Michael Autumn

Category: Art Criticism

  • Survival of the Most Beautiful Art

    Another eery coincidence has occurred in my life. It was only yesterday, while listening to BBC Radio3 (something I listen to a lot because it is not very invasive and it allows me to concentrate on my work; and, not least, because they often play beautiful music!), and really enjoying the sheer brilliance of Felix Mendelssohn (1809–1847), Pyotr Tchaikovsky (1840–1893), and Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) – that I asked myself: has any music of this standard been produced since? Was the 19th Century the pinnacle of music? Have composers just run out of ideas or lost their direction?

    The coincidence was that today I was listening to a BBC Radio 3 programme called Darwin And Music – where Petroc Trelawny was in discussion with Gary Tomlinson, Professor of Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania, Ian Cross, reader in music and science at Cambridge University and Roderick Swanston of Imperial College. They were discussing the idea that music had peaked with Beethoven – or at least with 19th Century music. They mentioned musicologist Paul Henry Lang (arguably the leading musicologist of the Twentieth Century who produced a seminal work: “Music in Western Civilization” 1941), who lamented the demise of modern music – saying that none of his contemporaries – Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951), Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971), etc. were as good as previous composers…

    But I think there is another evolutionary force in human activities: basically this is not so much survival of the fittest but survival of the most beautiful. That is quality or beauty will survive the longest – the implication being that less beautiful works or works that do not come up to a certain standard will not have the same success at the box office or record sales, and general demand for them will be low. Given the choice between atonal music and 19th Century Romanticism, the latter will win hands down into perpetuity. The less beautiful, or even the non-beautiful (to put it politely) will fall into obscurity – where it belongs.

    I think there comes a point when the standard reached by predecessors is so great and requires so much effort and imagination – that would-be successors are in awe, but not awe-inspired. They are simply humbled into defeatism: a feeling that there is no way they can achieve the same quality. Some people’s reaction to this is to try to produce something different: I cannot compete on the same terms so I will try something completely different…

    Evolution, as I understand it, is not a gradual and constant “improvement” – somehow defined – but a continuous adaptation to changes. But that is not to imply intention. Evolution is blind. What it boils do to is that if there are changes to the environment (which are always happening due to catastrophic and/or gradual geological phenomena) then those changes may adversely affect the survival of certain species in certain locations with certain physical and psychological attributes. For example, if huge parts of Africa were to turn to a desert the animals have certain choices: if possible move to locations where they are adapted to survive, or nature will whittle out those unadapted – who cannot find food, a mate, shelter.

    Random genetic mutations take place all the time in the history of species. However, if, during the aforementioned environmental transition, genetic mutations happen to favour certain individuals – like longer necks, smaller size, longer tongues, or a greater sense of smell of hidden water – then there may be a negative filtering process where the species’ design tends to head in a particular direction. Such biological adaption, however, is not necessarily continuous or beneficial to future generations. An ever-growing neck is only useful as long as the trees are tall. And if the trees disappear and there is only close grazing to be had, then the long neck could be a positive disadvantage…

    However, I do think there are some unequivocally good, or universally useful adaptions, and their omnipresence is possibly testimony to this idea. I am of course thinking about the senses of sight, hearing, taste, and touch. Necks can grow and shrink, legs can come and go, wingspan can grow and shrink, size can grow and shrink – as prevalent environmental conditions “dictate”. However, I can imagine no situations where being able to detect one’s environment – to help locate food and mates, avoid potential predators, avoid physical dangers – like not walking off a cliff – I can think of no situations where these senses could be a hindrance. So while many species of animal differ quite considerably, the one thing the vast majority seem to share is the aforementioned senses…

    I feel human evolution, where the arts are concerned, is not “natural” in the normal evolutionary sense of the word. Human evolution in the arts is very much pre-meditated and deliberate. But is it? Surely evolution is not about what individual species do in order to try to survive. It is about what history has shown to be successful, and by implication unsuccessful, adaptations – regardless of how those adaptions came about. Some species, like the Horseshoe Crab (Limulus polyphemus), have lived on this planet for hundreds of millions of years with little or no change (hence they are sometimes known as “living fossils”), and they are contemporaries of very new species – like humans – who have only be around for about 5 million years. The human species isn’t necessarily the zenith of evolution on the planet: evolution is neutral with regards newness of species (many new species have come and gone in the course of the Eath’s history), or, if anything, it smiles on the longest surviving and most planet-friendly…

    In a similar vein, albeit on a much smaller scale(!), some art and classical music has been around for centuries and there is contemporary art and classical music. Contemporary, from an evolutionary perspective, confers no privilege or status – just chronology. If, and only if, two hundred years from now future generations wish to see or listen to today’s contemporary art – as much as we do today for the Impressionists, the Pre-Raphaelites, the 19th Century Romanticists, the Three B’s, Mozart – only then will be we able to say that today’s contemporary art is as “good” as art of yester-year… I bet my life that this will not happen as a general preference.

