Tag: Studying

  • September [08:46]

    September [08:46]

    (Copied from a post I made from Facebook.)

    19488
    Sometimes I sit on the floor of my photography studio to work rather than anywhere more conventional like a desk with a chair, or the sofa. I don’t know why I like the floor in here so much. Maybe it’s because I’ve drunk wine, a rarity for me at home, and therefore it feels safer down here.

    I’m contemplating the case studies I might use in my Masters thesis, to support my argument that videogames are works of art, when I find a book on the floor under the table in here. It’s not supposed to be here – only photography books go in this room. It’s meant to be downstairs in the study with my art books.

    It’s called ‘September’ and is an essay on Gerhard Richter’s painting of the same name – attached below to this post. It’s a small work, about 50x70cm. Indeed about the size of a television… or a computer monitor.

    Can you see it? If you let your eyes relax like a magic eye picture. Can you make out the image of the World Trade Centre?

    I’ve never seen the original of this painting with it’s thick layers of paint applied and then scraped back – I’ve only ever seen one of the edition of 40 prints. They are printed on vinyl, enlarged slightly, and shown between two pieces of glass, only increasing the temptation to compare it to a computer monitor. Or a TV screen.

    The book argues that paintings can be a way to engage with complicated events in our world today. That they can shape and mould our understanding of the world. That they can help us come to terms with world-shattering events.

    There is a game called [08:46]. I say a game, it’s a ‘serious game’, technically, if you want to use the lingo of the industry. It uses Oculus Rift technology to allow you to explore what happened at 0846 that dreadful day in September 2001.

    I was at school. Everyone can remember what they were doing that day. I was at school, and I found out about it in the parquet floored entrance hall, next to the big glass wall of windows that looked out over the playground. At home, after school, I watched the news with my grandmother. I even remember my sullen response – I had grown up near London with the ever-present threat of my father being blown up at work by the IRA. Terrorism was ingrained in the fabric of my life even at the age of 16.

    I should ‘play’ [08:46] to see if it brings the same kind of visceral experience and understanding that being stood in front of the Richter painting does. The Richter gave me that strong feeling as if I’d been punched in the gut. The layers and layers of paint, the streaks, the colour, the vinyl and the glass, it was like being there in front of the TV again. Watching the news. While people burned.

  • There’s nothing good about today.

    0130hrs I got up this morning. I couldn’t sleep. Too much was weighing on my mind. The results of the EU Referendum will impact my life, perhaps more than most. I slipped downstairs and put on the BBC news that is running all night.

    In the early hours the Remain vote started to pull ahead. For a while there those presenting the show seemed upbeat and positive, but then it started to go downhill. Leave began to take key areas. The map turned blue.

    I’ve just graduated with almost fifty thousand pounds worth of debt from university. This doesn’t scare me – not at all. The last three years of my life has been more than worth than that – I’d have paid double.

    The EU has been one of the things that has helped make the institution that I studied at so good. Only recently they celebrated being placed 20th in the rankings for History of Art. Not bad for an old polytechnic. It’s EU investment that got us here. It’s EU students that have diversified the student body, and bought multiculturalism to what we do.

    If we leave the EU many institutions have stated that our education system will suffer. Less money, less foreign students, less talent. Many will downsize their operations. Many will just simply get worse.

    My degree teeters on the edge. I took a gamble and went to an up and coming university. My universities reputation is likely to go down in the global rankings now. My degree is not worth as much in the global market now as it was two hours ago.

    My career was based on the idea that I wanted to be a lecturer. But there will be less money in the future. More staff fighting over fewer jobs. Less money for research. Less research. A downward spiral.

    Our currency has this morning hit levels that have not been since since before I was born. I am 31 years old.

    We are fucked. My career is fucked.

    What could I have done better? What could I have said to convince people to vote Remain? How could I have used my writing more effectively? I don’t know.

  • Osborne’s Nursing Cuts (OR: I already know y’all hate my career choice)

    So, Osborne has cut bursaries for nurses. As my post the other day indicated – I’m struggling to see a problem with this. At all. It seems to me that nurses will be better off while at university if they take a student loan instead of a bursary, and it will enable universities to improve their offerings and take more students – which should in turn improve the quality of education and mean that other departments don’t have to fund that degree. As well as meaning that – in the long term – we have more nurses. Great. I’m struggling to see how you can be against that at all.

