What is Art
- GG Barrett/SMaguire
- Feb 6, 2018
- 13 min read
The question often arises 'what is art?'. .What defines art and why does it matter? Should it matter that it is even defined? Surely, a creation that comes from ones mind is considered art, regardless of the content and medium used.
As Andy Warhol said 'Art is anything you can get away with'
Is this just a cop out for many people who you wouldn't consider to be artists? Or, is this phrase a good reason for anyone to be able to create freely without boundaries and stigma as to whether what they create is actually art? I think the latter, as, with writing, I believe people should be free to express themselves however they choose. And, if they can profit from their artistic creations all the better.
Photography is now being seen as Fine Art in the world of art snobbery, which is a very positive step. As we move over into a more digital age, the way art is 'produced' (for want of a better word) should not even be a consideration. It should be about the finished creation, rather than the process of the creation. And over the last decade digital art is beginning to make a name for itself.
My artistic flair is to take a photograph you wouldn't place on your wall, and create a visually unique and stunning masterpiece so far removed from the original that you wouldn't have associated it with a photograph in the first place. Sure, I have digital paintings which I have done which didn't start off as a photograph, but the majority of my work did. I feel proud in my process of creation to talk confidently about the fact they are, indeed, photo manipulation. Personally I don't like the word manipulation, this in itself derives negative connotations.. I prefer photo 'Enhancement'. Describe as you wish, you can't take away from the fact that technology is enabling artists to reach out and discover new and elaborate ways to create visually pleasing and emotive art. One of the most famous today being David Hockney.
Now over to Simon...
What is Art? Photography and Photographs as an Artistic Source and Influence
Art: The expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power. – On line English, Oxford Living Dictionaries.
The question ‘what is art’ is one that has been debated for millennia. The above dictionary definition provides a somewhat cold and clinical evaluation, but few thinking people would be happy to regard that as the full story. As I have written in a previous article, the oldest known art is attributed to an early human from the Blombos Cave on the southern cape coast of South Africa, this art is a delicate geometric pattern marked on a piece of ochre and is dated to circa 70,000 BCE, the forms of artistic expression subsequent to that essentially equate to the number of pieces of art subsequent to that event. This article will, however, try to evaluate the significance of one of the more recent forms of art, specifically, photography. This will include photography generally and the use of photographs within artistic images where the end result provides a creative expression far removed from the ‘original’ photograph(s) and where a new artistic narrative has been allowed to unfold.
In terms of the history of photography, this art-form traces its origin back to Nicéphore Niépce, a Frenchman who created the image below of the horse being guided, the image was created in 1825. The image itself is an ink-on-paper print, but significantly the printing plate, which was used to make it, was created photographically by a means that Niépce referred to as a ‘heliographic process’.
I have also written previously about the various media for art and explored the snobbery that seems to exist even now concerning almost any visual art form that is not expressed in terms of oil on canvas or oil on wood. However, more measured words are used by the English art critic John Berger, who I believe gets to the very raison d'être [or concerning GG Barrett, the Japanese concept of ‘ikigai’ may be more appropriate] of photography, as below:
‘Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it. No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.’ John Berger.
The danger here is to read the photograph as nothing other than a technically skilful reproduction of reality but Berger is more subtle, he talks of the trace of reality, an echo of truth that resonates within the work.
When I was struggling to find the words to articulate this article, I was lucky enough to have a photographer/artist friend of mine, Louise Openshaw, staying locally on her Christmas break from Brighton. When I spoke to her about the difficulties of finding the appropriate language for the subject she told me that I had to read ‘Barthes’ and she was certainly right, doing so was an epiphany.
