This to me feels like a Cindy Sherman themed fashion spread, the diptych format helps make it seem like a centrefold. It’s like an appropriation of the appropriation of appropriation of images.
Bifurcation seems to be a very pragmatic compositional solution. It is always safer to throw two punches rather than one. Three unreturned strikes seems to be a bit unsporting (and jeopardizes a plea of self-defense).
Yes, the ol’ one-two, effective against bullies and skeptics.
In these images it is interesting how it is used to sideline the viewer in the transaction between work and reaction as it is too busy looking at itself, back and forth.
I don’ think that kind of narcissism is necessarily a bad thing either.
I tend to think of bifurcation as broken continuity. Is/isn’t connected. It’s not an abstraction exclusive to our generation/environment/time, but it’s very relevant in my view.
There’s something oddly natural to me about a bifurcated image. Composing with them and looking at them.
I guess banole has a point: if your afraid your photo’s not enough, just put one next to it, and wham, instantly it’s a more ‘difficult’ read. Even if that’s so, the ‘why’ of it is still interesting.
I like several of these, including non-bifurcated ones. There’s a side of them that’s a bit, uh, music magazine band photo shoot (or something), but they’re also clever, which I like.
…and can anyone place that tune? it’s on the tip of my brain? air? album leaf? boards of canada?
going back to the influence thing, i think sarah’s work is definitely the tried and true approach–take a canonical artist (Cindy Sherman) throw in new technology, link the work formally to other newer cultural items (music video, fashion, flickr, facebook, et al.). Come up with a quirky, more focused take on one aspect of the influencer’s work.
in terms of bifurcation, i am often attracted to it because of of the way it hinges a work…balancing two implied picture planes on a high point that just sort of feathers the surface of the skin between the real world of the viewer and the pictorial world of the piece. like a fulcrum.
so it presses a point of tension between itself and the viewer. because of this, it offers a point of likely entry, but it is also sort of obtuse/clumsy, and resists speediness.
also, it calls in to question the passage of sequential events vs. events (and time) that have an accreted fullness.
bifurcation also helps the artist locate him/herself away from the definitive, the finished, the closed. To use a theoretical cliché (but still a very useful and cogent one) it is like Roland Barthes’ distinction between “work” and “text,” wherein the text constantly opens itself, not only to new readings, by to new readers. One important point to stress about this distinction is that not only are “works” and “texts” categories for artmaking, but they are also, I think more importantly, methods of encountering all art. But now that the cat is out of the bag, artists deliberately court the “text” method,partially through bufurcation, which is one way of asking us to consider their work as a body of work, not a group of distinct masterpieces. Can you really expect to comprehend Sherman, Richter, Rosler, through one work? Artists today seem to make fields, and the bifurcation thing is to make each work itself a sort of field.
I agree that bifurcation can create a space where a lot of beautiful things can happen, and I would imagine that some of those things can only be created through bifurcation. However, I would want to be careful that this was the case.
(for some reason I would want to be careful, much like I would want to be careful when using repetition. I fear sometimes these beautiful strategies can become invisible preferences.)
Also, how does a diptych fit into this whole bifurcation concept? I suspect there is a distinction, especially in regards to the “works” “texts” argument.
lots of great comments here. for me it’s all about building contexts. i’m sure some of you here have read john coplans’ text in “serial imagery” which was also the title for the landmark 1968 show featuring the likes of albers, noland, and frank stella, among many others. much of what “serial imagery” dealt with was the implications of interrelation and continuity as sort of founding cornerstones of serial imagery, particularly as it dealt with mid-20th-century abstraction. the authority of the work was understood to be validated not as much by outside or even analogous art historical models as it was by its own entirely related set of “sister” works. legitimacy was refocused away from legacy (outside the artist and work) and toward the insular (particular to the artist and work).
i dig a lot of this – in the sense that i like resonances and want to build up species of coding/imagery that creates a kind of vernacular of visual language within a particular body of work. but i think that this can be done while retaining connections to historical modes and practices (in as much as it’s impossible to get away from them anyway). in some sense i think all artists are building contextual vernaculars within their works over time and more or less responding to what they’ve received.
the bifurcated image, i think, ramps up the necessity of a 1 to 1 narrative read. that is, the one image directly relates and acts as a cypher to the other image. rather than broad series, the two stand as a concealing and revealing device. basically, it’s just another way to make looking at images different and interesting.
i just got back from a residency in michigan, and this sort of thing was exacting what i was trying to do with the images. a lot of these comments feel uncanny as they were some of what was passing through my mind as i tried to clarify what was happening in the pairs i’d made…
about the diptych question, another question: can we say that diptychs (and triptychs, etc, etc) are really more than just practical strategies to make work be a certain size or have a sense of expansiveness?
those seem like two vastly different questions. am i reading it right?
the diptych-triptych-etc is a practical strategy for those with limited carpentry skills or storage space to work in larger scale. but obviously it’s a lot more, just a look at bacon or piero confirms this.
as for a sense of expansiveness, i think that is exactly what the multi-format work, and even cycles and serials, do. the innate urge to make connections, the automatic awareness of what is absent creates exactly a sense of expansiveness.
