When I left Newlyn Art Gallery I wondered down to the Harbour. With all my questions buzzing around, I found myself trying to square up the act of framing shots and finding interest and/or satisfaction in creating images, with this problematic of art as politics, art as social activator. Do pretty pictures affirm the status quo? Can I make images that can contribute to a green politics?
Mostly, the images need to lead themselves. I can worry over the larger paradigm that will show itself positively or negatively anyway. The framing I'm always drawn to is the composite of shapes and elements... Struggling to articulate what those composites are attempting to do...
And it is clear to me as I walk down the pier, that it is not any old landscape that makes me want to photograph it. I am drawn to the places where industry provides its clear and decisive objects, where industry and human activity have fallen into a state of disrepair, where the natural is breaking it down.
In this way, there is a material, social aspect to the work.
Smells: sea, shell fish, oil, cold. Sounds: gulls crying and wheezing, chugging of small boat motors, cars in the distance, some welding further up the quay, two men chatting as they head on to one of the boats.
Happy New Year. Its sort of beginning for you?
ReplyDeleteIn this post too I find a sort of Kantian Natural ...
Hope you will soon put more up
Responding to your musing on art and response to climate change (art as important for that). I just listened to "Eine Alpensinfonie", R Strauss (1915) on the radio - came up unanticipated. Listening to it, lifted from absolute depths to piercing light. Awesome and fragile. A moment of beauty, which Strauss could attempt with some sort of innocence. I wonder if they had this music at the North Pole?
ReplyDeleteNow, Kantian natural - this is interesting. Will you elaborate on your point? I am yet to really try and put Kant into practice or to see how it might be in practice already in art or in Nature, but it's something I'm drawn to, being quite a fan of his work and of Nature (!). Anyway, it's certainly something to think on...
ReplyDeleteThank you for your Strauss tip. Going to try and get to know the piece a little as yes, the issues of nature and art and - precipices, the fragile, the sublime etc. have a long and exquisite history. Another point on the climate change thing would be to ask how much the current discourse re-appropriates already existing tropes of art to re-present notions of doom or majesty...? Oh, those polar ice-caps..
Thank you again for your comments.