Roland Gérard Barthes, a French literary theorist, philosopher, linguist, critic, and semiotician truly gets to grips with photography and its philosophical meaning in a bold and meaningful way. According to his critic Cory Rice, writing in ‘four Ideas from the photographic writings of Roland Barthes’, Barthes sees photography as a marriage of concept and skill acknowledging that a bright idea can fall apart in the hands of a poor photographer and likewise a beautiful exposure is wasted if the image created is not worth looking at. Barthes is a hugely influential figure when it comes to the philosophy of photography and one of the people most frequently quoted in the field. Although a polymath, Barthes’s fundamental background was in semiotics which essentially is the concept of signs and what signs signify. Concerning the question ‘what is a photograph’ Barthes provided the following deliberation:
‘The type of consciousness the photograph involves is indeed truly unprecedented, since it establishes not a consciousness of the being-there of the thing … but an awareness of its having been-there. What we have is a new space-time category: special immediacy and temporal anteriority, the photograph being an illogical conjunction of the here-now and the there-then’.
Barthes spends an inordinate amount of time considering the seemingly simple question of ‘what is a photograph’. Cory Rice explores this in some detail noting that more traditional forms of art, such as painting, have changed very little in time, photography has changed dramatically in the two centuries or so that it has been present. Starting as delicate traces of silver on highly polished, mirror-like plates to heavily manipulated computer files that can be printed on virtually any material and in virtually any size. Consequently, evaluating what the images, we call photographs, actually have in common becomes a daunting task.
Again, when answering this question, Barthes considers the space, time dynamic, concluding, according to Rice, that the moment is simultaneously immortalised and at the same time gone for ever.
Barthes askes himself – ‘how does meaning get into image? Where does it end? And if it ends, what is there beyond?’ The answer to those questions seems to me to provide some sort of framework for addressing why the work of GG Barret [formerly Joanne Barrett] of Urban Fraggle is so exquisite and engaging. Barthes famously talks about photographs having ‘a message without a code’, in this regard he goes on to make a comparison between this concept and language where indeed code is found to be present. I think that the crux of the idea for me is to be found in the concepts that Barthes develops know as ‘denoted messages’ and ‘connoted messages’. Specifically, the denoted message can be seen as the knowledge that is imparted by a consideration of the photograph, according to Rice, this provides a connection to the subject that a painter or sculptor cannot. Again following Rice ‘The denoted message is the objective side of photography – beginning and ending with what the photograph represents’. Conversely, the connoted message is subjective, what does this image bring to the observer? This image makes me think/feel/experience …..
The significant distinguishing point between denoted messages and connoted messages, according to Rice, is what the viewer actually brings to the image. Denoted images are generally understood and from the same stand point, conversely, connoted images are subjective, meaning different things to different people.
Perhaps Barthes’s most famous work, relating to photography, is ‘Camera Lucida’. This book addresses the nature and essence of photography considering the effects that photographs have on people, it is also a eulogy to his mother. Within this work, Rice identifies photography, as understood by Barthes, to be ‘the end product of an obsessive quest to understand why certain photographs are able to move us in ways that no other medium can match’. Barthes goes on to say that ‘society is concerned to tame the photograph, to temper the madness which keeps threatening to explode in the face of whoever looks at it’.
Within the book ‘Camera Lucida’, Barthes introduces a new word to the English language and a new concept relating to photographic interpretation, the concept is known as the ‘punctum’. The word punctum is derived from a Latin word meaning to prick and for Barthes it relates to the unexpected details in certain photographs that have the ability to affect people at a personal level. Cory Rice argues that the concept catches us off guard and elicits an instant and visceral response. Significantly Rice maintains that the punctum is not anticipated by the photographer and has no commonality of interpretation by the viewer. ‘To this end, it strikes the innermost core of our subjectivity in a way distinct from any other visual form’.
Another artist that I value highly and often compare to GG Barret is the photorealist [some would argue super/hyper-realist] Ben Johnson. When interviewed a few years ago Johnson had something to say about the mechanical process that is used to create his images, thoughts which are quite enlightening when it comes to the manner in which art can be expressed, Johnson stated:
‘I would much rather have a good piece of craft than a bad painting.’
