Stephanie Cardon, ‘Canopus was a town in ancient Egypt’, Gouache on Pigment Print. 2012
Stephanie Cardon, ‘Unshakable’, Gouache on Pigment Print. 2012
My second model is much darker in mood. She reminds me of Medea or Circe, one of the strong but more unpredictable women in myth. These recent pieces are still very obviously portraits. I had hoped that by attaching the figures to architectural elements, they would become themselves another a part of the structure – just a form. The top image reminds me of a Canopic jar, used to embalm the entrails of the deceased. The bottom one was inspired by the load-bearing caryatids of Ancient Greece. Each composition has a quiet power I am pleased with, both because of the figures’ unwavering eye-contact and their unmovable posture. The blocks they are attached to seem to rely on this strength for their structural integrity. That’s a step in the right direction.
I am beginning, like so often, to see that my current preoccupations with space and flatness are shared with many artists around me – though we haven’t met much nor ever worked together. Yesterday, I looked at Susan Metrican‘s thesis work at MassArt. I’d seen the show she so brilliantly curated earlier this year (I’m a sucker for that kind of work) but I had no idea her own artwork grappled with space and color particularly through ancient art. While I am not as taken with her approach in painting, I am really blown-away-jealous of her latest video ‘Set’ which pulls the viewer between the flatness of the screen and the illusion of depth in imagery. It got me thinking about the possibilities of video and its own flatness, which I had never considered.
It feels good to devote some days to the thought of others. Today’s studio practice was set aside to make a book for my friends in Warsaw.
I arrived in Poland the day of the terrible train collision on the Warszawa-Kraków line. President Komorowski’s response was to declare a week of national mourning, which is shown by small pieces of black ribbon tied to the tip of every flag staff. One passionate Pole I met was outraged by the gesture, seeing it as more of a public relations stunt than a way of addressing the real problem of poorly managed and maintained railways.
After completing the binding for this book, I was pondering how to wrap it. I made a brown paper sleeve and painted two squares on the front in the colors of the Polish flag, because the black ribbon I used to close the accordion reminded me of those ubiquitous signs of mourning.
In The Landscape of History (how historians map the past), John Lewis Gaddis adapts Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle to the study of History and suggests that ‘the act of observation alters what’s being observed.’ That single sentence identifies the reason this blog could never truly become the archive of a creative process. An archive is non-narrative: it does not discriminate, edit, sequence or evaluate; it simply gathers. Furthermore, the objectivity an archive upholds is hardest to achieve when its contents are selected by the author of those contents. Over the course of these posts, I’ve chosen images, remarked upon trains of thought and tagged those thoughts with keywords. As the word ‘web-log’ indicates, a log-book is a closer parent to the blog form than the archive is, the log-book being a systematic and chronological record of observations. A disciplined and dutiful form of record keeping, it is presumed to be more opinionated and acceptably biased than the unexamined archive that awaits a reader-historian-detective to shed meaning on it by applying a perspective.
Stephanie Cardon, to be titled (Digital photograph). 2012
The fact that my blog was founded on a misnomer is not entirely discouraging. Other than the concession I made by changing the subtitle to read ‘an archive’, I see a reason to name this particular process of record-keeping ‘archive’ because I hope it will eventually yield some surprise. Over time, perhaps it will allow for different readings; patterns I had not foreseen might emerge; individually accumulated images may turn into obvious collections.
Writing in the public sphere about such a private practice – experiments and admittedly failure – obliges me to clarify my thoughts and intent, to make myself intelligible to others and therefore to myself. Some other blog some other day expressed frustration with blogger-artists and photographers. The gist: too many images, not enough words. This may be too why I feel a need to justify my choice of phrasing: the word archive gets bandied about a lot these days and stopping to think about its meaning is an important step for me to take in the face of possible criticism. What’s more, I agree with the blogger‘s (was it Jörg M Colberg?) observation and would add that visual artists, myself included, are lazy, afraid or object to writing. The objection stems from the trite thought that artwork should stand alone without verbal elaboration. Excuse me, but that’s not really the point. Writing doesn’t somehow strip the visual work of its purity or integrity. Which brings me to laziness, an affliction I suffer from as much as the next person. Writing takes time. This blog-post alone has taken me over four hours to write. Far from being wasted, time devoted to the act of writing is time devoted to my self, in the most nurturing way, and therefore to my artwork. It is thanks to the anonymous presence of an audience that I take more care with the words expressed here. The crafting of a single post means ultimately greater attention paid to the other things I create – each part matters, like each word in a sentence. And so we arrive at the fear that, as in writing, a single wrong choice may render the whole meaningless. To which I counter: “impossible.”
