"But what Pollock did is he painted, he dripped for 48 months and became this most famous artist.  And then he thought, 'I'm repeating myself.'  And so he willingly went back to the hell of not knowing what he was doing.  Artists, I want you to think about inventing a machine in your work that creates things that you cannot predict that it will spin off.  That's why I like Matthew Barney's work.  That's the only reason.  I just think that he might be as surprised as you are - hating it or liking it - about what's coming out."

A loose quote from this lecture by Jerry Saltz.

"The absence of color cannot and does not diminish the strength of Eggleston as an artist. It is largely up to the viewer to disassociate themselves from their own deep mental ties to him and to his 'color'. I would not though say that the absence of the 'Southern' would not diminish Eggleston as an artist. I think that it would. Eggleston as a 'Southern artist' cannot and should not project his 'South' on to simply anywhere. Yes, to be a 'democratic' photographer might suggest this approach but I would put forth that Eggleston is more accurately a 'Southern democratic' photographer. There is no need for him to show anything or anywhere else."

From an essay on Wiliam Eggleston: 'Before Color' (2010) by Doug Rickard.

Corita Kent's rules for my new year.

"There is a failure to understand how much richer in surprise and creative possibility the world is for photographers in comparison to their imagination. This is an understanding that an earlier generation of students, and photographers, accepted as a first principle. Now ideas are paramount, and the computer and Photoshop are seen as the engines to stage and digitally coax those ideas into a physical form--typically a very large form. This process is synthetic, and the results, for me, are often emotionally synthetic too. Sure, things have to change, but photography-as-illustration, even sublime illustration, seems to me an uninteresting direction for the medium to be tracking now, particularly at such a difficult time in the general American culture."

Tod Papageorge via reallycrumby, Erin Jane Nelson's blog.

"After listening to the king, they went on their way. And behold, the star that they had seen when it rose went before them until it came to rest over the place where the child was. When they saw the star, they rejoiced exceedingly with great joy. And going into the house they saw the child with Mary his mother, and they fell down and worshiped him."

Matthew 2:9-11

This fall.  Merry Christmas!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compass
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Magnetic_Pole
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynesian_navigation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrolabe
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qibla

From this summer.

"The herders used knives to carve, though the paper-thin soft, white bark of the aspen could be carved or scratched easily with just about any sharp object, even a thumbnail. The herders made a thin incision or cut, which could hardly be seen, and that was all the human hand contributed. The rest was up to the tree itself. The outline of the carving begins to show a few years later after the tree scars over. [...] No re-doing and no correcting mistakes are possible, and in the end you know that the tree will wither, revert to the earth, and the carving will self-destruct."

"J.L., a sheepherder, recounted that when he arrived in America the camptender took him to this godforsaken mountain in the wilds of northeastern Nevada and told him, 'This is going to be your home for a while.' After the camptender left he felt so terribly alone that he instinctively walked over [to] an aspen and carved, 'Hotel Derrepente' ('Hotel Suddenly')."

"The herders used aspens as their medium of communication, though it was not a very speedy one – in the best cases it took years for a 'conversation' to be completed."

From "Carving Out History: The Basque Aspens" by Joxe Mallea-Olaetxe. Photo from here.

This summer.

"When we think of wilderness in America today, we think of remote and perhaps designated regions that are commonly alpine, desert, or swamp.  Just a few centuries ago, when virtually all was wild in North America, wilderness was not something exceptionally severe.  Prong-horn and bison trailed through the grasslands, creeks ran full of salmon, there were acres of clams, and grizzlies, cougar, and bighorn sheep were common in the lowlands.  There were human beings, too: North America was all populated.  One might say yes, but thinly – which raises the question of according to who.  The fact is, people were everywhere.  When the Spanish foot-soldier Alvar Nunes (Cabeza de Vaca) and his two companions (one of whom was African) were wrecked on the beach of what is now Galveston, and walked to the Rio Grande valley and then south back into Mexico between 1528 to 1536, there were few times in the whole eight years that they were not staying at a native settlement or camp.  They were always on trails.

"It has been a part of basic human experience to live in a culture of wilderness.  There has been no wilderness without some kind of human presence for several hundred thousand years.  Nature is not a place to visit, it is home: and within that home territory there are more familiar and less familiar places.  Often there are areas that are difficult and remote, but all are known, and even named.  One August I was at a pass in the Brooks Range of northern Alaska at the headwaters of the Koyukuk River, a green 3000 foot tundra pass between the broad ranges, open and gentle, dividing the waters that flow to the Arctic Sea from the Yukon.  It is as remote a place as you could be in North America, no roads, and the trails are those made by migrating caribou.  Yet this pass has been steadily used by the Inupiaq people of the north slope, and Athapaskan people of the Yukon, as a regular north-south trade route for at least seven thousand years.  All of the hills and lakes of Alaska have been named in one or another of the dozen or so languages spoken by the native people, as the researches of Jim Kari and others have shown.  Euro-American mapmakers name these places after transient exploiters, or their own girl friends, or hometowns in the lower 48.  The point is, it's all in the native story, and yet only the tiniest trace of human presence through all that time shows.  The place-based stories people tell, and the naming they've done, is their archeology, architecture, and title to the land."

from "The Etiquette of Freedom" by Gary Snyder.

