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SECAC Sessions

SECAC is having their annual conference in Greensboro, NC this year. Last year's was a great success, and I'm excited about submitting a couple of proposals again this year. Below are the sessions I plan on shooting for. For the first, I'll be revising an aspect of my thesis work on Heinecken's magazines, while the second will be a new project on Heinecken's book, 1984: A Case Study in Finding an Appropriate TV Newswoman (A CBS Docudrama in Words and Pictures. 

Artists' Publications in the 1960s: Critical Readings

 While the involvement of artists in the creation of books is as venerable as the invention of the medium itself, the 1960s saw a significant shift of its utilization. Books, catalogues and magazines functioned as alternative modes of exhibition for works that no longer required the institution's walls for their material presentation, nor its endorsement for their critical validation. In fact, their very format not only challenged the museums and galleries' modes of operation based on the distribution of an authentic and highly valuable art object, but they also allowed artists to circumvent the authority of the institutional players, whether curators or critics. If some publications were carefully handcrafted, many were mechanically produced, allowing artists to further disrupt the art object's resilient aura. Through case studies, this panel will consider the critical implications of publications functioning as alternative spaces of exhibition and their relations to the contemporaneous practice of institutional critique. In addition, the panel will foreground the medium's affiliation with the Minimalists’ ontological explorations into the nature of the art object, and discuss its ambivalence with regards to the development of mass communication, which challenged its democratic, if not utopian, ambitions.

ParaFiction and ParaFact: The Space Between

This session addresses the complex intersection of artistic practice and "parafiction," a term offered by Carrie Lambert-Beatty to discuss projects that call attention to, play with, and function in the gray area between fact and fiction. Much recent work has explored and problematized this unstable binary whereby inserting a particular falsehood points to versions of the "truth." Projects enacted by Ai Weiwei, The Atlas Project, Pierre Huyghe, Michael Blum, The Yes Men, etc. have used strategies of pranks, lies, humor, deception, and impersonation to examine instances of "truthiness," to use Stephen Colbert's term. Such projects build on mimicry, détournement and encourage shades of plausibility with which to implicate contemporaneous issues. We invite papers that investigate aspects of parafiction, the functionality of such projects, the facets of dissemination, and the implications of its practice. Simultaneously, this panel will provide a forum for discussing the vocabulary that informs the discourse surrounding parafiction.

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I successfully defended my thesis last week. One thing I was complimented on: my snappy title. I’m really looking forward to stepping back from this project for a few more days before revising it for (hopeful) publication… 

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In the archives

A small piece of ephemera from the Center for Creative Photography, Robert Heinecken archive. Found this while doing research in July of last year among a bunch of old magazine covers. This may have been for an unrealized "mongrel" magazine called Periodical Pain that Heinecken was working on sometime in the early 1970s. I also found old correspondance where he talks about publishing a softcover facsimile of the same name containing  some of his previous magazine-based prints. Not sure about the specifics—that will take some more digging—but a fun find, nevertheless. 

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Self = Portrayal

Thought I would post a picture of a really nice find I picked up while in Santa Barbara a few weeks ago. Browsing through a local bookstore (!) I came across a 1978 publication from the Friends of Photography titled Self = Portrayal. Included in it are a self-portraits from a number of amazing photographers who are vastly under appreciated outside of a small community of image-makers. Hopefully, I can use this as a source and starting point for some future projects... 

Cover:

Title:

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I love these series of old SPE baseball cards. There is a whole series - 150 total, I believe - that come up on eBay occasionally. Once I get a little extra scratch, I might try to pick up a Bob Heinecken card…

One of Nathan in honor of the 50th Anniversary of SPE

Nathan Lyons, Baseball-Photographer Trading Card, 1975, Mike Mandel

from the Visual Studies Workshop Archive 

www.vsw.org

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I'm really glad I'm friends with Sarah. She is an immensely talented writer with one of the sharpest wits of any person I've been around. She introduced me to Ray Wylie Hubbard's "Snake Farm." Last time we got together, she wore an American flag as a cape. Needless to say, every time I go home to NE Oklahoma, I'm usually most excited to see her and whatever weird junk she pulls out of the back of her 2000 Extended Cab Dodge Dakota. Read her coming out story linked here, if you're so inclined. Or her Tumblr, here.

