The MFA Saga

Images with stone

2008-10-28T06:47:00.000-07:00

More images, etc

2008-09-25T14:09:00.001-07:00

Here's a mock-up of what I hope my spread in the MFA Graduate Catalog will look like (lookit me, I can use Microsoft Publisher! Woo!)

And then here are some more pictures of the latest Gettysburg images on glass. Now it's only a matter of choosing the best three or four for the exhibition, preparing the appropriate stone bases, and materializing some pedestals (and transporting them to Boston in January, the worst part). I've decided to name them the Cenotaph series, and thanks to Jesseca Ferguson for the word. It literally means "empty tomb," which fits in very nicely with my absence/presence theme:

Gettysburg on Glass

2008-07-03T17:45:00.001-07:00

...for my new mentor to view. New images to come in the next few weeks, after I make another trip down there to photograph.

The other half of the project?

2008-05-04T12:23:00.001-07:00

Many thanks to my mentor Liz for yet another great meeting. I'm glad that I decided to bring these tintypes along, as they may just be the missing link that holds together the Gettysburg project! Devils Den, to me, has always been the true "monument" at Gettysburg. While the other statues and memorials around the battlefields try their best to inspire awe and strength within the visitors (I would argue that they usually don't), Devils Den does it naturally. This huge pile of boulders, some about fifty feet high, are thrust up violently from the rolling hills and pastures surrounding it. During the war snipers used Devils Den as a place to hide, and control of the rock formation changed sides many times during the three days of battle. I like the one panorama I've done of this place in tin so far. I'm sure I'll do more now.

New Paper

2008-05-03T15:55:00.000-07:00

After six months, I finally have internet at home again. Granted, it's satellite internet (no cable out here, and I'll be damned if I ever get stuck with dial-up again), but I can finally post blog entries and do MFA work (and shop and all of the other e-wonders) without possibly getting in trouble at work for doing so. It's a brave new world, folks.

Attached is the paper for May, as well as mock-ups - just mock-ups made in photoshop, for the future images on glass that I discuss in the paper. The Gettysburg trip was great...we're already planning for a third in the Fall. Just in time for thesis, which is getting closer every day. Ugh.

MFA Paper
April/May 2008

“…How we understand space is affected by how we understand time. What was here is inseparable from what is here: it must all be considered together, without recourse to nostalgia or amnesia.”[1]

Perhaps living in a place like Gettysburg naturally causes one to become more responsive to landscape. As a child I would go to the Civil War battlefields here and see thousands upon thousands of people stare across a field, studying every rise and dip in the landscape, every tree and rock, as if these things themselves contained the essence of the horrific events of 1863. In very few other places would one see a phenomenon such as this. Since childhood I seem to have been drawn to other areas prized for their landscapes for one reason or another. I have lived in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, known for inspiring artists from the Hudson River School, and now I work in and reside near Cooperstown, NY, best known for baseball (“invented” by, ironically, Abner Doubleday, who fought for the Union at Gettysburg and has a monument there) but also for the beautiful Otsego Lake, headwaters of the Susquehanna River.

Each of these places is visited by tourists for different reasons, and an interesting future project for me would be to investigate and record how areas become and are maintained as grand tourism centers. At the moment, though, I am focusing my energies on understanding Gettysburg specifically, as a center for history and memory. Jim Weeks, an American history professor at Penn State University, has written a crucial book on the subject of Gettysburg as a marketer of memory. In Gettysburg: Memory, Market, and An American Shrine, Weeks outlines what few have taken the time to study: the history of Gettysburg after the battle. He explores how those in charge of maintaining the battlefields and town over the years have created a unique blend of the sacred and secular. Nearly 150 years after the battle, however, the marriage is not complete. States Weeks, “In his most famous speech, [President] Lincoln said the living could not hallow the Gettysburg battlefield any more than the dead who fell already had. Successive generations ignoring those words have met with frustration over a work that defies completion.”[2]

The current method for achieving this unattainable completion is the idea of restoration. Media projects over the past few years, including Ken Burns’ documentary on the Civil War, Michael Shaara’s blend of historical fact and fiction in the book The Killer Angels, and the Ted Turner-produced film Gettysburg have invigorated a new population of battlefield-seekers (and Civil War reenactors) who wished to see the landscape in its historical setting. What did the soldiers who fought on Little Round Top or at Pickett’s Charge see in 1863? In an effort to reflect the current theme of what Jim Weeks calls “heritage,” the Gettysburg National Military Park Commission (GNMP) has begun an effort to restore the landscape as much as possible to how it appeared in July of 1863. This plan will, for example, “remove 576 acres of ‘non-historic trees’ but restore 115 ‘historic’ acres of trees and 160 acres of orchards (using ornamental rather than fruit-bearing trees).”[3] These actions inspire Jim Weeks to ask, “If all agree that certain ground is hallowed, does it need to have its historical integrity restored? Moreover, is there not a difference between preserving land to remember an event and transforming the land to look like it did when the event occurred?”[4] The question becomes all the more pertinent, and complex, when one realizes that this restoration process does not include the removal of the nearly 1,400 monuments scattered across the battlefields, making Gettysburg the most monument-filled battlefield on the planet.

“Monumental architecture and sculpture rarely hold their own against space or time. The feeling of reverence sought by monument makers is not easy to come by in our irreverent society.”[5] Lucy Lippard’s words ring very true – Maya Lin is the only artist working today that immediately comes to mind who has produced effective contemporary memorials – in regards to the plethora of marble and bronze sculptures at Gettysburg. The heyday of monument-building on the battlefields was between 1885 and 1910 (although the construction of them continued throughout the 20th century), building to a point where certain areas of the landscape truly look like oversize versions of the rural cemeteries the post-war battlefield plans were modeled after. Politics played a major part in the size and placement of monuments, as each regiment and family members of important generals fought to ensure that their respective sculptures were as imposing and impressive as possible. However, as a child in Gettysburg I spent very little time studying the monuments; I was far more interested in the landscape, especially the grand boulders of Devils Den, and the striking expanse of fields that became the setting for Pickett’s Charge. Monuments only interested me if they permitted me to achieve an overhead view of the landscape surrounding it, such as the tower on Little Round Top or the massive, two-story Pennsylvania Monument on statue-laden Cemetery Ridge. Returning to the battlefield this year as a 29 year-old, I noticed that other visitors had a similar relationship to the monuments. Rarely do they now inspire the kind of reverence which was intended when they were created; they simply become oversized, expensive information tablets – they fought here, he died there – or convenient backdrops for group photographs. They are an archaic method of remembrance, overly laden with nostalgia and taken seriously by practically no one in either the art world or society in general.

