Death & Destruction - Sarah Charlesworth

Sarah Charlesworth was born in 1947 in East Orange, New Jersey. She went to Barnard College where she received her BA and lived and worked in New York City. She died in 2013 of a brain aneurysm.

Charlesworth is a conceptual artist who looked at the photograph and "it's ability to deconstruct our shared symbols and public images in ways that articulate and question the values and beliefs of our culture." (artspace.com). Her website is clean and crisp. The home page was minimal, alongside an image from her Natural Magic series, only contacts for her estate and gallery business inquiries were available. The menu tabs were categorized with a section for each relevant topic.The website did not have an artist statement, so I took it upon myself to do extra research to understand her work and her life.

I was thoroughly impressed with the amount of work that was displayed, all of her works clearly organised. Each was broken up by years of the body of work, but also had the option of looking at everything at once. Some of her works had a shot text "about" the piece. I feel conceptual art is at times hard to grasp, so having a starting point is helpful in looking at and dissecting the work. My only issue was that not all of her bodies of work had an "about" text and half of the bodies that did, didn't have functioning text. Instead I was stuck with an unloaded image icon where the text should be.

The video explaining the story behind The Jumping Man, was the most relevant to that specific image.This work relates closely to that of the iconic 9/11 image of The Jumping Man. Unlike the images from Stills, the outcome and intention of the jumper is very well known. This type of image is iconic in the fact that as stated by the artists "it was the only photo that showed the death of our people that day". The image was quite, but powerful. Though it showed no gore, it became infamous. The Jumping Man is also a very relatable image because the viewer can put themselves in the situation and see that as a potential choice and rationalization behind the decision given the circumstances. The images from Stills are less static in the motions of the jumper, but they still convey a similar image without the backstory. They show a defining moment.

Charlesworth is most known for her Modern History which consists of enlarged images of newspapers with everything but the images and headlines removed. This work is still relevant to today in regards to how we as viewers, and the media itself ,documents and remembers war/crime/and headlines, but few details.

Questions: How do you feel the media portrays war/death/destruction news in the contemporary/present day?

Phantasm - Olafur Eliasson

Olafur Eliasson is an Icelandic-Norwegian artist. His work began as photography, using images as a way to survey the landscape of Iceland through a series of multi-image pieces. Each one was a collection of almost repetitive images. These started in 1998 and continued on well into the late 2010’s. I found while researching Eliasson that his early works, his photographs served as a base for his interests and, as his work evolved, he stepped out of the realm of photography and moved onto site specific installation.

One of his more famous work was from 2003 at the Tate modern. He went through the process of creating the sun in a way that could be tangible to the viewers. He did this by integrating fog into the space. That way more senses were being used to interpret the installation. I think that this work is very successful and helped me understand the vision that Eliasson is trying to achieve in his works.

When Eliasson works he considers the viewer. In his TED talk, he spoke of the responsibility of both the viewers and the artist to communiate. He talks about how we see the work, and what we do after we are immersed in the work. This consideration is apparent in political and ecological issues.

At the Climate Conference of 2015 he imported pieces of glacial ice from Greenland in front of the Pantheon in Greece. Here he is forcing the public, not just the people of the conference to face the realities of our actions as a society. Eliasson is shoving global warming in the faces of the participants in a very concrete way. However, the work still had a visual appeal that wasn’t overly unsettling. I enjoy his work because while it does envelop the public space, it’s in a subtle and gradual way, so as to help illustrate the consequences of the actions we take. 

Another example would be his work pouring non-toxic green dye in the of Rivers in major cities: L.A., Tokyo, London, and Amsterdam. He talks about how as the river flow,s the dye starts to work it’s way through the city and cover more of the river. Again, I feel his ideas circle back on his idea of public responsibility that we have as humans, as well as the definite scientific aspect underlying his work. He works in tandem with scientists to create eologically responsible pieces.

While Eliasson's work often frequents the public space, other work occupies the more formal spaces of museums and galleries. Those works often play more with the fantastical and magic of light play. One of my favorites is titled Your Unpredictable Path (2016). This is a series of colored and/or reflective orbs placed on a black wall. The seemingly random position of the orbs is meant to imitate the cosmos and outer space phenomenons. By incorporating the reflective orbs that also invert the space reflects the viewers' images back in distorted mirror.

Ideas/ Phantasm/Narrative - Alec Soth

Alec Soth
Photographer/Narrator
Rebeka Schmieder 

Alec Soth is a photographic storyteller. His work focuses on the human condition and specifically, American culture. Soth is a Magnum photographer, using his skills as a photojournalist and artist creates  books. When working on book projects, he collaborates with writers to give a text narrative to accompany the photographs. He has published over 25 photograpic artists' books in his career. In addition, has had more than 50 solo-exhibitions in his hometown, Minnesota and internationally, including Paris and London. In 2013 he earned Guggenheim Fellowship. Soth most recently created a multi-media enterprise, Little Brown Mushroom, focused on visual story telling. 

