Wednesday, April 15, 2015
Response to David Campany
The issue of capturing the aftermath in Campany's essay was the most thought provoking for me, in contemporary experiential, performance, and body art the aftermath and photography play a key role in developing the art object. Campany states that capturing the aftermath of an event is exhibiting the trace of the trace of an event, this statement serves to distance the viewer of the photograph by three layers from the actual event but what about events that exist in the viewing of a photograph? In Argentina in the 1960's conceptual artist Alan Kaprow began a series of experiential performances called "Happenings" where people would come together in a space and participate in a piece for only one night, the happening was never to be repeated as a means of dematerializing the art object and emphasizing the impermanence of the event. One particular Happening called "Happening for a Dead Boar" from 1966 is particularly reliant on photography's ability to convey the aftermath. Photographs were circulated through print media around Buenos Aires advertising a Happening that never existed. The photographs were staged but the people reading about the event believed that it actually took place, they were under the impression that they were experiencing the aftermath of an event but in reality they were the event. The circulation of photographs from a Happening would normally be the secondary documentation but because there was no primary event the Happening exists in the circulation. In relation to Campany's essay "Happening for a Dead Boar" serves to undo some of his focus on the role of late photography because photography has the power to alternate perceptions of what the "event" is and when it took place. Rather than looking at Meyerowitz's photographs as the aftermath of 9/11, we can view them as the event of the clean up or the event of the search for missing persons in the rubble. Perspective changes the role of photography and what it is capturing.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
I agree with you, with what you said about how perspective changes the roll of what photography is capturing. As individual humans, we often just want a fixed meaning for something visual so that we can understand what it is, so that we can understand what we are seeing. Throughout our class we have been looking at images within the framework of social and political history, as well as the history of previous photography practices and genres. This has changed the way I see and understand images, and I wonder how differently I would respond to some of the images we've seen in class without knowing any background information. For the Meyerowitz photos, though, I think I would still see them as aftermath photos, just because there is so much destruction implied yet so much stillness.
Paige--a interesting comparison between late photography and experimental, performance, and body art. In light of your discussion, I agree most with your last statement that "perspective changes the role of photography and what it is capturing." The "late" perspective of for example, Meyerowitz, completely changes the role of photography in relation to other media. Instead of capturing an action (which a video can easily do), he freezes a scene that is already static. When "aftermath" photographs are placed in an art (rather than journalistic) context, the prior event being photographed is also swallowed by this new category. When an photographer sells an image of the rubble after 9.11, what is he actually selling? An aestheticized/sublime shot of an ash-covered and crumbling landscape? Or a collective memory of the prior event he traced, now also aestheticized by association? Is this, as Campany suggests, truly problematic? Or can we continue to ignore the political conversation that Campany believes important photography (or other media) fosters?
What I particularly liked in your post was the idea of the 'performance' art happening only to never be replicated or recorded the actual event itself. All that was seen were the photographs that displayed the aftermath. This allowed me to beg the infamous question, if we didn't see it happen, did it actually happen? The pseudo-if a tree falls in a forest, but no one's around to hear it, did it actually make a sound? We rely so much on pictures and documentation to justify our own realities that we have become obsessed with the phases in which a photograph can take place. Bursts of photos showing before, during, and after allow us to visualize every single second of anything that has ever happened. But why don't we just watch it for ourselves? People joke about parents so busy taking videos on their iPads of their children's events that they don't stop to see it themselves, but that reality is all too true. Now, we have become obsessed with this idea of the aftermath, but what obsession with come next begs a serious question.
-Morgan Kirol
Post a Comment