From: Judy Seigel (jseigel@panix.com)
Date: 10/31/01-11:48:09 PM Z
On Wed, 31 Oct 2001, K wrote:
> At the same time, I think 'medium' has become displaced, in either your
> argument or Elkins's. I wholly agree with Judy, Photoshop IS a tool:
> _computer technology_ is the medium (ie. networked, near-instantaneous
> ....This does not mean that Photoshop
> is the medium, however. A freeware linux version, called The Gimp, does most
> of the same things as photoshop (and even some of the filters like unsharp
> mask and gaussian blur even better)--
Tho I'm certainly resistant to notion of Photoshop as an art form in
itself, Shannon is I suspect using the term as a form of shorthand for
"digital" -- if so, digital is a *technical* means that has enabled new
forms of art. But that began in 70s, if not before, with Computer
Graphics... which truly were a new form, giving us, among other things,
computer animation, Nam June Paik, and a host of *new visual strategies.*
Photoshop et al are merely incremental, a bunch of bells & whistles. The
computer animations by Ken Knowlton and Lillian Schwartz, for instance
(circa 1970), were new and ravishing.
But issues of the inter-relation of new technical means with new art forms
have been plumbed in "the canon." William Ivins classic discussion of the
*syntax* of media, epecially printmaking (title eluding me now) is perhaps
the place to begin. (Tho Gombrich also has early chapters on the ways
"seeing" evolved as media advanced -- I'm spacing on that title too, could
be "Art & Illusion" ? Those scanner programs really burn your brain.)
> ... Photography, in my mind, is as
> young today as it was a century and a half ago. It is definitively and
> distinctly a medium in its own right....
Absolutely, but the boundaries are porous and shifting, and some of the
most exciting work is -- literally -- on the edge. I'm failing to bring
up yet another title -- one of Szarkowski's last shows at MoMA --"Many
Photographies"???? The point was that a very large proportion of
contemporary photography is "mixed media", and many "art media" also
incorporate photography, while the major figures of that moment's
"artworld" used photographs (ie Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, Richard
Prince, Andy Warhol), which is to say that the ideas of photography
suffuse contemporary art -- in light of which photoshop is a small patch
of the elephant indeed, at least so far.
Judy
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