Photography used to be full of hiatus’, gaps, voids. No matter how much it tried to capture, more remained. No matter how much it attempted to represent, more was elusive, more visible. By this, I don’t mean the gaps in time, the gaps Eadweard Muybridge attempted to fill with his proto time lapse photography nor the necessary stasis of the still image. What I mean is that photography used to be seen simply as a representational tool. Photography only ever re-presented an object, the object remained outside of its presentation. However, as I shall argue below, the recent collapse of the object into its representational field has considerably breached the etiquette of aesthetic possibilities within the discipline. This has had far reaching implications for however. However, whilst these images might carry such negative implications, there’s little lost reality between it and the endless preening, sculptured botox of the on demand models and studios themselves, the loss of the real is much further back down the process. Doctored can no longer simply be taken as a negative pejorative, as it is has to be seen within a much larger context of a world constantly being re-touched at many levels and not just as an end process. The unobtainable is not even an aspirational mise-en-scene but one of the less pedicured realities we still have left. We understand that these views of the world are partial and suited to fit within a certain limited framework. Rolling news and a burgoning virtual cultural economy have seen a further collapse between subject and its representation. The object has become more like its representation.
3d and 2d rendering of spatial realities are no longer separate ends of a visual logic but are closing in on each other with an increasing force, as for example with QR codes. A quantitatively 2d experience of a still image folds out (or in) through the swipe of a app. to reveal an inner, richer experience, like peering inside a 2d box, the lion, the witch and the wardrobe read as 1984, Winston standing in as a metaphor for the narcissism of any remaining separation. Somewhere between descriptive rendering and conjunctive object, QR codes (or Quick Response) no longer rely on solid Euclidean geometry but on a visual hiatus of solidity, mass and volume. The use of technology is already beyond its application. 4G or 5G are here because they can render our last movement not as invalid but as both relative and predictive. In this climate the academic categorization for the disciplines in the plastic arts have lost their broader purpose as a descriptive framework. The separation of sculpture, painting or photography have collapsed into a generalized plethora of ad hoc and temporary practices, often moving towards a re-imagining of the categories themselves. Art, as an academic disciple, no longer represents, mirrors nor disparages mercantile and technological practices but is indistinguishable from them, because it can only ever attempt to catch them up. Below I want to discuss in further detail these shifts in the dimensional and materialistic properties of contemporary culture. In order to show this I will discuss the changes in my own practices as a photographer in recent years alongside the broader practices of the arts in general.
Modern Icons, 2013
In 2013 I began photographing a series of objects on a black ground. My initial intention for the series was to ironize pop sensibility in general and that of Warhol and Koons in particular. I thought it might highlight the failure of the consumerist/aesthetic utopia through its own mechanisms. My working title for the series at the time was End User. I intended the series to show the failure of objects to satisfy their function, to de-familiarize the everyday pop aesthetic, to escape the banal by re-configuring its use. The objects, I thought, might serve as totems not of desire or longing but of warning and disgust. I finished the series sometime late in 2013 & thought little more of it but as a reliquary languishing somewhere among all the other online space junk. I will return to my re-engagement with the series later. But below I want to discuss the shift in spatial rendering in greater detail.
Jeff Koons, Three Ball Total Equilibrium Tank (1985)
Piet Mondrian, Broadway Boogie-Woogie, (1943)
The QR code (or Quick Response) allays itself to the modern condition with ease. It gives us the illusion of a bespoke experience whilst delivering a flattened out product. The hustle and bustle of the market is only experiential through personal time, Willow Farm or Oakland Grange aren’t real places, yet capital allows us to imagine them as a comfort, as a familiarity. Time and money, the old adage, exists at the expense of space, concomitant of the ‘real’. The way we choose has become as important as what we choose. We might consider this faddish form of cultural hegemony to have also affected our relationship to the arts, or vice-versa. Compare, for example, Koons’ Three Ball Total Equilibrium Tank with Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie-Woogie. Mondrian’s piece exists in a strictly linear fashion. Albeit in an abstracted way, Boogie-Woogie represents the movement of mass through time and space. The blocks of colour are like cross town traffic seen from above. Its easy to imagine the car horns and bustle of New York as a kind of jazz rendered by Mondrian as an interlocking series of shapes and colours and sounds.