    Perhaps using the term classical music is defeating in this context – because I am effectively restricting how music might evolve. Perhaps the evolutionary direction music in general has taken is to generally favour the smaller more agile species. Let me explain. Conventional classical music is the blue whale or mammoth in evolutionary terms, requiring months of a composer’s imagination and effort, big orchestras, and are generally big, expensive, projects and a slow creative process. To compete with the great works of the past in the same genre is fantastically difficult. Perhaps music has adapted to smaller more agile units with small groups of individuals and single people, and improvisation. Maybe (classical) music has evolved, or is evolving into pop and jazz music and their numerous incarnations and derivatives. This could be as a result of the dissatisfaction of what conventional classical composers were producing. Maybe not. Maybe a new source of food in the form of radio, records, and television brought opportunities that enabled the smaller musical creatives to survive. Let me be absolutely clear: I am not saying the quality of these latter genres is no good –  nothing of the sort – some of it is in my opinion every bit as good and I think will stand the test of time. The problem for contemporary music posterity is that there is so much of it…

    Maybe the equivalent paradigm shift in visual art has been in graphic art, photography, digital art, animation and film. Maybe the old purposes for, or uses of, art have changed – leaving a lot of artists unsure as to what to produce. Many artists in the past had a “brief”. Today’s briefs are more often for things like adverts, product shots, graphic representations, etc. A lot of art today is completely uncommissioned and with a client’s brief. Maye artists are a bit lost?

    So the old notions of art may have changed – scale, medium, patronage, client-artist relationship, etc. But the standards by which they should be judged – and whether they will pass the test of time – are the same. It is not enough just to change medium.

    If evolution has any long-term direction I would say it is favours archetypes like progressively improving senses, mobility, adaptability, efficiency of converting food to energy, and … beauty.

  • Gallery #1 didn’t have the decency to reply…

    The gallery (which I shall refer to as Gallery #1 because there will be others) didn’t get back to me within a week so I decided to give them a call. I asked to speak to the owner (whom I named – I didn’t just say "may I speak with the owner" – the typical cold-calling approach!) but was told he was not in. I then started having a chat with the man who answered the phone. I said to him that I just wanted to make sure the owner had received my email – in this day-and-age of junk mail there was a good chance that he didn’t. The gentleman asked my name and said that the gallery receives maybe a dozen approaches from artists a day, that the owner generally checks all the mail, and if he hadn’t got back to me then the chances are he would not.

    The gentleman said that the gallery doesn’t have enough time in their calendar or space in their gallery to show all the work of their existing artists – let alone taking on new ones. He apologised and said that that was just the reality of the situation. I thanked him and that was the end of the conversation.

    I just feel that with a gallery owner making his living from hard-working artists – that at least he would have the decency to reply to a prospective artist who has approached him for representation. Suppose the situation was reversed: I was a famous artist, he was setting up a new gallery aiming for the big time, and he approached me… Did he ever stop to think how he might feel if I completely ignored him?

    He may live to regret it – who knows? The search goes on…

  • My First Approach to a Top Commercial Art Gallery

    Today I made my first approach to a top commercial art gallery to see if they are interested in representing me. This must be something akin to an author approaching a book publisher to try to get their work published. I am sure that, like novels, some will like your work and some will not…

    I selected them very carefully on the basis that they deal with famous contemporary artists – including those working in photographic and digital mediums, and I know of them indirectly through a buyer of one of my works.

    It will be interesting to see if they consider my work on merit or whether they are more interested in the CV – i.e. something which tells them you are good – or not – as the case may be…

    This endeavour has been slightly delayed due to the RA Summer Exhibition – where one of my three pieces was damaged and the insurance claim has taken some time to be settled. It has meant that some of my work has been sitting in their vaults awaiting collection. I did not want to arrange for more than one collection – preferring to await the outcome of the insurance claim. The RA has been very good in dealing with the damaged picture, has resolved it amicably, and they have returned all my work at their own expense.

