On Fri, 2009-06-26 at 09:00 -0600, Douglas Barbour wrote:
> lyric with/plus b&w photographs? That's intriguing....
I have just started reading Gerald Genette, the Work of Art, and am
surprised to read that an important literary theorist, writing in early
1990's Paris, has a need to defend novels and poems as works of art.
Photography seems to be in a similar situation in that it also needs to
be defended as art.
It is to Deleuze whom we may turn in defending photography as art when
in his book on Bacon and haptic aesthetics he reserves his highest
praise for photographs of trees as just as much art as the oil on canvas
easel paintings of Bacon. What does he say? That art photographs of
trees, landscape photography as provided by Ansel Adams, are not only
rare but also miracles! What higher praise can a vitalist philosopher
such as Deleuze give to a photographer of trees then to say this is the
miracle of life itself. Photography is art.
It seems to me that today's poets and artist photographers have an
outsider status when it comes to the old and archaic Aristotle's
categories or for that matter Kant's faculties, which make a claim as to
what is and what is not art, based on some sort of bullshit ontology by
which we can, if complied with, not be able to make art.
There is, of course, a lot more to it then this. I am not a fan of Ansel
Adams landscapes but it is only after I have come to admire the zone
system compositions of his art that I can begin a quarrel with what he
has achieved for art.
Best, Chris Jones.
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