I’ve been writing bits of dialogue all over the place, but at the AFTRS library I’ve run into a set of film scripts and decided to take a look at what one looks like. I chose Network which is a movie that I really like, and which I remember as being quite talky. Here’s some impressions.

• Nearly everything is ‘visual’ in a way that I’m not used to writing. So where as I’d have something like: ‘He wonders if that’s true. Can she even know that? He knows now that she’s said it, she has to defend it.’ the farthest the script goes is to say ‘For some reason, this knocks him out.’ But even this is really information for the actor and director to work visually from.
• The formatting makes very clear the differences between what is said on screen, and what is not. There are scene delimiters. Also stage and camera directions.
• The meat-text in the script is quite bad: ‘Two roaring drunks’, ‘silently flit and flicker’, ‘reeling along and hooting it up.’ It is not literature but is trying to give direction to wide variety of people in the most immediate, direct way possible. Tasteless cliché, and flowery language seem to be the standard (I had a scan of some other scripts. But I guess real people talk that way, and you aren’t being yourself in a script you are mostly being someone else. Someone who doesn’t read Bellow and Dostoevsky after dinner.
• The dialogue however, is tack sharp. It seems a different set of skills is required to be a good screenwriter as opposed to a good novelist.
• Really important stage and sound directions, and characters are capitalised: DARK, BUZZING, HOWARD BEALE etc.
• This is so different to photography. I know nothing about this stuff. Yet.
• Seems like the director already has a lot to work with by the time the script is done. This particular script has detailed directions on nearly all aspects of the production. Does the director really not play a part until the script is done?
• There is an awareness of who is in the room when, and who someone speaks to. Again the goal is that a whole set of people can get appropriate directions from the script.
• Some of the dialogue gets pretty long: half a page and so on.

• script review
• review

Posted 2 years ago

Photo by Unknown

The thing to learn from her is a simplicity of style. Saying that it is understated, is, well, an understatement. She has a polite, but razor honesty. Stealthy, when she slaps, she comes hard and her eyes don’t flinch. She means it!

What she does is build pristine paragraphs, and pages, and stories. Other writers conjure up gaudy facades. Like a Shaker, with her plain, unadorned words she builds a sturdy cottage. A cottage where murders happened. Her effort is put into moving you through surprise, and the unexpected nothing, and rarely, the eternal, permanent insight.

It is a good example that you don’t have to be a hero. That not every sentence has to have a state-of-the-art set of words. That the observations are the thing. She creates a clean window into the truly profound knowledge she has about the faintest, the most shapeless, but also the most deep seated of human events. She keeps that window crystal clear, with what must be an unearthly amount of effort.

She’s not Bellow. Thank god. At first it seems like what she achieves is within your grasp. Then, trying to write something in her hand, you realise that in terms of technique, on some fair scales both balance the other. You wouldn’t think so to look at them. I guess, that’s her point. You can only see so much just by looking. Her roots are burrowed deep into the character of her medium.

The devastating idea that Judith is, or was, or still is, a bad mother has so much depth, gives you so much to think about. Especially as it is introduced with such sensitivity. She thought everything was okay. She still doesn’t really know what she did. But she can feel the truth in her pared down clothes, her faded hair, the authenticity of her reading, and her motionless libido. The fact that she doesn’t make an effort to track Penelope down. The fact that she burdened Penelope so selfishly. That she seemed to be so concentrated on her career that she didn’t hand back the same compassion. But, did she really do all those things? It isn’t clear cut. They are all things that sound trite when said out loud, but are awakened with such a delicate touch that one must sit back in the chair and let out a dumb whistle of awe.

She is everything this essay is not. How do you write so softly?

• review
• alice munro

Posted 2 years ago

Photo by Winogrand

Of all my readings in photography, this has had the most profound effect on my thinking. It is the greatest critic, Szarkowski, writing on who is the most important photographer, Winogrand. It’s like the super bowl of essays. Get some chips and coke and settle back. The common sense and sheer insight is astounding.

