3 February 2009

some notes on the art of failure (unedited)

“…I do appreciate the opportunity to talk about my work, because you sort of take a little step back, you look at it differently and, among this group, it definitely had me thinking, ok what is the historical basis for my work? Uh, where does it come from? How does it fit into the photo history? Uh… uh… So you’ll forgive me if I found myself getting a little philosophical about it and, uh, to that end I’m gonna talk a little bit about failure.

“I’m starting with this Talbot slide, uh, partly to claim some procedural ground… uh, paper photography has been probably my real love, even tho I’ve used quite a few different processes, in the last uh… 8 years or so, ten years or so it’s been salt prints and calotype negatives. Uh. But I also use it to illustrate the little paradox that this blurry scrap of pink paper represented to many people – and still represents in some ways – the end of painting and subjective reality and the beginning of a sort of new objective world order. Um, we all know in this room that that’s not quite true and in fact many people do, but you’d be surprised at how many artists and non-artists alike still hold on to this idea that Photography is a reflection of the real world. Um… For me I really believe that it’s only in the way that Photography fails to do that that it gets interesting…

“Um the history as written still holds that photography has been on this trajectory towards greater and greater accuracy. Uh, faster machines, sharper films and plates, more and more pixels… Of course any good Daguerrian will tell you otherwise but um you know it’s still left up to us contrarian Artists to go against that progress and mess around in the past and discover what’s there.

“Um… For me, uh my inspiration comes from this past very specifically but not from the canon of Art History that we know, more from the sidelines, the little anonymous photographs that are dragged along with the tide of history and… um, left on the beach, as it were. Uh, these anonymous photographs to me are uh, poignant reminders of something human. Um they’re.. odd, they’re decayed, they’re lost without name or history… um and they become objects of, uh, a past humanity that we can start to uh connect with in uh, perhaps a little more human way.

“Uh, I found particular inspiration in these images of the children in baptismal dresses, part of that is for, uh, simple graphic reasons. I just loved the shapes that these little dresses made. Um, but part of it was, uh, a simplified sense of that Everyman, Everywoman, Everychild thing, when we find a photograph without a name, uh, that it could be almost anybody. It could be a relative; it could be someone we know; it could be us. Uh, all these little white babies kinda look the same anyways, uh, but something definitely happened when I started collecting the baptismal dresses and realized that some of them were no longer alive. That there was this extra link now not only, uh, between me and whoever it could have been, but between life and death sort of within one type of image.

“Uh, this is really where my work begins. I would try to build a false history of anonymous photography, in a way, by making my own props and photographs, handmade in the studio and in the darkroom, uh, and playing with them so that they had a sense of that nostalgia, that loss… um, and that original time – that they were, uh, perhaps out of time in a way although they were laying bare what was missing or rather what we were projecting onto those old images. Um, and these objects could now begin to take that space, that space of time between us and that original image, that space of nostalgia, that space of loss, and use that as the medium of the work itself. A… a space where I could begin to, uh, put in my own ideas or tell my own stories. Um, you know, a leaden attempt to fly, the strangeness of being a couple – these little pickled punks in a palladium print – um, or, uh, the difficulty of knowing oneself. Um, this is a… gelatin contemporary tintype, printed on top of another one. All this work is… is pretty small. I mean the idea was that your first approach to them would suggest that you were coming across a found object, um, but obviously anybody paying attention would realize that they were made, uh, in contemporary time.

“That shape though, uh, on that last image as well as on here – that blank shape – kind of became the point for a lot of the work. It was the space for the uh, a very specific space for me to prject all those ideas that i had about loss and humanity and time passing. Um…. Another set of blanks…. The missing figure, the missing artist, the missing muse… all became part of the work. Uh but to me the… the idea was to lay bare that what was lost was the art. That that um.. that emptiness that we felt – that gap between us and what we know about a found object was actually the medium of my work, not just Photography.

“Of course none of these old photographs are really blanks. Uh, and the more that I collected them and thought about them as objects that were inspiring me the more I would, uh, look more closely, looking for clues almost, in a way, to… to that history or that sense of history that I was trying to, uh, respond to or reinvent in a way.

“Um, this, another one of the baby dress photos but with… a sort of typical foxing… decay on the paper, started to look like a pattern that you could almost read. I mean there’s, you know, probably a portrait of Abraham Lincoln or something in there if you could connect the right dots. Uh… but s-something again happened in looking at a couple of different images, something between that and this other image from roughly the same time period of a child with smallpox.