Front Cover of Songbook 

Songbook is Soth's most recent artist book. It is a collection of photographs that he has taken over the years working for news magazines. In this iteration, however, he has given these images a new meaning. For the first time, Soth did not provide text to go along with the images with the intention of  testing the photo's functionality without text to explain them. Instead, he forces the viewer to imagine the story. The viewer becomes the story teller, but he has provided the images and sequence. In other words, he has provided the basis for a great story, or many stories.

These photos have a rhythm built into the sequential pattern of the book. Some have a musical overturn to it. This is why he says he sees this book as a melodic play. This book is wide open for interpretation and can have multiple meanings depending on the viewer. Each photo is intimate and accentuates the personality of the person portrayed. 

Soth sees photography as a medium of separation. He wants to bridge that gap, but also maintain the medium as a separation from photograph and viewer.

Event Review - Joseph Mougel - Artist Now! Talk

Artists Now! Guest Lecture Series: Joseph Mougel

February 15 @ 7:30 pm - 9:00 pm

By Rebeka Schmieder

Joseph Mougel is a videographer, photographer, sculptor and performative artist. All of these techniques have been methodically used in his projects. His work explores specific places and experiencing the place in its entirety. 

Mougel generously introduced us to his early work and the artists who have influenced him. All  artists are all influenced by other people, events, politics, etc. In most artist talks I have attended, the speaker failed to include influences which helped them create their work. Inspiration is part of the creative process for artists and research is important. Students need to be aware of other artists who tackle a subject, concept, or esthetic that relates to their own developing work.

Mougel's experience as a marine influenced his early work. Rabbit to Bee questions how he came to this place and his travels influencing the man he is today. He photographs himself doing different actions. While photos themselves have an empty feeling, I see them being a small moment in Mougel's life that he is capturing. Although these scenes are choreographed, Mougel still wants the viewer to perceive the images as discrete moments, he wants the viewer to literally stare at them and witness the scene. 

Cowboy

Mougel continues to use his history as a marine in his series Blanc. This series revisits the time in a person's life when they transform into a new recruit for the military. The idea of unification of individuals is the process when someone joined the armed services. What I found beautiful was, as Mougel states, "Even though these figures are fully covered in paint and camouflaged into the background, you couldn't fully erase the identity of the person behind the paint." This notion contradicts what the government's desire to transform individuals into a unified being. No one person can be blended into being the same as another.

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In my own work, I have started to realize that my interest in landscapes and documentary work is purely based on the discovery and documentation, but there is this underlying theme. I need to show the identity that a body of people give a place. Whether this is a town or a vast landscape, I want to  identify the uniqueness of a land has and how it came to be. The human footprint is what I am interested in. In his work, Mougel explores/discovers, how a place came to be. He settles on a place and studies the landscape in depth rather than photographing it and moving on. This is why he documents his process with different media. Perhaps his influence can help me shape and strengthen my work through examination of one landscape at a time. 

Death/Destruction - Journalism/Fine Art - Mark Neville

Mark Neville
by Rebeka Schmieder
Mark Neville is a photojournalist located in London. His work is exclusive and changing the dynamics of documentary photography. He explores the social functions of photography by shifting the focus of the elite art audience to the lower class audience. Neville has found comfort with making work for the communities he documents. He creates these beautiful photographs and makes a coffee table photo book to disperse amongst the communities. He is more interested in empowering the subject rather than the director or photographer. 

Neville's work is concentrated on working class communities. His series The Port Glasgow Project  shows the life of a once thriving shipbuilding city and now is an industrial and economic decline. After he documented Glasgow, he put them into a book to disperse throughout the city. In an interview, he stated that this book had mixed reviews amongst the public. 

"The most extreme reaction I had was, all the protestant residence in one particular street got together and had a meeting and took their copies of the book and dumped them in the back of  a catholic pub and set fire to them"  

-Mark Neville 

Betty ( Port Glasgow Town Hall Xmas Party), Mark Neville, 2005

Sports Personality of the Year Award, Mark Neville, 2005

When Neville gives out his books to ten thousand people rather than selling the book in a store, the reactions are more genuine and dramatic. The reason for the outburst from the protestant residence was because they thought the book had too many catholic pubs pictures and not enough protestant pubs. It's reactions like this that make documentary photojournalism work so fragile and complicated. But it can also make the work photojournalist do special because you get reactions that are heartfelt as well. 

He most recently published his book Fancy Pictures which is a collective from all of his past works put into one book for publication. This made him reflect on his work in a new light because of a public production of it all. 

Neville is an inspirational photojournalist who produces masterful photos. I think what is refreshing about his work is that he doesn't do it for the sales. He also is not for the fame of his name. I think as photojournalist we have to have this mentality because this style of photography can impact many people. Taking away our personal feelings and biases and creating work for the viewers is more important. 

http://www.markneville.com