    I am still struggling with the catch22 situation I am in – of trying to get financial security to do more art. I have to support my family and home, and somehow I have to break out of non-art work. Family life is precious, and there can be no better creation than children. However, they do sap art time…

  • Art speak for itself should

    Art speak for itself should
    If it is any good
    It matters not a jot
    Who did what
    Where they studied
    Whether they studied
    Like music a chord strikes
    In your soul or dislikes
    Art in your mind’s eye
    Doth please or defy
    No scholar or seller is able
    To umrumble your taste’s stable
    As no amount of psyching
    Can change your marmite liking…

  • Hirst art heist

    According to an article in the Sunday Times (17th June 2007 by Maurice Chittenden), Sir Trevor Nunn bought a painting he thought was a genuine Damien Hirst for £27,000. The “painting” was called “Squirly Hoops Touch My Nuts Peace and Love” and was in fact a “spin painting” done by Hirst’s two-year-old son, Connor, and Keith Allen’s son Alfie, aged 10. Nunn subsequently sold the “painting” for £45,000.

    This begs a number of questions. Why did Nunn buy it in the first place? Did he buy it because he liked it? In which case why did he sell it? Did he like it initially and then go off it? Or did he buy it as an investment? If the latter, what does this say about the art market…? Is art no more than stocks and shares – with no intrinsic value – just bought and sold in the hope of making a profit?

    Another question: in what sense was it a Hirst painting? What gave him (or his agent) the right to put his name to it? Why was the painting not sold as having being done by Hirst’s and Allen’s sons? And if it was, would it have fetched the same price…?

    It seems that it does not matter what the work is like or who actually did it – only that it is thought be have been done by a famous artist, or somehow orchestrated by them.
    I think we have to draw a line about who did a piece of art and therefore whose name should go on it. Suppose we were not talking about a piece of “art”, but consider instead that this were a piece of music. Let us consider a recording of some random piano “playing” by Mozart’s two-year-old son. The question is not would it be worth anything – because there are people who would probably be interested in anything to do with the great man (a truly great man). The more interesting question is: could the piano “sounds” be passed off as a work music produced by Mozart? ANother way of putting this question is: would the piano “sounds” have any musical merit? The answer in both cases is certainly not, because, firstly, Mozart simply would not put his name to anything he hadn’t finished and was not proud to proud to put his name to – his was a genius and had the highest standards. Secondly, in music there is probably unwritten but fairly universally accepted standards – and, quite simply, random sounds do not constitute music.

    For a piece of “art” to be indistinguishable from having been done by a “world famous artist” and what is in effect a couple of random young children – says a lot about the quality of the work being produced by the “artist” – i.e. utter rubbish, purely random and mechanical, and with no artistic merit at all. You certainly would not mistake the work of a two-year-old child for a completed work of Dali, Ingres, Hans Holbein, or Pieter Bruegel…

    In philosophy it is very hard to categorically know something for certain or to be sure you are right, however a very useful technique generally used is to appear to the reader’s general intellect and show that the opposite of your proposition is absurd – and therefore extremely unlikely to be false – reductio ad absurdum (Latin for reduction to the absurd).

    I wish to attack two commonly held beliefs in art today. The first is the claim that anything an artist claims is art – is art. The second is that anything an artist gets anyone else to make for them is art.

    Anything an artist claims is art – is art – was thought up by Duchamp in 1917 (Fountain).
    Anything an artist gets anyone else to make for them is art. This is a fairly common practice today and the most infamous exponents of it are Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons.

    Hirst’s spin painting with butterflies – where the butterflies are ethically sourced. I find this term very peculiar indeed. Killing butterflies, or any other living creature for that matter, is a tragedy. Period. Doing it just to make money should be met with a jail sentence. The only ethically sourced butterflies are those painted or photographed – where no butterfly is harmed or distressed. Hirst is thought to be the biggest importer of butterflies in Europe. The sooner he stops this cruel inhumane nonsense the better. I hope for his sake that reincarnation and karma…

    To be continued…

    ***

    Michael Autumn
    Cambridge, UK
    June 2007

  • RA Summer Exhibition 2007: How unlucky is that?

