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spending so much focused time on discussing art, and what defines art, and how and why people make art... and the reason people think they have the authority to label and classify and qualify and quantify art makes me hurt. Jeff Wall's essays on modernism and photography as conceptual modern art... got me thinking about so much. why am i even taking pictures?
i don't know, up until this i've been in a constant cycle of act now think later. photograph now think later. photograph now analyze to death. premeditative photography never works out as well for me, or loses some meaning to me for some reason. i suppose i'll eleaborate on Jeff Wall later, because i honestly a week ago went to see his exhibit at the AI and bought his essays immediately... i've been re-reading the same essay for the past week trying to make sense of it and put it in relation to how i view my artist process.
the one thing i have concluded from this class in particular is that the way columbia teaches photography without philosophy is completey frustrating to me. i know we're in ways as much a technical trade school (especially the photography department) as an art school. but some of us are making art, and trying to understand how and why we're making art and trying to do that with no history or theory behind that is entirely unsettling. i guess i'm just surprised there isn't atleast something addressing the intellectual and psychological ramifications of making pictures... but that like many other things is just left for us to flounder about figuring out. but if generations of people sat down and discussed painting and what that meant to society then why isn't that happening more in this school for this artform?
i'm stepping off my soapbox because if that happened i don't know if i would even be able to deal with it... this class has made me realize how much i'd rather just be making and doing art right now and maybe i'll think about it later. hell some of the most refreshing "art pieces" i've seen lately have been stencils and tags scattered around logan square. and while all of this is bouncing around in my head i come across Dave Eggers' "Go- Getters"
"The woman is a young woman. She wants to make a living as a photographer, but at the moment she is temping at a company that publishes books about wetlands preservation. On her days off she takes pictures, and today she is sitting in her car, across the street from a small grocery store called The Go-Getters Market. The store is located in a very poor neighbourhood: the windows are barred and at night a roll-down steel door covers the storefront. The woman thus finds the name Go-Getters an interesting one, because it is clear that the customers of the market are anything but. They are drunkards and prostitutes and transients, and the young photographer thinks that if she can get the right picture of some of these people entering the store, she will make a picture that would be considered trenchant, or even poignant - either way the product of a sharp and observant eye. So she sits in her Toyota Camry, which her parents gave her because it was four years old and they wanted something new, and she waits for the right poor person to enter or leave the store. She has her window closed, but will open it when the right person appears, and then shoot that person under the sign that says Go-Getters. This, for the viewer of her photograph when it is displayed - first in a gallery, then in the hallway of a collector, and later in a museum when she has her retrospective - will prove that she, the photographer, has an exceptional eye for irony and hypocrisy, for the inequities and injustices of life, its absurdity perfect and absolute."
- we've all been there. we're all narcissists... this might just be THE reason why i sometimes feel like an asshole for calling myself "a photographer". then again most people are assholes. bet Dave Egger's an asshole but boy did he make me laugh.
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