Archives 1988 ()

21 June - 18 July 1988

(A Bathing Boy, India. 1986)

Recently I broke one more of the “nevers” which I had set upon myself as rules to abide by. I photographed some flowers: an abominable act in the eyes of Rafaelo of several years ago. At that time i was sure I had the definitive answers about what artists and serious photographers in particular should do: serve society to the best of their abilities. Socially preoccupied photography, one striving to shake up complacency and prejudice, seemed to me the only valid and sensible choice to be made. This meant working exclusively in the W.Eugene Smith - like social documentary tradition, maintaining an objective point of view, and avoiding prearranged scenes, “artiness”, and “pretense”. All non-reportage genre such as nude, landscape, and still life seemed laughable and infantile to me. They constituted the body of the “nevers”: I was to stick to my guns and to do my best within a set of self-imposed limitations. Black-and-white, beggars, alienated pedestrians, and gypsies were “shoulds”; color, beautiful girls, flowers, and landscapes were “nevers”.

31 May - 18 June 1988

(tryptic (black and white, selenium toned, 16″ x 20″) titled: Trolley Bus (Brian Mulvihill))

10 - 28 May 1988

(On Sunday afternoon, friends and neighbours gather at the Gallaghers, Chiswick, Ontario, 1953)

19 April - 7 May 1988

29 March - 16 April 1988

Excerpt from Winnipeg Art Gallery catalogue “Contemporary Art in Manitoba”

David Firman’s “Trail Markers Series” are constructed panoramas that psychologically provide a total experience of  a specific environment. Firman beings with a ‘marker’, and object identified by himself that is positioned in the landscape. It could be a rock, a monument, or a piece of wood. Using this ‘marker’ as a starting point, he leads us visually into the environment by photographing  areas surrounding that marker. It is through the association and compilation of images that we understand the total picture. Experiencing these images is like being led on a journey, the trail set by Firman. Firman literally reorders the surroundings from the center. He is never seen, but his presence is implied although the landscape dominates the viewer’s impression.

8 - 26 March 1988

Curated by Joanne Jackson Johnson

Christine Blair:
Relationships between my family and the environments they encase around themselves is the main focus of these photographs. The viewer is made to look at daily domestic  occurrences. The photographs make no attempt to flatter the family members of their surroundings. Frequently, the setting is free of human warmth and emotions, if any, are bleak.It appears the people have become oblivious to their cluttered physical surroundings. The humans and their chosen environments are “one”, each needing the other to exist. For this reason, the photographs are black and white, giving no greater value to any one element.

Peter G. Malyon:
There is nothing to suggest that the urban environment is either natural or healthy to human beings, yet we are the ones who build it, Whether this environment is formed consciously or against our will, is almost beside the point since we do live in it.
“City” has almost infinitive variations yet it is always instantly recognized. Through my photographs, I seek to explore the beauty and ugliness of the City. I seek to express my fascination with, and incredulous admiration for, what we have wrought.

Jody Moroz:
The way the city is transformed when the night occurs is the primary focus of these photographs. Long exposures and the fact that they are black-and-white enable the prints to appear surreal in many ways. The prints consist of images that can only be seen in a photograph and never by eyesight because of the way light reacts to film over a period of time.

16 February - 5 March 1988

26 January - 13 February 1988

This project grew out of a variety of concerns. First, do photographs exist as objects in their own right or do they exist only as reflections of other objects? Secondly there is the question of the relation of male to female; particularly, my own feelings as an artist towards the model. Finally, I wanted to use the nude figure as a formal element and still allow the viewer a sense of the individual person involved.
The photographs in this were created in a studio environment for several reasons: to create a sense of universal space, to have a place where I could arrange the various objects used in these images, and to have the privacy to concentrate my attention on the interactions between artist, model, and camera.
In this series I felt the need to strike a balance between intentionality and spontaneity. I set up a series of decision points to facilitate this. At each point I would alternate between choice and chance. The set for each photograph was carefully arranged. Chance entered the picture with the introduction of the model and the artist into the scene. After each session the proof sheets were examined to select the optimum negative from each set-up. Finally, the negatives were printed using the sabattier effect, a process that causes a partial reversal of tonality and gives the photograph as silver sheen. This process is an unpredictable one; it is impossible to pre-visualize the exact appearance of the resulting images.
The images you see were created in front of the camera, and they are each the result of a single negative. My primary area for exploration was in the studio. The work done in the darkroom was intended to heighten the effect that I was working towards.
These concerns and procedures were used as a starting point for visual exploration. It is important to note that the images were created through the combination of the conceived and the accidental. It is this fusion that makes “Self-Reflexive Portions” more than a theoretical manifesto. The resulting work is a combination of mystery and concept. -F.E. Thomson