So now, perhaps absurdly, I am using a photographic process that many would agree to be archaic in order to create images in which I can erase the equally antiquated Gettysburg monuments from the landscape. I am utilizing liquid emulsion to create black and white photographs of the Gettysburg battlefields and monuments on thick sheets of glass. Then, I scratch the monuments off of the glass using an X-acto knife, leaving a transparent silhouette of the statue. What remains is the landscape surrounding the statue. When I first started performing this act, I asked myself the question, how would if affect the Gettysburg landscape and its interpretation by the public if the monuments were no longer on the battlefields? The intention was partly to complete the job of the restorers, taking their restorations to limits that they may sometimes consider but would never act on, for fear of repercussion. However, I soon realized that the erasure of the monument from the image actually returns the viewer’s gaze to the space the monument once occupied. The figures become ghosts (fitting, since Gettysburg has a lucrative market involving ghosts and ghost tours these days), permeating the landscape and invoking loss, time, and memory. The images also invoke photographs taken at the battlefields, using glass plate negatives, directly after the battle by photographers such as Matthew Brady.

It must be remembered that the monuments I am scratching out of my photographs were made by artists. Local, little-known sculptors as well as famous artists are both represented by memorials at Gettysburg. The North Carolina monument, completed in 1929, was sculpted by Gutzon Borglum, who is best known (for better or worse) for sculpting the giant portraits at Mount Rushmore. The sculptures, especially the portrait statues and equestrian monuments, are direct throwbacks to ancient Roman art and architecture, and while this may have been significant imagery to American culture during the 19th century, it has since lost much of its import. When it comes to monuments in contemporary culture, it seems that less is more. States Lucy Lippard, “some of the most impressive ideas for monuments have dealt directly with the fact that absence can be more powerfully evoked than presence.”[6] She cites examples such as the large hole that Claes Oldenberg had dug behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1967, creating a negative space to offset the monumental, mausoleum effect of the museum itself. In scratching out the monuments from my photographs, I wonder what the general public’s response will be. Offended? Amused? Indifferent? Will the erasure affect how the viewer interprets memory, history, and the landscape? I am hopeful that my works will add to a crucial, post-modern conversation about these issues.

[1] Lucy Lippard, The Lure of the Local (New York: The New Press, 1997), 116.
[2] Jim Weeks, Gettysburg: Memory, Market, and An American Shrine (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2003), 225.
[3] Ibid, 191-192.
[4] Ibid, 194.
[5] Lucy Lippard, The Lure of the Local (New York: The New Press, 1997), 107.
[6] Ibid, 110.

Relay for Life

2008-04-10T11:52:00.000-07:00

Just before Christmas last year, a very good friend of mine, Ron Wilcox, was lost to cancer after a long struggle. He was my photo professor during my undergrad and helped me to appreciate not only the art of photography, but also the importance of going the extra mile to make something as good and high quality as it could possibly be. We became good friends and stayed in constant contact after I graduated. We also became Netflix buddies: we would often go to each other's houses to watch obscure movies or old classics. His sense of humor was what I'll remember him for most, though. There wasn't a pun he didn't know, and he was lightning-quick with them.

After a long spring and summer in chemo treatments, and finally surgery, everything seemed to have gone perfectly. Ron was gaining his strength, in great spirits, and looking forward to all the activities that he was hoping to be doing before the cancer hit, including making a grand trip of Asia, where he had made many friends in the Peace Corps years ago. Then a few weeks before Christmas his cancer returned and it spread more quickly than anyone could anticipate. When he called me a week before he died I didn't realize how bad it was, that he was actually going through his entire list of friends, spending hours upon hours on the phone because he knew the end was coming. The next thing I knew he was gone.

I say all this to finally say something not very eloquent but damned true: cancer sucks. I hate it. I want to destroy it before it gets to anyone else I hold dear (I just learned that one of my aunts has cancer now too). I've done Relay for Life for the past few years, but now it holds extra meaning. If you wish to donate to the cause, please go to the following link. Thanks.

http://main.acsevents.org/goto/kevingray

And, here's a link to some of Ron's work. "Me and my RC" will always be a classic to me. :)

Ron Wilcox

Thought Paper for March: Maps

2008-04-04T05:38:00.000-07:00

Kevin Gray
MFA Thought Paper
April 2008

“The map, and map-derived art, is in itself fundamentally an overlay – simultaneously a place, a journey, and a mental concept; abstract and figurative; remote and intimate. Maps are like ‘stills’ of voyages, stasis laid on motion. Our current fascination with them may have something to do with our need for a meaningful overview, for a way to oversee and understand our location.”1

My interest in maps reaches far back to my childhood. As an adolescent I would spend hours poring over road and trail maps, creating detailed plans for trips that would more often than not never become realities. I can remember planning elaborate daily schedules for vacations to places like Glacier National Park in Montana and Baxter State Park in Maine, studying the maps and guidebooks closely and writing out timetables so that we could squeeze as much exploration as possible out of every day. I would use the contour lines of a map to attempt to determine the steepness and overall difficulty of a trail and would adapt the timetables accordingly. The destination for most of these hikes and trips was a prominent view or scenic overlook; these, to me, would make the trip worthwhile. These “trips on paper” were idealized vacations, plans not affected by forces such as weather, delays, or fatigue. The only factors that mattered were distance, time, and destination.

I still use maps to plan hikes and trips today, but hopefully I am now a bit more realistic about the expectations. However I often continue to want to idealize the landscape, which has led to years of emulating photographers such as Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. Not only did they photograph in the beautiful, exotic locales I had always hoped (and in some cases, planned) to visit, but their images of Yosemite and the Western U.S. amplified the romantic qualities of these landscapes and turned them into the sublime. I have never been to the West, but I have spent a great deal of time in places where the spiritual precursors to these photographers, the Hudson River School of artists, painted their sublime landscapes. I photograph in the White Mountains of New Hampshire and the Catskill Mountains of New York, and I often find myself drawn to vistas that share this romantic quality.

