January 2013
1 post
December 2012
2 posts
Watchannotatedimages:
James and I, Extended. 2012.
Final Project Check In
I shot another video this Sunday, which is framed a little differently and has more dramatic light. I tried to create a greater sense of tension between my subject and I, kneeling down beside the camera so that my subject (James) and I were looking directly at each other while I was filming and slowly undressing off camera. I like the idea that there is a deliberate/constructed sense of sexual...
November 2012
3 posts
8 tags
A soft or hard g.
This week’s readings all centered around the animated GIF (graphic interchange format), a file format introduced in 1987 that wasn’t really intended to be used for animation, but has today become synonymous with short animated loops. Much like photography, the “low-tech” aspect of the file format has allowed for it flourish both within the artistic community and within the...
WatchCory Archangel, Discussing Colors PE.
7 tags
Producing New Material / Becoming Producers
Nicolas Bourriaud’s essay Postproduction, Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World outlines the various intersections between artistic production, consumer culture, and what can loosely be described as “remix culture”. Bourriaud’s essay follows and directly responds to his milestone work Relational Aesthetics, discussing many artists mentioned in his infamous work,...
October 2012
13 posts
WatchWork No.405 Ships coming in, as discussed by Martin Creed, over the phone.
Midterm Paper Proposal
For the midterm paper I would like to take the opportunity to discuss Martin Creed’s piece Work No. 405 Ships coming in. I have been interested in Creed’s work for many years, and have been unexpectedly drawn into the piece each time I have been to the MCA this past year.
The work consists of two tv’s stacked on top of each other, both playing video footage shot from...
12 tags
Confronting two types of stillness; or, Of the...
This weeks readings, David Campany’s Stillness from his book Photography and Cinema, and Janet Sarbanes The Idea of Still, an interview conducted by Sarbanes with director Rebecca Baron about her films exploration of still imagery, both highlight the murky similarities and differences inherent in still and moving imagery. Where Campany often deals with moving imagery which toys with aspects...
WatchRobert Smithson - Hotel Palenque
WatchTwelve Monkeys, a 1995 film by Terry Gilliam based on La Jetee.
WatchLa Jetee by Chris Marker.
8 tags
A momentary glimpse of the present
This weeks readings both dealt with the use of slide shows as art object. One, Darsie Alexander’s Slideshow, tracing the history of it’s use from before it’s inception to more contemporary practice, made me reconsider how prominent the format was within an artistic context. The other, a transcript of Robert Smithson’s Hotel Palenque 1969-72, felt more engaging and exciting,...
A break, a shift, a slow zoom.
After viewing several of Bruce Connor’s films, Stan Brakhage’s film Wondering, and Michael Snow’s infamous film Wavelength in class this week, many of the ideas discussed in Annette Michelson’s 1971 essay Toward Snow were clarified, even while a few questions were raised about her claims. Michelson starts her essay with a quote from Stan Brakhage, which seems to underscore...
September 2012
2 posts
7 tags
Early film; or, Running from perception,...
This week’s readings, Tom Gunning’s An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator and Jonathan Crary’s Techniques of the Observer deal with the dawn of early cinema, pre-photographic “philosophical toys”, and the particularly heightened sense of “the imaginary perceived as real” in early audiences.
Gunning begins his essay by paraphrasing, and...
HERE BEGINS WRITINGS FOR GREG FOSTER RICE’S MOVING PICTURES CLASS, FALL 2012.
March 2012
1 post
THESIS TAKE THREE
annotatedimages:
Gregg Evans How Soon is Now? How the confusion of time activates the viewer and expands the possibility of the single moment in the work of Collier Schorr, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and Mike Mills. (Working Title)
Do artists whose work confuses our perception of narrative time change our experience of the art object itself? How does the use of disjointed or non-linear...
May 2011
2 posts
End of semester
So to anyone who has been following my writing here throughout the semester outside of my class, since the semester is now over I’ll now be posting regularly on my other blog, annotatedimages.tumblr.com. I don’t post as much writing on a regular basis, but I will write from time to time there, so please check back when you have a chance.
Happy Trails!
—Gregg
Photography's Expanded Field
It was a little weird that Purchase College, where I went for undergrad, was the image that introduced George Baker’s Photography’s Expanded Field, but I guess that doesn’t really have any bearing on my experience of the essay. However, I will say that, while I found Baker’s essay fascinating and very relevant today - already seven years after it was originally published,...
