Hyperventilation

High time for another rant, I think.

The following quotation is the actual description of a photobook published recently by a highly-reputable specialist publishing house. I've substituted personal and place names on the advice of my highly-paid legal team, but it is otherwise exactly as found:

In the early 1990s, Taylor Swift began working on and off in the small southern German town of Kaum zu Glauben, compiling a documentary and fictional portrait of a place inhabited by historical apparitions. April employs polaroids made between 2001 and 2006 to explore the liminal existence of images that would seem documentary but were actually premeditated and treated with the tools of studio photography. Aware of the demons and pitfalls of historical authority, Swift probes at the space between identification and critique in posed, referentially layered portraits which evoke the performative traditions of fetishism and uniform and the place of history between distance and desire.

Artists' statements and publisher's blurbs are easy targets, but I think this one is something of a minor classic.

Where to begin? Well, for a start, by looking at some actual sample images, which are – really? – mainly affectless monochrome snaps of bare-chested youths wearing or holding items of military gear, at least one of them tarted up with a feather boa to suggest, rather limply, a Night Porter-ish Nazified decadence. I find it hard to imagine who would find these distinctly dull and utterly unerotic pictures of interest, or why a major publisher would go to the trouble of publishing them. The notable thing, though, is that this book, like so many, is being pitched entirely on the basis of the photographer's declared intentions: she is "exploring" and "probing", she is "aware" of certain pitfalls and is setting up a sort of trap for what are presumed to be our expectations. "Damn, I though these were documentary photos, but – doh! – they're all staged!" I mean, south German youths are notoriously in the habit of lounging about with their tops off and posing listlessly with peaked caps and steel helmets, aren't they? Not actual Nazi stuff, obviously; that would be illegal, as opposed to merely tasteless. But it's hardly surprising that we might mistake these for documentary photos! So clever.

Any photographic project that has to explain its intentions in order to be appreciated is off to a bad start, really. Worse, such descriptions are typically riddled with the sort of artspeak that seeks to imply that some art-school graduate who has cobbled a visual sequence together is somehow engaged in a solemn philosophical investigation simply because they say they are or, more likely, has been told that they should be. Photographs of nothing in particular are said to "gesture at", "embody", "reference", or to "evoke" abstract concepts that are not actually present in the frame (how could they be?), in the same way one might say that a series of completely blank, unexposed frames imply everything that might have been photographed but wasn't, as the artist probes and enacts the void created by the contemporary ennui of inaction, faced with overwhelming anxieties about climate change, social injustice, fossil fuels, dairy farming, and whatever else is on the approved list of exhausting and triggering stuff out there.

Of course, something very like that has already been done, and rather a long time ago. Rauschenberg's "white paintings" (literally blank canvases, painted white) were done in 1951, swiftly followed in 1952 by John Cage's 4'33" (that is, four minutes and thirty-three seconds during which the assembled musicians do not play their instruments). Crucially, though, the point of both of these works was not to "gesture" at some factitious significance – to point up how "hideously white" the art world is, perhaps – but to focus the attention of the viewer or listener on whatever ambient light and sounds were happening at the time: to be here now. Very Zen, John. Just ignore the musicians and attend closely instead to the revelatory sound of your neighbour shuffling restlessly in her seat. The Wikipedia page on 4' 33"  contains an illuminating art-historical passage:

Since the Romantic Era composers have been striving to produce music that could be separated from any social connections, transcending the boundaries of time and space. In automatism, composers wish to completely remove both the composers and the artist from the process of creation. This is motivated by the belief that what we think of as "self-expression" is really just an infusion of the art with the social standards that we have been subjected to since birth. Therefore, the only way to achieve truth is to remove the artist from the process of creation. Cage achieves that by employing chance (e.g., use of the I Ching, or tossing coins) to make compositional decisions. In 4′33″, neither artist nor composer has any impact on the piece, so that Cage has no way of controlling what ambient sounds will be heard by the audience.

It's an interesting question why anyone thinks there is a "truth" independent of and corruptible by the artist's social being – as if the only truly truthful visual work of art would be a perfectly transparent, randomly-located window – but perhaps not as interesting as why such self-cancelling artists persist in making a career out of and putting their name tag (not to mention a price tag) on work from which they had allegedly been trying to eliminate themselves. Somehow, whatever the philosophical justification, I don't think a self-declared electrician who left a house without any wires or sockets, or a hands-off doctor whose practice was always to let nature take its course, would be able to pay any bills, or indeed escape prosecution. But, through the efforts of 20th century pioneers like these, artists have managed to lay claim to an oddly privileged status, whereby whatever they do (or don't do) is art, simply because they say so. This inevitably leads to an obsession in some quarters with art as a form of intellectual enquiry, and to meta-gestures that "interrogate" the nature of the medium at the expense of "mere" skill and subject matter.