If contemporary art has taught us anything, however, it is that this style of landscape photography, or any photography for that matter, is inherently a lie. Even when a landscape photographer intentionally strays from the conventions of composition and form, as in the case of someone like Lee Friedlander, the rectangular frame of the photographic format automatically forces the artist to make choices about what is to be included in the image. What is behind the photographer? What is directly above and below? What time, and on what date, was the photograph taken? All of these potential unknowns add a crucial layer of uncertainty that makes the photograph a compelling image to look at.

Similarly, a map attempts to show the absolute truth but falls short no matter how hard it may try. Denis Wood states, “No map can show everything. Could it, it would no more than reproduce the world, which, without the map, we already have. It is only its selection from the world’s overwhelming richness that justifies the map.”2 However, Wood’s statement is only a part of the paradox. While a map shows less than what actually exists for practical reasons – the absence of trees, stoplights, and telephone poles on a road map, for example – it also shows more than a person living on earth can see at any one time. The overhead, birds-eye view of a typical map is not affected by walls, trees, hills, or the myriad of other obstacles that block our standard, gravity-enforced view of the world. One can see the topography of an area as a whole, which creates a new relationship to that area. This information helps us to imagine what exists around that hillside, behind that tree, or even underneath our feet.

I am exploring the issue of truth in the representation, and knowledge, of the landscape as it is recorded in photography and maps, through a series of artwork. Poring through my negatives of photographs taken in the White Mountains, I have begun to search for images where 1) I can locate on a map with near exactitude where I was standing when the photograph was taken, and 2) a great expanse of the landscape is visible. I am studying these photographs closely to determine with as much accuracy as possible what sections of the appropriate US Geological Survey topographical map can be seen in the image. Using this information, I then block out all areas on the map in black paint that are not visible in the photograph. When the photograph and the altered map are juxtaposed, the respective difficulties that each medium has with the notion of truth are revealed.

“To ask for a map is to say, ‘Tell me a story.’”3

Not all mapmakers create what they may consider art, but many artists make maps. Peter Turchi, an author and teacher, argues in his book, Maps of the Imagination, that writing is a form of mapmaking because writers need to know how to lead a reader from Point A to Point B. There are many visual artists who have used maps directly in their work, or have taken scientific elements from them. Jasper Johns incorporated maps of the United States in some of his paintings. Architect and artist Maya Lin explored maps and topography in great detail for her recent Systematic Landscapes exhibition. Lin utilized computer mapmaking technology to create sculptures in a gallery setting that spoke both to the landscape and the systems humans use to understand it. Other artists use maps to understand the story of their own lives or to create new realities. Katherine Harmon compiled many examples of these kinds of maps made by artists such as William Wegman and Claes Oldenberg in her book, You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination. By appropriating the symbols and techniques of mapmakers, all of the artists listed here create new meanings and stories that relate to traditional maps but add a conceptual layer to them.

The recent event that sparked my new interest in maps and mapping was my October trip to Gettysburg, where I lived as a child. There I was reintroduced to a style of map that is familiar to any school student in a social studies class: the battlefield map. One of the key methods used by people to understand the movements of troops and the strategies used during battle are maps that reduce the soldiers, sometimes hundreds or thousands of troops, to simple colored rectangles and/or arrows. These abstract symbols quickly come to be understood by the viewer, or reader, as people and events within the story of the map. The rectangles (often colored red and blue, especially in Civil War maps), become the people participating in the battle, and the arrows not only depict the direction traveled by the troops but are also understood as representing a particular span of time. Once the symbols are deciphered, a viewer can quickly begin to see which group is attacking, which group is defending, and perhaps most importantly, who is winning. Therefore, these battlefield maps are quite effective in telling stories, as they give us setting, important characters, conflict, and a sense of the passing of time.

The conquering and defense of territory has a long history in the Western world that I need not detail here. It is sufficed to say that this conflict comes in both grand and small scales, from the invasion of entire countries to a homeowner’s battle with a neighbor’s curious dog. During my lifetime I have lived in many different places, rarely attaining a true sense of home in any of them. Some of these places I lived in for ten years or more; others, only a few months. Regardless of the length of time, there was a lingering sense in all of these places that my existence there would be temporary, that I would be moving on at a moment’s notice. Part of this feeling was due to a natural bit of wanderlust on my part, but I also felt a sense of various outside forces threatening to push me away from my recent “claim.” I have begun to play with this phenomenon in a series of artwork called Personal Conquests. “Play” is a carefully chosen word here, because children play War from an early age. Forts are constructed from snow or wooden boards and are fiercely defended by the kids who claim them. What begins as a game can sometimes turn ugly and bring out as much raw anger and emotion that a real war, waged by adults, can generate. The artworks I am creating, from a conceptual standpoint, are barely more sophisticated than one of these childhood battles. I am making a series of maps in which I “attack” and “defend” the places I have lived during my lifetime. I first traced on mulberry paper the contour lines from USGS topographical maps that correspond to the regions where my homes were, including Littlestown, PA, Augusta, ME, and Crawford Notch, NH. Then, using the lay of the land as a guide, I laid out battle strategies for my imaginary troops on a separate sheet of paper. Troops in red attack and attempt to conquer; troops in blue defend their home. I plan to attach these two sheets together using a thin layer of encaustic wax, creating a translucent effect. Because these fictional stories of battles are depicted through maps (and because they will be sealed in wax), they will have an air of authenticity to them despite their complete absurdity.

The two projects of mine that I have discussed in this paper have something in common other than the use of maps. They are both grounded in, and taken from, the places that have been important to me over the years. Places that I have called home, and the places where I actually feel at home (there is a difference) are the subjects of these artworks. I am combining the nostalgic and the scientific, the fictional and the real, in my work. Both are valid ways of perceiving and by combining them a rich – if complicated – method of understanding place can be achieved.

1. Lucy Lippard, Overlay (New York: The New Press, 1983), 122.
2. Denis Wood, The Power of Maps (New York: Guildord 1992), quoted in Peter Turchi, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer (Texas: Trinity University Press, 2004), 40.
3.Peter Turchi, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer (Texas: Trinity University Press 2004), 11.

Maya Lin rocks the hiz-ouse (yes, I deserve to be hit for that)

2008-02-29T08:47:00.000-08:00

Until recently I only knew Maya Lin for her Vietnam Veterans' Memorial in Washington, D.C. (which she designed in GRAD SCHOOL...ugh, it makes me sick). It turns out that her more recent work is some of the coolest, most elegant I've ever seen, and it's becoming a real influence on me.