5 - 23 January 1988

INFORMATION/LANGUAGE/ART: The Formation of Models

As artists bring communications and information technologies into the context of the art gallery, we are witnessing the advent of a re-packaged cultural hero: the artist as renaissance man.
The new scenario for this old fellow dictates that the artist shall proceed as a visionary of the information age, using her/his creativity and abilities of self-expression to extend the limitations imposed upon artificial intelligence (and its attending technologies) by the rigid disciplines of science, and thus pave yet another avennue with which to perpetuate the myth of the avant-garde. Questions arise concerning how the artworks currently being generated by electronic media contribute to contemporary epistemological institutions. Are the underlying messages of these artworks significant and/or responsible within contemporary discourse?
I would suggest that in order to address these questions, Canadian cultural institutions must first adopt more flexible policies regarding the design of forums within which the artist can evolve vocabulary and language for cultural discourse through the development of working models. Current art museum/gallery policies dictate that the artist must first exhaust all exploratory and anasemic processes connected with her/his workings, and only then, when all language involved with a piece has passed into convention, may the husk of that work enter into the museum/gallery to enjoy a commodity rather than epistemological relationship with society. By operating within a commodity relationship, the artist becomes constricted by the art production standards that are administered by an art bureaucracy who provides a quality control function for art before it allowed a consumer forum. The now common question: “Does it work?”, in referring to the effectiveness of artwork, does not necessarily mean: “Does it matter?”. The question refers to how does this product measure/function in relation to other products in the arena of the spectacle we call Art. Hence, artists compete with one another for state funding in order to afford extravagant materials to produce unique objects to be housed in specialized architecture where the objects will then be assigned a status among other objects within a system that declares itself to transcend time and the political/economic bases of society. Hence, the contradictory stereotype of the artist starving for her/his Art. Hence, we need for a marketing strategy for the unmarketable. Hence, the new renaissance man.
In my own art, I have chosen to deal with timely issues and issues that concern the socio-political bases of my culture. I have chosen to develop what I refer to as discursive models: that is; constructed situations and/or environments that act as a forum for discourse between the artist and viewer, (the viewer’s role being changed from passive consumer to participant), in which experiments can be conducted for the development of art vocabulary. Representations within such models need not promote standards for replication. Rather, the model can serve as a point of departure for the further development of a cultural language that defines its purpose within a responsible social activity.
As an artist, I began a program to develop such discursive models in 1985. Specifically, I initiated a program to investigate how the conventional usage of communications and information technologies (the Media) portray and develop history and historical perceptions.The program began with the proposition that history does not follow a linear course progressing towards a defined and purposeful end, but, progresses as a series of socio-political contradictions with events acting in reaction to one another. The perception that Western Media offers, however, is that of the former and not the latter. With this in mind, I began examining the methods with which contemporary news-gathering organizations first fragment events within time and space, and then redefine, reorder, and reconstruct segments of the event into the narratives that structure the ever-evolving myths with which we have come to structure the ever-evolving myths with which we have come to perceive the world and other people who inhabit it. It has become my concern that consumers of such media usage develop language with which to exercise a critical attitude while consuming media technology and the myths media generate.
An example of one model to result from this program is the piece; “New Year: An installation reviewing the visual language developing within superpower rhetoric as applied within a televised political event”. This work focuses upon a single media event: the Reagan/Gorbachev New Year addresses, broadcasted on North American and Soviet television networks on January 1, 1986. The objective of the installation is to demonstrate that in addition to the direct auditory and visual analogue offered by televised speeches, there is also a quantity of underlying messages conveyed by gestures, facial expressions, arrangement of stage properties, graphisms and colours that connote historical presentation and political rhetoric. In order to demonstrate this, I have composed an installation in which I transposed the two addresses from videotape into a grouping to photographic stills and printed transcripts.
Initially, the two speeches were recorded onto videotape from the original broadcast on CBC television. From this, black & white photographs were taken of the entire TV screen at intervals of five seconds. Contact sheets were then made from the negatives and two syntagmatic axes were plotted, a Gorbachev axis on top of a Reagan axis, showing the sequence of events over the respective time periods (6min., 50 sec. for Gorbachev/ 5 min. for Reagan. 83 units for Gorbachev/ 61 units for Reagan). The two axes were then studied in their totality and in individual units for what I perceived to be significant examples of gesture, expression, stage properties and colours. Then these features were photographed and plotted paradigmatically in relation to the two syntagmatic axes. Finally, typewritten transcripts of the text and time statements were plotted in relation to the visual units. The feature of colour was recorded with slides, from which cibachrome prints were made and located in the appropriate places on the paradigmatic axes. In all, six lines of sequence are presented for comparison of information.
(this essay is accompanied by the initial studies constructed for the first four paradigmatic axes of what was to become a syntagm of eighty-three paradigmatic axes situated one beside the other during the final installation. To draw observations regarding the relationships of the individual axes of the syntagm, it proved convenient to produce models of a miniature scale, which resulted in a more tangible overview of the project. However, it also necessitated that the units of text be ganged one upon the other in pairs, making the words legible on the boards, but incorrect in their relationship to their respective axes. Such a relationship remains necessary for the purpose of this publication.)
This process of transposition takes into account the influence of television broadcast technology upon the sociology of public speaking: Prior to the mass use of radio and television for political purposes, speech/addresses centered on the transposition of a written text that was composed, rfeined, delivered (orally), and then critically responded to (verbally or in text). With the advent of radio and then television, a multitude of factors intervened to complicate and expand the message received by the audience during the reception of political statements. The text for a speech became treated by writers, producers, actors (statesmen), and technicians (cameramen, soundmen, production teams, translators, etc.); each effectively altering the delivery of the message. What has resulted is that the purely denotative status of the speech ( speaker/text reflecting on political issue) and its apparent objectivity has become veiled by the technical codes of the intervening participants, (there are certain professional procedures and rules adopted by writers, actors, production teams etc.), and the imposition of secondary meaning on the message proper.
With televised political events, it has become insufficient to merely study the content of the spoken word. The gestures and expressions of the orators, stage properties and coloration are individually dictated to by the professional, aesthetic and ideological norm of the numerous people involved in producing the television event. Through isolating and investigating the nature of these treatments, (and more importantly their results), I propose we can alter our perception of the meaning underlying the message being delivered.
Originally, I had intended this piece to include the playing of the videotaped Reagan/Gorbachev speeches for further comparison of information. However, I felt that the initial intent of the project would be adversely effected by the time relationship involved in video. The video viewer psychologically lives the TV event as now. Movement and plurality of image both imply time, as opposed to the timelessness of photography and text. I did not feel it was necessary for the viewer to re-live these speeches. We are removed (time wise and historically) from that event, and the political issue has moved along. What remains as being important here is the examination of devices used b the superpowers that effect the overall message of their communications.
During the initial period of exhibition, two questions from viewers arose that I would now like to respond to:
1. Why had the artist not provided analysis and conclusion? and,
2. Did the concerns of this piece belong within an art forum or did they pertain to communications theory (and therefore cross over into academic disciplines considered extraneous of art)?
While the installation does not provide conclusions concerning the television event for the viewer; it provides a situation/environment where the viewers can exercise their critical abilities and draw conclusions based on their own particular backgrounds and disciplines. My intention was to use the gallery as a forum to initiate discourse upon the issues outlined above. Through the presentation of the resulting model, I hope to provide a tool which might, in turn, stimulate viewers who chose to participate in the discourse to proceed with activities that further contribute to cultural discourse. By providing analytic and conclusive components within the installation, I felt the discursive nature of the work would be reduced to that of a statement reflecting my particular ideological bias.
In comparing my models to those developed through communications studies, one must acknowledge the difference in intention and purpose. If we review a communications model such as Shannon and Weaver’s classic model of 1949:

