Weddings and Sunsets

There was a good deal of critical commentary towards the millennium around the idea of 'beauty' spurred on, in part, by the crisis in confidence in the then rapidly diminishing returns from the YBA and subsequent generations mining the legacies of Marcel Duchamp.  Quite how the discussions, often centred around the margins of post structuralist philosophy (and particularly focussed on post feminist texts, entirely misappropriated), turned out I am not at all sure.  Part of this is down to my dwindling interest in keeping up with the current chatter in the art mags and part - I suspect - to a confusion about exactly what contemporary art activity can be as we dig into the century for real.

The place of photography in all this is even more vexing - I have written before about the barely contained horror of one or two of my fellow students as regards sunsets! - where the cliche is hard to avoid if one moves into certain subject areas.  But why can't we consider weddings or sunsets as suitable subjects for 'art photography'? Are they simply to be excluded because of their ubiquity and staus as 'known' material - after all Avedon, for just one example, mined the frontal, b&w, portrait to the point of exhaustion - Tom Cooper and Sugimoto the oceans and so on and on.

These thoughts occurred to me as I shot endless frames from a friend's terrace recently and cropped up again when I took snaps at her son's wedding - along with everyone else naturally.  At least its a change of pace and problematics from the MA for a few weeks!  In The Inhuman by Jean-Francois Lyotard there's a quote that resonates with me - "The pleasure procured by the beautiful is not the object of research, it happens or it doesn't".

Calming Down A Tad

Following on from the semester just passed I began, last week, to start agonizing over the 'major' project for the year ahead,  I bored my friend Simon with my crazy ramblings about whether it should be this or that whilst we were 'taking the air' and started to get quite het up about it.

Over the last day or so I have tried to calm down a little and take a step back.  Whilst it's true that given that it's a year from now when whatever it is will have been submitted - and that therefore if you want an image taken in May/June then it has to have been now - maybe that isn't an absolute in terms of a good idea for a project anyway.  So I'm taking a week or two off and intend just taking some pictures for enjoyments sake.  The stripped bark of the tree above caught my attention and gave me an excuse to take the picture here.  Sometimes a simple visual moment is enough.

Out And about

A trip down to London - primarily to see Ian McKellan and Patrick Stewart on their take of 'Waiting For Godot' - gave the chance to think about photography and what it really means as an artform.  Outside of any immediate concerns with the MA and away from my own practice, it's easier to reflect on what the medium really has to offer.

An early stop at the Haunch Of Venison gave an opportunity to view the latest work from Thomas Joshua Cooper.  I have been a long time admirer of his landscapes, and am the proud owner of both "Dreaming The Gokstadt' and 'Some Rivers, Some Trees, Some Rocks, Some Seas'.  On this occasion though I was a little more quizzical about the work.  Not least because the images have been blown up in scale and for me at least lose some mystery as a result.  They also, dare one say it? and does it matter? looked a little old fashioned - or maybe I simply mean had less to say to us nowadays?  I am also troubled, presently, by the issue of colour.   By chance I happened upon some recent colour prints by Dan Gustav Cramer in the excellent Maddox Gallery show 'Terra Nihilus' that were in my mind far more satisfactory landscape works.  A case for more reflection on my part I think.

In another place - Hauser & Wirth - David Claerbout was showing three new video works.  One of my fellow students is a Claerbout fan - as am I - and these latest works did not disappoint.  One in particular, up in the top of the building - in the room it was made - entitled The American Room (1st movement) was a marvellous piece of work with so much to say about  time and place and photography as a medium and its relationship to film.  It had a powerful poetic quality that is impossible to describe - a must see in my judgment!

Away From The Flock

Well its all over for a week or two.  The work is submitted, the group dispersed after a drink at the pub round the corner.  Was I alone in feeling - Is That It?  But I guess that feeling of deflation is inevitable.  I, for one, and I suspect I'm not alone, am keenly awaiting the information with regard to the next assignment.  Of course we know roughly what's expected, the handbook tells us that, but one always has the feeling that the current info is needed before you start piling into the project.

I think I know what I want to do - but have sneeking feelings for one or two other ideas as well.  I am showing some prints in Germany in August and got quite a wry response to the idea that one of the pictures might be a sunset...  Its interesting how some subjects and treatments are so cliched that an honest response to them is virtually impossible?  I have looked at other work where what could easily be dismissed as hackneyed is lauded...  Context is o course everything I guess but nonetheless there are strange perspectives at work in the contemporary art environment.

Over and out

Thats it!  The project is complete...though I didn't quite make it with every one of my favoured subjects I did have thirteen from which to make the selection of ten.  Although I still feel dissatisfied - when is it otherwise? - I do think I've made quite a personal journey.  I now have some understanding of portraiture and a feeling for coherence in terms of a portfolio of images.  Some progress too with the use of equipment and processes that necessarily go with it.

I may even push on with the idea - not in terms of my studies on the MA, where I'm firmly thinking around landscape - but simply as a personal project.  Pushing onwards into other locations and subjects...who knows what might emerge from it.

For now though that blessed relief and euphoria when something is put to rest and one can move on!  This photograph is one of those that didn't make the final selection.

Steadying The Ship

I'm trying hard to keep some focus on my studies at a really difficult time.  I have taken a decision to leave my current role at the University of Derby and in part, at least, return to self-employment.  The upside of this ought to be more time to devote to my MA, the downside, for now, is that I'm working harder than ever.  There's just so much to do at present.  Yesterday however I did pull in two more sessions and so theoretically have enough material now to make a submission.  I am clinging onto the notion that focus in the essay will result from the production of the final images!  

Diversionary tactics

In trying to complete a task I'm a terrible prevaricator - added to which a variety of other pressures to get things done - and the project that has to be completed and handed in exactly two weeks today is still a way off.  I'm shooting more subjects this week...and trying to set up several more for next.  Leaving a few days to make the prints and the final selection...oh, and the small matter of an essay that still consists of 70% unedited notes.

Ah well...best not to worry or panic.  The materials for printing and submitting are now to hand.  There is at the least some clarity in the conception of the pictures and if I could just settle to it the essay should be relatively straightforward.  Though goodness knows what feedback I'll receive from the really rough draft I submitted last week.

So why was I in the painting studio this past Friday, Saturday, Sunday?  Because I needed to distance myself from the other - as well as complete the move from my previous space within the studio complex to the larger space I now inhabit.  I tend to work on a number of parallel themes/projects simultaneously and moving across allows me to do this more easily.  One project is a series of roughly 50x40 cms paintings on panels - entitled the 'Ivanhoe' series and each image (though they are entirely non-referential) named after a town/village/hamlet in North West Leicestershire - which used to style itself 'Ivanhoe Country' for tourism purposes!  This body of work had stalled in around 2006 when I had a period of enforced inactivity due to heart surgery and its only been this past weekend I've been able to stretch out and start work on these pictures again.  This one is no. 14 in the series (and its a bit weird that the project stalled at 13 images if you like that sort of coincidence!) - which place it will be named after is yet to be decided...