Swedish neo-nazi art terrorists attack Serrano photographs

Apparently, everyone's a critic - even neo-nazi thugs.

I should really credit Luis Gottardi as a Musings Correspondent. I just received an email from him about an NY Times article which describes an attack on an exhibition in sleepy Swedish University town of Lund.

It sounds for all the world like a piece of dramatic performance art though apparently - and sadly - it isn't.

Masked attackers ran the a gallery displaying and exhibit called "The History of Sex" by Andres Serrano (of "Piss Christ" frame) with crowbars and axes attacking and smashing the photographs while shouting things like "this is art? and "we don't agree with this crap", finally, leaving leaflets entitled “Against decadence and for a healthier culture.” They later posted video of the attack on youtube.

A grainy video of four masked vandals running through an art gallery in Sweden, smashing sexually explicit photographs with crowbars and axes to the strain of thundering death-metal music, was posted on YouTube Friday night.

This was no joke or acting stunt. It was what actually happened on a quiet Friday afternoon in Lund, a small university town in southern Sweden where “The History of Sex,” an exhibition of photographs by the New York artist Andres Serrano, had opened two weeks earlier.

Around 3:30, half an hour before closing, four vandals wearing black masks stormed into a space known as the Kulturen Gallery while shouting in Swedish, “We don’t support this,” plus an expletive. They pushed visitors aside, entered a darkened room where some of the photographs were displayed and began smashing the glass protecting the photographs and then hacking away at the prints. more .

Mind you, I know a good few photographers who seem to hold the same views on art as the attackers...

Chris Jordan on The Colbert Report

I've mentioned Chris Jordan's work a few times - especially his new/current massive photographic constructions.

Anyway, for those in N. America Chris just let me know that on October 10th he is supposed to be a guest on the satirical news show The Colbert Report with Stephen Colbert, all other things being equal (the same show that brought us such appropriate new words as "truthiness" and "wikiality" ) .

Now, I'm not a regular viewer of the Report - I just catch it every now and then - but I think this may be the first time they have had a photographer on as a guest - especially an "art photographer". Either way, I think Chris is pretty much expecting to get his ass whooped... especially as what he does is pretty much "un-american". So it should be fun - or at least cringe-making :-)

UPDATE - I don't know if I got the dates wrong or Chris was bumped for Wes Clarke, but it now looks like he's on Thursday the 11th

Happy Thanksgiving

Yes, it's Thanksgiving Weekend in Canada and Monday is a holiday.

Thanksgiving here is a combination of old English/Anglo Saxon Harvest Festival and American Thanksgiving. Which is why you'll find old pre-Christian Horns of Plenty and corn dollies alongside churches full of wheat sheaves, along with borrowing from our neighbours from the south - so there are usually pumpkins and turkey and cranberries and sweet potato (and I did see some Pilgrim Father's stuff in Walmart a year or two ago - which was just plain weird - but then their "wet floor" signs are in english and spanish not english and french so it's not surprising).

So, I hope you can be thankful for something wherever you are this weekend.

(Pictures from The Gallery of Regrettable Food)

Errol goes to the Crimea - Fenton Pt.II

(Photograph by Eric Zimmerman)

I mentioned Errol Morris's article on the two Roger Fenton photographs (the disappearing cannonballs) last week.

Morris has now put up part two wherein he travels to the Crimea to seek out the Valley of the Shadow of Death and Fenton's tripod holes lugging around Russian cannonballs. And I love his idea of the young Artillery Lieutenant Tolstoy leaving his fingerprints on the cannonballs that landed at Fenton's feet.

There is also a nice little bit on Fenton's "style":

"RICHARD PARE: Fenton always had a taste for the abstract and the geometrically formal in image making. There’s this strange collapsing of perspective that he gets because of the footpath that’s trodden into the left hand side of the road that connects up in the further distance to the main track as it disappears over the horizon. They have a parallel width that causes the thing to flip-flop in a way, visually condenses it into a kind of uneasy restlessness. He was very satisfied with the two pictures he made – in getting two negatives – and left it at that. The way it fits into the whole of his output is interesting."



