Sumpfinselwormloch from Scottlandfuturebog by Nicolas Kahn and Richard Selesnick
Accessed at https://blogs.commons.georgetown.edu/cctp-725-fall2013/files/2013/11/Picture-8.png 1/3/17
And I am also discovering that postmodernism stirs people up a bit.
The post-modernism movement is based on the unfortunate belief that the most important purpose of art is to deal with theoretical intellectual issues. So, following in the footsteps of the post-modernist painters, post-modernist photographers take un-creative badly-composed, crappy-looking photographs of mundane subjects, and print them with tricky edge effects and other gimmicks (such as enormous size and cutesy frames) to hide their pathetic lack of substance, and then stand around in their hip haircuts and black turtlenecks waxing eloquent about all the grand intellectual theoretical issues that their great works supposedly raise.
And, if you ever make the fatal mistake of admitting that you don't "get it", you're instantly relegated to the masses of lower beings who aren't smart enough to understand real "art." What a sad state of affairs! I've personally never seen a post-modernist photo that I'd hang on my wall if it were free.
What this movement misses is the tremendous capacity for art to carry an intuitive message that speaks to our spirit on a primal level which cannot be reduced to bland intellectual concepts. Just think of Bach's fugues, and think of how silly it would be to sit around and talk about the theoretical issues they raise. To anyone willing to show up with their soul, the meaning of Bach's fugues is obvious and profound, and no amount of intellectual discussion would ever convey their meaning to someone who didn't get it directly from the music. That's what all of great art was about for 4000 years or so, until the modernists showed up and turned art into a self-aggrandizing sales pitch based on intellectual intimidation. Happily, that movement finally seems to be coming to a close (for some wonderful articles on this, check out http://www.artrenewal.org/).
regards,
~chris jordan (Seattle)
www.chrisjordanphoto.com accessed 09/03/17
Jordan's statement that postmodern photography "misses ... the tremendous capacity for art to carry an intuitive message" is surely counter intuitive. The whole point of postmodernism, to my mind at least is that it relies on the viewers intuition. A denial of the right to authorship allows for an intuitive viewing.
If for instance, I show this image with the title "Misty morning" I am leading the viewer into an autumnal vision of bucolic romanticism. If I call it "Two lovely trees just before they were cut down to make way for an abbatoir" it creates a whole new mental, intuitive image. If I give it no title at all, I suspect due to its subject matter, the first description weill probably uppermost in viewers minds.
But a more abstracted image, that is an image created to form conflict or tension, an image created to provoke thought, or even intuition works completely differently.
This image works completely differently. The subject matter is to some extent alien. If I were coming to this image as a viewer I would be asking how big are the dice? How far away is the sea? Is there a significance to the combination of numbers? Why are the dice red? Why are they there at all?
If as the photographer I leave this untitled then every viewer has the chance to ask these questions or not, and form an intuitive opinion. I can take this intuition away simply by giving the photograph a title, for instance " Two concrete dice left on a beach by a giant", or "Installation no 6". Either way, I have led the viewer down a path I want them to walk.
Barthes' "Death of the author" frees us from explanation. It also frees us from forcing the viewer to look at a photograph in exactly the same way we do. It creates the opportunity for the viewer to have an intuitive opinion, and that is what I am striving to create within my own practice.
