"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.