Koons however negates mass, volume and time in favour of a vacuum. The balls are neither rising nor descending, but untouchable and therefore desirous, idealized. Koons ironises the fetishistic quality of consumer goods by highlighting the void of displayed products. Capital of course hates a vacuum, cannot exist on stasis, needs trends and fluctuations to survive, needs equilibrium and so we buy into Koons’ version of the ’emperor’s new clothes’ as a critique of culture capital. Space has become distance, that is the distance between the wholesale consumption of culture as desirous and the loss of a sensual or textual experience through its treatment. The gallery experience further seperates us from the object rather than bringing us closer to it. But we've nowhere left to go but the gallery to try and authenticate the loss, Willow Farm or Oakland Grange become the only real we have.
Andy Warhol, One Hundred One Dollar Bills (1965)
With Warhol capital and art become synonymous, unashamedly so. To sell the dollar back to itself at a hyper inflated rate says as much about the need for art as a product as it does about the desire for the product as art. Like an ultimate act of self depreciation capital has to eat with wolves, has to exist in the void. Nothing but itself to desire, the narcissistic conditional flow is ever ready empty. You could get away with that stuff in the 60’s. Even up to the 90’s the petulance of appropriating the everyday world seemed a bit like an act of defiance and nobody seemed to draw a line in the sand between art and consumption. Warhol or Lichtenstein’s pop aesthetic of course are an ad-mans dream, and so the endless re-appropriation between commerce and art is comsummated. It’s a quick enough leap from dada to pop and easier still to relieve either of any radicalism. As for today, we’re either left staring back at the void of cultural capital or fizzing with the mock desire of the quick response of a personalized alternative. Culture is now a player of hyper-credit, rather than subsisting at the counter-cultural level of the semblance of an alternative. With Warhol each print has a further degradation of surface, the non-mechanical process of screen printing renders the dollar bill increasingly useless except as an artefact (or artifice) of corruption and consumption, process as purpose. The reproduction of One Hundred Dollar Bills belies its status as an original and expensive screen print. Only a truly mechanized process might correct these flaws. Counter to this would be a rejection of the objectification of art practices. If we skip forward a couple of decades, terms like ‘handmade’ , ‘craft ‘ ‘bespoke’ or ‘ regional’ begin to gain currency again (within a framework of fear and boredom of a perceived mechanization of culture that is). Of course the relationship between the arts and a burgeoning mercantile class isn’t a new one, and small cottage industries whilst laudable in themselves become problematic at the distributive or critical level.
Photography today can be potentially, endlessly reproduced without a loss of quality. The impersonal no longer resides in the digital age, but in its end use, in the co-opting of the impersonal as folksy, retro or iconic. For me, there’s a status crisis when I look at an image by say, Richard Prince, each time I consider its worth the counter clicks and a dollar passes between its value and its meaning. a dollar between someone managing my click and the guy utilizing it. A dollar between the guy making an appropriation and the guy making an approximation. Its no wonder then that we feel so helmed in. If I were to 'follow' a Richard Prince image on a social media feed it might endlessly tell me what its status is, in real time, like a Tamagotchi version of cultural engagement, art as productive artifice. Of course in today’s over saturated climate de-familiarity is a luxury. Just as we can’t decommission our curiosity around consumption, artists also become caught up in the habit of supplying and refining these demands. Those unwilling or unable to do so are culturally ostracised as old fashioned or awkward or worst of all ignored. Those who are predisposed to engage are caught in a tidal wave of just so back slapping as in the re-affirmation of place as product.
So it was this background in mind that I again began to engage with Modern Icons. I thought of the objects in the original series as finished or disposed of. That the photographs were catching their passing, that these images and our consumption of them had an end user status and that the objects would disappear from use without trace. Now, I realise that I misunderstood the nature of what re-cycling (or upcycling) is. Objects don't just disappear and in fact often can't be wholly dismantled or destroyed, This fragmentation and unresolved materiality began to bother me. Beginning the series again I saw these strange remanents and discarded objects as somehow exotic and rare. I didn't know what the objects were any longer nor what use, if any, they ever had, They seemed to carry their strange elusive quality with them as if they were archaeological finds. The elusive quality of not knowing a use for a thing gave them a status as beautiful like Icons from an age where consumption and production raged unchecked. Not a world we are absent from but one we have forgotten we are of and responsible for. Objects are here to stay, we cannot avoid them, though I've still not found a use for them. Perhaps I'll keep the objects as grave goods, amulets to guide me off or ward away evil or perhaps we should send them into space as satellites of human desire and its implications. The series of photographs will eventually fade to pale outlines and go with their objects into the ever increasing swell of the void.
the 2015 version of Modern Icons series can be viewed here