You all owe it to yourselves to watch this documentary, and then pick up her book, "Boundaries," in which she writes about her work. Awesome stuff.

Maya Lin, Systematic Landscapes

DON'T PANIC!...or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love my Artwork

2008-02-29T06:49:00.000-08:00

Good gravy. The past week to week and a half or so I've been steadily throwing myself into more of a panic about what I've been doing for grad school. I'm a second-guesser by nature, but lately it's become third and fourth-guessing as I can feel that dreaded six-letter word - THESIS - peeking at me from around the corner. My typical manner of working on art is to fiddle around with three or four projects at once, while trying to push away the new ideas that pop into my head so that I don't find myself working on 27 projects at the same time. I know that I need to focus now so that I have a really good, solid body of work come January when I graduate...but what to work on? It's gotten to the point a couple of times where I go into my studio and just freeze up, not working on anything because I'm not sure what project I should be devoting my time to, or if any of them at all are worth it.

On Sunday I went to visit Liz, my mentor, with these problems in mind (Liz, if you're reading this, I think I left some USGS maps at your house in a cardboard tube! Hold onto them for me until our next meeting, would you?). I really knew I was in trouble when she would ask me important questions about the work and I responded with a mixture of broken sentences, primitive grunts, and silent pauses long enough to drive a Mac truck through. Part of the problem is that I've tossed aside so many of the projects I've done since I started the program. I let go of Polaroid emulsion lifts (which in hindsight is a good thing, since they've now discontinued ALL of their instant film. Bastards...), the mannequin tintype series I think is still interesting but not what I want to pursue right now, and the old Woodstock hotel series and anything that seemed purely "nostalgic" has taken a back seat as well. To top it off I'm rethinking the Gettysburg work and really can't make much more progress on it until I go back in April (having a full-time job and being on a tight budget can be a drag). Now I've thrown maps and mapmaking into the mix and...yeah, I really felt like I was spread too thin.

Two things have helped since the panicking began. The first was a suggestion that Liz made to me during our meeting. She wants me to write an artist's statement NOW, which concisely encompasses the works that I want to pursue at this moment. The results of this are below. The second bit of help was something that was right under my nose and yet I so rarely take advantage of: the advice of Sarah, my fiancee. Maybe it's because she doesn't have a great knowledge of contemporary art, or maybe it's because she tells it EXACTLY how she sees it and never ever holds back (what a strain to my precious little ego!), but I tend not to ask her too often for her critique of my work. What a mistake. Yesterday I brought her up to the studio and explained to her what I was trying to do and just told her, "let me have it." Her knowledge of history and her very honest perceptions actually helped me a great deal, and now I feel a lot better about the work.

So here's the Artist's Statement of the moment. Hopefully it won't change too much by the time THESIS rolls around:

Every landscape has its own histories, both natural and human. A landscape, or a space, becomes a place to us when we begin to feel that we know it on a personal level, and we create our own history with it. However, this knowledge comes in many forms, and is also very subjective. The artwork I create deals with my knowledge of the places I have become familiar with, and how it compares and contrasts with the knowledge of others.

As I stated, knowledge of place comes in many forms. Memory, nostalgia, recorded history, and science all shape the way we see the landscape. History is a story that changes in meaning as it is told in new iterations through generations. We try to solidify human events through words, maps, memorials, etc...but these are mere abstract symbols that are constantly jostled and warped by the passage of time. It can become easy to misunderstand a place and its history, to become so wrapped up in a particular moment that one cannot see anything beyond it, or to feel that a place is so familiar that one overstates their knowledge of it. This can happen on both personal and cultural levels, for a multitude of reasons.

I am using a mixture of mediums and imagery - photographs on glass, maps, encausitcs, etc. - to explore my own connection to the landscape as well as cultural connections. I combine the scientific with the personal to come to new understandings of place, as well as to discover the limitations of such knowledge.

Hmm...still a little too broad. What do all y'all think?

The answer to last week's puzzler

2008-02-22T06:05:00.001-08:00

So, just how much of that map is seen in the picture I posted last week? Approximately, this much. I used the contour lines on the topo map, as well as my knowledge of the area, to figure out to the best of my ability how much of the land is actually seen. I sacrificed a $6 USGS map of that particular "quadrangle" and blacked out everything else. On a poster-sized map, it's pretty dramatic. Standing on top of that mountain, or lots of mountains in the Whites, you almost feel like you can see forever. Turns out that you're not seeing nearly as much of the earth as you think you are (and when you photograph it, you see even less).

So what does this have to do with Gettysburg, tintypes, or anything else I've been doing? Um, nothing. But I'm in a minor limbo with some of those projects. I just picked up the large, thick sheets of glass I'll be re-doing some of the Gettysburg panoramas on, but they need to be prepped and coated before I can print. I also need more pictures of Gettysburg, and I won't be going back until April. There's an encaustic project I'm going to do, but I need to take a workshop in encaustics that won't happen till mid-March. These blacked-out maps can be done anytime, whenever I find a photo I want to use and order the appropriate map. I need to get some matte black paint, though. This glossy stuff is awful.

Can you see it?

2008-02-15T06:39:00.000-08:00

I can. Here's a topographic map of Crawford Notch in NH, where I used to live. Pretend you're standing on the spot marked "Elephant Head" and looking south.

Now look at this picture I took years ago from Elephant Head, looking south. What parts of the map can you see in the photograph?

As an extention of the map project I've been working on, I'd love to go back to all the places I've lived (or loved) and play this "mapping" game.

Looking for the "index"

2008-02-11T09:24:00.000-08:00

For all of the photographers out there, I highly recommend the book, Photography Theory, in which James Elkins leads a group of art historians in a panel discussion on what photography is, how it's related to the art world, and how it should be considered and handled in 21st century art criticism. The actual transcript of the panel discussion is kind of strange: it definitely creates more questions than answers (something you'll be used to if you're as big a fan of LOST on tv as I am!), and many of the historians and theorists get stuck on the issue of the "index." That is, can a photograph really be considered a reasonable referent to the real world? A photograph isn't the real thing, but it's meant to stand in for the real thing. The panel went round and round on this issue without really getting anywhere, but what is great about the book is that James Elkins asked a whole bunch of OTHER historians and critics to look at the panel transcript and write their own response to it. The result is that you get lots of very well-informed opinions on the matter, and, for me, I began to understand why particular photographers working today - Gursky, Ruff, Burtynzky, the Bechers, are so HUGE in the art world right now. All of them are ground in "index": making unemotional records of the world (people, buildings, landscape) that, even if digital manipulation is done in some instances, look real. Seems to be the big thing currently.

