'And God said to man: I have placed you in the world that you may more readily see what you are. I have made you neither an earthly nor a heavenly, neither a mortal nor an immortal being, in order that you, as your own sculptor, may carve features for yourself. You may degenerate into an animal; but by using your free will you may also be reborn as a god-like being.'
Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola, 'Oration on the Dignity of Man'
有空要读一读。
.
Monday, 17 May 2010
Prints & Drawings
Prints & Drawings, a pictorial history
Gottfried Lindemann, Translated by Gerald Onn
Phaidon Press, 1970
ISBN 0 7148 1760 0
Introduction
Graphic art has always been overshadowed by the painted picture. With its small format, its economical use of colour and its delicate techniques it is a fundamentally less spectacular art form and consequently is known only to the small group of connoisseurs who visit the collections of prints and drawings or are themselves collectors. But although it has not been easy for the general publich to gain access to this special branch of the fine arts, its importance as an independent medium has long been established. After all, the great European graphic collections were started as early as the sixteenth century. This, however, is only of incidental interest. What really matters is the fact that line drawing -- which lies at the heart of graphic art -- actually forms the basis of all artistic activity. Children's drawings, the incised drawings of the prehistoric cave dwellers, and the Greek vase paintings all testify in their different ways to the primacy of linear composition over colour. Moreover, when an artist chooses to portray reality in linear terms he takes the crucial step which leads away from nature and towards abstraction. Colour, on the other hand, has constantly induced artists to emulate nature.
It would be wrong to think that, by restricting himself to a linear technique, the artist also restricts his power of expression. Drawings alone offer immense scope. There is the delicate silver point, the pencil -- which is capable of producing a whole series of greys -- chalk, charcoal and the reed pen, whose harsh line stands in marked contrast to the smooth stroke of the ink brush. But, quite apart from drawings, we also have the various graphic media, which permit of infinite variations extending from the black and white contrast of the linoleum cut to the painterly nuances of the etching. With this wide selection at his disposal the graphic artist is extremely well equipped. And, like every other artist, he can use colour to heighten his effects.
But however hightly we may feel inclined to rate prints and drawings as a genre, we should not overlook the fact that in the course of their development they have led a decidedly chequered existence. In certain historical periods the only drawings produced were those used as sketches or studies while in others drawings were regarded as an autonomous branch of art and included a number of really great works. The copper engravings and woodcuts of the Durer period were conceived in purely artistic terms, whereas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries these techniques were used largely as a means of mechanical reproduction. In general we may say that linear composition reached its peak whenever it was pursued independently of painting and, conversely, that it reached its nadir whenever it became busservient to paitning. And so in this enquiry, in which we hope to trace the historical development of prints and drawings, we shall be assessing the imnportance of the graphic art of various periods with reference to paitning and the other artistic activies.
The illustrations include a number of less well known but none the less important prints, which it is hoped will now reach a wider public....
Well, well, i typed this purely for relax my figures. Published in 1970, it is now NOT interesting to me AT ALL. Maybe also because I am not a 'professional' painter, so the significance of drawings and paintings are equivalent on my mind. Besides, any painter would know drawings are important. Real interesting collectors would also keep an eye on their favourate artists' working process. Maybe only art sales are not so fond of prints and drawings.
我估计drawing和painting的区别和意义，有机会问问徐芒耀老师，他应该会回答得比较清楚。
Gottfried Lindemann, Translated by Gerald Onn
Phaidon Press, 1970
ISBN 0 7148 1760 0
Introduction
Graphic art has always been overshadowed by the painted picture. With its small format, its economical use of colour and its delicate techniques it is a fundamentally less spectacular art form and consequently is known only to the small group of connoisseurs who visit the collections of prints and drawings or are themselves collectors. But although it has not been easy for the general publich to gain access to this special branch of the fine arts, its importance as an independent medium has long been established. After all, the great European graphic collections were started as early as the sixteenth century. This, however, is only of incidental interest. What really matters is the fact that line drawing -- which lies at the heart of graphic art -- actually forms the basis of all artistic activity. Children's drawings, the incised drawings of the prehistoric cave dwellers, and the Greek vase paintings all testify in their different ways to the primacy of linear composition over colour. Moreover, when an artist chooses to portray reality in linear terms he takes the crucial step which leads away from nature and towards abstraction. Colour, on the other hand, has constantly induced artists to emulate nature.
It would be wrong to think that, by restricting himself to a linear technique, the artist also restricts his power of expression. Drawings alone offer immense scope. There is the delicate silver point, the pencil -- which is capable of producing a whole series of greys -- chalk, charcoal and the reed pen, whose harsh line stands in marked contrast to the smooth stroke of the ink brush. But, quite apart from drawings, we also have the various graphic media, which permit of infinite variations extending from the black and white contrast of the linoleum cut to the painterly nuances of the etching. With this wide selection at his disposal the graphic artist is extremely well equipped. And, like every other artist, he can use colour to heighten his effects.
