Fantasy

Norma Desmond · December 2, 2009

Rebecca--

Yoko has made herself a force. I admire that sort of energy.

Julie--

My process of relating to viewers is ongoing and evolving. It is sometimes sufficient but doesn't always seem necessary. Yes, empathy with my viewers and bringing me closer to them is a valuable part of the experience of photographing, but I'm not sure I need it . . . all the time. Giving space to my subjects seems equally rewarding and joining them in that space is significant for me.

Phylo--

I feel like sometimes it's not really about what I'm looking at any more than a painting is about the paint per se. (Although, of course, to an extent all paintings are about the paint.) What's there, reality, is the raw material to create a vision . . . a photograph. But it may not be about that reality or even an altered view of it. It may be about something completely different than the reality I use to make it. Reality may simply be what's at hand. But I'm not sure of this . . .

mizore · December 2, 2009

Yoko was born with money. Money is a force amplifier. Arts in our lives are signals of having surplus money, therefore erotically appealing as a sign of having access to goods beyond mere survival. Being Thomas Wedgwood, the business owner and patron was more significant than being William Blake to most people.

A lot of art is about fantasy -- the fantasy of being on the cutting edge with Ginsberg and the Beats for me as a South Carolina teenager; the fantasy of being part of Yoko Ono's floating world where the avant guard met popular music that wasn't intellectually embarrassing for the people who follow Ono now. I'd rather be Patti Smith, whose life isn't so utterly impossible for me to imagine being. Smith earned her life, and had to work for a living, unlike many of the people floating around on money from home at that time, and paid her dues in NJ bars where she played music for three years between the first appearance at St. Marks and the serious money from performing.

But a lot of what art does is create an imaginary relationship between the artist and the audience -- a fantasy. Schnabel, for one, plays overtly with the high fashion magazines having articles on him and his latest wife every three years or so, the bare chested artist with the bathtube on a dais so he can watch his latest wife bathing. This is closer to Van Gogh's ear than anything else -- many of the women who read these magazines are imagining being with such an artist. Part of the fantasy. Me, I'm just there for the clothes.

Ono's money is from the period of Japanese imperial expansion. She's a female Mishima, all the trappings of peace now aside. I find Mishima more interesting, even thought Mishima was no more interested in women than Ono. Smith does open space for me in her work, not that it isn't just as imaginary space. I suspect that Ono would be uneasy if I did like her work. It's for a certain rarified sensibility in males, not for other women. She's a Queen Bee (most of the Fluxis women were; Wakoski is quite a bit more generous to younger women writers than ususal but men were still more important than women in her life). Straightness or gayness plays no part of it being for the guys rather than for other women. I've never liked Edna St. Vincent Millay, either -- the work is for men, always and only. Guys, straight or gay, are still guys. Women, straight or gay, are still not guys. Difference between Marisol and Annie Leibovitz -- both gay, one for the guys, didn't hang out with women socially (and Gertrude Stein was a bit like this, too); one much more open to women, straight or gay. These women affirm that guys are the most important ones and want an exception to be made for them. Of course, guys love them if they're beautiful and feminine and not big fans of the wives. For a beautiful woman to get an audience of other women, the strategies have to be significantly different. I don't think this is just female jealousy; plenty of non-elite writing women are quite attractive, but then that fantasy is different, too.

Jonathan Franzen was upset that Oprah Winfrey chose one of his books for her T.V. book club. People fantasize about their audiences all the time. I had a fantasy about what the S.F. audience was that collided rather hard with the reality of it.

I think fantasy and reality are a dance -- and for complex social creatures, sometimes fantasy leads, sometimes it follows, and maybe all our lives as complex primates who build complex societies out of manipulated symbols is always more than a bit fantasy. The geeks who created the economic forecasting systems were less surprised by their failure than the men who hired them to do the work or sold the concept to clients. Our ability to reify or even to make real some of our fantasies makes it hard to separate what's fantasy from what's not. What may be real interpenetrates what may be fantasy. We all bring much if not most of the art to the art object or the latest business model.

luis_g · December 3, 2009

When I was very young, before kindergarten, I loved to read comic books. I fantasized about Superman, rarely about being him, but wishing he was real, that he was just busy going about his work in the US. I desperately hoped he would read about us in a paper or see us on TV, and that he would come down to make things right and take away the despot du jour, violence and terrorist street bombings that were going on at the time. Maybe he could find a moment's rest afterward to enjoy our beaches, music, and cuisine before returning to the never-ending fray. Shortly thereafter, when I understood this to be a fiction, the fantasy of Superman as Savior, closely paralleling the Catholic upbringing I was experiencing, lingered for months.

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I don't know what to say to Rebecca's post, except that I disagree with the Yoko Ono part. Interesting that Rebecca mentioned Mishima, because he was in the same class as Yoko when they were children in Japan. So was the child who would later become Emperor of Japan.

Some class that must have been...