I haven’t said anything about the photograph above, which to myself I keep calling Three Graces, hoping for a better title. It’s number 4 in a series of studio works all of which have been shown here. If there is one other step I can take towards contributing to a true archive, it is posting more snapshots not so much of work-in-progress as of progress through work.
Sometimes strange things happen in the studio. This is the fruit of my six hour stint today. Clearly, I was working under the spell of Sol Lewitt’s letter to Eva Hesse.
Stephanie Cardon, Herm (pigment print and acrylic ink). 2012
A herm is a classical sculpture consisting of a pillar with a head on top, sometimes framed and usually representing Hermes, that is placed to mark a boundary or to serve as a signpost.
Stephanie Cardon, The bar at U Kucharzy. 2012
Yesterday, I returned from Poland. The trip was made, ostensibly, to visit friends who have been living there for three years on a diplomatic posting. Also motivating my departure was the fact that I have never been to the eastern edges of Europe, that I had not travelled to a foreign part of the world in a while and, perhaps finding the sound of my voice lecturing students increasingly tiresome, I longed to be somewhere I wouldn’t understand the language and would be forced to point.
I did not expect to return from the trip utterly transformed by the experiences I had; my heart a little more broken and a little more compassionate. That first night in Warsaw, walking along the Nowy Swiat (New World Street), I could sense a warmth in the relations shared by passers-by that I recognized from a decade ago, before the iPhone became ubiquitous and people wavered down streets entranced by their touch-screens. It’s not that the technology isn’t available in Poland – it is – it just doesn’t seem to have dented the allure of the tête-à-tête. The bar nearby was packed with upbeat revelers, full of smiles for the trio of strangers who stole their spot on the couch.
There are a few facts that are important to know about Warsaw, first among them, that 85% of the city was destroyed by the end of World War II. The city was blitzed to ruin. The second, and possibly even more astonishing fact, is that its historic center was rebuilt, stone for stone, by the Poles in the decades following the war, completed with the reconstruction of the Royal Castle in 1984.
Stephanie Cardon, Pink Bag, Warszawa. 2012
The rest of the city grew around this reanimated heart, starting under the Communist thumb with the Palace of Culture, that Moloch of Stalinist architecture, and the more predictably dismal housing blocks, while vigorously continuing today as glass spires climb and futuristic shopping malls sprawl. In spite of this feat of resilience, this return from the grave, never does the memory of the carnage and desolation fade. It surrounds you like a shroud and like a shield, at once affirming of survival and reeking of death.
Because the other fact one needs to know about Warsaw is that countless people died there. I could paint the picture of atrocity but it is its unfathomable extent that truly upsets. 800,000 dead including 400,000 Jews, one forth of whom died of starvation in the Ghetto, the others gassed or shot. There is no other way of putting it. Tears will blind you as you wander through the cemetery where none of them lie – the city’s streets are the real graveyard.
Stephanie Cardon, Ruban Bleu. 2012
Of the artwork I saw in Warsaw’s contemporary spaces, one project in particular stands out. The press release explains:
“The cycle A–Z (Educational Cabinets) – begun by Andrzej Tobis in 2006, a fragment of which is presented in Zachęta – is a series of photographs. To each of them has been appended a Polish-German term and index number from a Polish-German dictionary issued in 1954. Most of the photographs were taken in Upper Silesia where the artist lives and works. Between languages (Polish and German), between times and systems (the past of the People’s Republic of Poland and the present of the new Republic of Poland), between the cold objectivity of an existing situation (and not a created situation) and the Polish-German terms/definitions disturbing objectivity.”
This work seemed to encapsulate the state of mind of the Poles of my generation whom I met. History lives and breathes through them: it is neither relegated to bookshelves nor eulogized. In fact, along with a keen eye for photographing, Tobis’s A-Z reveals a spirited sense of humor. These are late twenties, early thirties artists and academics with concerns that cut far into the fabric of the society and culture they live in with a self-awareness, an openness of mind and an intellectual ambition that is truly humbling.