    After waiting nearly two months I finally got the bad news:

     
    “Dear Michael Autumn

    Summer Exhibition 2007
    11 June – 19 August

    Thank you for entering this year’s Summer Exhibition. With nearly 12,000 entries the competition was extremely strong. On this occasion, I am sorry to inform you that your works were not hung in the exhibition; two of them however were shortlisted, which is a fine achievement.

    …
    [ collection details]
    …

    I very much hope that you will submit work in future years.

    Yours sincerely

    Sir Nicholas Grimshaw CBE
    President”

    I can consider myself extremely unlucky to have had two of my three works shortlisted, put into one or two gallery rooms to be assessed for hanging with other works in those rooms – and for them both not to be selected! This could have been because there was not enough space or they didn’t make up the hanging aims of the gallery hanger – in terms of symmetry, size, balance, or some other aesthetics.

    My work is high risk in terms of the RA Summer Exhibition: it is big – with limited wall space smaller works have a better chance; digital – for a conservative institution this is not universally understood and appreciated; and they look photographic – for a conservative institution this is not universally understood and appreciated.

    It is high time the RA elected digital artists and photographers to better represent the diversity of art being produced today. Currently the Academy’s rules are that there must always be at least 14 sculptors, 12 architects, and 8 printmakers; the balance being made up of 46 painters. Things have moved on since 1769…

    It is a bit misleading to call it an “open” exhibition when the 80 Royal Academicians making up its membership can each submit up to six works as of right. With room for approximately 1000 works, up to 480 places – nearly half – are clearly not open. Moreover, the Academician’s work can be, and often is, very large, and sometimes huge – like Hockney’s “Bigger Trees Near Water“: it takes up a whole huge wall (about a third of a room allowing for doorways)! Last year, 2006, the Summer Exhibition included two memorial galleries (from a total of thirteen) dedicated to the late Members Sir Eduardo Paolozzi and Patrick Caulfield…

    With these “special privileges” I estimate the Royal Academicians take between 30-70% of the available hanging space. I am not criticising the RA as such: it is their club and they can have whatever rules they like. I just question the use of the term “open exhibition” – because clearly is it not entirely that.

    I would like there to be a really open annual art exhibition held in London, somewhere prestigious, where the selections were made by a large cross-section of artists (from all fields) – who couldn’t select their own work.

    I am not disheartened. I will try again next year because I like the spectacle, and I just accept that there is a large element of luck and a huge element of subjectivity. This is after all representative of art in general…

  • I did not get into the RCA: is that a good or a bad thing?!

    After all the trouble the applicants go through to apply, to put a portfolio together, the logistics of sending their portfolio in and collecting it (mine was very big: I had to make a portfolio case because you can’t buy them as big as I needed, and I had to hire a van) – if we are unsuccessful, is it asking too much to be informed why?

    Was it that they felt they had no one in the department who knows enough about digital art, digital and analogue photography, and natural digital painting – the areas I am particularly interested in? Do they even recognize this as a valid art form? Do they appreciate the amount of effort and skill involved in this art form? Are they relatively new to computing, and is their perception of computing so naive thet they think anything done using computers is easy? Is it just too new for them and do they feel they couldn’t support me at a sufficiently advanced level?

    Of course it could have been that the selection panel’s consensus of opinion of my work was simply that it wasn’t good enough and showed no potential or promise. Or it could have been that with only forty-five places available, they simply considered that there were at least forty-five other applicants who were better or more deserving than me? I have no idea.

    One thing we were told at the Open Day was that they were looking for applicants who showed a certain “need” or incompleteness: students who weren’t entirely sure where they were going. As soon as I heard this I started to doubt my chances… I am not in the least unclear about the art I am creating. This selection policy is at odds with scientific and social science disciplines (and almost certainly the other arts) – where academic establishments select the best on merit – i.e. those with the most promise, the most talent, and the clearest vision. What is wrong with being clear?! Surely the best artists are clear about what they are trying to achieve?!

    Now that the whole process is over and I am no longer trying to get a place at the RCA, I can speak my mind freely. First of all I am not in the least bitter about the rejection – a bit disappointed yes, but not bitter. In fact it takes a huge weight off my mind – the pressure of how to finance it. I confess I was hoping to go there mainly for the kudos, and to have the time to explore new things. I certainly don’t feel I need direction, and if the selection panel think someone else would benefit more from studying there than me – that is their prerogative.

