Wow! Good one. Yes, that qualifies.
In a letter, he probably covered much of what would be considered an artist statement.
"Atget wrote to Paul Léon, minister of fine arts, to offer for sale a portion of his negative collection. The letter begins, “Sir, for more than twenty years I have been working alone and of my own initiative in all the old streets of Old Paris to make a collection of 18 × 24 [centimetre] photographic negatives: artistic documents of beautiful urban architecture from the 16th to the 19th centuries.…Today this enormous artistic and documentary collection is finished; I can say that I possess all of Old Paris.” ---link here.
I come from a simpler time. I graduated with a BA in Fine Art in 1981. We did not have artist statements or juried exhibits or anything else that I’m hearing is required these days.
In 50 years of doing and selling artwork I have never been asked why I did any of it. I think the need to explain your work depends on the type of work it is. I would say that the more abstract or minimalist works would require it more than, say, my realistic drawings of covered bridges, barns, and trees.
I’ve seen Vince’s artwork and most of it requires explanation, too. With these two artists, explaining their artwork or otherwise giving backstory on it is not pretentious, it is necessary.
If your school or a gallery requires that you explain your work, then you should meet those requirements without complaint. Maybe they’re requiring it because, with your work, it’s needed.
Don’t you just love first world problems?
I humbly recommend that you adjust you life expectancy to a later date. Then you could spend seven years getting your BFA or MFA and have time to enjoy it. What do you have to loose?
That is a good example of an Artist Statement - and a really excellent example of how one might be used.
I think part of the dislike for Artist Statements comes from having encountered some of them which have been designed for the academic world. Some (but not all) of those are incredibly complex and nearly impossible for non-academics to make any sense of.
An Artist Statement referencing a lot of other artist's work is designed for a very limited audience!
Is there an abbreviated 3-year course? Just in case.
Exactly. Artist statements are often like those psychological descriptions of photos requiring a degree in Freud to decipher. They're mainly pretentious and say nothing, only there to impress the readers with ten dollars words. The Atget letter is descriptive about what the work covers. Simplicity. That's enough. No one cares if he was dropped on his head as a kid or had to photograph with one arm. Next is to look at the actual results to see if it's any good.
Is there an abbreviated 3-year course? Just in case.
I could have done mine in less than the 7 years it took me but I wanted to take my time and enjoy. I did take one semester off after my cancer diagnosis. Since I already have a masters degree they waved all the general education requirements and I just took art classes.
Exactly. Artist statements are often like those psychological descriptions of photos requiring a degree in Freud to decipher. They're mainly pretentious and say nothing, only there to impress the readers with ten dollars words. The Atget letter is descriptive about what the work covers. Simplicity. That's enough. No one cares if he was dropped on his head as a kid or had to photograph with one arm. Next is to look at the actual results to see if it's any good.
My point was not so much that he wrote bullshit artspeak in the early daybooks (I don't think artspeak had yet been invented in 1900) but rather taken as a collection, the Daybooks could be seen as an artists statement in diaristic form. A very long, unedited diaristic artist statement.Yes, I've read both Daybooks. Don't see them as "artist's statements," although the are wonderful and fascinating. I don't think of a grant proposal that way either. But the how and why of those nudes, landscapes and peppers would fit the bill. Still, they are so beautiful, so clearly "Fine Art," that a statement wouldn't be necessary. That's because Weston actually was an artist.
I do think artist's statements, as required in grad school are meant to help the artist figure out what he or she is doing and not the viewer. I don't think Atget ever wrote an artist's statement either.
if you were to approach him and ask him to describe what he was working on and why he was choosing the subjects he chose, I'd bet you that he would have been able to articulate those ideas rather than just say "because Charis mamade me horny".
Thanks, at 77, I don't think I have 7 years.
That's OK. I wasn't that clear (and it's good to see you back on site)
I would say re: statements that personally it's entirely valid to wish Yr photos to be accompanied by a 400 page book if you so wish.
Where the issue for me is in the prescription of statements which automatically
1. Excludes a whole slew of thought (eg. Those who might consider visuals / dance / etc to transcend the tyranny of language as an example)
2. Demands work be contextualised when the artist wishes it to be ambiguous or wishes audience to do with it as they wish.