An interesting and fun, if extensive, read (hopefully it won't reach 800+ comments to scroll through this time...)

"Olga led us first to the Woronzoff Ravine, marked on contemporary maps as lying to the east of the Valley of the Shadow of Death. I was adamant. “No, no! This is the Woronzoff Ravine. This is not the Valley of the Shadow of Death.” There is always difficulty when you try to tell local guides their business, but we retraced our steps back to Sebastopol and took a different road, which took us up to a ridge to the west of the Woronzoff Ravine. At last we were able to look down into the Valley of the Shadow of Death.

Miraculously, the area is still undeveloped. You can still see the remnants of trenches on the hill facing the Great Redan. The old Chapman Batteries. The cannonballs are gone but the ground is littered with very tiny snail shells on what is called Shell Hill in many accounts from the Crimean War. I don’t know why, but the snails made me feel connected to history...

Olga seemed amused. I am not a great believer in certainty, but I am pretty certain the Duke of Edinburgh never asked to go to the Panorama Museum to borrow a Crimean War cannonball...

...After some confusion, we were brought upstairs to meet the curator and some of the staff. (I told them I’d won an Oscar.) After a desultory conversation – as desultory as a conversation can be when none of the parties understand each other or have a clear idea of what is going on – I asked for a cannonball. There were additional translation difficulties. I remember Olga gesticulating wildly.

Successful, we returned to the Valley of the Shadow of Death with one cannonball and took various pictures.

(pictures by Bob Chappell.)

...“The demon is cruel and firm,” “he acquires a strange nimbleness…a new and baneful power,” “a tiger intent on the throat of a camel.” The soulless, inanimate world of the iron cannonball comes alive. Literally with a vengeance. Not only does the cannonball have intent – it plans, it connives… it is hopelessly devious, maybe even deviant.

Photographs are no different. We look at them. They are nothing more than silver halide crystals arranged on paper or with digital photography, nothing more than a concatenation of 1’s and 0’s resident on a hard-drive. Yet we believe they have captured something of our essence – something of the stuff that is in our heads.

I, too, look at the two Fenton photographs and try to imagine what Fenton’s intentions might have been. It’s unavoidable. We have been programmed to do so by natural selection – to project ourselves into the world – and to imagine his world as we imagine ours. I try to figure out which photograph was taken first and to develop theories about Fenton’s motivations, but these are just theories, nothing more."

But Pt.III (and presumably the film?) to come soon

Photoeye and Amazon

Interesting news - the excellent photography bookshop Photoeye has now affiliated/integrated with Amazon see here

Hopefully this is a good thing?

Paul Muldoon

I enjoy modern (i.e. contemporary) poetry, but I don't exactly "follow" it. So it wasn't a suprise when I read that Paul Muldoon had been appointed poetry editor of the New Yorker and I realised I' d never heard of him.

So more fool me - because his poetry is great stuff!

Muldoon is a Northern Irishman like his senior elder statesman Seamus Heaney (whose poetry I enjoy immensely). He has been Professor of Poetry at Oxford and more latterly Professor of the Humanities and Creative Writing at Princeton University.

I got a couple of his books out of the library - the Pulitzer Prize winning Moy Sand & Gravel and the more recent Horse Latitudes. The poems are great fun, challenging, harsh and beautiful (though it helps to reads them with that hard/soft Armagh accent in your mind as well).




I'll be interested to see how it effects to poetry at the New Yorker - this article on Muldoon makes mention of "is there really such a thing as a New Yorker poem" -In 1990, Muldoon published a mischievous poem called Capercaillies (in Madoc: A Mystery), in which the first letters of each line spelt out, in acrostic, Is This a New Yorker Poem Or What? (The New Yorker maintains that it rejected the poem.) But is there really such a thing as a "New Yorker poem"? - and I think there is - unfortuantely often somewhat insipid, although with some notable exceptions.

