Category: How To

Walead Beshty: RA4 process

Posted on Posted in art biz, How To, overnight notes, Prints, the Lab, The Positive, visual mind

Walead Beshty (b. 1976, London, U.K.) Walead Beshty was born in London, United Kingdom in 1976 and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. He studied at Bard College and received his Masters in Fine Art from Yale University in 2002.

https://www.thomasdanegallery.com/exhibitions/174/works/artworks4495/

“I tend to think of my work in terms of constraints, whether that be context, convention or material, and use their logics to generate the work. I guess that’s because I see life as an improvisation within constraints, and affirmative notions of selfhood, autonomy, freedom, etc., arise through the active negotiation with restriction.” Walead Beshty in Conversation with Hamza Walker on the occasion of Equivalents, Regen Projects, Los Angeles, 2018

Notions:

Objects are given meaning through use, and over time certain uses become naturalized. Through the accumulation of patterns of use, certain conventions become standardized. Painting, for example, has developed a certain set of base conventions (e.g. canvas, rectilinear form, wall as support, portability). These conventions form the starting point for a dialogue, an agreement regarding the nature of the communication that will be taking place. For example, if a painting has a ‘conventional’ relationship to the wall on which it hangs, we would be acting in bad faith if we were to discuss the paint on that wall as part of the work. In art, these conventions designate what is inside and what is outside of the work. The boundary between the work and its surroundings is manifest through its adherence to convention. [from: https://www.actionstakenunderthefictitiousnamewaleadbeshtystudiosinc.com/lesson-notes-for-an-introductory-lecture ]

YT: 2020.

june ’23 auction: Lot 17, Walead Beshty, Six Magnet, Three Color Curl (CMY: Irvine, California, September 6th 2009, Fuji Crystal Archive Type C) (WB06709), 2009, estimated at £15000-20000, sold at £44450

Print Finishing.

Posted on Posted in overnight notes, the Lab, The PostTagged

The Print… between books and followings: Mortensen or Adams.

William Mortensen (1897 – 1965) was one of the most well known and respected photographers in America in the thirties. Ansel Adams called him ‘the Antichrist’ and wanted him written out of history.

Ansel Easton Adams (February 20, 1902 – April 22, 1984) 

The Print… Adams (outlasted ..)

Print Finishing.. Mortensen (came first)

Should you want to make prints, the Mortensen is overlooked; it shouldn’t be.

The contents, shown below, is why. Much more content.

Adams is about curves and chemistry… in search of a print, whereas Mortensen is about how to retouch, to introduce the hand, while also providing specifics about drying, flattening of the print.

Even though he was there before Adams, we all know Ansel Adams.

Mortensen’s method required the hand. It was all about the final print; what could be done by the individual photographer… using haptic tools in addition to the optics.

Not the Zone System. A tone system.

In "Venus and Vulcan" -- a series of 1934 Camera Craft magazine essays -- Mortensen defended Pictorialism against criticism from the f.64 school and other "straight shooters":

Photography, like any other art, is a form of communication. The artist is not blowing bubbles for his own gratification, but is speaking a language, is telling somebody something. Three corollaries are derived from this proposition.

a. As a language, art fails unless it is clear and unequivocal in saying what it means.
b. Ideas may be communicated, not things.
c. Art expresses itself, as all languages do, in terms of symbols [William Mortensen, "Venus and Vulcan 5 - A Manifesto and a Prophecy," Camera Craft 41, n. 6 (July 1934): 310-12. As quoted in A. D. Coleman, "Conspicuous by His Absence: Concerning the Mysterious Disappearance of William Mortensen" in Coleman, Depth of Field (Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1998).]

Mortensen could draw. Had a larger world to draw from than Ansel’s insulated Carmellows. Limited by his piano, limited by playing to predetermined steps; not the human voice, rather the machine one. Chartable. The Adams universe prevailed since it relied less on human spheres. It is something that can be done on the weekends, alone. All that is needed is money and weekends.

Ansel gave us Coffee Cans and Canned Landscapes. Mortensen… another voice from the past, even though it seems possible that his whisper remains stronger than Ansel and the Newhalls wanted

The digital age is the age of retouching, even more than the chemical age.