Pichure Escapades: home of mediated visual bliss

Design thought of the day:

Photography by other means:

Saw Kaja at the ICA last Thursday. Her lecture was very dense. Hard to follow for someone who hasn’t had their head stuck in theory books in a while.

Compared to Drucker, she’s not very clear. Then again, Drucker’s talk was casual and she directly responded to questions. Kaja read her paper, “Photography by other means”.

I was able to follow her introduction to Richter. She ran through a couple analysis of Richter’s photopictures, “Stag” and “Motor boat”. I understood her discussion of his photography’s allegoric properties how the relationship of a subject becomes obscure when Richter ..uh..obscures..the object by physically altering the painting/photo. See the photopicture below of “Stag” (Hirsch) where Gerhard takes a realistic image of a stag and creates a smear down dead center. I think Silverman was addressing the question: how do we understand the smear, what does it do to our understanding of the subject and our relationship to it?

Separately, she dropped a quote from Richter to the effect that, when questioned, he mentioned he doesn’t see the typical difference people see between abstract art and realism. How neat. Silverman asked something I really enjoyed: she asked from a critic’s stand point “Please, help us how to see in different ways”. Sort of humbling for a woman of such stature.

I stole this blurb from Upenn’s Art History website. It’s a nice and succinct description of the talk. Something I obviously haven’t achieved :

Renowned cultural critic Kaja Silverman will explore the work of Gerhard Richter, who does not view the photographs with which he works as “cultural constructions,” as we have become habituated to doing. They constitute, rather, “solicitations from the past, blasted out of the continuum of time;” they “drop” on his “doormat,” like “nature.” In her talk, Kaja Silverman will explore how Richter responded to two such solicitations: one embodied by a group of concentration camp photographs, and the other instantiated by a series of photographs documenting the arrest, imprisonment and deaths of three members of the German terrorist group, the RAF. Richter found the concentration camp photographs—which he published side by side with some pornographic photographs in the Atlas—to be “unpaintable.” Although for eleven years he feared that the same might be true of the RAF photographs, he ultimately succeeded in painting them.

This is an essay written by Lynne Cook on Richter’s “Atlas”, the collection mentioned above.