The myth goes (recounted in another useful article) that "The first meeting between Seamus Heaney and the 17-year-old Paul Muldoon has bred a number of apocryphal tales. Muldoon was said to have sent some poems to Heaney, asking, "What's wrong with these?", to which the future Nobel Laureate apparently replied, "Nothing". In another account, Heaney is alleged to have said: "Muldoon has nothing to learn from me; I may have something to learn from him." "

There's also a NY Times article here.



Pineapples and Pomegranates
Paul Muldoon

In Memory of Yehuda Amichai


To think that, as a boy of thirteen, I would grapple
with my first pineapple,
its exposed breast
setting itself as another test
of my will-power, knowing in my bones
that it stood for something other than itself alone
while having absolutely no sense
of its being a world-wide symbol of munificence.
Munificence - right? Not munitions, if you understand
where I'm coming from. As if the open hand
might, for once, put paid
to the hand-grenade
in one corner of the planet.
I'm talking about pineapples - right? - not pomegranates.


-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-


One Last Draw of the Pipe


Heard a piece of Roscommon folklore the other night. At some village or other, they lay pipes full of tobacco on the graves of the new buried in case they may like a draw of the pipe. A wild American indian kind of buisness [sic] it seems.
--A letter from W. B. Yeats to Douglas Hyde, October 1889


Even though it happened as long ago as the late fifties, I could still draw
you a picture of the place. A little draw

through which we were helping a neighbor draw
green hay when we would suddenly draw

level with a freshly dug hole. He must have been torn between one last
draw

of the pipe and hurriedly trying to draw

a veil of thatch and pine boughs over the hole before having to withdraw,
that ghost who may even now draw

a bead on me. On the day Sitting Bull was shot, his old trick pony (once
such a draw

in Buffalo Bill's circus because he was given to dance

attendance
when he heard a volley of shots) would automatically draw

himself up and raise one hoof.
Even now I hear it coming down. I hear it coming down on my yew-bough
roof.




(photo: Eamonn McCabe)

Administrative Typologies Pt.II - Paul Shambroom

This was going to be my original post on this topic - the work of Paul Shambroom in his Meetings series.

Much of what I said yesterday also applies to these. To look at them on a gallery wall (or in Paul's book) I would find myself going back and forth between pictures, comparing settings and faces and little incidentals.

Paul also makes good use of captions with this work; in this case often the minutes of the meeting (such as for the picture above):

(Sedgwick, Arkansas (population 112) City Council, May 13, 2002 (L to R): Wilma Britton (Recorder/Treasurer), Stanley Debow, Frankie Britton (Mayor), Clara Manus (citizen), Beverly Fowler, Ezra Pierce (city policeman), Homer Harper, Charles Petty, Tommie Pierce (citizen))

Sedgwick City Council Meeting May 13-02

Meeting was called to order at 7:00 P.M

Present Mayor Bud Britton, Rec. Treas. Wilma Britton, Councilmen Present Beverley Fowler, Stanley Debaw, Charles Petty, Homer Harper, absent Blake Burvis. Visitors Edd Pierce, Tommie Pierce, Claire Manus, Tammy Wielier, Jeff Moskop, Paul Shambroom was there taking pictures of the meeting.

Minutes of last month meeting was read and financial report given. Motion to accept by Stanley Debaw, second by Homer Harper. All Councilmen voted yea.

Bud said he would check with Atlas to why they are not starting work on the street. If they can't start on it he will give job to A-State if they can start on it. Talked about Walk was not sure where to put it.

Meeting adjourned at 7:45 P.M.

Mayor
Rec Treas. Wilma Britton

I would guess that for many, sitting through seemingly endless small meetings such as these - town council, school board, parish council or whatever is a common experience - either as participants or audience. In part, it's certainly mine, and when the meetings do begin to drag, the mind wanders and focuses on small, odd details: "huh, I never noticed in that photo of the old mayor on the wall one side of his moustache is longer than the other"; "what was Mrs. Lukowski thinking wearing that lime green striped dress"; "hmm, the police chief could do with losing some weight"; "I just noticed the roof joists aren't straight"....

