Creative constructive antagonism in photography

Norma Desmond · September 1, 2015

If I accept Korn's premise that art tends to portray the place where humans feel truth resides, then in the beginning

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I guess there might be some academic reason to do so, but I have a hard time accepting this premise even for the sake of argument. I just don't see framing art within the context of truth.

I do put stock in a question that you asked, however, which is, "Will we come full circle?" I think we continually do, though it's probably a bit more like a spiral than a circle. Again, back to antagonism: without it, we might just come full circle, or more likely just keep going in circles. With it, we do often circle back but within an overall state of advance.

charleswood · September 2, 2015

OK, but I would add that in that spiral, in the progress of human generations, children become their parents and what's reproduced along with new adults are the age-old, self-made problems that beset our species. That's a view of our species as in stasis, and the fossil record shows that once a species is physically stable, it is in stasis and that it's only geographical isolation that contributes change. If punctuated equilibrium describes the change mechanism for our mental constituents, and if our mental state even can evolve, then it follows that an individual working in isolation is the only hope for the emergence of an evolved mental state, an evolved mental state the only way out of our current congenital stasis that is our anthropogenic extinction, a physical product of our limited minds. Hail the tortured artist working in isolation on the problem of the human condition.

charleswood · September 2, 2015

And as to art framed within a context of truth, I don't see how it can be otherwise framed. The truth of a Jackson Pollock is hard to sort out, maybe as incomprehensible and mysterious as are some examples of his art. Incomprehensible I don't value in dialog however, incomprehensibility in conversation, medium and no message of little value; and in truth if we look at Jackson Pollock we find he embraced the bottle, not his suffering. Though there may be intuitions and connections portrayed on a canvas that he rolled around on with paint, we don't know from his art product what exactly that inner life of his consisted of. Apparently he didn't either. Because he didn't embrace his suffering, he embraced the bottle and the bottle killed him and I don't see how that truth, or a truth, doesn't frame his art or the art of anyone else.

Even mine. Here's my neighbor's backyard after the tree 'trimmers' came today. It is my expression about how I at times see man in relation to nature. Naturally my neighbor spends most of his time in his house. His idea of a yard is comprehensible as should be my antagonism toward that idea of his. I baited the bird with peanuts, the bird is nature, the backyard man's relationship to nature.

Norma Desmond · September 2, 2015

Truth demands meaning and art doesn't. Jackson Pollock's paintings don't have to mean anything at all, and neither do da Vinci's. You may want something from Jackson Pollock and you're entitled to want that. But he's not obliged to give you that.

In any case, why isn't one's drunken product a truth as valid as one's self reflection? Are our truths only things we know about ourselves?

IMO, you're over-defining both art and the artist and in that sense putting unreasonable restrictions and demands on both.

charleswood · September 2, 2015

Art doesn't demand meaning, nor does a cough or a sneeze demand meaning beyond whether a cough or sneeze be produced in interesting form or not. I suppose then I'm just making a value judgment.

Fred - "Are our truths only things we know about ourselves?"

No, sure, our truths includes things we don't know about ourselves. For example, my neighbor has no awareness that his back yard is a self-portrait of not only his relationship to nature, but of his relationship to his inner garden, a garden in which he allows some things to grow and with the other things there he's rude and controlling.

Allen Herbert · September 3, 2015

" For example, my neighbor has no awareness that his back yard is a self-portrait of not only his relationship to nature, but of his relationship to his inner garden, a garden in which he allows some things to grow and with the other things there he's rude and controlling."

Interesting. A persons or society reflecting images which reveal their character and nature.

I wonder if this photo also speaks the same message.

Allen Herbert · September 3, 2015

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Norma Desmond · September 3, 2015

my neighbor has no awareness that his back yard is a self-portrait of not only his relationship to nature, but of his relationship to his inner garden

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Charles, this is why truth and meaning are connected but neither necessarily connects either to art or photography, though they often do. So, for example, the reason you say your neighbor's garden is a self portrait, etc. is because you may know something about your neighbor or his gardening habits. Now, let's say I don't know anything about your neighbor and pass by his yard on the day this picture was taken and assume it's a self portrait telling me just the things you're thinking. The next day I learn that, in fact, his trees became infested with a destructive bug and had to be taken down and he was sick about it and his garden likewise had been infected with some awful disease and he decided to strip it and was in the process of starting from scratch. In fact, just a few months ago he had a spectacular garden. Then my seeing his relationship to nature as you seem to be would have been very much "false."

