The quality of his defiance
Welcome to the 76th edition of this newsletter!
With each email I'm sharing material that has inspired me recently. I'm hoping it will inspire you, too. If you want to support my work, you can sign up for my Patreon. This will get you access to exclusive material every week.
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I just published a slightly longer piece on CPhMag.com about a topic that I have been preoccupied with for a while: how the way we feel about photography itself often crowds out what photographs show. It's a form of deceit that, unfortunately, often reduces serious photography discussions down to a lot less than what they should be. This deceit has consequences when we take photographs and when we look at them.
Even as I don't know whether the piece is the final word (it's certainly not intended to be), I'm hoping that it will push me closer towards a better understanding of what writing about photographs really ought to do.
I wasn't going to spend more time with AI. But John Oliver just had a pretty great episode about the topic. I might as well share it here. It's time well spent, and there are quite a few very witty jokes included (if that's your thing).
I don't know if you're familiar with the Mulligan & O'Hare characters, created by Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer. If you are interested in comedy that pokes fun at the sheer pretense that goes into so much music, they got you covered.
But it's not all "just" comedy as Jennifer Lucy Allan argues in this incredibly insightful article about avant-garde music:
One of my most revelatory experiences in the early days of Cafe Oto was watching Han playing solo, a chequered teatowel wrapped like a bandana around his head, his big lean body in clunky brown boots folded clownishly behind the kit, leaping up to play the wall, or shoving a stick in his mouth and tapping out a tune on said stick by opening and closing his gob. It was fun! It was funny! Until that moment, I had no idea that there was a valid reaction to this music that was other than deeply reverent. Perhaps some still don't.
It's too bad that photography is simply too irrelevant for people like Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer to make fun of it.
A little while ago, a train carrying a boatload (sorry!) of incredibly toxic chemicals derailed somewhere in Ohio. Authorities decided they needed to do what they called a "controlled burn" of some of the material.
The event has now entered US politics. The same people who eliminated crucial train-safety regulations are now using the disaster that they're indirectly responsible for to tell the people who are affected by it that they're being victimized -- mind you, not by admitting that the regulations were needed. No, now the focus is on how people living nearby are supposedly being left alone.
Anyway, early on, some photographs from that "controlled burn" were being shared online. The website Snopes.com looked into a picture and came to the conclusion that it wasn't clear whether or not it was real. But a few days later, there were more pictures, and they updated their original article. The article is really instructive. First, the photos are absolutely crazy. Second, it's interesting to see how verification of images on the internet works.
If you know your art history, you'll know that this is a painting by George Grosz (entitled Der Liebeskranke from 1916). You might not know all that much about the painter and his life. This article got you covered. It's filled with interesting insight:
Grosz’s unequivocal sense that the lives of workers in industrial society were miserable and degraded meant that the last thing he wanted was the equalisation of society to the mean: the world was too rotten for that. Grosz’s Marxism expressed itself not in a positive vision but in the quality of his defiance.
There wasn't supposed to be a happy ending to what might have been an equally unhappy life for the painter:
‘Rarely have I seen a person who lives with such self-destructive rage,’ Rudolf Schlichter, an old Dada comrade, reported in 1954. ‘It is a depressing spectacle to see a man whom one once cherished go to the dogs in this way.’
You might have heard that a little while ago, a ballet director attacked a critic by smearing his dog's feces into her face in Germany. As you can imagine, this caused a huge uproar, with -- sadly not making this up -- a number of people saying that somehow, they were able to understand the ballet director.
The German cultural scene loves nothing more than to endlessly and usually absurdly discuss such incidents. In the end, there was an amazing piece being written about the incident and reactions that I thought I'd share. I realize that most of you won't be able to read German. However, Google Translate does a pretty good job (there is the occasional wonkyness). So do yourself a favour and read the machine translation. Here's a short sample:
I studied several humanities, received my doctorate and have published - and now, as a profession, I am forced to write about dog poop. So we are all losers in this game we call discourse.
Why would you read about dog shit? Because it's not about shit at all. Instead, the whole affair centers on the roles of artist and critic, misogyny also playing a huge role.
Lastly, I need to point out that spots in my workshops are still available. If you're interested in either learning how to write about your work or in acquiring a vast assortment of new skills that will help your practice, get in touch, please!
With that I will conclude for today. As always thank you for reading!
-- Jörg