Ernesto Neto

quote from http://www.tanyabonakdargallery.com/artists/ernesto-neto/series

Ernesto Neto has produced an influential body of work that explores constructions of social space and the natural world by inviting physical interaction and sensory experience

quote from http://www.kiasma.fi/en/calendar/ernesto-neto/

Neto is intrigued by traditions and rituals of Huni Kuin, particularly by their desire to achieve happiness and harmony in life and to abide by the timeless wisdom of nature.

maybe thats what i want to say that to be in tune with nature is to be happy and relax, that nature is timeless, the city always has new development - however so that the natural world, plants wither and die and grow again, and slowly over time species evolve, i guess its a bit like the city, the buildings are built and knocked down and eventually the city evolves. so i guess the question is why am i more fascinated by the nature than the city? i think always its bee that in the grey i city is where i was most of the time, thats where i lived and grew up, an it was a rare occasion when i got the chance to visit outside and these were like little holidays, even if they were only for part of a day, when everything else can be forgotten. and this gradual repeated trips became part of my psyche, these little things that made me happy to break away from the city, that made me revere the nature, the countryside, much more than the city. this includes the wider views that refernce human activity, the fields, the hedgrerows, the tracks, the distant buildings, towns and smoke rising frozen in the evening air. but also the macro views of a single plant, a single leaf, a single berry that i pick and eat, the aumtumnal leafs falling from the sky in a breeze surrounding me in a golden falling rain, being lost in the middle of a forest, it makes me yearn for the primeval days when the UK was covered in forest and settlements were few and far between.

his work is quite primal and tribal, one can imagine some remote tribes in the brazilian rainforest or somewhere far into the bush of austrailia somewhere lost in time happy in their small role in the world tucked away from the wars, living by their traditions.

quotes from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-features/7772975/Ernesto-Neto-interview-for-Festival-Brazil-realm-of-the-senses.html

My work,’ Ernesto Neto declares suddenly, 'is about liquids, about drinking. I love to drink. Drinking is such a delicious thing. When you drink, ahh…’ – he lets out a sigh of pleasure – 'amazing beer, great wine, fruit juice, coconut milk or water, it is so good. I think we should pray a little bit every time we drink something.’

thats interesting becaue i didnt excatly get that feeling from looking at his work, i thought it was abut cultures and traditions and bringing people together to experience each other, not just through speaking, but getting to go to cultural places and feel the feel on your skin, the sounds, the sights, the flavours and smells.

One of the themes in recent Brazilian art is the way that the viewer is encouraged to interact with it. Very often, Neto’s work encourages you to do the opposite of what art galleries generally instruct: do not touch.

so far in the last year often my work has incorportated this element, with my last series about the both the wasted and lost time on train journeys, and the inbetween space, which required viewers to physically move the papers themselves. now i have this idea that the images will be everexposed and lost on the walls, with a better exposure underneath requiring the viewer to physically turn the papers. to see properly the picture.

You are supposed to lean against a Neto, recline on it, even put it on. In fact, Cliff Lauson, the curator of the new exhibition, says that it will be impossible not to do so at the Hayward – some of the work takes the form of a corridor leading from one part of the exhibition to another.

my work will not be this involved! it was nice in my previous piece as i wanted people to feel the paper, and feel this precious little thing in their hand.

'People are too scared all the time of something going wrong. But there’s no need to worry about that. Things go wrong all the time. My work is all about things going wrong!’

yeah he as well has totally embraced this feeling out of control things going wrong, and used it to make something creative, i need to find this instead of feeling suffocated by it

quotes from http://playgallery.org/stories/neto/

And another thing is, you let each thing have its own nature. You don't want to control: "Oh, no. This should be like this." The work doesn't want to be like this. It's a dialogue with the work, itself.

he is letting the work have its own life, he just shapes it and moulds it but it makes itself i think is what he is saying

You spoke of something in your talk, something that seemed really humble and human to me. You said that sometimes you just have to allow yourself to feel kind of down, or kind of depressed about your work, to give it some space, in order to move on. I was wondering if you could explain what you meant by that.

This is very personal and I don't know if this applies to everybody. But with myself, I realized that sometimes I would go to the studio and I would try to work and at some point, I couldn't do anything. I would lay down, and begin to feel myself getting depressed. Then, suddenly something would shift, and I would have a great idea, and begin to work again.

