From: shannon stoney (sstoney@pdq.net)
Date: 04/10/02-08:55:52 AM Z
>On Tue, 9 Apr 2002, shannon stoney wrote:
>>
>> I re-read the Jed Perl article last night. He is not saying that
>> painters should never use photographs; he objects to copying
>> photographs "slavishly." As somebody who has painted both from life
Judy wrote:
>
>That's not my reading of this article. He jumps up and down for 3 or 4
>pages on the intermix of photography and painting... he uses "slavish
>dependency" to mean "interest in" or "reference to" photography; he says
>"There are by now several generations of museum goers who have been
>trained to regard photo-dependency as a fact of artistic life." And so
>forth.
Here is the critical passage I think: "The fundamentally unanalyzed
fact of Richter's career is his slavish dependency on photographic
images. We would do well to remember that only four years ago Robert
Storr organized at the Modern a retrospective of Chuck Close, another
contemporary artist whose career is grounded in a slavish dependency
on photographic images. These are not artists who from time to time
take an interest in the particular qualities of certain photographic
images, or who find compositional or structural ideas in photographs
that intrigue them and that they think of bringing into their work as
painters. They cling to the two dimensional images that the camera
produces in order to concoct their own two dimensional painted
images....Basically, Richter and Close have ceded the act of creation
to the camera. AFter which they dither around with notions of
facture and style--they give their photographic material a
personalized 'artistic' spin. Yet there is always a deadness to this
work: the deadness of their dependency on the photograph, of their
inability to make anything on their own. They want us to believe
that deadness is a form of hipness.
Richter and Close are far from being the only contemporary
artists who are hardpressed to respond to nature if they do not have
a camera to do the looking for them.Countless academic portrait
painters, who will never garner any attention at the museum of modern
art, depend on photographs when they do their work; and they are
dismissed as sentimental hacks. With Richter and Close, however,
photorealism has an avant-gardist eclat..."
What I think he's talking about is something I've observed as an art
student: there is very little emphasis in art education any more on
drawing from the real world. I was in a drawing class where we were
made to copy a photograph by gridding it and copying each square of
the grid laboriously. This was depressing and boring, and the
resulting drawings looked like bad photographs. It may be that
contemporary artists are forced to work from mass media photographs
because they can't draw from life. It may not be that much of a
choice. Also, there's an obsession in contemporary art with mass
media, so that art that is not about mass media or consumer culture
in some way is deemed irrelevant. I think Perl is urging painters to
get out and look at the real world and stop clipping from newspapers,
tv, etc. There is a difference between experiencing the world
directly, and experiencing it mediated through, well, media.
>
>> and from photographs, I agree with him that you can tell the
>> difference between a painting from life and one copied from a
>> photograph, and the latter has a kind of flatness to it. I think
>> this is because we see in stereo, with two eyes, and a camera sees
>> with one eye. It's as if it has one eye in the middle of its
>
>Hardly -- you're looking at a 2-dimensional image whichever way it was
>made, with 2 eyes or 3 eyes. Many are blends, with photo as reference --
>you and Perl none the wiser, that is, you wouldn't know unless you knew...
>If the painting is "flat" that's a deliberate "look", or stylization... or
>what you "see" via preconception. (Do photo realist paintings look
>"flat"?)
Yes.
>
>> forehead. The camera's monocular vision does not bother me in a
>> photograph, but somehow when it's translated literally into a
> > painting, something is lost.
>
>Like which painting?
Like one I made from a slide of Fountain's Abbey in Yorkshire. I sold
that painting, amazingly, but it always sort of depressed me. A lot
of watercolor painters paint from slides and photos because
watercolor is hard to paint with alla prima, sur le motif (to mix
languages), and requires a lot of planning and layers. But my
clumsier paintings done from life seem more alive to me than my tight
paintings I've done from photographs.
I would make an exception for some drawings done with a camera
lucida, like Ingres' drawings. In that case the "motif" is still in
front of you, and you look at it, and at the prism's projection,
alternately, so that you can "correct" unconsciously the monocular
flatness of the projection.
Also I think nineteenth century artists, who had a long training in
drawing from life, were much more able to avoid the flatness risk
when painting from photographs than contemporary artists are, who
rarely have this long, rigorous academic training in drawing the
human figure and the landscape for example. That's why Degas'
paintings from photographs don't look flat. He could also paint from
life.
>
>You also assume it's the duty of a painting in 2 dimensions to look 3
>dimensional. A major development of 20th century painting was what was
>called "flattening of the picture plane." In post modernism, this may be
>reversed, but whether or not, it is NOT a sign of something "wrong," only
>of an evolution of form.
I don't mind flatness in some painting that is intentionally flat,
like Manet's "Olympia" or "Dejeuner Sur L'Herbe," or in abstract
expressionism. But I mind it in my own painting, especially figure
painting and drawing. In Manet's time, this flatness was a new idea,
and a kind of statement about the primacy of paint and surface over
subject matter. Flatness is sort of a move toward abstraction. If
that's intentional, fine. But sometimes I think it's an unfortunate
accident that doesn't really fit the subject matter.
>
>
>> I think Perl's larger point was about the vacuity and nihilism of a
>> lot of contemporary art that descends from Duchamp. It's not that he
>> hates all contemporary and modern art; he loves Mondrian, Matisse,
>> Picasso, et al, and he says nice things too about a lot of
>> contemporary artists.
>
>Mondrian, Matisse and Picasso are for the purposes of this discussion
>hardly "contemporary," but old masters.
But they are usually considered to be modern, right?
> In the article at issue, Perl
>says "nice things" only about the "master" Balthus, but no later artists,
>tho he gives a pass to Lucien Freud & Kitaj. He sort of likes early
>Warhol, but says the later is "nothing at all," making a point of fact
>that he doesn't consider Warhol great. Three & a half isn't "a lot." I
>would also add that a "critic" who doesn't see the greatness of Warhol has
>no business writing about 20th century art.... or not beyond Balthus.
I guess that means I should stop writing about art. I am a bit
amused by some warhol things and I understand his contribution to
20th century art conceptually, but as my teacher DAvid Brauer says,
"Pop art had a short shelf life."
>
>I agree with you AND Perl, BTW, about emptiness of much/most contemporary
>art. But so what? 'Twas ever thus.
What do you mean? That most art in most epochs was empty and
nihilistic? I would agree that probably most art was mediocre if you
took the whole sum of the art of any one year in human history. But
these days we seem to adore empty gestures of nihilism, statements
about the futility of art, and we enshrine them in museums. I think
that's what worries Perl, and me. I would rather see a lot of bad
landscapes, or bad madonnas and childs, than a lot of bad paintings
about how stupid it is to paint or make a photograph.
--shannon
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