The Futurism Vs. Duane Michals

eseul in varianta originala continea si poze...poze ce o sa le pun in alt post pentru o vizualizare mai usoara :D
have fun, daca puteti, mie mi`a mancat nervii...desi a iesit destul de nice!!!





The Futurism Vs. Duane Michals

Ana Maria Neamu
Photography for Fashion and Advertising



Speed? The wish to hurry up things in art? The hate for museums? Why?
Big names, such as Umberto Poggioni, Gino Severini, Carlo Carra, Jaco Moballa, signed this manifesto which sustained their ideas, beliefs, principles, convictions.
I say this with amazement and stupefaction because most of their works are in great museums and were in very well known museums.
The world watched and watches their paintings as an expression of the past. This means speed?
Allow me to doubt that! Is very hard, for me, to believe that these artists did not want their works to be seen and revised. Lets not forget that in the end their paintings were representing, artistically, the written manifesto. So is this all about words and hypocrisy or is for real about strong beliefs?

I see that in another artistic area, mostly denied by the futurists, 50 years later, in photography, Duane Michals comes with another genre, very interesting, but a bit hard to understand.
Watching insistently Duane Michals photographs, some words pop-up into my head: “time and space, died yesterday. We are living in the absolute since we have already created eternal, omnipresent speed.”
Represented in a different way, because we are talking about the real speed, the photography world, and because we are talking about a different continent, way of living and art, Michals is an innovator!
Michals got his inspiration from Rene Magritte and Giorgio de Chirico’s paintings and he brings up the mystery, the darkness and lets not forget the speed!
Many years after futurists appears this tearing in photography. Would`ve they consider Michals a futurist photographer? Is that even possible? Allow me to doubt that, too.
“his [futurism] members deny the photographic influence in the matter of movement discomposure”


What aspect do they deny? Exactly the one that defines Michals photography. If we are taking the futurism definition and we are looking at Michals photographs we are looking pretty much at the same thing. If we wouldn`t know that the futurists were writers and painters and not photographers, would we thought that Michals is one of them?

Talking about photomontage, from the earliest days of coinage and use by the Dadaists, has been associated with mixed signifying modes including printed and hand-written fragments of text (letters, journal entries, newspaper headlines and columns, advertisements, packaging, instructions, posters and fliers). But the means of mixing or compositing Dada "photomontages" were frequently the scissors and paste of collage. From its origins, photomontage has had a close and well-documented relation to advertising and also to fashion photography; (notably Klutis, Buchloh shows). Others have noted a rapid adoption and extensive commercial use beginning in the 1930s (Naomi Rosenblum). Its general tendency to project an imagined world served and serve the purposes of fashion and advertising very well. Such images depict the product in an atmosphere of yet to be realized desire.
Photomontage produces a single photographic (or photo-digital) image from multiple negatives, scans, or layers; the stack of layers may or may not include images of texts. Is still a mixed mode, however, because it involves seeing double or multiply. Photomontage insists on its multiple modes within a single frame.
Much has changed since the early days of photomontage, both in the technology of image making and in the terms for interpreting them. The simple linguistic analogy that thinks of component shapes as words and the placement of the shapes as the syntax that constructs them into sentences is in trouble with photomontage from the outset, since photomontage works against the discreteness of "words" or their placement in one consistent organizing sentence structure. The modes of language that come closest are those of analogy, simile, metaphor, syllepsis ("construction changed"), and paradox—figures of doubleness and plurisignification rather than unequivocal statement.
Science popularization magazines use photomontage quite a bit, especially for topics that are hard to photograph or diagram (Borderline Personality Disorder, Dark Matter, Will to Dominate, Migraine Headache). With such topics the merging of multiple layers each depicting an aspect of the phenomenon or concept directly represents the incompleteness of our understanding, and the effort of seeing the image parallels the struggle to understand the topic.


