From: Shannon Stoney (shannonstoney@earthlink.net)
Date: 07/30/02-11:39:18 PM Z
Jack wrote:
> I find it interesting in that most are employing a sort of visual poetry to
> better define intent. However, the "bad" art of much of this praxis merely
> obfuscates (in a deliberate manner) identity and create visual enigmas that
> are a pretence for art.
I think one reason for the huge amount of "bad" photoshop work is that
photoshop was originally created for graphic designers--people making ads,
brochures, etc--and that is the kind of photoshop product that we're used to
seeing: cd covers, ads in magazines, etc. Naturally we unconsciously
absorb the commercial, slick look of those Photoshopped images and sometimes
unconsciously "copy" that look, even if we don't want to, and not in an
ironic "Pop art" way. It's hard to find or get to see real fine art made
with Photoshop and digital imagery. I worked on my project without having
seen any other photoshop artwork at all, other than that of my fellow
students. I was inventing it from scratch, as it were. There is very
little of a fine art digital tradition as yet for us to draw on. So, we
draw on collage and montage, as well as conventional photography, and
painting. And we just make stuff up!
In March, though, Fotofest in Houston had some digital art, and some of it I
liked very much, particularly the work of a German woman whose name I can't
remember right now. Again, the work was very surreal in feeling, and also a
bit humorous. (I think humor is a sort of inherent quality of Photoshop, as
well as surrealism.) All of her very large prints sold to one collector, I
heard. Some of the other digital art I saw at Fotofest was of the rather
bad album cover variety, or reminiscent of scenes from computer games.
I hope that in the future we will see more digital art in galleries and
museums and books. I saw one of Dan's prints in the John Cleary gallery in
Houston, which was nice.
Maybe it's ok for fine art digital imagery to draw on popular commercial
digital art, like album covers, ads and the like, but most of that kind of
stuff looks sort of vapid to me. I think digital imagery can go a lot
further and be a lot more subtle and thoughtful than that, like surrealist
painting or Dada
collage.
--shannon
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