Thursday, May 31, 2012
Ryan Trecartin
I'm a big fan of Ryan Trecartin. In this interview he likens the editing process to more traditional media and describes it as painting with footage. I'm nearly finished with editing my footage, it has been unexpected how much traditional processes used in painting such as framing and glazing are present in this work.
I feel an affinity with Trecartin's description of editing, it's like painting back over a primed surface and layering imagery to develop a meaningful image.
Other works of his I have looked at which play with pictorial traditions:
Sunday, May 20, 2012
Post-documentary theory
Difficult to find articles about post-documentary theory. Even on UNSW library catalogue could not find any print sources. These are a few I found on the internet. My comments beneath relevant quotes.
Representation through Documentary: A Post-Modern Assessment
Krystin Arneson
Mar 30th, 2012
Critical Theory, Culture, Issue 6
http://cwp.missouri.edu/artifacts/?p=270
'Despite their presentation, documentaries are not an objective but a subjective device, a medium that “marshal[s] systems of representation to encourage point of view about something”[3] This inherent subjectivity, drawn not only from the construction of the film but also from the interpretation of the filmmaker, makes it impossible for a documentary to ever accurately represent the everyday.'
Interviews are infected with the subjectivity of the interviewer because the process of questioning that guides the conversation in the direction of the person giving the interview. Images are framed i.e. images are reductive of environments. Editing is then a further abstraction away from an objective representation... quotes are selected, other parts of discussion are excluded and a voice is constructed instead of simply just presented to be heard.
Traces Of The Real: Photographs of songs and other things
Martha Rosler
http://tracesofthereal.com/2009/11/29/post-documentary-post-photography-martha-rosler-2001/
This article is about photography, but important and relevant because it discusses aesthetic. Developing a meaningful aesthetic that acknowledges the short-comings of documentary artworks
'The role of the documentarian as the privileged outsider shedding light on those underprivileged communities fortunate to benefit from the attention of his/her lens is no longer tenable. At the same time, the idea that marginalised communities should document their own struggles without the interference of “outside” agents is also fraught with difficulty, not least of which is the impossibility of defining what “outside” actually means in many contexts.' I suppose in my work initially the idea of 'outsider' referred to people who are not creative practitioners, and the work was created to redress the modern notion of artist as tortured genius. This has evolved as I now consider the outsider to be everyone who is not a person I have interviewed and myself... therefore communication of an objective truth isn't the aim of the artwork and I feel freer to move towards more abstract representations of the documentation.
'...photography remains a cornerstone of the documentation of events. She argues that this is largely attributable to the context in which the photographs are presented. For example, if they are presented as part of a report from a reputable media organisation, with associated codes of journalistic practice in place, they are likely to be accepted... These codes of practice are critically important to news photographers as they embody the notions of responsibility towards their viewers, their subjects, and indeed their own profession, that are crucial to the continued viability of their work. A genre of photography that is devoid of such responsbility is street photography, which Rosler criticises for this reason.'
This last quote is relevant because my artwork will be somewhere between documentary and a contemporary video artwork... therefore it falls into a realm with perhaps conflicting codes of practice.
Representation through Documentary: A Post-Modern Assessment
Krystin Arneson
Mar 30th, 2012
Critical Theory, Culture, Issue 6
http://cwp.missouri.edu/artifacts/?p=270
'Despite their presentation, documentaries are not an objective but a subjective device, a medium that “marshal[s] systems of representation to encourage point of view about something”[3] This inherent subjectivity, drawn not only from the construction of the film but also from the interpretation of the filmmaker, makes it impossible for a documentary to ever accurately represent the everyday.'
Interviews are infected with the subjectivity of the interviewer because the process of questioning that guides the conversation in the direction of the person giving the interview. Images are framed i.e. images are reductive of environments. Editing is then a further abstraction away from an objective representation... quotes are selected, other parts of discussion are excluded and a voice is constructed instead of simply just presented to be heard.
Traces Of The Real: Photographs of songs and other things
Martha Rosler
http://tracesofthereal.com/2009/11/29/post-documentary-post-photography-martha-rosler-2001/
This article is about photography, but important and relevant because it discusses aesthetic. Developing a meaningful aesthetic that acknowledges the short-comings of documentary artworks
'The role of the documentarian as the privileged outsider shedding light on those underprivileged communities fortunate to benefit from the attention of his/her lens is no longer tenable. At the same time, the idea that marginalised communities should document their own struggles without the interference of “outside” agents is also fraught with difficulty, not least of which is the impossibility of defining what “outside” actually means in many contexts.' I suppose in my work initially the idea of 'outsider' referred to people who are not creative practitioners, and the work was created to redress the modern notion of artist as tortured genius. This has evolved as I now consider the outsider to be everyone who is not a person I have interviewed and myself... therefore communication of an objective truth isn't the aim of the artwork and I feel freer to move towards more abstract representations of the documentation.
'...photography remains a cornerstone of the documentation of events. She argues that this is largely attributable to the context in which the photographs are presented. For example, if they are presented as part of a report from a reputable media organisation, with associated codes of journalistic practice in place, they are likely to be accepted... These codes of practice are critically important to news photographers as they embody the notions of responsibility towards their viewers, their subjects, and indeed their own profession, that are crucial to the continued viability of their work. A genre of photography that is devoid of such responsbility is street photography, which Rosler criticises for this reason.'
This last quote is relevant because my artwork will be somewhere between documentary and a contemporary video artwork... therefore it falls into a realm with perhaps conflicting codes of practice.
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