Category: coursenotes

from lectures and presentations I’ve taught

Better Class of Photographs

Posted on Posted in alt photo, coursenotes, meaning, webionaire

classifying print by significant or consequential process result so that an archivist or curator can know what to do to preserve or present

classifying prints by final output.

  • A print: analog, including ‘alt’ non-silver print
  • C print: aka, Type-C. chromogenic color print
  • D print: digital print. replaces calling them giclee, or inkjet or

it may take more than one picture as reference or notation about the exhibition print, but that shouldn’t be uncomfortable to those who have experienced print translations.

  • E prints

what you are responding to is an E-print, a screen image. If that prompts your action then good. Most people say their work is better in person; some so great that, like the face of enlightenment,  it can’t be shown in lesser surrounds. They are wrong. Most work doesn’t gain meaning in physical space – it remains just as dull as most of those online posers whose work would be much better in person.

Question today

Posted on Posted in A Symbol Life, coursenotes, creativity
  • A Poetics of Composition , Bris Uspensky (1973)
  • Words and Pictures: On the Literal and the Symbolic in the Illustration of a Text Meyer Schapiro (1973)
  • A Theory of Semitoics Umberto Eco, (1976)
  • Beyond Modern Sculpture, Jack Burnham (1968)
  • The Structure of Art, Jack Burnham (1971)
  • The Order of Things, Michel Foucault (1970)
  • Elements of Semiology, Roland Barthes (1964)
  • Act of Creation, Arthur Koestler (1964)
  • Art and Visual Perception, Rudolf Arnheim, (1974)  — Gestalt
  • The Human Use of Human Beings, Norbert Wiener (1950)
  • Mathematical Basis of the Arts, Schiliinger
  • Aesthetics and Psychobiology , Berlyne(1971) 
  • A Theory of Human Curiosity, Berlyne , 1954, British Journal of Psychology
  • Fechner — Zur experimentalen Aesthetik ,1871 
 
 Experts and Masters of the Game freely wove the initial theme into unlimited combinations. For a long time one school of players favored the technique of stating side by side, developing in counterpoint, and finally harmoniously combining two hostile themes or ideas, such as law and freedom, individual and community. In such a Game the goal was to develop both themes or theses with complete equality and impartiality, to evolve out of thesis and antithesis the purest possible synthesis .... We would scarcely be exaggerating if we ventured to say that for a small circle of genuine Glass Bead Game players the Game was virtually equivalent to worship, although it deliberately eschewed developing any theology of its own.  -HERMANN HESSE The Glass Bead Game (pp. 40-41)  
 
 The first result of our substitution is very remarkable. If the totem animal is the father, then the two main commandments of totemism, the two taboo rules which constitute its nucleus-not to kill the totem animal and not to use a woman belonging to the same totem for sexual purposes-agree in content with the two crimes of Oedipus, who slew his father and took his motlier to wife, and also with the child's two primal wishes whose insufficient repression or whose reawakening forms the nucleus of perhaps all neuroses.  ---SIGMUND FREUD Totem and Taboo

Structuralism is the search for unsuspected harmonies. It is the discovery of a system of relations latent in a series of objects. 

-HAYES AND HAYES Claude Levi-Strauss (p. 4)

 But, whether one deplores or rejoices in the fact, there are still zones in which savage thought, like savage species, is relatively protected. This is the case of art, to which our civilization accords the status of a national part, with all the advantages and inconveniences attending so artificial a formula; and it is particularly the case of so many as yet 'uncleared' sectors of social life, where, through indifference or inability, and most often without our knowing why, primitive thought continues to flourish.  -CLAUDE LEVI-STRAUSS The Savage Mind (p. 219)