Okay, new question, though maybe the post is just dead…how is the bifurcated image different than the layered image? in terms of a lot of the effect, resonances, intentions that we’ve already discussed vis-a-vis bifurcating?
anthony pontius vs. sarah knobel…
ps. I still can’t come up with the song on flash site. something from a sophia copola film?
pps. If the post is just dead…I think we need some public outcry to squeeze a post out of sam…he’s got some interesting stuff waiting to go…
kinda sounds like it could of come off of Broadcast’s microtronics volume 2. album.
dunno.
in Coppola’s Lost In Translation there is that scene where johansson is walking across the rocks at the monastary. it’s not that song, but it has a similar feel.
…which i think was done by Air?? — in which case, Chris, you might be on the right track with your first guess –
i don’t know for shit. my i-pod’s done gone and broke itself it for the second time (but it’s still under warranty!), and i’m too lazy to go and sort through my dvd’s.
Looking at separate objects next to each other is a very different experience from looking at single object. I find it most effective in surrealism, probably because is just so confrontational. You don’t really get a choice in the matter. But the same experience is in diptychs as well.
I find in diptychs there’s a wonderful moment of fantasy. Where you mentally have to bridge the gap between the two images. Those moments are as interesting to me, as the images in the diptychs. If these were a single image, the relationship would be much more natural, or at the very least, much less in my head. That experience is in the same vein as a response to a surrealist image.
Crap I forgot to even mention Knobel’s work. How rude of me. The comment on that was “a Cindy Sherman themed fashion spread” seemed to resonate for me. But these seemed a bit more sincere. They REALLY remind me of http://hankwillisthomas.com/splash.html
Specifically his Unbranded stuff. The websites awesome. I’m jealous.
I think this would be a good place to start the proposed discussion about influence and how it works now, as different than in the past…anyone game?
Yeah, but I’m gonna be tempted to also talk about our generation’s compositional tendency toward bifurcation.
So…we could bifurcate the conversation, into one about influences and one about bifurcation..?
This to me feels like a Cindy Sherman themed fashion spread, the diptych format helps make it seem like a centrefold. It’s like an appropriation of the appropriation of appropriation of images.
… our generation’s compositional tendency toward bifurcation…
Bifurcation seems to be a very pragmatic compositional solution. It is always safer to throw two punches rather than one. Three unreturned strikes seems to be a bit unsporting (and jeopardizes a plea of self-defense).
Yes, the ol’ one-two, effective against bullies and skeptics.
In these images it is interesting how it is used to sideline the viewer in the transaction between work and reaction as it is too busy looking at itself, back and forth.
I don’ think that kind of narcissism is necessarily a bad thing either.
I tend to think of bifurcation as broken continuity. Is/isn’t connected. It’s not an abstraction exclusive to our generation/environment/time, but it’s very relevant in my view.
There’s something oddly natural to me about a bifurcated image. Composing with them and looking at them.
I guess banole has a point: if your afraid your photo’s not enough, just put one next to it, and wham, instantly it’s a more ‘difficult’ read. Even if that’s so, the ‘why’ of it is still interesting.
I like several of these, including non-bifurcated ones. There’s a side of them that’s a bit, uh, music magazine band photo shoot (or something), but they’re also clever, which I like.
That website’s got some flash, huh?
…and can anyone place that tune? it’s on the tip of my brain? air? album leaf? boards of canada?
going back to the influence thing, i think sarah’s work is definitely the tried and true approach–take a canonical artist (Cindy Sherman) throw in new technology, link the work formally to other newer cultural items (music video, fashion, flickr, facebook, et al.). Come up with a quirky, more focused take on one aspect of the influencer’s work.
in terms of bifurcation, i am often attracted to it because of of the way it hinges a work…balancing two implied picture planes on a high point that just sort of feathers the surface of the skin between the real world of the viewer and the pictorial world of the piece. like a fulcrum.
so it presses a point of tension between itself and the viewer. because of this, it offers a point of likely entry, but it is also sort of obtuse/clumsy, and resists speediness.
also, it calls in to question the passage of sequential events vs. events (and time) that have an accreted fullness.
bifurcation also helps the artist locate him/herself away from the definitive, the finished, the closed. To use a theoretical cliché (but still a very useful and cogent one) it is like Roland Barthes’ distinction between “work” and “text,” wherein the text constantly opens itself, not only to new readings, by to new readers. One important point to stress about this distinction is that not only are “works” and “texts” categories for artmaking, but they are also, I think more importantly, methods of encountering all art. But now that the cat is out of the bag, artists deliberately court the “text” method,partially through bufurcation, which is one way of asking us to consider their work as a body of work, not a group of distinct masterpieces. Can you really expect to comprehend Sherman, Richter, Rosler, through one work? Artists today seem to make fields, and the bifurcation thing is to make each work itself a sort of field.