The trouble with meta-gestures is that they can't really be repeated: each one is its own evolutionary dead end. Finding yet another way to declare, for example, that "This is just a flat surface with marks on it!" gets pretty boring after the first fifty years. It is essentially a version of "The Emperor's New Clothes", except that in this fable a tiresome kibitzer points out repeatedly not that the emperor is naked but that the emperor is naked beneath all his fine clothes. Well, sure, but...

The other, more pernicious problem is that this peculiar privilege, once established, gives permission to any second- or third-rate mind with an MFA degree to posture as an Important Thinker, something no actual philosophy graduate would ever contemplate. Yes, you say these photographs "probe at the space between identification and critique in posed, referentially layered portraits which evoke the performative traditions of fetishism and uniform and the place of history between distance and desire", but I'm not seeing it, and I'm not sure I care. Got anything more colourful to go with my new sofa?

Here's another publisher's puff, less pretentious, perhaps, but equally annoying:

Paris Park Perambulations features spectacular images from a dozen public parks and gardens in and near France's capital city. Exploring many of the same places that photographer Eugène Atget (1857-1927) made famous a century ago, Peter Plodder references the pleasures and pitfalls of wandering alone amongst trees and plants and sculpture, unkempt and formally designed places, tempered by the knowledge that the modern world with all its congestion is only a few short steps away. Few people venture into the frame of Plodder's photographs, but the promise of a renewed sense of hope and community resides in the details of his visual encounters and the moments of his heightened attention. Each picture speaks to us as a moment in time, even as the sequence suggests a choreography of place, one that can vary daily along with the changing moods and light of each park. Paris Park Promenades is presented in a bilingual English/French edition and concludes with an afterword by Riverine Po. Of note is how the book's design is inspired by Walker Evans's 1938 classic work, American Photographs, making Plodder's book of immediate interest to photo and book collectors.

 In rather fewer words, this is a book of fairly ordinary monochrome photographs taken in some Paris parks. That's it. Pretty much everything else that is asserted about the book is pure projection, wishful thinking, and the sort of hyperventilated puff that expands to fill the space available. To be fair, I suspect it may have been translated from French, in which language pneumatic hyperbole is mandatory. But in what possible way could the declaration that "the promise of a renewed sense of hope and community resides in the details of his visual encounters and the moments of his heightened attention" be true of these particular photographs that is not equally true of any other collection of urban photographs? Are we really to imagine that the sheer force of Plodder's gaze invests a scene with socially transformative potential? Wow, that's some superpower! And what photograph has ever not been "a moment in time"? Above all, when faced with words that have designs on my responses such as "spectacular", "speaks to us", and "immediate interest", I'm afraid my reaction will always be: Well, I'll be the judge of that, thanks.

Namedropping is another common but high-risk strategy. It's a variety of marketing by association ("people who enjoyed Jane Austen also bought Barbara Cartland"), a way of inviting the reader to join some cultural dots and thus place the work in question within a certain cultural lineage. In this case, though, you can't mention Atget and Walker Evans – two very big dots to join with a single line – and not invite suspicions of hubris. Although I can't help admiring the desperation of the idea that to borrow the design format of one famous book is to guarantee the desirability of another. If you enjoyed American Photographs...

As I say, these are easy targets. But, as someone with an abiding interest in both photography and photo-books, I object to being subjected to this constant clamour for attention by so many prematurely-published photographers who are neither creating visually striking photographs nor breaking new artistic ground, but who instead hope to invest their dull, derivative work with the borrowed gravitas of entirely spurious, non-visual points of reference. Not to mention this curious desire to appropriate the dowdy glamour of the academy and its headache-inducing jargon. In the end, you can talk your way onto an MFA programme, you can talk your way into a commission, you can even talk your way into getting published, but you can't talk me into liking your pictures, no matter how sympathetic I might be towards the issues and causes you want to persuade me to associate with them. I'm always going to prefer the good art of an unreconstructed devil over the bad but well-meaning art of a saint.

Rant over. That feels better. Time for a restful and contemplative four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence in front of a blank white wall. I'm sure I've got the Cage CD somewhere. Or maybe I'll hire some musicians to play absolutely nothing, live, and then only pretend to pay them. As artists they'll appreciate the gesture, I'm sure.