art ongoing: In the Darkroom, at The National Gallery, Washington, D.C.

Thursday, December 24, 2009

In the Darkroom, at The National Gallery, Washington, D.C.

II. The National Gallery of Art.
Despite having been given the 1700 works of the Stieglitz archive by Georgia O’Keefe in 1948, The National Gallery did not establish a Department of Photography until 1990. Since that time it has amassed a collection of over 10,000 photographs. In that twenty years time that amounts to 500 photographs a year or just over one a day. Frankly I am rather suspicious of this haul: are there really that many fine art photographs swirling about in the ether? Are they truly putting together a unique collection with a strong point of view, which would be my preference, or are they merely buying copies of the standard American art museum holdings …all the well known names and all the standard shots? American museums are so devoted to playing the game of keeping up with the Joneses, in which all of them have collections that look like all of the other collections, that all of them lessen the importance of the works they hold. Be that as it may…

In the Darkroom is an exhibition of photographic prints made in all the darkroom techniques prior to the advent of digital photography. They are arranged in chronological order of the development of these methods and in many of the methods the work of more than one photographer is shown to illustrate the range of that technique. In addition there are examples of photographers who have printed in a number of methods from the same negative.

There are as well several examples of photo reproduction methods. One of my criticisms of the exhibition is that no means was provided to show the details of these different processes, such as a magnifying glass or enlargements of sections of the works. It is interesting to read about the difference in half tone screens and gravure but much more informative to see how the dots vary in the different processes.

I think it might have been more informative to have had a darkroom set up on hand as well so that the various terms used in the interpretation could have been seen first hand…developing tanks, pans, enlargers, drying racks and lines. I would have liked to have seen paper, glass, and acetate negatives and to have seen a demonstration of how each of them was used for printing …through the wet or the dry processes. I know there are photographs showing the printing of negatives on photographic papers out of doors using the sun as the light source.
I had hoped before seeing this exhibition that it would have covered all of that.

As it is it is fine. And it is something I would like to see made available in more museums. I think it would greatly enhance the appreciation of fine art photography if the public could be shown in all its complexity exactly what goes into making a negative and from that a print: we could have been shown photographs made from the same negative and printed on different papers. Museums would do well to remember that the general public is the market for point and shoot and the one hour foto shop. I remember seeing at the Los Angeles County Art Museum a few years ago a small …about six square feet …exhibition explaining the lost wax technique featuring a small Rodin work as the example. An art work can be greatly more appreciated if one is made aware that the mastery of craft, often extremely complicated, is prior to the production of something that is expressive of one’s feelings.

For example: on the museum web site under Irving Penn there is a wonderful, brief history of the twenty years of trials that he went through in order to revive the platinum print…going so far as to involve the DuPont Chemical Company in his research and process.

Prior to going to Washington I bought a copy of the catalogue for the exhibition and while it is good, after reading it I felt I had not been told anything I could not have found in others of my reference books, including the Time/Life Photography series, or that can be found on Wikipedia.

I think the museum might also have shared its thoughts with us on what all this has to do with digital photography and the future of the art form. Can just anyone with a digital camera and the Adobe Photoshop now create photographs the equal the masterworks of the past? Is there something more to it than just craft? What is it about a photograph that distinguishes it as a fine art photograph?

One aspect of the installation that bothered me very much was the poor lighting on the photographs. Because of the position of the overhead lights I could see myself reflected in the glass over each one of them. I found it necessary to step around until that reflection was minimized enough for me to see the work. There is really no excuse for a major museum using such poor lighting. To learn what the correct lighting should be, I am referring all museums to The International Photography Center, one of the few photography venues that knows how to illuminate exhibition photographs. (See this Blog, Richard Avedon, July 2009.)

But as I said, it is a fine exhibition; it just didn’t go as far as I would have liked to have seen it go.

http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/darkroominfo.shtm

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The Aesthetic

The Aesthetic.
I was trained as a set designer and I have studied life drawing at The Art Student’s League and NYU. I lived and worked in New York City for nearly thirty years. Recently I have felt that I needed to develop a better working criterion for looking at art works. Over the years three books have been very important to me and so I have used them to hone my understanding: The Art in Painting, by Alfred Barnes, of the Barnes Foundation; Problems in Art, by Susanne Langer, the American philosopher; and the essay, Kitsch and Modern Art, by Clement Greenberg, the American art critic.

