Digital Discord

  It was interesting to hear from Tim Sullivan on his experimental art, his career, and his uncanny resemblance to the pop star Heino. One of my favorite ideas of his was the still life ‘negatives’. The artist would attempt to paint the objects in the scene their opposite/negative color, so that after inverting them the colors would stay the same while shadows turned white and highlights turned black. Overall, Sullivan’s experimental practice greatly appealed to me. He seemed to dabble in almost every medium to suit his needs as an artist. Sullivan’s work based on California also appealed to me, in the way it coexisted with Barthesian ideas of the work and the text. The images on the billboards (images of idealized ‘California’ that often depicted entirely different locales) recalled the viewers perceptions of the textual idealization of the state, while simultaneously subverting them (the holes cut out of the billboards add a tinge of doubt to the ideas). The cut out circles from the

     Lyle Rexer gave a very interesting talk about the prevalence in contemporary photo art of ‘Bad Pictures of Bad Subjects’. This is not a disparaging comment, however. Rexer discussed how the changing nature and use-cases of photographs have led to this outcome. Today, nearly all Americans have access to a camera attached to their phones at all times. This, along with social media’s meteoric rise, has lead to an unprecedented volume of so-called ‘vernacular’ images being taken as compared to past eras. What do these kinds of images, with little consideration given to framing, composition, or conceptual ideas, say about our contemporary image making culture? Naturally, contemporary ‘fine art’ photographers have been quick to respond to the growing trend. In creating these ‘bad pictures of bad subjects’, scrutiny is placed upon the context of the photographs, rather than the content themselves. I always wonder whether I would be able to tell the difference between these ‘bad’ pictures