Reading:
Photography and Fetish by Christian Metz
Winning the Game when the Rules have been Changed: Art Photography and Postmodernism by Abigail Solomon-Godeau
The Crisis of the REal: Photography and Postmodernism by Andy Grundberg
NOTE: on-going work on peer review due next class.
Photography And Fetish
ReplyDeleteBy Christian Metz
Notes on the author:
Christian Metz (1931 -1993) was a French theorist known for his application of Semiology to film. He was a Professor at l’Ecoles des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. His works were a major contribution to French cinema and to visual semiology. His semiology on cinema was based on linguistic structuralism and psychoanalysis by Freud and Lacan.
Source: http://www.babelio.com/auteur/Christian-Metz/7342
Summary:
Film, according to Christian Metz, is capable of activating fetishism whereas photography is capable of becoming a fetish itself. He starts by analyzing the differences between film and photography. The differences between the two media influence their respective status in relation to fetish and fetishism. Metz discusses the following differences: in their social use, in the spatio-temporal size of the lexis, in the physical nature of the signifiers. Metz defines the lexis as “socialized unit of reception.” He adds that the photographic lexis is smaller than the cinematic lexis. Photography works better as a fetish because its lexis has no fixed duration; it is determined by the viewer who may choose to linger on one image. On the other hand the duration of the cinematic lexis is pre-determined by the filmmaker.
Metz also points out that both photography and film are connected to the real world; they are both prints of real objects. However, photographs are often used as keepsake and get a great level of social recognition in private settings and the family life; which is where the Freudian fetish is rooted. Film’s social reception leans toward a “show-business-like or imaginary referent; the real referent is felt to be dominant in photography.” Metz refers to Charles Sanders Pierce when he says that both media are ‘indexical.’ Pierce defined as indexical the “process of signification (semiosis) in which the signifier is bound to the referent not by social convention (symbol), not necessarily by similarity (icon), but [...] by an actual connection to the world.” Metz goes on by saying that the indexicality leaves room for iconic and symbolic aspects.
Photography is linked to death as discussed by Roland Barthes and Philippe Dubois. Metz acknowledges that the photographic medium shares similarities with death: immobility and silence. He also states: “... the snapshot, like death, is an instantaneous abduction of the object out of the world into another world, into another kind of time - unlike cinema which replaces the object, after the act of appropriation, in an unfolding time similar to that of life.” The fetishized function of the photograph also derives from its relationship to death.
Winning The Game When The Rules Have Been Changed - Art photography and postmodernism
ReplyDeleteBy Abigail Solomon-Godeau
Notes on the author:
Abigail Solomon-Godeau, a Professor Emeritus at the University of California Santa Barbara, is an art historian, a curator, and a photographic critic. She specializes in Feminist theory and criticism, photography, contemporary art and nineteenth-century French visual culture.
Source: http://www.arthistory.ucsb.edu/faculty/solomon-godeau.html
Summary:
When comparing Sherrie Levine’s “Portrait of Neil, after Edward Weston” with Edward Weston’s “Torso of Neil,” Solomon-Godeau raises an interesting question. These two photographs are similar. Levine squarely appropriated Weston’s image. She is rejecting the notions of authorship and originality. She also critiques “... the forms, meanings and conventions of photographic imagery (particularly that which has become canonised as art)...” Thus Solomon-Godeau explains: “Sherrie Levine is concerned with more than making a point about the conditions of representations, more too than underscoring the rather murky notion of what constitutes an ‘original’ within a technology of mechanical reproduction.” How can we identify an original photograph from the limitless number of reproductions?
The concept of authorship is connected to patriarchy, as Solomon-Godeau notes. The word “author” implies authority and, within a capitalist context, the author’s work represents her or his property - hence the copyright laws. By refusing the notion of authorship, Levine is also questioning the idea of “the artist as the bearer of a privileged subjectivity.” Solomon-Godeau puts talks about Pictorialism and highlights the fact that, despite all the different permutations - pertaining to style, technology, or culture - the ideology in mainstream art photography remained the same. When new technologies increased the accessibility of photography, the art photographers felt the need to distinguish their work from that of the common “amateurs,” the commercial portraitist, or the family chronicler as Solomon-Godeau states. This was the period of the Photo-Secession leaded by the notorious Alfred Stieglitz. After Pictorialism, art photography took another direction with the Modernist movement and became what Stieglitz described as “brutally direct.” The center of art was placed within the photographers’ sensibility. What made art photography was no longer the nature of the subject matters nor the stylistic manipulation of the prints. Then, in the 1960’s, Postmodernism emerged and changed the production of art photography. The two significant tendencies, as Solomon-Godeau points out, were the appropriation of images from mass media by conceptual artists and the pronounced academisation of art photography in both a literal and stylistic sense. Postmodernist practice is also defined by a collective resistance to formal analysis, psychological interpretation, and aesthetic reading. Usually aesthetically self-referencing, the works are based on the social and cultural world from which they emerge. Their purpose is not to evoke feelings but to rather provoke thoughts. Solomon-Godeau adds that the integrity of such work resides in its ability to “make the invisible visible.” The postmodernists went beyond appearances by deconstructing the connotation of images.