Alfred Barnes promotes his belief that the appreciation of art can be taught just as science can be taught…through methodology. In the introduction to his book there is a long paragraph that sets forth his premise. But I think that a shorter version in the Barnes Foundation literature is sufficient here: “One cannot understand art by walking through a museum anymore than he can master surgery by walking though a hospital.” Barnes insists that the observer has to work as hard to understand an artwork as the artist did to create it. He begins the educational approach by naming the three plastic elements of painting: color, line, and form. Each of these is visible on the surface and each has as well a sub textural presence: color is the actual color seen but a painting has as well a tenor, a color overall. Line is a visible line but within a painting a line carries the eye. The painting has a vertical, a horizontal, or a diagonal line. Form is the visible evidence of geometric forms but it is also the summation of the totality of the work. He suggests that the person who wants to understand an artwork must begin with an understanding of the way color has been used because color is the first thing we see in a painting.

In her work Susanne Langer states that every culture has left evidence of a need for symbolic experience and that that need has been manifest in magic and ritual, religion and art. It is her view that the artist produces an artwork in order to express his feelings about something. When his mastery of craft allows him to have insights during the creation of the work at hand, that gives that particular work significant meaning. Those two elements, if brought together, result in the creation of an artwork. My disagreement with her concerns her preference for the use of the word “feeling”. There seems to be too much misunderstanding of “feeling” in looking at artwork. Too many persons are of the conviction now that the artist is expressing his emotions…I felt like such and such and so I painted this in this way to express myself, my emotions. I prefer to use the word “sentiments” in the same sense that Flaubert used it in his novel, A Sentimental Education. His novel was not about the developing melancholy (the emotional state) of a particular person but about that person’s forming a sensate understanding of the world in which he lives and as an aid for his adult life.

Where Langer uses the word feeling, Barnes states that an artist creates art because he has an added “interest”. He describes this as a compelling interest. I prefer to define it as a profound interest. Certainly an interest in any subject or effort is unlikely to produce major artworks unless it is more than an interest and more than compelling. I think profound is the right word. Very likely we refer to an artist or craftsman as a dilettante when we examine the complete works and find little that has sustained him other than his cursory interests or appeals to our own. And it is in the merely casual interest that we discover the distinction made by Clement Greenberg between kitsch and modern art. He defines kitsch as that which is pre digested for us, that which is easily digested, and he defines art as that which we may not always grasp at first sight but which creates a lingering iconic memory that we find resonating in our mind. It is that which resonates that causes us to go back, to return to the source and to look with greater attention at particular works. Eventually, through study and through opening ourselves to the experience, we may come to recognize these as the artworks.

This, then, became my criterion for viewing art works; that which we study is the artist’s mastery of craft, his expression of a profound interest, his insights which have come to him during the creation of the particular work that resonates with us, and in his decisive expression of “something”. In each artwork there is that which is “expressed”. In looking at every art work the observer “experiences” something. Thus there are two questions raised by every artwork: What is expressed? What is experienced? When the observer resolves this question with an understanding of the artist’s work and his intention, a communication between artist and observer has been effected. From this perspective it can be understood that an artwork is not merely an object placed on a wall before the observer but an experience to be shared.
By stating that I have devised a system for looking at artworks I should add that I do not use this system to the exclusion of opening myself up to another experience. Early in my adult life I was made aware that Aristotle’s Poetics was written long after the Greek tragedies it describes were written. The Poetics is the record of his response and efforts toward understanding of those deeply moving works. I firmly believe that first and foremost an observer of art should allow the work to communicate with him. It is when the work is presented with museum credentials or appears authentic and one does not hear what it says that one could fall back on a system for analyzing it and achieving understanding.

art ongoing

Thursday, December 24, 2009

In the Darkroom, at The National Gallery, Washington, D.C.

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