"'In that day each of you will invite your neighbor to sit under your vine and fig tree,’ declares the Lord Almighty.”

Zechariah 3:10.  Dad likes this one.

“The wilderness is not a landscape you visit; it is all around you, wherever you are. We persuade ourselves that our taming of the world is profound, we lay water mains and sewers and read thousand year old books, we drive autobahns through solid rock, we huddle together in caves lit by incandescence of television screens. We do everything we can to be safe, and still the planet spins, the wind roars, the great ice caps creak and heave, the continental plates shudder and bring cities crashing to the ground, the viruses infect us and the oceans toy with us, lapping against the edges of our precarious land. We are in the midst of wilderness, even curled up with our lovers in bed.”

Paul Shepheard in The Cultivated Wilderness: Or, What Is Landscape?

"according to Willa Cather all the foundation/raw material for artists comes from their experiences they form before the age of 14 - a very rough approximation of an idea nestled in a quote she says"

Willa quoting Willa Cather

"'For behold, I create new heavens
   and a new earth,
and the former things shall not be remembered
   or come into mind.
But be glad and rejoice forever
   in that which I create;
for behold, I create Jerusalem to be a joy,
   and her people to be a gladness.
I will rejoice in Jerusalem
   and be glad in my people;
no more shall be heard in it the sound of weeping
   and the cry of distress.
No more shall there be in it
   an infant who lives but a few days,
   or an old man who does not fill out his days,
for the young man shall die a hundred years old,
   and the sinner a hundred years old shall be accursed.
They shall build houses and inhabit them;
   they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit.
They shall not build and another inhabit;
   they shall not plant and another eat;
for like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be,
   and my chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands.
They shall not labor in vain
or bear children for calamity,
for they shall be the offspring of the blessed of the Lord,
   and their descendants with them.
Before they call I will answer;
   while they are yet speaking I will hear.
The wolf and the lamb shall graze together;
   the lion shall eat straw like the ox,
   and dust shall be the serpent’s food.
They shall not hurt or destroy
   in all my holy mountain,'
     says the Lord."

 Isaiah 65

"With friends, or people that I see on a daily basis, I begin to notice gestures and movements that convey a way of holding ourselves up to being seen. Being comfortable in one's own skin has always fascinated me. What interests me is when someone is caught in an unselfconscious moment. It's a hard thing to see in everyday life, because it happens so rarely that we get to see someone's guard let down. It probably accounts for why I love seeing people read, or sleep, or do the dishes—the moments in which we immerse ourselves in something and slip out of self-consciousness."

Dave Woody, writing for the National Portrait Gallery.

More:

"The images that I have been making lately are a mix of landscapes and portraits from the Northern Colorado area. I live on the Front Range, along the start of the Rocky Mountains, but I find myself always driving east towards the Plains. There is something comforting in the drive, and the expansive space allows me to deal with a minimalism that complements the portraits. There's not much out there to deal with, pictorially, so the interesting thing is to become attuned to the variations in light and color. The Plains pictures are about the oceanic space and the horizon, the light and the weather.

"The portraits are of kids from the area of Fort Collins, Greeley, Eaton and Ault. Having grown up here, I think about the accumulative effect of living near the plains, of being sensitized to this kind of space and light. I've never experienced the same quality of light, or the same feeling of immensity of earth and sky in any other place I have lived in."

"In 1944 a Cold War began, a war that was brutal, inhumane. A war that has now been almost forgotten. The Western powers continued to consider the occupation of the Baltic and Eastern Countries by the Stalinist powers to be illegal despite the post war conferences that had recognized the borders of the USSR. Hidden behind the Iron Curtain, the occupation of the Soviet block continued for 50 years and destroyed the lives of millions.

"It is estimated that there were at least 20 million deaths. Many believe that the real figure is closer to 60 million.

"Despite not receiving any backing from the West, the partisans’ resistance fought against the Soviet regime. These partisans had to abandon both their families and homes and seek sanctuary in the forests. In numerous villages and towns, domestic dwellings were attained by KGB officers for use as control centres, interrogation, imprisonment and torture. These homely spaces were converted into places of terror. As a result the forest not only became the place of refuge but also the place of mass graves.