Now, either way, whether he has a very uncaring or even destructive relationship to his garden or whether he had no choice and is terribly upset about his garden, there would be something negative going on, and that's something significant to get from the photo, but taking it much further than that in terms of meaning and truth could be very misleading. Maybe he really does hate nature and revels in that fact and is kind of giddy over the way his garden looks and makes his neighbors feel. Well, then, the negativity is on YOUR part, not his, so it may be that your reaction is more a portrait of you than his backyard is a portrait of him.

I'm certainly not saying that portraits can't give us insights into the people they're of. They very often do and they do often reflect significant things about their subjects. At the same time, the only confirmation that those things are "true" comes with knowledge, not just by looking at the photos. I think sometimes we get emotional truths (which may not line up to what the subject was experiencing but is simply a product of our relationship to the photo) and not factual ones or ones with literal meaning.

charleswood · September 3, 2015

Allen, offhand I don't think yours and mine speak a similar message because yours is of a person and mine isn't of a person. I intentionally let the back yard attest to a person's character without picturing the actual person. It's like you came over to my house and I let you stand on a ladder to peer into the guys back yard, something I used to do with guests to show them how tall native CA weed species can grow without actually having to take them on a trip with me to the local park's nature center. (Weeds not a problem any longer because he got a gardener. I was instrumental in his obtaining a gardener.) So you can tell from looking over his fence a bit about my neighbor. And you can tell a little about me, that I'm the type to get a ladder to look at just how bad the neighbor's yard has gotten and to do it in broad daylight without any canopy to hide me from my neighbor's eyes. Had I used a wide enough lens to get the ladder I was standing on into the shot, it could have become a picture suggestive of neighbors being the topic. That the photographer was standing on a ladder in full view would have suggested that I don't care if my neighbor is antagonized by my taking a photographic survey of his yard. A ladder would have put a bit more of me into the photograph, the ladder would have become a prop just as the bird is a prop for my having baited it into the photograph.

In yours, the person is pictured and speaks for herself.

charleswood · September 3, 2015

Fred wrote:

At the same time, the only confirmation that those things are "true" comes with knowledge, not just by looking at the photos.

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Interesting points. So again with my The Hand of Man photo as an example, I take it your sympathy as a viewer could fall to either side of the fence? At first blush let's say that photo bears equally either interpretation, sympathy on my side or sympathy on my neighbor's side. My bias is that it is on me the photographer to 'speak' clearly if I want sympathy; it's on me the photographer to speak clearly if I want sympathy for my neighbor. Had sufficient clarity been achieved: I think that the only fact discernible by a skeptical viewer would be that the photo was a plea for sympathy, a plea made by the photographer, a plea for sympathy for one side only, not for the other. It would have then been for the viewer to decide what to make of such a plea for sympathy beyond just enjoying it as such. The only truth expressed might be that neighbors can annoy each other at times despite how egregiously I could have portrayed one neighbor or the other. My attempt however was to present my neighbor's back yard as exemplifying what I think of as our species' collective effect on nature, we as bad a neighbor to nature as my neighbor is to me in some respects.

charleswood · September 3, 2015

Anyway I think communication of any kind is framed by clarity and veracity, and we combine those two elements in varying degrees when communicating.

Norma Desmond · September 3, 2015

Sure. But I think art runs the gamut from literal communication all the way to impressionism and expressionism not to mention abstraction, whose goals are neither clarity nor veracity.

By the way, your photo causes me only to have sympathy for the trees and not to even have considered either neighbor.

charleswood · September 4, 2015

Fred: "But I think art runs the gamut from literal communication all the way to impressionism and expressionism not to mention abstraction, whose goals are neither clarity nor veracity."

I agree and add that it still helps for there to be clarity in the artwork about whether it's impressionism, expressionism, abstraction, etc., or something entirely new, because the work can at least then be understood in context of the ongoing conversation, or as the start of a new conversation. What comes to mind in that regard is Stieglitz. Quoting from Wikipedia

It was in the catalog for this show that Stieglitz made his famous declaration: "I was born in Hoboken. I am an American. Photography is my passion. The search for Truth my obsession." What is less known is that he conditioned this statement by following it with these words:

