Barbara Ess - Interview

Barbara Ess is a veteran artist using the proto-photographic technology of pinhole cameras to make work that persuasively comments on the embodied construction of visual experience, its distortions and various frailties, integrating those elements into the conceptual effect of her photography. Although her pictures are indeed dream-like in nature, they have at the same time an underlying rigour.

"I think of my work as an investigation and it's always concerned with the same question: Exactly what is the true nature of reality?" says New York artist Barbara Ess of her darkly disturbing photographs.

"I don't know if there's an essential reality it's possible for us to get a grip on," she adds, "but I know I don't experience life primarily in terms of the physical world--my emotions and memories play a much larger role in shaping my experience as a human. I know there's a me that's more solid than this body I move through the world in."

This interview, although it is several years old, does a great job of outlining what she's interested in and the evolution of her work. (It also contains an inexplicable moment of confusion on the part of its author between a pinhole photograph and a photogram, but aside from that is well deserving of your time).

Mariah Robertson

Mariah Robertson is another artist who uses a reclaimed vocabulary of modernist aesthetics, in collision with any number of other cultural reference points, to examine the increasingly displaced material presence of the photographic image. The result is surprisingly, well, funky is the best word, I suppose, but it's also serious in engaging with the abstract qualities of vision, right at the point where they merge with the psychological. See also this.

Here is a short video that shows Robertson at work:




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Fleur van Dodewaard - Sun Set Series

The conventional tropes that would overtake the photographic image existed even before the medium came into being, so that certain things were understood as "beautiful" and others not, mere happenstance absorbed by the indifferent lens. These conventions are pictorial of course, but they are also social, creating limits to what could be seen. Fleur van Dodewaard's playful work is about exactly this kind of "negative" visibility and although the pictures are themselves quite restrained, with their limited palette and staging, the effect in sum is unexpectedly critical. She is taking the "beautiful" image apart and has found only this rigid set of archetypes, a repression of the visible.

See more here.

Josh Brand

Josh Brand makes subtle and evocative photograms that utilise a clear set of references to modernist abstraction, but at the same time bending them to new conceptual ends, in particular having to do with the substance of the photographic image and also the way in which the specific constraints of a process help to determine meaning.

This article by Fionn Meade is a great introduction to the scope of his work, as are these videos, which date from when he was shortlisted for the Grange Prize in 2010:

Michelle Kloehn - Unseen

It’s commonplace to say that there is now a certain ambiguity in how we think about and use photography, given that the thread of reference that once defined the medium has been so undermined by changing technology. Yet the very individual work of Michelle Kloehn treats this quality as if it had always been present in photography, a sort of enigmatic reticence whereby the medium becomes a complicated surface for meaning, one that is never quite revealed.

Working for the most part with large tintypes she has created a body of images that successfully integrate this dimension of photography back into its history, both materially with regard to the technique she uses, but also in a conceptual sense, because although the images are themselves concrete they manage not to fully resolve into any particular sense of what they are about or what is happening within the frame. Kloehn suggests an alternative trajectory for the development of photography, one grounded in a disappearance of her subject into the process by which it becomes visible.

Though she risks an understanding of her work as somehow nostalgic, just in the simple comparison of its hand-made qualities to the more disembodied process we’re now so familiar with, Kloehn avoids this reading by a clearly systematic approach to her subject matter, studio constructions mostly, without any overt emotional content. This suggestive emptiness inevitably turns us back to our experience of the medium and indeed the contradictory nature of visual perception itself.

See more here.

Marcus Erixson - Interview

Check out this interview with Marcus Erixson. The site is worth keeping an eye on too for an an interesting mix of new photography.

Art and Capital

A gilded trinket for the speculative investor; doesn’t hurt that it’s easy on the eye – and everything else as well. Of course people are entitled to spend money however they see fit, and maybe it was love at first sight with this (inescapably minor) work, but the pernicious assumption that its price is somehow a measure of what the photographer has achieved is one that undermines the potential of the medium as a whole – perhaps it is better to be outside the Academy than smothered by it, because if we accept that “art” inheres in that class of objects designated as art, then we are bound to an unnecessarily limited view of what it can be, at best a set of object relations and their effect – little more than the stuff of art, and whatever someone is willing to pay for it.

The commodity value of an artwork depends on any number of factors, but not at all on its discursive potential, the ability something has to acquire meaning apart from its status as an object – art exists in the scope of that discourse for which the artwork is merely a catalyst. Ideas and aesthetic experiences don’t come with prices tags, or at least they shouldn’t, because art has nothing to do with its institutions and less still to do with any sense of terminal anxiety about what art is besides a good investment for the obscenely rich, no more significant than last season’s designer handbags. If Gursky is to be remembered it will be because the best of what he achieved was able to make visible a particular cultural moment, and indeed the nearly unique way in which he was seen to embody something of that in his work – what his prints sell for at auction is perhaps not incidental to his status as an artist, but it is certainly not a meaningful index of what his work is about or how it will be seen in the future.

The bond between art and wealth is an historical fact, but it need not be an inevitability.

For some artworks comparative rarity determines their price; a painting is a unique object, the product of intense labour that requires both an overall vision and daily commitment. That fact alone is enough to make a painting the object of speculative interest, at least when it is the work of an artist who is clearly sanctified by the market – in other words, a safe bet. Those anti-establishment practices that were supposed to obliterate the stranglehold of economic forces in the distribution of art have now safely entered the cannon. Installations and video routinely sell at auction for prices much the same as those achieved by painting or sculpture and if a mere photograph can be sold for as much then it surely is as important.

All of which is not to suggest of course that an artist should not be paid for their work or that it doesn’t have some monetary worth, but rather that the value of art is – maybe somewhat paradoxically – unrelated to the work itself. Meaning is not for sale.