"The most active and forceful resistance came from the Lithuanian ‘forest brothers’, which lasted for 10 years."

Statement for Indre Serpytyte's series 1944-1991.

"Pedro Vicente: The first thing I thought when I saw your images was that they were very aesthetic and visually pleasing. I would say, even, that they seemed to me, to some extent, peaceful, especially the paper or the typewriter ones. But when I faced the explanatory text accompanying your photographs it was like my perception was slapping my vision. I didn't see what I looked at. What role does text play in your photographs? Do you feel the text is part of your work?

"Indre Serpytyte: At the time the text was very necessary to me, it just seemed right to have it. Seeing the events written in black and white helped me to come to terms with what had happened. In some ways it was like a full stop at the end of the sentence. At the start of the project, the text intended just for me, but through time, I found it hard to separate the two and now I think that the text has definitely become an inseparable part of this work. I understand that the juxtaposition of these two factors, the very visually pleasing images with such a personal and straight to the point piece of text causes friction, but it is this friction that I find fascinating. I think this friction portrays the exact emotional state I was in when these events occurred. The images portray the emotional coldness and distance towards the situation as they are very calculated and constructed therefore the text confronts the situation and the viewer head on. I hope this is how the work touches the viewers too."

Interview about the series A State of Silence, about her father's death, in 1000 Words Photography via this blog.

"Perhaps the deepest form of being svoi is being rodnoi.  People who are rodnye to each other have one of two connections: they are tied to the same family line, or by the land on which they live.  These two notions are so symbolically close that the resonance from one nearly merges with the other.  Rodina, the land of the rod, is kin and rodina is earth.  When it is of the earth, a rodina can nearly smell with local soils; when it is Mother Russia, it is a vast expanse that one loves.  Land has an intimate relationship to the concept of being svoi.  Being rodnoi is a special form of being svoi, with an emphasis on the fact that that soil and kin are shared." (pg. 84)

Margaret Paxson in Solovyovo: The Story of Memory In A Russian Village, published 2005 by Woodrow Wilson Center Press

Growing Apple Trees.

Edit 1/8/11: Maybe our fridge is too cold?  The seeds I put in a paper cup with moist paper towels at room temperature sprouted real quick.

"Once he had the impulse to make landscape images, Friedlander implies, the desert seemed the 'natural' place to turn. Yet, in the brief personal essay that concludes his book, Friedlander states that the Sonora is, for him, among America's least welcoming landscapes. It is 'a pincushion with pins on the outside,' a place so bright it makes his eyes sore as if they were stuck full of cactus needles. The photographs he made there over a 10-year period convey this inhospitality to viewers. Glaringly bright and seemingly uncomposed, they aspire to get us lost too, among the phallic saguaro and deciduous trees.

"While Friedlander sets out to explain how in mid-life he came to photograph these landscapes, he spends more time in this essay recalling the lush Pacific Northwest of his childhood than explaining what took him to the Southwest - 'the place most foreign to me, the opposite of my home Olympics, opposite in every way.' He might as well say Olympus, or just plain Eden, when describing his native Washington state. Although he has not lived there for years - years during which his camera focused on what he considers the inherently dislocating subject of cities - it is clearly the landscape by which he still sets his compass.

"Finding a second home, a landscape for adulthood, in this country where relocation is almost a given, is in many ways the subject of The Desert Seen. The book begins with an epigraph from Jamaica Kincaid's Autobiography of My Mother (1996), a sentence of Proustian length and musicality, printed large to fill a page. It is the only introduction the unruly photographs receive, and it was obviously chosen with care. With typical aplomb, Friedlander turns to a writer whose recurrent subject is gardens to introduce these pictures of a garden turned inside out, all chaos and thorns. Kincaid writes of the imaginative bonds that tie people to places, the places they are from and the places they may later choose to be from:

"A human being, a person, many people, a people, will say that their surroundings, their physical surroundings, form their consciousness, their very being; they will get up every morning and look at green hills, white cliffs, silver mountains, fields of golden grain, rivers of blue-glinting water, and in the beauty of this - and it is beautiful, they cannot help but find it beautiful - they invisibly, magically, conquer the distance that is between them and the beauty they are beholding, and they feel themselves become one with it, they draw strength from it, they are inspired by it to sing songs, to write verse; they invent themselves and reinvent themselves . . .

"Precariously, the passage works itself up to the conviction it has been trying to adopt: 'you and the place you are from are not a chance encounter; it is something beyond destiny, it is something so meant to be that it is beyond words.'