For other opinions, read this:

http://www.nytimes.com/1989/02/05/arts/art-yoko-ono-s-new-bronze-age-at-the-whitney.html

I do not think Rebecca is a petit bourgeois. I found it curious that she would preempt imaginary attacks; their (also imaginary) focus, and preemptively stereotype the motivations of any member of the male gender who might disagree with her argument.

Name-dropping fourteen people in one post? I think that's a record for this forum.

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I must be missing a gene or something, but I've never fantasized about being another artist, save for Margot Fonteyn and Elvis*. I have fantasized about what it must have been like for many artists from what I know.

Strangely, other people fantasize (more like hallucinate) about me looking like an actor. Even though I don't see it or fantasize about it, I must look more than a little like Jack Nicholson, because several times a month, sometimes a day , total strangers stop me to tell me I do. Many people have asked me to pose with them and have our picture taken. I always oblige. It just happened again this very morning, this time from a new UPS guy. The waitresses at one of my favorite breakfast joints and a couple of clerks at Office Depot call me "Uncle Jack". Weirdly amusing. Must be the vintage Ray-Bans or what I am told is my cat-that-ate-the-canary smile.

[No, I have zero interest in becoming a Nicholson impersonator.]

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Julie's point about some pictures being "inviting" was...er...well, inviting. One thing that Fred and Nan Goldin have in common, besides doing portraits, is that they both tend to focus on what Goldin refers to as one's tribe , which according to her, "is the only thing you can photograph". I find Goldin's work unabashedly visceral, humanistic, and in an old-school documentary style. With her, I always get the feeling that I am being not so much invited as ushered in. Her world feels strangely familiar. These are uncommon people, but they're often pictured doing everyday quotidian things. There's tension and energy in that. I loved what Goldin said about Arbus wanting "...to be anyone else but herself, and trying on everyone else's skin". That's another kind of fantasy.

[i think Goldin's remarkable jiggly night land-and-city-scapes are underrated (and under priced). ]

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* Just kidding.

mizore · December 3, 2009

Luis, this wasn't an imaginary attack. It was an attack somewhere else. I was rather harsher there about Ono than I've been here -- the initial question was would we care about a 70 something year old woman screaming as a performance piece if she wasn't The Widow Lennon. She does come wrapped with money, a sense of entitlement, good education, and exotic good looks, which is coin of most realms that don't require sufficient bridge or working code.

I think there are artists who speak only to their gender or mostly to their gender (Sylvia Plath, perhaps only to her gender at a certain age); some to the opposite sex (Ono, Edna St. Vincent Millay, the fashion photographers that we don't hear about because they didn't go beyond fashion, certain singers. Not all fantasies are open to everyone. Fashion photography is generally quite accomplished, just not always able to break out of its role as presenter of fantasy images.

Most of the people I know or know of who find Yoko Ono fascinating are male. It's a pretty straight forward observation, though not a world wide survey.

Norma Desmond · December 4, 2009

Speaking of superheros we fantasized about, mine was Robin. Holy tights and speedo, Batman! ;)

I find Goldin's work also to be intimate. I think the fantasies I'm thinking of related to making photographs have elements of intimacy.

As far as Yoko Ono, who comes "wrapped with money, a sense of entitlement, good education, and exotic good looks," I've heard judgments and assumptions made about people who are poor, with a sense of disadvantage, lousy education, who are ordinary looking and I'm not moved by those stereotypes either. There are plenty of exotic looking rich people who haven't walked the paths that Yoko Ono has. Yoko didn't have to become who she did and she didn't have to do the things she did. One may be given a voice by circumstance. Then one has to use it. That's freedom.

I saw Patti Smith at Winterland in San Francisco, 1978. Actually wrote a review of it for a local newspaper. Very memorable and inspiring. On the top of my list of all-time best concerts I've attended. Raw.

Luis, I wonder if you'd say a little more about the difference between being invited in and being ushered in. Is there less distance between you and the photographer when you feel "ushered" in? There seems to be a more proximate or immediate, perhaps even more active role (even more active than what Julie had in mind with "inviting"?) in someone ushering. Might lead to a good thread on the kinds of relationships photographers consider with their viewers and as viewers we consider to be having with photographers, and photographs. From presenting to ushering . . .

luis_g · December 4, 2009

Rebecca- " Luis, this wasn't an imaginary attack. It was an attack somewhere else."

How was one supposed to know that from reading this?

RB- "I don't like Yoko Ono; I think she's a derivative rich girl who fucked her way into various art circles, and will bite anyone suggesting that I can't stand her because I'm petit bourgeois -- I think a lot of "you don't like that because you're petit bourgeois" is coded dislike for the poor who don't have time for doing small audience art -- real petit bourgeois in Marxist terms are shop owners and wedding photograhers, not lumpen proles like adjunct composition teachers). I think she's a fantasy for certain kinds of guys, and the vigor of their defense of her tends to more make me think they're aware at some level that they're identifying with the money, the beauty, and the connections, and that they're creating an imaginary Yoko."

