Stunning.

Robert Longo website
Via ISO50

“Discarded”. How can that be? This is the final part of the out of print four volume set. Not as cheap as the others, but an ongoing delight.

Here’s another post I’ve been meaning to write for some time. Further to my previous post about the first volume of The Work Of Atget that I’d bought, I’ve now secured two more and, being secondhand, they also both bear the marks of their previous owners. Thank god they’re not mint (though that would mean they’d be worth at least £100 more than these copies). In The Art Of Old Paris, whatever happened to Caroline and Frank and Margaret and Tasso? Did they all make it to Paris? I hope they did. A lot of the photographs in this volume are of hovels and semi-derelict buildings soon to be demolished in the great renovations of the early part of the last century, so Margaret’s (or Tasso’s) entreaty to “fasten some fantasies to these pages” is just a little strange.

My edition of Old France (Volume 1) breaks my heart a little: “Public Library DISCARD Columbus Ohio”. Borrowed only 15 times between 1983 and 1995 – what could the denizens of Columbus have been thinking? They deserve to be thoroughly chastised.

I’ve become increasingly interested in photography over the past year or so, to the point now where I look forward to any diversion from my routine as an opportunity to take pictures. It’s a return to the ten years or so I spent practising fine art, but pretty much ceased when my children were born. As part of this growing enthusiasm, I began to look at the stock of photography books at the college where I work. Despite gaining what I thought was a fair knowledge of 20th century art, I’d never really taken a serious look at photographers apart from the likes of the Starn Twins and the Surrealist photographers exhibited as part of the L’Amour Fou exhibition in the ’90s. On my first visit to the college library, I discovered Eugene Atget. His work takes my breath away.

I’ve looked at a fair selection of other work (probably in actual fact a tiny drop in a very broad ocean), but I keep returning to Atget. He died 80 years ago and remains something of an enigma, relatively little is known about his opinions. He made no claim to art, but conducted his work as a documenter of scenes and objects (door knockers, interiors and so forth) for the use of artists and, later, institutions interested in preserving the ‘ancien Paris’ rapidly disappearing during Atget’s lifetime under Hausmann’s reforms. The brilliance of Atget’s compositions, their sense of engagement with and transcendence of both the everyday and the ordered beauty of the great parks of the Sun King, Louis XIV is both bewitching and haunting. I would have to jump medium and refer to Scott Walker’s late work (the beauty and otherness, if not the dread, of Climate of Hunter and Tilt) to find some kind of reference point.

Although I now also own Atget The Pioneer and the NY MOMA monograph Atget, the key collection of Atget’s images is the four volume The Work of Atget by John Szarkowski and Maria Morris. Inevitably, it’s long out of print and individual volumes appear to go for a minimum of £90. I was lucky to find a copy of volume III, The Ancien Regime (pictured above) for a mere £20 + p&p. To my delight, it turned out to be an ex-library copy:

It’s in remarkably good condition, but I’m writing this post to express my delight at one particular detail. As I wrote above, Atget referred to his photographs as documents for artists to enable them to paint scenes without having to travel, risk poor light or brave adverse weather conditions. Atget’s work is clearly still of use: on page 107 of my edition can be spied dabs of green, crimson and yellow paint:

The key facet that links all these great writers, according to Harold Bloom, is “strangeness, a mode of originality that either cannot be assimilated, or that so assimilates us that we cease to see it as strange.”

I can’t help but concur with this assertion: the vast majority of my desert island music would be marked by an otherness, a refusal to be assimilated; this, after all, is the art that challenges, that refuses to be worked out, pinned down, calculated, tidily defined, easily marketed, etc. Oddly, Moss then goes on to make a rather difficult to prove assertion, as though expressing a piece of universally-shared commonsense:

Literature is oddly difficult to canonise, more subject to changing tastes than other art forms. In music, greatness is transparent; genius announces itself. In literature, perhaps less so.

Music is certainly as hard to pare down to a canon, particularly if the whole musical field is considered rather than the Classical music I suspect the author is referring to. In responding to the inevitable criticism that attempting to define Britain’s great living writer is a folly, Moss responds:

Trying to establish Britain’s GLA, or even a leading group of contenders, is a hazardous undertaking. But it is at worst harmless fun, and at best might provoke us to consider what constitutes great writing, whether a canon has any validity, and who determines what work survives.

Fair enough, but it confirms for me the knowledge that my canon is a personal one and I’ll only ever be partially interested or convinced by anybody else’s. Thank goodness.

Read: Who is the Greatest of Them All? (The Guardian)

All images in this post are by Cypher One. Visit his Flickr area to view gorgeous hi-res versions of these and other images.

