January 2009

more capturecrit

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More thoughts on screen captures vis a vis photography:

1. Authorship is an issue even more than with Sherrie Levine/Richard Prince "rephotography," assuming the capture is some one else's work other than the capturer's. Putting a Walker Evans on the copystand, printing, framing, and exhibiting vs hitting the "printscreen" button, making a jpeg, and uploading to a blog.

2. Photography at its most indexical doesn't confuse as to its purpose. Whereas a screen capture that includes, say, YouTube controls, is far more likely to be mistakenly clicked by the consumer than merely passively viewed.

3. Captures are inherently irresponsible. Unless the capturer has included a surrounding frame (such as a web browser's scroll bars and address bar) the viewer has no way of knowing if the capture came from the web, the capturer's home computer, or somewhere else entirely. There are no easy verification methods such as looking for telltale signs of the clone stamp to detect Photoshopping.

More.
See also Wodzinski capture collection.

Diana Kingsley: In Pari Delicto

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diana kingsley

Diana Kingsley has a show of new work opening Friday night at Leo Castelli gallery [ArtCal listing]:

Leo Castelli Gallery is pleased to present In Pari Delicto, an exhibition of new photographs by Diana Kingsley, her third solo show at the gallery. Kingsley, continuing to mine the terrain of the slight incident and the small indignity, has ratcheted up a sense of the absurd while maintaining the cool formalism and deadpan humor of her previous work.

The exhibition’s title, In Pari Delicto, a somewhat archaic legal term meaning “in equal fault,” connotes an elegance and charged sensuality belying the prosaic resignation of the phrase's meaning. Dress gloves, cigarettes, sterling silver sets, antiques, and thoroughbreds anachronistically symbolize sophistication, while barely disguising a standoff between ordinary, commensurable forces: incumbent and invading, animated and inert, covetous and restrained. In the slow unfolding of non-events each side acts in balletic concert; no side is privileged.

In “Delicate Beast” a tangle of unruly dried branch arrangements impossibly grows into a silver chalice as a live praying mantis materializes under the tangle, creepily mocking its own cartoon depiction on the background wallpaper. In “Bad Seed” the busywork of an unseen miscreant defaces the back of an antique chair with a spray of equestrian stickers. In “Night Ramble” a hand in an ill-fitting glove confronts a succulent gardenia in a mysterious stalemate as a cigarette in the gloved fingers languishes, ready to drop ash on the mitt's clean whiteness.

Though the images are strikingly lush, there is something discomfiting about their deliberate, almost defiant prettiness. Kingsley’s precise compositional rigor even hints at an inherent inanity in such photographic strategies. It is the unexpected contradictions and tensions in both form and subject matter that give the work its mischievous wit and power.

previous posts about Kingsley: "Get Those Breasts Out of the Lobby, Theyre Offending Women" and several from my digital media tree blog. I've been a fan of the artist's work since first seeing it in Soho around 1997, and look forward to this show.

All Flickr Top Ten

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My "all Flickr Top Ten" has been posted on Paddy Johnson's blog as part of her Best Of The Web series, check it out.
Johnson has paired my BOTW selections with Ceci Moss's. Moss recently rebutted my "New Media vs Artists With Computers" post on Rhizome.org--that was much appreciated but still waiting for a reply to my reply to her reply.

You can see the argument continuing tacitly in our Top Tens. Generally speaking, her links go to sites heavy on interaction or documentation and mine favor direct, "one click" visual experiences (right-brain-aimed images or photos sans verbal narrative, instructions, or back story).

This isn't to say we can't appreciate each other's other brain halves and I've enjoyed her rebloggings of animations and other so-called eye candy on Rhizome.

twitter-vvork nod

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Much appreciation to Kevin Bewersdorf for including twitter/vvork in his top ten this year, on Paddy Johnson's blog.

Guthrie Lonergan explained the project thusly.

Ennui Magazine said: "...the only comprehensive attempt to assess a popular, mostly visual blog that endlessly recapitulates tropes of international conceptualism."