But however hightly we may feel inclined to rate prints and drawings as a genre, we should not overlook the fact that in the course of their development they have led a decidedly chequered existence. In certain historical periods the only drawings produced were those used as sketches or studies while in others drawings were regarded as an autonomous branch of art and included a number of really great works. The copper engravings and woodcuts of the Durer period were conceived in purely artistic terms, whereas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries these techniques were used largely as a means of mechanical reproduction. In general we may say that linear composition reached its peak whenever it was pursued independently of painting and, conversely, that it reached its nadir whenever it became busservient to paitning. And so in this enquiry, in which we hope to trace the historical development of prints and drawings, we shall be assessing the imnportance of the graphic art of various periods with reference to paitning and the other artistic activies.
The illustrations include a number of less well known but none the less important prints, which it is hoped will now reach a wider public....
Well, well, i typed this purely for relax my figures. Published in 1970, it is now NOT interesting to me AT ALL. Maybe also because I am not a 'professional' painter, so the significance of drawings and paintings are equivalent on my mind. Besides, any painter would know drawings are important. Real interesting collectors would also keep an eye on their favourate artists' working process. Maybe only art sales are not so fond of prints and drawings.
我估计drawing和painting的区别和意义，有机会问问徐芒耀老师，他应该会回答得比较清楚。
Sunday, 16 May 2010
Saturday, 15 May 2010
Punctum
Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes, Vintage Classics
Page 43:
Very often the Punctum is a "detail, " i.e., a partial object. Hence, to give examples of punctum is, in a certain fashion, to give myself up. Here is a family of American blacks, photographed in 1926 by James Van der Zee. The studium is clear: I am sympathetically interested, as a docile cultural subject, in what the photograph has to say, for it speaks (it is a "good"photograph):
it utters respectability, family life, conformism, Sunday best, an effort of social advancement in order to assume the White Man's attributes (an effort touching by reason of its naiveté). The spectacle interests me but does not prick me. What does, strange to say, is the belt worn low by the sister (or daughter) -- the "solacing Mammy" -- whose arms are crossed behind her back like a schoolgirl, and avobe all her strapped pumps (Mary Janes -- why does this dated fashion touch me? I mean: to what date does it refer me?). This particular punctum arouses great sympathy in me, almost a kind of tenderness. Yet the punctum shows no preference for morality or good taste: the punctum can be ill-bred. William Klein has photographed children of Little Italy in New York (1954); all very touching, amusing, but what I stubbornly see are one child's bad teeth.
Kertész, in 1926, took young Tzara's portrait (with a monocle); but what I notice, by that additional vision which is in a sense the gift, the grace of the punctum , is Tazra's hand resting on the door frame: a large hand whose nails are anything but clean.
However lighting-like it may be, the punctum has, more or less potentially, a power of expansion. This power is often metonymic. There is a photograph by Kertész (1921) which shows a blind gypsy violinist being led by a boy; now what I see, by means of this "thinking eye" which makes me add something to the photograph, is the dirt road; its texture gives me the certainty of being in Central Europe; I perceive the referent (here, the photograph really transcends itself: s this not the sole proof of its art? To annihilate itself as medium, to be no longer a sign but the thing itself?), I recognize, with my whole body, the straggling villages I passed through on my longago travels in Hungary and Rumania.
There is another (less Proustian) expansion of the punctum: when, paradoxically, while remaining a "detail," it fills the whole picture. Duane Michals has photographed Andy Warhol: a provocative portrait, since Warhol hides his face behind both hands. I have no desire to comment intellectually on this game of hide-and-seek (which belongs to the Studium); since for me, Warhol hides nothing; he offers his hands to read, quite openly; and the punctum is not the gesture but the slightly repellent substance of those spatulate nails, at once soft and hard-edged.
extra viewing:
butdoesitfloat on André Kertész
Page 43:
Very often the Punctum is a "detail, " i.e., a partial object. Hence, to give examples of punctum is, in a certain fashion, to give myself up. Here is a family of American blacks, photographed in 1926 by James Van der Zee. The studium is clear: I am sympathetically interested, as a docile cultural subject, in what the photograph has to say, for it speaks (it is a "good"photograph):
it utters respectability, family life, conformism, Sunday best, an effort of social advancement in order to assume the White Man's attributes (an effort touching by reason of its naiveté). The spectacle interests me but does not prick me. What does, strange to say, is the belt worn low by the sister (or daughter) -- the "solacing Mammy" -- whose arms are crossed behind her back like a schoolgirl, and avobe all her strapped pumps (Mary Janes -- why does this dated fashion touch me? I mean: to what date does it refer me?). This particular punctum arouses great sympathy in me, almost a kind of tenderness. Yet the punctum shows no preference for morality or good taste: the punctum can be ill-bred. William Klein has photographed children of Little Italy in New York (1954); all very touching, amusing, but what I stubbornly see are one child's bad teeth.
