i love photography, but i do think it's less complex than
painting.
in painting the very image comes from the artist's nervous
system.
to put painting above photography is to value the human
brain's resources.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Chris Jones" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Saturday, June 27, 2009 6:30 AM
Subject: Re: still alive and here
> 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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