Andrzej Tobis, from the cycle A–Z (Educational Cabinets), 2006-2012.
Stephanie Cardon, Between a Rock and a Hard Place. (Gouache on Pigment Print) 2012
Whatever happened to Experiments #2? The post was started then abandoned in draft form. In it, I began developing a rule-set for my investigation of 2D space that went something like this:
- all elements of a composition are equal because all elements are forms: for instance, a human being is equal to an object which is equal to a tree.
- relationships of scale can follow a logic internal to a composition, rather than mimic the order and appearance of the physical world.
- forget perspective.
- escape the frame.
- there is no such thing as place or time.
The piece above is one imperfect result from this rule-set.
I abandoned the Experiments #2 post because it wasn’t very thoughtful. For one thing, all elements being what they are in photography – representations of real-world objects and people – cannot be perceived as equal. The human mind will distinguish a person from a tree and a tree from an inanimate object, by recognizing itself in the human form, by defining the tree as a living organism and by perceiving the object as inert. The elements of a composition could, however, become closer formally, which is what this small piece attempts, by both depicting and speaking to a kind of animism. In spiritual terms, which is not the premise of this work, that would mean attributing a soul to an inanimate object. Formally though, animism hints at that equation of an object with a living being – so that you could stretch as far as considering them one and the same, of equal importance. This is something uniquely interesting in Ancient Art: women as pillars (the caryatid), or pompeiian frescos full of framed, disembodied heads sitting atop a column like a fruit-basket.
Moving on to statement number 2. In conventional photographs, the proportions we observe in the world are simply scaled down. Visual relationships are created within a chosen frame. Composition in a photograph makes use of line, shape, value, balance and so on, as observed, or as constructed, by the photographer. Something three dimensional is flattened and, subject matter set aside, to make a “good” photograph you have to see that way – flatly. Unfortunately, I don’t think I was ever particularly gifted for that. As I confessed previously, photography made me too much of a literalist.
Photoshop has brought more possibilities to Photography than most would like to acknowledge. Realistic rules need not apply, but unlike in collage, the whole print can retain a flatness usually only seen in “straight” photography. Photoshop opens up the possibility of a more painterly approach to photographic work, as in new pictures by Ryan Arthurs included in Susan Metrican’s excellent show “Hung Jury” in Boston. I’d be curious to talk to the guy based on the change I perceive in his approach to the medium (he used to make rather romantic color tableaux).
My solution in this small experiment was to paint in the background with a shade of red reminiscent of Roman murals. It has the advantage of bringing all elements of the composition to the same plane – yes, there is a figure-ground relationship but I can’t exactly tell which part of the composition is “in front” of the other, for which I feel relieved. The photograph was composed and shot around a prop which I built exactly for the purpose of making a flat picture – it was lit evenly to that end too. Painting in the background has the added benefit of removing any illusion of depth and perspective, and any other elements that could provide a sense of scale. The frame of the photograph is gone, but only to be replaced by the edge of the paper. To be continued…
On the topic of place and time, I do feel that my experiment frees the photograph from its systematic link to the world it was made in, and so, I will persevere and save further thoughts on that topic for another day.
Stephanie Cardon, Between a Rock and a Hard Place. (Gouache on Pigment Print) 2012
ABILITY, 2012, photographs
After working out my hand to the point of being ABLE to create these letters, I dusted off my high-school geometry books and figured out how to build an arch, complete with keystone, entirely out of chipboard. Following on the previous post‘s line of inquiry about photography and flatness, I am building sets to photograph and work into collage. Two exhibitions propel me: Degas and the Nude, at the Museum of Fine Arts, and A Day in Pompeii, at the Museum of Science – both in Boston, both now closed. The relationship to photography is more obvious in Degas’s work – he frequently put the camera to work to capture fleeting gestures and movement – yet I found the Roman frescos, preserved for centuries under hardened pyroclastic flows, fascinating for their consideration of frame and composition. Consider this one detail of a bacchanal: she looks right at us, he contemplates her.
detail of a Pompeian fresco
The frame around the two figures is obvious and unrealistic (where did the rest of their bodies disappear to?) The same lines that create the frame extend up and right of the vignette and the composition continues beyond the image of Bacchus and his lady-friend, probably (this is a fragment) drawing them into a more complex accumulation of similarly framed scenes. It is this reach beyond the frame that I find compelling.