Kertész, in 1926, took young Tzara's portrait (with a monocle); but what I notice, by that additional vision which is in a sense the gift, the grace of the punctum , is Tazra's hand resting on the door frame: a large hand whose nails are anything but clean.
However lighting-like it may be, the punctum has, more or less potentially, a power of expansion. This power is often metonymic. There is a photograph by Kertész (1921) which shows a blind gypsy violinist being led by a boy; now what I see, by means of this "thinking eye" which makes me add something to the photograph, is the dirt road; its texture gives me the certainty of being in Central Europe; I perceive the referent (here, the photograph really transcends itself: s this not the sole proof of its art? To annihilate itself as medium, to be no longer a sign but the thing itself?), I recognize, with my whole body, the straggling villages I passed through on my longago travels in Hungary and Rumania.
There is another (less Proustian) expansion of the punctum: when, paradoxically, while remaining a "detail," it fills the whole picture. Duane Michals has photographed Andy Warhol: a provocative portrait, since Warhol hides his face behind both hands. I have no desire to comment intellectually on this game of hide-and-seek (which belongs to the Studium); since for me, Warhol hides nothing; he offers his hands to read, quite openly; and the punctum is not the gesture but the slightly repellent substance of those spatulate nails, at once soft and hard-edged.
extra viewing:
butdoesitfloat on André Kertész
Friday, 14 May 2010
Realism claims "truthfulness"?
The graphic work of Kathe Kollwitz (1867-1945), who lived in the poorer districts of northern Berlin, exemplifies an approach which combines the emotional charge of German Expressionism with sober social realist concerns. Her Mother with Dead Child shows its subject without a context; there are no narrative details of the kind which Wallis included to explain the death of his stonebreaker.
But as a printmaker, she was able to specify a meaning for some of her pictures by adding a caption or slogan and using them as posters on behalf of the socialist and pacifist causes she espoused. This technique enabled her work to move from the gallery walls, to the pages of left-wing newspapers and the walls of the street. Her style combined the direct message-bearing capacity of graphic design with a psychological internsity which made her subjects more than just stereotypical victims. The theme of the mother and dead child obsessed Kollwitz as a private fear which was tragically realized in the death of her son in the First World War and of her grandson in the Second. Her strategy of infusing social realism with emotive themes became a widespread approach in left-wing art. But does this persuasive intention compromise realism's claim to "truthfulness?"
This question is particularly problematic where realist approaches intersect with the techniques of social documentary. The American photographer Lewis Hine (1874-1940) was an influential figure in the development of documentary photography. Hine worked as a campaigner for The National Child Labor Committee between 1906 and 1918 and within the wider Progressive Reform Movement. This was not a revolutionary movement, but one which sought the improvement of working-class conditions through legal reform. Hine's practice combined propaganda with social anthropology, taking pictures as part of a project to collect information and statistics on poverty, and as he put it, for "publicity in our appeal for public sympathy." His own sympathy for the people, espeicially the working children he photographed, is not in doubt, but recent attention to the ethical implications of photography has raised questions about the ideological assumptions and functions which underpin his work.
His Family in Tenement, New York City is typical of the studies he made of poor housing conditions as part of the Reform Movement's campaign to extend the bureaucratic basis of welfare provision. Through this photograph the spectator is brought like a visitor to the family. Most of the children look back with faces which variously suggest curiosity, anticipation, or indifference, and the mother's expression has an air of hospitality which removes any sense of intrusion or voyeurism. The family remains anonymous in the title, though, and despite the naturalness of the image, it is being shown as a sociological example. The room, the household objects in it, and the children's clothing are inspected as evidence of the family's economic and social status. There are no signs here of extreme poverty, so what is it that makes this family an object of the viewer's concert? Studies of Hine's work have pointed out how often he showed such families without a father present, using the absence of a male provider to signal the family's lack or neediness. The positioning of the spectator/photographer as filling this gap underscores the paternalistic impulse of the Reformist ideology, which tended to regard social reform within a Christian framework of father's care and authority. Hine's work underlines the problem for socially concerned documentary: that in depicting the poor for philanthropic purposes, such images require their subjects to conform visually with the expected styles of "being poor." His photographs also show that realism can never be truly objective because all images are contrived; mediated through the process of representation.
Propaganda and Art, by Toby Clark
Page22-24.
