Walking the high line

On the Guardian's homepage today was a story about the opening of the second phase of New York's High Line park. I'd read about this project a couple of months ago in Frieze magazine, in which the New York authorities have turned the disused High Line railway which runs down the west side of Manhattan into a public space, transforming the once overgrown rail tracks into a kind of faux-overgrown leisure space. It's quite interesting how they've created this artificial sense of nature reclaiming an urban space that had become long forgotten, essentially mimicking what the High Line had become - captured in a series of images by Joel Sternfield at the turn of the century - but with nice clean walkways to stroll down.

Tennis

Yesterday, whilst taking a break from manning the stall at the book fair, I came across a book by Giasco Bertoli consisting of a series of photographs of abandoned tennis courts, a set of melancholic images reflecting on these disused, unloved spaces. These spaces of leisure were varied in their location, from inner-city to holiday resorts, all are united in their conspicuous absence of activity. After seeing these images and watching the French Open Final today I have to say I'm quite keen to get out on a court and have a knock around...

Quiche!

Today we held a book fair at X Marks the Bokship in Bethnal Green, exhibiting the publications we've produced over the past four months in the AND Publishing workshop. I managed to sell a couple and Eleanor from the Bokship even asked to stock one of my books in the shop!

Reflection

A little sneak peek at a series of photographs I've been working on, looking at plant life and flora within the urban environment. I've been attempting to create a sense of ambiguity with the framing of the shot, and it is a continuation of this idea of the in-between that I've been interested in for some time now. I've been starting to realise that my work needs a more systematic approach and a sense of a framework that would be given by undertaking a more specific project, and this is something I will be attempting to address over the coming months before my final year...

Book fair

This Saturday I'll be joining my Unit 6 group in presenting our publications at X Marks the Bokship in Bethnal Green, an independent art book shop which does much to promote self publishing with various talks and events. They've ben kind enough to host our event so if your in the area pop by and check it out!

A return to form

I first saw Walead Beshty's work at the Tate Trienniel a couple of years back, where curator Nicolas Bourriaud had selected a number of his photogram works alongside his glass Fed Ex boxes as part of the exhibition. The show, which attempted (whilst not quite succeding) to propose a new stage in the trajectory of postmodernism - Altermodern - essentially brought together a large number of artists loosely connected by their work's capacity to address the globalised world we inhabit today. Seen in this context it is easy to see why Beshty was chosen, his photograms alluding to the X-Ray machines encountered at Airport security checks - indeed, this is how they are made, with negatives being passed through the machines and then prints being made from the results - and the Fed Ex boxes an obvious symbol of trade and globalised travel, their transit to and from exhibitions leaving visible traces in the gradual cracking of the glass boxes.

Beyond this Beshty's works addresses the wider questions of medium, specifically in his case the medium of photography. His work, particularly the photograms and also his other camera-less work made in the darkroom, forms part of a dialogue with a number of artists whose practice involves photography who are dealing with the question of medium and form, a seemingly outdated concern associated with Clement Greenberg and modernist painting. Yet it would seem that these old arguments are coming to the fore with photography (consider Michael Fried's recent book on photography), a medium that is by nature ambiguous and is perhaps still having to assert itself amongst a portion of the art world - indeed, the title of Fried's book, Why Photography Matters As Art As Never Before, almost parodies (unintentionally, of course) photography's contested status as an artistic medium.

It is this ambiguity of the nature of photography - what it actually is - that is perhaps leading to these formal explorations. Beshty states that photography is essentially a type of medium, "constituted by a dialectic of applied use and technological development" that is "in a state of constant revision". With the advent of digital technology posing fresh questions about the indexical nature of the photographic image and assigning analogue photography to a specific moment in history, categorised and reference-able, it would appear that these explorations of medium are only just beginning to be rethought.

A thought

Wolfgang Tillmans' practice has always blurred distinctions between high art, commercial and documentary forms of photography. These photos are from a series of images taken in Haiti which appeared some time ago on the BBC website and are perhaps his closest to straight journalistic work. Although they appear here as part of a concise series there is nothing to stop these photos appearing in one of his installations in dialogue with other images from his archives, in fact it is not improbable that they won't. These photos raise questions that are also examined in the work of Allan Sekula, whose work I blogged about below, questions regarding the relationship between journalistic or documentary photography and fine art photography and the representation of labour in fine art photography. The topic of representation is particularly interesting, the ethical implications of 'straight' photographers like Tillmans and Sekula seemingly questioned by the 'near documentary' or staged realism of a practitioner such as Jeff Wall. Photography has long been a medium questioned by the high/fine art establishment of the West, Greenberg's assessment of it's 'transparency' as a medium still posing the main problem for those looking for the work of the artist's hand in the final output. I feel that it is increasingly methods of display that are redefining the nature of 'straight' photography in the world of art, from Tillmans' heterogeneous wall installations to people such as Sekula and Zoe Leonard employing conceptual traditions such as the series or the grid to frame their documentary influenced practice.

Post Script 26/04: Interesting news this evening: Jim Goldberg's documentary project Open See has won this year's Deutche Borse prize for photography, triumphing over amongst others Thomas Demand.

Still missing

Ai Wei Wei has now been missing eleven days since being arrested at Beijing Airport by Chinese authorities. Today it was reported that the artist is 'confessing' to crimes of tax evasion, bigamy and spreading pornography on the internet. The Guggenheim have set up a petition calling for his release which you can sign here.

No Age presents

This evening I finally got round to seeing No Age perform after two years of listening to them and multiple missed opportunities during their previous UK tours. This however was not an ordinary gig; held at the ICA, the event consisted of the band performing a live soundtrack to Jean-Jacques Annaud's 1988 film The Bear, which follows an orphaned bear cub who befriends an older, male grizzly bear who has been wounded by hunters, and charts their companionship and attempts to avoid the guns of the two hunters. It provided a more than suitable back drop to the sounds coming from below the screen, No Age's instrumental improvisation allowing you to to sit back and lose yourself in the narrative of the - at times quite poignant - film. Playing continuously for the length of the film it was akin to album tracks such as Impossible Bouquet or Escarpment, the guitars and electronics at time melodic and at others crashing down, with walls of distortion and drums used to heighten the tension at certain moments throughout the film. Managing to avoid both repetitiveness and overbearing the film, their understated playing style, doing a lot with not a lot, turned this marriage of music and film into a pretty successful one in my opinion. Perhaps more No Age film scores are needed?

Long distance