So, because of my experience, I began to think that depression is something that is a normal part of life. It's kind of necessary, to sometimes feel like a little animal. Sometimes you need to be down. You can not be up all the time.

again another artist talking about this processes of embracing the depression and the waiting, that it isnt always productivity 24/7 you need to take a break and that takes time, i gus my problem is that my break has been so long i dont have time for anymore breaks, and the timeframe was so short in the beginning that any break was too long

If I have an idea, and I make the work, and it turns out to be exactly the idea, I say, "Oh! It's exactly what I was thinking!" And, I think it's a stupid work.

Because it's boring. It didn't surprise you.

Because there's nothing. No transit. Nothing happened in between. If it's something that I can think, then what's the point?

this is kind of the opposite of how i feel, i feel like i must think in every moment and have some reason or thought behind everything i do in every moment, and perhaps for him there is a reason for everything, but he feel free to create and find the meaning later.

Paul Graham and Seizing the Everyday Moments - in NY Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/21/arts/design/paul-graham-and-seizing-the-everyday-moments.html?_r=2

“Stare,” wrote Walker Evans, the canonical 20th-century photographer. “It is the way to educate your eye, and more. Stare; pry; listen; eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.”

What do i know? i need to look and stare and look at more.

“Boredom is part of my work. I accept it and embrace it.” He was describing the off-handed concentration with which he looks at the normal flow of everyday activity and documents it in narrative sequences.

i dont feel i can embrace boredom at the moment for the next few months,  must be constantly busy, and if i find myself not busy then i must fill my time with researching.

Afternoon light spilled in from a bank of windows as he described his routine. “A good day is one where I’ve overcome my procrastination, actually gotten out the door to shoot, weather cooperating.” He can get lost answering emails, surfing the Internet, grazing for new camera equipment. Pointing to the monitor at his desk, he leveled a modest bombshell with his tidy British accent.

he sounds like me, endless procrastinating, but he has found a way to be productive, be successful and get things done; i need to find a way that it works for me.

Given the 14 bodies of work Mr. Graham has produced over the last 30 years, his claims to distraction are more akin to Zen koans about diligence and rigor: “Sometimes I have to kill a couple of weeks doing other things, appearing to be very lazy while I’m actually finding my way through a problem.”

interesting what he says about distraction being a zen koan. i cofess i dont think i have heard the term koan before. so i had a quick google to understand the word. it seems a koan is a riddle that must be studied and thought about and the first answer that might spring to your head is just not it and completely misses the point, it must be thought about deeply for a long time without thinking of something else for the answer to be found. 
i think this is interesting as i think he is saying that he is studying distraction, trying to search for and find the deeper meaning in it, and only by studying it for a long time can he understand, he cant just come to the answer in a first moment.

Mr. Graham had in mind what the French refer to as the “social fracture” while making “American Night,” on his first travels in America. The title alludes to the Truffaut film, “Day for Night,” a filmmaking term for creating nighttime scenes by underexposing footage shot in broad daylight.

he references this by overexposing his images, where the filmmaking technique was to undeerexpose to get a faux nighttime, he is making a faux washed out scene, it is almost completely devoid of detail to say they are all a whitewash, a blur, maybe they are of similarity to him, where he has a yearning for the houses that he does depict in colour.

Susan Kismaric, former senior curator of MoMa - The everyday moments he captured “are, after all, how we spend most of our time, mindlessly active or lost in thought — they provide what appears to be the undercurrent of our existence,” she said. “Paul’s work is innovative, inventive and freshly imagined, while rooted in photography’s magic, that is, its ability to transform the mundane into a picture with resonance.”

Maybe actually i need to embrace this times of procrastinating, but they always lead to further stress that i didnt accomplish something while i was procrastinating, i think the problem also for me is i havent found a way of capturing something procrastinatory and turn it into something creative.

“Why is everyone addicted to prepackaged spectacular moments, as if that’s all that’s worth photographing?” Mr. Graham said. “There is so much more to the flow of life all around us that isn’t revolving around perfect page-one moments.”

how can i make this work in a body of work?

Mr. Graham is alert to “someone sitting at the bus stop, or someone smoking a cigarette,” he said. “You know, some moment of quiet beauty that arrived into your life and was humbling, really.”

