In Terms Of

Tag: National Geographic

  • Repainting the Battle Lines

    This text is the first of two that reviews a panel on photography and painting, held in 1983. Read the second report.

    Painting and Photography: Defining the Difference
    Friday, April 29, 1983
    Artists Talk on Art, New York

    Richard Estes,
    Richard Estes, Diner, 1971, oil on canvas, 40⅛ x 50 in. (artwork © Richard Estes; photograph by Lee Stalsworth)

    As I recall the moment, Photo-Realist painting had become so well accepted it was passé; painting on photographs was still tacky, or anyway naughty, at least in New York—in the West or Southwest it was a regular style. But “discourse between painting and photography” was not yet so obvious and popular a topic as it soon became. (I was amazed, amazed, the other day to see Art and Photography, Aaron Scharf’s excellent book on the subject, in B. Dalton!)

    Having myself recently switched from painting to photography, and being then on the Program Committee of Artists Talk on Art, I thought a “Difference between Painting and Photography” panel would be timely, and began casting about for a brainy moderator. Someone suggested Craig Owens, who not only agreed cheerfully, but turned out to be a committee person’s dream, conjuring up an all-star cast on time, not just for the announcement, but for the event itself, without so much as a reminder.

    The panel Owens conjured up became one of those special SoHo events, measurably enhanced by the overflow gang on the sidewalk outside pounding on the plate-glass window. These were reportedly motorcyclist friends of Robert Mapplethorpe, whose work, by the way, looked smashing in the evening’s format of slides projected onto a portable screen. I suppose it hardly needs to be added that nobody defined anything, let alone the difference, though since then I have heard others make a stab at it. (Ben Lifson presented a two-part theory at a photo conference in 1990. The part I remember was that the photograph has an absolutely even surface.) Another difference occurred to me that night: photographs probably mutate less in slides than do paintings.

    Carol Steinberg’s report, which came in “over the transom,” precisely and eloquently defined the ways discussants begged—or fogged—the issues.

    —Judy Seigel

    Moderator: Craig Owens

    Panelists: Joseph Kosuth, Jack Goldstein, Sarah Charlesworth, Barbara Kruger, Mark Tansey, Robert Mapplethorpe

    Luca Del Baldo, Craig Owens, 200
    Luca Del Baldo, Craig Owens, 2012, acrylic, colored pencil, and watercolor, 30 x 40 cm (artwork © Luca Del Baldo)

    Craig Owens, senior editor of Art in America, sat with the six panel members and spread his hands, butterflylike, cigarette dangling from the long fingers. We, seated on the floor of the crowded gallery, were, mercifully, not permitted to smoke, having squeezed in while others less fortunate clamored at the entrance and pressed against the window to see—an Artists Talk On Art panel!

    True, it was, at $1, a cheap Friday night and an interesting topic: “Painting and Photography: Defining the Difference.” Owens’s hands seemed to point to two points of view even while he hoped those who had come for the latest installment of the historical battle would be disappointed. They were there, he said, to “define difference,” not define or create false oppositions.

    Joseph Kosuth, in his perennial black outfit (is he making an unconscious statement about being in mourning, does black flatter his figure, or is it some kind of ’60s minimalist, conceptualist, artist’s statement?), read a tract about how the institutions of gallery, critic, market, etc., create what we think “art” means. He showed no slides, not to be arrogant, he said, but because those familiar with his work didn’t need to see them and those not might fall into that tendency people have of thinking they understand something after they’ve seen slides. No one told the audience he is a conceptualist. I guess he wasn’t on the side of painting or photography. Next, Jack Goldstein showed us a slide of his painting of a [Margaret] Bourke-White photograph of a Kremlin air raid. He jocularly read an interview and some comments on the dilemmas of quotation and authorship. He also said he was “not interested in Painting.”

    jackgoldsteinuntitled
    Jack Goldstein, Untitled, 1981, acrylic on canvas, 84 × 132 in. (artwork © Estate of Jack Goldstein; photograph by Brian Wilcox)

    Sarah Charlesworth said she was “freaked out” that day about having to do the panel and that she would read to us from a letter she had written to a friend. She even began, “Dear Rudy,” but I was not convinced her friend really wanted to hear about the gap between the subjective/presence of oneself of painting and the objective/absence of self-presence of the other in photography, which I found difficult to hear and understand. She showed a slide of a photo of a photo of a photo which had been ripped up and some other manipulated photographs.

