Mental Models – Source Images / Photographs / Flickr and an Atlas

:UPDATE:

Interesting thoughts about photography over here at prison photography, et al… (particularly that the image must now in these times of visual record overload be accompanied with an appropriate caption…)  Perhaps, if the idea of sharing the image is to convey a particular circumstance in a particular situation…  but I wonder, has it been any other way?  Caption as filter that is ?

Original post: Aug 8th, 2007:  After seeing all the responses to Alec Soth’s recent post questioning “where are the great pictures on Flickr?”... I found myself serendipitously picking up my copy of Gehard Richter’s “Atlas” and leafing through the various images that are collected and reproduced in a chronological fashion as his Atlas. It’s interesting and probably just a coincidental circumstance to consider. But I’ve been thinking about the “mental model” lately and what influence that has on the kinds of images one might try to make.

I’m not saying that Flickr is – or even equates to – what Richter’s Atlas is to his paintings… The difference is all about a careful and conscious awareness of intentionality on behalf of the collector / artist… It’s just that there is something profound that I can’t quite fully articulate just yet that has some similarity. Maybe it just a human condition trying to make some sense of the world. Flickr is a wonderful example of both conscientious and unconscious image making.

I think for me, it has to do with the collecting of the images of our lives around us. Whether we make them ourselves through our cameras or find them through some other means of appropriation, these images are important enough to make and then collect. In the collection, they become representative projections of our lives, interests and the times happening all around us in which we attempt to arrange, present and tag for sorting and recollection – to what purpose (understanding?) I’m not entirely sure – but it’s clear the urge to collect and present is passionately pursued. Why else would something like Flickr be so passionately embraced?

Richter’s Atlas (previous post of mine here) is presented as a collection of Photographs, Collages and Sketches from 1962 – 2006 – which I read about in the forward to the images as a collection of “image models” or “sketches” for the body of works that sometimes result in final artistic works. The Atlas is presented as a sort of narrative story of intentionally collected series of images – which we are to consider as a “foil” against the final works. It is about an artist and his collection of models of inspiration.

As a place holder for something deserving of more thought personally…about an artistic creative process… I think it best to simply make note and to quote an entry in the beginning pages which is actually I believe a statement from the artist writings and footnoted as such in the Atlas forward coming from “Notes, 1964″, in : Gerhard Richter, Text-Shriften und Interviews, ed. by Hans-Ulrich Obrist – 1993 p 17.

“I see countless landscapes, photograph scarcely one in 100,000, painting hardly
one in 100 photographed landscapes – I am therefore looking for something quite
specific; from this I can conclude that I know what I want” – from Richter’s
diary dated 12 October 1986.”

…examining the threshold at which ordinary visibility ends and perception begins ….

Joan Didion – Excerpts from “Why I write”

Applicable thoughts below on what exactly it is that you do….  (originally found partially via “but does it float”)

The trick it seems is to recognize the things that hold your attention and then to apply all your attention possible to those things…

Excerpts from Why I write

From The New York Times Magazine, December 5, 1976. Copyright 1976 by Joan Didion and The New York Times Company.

Of course I stole the title from this talk, from George Orwell. One reason I stole it was that I like the sound of the words: Why I Write. There you have three short unambiguous words that share a sound, and the sound they share is this:

I

I

I

In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind.Its an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasionswith the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than statingbut theres no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writers sensibility on the readers most private space.

I stole the title not only because the words sounded right but because they seemed to sum up, in a no-nonsense way, all I have to tell you. Like many writers I have only this one “subject,” this one “area”: the act of writing. I can bring you no reports from any other front. I may have other interests: I am “interested,” for example, in marine biology, but I don’t flatter myself that you would come out to hear me talk about it. I am not a scholar. I am not in the least an intellectual, which is not to say that when I hear the word “intellectual” I reach for my gun, but only to say that I do not think in abstracts. During the years when I was an undergraduate at Berkeley, I tried, with a kind of hopeless late-adolescent energy, to buy some temporary visa into the world of ideas, to forge for myself a mind that could deal with abstract.

In short I tried to think. I failed. My attention veered inexorably back to the specific, to the tangible, to what was generally considered, by everyone I knew then and for that matter have known since, the peripheral. I would try to contemplate the Hegelian dialectic and would find myself concentrating instead on a flowering pear tree outside my window and the particular way the petals fell on my floor. I would try to read linguistic theory and would find myself wondering instead if the lights were on in the bevatron up the hill. When I say that I was wondering if the lights were on in the bevatron you might immediately suspect, if you deal in ideas at all, that I was registering the bevatron as a political symbol, thinking in shorthand about the military-industrial complex and its role in the university community, but you would be wrong. I was only wondering if the lights were on in the bevatron, and how they looked.