    However I’ve woken up to an explosion of hurtful comments about my choice of degree – and it’s hard not to take it personally. Well, not about my degree specifically, but about how we should – as a nation – not fund ‘pointless’ degrees.

    There seems to be a strong belief amongst many that the government should fully fund and bursary ‘essential’ degrees. Largely this includes degrees for teaching, engineering, maths, medicine, nursing, dentistry, etc. And that everyone else should have to pay full price – and often this belief also suggests that we shouldn’t give a student loan to anyone not doing an ‘essential’ degree.

    If I had to pick one of those ‘essential’ degrees, I would fail. I failed maths at A Level. I don’t exactly have the bedside manner to be a nurse or a doctor. Engineering largely doesn’t interest me. And teaching children, well, that career is off-limits to me than more reasons than ‘I don’t like children’.

    Besides if we *all* did those jobs it would be a total race to the bottom. We’d end up working for nothing because there would be so much competition (oh hey, just like photography and/or the art world can be sometimes/most of the time).

    “But” you say “Of course we would limit the amount of people who can do those degrees.” Well, ok. So that means that anyone not capable of doing ‘essential’ degrees has to pay for their own degree. Thus enforcing the two-tier system that the British university system has been trying to move away from for years. If you make people pay for non-essential degrees up front (and pay for their expenses while they do those degrees) then you end up with only the rich being able to afford education. And that would be a very bad thing (again).

    tumblr_mr6og3D35a1rqpa8po1_500

    I love this drawing. I’ve seen it pop up time and time again and I think it’s just great. Not because it places art as one of the most important things in an alternative hierarchy of needs, but because I think it reinforces the fact that in our modern society it shouldn’t be about ‘existing’ it should be about living. I think people don’t understand that society is so much wider than just the essentials. Without the complex interaction that compliments the other subjects we’re just fucked. And we’re possibly even more fucked if those complex interactions are led by only those people who can afford to self fund a degree at 18.

    But I often feel like people misunderstand what I do on my degree in particular. Art History is a subject that is all about research and analysis. It’s a very powerful degree, it enables you to take both written and visual sources and turn them into something extremely meaningful (well, you hope that anyway). It’s not all about art. Modern art history is as much about the society that creates the art as it is about the way that the works were produced. It is a subject that helps us to make sense of the world around us, to see what has happened in the past and apply those lessons in the future.

    It seems that a subject like art history (amongst many others) is as essential to a productive and happy society as any of the aforementioned ‘essential’ subjects. So why do so many people tell me that my degree is worthless, pointless, and a drain on the social benefits system?

  • Is Feminist Methodology still relevant in History of Art today?

    Since I’ve now had my results back from my second year at university, I can post the final essay for my Culture, Gender and Sexuality module. I got 80% overall in this module – 70% is required for achieving a 1st.

    Enjoy!

     


     

    Is Feminist Methodology still relevant in History of Art today?

     

    There is little doubt that the New Art Histories revolutionised the way that many art historians saw the world and participated in art historical academia in the 1970s (Rees and Borzello, 1986a, p. 3). The term ‘The New Art Histories’ came into use because of the book of the same name which tried to summarise emerging methodologies in the late 1970s and early 1980s (Rees and Borzello, 1986b). Other authors interpreted the term as an umbrella phrase for critical theory (Jõekalda, 2013, p. 2) and most would agree that the term the New Art Histories cover political, feminist, psychoanalytical and theoretical approaches (Fernie, 1995, p. 19). This poststructuralist approach marked an important shift away from art as objects and focussed instead on social context rather than concepts such as connoisseurship and biography. In this essay I will focus on how feminist art history methodologies do not address queer artists and artworks adequately, however it should also be considered that non-Caucasian, non-Western, and disabled people are also not addressed by mainstream feminist theory either – amongst other personhood statuses. The word queer itself is complex but for the purpose of this essay I will be using it to represent non-default gender, sex and sexuality.

