represent

The Omnivorous Eye

January 15th, 2013 by dave dorsey

WINOGRANDGarry

There’s a great article about photographer Garry Winogrand in the most recent Harper’s. (You have to subscribe to view it online.) It describes how, when he worked up a little steam, he would shoot his work continuously, exposing roll after roll of 400ASA film, sometimes taking shots as he drove around the city, obsessive, compulsive, in thrall to the shutter button. The speed of the film enabled him to do much of what he did, which feels to me like something a Beat generation writer would have done, as well as a body of work Walt Whitman could have fallen in love with. The endless series of shots, often left in undeveloped rolls, reminds me of Kerouac with his continuous scroll of paper running through the typewriter, typing furiously and never looking back. His methods, shooting as a knee-jerk response to nearly everything he looked at, has an indiscriminate Zen-like spontaneity, a ceaseless flow of shooting as a fertile shadow of seeing itself. Almost as if Winogrand was simply trying to leave behind a lesson in mindfulness. As if he wanted to achieve that pinnacle of attention that Eliot attributed to James: the ideal of having a mind on which nothing was lost. His voracious impulse to record the world also reminds me of the polymorphous appetite familiar in Whitman and Ginsburg both for celebrating just about everything that is. OK, so I guess I’ve gone and turned him into a writer. He was just the opposite. There’s always a subject, but rarely a story, in his work. As always, go see for yourself on Google image.

Here are some quotes from Garry Winogrand. Replace “photograph” with “painting” and these comments have just as much significance, more often than not. These are wonderfully written, but his pictures don’t need words. They’re all about the visual and totally “against interpretation.” Sontag would have loved the guy:

“Photos have no narrative content. They only describe light on surface.”
“Great photography is always on the edge of failure.”
“Every photograph is a battle of form versus content.”
“I photograph to see what the world looks like in photographs.”
“I like to think of photographing as a two-way act of respect. Respect for the medium, by letting it do what it does best, describe. And respect for the subject, by describing as it is. A photograph must be responsible to both.”
“I don’t have anything to say in any picture. My only interest in photography is to see what something looks like as a photograph. I have no preconceptions.”
“There is no special way a photograph should look.”

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My thank you note to Manifest

January 14th, 2013 by dave dorsey

INPA2_cover

Just sent this off to Jason Franz and crew in Cincinnati. I know it’s a little suspect to praise a gallery for showing high-quality work when you’re own stuff is in the mix. But they’re doing more than just picking good work, and they do it in their own unique way. As I’ve said before, I wish they’d clone themselves as Manifest franchises in a lot of other cities. Even if I keep saying that, I’m sure it won’t happen.

I loved INPA 2, both as a writer and a painter. You included samples of both my writing and my painting, so this edition of the book serves as a validating way for me to introduce people what I’m doing in both areas. Your publications work the way your exhibitions do. They give artists an opportunity to have their work shown alongside some of the best art being made nationally and internationally–without any reference to whether or not it sells or hews to any particular trend or critical school. The fact that the work you select for everything you do is usually less than ten percent of what’s submitted for possible inclusion–and also that your selections are based on the review of a committee rather than one or two jurors–authenticates the Manifest “brand” in a way that’s hard to find in other juried shows open to nearly anyone who makes art. I’m always pleased when I’m able to participate in anything Manifest puts together because its an honor to be selected from among a pool of such worthy art. Your shows and publications strike me as a rare way for people to find work that’s excellent but possibly overlooked by the usual gatekeepers: academia, museums, commercial galleries, commercial art publications, and the mainstream market in general. I also have the sense that Manifest cares about championing art that can communicate with the art world’s equivalent of what has been called, or at least used to be called, in the world of publishing, the “common reader.” The shows are always sophisticated, but they also seem to be driven by an ideal of reaching as large a public as possible–the common viewer if you will–rather than an elite group of initiates (insofar as it’s possible to do that with the way visual art has evolved in the past hundred years).

The INPA2 book itself is wonderfully made. The materials are the highest quality, as is the binding, the reproductions and color fidelity. Thanks once again for allowing me to participate.

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Rubber duckies make way

January 9th, 2013 by dave dorsey

dice

Little, endearing video from the New York Times about an artist who likes to design impossible boats, including paradoxical ones: it’ll float, but you have to keep fixing it continuously to keep it from sinking, for example. Water dice! I love learning about the French equivalent of Kickstarter: Kiss Kiss, Bank, Bank. So French. (They probably loved the Robert Downey/Val Kilmer movie.) The dice follow the path Columbus took on his way to the New World. The slaves arrived by the same route. He launched his dice from the Canary Islands, for the trade winds. The dice are currently in the Atlantic, heading toward the Caribbean.

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Just look at it!

January 5th, 2013 by dave dorsey

Relief map of Nevada lake

Love this little post from kottke.org. It applies to nearly all art I love, though it’s actually about, uh, some water maps. Like the one above. What’s under water is up above. I sound confused. (Maybe what they’ve been saying about me is true.)

Take this quote and insert name of favorite painting to replace the link in the middle:

There’s not much to say about this gorgeous, wooden, laser-cut bathymetric chart of various bodies of water except that just look at it!

I altered two words in that quote in a way that doesn’t matter. Trust me on that. If only all art criticism could be reduced to the sentence I’ve offered instructions in how to make, up above. Under my first paragraph . . . oh well.

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