<dl><dd>"PLEASE NOTE: In the above STATEMENT the following, fast becoming "obsolete", terms do not appear: ART, SCIENCE, BEAUTY, RELIGION, every ISM, ABSTRACTION, FORM, PLASTICITY, OBJECTIVITY, SUBJECTIVITY, OLD MASTERS, MODERN ART, PSYCHOANALYSIS, AESTHETICS, PICTORIAL PHOTOGRAPHY, DEMOCRACY, CEZANNE, "291", PROHIBITION. The term TRUTH did creep in but it may be kicked out by any one." <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Stieglitz#cite_note-DN-24">[24]</a></dd></dl>

This statement symbolized the dichotomy that Stieglitz embodied. On one hand he was the absolute perfectionist who photographed the same scene over and over until he was satisfied and then used only the finest papers and printing techniques to bring in the image to completion; on the other he completely disdained any attempt to apply artistic terminology to his work, for it would always be that – "work" created from the heart and not "art" created by academicians and others who had to be "trained" to see the beauty in front of them.

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So I gather that to some extent training is dead weight, but more to the point, I can see where at times the term TRUTH can be seen as always trying to creep into a conversation and I suppose the term Truth SHOULD be kicked out! I hate truth. Why all this framing art in terms of truth? I'm not down with that.

Norma Desmond · September 4, 2015

I agree and add that it still helps for there to be clarity in the artwork about whether it's impressionism, expressionism, abstraction, etc., or something entirely new, because the work can at least then be understood in context of the ongoing conversation, or as the start of a new conversation.

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No, no, no! ;)

What's great about art and about so many of these types of conversations you refer to—whether among folks like you and me or art historians and critics, or curators and museum owners, or artists from decade to decade and century to century—is the LACK of clarity about such things. We never really know for sure just how to categorize it, classify it, or in which (of so many) contexts to see or understand it. That allows the same piece of art to fall into different categories, play different roles in different contexts, change over the centuries, and be and remain alive. Some of my best art experiences have been when I'm really not sure what I'm looking at or listening to and I may well be all over the place in terms of where it actually fits in and whether it even does.

charleswood · September 4, 2015

I hate categories too. Seems I've been approaching art the way my neighbor deals with his back yard.

alan_zinn · September 4, 2015

My first impression of Chicago, and the start of my urban photography passion forty years ago was arriving at Union station in the morning rush hour. An enormous flow of people poured out into the city. I went there last month and took a few hundred frames. Among the results there are a couple that seem to feel right, but looking closer they didn’t express what I was feeling. The only way they looked good as traditional b/w images, looked like Metzker, Kline or Sugimoto. I love doing those guys all the time but not this time. I joyously took pictures of half-awake people trudging off to work and got "Urbanism’s deadening effect on the human spirit". I am used to going out at the noon hour and shooting people in line at gourmet food trucks. A word about selfies. I had to learn about some of the effects available to smart phones and P&S cams from my 5th grader grandson. Like, “Ken Burnes effect” and “old films” He has no idea what they mean but looks cool. What does that tell us about visual sophistication and fluency? I agree with Fred G. and those who say selfies are punctuations or gesturing. And they are “real-time”. Forget about reality and meaning. They change with every picture. New forms of expression always arouse and selfies will continue to evolve just like all gestures. The ability to gesture with a camera intrigues me. Give a monkey a mirror and what does it do first? It looks at its ass. It knows it has one because all the other monkeys do – but they are not his ass. So just to be sure and self-aware… . My reflection or shadow is commentary about myself. It places me somewhere actual.

There will be a special selfie app for everyone. – you heard it hear folks!<div></div>

Norma Desmond · September 4, 2015

Seems I've been approaching art the way my neighbor deals with his back yard.

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Don't be hard on yourself. I didn't think you were doing that. A hatchet is kind of an ending. Sharing of thoughts is a beginning. Had you stormed out of the room and deleted this thread from your computer, maybe there would be a comparison. ;)

Probably should also distinguish between contexts for clarity and veracity. When talking about art and when a curator puts together a show or an art historian writes a book, there's certainly room for clarity and veracity, for categorization, etc. These things often help edify and expand ideas about art. That's different from any need for clarity, veracity, or truth from art itself.

I saw a show a few years ago about Picasso's influence on Modern American art. There were looser influences and there were very direct instances of influence, homages, mimicking, copying, all by some of the great American artists of the 20th century. The show provided a lot of clarity and put a lot of the American works of art into a significant context. And, of course, that context and what those works communicated in that show and with reference to their roots in Picasso is still only part of the story. The importance of clarity in that particular presentation of the various artworks exists side-by-side with the importance of not tying those works down to such clarity. It's why I think art is served well by seeing it both in terms of communication and expressiveness, the latter having less to do with clarity and truth than the former.

