Visual Art An Art Quiz from Michael James Hawk, Beacon Hill
posted by on October 9 at 14:00 PM
This arrived in my inbox yesterday. Test yourself.
Here is Edward S. Curtis’ Apache Gaun Dancers (1906):
Forget that you know who Curtis is. Just view the image for what it is. Adjectivally, the image seems: historical, indigenous, well composed, pastoral, anthropological, ethnic, ritualistic, natural (not too posed or art-directed).
Stare at it, integrate your own adjectival list into feeling. There is a Beauty that becomes undeniable.
This is an incredible shot [so good as to be “not credible”]. That it is credible, though, is the stuff that takes one’s breath away.
Curtis was known as a humanist (obviously). Curtis’ genius was just not technical, but communicative: he was legendary in putting his subjects at ease and getting their true natures to become revealed before the first shot was taken.
But I wonder - who is the Artist here?
A. Is it Curtis, who framed the Reality, and captured It? B. Is it Curtis and his technical team that produced the first Print in Boston [the Processors of the Negatives]? C. Is it Curtis and his technical team as well as the humanists that sponsored the art, and marketed the art [call this “The” Team]? D. Is it the single Audience Member - the Gazer - that connects with the art emotionally? Does the Work even exist if it is not experienced by someone other than Curtis? E. Is it the Apache Gaun Dancer troupe itself, the Subject, that is the True Beauty, whereby Curtis is only a Voyeur, a photo-journalist, nothing more? Are they the “Walking Art?” F. All of the Above [is this kind of umbrella answer even plausible]? An ancillary Quiz:
A. Is photo-graph-y an Art [realistically]? YES / NO B. Is the Voyeuristic document part and parcel of using one’s eyes to gaze into a subject matter that we could not otherwise do in our Society [that is, to stare for long periods at a human subject would be Rude to the subject’s sense of Individualistic Space and would reveal too our Curious/Voyeuristic/Obsessive nature]? YES / NO C. Is all Art in some sense Voyeuristic - that is, it is there to be stared at, naked, as a “mental” document of an Artist’s mind and brain processes [inferring that we want to make a judgment about the Artist’s symptomolgy as a member of our tribe]? YES / NO When you answer these short quizzes, rationally, you may begin to learn of your own Real Expectations of Art.
Forthcoming: extending this notion into the Sensual-Erotic Mission of Art.
yours, michael james hawk, beacon hill
Blah blah blah -- learn how to capitalize correctly, you jackass!
Any relation to Daniel Bennett Kienecker, by chance?
The artist is Curtis, obviously, and the interesting thing about the photograph is that its "indigenousness" is posed and modern, a survival, not an authentic prehistorical glimpse, though it pretends to be one. These Indians are modern people in a modern world, Curtis's world. They're on the cusp; they are carrying on their cultural tradition but they are HERE and they are US, or starting to become us, as much as Curtis himself is us. Of course, we're about to kill them.
The only branch of philosophy worth a damn is ethics. Aesthetics is a complete intellectual dead end. Let me solve everything for you right now: Did someone call it art?
Yes=It's art.
No=It's not art.
I thought it DBK Sr., too.
This person should be punished for using the word adjective as an adverb.
The dood's blog is here >> http://michaeljameshawk.com/artblog/ and has links n shit. It is Curtis.
He's taking the piss, right?
The last of innocent humans. Haunting photography replacing oils, to capture humans as ancients. Nice sepia tones.
*masturbatory hand gesture*
Fnarf, shush for a second.
I doubt the individuals in this image are pretending to be anything more than what they naturally are for your honky viewing pleasure.
I don't think being an "authentic prehistorical glimpse" for your cultural experience was anywhere in their plans.
Yeah, now we're modern peoples in a modern world, but did you see that this image was taken in 1906? During a ceremony? That these individuals were performing on their own, that this white guy happened in on essentially?
We. Are. Not. Here. For. You.
We. Are. Not. Here. To. Entertain. You.
Now stop trying to sound above your culturally influenced expectations of Native peoples and how they are supposed to appear to you, and just accept that this is a very pretty and very well done photograph. Jeez.
its the viewer who turns this into art. curtis was an ethnographer type who often posed his participants. this may have happened here, or not.
to fnarf this is art of humans becoming 'us'.
to me this is art of people modeling how their world used to look. a world that they loved and often did not pass down to their children because they thought it lost, or they feared to. its heartbreaking in some ways. they loved their world and sometimes they would not pass on culture because it couldn't be taken care of in the right way, they loved it to much for it to be gotten wrong. in many ways i think they've passed that longing onto us. we just don't know what it is we're longing for.
Morgi @10: I did not say they were pretending, nor did I say they were trying to entertain anyone. I didn't say anything about entertainment at all. I was attempting, not clearly enough for you, I see, to explain that this is absolutely NOT "lost innocence" or "last innocence". The picture is, in fact, for whites to see; but the dance is not for whites. But it is informed by contact with whites, and is a cultural production of a group that lives, or is starting to live, in a white world.
The point being that Indian culture did not stop and freeze solid like a photograph the day the white men first showed up in the neighborhood. This was, at the time of the picture, a living culture, not an historical one, not an ethnographic one, though the picture is ethnographic. There are several walls there, between Curtis and them, between them and their own past, between us and this picture.
The image is beautiful. But it would be much better without the conversation.
You're not supposed to answer, it's a like a zen thing.
E, YES, YES, YES.
Doesn't it boil down to the question of whether art is in the intention or reception? Is something art because the viewer connects with it in an artful way? Or is it art because the artist intended it to communicate something artful? And, are these two things necessarily separate?
@3, you stink. I like talking about this stuff.
Arguing about whether or not something is art is probably the worst past-time ever.
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