• “Garry Winogrand discovered photography—or was confronted by it—at a moment in its history when it was particularly susceptible to redefinition. … The goal of the new work was not clarity but authenticity. It did not so much describe its subject as allude to it. …
• A chief prophet of the new photography was Alexey Brodovitch … [who] proposed that successful photography was the triumph of intuition over science and design.“ Winogrand studied with Brodovitch for a year. Before that he studied painting at Columbia. But when he discovered photography: “Within two weeks he had abandoned painting. ‘I never looked back,’ he said later.”
• “To the new photographers the old pictures seemed planned, designed, conceived, understood in advance: they were little more than illustrations, in fact less, since they claimed to be something else—the exploration of real life.”
• Doisneau: “The photographer must be absorbent—like a blotter, allow himself to be permeated by the poetic moment. … His technique should be like an animal function … he should act automatically.”
• “He lived with his parents in the Pelham Parkway section of the Bronx, and presumably received some walking-around money from his father Abraham, a leather worker, or his mother Bertha, who made neckties on a piecework basis. During the first years photography brought him no income, and it can only be guess that he lived by those unrecorded strategies known intuitively to indigent but ambitious youth. … It is not difficult to imagine the young Winogrand as a kind of city hick—an undisciplined mixture of energy, ego, curiosity, ignorance, and street-smart naiveté. Bob Schwalberg, a friend from the early days, said, ‘He was a wild man from the beginning,’ and added, ‘Everybody knew from the start that there was some special about Garry, but it was hard to know why. … He was a little more private than the rest of us.’” I doubt they had a clue.
• “Winogrand told Tod Papageorge that at the age of ten or twelve he walked the streets of the Bronx untill late at night, seeking refuge from the apartment where his parents ‘did not put a high priority on privacy’ and where one could be alone only in the bathroom.”
• “In January 1952 Winogrand married nineteen-year-old Adrienne Lubow, … It soon became clear to Adrienne that Winogrand was egocentric, overbearing, demanding, and (except to the children) insensitive. It seemed reasonable to Winogrand that his wife should work in order to allow him some freedom in pursuing his ambitions as a photographer. She, scarcely out of childhood, wanted to be a dancer, and considered her ambitions as valid as his.
• “Brackman [a photographer’s representative] recorded her sense of him in her notes as a person of ‘strong inner drive—his own style and character.’”
• Winogrand then had a magazine career.
• “In the mid-fifties Winogrand’s work was still formed wholly by his own intuitive response to work in the magazines, plus the judgements of a little group of colleagues. He was ignorant of the history of photography and they history of much else. … It is not clear that he ever then considered the question of whether it was useful. A quarter-century later he still avoided answering it.” He answered it for himself. The question of whether it is important for the world was irrelevant. Is irrelevant?
• “Late in 1955 Winogrand, with Adrienne, made his first independent excursion across the country, because of a vague sense that ‘there were pictures to be made out there.’ When Weiner learned of the plan he showed Winogrand his copy of American Photographs by Walker Evans, a name with which Winogrand was not familiar. … He remembered the experience of the book as the first time that he had been moved by photographs—not as in moved to tears, but moved to understanding. For the first time he realized that photography could deal with the fact of intelligence.” I don’t understand Walker Evans. What is special in what he did? Perhaps it was of its time and now has made so ubiquitous through the other FSA photographers and many others that it is hard to contrast what is good about him. Was it the clarity of his camera, its disinterested, ironic interest? I feel the same about loving Nietzsche, without knowing what he loved first, Schopenhauer. As to how Winogrand felt about Evans, I feel that way about Winogrand. But I’m not just move by the intelligence, but by the honesty; the clarity which which he saw the most ephemeral, the palest moments.
• “The trip west produced surprisingly few photographs. … Many years later he remembered that he had technical failures; he was perhaps also a little disarmed by a country that looked so little like the one he knew, and so much like photographs by Walker Evans.”
• “In 1955 Frank [who’s work Winogrand hadn’t seen] was a mature and sophisticated artist ready to produce his best work; Winogrand was still a raw talent, only beginning to wonder what a photograph might be.”
• “Winogrand told Tod Papageorge in 1977 that he had begun to be a serious photographer about 1960. Years later Schwalberg remembered ‘the years around 1960’ as a period of personal failure for winogrand.” Magazines closed, Feingersh, a good friend died, marriage problems resulting in separation in 1963.
• “Winogrand spoke of the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 as a crucial episode in his life. During the days and nights when the issue remained in doubt he walked the streets, in despair out of feat for the life of his family and himself and his city, and from his own impotence to affect the outcome. Finally it came to him that he was nothing—powerless, insignificant, helpless—and that knowledge, he said, liberated him. … For the rest of his life he apparently belonged to no organizations, and he declined to vote.”
• “In 1962 Winogrand was also facing the dissolution of his marriage. … Winogrand told Papageorge that in his family, divorce was not a recognised option, and it had not been for him, until the failure of his marriage could no longer be denied. … Both the loss of his wife and the loss of his marriage were profound defeats for Winogrand. Perhaps, like the missile crises, they were also liberating.”
• “About 1960 Winogrand had begun to photograph women on the street. The subject remained a major preoccupation for several years until about 1965, when he met his second wife, and it recurred like malaria throughout the rest of his life, possibly as an index of his loneliness, and of his inability either to escape or to satisfy a lust that seemed not, in the contemporary mode, … but some more atavistic need, in which women represented neither pleasure nor companionship, but magic power.”
• Of his experience of working as a supernumeraries at the ballet: “‘All that flesh! I couldn’t believe it. … My face was buried in thighs. I think I never got over that.’”
• “However problematic Winogrand’s view of women may have been, the best pictures that he made in celebration of that view were original and compelling, possessed by a vitality and a psychological urgency …” The book was a failure. He considered it his weakest. “… perhaps because it was not a complete success—Winogrand remained deeply interested in it …”
• “He had a special affection for those of his pictures that were almost out of control, the pictures in which the triumph of form over chaos was precarious. He believed that a successful photograph must be more interesting than the thing photographed, but he photographed nothing that did not interest him as a fact of life. Success—the vitality and energy of the bets pictures—came from the contention between the anarchic claims of life and the will to form.” Brilliant summary of the central battle for an artist.
• “As a rule these pictures were made from vantage points that avoided reference to the bars of the cages, or the human visitors and keepers—to the facts of life of zoos—and gave us informal portraits of the animals at home, so to speak. In Winogrand’s zoo, on the other hand, the animals are not more important than the humans, and are in fact united with them in a peculiar kind of symbiosis. Winogrand’s zoo is a kind of theatre, in which humans and the lower vertebrates act out in parable the comic drama of modern urban life.” Of course the vision is much darker, more forlorn than comic. The wolf hunts down the couple, the boy tries to shoot the animal. Szarkowski thinks it’s his best book in its coherence of style and meaning, and simplicity in the midst of ‘bedlam’.
• “The people in the earlier pictures—free agents with their own agendas, improvising their own one-liners—would have become players in a more complex drama, serving roles within a larger design of which they are unaware.” Pithy, but is that just that as Winogrand produced more, we came to be familiar with his world rather than he?
• “Winogrand might have meant that about 1960 he began to recognize, and to realize consciously in photographic terms, his own sense of life.”
• “In the street pictures of the early sixties Winogrand began to develop two pictorial strategies that he found suggested in certain pictures in Frank’s The Americans. The first of these related to unexplored possibilities of the wide-angle lens [that described more from closer] on the hand camera.” The tilt was to obviate the distortions of the wide angle lens but allow composition of any edge not just the horizontal to a straight edge or object in the frame. Also amplified the dizzying movement in his pictures.
• “He said (repeatedly) that there was no special way that a photograph should look, and he could not abide a lens that made photographs look a special way.”
• “Winogrand was uninterested in making pictures that he knew would succeed, and one might guess that in the last twenty years of his life, …, he never made an exposure that he was confident would satisfy him.”
• “His remark that he photographed in order to see what the things that interested him looked like as photographs.” The photograph is not what was photographed. It is a transformed thing. And that transformation shows the artists hand, his inclinations, and maybe even meanings. So what he is saying is that he was finding out about himself through the photographs.
• «MISSING TWO PAGES; 25 and 26 » Damn. Very important discussion.
• His later “style of description is literal and encyclopaedic; the subject of the picture is not the drama of heroic confrontation but the excitement of chaotic violence. The meaning of the first picture seemed perfectly clear; the second simplifies nothing but achieves nevertheless an ordered pattern of fact that we had not seen before.”
• “Most of Winogrand’s best pictures—let us say all of his best pictures—involve luck of a different order than that kind of minimal, survivor’s luck on which any human achievement depends. It is luck of an order that can perhaps be compared to the luck of an athlete, for whom the game is devised to make failure the rule and conspicuous success never wholly in the hands of the hero. The great Henry Aaron hit a home run 755 times in his career, but failed to do so almost 12,000 times.” Photography is a training in failure. Or at learning to live with failure. It takes the strongest personalities to persevere.
• “As Winogrand grew older and his ambition grew more demanding, the role of lick in his work grew larger. As his motifs became more complex, and more unpredictable in their development, the chances of success in a given frame became smaller.”

(This is part 1, up to page 30)

• review
• garry winogrand
• szarkowski

Posted 2 years ago

Top photo by Garry Winogrand, second photo of him shooting.