     

    Women were often left out of the traditional art historical canon and the New Art Histories enabled feminist art historians to rethink the past. Initially there was a push to rediscover women artists and attempt to place them within the traditional canon. This was primarily achieved by questioning assumptions about the difference between art and craft – many feminist art historians at this time believed that these definitions of art and craft were one of the primary reasons for women’s art being seen as inferior (Fernie, 1995, p. 20). However this approach relied on traditional canonical and biographical methodologies and the late 1970s saw a move by feminist theorists to challenging the discipline of History of Art itself. Academics began to suggest that merely inserting women into history was not the same as writing women’s history (Fox-Genovese, 1982, p. 6) and Griselda Pollock put forward the idea that women’s studies were not about women but rather the social systems that allow and maintain the dominance of men over women (Pollock, 1988, p. 1). One of the formative essays for feminist art history was Linda Nochlin’s ‘Why have there been no great women artists?’ (Nochlin, 1978) which warned against the idea of simply trying to name women artists who might be considered ‘good’ and insert them into the traditional male-dominated canon.

     

    Feminist methodologies, especially when combined with Marxist theories, gave academics a powerful and alternative way of looking at both history and the present, yet feminist methodologies as applied to the history of art have remained reasonably static in their approach. While feminism as a political movement has moved on with successive waves of ideologies, feminist methodology for history art often still works from the same seminal texts (such as Nochlin’s) that broke the original ground.

     

    In many respects feminist methodologies fit neatly into hegemonic, patriarchal culture – as much as their practitioners would like to suggest that they now champion intersectionality (McCall, 2005, p. 1771). They support the notion of a bigender society and specifically exclude those who exist outside of the gender paradigm that society currently uses to view the world and write history. Feminist art historical methodologies may well be the fight against the male dominated view of the history of art, but when viewing the history of art as a queer participant these methodologies only serve to reinforce the patriarchal structure and act as another hegemonic barrier that needs to be removed before a queer history can be composed. Traditional and New art histories combined act as a complete patriarchal version of the histories of art, a history that could potentially be rewritten by a new queer methodology.

     

    Introducing queer methodologies to the history of art is unlikely to be as simple as just viewing the world from a queer point of view. Queer methodology must be counterhegemonic in its nature, allowing new paradigms to be enacted. It is not simply a case of rewriting the history of art from a gay or lesbian perspective, or even a transgender perspective. In order to create a truly queered history of art the bigender paradigm should not be used and another must be found; otherwise queer methodologies will become just another pillar that supports the dominant patriarchal norm by acting in support of male masculinities and female femininities (Halberstam, 1998, pp. 3–4). Stephen Bann’s suggestion that a new cultural critique can gain strength from the fact that old positions have already run their course is as relevant now as it was when he discussed the idea almost thirty years ago (Bann, 1986, p. 19) and so queer theory must learn from the limitations faced today by feminist theory. As McCall discuses in a paper on intersectionality, feminist researches are already very aware of the limitations of using gender as an analytical category (McCall, 2005, p. 1772).

     

    ‘Feminine success is always measured by male standards’ claims Halberstam (2011, p. 4), and so by acting outside of the expected standards we can relieve ourselves of the pressure to conform. Some ‘renegade’ feminists, Jack Halberstam argues, have addressed that failing might be better than success while in pursuit of the counterhegemonies and this is a lesson that could potentially be learned by any new approach to the history of art. For instance lesbians do not conform to the expected heterosexual framework so they therefore fall outside of patriarchal societies and could redefine what gender means to them (Halberstam, 2011, p. 4). This way of thinking allows us to begin to construct a different gender narrative for the viewing of the history of art, by enabling those outside of the patriarchal hegemony to apply their own definitions of gender and sexuality. However most feminist history of art is largely unconcerned with sexuality or gender-fluidity and therefore this is not a tool that would be used by most feminist art historians. In most feminist art history the assumption is that the artist is heterosexual, white and often middle-class; there is no discourse available for the kind of alternative femininities and masculinities that Halberstam addresses in their text on female masculinity (Halberstam, 1998).

     

    Some feminist academics have begun to offer a kind of queer methodology – although still under the banner of feminism. The idea of introducing sex, gender and sexuality to feminist approaches is proposed by Mimi Marinucci (Marinucci, 2010, p. 105) and can be seen as part of the wider movement of mainstream feminism towards an intersectional approach. In some ways this approach works very well – there is real solidarity between the experiences of many women and those who are LGBT* (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex) due to the basic understanding of what it is like to be born into a state of patriarchal oppression. However there is also tension between the feminist and queer movements and as Marinucci points out there has been a history of feminist studies showing bias against lesbian women, gay men, minority sexualities and transgender people (Marinucci, 2010, p. 106).

