Hi Jack:
I do hope you get lots of good "art manner" slides for the school's
collection, but you won't get any from me. Not because of copyright concerns
(although many schools "teach" "appropriation") but for the same reason i
don't have any alternative process images on my web "portfolio." It's an
important issue to alternative processes in general and i'll go into some
detail. hopefully this will be of interest to some listreaders.
Basically, i make alternative process images as *objects* not *images* and
too much of that quality gets lost in reproduction (as slides, offset
lithography, whatever). If it weren't for this specific quality, having to
do with paper texture and how light responds to it, etc., one could just use
*charcoal,* *Monet* or whatever filters in Photoshop and similar computer
programs. I do use computer image manipulation lots these days (calling
myself as an "electronic photo illustrator") and outputting to Iris inkjet
on watercolor paper so i know a bit about this. I could reproduce electronic
work and make it look identical to reproduced alternative work (i've worked
with platinum/palladium, oil, bromoil, gum and others). But NOT like the
originals. I've read that the Iris can produce output "equal to to platinum
prints." This is just not so, but you can't tell from slides. (I think
Grahm Nash's sepia Iris prints are ersatz platinum, or more accurately to my
eye, ersatz photogravures. Most computer artists also do "limited editions"
and sign and edition in pencil, "just like real artists." In analog
processes, such as etching, the matrix (plate) deteriorates with use, and
the artist cancels the plate to preserve the quality of the output.
Arbitrarily limiting a digital print is a purely market-driven act, a way of
"making special," hence valuable, through scarcity. This is also somewhat
true of regular photography, when the artist is not manipulating the output).
At the University of California, Santa Cruz, Victor Burgin said, "the
contemporary museum is a corkboard with pushpins, and in the future will be
the computer screen" [not an exact quote, said ca. 1989]. I told him that i
thought a problem with contemporary art history was that we look almost
excusively at slides, almost never at real work. (I recall looking at
Weston's "Pepper #30" in reproduction and thinking, "that's nice" - when i
saw the actual photograph, the hair stood up on the back of my neck, and i
"got it". Same with Modigliani's "Reclining Nude" and so much other art).
Burgin, as a "Marxist," thought this was a good thing, that those qualities
which are lost in reproduction have no business in art to begin with.
Perhaps this is why the "dean of students" at SFAI (don't remember his name,
he was the only person admissions could get for me to talk to when i was
exploring possible grad schools) said, "If you were a better photographer,
you wouldn't need to make such beautiful prints." Yow.
It is partially to avoid this "object quality" that Weston abandoned
platinum, writing in 1930, "printing on glossy paper... subterfuge becomes
impossible... no second hand emotion from exquisite paper surfaces or color."
Paul Strand, in a lecture delivered in 1923 (available in Vicki Goldberg's
excellent "Photographers in Print") gives some clear statements concerning
formalism, or purism, as later propounded by Clement Greenberg. An art
practice must limit itself to the domain which it inhabits exclusively (thus
Greenberg rejects narrative painting). Strand rejects alternative processes
because they are not purely photographic, "oil and gum introduce a paint
feeling... alien to photography." Taking this logic as far as it will go
(reductio ad absurdum) we shouldn't use negatives, only daguerreotypes (or
Polaroid), and photographs should be round, like lenses, not rectangular
like windows or (shudder!) paintings.
Of course, with "postmodernism" (post-Greenbergian purist formalism) and
"pluralism" we're beyond all that (OK it's not "photography," but it is what
is is). My point is that if we let these things exist, let's respect them,
and not lose the subterfuge and second hand emotion we worked so hard to
get, by making slides.
What to do, then. You are in San Francisco. Students have many opportunities
to view original art, including alternative processes, at museums and
galleries. Travelling exhibits can be had at little expense. Invite artists
to show their work. I feel a slide registry, like an "online museum" does
not accurately depict most art, particularly alternative processes, and is
not really helpful (lots of art, including some of mine, does hold up fairly
well to reproduction, and this gets unfairly "priviledged" over the rest,
under this system). But then, i am a freak, (i reject that whole "body of
work" thang), my work is "too diverse" they say ("i'm diverse," i say,
"pretend it's a group show."), i'm just whining, ignore me.
P.S i've lurked here for a while, never seen ANY discussion of esthetics,
only shop talk, not a bad or pointless thing (unlike the Mac v. PC, Ford v.
Chevy stuff) but...
P.P.S. Louis Nadeau ROCKS!
P.P.S.S obviously (i hope) this is not meant as a specific attack on Jack
Fulton's laudable attempt to get stuff to show his students. Disclaimer: i
took a class with Jack once (at UCSC, doubt if he remembers me); liked him,
disagreed about a lot of stuff (not a bad thing).
Plywood and Rhetoric: Graphic Design from Both Sides of the Brain
http://www.teleport.com/~plyboy