I still see no hint that there was indeed a prior attack, and/or that you were referring to it, which is why I thought you were talking offensively defensive about an imaginary potential attack. Methinks you may be stereotyping what men think about Y.O.

Rebecca , I respect your opinion, but I certainly don't recognize Ms. Ono because of education, wealth, being "The Widow Lennon" or "exotic" looks (I don't even have yellow fever). People like that are dime a dozen. I see this as pre-loading, trivializing and stereotyping the range of possible reasons why anyone (me, in this case) might disagree with you.

RB - "Most of the people I know or know of who find Yoko Ono fascinating are male."

That's funny, because most non-arts oriented men I know seem much closer to your position on Yoko's life and work than finding her "fascinating", let alone attractive.

Fred - I used "ushered" for Goldin because I feel like she takes extreme care not just with her subjects, but with her viewers as well. She doesn't brickbat the viewer with the members of her tribe. By this I don't mean her imagery is watered down in any way, but that she's not being sensationalistic about her subjects. She is being serious, and in spite of the uncommon subjects and their subculture, Goldin is not trying to exploitatively draw contrast between them and her viewers. She is exploring many aspects of and themes through her tribe.

They are not freaks, but family, with all the baggage that entails. She is portraying them lovingly, truthfully, strong and weak, loving, fighting, and dying, warts and all, doing things we all do. The overarching effect to me is that they are me and I am them, that we're much more alike than we are different, and that the differences are a magnificent reminder of the human spectrum. Her subjects pay a dear price for identity, living courageously.

Goldin visually escorts the viewer, introducing him to this tribe of passionate people she is a member of and knows first-hand, maybe like the lines of her hand, ultimately revealing this is who we are, and this includes the viewer, too.

Norma Desmond · December 4, 2009

Thanks, Luis.

I think Goldin's approach to color and the style of her photographs have much to do with how I feel about her people as well.

mizore · December 4, 2009

Luis, one of the reasons people in general have relatively little respect for the arts is that much of the arts does appear to be self-hypnosis and group think.

Or I could be envious of Ono because she doesn't seem to be that different from me, just with the leisure to do what she wanted to do.

One of the things that photography does is give us the illusion that we're sharing the light of a prior experience, that we're in the scene. The field has been fraught with exoticism since the beginning and tends to take off where the 19th Century Orientalist painters left off, just with different senses of the exotic. I'm not sure Goldin is playing with that or against that. The whole abstract expressionalist movement could be seen as a hypertrophied form of exoticism, if you squint, going somewhere never gone to before.

I'm almost to the point of saying that if context and content matters to a photograph, it's not art. If content is the most salient point of the photograph, the photograph is unbalanced as art. If focus is obscured to avoid context and content, it's unbalanced as a photograph and fails to respect its medium. Might have well have used paint or a lithography stone.

Norma Desmond · December 4, 2009

Rebecca--

I take photographs of what matters to me, often. And that content matters to the photograph. Sometimes, on the other hand, as I said to Phylo recently, I just use "reality" to express what I want and the subject really doesn't seem to matter to me as much but I can't deny it still matters to the photograph . . . because it's there. I wonder, if the content and context of what I photograph ever stops mattering to me altogether, will I put my camera down? I don't know. I'm still evolving. Maybe someday, I'll find situations or set up situations that mean nothing to me and shoot them and find expression in that. It actually sounds like an intriguing way to go, if it's actually possible. Right now, I'm not exactly sure how to separate content from art or from the supposedly other more salient aspects of a photograph.

On another matter, are you saying that liking Yoko Ono shows that one is self-hypnotized or deluded by group think?

luis_g · December 4, 2009

I am not an exclusionist when it comes to what is or isn't art. If the author calls it art, it's art. I'll leave the drawing of the lines of demarcation and the pronouncements that usually follow to others.

Fred - In no way was it an oversight or disregard on my part for Goldin's color and style. I hadn't touched on Goldin's use of color or anything else, because the question was about why I'd used the word "ushered" instead of "inviting" and I was being specific, but Fred's right, they're an integral, irreducible part of her pictures and their gestalt.

RB - " one of the reasons people in general have relatively little respect for the arts is that much of the arts does appear to be self-hypnosis and group think."

Oh, please, this is a risible argument. Like the arts have a monopoly on "self-hypnosis and group think"? It happens in all human endeavors, including those commonly thought of as the most objective. Look back at what the latter term was coined around.

That just shows to me that the real reason is ignorance. I've never heard anyone who would qualify for "people in general" even mention either of those reasons for their contempt for art, though I have heard those stereotypes from others... used against people of other races, orientations, ethnicity, etc.

