Groping in the Dark

Put Me In A Corner

This image is taken from the web site for the Royal Academy for the Arts summer exhibition 2017. The summer exhibition has been taking place every year since 1769. It is always hung in this way, covering every available square inch of space. The paintings form relationships with each other, forming harmonies and discords between them and suggesting possible narratives. This style of hanging excites the imagination.

This is an image of an exhibition at the White Cube. Nowadays it is the more usual way of presenting art but it seems sterile and uninviting.

This is a photograph of one of the first exhibitions of work by the German photographer Wolgang Tillmans at the Buchholz gallery in Cologne in 1993. I got this image from the Frieze website which included in the blurb these words;
“One of the more remarkable things about the photographer Wolfgang Tillmans is the way he chooses to display his work.[…[his unusual, non-hierarchical hanging style, where simple magazine spreads are sometimes taped up next to high-quality prints”

This image is of an exhibition in Boston of work by the American artist Barry McGee.

I have recently been reading about The Snapshot Aesthetic, which is primarily a photographic style started by the Swiss photographer Robert Frank in the nineteen fifties. Since the fifties it has grown and now, particularly, with the rise in popularity of mobile phones and social media it is easily the dominant style.
Snapshots were originally photographs taken by amateurs on cheap cameras. They were not necessarily very well composed or exposed but tended to have a look all of their own.it was this look that Robert Frank was trying to emulate. It is amusing to think of Frank spending many hours working on his prints in order to give them the appearance of not having been worked on at all.
Many painters use photographic material as a source for their work. If the photographs are “snapshot” photographs then it seems to me that the paintings are snapshot paintings.

The best way to view snapshots is, in my mind, in large numbers. You look at one and then another and another. The best way to hang snapshot paintings is, therefore, in large numbers in order to allow the eye the opportunity to roam and, by hanging them in a corner, for the viewer to be immersed in the images.

I have been looking at the way the Snapshot aesthetic has affected the work of many contemporary photographers and painters and will be posting blogs about some of them later. Now I am going to talk about the work I am preparing for my degree show.

It seems to me that the primary aim of painting and photography is not necessarily to make bold statements or overtly ask deep, meaningful questions but to reflect the world through the artists eyes.Just as a conversation with a stranger can be rewarding by acquainting you with a point of view that you don’t necessarily share, but adds to the overall tapestry of life so too can paintings.
For these images I am drawing on my life so far by means of my collection of photographs, films I have seen, that I feel had an effect on my subsequent life, television programs, advertisements, books and anything else that appeals to me.
I consider these images to be snapshots as they are Painted quickly and I have endeavoured to only paint what is necessary. I don’t want to create masterpieces, even if I could.
Each one of these images has a significance to me that people viewing them have no way of knowing. By hanging them close together and in no particular order they react with each other and suggest narratives that will change from viewer to viewer. Hopefully they will inspire (maybe too strong a word) the imagination.
A question that occurs to me repeatedly when i am painting these images is “Why bother painting them?” I already have them in photographic form, why do I feel I need to make paintings from them?

I don’t know but I feel that people react differently to paintings than they do to photographs. Everybody has a collection of photographs taken through their lives often in rows of albums that are rarely, if ever, looked at or lurking in their envelopes at the bottom of an unopened drawer. Many people have libraries full of images on their I-phones, too many to recall. by spending time painting these images it is almost as though I am bestowing a legitimacy on them;They have the right to be looked at often and by many.
By making paintings I also try to select what needs to be in the image,(either by selective painting or by cutting relevant pieces out of bigger works) and reject the rest. They are in effect distilled versions.
There is a concept in Japan known as Wabi-Sabi which is closely connected to Zen Buddhism. Wabi is the stripping away of everything apart from that which is vital. Sabi is the passing of time. According to Wabi Sabi a misformed pot of rough clay that has been broken in the past and repaired has more significance than a perfect highly decorated piece of expensive porcelain. Haiku are Zen poems pared back to only seventeen syllables and, to be true haiku, they must reference something; a type of leaf or flower, snow, melting ice, that indicates the time of year or day that the Haiku was conceived.
I know what time of year my photos were taken, I was there, so by stripping them down I am using my own form of Wabi Sabi. Other viewers who are not familiar with my life will not necessarily be able to place them in time.But by hanging them close together perhaps time frames can be implied or imagined.
The Idea of hanging my paintings close together in groups is not a new one. I recently had to do a presentation, in order that I will be able to access a suitable space for the exhibition which says more on this subject. I will be adding this as a blog in the near future.

I have recently been playing with an idea that I call Snapshot Painting. I don’t know if this term has been used before, I would have thought it would have been but I haven’t found any direct reference to it.

Before saying what my idea of Snapshot Painting is I’d like to say something about the Snapshot Aesthetic.

The Snapshot Aesthetic refers to a trend in photography which was started by the Swiss photographer Robert Frank.