    However, it does answer a few questions that I had… I spoke to a number of students on the Open Day and not one of them seemed to know what they were doing – artistically. One second-year student was really quite stressed out by it, and I really felt for her. What do they expect if they select students who don’t know what they are striving for?!

    It wasn’t all bad: on the Open Day some of the graduate illustration and animation work we were shown (via the internet) was excellent – but then it would be if you pick the best of the last few years?

    The exhibition of work-in-progress was outstandingly bad. It is no exaggeration to say that the whole exhibition wouldn’t have looked out of place in a secondary, or even primary, school art display. There was no display of talent, care, or pride of work (with the exception of some of the textile work). My jaw dropped when I saw it. With utter disbelief I said to myself “Is this the best of the best…?”

    If this is what is taught in art colleges, if this is the standard that art students are molded into producing and praised for – then that answers the fundamental question I have with modern art: why is the vast majority of it so bad, shoddy, poor in work-person-ship and professionalism, and almost irreverent? Are the lecturers so embroiled with theory and the quest for originality – almost at any cost – that they have lost sight of what art is about? Art is not about pandering to novelty-seeking academics – who are so caught up in art history and theory that they long for new ideas to muse and pontificate about. Art is for society, it is a public discipline, and as such is judged by the majority – by the public. If it doesn’t communicate with the public in a positive way at some level then it has failed. Period.

    A word of advice to aspiring artists, and you can take it or leave it. Academics are not wealthy people. They will not buy your work, or if they do, you will not get much from them for it. Think about who your buyers might be, and consider them, not you tutors, when producing work… If you get a first class degree or some other qualification and nobody buys your work because it is so obscure and inaccessible…

    In closing, I would say about the buildings themselves, that they in no way lend themselves to art. They would be better used as offices or a prison: totally uninspiring and with very poor natural lighting. I don’t think I could have spent much time there…

    I am not sure why the RCA has the kudos it undoubtedly has. What does this say about “lesser” art colleges…?

  • Gigapixel Art and Photography

    There seems to be at bit of a buzz going around at the moment about gigapixel photography. This is digital photography where the detail or resolution is so high that the number of pixels used to make up the image is in execss of a billion – one thousand megapixels. If such numbers don’t mean anything to you then it might help to say that such images occupy in excess of four CDs, or you might fit one of them on a standard DVD. The average digital camera is currently about five megapixels – so in excess of two hundred of such images would go to make a single gigapixel image.

    Printed out they look stunning, and they require special zooming technology for you to be able to see them on the web.

    I have being doing gigapixel art and photography since 2003, indeed some of my pictures run into several gigapixels in size. There is a big difference between gigapixel art and gigapixel photography though. Whereas you can get a camera to take a gigapixel image at the press of a button – or you can get stitching software to fit dozens or hundreds of smaller images together to form one larger composite

    (e.g. work in progress of photograph of shops)
    Shops
    (Click on image to zoom in…)

    – this bears no resemblance to the effort involved in gigapixel art. The work involved in creating, editing, and compositing dozens of photographs, all the freehand work on such large files, and the colour proofing – typically runs in to several hundred hours for me – using the most powerful computer equipment. And that is before doing anything creative with it…

    E.G. zoom in to the centre to see the flying doves? Times Square
    (Click on image to zoom in…)

    I hope this puts to bed the myth that digital art is quick and easy – or certainly gigapixel art definitely isn’t!

    Just for the record, gigapixel photography is nothing new really. In terms of film photography, large format cameras, like my 10″ x 8″ (this is the actual size of the usable part of the transparency or negative) Sinar P2, took/take the equivalent of gigapixel photographs all the time. Indeed I have a scanner that can scan up to 18″ x 13″ at 10000 dpi (dots per inch). A 10″ x 8″ transparency or negative scanned at this resolution equates to 100,000 x 80,000 pixels = 8,000,000,000 pixels of information. This is 8 thousand million pixels or 8 gigapixels… (For those of you who think in terms of bits and bytes, this is twenty-four (24) gigabytes at 8 bits per colour, or forty-eight (48) gigabytes at 16 bits per colour).

    As an artist I am thrilled and daunted at the same time about the prospect of being in control of well in excess of a thousand megapixels. However, the creative freedom this level of control gives is very liberating…

    You can see zoomable examples of my work either from links on this blog or on my web site, or at various exhibitions.