Anyway, great book.

Some fun facts about Gettysburg

2008-02-04T11:51:00.000-08:00

Sometimes it pays to work at a museum/historical association. Our library holds a wonderful book I just discovered, titled Gettysburg: Memory, Market, and an American Shrine by Jim Weeks. This book records not the history of Gettysburg during the battle like pretty much every other book I've seen, instead it records how the town became tourist destination #1 for so many Americans directly after the battle and up to today. The battlefield was first marketed to the same "genteels" (wealthy Americans of leisure), including artists and writers, who went to places like the Hudson River Valley, Niagara Falls, and the White Mountains of NH in the 1800s to experience the "sublime" American landscape. According to Weeks, Gettysburg has since the battle been operating in a strange market where the sacred and the secular are advertised at the same time.

Weeks writes that the National Park Service is currently working on a "restoration" project in the battlefields, in which they will remove 576 acres of "non-historic trees," re-plant 115 acres of "historic" trees, and replace 160 acres of orchards, using ornamental instead of fruit-bearing trees. They will also maintain firewood lots and thickets to appear as they did during battle. Says Weeks in his book, "What visitors will see is not the 1863 battlefield, but a hyperreal version of it that conforms to their image of the original. The simulation will be an 'airbrushed' improvement on the original without authentic blemishes or unpleasantries."

The NPS is doing this to enhance people's "experience" of the battle, to create a sanitized and, dare I say it, a "Disney-fied" version of history. Weeks mentions that the newfound interest in this kind of restoration comes from visitor's preconceived notions of what they will see at the battlefields, thanks to film series like Ken Burns' Civil War and the book The Killer Angels.

Good stuff. It's getting me thinking.

Missing monuments and Maps

2008-01-28T11:12:00.000-08:00

Apologies for the poor quality images (I'm still figuring out the best way to photograph these pictures on glass), but I'd like people's thoughts on what I've been doing since I got home from the residency. I've been taking my panoramas of Gettysburg battlefields and very carefully scratching off the emulsion, removing all of the monuments. Other than the multitude of souvenir stores and museums in town, the only signifiers on the actual landscapes where the battles took place are the thousands of stone monuments scattered about. The monuments are put here for a variety of reasons: to note regiment movements on a particular day, to mark the location where a general was wounded, to celebrate a calvary unit, etc. Now is an odd time for the battlefield because the park service is working to "restore" the landscape to how it looked during 1863. They are cutting down full stands of trees so that visitors can see a more "realistic" view of the pastures that existed during the battle. However, they're conspicuously leaving one thing that was definitely not there at the time: the monuments. If the monuments weren't there, I wonder how that would affect people's views of the landscape, and the history of what happened here. So, I decided to scratch them out of the pictures I took. The strange thing that I wasn't expecting is that the monuments now seem to have MORE presence in the image. This is all a continuation of my exploration of how landscape and memory are intertwined.

I am now also looking quite a bit at maps. I've always been attracted to maps and mapping, and as a kid I would spend hours poring over maps of farwaway places and planning hypothetical trips to them. On day 1 we'd go here. On day 2 we'd take Route whatever south to this place and hike this trail, etc. I still do this kind of thing (and I can't wait to get a handheld GPS unit so I can go geocaching!). Anyway, as a way of exploring all of the various landscapes I've called home over the years, I've begun planning for a series I call "personal conquests." Using USGS topographical maps of the areas I've lived in, I'm zooming into the areas where I used to live and imagining "conquests" and "defenses" of these properties. When you go to a place like Gettysburg (or if you open a social studies textbook from high school) you see lots of maps with red and blue lines and arrows that represent troop movements on them, like the one seen here printed in a TravelBrains guide. I've always been intrigued with maps like this, and I want to play with the very male, western notion of ownership and property (and the way we play "war," as kids and as adults), while at the same time exploring the "lay of the land" in the places I've lived. I've lived in seven or eight different places over the years, having never really felt like any of them were permanent (except for now, a little bit more so). How would the slope of the land affect how my hypothetical "army" would attack, and defend, the lands I have called home? So far I've only made a couple mock-ups of this using transparency paper and sharpies, but I am planning on making large-scale versions with Japanese paper and encaustics. Below are two of the places I've lived: Littlestown, PA and Crawford Notch, NH.

The joys of abstract map symbols...

2008-01-25T12:09:00.001-08:00

as seen by the folks at The Onion. Love it.

Concentric Circles

Meeting with Mentor

2008-01-24T07:17:00.000-08:00

A special thanks to Liz Unterman, my new mentor and Education Coordinator at the Center for Photography at Woodstock, for meeting with me last evening (and for a wonderfully strong cup of coffee to boot!). Liz's personal work deals with many of the same issues I'm working with (place and how it affects identity, and vice versa) and so her comments will definitely help to refine my concepts. Looking forward to a great semester!

Semester Reflection/Future Plans

2008-01-18T11:57:00.000-08:00

3rd Residency Summary
Kevin Gray

In the town I used to live in, there is a foot race called the Pit Run in which I have participated. It isn’t a particularly long race – only ten kilometers – but the way in which the race is laid out makes it seem significantly longer. About two and a half kilometers into the race, the path leaves the flat roads of the valley and begins to rise eight hundred feet or so into the surrounding hills. The halfway point of the race is reached at the top of a very steep hill, where a state college campus overlooks the countryside. For every runner who enters this race, reaching this pinnacle is an important milestone, because he or she knows that “it’s all downhill from here.” And while the downhill portion may be a little bit harder on the knees, it is a refreshing feeling to know that from here on to the finish, the heart won’t be beating quite so hard and that every stride of the legs will be longer. Once the top of the great hill is reached, every runner knows that their chances of making it to the finish line are greatly increased.