"These are curious words to introduce a volume of pictures of a place where the artist emphatically does not feel at home, but to which he is drawn nonetheless. The brilliance of Kincaid's sentence lies not just in the compelling beauty of the sentiment it hits like a crescendo, but also in the seed of doubt it holds - the awareness that, no matter how vital it is for people to feel connected to a landscape, this is a connection they build in the imagination, with songs, poems and pictures, a connection they build unconsciously, inevitably. How else could people feel tied to all manner of landscapes? The sense of place, of home, she gently suggests, may be the ultimate 'pathetic fallacy' necessary for people to 'conquer the distance that is between them and the beauty they are beholding,' to prove the land responds to our need to belong to it."

From "Back West: Reviewing American Landscape Photography" by Stephen Longmire, 1997 in Afterimage via American Suburb X.

My roommate's photo of the dwelling place of Khurtuyakh-tas – a stone (a menhir!) that looks like a pregnant woman, said to heal infertility.  In the Russian republic of Khakassia, where her family lives.

"I seriously believe that highly intellectual investigations and aesthetic accomplishments are not mutually exclusive. For art to be truly great, they rarely can be far apart. But to think an artist would be so wrapped up in their conceptual pursuits that they'd miss seeing those happy accidents that can come through experimentation quite frankly makes me sad for them. What are you doing in your studio if not, at times at least, opening yourself up to the possibility of some sublime incident sneaking its way into your process?

"In other words, PLAY. For the love of all that's wondrous about art, let yourself play in your studio (from time to time anyway). You can come back round to the hard work when the time's right. If all you do is play, it will show in the work as well, so don't get addicted to it. But if the images looks great...do us all a favor and yes, please, print them! If a sculpture captures your meaning better than a video can, please make the sculpture. No one says it has to be the centerpiece of your next exhibition, but it should exist if it's great, if it's right. There is nowhere near too much of that, ever."

From Edward Winkleman's blog.

"The Center for Land Use Interpretation is a research and education organization interested in understanding the nature and extent of human interaction with the earth’s surface, and in finding new meanings in the intentional and incidental forms that we individually and collectively create. We believe that the manmade landscape is a cultural inscription, that can be read to better understand who we are, and what we are doing.

"The organization was founded in 1994, and since that time it has produced dozens of exhibits on land use themes and regions, for public institutions all over the United States, as well as overseas. The Center publishes books, conducts public tours, and offers information and research resources through its library, archive, and web site.

"The CLUI exists to stimulate discussion, thought, and general interest in the contemporary landscape. Neither an environmental group nor an industry affiliated organization, the work of the Center integrates the many approaches to land use - the many perspectives of the landscape - into a single vision that illustrates the common ground in “land use” debates. At the very least, the Center attempts to emphasize the multiplicity of points of view regarding the utilization of terrestrial and geographic resources."

via I Heart Photograph.

"I photographed objects and people and situations and landscapes, scenarios and fragments. Every time I felt that tingle—the one that had accompanied a field of stone fragments rising in my imagination into an ancient temple—I would take a picture."

Also Tim Davis, this time from his statement for his series The New Antiquity.

Sarah Ann Johnson, Untitled, People Talking

Sarah Ann Johnson, Burt

Sarah Ann Johnson, Boy In Field

Sarah Ann Johnson, Hiking At Night

Sarah Ann Johnson, Mosquitoes 

From Sarah Ann Johnson's 2004 Tree Planting Project.  Also look at her House on Fire series.

"Staging tends to appear at the peaks of the sine wave of self consciously “artistic” photographic practice—Photo-Secessionism, Surrrealism, high Postmodernism—and from Gertrude Kasebier to Jeff Wall, is typically content to illustrate an idea rather than embody a fleeting feeling. [...]

"There must be some peculiar clairvoyance to Johnson’s figuration. When looking at these stiff little artificial worlds so suffused with personal feeling, I screw up like Marcello Mastroianni confronted by the mind reader in Fellini’s 8 1/2. Once the hotel guests have been sufficiently entertained by the blindfolded lady on the dais, Mastraoianni, playing a flim director, turns to the soothsayer’s assistant and asks, “How do you transmit….Can you transmit anything?” It is the essential problem for the photographic arts: How can a medium so thoroughly committed to surface convey an inner life? For Johnson, scale is the secret. An artist for whom nothing is impersonal, Sarah Anne Johnson has forced her social world into endlessly complicating scale, epic into miniature and back out again, like a poet looking for syntactic friction by scraping up against the limitations of meter."

From Tim Davis's review.

"I knew then, standing before this array of materials that emanated potential, that the process was always intuitive; the rationales, arguments, polemics, explanations always following from something intuitive, and fundamentally romantic."

From Hirsch E.P. Rothko's Hirsch E.P. Rothko, ghostwritten by Inez Kruckev for Christopher K. Ho

Alisa, last month.

S. Billie Mandle, Our Lady of Good Counsel

S. Billie Mandle, Saint Christopher

From Reconcilliation, photographs of confessionals.