This work highlights the small - often quirky - sometimes humorous - differences between these seemingly similar scenes and events.

These are also pictures where making them big makes sense to my mind. They were photographed using panoramic medium format and then printed nice and large - 5 1/2 feet or so.

BTW, Paul also has some other interesting work on his site. His Security series and Nuclear Weapons series are worth looking at.

(1987 Toyota Celica, 500 lbs ANFO explosive. (Energetic Materials Research and Testing Center (EMRTC), New Mexico Tech, Socorro, NM))

Administrative Typologies - Jan Banning

Pt I. in a two part series (I was just going to do the one post tomorrow, and then I serendipitously came across these today via woods_s_lot).

While it's very easy to step over the line into monotonous repetition with the "typologies" approach to photography (something you could never accuse August Sander of), especially in it's more contemporary grid form, one thing I like about them when I work is what I call "the comparison game"

I found myself playing with Jan Banning's bureaucracy photographs - The Office. Even with the online version I find myself going back and froth between them. If they were in, say, linear form at an exhibition I would no doubt be scuttling back and forth along the wall looking from one to another.

I like getting drawn into the details - the differing facial expression between people behind similar desks in different countries (or vice versa). Or comparing what one has on his bookshelves with another, or what pictures they have on their wall, or drawn to the similar endless piles of papers in different photographs.

And even though for most of us living in N. America or Europe there's something of a slightly "exotic" tinge to most of these, that's more than overridden by the shared experience of bureaucracy and shuffling paperwork.

"Bureaucracy is an everyday form of state power with which citizens are confronted everywhere. Jan Banning has done portraits of bureaucrats at all levels, from village clerks to governors. Although the bureaucrats pose, their desk is the real subject. That is the permanent expression of their status and power. The person behind it is interchangeable, during his working hours assuming the role of immigration officer or revenue agent. That is emphasized by the pose in which he is photographed: as an actor playing himself. THE OFFICE (India/Indonesia, 2004-2006) is a work in progress, eventually to include bureaucrats in ten countries. The series on Bihar, a state in the world's largest democracy, India, is completed; the series on Indonesia has just begun."

I also like Bannig's use of extended captions with these images as well, such as: "Rp Yadav (born 7-8-1970), trained as history teacher, since 3-1-2002 he is sub-inspector of police in Maner Block (125.000 people), Patna district, Bihar. "I would rather have become a history teacher. But look at the unemployment here: I am happy to have a job." Yadav is in charge of 14 policemen. His salary: 10.000 rupees (200 euro) a month. He also has an official residence and car. behind him a plaque with his predecessors' names, to the right the local crime statistics since 1992." (below)

"The loo roll that says I love you"

I posted a while back on Stephen Gill's work and his new books.

One other book on the lists of his I had seen is Anonymous Origami, but I hadn't paid too much attention to it (I've never been terribly enamoured of the whole origami thing).

But the other day I came across this from the Guardian - and apparently it's photographs of those fancy folded little ends to the loo (toilet) roll you get in hotels.

Now, part of me thinks that's a brilliant idea and part of me is going "no way am I buying a photo book about bog paper"...

In the hands of your cookie cutter MFA (post) conceptual artists, this might easily have become deadly, but in the end, although Gill may still not quite have hooked me, the idea still makes me smile:

I was sitting on a hotel toilet one day when I noticed that the corners of the toilet roll had been carefully folded to make a neat, symmetrical point. I realised that it wasn't the first time I had seen this. I'd found toilet paper meticulously folded in hotels and B&Bs the world over, as if to some international standard.

It was a depressing thought. All over the planet, there must be thousands of people - chambermaids and cleaners, I imagine - folding toilet paper for guests. But it also struck me as a remarkable detail: a finishing touch, like a sprig of herbs on a dish, or a cherry on top of a cake...

