This past Saturday I photographed a dance performance at Royce (UCLA Live). According to the program, the piece “explores themes of power, free will and survival instinct through the story of a group of servants trapped in the basement of their abusive mistress’ home.”
Mimetic much?
A lot of ideas popped up in my head while I was shooting the performance. Some inspired by the performance itself and others retrospectively, which as an activity in itself raises some interesting questions. Do we re-enter a make-believe world created for us in retrospectively reflecting on a performance (or any work of art) or is this process an act of recalling the cognitive content and emotional states experienced during the performance? Do all mental states that arise during a performance result solely from the performance itself or can we have mental states while participating in make believe that aren’t manifested by the fictional milieu? Can any mental state come about independently of our sensory experiences? Maybe participation in make believe can yield an exception?
Something I've been thinking about since starting shooting performance is if this activity counts as art (?). Am I merely documenting performance or could my activity be compared to that of photographing in the real world or creating my own fictional world in the studio? Are my pictures just a simulacrum of the performance or do they capture the passion and meaning of the performance in a different form?
I consider my performance photography art but not to same extent as my ‘fine art’ and photojournalistic work--not necessarily because of how the photos are perceived by viewers but in terms of how I feel engaged to the process. I certainly employ the same technique and skill set while doing performance photography that I do in my other work. Variables like changes in lighting and the inherent precariousness of the performers--of human beings themselves demand the same sensitivity to these sorts of things as their real-world counterparts. Still, I don’t find photographing performers as sexy as choosing the ‘performers’ and milieu for myself. When my colleagues or the artists ask me if I got good pictures I always say half-jokingly that it would be impossible not to with the good stuff happening on stage.
But still, maybe I am in a sense cheating in marketing my concert work as mine. Legally the work is mine. I hold exclusive rights to these images. Does the law match our concept of ownership in this case? Where does our concept of ownership come from? Is assigning/valuing ownership intuitive, an inherent part of our nature, to structure our world via formulization and nomenclature? Do copywrite laws exist because we see fairness in financial compensation, or social transgression in stealing ownership? And from a mimesis standpoint, to what extent must mimetic representation differ from actual form until we can perceive it to be interpretive enough to credit the artist?
These questions first occurred to me when after shooting behind the scenes for a music video, the director, Luck Gilford, who is also a fantastic photographer (http://lukegilford.com/), said that my photos were great, not as documentary material but as works of art in themselves. I was surprised that he would give this compliment because all I had really done was parasite off his work. I told him so. He replied that arguably all photography is parasitic in this way--that the photographer can only apprehend the tangible formal properties of what lies before him.
Luke's comment seems to suggest that perhaps a process that doesn't involve interpretation and is only a process of mimetic representation.
It took several years before photography was generally accepted by the art community for this reason. Many artists, particular those in the business of portraiture (fearing loosing business), complained that photography was too mimetic to be art.
Now of course photography is ubiquitously accepted as an art form. But the original controversy surrounding photography calls attention to a general trend of correlation between how close an artist can come to realistically imitating real world form and the reluctance to accept these mediums as ‘art.’ A big part of this is the perceived ‘ease’ by which new art forms can faithfully capture real world.
In a big way these controversies are a product of our times. The spirit of advancement, of progress, has seeped into our attitudes and expectations of art. Technology advances so quickly now that mediums don’t have time to fade before new ones begin. The introduction of photography would have seem like magic to 99.9% of our ancestry. The technology we have today is unbelievable compared to what was going down a decade ago. As a result we’ve come to value things in measure of superiority over their predecessors.
This phenomenon has profoundly influenced how we appreciating, shifting our perception of innovation from prospect to expectancy. For the first of ever in Western art there is a division between art conditioned for aesthetic appreciation alone and art recognized for its innovative potential. ‘Modern art,’ art that seeks to redefine itself through our contemporary cultural values, is accordingly mimetic of our value of progress and held notions of temporal advancement in art, either in critique or accordance with.
The notion that art advances like technology (especially by way of new technology) has pitted generations of artists against one another, which in itself is representative of what has become art’s guiding force and quintessence. Critics of contemporary forms and in particular those utilizing technology complain that such forms cheapen the cultural value of art--that art is becoming more prized as a pageant for the latest technology or for its shock value.
As a photographer I am both sympathetic to and resentful of these sentiments. Since the move into the digital age there has been a trend among many photographers to use powerful software like Photoshop to distort images from their likeness into computer enhanced spectacles, IMO. Many photographers lament this shift, complaining that overly post-processed images cheapens photography to a technological spectacle and draws the appreciators attention away from traditional artistry such as composition, attention to detail and command over natural lighting.
Adding to this apprehension is of the millions owners of ‘smart’ cameras that automatically adjust for exposure. All the technical prowess needed is literally at the tip of one's fingers. Photographers worry viewers will lose their appreciating for the artistry of the medium, who can now apprehend form with the ease of pushing a button. A parallel in music is GarageBand, software that allows the user to make (or compose?) music by drag and dropping pre-recorded loops.
On the other hand, I am also resentful of having these sentiments myself. Many artists recognize that they too were often distained by giants on which they stand yet they antagonize emerging mediums with the same distain. Some film traditionalists, especially at the introduction of digital photography, complain that digital photography bypasses the multitude of creative work that can be done in the darkroom. Many earlier film traditionalists who used large and medium format film had similar complaints of their successors who abandoned these high quality formats in favor of 35mm film for its portability and stability. And this doesn’t even bring us back to the original photographers who faced criticism from the art world for their use of technology.
This paradoxology has generated a huge amount of discourse examining art qua art and calling attention to what has become the crux of controversy in art; the terror that many artists and audience feel when something seems to be blurring the lines between an art and non-art. I'll pick up on this in my followup post.
-Shalev
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