S. Billie Mandle, Drosophila melanogaster, no. 4

S. Billie Mandle, Arabidopis thalania, no. 14 & 16

"These are photographs of two organisms used as model systems in genetics: mustard weeds (Arabidopsis thaliana) and fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster). The organisms have been studied by biologists for over 60 years and are at the source of most biotechnology and agricultural developments. They are tools, integral to science and perfectly engineered, yet they are also a part of nature, just beyond complete understanding."

From S. Billie Mandle's series Model Systems.  More photos here.

"Billie Mandle uses her camera as an epistemological tool. The thing about her pictures that gets under your skin is not so much their silence as it is their brazen, stubborn refusal to resolve into familiar certainties. To look at one of her photographs is to invite dangerous uncertainties like truth, belief, and justification to have their proper seats with you at the table, and once seated the do not go away easily. You might just as well set off a bomb in the middle of your living room, the effect would be the same. The only thing these pictures leave you with is the hope of something like a genuine dialog: seeing as touch, seeing as negotiation, seeing as a way of growing closer to the peculiar state of things as they are and not as we think they should be. Seeing till, in the end, we are (always and eternally) standing somewhere rich and strange."

Michael Zachary here. 

From Juzo Itami's Tampopo, 1985. True obsession!

“A portrait is one of the hardest pictures for me to take and to take well. The impulse that arises when wanting to take someone’s portrait is similar to that of high school puppy love. I’ve often compared asking to take one’s portrait to asking someone out on a first date. There’s always a sense of uncertainty that haunts your own insecurities with rejection and humility. You are fascinated by someone’s physical appearance and the immediate emotions that surge before even connecting deeply. With a more refined sensibility as an artist, you become hyper aware of the emotional evocation someone can offer."

Nelson Chan, in this series of statements about portraiture on the Conscientious blog.

My first intentional ventures into landscape photography are not very good so far.  Here is a photo from the beach last week.

Colin Stearns's photos of the Mason-Dixon Line, via I Heart Photograph.

Narahashi Asako's series Half Awake and Half Asleep In the Water.

"A Line Describing the Sun involved a day long performance in which I followed the path of the sun with a large Fresnel lens mounted on a rolling apparatus. The lens focuses the sun into a 1,600-degree point of light that melts the dry mud, transforming it into a black glassy substance. Over the course of a day, as the sun moves across the sky, a hemispherical arc is imprinted into the lakebed floor."

"The video and installation are so well executed, the piece must be serious, sincere poetry. But there are hints Lamson has ulterior intentions. His costume–the ostentatious sunhat–reminds one of the flippant behavior in his other video work in which the documentation is equally neutral, but the content more absurd. [...] It’s hard to reach under Lamson’s work and determine when it is sincere and when it is a farce, but of course, this is what makes it mysterious and worth paying attention to."

From this review.




"Over the course of several months, I biked around Brooklyn with a custom made bike-ladder shooting down shoes hanging from power-lines, with a bow and arrow, and trading these found shoes for ones that I am wearing."

See William Lamson's other work, including Time Is Like the East River, William Tell, and Levitation Exercise.

From Postsecret, 11/21/10

Summer 2009.

"People in a remote part of Russia have blamed a spate of earth tremors on the excavation of a 2,500-year-old mummy known as the Princess of Altai.  They want scientists to return the remains, which were found in ice and offer unique insights into their time.

"[...] The Princess is being examined at the Ethnographic Institute in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk.  She was a prized find for archaeologists in Russia and across the world, when she was excavated in 1993 along with six saddled and bridled horses from the frozen earth of Altai's Ukok plateau.  Mummy specialists from Moscow - who were more used to embalming the body of Soviet revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin - were brought in to restore the Princess. Nothing is known of her actual history, but DNA tests and the reconstruction of her face already indicate she was of European, not Asian, origin, Russia's Izvestia newspaper reports.  Found on the borders of China and Mongolia, she was initially thought to have been of Scythian extraction. Archaeologists in Novosibirsk say they are willing to return the mummy to an Altai museum eventually, but only if suitable conditions are provided there for conserving the body. 'We are prepared to discuss the mummy's possible transfer to the museum, but burying it is out of the question,' team leader Vyacheslav Molodin told Izvestia. The director of the ethnographic museum in Altai's capital, Gorno-Altaisk, says there are plans to build a glass tomb for the mummy inside the museum."

From article "'Mummy's curse' upsets Siberians", BBC 2004.  Related documents.