Call it that dumb, just-being-there quality or a second glimpse of the “it-ness” of those moments, perhaps a clarity of the kind evoked in the metaphors in imagist poetry: “So much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens,” wrote William Carlos Williams. So much, indeed.

additional information http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/apr/11/paul-graham-interview-whitechapel-ohagan

Kairos and Chronos

In a tutorial with David Moore, he suggested I look at the ancient Greek theories of time as a way to understand my concept more.

Chronos - the first ancient Greek work for time, it refers to measured time, like on a clock. we have the English word 'chronological' as in the natural order of one thing after another. The sequence or timeline of events or narratives or patterns.

Kairos - the other ancient Greek word for time, but this refers to time that is not measured by a clock or by some other time measuring device, but refers to the opportune moment (a bit like the Henri Cartier-Bresson, the decisive moment).

It seems to me that all photographs are in some way Chronos. The shutter is open for an exact moment of time and is recording a holographic world described by various wavelengths. Onto a plane of photographic material. My project is taking the Chronos, that all photography, is and making work personified by Kairos, which is given form, given a 'voice' by my photographs surrounding my relationship with the camera. It started as a way to try and control the Chronos but because I am human, I cannot do this, so I subject myself to this beautiful Kairos.

Information from -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kairos
http://mckinleyvalentine.com/kairos/
http://www.lifeofasteward.com/chronos-kairos/

An edit of 10x8s

I retouched these files. I haven't tried to perfect any anomalies in the scanning, however I have brought detail out from the highlights, doing this revealed intense light ray developing marks.

These are starting to reflect a dystopian nightmare. It really has the feeling of the strains of everyday life, without directly showing anything directly mundane. These photographs stand in for my feelings surrounding the subjects discussed, while giving a tantalising glimpse, albeit nervous, uncertain view into a release -
"feelings and emotions towards the passage of time: time moving ever forward, my worries over forging a career after uni, my consideration over the choice to study a Masters degree, my fears, my memories of choices made in the past, the rural wilderness I choose to escape to and my desire to float on down the river and into the horizon."

Each viewer is invited to read these images their own way, as I will not present anything that puts the work in any boundaries that specifically defines what it is about.

Those same Initial 10x8 photos

The tones look a bit strange when compressed and re-sized for the web, but when I see these images like this, I take back what I previously said about wanting to display them small. These photographs need to be big. If I could economically print one the size of a bus I would. There is such sharp detail in them I feel one could look at them for hours to pick out all the minor details, the way the elemental objects play out within the composition. Shooting on f64 and careful framing and critical focusing has helped get such a wide depth of field. I did play with the tilting aspects of the 10x8 camera. But I found the shift very useful for framing precise shots. The camera is very unwieldy so I would get it more or less set up right, all leveled and squared away how I wanted, then focus and shift the lens and ground glass precisely how I wanted over 5 minutes. I would take several meter readings, and pay careful attention to the sky, what the clouds were doing, how the light was moving to make sure my exposures were correct. I feel this super slow way of working has helped to create a meaning to my photographs and allowed me to think not just how to perfect the image, but also to ask myself why I am taking each respective image. 

However although it frees my mind to think critically about why I am taking photographs, the size and weight of the camera severely limit the usage of the camera. It lives in a large PeliCase. It rolls on wheels, this means I can not really take it off road very far, and when I walk I must use the easiest least bumpy paths I can find. Often I have a friend to help me with the tripod and setting up 'the beast' aka 'Nidhogg'.

Initial 10x8s

I used a 10x8 camera to create these photos. Again I used the paper, however a couple of these I shot on ultra gloss paper which didn't look as nice to me as semi-gloss paper. Also when developing the ultra gloss papers, using the little plastic clips I managed to put a scratch in the emulsion of one of the papers, even when I was being careful, just poking the paper into the developer, it picked up the scratch.
I feel these negative pieces of paper have such a beautiful natural quality that if I was to display these I would display them, as the negatives, directly on the wall behind glass, so they wouldn't get damaged and to draw the viewer in so they interact with them on a very intimate close level.
Again I focused on repetition as the project is the methodical relationship where I return to the camera to feed it paper and light. But also I let my imagination take me, and I shot several landscapes, these dark, mysterious, rich, textured 'dreamscapes', represent my feelings and emotions towards the passage of time: time moving ever forward, my worries over forging a career after uni, my consideration over the choice to study a Masters degree, my fears, my memories of choices made in the past, the rural wilderness I choose to escape to and my desire to float on down the river and into the horizon.

