Photographic triangualtions: need help in understanding

The photograph and reproducibility is perhaps the medium of the postmodernism. To take a photograph is to freeze reality in an image, cut it out and seal it off.

postmodern because it is a work which can never be fully autonomous. It breaks down the possibility of the original. Douglas Crimp comments on this as plurality. Not a 'pluralism of originals' but plurality. As such no concrete origin can ever be located, no single moment, even though the photograph is supposed to capture a single moment for duration.

What about when a photograph lies, when it is doctored, when it is altered in post-production. Then is it art?

What about typological photography? Reducing taking pictures to a constant process which reveals difference or sameness, presence or absence, the extraordinary or the banal? Then is it art?

What about the photographic object? Then is it art?

Photographic presence, is a ghostly absence- is that the postmodern art experience- the emptying out of the image and filling up of potentiality without didacticism but subjective possibility.

These are questions... please help me answer them....

They are triangualting in my mind

Future?

I've been thinking alot about the future. Firstly through my writing; currently an essay on Turner Prize nominees The Otolith Group. The future in this essay is a hypothetical one, one that is always in the future, always just beyond our reach. Yet in a complicated turn this is a hypothetical future brought to bear on the present. Cool. Secondly a future, less hypothetical, my own. Less cool.

The Otolith trilogy is really quite inspirational, quoting, appropriating, mixing a culture which doesn't fit or doesn't quite work into one that does. A future in which images are not consumed dumb but thought about, chewed over and spat out.

The future, my future, could follow in these positive footsteps. Yet the work of the Otolith Group is in response to their unhappiness in the present moment of each film's production. Kodwo Eshun talks about the difficulty of bringing an image into a world already over-saturated; it seems that his reasoning for creation is only within a climate of need, of want, of desperation. Creation is positive in response to a dirth.

(Creation or production? A question for another time.)

So in these times of economic strife, where it seems unlikely that my future will be anything but plain sailing I feel a little bit excited. Opportunities for creation and individuality spring up when the big institutions come under pressure. People have to go elsewhere, either they create in new and exciting ways propelling the bounds and casting them aside in order to exist or they drift into another place and forget. I see neither as a negative option.

Lets hope for creativity, more ambitious writing, more interesting exhibitions which occupy the empty space created by this cultural, social and economic dirth.

See 'hither and thither' on tether television for curator's testimonies from artist-led spaces across the country.

So what happens when you have your first 4,000 word essay due for your v. expensive and renowned MA course?

Obviously, you think of a topic, plan it, write it. Hopefully (and especially if you get non-work guilt like 24/7 heartattacks) with plenty of time to spare.

Forget it, if you are writing on contemporary art.

Is it on show in London? No. Can you see it elsewhere? No. Can you write about it? No. Damn.

Annoying as this is, it also leads to some prominent questions; How do we write about a discourse which is very much still in full swing? How does chance form what we write about? How, in an environment of art over-stimulation does something stick in your mind? What if I don't want to write about something with no images? (-2 marks for bad presentation I'm afraid).

What if we do not want to write about work in institutions (ie work's already chosen to be enveloped into the canon or put up for sale), does that mean writing outside the institution cannot be done- but then are we writing an art history or an institution history?

This can surely only get worse with cuts to the arts which will reduce exhibition budgets and money for the proper archiving and making available of mixed-media and performance based artworks. These are sad times.

Wish me luck for the essay...