Toby Clark 寫得真好。也或許只是我，他的文字看來比較順暢。不像法國人的那麼抒情。哈哈。
Thursday, 13 May 2010
Putting things together
So I have the powerful El Lissitzky works sending me straight up to the sky, and while floating in my imagined USSR space, I was scoping where I could find a foldout catalog of his design for the Soviet pavilion at Pressa, Cologne back in 1928. I would examine its usage of paper and calculation of colors used for the printing.
Lissitzky would be a perfect example to introduce DESIGN - art with audience in concern or say art with propaganda purpose.
In DESIGN, all kinds of tool and forms are working together as a machine with one purpose on its mind, to convey the director/constructor's ideas. Drawings, photography, paintings, printings, paper, and other materials that are visually STABLE are gathered together by the constructor. Different from some Suprematism and other stream of artists, Lissitzky confirmed that "aesthetic program remained dominant to technological considerations", which as how I understand means the idea of the work is conceivable. And Lissitzky must be a very cool person, his works seem to undergo great calculation and considretaion, measuring everyone's emotional gain and loss. Then he rely on aesthetic calculation to remain neutral and gather his fans...
Designers always stay cool and neutral.
. no good .
El Lissitzky
El Lissitzky in Germany 1922-1925, by Matthew Drutt
[page 9, paragraph 1]
Whatever the reasons, what resulted from his initial sojourn -- which lasted barely two years and was characterized b frequent travel to various German cities and neighboring countries -- was a series of collaborative and interdisciplinary projects that drew upon his explorations of painting, graphic design, and architecture combined with a burgeoning interest in photography, catapulting him into the limelight of the international avant-garde and transforming him into something of an ambassador for activities emerging both at home and abroad.
An exemplary figure.
from FIGURATION to GEOMETRIC ABSTRCTION.
under the tutelage of the Suprematist painter Kazimir Malevich.
[page 9, paragraph 2]
In an essay written in 1920, Lissitzky proclaimed: "The artist constructs a new symbol with his brush. This symbol is not a recognizable form of anything in the world -- it is a symbol of the new world, which is being built upon and which exists by way of the people." Lissitzky carried Suprematism beyond Malevich's orginal formulation of pure painting imbued with a spiritul aura. With their multiple references to real and abstract space, the Prouns became a system through which Lissitzky not only ruminated upon formal properties of transparency, opacity, color, shape, and line but began to dwell upon the deployment of these forms into socialized space, placing him into the path of the emergence of Constructivism, which, using a similarly reductive visual vocabulary, sought to merge art and life through mass production and industry.
Russia, VKhUTEMAS (the Higher State Artistic-Techinical Workshops)
Germany, Bauhaus.
[page 9, paragraph 3]
Its interdisciplinary environment, where painting, design, architecture, photography, and handcrafts were taught under a single roof, was radically opposed to the traditions of the academy and reflected the new persona of the artist as worker or engineer as it was evolving amid the rhetoric of Soviet culture. The collision between art for art's sake and art with a utilitarian purpose was settling there by the time Lissitzky arrived.
OBMOKhU (the brother Stenberg Medunestky, Ioganson, and others)
UNOVIS (Senkin, Klutsis, Ermolaeva, and others led by Malevich and Lissitzky)
[page 10, paragraph 2]
Thus, for Lissitzky constructive art could be successful as art only if its aesthetic program remained dominant to technological considerations, a sentiment he would continue to assert in the ensuing years.
我以為所謂的審美標準，就是指作品能夠為大眾讀懂，不因為概念而局限觀眾和藝術家之間的溝通。Lissitzky之所以注重字體的設計和運用，因為在抽象構成中，文字可以幫助觀眾理解符號，總結大意。Lissitzky是藝術家，也是設計師。我想設計師是有政治經濟頭腦的藝術家。藝術家的專職還是在於追求提升自我的技術和表達個人情感。
[page 10, paragraph 4]
In the tradition of modernist journals procaliming the arrival of new art forms to a broader audience, such as L'Esprit Nouveau, de Stijl, and Valori Plastici, Ehrenburg and Lissitzky published the periodical Veshch-Gegenstand-Object, which appeared only twice in 1922 but whose objective was to act as an international hournal of contemporary culture, hence its trilingual title and content. It provided both a window to the West for artists back in Russia and a vew for Western readers into the various cultural activities in the Soviet Union. The inaugural issue included notices of forth coming exhibitions, artist' congresses, and announcements for other avant-garde periodicals, as well as interview with such artists as Fernand Leger and Gino Severini, articals by le Corbusier and Theo van Doesberg, and one by Nikolai Punin celebrating Tatlin's Monument to the Third International, which was fast becoming the symbol in Germany for Russia's artistic revolution.
內容豐富。
[page 11, paragraph 1]
"From now on, art, while preserving all local characteristics and symptoms is international. ... We consider the triumph of the constructive method to be essential for our present. 'Object' will champion constructive art, whose mission is not, after all, to embellish life but to organize it."