All "access" pictures can be said to lie in the shadow of Orientalism, and sometimes it seems like Goldin is tiptoeing around, but not stomping that line. She has come closer to doing that lately, much less so in the early work. Orientalism is a relative term. It has as much to do with the photographer and the content, as it does with the viewer and where it is being seen. It is undeniable that "access" pictures have that forbidden fruit/voyeuristic aura that most lay people and more than a few who should know better find irresistible. As the interview with the guy from Getty made clear, this keeps more than a few mediocre photographers gainfully employed. In all fairness, there are some great photographers who do "access" pics.

I would not call unusual, brilliant work streaming from a powerhouse intelligence (and no, I do not necessarily mean Goldin) Orientalism.

Goldin has walked a perilously high and loose tightrope. It is easy to find in her work what appear to be first-year art school student tropes. Or undertones of Orientalism. She is openly romantic, sometimes dangerously so, but usually does not edge too deep into sentimentality and rarely into the saccharine. I would consider her edits counterproductively self-indulgent, but hers is a longitudinal form of storytelling, a largely autobiographical epic with its own stylistic demands. She's been described as using the snapshot aesthetic , and the documentary style, yet there is ample evidence in the work of fluency in art history. It was a touch of genius to adopt the two traditional "family formats" of the snapshot and the slideshow, a way of presenting the rare in a very common, ur-format that directly reaches -- and includes -- her viewers in the work.

People have characterized her as a JAP. To me, she comes across as more of an Earth-Jewish Mother. A lot of people have said she was a pioneer in color. She wasn't, but she learned the lessons of the those who preceded her, made them her own, took color to a different place and uses it beautifully in the work. Nevertheless, it is at a precarious place, where it sometimes flirts with the decorative. In all fairness, the poetic use of color is one of the least understood things in photography, even after Kandinsky.

There are two kinds of photographers, those who work in discrete projects, and those like Ms. Goldin, whose work is a lifelong project cut into chapters. This cohesion can pay off, but it is risky business, and not the conventional gallery business model. Her initial Ballad of Sexual Dependency was an extraordinary departure from other work at the time, but like many others who work in this fashion, the difficulty of reinventing oneself within a longitudinal channel becomes asymptotically difficult across time. Goldin juggles identity, loss, mortality and the moments that are the antidotes to it, both the chop wood, carry water, and the weightless, ecstatic kind, as few can.

In nuclear physics, there are four kinds of forces. The strongest is imaginatively named the Strong Force. It is only effective at very short ranges, and it is what holds nucleii together. When I see how intimately close Goldin is to her subjects and photographically to herself, how conscious she is of the duality of public and private, the need for, and potency to be found in sculpting or discovering one's identity, no matter how extreme, and the fragility, alienation, and frequent tragedy that goes with that, and so much more, the Strong Force comes to mind.

Allen Herbert · December 4, 2009

I think the closer the fantasy touches hands with the reality the more real the fantasy. For instance the girl/boy next door can be a fantasy with some hope of it becoming a reality feeding the fantasy. Fred gave an example, in another thread, of his awakening and fantasy of older folk…. a fantasy with a base of reality for him.

“It is easy to find in her work what appear to be first-year art school student tropes”

Probably but she can write a good story to help the art along.

“The strongest is imaginatively named the Strong Force. It is only effective at very short ranges”

Sort of fits Yoko.

luis_g · December 4, 2009

Allen - " Probably but she can write a good story to help the art along."

What story is that? Can you provide an URL?

mizore · December 4, 2009

Fred. Basically, photography has characteristics that allow us to use all sorts of things -- realism, context, technical effects from lens/film/developing(postprocessing -- as part of the photograph. Some uses of film are closer to other contemporary art forms.

I was wondering elsewhere if the whole concept of ART in the sense of something that has value outside the uses of religion/propaganda/visual souvenir didn't rise as art as a craft began to be mechanized -- first with the camera oscura to help with copying and various tools for laying out perspective in the Renaissance then to the rise of Western European non-representational art with the rise of photography. Lace went from being a luxury for men as well as women in the 18th Century to being utterly devalued when many forms of it could be machine made (some still can't be but nobody outside of fairly specialized textile circles is that good at spotting it across a ballroom). Things that come dear are more valued than things that come cheap.

Insisting that people like Yoko Ono or be considered ignorant is a sign of an art boor. Me, I don't like her.

Photography still doesn't always know what it wants to be when it grows up. It can't make representation hard, so it has to work with and around this reality of the medium.

Luis, economically, I'm an unemployed lumpen prole according to Marx, not even up to being one of the masses.

Larry Clark's Tulsa predates Goldin's work. Clark's Tulsa was like nothing else then that I knew anything about, though I didn't know about Frank's work then. Various fashion magazine photographers did masterful things with color, whatever the motivations.

The more experimental arts have been around for a century now. I'm not sure that ignorance really is why many people prefer television and the movies. The acting in movies and the production values tend to be first rate even when the story is brain candy.

The thing about some other human projects is that the bridge has to agree that it's a good bridge for the money, and completely imagining that a bridge or circuit is an impressive advance in their fields tends to get corrected by things that are not impressed by human charisma. Art is about human charisma and self-manipulation. And sometimes, there's no there there. See The Forger's Spell.

