Fragmentation of Fragments

I decided to fragment my fragmentation. Ironically, the original piece is made of fragments. Pettibon took fragments of books (specifically the title page) and commented on them. He drew attention to the least valuable page of a book. No one really reads the title page (if you do I'm sorry on the regular), unless a person has scribbled a note denoting this book as a gift. The title page becomes valuable when it is written on by another. When another person claims ownership of it. Pettibon plays with this idea by writing on the page not a dedication but a comment. He directly comments on the title, setting a different tone for the book that would read in the future. Yet, it is just the title page present; the book cannot be read. Therefore, he takes ownership of the book for the viewer. The viewer at this moment only knows the books through the comments nothing more. He becomes omnipotent in a way.

I don't like being out of control, so I gave myself new power in my fragment. Abstraction allowed me to get rid of all the knowledge Pettibon had added and all the context of the original book page fragments. I zoomed in until the text became line and the paper became grainy. Yet, the fact that it is clearly text still shows through. You just don't know what letters are there. What they mean? What they say? I do. In this case abstraction through fragmentation got me a pen and ink line drawing as well as a small power trip in knowing more than my viewer. The actual piece the photo is mine, so I guess this is my art. But I prefer to think that when viewed separately from the original it is the knowledge not the object that is the art.

Objectivity

What is an object, what is a subject?

Jean Paul Sartre wrote something like: "When somebody is looking at you, he's the subject, you're the object. When somebody is looking at you, you can't detect his eyecolor."

Time passed, and things changed. Now we have objects looking at us, and they aren't turning into subjects. It's objects looking at subjects. Surveillance cameras with face detection will detect your eyecolor, fou shou.

Instead if you're using this wonderful way to irritate the softwear.

http://cvdazzle.com/

You enable the object to register your subjectivity by drawing simple lines and geometrical shapes on your face. For other subjects it is still possible to recognize you. That's the future.

Prompt #2

I have two images...

I put balloons under a chair. What you are looking at: a guy with dirty secrets.

I put a can of beans in front of a mouth. What you are looking at: nausea.

Also, sorry there is so much lint on the pictures! It is so distracting and I have already tried wiping my scanner off...

Prompt 2

What we are looking at is the passage of images through life: 

we carry images with us and sometimes we express them, for instance, in art. 

The Hopper’s painting and the picture I took in the subway could be an example of how visual information cross time and different media. 

To look at something is to acknowledge the mysterious necessity of the phenomenon’s presence; to see is a celebration of distraction. 

These women, concentrated in their reading, made me look at them. 

Strangely enough, one’s distraction allows someone else’s look.

While we look there is no hidden side of the object, its mystery is clear. 

By looking we take into consideration perceptions boundaries and possibilities.  

Gilded

I've gilded a disposable photo of a stranger at a bar with "as gold as it gets" luxe effects nail varnish. Photograph by me, polish by essie, pillow by west elm.

strange fragment of a strange artwork

This image is a fragment of a photography of "The Fountain" of Marcel Duchamp. I think that this signing is very important to understand the artwork (or to don't understand it). The artist didn't sign with his real name. The pseudonym was a way to be "grotesque". Nobody really knows why Duchamp sign "R.Mutt".

 In fact, this is the most inapprehensible

 fragmented picture of one of the most inapprehensible artwork.

The date is the only true thing...why ? Why not ?

Images and objects

An image is an extract of our visual life, the result of an hard selection. In my artistic practice I choose some objects, I take it and I exhibit it in a conventional exhibition space.

In fact, I don't ever choose my object just by myself. My objects beg me to take it. So, sometimes, even if it's a banality, I feel that my object choose me. In fact, before the object, I'm sensitive about an image of it. In this case the first image is like a scream from the reality..."See me ! Take me ! I'm unique !".

It was the same storie for this "screaming pole", a storie of image, before a storie of art.

What's an image ?

I'm totally agree with the Emily's point of view about the nature of the images. I think that each image is necessarly the result of a mental selection, conscius or unconscius. Emily wrote this following sentence : "(...) images vary from person to person. An image for one person is not an image for the next necessarily". I'm happy to think that, even if it's right to think that the images are not universal, we can share this idea, in a universal way. Better than the images, we can share a rich and valuable point of view about it.

Prompt 3: Framing the Image

Picasso and Eule

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality. [PABLO PICASSO]

This coming week we will consider the possibilities and the limitations of the reproduced image through fragmentation. What does it mean to create compositions through fragmentation? How can we open our imagination / ways of seeing an image by using the frame of a camera (or camera/phone/device) to abstract a detail – highlight a texture, create a new composition, etc?

During our gallery walk, find a fragment of an image to respond to: using a camera – from your phone/device or other personal camera—take images of the works of other artists, in whole and in fragments/parts. Choose an abstracted fragment/detail to post to the blog and write about it – how does it change your view of the original work?

READING: Assigned reading this week is artist Seth Price’s Dispersion – click here for the PDF. Click here to read more about the work of Seth Price.

