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Posts published by “brandonclaire”

James Elkins in Conversation with Claire Brandon

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Screenshot of draft provided by James Elkins.

James Elkins, Professor in Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, delivered a lecture at the Institute of Fine Arts on February 10, 2015 as part of the Institute of Fine Art’s Daniel H. Silberberg Lecture Series. The lecture, “The End of the Theory of the Gaze,” explored the shortcomings of existing theories about the gaze and presented several aspects of Visual Worlds, the book that Professor Elkins is currently working on. IFA Ph.D. Candidate Claire Brandon spoke with Professor Elkins after the lecture.

Claire Brandon: Your lecture presented the failure of the theory of the gaze in the context of the new book you are working on, Visual Worlds.  Could you talk a little bit about the digital format for this project?  You mentioned that you and Erna Fiorentini are writing and editing this document using Google Drive, allowing for open-sourced authorship in some instances.  How does this process work?  How did you decide on Google Drive as a tool?

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Screenshot of Google Spreadsheet provided by James Elkins.

James Elkins: Well, we chose Google Drive (link here) just because it’s simple and it includes spreadsheets (which we need to keep track of word counts, illustrations, etc.). I have tried several WordPress sites, Nings (some are quite expensive), and other collaborative tools; they’re useful if you need video conferencing, separate discussion groups, etc.

The co-authoring part of the project works extremely smoothly: we have a document called “What’s new” where we exchange ideas; two spreadsheets to manage the many tasks of accumulating words, images, and arguments; a third spreadsheet for managing word counts; a document that records the Oxford Press “house style” (that’s something authors usually don’t see until the end, but we’re making our own “house style” for citations and usages).

A Conversation with Joshua Shannon

On December 2, 2014, University of Maryland Professor Joshua Shannon delivered a lecture entitled “Photorealism: A History of Surfaces” as part of the Institute of Fine Art’s Daniel H. Silberberg Lecture Series.  (A recording of his talk can be viewed here.)  The theme of the Silberberg lecture series this year is “failure,” and Professor Shannon’s presentation on photorealism took the failure of credibility suffered by humanist painting in the late twentieth century as a point of departure.  IFA Ph.D. Candidate Claire Brandon interviewed Professor Shannon following the lecture.

Joshua Shannon's lecture, "Photorealism: A History of Surfaces," in the lecture hall of the IFA.
Joshua Shannon’s lecture, “Photorealism: A History of Surfaces,” at the IFA.

In the beginning of your lecture, you mentioned 1968 as the starting point for your study.  What was happening with the practice of photorealism during that moment?  How do you see it as marking such a major shift in painting?

Photorealism made a rather sudden appearance in painting in 1967-68.  Most of the photorealists had been making other kinds of realist painting in the years just before then, but it is amazing to see how suddenly—and simultaneously—many of them began to make paintings that acknowledged, even exaggerated, the fact that that they were based on photographs.  This struck me as a fact needing some historical explanation.

Why have you chosen to focus on Robert Bechtle?  How can his work be differentiated from the other photorealists you brought up, such as Chuck Close, Richard Estes, and Ralph Goings?

I just think Bechtle made many of the richest and most revealing paintings.  The photorealists are united by the fact that they all make clear that they have painted from photographs, but the kinds of photographs they work from are actually quite diverse.  While Estes, for example, uses urban architectural photography and Close uses portrait photographs, Bechtle works from snapshots.  His paintings are deliberately exploring amateur photography, even mediocre amateur photography.  Bechtle is interested not so much in precision or in dryness as he is in posing.  His paintings are about self-presentation, and about what counts as a good or meaningful picture.  As such, Bechtle has his fingers on many of the most important problems in visual representation over the past several decades.  We have so much to learn from his paintings.