces speak to the following ideas:

• The false notion of truth in photography: while the use of Photoshop has sullied the photograph's claim of absolute truth in recent years, there is still a largely-held belief that a photograph cannot lie, that it is an unobjective vision of reality. Unfortunately, every photograph lies. Whatever is cropped out of a photo tells a larger truth that can't be seen, and what is in the frame is chosen by the photographer, consciously or not. Also, the fact that a photograph tells the story of only a single moment in time takes away the temporal qualities that truth relies on. This allows the image in the photograph to be misconstrued by the viewer, leading to thousands of possible meanings and outcomes.
• The lie of nostalgia: in his book Forget Me Not, Geoffrey Batchen makes the comment that in past centuries, nostalgia was considered a very dangerous idea that was even labeled a mental disorder by some. Now, nostalgia is marketed to the masses. We like to look at the past as a simpler, better time, even if it never was that. People tend to look at old or simply old-fashioned photographs in this way, mostly because of the false notion of truth within them. A viewer can easily create his or her own story about a person dressed to the nines in an old tintype or daguerreotype, and imagine a sublime world for this person. It's easy to ignore the artificiality in all of this and believe whatever story you can come up with.
• The artificiality of memory: Geoffrey Batchen, again, makes an interesting point in his book when he asks the reader if his or her childhood memories are anything like the photographs taken during their childhood. Probably not; how often are difficult or painful times rushed to be recorded on film? Memory is a fluid construct which needs time to be created and destroyed. A photograph is a slice of unmovable time, automatically making it an artificial memory. At best, a photo can tell what and where with some accuracy. Why is impossible to decipher, and even when is an answer that can't be trusted.

So, making images of mannequins with tintypes is a somewhat ironic way of making the points above. There's lots more nuance and ideas to it than that, of course, including modern fashion and celebrity photography and its own problems with artificiality, but for now I think this is a good way of looking at it. Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Please share!!!

Meh

Had an ok day in the darkroom today...tried to make some tintypes from the photos I posted the other day, with mixed success. The problem with using color slides in the enlarger is that the exposure times shift wildly from image to image. In pictures with artificial, orangish light, the exposure times are extra long because the tintype emulsion is naturally resistant to orange light (just like regular b&w photo paper; that's why darkroom safelights are orange). So I tried hard to keep frustration from setting in. I'll scan and post these in a couple days once they're dry and I've collected them.

I've also been playing around with hand-coloring tintypes with oil paint. I bought one of those cheesy Marshalls oil kits to start with, and I'm using tintype "seconds:" ones with imperfections on the emulsion or under/overexposed images that won't be part of any final display. I'm not great at it yet, but I must say that they look much better in person than they do in these scans; the scanner managed to make every brushstroke stand out. Also, at the moment I only have five colors, hence the obnoxious yellow hair. Ugh.

Also some "panoramas" from the old hotel and the city of Baahston using my half-frame camera. These are just from scanned negatives, no printing yet.