The Crisis Of The Real - Photography And Postmodernism
ReplyDeleteBy Andy Grundberg
Notes on the author:
Andy Grundberg is an art critic, curator, and Professor at the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington, DC. His essays are about photography and video within contemporary art.
Source: http://www.corcoran.edu/faculty/andy-grundberg
Summary:
In defining Postmodernism, Grundberg states that it takes different meanings in different artistic media. In dance, for instance, it is an attempt to make dance more vernacular - their movements were based on everyday gestures such as walking - by rejecting the heroicism and emotional subjective expressionism of modernism. Although the application of postmodernist concepts varies in different forms of artistic expression, the movement questions the role of art in culture and the role of the artist in relation to her or his art. Structuralist theory can help define the characteristics of postmodernism.
Structuralism, by Ferdinand De Saussure, is a linguistic theory supporting that words or images - in other words: signs - do not have intrinsic meanings, contrarily to Nomenclaturism. They must be decoded using a pre-established system or conventions. Structuralism, much like Semiotics, analyses a sign by dividing it into two parts: the signifier, i.e. the object, the word, or the image; and the signified. Grundberg points out that the signifier is totally arbitrary and depends on social practices. He considers Structuralism a pseudo-science just like sociology; for “they are, as he states, symptoms of a certain historical desire to make the realm of human activities a bit more neat, a bit more calculable.” Postmodernist art uses structuralist theory to deconstruct the “myths of the author” and the “myth of originality.”
The characteristics of postmodernist practices include the concept of pastiche, the self-awareness of the medium, and appropriation of pre-existing images. Grundberg also points out that while postmodernist theories were rejecting the notion of the avant garde their application resulted in the production of avant garde artwork.
Abigail Solomon- Godeau
ReplyDeleteGodeau is a freelance critic, curator and photographic critic and historian. She specializes in feminist theory and criticism, photography, contemporary art and 19th-century French visual culture.Her essays have appeared in such journals as Art in America, Artforum, The Art Journal, Afterimage, Camera Obscura, October, Screen, and have been widely anthologized and translated into various languages.
During the essay, Godeau compares the difference between a photograph and rephotograph of the same photo. She then questions if there really is a difference or not between the two photos and how. Besides the difference in quality, she begins to discuss how each photograph was shot in a certain perspective and mindset and that no one can properly reproduce Edward Weston's Neil the same way.
During her essay, she uses the term “ghettoized” which she uses to show how art photography has changed over time. The photograph is an example of the photographers interior, not anyone else's.
Andy Grundberg
ReplyDeleteGrundberg is an art curator, education and art critic with over 25 years of experience. He specializes in writing about photography and video. Exhibitions he has organized include Photography and Art: Interactions Since 1946, Ansel Adams: A Legacy, and In Response to Place: Photographs from the Nature Conservancy's Last Great Places. Awards include an Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography and a Leica Medal of Excellence for writing.
He starts off by explaining that post modernism means different opinions to different mediums. Not one idea will be the same in different mediums. He explains post modernism as anything that is not modern so, basically, post modernism is like poking fun at modernism. He also explains that behind modernism is a theory for structuralism.
A quote says that “The inability to have a pure unblemished meaning or experience at all.” The quote speaks of the issue that occurred in the late 20th century for photography and other medias. This is why Grundberg promotes the cross between mediums.
Christian Metz
ReplyDeleteMetz is a French Film theorist who pioneered theories of semiology.Metz applied both Sigmund Freud's (founding father of psychoanalysis) psychology and Jacques Lacan's (french psychoanalyst and psychologist) mirror theory to the cinema. He believed film is a “good reflection of and imperfect reflection of reality and method to delve into the unconscious dream state.” Died in Paris at age 61.
Summary:
Metz attempts to explain the effects that fetishism has on a viewer of a lens based image. He compares the difference of viewing cinema versus photography. He says that photography is easier to fetishize over because of the small size and how to photograph lingers over time and more so represents death. Cinema gives back to the semblance of death and celebrates life. With photography, viewers have an undefined time limit of viewing while with cinema, the time frame is set and in motion. Also, off frame figures in photographs will never make a presence in the photo, and resemble a sense of death allow the viewer to hallucinate and imagine whats happening outside the frame giving a different outlook to the photograph. During cinema, the viewer knows that what steps out of frame can (or may) reappear during the film and the viewer has a better sense of what is going on outside the frame.
During Weston’s essay, he explains how photography can be hard to define as “art” due to the extensive limitations and having no prior interpretations to work off of. Early photographers would mimic paintings and dress up their subjects to mimic past paintings to be considered “art.” He explains how the harm lay on the fact that false standard has been established since the beginning of photography which has lead to the creation of “compositional rules.”
ReplyDeleteWeston also says that there are two basic factors in the photographic process: Nature of the recording and Nature of the image, Each one states certain “rules” that lead to a well to do photograph. He also states that due to these rules and different methods of capturing a photograph and that often the photographer never masters the art, the art masters the photographer. The photographers advantage “can only be retained if he simplifies his equipment and technique to the minimum necessary, and keeps his approach free from all formula, art-dogma, rules, and taboos. Only then can he be free to put his photographic sight to use in discovering and revealing the nature of the world he lives in.”