     

    It could be suggested that art history is now in a state of post-feminism; where equality has begun to be achieved in academic writing and galleries. Certainly the large art institutions in the United Kingdom, such as the Tate, have no problems with showing large retrospectives dedicated to twentieth-century women artists. Marlene Dumas (Marlene Dumas: The Image as Burden, no date) and Sonia Delaunay (The EY Exhibition: Sonia Delaunay, no date) are currently showing major retrospectives at the Tate Modern in London, Cathy Wilkes is showing at the Tate Liverpool (Cathy Wilkes, no date) and the Tate Britain has hosted retrospectives of well known women artists such as Susan Hiller (Susan Hiller, no date) and has a Barbara Hepworth exhibition opening in June 2015 (Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture for a Modern World, no date). I am aware that naming the exhibitions being held of women artists pushes me precariously close to being guilty of what Nochlin warned against, however it does certainly appear that women artists now have a roughly equal number of major exhibitions as artists who are men when considering twentieth and twenty-first century art. Most feminist art historians can be categorised as using one of the other approaches to art history (such as connoisseurship, biography or iconography to name just a few) so it could be suggested that feminist art historians should just continue to work under those banners rather than identifying as feminists since the feminist art historian label seems to be no longer required.

     

    Marunucci presents the idea that queer feminism provides a new direction for feminism as a critical perspective. Introducing questions of sexuality into feminist art history would greatly increase the scope of the methodology. According to the label on the front of the book Art & Queer Culture it is ‘the first book to focus on the criticism and theory regarding queer visual art’ (Lord and Meyer, 2013). If this statement is indeed true it means that no feminist (or any other) art historian has been addressing the criticism and theory of queer art. This raises the question – if feminism was truly interested in any sexuality, sex or gender other than heterosexual women who were identified as women at birth, wouldn’t this book have been written years or perhaps even decades ago?

     

    Even if feminist art historians use approaches borrowed from gay and lesbian studies, this does not go far enough. A relatively recent biography of photographer Claude Cahun (Doy, 2007) is a good example of why feminist approaches are often inadequate even when combined with gay and lesbian studies. Cahun was a photographer who lived from 1894 to 1954. Originally identified as female at birth, Cahun had romantic relationships with women and in 1915-1916 began using the gender-ambiguous name Claude Cahun instead of the assigned birth name of Lucy Schwob (Claude Cahun – Chronology, no date). Most of Cahun’s body of photographic work is self-portraiture and Cahun presents as outwardly male in a large portion of the images. Where Cahun presents as a woman in images it is often an exaggerated and drag version of femininity. The biography by Gen Doy deals extensively with Cahun’s theoretical interests in sex and sexuality and also recounts her preference of living with a woman multiple times, however the assumption is always made that Cahun is a lesbian woman. Not once is the idea entertained that Cahun could possibly be transgender (and therefore potentially heterosexual) or genderqueer and Cahun is referred to as ‘she’ and ‘lesbian’ throughout the text without any explanation. Both feminist and gay and lesbian studies have failed as approaches when it comes to artists such as Claude Cahun since they refuse to engage with major political and personal aspects of the artist’s life and work. A queer approach may well have shed more light on this popular photographer from the early twentieth-century.

     

    According to government surveys only 93.9% of the adult population in the UK identified as heterosexual in April 2011 to March 2012 (Woodsford, 2012). Estimating the amount of transpeople in the UK is problematic due to the difficulty defining transgender status within current gender paradigms (do we consider self-identification as with sexuality or is medical intervention the standard for defining a transperson?), but a 2008 European study suggests that there could be as many as 1 in 20 transgender individuals within the male population alone using the most wide definitions – and this number is increasing exponentially (‘Transgender EuroStudy’, no date). Going forward feminist approaches do not offer enough scope to record and analyse these important aspects of an artists work and personal life.

