Highlighter Pen
Came across a post on greg.org (via) with notes from a panel discussion about (the DC area’s) status as a regional/local art center, art quality, isolation, art journalism and community. Definitely go back and read the whole piece for the context. Fragments I’d mark with a highlighter somewhat in relation to Tucson:
Everyone wants “community,” and “dialogue,” which boils down to attention.
I heard no local commercial gallery presence, and only the intermittent reference to selling work, so I think the arts center/non-profit/alternative space paradigm of “community” prevails. Which means writing as a generator of foot traffic, not necessarily as a generator of discussion or its MFA cousin, discourse.
…comparisons were constantly made to Chelsea*, which seems inapt and non-applicable in many ways.
Two writer/editors on the panel, Kriston and Danielle, both frankly acknowledged the limits of their own interests: for them to write, something needed “a hook” or to “be sexy.” Kriston said flat out that supporting the scene or “community” was not his responsibility. This is fair, honest, and generally correct.
The Post’s sole impact is to generate some awareness and foot traffic among the art-sympathetic non-enthusiasts in the region.
For a rigorous, critically engaged artist, I’d argue that the work itself should be vastly more important than the co-workers at your dayjob seeing your name in the Post. This goes for other types of artists, too, including those for whom art is primarily a self-expressive means for connecting with others.
* Or Austin, or Portland, or… (asterisk mine)
Also recommend reading this succinct critique of appropriation by former Life photographer Bill Eppridge (via).
I don’t see a definitive statement, nor do I see where my photograph relates to any other image in her artwork except to enhance the bottom two-thirds of her work. Remove my photograph and the composition has no impact. The artist used my work to make her collaged work look better.
4 comments
Eppridge just sounds like a cranky old photographer to me. Wasn’t authorship and originality already battled out in 70′s and 80′s by the Pictures Generation (and even earlier than that by Duchamp)? I don’t mean to defend Lawrence’s work, but Eppridge’s post seems like a reactionary complaint rather than a critique of appropriation.
Probably much of that crankiness stems from just taking the unauthorized usage personally, it was his photograph after all, and although when I read it he seems to make an effort to critique, or at least control his rhetoric, but this does little to conceal his underlying rant. Not to defend either one of them, but how would you feel if your work was incorporated without credit? I wonder if the art was any good though if he would still care. I don’t think art debates ever really end, they just die down and bubble up every once in awhile. Because who decides when something is resolved? Technology seems to have busted the appropriation issue wide open again, at least for those of us born pre-Internet. Does anyone born after 1995 really care about this stuff?
I’d be flattered if an artist used something of mine in his or her work to say something else. Whenever I put something online or in some other type of public space I’m fully aware that it can be copied-and-pasted or (re)photographed. Artists have been using images from mass culture in collage for almost one hundred years, Eppridge has to realize that and get over it. His photographs were in LIFE magazine, the millions of people that read the magazine were just supposed to consume its contents without question? There really is no end to this conversation, that’s what makes it fun.
We’ll all be dead someday anyways, so taking credit won’t really matter. I mean, is, like, Pollock haunting AbEx hobbyists selling canvas board paintings on craigslist, shaking his fist at them? No. At least, there hasn’t been a Ghost Hunters or Paranormal State episode about something like that yet…
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