information source
I
transmitter
I
signal ———- noise source
I
receiver
I
destination

…we are presented with a structure whose main concern was to aid in formulating ways in which channels of communication could be used most efficiently. A great concern was that the medium form be retained intact during signal transmission. The objective of reducing noise (anything that is added to the signal between its transmission and reception that is not intended by the source) became imperative. The political and economic benefits of such an objective are obvious. If we then examine my model in relation to this, noise, I am increasing it through my transposition exercises. The result of my exercise is not one of clarifying the transmission of the signal (speech/message) from the source (superpower orators_, but, one of problematizing the signal and inviting subjective interpretation by the viewer. The purpose of this activity becomes perceptual rather than serving he political and economic interests of the message source. By publicly displaying the information into a forum that can be reviewed from a variety of perceptual angles (and in an accessible site within which the material can be reviewed in a time-frame decided upon by the viewer), the process, then, is an asemic, operating through the problematization of the meaning of the signs being transmitted in the original context for the purpose of establishing a selection of departure points from which the viewer may interpret message(s).
To the extent that the resulting model can be manipulated by those who use it, one is quite justified in wondering about the ability it offers to change belief in the original statements into distrust, and about whether citizens can control politically that which is information. It is here that I feel there is potential for art to provide forums for critical examinations and discourse that do not exist in other disciplines.
-Bill Leeming (April, 1987)