藝術家已經表示，我們將不止被“物件”美化，還將被“物件”管理。藝術家从上個世紀就開始認真地推進這個[人]被[物化]的項目。
[page 12, paragraph 1]
What is different about Lissitzky's converntion is the implication that the incorporation of a photograph into an abstract space would have for his impending deployment of abstract space into real space. Again, theorizing these issues through the Proun, his primary preoccupation at the time, he wrote: "Proun begins as a level surface, turns into a model of three dimensional space, and goes on to construct all the objects of everyday life."
Lissitzky解釋何謂Proun，這個概念輿達達有分別，比較重要，請記。Lissitzky是一個考慮3維空間的人。可能因此他的平面構成會很精簡，他在做疊影的時候，不止看到了平面上色彩的滲透，還看到的是對3維空間的可能性。
很想把這篇文章盡快讀完。但是心緒又有些煩亂。找到一個網站，有很多關於藝術的短片。甚好。
This website reminds me a female artist Bridget Riley. Would be helpful for the lesson of female artists.
Wednesday, 12 May 2010
北上南下
There is another problem with longitude, other than methods to calculate it, namely that a zero needs to be set arbitrarily. At first, as is to be expected, several different places were chosen as the zero such as Paris, Cadiz, Naples, Pulkova, Stockholm and London. International agreement was needed to set cartographic standards and the International Meridian Conference held in Washington D.C. USA in 1884 had delegates from 26 countries. They standardised the Greenwich Meridian as the zero for longitude and, after some delay, all countries adopted this and the equator as the basic reference lines.
There is, of course, another decision to be taken in order to standardise maps, namely how the map is oriented. It is fairly logical to have either north or south at the top, but which is chosen is a completely arbitrary decision. Early Christian maps had north at the top while early Arabic/Muslim maps had south at the top. Without any international agreement, it has become standard practice to have north at the top of a map. Other collaborative international projects have been less successful. In 1891 there was an International Geographical Congress in Bern which established the International Map of the World. Standards were set and a symbol convention was chosen. The scale was to be 1:1000000 and several nations agreed to cooperate to produce a world map to this standard. Some, but not all, of the proposed maps have been produced but the project has never been completed.
有趣的是河童也有這樣的嘗試，把地圖倒過來看。所有的視覺習慣收到挑戰的時候，有趣就產生了。找到一条規則，打破，重建。聽上去像是地震。
在練習河童的房間俯視圖後，還可嘗試把自己的房間倒過來畫。
Map
size, dimension, comparison, accuracy, copy, interpretation, symbols, sigh, time and space.
A map is a visual representation of an area—a symbolic depiction highlighting relationships between elements of that space such as objects, regions, and themes.
Many maps are static two-dimensional, geometrically accurate (or approximately accurate) representations of three-dimensional space, while others are dynamic or interactive, even three-dimensional. Although most commonly used to depict geography, maps may represent any space, real or imagined, without regard to context or scale; e.g. Brain mapping, DNA mapping, and extraterrestrial mapping.
First of all, some interesting Cartography history.
Monday, 10 May 2010
the Winter Garden Photograph
Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes, Vintage Classics
Page 67:
28.
There I was, alone in the apartment where she had died, looking at these pictures of my mother, one by one, under the lamp, gradually moving back in time with her, looking for the truth of the face I had loved. And I found it.
The photograph was very old. The corners were blunted from having been pasted into an album, the sepia print had faded, and the picture just managed to show two children standing together at the end of a little wooden bridge in a glassed-in conservatory, what was called a Winter Garden in those days. My mother was five at the time (1898), her brother seven. He was leaning against the bridge railing, along which he had extended one arm; she, shorter than he, was standing a little back, facing the camera; you could tell that the photographer had said, "Step forward a little so we can see you"; she was holding one finger in the other hand, as children often do, in an awkward gesture. The brother and sister, united, as I knew, by the discord of their parents, who were soon to divorce, had posed side by side, alone, under the palms of the Winter Garden (it was the house where my mother was born, in Chennevieres-sur-Marne).
I studied the little girl and at last rediscovered my mother. The distinctness of her face, the naive attitude of her hands, the place she had docilely taken without either showing or hiding her, like Good from Evil, from the hysterical little girl, from the simpering doll who plays at being a grownup -- all this constituted the figure of a sovereign innocence (if you will take this word according to its etymology, which is:"I do no harm"),all this had transformed the photographic pose into that untenable paradox which she had nonetheless maintained all her life: the assertion of a gentleness. In this little girl's image I saw the kindness which had formed her being immediately and forever, without her having inherited it from anyone; how could this kindness have proceeded from the imperfect parents who had loved her so badly--in short: from a family? Her kindness was specifically out-of-play, it belonged to no system, or at least it was located at the limits of a morality (evangelical, for instance); I could not define it better than by this feature (among others): that during the whole of our life together, she never made a single "observation." This extreme and particular circumstance, so abstract in relation to an image, was nonetheless present in the face revealed in the photograph I had just discovered. "Not a just image, just an image," Godard says. But my grief wanted a just image, an image which would be both justice and accuracy - justesse: just an image, but a just image. Such, for me, was the Winter Garden Photograph.
