>What's Shinola ?
It's an old brand of shoe polish, the old colloquialism being that someone
"doesn't know shit from Shinola"
>Victor has got a lot to answer for [the attitude that original work carries
a "preciousness" which must be eliminated]. His unforgivably narrow and
unintellectual
>viewpoint has led to a lot of unhappiness and bad education.
The specific attitude is what makes me so leery of showing my work in
reproduction. I remember that Mondrian's "Reclining Nude" never did much for
me in books, but when i saw the original at NY MOMA. the hair stood up on
the back of my neck (same w/ Weston's "Pepper #30). Those qualities did not
translate, Burgin felt those were *bad* qualities, false, ... The only
photographer i can think of whose work loses nothing in reproduction (or
gains nothing in original) is Cartier-Bresson. (I like it.)
Famous people have sometimes taken up phtography, often "fine print
esthetic" type stuff... two names come up offhand, Diane Keaton and Kenny
Rodgers.
Keaton's book "Interiors" (a "body of work" if i ever saw one) seemed a
prime example of vapid work whose intent is to resemble work which is hung
on a wall in order to be hung on a wall... (a simulacrum of art, if you
will)(disclaimer: i only saw the book, not the original prints, so i am
guilty of exactly that judging by repro i'm so critical of...)
Kenny Rodgers' were worse: standard pitchers of waterfalls printed by
someone else (Brad Cole?)(and sold as bad offset repros in plastic gilt
framez at K-Mart). But one *cannot* expect art from someone who writes a
paean to his beloved wife called "You decorated my life" with NO sense of IRONY!
And there's always those folks in Yosemite with their view cameras on the
Stoneman Bridge (why hike?) takin dat pitcher of Half Dome (never mind the
light, gotta meet Stacy at the giftshop in half an hour...) ... (i usta live
and work there- once i saw a scene *just like* "Clearing Winter Storm"-
except that the breaks in the fog/clouds didn't perfectly align with the
major falls- no kitsch there)
In my many years of bouncing around to various schools in vain pursuit of
the goal of becoming a teacher (Carnegie-Mellon, Pratt, Pratt Graphics
Center, New School, ICP, UCSC, Central Washington University, City College
of San Francisco, Academy of Art College SF) i found the general attitude to
be more restrictive and proscriptive than i gather the old French Academy was.
At CWU, the painting "master" forbade the students to paint non-objective,
and the sheep followed (their goal apparently not to produce "art from
within", but to hang in galleries, be accepted as an artist...)
Academic 'postmodern neo-freudian fem/politico agenda blahblah' art has
allowed itself to become superfluous, an illustraction (a typo but i like
it) of its caption...
And i found a great deal of resonance in Bill Jay's "Facism of the Left"
article which Jack Fulton brought in for his students.
My biggest beef with the art establishment is the demand for "body of work"-
all my rejections come with the litany "...failure to create a consistent
body of work demonstrating maturity and focus..." -i can only reply "think
of it [my work] as a 'group show'-it works." (the individual pieces *are*
solid on their own and do not need to be validated by 20 more similar ones...)
On the first day of my first photo class at UCSC, we all sat in a circle and
spoke of our work. "I do billboards", "I do navels (belly buttons, tummies)"
(at every school i've ever attended somebody's always doing radical navel
pitchers), "my lover who died" (a hard act to follow)... . When my turn came
i said, "I do socks... clean socks, dirty socks... i feel that if i'm
successful the viewer should be able to *smell* the socks..." not a laugh
(though i did note a tiny smirk on professor Norman Locks' face, which i
learned later indicated he was enjoying himself immensely). Over 2 years
later my pal Marcy who had been in that class said she had never seen my
sock photos...
Nuff ramblin. i'm goin fishin
-------------------------
Plywood and Rhetoric
graphic design from both sides of the brain
plyboy@teleport.com
http://www.teleport.com/~plyboy
"Momma DID raise a fool"