Lesson Six Notes.

Critical Studies Lesson Six: Globalisation.

What is historically unique about contemporary cultural environments is there composition from architectural structures, objects, images and people who did not originate within that locality and may have arrived within it from far flung places. A town centre will now comprise a collage of different places represented in images articulated through foreign objects and shown by the ethnic diversity of those people in it. Event or thing depends on everything else around it to take place.

Globalisation can be associated with multiplicity and diversity but also paradoxically with uniformity and homogeneity. Term first used to describe political and economic changes in the 80’s but later has gone on to accrue social and cultural associations as well term first derived from Marshall McLuhan.

1970’s globalisation replaced internationalism, first world countries loaned millions to third world countries. Structural adjustment loans introduced which forced these countries to deregulate their markets and allows international free trade. Allowed multi national companies to trade without considering individual states.

Documenta 11, production of art, cultural drive of globalisation today.

Fredrick Jameson if everywhere is connected how you can be given a space individual can’t conceptualise the given space you live in.

Andreas Gursky Large scale images distinctive for their incisive and critical look at the effect of capitalism and globalisation on contemporary life. Often depicts people as tiny protagonists caught in vast landscapes. Since 1990’s concentrated on sites of tourism etc, chooses to take images of places that are un represent able (too big) so uses many smaller images to create a representation of that space.

Simon Starling investigated the historical processes by which objects and situations are created, often focuses upon how we transform raw materials into usable objects.

Lesson Five Notes.

Critical Studies Lesson Five: Repititions.

Dialog between representations and the real, hyper reality; everything is constructed as a code, a simulation is everything reduced to text or language?

John Berger painting and reproduction. Drawing upon Benjamin’s analysis of photographic reproduction Berger considers how the status of paintings is transformed by mechanical reproduction. The original is transformed by its reproduction, it is no longer valued for what it shows but for its rarity which is confirmed by the price. Work enters into a relationship with reproductions of it, defined by how it is contrasted with them. Inflated prices of the original.

The Counterfeit: The industrial simulacrum, the structural code. A simulacrum is a representation that is not necessarily tied to an object in the world. Used by Plato to describe the copy of a copy that is cut off from the object it represents threatens the relationship of reference between sign and object. The counterfeit emerges through the breakdown of feudal society and the emergence of bourgeoisie society. Free production brings a proliferation of signs which also only appear to be referential.

The industrial simulacrum: Industry transforms natural world, signs are produced simultaneous on a giant scale. They originate through mechanical production. They function as commodities in an economy. The law of equivalence (monetary value) permits the obliteration of reference Benjamin shows that the reproduction absorbs the process of production.

The Code: Industrial production anticipates models from which proceed all forms according to variation between their parts. Modulation super side’s economic equivalence. Object and operations of a code that served as a vehicle for exchanges of meaning and value. Reality collapses into hyper reality the code permeates all aspects of life.

Bernd and Hilla Becher Objective matter of fact images, showing what the towers are, they are after a UN coded image; you look at them as a mass. One level it’s all about the code, other all about the object/image.

Dan Graham deskilled photography, removed all traces of manual process or subjective decision making from the photographic process. Took himself out of the frame by using instant cameras, limits the choice he has, limited decisions on lighting and settings.

Ed Ruscha 26 gas stations, all the buildings along sun set strip, repetitive structures of his books.

Thomas Demand dealing with a world of simulacrum. The images tell a dark story, creating tension between the fabricated and the real, he begins with a pre-existing photograph of actual locations culled from the mass media and wants to represent a certain distance between us and the event that happened which is true to life during this media consumed society.

Lesson Four Notes.

Critical Studies Lesson Four: The Rhetoric of Images.

Saussure: Believed that the sign was a linguistic unit consisting of signifier (sound image) and signified (concept) in visual culture the signifier may be thought of as a physical object, which was been given a meaning.

Pierce: Is interested in how signs represent and relates to an object. Identifies 3 different types of signs icon, index and symbol.
Icon: Relation between sign and object is one of likeliness. Looks like the thing it is supposed to represent.
Index: Casual relations between sign and object. Indexical signs are really                                                                              affected by their objects. Fire alarm would be a signifier of fire or danger. How we pronounce things can alter the meaning of what we’re saying.

Arbitrary: How things have worked out, no particular reason.

Image analysis of a coin:

-Icon of the queen.

-Symbol of monetary value.

-Symbol of Britishness.

-Index of Britain.

-Index of its own usage, age.

-Symbol of monarchy.

-Symbol of power.

Roland Barthes- Denotations/connotations.

Panzani pasta advert analysis: Italian name therefore you are buying into the country, the real deal. Word panzani denotes a range of pasta products but also connotes the general idea of Italianicity. Colours used are red white and green, the colours of the Italian flag meaning the pasta must be more genuine. In the bag there is a lot of other fresh produces which makes us believe that the pasta is just as fresh as the other products there.