Frank was a formal photographer who emigrated to the U.S.A. in the fifties. He found it difficult to settle as he found much of the American culture of the day alien and crass. In 1955 he obtained a Guggenhiem Fellowship and set off on a journey across the U.S. He made a photographic record of his journey which he later published as a book entitled The Americans. Jack Kerouac provide the introduction, which greatly helped the book’s circulation as the photography was initially scorned. Frank’s feelings of disassociation had resulted in him taking pictures of everyday, some would say, banal subjects, sometimes framed a little oddly, with no great care given to setting up or retouching. Frank said “I was tired of romanticism[…] I wanted to present what I saw pure and simple.” Kerouac said “ Robert Frank, Swiss, unobtrusive, nice, with that little camera he raises and snaps with one hand he sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film, taking rank among the tragic poets of the world.”

The Americans became a best seller and had a great influence on photographers such as Nan Goldin, Wolfgang Tillmans, Terry Richardson and, later, Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander and Gary Winogrand who has said “When I’m photographing I see life[…] That’s what I deal with. I don’t see pictures in my head[…] I don’t worry how the picture is going to look. Let that take care of itself[…] It’s not about making a nice picture. That anyone can do.”

The term Snapshot originally referred to pictures taken with cheap cameras, such as the Kodak “Box” brownie, by amateurs. Now, however it had become a recognised photographic style which went on to become the predominant style in fashion magazines, many lifestyle magazines and in advertising generally. The increase in popularity of mobile phones and social media has resulted in the majority of images viewed by a given person in a day being either true snapshots taken by amateurs or pictures taken by professional photographers in the snapshot style.

 

Robert Frank (2008). The Americans. 3rd ed. Germany: Steidl. p1 et-al.

One of the first things we did when starting the BA in Fine art was to look through the book Vitamin P which has an introduction by the American art critic Barry Schwabsky who has some very interesting things to say about the status of Painting in contemporary art.

“Once historical narratives were organised by “Schools”; although the notion persisted into the Modernist era ( Ecole de Paris, New York School), a new historical unit, the “Movement” (Cubism, Abstract expressionism), eclipsed it. But today an introduction to contemporary painting no longer forms a chapter in the chronicle of successive movements any more than it charts the geography of adjacent schools. Positions are now multiple, simultaneous and decentered.

It is no longer possible to presume to know all that is going on in painting.”

So today painters are individuals and their styles do not align them with movements. They are free to paint what they like how they like where they like.

Schwabsky goes on; “One can wonder if today’s painters consider themselves heirs to a tradition that stretches back to Giotto and the the beginning of the Italian renaissance or if they feel themselves utterly cut off from all that, participants in or competitors with a wholly immediate image world that includes billboards, video games, magazine adds,pornography, instruction diagrams, television, and an infinite number of other things, among which the paintings seen in those great entertainment halls, our museums, play a part not much greater than anything else.”

The book itself (Vitamin P) is a cornucopia of painting that seems to overflow with different styles, subjects and sources. The accompanying blurb to Chris Ofili’s paintings states; “Chris Ofili’s mosaic-like paintings blissfully sweep aside the whole history of conventional art opposites – abstraction/figuration, high/low, sacred profane- by ignoring or combining these all at once.”

Elizabeth Peyton paints “genre-portraits” from magazine photographs or images from MTV.

Luc Tuymans also uses photographs or scenes from films or TV as source material. the blurb says; ” the subjects he renders are always caught between history and collective memory.

George Shaw again works from photographs of very mundane subjects and creates “unforgettable forgettable places” using paints intended for use on plastic models and a high degree of painterly skill.

All these, and more seem to reinforce Schwabsky’s assertion that there really are no rules what so ever when it comes to contemporary painting.

Punch Fine Art – definition into a search engine and numerous sites will pop up on the screen, one of them www.Visual-arts-cork.com has a paragraph headed “Problems of Definition” which concludes

“Because of this[…]it is almost impossible to define or fix a meaning to fine art”.

It goes on to say that in early civilizations, such as the Greek, Roman, Romanesque or Gothic, artists were regarded as skilled workers. It was with the Renaissance that Art became a profession and academies were set up to train would be artists.

These academies taught a highly traditional and regulated form of renaissance art that remained the standard, really until the early twentieth century when Modernism swept away the rules.

So now we have a situation in which Universities around the world offer Diplomas, Degrees, Mas etc in a subject that no one can define.

Art has become The Waste Land.

There is a Tarot card, one of the Major Arcana. It is entitled The Tower (sometimes The Burning Tower) Drawing this card is said to warn of a forthcoming, sudden upheaval. Upheavals can be traumatic and cause pain but they can also cause us to examine our lives, to re-evaluate our worlds and can shock us out of our stale and outmoded ways of thinking.

Maybe Modernism was the Ivory tower of art being torn asunder to make way for a more relevant art. If so it seems to me that present day artists are scrabbling around in the ruins holding up charred fragments and saying “is this art?” and it may well be. who knows?

 

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