Re: [Leica] pornography, Ansel, screens, W

[Johnny Deadman <john@pinkheadedbug.com>]

on 5/12/00 3:29 am, Robert Appleby at robert.appleby@tin.it wrote:

> Isn't the idea that art has to communicate emotion a bit old-fashioned? A
> bit like standing in front of a Rothko waiting for the spritual orgasm? Art
> and its success/failure are defined by its social role<s>, which makes
> Ansel Adams a pretty successful artist. John's comparison to Wordsworth is
> absolutely spot on. Whitman would be another (both W's - freaky!).

Old fashioned? I wouldn't know, really. Purely intellectual art (conceptual
post-modernism for example) holds no interest for me so I'd guess there has
to be an emotional component. re another post I'm not really an
anti-classicist or an anti-modernist but I do look for questions to be
raised in art about art itself, whether that's Constable making a big mess
on the surface of the canvas with the thickness of his oils, when
'perfection of illusion' was the current vogue, or Walker Evans getting his
composition just ever so slightly wrong time and time again, totallyon
purpose. I think ultimately I'm probably a romantic, in that I believe that
art does have a lot to say about human redemption.

At bottom I'm just one of those who thinks AA is really eyecandy and not
much more. Jim isn't, Mark isn't, and we can all live with that.

Incidentally, re Wimberley and what M calls 'zone system cliches' I can
completely understand why anyone would think that, but to me he has
penetrated the veil repeatedly.

I think the wordsworth/coleridge notions are really fundamental to
discussions of this kind of landscape photography as wordsworth's original
concept of the 'sublime' as articulated in the early prelude and also
'intimations of immortality', the idea that we read the natural world for
evidence of the transcendent, almost as mediaeval scholars examined botanic
specimens for evidence of the great chain of being, is fundamentally what
*I* think people like Wimberley and Adams are striving for.

There are many other kinds of landscape... my personal favourites are Adams'
urban photos in WHAT WE BOUGHT and some of the topographical school, as well
as (I always go on about these I know) Sudek's photos of his back garden and
Frank's occasional landscapes in THE AMERICANS. We shouldn't get stuck on
any one purpose or definition I don't think.

- -- 
Johnny Deadman

http://www.pinkheadedbug.com