Here’s the complete interview. The video is good. You can get it on iTunes.

Winogrand’s personality is never hidden. It comes through plainly as cantankerous, intelligent, virtuosic, insecure, but always, always honest. Even when he is being terribly dishonest you can see the twinkle in his eye which tells you that he just can’t tell you what you want to hear—It would risk his work too much. I’m surprised he wanted to be interviewed at all considering how risky he thought explication of his method, or ideas were to continuing that work.

• He stopped being a “hired gun”, because he enjoyed it “until I stopped. … I just didn’t want to do it anymore.” Did his personal work at the same time as his commercial work. The concern that doing commercial work somehow taints your artistic vision is I think a delicate, artistic pose. You’re personality should be strong enough to withstand, and even develop from doing commercial work. To having actual demands put on you. Something to try at least.
• Public Relations. “I don’t think anything happens without the press.” He says it would have been easy for him to come directly at the topic of the relationship between the media and the event, but that he tried to engage with the event itself. I think he is making the case for subtlety. That the very best pictures do not open up at a touch, but take puzzling, and prying to unloose. Or that photography is so clear that one must be ‘sly’ about how one uses it. Any heavy-handed sermonising, or positioning of one’s case comes through as unsubtle. He later goes on to say that he was the press, but that he was ‘slyer’, and that the people in the press were useful to him. I wonder if he means that by identifying himself with the press, by being one of them, and then letting just a little more into the frame than they would he could be the most revealing. Very interesting approach. Smart, smart.
• “What common thread runs through your work.” “Well, I’m not going to get into that.” He refuses to say the meaning behind what he does. To leave room for other interpretations. To allow for the greater subtly of the print than what words allow for. Words make you say what you mean. A photograph can be far more ambiguous. But was he like this at the beginning when he was starting out? Is he really just trying to make interesting pictures? Was he just lucky that Szarkowski picked him out? But he had already been shooting for more than 15 years by the time of the New Documents exhibition. “Never apologise, and never explain” a female novelist said that.
• Rejects the term street photographer. “I’m a photographer. A still photographer, that’s it.”
• Snapshot aesthetic. “That’s another stupidity.” The family album picture “is one of the most precisely made photographs.” A lot of work and planning went into the photograph. “It’s one of the most carefully made photographs that ever happen. They’re just dumb.” Amen.
• On his hand. “In the end, the picture. Right. Not how I do anything. … How the fact of putting four edges around a collection of information or facts transforms them. Now a photograph is not what was photographed, it’s something else.” He in a roundabout way is acceding to the artists intent. I think he he being paradoxical. By saying that the photograph was different from what is there, he is saying that something new has been made. Then the photographer has made something new to what was there. So the photographer’s intent is now captured in the photograph. And it is the consistency of the photographers intent which will reveal narrative. Later on in the interview he rejects the idea of talking about this, but this what he means. By choosing what to point to, and where you cut off the edges, what is clear and what is not, where things are in the frame, planes, shapes, balance, colours you are revealing yourself, your ideas, your feelings, and the meanings you see in life, and what you are trying to communicate. But he can’t come out and say this because he was the most subtle of all the photographer and dealing with the most delicate and ephemeral of human feelings and he feared that too much knowledge or analysis may destroy this ability. He was probably right. And, then, what about me and my endless desire to think and talk about things? Am I not Winogrand. Or am I just young? Did he talk more when he was young like most artists and then shut up as he got older?
• On equipment. “I don’t ask the photograph’s questions. Of mine, or anybody else’s. You know, how it was made. I’m interested if it’s interesting. The only time I talk about that kind of thing is when I’m teaching. When there’s a reason.” He is insistent on the picture being the ultimate truth. And it should be. My defensive posturing  about my photos being unscripted, on the street, difficult to make is really the wrong way to go about it. The photos should be good enough that the viewer asks that question and resolves it without me having to pipe up. They should see the number of heads, the honesty of the expressions, the unpreparedness of the face and come to the conclusion. By making the photographs the one and only fact, you put all of your energies into making them the best possible thing. You focus only on that and they become good rather than texts, and captions, and explanations. But that assumes that there are smart people already looking at your work and trying to get your name out. “When I look at photographs I couldn’t care less how.”
• “What do you look for?” “I look at a photograph! What’s going on. What’s happening in a sense photographically. If it’s interesting, I try to understand why.”
• The Animals. He would take his kids to the zoo and take pictures of them. Found some clue pictures in his contact sheets and then he went to work. I love how he uses the word work so much.
• On the current rise of interest in photography (this is in 1981). “I guess some of it has to do with taxes. You know, tax shelter things.” This is so funny, but probably true. He says it’s the money.
• “I don’t have any faith in anybody enjoying photographs, particularly, really. You know, in a large enough sense to matter. I thinking it’s all about, got to do with finances on one side, and there’s a kind of, there are people who are socially ambitious.” This is such a deeply nihilistic position on photography (forget about his comments on the photo world which is true). How could he not get enjoyment out of them. What does he mean large enough sense? I care about many of his pictures deeply and want to remember them for the rest of my life and I’m sure he feels that way about other photos that are important to him. Or is it that he is so deeply in lust with the process that the product does not matter?
• On tilting. “It isn’t tilted. … You use a vertical edge. … It’s all games. Keeps it interesting, to play.”
• On what makes a picture alive instead of dead. “There are things that I photograph because I’m interested in those things. … But I said something earlier tonight, I said the photograph isn’t what was photographed it’s something else. There’s a transformation.” “It’s got to do with the contention between content and form, invariably. Which is what’s responsible for its energies, its tensions. It being interesting or not.” “Most photographs are of life, of what goes on in the world, and that’s boring. Life is banal. Let’s say an artist deals with banality I don’t care what the discipline is.” Then how do you find the mystery in the banal. “Well that’s what’s so interesting, there is a transformation. By just putting four edges around it, you get a chance to …, it changes it.” This is the most revealing I’ve ever heard Winogrand be. He uses the word ‘you’ in a half sentence that peters off. He is saying that what he does is art.
• What were some photos in the development of your work. He mentions the Forth Worth rodeo photographs. I wonder why? “If I was going to make a book, I’d want to shoot more. You do a book, you want it to be a crackerjack little book.”
• “… was that your intent.” “I don’t have any intent. I’m taking pictures. My intention is to make interesting photographs. That’s it in the end. But, I don’t make it up. … That’s what was there to photograph.” He is strongly defending the artists subconscious process against harm. So evasive.
• Women are beautiful. “I’ve always compulsively photographed women. … What was interesting. Is it a good picture or was it the woman? And I don’t think I always got it straight. I think it is an interesting book, but I don’t think it’s as good as the other books that I’ve made.”
• On having a narrative voice. “I don’t completely understand that. … Only in the sense that I deal with something happening. … I think the pictures often play with the question of what actually is happening. … I always liked how puns function.” He wants to reflect the ambiguity of meanings in life itself. Things aren’t clearcut in life and he is trying to capture that on film which gives him even more reason to not talk about things. Double meanings. Tension between counter meanings. How can you load the most tension into the frame. Have little battles between forms and content, between various meanings in the content itself, and between visual shapes and colours and lines. Make it an active picture. Breathe life into it.
• On recurring themes, iconography. “Women. I don’t know.” Maybe he isn’t joking?
• “I was in Texas for 5 years. And the only way you could do it is to live there.” You have to intimately feel a place before you can start taking photographs. This is an important lesson that I felt in Bangladesh and felt the counter to in Europe. Until you start feeling comfortable, like you fit in, like you are of the place to some extent, it is difficult to start working.
• On influences from Evans. “My attitude to things is very different to Evans. …  Let’s say I have a different kind of respect for the world than he does. I have a different kind of seriousness about it which might be misunderstood. You may think that I’m being funny or whatever.” This is very revealing. What he is saying is that he has the opposite of Evans’ cool, steely, aristocratic, mocking distance from the world. What Winogrand is saying is that he actually loves the world, wants to be accepted by it, wants to enjoy its pleasures (women for example) but there is something in him, or something in the world, or something about the very character of reality and life that won’t allow it. His voracious interest in the world can’t ever be reciprocated. He can’t fuck all of the women that he is attracted to, and this is what results in the vast loneliness that is projected in his work. He then goes on to say that although there are visual puns and so on in his own pictures he is deadly serious about what he feels about the world and that this may be overlooked in looking at his work. “The things that I photograph may describe a lack of [taste].” He twists and turns in trying to avoid saying out loud what he can’t say. That is so very lonely, and so very disappointed with the amazing gift of life. I’ve never felt closer to another human being besides Nietzche before.
• “I’m less interested than he was. I’d think of Atget. Because the things that he would photograph were often beautiful. And that’s a hell of a problem … . I deal with much more mundane objects. I deal with it all. …”
• “What advice would you give in general to a young photographer, what should they be doing?” “Well they should be, the problem is, the primary problem is to learn to be your own best critic. Your own toughest critic. You have to pay attention to intelligent work, and work at the same time. You’ve got to balance what you do off better work. It’s a matter of working.” This is validation. This is exactly what I’m trying to do.
• “John Szarkowski called you the central photographer of your generation. It’s very high praise, but also an enormous burden.” “No, not a burden at all. What has that got to do with working? When I’m photographing, I don’t have that kind of nonsense running around in my head. It’s irrelevant in the end.”
• I don’t want to be like Raphael and be liked. I think it is a greater critical position to be in for people to like your work although they may not like you. And it may suit me better too.
• “What did you have in mind?” “Surviving. That’s all I have in mind right now. … I’m a survivor.”
• “I don’t ever think in terms of projects.”
• “You are the fastest camera around.” “Well, I don’t know if I’m the fastest. It’s irrelevant.” “Isn’t that important to your work. the fact that you can organise complex material and compose and snap it so quickly.” “But it isn’t that difficult. What would be difficult is if I was carrying something heavy. No. Do you know what I mean? It’s not difficult. I’m not operating a shovel and getting tired.” He’s right, this isn’t the hard part. The hard part is knowing yourself enough to figure out what you want to say and trying to make that in the photograph.
• “Do you think of yourself as an artist?” “I don’t think about it. But if I have to think. Yeah, I guess so. <sighs>.” This is some touching shit. He is nearly defeated into saying that he is an artist.
• “And how would you like us to think of you and your work?” “I couldn’t, I have no ideas. No ideas at all on the subject. It’s all about, let me work. That’s all. That’s what it gets down to.”

