Some text I have written to accompany my contribution to our open studios exhibition 'Around Photography' 25 and 26 October and 1 and 2 November 12 – 6pm:
Thinking Still
Photography is to my practice what something is to something else, but I don’t know what those things are.
I don’t know what the relationship is or the things that it connects. I don’t know that I need to articulate this any more clearly to myself at the moment.
I use photography just as most artists do. I use it for the following:
• To document work I have made and exhibitions I am in.
• To record visual ideas I think of so that I don’t forget them.
• To record an arrangement of objects in my studio before I move it around or put it away, so that the connections may be recalled at a later date.
But mostly I don’t go back to look at these saved images.
I can’t get round the power involved in photography. Behind the lens I am a god creating worlds. In front of the camera I am always a victim. Maybe because I am female and I can’t get through, round, over or past porn.
My first camera was a really old paper concertina job that my Dad gave me. I took it to London on a school trip and took a picture of Tower Bridge. It was magic.
During the Brighton Photobiennial 2008 I am artist in residence at Fabrica, engaging with and thinking (a lot) about the work of Thomas Hirschhorn, specifically his use of appropriated images in his Incommensurable Banner. The images are graphic depictions of bodies damaged and destroyed by munitions. People so far are displaying a range of reactions to this work. I am a lightning conductor for them.
I am thinking still.
Someone's response emailed to me. They wish to remain anonymous.
"I looked at your blog and the Fabrica site about Hirschhorn.
It must be difficult to keep an objective position on this work.
Quite honestly I think his work is such butch male piffle.
I suppose if we live in a landscape of rubbish and people are
brutally turned into rubbish and then photographed like landfill sites,
we will get an ‘art’ that is an equivalent of MRM.
What is the point of this kind of visual / philosophical appropriation.
It colludes with the visual landscape of excess, nihilism and amorality – its really about his celebrity, about violence and political philosophy being sexy.
He’s producing a commodity – ‘find prices on artnet’."
A view of the tin can from the side. To prove that it really is flat.
Blog block
A lot has happened over the past couple of days. I have done my first two residency sessions in the gallery talking to visitors about the Thomas Hirschhorn exhibition.
I need to digest it all a bit before adding another blog posting.
I was in Polegate today, which is a town near Eastbourne, in Sussex. I found this completely flattened and very rusty tin can on the grass verge by the side of the road.
It set me thinking about flatness and three-dimensionality. And about bodies I suppose. And their transposition into images.
Photography.
What an alien concept to me.
The visual.
What does that mean?
And why if we inhabit fleshed out, rounded bodies, would we ever think of making flat images? I know, it's something to do with the retina and all.
Flat Stanley.
A children's book about a boy whose noticeboard falls onto him in the night and he wakes up with as a two dimensional person. And then he has adventures as a 2-D person in a 3-D world.
How can the images that Hirschhorn has chosen for his banner have the visceral impact on us that they do have? What is the process whereby animal fear is generated by looking at pictures of dead and mutilated people? I'm not really interested in the neurological answers to these questions. But rather in the part that imagination plays in that process.
Imag(e) in a(c)tion.
