Friday, February 23, 2007

The CAA Experience...
Janet Koplos and Bruce Metcalf chaired the 2-part session "When is Technique Central to Meaning?" at CAA in NYC last week. I was fascinated by the topics the presenters chose.

Christina Bryan Rosenberger, from the Center for the Technical Study of Modern Art at Harvard University Art Museums, spoke about Agnes Martin's paintings and how the complex ways she prepared her canvases and worked the surfaces "challenge the traditional understanding of Martin's canvases as dematerialized and disembodied". The next day I was at MOMA and had the chance to really examine one of Martin's paintings and see, anew, the kind of rough and smooth surfaces that she had prepared, the skipping of the graphite lines over the sanded ground and linen and the layering of washes.

Yuko Teshima, from the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, spoke about the Provoke photographers of late 1960's Japan, whose signature "a-re, bu-re, bo-ke", (rough blurred and out-of- focus) quality "signified an act of creating meaning both in their works and their lives. Ultimately, taking photographs was not about the content- let alone the composition- but about the act itself." The photographers of the collective, Provoke, were Nakahira Takuma, Takanashi Yutaka, Taki Koji , Okada Takahiko and Moriyama Daido.
I had never heard of these photographers before and was interested to learn about their technique of taking photographs without looking through the viewfinder, while running or walking.

I will write more about the presentations tomorrow. I need to get back to work.

And, of course, congratulations to Dr. Mia Reinoso Genoni, on her successful PhD defense at NYU last Monday...

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