Week 2

Clement Greenberg's Modernist Painting.  

  I had my highlighter out while reading and when I got to this article I pretty much highlighted the whole thing.  I'm sure this has happened to many of you- you're at a museum or gallery and gazing at some 'modern' art, perhaps a Pollack or Mondrian, when you overhear some whispered comments.  "My kid could make that" or "Psh, I could have made that in five seconds.  What?  They're selling that for five grand??!!" 

 I'm quite sure many of those people have never read this article nor care to do so.  Greenberg states "modernism used art to call attention to art."  How true!  It is so easy to quickly become caught up in the realistic details of painting especially.  Do people merely want to be impressed by art?  I think of the dutch masters and how easy it is to look at the detail and delicacy of brushstroke involved in their paintings while never stopping to ponder the overall work.   "Whereas one tends to see what is in an Old Master before one sees the picture itself, one sees a Modernist picture as a picture first." 

John Szarkowski's Introduction to The Photographer's Eye

When I began this article I took a moment to remember the first thrill of making an image in the darkroom.  Even now, it still amazes me that you can shine light on paper and run it through some chemicals- an image appears!  I'm sure if you multiplied that feeling by about a million- you'd get and idea of some of the reaction to photography when it first began.  It's no small wonder that people were scampering around all over the place- taking pictures of anything and everything.  Equally understandable is the rough start that photography got in the art world.  Painting was expensive and time consuming, therefore only monumental and important events and subjects were captured.  With the simple ease and inexpensiveness of photography, anything was a possibility for subject matter and anyone could become an artist.  Szarkowski breaks photography down into five issues that have been critical to the progression of photography.  

The thing itself- treasuring the fact that photography deals with the actual

The detail- the photographer is isolating and cataloging clues.  "If photographs could not be read as stories, they could be read as symbols."

The frame- Photography allows you to choose and eliminate.  The world is an infinite scroll in which there are a myriad of compositions to compose and crop.  (I love this idea.)

Time- Photography captures a still moment that was previously hidden in a flurry of movement.  Muybridge stopped time and showed how horses run.  Cartier-Bresson eloquently titled this idea "the decisive moment."

Vantage Point- Photographers are able to choose from a variety of options to present- birds eye view, backs of heads... all to give us a different sense of the scene.

And lastly- I found it interesting that Greenberg talks about modernism as an "evolution"  while Szarkowski compares the history of photography to a "growth."  "Photography, and our understanding of it, has spread from a center.."  This is my very brief mental interpretation of some photography history.  (I'm having issues getting it to appear below- sorry!)