Todd Hido's Fragmented Narratives.

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Todd Hido's Fragmented Narratives captures the intersections of photography and life and exploits them to create a dramatic yet understated poetry. Absences haunt each one of these photographs, whether that be an object with out a person, or a person with out a context. The outside world is always depicted with the dramatic quality of a dream. Like television sets, houses leak rectangles of electricity from their windows onto a bare ground that fades into the night. There are no humans here despite all the indicators: tire tracks in the snow, a Dodge pick up in the drive way. These are photographs of memories of night. Maybe belonging to the women in the series who sit in hotel rooms (mostly naked) giving melancholic stares that allude to the existential sadness of their narratives. Hido understands that photographs lie but he also understands that we are more than willing to get lost in it.

Umshini Wam

Bring Me My Machine Gun

This short film is a collaboration between writer/director Harmony Korine (who penned the controversial film Kids before he was twenty) and South African artists Ninja and Yo Londi, known together as Die Antwoord (The Answer) This is a story about making next level shit, upward mobility, and then ultimately love. The two characters roll onto screen while an opening dialogue from Yo Londi lays out the direction of the plot. "...It's time to get the fucking respect we deserve...If we want to be next level, we have to role next level." Several ideas can be drawn from this film. The structure of the plot explores ideas of class separation. This could reference the social structure within South Africa, or even the relationship of South African's to the rest of the world.

On the other hand we could explore this idea of 'the other' that's always excellently exploited in Korine's work as well as in Die Antwoord's. This specific piece is being shown largely to people who are unaware of South African culture. I for one fit into that group of people. These artists work in that cloud of the unknown to create their own representation of South Africa and possibly comment on that. I believe what they're doing is utilizing their position to create a sense of 'the strange' and a sort of poetry that speaks in universal terms despite it's absurdity.

What's most charming about this film is the relationship between Ninja and Yo Londi. The fact that they exist in a world that's unique to them, both in the world of the story and in relation to us, highlights how much these two need and rely on each other. Somehow in its absurdist fashion, this film manages to evoke a level of emotion and understanding of the human condition that can't be captured by most films that strive for realism. This is what chiefly interests me about this film: it's exploration of the strange and use of allegory to make articulate something that can be widely appreciated as beautiful.

John Divola

 

ZUMA

Upon first viewing John Divola's work with his series ZUMA  I assumed this was something that had been created during the 21st century. To me its use of color and subject matter felt contemporary and relevant in comparison to a lot of contemporary photographers I've been studying. This work was created 34 years ago in 1977 and I find that interesting.

I appreciate Divola's work. More interestingly, I appreciate and respect his process which seems to be an important aspect to him as well. When he visited this decaying house, if there was not a photograph waiting for him, he'd create a photograph by adding spray paint and debris. He remarked that this was not a documentation of painting or sculpture. These were similar to doodles. There's a certain impulse you experience as an artist when you are creating work. Jackson Pollock knew his work was be successful as long as he never lost touch with the painting. At the end of his artist statement on Zuma, Divola says "My participation was not so much one of intellectual consideration as one of visceral involvement." He's speaking here to the process. That visceral enjoyment that, for certain artists, is the reason behind creating visual art.


I enjoy this work because it's beautiful to look at and on an intellectual level I appreciate the fact that there is no contrived meaning being conjured. It is what it is. The meaning behind this is art. Other meanings gathered are incidental but I think that can be fascinating.

Sunflower Seeds

Ai WeiWie’s Sunflower Seeds exhibition at the Tate Modern in2011 is an interesting example of an artist working conceptually while others manufacture his work.  His commissioned installation at the Tate consists of over one hundred million hand crafted, porcelain sunflower seeds covering the museum floor in a flat landscape of gravel.  The sheer size of this effort is reflected in the two and a half years it took 1,600 workers to finish this astonishing amount of work.  The amount of time and effort needed to create these one hundred million unique, porcelain sunflower seed replicas seems to necessitate the artists use of others to create this work. However, this installation, among other things, is also commenting on the “made in China” phenomenon, highlighting the issue of a complex global economy, represented poetically by this small ocean of sunflower seeds. The methods used to make this mammoth proportion of husks, was a modified version of traditional porcelain manufacturing techniques. According to the Guardian, the employment of the 1600 workers saved a Chinese town from bankruptcy. This was a town that at one time made porcelain for the imperial courts. The material used, porcelain, has been one of China’s largest exports historically while also having a strong traditional connection to China’s old power structures and the history of its art. The process in which this installation was manufactured is essential the final reading of the piece.

The Headless Woman, Lucretia Martel, 2008

Film Critic  The Headless Woman

The Headless Woman was one of the most difficult but rewarding films I've seen in along time. The attention to light, color, and composition makes this film absolutely fascination watch. 

The films explores how a person deals with the guilt of thinking they've accidentally killed someone. In the film, the main character hits something with her car while driving and distracted. She has a genuine fear that what she's run over is a child. In the film we catch a glimpse of what we can almost distinguish as dog. However, the character's doubt spreads and we begin to wonder what it is we really saw in that split second. The rest of the film is a visual and auditory masterpiece that follows banal moments in the main characters life that are now affected by this guilt. The cinematography and audio purposefully work together to create a sense of a character who has become isolate and constantly put on edge. 

Sarah Pickering

I've recently discovered the work of Sarah Pickering. Specifically, via her website (http://www.sarahpickering.co.uk/index.html) I've viewed her works: Public Order, Incident, Explosion, and Fire Scene. Lately I've been feeling a sort a poverty when it comes to visual and conceptual inspiration in photography.  Anyway, what I've discovered in Sarah Pickering's works is formal and conceptual poetry. I'll talk specifically about my experience in viewing her series 'Public Order'. Initially, I was struck by her muted blending of color and shape in what initially appeared to me to be an exploration of a sort of formal order found in the city. Blues, greens, reds, and yellows worked against the cement gray of the brick and over cast sky. As I progressed through the series certain themes began to put themselves together. There were no people, the city was empty. Streets were barricaded and the cement walls showed signs of past fires, maybe explosions. But again everything feels calm. The fires and the barricades are tidy. And then there is a change that leads us to understanding the unnerving serenity of this scape. While there were earlier signs, my initial understanding began with the image 'High Street, 2002'. The walls of the city, are in fact facades. No real buildings. The sense of familiar is completely displaced and in that there is a surreal and delightful point of confusion. Public Order is  series of photographs from a police training ground outside of London that trains officers to control civil unrest in a replicated city. What Pickering creates is documentation that toys around with the idea of fiction. Along with our changing understanding of what the city is and from seeming fact to fiction,  our understanding of 'Public Order' changes as well. I'm hesitant to search for meaning outside of this surreal feeling of detachment she creates in her work. It could certainly be read as revealing new ideas of what what public order means and the means that go into keeping public order.