Over the next three years, I carefully ripped off and collected the folded papers I found in all the hotels I stayed in, from Spain to Canada, New York City to Japan, Britain to Romania. I'd place them between the pages of a book (taking care to preserve the folded edge), carry them back to my London studio and keep them in a box. Then I laid them out on a sheet of dark-grey card, and took photographs, using the same camera and light source each time. Each picture is almost exactly the same, but that very uniformity seems to emphasise the subtle differences between them...

I hope some people will find them interesting, even funny. Others may just see folded bits of toilet roll. But I look at them and see the people sat there in hotel rooms around the world, folding the thin paper into shapes, creating symbols of love, even if no love was actually there... more

Colour Field Polaroids

I came across this work last week (via I'm not sure which blog on my feed...?) by Grant Hamilton.

Now I'm not sure I'd buy a book of 142 of them or something, but nevertheless I must say that I really quite like them - sort of colour field polaroids - especially the first 20 or so..

I also feel they are something at least a little bit more than "just" graphic art or abstract photographs

UPDATE: There's also a fun piece in jpgmag here (thanks Laura)

two neat pictures

First from Chris Jordan who I've mentioned before. Not all of his new work turns my crank, but this one is pretty neat (go here for a slightly bigger view).

Partial zoom:

Detail at actual size:

Jet Trails 2007 Depicts 11,000 jet trails, equal to the number of commercial flights in the US every eight hours.

There's also an interview with Chris on PBS here

And sticking with the airliner theme the second picture is from the Guardian - Engineer's Concorde prototypes - part of an auction of all sorts of design bits and pieces and sapre parts from Concorde up for auction in Toulouse if you want to go and bid...:

Concorde, that most charismatic of all civil airliners, always did look like a paper plane. Not just any old school playground paper dart, of course, but the most beautifully thought out and most aerodynamic aircraft possible, folded by the hands of brilliant, if still unsung, backbench aero-engineers.

Now we learn that Concorde engineers really did make paper aircraft at their drawing boards and workbenches, testing these outside the former British Aircraft Corporation workshops near Bristol during their lunch hours. Made of any scrap of paper or card available, these primitive, hand-propelled Concordes did their bit in the design process of the most famous, and dynamic, airliner of all.

Hans Palmboom

Hans Palmboom (I'm not even sure if that's his actual name... he just posts as Hans) recently posted a few pictures from Japan on the street photo list - who can be a bit a tough audience sometimes.

Anyway, there were two or three of those Japan photos that really caught my eye, and I also tracked back from there to Hans' website where there is a wide selection of other work.

I rather like Zeeslag/Strand.

Other than that, about all I know about him is that he is based in the Netherlands

Which Came First, the Chicken or the Egg? (or flogging Lord Cardigan's horse to death)

I came across this piece from the NY Times about Roger Fenton's two photographs of the "Valley of the Shadow of Death" in the Crimea and took a quick look at it the other day and thought it seemed pretty interesting (especially as my old Grammar School history teacher had used the same two photographs during lessons long before Mark Hawarth-Booth seems to have ever noticed them).

Indeed, the piece starts off pretty well, having a good dig at Sontag (who seems to especially deserve it in this case) and sets out some thought provoking ideas and issues about trust, fact, truth, staging and so on in photography. But then, when I took time to read the whole thing - oh my - does it ever drag on... and on... and on.

Fenton's picture (well, both of them) are ones I have always thought of as impressive and well worth time spent considering them, so read the articel for what it's worth (for the record, I think the cannonballs on the road picture came first, and the cleared road came second - which picture I have always thought is the stronger. I also don't believe it matters which order they were taken in, nor does it matter in the least if he lugged the things around himself to make a "better" picture. ). I also feel that a quick trip - à la David Hockney and his mirror/lenses/painting thing - to some NASA or CIA expert on Photogrammetry would probably solve the issue in a couple of hours.

