UNDER THE HOOD: Street Cred

by Drew Martin

Photography for me is primarily a social device...so much so that I cannot take credit for its products. This relationship to the medium was confirmed this past Saturday at the UNDER THE HOOD show in Los Angeles, which "happened" at the Thinkery, with the help of its stewards, Anne Hars and Bill Wheelock. On Saturday morning, Anne and I walked around their neighborhood and she introduced me to the residents. I took just shy of 200 pictures of the people we bumped into on the street. The black and white film was developed midday and was ready later in the afternoon for the show, which stayed up until sunset.

The neighbors were all invited to see the photographs together and could take home the ones of them or the pictures they liked.

Below is a selection of the pictures from the show, starting with one of Anne and her 104 year old neighbor, Nadia:

My favorite picture of all, however, is the picture Anne snapped of me and my two year old son, Miles, during the shoot. He is, in fact, responsible for when each picture was taken; the moment of stillness he would afford me.

To view an online book version of the photography show, click here >>>

UNDER THE HOOD: At the Thinkery, Los Angeles

This Saturday on May 15th from 5-7pm, the Thinkery will be hosting an UNDER THE HOOD show. All the pictures will be taken of residents in the surrounding neighborhoods within 24 hours of the show and all the subjects are invited to come and take their pictures...and do with them as they please.

The first UNDER THE HOOD started in my back yard half a year ago, which turned out to be a great event.

To see pictures from that November show in New Jersey click on the following links:
UNDER THE HOOD: Show Preview
UNDER THE HOOD: A Garden Party

As posted by the Hairy Prone Companion:
Thinkery Rises Again

Click on the invitation above for a larger view with details and feel free to stop by...

Dreaming as Media

by Drew Martin

Dreams have an obvious parallel to media and the arts; most notably, film and surrealism...especially surrealist films. It seems, however, content aside, there are quality and resolution aspects that are more about the "content provider."

Some people have uneventful dreams, while others simply do not remember their dreams. I am always fascinated by the visual saturation and details of my own dreams. I never have physical sensations of the environment: wind or heat and cold, and I never taste or smell anything. While the sound in my dreams is typically nothing special, the visual details are hyperrealistic.

Four nights ago I had a dream I was trying to get into a grand sanatorium, which was being used as a halfway home/shelter but I was turned away because I looked too clean: I had on a suit, a crisp white shirt and a tie. I walked away from the large old building with vaulted ceilings and marble columns and noticed a brand new, multi-storied and modern, glass Bank of America built on top of it. The sight was so crisp that it looked like a high-end architectural 3-D computer rendering.

When I left, I went to a hardware store nearby and asked to see their doorknobs. These were kept in huge glass jugs, which were lying on their sides on a rack. The shopkeeper only showed me two. One was half of a cheap brass-looking model and the second was some clear plastic contraption with elaborate internal circuitry, which I inspected quite closely. It looked like a piece of laboratory equipment. The shopkeeper told me it was a "widow's" door knob. When I asked him what that meant he said that anticipated what a widow was thinking or looking for and lit up a red light that simply acknowledged that it understood, but it actually did nothing after that. It simply let the woman know that it knows she is entering her bedroom for a specific reason and that it comforted her with a kind of technological small talk.

The following night, when I was aware that I was in a dream, I decided to have a look around and see what was different about seeing in a dream versus seeing in reality. Dreams are not as controllable as one might hope. You can wish things into them but they are fleeting. The best I could do was to make may way over to a wall, twice, but it was an awkward maneuvering, like stumbling drunk or driving an old VW bus with loose steering.

The first time, I got right up to it and looked as close as possible. All the familiar wall details dissolved into what seemed like just a veneer of an electric pattern...like the scene in the Matrix when Neo sees everything as layers of code, only in my dream that "force field" was more colorful and with a design that looked like chipboard. The second time, a few minutes later in the same dream, I made my way over to the wall again and I was able to get, what seemed to be, less than a centimeter away. Everything was crisp and in focus, no matter how close I got. I had macroscopic and microscopic vision, which makes a lot of sense since there are no lenses involved when you "see" things in your dreams.