The artist then went on to talk about his own process which, according to Mark Sheerin, stretch the limits of the word craft to some considerable degree. Johnson will use photographs, a computer, assistants and up to 200 stencils. ‘It’s almost like a very elaborate piece of print making’, he explains – [Mark Sheerin, Getting realism: Ben Johnson talks about a controversial painting show in Birmingham, Culture 24, January 2014].
So where do all these deliberations leave us when considering the subject of this piece [What is Art? Photography and Photographs as an Artistic Source and Influence] in relation to the work of GG Barrett? I guess that the core question for me is why do I think her work is so much more valuable than mere photographic manipulation. I use the word ‘mere’ with caution as I think photographic manipulation is a true art form in itself, one only needs to think of the work of the Wigan 10 to realise this. Readers are invited to look at the work of Lynne Morris of Wigan 10 and particularly ‘don’t look down’ and ‘wild goose chase,’ to see what I mean.
By way of an answer, I may wish to start by looking at ‘I am Gracious’, (Digital Painting), a piece that I have written about extensively before. In this image, there is a characteristic on the lower horse immediately below the ear that may be observed as a second eye – if this was a photograph, Barthes would doubtless say it was my experience of the punctum of the picture – in any event the characteristic is suggestive of a view beyond the immediacy of that which is obvious and applies in equal terms to all of Barrett’s work.
In the pictures below we can see the hierarchy of photographic usage in imagery. Nicéphore Niépce’s image represents the genesis and most basic application of photography and when considering the work of GG Barrett; it is difficult not to see the horse figure as somewhat synchronous.
By Nicéphore Niépce (1765-1833) - Bibliothèque nationale de France, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3762721
My photograph of the Entwistle Viaduct represents a basic photograph ‘off the back of the camera’ with nothing more than ‘Light Room’ enhancement to make that image as good as it can be in terms of all relevant factors e.g. contrast, lightness and shade, tonal quality, variation and the rest, but it is still in essence the vision that I saw that June day in 2014.
Entwistle Viaduct: Simon J Maguire 2014
In contrast the superlative ‘wild goose chase’ by Lynne Morris of the famed ‘Wigan 10’ uses a series of photographs to create an image that bears no resemblance to any single photograph that was used to compile it but the output is beyond magnificent in its execution.
Wild Goose Chase by Lynne Morris: PAGB Digital Championships 2016
Finally we have the piece by GG Barret ‘1945, Oblivion to Rebirth’: Urban Fraggle Art, 2017. Here the photographs used provide a narrative, in 1945 we have oblivion in the form of nuclear attacks on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, followed later that year by the enlightening discovery of the Nag Hammadi library of Gnostic gospels as discovered by Muhammed al-Samman. So in 1945 we have the juxtaposition of oblivion in the form of nuclear carnage followed by the potential rebirth for humanity through the long since banned and lost early Christian texts from Upper Egypt.
1945, Oblivion to Rebirth: GG Barrett, Urban Fraggle Art, 2017.
So having gone through this journey of discovery concerning the question ‘what is Art? Photography and Photographs as an Artistic Source and Influence’, how is it possible to draw these threads together? Why do I think that GG Barrett’s work is at a level beyond all before it, is that a purely subjective view capable of significant challenge or is something else going on in her work? I have been mulling over that question for some time now with constant revisits to Barthes’s concept of denoted messages and connoted messages. So I ask myself what is the denoted message of ‘1945’? Well, clearly any observer can pick out the images of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the Jabel al-Tarif cliff face of Lower Egypt and the Gnostic Codices – all this is beyond question. The connoted message is more subjective but I have provided above the narrative of oblivion and renewal that goes with this image at a personal level. We could in addition consider what the punctum of the picture is, though I am not sure that I can and that may in itself be significant. This process could of course be applied to Morris’s ‘wild goose chase’, with equal effect, but I am maintaining that Barrett’s work hits a higher note and somehow I need to try to articulate why that is.