"Мы, коренные жители Горного Алтая, являемся язычниками и поклоняемся природе. Все раскопки, которые велись и ведутся на Алтае, причиняют нам непоправимый урон. Не считаясь с мнением народа, вывозятся бесценные сокровища, духовное наследие алтайцев. Так, на плато Укок в Кош-Агачском районе был вскрыт курган-могильник, где находилась татуированная молодая женщина знатного происхождения. Для жителей Алтая она являлась священной реликвией - хранительницей покоя и величия нашего народа. Сейчас Алтайская принцесса хранится в новосибирском музее. Как язычники мы не сомневаемся в том, что душа Алтайской принцессы бунтует и требует упокоить наконец ее прах. С этим связаны трагические события последних месяцев. Мы, жители села Ороктой, обращаемся к жителям Республики Алтай с призывом поддержать нас и требовать возвращения священной реликвии."

Letter of protest from the people of the Altai region.  Source.

I'm digging into my hard drive for images from last year that never saw the light of day because I was taking Alternative Processes and working on my show.

A little collaboration I started with my dog just before leaving.  To be continued one day, probably.

Note: any photos I post from now until at least May will be from low-quality files since I don't have access to a good photo lab here in Novosibirsk.  The color will be off, too.  Sorry!

"I’m not interested in experimentation for its own sake. But I’m interested in works of art that transport a reader. That send you to a different place—pure magic. We’ve gotten used to the notion that art, if it entertains or says something interesting about our time, that’s enough. But there’s something else it can do that nothing else can do. To be genuinely transported, to have your nerves touched, make your hair stand on end, that’s what I think art can do well—or only art can do.

"[...] I love the notion that 'this is a book that remembers it has a body.' When a book remembers, we remember. It reminds you that you have a body. So many of the things we may think of as burdensome are actually the things that make us more human."

- Jonathan Safran Foer Talks Tree of Codes and Conceptual Art in Vanity Fair, 2010

Every Leaf 114, Aspen Mays 2009
























































Einstein Rainbow 1, Aspen Mays 2009

From her 2009 show at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago – Every Leaf on a Tree.

"Research is often the catalyst for my work. I studied Anthropology as an Undergraduate student- that’s what my degree is in, and I think that sort of academic training has found its way into my practice mostly because I enjoy it so much. I’ve always been a really curious person, and I try to channel that as an artist.  I love spending time in the library chasing down ideas, and I also try to get out and do a lot of hands-on research.  Perhaps its my background in another field, but I read a lot of books about science and astronomy, and as an artist, I love speaking to folks in different research areas. A lot of projects start by tracking down experts in different fields that I’m interested in. I enjoy that interaction and these sort of 'field trips' can be a great source of inspiration and potential collaboration."

From this interview.

"Abraham Ritchie: Since you brought up the diversity of your artistic practice, how do you see technology playing a role in your practice?  It seems to me that there’s a lot of writing now about art and science and artists trying really hard to show science at work, like mad scientist experiments going wrong, but in your practice it seems so organic and not forced.  How do you use technology and see technology extending your artistic practice?

"Aspen Mays: Right, yes, I think a lot about that, maybe in terms of how slick the art could be.  I think the flip side of what you are saying is that the art could be so data-driven and you could have a really clean look but I feel mine is so clunky sometimes.  Like ordering the books for example, is such a cumbersome thing to do, to physically get the books, when you could use the internet or something.

"I think a lot of times using the analog processes, like I do in a lot of my work, is a way to create a really human presence in the work that may be counter to rationalist thinking, or objectivity, or a machine.  I want to insert the human back into everything; I’m trying to figure out these systems with whatever is at hand."

"AR: And in that sense, the ‘art’ never escapes your objects as a lot of your creations are quite beautiful too.  That is interesting to me since beauty is qualitative but science is interested in the quantitative.  Your work seems much more personal in the way it invokes science; technological apparatus is not overwhelming it.  Where does the aesthetic and this sense of beauty enter into your work?

"AM: Yes, beauty does feel really important.  I don’t set up experiments and whatever the results are, are the work. I am exerting control and making aesthetic choices.

"AR: So this would be unlike the way the idea drives the art in Conceptualism?  You're avoiding a situation where the process becomes the artwork rather than the end product?

"AM: Yes, I think about the formal concerns a lot.  Color is such a huge part of my work, like in the Fireflies piece or the 8 Ball piece, where it’s pure color almost and I just let that color be the piece in a lot of ways.  That color is mysterious and hopefully opens the door to further investigations.  I think that you’re right that beauty does drive the work in a lot of ways."

From this one.  Both explain the show.

"The most isolated man on the planet will spend tonight inside a leafy palm-thatch hut in the Brazilian Amazon. As always, insects will darn the air. Spider monkeys will patrol the treetops. Wild pigs will root in the undergrowth. And the man will remain a quietly anonymous fixture of the landscape, camouflaged to the point of near invisibility.