Image Karma

by Drew Martin

I have a confession: I am an image kleptomaniac. I take images from the Internet without permission and I shamelessly use them here without acknowledgement. It's not that I am an evil person, it's simply that it is impossible for me to fluidly and creatively function otherwise. Yes, it's "lying, stealing, cheating" but I think this has to be the way of the future. On some photo sharing sites, such as Flickr the photographer can be easily contacted but it is often very difficult to find the right person from other image amassing tools such as Google Image Search.

Since I am not business minded and have no model of how image exchanges could work, I have thought about it more holistically and have come up with the idea of Image Karma. The idea is to generate and upload as many images as you "lift" and that you are willing to give them as much freedom of usage as you expect from the images of other people. Like Karma, it's not something that needs to be monitored and externally regulated because it is something you have to live with, balance and own up to. Although, technologically, it would be quite easy to tag the original image and then run a program to detect which user owns the images.

I looked at this blog to test the waters and see if I have image debt or image credit. I thought it would be quite easy to add up all the contributed versus appropriated images but it gets complicated. For example, what do you do with a picture you find of yourself or something you made, which was taken by a photographer you do not know and posted online? And what about an image you take and add to, giving it another meaning or if you make a unique collage from several independently lifted images?

I came up with four categories for images (which includes photographs, drawings, charts and graphics): Generated, Lifted, Borrowed and Deserved. Generated means you are the original source. Lifted are the ones you have taken without permission. Borrowed are ones either given to you or which you took with some kind of understanding. This happens a lot with people I interview, they either send me pictures of their work or I get them from their websites. The latter, is more a matter of convenience for my subject and is always done with discretion and the rightful owner always has final say of whether or not I can use it. Deserved images are pictures of you or something you have done.

Of course there are tons of existing rights issues involved with what I am suggesting. I would not typically grab someone's personal photograph unless it was absolutely fitting and was handled respectfully. I also would not purposely trespass onto the property of living professional photographers who depend on their photo rights for their livelihood. These people are typically sharks roaming the Internet for improper usage of their photographs and will sink their teeth into you with threats and lawsuits. I envision a shared future where such possessiveness will seem wrong and archaic.

This is the 90th posting to this blog and up until now I came up with roughly 150 Generated and 125 Lifted images...so I have got some image credit in the grand scheme of Image Karma. I also have about 50 Borrowed images, which are, in the end promotional for the original source. There were also a couple Deserved images and those were from a freezing mud run I took part in so I really deserved those images. Although this seems like a justification for appropriating images, I actually think it is a duty to be thinking this way and contributing as well as taking. It is a very positive exchange and a lot less suspicious than the thinking behind the idea of offsetting your carbon footprint. In this posting there is one Generated graph and a Deserved image below. The other two pictures are photographs I took of sculptures I assembled from found objects. No one else could possibly have these pictures. I have added them only for that reason, to introduce them into the sea of images without restriction. I could care less if they end up on a corporate presentation or someone else's website.

I started thinking about this a year after 9/11. I was pursuing my Masters degree in Media Studies at The New School and was taking a class in Media Ethics. One day I was flipping through a big silver book by Magnum Photographers on 9/11 while waiting for a librarian. To my surprise, there was a picture of me running (in the center, black suit) from a wall of smoke/debris/ash being pushed up West Broadway. I was four blocks from the first tower to collapse, when it collapsed. One would think that I would have some say as to whether or not that picture could be used, especially to generate money for profit or even a cause. But I have absolutely no rights to it. It belongs to the photographer Adam Wiseman. I did contact him and we arranged for him to send me prints but I did not get his permission to use it here. I did not ask. In terms of Image Karma, this falls into the 100% Deserved, especially because of the emotional circumstances.

Critical Mass: Julian Schnabel

by Drew Martin
It is often hard for me to write about a current, big-name artist, such as Julian Schnabel, because my own life as an artist has been quite isolated from trends, raves and the who's who of the art world. At the same time I feel compelled to chime in when I am turned on to someone because I want to explain him or her first and foremost as an artist.

With all due respect to the old guard critics who have said some unkind and unfair things in the past about Schnabel, I think they take themselves a bit too seriously and, in doing so, betray the very nature of art and the free expression of artists. While their dialogue is often enlightening, their judgement, especially because of their influence, functions as a kind of censorship.

