Prince's Purple Rain

I remember listening to this album constantly when it came out. I had the 45" of "When Doves Cry" and my sister had the LP, and we'd listen to it at our house and her best friend, Jennifer Wentzel's house. I would sing, "this is what it sounds like, when dogs dieeeee!!!" I didn't know what "Darling Nikki" was about, but I wanted to. Spin just published a huge feature package marking the 25th anniversary of the release of the movie and album, and they got a bunch of bands to cover the album. Best part for me? I got to do the photo-illustration for the cover under art direction from Devin Pedzwater.

This first sketch is something I threw together that didn't get used. I had done a few different ink versions before I scanned this and colored it in photoshop. It got me very comfortable with the image, which helped when I made the final.
This is the final version, as it looks on newsstands.
And this is the original photo, by ASP.

Rant: You Kids Get Off My Lawn!!!

The beginnings of a full-scale rant, in their raw form, an email back to a friend after a pretty innocuous comment from him. Couldn't really tell if he was being sarcastic or not, but the gray area allowed me to grow my rant.

From: Diran Lyons
To: Eli Noogabooga
Subject: ?

You really hate Girltalk? He's a legend in the remix world...reminds me a bit of Ethank.

From: Eli Noogabooga
To: Diran Lyons
Subject: ?

When did we communicate about Girltalk? I don't like him, but maybe I'm just an old man, railing against the yoot. He's one step further removed from cd-DJs, and even further removed from LP DJs, who really do show talent sometimes, in their mixing, etc. Girl talk as a studio artist is fine, he mashes up, he mixes and remixes, he creates a new composition from found pieces. Fine. But Girltalk getting $xx,000 to 'play' a Thursday night promo gig thrown by Canon and the magazine I work for? Fucking ridiculous. And, yes, full disclosure, I think I am a bit jealous.

My problem with Ethan's work (ed's note: ran a band's fansite before gradschool, continued doing so and as far as I could tell the only thing he changed for art grad school was the way he talked about this site. The Emperor's New Clothes theorum, as it were,) was mostly one of classification; what he was doing was mostly social engineering and social networking. His argument was that he was creating 'happenings', but most of the time it was just social networking that he was passing off as happenings. I think because of his SD background he saw himself fitting into the continuum of some of the seminal artists of that genre that are associated with that school. I think he also subscribed to the Jevbratt school of thought wherein Code = Art. This gets into a tricky area for me because its a bit of the tail wagging the dog; similar to printmakers, paper-makers, and ceramicists, the process becomes the focus of the art and the experience of the art, rather, the prescribed experience of the art by the artist, rather than a more laissez-faire attitude about viewer/user experience and appreciation really being up to them.

It is my belief that prescribing meaning is a slippery slope to a fascist and monistic attitude and posture, and that it should not be necessary to know all context specific to a piece of work for it to be understood and thus 'good'. (An argument for using language like 'good' or 'bad' in terms of art is too big to have here, so let's just assume its ok to judge ;)) I think we have had a lot of discussions about the relative value and merit of art that is text-dependant, where the Text is what drives the work, sometimes propping up the most flimsy facade.

To bring this full circle, Ethan's work is, I think, interesting, and has value, and is not merely style, but substantive. Whether or not it is art, and from there, whether or not it is 'good' art, is an altogether different discussion, but I don't think it is art, rather it is craft, technical skill, and from there, it is most definitely not good art. Girl Talk's remixes might be art, but definitely not good art, as they are 100% style, and are merely pastiche. He is a visual decoupagist, not even on the level of a true collage artist. That he is valued in the more public realm of popular music, commands money, etc. does not solidify him as an Artist, rather as an entertainer. He is a huckster selling snake oil, and he is louder than the other slimy hucksters clambering for the same bit of soap box in the town square.

Phone camera pictures

Here's a bunch of pictures I've taken on my phone while out and about.