"That description relies on a few unknowable assumptions, obviously, but they're relatively safe. The man's isolation has been so well-established—and is so mind-bendingly extreme—that portraying him silently enduring another moment of utter solitude is a practical guarantee of reportorial accuracy.

"He's an Indian, and Brazilian officials have concluded that he's the last survivor of an uncontacted tribe. They first became aware of his existence nearly 15 years ago and for a decade launched numerous expeditions to track him, to ensure his safety, and to try to establish peaceful contact with him. In 2007, with ranching and logging closing in quickly on all sides, government officials declared a 31-square-mile area around him off-limits to trespassing and development.

"[...]Those kinds of clashes aren't unheard of: Brazil's 1988 Constitution gave Indians the legal right to the land they have traditionally occupied, which created a powerful incentive for settlers to chase uncontacted tribes off of any properties they might be eyeing for development. Just months before the agents began tracking the lone Indian, they made peaceful first contact with two other tribes that lived in the same region. One tribe, the Akuntsu, had been reduced to just six members. The rest of the tribe, explained the chief, had been killed during a raid by men with guns and chainsaws.

"Some of the markings he makes on trees have suggested to indigenous experts that he maintains a spiritual life, which they've speculated might help him survive the psychological toil of being, to a certain extent, the last man standing in a world of one.

"[...]Some Brazilians believe that the rapid spread of technology itself might protect his solitude, not threaten it. The agents who have worked on the lone Indian's case since 1996 believe that the wider the story of the man's isolation spreads—something that's easier than ever now—the safer he'll be from the sort of stealthy, anonymous raids by local land-grabbers that have decimated tribes in the past. Technologies like Google Earth and other mapping programs can assist in monitoring the boundaries of his territory. Instead of launching intrusive expeditions into the tribal territories to verify the Indians' safety, Brazilian officials have announced they will experiment with heat-seeking sensors that can be attached to airplanes flying high enough to cause no disruption on the ground."

From The Most Isolated Man on the Planet," in Slate Magazine 2010.

"In 1987, Medvedev wrote: 'In fact, private agriculture occupies only 1.6% of the arable land.  Nonetheless, in the 1980s, it produces more meat, milk, and eggs annually than the total amount of these products produced by all sectors (1933-1939).  Moreover it does this without any mechanization and virtually without horses.'  Overall, he demonstrated that '1.6 percent of the arable land in the Soviet Union produces around 30% of the national agricultural product in the Soviet Union' (1987:363-364).  Contemporary studies reach a similar broad conclusion for the post-Soviet world.  See Gambold Miller and Head (2004) and Pastiorkovskii (2002)."  (pg. 58)

"The question of descent regarding agricultural land ownership has been (and continues to be) an extremely complex matter in rural Russian society.  In Soviet Russia, land was not legally 'owned,' but private plots were granted to the families of kolkhoz and sovkhoz workers–plots that were, for all intent and purposes, passed on the subsequent generations.  In the 1990s, the legalities of land ownership were in chaos due to the process of privatization and residues of the Soviet kolkhoz system.  What appears to be clear is that the relative power of the male or female lines is secondary to the overall sense of belonging to the line of a given residential group.  A house is a place.  That place has its own line of history, its own line of ancestors who have been invoked within its walls, year after year.  It is rooted in a location, and property appears to descend along that line of rootedness.  Because residence has tended to be patrilocal, the land has tended to pass through the male line.  But the subordination (or at least, confrontation) of the human line to the territorial space is of marked importance."  (pg. 60)

"In terms of social organization, the obshchina was a fascinating institution.  Given the fact that the suprafamilial obshchina was charged with the redistribution of land, the concept of land ownership in the village resonated with both a sense of transience, in relation to the rod, and permanence, in relation to the village.  The village layout echoes this: houses are clustered together, and outside the residential part of the village, individual plots are clustered together." (pg. 64)

Margaret Paxson in Solovyovo: The Story of Memory In A Russian Village, published 2005 by Woodrow Wilson Center Press

Josef Koudelka's photo of Wenceslas Square after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Untitled, Anna Shteynshleyger

Untitled (Kolyma), Anna Shteynshleyger

Untitled (Puddles), Anna Shteynshleyger

From her series Siberia, photographs of three sites of gulag prison camps.

"I'm not interested in the political side of it at all. I don't deny it and know it filters into the work, but I'm just not approaching it from that perspective. I'm interested in exploring inner exile and profound beauty as redemptive and liberating. There is that famous Dostoyevsky quote that ‘Beauty will redeem the world.’

– in an email to Tim Davis

"Anna’s photographs of Siberia, a territory as suffused with suffering as any place on the planet, do not 'bear witness' to anything. They are not documents of anyone’s journey. They are not war monuments; they are not apologies. Though her camera is pointing in the direction of historical sites of unremembered trauma, her pictures are not records of the locations of past crimes. They do not reckon with the past. They sidestep the inevitable failure of the photograph to stand for historical events. They are oblique and difficult, refusing any Spielbergian urge to heal through reliving previous horrors."

