Lady bugs

Rosalind Krauss'
The Originality of the Avant-Garde: A Postmodernist Repetition

and Baudrillard's
The Hyper-realism of Simulation

I either couldn't understand Krauss or I disagreed with what she was trying to say. She says Originality rises out of repetition and recurrence. Citing artists that work closely with the grid as either a starting point, or a general aesthetic likeness with the grid, Krauss tries to show how originality and repetition work together. What I couldn't see was how this idea is very different from the notion that Avant-Garde is original by going against tradition. Isn't the development of tradition the product of repetition and avant-garde attempts a kind of mutation, mirror, or evolution of that repeated past?

Baudrillard - that there's a new, Hyper-reality created by the simulated reality by the use of images and digitized reality. He says a product of this phenomena is that whereas allegorical objects used to exist in specific signs, they are now everywhere to be recognized only with the aid of a different perspective. What I like from his paragraphs are, "An air of nondeliberate parody clings to everything." He says art "entered a phase of its own indefinite reproduction," but I'm not entirely sure how to visualize this idea. I wish more of these writers gave more concrete examples. In all his talk about represented reality, he does not mention more than one artist and medium. There is no mention of any kind of relationship between people, photography, television, advertisement, billboards, magazines, or radio ads. I wish he gave a visual representation of this whirligig of his. Because I was kind of lost in the whirligig of his abstract ideas. Well, I'll give it a shot.
(the definition of real he gives is "that for which it is possible to provide an equivalent representation." Still trying to wrap my mind around this)

Reinventing Medium

update: The use of photography by the masses and the artists' use of the camera in an amateurish way is not what makes photography a theoretical object. Photography becomes a theoretical object because of its ability to "transform the specificity of its own medium" as well as that of the whole field of art and its other mediums. Something about the fact that
***mere framing the world (whether we take a picture or not) becomes an aesthetic act***
makes photography a theoretical object. How this happens ... needs another update for another time.


















but as "tourists and picknickers [sported] Pentaxes and Nikons" and DSLRs and Macro and fishi and telescopic lenses and photoshop filters and other professional-class equipment, "amateurism [ceased] to be a techincal category. So no longer could the artist have a certain non-art look. Utube and flickr soon took over as the mass social practice. photography with my view camera has become an "industrial discard" like the jukebox or the trolley car. It has become obsolete.

This is when artists like James Coleman comes in and uses a slide projector and strange techniques of double face-outs to bring attention back to the medium and address its structure.













The strangeness of his techniques and the less familiar nature of the obsolete projector brings more attention to the medium he is using and in effect Coleman addresses its mediation of reality and the difficulties of the photograph and the flat image to preserve likeness and authenticity.




Rosalind E. Krauss
Reinventing the Medium