I have just reached the middle of the 2 year-long MFA program at the Art Institute of Boston and a similar feeling as above has come over me. The amount of information I’ve taken in during the past year, and the sheer volume of artwork I have created and how it has been enriched, seem absolutely overwhelming when I think about it. The first semester was basically an open invitation for me to experiment, to use any materials I wanted to explore and to investigate a series of subject matter to find common threads between theme and medium. I created Polaroid emulsion lifts, charcoal drawings, tintypes, and photos using liquid emulsion on glass. Subjects in these works included cityscapes, still lifes from an antique store, mannequin portraits, and photographs of an abandoned hotel. The second semester was more of an uphill battle as I fought to streamline my work in terms of both medium and theme. With the indispensable help of my advisor Jesseca Ferguson and artist mentor Fawn Potash, I decided to narrow my exploration to two series: a group of framed mannequin tintypes and a series of landscape panoramas of Gettysburg printed on glass. The tintype images were created to explore nostalgia in art as it related to portraiture, and how both memory and photography create artificial histories in their own ways. The landscape images were the beginning stages of another examination of nostalgia, and how certain American landscapes are recreated and preserved to record a particular moment in time. An important aspect to these works for me is the ability to speak about nostalgia without becoming purely nostalgic. These are the two bodies of work I displayed at the latest residency in January.

The most burning question on my mind as this semester began was, how do these disparate-looking series of work find a common ground (if at all), and would it be reasonable to attempt to tie both works together in a final thesis? It turns out, perhaps not surprisingly, that there were a multitude of answers to this question given to me by my peers and the professors at AIB. Some thought that it was completely possible to do so (and one professor even believed that a third project may be necessary to neatly tie it all together). Others, however, felt that coalescing both projects into one tidy thesis would be as likely as, say, effectively injecting a sports metaphor into a written report about contemporary art. If one reads the first paragraph of this paper again, it can be pretty well deduced which direction I have chosen to take. It could very well be all downhill from here.

Over the next six months I will work to further develop both the tintypes and the images on glass. I feel that both series could become very strong work, and for that reason I choose not to abandon either of them. In fact, I have a third project in mind that may help to tie the projects together, one that involves maps and mapmaking, and I do intend to explore this one during the semester as well. By the end of the semester, when my thesis outline is due, I will have developed through my work a clear answer as to what my thesis should include, and what it should not.

What follows is a list of opinions, suggestions, and questions posed to me by students and faculty at the January residency:

· Explore the idea of landscape as a place that people connect to. Why is there an emotional charge? – John Kramer
· The mannequin tintypes can be pushed farther, add more extravagant layers to the images – JK
· There is a peculiar contrast and resonance between the tintype and the mannequin. This could be enhanced by printing larger – JK
· The theme of landscape is “safer” – JK

· Work on more coherence with the tintypes, making them seem more convincing of a time period and of a cared-for, loved portrait – Jesseca Ferguson

· Nostalgia can be a tricky subject. Focus on it very deeply in both series, or just choose one series so it becomes more manageable – Sunanda Sanyal
· Explore a layered, critical approach to nostalgia through the history of American photography – SS
· The mannequin is iconic and waiting to be written about by someone, but there are richer elements in my landscape images – SS
· Is it necessary to appropriate work and processes of the past to speak about the past? – SS
· Why is America nostalgic about our history while others may not be? – SS
· Look at Hudson River School painters, Native American photography, etc. – SS
· Do not get caught up in institutional (restorative) nostalgia; keep focus on personal (reflective) nostalgia – SS
· Be cold and analytical when exploring these themes, or else face the danger of the “tearful journey” during thesis presentation – SS

· In the landscape images, do more exploration of the way history can be remembered or forgotten and how this affects the landscape – Melissa Good

· Break the boundaries in terms of both series. The tintypes should be “kitschy as hell,” by adding more elements and stretching out beyond the limits of the frames. The landscape images, as well, are too controlled. Try changing the distance between panes of glass, breaking the glass, printing images as a negative, etc. – Oscar Palacio

· Use nostalgia as the tying thread between projects. When thinking about the series, place nostalgia at the top of the list and then put three words under nostalgia for each series that describes how they differ – Deb Todd Wheeler
· Instead of choosing just one series to focus on, perhaps a third project is needed to tie things together better – DTW
· Explore “applied” history and the relationship to fakery – DTW

· Make the mannequins stand out more; add more info to the tintype to compete with info in the frame – Kate Philbrick

· Play with scale in both the tintypes and landscapes – Deborah Davidson

· The tintypes have room to grow, while the landscapes seem resolved – Laurel Sparks
· Exploit the imperfections in the photographs on glass – LS

Here are suggested artists and authors to explore:

Artists –
Joseph Cornell
Mildred Howard
Gary Winogrand
Barbara Bosworth
Joseph Sudek
Marcel Broodthaers
Native American photographers
Hudson River School painters
Jeremy Lepisto
Mary van Cline
Deborah Muirhead
Lauren Fensterstock
Sally Mann
James Casebere
Lorna Simpson
Maya Lin

Authors –
Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory
Kate Harmon, You Are Here
Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime
Kenneth Clark, Landscape Into Art
James Young, The Texture of Memory
Lucy Lippard, Overlay

Tired, but a GOOD tired

2008-01-16T06:52:00.000-08:00

A million gazillion thank yous to everyone for what was undoubtedly the best MFA residency yet. I'm thankful to be part of such a dedicated, talented group of students and professors. Now the task is to keep the ball rolling now that I'm back at home in NY. I was telling some friends of mine that in some ways it feels like I've been sucked into a sort of black hole because there's so much less culture here where I live than what I was experiencing in Boston for ten days. Gone is the constant discussion of art and art theory. Gone is the waking up and seeing art on walls for twelve hours a day. The blogs everyone in the program keeps, and our Super (Tired) Group page on Flickr are going to be very important to me for the next six months.

I've already started fiddling with my landscapes on glass. Been scratching emulsion off with an exacto knife. It feels good to have artists' materials in my hands again.

And I think I've got a mentor for the semester! Liz Untermann is the Education Coordinator at the Center for Photography at Woodstock, and an artist in her own right. Once her portfolio is approved by AIB, we're ready to go!

Happy working, everyone! Hope you all got home safe and sound.

Artist's Statement

2007-11-30T09:58:00.000-08:00

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

2007-11-15T08:19:00.000-08:00

...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!!

2007-11-02T05:50:00.000-07:00

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

2007-11-01T08:17:00.000-07:00

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

2007-10-30T09:26:00.000-07:00

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

2007-10-30T09:04:00.000-07:00

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

2007-10-26T12:14:00.000-07:00

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..."

2007-10-18T10:49:00.001-07:00

...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...