There is also an irrelevance - I have certainly spoken to art historians for whom the artists position is irrelevant as they "don't understand what they are doing" anyway.
im not sure how it excludes these things, and who cares what some art historian has to say, people make forest through the trees comments about pretty much everything, why is their educated opinion less valid when they say something about photography or someone's "art" ( btw I'm a trained art and architectural historian and I've never said that or heard anyone say that about artwork before, as Bullwinkle The Moose would say "I must take a size 7 1/2!). if someone wants to say the images &c transcend the tyranny of language not really sure what the problem is, I hope they actually do! and if they don't (and that was the point) at least it's good conversation while someone snacks on the cucumbers, cat food and white zin.
you don't need 7 years, there are low Rez programs in photography as well. ..
in some programs it seems that older returning students have an advantage.
Tips for older MFA students going back to school - The Writer
Older MFA students seeking graduate degrees in creative writing prove that age really is just a number. Here are their tips for going back to school.www.writermag.com
some are, others are straight forward and to the point, just like atget's ... dropped on his head and 1 arm ? that is sometimes important if specific hardships related to the work had to be overcome. it's important to have an open mind, it might allow a greater understanding and maybe insights to your own image making process. there is a photographer who has posted here and on the LF site who has vision issues, I would imagine if he wrote a statement and it related to his vision / seeing the world it would be mentioned.
you don't need 7 years, there are low Rez programs in photography as well. ..
in some programs it seems that older returning students have an advantage.
Tips for older MFA students going back to school - The Writer
Older MFA students seeking graduate degrees in creative writing prove that age really is just a number. Here are their tips for going back to school.www.writermag.com
Jim Jones, 9/14/06, post #55 in this thread:
"If we have to talk so much about it, it can't be art. The best of art is felt, not discussed."
You can't talk aboout art.
“It’s an old split. Like the one between art and art history. One does it and the other talks about how it’s done and the talk about how it’s done never seems to match how one does it.”- Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
I am looking in again this morning at a nearly two year-old topic on a very widely-read photography forum of international reach.
It began as a poll. At this writing there are at present 70 sober replies to the founding post, and just over one thousand five hundred views.
My stupefaction deepens as it gains weight each day. The topic is a serious query: Which hand is on top (of the camera) when one is shooting in the ‘portrait', the vertical position?
This is an extreme, lands-end, low-oxygen exemplar of the base conundrum of art: you can't talk about it.
You can talk around it. And which-hand-on-top is the gross irrelevancy where aspirant-artists/photographers end up when they do so.
They arrive there through exhaustion of the accessible near/quasi-art topics: the equipage, matériel, technology, techniques, history, sufferings and sacrifices for, trade in, record auction prices of, trends, gossip, schools, and even some structures or components of art. There is the aesthetic geometry of composition. There is the color wheel. There is the Zone System. There is the Nautilus-y Golden Ratio. These things can be taught. But no person can definitively state what it is that sounds emotive resonance in another and why or how to do it.
It gets not much better with sophistication or academic formality: read any book of art criticism and find anything about the actuality beyond faint footprints and a spore of coarse hair snagged on branches.
This phenomenon has symptoms. Comments on an engaging photo, e.g., are oddly stunted : “Well-seen!”, “Good capture!”, “Excellent! Reminds me of the work of ...”
We lack the vocabulary to plainly say what it is or how it was done, and we can’t make one. What art is might solely be of or in the provenance of God; a mute, unutterable mystery, with another – talent - at the core.
This ineffability is recognized elsewhere. The Taoist has it: He Who Knows Does Not Say, and He That Says Does Not Know. Authentic practitioners do not talk about it; they can’t. They simply do it.
Talent is the first and last Zero and One. Beyond, all else is formula, recipe, like the auto-exposure algorithms built into cameras. And while AE makes perfect exposure, it does not make divinity.
When present, talent comes in degrees and sizes, and can be developed beyond its birth
weight, but the zygote must be there first.If spending worked, your orthodontist would be Sudek.
And the blessed are few.
