You would’ve thought that the internet would’ve caused a crisis in photography circles, if we take Benjamin’s Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction and the premise of the aura of the genuine art work and its relation to photography (aura is not reproducible and it is lost through an image’s reproduction – this is especially prevalent in photography where the idea of the original is subsumed as soon as an image is taken) then surely the internet and the photography blog, would provide a further crisis in the shaky world of ‘fine art photography’. It takes photography a step further away from ‘genuineness’, and yet with blogs like Holy Ghost and Jake Dow-Smith’s project, Triangle Triangle, photography has found a niche in the corners of the internet, rising out of the paradox that beautifully taken photography is now flourishing on an internet stuffed full of millions of out-of-focus pictures of people getting drunk in provincial student unions.

Read more…

In my second year at art school everyone was siphoned off into different electives for the first term. I studied curation, organising and setting up exhibitions and what not. Others included things like computer animation, ethics and criticism, and the always enigmatic ‘digital environments’. There was one option however, that on signing up day was fiercely fought over, and over the course of the term proved itself to be the most thought provoking and challenging. The lucky few that managed to get on to the performance elective would eventually come to an interesting conclusion; that really, all you need to make art is one thing – a body. Since a body is something that most people have easy access to, the students found themselves free from the usual constraints of studios and equipment, and suddenly art and truth was all around them, it was them; their words and movements, their ideas. They marveled at these startling new realisations, and stared with wonderment at their chests and limbs, now so suddenly loaded with promising new visceral creative energy.

Read more…