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I suppose since Tumblr is the place for GIFS, here is William Wegman's first ever GIF (duh, it's got a dog in it). Via: ArtFCity

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Brainwashing, Modernity, and the Cold War subject

"The invention of brainwashing was in this sense not simply an American propaganda coup, as has been frequently argued.4 The term also became shorthand for a multitude of forms of control, persuasion, and influence—for political but also other purposes—experienced by many people in the aftermath of Word War II. If many of these practices remained intangible, viscerally felt but difficult to comprehend, the notion of brainwashing seemed to crystallize them in a powerful way, to name them as a specific pathology not just of totalitarian society but of modernity as such. What I explore in the following are several elements within the cultural fantasy sur- rounding brainwashing: in particular, the way Pavlov’s name, together with certain forms of human science and the modern visual media, became written into it. These elements are central to the era’s iconic representation of mind control, John Frankenheimer’s 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate, an account of a hypno- programmed assassin’s role in a plot to take over the White House. Yet, while in many ways Frankenheimer’s film represents the apotheosis of this fantasy, it also complicates the fantasy by suggesting that “knowledge of the enemy,” as Hunter had defined it, was at the same time deeply self-reflexive, a form of knowledge of American society itself. "

Andreas Killen, "Homo Pavlovius: Cinema, Conditioning, and the Cold War Subject," Grey Room 45 (Fall 2011): 44.

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Manuscripts and Plans

So, major accomplishment of the week: I have circulated a completed draft of my masters thesis to my committee members. The manuscript is titled "Another Sort of Camera: Robert Heinecken's Photographic Neo-Avant-Gardism." I've posted an initial abstract below - which, honestly, needs to be reworked. I'm afraid it sounds like gibberish (it was the final element of the manuscript that I had to complete, and was pretty burned out at that point). Hopefully, a bit of space from the material for a few days will give me a clearer perspective on the abstract. 

I have also been considering the future publication options for this material. I plan on editing the second chapter for journal submissions. That chapter includes what I think are the most significant re-considerations of Heinecken's work, both conceptually and historically. In that chapter, I detail how Heinecken completely rethinks the structure of photography by utilizing substituting apertures. Heinecken completely does away with lens-based apertures, using instead any number of other photographic reproductions as a way to see through images.  

My number one journal goal for this work would be Grey Room. The material concerns of the piece, as well as its theoretical framework, compliment what the journal regularly publishes. So—commence the edits, and we shall see. 

Abstract

From the late 1960s through the mid 1970s, Los Angeles based photographer Robert Heinecken created a myriad of magazine works that included the artist's self-produced "mongrel" magazines, various photomontages and photocollages, and other hybrid prints derived from mass-media imagery. This thesis contends that these magazine works constitute a particular strand of photographic neo-avant-gardism, a category of advanced artistic practice thus far underdeveloped in the scholarly literature. By synthesizing the discourse of historical and neo-avant-gardism with media-critical texts, I develop of framework to explain the radical moves inaugurated by Heinecken's work.

The first two chapters of this thesis, which comprise the body of my argument, demonstrate how Heinecken folds the strategies of the historical avant-garde into the medium of photography. In so doing, he creates a form of photographic practice that interrogates the history of photography as it relates to America's burgeoning, Cold War consumer society. Through his magazine works, Heinecken seeks to interrupt the incessant flow of media temporality, to focus his viewers attention on the structure of photographic meaning, and most provocatively, to upend the notion of photographic indexicality through an innovative substitution of apertures. To conclude, I outline a trajectory of radical photographic evolution that progressed through the twentieth century—a trajectory that moves from making photographs, to creating objects about things, and finally, to presenting pictures. 

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A bit of material I have been focused on for a while now: Robert Heinecken's Are You Rea portfolio, produced from about 1966-68. 

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Opening Gambit

Hopefully this will become a fuller repository for the work I have, and will, complete throughout my graduate studies and beyond. No promises to myself or anybody else, though—just a bit of open potential to keep track thoughts, ideas, and goals. Perhaps if it grows enough, I can use this space to hold myself accountable for maintaining a healthy level of public engagement.  Academia is (too often it seems) a place where work happens in private and only appears publicly in a more-or-less completed form. It shouldn't have to remain that way.