This little sequence by Duane Michals doesn't quite say it all, but it certainly provides a start to the semiotics of photo-manipulation and photomontage. Assuming that we have picked out some objects and located them in scenes, we still need to account for why they are all placed together in one frame. Some of these very basic perceptions, such as those of edges, surfaces, and shapes, appear to be hard-wired and to occur without much guidance or interaction from higher levels of cognition, and hence can fool us even when we know we are looking at an illusion, but equally clearly this is not purely a bottom-to-top process, since we see what fits or makes sense in a frame and then correct or modify the frame in terms of what we see.
The common-sense lore about ghosts, visions, apparitions, and dream figures is that their insubstantiality is related to reduced opacity. The damned souls in Dante's Inferno recognized Dante as a mortal because he cast a shadow, but they did not. All of these manifestations are commonly psychologized and assumed to belong to the inward world of individuals. Solid things are what everyone sees--what you and perhaps you alone see is less publicly seeable, hence less opaque. It is unlikely that viewers have much experience decoding the resulting visual cues. The effect very broadly is as with standard photomontage: the mythological or Biblical scene appears to be copresent with or to inhabit the rather shabby, messy and cluttered space of the contemporary room.

In splendid article on photomontage and photocollage as developed by the Russians in the 1920s and '30s, Benjamin Buchloh gives great prominence to the utopian and futurist hopes of Lissitsky, Klutis, and Rodchenko among others that their new art which shattered the conventions of bourgeois realism and representation would have a direct, immediate appeal to the workers and peasants, so that the work of the avant garde could be the art of the people and foster revolutionary aspirations to build a new order. This dream quickly collapsed, says Buchloh, when it became clear that the new order might just as easily be Fascist as Bolshevik and when the new art was not embraced by those traditionally excluded from the appreciation of high culture.

Interesting is the fact that even with 50 years earlier, the futurists were thinking at speed, in their opinion speed was the main key that defined their work. Did this word represent the fear of its meaning? Were they actually scared that speed will be discovered so they were in hurry to write something down as proof? Were they afraid of speed even though they said it was discovered, created by them?
A point of visual literacy arises when either a medium presents us with something we have not seen before or assigns something a special signification it does not usually have outside the medium. Even if something meets one of those conditions, it may not be codified. Codification narrows interpretation, in that it picks out one from among several significations that we could think of assigning to a feature.

Literary and artistic movements were built and demolished with speed. With all this Duane Michals chooses photography as a way of exposure in an original style showing what the image discomposure, the movement discomposure really means and he chooses to do that with speed. He usually staged scenes to be photographed and worked with multiple exposures sequences and series. He also experimented with combining text and drawings with images.
Michals began to address literary and philosophical ideas about death, gender and sexuality.


His photographs were like scenes ripped out of a movie and these were frequently annotated with comments.
As a photographer, how can you present the nature of existence and the drama of the human condition? How will you define beauty and ugliness in visual terms? What is death and why is mankind fixated on rational explanations of the afterlife? In short, start asking the BIG questions.
Unlike many of his contemporaries, Michals delves deep into the unconscious mind to find lasting meaning in his life and his art. "When people ask me what I am, I tell them I'm the artist formally known as a photographer", he is an expressionist, he doesn`t want to be called a photographer, a writer or a painter. Michals said that he would like to express himself according to his needs.
He has often found himself an outsider in the photographic universe that he finds dull and uninspired.
Michals uses visual narratives and symbolism to convey ideas and interpretation of the human condition.
DM: We’re always projecting on the world our own experience. The only truth we know is what we experience. So, when we see a woman crying, we think, “Ah grief.” But we can’t share her grief. We only know how we felt when someone we loved died, when there was a sense of loss. A photograph of a woman crying tells me nothing about grief. Or a photograph of a woman ecstatic tells me nothing about ecstasy. What is the nature of these emotions? The problem with photography is that it only deals with appearances.
According to Michals, to illustrate grief by taking a picture of a woman crying does not aid the observer in understanding it is truly like to experience deep sadness.
Instead, the photographer must help the viewer feel what the woman feels by tracing the woman's pain with photographs, text, icons, or anything else that brings the audience closer to the actual experience.
"It's the difference between reading a hundred love stories and actually falling in love,"