Barthes critiqued the possibility that the image might convey a non-coded message (to directly communicate its subject matter) and sought to demonstrate how all the different elements made up the image conspire the produce its meaning.

Robert Hughes, Richard prince, Vacility.

Barthes seems to be suggesting that at the centre of photographic images, where we expect to find the denoted meaning there is an absence, which is filled by rhetoric (persuasive speaking or writing) of associations.

Hughes does not like Warhol’s work, wants there to be more meaning to them.

Rosetta Brookes has identified 3 aspects to his practice.

1. Choice of common place banal imagery.
2. The authenticity of the artists own investment in the images.
3. The silence of his own intentions.

Emptiness.

There is an emptiness that lies at the hearts of prince’s work; he is re photographing the kinds of advertising imagery that Barthes analysed. Barthes associated advertising with persuasive rhetoric an architecture of connotations that generates the message perhaps we can consider prince to be examining the status of the advertising image and the ways in which it is meaningful for us. 

Lesson Three Notes.

Critical Studies Lesson Three: The gaze and voyeurism.

John Berger- Naked/nude.

A mans presence is dependent upon the promise of power whereas a woman’s presence expresses her own attitude to herself; her presence is manifested in her own gestures voice etc. Mans presence is what he has outside of his body whereas a woman’s presence is literally just her body how they appear to men. Men generate an image out of a woman’s presence (painter) beauty. Women must generate presence out of men’s judgements.

To be naked is to be oneself, to be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognised for oneself. A naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become nude, nudity is like a part of clothing as you are not truly naked. If you paint a naked body is becomes nude as the painter is judging her, only painting what he wants to see i.e. not painting pubic hair. The surveyor of woman in herself is male; she turns herself into an object of vision, sight.

Objectification: Pornographic imagery offers women as available for male sexual fantasy, in a restricted range of roles. It is the practice of treating another person as a commodity or as an object for use.

The Gaze: The power to look upon others. It has been suggested that men possess the gaze and look upon women. This operates at a social level and generates a culture of image production in which women are continually viewed as objects for men to look at, forcing women to internalise this gaze to the point where they survey and monitor their actions in relations to a perceived on lookers.

Voyeurism: Sexual interest in observing other people engaged in sexual practices. Linked with the term scopophilia, sexual pleasure from looking at others bodies as objects.

Larry Clark creator of ‘Teenage Lust’ and ‘Tulsa’ wanted to capture teenagers in the moment, wanted it to feel as if we were there with them.

Jeff Burton more subtle than Clarks but still nude images. Very suggestive by the colour etc.

Nobuyoshi Araki Women in rope bondage very explicit. Objectifying women, camera embodies the male role.

Cindy Sherman her images imply that the very construction of identity is built upon a representation.

Lesson Two Notes.

Critical Studies Lesson Two: Documentary Forms

Aims:

-How Benjamin contrasts traditional art forms with mechanically reproducible ones, consider how this facilitates the development of documentary.

-Consider historical forms of documentary, contrast these with more recent, models where the status of the image is questioned.

Questions:

1. What does Benjamin consider to be happening to art at the beginning of the 20^th Century?
2. What is the effect upon notions traditionally associated with art?
3. How does he consider that these changed transform the ways we come into contact with art?

Answers:

1. Art is becoming less authentic because of its reproducibility. Technology advances allow you to reproduce art works more easily and cheaper.
2. Usually associated with pieces of art. No original pieces of work, jeopardise the authenticity of art, jeopardises the notions traditionally associated with art. Genius, one of a kind etc. Disregards the terms creative.  Photography does something to the act of recording, it makes everything quicker, if you drew an image it is very time consuming. Where as with a photograph you just click the shutter which takes a second.  If someone copies your art it is known as a fake or forgery.

Photography brings the location to you; you don’t need to go there anymore as the photograph brings the place to you. Our experience of the place is therefore transformed by photography.

Authenticity: The essence of all that is transmissible from the scene of the works production time and place.

Original: Preserve the scene of its making I.E. by painting a scene in 1999 preserves that scene in that specific time. Exists outside the technical reproducibility. Presence is depreciated through reproducibility a copy of an image lacks the essence of that scenes time and place.

Reproduction (Photograph): Locks the originals original presence in time and space. The original becomes detached from the scene it is/ is of. The original becomes not about what it shows but what it is, as a photograph is a piece of art.

Aura: The presence of an object before us, original, uniqueness, presence. Space, time and being removed from it. Two examples of a mountain and a shadow of a branch. We can sense the presence of the mountain before us but we are physically distant from it.

How is aura/uniqueness linked to ritual?