Dick and Vageena go on Vacation

This is an issue of Brooklyn Rail that I had lying around my place.  I took a box cutter to it.  I guess it's a snapshot of what I was thinking and feeling at the time, consciously and subconsciously.  This is what I felt like making, so I made it.


Here's to questionable judgement and possibly disturbing people in one's art class.

Cheers.

This is a sketched head atop a stackhead. The first of 109.

Cake Boss

I don't make art. I make cakes. Lots of cakes. Birthday cakes. Coffee cakes. Apple cakes. Pumpkin spice cakes. Walnut cakes. You name it, I make it. What I love about a cake is the whole-megillah element. Unlike a batch of cookies, one cannot sneak a slice without ruining it. Even better, cakes are novel. Nobody makes a cake from scratch anymore. I grew up baking with my mother, who learned from her grandfather, a professional baker in Warsaw and then Detroit.

What you see in the image above is a version of the birthday cake I make. Two layers of moist, dense chocolate that I have spiked with espresso, slathered with melt-your-teeth-off buttercream and topped with French dragée "oyster pearls." It is the object I made specifically for this exercise. That my dress -- an '80s number by Carmen Marc Valvo that once belonged to my echt-'80s aunt -- matches the spirit of the cake's décor is a neat aesthetic coincidence.

Here is what I did to the cake:

My worst nightmare on the cake-baking front was transformed into an art project. My cake now reminds me of the scene in "Superman" in which the road falls away as a result of an earthquake. A giant swath, jagged and definite, has been ripped out by my own hands.

I remain surprised by how unbothered I felt making a cake destined for destruction. The process of digging and scooping was also surprising in that it wasn't nearly as fun as I imagined it would be. I was too focused on appearances to accrue much visceral satisfaction from my bad behavior. I feel guilty about the waste I have engendered but that did not stop me.

Why did I slaughter the cake? In part because, as mentioned above, cakes are one of the few things I make. Next, this action is what one expects from children, not adults. Lastly, I did it because I could. Then I dumped it in the trash.
Rebecca Cascade

Image

An image is a visual representation of a particular subject. For instance, when one conjures up something, the picture that comes to mind is described as an image. For this reason, image is psychological, in that it is shaped by the human subconscious. A mental image is framed when one encounters a person or an object; he quickly relates that subject to something that he is either familiar with, or is self-evident. In that sense, an image that a person constructs in his brain can also be represented as an impression. The particular sensation the person has experienced aptly shapes the image of the subject. For that reason, image is active and moving, for it is guided by the psychological response of a person.

Image

What is an image?

For me, it is first of all a language problem. If you look it up in a latin dictionary, imaginatio means 'a fancy, imagination'. That is not satisfying at all. If you look it up in a latin - german dictionary, you get the term 'Einbildung'. As Harun Faroki and Mary already mentioned, I would like to deepen that.
'Ein' means 'a' or 'one', but is also used with a inherent direction, like 'in' or 'into'. 'Bilden' has many meanings, like to form, compose, generate, develop, accumulate, frame, make, give rise to sth.
One could put it together as "something comes in our direction and we / our brain makes something out of it".

Roland Barthes wrote in camera lucida about the development of photography. He describes the process of light being reflected of an object, crossing a lens and manifesting that reflection on a film and then a piece of paper. When we look at that again, we still see that reflection. If you look at a picture of a friend, the light might have touched his skin, in a materialistic idea.
Coming to digital photography, we leave this component. Light loses its materialisic component and is reduced to the electronical character of a wave. This information is stored electronically again, and kept it the universe of data, to be shown on a screen or printed on paper. The reflection of light you see on that paper never touched the object you're looking at. It died. That's why digital images can't olden. They were never developed.

What is an Image?

Google definitions describes an image as a "simile or metaphor". This description is the perfect way to conceptualize an image. An image stands as a visual simile or metaphor for the reality that it represents, no matter how literal or abstract. Whether this reality is something in the physical world, a moment, a sensation, or simply an emotion. An image is how our mind's eye conceptualizes these and presents them to ourselves in a way that our mind can process through vision. 

An image is also a highly personal relationship that we have with an image long after we look at it. In this example, we are discussing an image of an image. In this instance, we each have our own personal image in our minds eye, our own memory of the image. At this level of such an intangible concept, it becomes whatever your intuition makes it to be. Basically, an image is a visual representation or manipulation of reality, on any level, whether it be physically manifested by painting, sculpture, photography, or even dance. And then how we recall this image personally, is another level deeper into the concept of the image. On this level, one's understanding and memory of an image is completely dependent upon the individual's subconscious, of which it is created. So an image can be both an item with more universally recognizable characteristics, meanwhile an image of an image brings the definition to  a much more abstract place within the individual subconscious.

Prompt 2: What are we looking at?

Prompt #2 asks us to describe what we see. Take an object, and do something to it. Or, take an image, and place it next to another image. Post a picture of the result of your exercise and answer the question: What are we looking at? 

For inspiration on looking and seeing, on ways of working with objects, with words, with pages, with moving images, with the eye and with the mind, see below: 

Notes on Ways of Looking / Ways of Seeing:

Dieter Roth

ON THE VISUAL ARTS: (Dieter Roth, Collected Works v. 7)

Take a thing and put it on one thing
Take a thing and put it on 2 things
Take a thing and put it on 3 things
Take a thing and put it on 4 things
Take a thing and put it on 6 things
Take a thing and put it on 7 things
... sell any time.