We look at a sheet of paper with patterns of colors, black, white gray, and we see things in it. Very few animals can do this, or invent religions or decide that listening to silence makes it a musical composition (and I respect what Cage did with that), and I've walked out of movies where the film esthetic continued into the street. I was seeing things Truffautishly.

Goldin illustrates a view of the bohemian world that has been with us since Our Lady of the Camellias, maybe from Samuel Johnson's Lives of the Poets. People really do live those lives, and some of them do die. And we get to watch or read about it at a safe distance. The lives that aren't like that aren't such good voyeur food -- people who lived as artists, raised children, worked the day job until the museums started buying, don't make for the same sense of pleasure in seeing someone else wreck his life more thoroughly than we've done. We can pretend that the photos are less framed and distanced that Live of the Poets, but the reality is safely years away and far on the other side of the paper.

Like Ginsberg said in the 1950s, death to Van Gogh's Ear.

Norma Desmond · December 4, 2009

"Insisting that people like Yoko Ono or be considered ignorant is a sign of an art boor. Me, I don't like her."

</blockquote>

I'm sorry, Rebecca, but you've now created a straw man, and I'm not buying it. No one is insisting you like Yoko Ono. You have, however, made some controversial and rather extreme statements about her and about the people who like her. You deserve heat for those statements and are getting it. No one has suggested you're ignorant for not liking her. That's your own creation.

"Me, I don't like her" is a fairly simple statement with which I never would have argued. It's your paragraph upon paragraph elaborating on that statement, your adding sociological and gender-stereotypical rationale for your dislike of her, and your critique of her as a person and, more so, as a type of person, that is being reacted to. I'm not reacting to your taste.

Otherwise, I'm sorry, but I don't know what you're talking about. You originally made a somewhat-unclear-to-me statement about content and context not mattering to a photo. I responded to that. I find your latest comment, presumably about content and context not mattering, unclear. Can you simplify it? I am not able to follow you.

luis_g · December 4, 2009

Rebecca - " Insisting that people like Yoko Ono or be considered ignorant is a sign of an art boor. Me, I don't like her."

It could be, but that's not what I wrote, nor what I am, thank you. What I said was that the stereotyping of those who disagree with (or are not like) you is a sign of ignorance. It is a simple mistake to think that I am proselytizing, making a case for Ms. Ono , or that she's a personal favorite (Or Goldin or Serrano, for that matter). I know well your mind is not open on this subject, and I was not and am not trying to change it. Your anticipation of an attack that isn't coming, and putting up a needless, constant offense is a waste.

RB - " Photography still doesn't always know what it wants to be when it grows up. It can't make representation hard, so it has to work with and around this reality of the medium."

Photography's heyday has come and gone. The relatively facile representation did nothing but shift arts' problems away from hand-eye coordination and towards the conceptual level. Many thought this would kill painting, but in fact, it liberated it from one of its biggest yokes.

RB " Luis, economically, I'm an unemployed lumpen prole according to Marx, not even up to being one of the masses."

My heart goes out to you, Rebecca. I hope things get better soon.

For me, art is about a lot more than human charisma and self-manipulation. If I ever thought that was all there was to it, frankly, I'd get out and never look back.

There's a there in the viewer's mind and heart.

In Vasari's Life of the Artists, there's an account of a mural Leonardo painted on the side of his house, I believe. Vasari tells how it was so realistic that birds tried to perch themselves on the trees in it.

RB " (and I respect what Cage did with that)"

And Cage held Yoko's performance work in high regard before Lennon, btw.

RB - "I've walked out of movies where the film esthetic continued into the street. I was seeing things Truffautishly."

Me too. I had the same trouble David Byrne did with Eggleston. He grew on you way too easily, and the only way out was to work through it.

I never said or thought that Ms. Goldin was unique, or was born whole, without ancestry. How do you compare Larry Clark's Tulsa to Goldin? Or color found in 1988 fashion to Goldin's color? When the Ballad came out, there had been other bodies of work connected to people living below the ice, but there was nothing like her work. If you think there was, I would love to see it.

Goldin's work is, IMO, more closely related to Cindy Sherman's than any of her contemporaries.

Allen Herbert · December 5, 2009

Fred, the metaphor is the principal appliance of poetry, it can be defined as a play on words in which one object or idea is expressed as if it were something else, something with which it is said to share universal features.

“What story is that? Can you provide an URL?”

Just for you Louis cause I’m that sort of helpful dude.

<a href="http://fototapeta.art.pl/2003/ngie.php">http://fototapeta.art.pl/2003/ngie.php</a>

Although Nan’s work does not really work for me in a” top draw” way as a person she is certainly my sort of gal. Love Nan’s thoughts and the story which is revealed.

