Art & Perception

A while ago I posted some first thoughts on personal psychogeography, including the germ of a project involving photography and writing. I’m grateful to comments (from Martha and Lucy) for pointing me to significant related work by Richard Long, Hamish Fulton (beware annoying Flash), and Francesco Careri. These have been helpful to me in formulating my own project, which is, in fact, very different. I am approaching the idea — call it a psychogeographic study — primarily as a photographer, i.e. one interested in making photographs. In contrast, Long and Fulton (and the architect Careri, from the little I know) consider their photographs quite secondary: the walk itself is the artwork.
Continue reading Art walk

as we are told in yesterday’s headline of the Columbia Daily Spectator reporting on the opening of an HBO documentary reminding us of the long gestation of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Saffron Gates in Central Park, New York City?

Or does Saffron spell enthusiasm? Here is my snapshot of Saffron cloth billowing in the wind on a snow-free day, February 2005.

Continue reading Does Saffron Spell Dissent

Continue reading Positional, Appositional and Oppositional Propositions

After musing for decade or so on how to capture this solitary stand of cottonwoods growing on a ridge in the dunes, the challenge was met through dérive or drifting.

Continue reading dérive = drifting

There is always an on going conversation with representational artist about the use of tools, like mirrors, photos, projectors, grids etc. and the question of whether or not the use of these tools constitutes cheating. As if there is some unfair advantage in using these tools and conversely sainthood when you don’t use them. But the use of any tool as well as not using one does not make a drawing or painting better, especially representation works. When we have completed a painting of someone, what we have is not that person, regardless of the tools we used. What we have is our interpretation of that person on canvas or paper and it is the interpretation that is the most important part. I’ve heard this story about Gertrude Stein and Picasso many times and can guess that it is true. Supposedly on seeing this portrait of herself she said to Picasso “It doesn’t look anything like me” and he responded “that in time it will”. I and many other people that I know have seen photos of Ms. Stein and they don’t look anything like her. It’s the Picasso interpretation that I remember best. I believe everything we create is about us, what we feel, what’s important to us and what we want to say about it. Being skillful is helpful, but it doesn’t guarantee that you’ve got something to say. (As a kid, I was very skillful playing the piano scales, that is as far as it got). Creativity can be seen as a interpretation of what we believe is physically real. This small painting is a wp interpretation.

Among the first images I captured after purchasing my digital camera were made on a trip to the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico. I was drawn mainly by the Mayan ruins there, having had a particular interest in things Maya since a college anthropology class. Though terrific in some ways, photographically the trip was not a success. Although I wrote last week of re-visiting and revising old images, there’s no point if the original lacks merit. I did not know my new equipment well, I didn’t understand picture-making very well, and though I knew I wanted to work in black and white, I hadn’t yet developed an eye for it.

Continue reading Separation issues

The first phase of the dramatic expansion at LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) has just opened, featuring a new building for contemporary art, BCAM (Broad Contemporary Art Museum), and large-scale sculptural installations by a number of artists including Charles Ray, Richard Serra, and others. Here are some photos I shot this evening of Urban Light, a sculpture by Chris Burden that incorporates more than two hundred restored cast-iron lampposts from Los Angeles County.

Continue reading Urban Light / Chris Burden @BCAM @LACMA

Change, the oft heard mantra of Democratic campaigners, has made an early stop in our house.

This post may serve as a small contribution to the ongoing conversation between Steve and myself about waterfalls as a cascade has here come undammed. It was time to get a new printer, and we got one. This drip was followed by a new Laptop to supplement our revered, but elderly desktop. I found that my equally elderly and revered Olympus camera could not be supported on the laptop. Not to worry as Jo received a new Canon Powershot for Christmas - but then its USB cable disappeared. Meanwhile the jewel case to my Photoshop program has itself gone missing. At this point the video card on the desktop went out, stranding my installed Olympus and Photoshop programs, leaving me with the option of buying a “new” card. These problems are - most of them - solvable with a precipitous flow of time and money. So, in the nonce, and failing anything new to show, I wish to present a little song and dance about t-shirts.

For the last four or five years I have done t-shirts for family and friends. I use simple iron-ons and depend upon humor and sentimentality to carry the day. Call it a little hobby of sorts, and different from anything else I do. So, granted my predicament, I beg your patience and forbearance.

I thrust my camera at a goose and added the moniker in recognition of my daughter”s - in - law old English major.

Continue reading Blind, Deaf and Dumb

The back wall of the Hewitt Downstairs studio at the Montana Artists Refuge is about 15 feet by 20 feet. It was that wall that became the repository for a series of oil-painted panels called The Refuge. The Artists Refuge is in Basin, Montana; The Refuge is oil on canvas, a product of my two-month residency in Basin.

The Refuge is a visual rendition of a psychogeography of Basin, Montana — paintings that recall scenes and feelings arising from that particular place in that particular time and space of my life.

The Refuge, oil on canvas, Approximately 6′ x 10′.

Continue reading The Refuge

When it comes to created work, most artists have little choice but to move on once they’ve produced a piece (admittedly, it can sometimes be difficult to identify or reach an endpoint). Photographers are blessed or cursed with a real choice. Probably most, having once achieved a satisfactory rendition of an image, are willing to leave it there. From that point, with digital technology, endless identical copies can be made (I’m ignoring printing technicalities, a different subject altogether). In the non-digital world of printing from negatives, a new print request may entail a repeat visit to the darkroom, but careful photographers certainly have notes on paper choice, development time, and any dodging or burning they might have settled on. Reproducibility is one of photography’s greatest strengths, despite the headaches and posturing over pricing that it may induce.

Continue reading On not letting go

Thinking as an artist, of course not. Thinking as a scientist, of course yes. This certainly reflects a difference in approach, but I don’t think there’s a true disagreement. Rather, the response depends mostly on how the question is interpreted: does my moon mean what the moon means to me or is it the moon in the sky that I see.

Somewhere between physical stimulus and mental concept lies perception. Does how I perceive the moon depend on whether I am German or Spanish, male or female? A fascinating (and amazingly readable) paper by Lera Boroditsky, Lauren Schmidt, and Webb Phillips (Dept. of Psychology, Stanford) suggests that it might. The authors didn’t study the effect of biological gender, but I suspect it could play a role because the language/culture seems to be related to grammatical gender. In German der Mond is masculine, while in Spanish la luna is feminine.

Continue reading Is your moon my moon?

Personal psychogeography (see previous post) has provided food for thoughts for many days to come. Listening to Will Self’s lecture on this subject, I enjoyed the image of a busy novelist who, intellectually, made the decision to allow ‘drift’ into his own life. He explained that he used to live in ‘microenvironments’ consisting of the city of London and, on his book tours, the hotels that he was transported into by airplanes and taxis. To appreciate more of his surroundings, he now walks from airports to hotels or takes buses.

I, too, find it more enjoyable to take a bus from La Guardia airport through the streets of Queens to Manhattan. Part of my enjoyment is watching the ethnicity of people boarding or leaving the bus in the different neighborhoods. Psychogeography accompanied by anthropology, an interest in the lives of people?

First of all, a common thread in my personal psychogeography has been Water. Having grown up in a small town at the North Sea, I often jogged with my dog along a bay in the ocean.

Continue reading Drawn to Water or Psychogeography II