I have lived very few things more moving than this interview. A great, great man. Thank god he’s dead, or else I’d try to do something stupid like go and meet him. The thing to do is engage with his work deeper than anyone else has. Figure out his problems and where he left off and where the gaps are and then work away at them.

My video cut out bits. Here’s some extra comments:

• His bit about the black power and woman’s rights speeches is hilarious. I like his politics. “Tiresome.”
• His position is that it doesn’t matter whether the photo is set up or not. I have to think that through.
• Says that photography is fashionable now.
• He says teaching is interesting because it presents the problem of having to talk about photography. I think his actions belie his words. From other sources it’s known that he was a haphazard teacher who talked little and took students out to shoot as the main method of teaching.
• He seems to have bitter, acrimonious relationships with other photographers.
• Names these contemporaries of his as shows he’d go see: “Tod or Hank Wessel, Bill Dane, Paul McConough, Steve Shore. Robert Adams, for sure. I’m ready to see what they do. Nicholas Nixon, also, I would make it my business to see. There’s a lot of people working reasonably intelligently.”
• His extension of the pun idea is enlightening: “I generally deal with something happening. So let’s say that what’s out there is a narrative. Often enough, the picture plays with the question of what actually is happening. Almost the way puns function. They call the meaning of things into question. You know, why do you laugh at a pun? Language is basic to all of our existences in this world. We depend on it. So a pun calls the meaning of a word into question, and it upsets us tremendously. We laugh because suddenly we find out we’re not going to get killed. I think a lot of things work that way with photographs.’
• When he is working he wants his photos to be as ‘useless’ as possible. To let things take it’s natural shape, or to avoid the pressures of construction? Or both, or more?

• garry winogrand
• winogrand
• review
• interview

Posted 2 years ago

Photos by Edward Weston

I liked my skim of his daybooks so I thought I’d have a look at this essay he’s written. Also, I’ve taken to photographing fruit because of him, and he may talk about fruit!