April 2011
3 posts
A break, a rift, a disruption.
The break from the aesthetic formalism of the modernist period within photography associated with photoconceptualism in the 1960’s and 70’s was the subject of all three essays this week – Jeff Wall’s “Marks of Indifference”: Aspects of Photography in, or as, Conceptual Art, Hal Foster’s An Archival Impulse, and (our professor) Gregg Foster-Rice’s recent essay...
Liquid Intelligence and the interweb.
Of the five readings we were assigned for class this week (we had to pick 3) I chose to read The Practice of Everyday (Media) Life: From Mass Consumption to Mass Cultural Production? By Lev Manovich, Jeff Wall’s essay Photography and Liquid Intelligence, and Jason Evans’ Online Photographic Thinking from the 2008 book and online forum Words Without Pictures. All three essays centered...
Race, Empowerment, Ghettoization, and the Art...
This weeks readings, which included an essay by Howard Winant for the catalog of the 2003 exhibition Only Skin Deep at New York’s International Center of Photography, a review of that exhibition by New York Times columnist Holland Cotter, and an additional essay by Carter entitled Beyond Multiculturalism, Freedom?, as well as The
Sound of Light: Reflections on Art History in the Visual...
March 2011
3 posts
Regarding the Pain of Others with Anxiety and a...
This weeks readings, excerpts from Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others, Ariella Azoulay’s The Civil Contract of Photography, and Mark Reinhardt’s text Picturing Violence: Aesthetics and the Anxiety of Critique, all revolve around ideas of photographic responsibility, both in terms of journalistic ethics and a fine art framework. While all three essays deal with the...
Michael Fried, Chapter 9.
Donald Judd Installation Image.
In chapter 9 of Michael Fried’s Why Photography Matters As Art As Never Before, Fried focuses on the work of Thomas Demand, Candida Höfer, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Thomas Struth, discussing the correlations (and distinct differences) between the emphasis on experience within they’re work, and that of the minimalist artists Fried critiqued in his essay...
Michael Fried, Chapter 1.
Michael Fried’s basic point within his introduction and first chapter for Why Photography Matters… is that, beginning sometime around the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, art photography began to be made “at a large scale but also for the wall”, and that this shift ushered many of the issues associated with high modernism “to the very center of advanced photographic...
February 2011
11 posts
What is put on, invariably, under constraint.
Gender is a socially mediated construction, and therefore, like in theater, functions as a public performance we all participate in. This is the basic argument of Judith Butler’s Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory. The essay, written in the late 1980’s, questions the concrete foundations that commonly link notions of sex and...
Being, With, Real, In, The, Same.
This weeks readings, What is Contemporary Art? by Terry Smith, Hal Foster’s Questionnaire on “The Contemporary” and the responses to it by Alexander Alberro and (as chosen by me) Julia Bryan-Wilson, all focused on the current period of contemporaneity within the art world, and it’s hazy boundaries and definitions. The period, which can be vaugely defined as occurring after the...
WatchThe full version of Paris Is Burning.
Confusion on The Practice of Everyday Life,...
While I don’t want to use an inability to grasp this weeks readings as an excuse or a cop-out, I very much feel like I’m at a bit of a stand still with both the excerpt from Foucault’s Discipline & Punish and Michel De Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life. While Foucault starts his text off with a fascinating discussion of the ways in which primitive forms of...
Watch
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Referents, Specters, Clocks, Time and Truth.
This weeks readings; excerpts from Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida, Marjorie Perloff’s comparison of Barthes’ writings in Camera Lucida with the work of Christian Boltanski ( What Has Occurred Only Once), Amelia Jones’ discussion of Hippolyte Bayard’s bitter rebuttal of photographic truth at the dawn of photography, and Barthes’ rather confusing and verbose essay...
January 2011
4 posts
8 tags
More Than This: Walter Benjamin, Frederic Jameson,...
Throughout this weeks readings, I kept returning to the idea of “the thing itself” used by John Szarkowski in the Photographer’s Eye, which we talked about during our first class. While Szarkowski uses the phrase to reiterate the objecthood of the photographs used in his book - as opposed to using the phrase “This is the Eiffel Tower” when discussing a photograph of...