  • Art vs Photography

    Art is primarily created by the imagination of the artist. Photographs are created by electro-mechanical devices. Photography is the precise reproduction of a two (possibly three, or four) dimensional image of reality. I am an artist and a photographer, and I like some of my art to look like photographs because I am so impressed by reality. Just like fact is often more interesting than fiction, reality is often more interesting and beautiful that imitation. So, on the one hand, some of my art I create to look like photographs; and on the other I am happy to share my love of the visual world through simple photographs (albeit invariably with subjective alterations/enhancements).

    Rightly or wrongly, I think the generally perceived wisdom is that photography is easy and art is hard or more skillful. Consequently culturally art is generally more valued than photography. Whilst this obviously has a lot to do with the reproducibility of photographs and the often uniqueness of art, I think it is fair to say that even if only one photograph could be produced – for example polaroids – art would generally still be valued more highly than photography. I say generally, because there are exceptions, and society is slowly wakening up to the value of really good photography. (Of course there is a lot of “bad” art with little or no value, and the same applies to photography…)

    On the subject of skill and value, I would like to make the point that a lot of so-called “art” could have been done by young children with very basic materials – paper, paint, and a paint brush – whereas even the most basic photograph requires much more complex equipment – a camera, chemical processing (until the digital age dawned), and a printer – several steps (take the picture, process it, print it), and training in the use of the equipment…

    Some of my art could be described as photo-idealism, or photo-surrealism, in that they look like photographs. However, the arrangement and presence of certain, sometimes unlikely, items may seem too good to be true. For example the existence of birds, animals, and insects in some of my pictures – to say nothing of their very convenient placement… Or the apparent transformation of people into objects… In many ways this is what I am striving to achieve, however, I’m concerned about the term “photo” because of its’ often negative or cheap connotations.

    I think it is the responsibility of the artist to do the best they can with their time in history – in terms of knowledge, materials and techniques. This means using any tools and techniques that will help them produce better work or to do it more quickly than otherwise. Cave people used different colour earths and cave walls because they had no other choice. However, throughout history new materials and techniques have evolved, at different times in different parts of the world, and artists have progressively had an increasing range of options to choose from. Much of what was attempted in the past was as faithfully as possible to reproduce reality. Techniques like ray-tracing – using Alberti’s “Artist Glass” (dating back as far as the mid fifteenth century); copying using a grid – Alberti’s Grid or “Veil” (fifteenth century); and devices like the camera lucida (early to mid nineteenth century) and obscura (from the sixteenth century onwards) were employed by the likes of Caneletto and Vermeer, to name just two – to help them achieve that faithful reproduction objective. There is no doubt in my mind that these two artists and many more besides would have used a camera of the modern variety if they were available in their day…

    But it is not the tool that makes the art. A tool is just a tool. A camera is a complex heap of metal, electronics, and glass – and is incapable of selection, composition, timing, editing. Hundreds of people can be given the same camera, but few will make art. Likewise, hundreds of people can have a piano, but very few are composers. And fewer still are good composers. Modern day digital music technology can help the composer by making editing easier and writing down the music, being able to hear bars played by different instruments and to hear a whole orchestra – without leaving his or her study. However, the actual creative process remains unchanged: it is as uncontrollable and mysterious as ever…

    I take photographs – like most people. I have a long and great affinity with photography, and some, in view of the equipment I have and the time I spend on it, consider me a fanatic or a perfectionist. Yes, I shoot probably more deliberately and diligently than most people, but that is simply because I really, really, want to capture as accurately as I can, what I can see. Often I take photographs because what I see I just want to capture as well as I can. I don’t want to change it at all. I specifically do not want to change it at all. I’m impressed and inspired by what my eyes can see, and that, in and of itself, is what amazes me.

    However, I am all too aware of photography’s limitations and often I am frustrated by this because I cannot capture what I want to. This can be where art comes in…

    I use photography for two purposes. One is simple photography – capture something amazing that I can see. The other is to make raw material for my art.

    To capture what I can see can be a lengthy process in itself because of technical limitations that I want to overcome. For example the dynamic range of film (digital or celluloid) often cannot capture extremes of light and dark, especially if both are present in the scene. Moreover, certain corrections for perspective, colour, tonal range, and composition might have to be made. All this can be done after the shoot on the computer.