For once, photography gave me a sentiment as certain as remembrance, just as Proust experienced in one day when, leaning over to take off his boots, there suddenly came to him his grandmother's true face, "whose living reality I was experiencing for the first time, in an involuntary and complete memory." The unknown photographer of Chennevieres-sur-Marne had been the mediator of a truth, as much as Nadar making of his mother (or of his wife - no one knows for certain) one of the loveliest photograph in the world; he had produced a supererogatory photograph which contained more than what the technical being of photography can reasonably offer. Or again (for I am trying to express this truth) this Winter Garden Photograph was for me like the last music Schumann wrote before collapsing, that first Gesang der Fruehe which accords with both my mother's being and my grief at her death, I could not express this accord except by an infinite series of adjectives, which I omit, convinced however that this photograph collected all the possible predicates from which my mother's being was constituted and whose suppression or partial alteration, conversely, had sent me back to these photographs of her which had left me so unsatisfied. These same photographs, which phenomenology would call "ordinary" objects, were merely analogical, provoking only her identity, not her truth; but the Winter Garden Photograph was indeed essential, it achieved for me, utopically, the impossible science of the unique being.
好一个感伤的巴特。我发现一个用感觉多过术语来写作的人，要向巴特先生学习如何热情地推销自创的词汇。
就像那些涂鸦的年轻人一样。还要准备古典音乐，培养高尚的感情。
bonus -- 原来Nadar有很多轶事。他是最早用人造光拍照的摄影师，他把自己的工作室借给印象派画家使用，促成第一届印象主义画展，他还是最早作高空摄影的人。了不起，了不起。
Page 67:
28.
There I was, alone in the apartment where she had died, looking at these pictures of my mother, one by one, under the lamp, gradually moving back in time with her, looking for the truth of the face I had loved. And I found it.
The photograph was very old. The corners were blunted from having been pasted into an album, the sepia print had faded, and the picture just managed to show two children standing together at the end of a little wooden bridge in a glassed-in conservatory, what was called a Winter Garden in those days. My mother was five at the time (1898), her brother seven. He was leaning against the bridge railing, along which he had extended one arm; she, shorter than he, was standing a little back, facing the camera; you could tell that the photographer had said, "Step forward a little so we can see you"; she was holding one finger in the other hand, as children often do, in an awkward gesture. The brother and sister, united, as I knew, by the discord of their parents, who were soon to divorce, had posed side by side, alone, under the palms of the Winter Garden (it was the house where my mother was born, in Chennevieres-sur-Marne).
I studied the little girl and at last rediscovered my mother. The distinctness of her face, the naive attitude of her hands, the place she had docilely taken without either showing or hiding her, like Good from Evil, from the hysterical little girl, from the simpering doll who plays at being a grownup -- all this constituted the figure of a sovereign innocence (if you will take this word according to its etymology, which is:"I do no harm"),all this had transformed the photographic pose into that untenable paradox which she had nonetheless maintained all her life: the assertion of a gentleness. In this little girl's image I saw the kindness which had formed her being immediately and forever, without her having inherited it from anyone; how could this kindness have proceeded from the imperfect parents who had loved her so badly--in short: from a family? Her kindness was specifically out-of-play, it belonged to no system, or at least it was located at the limits of a morality (evangelical, for instance); I could not define it better than by this feature (among others): that during the whole of our life together, she never made a single "observation." This extreme and particular circumstance, so abstract in relation to an image, was nonetheless present in the face revealed in the photograph I had just discovered. "Not a just image, just an image," Godard says. But my grief wanted a just image, an image which would be both justice and accuracy - justesse: just an image, but a just image. Such, for me, was the Winter Garden Photograph.