Conflict Time Photography

A while back I went to see Conflict, Time, Photography at Tate Modern. I spent around 3 hours in there slowly moving around the exhibit reading everything and making notes on the framing and display and mounting of each of the works, unfortunately I lost my notebook before I had typed it all up, here are my very few notes, literally only 2% of what I wrote as the exhibit was quite extensive!

Conflict time Photography


The exhibition starts with 3 paragraphs about the Dresden Air Raids in February 1945.

Kurt Vonnent Jr – Was a Prisoner kept in an underground meat locker during that time
“looking back without becoming frozen in the process”

25 minutes after the bombs on Hiroshima, were taken from the top of a hill that shielded the photographer and his surroundings from the bomb blast.
They are in thin black frames, large white space of mount board as a frame around the photographs.
The third photo out of the four black and white photographs has a lot of dust and scratches from the film. Interesting to me, makes it seem to me that the camera had been involved in a bomb blast and as such had been broken and thrown around. The other 3 shots didn’t have as many scratches in them. The scratches looked to be in the film rather than the prints.


Luc Delahaye 2001 US Bomb Taliban Positions
He used a large format camera. The print is huge, about a meter tall and in a 16x9 ratio, or something similar. It had a thick wooden frame that was next to the picture; mount board didn’t surround it.
There was a small amount of smoke in the center and some lesser smoke in the right hand side in the distance. It looks like beautiful field taken in the golden hour and looks serene almost, if the smoke wasn’t there and the knowledge that bombs were being dropped.


Luc Delahaye 2006 Iraq Insurgents Bombs on US
There is a broken vehicle in the center, to the side of a road. The whole picture is grey. The photograph is filled with an eerie sense of calm before the storm, or shock and confusion over what just happened.

More on Hiroshi Sugimoto

"While Sugimoto's photographs date from the mid to late 1980s to the present day, he relates that it was in the period after he moved to New York when he conceived of the idea for his three series: Dioramas, Theatres and Seascapes. He started to work on them concurrently in 1976-77. In fact, he is continuously adding to each series, refining and expanding them. These series have no past or present, they are in effect all produced simultaneously, creating his own sense of time."

Coolidge Rousmaniere, Nicole. (1997). Towards the End of Time: Hiroshi Sugimoto's Hall of Thirty-Three Bays. In: Coolidge Rousmaniere, Nicole and Jeffett, William Hiroshi Sugimoto. Norwich, England: Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts. p7.

"Sugimoto is not only trying to relate his vision, he is trying to alter ours."

"Sugimoto's photographs resonate with tradition. They reflect his love of object, detail, and technique - the traditional purvey of classical photography. His techniques play on those of Louis Daguerre, the 19th-century originator of the daguerreotype, one of the first photographic techniques. The camera Sugimoto uses is not far from the one that Daguerre might have used. Departing from Daguerre's photographs and dioramas which he created in the 1820s in Paris, Sugimoto's series are tableaux which move the images away from becoming just a memory or entertainment and into the more encompassing realm of art and into an exploration of meaning"

"In his Seascape series he takes what appears to be untouched landscape and inverts it to show that while land (sea)scape may appear constant it is in fact both temporal and subject to human definitions. Sugimoto himself states that the sea is 'an early example of human naming something outside the world inside himself'"

Coolidge Rousmaniere, Nicole. (1997). Towards the End of Time: Hiroshi Sugimoto's Hall of Thirty-Three Bays. In: Coolidge Rousmaniere, Nicole and Jeffett, William Hiroshi Sugimoto. Norwich, England: Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts. p8.

"Photography can be seen as a time machine, for it freezes a moment, preserving it for the future. But whose future?"

