Chapter 4

TATE
the potential for documentation to be a way of maintaing the memory of an experience. a way of accessing and collecting information. this is compelling. It speaks to something beyond fetishization and using the mass media and the nature of certain mediums toward wide dissemination. There are a lot of people saying hello to themselves. People using self-documentation as way to wax and wane, and further grind their axe. 

information. is something that is active. real-time. it involves people’s lives. it is something that requires response. it ceases to become information when it becomes abstract, which is inspiring at times and motivating but often useless. We maybe rely too much on.

Not totally submitting to the aesthetic of the visual.

social and political realities of regions.

verify realities through a variety of means of collecting information.

ecological. photographic, visual, physical. story telling.

the justification for aesthetic journalism, not that it needs one, is its capacity to move the imagination into realistic alternatives. the imagination is the necessary fantasy upon which reality is produced. without imagination we have very little. This is what is so deadening about main stream media. It offers unimaginative stories of the world. A world of problems. Dead images that when taken in also make us stagnant. anaesthetization.  one point,

when an image is over exposed it speaks to a loss of information and value. it holds a little metaphorical insight what happens to people as well when we are overexposed. it’s of little use.

we long to experience the information. to make sense of it with the capacity of our bodies. to discover, collect and understand information using different parts of ourselves. it cannot come only through eyes to be disassembled and reassembled in heads. I think this is what we miss when we over academicize/formalize information practices. It lessens the ability for information to move us and strike the imagination and there a new response. For the information we experience to belong to memory and shape us so. 

azoulay is a little more confusing for me. she speaks as an historian, and in that case photographs are very important and powerful tools. But i am not convinced the relevance and use of history.


MICHELLE
“The idea of confronting society with a veracious mirror coincided with the introduction of portable 35mm cameras. [Artists] took responsibility for divulging issues passed over by mainstream media, and representing them via a journalistic narrative, revealing meaning to an audience." This line was re-inspiring. With all of our discussions in class so far, I have been reminded of the question: What is the point of art? Concerning a place in journalism and activism, can art really move people to action? Well, there's a limit to the control we have as artists over our viewers, but that should not stop us from "confronting society" and bringing to light the issues that are sidelined by, over even hidden, by mainstream media. It is at once empowering and frustrating that we as artists have the freedom to bring anything to light and viewers have an equal amount of freedom in facing or rejecting artists' work. Perhaps that reality calls for artists to be relentless in claiming a place in journalism and activism, to unceasingly confront society over and over again. 



Hans Haacke's works make me wonder where the line is between art and journalism, or art and sociology. Besides the fact that Haacke had access to present in a museum space, what makes his MOMA-Poll (1970) piece art as opposed to any other, regular survey? The work can exists as a survey, if it weren't called art. So, why is it art? The same goes for his cancelled Guggenheim solo show work. The project consisted of photographs, marked maps, and charts. Those are materials that could be in a research or journal document, just as much as a museum space. So, why is it important for them to be in a museum? Because they are information collected by an artist? I think the projects are great, but when neither the aesthetic nor journalistic approach is primary, where should a project exist? 

Alex:

"Seeing so many documentaries of the world’s horrors ultimately has a diminished impact, like watching too much CNN."

Cramerotti quotes this statement, presenting art as the mode through which one can counter such a leveling of effectiveness. This leads me to consider, however, the effectiveness of art. I read, several years ago, somewhere in a text about the Louvre, that one can only truly appreciate three pieces of art a day. We go to galleries and museums and sculpture parks, etc, but how much of that do we truly see? How many will we really remember? These questions line up with the qualm of how many of those graphic images in journalism do we manage to process? These issues seem quite similar, causing me to have qualms with the division portrayed. Though he notes the ineffectiveness of art that resembles regular journalism too much, this huge faith in the power of art is just something I find strange and hard for me to personally reconcile with in the way it is put in the text.

Advait:

There are some lovely parallels between the week’s readings and the week’s in-class discussions. That which interests me most in the Azoulay reading is this notion of reconstructions, the rendering of alternatives, of the potential of art/journalism to present us with choices. Once again, a reiteration of the dangers of the single story, of the suppression of information.

The role of the archive seems to be crucial, in this respect. Preservation of these stories, of these voices, helps to prevent mis-representation. Remembering is important. Our class has discussed (at length!) the malleability of truth, and the construction of a singular history. This kind of construction seems especially dangerous, and was, for example, perpetrated to disastrous effect by the Belgian colonists in Rwanda.

We’ve talked about feeling as though there’s a deluge of information, too many stories. I suppose that something like Reddit is a problematic example, but: here is a community of people, sifting through large amounts of information, news, et cetera, and highlighting stories through consensus. Problems of course arrive when the collective exhibits a kind of hivemind, dissenting stories can be silenced, and discourse is limited to confirmation rather than provocation (I’ve not looked into the demographics of an online community like Reddit).

