Art & Perception

From the mid 1970s until the late 1990s, the Times Square area hosted three completely illegal, outrageous and brazen gay whore houses:  The Gaiety, Show Palace and Eros.  Show Palace and Eros survived until the late 90s, The Gaiety hung on–thanks to the patronage of many influential and prominent Manhattanites–through March of 2005.  But even with the patronage of icons of the New York performing arts world and several entertainment industry moguls, the Internet ultimately proved to be too fierce of a competitor and Denise the very professional and always courteous Greek lady who owned this establishment shuttered the doors, collected her Drachmas and retired to Lesbos (not actually Lesbos, but you get the idea) after 30 years of peddling boys to men.

The cover story that allowed the authorities to turn a blind eye to these whorehouses was simple.  They were not whorehouses; they were burlesque houses where boys would strip, dance and display their merchandise.  No liquor was served and the”theaters” fell under the protection of Off-Broadway regulations.

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As I was wandering down 10th Avenue a couple of days ago, camera in hand, marveling at the amazing variety of shapes, colors and play of light I thought this is an artist’s guilty pleasure. I felt terribly lazy. I know I have a talented eye, but it is so easy to capture compositions and brilliant visuals in a matter of minutes compared to many 20th and 21st Century painters who struggled amd struggle for hours, days and even months to capture on canvas what an observant photographer can capture in a second. 

Is time a factor in great art?  And if not, why not?  Picasso spit out paintings like a fecund rodent. Van Gogh produced something like 40 paintings in the last five minutes of his life–well–something like that.  Other artists labor and struggle for months over one painting.  The photographer is almost the Henry Ford Model T production line of work, especially with digital photography.  Click. Click. Click. Delete. Click. Delete. Click,  I actually find myself feeling guilty. I shouldn’t enjoy it so much and it should take much longer.  This morning I was paid $1,000 plus a percentage for agreeing to post an online gallery with narration of 12 of my photographs in the Queer New York at Night series.  Easiest and fastest $1,000 I’ve ever made.  Guilt. And Jewish guilt which is the most refined vintage and vineyard of guilt, like a Vosne Romanee of guilt.

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An admirer of my photography recently praised my clever ability to capture the spirit of the great Dutch painter Piet Mondrian in my work.  I was quite taken aback by this and without diminishing the genius of Mondrian, I felt obliged to explain to my admirer that he was putting the proverbial cart before the horse.  The only relationship I can claim to Mondrian is that our work benefits from the same model, the same muse.

In one sense, Mondrian did not create Broadway Boogie Woogie, rather the boogie woogie of Broadway inspired Mondrian.  Mondrian recorded and interpreted with his brush what I record and interpret with my camera: a unique energy fueled by verticals, horizontals and colors that is the visual signature of Manhattan and it’s relentless boogie woogie.

As a young man off on his first world adventures I was stunned by the revelation that many of the great artists I admired did not invent their mysterious landscapes, colors and visual signatures of China, Japan, Tuscany and Provence. Rather they were brilliantly capturing the unique moods, colors, light and shapes that nature had already chosen to create.  I remember gazing over the hills of Tuscany for the first time and thinking, “Oh!  So that’s where Leonardo got that.”  And I remember the day I realized the Van Gogh was “photographing” (through his unusual lens) the unique palette and landscapes of Provence.

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‘What one must paint is the image of resemblance—if thought is to become visible in the world. ‘        —Rene Magritte
 

Semiotics is the study of works of art signs and symbols, either individually or grouped in sign systems that can give us more insight from the work source and meaning. All painters work in a pictorial language by following a set of standards, basics and rules of picture-making. There is a big resemblance between pictorial image making and the creation of written language, the study of this nature of what consists and the individual components of pictorial and written language is known as Semiotics.

Semiotics can translate a picture from an image into words. Visual communication terms and theories come from linguistics, the study of language, and from semiotics, the science of signs. Signs take the form of words, images, sounds, odours, flavours, acts or objects, but such things have no natural meaning and become signs only when we provide them with meaning.

The semiotic theories are not definite but constantly being reviewed, extended and developed to become more precise and improve the significance of the information gathered when these theories are applied to works of art.

Visual Art consumers have become highly sophisticated readers of signs and signals, decoding subconsciously art work compositions. Everything surrounding us human beings today, including our own identities are all moulded and manipulated by signs, words, images and our visual language.

Communication can be a form of mind control; the one that has the power to speak higher and have the right speech can have a power over others in a certain way by making the individual point stand above all. The same happens with artworks with a conceptual meaning that stand and activate other people’s minds.

