Photo Journal: Three of my favorite things.
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I’ve been looking a lot like this guy on the left lately—although it comes and goes, and a lot of the time I look like the guy on the right (gosh, it’s hard to find a Shahn drawing of a happy person). Actually … now taking a closer look, nevermind, I look nothing like Lane Pryce from Mad Men … Ha, actually that looks like sorry old Pete Campbell holding his busted face on the left, and the triumphant ass-kicking Layne Pryce on the right. Way to go, Ben Shahn—he probably did commercial illustration for guys like this in the 1960s and saw it all the time.
But, back to the guy on the left … what I’m trying to say is that I alternate between introspection and good times, and lately I’ve been thinking a lot about creativity. A while ago I read an article called How To Be Creative, and the hypothesis is that creativity is a skill that anyone can learn, it’s not magic, and there’s no such thing as the ‘creative type.’ It’s the creativity part that I disagree with because I think that everyone is inherently creative, so it isn’t a skill to be learned. I think it’s easy to confuse being creative with being artistic, but without creativity, in its infinite varying degrees, I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t be able to stay alive. I’ve been tossing these ideas around, so I was happy to come across Ben Shahn’s similar thoughts about imagination the other day.
I hope I will not be betraying my profession if I begin by saying that imagination is by no means ineffable. Imagination is equally shared by the bright and the dull, the flighty and the mundane. Imagination supplies the banalities of life as well as the inspirations. Imagination is the total conscious life of each one of us. Without it neither you nor I could make his way to his parked car, or recognize it when he arrived there. Without it we could not dress ourselves in the morning nor find our way to the breakfast table, nor know what we were eating, or what was said to us by our morning paper. Without it we would recognize nothing at all.
For imagination is images, traces of experience, the residue of impacts made upon us by all sorts of forces both from outside and inside ourselves. it is such images retained, and the power to re-invoke them, the power to re-group them and out of them to create new images according to our uses and intentions.
—Ben Shahn- from Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry (Winter, 1967).
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I made this video last month and I’m not sure what to do with it, so I’ve let it sit for a while, focusing on the stills. I’ve been playing around with sound lately, and I think it’s funny how video that I shot out the window of my old office building can seem so dramatic just because of the sound, not a story. I guess it’s about the narrative of repetition rather than the narrative of a story. Sound is amazing, I need a collaborator who actually knows something about it—please help!
Laura Manney | Broad Street – in progress, rough cut| 2011 | 5:16
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I’m going to see The Avett Brothers tonight! I’ve heard they put on a legendary live show, so I’m sitting on the edge of my office chair listening to Head Full of Doubt/Road Full of Promise. This video is the first thing I watched on this lovely rainy Wednesday morning …
… and it’s an extra lovely morning because the laundromat I live above caught on fire last night (sheesh, it’s the second one in the neighborhood—clean out the dryer lint, people!), and I’m still sitting here feeling very grateful, and that being an artist is actually pretty great, and not the burden it’s been feeling like lately.
It all happened pretty quickly, but as the halls filled with smoke, I had a terrifying flash of all of my paintings, drawings, negatives, and hard drives burning up while I squeezed my friends american bulldog down the fire escape to embark on my new life as a homeless person—and then none of that happened! What a great day!
There’s a darkness upon me that’s flooded in light
In the fine print they tell me what’s wrong and what’s right
And it comes in black and it comes in white
And I’m frightened by those that don’t see it
When nothing is owed or deserved or expected
And your life doesn’t change by the man that’s elected
If you’re loved by someone, you’re never rejected
Decide what to be and go be it
There was a dream and one day I could see it
Like a bird in a cage I broke in and demanded that somebody free it
And there was a kid with a head full of doubt
So I’ll scream til I die and the last of those bad thoughts are finally out
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I’ve been thinking about Gerhard Richter’s Atlas project lately, and how nice it would be to have all of my ideas in one place besides my head. Sometimes I think about firing up the old sketchbook again, but then I get sidetracked looking through images on my computer, and spend an hour making a picture like this.
These are video stills from things I’m working on. I don’t know what to make of them yet, so I watch them rotate as slideshows between my 4 computer monitors all day long, waiting for lightning to strike. What are you, art?! videos? photos? diptychs? paintings? silkscreens? all of it? … I’m overwhelmed.
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I paint in layers, well, I guess I do everything in layers, but I took these photographs a few years ago. I did paintings inside, took photographs outside, made the photos black and white, printed them on transparencies, projected them onto the paintings, and then took the photographs that you see here. I think it’s an interesting idea—maybe I’ll take a stab at it again someday now that I’m back to painting.
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I was a die-hard silk screener in art school. I started as a painter, but moved on to printmaking because I found more freedom within the constraints of the process. I found that thinking slowly in stages, one layer at a time, helped me to focus.
I was at a friends house recently and found myself lost in some other world, staring at this top print, Drifters, which was hanging on the wall. I did it 13 years ago and haven’t seen it in so long, so I was amazed by how cinematic it is and related to all of the photography and video that I’ve done since.
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“Eventually everything connects—people, ideas, objects…the quality of the connections
is the key to quality per se.” —Charles Eames
I watched a good documentary, Eames: the Architect and Painter, the other night on Netflix. I knew pretty much nothing about them—knew they designed chairs and that’s about it. The workshop they ran in California seemed like a magical world of design, art, film, sculpture and anything else that suddenly struck their interest. There was no division between art and life, personal and commercial, work and play. I’ve always liked the Powers of Ten video below.