<h3>“If I want to take a picture, I take it no matter what”</h3>

“You were one of the few photographers who started to take color pictures. How did it happen? I accidentally used the roll of color film in my camera. I thought it is black and white, but it was color”. Nan “that you do not need material, financial success, but you have to be driven”.

Allen Herbert · December 5, 2009

Indeed, Mr Shakespeare was the master of Mr Metaphor who answered to he's every whim and deed.

The dude gives you an inferiority complex in every way.

luis_g · December 5, 2009

Allen H. typed - " Probably but she can write a good story to help the art along."

Allen, do you write "good stories" to help your art along? If not, is it because you can't/don't want to write, or because you feel your work, unlike Goldin's, doesn't need it?

Thanks for providing it, I was wondering what you were referring to. You cherry-picked two of the dumbest-sounding quotes in the interview to make your point, but they end up making the opposite point: That her text is self-effacing, revealing, & honest, not promotional, as you claim.

I was thinking that Rebecca probably read it, too, from her citing both Larry Clark's work and the use of color in fashion.

Goldin has also written articles about other photographers, that have nothing to do with her own work.

Thanks again.

mizore · December 6, 2009

Re Ono, and even John Cage, these are from older battles and the heat wasn't appropriate here. At the last Cage performance I saw at St. Mark's Church, he was viciously heckled. And this was supposedly an audience more likely to be friendly than not. I understand from what I've read that the same thing happened at Naropa.

I think we live in contexts whether we're interested in doing that or not. I began to feel that I was more accepted in the poetry world for being in the poetry world than for what I was writing, which may or may not have been an accurate assessment. We do frame how we see things by cultural contexts -- and I'm not sure (today) that one can escape that.

I suspect a good bit of my reaction to Yoko Ono is envy, and my friend who sat me down with a large book on the psychodymanics envy would be happy to know that I've raised my sights. "What, can't you be envious of Allen Ginsberg; why be envious of all these minor poets?"

Regarding Larry Clark's Tulsa, that was one of the first things I saw in New York after starting to go to the workshops at St. Marks, which had a couple of Tulsa poets teaching in them. So, which Tulsa was the real one? I suspect that it also had history, and that Clark knew the works of HCB. It was the book of photographs of anything that brutal, that revealing, this side of the photos the cops found on one of the local drug dealers (which was later and which I didn't see, just heard about).

I don't think we can create anything without it being in a cultural context, that people have to have experiences with arts that lead them to believe it was do something for them, enough to learn more about it.

Goldin's texts, which I've read since the start of this discussion, aren't self-promoting, but the texts about her come across as ad copy.

Luis, on the economic front, I also have $20K and unemployment, and in May, I can start collecting social security, thought not much. I'm more tempted to try to never work again full time than anything else. I loathe giving up my time to most of the jobs I've had and teaching creative writing strikes me as joining the biggest pyramid scheme in the country, and some of the students are dangerously insane (see Cho). But I'm not sure my current plan makes sense, so I'm particularly uneasy about self-destructive life styles. Goldin illustrates that people die younger than they should because of self-destructive choices (the drug users, not the people who died of sexually transmitted AIDS before anything much was known about it). I may be more moralistic than compassionate, but then I suspect that if I impoverish myself by refusing to do a job of work for money, nobody will really have much compassion for me, either.

I don't think that human charisma and self-manipulation are particularly bad things (I know a poet who claims poetry is interesting when the poet is an interesting person). The tools for self-manipulation survive the death of the charismatic artist, though.

Basically, art is a pleasure -- and if it's not fun, not a pleasure, an excitement, then it's not really going to have much of an audience. Humans take pleasure or find excitement in graphic or literary representations of things we'd flee from in real life? It's obviously part of the human condition.

luis_g · December 6, 2009

Rebecca " I don't think that human charisma and self-manipulation are particularly bad things..."

Nor do I, but they're not nearly enough for me. There's no denying that a charming character doesn't hurt in the art world, but there's a lot more to it than that. For poets, there's no denying that a good reading voice helps, but 99.9% of the readers will never attend a live reading of most poems they read.

"Basically, art is a pleasure -- and if it's not fun, not a pleasure, an excitement, then it's not really going to have much of an audience. Humans take pleasure or find excitement in graphic or literary representations of things we'd flee from in real life? It's obviously part of the human condition."

I think pleasure is a part of it, but there's a lot more to it than that. A huge majority of art, even that on the web, has a minimal audience.

As you've probably guessed by now, I'm not one for these dogmatisms about art. Most art has to appeal to people. But that appeal is not always about pleasure. It can be about anything that makes us human -- or the lack thereof.

"Humans take pleasure or find excitement in graphic or literary representations of things we'd flee from in real life? It's obviously part of the human condition."

You're right: The things that we might flee from in real life are but a part of the human condition. There are things we'd run to, or with, or dance to/with, that spur our curiosity, or make us feel, wonder and think, in short things that address, expand, define and help us understand our own and the human condition -- and much more. Gauguin, titled his large last masterpiece "Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going?" These are some of the fundamental questions of art and being human.