Different media carries different meanings despite the message content. Each form of media explores these meanings in the way the subject is represented and the context in which it appears. Visual language covers a whole range of different social mediums from low culture advertising, comic books and television to high culture like galleries and theatres. Visual signs look for the possibility of a language that already exists and is used already by a large amount of people connected or not with the arts and the media. The linguistic sign consists of content like sense and meaning of an expression like letters or sounds. Language is ruled by strong codes or rules and becomes complicated when we look at it in the form of visual artworks. It becomes a translation from linguistic to visual expression and the forms are as random as in linguistic signs.

Icons as a form of semiotics are all kinds of pictures representing an object like photos, drawings and paintings. Most pictures have a double meaning; visual and symbolic, conventional and arbitrary. Everyone knows, for example, that a picture of an old woman with a broom it is just a picture of an old woman but it can be perceived as a picture of a witch. Modern advertising is filled with this type of signage that holds double meanings.

Normally it is thought of as language in relation to pictures, very straight forward and clear where the visual language is an expression of emotional, deeper thoughts or even ambiguous ideas. It is then that visual expression needs the linguistic explanation to clear up the superfluous meaning. For example, in advertising, a linguistic message always comes attached to the advertisement in order to help establish the picture being shown.

So this form of anchorage of meaning opens us up to not only one, but several meanings without unsettling the main indented meaning; it forces the mind to interpret the media in a most complex and accurate way.

Pictorial Semiotics is often concerned with the study of pictures into a more constructive verbal description while maintaining confidence in the objectivity of the practice. A linguistic community that speaks the same language is a group of people making verbal agreements, speaking similarly as long the community lasts. Small changes are easily adopted and taken positively and are adjustable. The idea of representation by chance, where things do not follow rules but are used as signs is however very explored in the visual arts. This is where the principles of semiotics come in use; to map out and decode as a discipline.

The paintings of Rene Magritte for example in his series called ‘ The key of dreams (1930)’ show a collection of objects illustrated and labelled just like in a child’s learning picture book. They are all incorrectly described except for one of them. the As another example he paints a standard side view of a head of a horse against a black background with white writings and labels it ‘a door’, all of this with a primary aesthetic. These violations of representation are playing up with our early impingement teaching of associating names with the correct class objects that are part of our visual culture since childhood. Of course we grow up taking this for granted but Magritte with this illustration is showing us in a great way how resemblance, symbols and signs are often just representations of the real things.

Magritte in ‘The Betrayal of Images‘(1929) makes a painting of a simple pipe, a side view well illustrated with the phrase underneath saying’ This is not a pipe’. This text is neither true nor false and explores a new science of representation and signing. Is the painting a pipe or a depiction of a pipe? Yes, it is not the physical reality of a pipe, it is a representation of a pipe, a painting of it, a signifier for it but not the real thing. Would that still make it a pipe or should we call it something else?

Magritte had a special talent to make objects look mysterious and magical, and his objects are carefully chosen and depicted in a school textbook way. The ‘Pipe’ painting is a good example of how conventional imagery often betrays us all by making everyone realize that it is just a convention and not a real object. In my opinion I think Magritte was trying to make us all aware of the signs and symbols we often take for granted in our everyday lives.

This is a classical association for artists to make out the difference between the signifiers and the signified. A sign is something that stands for something other than itself; we interpret things as signs naturally by relating them to familiar systems or conventions.

A while ago I got “fan mail” from someone regarding my portfolio of “stick pictures,” a body of work that I make in dense, brushy environments. She wanted some insight into my process, and I thought it would be illustrative to share the exchange here.

“Often I find that pictures of this nature look cluttered and pinched, but yours I find to be exceptionally emotive and contemplative. I was wondering about your mental and emotional approach to shooting these images. Do you focus more on the mental, with respect to composition, or is it something that you feel more so than see?”

My response:

“Thanks for the note. The “stick pictures” is where I do my deep work as a photographer. It is internal, it is visceral, and the question of why that sort of landscape is so compelling to me is not the interesting one. I’m grateful that there is such a rich vein for me to mine and that it has stayed so compelling for so many years.

“Though I’m sure it would be hugely valuable, I don’t meditate, I don’t do yoga, and I don’t have a regular practice to center myself or otherwise quiet the inner voice in my head so that I can pay attention to the moment. I’m actually an anxious fidgeter much of the time, and I’m forgetful and absent minded. Working with the camera, in the landscape, is the closest I get to a meditation practice of any kind, and it probably occupies that role in my life. I do know that, in those complex brushy environments, I am able to let go of the conscious attention to composition and framing and the sense that “now I’m taking a picture.” The pictures find themselves, and I follow. That part of the brain that is a lot smarter than the part that consciously knows what is going on is taking the lead.

