From: Phillip Murphy (pmurf@bellsouth.net)
Date: 12/29/02-06:16:49 PM Z
Hello,
It's my personal opinion that creating Daguerreotypes and allowing an
art personality to put his name to the work is a type of alt-whoring.
Sorry Jerry, I love your work and you are an extremely talented and
generous person. The arguement is different when an artist isn't
pulling
from his own printing plates or not printing his own negatives or not
casting his bronze horse. I suppose you could say the same about the
guy
behind the 20 x 24 Polaroid camera or perhaps Avedon when he doesn't
open and close the shutter. Does this collaboration make the "creator"
of the image more akin to a motion picture director or perhaps an
architect? It's possible, that with his condition, that Chuck Close
would not
be able to physically create a Daguerreotype on his own. I have no
idea. Maybe it's just me, but the whole thing just doesn't seem to ring
true.
Don't get me wrong, I wish them both much success. It just leaves for
me as a viewer a kind of distancing from the artist who sweated over
his/her medium and has left her/his intimate touch (or not) on the final
plate.
IMHO,
Phillip
Jack Fulton wrote:
>
>
> Just saw the Chuck Close show at Pace Wildenstein here in
> NYC and can honestly say it just goes to show what can
> happen when a wonderful idea/ medium like the Daguerreotype
> falls into the wrong hands. These pictures have none of
> the charm, mystery, expressiveness or beauty of a classic
> Dag -- or even most of the other contemporary Dags I've
> seen. Instead, they are slick, machine-made parodies of the
> traditional form.
> What's the problem? Perhaps it's the industrial finish of
> the plates, which look more like mylar than silver. It
> probably also has something to do with the 30,000
> watt-seconds of Elinchrome stobes (6 power packs) that has
> only worked to kill the portrait subjects. These pictures
> look more like they came from a NASA lab then an artist's
> studio. But my guess is that it has something to do with
> Chuck's sensibility, which can't distinguish between the
> good, the bad, and the ugly.
> There, now I feel better. Arthur
>
> Here, here now! I'll agree with Arthur here.
> I've seen a Close Daguerreotype and IMHO it is not interesting.
> What IS interesting is that an artist w/cachet can so much as piss on
> the ground
> (referring to the comical and erudite previous tangent)
> and
> it'll be considered important and given splendiferous display by the
> gallery system.
> Commodity . . mere commodity.
> Not the oddity that true art is.
> Jack
>
>
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