Jasper Johns

Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it. Do something else to it. (Jasper Johns)

Anne Carson

A page making something on a page will suggest other ways of making such things. The imagery itself generates other imagery.  This happens a lot when you’re using glitter.  (Anne Carson)

Robert Bresson

Excerpts from Robert Bresson, Notes on Cinematography:

·       An old thing becomes new if you detach it from what usually surrounds it.

·       Don't think of your film apart from the resources you have made for yourself.

·       The sight of movement gives happiness: horse, athlete, bird.

·       The exchanges that are produced between images and images, sounds and sounds, images and sounds, give the people and objects in your films their cinematographic life and, by a subtle phenomenon, unify your composition.

·       IN THIS LANGUAGE OF IMAGES. ONE MUST LOSE COMPLETELY THE NOTION OF IMAGE. THE IMAGES MUST EXCLUDE THE IDEA OF IMAGE.

·       Your film is not readymade. It makes itself as it goes along under your gaze. Images and sounds in a state of waiting and reserve.

·       Dig into your sensation. Look at what there is within. Don't analyze it with words. Translate it into sister images, into equivalent sounds. The clearer it is, the more your style affirms itself (Style: whatever is not technique.)

 

Eye

If one looks at the etymology, one finds that to denote directed vision French resorts to the word regard [gaze], whose root originally referred not to the act of seeing but to expectation, concern, watchfulness, consideration, and safeguard, made emphatic by the addition of a prefix expressing a redoubling or return. Regarder [to look at, to gaze upon] is a movement that aims to recapture, reprendre sous garde, [to place in safekeeping once again]. The gaze does not exhaust itself immediately. It involves perseverance, doggedness, as if animated by the hope of adding to its discovery or reconquering what is about to escape. What interests me is the fate of the impatient energy that inhabits the gaze and desires something other than what it is given. It lies in wait, hoping that a moving form will come to a standstill or that a figure at rest will reveal a slight tremor, insistent on touching the face behind the mask, or seeking to shake off the bewildering fascination with depths in order to rediscover the shimmering reflections that play on the water's surface.

                                                                --Jean Starobinksi, The Living Eye

Ein Bild / An Image

Relief image of Zeus and Hera

From Harun Farocki, Ein Bild (An Image), 1983

We are beginning Eye & Idea Fall 2013 with the endless question, “What is an image?” Lately I’ve been thinking of the relationship between image and object and how tenuous and closely knitted the two are – and rolling around in my mind since our discussion in last week’s class has been this bit of mythological drama on the image:

There is this incredible story of Zeus and Hera - they are fighting, as they usually are. Hera goes into hiding to torment Zeus - he looks everywhere for her and can't find her. He's totally despondent, while the world itself (according to Roberto Calasso) "will soon fall apart" when a goddess goes into hiding. So Zeus must to trick Hera out of retreat by pretending to marry someone else. He creates a phantom bride, installing a wooden artifact, a copy or image of a bride into a chariot and has his servants parade the mock bridal procession through the streets. Hera is enraged at this perceived rivalry, comes out of hiding, leaps onto the "bride" and tears its veils to shreds. When she discovers it is a mere copy, an image, Hera erupts into laughter. However the ritual has already begun and she must complete it. She marches the mock procession into the mountains. Hera bathes the copy – the mock bride –  in the river as if it were an actual living bride, then installs it on the top of a huge bonfire. The animals from the procession are heaped into the fire along with the wooden icon, and the whole thing is lit in flames. This ritual is played out in the village by the community over and again for many years.

In this story of Zeus and Hera's marital issues, the image is both a surplus that stands for something (wooden statue in place of a bride), and hides something (Zeus's attempted deception), and in the end turns as a hinge to knit together two very extreme acts—the ritual and the sacrifice. Even the parodic act of parading an effigy carries with it the consequences necessitating completion - in place of a real rival Hera discovers a copy, however this discovery of bride as image does not make the image any less powerful of a rival, and does not stop Hera from killing it.  The copy, the image, has a dynamic effect no less powerful than the real itself.

This metaphor of turning like a hinge is important to the question "What is an image" -- the image holds with it the action of turning, becoming both surface and surplus, which is a very powerful moment I think. This weekend I watched again Harun Farocki's 25-minute film documenting the tedious process of photographing a Playboy model for a nude spread, titled, “Ein Bild/An Image” (I love that the German word for image - bild - sounds like "build" - reminding of the construction of images, as if an image has inherent in it a sort of assembly). I love the Farocki piece as it speaks to this idea of image as a certain sort of ritual - in this case, the preparation and "building" of the centerfold - revealing the attentive, really quite boring qualities of this process... Farocki never reveals the eventual photo proof—the eventual image—of the shoot, and he doesn't need to - the making of the image IS the image, similar to the Zeus/Hera story. View the Farocki piece on Vimeo here: http://vimeo.com/62879563