For once, photography gave me a sentiment as certain as remembrance, just as Proust experienced in one day when, leaning over to take off his boots, there suddenly came to him his grandmother's true face, "whose living reality I was experiencing for the first time, in an involuntary and complete memory." The unknown photographer of Chennevieres-sur-Marne had been the mediator of a truth, as much as Nadar making of his mother (or of his wife - no one knows for certain) one of the loveliest photograph in the world; he had produced a supererogatory photograph which contained more than what the technical being of photography can reasonably offer. Or again (for I am trying to express this truth) this Winter Garden Photograph was for me like the last music Schumann wrote before collapsing, that first Gesang der Fruehe which accords with both my mother's being and my grief at her death, I could not express this accord except by an infinite series of adjectives, which I omit, convinced however that this photograph collected all the possible predicates from which my mother's being was constituted and whose suppression or partial alteration, conversely, had sent me back to these photographs of her which had left me so unsatisfied. These same photographs, which phenomenology would call "ordinary" objects, were merely analogical, provoking only her identity, not her truth; but the Winter Garden Photograph was indeed essential, it achieved for me, utopically, the impossible science of the unique being.
好一个感伤的巴特。我发现一个用感觉多过术语来写作的人，要向巴特先生学习如何热情地推销自创的词汇。
就像那些涂鸦的年轻人一样。还要准备古典音乐，培养高尚的感情。
bonus -- 原来Nadar有很多轶事。他是最早用人造光拍照的摄影师，他把自己的工作室借给印象派画家使用，促成第一届印象主义画展，他还是最早作高空摄影的人。了不起，了不起。
To Paint
Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes, Vintage Classics
Page30:
13.
The first man who saw the first photograph (if we except Niepce, who made it) must have thought it was a painting: same framing, same perspective. Photography has been, and is still, tormented by the ghost of Painting (Mapplethorpe represents an iris stalk the way an Oriental painter might have done it); it has made Painting, through its copies and contestations, into the absolute, paternal Reference, as if it were born from the Canvas (this is true, technically, but only in part; for the painters' camera obscura is only one of the causes of Photography; the essential one, perhaps, was the chemical discovery). At this point in my investigation, nothing eidetically distinguishes a photograph, however realistic, from a painting. "Pictorialism" is only an exaggeration of what the Photograph thinks of itself.
Yet it is not (it seems to me) by Painting that Photography touches art, but by Theater. Niepce and Daguerre are always put at the origin of Photography (even if the latter has somewhat usurped the former's place); now Daguerre, when he took over Niepce's invention, was running a panorama theater animated by light shows and movements in the Place du Chateau. The camera obscura, in short, has generated at one and the same time perspective painting, photography, and the diorama, which are all three arts of the stage; but if Photography seems to me closer to the Theater, it is by way of a singular intermediary (and perhaps I am the only one who sees it): by way of Death. We know the original relation of the theater and the cult of the Dead: the first actors separated themselves from the community by playing the role of the Dead: to make oneself up was to designate oneself as a body simultaneously living and dead: the whitened bust of the totemic theater, the man with the painted face in the Chinese theater, the rice-paste makeup of the Indian Katha-Kali, the Japanese No mask... Now it is this same relation which I find in the Photograph; however "lifelike" we strive to make it (and this frenzy to be lifelike can only be our mythic denial of an apprehension of death), Photography is a kind of primitive theater, a kind of Tableau Vivant, a figuration of the motionless and made-up face beneath which we see the dead.
不是很喜欢罗兰巴特的笔调。大概法国人都是这样的。自言自语。感伤有余。我仿佛见到一个面对大海，悠然叹息的男子，他喜欢说话，穿柔软质地的衣服和皮鞋。他不会让我感兴趣，我不会喜欢听他说话，我宁可听海。
这第13小章题为‘作画’，但忽悠忽悠就把化学反应、剧场、时间、角度、死亡的名字都点了一遍。好像提起死亡就会很有深度……虽然我有时也有这样的倾向。
‘化学反应’倒是提醒我可以介绍seib早期的摄影绘画作品。
Page30:
13.
The first man who saw the first photograph (if we except Niepce, who made it) must have thought it was a painting: same framing, same perspective. Photography has been, and is still, tormented by the ghost of Painting (Mapplethorpe represents an iris stalk the way an Oriental painter might have done it); it has made Painting, through its copies and contestations, into the absolute, paternal Reference, as if it were born from the Canvas (this is true, technically, but only in part; for the painters' camera obscura is only one of the causes of Photography; the essential one, perhaps, was the chemical discovery). At this point in my investigation, nothing eidetically distinguishes a photograph, however realistic, from a painting. "Pictorialism" is only an exaggeration of what the Photograph thinks of itself.
Yet it is not (it seems to me) by Painting that Photography touches art, but by Theater. Niepce and Daguerre are always put at the origin of Photography (even if the latter has somewhat usurped the former's place); now Daguerre, when he took over Niepce's invention, was running a panorama theater animated by light shows and movements in the Place du Chateau. The camera obscura, in short, has generated at one and the same time perspective painting, photography, and the diorama, which are all three arts of the stage; but if Photography seems to me closer to the Theater, it is by way of a singular intermediary (and perhaps I am the only one who sees it): by way of Death. We know the original relation of the theater and the cult of the Dead: the first actors separated themselves from the community by playing the role of the Dead: to make oneself up was to designate oneself as a body simultaneously living and dead: the whitened bust of the totemic theater, the man with the painted face in the Chinese theater, the rice-paste makeup of the Indian Katha-Kali, the Japanese No mask... Now it is this same relation which I find in the Photograph; however "lifelike" we strive to make it (and this frenzy to be lifelike can only be our mythic denial of an apprehension of death), Photography is a kind of primitive theater, a kind of Tableau Vivant, a figuration of the motionless and made-up face beneath which we see the dead.
