Original Copy conclusion

Page 185: The tension between animate object and inanimate female form lies at the crux of many of Man Ray's photographs".
Page 186: "Man Ray transforms a classical nude into an object that can be played".
"L'amour fou, the surrealist concept of mad, obsessional love".
Page 187: "wearing probed the idea of difference ... people who share the same heritage ... she impersonated members of her family, recreating photographs of them".

Page 219: Marcel Duchamp begins body art. (around 1921)
"The idea that the artist can stand in for the artwork proved instrumental in broadening the definition of sculptural practice."

Original copy starts getting surreal

Original Copy, chapter vi. Cultural and Political icons.
Page 127: Monumnets discussed, Robert Frank's "The Americans" compared to Eisenstein's "October". Page 129: "Even as monuments continue to be commissioned, debate over how to probe the past from critical perspectives have produced more active modes of memory telling".

Chapter VII: The Studio Without Walls: Sculpture in the Expanded Field". Camera use in 60s for site specific art. Quoting Smithson "it appears that abstraction and nature are merging in art and that the synthesizer is the camera".
Page 154: dissecting building and dissecting 35mm film (both literally).
Christo unrealized anti-Berlin wall work described.
Page 167: early Man Ray readymades/photography described.
Page 167-8: Automatism and bits of scrap paper; "sculptures in volontaires": try this with students?

Page 169: "To produce sculpture ... is sometimes merely to notice it, to find it".
Page 178-179: look at the titles of these photos.

Original Copy: Duchamp

Read "Contstantin Brancusi: The Studio as Groupe Mobile and the Photos Radieuses" in Original Copy
Notes: Page 85, Rodin never took photos but collected them and had his progress documented.
Page 86: Reverse left/right image with two images printed together. Time exposures at night.
Page 98: Brancusi Studio is like a sculpture.
"Why write? Why not just show photographs?".
Page 98: "Highly composed,  his pictures make visible that which is not immediately perceptible".

Also "Marcel Duchamp's Box in a Valise: The Readymade as Reproduction".
Notes: Page 116 shows the Stieglitz photo from which all reproductions of "The Fountain" were made.
Page 115: Dawn Ades observes "simultaneously recognizing the fundamental change that photography made to the work of art, now endlessly repeatable and thus bereft of its 'aura' of unique presence.

Original Copy - Eugene Atget

Read short chapter in Original Copy, "Eugene Atget: the marvelous in the everyday". Discusses 1905-1925 photographer who shot 8500 photos documenting sculptures and architecture in France and was touted as a Surrealist by Man Ray and others, even though he denied the connection. Page 72: "Atget's photography dissolved the line between seeing and knowing". Between this one and yesterdays on the ordinary, I was inspired to create this Mr. Saul work as he documents his life for insurance.

Sculpture in the age of photography

Saturday, William got me busy in morning and didn't get my reading time in.
Looked at one short essay in Moma "Original Copy" book: chapter 1, Sculpture in the age of photography" by Roxana Marcoci. Notes: Interesting image of artist/filmmaker Leger's studio (page 40). Also notes on critic Ruskin advocacy to photograph every sculpture and brick of momuments before they become lost, contrary to the drive for artistic capturing of select angles or moments of such places.
Page 21 reiterates some ideas of Egypt photography as support of colonization by saying the photos taken with purposeful omission of humans are "rendered ... with the authority of a conqueror".

Pinhole and more sculpture and Frankenstein

Read first portion of "Pin Hole Cameras, a do-it-yourself guide" by Chris Keeney, (Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 2011).  So far it is a personal account of interest plus great technical advice. I like his note "we are human and imperfect" as a means to situate non-perfect art practices. Some important notes on paper iso on page 27-28.  I used pinhole to create my video today. http://vimeo.com/34692634

Frankenstein Cultural History, chapter 8 has interesting notes on the Hammer films which I love but have not read about or studied in depth. I especially like the idea that the novel was ignored when writing the first movie, the only thing necessary was that it not resemble the Universal in the least.

Essay in "The Original Copy": "From Sculpture in Photography to Photography as Plastic Art" by Tobia Bezzola. Of interest: I'm interested in the writings of Heinrich Wolffin from 1896 on his very limited view of how to photograph sculpture based on there being one definitive angle corresponding to the artist's conception. His views are compared to Baudelaire and his hypothesis of the viewer finding infinite entry points into art (page 29). Page 30 cites Artschwarger "it is pointless to compete with God or NASA".   Discusses 2 photo approaches to sculpture: to display or to create sculptuer that exists only in the photograph. Page 31 declares that the best surrealist sculptures are photographs. Page 32 says that objects surpass paintings and gain "semantic autonomy" due to photography's influence. The Surreal, Bahaus, and Straight photographers are compared. Tropes of modernism listed on page 33. Yesterday's video included a sculpture which I shot due to things in this book: http://vimeo.com/34643878

An Almost Unlimited Variety: photography and sculpture in the 19th century

I read "An Almost Unlimited Variety: photography and sculpture in the 19th century", an essay by Geoffrey Batchen in the book "The Original Copy" (previously cited). He writes at length about a couple of photographers who shot daguerreotypes of their collections of art and sculptures. The later half of the essay got more interesting as he shifted the discussion to ways that photography changed the context of the work such as showing an angel atop Notre Dame Cathedral which would have been place there for none but god to see (page 25). On page 20 he makes an odd correlation between the binaries art/science, true/false, nature/artificial, connections which could not hold up to significant scrutiny. Interesting points: that early 19th century French used art and history to reinforce the sense of nationalism. That the use of reproductions (molds or photos) turned art production into capitalism (pages 21-22). That Egypt was presented in photos as ruins with no infrastructure or people caring for the crumbling artifacts as a means to pave public opinion to extend European colonization into Egypt (page 24-25).

Frankenstein and intro to "Original Copy"

In chapter 6 of the Frankenstein culture book, the 1931 Karloff film was the primary discussion topic. There were a couple of points of trivia I'd not heard before but overall it was an unchallenging read. I picked up "The Original Copy: photography of sculpture, 1839 to today", which is a large hard covered 2010 MOMA catalog Margaret gave me last year but that I'd not spent any quality time with. I read the introduction essay by the editor, Roxana Marcoci. I generally don't like reading introductions; they always cover too much, list too many names, and say too little. This one was no exception. The basic idea of the book is to chronicle how photography and sculpture are tied together in current study, stating quite bluntly that the study of art is "the child of photography" (quoting Donald Preziosi, page 12). On page 18, she discusses how "the idea that the camera can at once extend a sculptural activity into performance and a performance into sculpture" I did find the explanation of the root of montage to be intriguing, that the word comes from the German montieren which means "to engineer" (page 16).