A physical fact.

I had trouble graduating from Berkeley, not because of this inability to deal with ideas–I was majoring in English, and I could locate the house-and-garden imagery in “The Portrait of a Lady” as well as the next person, “imagery” being by definition the kind of specific that got my attention–but simply because I had neglected to take a course in Milton. For reasons which now sound baroque I needed a degree by the end of that summer, and the English department finally agreed, if I would come down from Sacramento every Friday and talk about the cosmology of “Paradise Lost,” to certify me proficient in Milton. I did this. Some Fridays I took the Greyhound bus, other Fridays I caught the Southern Pacific’s City of San Francisco on the last leg of its transcontinental trip. I can no longer tell you whether Milton put the sun or the earth at the center of his universe in “Paradise Lost,” the central question of at least one century and a topic about which I wrote 10,000 words that summer, but I can still recall the exact rancidity of the butter in the City of San Francisco’s dining car, and the way the tinted windows on the Greyhound bus cast the oil refineries around Carquinez Straits into a grayed and obscurely sinister light. In short my attention was always on the periphery, on what I could see and taste and touch, on the butter, and the Greyhound bus. During those years I was traveling on what I knew to be a very shaky passport, forged papers: I knew that I was no legitimate resident in any world of ideas. I knew I couldn’t think. All I knew then was what I couldn’t do. All I knew was what I wasn’t, and it took me some years to discover what I was.

Which was a writer.

By which I mean not a “good” writer or a “bad” writer but simply a writer, a person whose most absorbed and passionate hourse are spent arranging words on pieces of paper. Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear. Why did the oil refineries around Carquinez Straits seem sinister to me in the summer of 1956? Why have the night lights in the bevatron burned in my mind for twenty years? What is going on in these pictures in my mind?

Proposal for Wall Drawing, Information Show, Sol LeWitt

“In conceptual art, the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all planning and decisions are made beforehand. The execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes the machine that makes the art.”  Sol Le Witt - via – Originally quoted from ” Paragraphs on Conceptual Art ” Sol Lewitt – Artforum (June, 1967).

The quote above sums up quite well, LeWitt’s notion of conceptual art. However,  I disagree that the execution is a perfunctory affair.  Given that the “work” is considered the “idea” and the piece of art merely the result is fine, but I believe that one has to “make” the idea into physical form in order to complete the process.  It is in the making that the physical world exerts it’s will and the work “becomes” independent of the mind.  It is transformed. And the “thing” made is the artifact, a record of the idea, in all it’s physical being – for as long as it may exist in a physical state.  Curiously, it seems that the object remains the thing of value around which one buys or sells or exchanges for something else of value.  Think of it this way: generally, one usually doesn’t purchase a sheet of musical notation, rather the consumer purchases the sound results of that notation… Even if you do purchase the notation – it is mostly likely so that you can (re)make the music yourself…

It seems that it is the form, a form which constitutes “physical being” which is shifting so rapidly  - sometimes only existing in a virtual presence.

a young artist in art school used to worship the paintings of cezanne. he looked and studied all the books he could find on cezanne and copied all of the reproductions of cezanne’s work he found in the books.  he visited a museum and for the first time saw a real cezanne painting. he hated it. it was nothing like the cezanne’s he had studied in the books. from that time on, he made all of this paintings the sizes of paintings reproduced in books and he painted them in black and white. he also printed captions and explanations on the paintings as in books. often he just used words. and one day he realized that very few people went to art galleries and museums but many people looked at books and magazines as he did and they got them through the mail as he did. moral: it’s difficult to put a painting in a mailbox.- the best way to do art – john baldessari – via (courteous of the echoing chamber – tumblr)

Perhaps Baldessari had it right – it is something to think about…  I also think with time and saturation especially of the virtual experience online – there will be a demand and recognition to return to the physical object as the most rewarding experience….

Even with “make an un-straight line” and the notion that “objects are perishable and ideas need not be” – I wonder why it is that as objects become scarce they tend to increase in value….

Longitude and Latitude

Today, a glimpse out the office window alternates between rainfall and sunshine,  a black hearse drives slowly by and somewhere the ocean changes color…

CY TWOMBLY
Untitled (Bolsena), 1969
House paint, oil, crayon and pencil on canvas
78 x 98-1/2 inches (198.1 x 250.2 cm)

Some notes on coordinate systems as a way towards a description:

“We might say that there are two sections through the substance of the world: the longitudinal section of painting and the cross-section of certain pieces of graphic art. The longitudinal section seems representational; it somehow contains the objects. The cross-section seems symbolic; it contains signs. Or is it only when we read that we place the page horizontally before us? And is there such a thing as an original vertical position for writing – say, for engraving in stone? ” Walter Benjamin (c. 1920) p. 8 – notes from Marus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (eds.) Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 1, 1913-1926, Harvard, MA, 1996.