To boomerang back to fantasy, here's a little video that obliquely gets tantalizingly close to the core (at 5:12):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3bfZmX4TMM

mizore · December 7, 2009

and, despite some anecdotal information to the contrary, I suspect there is enough homophobia in these towns for there to be some relevance to the story.

</blockquote>

Thing is there's relevance to that story in any number of big cities, too. I know people who were gay-bashed in New York and in Boston, and I know that people have been murdered because they were gay in London. Washington, DC, has a gay cop detailed to help with gay homicides, not that most of those aren't people getting killed by bar pickups they've misjudged, though that might be homophobic at its core, too.

Proulx's inspiration was watching an older guy looking longingly at young guys playing pool. Was the man's real life was what Proulx imagined it to be? One of the editors I know said that writers tend to imagine all sorts of complex things and believe in them -- that's kinda an occupational hazard, but most of us put more of ourselves than anyone else into our work, not necessarily even a significant part of the real people who triggered our fantasies.

Probably nobody can see the real life of any other person. We construct a mutually satisfying narrative of who we are to each other, or we cease to want to be in contact if the other person's narrative of us feels like an imposition or an insult.

Fantasy can be one of the reasons for taking this slice of time, light, and shadows. Another reason might be purely esthetic. Third reason might be to document something, to make this identification, to show this action, to give the viewer this experience, and the esthetic concerns would be in the service of better documentation.

mizore · December 7, 2009

I think pleasure is a part of it, but there's a lot more to it than that. A huge majority of art, even that on the web, has a minimal audience.

</blockquote>

One thing about this species is that we pay money to go on machines that scare us. Thrills and terrors are a pleasure to humans. If art isn't as good as a roller coaster, I dunno. The big questions strike me as utterly imaginary -- we're born; we get accultured to our tribe, we try a narrative or two on, we accept or reject the narratives laid out for us, we die and go away. What matters is contributing to the general distractions from that blank wall we all hit eventually, the blank wall before and after our own personal lives. We make our meaning out of raw thought. We like being scared -- this is something uniquely human, I think. Dogs certainly dislike being scared and will avoid anything that scares them. Same for horses. Cats will check out odd things in their environments (one trap bait for wild cats is a shiny thing over the trap jaws -- but that never works for canids).

Perhaps we wouldn't buy tickets to rollercoasters if we were descended from creatures who had to brachiate or die. The ones who loved being slightly scared survived, who took joy in flying through the air between branches yet holding the fear in mind to sharpen the physical skils; the ones who refused to learn to brachiate because you could get hurt died. We also pay good money to go climbing and skiing. Thrills in the arts maybe come from the mirror neurons and from our passion for the slightly dangerous that was part of our evolutionary history (some of the cave paintings are of confrontations between men and a bear over a carcass that the humans killed and that the bear wants). We were so smart that if we didn't find pleasure in the dangerous, the difficult, we'd have died of fear millions of years ago.

A huge amount of art has a minimal audience because it doesn't please anyone, not even the artist two weeks later. And some art will always have a small audience but will have huge impact through that small audience. The joke about The Velvet Underground's first album is that only 500 people bought it and all of them started rock bands.

Interesting about Arbus and the boy in the photograph. I always found Arbus a genius but creepy.

Norma Desmond · December 7, 2009

"Thing is there's relevance to that story in any number of big cities, too."

</blockquote>

Yes, but Proulx wasn't writing about the big city. She told a story about gay American cowboys. Did you want her to write a different story? That would be a step beyond even those who wrote letters to her wanting a different ending.

I've always lived in big cities, never worn chaps. I could relate personally to Proulx's story. Empathy? Her story is universal enough even though it's about particulars. And the American cowboy gay love story was, in some sense, at least for me, at least one of the essences of her story.

This line of thought began with your questioning Proulx's accuracy and suggesting that Southern small towns weren't completely homophobic. Do you think Proulx, with her story, was suggesting all places outside big cities are homophobic? Do you think she was telling "a" story or "the" story?

Bringing it back to photography (and fantasy), sometimes my photos and my fantasies are personal. They are not necessarily "accurate" in some sort of cultural/sociological/political study kind of way. I shoot middle aged gay men a lot because I'm drawn to doing so. I supposed I could be accused of leaving women and straight men out. Some might even go so far as to interpret why I am leaving 90% of the population out and they might even suggest there's a statement about straight people being made in my omission of them (which is, of course, not true . . . I do shoot straight people). While they were doing that, I'd continue making photographs.

luis_g · December 7, 2009

Rebecca - " The big questions strike me as utterly imaginary -- we're born; we get accultured to our tribe, we try a narrative or two on, we accept or reject the narratives laid out for us, we die and go away."

Wow....suddenly, it's all so clear...a little accretion, partying with the peeps, choosing from the cafeteria, trying on a few outfits in the dressing room, a funeral, and it's back to Worm Chow. I guess we can close the PoP forum now.

