Category: art school

First, Get Good Advice

Posted on Posted in art school, The Gallery, visual mindTagged , ,

Ask a guide who knows how to get where you are going. Easy enough. How do you know where you want to go? Compare and contrast destinations. These are two people providing answers to the same question. One person, Martin Parr is an established photographer known primarily to street photographers. The other, Marina Abromavitch was a major founder of a manner and means of expression. She is a creative with influence.

Parr at SCAD

Martin Parr is talking to students at SCAD, a Georgia art-school founded in 1978.

Marina Abromavitch: advice to the young

Marina will make a piece of work; give you an exercise. It make make you uncomfortable. If it doesn’t, did it work?

Both of these people are talking to the young artist, not that person who gave up before getting thru their teens. Art has a way of being confused, as well as confusing.

Art is more difficult than knowing how to do something. It is not limited to doing something well, or important, or grand. It is a worldmaker, not a describer.

Learn enough in your twenties so you have enough time to have more than a career.

Provoke – are, bure, boke

Posted on Posted in art school, coursenotes, creativityTagged ,

“Grainy, blurry, out-of-focus” A small movement that continues making changes in the way of picture making.

Yutaka Takanashi and Takuma Nakahira, critic Koji Taki, and writer Takahiko Okada. Started a short lived magazine: Provoke.

Provoke// materials for thought

Boke, usually: ‘bokeh,’ is the remainder of this stylistic trinity. It has been reduced to meaning the ‘out of focus’ rendering of a lens. Bokeh and ‘diffraction limited,’ form the recurrent, frequent topic in the online life of photography. A limited life, but it won’t die.

I’ve collected a set of videos so those of you at the table can have a brief, but worthwhile foundation of the provoke style.

Provoke (Purovōku) was an experimental magazine founded by photographers Yutaka Takanashi and Takuma Nakahira, critic Koji Taki, and writer Takahiko Okada in 1968. The magazine’s subtitle read as: shisō no tame no chōhatsuteki shiryō (Provocative documents for the sake of thought). Photographer Daido Moriyama is most often associated with the publication, but Moriyama did not join the magazine until the second issue. Provoke lasted only three issues with a small print run, but remains an important cultural artifact of the postwar era.

MoMA
Tate | Daido Moriyama

A longer, more complete interview with Daido is this from Vimeo:

2016, Moriyama [13min]