    In terms of digital art I can use as much freehand work and as many photographs as necessary. On average I think I spend 200 hours (20 ten-hour days) or more per picture. And I use the most powerful computers and the most sophisticated software.

    ***

    Michael Autumn
    Cambridge, UK
    December 2006

  • We Should Be True To Our Senses

    I was once on a flight from London to New York (on a personal photo shoot as it happens) and had the good fortune of sitting next to Anita Zabludowicz – a prominent collector of contemporary art. This was a very fortuitous chance encounter for me, and a real privilege. During our conversation I asked Anita what she looked for in contemporary art. Regretfully I cannot remember exactly what her reply was, but essentially she said that it had to be new. Whilst I would agree with this to a certain extent, it was what she didn’t say that intrigued me. She didn’t say it had to be beautiful, skillfully done, of outstanding quality – or anything along those lines. That is not to say she doesn’t think art should be these things – just that she didn’t mention them…

    Let us consider newness in relation to something else. I think most of us like to try out new food, but we probably wouldn’t take the view that all the food we eat in the future must be new. And just because it is new does not mean that we are going to like it. Whether we like a meal or not is actually out of our control: it is a natural and spontaneous reaction between the chemicals in the food, our taste buds, our olfactory (smell) system, and our brain. We cannot decide if we are going to like a meal or not.

    Beethoven once said of his music that he could communicate directly with people’s hearts – meaning their emotions. He knew human nature well enough to know that we all respond in a predictable way to certain types of music. His music could make us feel sorrow, joy, pride, reflective – whatever he choose – and film score composers today use the same principles all the time (Bernard Herrmann and Ennio Morricone to name a few). We respond automatically to harmony, melody, and rhythm. It is a natural and spontaneous response to sound waves being converted to electrical signals in our ears and the brain’s reaction to them. We cannot decide if we are going to like what we hear or not.

    This begs the question: why do some modern day contemporary composers create music that they know will probably be displeasing to the vast majority of us? They even have words for it: atonal and discordant music! Schönberg, Alban Berg, Anton von Webern, and Nicholas Cage – to name a few twentieth century composers of this negative, atonal, discordant genre – were striving for newness almost for the sake of newness – forgetting what music is for: to give pleasure, to stir the emotions in us. This is what was said by the eminent contemporary musicologist William Thomson about Schönberg, the father of atonal music:

    What was Schönberg’s error?
    (from the book Schönberg’s Error by William Thomson)

    “Renunciation of even the primal tonal archetypes bequeathed him by his full musical heritage, believing all the while that he was rejecting only the major-minor conventions of his immediate past. He did not understand the full ramifications of his renunciation, a denial that if followed rigorously entailed abandonment of the full range of structuring potentials of pitch. His transformation of music was motivated by the same hubris that in the world’s myths spells the tragic downfall of heroes who try to call the shots of destiny.

    “Schönberg thought he was fueling music’s flight to the next plateau, in its ascent toward a musical heaven. He was in reality only fueling the ambitions of a singularly enormous talent and establishing a brief, strange interlude in an art’s checkered history. It is true, as some contemporaries have said, that “he showed us the way.” But, some eighty years later, we must recognize that his way fell short of becoming the next Golden Age so anxiously sought during the beginning of the twentieth century. Nor was it the inexorable “way” that music’s hop scotching development had pointed toward in the long haul of history. As evolution, it was an ill-conceived , though passionately propagandized, mutation. It was an achieving far more radical than Schönberg dreamed.”

    I think such discordant music will be very rarely played, quickly forgotten, and will crop up in academic circles only. The same goes for a huge amount of contemporary art…

    It is as if pleasure is out-dated, it is time we had a period of displeasure! Isn’t this tantamount to saying you have enjoyed food for too long now – now it is time not to enjoy it and eat dirt?! I think artist neglect human senses and emotions at their peril…

    Art should be made to be appreciated at a superficial level at least. Deeper dimensions add to its cultural value, but this should be of secondary importance. Most viewers or listeners are unsophisticated and/or they do not have the time or inclination to delve below the surface. Good art communicates directly to everyone at the level of the basic senses and emotions.

    Is there too much pressure in the arts to be original – as opposed to simply good…?

    ***

    Michael Autumn
    Cambridge, UK
    January 2006