    Barbara Kruger spoke about the potential for creating feelings of richness or poverty in the spectator face-to-face with the artist’s image and the importance of understanding the politics of images, as well as her attempt to provide for a female art spectator. Her work consisted of photos with words collaged together, making political statements. I think one said, “You destroy what you perceive as different.”

    Mark Tansey showed his joke paintings. Each got a laugh from the audience, as with the National Geographic photoboat crew on the edge of a waterfall, entitled, Take One, or a woman lying in bed pointing a gun at a man pointing a camera at her, entitled Homage to Susan Sontag.

    marktansey
    Mark Tansey, On Photography (Homage to Susan Sontag), 1982, oil on canvas, 54 x 90 in. (artwork © Mark Tansey)

    Robert Mapplethorpe took off his dark glasses to tell us he really hadn’t prepared anything to say, just brought slides of his photographs, which he related more to sculpture than painting. The photos included Lisa Lyon (the bodybuilder) in the nude with graphite powder covering her body to emphasize its statuesqueness, portraits, a black guy who we were told could achieve erection at a moment’s notice, men embracing, children (whom he doesn’t particularly like, he said), flowers.

    The most wonderful commentary on the difference between painting and photography came unexpectedly from the audience, when Cynthia Mailman, whose works adorned the walls of the Soho20 Gallery, was moved to shout, “Don’t Touch My Painting!” as another member of the audience on her self/unconscious way out was about to put her hand through one of the paintings to support herself. As the audience laughed at the serendipity of the moment, Mailman became a bit defensive and added, “Mine are only one of a kind, you know.”

    robertmapplethorpe
    Robert Mapplethorpe, Lisa Lyon, ca. early 1980s (artwork © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation)

    I couldn’t decide whether this was more fun than realizing that the woman across the room I’d been admiring all evening was probably Lisa Lyon, as she left in her sleeveless white mini-dress with her beautiful arm and leg muscles bulging out just a bit more than one is used to seeing on the average woman.

    Someone in the audience asked about the power of painters to paint what isn’t there. Mapplethorpe answered that, as a photographer, he feels his best work is that in which he sees what he hasn’t seen before.

    Another member of the audience began to explain his understanding that, in light of the panel, “aren’t painting and photography the same thing except for content?” Sarah Charlesworth assured him that form was content and Craig Owens cautioned not to go from one extreme to the other, that is, from saying they’re opposites to saying there’s no difference.

    Too late, I tremblingly raised my hand, shocked by this question, and burning with something to ask, if only I could figure out what it was, something, something about the process of painting—by its nature longer, with more potential for discovering relationships, meanings, ideas, feelings, images, subconscious meanderings, the way we perceive. Don’t most of us feel we must study a painting for longer than a photograph? How long do we study photographs, and for what purpose? Isn’t there some major difference between the act of painting and the act of photographing? And then, can we escape evaluating that difference, at least for ourselves?

    I don’t know. I don’t know. I almost didn’t dare to write this and I didn’t dare to ask so I had to write. These ideas need deep questions and deep answers. Where were the painters, process painters, painters who discover ideas through their painting, not start with a pre-fixed idea or image and paint it? Where were the paintings, real paintings, not slides of photos of paintings, of paintings of photos, photos of photos. Slides are photos. Form is content. The panel was weighted, the sides were uneven, and the difference was never defined.

    In Terms Of count: unknown.

    Source

    Written by Carol Steinberg, “Repainting the Battle Lines” was originally published in Women Artists News 8, no. 5–6 (Summer 1983); and reprinted in Judy Seigel, ed., Mutiny and the Mainstream: Talk That Changed Art, 1975–1990 (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1992), 221–22. In Terms Of thanks Midmarch Arts Press for permission to republish this review.