2007-10-03T09:39:00.000-07:00

...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...

2007-10-01T09:56:00.000-07:00

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

2007-09-25T10:29:00.000-07:00

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...

2007-09-22T17:59:00.000-07:00

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

2007-09-06T08:33:00.000-07:00

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

2007-09-05T08:24:00.000-07:00

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

2007-08-25T14:29:00.000-07:00

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"

2007-08-17T18:58:00.000-07:00

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

2007-08-01T18:56:00.001-07:00

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

2007-08-01T07:57:00.000-07:00

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

2007-07-29T19:14:00.000-07:00

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.

Some Research

2007-07-28T10:58:00.000-07:00

To more fully understand how my mannequin tintypes do (or do not) relate to actual 19th century portraits, I've been doing a lot of research on antique photographs. The above images come from two books: Geoffrey Batchen's wonderful book Forget Me Not, and a book by collector Stanley Burns titled, Forgotten Marriage: The Painted Tintype & The Decorative Frame. The latter book was a bit of a revelation to me. I was unaware of the common practice to hand-color tintypes in the 1800s. It's interesting how the application of paint complicates the reading of the photograph by obliterating its surface. I also happen to LOVE some of the frames the portraits were placed in. They're so large and bold! The gilding and elaborate matting in some of these is just ridiculous.

Another thing I wish to explore is the practice of including hair of the sitter inside the frame's glass. Placing hair, dried flowers, and even butterflies in the glass was an attempt by the owner to make the person in the portrait more "real," more immortal. It also turns the final portrait into a fetish object. I can't help but wonder what would happen if I cut off some of the wig hair from the mannequins and placed it with the portrait. Think the antique store owners would go for me giving their dummies a little haircut?

Some quotes from Batchen's book that I must ruminate on:

"In early photos, 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."
"One of the interesting things about this genre of photo-portraiture is how easily its images depart from the realism we associate with the photograph. The portraits of children, in particular, often look strangely surreal."
"Memory is always in a state of ruin; to remember something is already to have ruined it, to have displaced it from its moment of origin. Memory is caught in a conundrum - the passing of time that makes memory possible and necessary is also what makes memory fade and die.
"The act of remembering someone is surely also about the positioning of oneself, about the affirmation of one's own place in time and space, about establishing oneself within a social and historical network of relationships. No wonder we surround ourselves with memory objects. One's sense of self, of identity, is buttressed by such objects."

Mannequins...Raw and Uncensored!

2007-07-24T16:20:00.000-07:00

These are some of the more recent raw 35mm slides of the mannequins at Wood Bull Antiques that may or may not become tintypes. I recently went back to the store with a tripod, which is essential to photograph some of these in dark locations since I loathe using a flash. As you can see, there are some men and children in the mix now; there was a misconception during the residency that I was only interested in photographing female mannequins - not so. It just so happened that the only dummies that were propped up in areas with enough light to photograph sans tripod were female ones.

Kip and Judy, the owners of the store, were very intrigued with what I was doing, and luckily they are (or were) artists themselves so they are perfectly fine with me mulling about and taking pictures of fake people. I must repay them someday by giving them a tintype, or maybe by buying one of their $1,500 antique dinner tables once I become rich and famous. Gad, there's some beautiful stuff in this barn.

Paper #1

2007-07-23T15:06:00.001-07:00

Although much of the discussion presented at the June AIB residency was filtered through an unfortunate haze of cold medicine and sinus pressure, I strove to glean as much useful information as I could from my talented fellow students and the ever so enlightening faculty. I arrived with the knowledge that the bulk of the work I was bringing from my first full semester in the MFA program was under the strict label of “experimentation;” with all but one exception, I saw this body of work as an exploration of medium and process, in the hopes that concept and meaning would cling to bits of it along the way like iron filings to a magnet. And though my thoughts were numbed by a corona of Benadryl, I was able to make sense of much of what was suggested to me during those ten days in Boston, to the point where I now feel I have a solid conceptual direction to move towards, and not just a technical one.

I was taken aback this residency by the sheer number of photographers in the newest pool of students. Further, I was somewhat pleased by the percentage of these newcomers who seemed to appreciate the qualities of traditional and alternative photographic techniques. There are some who believe that I am solidly opposed to digital imaging – not so; I simply believe in my heart that the act of capturing light onto a receptor and creating an image from it cannot be fully understood unless a person spends some amount of time working in a darkroom. Digital processing leaves the artist one step removed from the phenomenon of “fixing shadows.” I digress. The display room I was assigned to this residency was occupied by those artists who work primarily in photography – a drastic shift from my first residency, when I was with ceramicists, illustrators, and painters – and I found it quite helpful. Two newcomers, Elizabeth Schrenk and Lynda Schlosberg, were in my room, as well as fellow “Group 2-er” Jason Wallengren and two more from higher levels, Sarah Golden and Melissa Good. To critique with this group of students was wonderful, as they are all thoughtful people who were free with their suggestions, comments, and ideas.

One particular comment was common to nearly all of the critiques: the series of mannequin tintypes I presented seemed to be the most complete conceptually, and also proved to be the best “marriage” between subject and process. This is a conclusion that I fully agree with. Tintypes (also known as ferrotypes or melainotypes) were used almost exclusively for portraiture in the mid to late 19th century. In today’s light, many of these portraits have a rigid, inhuman quality to them due to the long exposure times and the need for the subject to pose very still for seconds, or minutes, at a time. Oliver Wasow, my former advisor, was reminded of The Twilight Zone when looking at my tintypes. He wondered if the mannequins were coming back to life; some, he said, look real already. In another critique, Julia Schaer and Michael Newman called the work a “perversion of portraiture” and suggested that I push the boundaries of the fetish qualities of the images, as well as my own comfort level, by giving the mannequins names and inventing entire background stories for them. While I am not sure whether this is necessary or an avenue I wish to pursue, I appreciated the opinion as it reinforced the belief I have that photography does not tell the “truth,” in contemporary photography nor in 19th century portraiture. Also discussed was the small 4”x5” size of the tintypes (more or less equal to traditional “half plate” tintype portraits of the 1800s), the kitsch quality of the images and concept, the inclusion of male mannequins and the possibility of photographing them in locations other than the antique barn (shopping malls, etc), and how they will ultimately be displayed in their final form (frames, sleeves, or lockets?). These are all questions I must tackle during this semester. Guest artist Annu Matthew provided me a critique on the morning following her interesting lecture. Her candid opinion and thoughtful insight were especially appreciated. She also found the tintypes the most compelling work that I presented, and further stressed the importance of a working marriage between process and subject.