My mulling on this question has been going on now since well before Christmas and not until the present time have I felt able to provide the answer and it came from an unlikely source. For my money, Carl Jung was probably the greatest mind of the twentieth century, in fact with the possible exception of Leonardo da Vinci; his was probably the greatest mind of all. In his autobiography ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’, Jung tries to make sense of some of the psychic experience that he had that led to the compilation of his famous red book. Jung talks of a:
‘Mythopoetic imagination which has vanished from our rational age. Though such imagination is present everywhere, it is both tabooed and dreaded, so that it even appears to be a risky experiment or a questionable adventure to entrust oneself to the uncertain path of error, of equivocation and misunderstanding. I am reminded of Goethe’s words: Now let me dare to open wide the gate past which the steps of people have flinchingly trod. The second part of Faust too was more than a literary exercise. It is a link in the Aurea Catena [the golden chain of alchemy which is a series of great people starting with Hermes Trismegistos and linking earth with heaven] which has existed from the beginning of philosophical alchemy and Gnosticism down to Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. Unpopular, ambiguous and dangerous, it is a voyage of discovery to the other pole of the world’.
This piece I had read years ago and caused me to retain the same level of cynicism for Nietzsche that I had developed as a young man. Elsewhere in ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’ Jung has the following to say about this deep psychological journey within:
‘… I stood helpless before an alien world; everything in it seemed difficult and incomprehensible. I was living in a constant state of tension; often I felt as if gigantic blocks of stone were tumbling down on me. One thunderstorm followed another. My enduring of these storms was a question of brute strength; others have been shattered by them – Nietzsche and Hölderlin and many others’.
Both Nietzsche and Hölderlin suffered mental breakdowns and Nietzsche died in a state of insanity. With the above in mind it seemed odd to me that I should be drawn to Nietzsche for an answer to my question but since I was so drawn I am going to let things play out.
I have recently finished reading a book by a Jungian known as James Hollis; his book is entitled ‘Swamplands of the Soul’ and has the subtext ‘New Life in Dismal Places’. In essence, Hollis suggests that the pursuit of happiness for its own sake is not necessarily a good idea even in theory, let alone possible in practice. He suggests that life’s journey through the ‘swamplands’, whilst causing all manner of difficulties, including neuroses in extreme cases, was nonetheless the mechanism of ‘true Self development’ and engenders a sense of meaning and it is this sense of meaning and not the random pursuit of happiness that has value. Hollis quotes Nietzsche from Thus Spoke Zarathustra as follows:
Mankind is a rope, tied between beast and overman – a rope over an abyss. A dangerous across, a dangerous on-the-way, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous shuddering and stopping. What is great in people is that they form a bridge and not an end: what can be loved in people is that they form an overture and a going under’.
What to make of this? Hollis tries to provide an answer:
‘The crossing over which Nietzsche speaks is analogous to what I mean by going through [i.e. the ‘swamplands’ of difficult emotional experiences]. The going through is not just hanging on until the swamp’s miasma [an oppressive or unpleasant atmosphere] lifts, though that can also be necessary; it is the enlargement of oneself through the identification of the task implicit in each swampland state. When Nietzsche sees us as an overture, he is considering the imaginal renewal of the sense of self which transcends the historically conditioned limits. When he sees us as going under, he means that dying to the limits of the old Weltanschauung [a philosophical concept literally meaning world view] that we are freed from the iron wheel of Ixion. Nietzsche was seeking liberation from the constrictions of the Western tradition into a radical reinvention of the individual. What he intended for the work of culture renewal is first necessary for the renewal of the person who must stand strong against the forces of personal history’.
And now I find myself, quite comfortably, in a place that I have been before when considering Barrett’s work, she facilitates a ‘leaving of the here and now’ and a journey where we have to ‘stand strong against the forces of personnel history’, in other words we go not to or own personal conscious awareness or even to our own personal subconscious awareness but to a space that Jung would call the collective unconscious, the world of archetypes or forms as Plato would call them. So finally I have my answer, it is for this reason that I think that Barrett hits a higher note than others who otherwise may be regarded as being of the same genre. SJM
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