• The early Art strain of photography veered erroneously to painterly effects as that was the dominant and seemingly closest tradition. This was anti-photographic.
• That is why the photography that we respect from the past is not art photography but amateur or commercial as they weren’t concerned about bending it into something it isn’t. That’s a smart reading and certainly explains the love of Atget.
• Sweet metaphor of singer’s paying out musicians for using machines.
• Nature of the recording process: instant.
• Nature of the image: precision of detail and ‘unbroken sequence of infinitely subtle gradations’. He then goes to argue that only this clarity, and ‘lucidity’ is to be respected. But as Frank and those after have shown, eschewing this doesn’t necessarily make something anti-photographic.
• Because of the two points above: the ‘finished print must be created in full before the film is exposed.’ Wrong, of course. That’s like saying Jazz players shouldn’t, or by the very character of their instruments, can’t improvise on the spot. And his denigration of luck as a factor is short sighted. But it isn’t for him. He believe in his theories and did great work based on those theories. You make up what ever lies you need to get the work done.
• Makes an interesting point that far from a photographer not having enough control, they have too much. Does he mean it would be much more photographic if we were reduced to some basic forms of control such as framing, shutter speed, and focus.
• Makes the important point that photographers do not stay with simple equipment long enough. Speaks of having one lens and really learning to see with it. I’ve just shot 20,000 photos with one fixed lens.
• He speaks of the photographer knowing how a scene will look as a finished print. Compare this to Winogrand’s ‘I photograph things to see how they will look as a photograph.’ I think it would be boring to know exactly how the photograph will look in the end. But you want to have the ability to control how you represent what you see either. Winogrand’s Utah 1964 involved aesthetic choices which result in its greatness.
• Photography’s honesty (it’s detail) makes just surfaces, or faux surfaces and inappropriate medium. It’s a little sad to read this and think of the Beauty industry and what it does with photography.
• Says that pre-planning of composition according to traditional compositional rules is impossible and shouldn’t be done before the fact but should be done afterwards in editing. I don’t know about that. You can see from HCB’s rolls that he would experiment with compositions on the spot.
• End advice is great: ‘his greatest asset is the directness of the process he employs. But this advantage can only be retained if he simplifies his equipment and technic to the minimum necessary, and keeps his approach free from all formula, art-dogma, rules and taboos. Only then can he be free to put his photographic sight to use in discovering and revealing the nature of the world he lives in.’

• review
• edward weston

Posted 2 years ago

Photos by Friedlander

I usually avoid landscape photography. I see it as too often cliche and banal. But I’ve always remembered Lee Friedlander’s close in desert work of bushes, and thistles, and cacti. I’m looking through it right now, as preparation for my own time out in the Australian bush.

• The first thing is that they are brilliant. They have so much critical intelligence in them and so much aesthetic sense that it will be a great challenge to better them. The humanise the landscape and use foregrounds that a real walker would encounter. Even where there is a ‘heroic’ background, the foreground makes a harsh counterpoint that punctures the ideal myths of what the desert has been represented as. The desert in Friedlander’s work is not the place for dreams but a spiky reality or even a painful bright nightmare that you are trapped in.
• Reminds me of the trope used by Katsushika Hokusai (in Mount Fuji seen behind a cistern, 1835) of contrasting foreground and background. This freedom and wit had a huge impact on the loosening of Academicism and the flowering of Impressionism.
• The shapes that F. finds are also reminiscent of the Japanese love of beauty in disequilibrium. In fact this discordance with traditional balance is a major argument for the uncontrolled barbarity of nature.
• The light is midday and harsh. He has tried to obliterate tonality in subservience to blinding detail. His language is intense so that he can communicate the intensity of that environment. I think the Australian desert isn’t like that. Does it have to be this harsh? This chaotic? The Aboriginals lived harmoniously in and around the desert. How did they do that? What did that harmonise with? A potential way to go beyond Friedlander.
• His subjects are plants. But the plants take on the symbolic weight of chaos itself. Starting from a point they burst and reconfigure the environment in an image of cacaphonic entropy. This entropy is not harmless however, the spikes spread along with the slender branches.
• But what takes his work deeper is the beauty inherent in this terrifying disorder. And some pictures go even further. The picture on page 20 of cacti discs is about beauty. The discs are nearly perfectly round, idealistically round, and they face themselves at angles that are diverse, and harmonic or even more, melodic.
• The background deserves a mention. Some of his backgrounds are terrifically lyrical. And it is the contrast that he is looking for. He creates small pockets of clear amongst the chaotic foreground for the optimism of the background to filter through like the morning sun.
• I, of course, love his square format. It simplifies the space and removes the distraction of format.
• Deep, deep focus. Probably not hard in the strong light. But still I wouldn’t want to lose too much quality in going to a too high f-stop.
• There is a dramatic cutting off of objects by the frame. It makes the object not an object, but more a flat structure put before what is being commented on. The trees are his comments on the text, the traditional landscapes. Of course, he can’t stop himself from innovating in the background too.
• By trying to represent chaos he is walking on the precipice of the work itself becoming incoherent. I believe some pictures do, for example p30, p.38. I don’t think it can be argued that he still used these to further the narrative. He didn’t need this many pictures. Maybe half would have done. Hard to judge though. He must have done a shit load. And in the edit become infatuated with parts rather than the whole.
• In some there is a direct interaction between the foreground and background. E.g. p.36 the cacti is touching the tree. Creates a very interesting feeling after the first 30 pictures where the two were very separated. The desert is slowly closing in on you as you tire, as your thirst grows. Things seem even more menacing.
• The cacti are humanoid. They are used as soldiers or sentries of a sort. But mute. You will get nothing but hurt from them. There is no lonliness more difficult than the one when someone else is around. Sometimes the cacti hover, ghostlike.
• His shape and pattern making are masterful. Unbeatable perhaps. He made photographic paintings out there.
• There is often a revelation. The foreground is allowed to be seen. It is anti-climactic. p.48. A certain story is developing here. Amazingly you do not get the feeling you are seeing something for the second time ever. An amazing success!
• He plays with the weight of the tone of different parts of the photograph, and of the photograph as a whole. Some are heavier and darker. Some are nearly washed out in white. Creates a way for him to differentiate and a scale for him to work with.
• p.57 show the remains of a battle. The remains of an event. Reminds me of the famous Gettysburg picture of fallen soldiers or Goya’s etchings of men impaled on trees.
• He is exploring the inherent shapes of the objects in and of themselves, beyond using them as texture or counterpoints.
• These pictures are the inbetween moments which are just as real as when you get to the vista and look. To get there you have to walk through the shrub. Like life. Heavy shit.
• Uses shadows with extreme sophistication. The shadows become third actors, reflecting, softening what is there, but also urging on the chaos.
• Often he uses blur, or over exposure to reduce the detail of various parts of the print, or the whole thing to be expressive. Uses less so that you feel more.
• These natural things look anything but natural. They look like they are lifeless things made of earth and stone. There is no life here.
• It is fatiguing. (He says in his essay: “More probably, it’s just like a long scratch of a fingernail on a blackboard.”)
• The cacti become characters further on in the piece. A baby a sleep, foetal (p.94). Two lovers (p.95). A fat kid with candy (p.97). A hand beckoning (p.99. An magic orb from outer-space (p.98)
• p.101 is a killer.
• This is a seriously masterful minor work. A great, great intelligence to it.
• Photography is big. Just as big as cinema, or a novels. It is a worth it.
• Of course he had an infatuation with Cherry blossoms. Of fucking course.

I looked at the Distributed Art Publishers edition.