     

    Feminist approaches to art history are still an excellent methodology for looking at artworks in the past and for discussing women’s status in society. However the fact that feminist methodologies rely heavily on a bigender paradigm, as demonstrated by the earlier discussed assumption that women’s studies are about the dominance of men over women (Pollock, 1988, p. 1), means that they are not so well-placed to look at artists today and in the future. In a society that is slowly but steadily rejecting the idea of a clear-cut ‘male’ and ‘female’ status (Hird, 2000, p. 348) we need methodologies that can produce a discourse on this new approach to working practices. Feminism is still relevant to the discipline of history of art while examining the past, but it becomes less relevant as we move into the future when those writing about art will need to talk authoritatively on a wider range of gender, sex and sexuality than feminist methodologies currently routinely discuss.

     


     

    Bibliography

    Bann, S. (1986) ‘How Revolutionary is the New Art History?’, in Rees, A. L. and Borzello, F. (eds) The New Art History. London, England: Camden Press.

    Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture for a Modern World (no date). Available at: http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/barbara-hepworth-sculpture-modern-world (Accessed: 6 May 2015).

    Cathy Wilkes (no date). Available at: http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-liverpool/exhibition/cathy-wilkes (Accessed: 6 May 2015).

    Claude Cahun – Chronology (no date) Claude Cahun Home Page. Available at: http://www.connectotel.com/cahun/cahunchr.html.

    Doy, G. (2007) Claude Cahun: A Sensual Politics of Photography. London: I.B. Tauris. Available at: http://site.ebrary.com/id/10333422 (Accessed: 6 May 2015).

    Fernie, E. (1995) Art History and Its Methods: A Critical Anthology. United Kingdom: Phaidon Press, Incorporated.

    Fox-Genovese, E. (1982) ‘Placing Women’s History in History’, New Left Review, (133), pp. 5–29.

    Halberstam, J. (1998) Female Masculinity. Durham: Duke University Press.

    Halberstam, J. (2011) The Queer Art of Failure. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

    Hird, M. J. (2000) ‘Gender’s nature: Intersexuality, transsexualism and the “sex”/’gender’ binary’, Feminist Theory, 1(3), pp. 347–364. doi: 10.1177/146470010000100305.

    Jõekalda, K. (2013) ‘What has become of the New Art History?’, Journal of Art Historiography, (9).

    Lord, C. and Meyer, R. (2013) Art and Queer Culture. London: Phaidon Press.

    Marinucci, M. (2010) Feminism Is Queer: The intimate connection between queer and feminist theory. London: Zed.

    Marlene Dumas: The Image as Burden (no date). Available at: http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/marlene-dumas-image-burden (Accessed: 6 May 2015).

    McCall, L. (2005) ‘The Complexity of Intersectionality’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 30(3), pp. 1771–1800. doi: 10.1086/426800.

    Nochlin, L. (1978) Art and sexual politics; women’s liberation, women artists, and art history. 4. print. Edited by T. B. Hess. New York: Collier Books (Collier books).

    Pollock, G. (1988) Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity and Histories of Art (Routledge Classics). United Kingdom: London ; Routledge.

    Rees, A. L. and Borzello, F. (eds) (1986a) ‘Introduction’, in The New Art History. London, England: Camden Press.

    Rees, A. L. and Borzello, F. (eds) (1986b) The New Art History. London, England: Camden Press.

    Susan Hiller (no date). Available at: http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/susan-hiller (Accessed: 6 May 2015).

    The EY Exhibition: Sonia Delaunay (no date). Available at: http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/ey-exhibition-sonia-delaunay (Accessed: 6 May 2015).

    ‘Transgender EuroStudy’ (no date) TGEU. Available at: http://tgeu.org/eurostudy/ (Accessed: 7 May 2015).

    Woodsford, S. (2012) Integrated Household Survey April 2011 to March 2012: Experimental Statistics. Available at: http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/integrated-household-survey/integrated-household-survey/april-2011-to-march-2012/stb-integrated-household-survey-april-2011-to-march-2012.html#tab-Sexual-identity (Accessed: 7 May 2015).

  • Choosing a photographer to study with

    Choosing a photographer to study with

    Very early on in my photographic career I discovered that my talent was most certainly not for taking photographs (although I’m not too bad at that either) but rather for looking at other peoples photographs. I worked out that with all the business acumen in the world I would never progress above the level of a-bit-better-than-average and I’d have to be happy on a lower end, modest salary for the rest of my life. Anyone that knows me will recognise that I’m not the kind of person to settle, so I took a long time working out what part of photography I am good at.

