Re: alt exhibit
Agree that the confusion, in part, is with the title they chose to
use for the exhibit. "Alternative Works" would have been more accurate.
That said, the term "alternative," as in "alternative processes,"
does imply, in part, that which is not firmly entrenched in the
mainstream-- to my way of thinking. (Again, digital printing is-- at
least from what I've seen.) I don't view that as a negative
definition, nor as having a negative connotation. "Anything outside
the mainstream," given where the mainstream has been lately, seems
positive to me. ;)
Diana
On Sep 6, 2007, at 1:11 PM, Katharine Thayer wrote:
On Sep 6, 2007, at 7:57 AM, permadocument wrote:
On visiting the on-line alt exhibit I was impressed by the overall
quality
of the retained works. A question arises: would it not be the
moment to
define what we really mean when we speak of "alternative works".
I think "alternative works" could be defined any way a person or
institution would care to define it, because "alternative works"
doesn't mean anything to me particularly. Now that I understand
that the call for work for this particular show defined
"alternative" as such things as images from plastic cameras,
pinhole images, photograms and the like, I'm not surprised to find
such images, printed digitally, as part of the show.
For me, the confusion arose from their use of the phrase
"alternative processes" as the title of the show. "Alternative
processes" has come to mean, for me at least, and I suspect for
some others as well, a specific set of handcoated processes. If
they had named the show "alternative works" rather than
"alternative processes," I wouldn't have had any expectation that
the show would consist mostly if not wholly of works made by one or
more of these handcoated "alternative processes," because as I
said, "alternative works" could be anything at all as far as I'm
concerned. Anthotypes, holga pictures, crossprocessed images,
whatever, including the set of processes I know as "alternative
processes."
And maybe "alternative processes" isn't a good name, because it
does seem to denote "alternative to" x, and then you have to define
what x is and accept everything outside x as "alternative." But
I've never defined "alternative processes" as being whatever's
left outside the boundaries of some x, to me it does have a
positive definition as this particular group of processes, rather
than a negative definition as "anything outside the mainstream."
So maybe something else, like "handcoated processes" or "historical
processes" would be a better name than "alternative processes."
I'm not yet ready to accept gelatin silver as an alternative
process unless it's handcoated, and then I do think it belongs.
But it's not surprising that we don't all agree precisely on where
the boundaries lie that demark "alternative processes."
katharine
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