On Mon, 2009-11-16 at 10:46 -0700, Douglas Barbour wrote:
> A lot of so-called pomo  
> photography just feels rather facile to me;

Although agreeing, I had wanted to come back to this... this pomo sort
of we all have a story autobiographical approach to photography and
print making and the large garish colour pomo digital prints; when
analysed can appear as an unsightly reactive formalism and this can make
it difficult to approach critically. 

What pomo does is confound and confuse the modernists debates, arguments
and discussion around form in art. I find this a big worry, and
especially when working with photographic media. (And remember, I was
taught in the modernist tradition of sculpture as video and modernist
photography.) Perhaps oddly, poetry is a little more immune to this and
could be seen as a life line thrown out to art photography as a way of
keeping it alive as a minor art. It seems odd that poetry, which is
clearly claimed to be a major art form, would do this. And yet, who is
the lifeline for? It can appear that poetry needs this as much as
photography. 

It is simply not possible to understand photography except as a minor
art and one of the most difficult of art media. This was said to me
before I even got to develop my first roll of Tri-X at art school; that
if you wish to continue with photography as your media of choice you
must understand you are choosing a most difficult media to make art
with. Experience gives an even more intense knowing, and the relations
of forces working against the media. Pomo opinions, of course, say
otherwise and see photography as a shopping trolley pushed up and down
the rows of supermarket shelves and what is in your trolley, picked
randomly anything goes from the shelves, imagined now as a collection of
tools and marketing is supposed to be what Art becomes; your website,
blog and facebook pages, as pomo says. So it becomes quite complex.
Looking back on it, I suspect this is why I wrote a novel called Swindle
in the third person. I am going to change Bar-B-Q to third person from
first, also. 

Douglas Crimp has in his introduction to "On the Museum's Ruins" also
said that Postmodernism cannot any longer be a useful term in art
history and has in fact left art history and as such, art itself. (There
can be no pomo art, Crimp Argues.) He has instead had to reposition
Sherry Levine's appropriations of Eward Weston's male nudes of his ten
year old son as late modernism, rather then pomo. Postmodernism as
Post-impressionism usage was the intent when the term was first used.
Appropriation then is a modernist term, or am I the only one who has
seen Cezanne's Post-impressionist appropriations of Baroque Dutch still
lifes at the beginning of painting. (And the colorist critique...) 

Anyways, I have said this before, but the way I could transfer ideas I
had for computer multi-media to silver gelatin prints has me returning
for another look.


Not sure who I quote below... 

Go to super-market to see pomo art...

I do not tell my students.... I don't have a heart to say that if they
want Art, they should be ready to live when no one will ever know them.