• lee friedlander
• review
• australia trip

Posted 2 years ago

Photo by Atget

I’ve seen Atget’s pictures a hundred times, and in many of them I can feel a subtle, mysterious power. But I’ve never been totally convinced as I am about say Frank, or Winogrand, or Klein. I’ve never been able to appreciate or see the consistent greatness of his work that would merit a huge exhibition at MOMA by Szarkowski. I fear that it is an example of a critic taking on an artist so that he can do criticism, not because the artist is in and of himself great. Szarkowski is the last person that I’d accuse of such underhandedness, or self-love so this is all a great mystery. I’m now sitting with the 4 volume set which accompanied the exhibition at MOMA which includes Szarkowski’s essay and so we shall see.

• He did not leave behind any writings. He did not say much. This has created a space for the critic to come in and establish a significant presence. Nothing is proven yet, but the environment is ripe for crime.
• Szarkowski argues that there is a unique sweetness to Atget’s representation of the world which avoids the ugly trials of the artist battling the world. That Atget saw the world as is in the purest photographic sense without force. That there is a subtlety of touch.
• Atget did not once out of 10,000 photos ever photograph the Eiffel tower. I’m beginning to like him already. It’s a good lesson in defining what you won’t photograph. What won’t you do? Fake, set up photos. Never. Never. Ok, maybe once.
• Atget did not shoot the products of the 19th century in Paris. Ancient, and current things were his concern. He did not acknowledge the powers of the times.
• He photographed the marks that people had left behind rather than the people themselves. A belief nearly that the product could conjure the reality of the situation. The same as what photography proposes.
• Interested in types not of individual personalities. He did not take one personal picture in the whole of the thirty years. Szarkowski questions that perhaps it was beyond his abilities.
• “Very early in his career Atget stopped trying to catch the world unawares.” In the beginning he shot with variety, but made a conscious decision to go down the path that he did.
• Purpose: the creation of a body of work that would describe the ‘authentic character’ of French culture. My goals of photographing Australia, or what it means reflects this. I have so much more thinking left to do on this. The clue is that is done in little pieces. With obsessions. It isn’t really Australia at all but what I want Australia to be.
• He liked doors.
• S. is very good, if a little unbelievable on the artist’s unconscious patterns and urges. Shape of the vines reoccur.
• Raises the very interesting question of returning to exact same subject at a different point in time. I never do that, do I? Should I? Am I interested? Probably not.
• The essential photographic task is essentially different to that of the affective representation of modern painting or art. In that photography can still be used to find out what the subject is, not how one feels about the subject. What a small but important purpose. I don’t know if I’m capable of it, but very very interesting. I’m not sure if it’s even true anymore.
• What makes a photographer (any artist) is the consistency of vision over a lifetime.
• S. suggests that A. made his own artistic desires and consistency subservient to his larger goal, his subject. And that when lesser photos or simple records were required he did that. Interesting but I’m not sure if I believe him. He gives other more pedestrian reasons for why half of Atget’s pictures aren’t particularly special. Of course, these are the pictures that he kept. Suggests a thinking and problem definition that comes from the subject rather than the artist or even the orthodoxy and expectations of the medium that he is working in.
• Idea: photograph one scene a thousand times. And pick the best 30. Different times, different places etc. etc. Atget went back to Saint-Cloud again and again over his lifetime. The anti ‘small world’  set.
• The majority of what is considered A. best pictures came from his last 6 years. He grew and grew more focused over the years. As he grew older he concentrated on less and less. “In his last years he seemed often to make thm out of almost nothing.”
• S. suggests a coil like returning to themes for artists over time. I hope so.
• “With few exceptions, the best photographers have completed their original contribution within a very short time—often within a decade.” Atget was different.
• “it would seem that most superior powers write their lyrics early in life, and then proceed to epic, dramatic, or philosophical works. In these forms, acquired skills, knowledge, and experience perhaps compensate for a falling off in sensibility.”
• My god, I’m in a desperate race against time!
• S. suggests that A. was able to produce so long and late because his purpose went beyond just self expression, to a moral urge.
• Great quote from Ansel Adams about the non-judgemental character of A. Need to look up Adam’s writings.
• A. as a counter weight to the thrust of Modernism. He looked back and looked at things as evolution, rather than revolution. I would not put him as part of the arc of modern art. He was something else, something aside.
• Stieglitz later in life suggested that an accurate photographic portrait should be made of many pictures not one. This is an interesting concept for the Australia work. Is this what I was getting at anyway with the plan for 10 photos of a person? Why not just make a video of them? Doesn’t provide the concentrated focus.

• review
• atget
• szarkowski

Posted 2 years ago

Painting by Van Dyck

I don’t actually remember the name of the museum where I saw this amazing, life changing shit. All German words are the same to me. But it was huge and disappointingly I had to run to Mitte and I couldn’t really take my time with these amazing paintings. The Flemish masters especially will have a huge impact on any set up shots that I do but the older religious works were also affective.