“Um, again it it tend to collapse the space between the image and the object, uh, the past and the present, and what we are projecting onto it, in that the… the photograph was the body, that the print could have the same disease as the subject, that somehow that photograph became like human skin. So this is my version, called Boy With Foxing, uh, in Gum Bichromate and acrylic ink. It’s actually th- kind of, uh, ironic that the more I was working with, uh… stains and decays and that kind of thing, these are actually very, super-permanent prints because they were gum bichromates and light-fast inks and that kind of thing.”

it’s very hard hear you when you turn towards the screen

“Ok thanks. I think it bounces off here, so… Thank you

“Um, but this idea that the body shared a language that we could read, the body was the photograph, was something that, uh, I was very invested in for quite a while.

“…a piece called Competing Conditions. This is a, a bleached salt print with watercolor… Uh, embossed Nude, albumen print, with hand embossing… As you can see the object was very important to me, that these photographs, even a thin albumen print still had weight, still had a curl, was still something that could, could be almost considered a vessel for this sort of lost humanity that i was talking about.

“Uh of course there’s something a little ridiculous about this. This is a piece called a, Another Impossible Task. It’s, um, you can tell I wasn’t a Boy Scout. It’s all my really terrible knots, but as if you could – it’s as if you could read them like language. Uh, you know, another – here’s me sort of showing the language that is impossible to read, uh, to begin with.

“And I got really into this idea, that I was making work about the way I was making work that was looking back at the work I was making. Um, and this very bizarre circuitous logic, that here I was looking for- at old photographs for inspiration, making work about old photographs that then I could maybe read to tell me more about the past. Uhm, and that’s kind of a lot of what we end up doing as artists, we end up looking back at ourselves and spinning around (and it becomes navel-gazing if we’re not too careful). Um, this uh, Liar’s Palm, was… you know, some of these were jokes, some of these were, uh, explicitly made to make fun of the very work that I was doing. Uh here’s you know somebody trying to, you know, give himself a better future or better personality by erasing what they saw there.

“Here’s my 19th-Century Bar Code. It’s made with my collection of baby tintypes and a very fine espresso dripped down the wall. (And a waste of a good espresso…) Um, the idea, though, started to become clear that the more we look at something, the more we try to dissect it for language, the more I looked at these old photographs for clues to my future, the more it was a destructive act. Um, taking apart this Rose to look at it petal by petal to better understand it’s shape, tore apart what was beautiful about the rose.

“That, um, sense of decay, uh, and fading as a language, as Time’s own language, really laid bare another part, a third part of of the beautiful failure of photography, um and that was the Artist’s Hand, where the Hand took over. None of these things were, um, perfectly machine-made. They never really are. Um, I think we’re even seeing that more and more through Photoshop and digital processing and… things are st- you know, your hands may not be touching them in the same way, you may be clicking a mouse, but it still becomes more and more a handmade photograph.

“Uh as these pieces faded, that hand would be, uh, laid bare, in a way. This piece, of course, when it was originally made was probably really beautifully, uh, super 3-D and realistic with the nice blue coat and the little pink cheeks, but of course as it fades it starts to look more and more absurd.

“This little child’s eyes were, you know, blacked in to get rid of its own nineteenth-century red-eye to make it seem a little bit more realistic, but as it fades it just sort of looks a little googly-eyed. Here’s a better version of that.

“But there’s something about this, the handwork is, is really important to me. Um, I think it’s important to all of us who use these processes. it’s probably part of what draws a lot of us to them, that we get our hands in there. It’s still Photographs, but our our handwork is involved and in fact, really important.

“For me the idea that there’s a reality to this child, uh, in front of the camera, is suspect already, uh, but I have a greater sense of somebody having been there by the little correction made. You know, this piece was probably printed backwards, originally, the ‘y’ would be on the left, but they’ve fixed it by putting a little ‘y’ on the right and now you can read it. That – I know somebody did that. I can see the ink on the – on that print. That photograph now becomes a much more physical object, much more poignant, of somebody trying to correct this picture of their lost child.

“Um, it’s this handwork that has really become a big part of what I concentrate on, uh and try to honor as well. This is a a 4×5 calotype with, um, silver nitrate, ink and pencil.