There is still a troubling lack of criticality to Cramerotti’s view of art; he seems to perceive it as a zone of respite, for pause, for contemplation. I recall having to read a book called Museum Legs before coming to RISD (it was assigned over the summer); it discussed a kind of exhaustion that occurs when one is walking through a museum, looking/seeing/observing. Art can just as easily acquire a homogeneity as reportage or pornography.

Hyo Jin

I agree with Advait's response. I haven't read Chapter 4 but read the others on the order of sent to us. The reading of documentary debate aesthetic for an-anesthetic made me think also aesthetic is a style. Style that reads meaning and by the style you show the image it show all different meanings. And it was quite interesting to think little by little on bigger things. First I thought if an image can be misread, is that responsibility on photographer? How far the maker has to be responsible. We mentions about where to present and how is very important but I don't really know. For me it is on what and how you want to present. My intention is to show my thinking to as many people as possible so what happens after presenting I'm happy with any result and ready to take charge for that. Who is responsible for mis reading by choosing certain style? and does it matter if it was intentional or not?

Chapter 4

Tate:

what is the relationship between painting and photography. How dod we get from one to the next? the evolution has produced very different kinds of image production and consumption, and we do not know enough about how we got from one to another. thinking about paintings in relation to photographs, what is the connection, have photographs replaced painting? if that is true then it deserves unpacking because they are not the same even if they occupy a similar place/role. thinking about times when people’s lives were dominated by religion and methods of subverting this power was very subtle. it had to be. the penalty was terrible. the danger and risk involved is of the sort we cannot imagine.

what do we think about Apple? providing us the tools to make our “paintings” and images. What is Apple’s role in supplying us with all these tools. Are they revolutionary tools? Democratizing? Does using them actually undermine potential forms and actions? Apple is definitely not neutral in this conversation.

____________________

I really like what is being talking about in the Azoulay article. It makes more sense to think of what goes down during protests and uprisings are not just stale gestures that come about through citizens performing revolution, but there is this semiotics and code of language. it makes sense also to think about photography as a way of “writing” down those exchanges.

Advait:

The Azoulay piece, for me, seemed to tie together a lot of the other readings we’ve had so far (and Nupur’s points in class this afternoon, re: codified vocabularies of space, et cetera). I think the notion of re-enactments is absolutely essential to understanding the effect that observation has upon the subject. Especially whilst watching The Act of Killing, I often wondered to what extent the men were simply acting for the camera (most succinctly when Herman, who found himself mostly, distressingly infantilised by the filmmaker, beat upon a drum kit with abandon for about fifteen seconds). As counterpoint, I wonder if, given the (quasi-)panopticon of modern society, we are used to having cameras trained upon us (or at the very least would “know” what to do if they were pointed at us). Cramerotti also mentioned the "prosumer" status of the Web-user; I wonder if this would extend to a commingling of subject/object relations (that is, the user is both viewing and being viewed, and so understands what role they must occupy as both audience and actor)?

Alex:
Cramerotti talks about self documentation, in relation to art, from the 1960s and 2970s. A few pages earlier, he talks about how art and literature movements came to define a new class in society. With that in mind, I wonder how he feels about how self documentation has expanded, not just with the advent of social media allowing for distribution of any taken images, but even with just the broadening of the target customer segments by camera-producing companies to reach more amateurs. It documents art, performances, events, daily life, anything. My dad still has photographs of crude drawings of flowers from my childhood, and tapes with videos of my dance recitals. But, then again, how does the dispersion of art change value and perception? So many people I know (given the art school bias) upload photos and instagrams of art in museums and their own art, in progress or finished. Does it dilute the importance of each individula, or, looking at it from a statistical point of view, does having more data through this documentation allow us to amass a truer, more accurate picture of art on the whole? In photography that depicts art, such as performance art, is that photo a separate piece of art to be considered, given that it undoubtedly has its own aesthetic properties and inherent meaning and value? 

Caroline:

Azoulay's article demonstrates the important civic role of documentation and photography. It brings hope in the sense that it places media at the center of the development of a new " rich" language of expression for the revolution.  I was particularly struck by his discussion on iconography: sure, icons are important drivers for change, but what are the limits of this device? By bringing up the example of iconized -- and therefore dehumanized-- women, Azoulay pinpoints the possible danger of our over-reliance on symbolic and often simplistic images. With the  modern ease of self-documentation, this iconization is also now very much bleeding from the public realm to the private realm.  Previously belonging only to societal movements (either of unification or of disruption), the idea of the " iconic" is becoming more and more personal: if we all can make our own photos and distribute our image freely, it seems logical that we can all become icons. Or can we? I don't think there will necessarily be a dilution of the power of the image, but I do think some new, unexpected devices will emerge from this conflict…