In my own effort to create a space for photographs, I spent the better part of the past two weeks building this:
Prop #1 for photographic space
and this:
Prop #2 for photographic space
with the intention of using them in photographs that will participate in something larger than themselves. It is not entirely a new direction for me, considering my recent installation work and interest in space, place, history, mapping, but it is, in my mind at least, the most interesting use for photographs I have found until now.
I won’t divulge what this may end up spelling.
These gymnastic exercises will make up an artist’s book.
Yesterday, after struggling for hours with the inklings of potential pieces in my studio, I printed out two recent photographs and hung them side by side on the wall. Both had puzzled me, because unlike practically all of my prior work, they didn’t represent anything. What I mean by that, is that as photographs of the world, they fail. One is a portrait of a woman who not only turns her back to the camera, but sits facing a wall. It gives us as a viewer very little, save the sensuality of her eyelashes and the bright red color of the elastic that pulls her hair into a rich dark ponytail. Though I was drawn to this image time and again for its palette and texture, the photographer in me recoiled at its refusal to show her face. It made sense neither as an image nor as a gesture from the model. Yet, I had posed her that way. The other image is entirely abstract. How I made it is not irrelevant but to reveal its real-world counterpart would destroy the photograph. What happened when I pinned them up next to each other, ‘the breakthrough’ as I called it yesterday in a moment of solitary enthusiasm, was that they created their own space. Suddenly, the woman’s back had meaning: she is shunning our world for hers, the 2D picture plane.
Naturally, once I left the studio and began rambling on about the possibilities of 2D space to my friends, I was met with a ‘well yeah, you hadn’t realized that before?’ But I persisted. No, to me, I’ll admit it, it had not been obvious until that juxtaposition. Photography will make you a literalist. Of late, I had grown so tired of the representation of things that I put down the camera for months at a time. My recent photographic work had been attempting to evoke another time and another space, namely 19th century landscape, but my perception and understanding of the subject chosen remained interior and therefore, inevitably, to anyone else the photographs remained representations of the world as we know it. I tried apposing text to the pictures, talking over the pictures, making books combining word and image – the images still wouldn’t budge from the time/space they had been created in. ‘Constructed realities’ were not the solution either because what I really wanted was to evoke the possibility of elsewhere in the here and now.
Perhaps it was working in three dimensions, making installations, sets and interactive works that caused the shift. Yesterday, what I understood at last is that the formal language of the 2D plane can extend beyond the frame of the photograph, onto the wall, into another photograph – from shape to shape, from color to color. It’s damned exciting. And surprisingly, it isn’t something photographers talk about. When you hear about the sequence (images juxtaposed on a wall or in a book), it always refers to activating their content, their subject, maybe their shape or color. It is about one frame and then the next. It is rarely about the ellipsis: that beautiful blank area between the images could hold its own space-time (think comic strips). When a wall-sequence is designed, it is with a viewer in mind, setting up a sort of triangular relationship between one viewer’s eye and point of view and the pictures on the wall. Organizing 3D space for the consideration of 2D objects sets very strong boundaries around each object. It strengthens the frame instead of dissolving it.
What I foresee wouldn’t work with just any photograph. It has to be an image that can escape the containing effect of the frame and it needs another image to activate it. This is where my character of the woman comes in. Her gesture is one of defiance to the third dimension. She claims the role of the viewer: she defines her own space and set of rules. We are spheres in her world of circles.
It’s early days yet, but this is has lit a fire in me. Then in one of those delicious moments of serendipity that have you shouting ‘What is going on? I mean what the hell is going on?!’ , I opened a book by Bruno Trentini (Une esthétique de l’ellipse) which I picked up in France last summer. And his first words address the non-temporality of the work of art, and the part of secret that each work of art contains. He raises the point of paradox – that something cannot be and not be at the same time: (loosely translated) “a paradoxical work is a porous work, meaning it is full of absences and gaps. Furthermore, the paradoxical work thereby becomes an elliptical work. Such a work has the particularity of being intemporal.”