Rebecca - "So, which Tulsa was the real one?"

Both, of course. Tulsa is not a one-dimensional place. Both representations of Tulsa were also fictions.

Clark has mentioned as his influences Dorothea Lange, Eugene Smith, Eugene Metz, Bob Dylan, Walter Sheffer and Lenny Bruce. Although Clark likes to give the impression that he was uneducated, self-made, and not exposed to the art of others, the fact is that he attended what was, at the time, one of the top art schools in the US for two years, before joining the army (which might explain where Clark picked up his Modernist compositions).

Clark has more than a little P.T. Barnum in him. He has, from the beginning, hawked himself as the analog of an icebreaker to bull----t, but unlike ice, the latter is sticky.

His first show was with Imogen Cunningham.

Goldin, while in her mid-teens, was already photographing her tribe at about the same time Clark was finishing what would become Tulsa, before she heard of him, or Tulsa was published. Clark's work was essentially unseen, except by a few friends, for years.

“...f---ing in the backseat... the fat girl next door who gave me b--w jobs after school. I treated her mean and told all my pals. We kept count up to about 300 times we f---ed her in the 8th grade. Once when I f---ed her after Bobby Hood (ol' horse dick) I was f---ing hair and air. A little rape.”

--- Larry Clark explaining his motivation to photograph what would become his self-published book -- in order to relive his teen experiences. From the introduction to Teen Lust.

mizore · December 7, 2009

Luis, philosophy is another great pleasure. Like you said, you're posting because it's fun. Anxiety is fun, too. Dying is something we share with other animals; using the internet isn't.

Both Clark and Goldin are from fairly privileged backgrounds then, and Clark grew up with a mom who was a photographer.

If these were straight photographs of people not doing exotic things, or if they had their clothes on or if they showed more genitalia than I've seen in Goldin's photos on line, would they be good photographs? If content is everything, then access to things that are interesting is required for being a photographer. If context plays a role in how we see things, which I suspect that it does, how much do the photographs require the framing narrative?

Vermeer went from religious art, which has a strongly conventional narrative, to the things we remember him for which were much less conventional and which were domestic scenes that wouldn't have been exotic in his day. There's often an implied narrative in the Vermeers, but it's framed by the slightly distorted perspectives (I once applied what I'd learned from Visual Perception to a Vermeer in the Frick). The narrative isn't what the painting is about in the way that School of Athens is.

A straight snap shot of stuff doesn't attract attention; a shot of inanimate objects has to be posed and lit to be interesting. The implied photograher is our craftsman, who arranged otherwise not particularly interesting things for us.

Clark and Goldin are playing with implied photographers, though Clark more obviously and disprovably. The snapshot taken with something less than a first rate lens has an anonymous photographer, no fun in that. The carefully framed shot taken with first rate equipment has a different sort of implied photographer without any other information necessary at all. I suspect that if I blew a focused Hasselblad/Zeiss shot to 24 by 24, regardless of subject matter, it would be looked at more closely than a similar but less sharp and creamily toned 10 by 10 crop from a 35 mm point and shoot. Even people who didn't know cameras would see that the something about the photograph was different. Certain looks imply photographer who has a quality camera. The photographer who is photographing her tribe is yet another implied photograher. Would these photographs get the attention they've gotten if they weren't framed with the meta-narrative of the implied photographer? Cops find pictures of people doing drugs all the time, just not taken with first rate cameras by people who learned about art, so it's not just the content, obviously. How much of it is the context? Goldin's narrative? Esthetic values? The content?

So we've got the implied photographer vs. the photographer who took the pictures vs. the person who takes pictures and has a whole rest of their lives to deal with -- what's the important one? When I was doing photography for the weekly paper, I wasn't in words when I was shooting, and nobody cared about me as the photographer at all. It just had to be framed not badly. The point was the subject of the photograph. All that was required of me was that the photos didn't suck.

Meta narrative would be part of the context of a work of art -- and in some cases, an important part. The context of a photograph of Civil War dead is different now than it would have been five years after Appomattox. If we were living in a culture where the transvestite was accepted as part of the culture (as was the case in certain native cultures), Goldin's photos would look different. Go back to Wilde's day and those photographs would have be criminal offenses, hidden. So the context that allows us to see Goldin's photos all required legal changes, and the context is also one where our narrative is that we're beyond the bigotries that destroyed Wilde,. But enough people aren't free of those bigotries so viewing them is a different act than it would be if these were from a culture that had cross dressing as generally accepted feature. Clark's narrative looks less interesting as a sentimentalization of tough macho men who use women as objects of their lust fades.

I don't think anyone does art without being influenced by other people doing art -- that Larry Clark wants to pretend that with a photographer mother and art classes that he was untrained says a lot about the culture we're in.

I think you want to say Goldin's work was essentially unseen, except for a few friends, for years.

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