    I’m really good at looking at pictures. I can pull portfolio images together with ease that other people don’t seem to have. I can see flaws in images and identify how things could be better. More to the point I actually enjoy doings things like this far more than taking pictures. Talking about and looking at photos is what I’m good at so I decided to go to university to do a degree in History of Art. And I’m doing very well at it, getting a first at the end of my first year.


    But what does this have to do with choosing a photographer to study with?

    Lots of photographers claim to be able to offer an awful lot to new photographers. The reality is that they don’t. Only today I saw a wedding photographer on Facebook who was offering the ‘opportunity’ to assist him on two weddings this weekend. He said it was a great chance for someone looking to make a career as a photographer. He also said you had to provide all your own gear (a minimum of a basic digital camera and an 18-55mm lens along with a flash gun) as well as your own transport too and from the venues. Graciously he said you’d be able to take and use any pictures you like – I hope his clients are happy with that!

    The big, fat cynic in me started to creep out and ask questions and provide answers along these lines:

    • He stated he was shooting three weddings this weekend. Three weddings in a weekend? Fuck my life that’s alot. Quantity is certainly a viable business model but remember that you can’t have quantity, quality and low cost. One of those things has to give. He wasn’t a very expensive photographer.
    • The gear he wanted the assistant to provide. Top photographers will often have gear for their assistants. That way they know it’s all maintained, insured and in great working order. However often assistants do provide their own kit, so that’s not totally unusual. It was the mention of the 18-55mm kit lens that did it for me. You cannot shoot a wedding on an 18-55mm kit lens. It doesn’t let enough light in for the ceremony or the evening celebrations. It’s not long enough to shoot much of the ceremony from where an assistant is likely to stand. It’s not good quality enough to produce a high quality result. The kit lenses are generally soft and hard to get good results from – certainly in the hands of someone inexperienced. There’s no way in a million years I’d consider using a 18-55mm kit lens for a wedding I cared about producing good results for – there’s a reason you can pick them up for less than £20 on eBay. I’m not a gear snob at all, quite the opposite in fact. But if you’re shooting someones wedding, this isn’t a time for shooting with entry level kit most of the time.
    • If you’re looking for assistants who want a break in the industry you’re mostly going to be looking at young people. People who have just finished degrees or who have just finished school. Makes you a bit of an arsehole to say that you won’t drop someone too and from a train station or similar. Young people often don’t have their own transport and since they’re doing you a favour here as much as you’re supposedly helping them out, the least you can do is offer to pick them up from the station.
    • He also mentioned that he couldn’t pay because he had to pay for insurance for the assistant. Warning bells, he’s not charging enough money. Why can’t he charge enough money to pay for an assistant? Must be because his photos aren’t very good or he’s a terrible business person – do you really think you can learn skills about the industry from a person who is either of those things?
    • Lastly I looked at his pictures. My suspicions were correct, they were terrible.

    There is so much emphasis put on taking photographs. At first glance that sounds like a silly thing to say. Of course if you want to be a photographer you have to take lots of photographs, right? Well yeah, of course you do. But you also need to look at photographs and learn what good photographs look like.

    This is where you go ‘But Char! Art is subjective!’ yes well… no. But yes. It is, different people can have different aesthetic tastes, but quality is not subjective when it comes to traditional commercial photography. (I’m going to insert a disclaimer here that some people make ‘poor quality’ their style, I’m not discussing that).

    Before you even think about assisting someone for experience (i.e. without getting paid) or apprenticing someone you need to take some time out to educate yourself as to what a quality photographer means. Learning to recognise bad photoshopping or things like, oh you know, the whole fucking image being out of focus are crucial skills for an assistant. I mean we all think stuff like the following shot is really funny, but the reality is that lots of photographers skills are no better. And why would you want to work with someone like that?

    Strange-Boob-Photoshop

    As an assistant your job is attention to detail. Attention to what the photographer is doing, attention to what s/he wants, attention to the brides dress and to the grooms suit. Attention to detail is one of the more relevant skills that either a photographer or an assistant can have and you need it before you even do your first job.

    Learning this skill requires looking at images and learning why they work and why they don’t. My attitude to photography hasn’t always gone down well in the LRP world – I simply refuse to put pictures online that do not meet my standard. That means they must be in focus, they must be sharp, they must be well composed and they must have a good background – I’d say they are fairly minimal requirements for any photographer who wants to be half decent. You should not assist or try to learn from any photographer that doesn’t have those skills.