This fuschia dimebag was sitting in the dirty snow on the way to the subway one morning. All sorts of metaphors mixing here.This artfully découpaged freezer door was sitting on a pile of trash (gasp!) on Lispenard street. Tattered newspaper page listing 9/11 victims blowing in the wind, next to pinups and sports heros.
(Straight) Gay Straws. Back behind the bar at Walker's on Varick.
This rock out at Ditch Plains in Montauk looked like it had a nice, wet head of hair on it.
Someone taped a dead roach to the fire hydrant with packing tape. Begged to be recorded.
"Supporting graffiti" I just liked the lines in this view: the real lines of the walls and the construction as well as the cast shadows. The graffiti really popped, too.
Dead chickadee on Smith and Baltic, in front of the elementary school there. Poor little bird.

Criminalizing Retouching

http://tinyurl.com/bs3ovh
A video op-ed piece appeared on the NYTimes.com (Op-Video: Sex, Lies and Photoshop: Why magazines should let readers know if images have been retouched, March 10, 2009) about whether to legislate or even criminalize retouching of images. Jesse Epstein mentions potential legislation in France where the Department of Health would mandate what images could be published, and how. The piece is voiced in terms of public service and right-to-know, but this is such a dangerous and slippery slope. If, by law, we are not allowed to retouch images for advertising, are we then not allowed to retouch wedding images? What about the kids in high school who had acne whose class pictures always had that dizzy glow to them as a result of the photo company helping them out a bit?

As someone who makes his living as a retoucher, I am in favor of full disclosure of retouching practices, and believe that there should be more public awareness of same. I sympathize with young women and their insecurities, and the need to identify with something, whether positive or negative, for example, and then try to model themselves after it. I have no problem telling anyone I meet that 100% of the images they see in print have been retouched. Sometimes that just means that the levels and colors have been altered and sometimes it is 20-30 rounds result in what I like to call "frankenstein's monster images" like the Lucky cover used as an example in the editorial.

The question Epstein does not ask is this: What would this knowing do for us? If, on the table of contents page, where they credit the clothes, stylist, and photographer of the cover shot, they also showed the four unretouched images, would that solve this problem? Would criminalizing this behavior so that all we would be allowed to publish are photos as-is, solve the problem? Should we mandate that only models who conform to national medians of height, weight, and ethnic makeup be allowed to be photographed? And what about celebrities? On the same day, Kelly Clarkson was on Good Morning America performing to promote her new album, and when they showed the cover she said something along the lines of, "I don't really look that good, they photoshopped me..." Is that enough? If celebrities had to issue disclaimers each time their image was photoshopped...

Retouching is not a new phenomenon. Since images were able to be reproduced with photographic techniques, they have been altered; from hand-tinted daguerrotypes to hand-tinting negatives to the common-until-now 'airbrushing'. Photoshop is now a verb as well as an adjective that refers to manipulation of images. Should the red-eye fixing tools be removed from picasa.com and iphoto?

We should certainly be wary, whenever we manipulate images, of the potential for abuse. There is an excellent case study of this type of excess aiding fascistic tendencies called, "The Commisar Vanishes" by David King. It documents instances in Stalin's Soviet empire where people were systematically removed from official images as they were eliminated, each new image becoming the new true fact. Thus images that are lies can become accepted as facts.

It seems like an oversimplification to conflate these two sets of images and intentions. Epstein seems more intent on discovering true images than exposing false images. My question is this: what is a True image? Is it a court portrait from antiquity, where the artist had to flatter the patron or face the blade? Is it an online-dating profile picture taken from a flattering angle with blemishes removed? Is it an AP news photo where the photographer has artfully composed the image in-camera, to capture a moment, and has edited out unwanted information? There's a big difference between eliminating a zit and eliminating a person, and we should be wary of giving power to others to make such distinctions - and to base laws upon the distinctions they make, and so determine what information is or isn't good for us.