Uniqueness is inseparable from tradition, magical, religious, reality. Aura based in ritual function. A statue of Jesus transcended its status as stone to take on a human form. The idea of aura/authenticity is used in many other social projects over time. The aura embodies something else. Difference between film and paintings, films are made with more than pone camera, therefore you have different viewpoints. Films move they play and then they go whereas the painting always stays the same. Many pieces of equipment are used to make a film but when you watch it all those pieces are subtracted, you do not see them. The camera throws you into reality, a camera man is like a surgeon, and he slices you into reality. The cameraman does not face you; a painting does not do this. Film is distracted, raises us to a level off consciousness.

Painted faces the scene he paints but remains distant from it. Captures that moment in time from his own perspective which is why he is like a magician.

Documentary photographers include: Robert Frank, Dorethea Lange, Cartier Bresson, all documented the great depression in the US in the 1930’s. Wanted to let other people aware of what was happening. People at that time trusted photography what you saw was completely the truth. It depicted reality, photography is considered to be indexical. Photography is a trace/ recording of that event, people began to use photographic images to draw work events to the attention of mass audiences.

Allan Sekula, how documentary could be re appraised of re applied in the late 1970’s. Martha rosier re appraised the status of the documentary genre, they places value against the capacity of photography to bring attention to social injustices, but considered that documentary images should be reference, the conventions through which they are produced the social framework through which they operate, and the mechanisms of knowledge production in relation to which they were produced.

Other artists such as Hito Steyeri choose to focus more closely upon conventions and social codes that infuse documentary. For Steyeri the intentions of the film maker affect the way that production of the film can compromise the truthfulness.

Lesson One Notes

Critical Studies Lesson One: Surveillance and Voyeurism.

Voyeurism: An invasion of privacy, peeping tom, for your own gratification, usually sexual pleasure.

Surveillance: No enjoyment, usually backed up by an institution, in order to stop bad acts or prevent bad acts from happening.

Vito Acconci, following piece 69. Chose a person at random on a street until they went into a building. In order to document how peoples behaviour changes when they realise they are being followed. Perhaps he was just curious and wanted to see into other people’s lives. \Foucault is saying that everyone has a mini Acconci following them all the time.

Thomas Demand camera 07, re-emphasis the construction of reality.

Wee gee, lovers at the movies 1940, (Arthur H.Fellig)

Merry Alpern dirty windows 1994. Looking into a brothel window at people taking drugs and having sex. Effects the way that you see the images.

Denis Beabois in the event of amnesia the city will recall 96-7.

Sophie Calle used her job as a chamber maid in order to go through people’s possessions and photograph them. Under cover, surveillance in a way. By her taking photographs is not panoptic but by us looking at the photographs makes it almost panoptic to us as we become worried that people might look through our stuff. If there were no interesting objects she would leave, she wanted to satisfy her curiosity.

-She follows her own investigative inclinations to enquire into the lives of others.

-Her mode of presentations is detached and factual; the act is still deviant and came from her own surveillance.

-The work parallels the emergence of surveillance culture in the 80’s.

Globalisation Research Task.

Allan Sekula 'Fish Story' 

    I have decided to research into Allan Sekula and his project he entitled 'Fish Story', this originally was displayed as an exhibition using mixed media, such as projected slides, along side framed photographs to display his work. Sekula used this project to explore the geography of the advanced capitalistic world, the key issue in this project is the connection between containerised cargo movement and the constantly growing internationalisation of the world industrial economy, and its effect on the social space of ports themselves. As Sekula had this in mind before he went out to the ports to shoot he structured his work around this idea, he visited and photographed a wide range of ports and harbours in cities including Glasgow, London, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Rotterdam, New York, Los Angeles, Veracruz and San Diego to name a few, he visited these places between 1988-1994. Sekula visited such a wide range of places in order to see how the globalisation was effecting each country individually and also how each country dealt with it differently. 
    Sekula wanted to show us the poverty that occurs in the major port cities across the world and also to see what remains of them in the new globalised economy, he documented the extremes of wealth and poverty that are reflected in the shipping industry as well as the charged role of politics. 
    When globalisation started to take happen it had a direct effect on small businesses such as fishermen etc as they were now less needed within society, the interesting thing about Sekula's 'Fish Story' is that he did not just photograph the ports and harbours he concentrated on the entire city in order to see how other people and businesses might have been affected. Allan Sekula wanted to create this body of work as it is something he feels passionate about, Sekula says that the indelible influence of romanticism has been to impart an idealised perception of harbours, ships and seafarers as suffused with adventure and nascent political rebellion. Where this perspective nowadays in todays society, homogenised by regional and global trade agreements seems to be outdated. Sekula, through his photographs is exposes a degree to which development of industry and trade globally is proceeding at different paces radically. 
    As I mentioned earlier Sekula originally displayed this work in an exhibition but has now been made into a book, containing about 900 colour images taken from around the worlds ports and at its heart is the impact of globalisation on the worlds economy.