    Here’s a good example. A few weeks ago I shot some stuff for Evenlode. I was feeling kind of under the weather, it was hot, we were doing things in a hurry and I didn’t pay enough attention. This is a photo I love. You know what I don’t love? The fact that the belt isn’t centred with the rest of the armour.

    _MG_9936webIf a photographer is kicking out work with constant mistakes like this, you shouldn’t be studying from them. And you need to teach yourself to spot mistakes. That could be brides dresses being messed up, or it could be bad photoshopping or inability to focus, but before you even start to work with another photographer with the intent of learning you need to understand and recognise these things.

    Working with just any photographer won’t help you. You need to be picky and as an apprentice it’s your prerogative to do so. Don’t just take every opportunity that comes along, hunt people out. You’ll learn more and you’re learn quickly. And you’ll be better.

    Learning about images is just as important as learning to shoot images. Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.

     

  • Female Agency in Art

    Female Agency in Art

    OR: WHY MY WORLD VIEW JUST GOT FUCKED.

    The problem with learning is that sometimes you learn things that you wish you could unlearn.

    I’d been quite happy with my art historical world view provided by such feminist scholars as Linda Nochlin and others from the 1970s era of rewriting the canon. The argument that there are few women artists in the historical ‘white male canon’ because they simply weren’t allowed to be there for various reasons sat well for me. I liked this explanation, it’s neat and it allows you to write with a confident view that could easily be backed up with good sources.

    Then somewhere around the late 1980s a bombshell got dropped. Someone said, ‘what if the women just… didn’t want to be artists?’. This… well… this causes me a problem.

    In the same way that I don’t believe that women completely autonomously choose to be Page 3 models, I simply don’t believe that women through history would just simply choose not to be artists. I mean of course, some of them will choose. However I don’t think that choice would have just been as simple as ‘I’d rather be an engineer’ for example. Not least because that career path was, again, just not open to them for various societal reasons.

    It’s kind of a bit like in your first Physics lesson at A-Level after successfully passing your GCSEs. When the teacher stands at the front of the class and basically goes ‘everything you learnt up until this point is pretty much bullshit’ and everything you thought you knew about light waves was destroyed. But then you realise that light can behave as both a wave and a particle and you understand how much learning you still have to do.

    So that’s where I’m at right now. Feminist art history was simple. And now it is not. Now we have to consider that women may have made their own choices about their hobbies and employment however I still think that many of those choices will have been dictated by the heavily patriarchal world that was forced upon the women in question.

    It’s tricky. But a good revelation going into my second year of study.

  • #BlurredLines

    #BlurredLines

    If you didn’t watch Blurred Lines last night on BBC, you probably should. It’s on iPlayer now, I’ll wait while you watch it.

    Watched it? Good.

    I thought it was interesting. Some of it was genuinely brilliant and some of it was… well… not so much. But a show that brings together Germaine Greer AND Mary Berry? It’s already fitting two of my academic hero’s into a mere hour of TV, so it’s going to be good.

    I had this bizarre meta experience during the show. Blurred Lines was a documentary on sexism and misogyny in the age of the internet and at the point where they began talking about twitter, I decided to log onto twitter and see what people were saying. Wow. People were taking part in casual misogyny about a program about casual misogyny… so meta it hurts! Good on you twitterati, congratulations for being absolutely fucking foul and proving you contain the absolute cesspit of human existence! Thankfully people were saying good things too, it seems the message was not entirely lost.

    Being a feminist is scary.

    Yeah. It is.

    I had a moment in class this term. It was Reading Art History, a module that explores different approaches that are open to art historians. So as usual I’d been pretty vocal throughout the previous six or so weeks. We’d covered biography, progress and Marxism amongst others. But on the way to the lecture I suddenly found myself panicking a little. I realised I was totally afraid of being outed as a feminist in a space that wasn’t ‘safe’. I was so desperately keen to discuss Linda Nochlin’s utterly brilliant essay, but at the same time scared of the backlash I might receive from my classmates. You know the even more crazy thing? My classmates are almost entirely female – I should have nothing to worry about.

