patternsthatconnect

Photography is literally “drawing with light”, so what is it when you “draw” a line by folding the paper, maybe it’s sculpture?

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In 1976, Angela Kelly was my photography tutor at Nelson & Colne College when I was an art & design foundation student. It was an excellent two-year course and there were some great lecturers/tutors, especially her. I can still hear her voice speaking passionately and intelligently about photography of all kinds, and particularly fine art photography and conceptualism. She was equally intelligent about politics, history and painting. I also recall that she arranged trips to galleries in London and other cities and to art schools. (It may have been that the faculty arranged them and she was present, but it is her that I remember.) She introduced us to the big London galleries as well as the commercial galleries then on Cork Street and Bond Street, and the Photographers Gallery, when it was at Great Newport Street. It was with her that I first visited the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham and the Anolfini in Bristol. I also remember that she encouraged my reading and writing as well as my studio work, suggesting to me to read above my comprehension, a strategy I consciously adopted and that has continually proved to be fruitful.

So when I saw that she has a chapter in the new book Photography and the Artists Book, edited by Theresa Wilkie, Jonathan Carson and Rosie Miller, and published by Museums Etc  later this month, I ordered my preview copy straight away.

I am already glad that I did, because with a preview copy you get access to the book’s content online as it develops, which I am finding really exciting. There’s already lots of good stuff to think about, and when I have thunk some more I will write a review for a future blog post.

Walking towards Model Studies the Thomas Demand exhibition at Nottingham Contemporary, and having forgotten whose work was on show, I felt sure that I was walking towards an exhibition of abstract paintings.

In fact, they are large photographs of small architectural models. The scale tends to flatten out the space and to produce large areas of lightly modulated colour, hence the resemblance to American abstract paintings of the 50s and 60s. When you get a bit closer the space in the photos becomes more apparent, it reminds me of the space in a cubist paintings now. I can imagine the artist bending a craning to get into the tiny models attempting to experience it for himself, in a way similar to the cubist modelling of space, as experienced in time.

Demand is known for his photographs of life-size models, made by him, of architectural interiors like the Oval Office, paper models which are destroyed after being photographed. In these new works the models he photographed were made by the architect John Lautner (1911 – 1994), and discovered by Demand in the archives of the Getty Research Institute when he was artist-in residence there.

In this short video clip he talks to Alex Farquharson, the Director of Nottingham Contemporary, about how he found these models and about his interest in the status of the model: far from being a diminution of reality modelling is our way of perceiving the world and communicating our experience of it to others. (In NLP we think of models and modelling in a similar way. We make models of how people do what they do well so that we can teach it to others.) It occurred to me that these photographs, themselves 2 dimensional models, document the process of modelling. They show us something of how in modelling we alter scale, freeze time, distort space in order to ‘understand’.

Still attempting to do some tidying up, I discovered these old Halloween photos.

We used to make masks with the kids and attempt to frighten the trick-or-treaters.

Trick-or-treaters. What's more frightening the masks or the early nineties fashion?

Even then I was probably age-regressing, to when I was doing my foundation course in art and design and I made a mask of myself and took photos of other people wearing it.

If that’s a mask of myself I must have been pretty ugly! Sorry, I couldn’t resist the oxymoron. There I go, age-regressing again! That’s what happens when you go looking through old photos.

The map is not the territory. The sketch is not the painting.

The photograph is not the painting.

Is it a sign when it signifies nothing at all? It neither says what I want it to say nor what someone else wants it to say (thank you Gillian Wearing)

Is it a sign when people give me funny looks when I’m taking my holiday snaps ?

This one is my favourite snap from my holiday in Tenerife

(Also check out the signs at this blog I saw recently)

snaps (representations) looking a lot like abstract (“non-representational”) paintings

On my holiday I kept seeing structures that looked like they wanted to be art.

I read two blogs recently about Picasso exhibitions and the system conditions in which the paintings were being viewed. Forest Knolls, blog is about a show at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. I was interested in the comment about making do with a photo of the exhibition poster because photography inside the gallery was prohibited, hence the picture of the giant poster of the small painting (an image of an image of an image).

My own photo above, a few years old, shows people looking at (and photographing?) a Picasso painting of a girl looking at her own image in a mirror (an image of an image of an image). This was at the Picasso Museum in Paris. I believe that cameras were allowed. (On the subject of photography in gallery spaces there’s a brilliant blog here by Rhetoricalpens)

The other blog, at The Painting Space is about the first time a Picasso has ever been shown in Palestine. Buste de Femme, 1943, is at the International Academy of Art. Two years in the making, this exhibition is an “exciting opportunity to build a new international cultural dialogue in the occupied territory of Ramallah”. The conditions in which the painting will be viewed are very different to the two examples above. As well as the big system condition of occupation, there is also the sub-system that only three people at a time will be able to see the painting, in a purpose-built viewing room, so the picture does not get damaged by the humidity.

The blog includes a short film of Slavoj Zizek in conversation with the organisers. He has some really interesting things to say and he tells some great stories. I am not always sure I can connect them to the subject of the exhibition (one of the many things I love about his work).

How easily we are influenced. The other day, I saw this photograph that my son took and posted on facebook.

image by courtesy of Luke Parkinson

Since then, when saying or writing the word “strictly” ( and I never realised before just how often I say or write that word) I am hearing my internal voice saying “strickly”.