As for the other works on display, I came in with the feeling that one process, the Polaroid emulsion lift, was leading me to a conceptual dead-end, and that the other process, liquid emulsion on glass, was at a beginning stage and not yet a fleshed-out body of work. These feelings were reinforced by the comments of others in my critiques. More than anything, the professors and fellow students commented more on the blue painter’s tape adhering the panes of glass together on the Polaroid lifts than the lifts themselves (this was a crucial lesson on the importance of proper display, however). While the lifts have an interesting look, the restriction of size, the preventive cost of Polaroid film, and the near impossibility for me to move the viewer past curiosity of process have pretty much convinced me to abandon this technique in terms of the fine art I will pursue in the grad program.

The images of the old hotel in the Catskills that I photographed with a Holga camera and printed with liquid emulsion on glass were found to be intriguing to many “critters” at the residency, but ultimately they found them to be lacking an element that allowed them to extract more meaning from the images. Part of the problem, proposed Oliver, was that the images have an inherent “flatness” to them – old buildings printed with an old-fashioned process – that prevent the artworks to carry an essential “edge,” as he put it. He connected it to an over-reliance on the notion of “nostalgia,” which he and some others believed was a dangerous and gloss-coated idea of the past that must be avoided. His suggestion was to begin photographing modern objects and architecture and printing these images with old processes, to examine the tension that is created. I intend to experiment with this during the second semester, though it is not necessarily a major direction I intend to travel towards. Ultimately, I believe that the liquid emulsion on glass process has strong potential, but the hurdle will be to make sure that I can use it in a way that the subject suits the medium. Part of what I am trying to accomplish during the beginning weeks of my second semester is to figure out how this can be done.

Concept: this is the word that will define the semester for me. I told many people at the residency that I am a “shoot first, ask questions later” kind of artist, but that was really an oversimplification. If anything I tend to over-think situations, both in my art and in daily life. Why this is not reflected more in much of the artwork I produce is unclear to me; perhaps I tend to look at art-making as more of an “escape” from these thoughts and intentionally try to steer clear. Perhaps I’m shy or slightly afraid of what people will think if my art becomes more personal. Whatever the reasons, I must begin to bare my thoughts this semester, both to myself and to others, so that the work I produce will follow suit and hopefully reach the depths of meaning that make them more than just “beautiful” and “interesting” images.

This will require a lot of writing at first, more so than the production of visual art. I need to organize my thoughts and share them with others. I will use my sketchbook, my blog, and restaurant napkins if necessary to jot down ideas and connections as they become clear to me. Right now the concentration of thoughts is being channeled to two bodies of work I wish to explore, and possibly which may become my final thesis. One is the series of mannequin tintypes. This series seems ripe with the themes of reality, memory, history, death, and truth in photography. The other body of work is at the moment but a spark in my mind, and I won’t know exactly what will come of it until I make a trip to Gettysburg, PA, the town I frequented as a child, this fall. The ideas I have for this work would fill up more than a three-page report on its own, but basically it deals with histories: my personal history, photographic history, and a history of war. I expect that I will use, in part, photographic emulsion on glass for this series.

Books Suggested to Me:
· Geoffrey Batchen, Forget Me Not
· Nicholas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics
· Lawrence Weschler, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees
· Lawrence Weschler, Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonders
· Jerry L. Thompson, Truth and Photography: Notes on Looking and Photographing
· Andy Grundberg, Crisis of the Real
· Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

Artists Suggested to Me:
· Troy Brauntch
· Wallace Nutting
· Gordon Matta Clark
· Rosamond Purcell
· Adam Fuss
· Binh Danh
· Deborah Luster
· Jerry Spagnoli
· Eugene Atget
· Henry Darger
· Hans Bellmer
· Joseph Sudek
· Aiken & Ludwig
· Joan Fontcuberta
· Mark Dion
· Mark Ostermann
· Ilya Kabokov

Mentor Meeting

2007-07-20T16:37:00.000-07:00

My new mentor Fawn Potash was incredibly gracious enough to drive 2 hours from her home in the Catskills (in a town named Catskill, appropriately) to the Fenimore Art Museum today to visit with me at work. She and her husband used the convenient excuse of taking their 16 month old son to the Empire State Carousel at The Farmers' Museum across the street from us for their decision to make the journey. I think Fawn is going to be a fantastic choice. We talked extensively about the challenges I have for this semester and she seems to understand. She was genuinely interested in the artwork I've been making, and I think she'll help me work through the ideas in my work and the various (sometimes conflicting) messages I got at the residency this time. Furthermore, she's an artist who finds much importance in teaching children about art, and I want to pick her brain extensively about how she juggles her teaching schedule with her art-making time. I'm happy. Now I've just got to start producing again.

The Infamous First Post

2007-07-19T08:29:00.000-07:00

Welcome friends and countrymen to my blog. Here I'll be sharing my thoughts and musings (hopefully) as I continue towards the coveted MFA degree at the Art Institute of Boston/Lesley University. At this point I am about three weeks into my second semester at the college, at a point where the blur of activity experienced at the 10-day residency should be wearing off and I should be getting back to work on lots and lots of art. Well, um, yeah. Not so much.

What I am working on, instead of producing artworks one can touch, is figuring out the conceptual elements, the meaning, behind what I've been working on during the first semester. No longer can I "shoot first, ask questions later;" now I really need to sit down and think about why I photograph what I photograph, and how I can use this knowledge to create a fully fleshed-out body of work. Easier said than done.

So what I've done in these three weeks is LOTS of reading. I've gone through three books already, including the very interesting Forget Me Not: Photography and Rememberance by Geoffrey Batchen. He explores portrait photography of the 19th century and how it was used to infuse its viewers with a not-very-accurate sense of memory. He fills an important hole in the discussion of the history of photography by exploring what can best be described as "fetish objects:" portraits mounted in lockets & frames with locks of the sitter's hair, dried flowers, butterfly wings, and other sentimental objects. Batchen makes the wise argument that these portraits don't enhance memory so much as replace it, creating new realities that never quite existed except in the viewer's mind. It's already given me lots to think about in terms of the mannequin tintypes I've been creating.