So, instead of a long winded post on this Fenton issue (and there is a good succinct one here anyway), I'm going to post some cool photos I came across on streetphoto - coming soon (in a couple of hours or so)

Novels about photographers - Coming Through Slaughter

When the English Patient first came out (the book, not the movie), I went on something of a Michael Ondaatje bender, reading all his other books I could lay my hands on.

As much as I like the later Anil's Ghost, his two best novel are earlier ones - In the Skin of a Lion (which has inspired photographer Geoffrey James with it's descriptions of the city) and Coming Through Slaughter

I had completely forgotten that the latter has as a character the New Orleans photographer E. J. Bellocq, until Struan Gray reminded me. (Bellocq's glass plates were later "discovered" and printed and eventually published by Lee Friedlander in the book Storyville Portraits).

Bellocq isn't the main character, but is an important secondary one, and his photography of the notorious Storyville district New Orleans in the early 20th Century plays an important role in the story. It's certainly one of the best "jazz novels" out there, and also gives in intriguing part to photography in the story (but don't expect a nice tidy linear story with straightforward construction though...)

From the wiki entry on the book:

"The novel is a fictionalised version of the life of the New Orleans jazz pioneer Buddy Bolden. It covers the last months of Bolden's sanity in 1907, as his music becomes more radical and his behaviour more erratic. A secondary character in the story is the photographer E. J. Bellocq. Both these historical figures are portrayed in ways that draw on their actual lives, but which depart from the facts in order to explore the novel's central theme – the relationship between creativity and self destruction.

The novel draws on the style of jazz, being structured in a fragmented, and "syncopated" form, with episodes extending in elongated "riffs" before suddenly lurching unpredictably into an apparently unrelated scene. The structure also conveys Bolden's own wild, fragmenting personality, as his schizophrenia takes hold. Bolden's manic, extrovert but self-harming behaviour is set against the introverted figure of Bellocq, who expresses his own frustrated desires in his intimate erotic photographs, but then compusively violates them with scratches"

More Stephen Shore (+ Bonus...)

Jörg has a good interview up with Stephen Shore over on Conscientious - and at the end a nice bonus - you can download one of the little print on demand books Shore has been making here's an extract:

JC: After the 1970's colour "revolution" in the fine-arts community - if we want to call it that - the introduction and spread of digital photography appears to be at least equally important. I'd be curious to learn how you view the impact of digital photography.


SS: I'm going to give you a long-winded answer. I guess I see how photographers work as influenced by, among other factors, the cost of their processes. In the 1970s, when I started using 8x10 color, it cost me more than $15 every time I took a picture (film, processing, and a contact print). Simple economy lead me to only take one exposure of a subject. I knew I couldn't economize by only taking pictures that I knew would be good – that would simply lead to boring, safe images. But, I could decide what I really wanted to photograph and how I wanted to structure the picture. This was a powerful learning experience. I began to learn what I really wanted. Digital is the opposite of 8x10. I see digital as a two-sided phenomenon. The fact that pictures are free can lead to greater spontaneity. As I watch people photograph (with film), I often see a hesitation, an inhibition, in their process. I don't see this as much with digital. There seems to be a greater freedom and lack of restraint. This is analogous to how word processing affects writing: one can put thoughts down in writing, even tangential thoughts, with a minimum of inner censorship, knowing that the piece can be edited later. The other side of this lack of restraint is greater indiscriminancy. Here's a tautology: as one considers one's pictures less, one produces fewer truly considered pictures...



...JC: I was intrigued to learn that you have been producing small editions of self-published books. What is the impetus behind this?

SS: Ever since I first saw Ed Ruscha's small books in the late 1960s, I've loved artists' books. Print-on-demand technology allows me to produce books with ease. I like the basic structure of these small books: the individual images are not intended to stand alone, but are seen as a part of a complex whole. I enjoy availing myself of commonly available technology. Finally, my book project allows me to explore many different visual ideas and explore a variety of directions...


Stephen Shore very graciously agreed to share one of his iBooks, which can be downloaded here (file size: about
7.7MB).

And just a reminder - you can link to a short movie of Stephen Shore wandering around with his 8x10 here