The Postmodern Blues

What is conceptual art?

There is no right answer of course. Of course. The idea of conceptual art revolves around theory and persuasive argument, which makes it extremely difficult to define it  in any concrete terms.

However, in a basic sense, conceptual art is meant to suggest that an idea or concept should take precedence over aesthetic or material concerns in regards to making art.

In modernist art (roughly 1860's - 1970's), the method or expertise of the artisan is the concept. Think for instance, Ansel Adams. His incredible methods and mastery constituted the entire concept of his art. They are inseparable, content and form are one. Contrast Adams with Nan Golden's 1986 The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, and the difference becomes apparent. Nan Goldin took photos with an inexpensive point and shoot camera. Her methods were in a sense irreverent. It was the idea or concept which drove her work.

Although concept driven work freed art from stuffy tradition, it also gave us ugly art. Anything and everything can be art (think Warhol) and so it was.

There is a bigger conversation going on here, and I will only allude to it. But when we discuss the conceptual, we can't go far without having to talk about postmodernism. In the 1970's when the "establishment" was being attacked, postmodernism was the intellectual tool of attack. Photography, due to it's fluid and sometimes ambiguous nature, was the perfect host for postmodern critique.

The problem I have with postmodernism is that, at it's core (some will disagree of course) postmodernism posits that ideals such as progress, inalienable rights, freedom, pursuit of happiness, and other enlightenment based concepts, are really just systems of control. Postmodernism sees everything in terms of power and control. So, in essence, although postmodernism was certainly important, it laced art with a pernicious negativism, and turned art into a tool of critique, where in modernist terms, art existed to memorialize, heighten, enlighten, and support the human project of social and spiritual progress.

I have a difficult time thinking about photography in these terms. To subvert it, rip it apart, shake it up, and repackage it into a conceptual framework, for this photographer, almost takes all the joy out of photo-making. In the 1940's Henri Cartier-Bresson compared the act of taking a photograph as an affirmation of life. A few decades latter, in the 1970's, Susan Sontag, in her well known book, On Photography, describes taking a photograph as type of rape.

I choose RIT's photography program because it has a reputation for a curriculum based on materials and processes. And to the schools credit, the undergraduate program is top notch in this regard.

Technically proficient undergraduates abound with an encyclopedic knowledge of photographic materials and processes. Some of them even have Gretagmacbeth color checker tattoos. Not to mention all the nubile undergraduate photo-babes. C’mon! Sounds like a paradise right?

My paradisaical assumptions met critical failure during my first quarter when I realized that my department regarded my ideas and work as something unworthy of graduate level classification.

I was in trouble until I was introduced to a wonderful book of photography by the artist Tseng Kwong Chi. I fell in love with his photo book, The Ambiguous Ambassador. 

There are many intellectuals and critics who like his work for many different intellectual and critical reasons. But let me tell you why I like Chi's photos. For me, Chi's work tells a story about a man who felt lonely, who didn't fit in, and who then expressed this alienation perfectly by inventing a unique and personal visual language with his photography.

However, that is not all. In the course of Chi's ten year project, Expeditionary Self-Portrait Series, his photos change in a wonderfully subtle way.  Chi begins to photograph himself in nature versus in social landscapes. There is a tone of tranquility and catharsis in his latter images. I feel he comes to terms with himself and his life. Chi died in 1990, at the end of his project, and the images he left behind become a beautiful eulogy to an artist's life.

I followed in the footsteps of Chi and invented a character who I called Alexander, or Sasha. Like Chi, Sasha is also a traveler and investigator of a foreign land. What follows is a partial artist statement for 

my work:  

"Hello, my name is Alexander. I am from Tyumen, Russia. My father fought in the  Afghanistan and my Grandfather fought in the Great Patriotic War of the Fathers. We are a family that supported very vigorously the Soviet Union. But, I also grew up hearing stories always about America too, about hippies and rock and roll and the great American Dream. There is no more Soviet Union. I think of Soviet Union and America as mother and father, and maybe I am child of the two. One parent has died, so I come in search of other parent and this is why I travel so far to America. My father is very proud that that I come to America not as soldier but as peaceful tourist with camera. Sometimes I take pictures with camera cord. I like this because camera cord is like umbilical cord to my own creation."

I see this project as an important step, and really an expression of my frustration more than anything. There is a little irony, a little humor, and a lot of respect to Chi!

Enjoy, and let me know what you think. My professors enjoyed the work and frankly, I crushed my departmental critique. Please note: occasionally I asked the people in the photos to use the cable release instead of myself. I did this to question the idea of control, to create ambiguity between photographer and subject.

Please leave comments, thanks.