“I have, though, been working this way for a couple of decades. The technical part is fluid and unconscious. I also take a lot of bad pictures when I’m out there. A lot of the work is attending to the results of a given shoot, and ferreting out the one shot that exemplifies the coherence of the moment. My method is to post proof prints in a place where I will see them in my peripheral vision for awhile, like my kitchen. Over time I take down the ones that bore me, and I see what survives. It is the spawning salmon method of photography. Most of the roe get eaten. Only a select few grow to adulthood and see the world.”

The link to the portfolio is here. I’ve fixed the code that seemed to keep non-IE users from viewing the page.

I am travelling in New England engaged in my two great passions, dance and photography. I have announced to the dance world that I am preparing a book of my contra dance photography. Nothing like going public with an idea to force one to actually proceed with it.

Here is one of the conundrums with which I am faced, and it goes to the heart of photography as both a descriptive and an abstracting medium. At dinner last night, David Millstone challenged me about what I wanted this book project to represent. Is it about the contra dance world, or is it about photography of contra dance? Is it a narrative description of a subculture I happen to belong to, or is it a series of solutions to finding resolved images in a complex, dynamic environment?

Mostly I come to dance, because it feeds my soul and my bliss. Because dancing is so close to my heart, it is a natural subject to turn my photographic attention toward. I know the feeling of dance, and the creative challenge is to make work that also has that feeling present. But I’m also responding to light and shadow, movement and expresion, all those things that can make an interesting photograph. I stand back, and I want to work with what I’m seeing.

This challenge speaks to one of the great paradoxes of photography as a creative, interactive process. Our source material is the external world. We take a picture, which has a complex cascade of metaphoric and literal meanings and implications. Take it where? Take it from what, or whom? It implies a duality, there’s the photographer, then there’s the thing that the photograph is taken of, or from, if you wish to include the soul-snatching metaphor. Relationally, it brings forth the conflict of choosing between being a witness or a participant.

To master the photographic process requires a fluency in the sequence of chemical, or now, electronic processes that create an object with its own presence and reality. The photograph resembles something that we understand as a document of a given moment and place, but it is nonetheless a highly abstracted artifact of a lot of technology. My jollies come from being able to see from one end to the other of that tunnel of process at the very moment I am engaged in the intitial framing and exposure. And I choose to play with that process in a really complicated environment, a contra dance floor.

My resolution to the duality conflict—am I a participant or a witness?—is to not resolve it. I flit back and forth. When I want a break from dancing, I take pictures. If it’s a dance where I think bodily harm can be avoided, I’ll dance with the camera. I want those stances to be as close to each other as I can manage. I want both aspects to be present in the work.

I expect much of my job for the next few months will be figuring out just what form this project is going to take.

Most photos don’t turn out as well as hoped for, and a rare few turn out better than expected. Some (like Colin’s hands and rock last Tuesday) can be turned to a new purpose. But the accompanying image seems to have turned on me altogether.

It was made in a mining ghost town last September, where I spent about 12 hours over two visits (once under hot sun, two weeks later in light snow). I was busy but unhurried, and the experience was entirely peaceful. I loved the light reaching into the rooms and hallways of the abandoned buildings, and I was thinking about that more than anything. It’s sometimes said that light is the only subject of photography, and it felt true then.

Developing the images later on my computer, I realized that beyond a feeling of nostalgia or mystery, many had something faintly (or not so faintly) sinister about them. I hadn’t been aiming for this effect, it just seemed to appear as I looked at the images ready for a first print. The image here, taken inside a shack built into a hill, elicited the term “violent” from a photographer friend, and I had to agree.

I’m really not sure how this came about. Am I inventing things that others don’t see? Is there inevitably a dark side to pictures about light? Was I so entranced by the light I just didn’t notice what was happening in the dark? Is it just poor preparation, led astray by my appreciation of darker tones — though the image shown is actually a bit lighter than my first version? Perhaps — an idea I rather relish — I have unsuspected psychological depths that are making themselves manifest…

I am interested in any thoughts you have on the image or the idea of light/dark in art or mind. Know of any similar pictures? If you’d like to consider a larger context, a dozen other photos from the same location are on my website. And if you want to adjust your monitor to show detail in both highlights and shadows, make sure all steps of gray are distinguishable on this test image.

I’m also wondering how often it happens to painters or other artists that one is surprised, looking back on a work, to discover something quite unintended. As a painting or quilt or whatever takes more time in the making than a typical photograph, and may entail more active decisions regarding content, is the chance of later surprise any less?

I will be checking comments intermittently, and will respond to remarks directed to me (or not!) when I can. I do work a day job…