Norma Desmond · September 8, 2015

By the way . . .

<a href="http://www.teamgal.com/production/1701/SS04October.pdf">ANTAGONISM AND RELATIONAL AESTHETICS</a>

<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antagonist_Movement">ANTAGONIST MOVEMENT</a>

And apropos of at least part of our discussion on the individual and art, a bit from the first link (which I haven't yet finished reading).

" . . . Bourriaud argues that art of the 1990s takes as its theoretical horizon 'the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space'. In other words, relational art works seek to establish intersubjective encounters (be these literal or potential) in which meaning is elaborated collectively rather than in the privatized space of individual consumption. The implication is that this work inverses the goals of Greenbergian modernism. Rather than a discrete, portable, autonomous work of art that transcends its context, relational art is entirely beholden to the contingencies of its environment and audience. Moreover, this audience is envisaged as a community: rather than a one-to-one relationship between work of art and viewer, relational art sets up situations in which viewers are not just addressed as a collective, social entity, but are actually given the wherewithal to create a community, however temporary or utopian this may be."

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charleswood · September 8, 2015

I see your point Phil.

And Fred, I read the article.

From Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics linked to by Fred above:

The interactivity of relational art is therefore superior to optical contemplation of an object, which is assumed to be passive and disengaged, because the work of art is a “social form” capable of producing positive human relationships. As a consequence, the work is automatically political in implication and emancipatory in effect.

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An example of relational art from artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, a:

...hybrid installation performances, in which he cooks vegetable curry or pad thai for people attending the museum or gallery where he has been invited to work.

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That cooking event together with interactions between artist and people an exhibit of a 'better world' of social harmony.

Enter 'antagonism' per the author, Claire Bishop:

If relational aesthetics requires a unified subject as a prerequisite for community-as-togetherness, then Hirschhorn and Sierra provide a mode of artistic experience more adequate to the divided and incomplete subject of today. This relational antagonism would be predicated not on social harmony, but on exposing that which is repressed in sustaining the semblance of this harmony. It would thereby provide a more concrete and polemical grounds for rethinking our relationship to the world and to one other [sic].

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I see that Nicolas Bourriaud is a curator.

So I'm tempted to see a Rirkrit Tiravanija as producing art for a curated art world. To do that he relies largely on his own narrative brain and on the narratives of others. Consequently, I see Bishop's endorsement of 'antagonism' as fiddling around with a narrative, adding 'antagonism' to the narrative brain's broth, 'antagonism' being "...that which is repressed in sustaining the semblance of this harmony." I think it's worthwhile of her to wish for relational antagonism as more concrete. I'm not sure how that would look in a thusly more polemical Tiravanija's cooking performance.

I think Bishop makes some interesting points.

Allen Herbert · September 12, 2015

"Allen, English is not my native language. Nonetheless it seems possible to understand what is written and try to constructively join the discussion, rather than making some simple snarky remarks that add nothing. Maybe it's not the language skills of the international visitors that are your problem here".Wooter.

Well, Wooter, have you just promoted yourself to a moderator or just a rude little man? Im entailed to my thoughts and opinions without a rude little man calling me names.

Norma Desmond · September 12, 2015

Allen, when you accuse someone else in the thread of "talking gibberish" (which is what you did in your first post) you might consider having a thicker skin when you get just the kinds of reactions you deserve. "You can dish it out but can't take it" comes to mind.

Allen Herbert · September 12, 2015

"You can dish it out but can't take it" comes to mind."

Of all people you just know that is not true....comes to mind. Okay, he is your mate...but no need to defend him he has his own loose mouth.

I was making a comment that certain posts were gibberish to my thoughts and perhaps clarity would help overseas members ....Wooter implied I was stupid and being snarky. I responded, as you would, if you were subject to such comments. That simple to understand...sorry, if that has upset you.

Allen Herbert · September 12, 2015

I have read the whole post with interest...and since I have made that comment folks have been responding in plain English... perhaphs my imagination but that is how I see it.

Allen Herbert · September 12, 2015

"Let us know when the swelling stops".

Not sure what you mean, Fred? I suspect, and maybe wrong, you are not being very nice. I forgive you as always. Just being Fred.

Allen Herbert · September 12, 2015

. "That's a view of our species as in stasis, and the fossil record shows that once a species is physically stable, it is in stasis and that it's only geographical isolation that contributes change"

The latest research contradicts that statement.

mentalfloss.com/article/30795/5-signs-humans-are-still-evolving

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