For the unblessed, this is cruel, heartbreaking, because encountering, recognizing art engenders the desire to make it. That seeing/desiring makes for an industry of marketing evangelism, is the engine of camera-selling, suborning the longing of the lorn to hope and channeling it into spending.
Cameras, like pencils, are accessible, more accessible today than ever before. Yet there is only the same amount of excellence in writing as ever was, “unleash your creativity” pitches notwithstanding.
Talent sees the art before it is made.
Some posit that it can be forced into being through determination and practice. This is the whole Internet-arisen career and being of certain preachers of Street Photography, like, oh, the Reverend XXXX XXX, and like the Reverend, they have a theology, scriptures, rites, acolytes, of course, the Pay-to-go pilgrimage. But they are not the Word; not even John the Baptist, preceding and announcing the Word. They are imitating the sandals, hair shirt, sacrificial honey-and-locust-eating lifestyle of the Word, and the widespread hope that it is so gives them a certain presence and makes them a living.
Art, the art-drive, also does not know categories in any medium. Categories are irrelevant to any work's standing as art.
Categories (like ‘street photography’) were from the first ex-post-facto, describing materials, techniques, locus or thematic content, subject-groupings, or means of approach. A Dewey Decimal System for archivists.
This is not to say that persons with talent do not go out with deliberation in a specific direction. They do, but it is the talent that says "look!", "see!,"knows the opportunity or the vignette or scene, or arrangement, or composition and says: make art here; use this, arrange that and do thus; stand there, and make it. Talent knows the art before it is made.
Talent provides the impetus for learning the tedious and prosaic details of gear-mastery in order to actualize, fulfill it’s vision, not vice-versa. Its imperatives drive creation wherever, whenever it flashes, beyond any predetermined thought: a writer, e.g., may say that the story he began “went where it wanted to go,” to places that surprised even him, though it was he who had held the pencil or tapped the keyboard.
Talk around art can be rewarding, collegial, stimulating, and drive the nascent to grow or the lacking to imitate. But this is only worship and wistful chat about bottling the godhead.
More than an analog: here, Robert Pirsig channeling Aristotle (or not, as some have it) posited that “quality” (art, seen in one way) is undefinable: we know, recognize it, but are unable to say just what it is.
… you know what it is, yet you don’t know what it is. But that’s self-contradictory. But some things are better than others, that is, they have more quality. But when you try to say what the quality is, apart from the things that have it, it all goes poof! There’s nothing to talk about. But if you can’t say what Quality is, how do you know what it is, or how do you know that it even exists? If no one knows what it is, then for all practical purposes it doesn’t exist at all. But for all practical purposes it really does exist. (ibid.)
And thus frustrated, we arrive bereft at which-hand-on-top, and an industry, an economy that is fundamentally entropic: vast sums spent that, absent actual talent, result only (however perfectly exposed) in records - images of lessor or greater success with the odd accidental triumph or simulacrum.
And so it must serve.
Jim Jones, 9/14/06, post #55 in this thread:
"If we have to talk so much about it, it can't be art. The best of art is felt, not discussed."
You can't talk aboout art.
“It’s an old split. Like the one between art and art history. One does it and the other talks about how it’s done and the talk about how it’s done never seems to match how one does it.”- Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
I am looking in again this morning at a nearly two year-old topic on a very widely-read photography forum of international reach.
It began as a poll. At this writing there are at present 70 sober replies to the founding post, and just over one thousand five hundred views.
My stupefaction deepens as it gains weight each day. The topic is a serious query: Which hand is on top (of the camera) when one is shooting in the ‘portrait', the vertical position?
This is an extreme, lands-end, low-oxygen exemplar of the base conundrum of art: you can't talk about it.
You can talk around it. And which-hand-on-top is the gross irrelevancy where aspirant-artists/photographers end up when they do so.
They arrive there through exhaustion of the accessible near/quasi-art topics: the equipage, matériel, technology, techniques, history, sufferings and sacrifices for, trade in, record auction prices of, trends, gossip, schools, and even some structures or components of art. There is the aesthetic geometry of composition. There is the color wheel. There is the Zone System. There is the Nautilus-y Golden Ratio. These things can be taught. But no person can definitively state what it is that sounds emotive resonance in another and why or how to do it.
