Art Review - March Issue - (Page 126)

Warning : session_start : The session id contains invalid characters, valid characters are only a-z, A-Z and 0-9 in /mnt/data/www.nxtbook.com/fx/config_1.3/global.php on line 9 Warning : session_start : Cannot send session cache limiter - headers already sent output started at /mnt/data/www.nxtbook.com/fx/config_1.3/global.php:9 in /mnt/data/www.nxtbook.com/fx/config_1.3/global.php on line 9 Warning : Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by output started at /mnt/data/www.nxtbook.com/fx/config_1.3/global.php:9 in /mnt/data/www.nxtbook.com/fx/config_1.3/global.php on line 10 ALL THAT FLICKRS... ARE BLURRY PHOTOBLOGS AND COMMUNITIES LIKE FLICKR SITES FOR GOLDEN NOSTALGIA OR DIGITAL REVOLUTION? words BRIAN DILLON EVERY TECHNOLOGY, WROTE WALTER BENJAMIN, dreams into being the one that will follow it. The diorama pictures photography before the fact; the phantasmagoria invents in advance the spectacle of cinema. But the process is dialectical: new media are also mistaken for old, new forms and materials are deployed, nostalgically, to traditional ends. The architects of Paris in the early nineteenth century ‘failed to understand the functional nature of iron’, for example, and blindly persisted in using the new construction technique to build ‘supports resembling Pompeian columns, and factories that imitate residential homes’. The error, if that’s what it is, is nowhere more evident than in the history of photography, where, as Benjamin famously puts it, the artistic forms of the past live on for decades in the deluded attempt to turn the photograph into a conventional work of art. At last, however, the ‘aura’ withers, and modernity prevails. About five years ago, a weak echo of Benjamin’s toowell-known essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ could just be discerned in excited accounts of the birth of the photoblog and websites like Flickr. You’d have been forgiven for thinking, briefly, that a democracy of photographs was upon us: a world in which our accelerated lives would leave contrails of digital images in their wake, casual archives of all our indecisive moments. Thames & Hudson even published, belatedly, fotolog.book: a hefty volume devoted to the phenomenon. In fact, as often with such predictions, the novelty in question has simply vanished into the texture of daily life, so that if it has any utopian potential left at all, it is now hidden in plain sight. When Everyman and his Luddite greataunt has got a MySpace page and a Flickr account, ‘the politicisation of aesthetics’ starts looking less likely than ever. If the proliferation of digital images has happened pretty much as prophesied in terms of volume, and not at all in terms of transformative value, what could not have been predicted is the way sites like Flickr have become repositories for a specific sort of technological nostalgia. On the one hand, inevitably, there are numerous groups devoted to aping unsuccessfully this or that venerable photographer. The William Eggleston group favours saturated colours and ‘a sense of randomness’, the Stephen Shore group something ‘somehow everyday but extraordinary’. Another group announces itself as a ‘tightly curated, representative sampling of the best Walker Evansesque photos’: so tightly curated that there are no pictures at all. Predictably, a certain pathos attends anonymous e orts to reproduce the work of Nan Goldin: all those unmade beds, over-considered and ill-composed. All photos polaroid_billy, fotolog.book, Thames & Hudson, 2006, £19.95 p126-127 Fotolog AR Mar07.indd 126 31/1/07 11:59:08  Warning : Unknown : The session id contains invalid characters, valid characters are only a-z, A-Z and 0-9 in Unknown on line 0 Warning : Unknown : Failed to write session data files . Please verify that the current setting of session.save_path is correct /var/lib/php/session in Unknown on line 0

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Art Review - March Issue

Manifesto
Dispatches
Consumed
Tales from the City
David Lynch
Marcel Dzama
Future Greats
Art Pilgrimage: Moscow
Mixed Media: Moving Images
Mixed Media: Photography
Mixed Media: Digital
Reviews
Book Reviews
On the Town
On the Record

Art Review - March Issue

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