I agree that bifurcation can create a space where a lot of beautiful things can happen, and I would imagine that some of those things can only be created through bifurcation. However, I would want to be careful that this was the case.
(for some reason I would want to be careful, much like I would want to be careful when using repetition. I fear sometimes these beautiful strategies can become invisible preferences.)
Also, how does a diptych fit into this whole bifurcation concept? I suspect there is a distinction, especially in regards to the “works” “texts” argument.
lots of great comments here. for me it’s all about building contexts. i’m sure some of you here have read john coplans’ text in “serial imagery” which was also the title for the landmark 1968 show featuring the likes of albers, noland, and frank stella, among many others. much of what “serial imagery” dealt with was the implications of interrelation and continuity as sort of founding cornerstones of serial imagery, particularly as it dealt with mid-20th-century abstraction. the authority of the work was understood to be validated not as much by outside or even analogous art historical models as it was by its own entirely related set of “sister” works. legitimacy was refocused away from legacy (outside the artist and work) and toward the insular (particular to the artist and work).
i dig a lot of this – in the sense that i like resonances and want to build up species of coding/imagery that creates a kind of vernacular of visual language within a particular body of work. but i think that this can be done while retaining connections to historical modes and practices (in as much as it’s impossible to get away from them anyway). in some sense i think all artists are building contextual vernaculars within their works over time and more or less responding to what they’ve received.
the bifurcated image, i think, ramps up the necessity of a 1 to 1 narrative read. that is, the one image directly relates and acts as a cypher to the other image. rather than broad series, the two stand as a concealing and revealing device. basically, it’s just another way to make looking at images different and interesting.
i just got back from a residency in michigan, and this sort of thing was exacting what i was trying to do with the images. a lot of these comments feel uncanny as they were some of what was passing through my mind as i tried to clarify what was happening in the pairs i’d made…
about the diptych question, another question: can we say that diptychs (and triptychs, etc, etc) are really more than just practical strategies to make work be a certain size or have a sense of expansiveness?
those seem like two vastly different questions. am i reading it right?
the diptych-triptych-etc is a practical strategy for those with limited carpentry skills or storage space to work in larger scale. but obviously it’s a lot more, just a look at bacon or piero confirms this.
as for a sense of expansiveness, i think that is exactly what the multi-format work, and even cycles and serials, do. the innate urge to make connections, the automatic awareness of what is absent creates exactly a sense of expansiveness.
Okay, new question, though maybe the post is just dead…how is the bifurcated image different than the layered image? in terms of a lot of the effect, resonances, intentions that we’ve already discussed vis-a-vis bifurcating?
anthony pontius vs. sarah knobel…
ps. I still can’t come up with the song on flash site. something from a sophia copola film?
pps. If the post is just dead…I think we need some public outcry to squeeze a post out of sam…he’s got some interesting stuff waiting to go…
kinda sounds like it could of come off of Broadcast’s microtronics volume 2. album.
dunno.
in Coppola’s Lost In Translation there is that scene where johansson is walking across the rocks at the monastary. it’s not that song, but it has a similar feel.
…which i think was done by Air?? — in which case, Chris, you might be on the right track with your first guess –
i don’t know for shit. my i-pod’s done gone and broke itself it for the second time (but it’s still under warranty!), and i’m too lazy to go and sort through my dvd’s.
diptych = surrealism
Care to unpack that a little, David?
Looking at separate objects next to each other is a very different experience from looking at single object. I find it most effective in surrealism, probably because is just so confrontational. You don’t really get a choice in the matter. But the same experience is in diptychs as well.
I find in diptychs there’s a wonderful moment of fantasy. Where you mentally have to bridge the gap between the two images. Those moments are as interesting to me, as the images in the diptychs. If these were a single image, the relationship would be much more natural, or at the very least, much less in my head. That experience is in the same vein as a response to a surrealist image.
Crap I forgot to even mention Knobel’s work. How rude of me. The comment on that was “a Cindy Sherman themed fashion spread” seemed to resonate for me. But these seemed a bit more sincere. They REALLY remind me of http://hankwillisthomas.com/splash.html
Specifically his Unbranded stuff. The websites awesome. I’m jealous.