On Emulation
“There are not 100 first-rate artists and many will not be in this exhibition anyway. Another of [the exhibition’s] stated aims is to 'examine the tensions between the ‘older’ generation and artists of today, especially emphasising contemporary works that can be conceived of as quotations and fragments.' These are virtually slogans, and ‘quotations’ simply appeals to the freedom to be unfree. The secret is that the artists supported are very unimaginative, very dull, very academic and ripe for institutionalization. Their absence of imagination must be justified, hence it is alright to ‘quote’ earlier work, which is merely copying, debasing the work of others.”

-Donald Judd, Bilderstreit (Art & Design v.5 no. 7/8, p.51)


An artist friend and I ate pizza and drank beer on Sunday night and talked about shows we’d seen. I singled out the recent faculty exhibition at Emily Carr for particularly harsh criticism; one or two adequate pieces (Carol Sawyer; Marion Penner Bancroft) scattered among dozens of dull and poorly conceived “art objects.” Soon I was suggesting, only half in jest, that the art college be burnt to the ground and the embers seeded with salt. Okay, said my laconic friend, if you’re a young artist, and your school is just a smoldering memory, how do you learn? By emulating, I said. Pick artists you admire and make works “after” them. If you’re any good, you’ll learn.

That sounds like a recipe for a clone army.

Not really. The work process will naturally expel any overt trace of “influence.”

What do you mean?

You make something “after” a work or artist you admire not to re-create that thing, but to study it on a microscopic level; to experience, first-hand, the decisions that went into making it, most of which won’t be visible in the work’s final form.

Uh-huh, said my anonymous friend, still dubious.

I thought I should test out my rhetoric on a day off. So I took my camera and the Subaru and went looking for Coastal Motifs, a photograph that has a deep and permanent lock on my imagination. I tried to find an image to bring with me in the car as reference, but couldn’t turn one up in the apartment on short notice.

Out to North Burnaby. It took a while to find the right site; I spent half an hour shooting at the far north end of Boundary Road, wondering why everything looked so different in 35mm, then finally realized I was supposed to be two or three blocks further east. A few drivers stopped to ask why I was standing on top of the car (A: to correct the slight curve that the 35mm lens induces in landscape images. Coastal Motifs was shot with a view camera, whose controls eliminate this distortion).

Changing light. Clouds trailing by. I worked from a memory of Coastal Motifs: luminous sky, deep “even” lighting (shot in late spring or early summer, probably at noon – no shadows). A little platform sits just below the road, which appears at the far left hand corner of the picture. I accidentally eliminated this detail, and the pictures felt forced and empty, the bottom third of the image devoid of incident. A second location, further up the road, worked better in 35mm; a sundeck at the far left hand edge stood in nicely for the edge of the platform, and the slight gain in elevation helped eliminate the pronounced curve in the mountains.

I had never really thought about the platform’s presence in the original image, but now I see how it torques the scene, pivoting it slightly off-center. It feels like a straight forward perspective-box composition, but it’s actually canted ever so slightly to the right. The sky is important; the original composition works because the high clouds seem to extend toward the viewer, instead of rolling flatly by from left to right.

I made a picture of the Subaru as the light started to fade. Dimly recalling a interview with Wall in which he describes setting up his view camera on the roof of his car to add a few extra feet of clearance from the trees, I was thinking goofy and conceptually schematic thoughts about “materializing the means of production.” Back home, another, more plausible source emerged: Kevin Schmidt’s station wagon, which I had just spent a week staring at on the Web.
- posted by cjb @ 9:31 PM