Artmaking – Page 3 – Photon Detector

Faking your own art?

14 February, 200728 April, 2007 Nicolai Grossman 2 Comments

This story is related by Robert Anton Wilson in Ishtar Rising:

An art dealer once went to Pablo Picasso and said, "I have a bunch of ‘Picasso’ canvasses that I was thinking of buying. Would you look them over and tell me which are real and which are forgeries?” Picasso obligingly began sorting the paintings into two piles. Then, as the Great Man added one particular picture to the fake pile, the dealer cried, "Wait a minute, Pablo. That’s no forgery. I was visiting you the weekend you painted it." Picasso replied imperturbably, "No matter. I can fake a Picasso as well as any thief in Europe."

[Source, via Chris Rywalt]

Funny, yes, but is it really a larger question? Every try to take something you made that doesn’t speak to you and try to tart it up to make it look like it does? What would that mean, anyway: faking, or working to bring out the "you" in your own work? Useful/not useful?

I have a bunch of photos in a holding bin that do nothing for me, but I can’t quite write off, either. Every once in a while, I go back and revisit them. Sometimes I start fiddling with it, radical cropping, monochrome vs colour, toning, viewing it at different sizes… although I don’t think that’s trying to fake my work—sometimes you have to shovel a little shit before you find the pony—it sometimes feels like it in the moment.

By the way, this doesn’t work most of the time. But sometimes it does: I’ll come back after a few months and see something in a completely different way, and it ends up becoming one of my favourite pieces.

Which leads me to another question: are some of these questions really worth examining this deeply? Most of the artmaking process doesn’t make intellectual sense to me. Yeah, you can say that artmaking trajectory X generally has a set of properties and perils, but at some point, I have to just play it as it lies. I’ve accepted that the above is part of the editing process. It simply is. Why put it under a microscope?

That said, sorting out what the perils are really is important, I think, because once you have a map, you are usefully disabused of the notion that you’re alone in this game. It’s pretty much the same for everybody. You are not a unique and special snowflake on the path of artmaking. While this goes against the grain of the Artist Mystique, I think it’s great, because there are nuts and bolts problems that can be overcome, and how to do so doesn’t have to be a mystery.

Making your own art as somebody else?

31 January, 200731 January, 2007 Nicolai Grossman 4 Comments

I was just reading Wally Lamb’s intro to Couldn’t Keep It to Myself: Wally Lamb and the Women of York Correctional Institution, which is the result of the writing workshops he taught at a women’s prison, when I came across this:

Then, mid-draft, Jessamy hit a snag. She began writing a flashback to an earlier instance of sexual abuse—a hallway molestation by a friend of the family when she was eleven. She stopped writing. But self-censorship felt uncomfortable, too. Jessamy had worked hard on her essay and wanted to see it through. The solution? A change of genre. On paper, Jessamy became Mo’Shay Shamblay, and the pronoun I became she. Mo’Shay had the same hazel eyes as Michelle, the same experiences, But now Jessamy was writing autobiographical fiction. That little bit of distance unblocked her and she finished her piece.

He’s obviously talking about writing, but it got me thinking about how the same principle might apply to photography. Of course it’s a little different in that there isn’t the same opportinity for iterative refinement of a single photo as there is with a story, but with cropping, contrast, print size/method, editing, sequencing, etc., there’s still plenty of room to get stuck, even once the exposure has been made.

I haven’t really thought this out, but does Lamb’s approach sound useful? To be perfectly clear, I’m not suggesting that you try to make somebody else’s work, but to make your own work with a little distance. I can see a case for it being both good and bad (or maybe helpful and diverting?).

What do you think?

That photo everyone hates but you

24 January, 200731 July, 2007 Nicolai Grossman 5 Comments

I think everyone’s shot that one photo that everyone hates, or worse, doesn’t respond to at all. Everyone except you, who love it to death and just don’t understand why others fail to see its obvious brilliance. Or at least absence of outright suckage. Sure, there may be some things that would be fair to bring up in an analytical critique, but that doesn’t stop you from just liking the thing.

Here’s mine (yes, it looks just the way I want it to, fuzziness, contrast, and all):

My hated photo: Ben and Jen

What’s yours?

(Comments with links in them get held for moderation, so don’t be surprised if your response isn’t visible right away. I’ll be checking the queue regularly, though.)

John Loomis on portfolio editing pain

22 January, 200721 January, 2007 Nicolai Grossman 1 Comment

Putting together a portfolio of any kind of art is painful. Way more painful than it seems it should be. Photographer John Loomis has some interesting thoughts on the process on his blog:

Even while I fully understand the need to put together an updated portfolio, and it is very important to put new, interesting work out there as often as possible, the process can be so unforgiving that even starting down the path can grind your professional life to a dead stop. More than a few times in the middle of designing a portfolio I’ve basically thrown up my hands and shouted, "holy shit, what am I doing?!" What you are really doing is creating a mirror of your passion and vision of the world you live in, and sometimes that reflection is extremely difficult to see anyway but darkly.

Sounds about right. This process has made me want to burn all my film and think that my pinhole cameras might be put to better use as gravy separators and my lenses used to start fires more times than I can count. There is a reason I haven’t managed to put anything in my gallery section in over a year of the site being up (though that’s about to change), and that is that editing portfolios sucks with a capital SUCKS.

Continue reading at Drinking With a Dead Man

Via Katie Cooke

My new favorite artist statement

8 December, 200623 October, 2007 Nicolai Grossman Leave a comment

Jonathan at Plaid Jello now has the awesomest, most succinct artist statement I’ve ever seen. Straight, no chaser.

Most of my art sucks. Yours, too.

18 August, 200623 January, 2007 Nicolai Grossman 2 Comments

Thought for the weekend:

To be honest, most of my pictures suck. The saving grace of that admission is that most of your pictures suck, too. How could I possibly know such a thing? Because most of everybody’s pictures suck, that’s how. I’ve seen Cartier-Bresson’s contact sheets, and most of his pictures sucked. One of my teachers said that it was an epiphany for him when he took a class from Garry Winogrand and learned that most of Winogrand’s exposures sucked. It’s the way it is.

— Mike Johnston, of 37th Frame, The Online Photographer, etc. fame, in his essay,The Magic Bullet

So how do you deal with most of your art sucking? The insanely excellent book, Art & Fear: Observations on the Peril (and Rewards) of Artmaking, by David Bayles and Ted Orland, has some outstanding thoughts on the subject. If you like that one, chase it with Orland’s follow-up, The View From The Studio Door: How Artists Find Their Way In An Uncertain World. I keep meaning to write reviews of both of them but never seem to find the time to do it properly. For now I’ll just say that they’re the best investments in artmaking I’ve ever made.