    I spoke out, no one had a go at me. I mean I still get called a lesbian on a regular basis by a particularly delightful group of girls in my class (apparently short hair makes you want to have sex with women – who knew!) but nothing really changed. Why was I worried? Because it’s not unusual to have deeply unpleasant comments aimed at you if you dare to speak out in public about women’s equality. Usually it’s puerile comments about my breasts or vagina to be honest. Or people like to assume that I don’t have a healthy sex life. I’d like to say it’s water off a ducks back, but it’s not. The comments grind you down.

    So I was somewhat reassured when I went to a day of papers at an art history conference recently on the subject of curating feminist art and feminism in the future. There were some brilliant academics there, including one of my hero’s – Griselda Pollock. At the end of the day there was a round table discussion where there was some discussion about if being a feminist had become easier. The general consensus was that it hadn’t, and there was a deep sense of worry over young feminist art historians coming into the industry. Several participants said that they still didn’t always tell people exactly what their specialist area of research was, despite being some of the most respected feminist art historians in the world.

    This is really sad stuff, but for the first time in my life I had a moment where I understood what the ‘sisterhood’ that many feminists refer to was all about. For the first time, in that room, I felt solidarity to the cause and a resoluteness to continue the work of brave early feminists. I don’t want to seem like a martyr, but perhaps you have to have some people who work through the misogyny and the nasty comments in order to make the world a better place. And perhaps it’s better that someone is an argumentative and thick skinned woman like me. After all, I’m used to invading the domain of men – otherwise known as the internet.

     

     

    This posts now been in my ‘draft’ folder for a few days and I can’t remember what else I was going to write… I’m pretty sure I’ll come back and write about this again…

  • Teaching basic study skills to those who don’t want to learn

    I know, a longwinded post title, right?

    My intention in this post is not to ‘call anyone out’ or to diss those who lecture me if they happen to somehow read this. My lecturers know how much I love the course I’m doing and that my feedback is overwhelmingly positive. With that said, here we go.

    As I settle into the second semester of my undergrad degree at the ancient age (compared to my classmates) of twenty eight there are some things that are bothering me. The hangovers of my colleagues I can just about manage. I can even mostly handle the irritation of people lacking respect for the lecturers by whispering to each other (no matter how quiet you think you are, you’re not) and the constant need to check phones. But one thing stands out.

    It’s the lack of ambition.

    I had this dream that university would be this place where everyone was there with a common goal. There would be hours lost debating art historical politics and investigating radical, revolutionary artists. On how we should deal with ‘the female problem’ and the canon of dead white guys. Or anything exciting. You know, time spent in the library together pouring over exciting journals and visits to exhibitions.

    Apparently not.

    I mean, I’d settle for just ‘interested in class’ and ‘does the minimum background reading’ but it seems that people don’t even want to do that.

    In the first semester one of our modules had two pieces of coursework. The first was a guided bibliography where we were directed to investigate, in steps, an artwork and basically compile a bibliography for a fantasy essay that we had not written. We had to write about why we selected those sources. The second piece of coursework was a guided essay with a set of questions to think about that led us through the process of constructing an essay. We had a similar one for our architecture course but it didn’t seem as forced. I treated these pieces of work with my usual level of contempt and go the

    The issue I have with these pieces of work is this. They should not be taught at undergraduate level.

    I appreciate that during A Levels you may not do subjects where you are taught how to approach research or write a bibliography, I certainly wasn’t taught these skills since I did physics, maths and music technology all those years ago. However when I came to do my first essay with the Open University we were simply thrown in at the deep end with nothing more than a ‘study skills’ guide and the phone number of our tutor. We were expected to go away and teach ourselves form the myriad of resources available how to write an essay.

    This stuff isn’t rocket science. I would expect anyone who is capable of studying at undergraduate level to have the ability and the drive to go and find this stuff out. It’s not as if writing essays is a surprise on the course, you have to do it on every undergraduate course. To be honest if you can’t even be bothered to look up how to write a correct essay then you’re not going to get very far.

    Lets put this in real terms. Each module costs me £1125 which is quite a lot of money to someone who doesn’t have very much. I want to spend that £1125 on learning and being tested to find out where my abilities lie – not being taught how to write an essay. Now obviously not all of the teaching on the module was spent teaching these skills, but a surprisingly large portion of it was. It was just frustrating.

    But the frustration is not directed at my lecturers, the course or the university system. My frustration is directed to my colleagues who do not seem to want to open a book and learn something for themselves.