  • A Special Kind of Ordinary

    Blonde Art Books: Artist Conversation and Launch
    Tuesday, July 22, 2014
    ICI Curatorial Hub, Independent Curators International, New York

    Sara Cwynar shows the original version of Kitsch Encyclopedia while Sonel Breslav looks on (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    There’s a special kind of ordinary that folks in the art world love. Artists, curators, and critics often fall over themselves to praise the everyday, elevate the banal, and highlight the overlooked, momentarily relegating what normally would be banal to a distinct realm of interest and reflection. But sometimes the ordinary is, well, simply unremarkable. The discussion that took place during “Blonde Art Books: Artist Conversation and Launch” was ordinary in that unexceptional sense. For this evening’s event, the three people involved in the publication of an artist’s book, Sara Cwynar’s Kitsch Encyclopedia, met to present and discuss their work and to celebrate the launch of a special collector’s edition of the book.

    In 2012 the New York–based curator Sonel Breslav founded Blonde Art Books, a project—one hesitates to call it a business—that sells artist’s books at exhibitions and fairs, as well as through an online store. Originating as a blog, Blonde Art Books was physically housed for most of 2013 at Schema Projects in Brooklyn. Kitsch Encyclopedia is the first book she published under the imprint.

    Breslav stated numerous times that she intended her digital slide presentation to loop (which it eventually did, kinda rapidly), her words themselves becoming looped, which was unintended metacommentary on the direction of tonight’s conversation.1 She repeated fuzzy notions about accessible spaces, broader audiences, sharing information, and collaboration. For example, Breslav expressed interest in “materials as objects and the information they embody,” a phrase that exemplifies the kind of language that has developed around the everyday—at least in the contemporary art world—that sounds agreeable but, if not explained in relation to tangible situations, is trite, if not hollow or incomprehensible.

    Breslav said she was given opportunities to do pop-up events, which evolved into full exhibitions—“my comfort zone,” she said. I wish she had better explained her curatorial projects, describing specific installation shots in her digital slide show or talking about other recent exhibitions, such as She Was a Film Star before She Was My Mother, held a few months ago at Dorsky Gallery in Long Island City. Breslav glossed over what she called a “summer tour,” which I later discovered was a Blonde Art Books traveling show for which she gave talks and conducted workshops on artist’s books across the Mid-Atlantic and Midwest last June and July.

    Born in Canada and based in New York, Sara Cwynar identified herself as a studio photographer and a graphic designer. She explained that Kitsch Encyclopedia was, in its original form, a one-of-a-kind hand-assembled artist’s book that she had started four years ago as a student. For this and other works, Cwynar adopts a strategy of appropriation, using other people’s images garnered from “the New York Public Library, flea markets, my parents’ basement, old encyclopedias.” Stuff from the 1950s through the 1970s interests her in particular, which she finds, removes from circulation, reworks, and redistributes, usually as digital prints for gallery display. While her art is largely visual, the book incorporates texts from three authors—a few sentences from Milan Kundera here, a few from Jean Baudrillard and Roland Barthes there—interspersed with her own writing. “All the texts are mashed together,” she said. The book’s alphabetical, encyclopedic format is a “quaint form of knowledge-containing,” and its organizing principle was Kundera’s definition of kitsch.

    Cwynar claimed that the images in Kitsch Encyclopedia—photographs of flower arrangements, ancient sculpture, obsolete electronic equipment, and outer space—are the “stuff we see everyday,” which is certainly true if you’re the kind of person who sifts through old issues of National Geographic, sets of Time Life books, and vintage photography how-to manuals. (The artists Matthew Craven, Abigail Reynolds, and Björn Meyer-Ebrecht also mine these sources, but walk the aisles of any art fair and you’ll see dozens more.) Cwynar didn’t elaborate on the specific nature of the images in her book, apart from an awkward explanation of Kundera’s notion of kitsch, which made me wonder how purposeful or random her choices were. I also wondered why the handmade Kitsch Encyclopedia was republished in print—one thousand copies were made—instead of posted online using platforms such as Tumblr and Pinterest that are the legacy of André Malraux’s imaginary museum. Cwynar pronounced that we live through images instead of real experiences, and that we’re desensitized to horrifying images, reacting the same to pictures of bombings and flowers. Pundits have voiced identical opinions for decades. What’s significant about these positions now?