Talk of HDD photography has been bouncing round the internet for a while now, the examples I’d seen of it were intriguing, but they didn’t move me particularly. The illustrations in the Wikipedia entry would leave most people scratching their head. Then I followed the BoingBoing entry about the derelict Taiwanese ‘space apartments’, pictured above. Quite apart from their post-production treatment, these images are beautifully shot and riddled with the pathos of lost futures. However the HDD technique suffuses them with something breathtaking: there’s a richness and depth that others have called painterly (though I’m not fond of that description). This is perhaps best illustrated by another of Cypher One’s photographs taken of a more workaday subject:

The fascination of these pictures comes, for me, from their folding of multiple timeframes into one image – except that folding isn’t quite right, the slight blurring and the strange play of colours and textures implies the passage of time in a very involving, subtle way.

• Elegant and minimal, I’m struck by the sparseness of Ryoji Ikeda’s music.
• The DVD is divided into Concert and Installation sections. Both share the same audio.
• The visuals are mesmerising and somewhat mysterious. Each visual element appears initially to reflect a sonic element. Gradually this is disproved.
• Looking at the accompanying book, I suddenly realise that the different segments of the visuals are in fact distinct pieces that were exhibited (I think) at different times.
• The filming of the visuals with the reflective floorspace makes for an excellent extra dimension, both literally and metaphorically.
• I was surprised to encounter a brief section containing American vocal samples. Also, at 10:10 there’s a sound that appears to be the same as the beginning of David Bowie’s Fashion.
• I was rather disappointed by the brevity of the DVD.
• I concur with my friend’s wish that what we saw at Tate Modern might be issued on DVD in the near future.
• What does it all mean? Stupid question, I know. The Tate performance appeared to finding ways to articulate big numbers and to express the depth of math that is simultaneously complex and, ultimately, simple.
• I’m struck by the sonic proximity of Ikeda’s (and Alva Noto’s in particular) work to that of music producers such as Ken Ishii, Ryoichi Kurokawa, Mika Vainio, the tech-house of Jan Jelinek, a slew of Mille Plateaux/Clicks and Cuts acts and from there back to early to mid 90s Junglists. Is this coincidence? Unlikely. Do Ikeda and Noto acknowledge or take inspiration from such sources? I struggle a little with the parameters of their music given its ‘repurposing’ – if that’s what it is – from dancefloor to art gallery. Hence the question of meaning.
• The bio at Ideda’s management site states “… Ikeda has been developing particular “microscopic” methods for sound engineering and composition, diffusing an aesthetic of ‘ultra minimalism’ to the art world…” Wow, if only Donald Judd and his mates had known…
• My copy is number 2123 of an edition of 3000. I remembered these figures four days after reading them for the first and only time.

Beguiling work from Stephen Berkman who appears to use early photographic techniques to interrogate attitudes to otherness. Reminds me a little of the Starn Twins and of course the Brothers Quay. Link via Boing Boing.

I’ve just seen Ararat, a film by Atom Egoyan made in 2002. Each of Egoyan’s films – Calendar, Exotica, The Sweet Hereafter – has struck me as allusive, resonant and intriguingly structured. Until now, however, there’s been a sense that the emotional element, though deeply felt, was very tightly controlled by the director’s intellectual concerns. The effect of this was an apparent alienation, as if the characters were in deep space, their voices delayed by the distance they needed to travel to the viewer.

At the time of its release, I recall reading reviews of Ararat which appeared to recoil at Egoyan’s treatment of the film’s central concern, that of the Armenian genocide in 1915. My reaction is rather different, in that I feet that, while the director’s intellectual engagement is as seriously playful as ever, his emotional engagement acts as a passionate medium that invests the film with . As always with Egoyan’s work, Ararat demands repeated viewing to gain an understanding of the multiple levels at which the film engages with the viewer: the film within the film, the allusions – both direct and indirect – to the Jewish Holocaust that Armenia prefigured, the impact of historical events upon the characters, the validity – or otherwise – of poetic interpretation particularly with regard to film (but also mirrored in Gorky’s painterly interrogation of his photograph and by extension, memory), nationalism, ethnicity, faith and so on. If that sounds awfully overloaded, the subtlety of the direction means that such weighty themes never oppress. In contrast to the reviews, I very much admired Egoyan’s courage in addressing (t)his history so directly. I’m probably being unfair, but in retrospect it’s as though the critics were recoiling from the earnestness of the approach.

The Armenian painter Arshile Gorky, and particularly his painting The Artist and His Mother is used as a potent symbol of the deliberate genocide which even now the Turkish government refuses to acknowledge (as this BBC report about the trial of the author Orhan Pamuk attests). I first saw Gorky’s work in my early 20s at The Whitechapel Gallery and continue to be moved by his work. Thank you Robin.

Just stumbled on this blog from the usual tangle of links and was stunned by these illustrations, a mixture of Svankmajer, Quay, Kafka and their own richly individual voices.