It gets not much better with sophistication or academic formality: read any book of art criticism and find anything about the actuality beyond faint footprints and a spore of coarse hair snagged on branches.
This phenomenon has symptoms. Comments on an engaging photo, e.g., are oddly stunted : “Well-seen!”, “Good capture!”, “Excellent! Reminds me of the work of ...”
We lack the vocabulary to plainly say what it is or how it was done, and we can’t make one. What art is might solely be of or in the provenance of God; a mute, unutterable mystery, with another – talent - at the core.
This ineffability is recognized elsewhere. The Taoist has it: He Who Knows Does Not Say, and He That Says Does Not Know. Authentic practitioners do not talk about it; they can’t. They simply do it.
Talent is the first and last Zero and One. Beyond, all else is formula, recipe, like the auto-exposure algorithms built into cameras. And while AE makes perfect exposure, it does not make divinity.
When present, talent comes in degrees and sizes, and can be developed beyond its birth
weight, but the zygote must be there first.If spending worked, your orthodontist would be Sudek.
And the blessed are few.
For the unblessed, this is cruel, heartbreaking, because encountering, recognizing art engenders the desire to make it. That seeing/desiring makes for an industry of marketing evangelism, is the engine of camera-selling, suborning the longing of the lorn to hope and channeling it into spending.
Cameras, like pencils, are accessible, more accessible today than ever before. Yet there is only the same amount of excellence in writing as ever was, “unleash your creativity” pitches notwithstanding.
Talent sees the art before it is made.
Some posit that it can be forced into being through determination and practice. This is the whole Internet-arisen career and being of certain preachers of Street Photography, like, oh, the Reverend XXXX XXX, and like the Reverend, they have a theology, scriptures, rites, acolytes, of course, the Pay-to-go pilgrimage. But they are not the Word; not even John the Baptist, preceding and announcing the Word. They are imitating the sandals, hair shirt, sacrificial honey-and-locust-eating lifestyle of the Word, and the widespread hope that it is so gives them a certain presence and makes them a living.
Art, the art-drive, also does not know categories in any medium. Categories are irrelevant to any work's standing as art.
Categories (like ‘street photography’) were from the first ex-post-facto, describing materials, techniques, locus or thematic content, subject-groupings, or means of approach. A Dewey Decimal System for archivists.
This is not to say that persons with talent do not go out with deliberation in a specific direction. They do, but it is the talent that says "look!", "see!,"knows the opportunity or the vignette or scene, or arrangement, or composition and says: make art here; use this, arrange that and do thus; stand there, and make it. Talent knows the art before it is made.
Talent provides the impetus for learning the tedious and prosaic details of gear-mastery in order to actualize, fulfill it’s vision, not vice-versa. Its imperatives drive creation wherever, whenever it flashes, beyond any predetermined thought: a writer, e.g., may say that the story he began “went where it wanted to go,” to places that surprised even him, though it was he who had held the pencil or tapped the keyboard.
Talk around art can be rewarding, collegial, stimulating, and drive the nascent to grow or the lacking to imitate. But this is only worship and wistful chat about bottling the godhead.
More than an analog: here, Robert Pirsig channeling Aristotle (or not, as some have it) posited that “quality” (art, seen in one way) is undefinable: we know, recognize it, but are unable to say just what it is.
… you know what it is, yet you don’t know what it is. But that’s self-contradictory. But some things are better than others, that is, they have more quality. But when you try to say what the quality is, apart from the things that have it, it all goes poof! There’s nothing to talk about. But if you can’t say what Quality is, how do you know what it is, or how do you know that it even exists? If no one knows what it is, then for all practical purposes it doesn’t exist at all. But for all practical purposes it really does exist. (ibid.)
And thus frustrated, we arrive bereft at which-hand-on-top, and an industry, an economy that is fundamentally entropic: vast sums spent that, absent actual talent, result only (however perfectly exposed) in records - images of lessor or greater success with the odd accidental triumph or simulacrum.
And so it must serve.
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