• Ghirlandio had backgrounds of his portraits as sharp as the foreground but by controlling the relative sizes of the fore and background still made the head standout. Great portraits. I have to think about how I can do something similar. I think using photoshop to superimpose the face onto an empty shot of the background may be a very interesting idea.
• The paintings from the middle ages have great technique but what Gombrich says about the Egyptians and their lack of innovation over millennia applies here too. There is very little room of individual differences between the artists. But this was when art was for useful things beyond just aesthetics. When paintings were key ways to tell stories. So often the story triumphs over the aesthetics. Rightly so. Like typefaces are right now.
• Found the plethora of mid-shot portraits actually quite inspiring. It’s nice to have the hands in there and not just the faces. Most of the pictures do not question their subjects at all though and are just a form of hagiography. In modernity one can question the sitter much more, make them look silly, find a deeper self for them through the painting or the photo. Obvious.
• Some of the portraits look like they’ve been painted over another painting. The subject in the back seems to be of a different era (but what would I know), or the perspectives seem dramatically different. Strange.
• Realised that painters never blurred their background for portraits. The idea just didn’t exist. That’s an interesting problem. I guess as they developed they did use black backgrounds (one I saw used green and it looked good) to isolate the subject. But actually having a detailed background to the portraits would be something new and different in this day and age. But it is hard to get I think, I think the super imposition idea may work well. Or getting the D700 and using super high ISOs to get both person and background in focus. But there would be a lot of loss of dynamic range. Boo hoo.
• In very early Italian religious art no one looks at you directly in the portraits. Reminds me of the amazing, amazing Benjamin Rinner portraits that are all over Berlin at the moment. They are close in, black background portraits of people from the Berlin Philharmonic looking so naive that it is shocking. They are amazingly honest portraits and I want to do work similar to that if I can out in the outback with some reflectors instead of lights. Don’t know how to get the back background. Avedon has already done white.
• Klimt’s gold leafing isn’t new. Lots of dark ages paintings used it for the backgrounds to portray holiness. Klimt divorced it from that pretty strongly I guess to use it for more decorative reasons. Had an idea to gold leaf out parts of a photo (maybe the the house in a picture of a house just leaving the background).
• Another thing that made me think of Klimt was the way the dark age painters would mass people together to represent like a chorus. Reifying these people makes them represent a concept. I think Klimt was doing the same thing in his paintings, where life is a collection of people hugging each other. Snap!
• De Georgio Martini had a painting which had wonderfully strange architectural porportions. I think it was from the 16th century. Seemed modern in a way. The scene of a courtyard were scene are scene from the other side of some columns and a low wall. But the columns and low wall take up a lot of room. The wall take up a third of the painting from the bottom. The painting seems squeezed. Then there is a nearly empty courtyard where the tiles go straight up to the river where there are boats. It was nearly surrealist in it’s slight shifting of reality to hint at a dream.
• Seeing the distortion that was used in the past where less important people are dramatically smaller than large people would be a very interesting thing to try these days using photoshop.
• The patterns in the clothes are super modern and very very interesting. Nearly modernist patterns appear on a 14th century ladies. Some awesome sandals were being worn back then too.
• I liked the greys and browns of Lorenzetti.
• Massacchio’s long portraits are an interesting shape and the pictures look good tightly next to each other.
• Miniature portraits in lockets really reminded me of modern day wallet photos. Everything has a lineage. This also reminded me of the amount of photo booths all over Berlin. Such a throwback but people use them all the time when they are drunk.
• Raffael has awesome technique. But everything looks too beautiful? Too idealised?
• The dark portrait lighting is amazing. See Moroni. I may need to buy a light and a big light-box, I think that’s how you do it, with a counter-light on the other side or even a reflector to bounce the main light back. So much mystery is created in these paintings.
• Idea: go back to bangladesh with a dark shaded studio that you can set up on the streets and get people in for portraits.
• I’m so, so interested in portraits at the moment. I can see the history of portraits which go back so far and has had so many practitioners. We can now do extreme detail and of people from the east instead of just the west.
• Later (17th C?) the portraits start losing detail. Don’t like these as much.
• Saw an awesome circular bench downstairs. Could be good for parties to build circular or square benches in the backyard. But too confronting?
• Saw some still lifes of dead animals which was really interesting in light of my night meat photos from Bangladesh. Dead meat is interesting! Lighting is the key thing being explored I guess. I should have done more maybe.
• Love, love the ‘cleanliness’ of van Miereveld and the others. There is such precision of representation. It is an aesthetic fly trap. But although the window is so clear do we care about the subject of the paintings more? That purpose has been lost in the winds of time as these people posing have become insignificant.
• Later European portraits do not have the ‘bite’, the strength of purpose and emotional tautness of the old religious ones. There isn’t that attempt to deify, or to connect to connotations of the transcendental or mad religiosity.
• The floors in the museum was very loud. I took off my shoes and walked around the museum with them under my arm. I made a sculpture before entering the museum. A cubic block 5cm square that had come loose on the footpath. Took some sand and rested the cube on one of it’s corners standing up. Put this in the middle of the footpath with a line bisecting the hole where the cube came from.
• Some of the religious war pictures had a weird mix of bright colours in a heap on the painting. Could come to like them but would take effort. Don’t like them.
• Mellins use of uplighting from the left for the fat guy full length painting was interesting, and different to what any of the others were doing. Gave it a different emotion. I don’t know what that emotion was?
• Caravaggio is funny! He’s irreverent. This is especially so in contrast with all of the serious portraits and religious scenes and war scenes in the room with him. He is also amazingly skilled and observant. The creases on the stomach of the cherub knocking over musical instruments are lovely.
• Whilst I was looking at Caravaggio I had one of my regular urges to tell people what I was thinking and so I wasted my time saying something about Carvaggio to a British dick who didn’t think Caravaggio was humorous. The dick was maybe 30, and very fashionable. Is everyone who dresses well a cunt? So far, yes. But in the end I had this creeping suspicion that the dick may have known more than me and just didn’t let on. Oh life!
• The old painters could create a more interesting street scene. More happened on the streets back then. Our job is harder but in an unexpected way. We don’t have to get the drafting right but the timing. We have to make sure all of the boring complexity of life, cars, strollers, hipsters are out of the background before making the picture.
• Canaletto had some interesting streetscapes at night which I now can’t remember at all. No internet to check. But may have been relevant to my night work.
• Detail took time. They start appearing in the best work. E.g. Backer.
• Flemish. Overwhelmingly black but totally legible. Very, very beautiful, sophisticated. Instantly liked them. May buy a couple.
• I envied the light falling on the black clothing and how much a painter can reveal with his brush that is far more difficult to do with a camera and lights. Although you wouldn’t be able to see it in real life, they painted in the shadow areas the detail that would have been there and this gives the clothes far more depth. Lace work gorgeous. Hands very good. Technically some of the best things I’ve seen.
• The Flems beauty, sophistication comes from the high contrast, high detailed, highly … ‘discrete’ aesthetic they had. Some of the paintings were hyper-realistic. Beyond what was there in the first place. Some are nearly cartoon like in the strength and definition of their lines.
• The white, when used, is a shock and must have been difficult to balance in the paintings.
• Some still lifes but low contrast, dark, not very interesting.
• Maes had a great concept of lighting.
• Not very impressed by de Hooch. Boring contrast. Lack of mood. Flat. Maybe he was one for subtlety and maybe I was moving through too fast at this point.
• Vermeer’s colours in the dark are very good. Very beautiful. He sees what happens to colours in low light. Some of my night work is too low contrasty. Underexposed. The colours have become gray. I see now that the bar for my night photography is going to be very very high. I wonder if the Canon 5DII is actually the right compromise in terms of the high ISO and detail. Is it’s high ISO actually good enough at 3200?
• Sometimes even in one painting a painter will put in an amazing amount of effort into one part an you can see the brush work in other parts are lazier. I’m sure it’s not an aesthetic choice in that period. Not the best painters of course.
• Rembrandt was really rough with lines sometimes. I didn’t know that about him. It is different to what had come before and what was being done around him I think. I was very surprised to see it besides all of the other very detailed, sharp work. But then walking a bit further I could see that he was capable of the most detailed, contrasty work to rival any of them. He had amazing range as a painter. A true great. Sometimes he also placed the subject a bit too far to the left or right, but this was very interesting after the uniform centring of everyone else. You can see a strong intelligence and an artist working and correcting that I couldn’t easily discern in many of the others. Perhaps you need to see a body of work to make a better judgement on this stuff.
• Ruisdael had some good dark landscapes.
• The lighting is so good sometimes. It really shows the subject as three dimensional.
• There were fashionable girls around even at that time and the painters loved to paint them even then.
• I was really inspired by this stuff. The level of detail that some of these painters got to in their large paintings is beyond what is possible with the cameras I can afford. This is something to aim for. You really can’t get a sense of all this from small book reproductions. You have to stand in front of a Van Dyak 4 meter length, 2 meter high painting to get it. It’s fucking impressive.
• De Keyser is good of course but a little obvious. A little boring.
• I have to get a good book (or find one in the library now that I’m poor) on all of these guys. I don’t really know who’s who and I want to see more of their work. Paris is going to be a good place maybe for that.
• I moved through the museum at a different pace. Walk quickly into a room, pick out what’s new, and what I like and walk over to that and then spend some real time looking. Have the confidence to do that. A big museum often becomes repetitive, you need to get out of it what you want to get out of it. What you need.