不是很喜欢罗兰巴特的笔调。大概法国人都是这样的。自言自语。感伤有余。我仿佛见到一个面对大海，悠然叹息的男子，他喜欢说话，穿柔软质地的衣服和皮鞋。他不会让我感兴趣，我不会喜欢听他说话，我宁可听海。
这第13小章题为‘作画’，但忽悠忽悠就把化学反应、剧场、时间、角度、死亡的名字都点了一遍。好像提起死亡就会很有深度……虽然我有时也有这样的倾向。
‘化学反应’倒是提醒我可以介绍seib早期的摄影绘画作品。
Sunday, 9 May 2010
Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes
Contents
Part One
1. Specialty of the Phtograph
2. The Photograph Unclassifiable
3. Emotion as Departure
4. OPERATOR, SPECTRUM and SPECTATOR
5. He Who is Photographed
6. The SPECTATOR: Chaos of Tastes
7. Photography as Adventure
8. A Casual Phenomenology
9. Duality
10. STUDIUM and PUNCTUM
11. Studium
12. To Inform
13. To Paint
14. To Surprise
15. To Signify
16. To Waken Desire
17. The Unary Photograph
18. Co-presence of the Studium and the Punctum
19. PUNCTUM: Partial Feature
20. Involuntary Feature
21. Satori
22. After-the-Fact and Silence
23. Blind Field
24. Palinode
Part Two
25. "One evening . . ."
26. History as Separation
27. To Recognize
28. The Winter Garden Photograph
29. The Little Girl
30. Ariadne
31. The Family, the Mother
32. "THAT-HAS BEEN"
33. The Pose
34. The Luminous Rays, Color
35. Amazement
36. Authentication
37. Stasis
38. Flat Death
39. Time as PUNCTUM
40. Private / Public
41. To Scrutinize
42. Resemblance
43. Lineage
44. CAMERA LUCIDA
45. The "Air"
46. The Look
47. Madness, Pity
48. The Photograph Tamed
Part One
1. Specialty of the Phtograph
2. The Photograph Unclassifiable
3. Emotion as Departure
4. OPERATOR, SPECTRUM and SPECTATOR
5. He Who is Photographed
6. The SPECTATOR: Chaos of Tastes
7. Photography as Adventure
8. A Casual Phenomenology
9. Duality
10. STUDIUM and PUNCTUM
11. Studium
12. To Inform
13. To Paint
14. To Surprise
15. To Signify
16. To Waken Desire
17. The Unary Photograph
18. Co-presence of the Studium and the Punctum
19. PUNCTUM: Partial Feature
20. Involuntary Feature
21. Satori
22. After-the-Fact and Silence
23. Blind Field
24. Palinode
Part Two
25. "One evening . . ."
26. History as Separation
27. To Recognize
28. The Winter Garden Photograph
29. The Little Girl
30. Ariadne
31. The Family, the Mother
32. "THAT-HAS BEEN"
33. The Pose
34. The Luminous Rays, Color
35. Amazement
36. Authentication
37. Stasis
38. Flat Death
39. Time as PUNCTUM
40. Private / Public
41. To Scrutinize
42. Resemblance
43. Lineage
44. CAMERA LUCIDA
45. The "Air"
46. The Look
47. Madness, Pity
48. The Photograph Tamed
Sunday, 2 May 2010
Stenberg Brothers
MoMA exhibition of Stenberg Brothers back in 1997 offers some good summaries in the introduction.
INKhUK (INstitut KHUdozhestvennoy Kultury, or institute of artistic culture). Active: 1921-24.
There was a shift from the illustrator-as-creator to the constructor-as-creator or nonlinear-narrator-as-creator. In the visual language of the constructor or Constructivist, the Stenbergs and other graphic designers and artists assembled images, such as portions of photographs and preprinted paper, that had been created by others. Thus, the Stenbergs and others realized wholly new images (or compositions) which were no longer about realism. Hence, graphic design as a modern expression eschewing traditional fine art was born in the form of the printed reproductions of collage or assemblage.
Source: Wiki.
Some good sites to read more:
http://greenlanddesign.org/coleg/
Russian Constructivism
Kinofilm
Russo Graphica
Sinead Lau's blog
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