One of my favorite and just retaliations by an artist towards the narrow scope of the critic was during the 1989 filming of the Polish television show 100 Pytań Do...Krzysztofa Kieślowskiego
(100 Hundred Questions For...Krzysztof Kieślowski) seven years before his death in 1996. In it, the famous (and my favorite) filmmaker irritatingly tells off the small audience of Polish film critics and basically says that not one of them present are competent enough to mount an intelligent conversation about films, particularly his.

After listening to all the questions and comments from the audience leading up to this remark, you cannot help but to feel his frustration and take his side. During this critique of the critics, he pauses for a second, counts in his head and then concludes that possibly three people in all of Poland could comprehensively discuss film (I wonder if that included himself, fellow screenwriter/trial lawyer Krzysztof Piesiewicz and Andrzej Wajda...and maybe he would have said four if Roman Polanski had not emigrated). He states this after discussing, by contrast, that in France he once heard an hour-long, in-depth conversation on the radio between four "serious" people about his use of music in the film, Krótki Film O Zabijaniu (A Short Film About Killing, 1988). They discussed it from all angles and thoughtfully analyzed it, thinking of things that not even he was aware of.

I write all of this not in defense or promotion of Schnabel, but merely to point out that what is lost in the language of the art review, and even in a dialogue with an artist, is the language of painting, drawing, sculpture, etc...because words like these are simply words. I also want to question our own competency when it comes to understanding various media. This has less to do with intelligence and more to do with what we set ourselves up for and how we have been raised. Most reviews and discussions about the arts are about liking and disliking the subject at hand and explaining and justifying what is to be liked or disliked. Sometimes the review is simply a biographical sketch, which uses the works of an artist as milestones. At other times, the critique feels like an extension of a report card. A serious problem is that we are often grading artists on languages we may not fully understand ourselves.

For the past year, I have explained that I am interested in the scope of "arts and media" but this is not actually how I really see it. Simply put, the arts are part of my idea of media. A painting, for example, is a medium and has its own special language unique to itself.

My interest in Schnabel has gradually developed; initiated with bad press and rekindled with each film (Before Night Falls, Basquiat, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), which I liked but wasn't crazy about. I pass near Schnabel's Palazzo Chupi quite often and not too long ago we crossed paths as he was about to enter The Spotted Pig in the West Village. We exchanged glances and polite hellos and then proceeded on with our respective friends. He looked good natured and approachable. I wanted to know more about him so I went online and watched a few hours of interviews with him and various hosts. Then I went to The Strand and bought an old, overpriced-but-well-worth-it monograph: Julian Schnabel: Paintings 1975 - 1987. Surveying the pictures in the monograph, I was surprised by Schnabel's range and style. There is also quite a bit of insightful writing about him and by him.

(November 1981, Amsterdam)
"I saw a Van Gogh drawing of his girlfriend's mother in her backyard in Amsterdam. It was made in 1887. It has a grayish purple wash on it. There's a funny light in it. It made me feel like I was standing on Houston Street in late November, the temperature has just changed; I don't have a scarf; a friend has cancelled a dinner appointment with me. I had nowhere to go. I felt the air go through me. I had a sense of my own twilight. That drawing made me fell like I was dead already. That's what I call Modern."

While Schnabel's films are widely liked, his paintings have been scoffed at and his material success with them has only deepened the suspicion...and jealousy. Typically the secondary activity of a celebrity is diluted and unimpressive...i.e. Madonna as actress. The fact that respect for Schnabel surged after he directed each film is a pretty good indicator that maybe the furrow-browed critics misread him. He has certainly written about art more comprehensively than a lot of peope who make it their profession.

(continued from the Amsterdam writing)
"Something that's appropriate, that approximates the recognition of your consciousness. That's what it means to say 'that painting looks like it was painted yesterday.' Vermeer has that power of moderness. The ability to make the viewer disappear...It is like when you go to the movies and the lights go out and you become invisible before the film comes on. These paintings can make you recognize yourself observing observation. For a moment, you have an acute realization of your own transience, and your explicit perception of being."

In an August 9, 1996 interview with Charlie Rose (and David Bowie) following the release of Basquiat, Schnabel responds to Bowie's very cynical take on the commodity of art by discussing how people experience music and how painting should be experienced in the same, open way. I think people do not understand Schnabel's paintings because they simply do not understand painting as a medium. They do not know how to open up and experience it. America is a cinematic culture. Cinema is our mother tongue and we understand its multitude of dialects. The language of cinema also goes hand-in-hand with America's car culture: the windshield as a screen and the "ride" as compression/play of time and an out of body experience. It is not simply that film is a popular medium and we are a nation of popular arts. It is a bit more complicated. It is more like we are finely tuned into cinematic time sequence, visual movement and linear narrative.