Photography in the early 1960s was dominated by the documentary and portrait style. To reject the paradigm of the medium during the era was to reject the conventions of such giants as Angel Adams and Robert Frank. Michals did - exploring photography with a sense of freedom and experimentation. Sequences of shots that ran with a narrative theme became Michals means of making sense of issues such as desire, time, youth and death. He did not, and still does not, believe himself to be radical in terms of the questions he asks with his art.
Throughout his career, Michals claims he has never worked for the benefit of an audience. As much as critics and student of photography scrutinize his work, Michals creates art solely for his own exploration. "If I cared what people thought of my work, I would never get near some of the issues I confront.”
And these words take me back to the Futurist Manifesto: “Museums and cemeteries! Truly identical […] To make a visit once a year, as one goes to see the graves of our dead once a year, that we can allow! […] but to take our sadness, our fragile courage and our anxiety to the museum every day, that we cannot admit! Do you want to poison yourselves?”
“To admire an old picture is to pour our sensibility into a funeral urn instead of casting it forward with violent spurts of creation and actions. Do you want to waste the best part of your strength in a useless admiration of the past, from which you will emerge exhausted diminished, trampled on?”
Is it only about them, about their unreviled talent? They did this because they didn`t need the “benefit of an audience”? If so, is Michals a late futurist?
By the time a piece has been shown or published, he has moved onto something new. His work remained and remains vital, kinetic, and wholly uninfluenced by public reaction.
To examine Michals' work is to step into a surreal and dreamlike universe where faces and figures are not always what they seem. People are seen standing in a vast conglomerate of stars, heads are pulled from magic hats and men gaze at ghostly figments of their imagination. These images are derived from Michals' ever evolving philosophy of how the universe operates. It dishes out maddening speculation and logical rationalization in equal amounts, carefully pieced together from years of intensive reading and hypothesizing about the meaning of existence.


"If we use observable fact to dictate what the possibilities of life are, then we are stuck with those that believe the earth was flat. It's like saying when we shut off the radio, the music no longer exists because it only came from the tubes within."
It is challenging enough to derive meaning from the art of photography when the artist is concerned with the rational literal observation of the world. It is more difficult when the artist moves beyond mere observation and into the real of his thoughts and translates his muse into film.
Michals bridges this gap because he is unfettered by the medium's boundaries and explores his visions through interpretive conceptual. For example, when illustrating desire and femininity he rejects the idea that women are merely objects of lust, as depicted in many images, and tries to envision the more intimate details of what it is truly like to be a woman.


"I don't want to catalogue images. I want to get into something that I can't truly describe. I might fail in the process, but it's where true creativity is born."
Michals moves beyond the idea that the body is merely a vessel for biological functions and tries to envision the processes through which the spirit moves from the body out into the expanse of space and time. He thinks that the layers of insight into the concept of death cannot be bound by the mechanics of photography, but must be given editorial comment and a sense of narrative. His visual meditations about death are not morbid dramatizations of an idea that some people naturally fear, but rather a series of questions asked to reach a closer understanding of something we will all someday face.


Not all of Michals' work is rooted in heavy issues. In fact, the photographer has a sharp sense of wit and an air of silliness that reveals itself in both his conversations and his photographs. Foolishness to Michals means being playful and expressive with words and images. A series of shots entitled What Funny Things Billy Dreams is indicative of this side of his work. The visual narrative uses illustration and photography to penetrate the seemingly ordinary man who has fantastic dreams set in an almost fairy tale world. The series, included in Michals children's book Upside Down, Inside Out and backwards, (or Downside Up, Outside In and Frontwards, depending on whether you are looking at the front or the back cover) reflects Michals' childlike innocence and sense of wonder. Michals is outspoken in his criticism of the current superstars of the photography world and has a particular lack of regard for fashion photography. He has gone so far as to come up with a term, 'fartster,' (first introduced in his article "Dr. Duane's Infernal Tongue and Cheeky Journal," published in the magazine 21) to describe "one who confuses fashion with art..." The word, both ridiculous and biting, plays with the idea that society has been transfixed for too long with the shallow pretences of celebrity and personality.
Duane Michals’ innovative and unconventional approach to photography has set him apart as an artist, redefining the ways in which we think about the medium. For Michals, it is the essence of expanding our understanding of what is real and of visualizing what is felt and experienced but not always seen. “The things that interested me were all invisible, metaphysical questions: life after death, the aura of sex - it’s atmosphere rather than the mechanics - these are things that you never see on the street. So I had to invent and make these situations to express and explore these things.” (Duane Michals, The Essential Duane Michals). His career has pushed the boundaries of the traditional notions of photography. The sequential format provided him the ability to convey an imaginative narrative. His application of hand written text further enriches the photographic medium in untraditional ways, opening more possibilities to express the metaphorical and abstract themes so quintessential to Michals’ work.