“The idea that, um, a 19th-Century photographer would try to make a perfect illusion and then, you know, fix what Photography couldn’t do by hand is something that really inspires me. Uh, this is a piece called Message in a Bottle and the inspiration is something that, you know, imagining that a 19th-century photographer making this and, oh, you you’d never notice the hand or the string. You know, oh it doesn’t really matter. I mean it’s the same thing when you look at a Spirit Photograph. You know at the time this was this great proof of the Other World, um, but now of course all we see is the, uh… Magician behind the curtain. And not a very good one at that.

“Um, the idea of the handwork laying bare the Magician is also very important to me. Uh, these bad Magic Tricks, like this Floating Cloth like this Exterior View, um with some of this work – this is from about, um… ’95 – I would set up the set, this sort of fakery, shooting, um, just gelatin glass negatives and making albumen prints, in this crappy little studio I had in Florida. Um, but once I’d set it up I’d end up just letting the sets fall apart. I’d take the camera and give it a kick. I’d pull it away. I’d wreck what I’d sort of carefully set up in order to kind of lay bare the idea that this was sort of all fake and that it has always been all fake.

“Um, back to that sort of ridiculousness of what I do as an artist and in fact what many of us do: Here’s my attempt to make, uh, two identical flowers. One is a plastic flower I bought at Wal-Mart, probably, and the other is, uh, an attempt to make an identical flower out of studio detritus – it’s scraps of paper, old prints… things like that. Here’s a fake version of a stereo photograph. Trying to make to identical piles of plastic fruit… Um, again the idea of what Photography couldn’t do at its inception became very important to me. So here’s an- what I- a piece I call Assembled Still Life. Each element was shot separately with small calotype negatives and then assembled with wax.

“The calotype really became something very important to me because it was so close to the birth of Photography, and because it is, sort of, baby steps away from drawing. They look like drawings. They invited me to get my own handwork in and draw there. This piece I call First Photograph of the, you know, glorious ray of sun is fake; it’s pencil.

“It was a way to show the the missing model or the present ghost... to show a dream work. This is a salt print made from a calotype negative. That figure is drawn onto the negative and then the print is made from that combination. Nightmares as well… Again, calotype negative on the left with pencil drawing and then a salt print on the right.

“It’s the idea that drawing and handwork and the irrational complete what Photography can’t quite capture. Um, it’s working with the limits of 19th-Century Photography, of the early techniques, uh, to lay bare the desires and the wishes of the artist as well.

"…same process: calotype negative on the left with, uh, hand drawing, so I’m drawing in negative and then making the print from that. For me this was, in a way, thinking about the handwork showing something that I, that you wouldn’t photograph. You wouldn’t photograph a noose – it would almost be too garish an image. But something about drawing allows you a greater leeway with a- an irrational idea. Something a little scary, something a little different.

"A piece I call Forever and Never for obvious reasons. Um, I think that the- the i-idea that the… purpose of Photography, um, was to show the world sort of more clearly more objectively – at least that was its initial stated purpose – is false is something that we’d kind of come to expect. But you’d be surprised at how many peple really hold onto this idea. Um, for me, uh, it’s again the way that this fails that makes all photography interesting, and always has made it interesting. That, um… capturing of time that photography was supposed to do – of course it’s a, you know, very short bit of time, sometimes just a fraction of a second – and yet we call that the ‘Decisive Moment’. The… view of the world it shows is a very tiny narrow window but we call it ‘Composition’. It’s in how it fails to capture reality that makes any Photograph good.

"I know that in many ways I’m I’m preaching to the converted, here, uh, but the accidents and failures and limits of Photography are what I say to embrace. Put the accidents on the wall, um, celebrate all the mistakes, pick up the junk and garbage and that’s part of your artwork. This is a piece I did just that with. As I was teaching myself calotype negatives I saved all the bits and pieces that didn’t quite work, uh, and then arranged them according to color. This is a piece I call Failure Spectrum.

"Um… I guess that, uh, the idea for my work is… I’ve often said, actually – I like that you called it 21st-Century Photography ‘cause I’ve always played with that idea, the uh, trying to chase a forever- constantly-changing future is is pretty futile. I mean these processes, like, uh, glass-plate negative had a very long time, very long run and for good reason and it’s been brought back for a good reason, but that printer you bought last year is crap. The more that we work in that growing space, the more we become 21st-century Artists. It’s in that space, as it increases, that we only gain more and more power. It’s if we try to stay up with some new and increasing technology, that we actually date ourselves to something that- a moment that’s already past. It’s in, um, not reconstructing the past but celebrating the loss of time – celebrating what we lose, what we forget and how we forget – that’s what’ll make us, uh, 21st-Century Artists.

"Thanks very much."

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