This is actually quite a conceptual leap...that we can shelve a two-hour time slot in our minds for the course of a film: quite a feat of patience actually because it means we are willing to wait that long for issues introduced at the beginning of the film to be resolved by its end. With this standard we are less able with true literature (Marcel Proust or James Joyce) but are better readers of books that flow like a movie (Dan Brown). It is also by this standard that we are critical of television shows and shorter video clips as being too flighty. When it comes to painting, however, we are left a bit dumbfounded. The typical approach, even with the most abstract work, is to look for something familiar, allegorical or narrative. This works well for paintings set up for this, such as Leonardo da Vinci's (or even Salvador Dali's for that matter) Last Supper because this is not a painting about painting. Schnabel makes paintings about painting. Like him/them or not, he speaks the language.

In one of the interviews I watched online, Schnabel stands in front of one of his works (at least a story tall) and draws a comment from his surfing experiences, that he considers the canvas as a wave he is about to enter. Like any language, the symbols and function of all the components need to have such meaning.

Fire Power

by Drew Martin

Today is the 148th anniversary of Cinco de Mayo, the holiday commemorating the unlikely victory of the outnumbered Mexican army in Puebla against the better equipped, invading French soldiers in 1862; a time when America was also at war, with itself. The fifth of May also marks the one year anniversary of another threatening display of fire power, the beginning of the Jesusita Fire in Santa Barbara, California, a place very dear to me because it is where I studied and especially because it is where my aunt, uncle and cousins live.

Fire is one of the most devastating products of war, so there is something very war ridden about any fire. Aside from a nuclear bomb, there is no weapon that could destroy every inch of land for miles around, as does a forest fire. In the dry mountains of California, it only takes a spark from a power tool, one bolt of lightning or a match to set off a blaze that travels as fast as the winds. The charred mountains last year reminded me of pictures I had seen of World War I battlefields and the crumbled houses had an eerie resemblance to bombed out European cities of World War II. Those are purely mediated references and certainly influenced my own framing of Jesusita's aftermath. I visited my aunt and uncle a week after the fire was contained. I had not intended on documenting the destruction but one morning I brought an inexpensive digital camera with me on a run up to one of my favorite places, Inspiration Point, which was still closed off by the parks services.

Devastation and destruction are interesting subject matter in the arts and are not uncommon. Gericault and Goya are two artists who championed such themes. The initial impulse is to capture its totality and permanence but what you are really doing is saving an extreme moment before there is the natural rebuilding actions of humans and regrowth of nature. That was the only motivation for taking pictures last year...not to capture the loss of possessions and nature but to record a temporary state that would soon be lost as well.

One of the pictures I took was of the trail sign, which shows where the name of the fire came from. Fires are usually named for their locations, as opposed to hurricanes. Originally the big storms were named after saint's days and then assumed latitude-longitude positions but it was found that distinctive names were quicker and less subject to error. Hurricanes started receiving female names in World War II when one was used in the 1941 novel Storm by George R. Stewart. In 1979, male names were introduced to alternate with the female names. Currently, six lists of names are used in rotation. If a storm is extremely devastating, the name is replaced for reasons of sensitivity.

An online book of all the photos I took can be viewed on blurb.com, with a search for the title Hot Tub.

The book jacket includes the following explanation:

The 2009 Jesusita Fire of Santa Barbara began on May 5 before 2pm, burned 8,733 acres, destroyed 80 homes and caused over $17 million of damage before being declared 100% contained on May 18 at 6pm.

The photographs in this book were taken on Tunnel Road in the mountains of Santa Barbara in the afternoon of May 28 and on the Jesusita Trail at dawn on May 30, 2009.

This book is dedicated to the residents of Santa Barbara who were affected by Jesusita. The two weeks of destruction left months of clean-up and years of rebuilding. The stress of the fire's threat and damage was only compounded by the labor and details of recovery: negotiating with insurance companies, dealing with contractors and landscapers, restoration cleaning furniture, dry cleaning everything, ozone cleaning the inside of houses and living with the constant smell of burned homes, vehicles and nature.