– Tim Davis's Review, "A Landscape Purged"


One more review.  See also: City of Destiny.

"A ceremony on Moscow's Red Square today celebrated the restoration of two huge icons that graced two of the Kremlin's gateways for half a millennium before vanishing during the first decades of the atheist Soviet state.

"The icons of Christ and St. Nicholas, key symbols of Russia's national and spiritual history, were apparently saved from destruction by a singular act of insubordination on the part of one or more Soviet-era workers. They were rediscovered in May and since restored to their original glory.  [...]

"Elena Gagarina, director of the Kremlin Museums (and daughter of the first man in space, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin), believes that the icons were removed under Stalin's orders in 1934, when the central state restoration workshops were closed down and their director arrested. 'We have no information about [the icons] after that,' she says, but with political purges gaining steam and the Great Terror on the horizon, there is strong circumstantial evidence that it was considered high time to purge the Kremlin walls of religious icons.

"But with a crafty -- and perhaps typically Russian -- anti-authoritarian ingenuity, the professional restorers intentionally subverted their presumed instructions to remove the icons from sight, outwitting the Soviet state at immense personal risk to themselves and their families.

"'We now see that the icons were not covered by accident, because they weren't just plastered over,' Gagarina told AOL News. 'First they were covered by a metal grating and the plaster was laid over that and the surface was then painted red. In other words, they were covered so that they could eventually be recovered.'

"Under the czars, the Savior icon was considered so holy that those passing beneath it were obliged to dismount and bare their heads.

"Instead of destroying the icons, the workers literally removed them from sight, leaving a small space to protect the painted surface before covering them with a new layer of wall, hiding them for an unguessable future."

Image source, text source.

By Anton Bogomyagkov, in my little collection, originally stolen from his zip drive.

"The Redwood species seems to exist in another kind of time: not human time, but what we might call Redwood time. Redwood time moves at a more stately pace than human time. To us, when we look at a Redwood tree, it seems to be motionless and still, and yet Redwoods are constantly in motion, moving upward into space, articulating themselves and filling Redwood space over Redwood time, over thousands of years. Plant this small seed, wait 2,000 years, and you get this: the Lost Monarch. It dwells in the Grove of Titans on the North Coast, and was discovered in 1998. And yet, when you look at the base of a Redwood tree, you're not seeing the organism. You're like a mouse looking at the foot of an elephant, and most of the organism is overhead, unseen."

"Many of my pieces, and most conspicuously Forest, deal with the relentless, changing continuities of remembered places and marked events.  Because of the density of the images, the repetitions are not always obvious to the viewer, but somebody approaching the piece might slowly realize they’re seeing one picture that nearly duplicates another 30 feet down the wall."

Joseph Bartscherer's Forest grid.  Also from BOMB Magazine online, see larger and read more here.

"I began working with groups of photographs right from the beginning. It probably came out of a frustration with what seemed to me the superficial completeness of a single photographic glance. [...] It was more interesting to me that groups of photographs could act as aggregates, that individual photographs could stand in relationship to each other as stanzas in a poem, or collections of poems in a book. That there could be interdependencies that would bolster, reinforce, undermine, contradict each other within the body of a work. [...] I organized the photographs not so much chronologically, or to trace a narrative, or by typologies, say the way the Bechers have, but by following an associative logic based on affinities and disjunctions among pictures and picture groups."

"I try to make my pictures read as plausible stares. It’s one of the things I admired about Robert Frank’s pictures when I first saw them, how much they felt like what it was like to see. In his case and in a lot of Andre Kertesz’s work, it’s not so much a stare as a glance. But the principle holds. One of the things I built into my pieces — most self-consciously starting with Snohomish — was that my proximity to a subject would reflect my curiosity and, to use a loaded word, intention. So when I was photographing things very close up, I often used a wide-angle lens. The pictures don’t look wide angle, but they approximate what it feels like to stand very close to something and stare at it. If I were to use that lens to photograph things from further away, you’d be much more conscious of the photographic distortion. I was interested in disguising the distortion and instead making a sequence of pictures that, one by one, read as moments of consciously focused attention. This introduces the idea of the looker and so raises the question: why is somebody staring at something this closely; wherein lies his curiosity that he would look at something in such a way? To the extent that it evokes the act of looking, it suggests a frame of mind in which somebody’s attention is aroused. Then you have introduced to the photographic project something like literary voice."

Interview of Joseph Bartscherer by James Welling in BOMB Magazine, Spring 2008, Issue 103 here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_possession
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_principle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_property