• review
• flemish
• art

Posted 2 years ago

Photo by Helmut Newton

I was pretty excited to go see Newton and I bought my hard-on along with me. But I lost that pretty quickly as I saw the amount of work he had done which depressed me in its vastness and the quality of his creativity, which was high. Also, still pictures of tits just aren’t that exciting sexually, nothing like a conceptual art action of a pair of tits.

• There was a really slow paced but really exciting video which showed you how he worked with models and he was exacting. He controlled everything. He took a long time to shoot and wore people down into not revealing themselves, but doing exactly what he wanted them to do.
• Idea: don’t let girl piss then take her photos. Even better if she ends up pissing on her clothes. Could be done with a man too. Might cause less controversy.
• There are earthquake indicators or something in all of the museum rooms in Germany.
• Nudity is only one topic. Desire is nigger but has he made it interesting for long enough. Many of his photos are very shallow and the overarching viewpoint is so schizo and so often so adjusted for the purpose of a magazine that he must me considered a minor artist.
• A beautiful girl knows that it is her job to be unattainable. A key apect, or foundational support of her beauty is unattainability. This makes me feel better about the past.
• His personality is disarming. ‘Forceful, but jolly.’ Extremely exacting. No fear. No restraint at all.
• Jodie Foster is the smartest person on earth. Her analysis of Newton is very good. But this is also why he took such a bad photograph of her. He likes simple, big, obvious, womanly, tits, hips, ass, thighs. She’s brains and it didn’t work.
• His wife is pretty awesome. Australian. She helped him a lot and documented his work. Edited his books.
• ‘He doesn’t hear anybody when he is working.’ So he doesn’t hear when someone is telling him he can’t do something. He just keeps on requesting it.
• Coolness is distance. A distance.
• He lived a very very comfortable Parisian life.
• Idea: take fashion photographs with a shit camera but great lighting.
• The bookstore downstairs at the museum was devoted to photography and very comprehensive. It was a little depressing to see s many photographers with books and I have nothing. Also how do you stand out amongst them. I know, by being different. But thinking differently. Most people think that same way. Do I need to isolate myself further?

• review
• helmut newton
• art

Posted 2 years ago

By the Bauhaus

I first went to the boring small Bauhaus Archiv and they pointed out to me that the largest Bauhaus exhibition in this history of the world was happening across town. So I cycled over to this monstrosity and was overwhelmed with knowledge. The Bauhaus was pretty fucking cool. It had people who were anti-hipsters, they were workers. WORK!

• The Bauhaus were radically modern. “What has come before us is wrong or it is no longer relevant for your times.” What they wanted was art to be inclusive of all and in tune with the mechanisms of technology. They took their visual and conceptual cues from machines. They were robots.
• You can never really have a girl that you’ve chased. You wouldn’t let yourself.
• Why did they want to merge art under he umbrella of architecture? They didn’t Gropius did architecture but the actual workshops were incredibly diverse. The overriding aesthetic was in response to the times and that is what allowed the assimilation of others, some great artists like Klee and Kandinsky, into the Bauhaus.
• Paper structures were amazing made in the workshops by students. Met a cute girl.
• Painting sculptures is a sweet idea.
• There was an interesting but obvious progression to the Bauhaus over the 14 years. First they played with the concepts in paintings and abstract art, although there was always Gropius with his architecture, and then they slowly moved to more structured studies of colours and so on. Then they developed a sophistication in this kind of machine or technological art (incl. product design, furniture, and architecture, textiles etc.)
• Oscar Schlemmer’s work was really nice. The heads fitting together. Would like to see more of his work. Beautifully proportioned, subtle work. The Bauhaus were rarely subtle until later.
• The central argument is a reduction of life into shapes and planes and colours. Structural.
• It’s amazing the extant to which a style can be reflected with consistency amongst many mediums. The theory and instruction must have been very strong. It is so rare for this to happen it seems. Some great textiles came out from the Bauhaus and this is not a surprise. It must have been a great atmosphere to be in as an artist.
• J told me that an artist usually worked with a craftsman who would help build the concept. She thought that was great, but I thought that you couldn’t really create something if you didn’t the whole thing and that’s why a lot of the Bauhaus furniture (excepting van der Rohe’s) was so uncomfortable and shit qua furniture. She conceded and said I was right. I made her say I was right four times. Real artists make terrible pick up artists, they don’t care about the audience enough.
• Typography, probably because of its natural structure was loved by the Bauhaus. They also wrote manifestos all the time.
• The Bauhaus were great marketers.
• Why were gradations so important to them? Because they were making things with discrete blocks and planes and colours had to go well next to each other. Problem meet solution.
• Awesome rugs by Roghe and someone else’s wife. The wives lived with the artists and were often artists themselves. Rather like a commune.
• There is an ignoring of, or maybe even an antagonism to the organic. Some of the architecture is inhabitable. The originial Bauhaus designs have been rejected as unusable. Even when they do trees in their models, the trees look like machines. But Ben made a good point that the showed the way, and didn’t have to consider fitness for purpose so much. That came later. The softening, the humanisation always comes later. Had a conversation with J where I nearly convinced here that the Barcelona Pavilion house was crap because if she came to visit it would be awkward because of the design. She was nearly convinced.
• The height of the ridiculous interdisciplinary-ness of the Bauhaus was reached in Bauhaus theatre. Or was it genius? There was something about the humans moving like machines that was insightful.
• Real sophistication develops in aesthetics and process and materials near the end.
• Why did it really end? Was it just politics? The Philistines?
• Hannes Mayer started the move for the architecture to get away from the purely structured buildings to becoming more organic, more thoughtful of how they were lived in.

• review
• bauhaus

Posted 2 years ago