I’ve been looking closely at some of Cy Twombly’s works in the book “Cycles and Seasons”. The passage quoted above resonated with me as I was looking at the reproductions of the Bolsena Paintings by Cy Twombly and reading the accompanying essay by Nicholas Cullinan. One of a series painted in 1969, the Bolsena series it is said records the events of 1969 that may have been on Twombly’s mind – the event of the decade perhaps as NASA’s Apollo 11 space mission unfolded before a collective world audience.  It’s an interesting consideration and connection of current events of that time influencing perhaps and recorded in Twombly’s own cryptic cypher of graphic marks and painterly splots.  What a hopeful time and sense of exploration!

NASA’s Terra satellite captured a visible satellite image of the Gulf oil spill on May 17 at 16:40 UTC (12:40 p.m. EDT) from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer Instrument on-board. The oil slick appears as a dull gray on the water’s surface and stretches south from the Mississippi Delta with what looks like a tail. Text Credit: NASA Goddard / Rob Gutro

I’ve been thinking about this in the context of our own current events unfolding, as reports and images trickle in on the growing disaster of the oil spill in the gulf. NASA Satellite images show the extent of the slick as is disperses – but it is too soon to know the toll and we somehow still are unsure of how to stop the bleeding. How far we have come in the last 40+ years.

Seeing that vs. seeing as

what do you see?

both/and -a rabbit? a duck…?

a series of lines / shading forming a differential between figure and ground?

I cherrish time the kids and I spend staring up at the clouds lying in the warm grass where we are free to do what comes natural. When we choose to make the time to do this,  it’s amazing how natural it seems to us “seeing as”.  The projection our perceptions upon an observable world, as you can imagine –  rarely do we exclaim: “look at the density of that vapor!”  It just doesn’t happen that way.

fig. above the ambiguous image – and Ludwig Wittgenstein

Caleb Charland – Demonstrations

Picturing phenomena – refreshing.

Circles with matches from the series “Demonstrations” by Caleb Charland

I was able to visit Bluesky Gallery, here in Portland  (the new website is great by the way) this last weekend to catch a look at the Caleb Charland show hanging from his series “Demonstrations”.     The large silver gelatin prints were quite beautiful. I say this because a number of the images I would imagine would have been quite difficult to get such a wonderfully large range of tones. To my eye, the prints excelled at achieving this wide range without the frustrating intrusion of having been pushed too far (you know the effect, where you notice “too much contrast” or “too much sharpness” which gets in the way of the absorbing the illusion of the photo… in other words,  the photographs seemed to have a “natural” appearance…  not over worked…  much richer than the images that can be had on the web as usual…

Sparkler through crystal ball from the series “Demonstrations” by Caleb Charland

However, the more lasting impression for me is what I think the pictures seem to record: the pictures bear witness to a performance of various phenomenon – you might say “law’s of nature”.  We can describe these phenomena perhaps precisely in abstract scientific terms, but it is difficult to grasp until you have some personal experience in some way with the phenomenon.  As I saw the work, I kept having that feeling of “hey look at this!” That’s what was refreshing. To simply witness what happens as various contraptions yield and act in cause and effect.

Skeleton key with copper wires from the series “Demonstrations” by Caleb Charland

“Demonstrations”, as noted in the show’s introduction, appear as quasi-scientific investigations. They record a happening over the duration of an experiment.  Charland’s contraptions themselves are wonderful sculptural elements, well composed within the picture borders. Often, there are references to famous scientific discovery’s of the past – some of which we might learn about in school as kids. The effect of the series is unpretentious – it tells us nothing in the end, but instead offers hints of how it might be rewarding to simply embrace seeing again with a child-like sense of wonder.

Additional information written up about Charland and an upcoming group show at Micheal Mazzeo.

Notes on bubble chamber inspiration

untitled  (photographs from a desktop series)

2010_03_15

Matt Niebuhr

The topside of my drawing / drafting table is way more like the bubble chamber…  more so than I’ve been able to intentionally make so far in another visual form on paper  (even though I have really, really tried to do so)…

I just love those bubble chamber diagrams / photographs…. on so many levels.  So, I’m accepting and embracing the imprint left behind  (pictured above)  as the meaningful record of those attempts. Perhaps my actions are not all together hopeless… These photos will serve as documents to the history of other actions.

Finding good source imagery (by this I mean images that trigger an action)  is a lot like panning for gold.  In the  blog-o-sphere… if you’re lucky, you might find the occasional nugget.  I became aware of the bubble chamber via and I’m so glad for that…

Imagine growing up in a world where the internet (for all the good and the bad it encompasses) has always existed !