"Sugimoto's series Hall of Thirty-Three Bays certainly points to his concern and indeed the eternal concern for the end of time. But Sugimoto's work is more about human conceptions of time, and millennialism is but one, albiet dramatic, manifestation. Sugimoto's series are all explorations into definitions, and as stated abovee provide a language through which we can access certain polemic questions that keep arising. Sugimoto is a contemporary artist and his conerns are in tune with current concerns, but his sense of time/space reflects not time as linear, but many different times: there is buddhist time, time cycles, tides, merchant's time, farmer's time, photographic time and serial time. Each time is a human construct, for it must be constructed for us to be able to perceive it as such. By restructuring our vision, Sugimoto challenges us to reposition our role in this production"

Coolidge Rousmaniere, Nicole. (1997). Towards the End of Time: Hiroshi Sugimoto's Hall of Thirty-Three Bays. In: Coolidge Rousmaniere, Nicole and Jeffett, William Hiroshi Sugimoto. Norwich, England: Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts. p16.

"The skyscrapers stand still, but their shadows race. Roads stay the same but the cars on them become transparent; at night their headlights form red and white rivers. Now place a body in that space: it participates in all these velocities at once. When swept up in high-velocity systems such as transportation, money, information, the body virtually disappears, just like the cars. But the body also inhabits medium-speed spaces: in the place where it sleeps, for hours at a time, nothing moves. Inside the body, processes are slower yet: once formed, the bones stabilize permanently; over a life-time the brain and other organs decay quite gradually.Sugimoto is like that. At first sight his images could be mistaken for Platonic forms, outside time, perfect. But like Metabolist analyses of the environment's different speeds, they isolate and separate the layered velocities across which the subject moves. When consciousness is placed, for instance, inside the cinematic system, whose images pulse at a regular 24-per-second, it quickly joins the speed of the apparatus, and mostly enjoys the show. Yet however absorbed inside the high-speed of the screen, some residential branch of consciousness remains behind to monitor the auditorium, where other and slower speeds obtain; the motionless confinement of the theatre that is is known to the bones and the Sitzfleisch; the unchanging architecture of the movie theatre's interior (at least of the interiors that Sugimoto chooses to photograph). As a subject of cinema the moviegoer is lost inside the apparatus - she or he literally disappears, like the evaporated cars in the speeded-up cityscape, or the banished movie on the screen"

Bryson, Norman. (1997). Hiroshi Sugimoto's Metabolic Photography. In: Coolidge Rousmaniere, Nicole and Jeffett, William Hiroshi Sugimoto. Norwich, England: Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts. p16.

Richard Long Research

Richard Long is a British Artist, specialising in sculpture.

His work reminds me of Cairns on mountainsides, of cave painting and of neolithic structures like Stonehenge. I researched these images for the Independent Study Project before this, when I was trying to understand different narrative concepts. I felt this work was strong and challenged my immediate knowledge and reading of narrative. Now when I re-look at these, a lightbulb suddenly shines. They are also passages of time, his journey, interpreted into form representing a linear structured narrative, however his work pushes the boundaries of what is linear, it is very much a contemporary imagination.

This one is my favourite, because of the leading lines of the path he made, the eye is lead down the path how I want to walk down it. The rocks and the shape of the ridge form another set of leading lines distinct against the continuing ridge in the background. I like the composition of the ridge almost towering over the sky and the subtle diagonal curve slashing through the image adding to the drama of the disparity between the light fluffy clouds and the dark hard volcanic rock of the mountain.

Franscesca Woodman Research

While researching Michael Wesely, I stumbled across Franscesca . She was an American photographer who took self portraits. Her pictures were interesting, but I liked reading about them, how they were displayed was interesting to me, she had small prints that force the viewer into an intimate relationship with the print. It makes me consider how I would like to display my work, as large prints to make the viewer step back and consider the photograph, or bring them in, to cradle the prints and look for tiny details in a small print in their hands.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francesca_Woodman

Idris Khan

Idris Khan is a British Photographic Artist. His work is the repeated overlaying of certain found material. I found his work while researching Michael Wesely.

These images are as awe inspiring as Michael Wesely. They have a similar ghostly aesthetic. However they seem more dense, the different technique renders a different reading of the images. His techniques is almost what I was going for when I was shooting my 'multiple exposures shot' which I blogged about two posts ago. Whereas his was digital, mine was purely chemical analogue. I must admit I saw his work after I started my multiple exposures side project. However his work has helped to alter my reading of my own work. His work shows some time in a different way: The time when the photographs were taken, the time between the photographs being taken and his work, the final reading of the work now.