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I just listened to this Soundcheck podcast, and I suggest you do the same. It’s very interesting, especially when they talk about the creative process, and the importance of not thinking too much.
WNYC.ORG: Back in March, songwriters David Byrne and James Murphy (formerly of LCD Sound System) met at Yale to talk about the evolving role of the artist in the digital age. John Schaefer moderated the discussion. Have a listen to a special Soundcheck podcast of the event, which includes discussion of the songwriting process, David Byrne’s proposal for an unusual (and potentially deadly) installation, and James Murphy’s plans to revolutionize New York City’s subway turnstiles.
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Photo journal: My neighborhood is full of dogs and headphones, so I’ve included them in some recent videos I’m working on. These are stills from that work in progress.
Fortunately I have multiple pairs of headphones, but unfortunately no dog.
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Photo journal: If I went running up the wall of an old-timey photo booth, I’m pretty sure the photos would turn out like this. But with my first half marathon quickly approaching, I ran a giant loop around lower Manhattan yesterday instead—my longest run ever. Many thanks to the Chemical Brothers, Prodigy and Public Enemy, I couldn’t have done it without you.
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Photo journal: Some hilarious physical comedy almost occurred on the corner of 2nd and 12th yesterday, but I looked south just in the nick of time.
Now I don’t think much of the man that throws a banana peelin’ on the sidewalk, and I don’t think much of the banana peel that throws a man on the sidewalk neither*. . .
. . . but I am reminded of how much I love living in NYC.
* The banana Wikipedia page [section on the cultural roll of the banana]
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I’ve begun the daunting task of organizing my many hard drives. It’s become a life-threatening problem because I’m certain my head will explode if I come across one more file titled CoolPhoto.FINALFINALForRealFINALSeriously.
AND the problem’s multiplied because I recently became a “remote employee”—which actually sounds cool, like I’ve gone undercover or work in outer space, but it’s actually just plain cool and means that I work in my apartment—with double everything, including hard drives.
So, organizing files really is a miserable task, and I feel like that guy from the myth that pushed the big rock uphill for eternity, but I’ve been finding a lot of old but relevant ideas, and art that I’d forgotten about. I’m amazed by how my work has changed mediums over the past decade, but my interests are still the same. Here are some of my paintings. It’s funny that I came across these today, because all week I’ve been thinking about painting from my video stills. Between Mediums forever!
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I’m not sure that many people know about the friendship between Walker Evans and Ben Shahn. Maybe it’s because their careers took such different paths, or maybe because Shahn’s work “went out of style” in a sense, partly because of it’s political nature, partly due to the rise of Modernism.
Whatever the reason, in the early 1930′s, Ben Shahn was sharing a studio with Walker Evans, and he constantly complained to Evans that his notebook was far too cumbersome and that the sketches were insufficient for his needs. Evans suggested that he might get a small Leica camera and begin to take pictures instead of doing sketches.
Shahn knew nothing about photography, so Evans gave him a brief lesson, “Its easy, Ben, F/9 on the sunny side of the street, F/4.5 on the shady side of the street, hold steady for a twentieth of a second.”[i] He began to use the camera as his sketch pad. He was very excited because he felt that “what the photographer can do that the painter can’t is to arrest that split second of action in a guy stepping onto a bus, or eating at a lunch counter.”
Ben Shahn photographs
The photographs became the raw material from which Shahn could structure and put together his ideas for murals and paintings. He also spent 5 years working as a photographer for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) shortly after he first picked up the camera. Even when the program was downsized due to lack of governmental funds, Shahn stayed on. At one point Walker Evans was actually the one to be fired because of his perfectionist eye. His insistence on use of the view camera caused him to be the photographer with the fewest negatives, and, therefore, the one to go.
Walker Evans photographs
Walker Evans spoke about his relationship with Shahn in this interview from 1971.
PAUL CUMMINGS: Well, you shared a studio or something with Shahn, didn’t you for a while? What was it like sharing space with a painter, sharing a studio with a painter?
WALKER EVANS: The questions should be: “What’s it like with Shahn?” – because everybody is different and Shahn was a very special character. Well, we had a great attachment to each other Shahn and I. Also he was an overpowering man. Which I begun to resent. He was too strong for me. But I knew I was getting educated. After all, a little boy from Kenilworth had never seen anybody like that, the son of a Russian immigrant really right out of the streets, you know, and tough. All the things I thought were exotic and fascinating. It was very marvelous. I was very attracted to his work. I loved it. I still do to this day. It’s not very fashionable to love it but I do. Everybody is disillusioned with Shahn really after having called him the greatest of contemporary artists. He’s lost that status I think. But he was a very clever and interesting artist. We both had the same kind of an eye really. That’s why he got interested in photography. He used to shamelessly make pictures from photographs.
[i] Laura Katzman, “Ben Shahn’s New York: Scenes from a Living Theater,” Ben Shahn’s New York: The Photography of Modern Times, (Hong Kong: Palace Press, 2000) 11-12.
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Photo journal: I spotted him in the East Village the other day, hiding behind some rust.
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