    The third speaker was Corina Reynolds, an artist, bookbinder, and founding partner of Small Editions, a studio and consultancy that helps produce artist’s books. She helped to make the portfolio of six zines included in the deluxe version of Kitsch Encyclopedia, which were hand-stitched into the original book. Summarizing her background, Reynolds learned the technical processes for bookbinding as an undergraduate at the University of California, San Diego. Seemingly without a business plan, the fledgling Small Editions started in a living room, became a website, and expanded through networking. Suddenly money was there, Reynolds said, after working on projects with Dash Snow and Dan Colen. (The chronology and circumstances were unclear.) She then described a book that Small Editions produced in 2013, Sheryl Oppenheim’s Black Hours, which comprises screenprints of drawings that were inspired by an illuminated manuscript in the Morgan Library and Museum.

    Corina Reynolds (right) talks about Small Editions (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    The conversation among the three panelists lagged after their individual presentations, perhaps indicative of a lack of planning, resulting in rote observations. Breslav argued that Kitsch Encyclopedia “is very specific to Cwynar’s practice but also has this universality,” something that could described any number of artworks. Breslav also stressed—several times—how she plays multifaceted roles in the contemporary art world (as curator, publisher, collaborator, et cetera). She also delighted in discussing trivial details of the book’s production. For instance, the Chinese printer Breslav contracted required that she and Cwynar remove images of Disney characters and nudes from Kitsch Encyclopedia. (Publishers have certainly policed morality and been overly protective against copyright infringement for decades.) The photographer did sneak in a picture of a naked body: “There are nudes in the zines,” Cwynar said. I got the impression that Breslav was tickled at the collaborative process behind publishing a book, discovering for the first time the types of decisions people have made along the way when producing a book—for centuries. Oh, process.

    Cwynar wondered aloud what it means to make an image that will be seen by a million people but neglected to offer an answer, even though she had worked as a designer for The New York Times Magazine until last year. How the context of images change over time greatly interests her, she disclosed, which sounded profound until I remembered that this is the inevitable fate of nearly every picture ever made.

    During the audience Q&A, a man visiting from Australia fawned over Cwynar’s work, and a woman in the front row asked the photographer about her font choice. “I used the ugly version on purpose,” Cwynar explained for the “1970s” typefaces in the book and on her website. “They’re really all nostalgic fonts.” This response made me think about how the term “futuristic” now specifically characterizes things that are forty and fifty years old.

    A display of Kitsch Encyclopedia (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Cwynar spoke more about the life of an image over time, how it loses and gains value, and also about what she referred to several times as an image’s patina. When looking at decades-old photographs in the New York Times, she explained, you can discern a quality, if not a style, of the era. You can tell “what looks contemporary,” she commented, “what looks classy.” That’s periodizing in a nutshell. Cwynar added that nostalgia is strong in graphic design of the present moment, and Breslav identified what she called “outdated colors” in Cwynar’s work. What exactly is an outdated color?

    Breslav feels the DIY culture that produces free “takeaway” publications is going strong, but she nevertheless chooses to publish more expensive art books. Reynolds is a believer in the precious object you can hold in your hands, whether that’s a limited or larger edition. The group talked some about scarcity versus mass production, but that’s a conversation which usually ends in stalemate.

    Revealed only at the end of the night was the fact that Cwynar’s book was largely financed by a successful Kickstarter campaign to the tune of $17,386 from 310 backers. (Wow!) I realized that the three speakers did an excellent job of avoiding conversation on financial issues, one glaring issue in the art world that needs more sustained and vocal attention. Since Breslav and Reynolds work in a multifaceted space that combines elements of for-profit, nonprofit, DIY, and entrepreneurial approaches, it would be beneficial for them to approach their models frankly, offering to the audience the solutions that they’ve found and challenges that they’ve faced.2 It would be interesting to know more about how art workers in their late 20s can sustain a practice and make a living, in New York and around the world.

    In Terms Of count: 7.

    1 Neither the panelists nor the Independent Curators International staff attempted to subdue the highly irritating bouncing iTunes icon on the Apple laptop’s dock, which was visible every few seconds on the projected screen for the full hour-and-a-half duration of this event.

    2 Cwynar works with traditional art galleries and presumably makes a living from her art, since she left her New York Times Magazine job in 2013 and didn’t mention another one.