Doug Hall

Doug Hall Thoughts of the Neighborhood Watch 1995



“To Scrutinize the City at close range is to see it as fragments”

 Neighborhood Watch 1995, grid consisting of ten prints (1 chromogenic print, 9 digital iris prints) total dimension: 16.3 x 175 cm.

Michael Wolf: 3

Michael Wolf's Talk, part 3/3 from Aperture Foundation on Vimeo.



In the third and final segment of Michael Wolf's talk, he takes several questions from the audience.

Topics include the arts culture in Hong Kong, Wolf's views on ethics and photography, legal issues regarding his work, and his conceptual decisions regarding how he depicts buildings and people.

Coinciding with the exhibition at Aperture Gallery and the release of its accompanying monograph, The Transparent City, Michael Wolf gave a talk on November 10, 2009. His large-scale color photographs of downtown Chicago’s buildings and their inhabitants examine public versus private space in the context of 21st-century urban life.

Michael Wolf: 2

In this clip of Michael Wolf's talk at Aperture, he begins with talking about his background in photography and how he started his career. Describing his process from studying with Otto Steinert in Germany, his editorial work to the development of his artistic career when he decided to move to Hong Kong.

Wolf explains how he develops his topics conceptually and how China's unpredictability has inspired him many series including dilapidated hybrid chairs in the streets; local artists reproducing art works and how these fake works affect the value of art; toy factory workers and a massive installation of children's toys made in China; as well as a series documenting Hong Kong during the SARS epidemic.

Coinciding with the exhibition at Aperture Gallery and the release of its accompanying monograph, The Transparent City, Michael Wolf gave a talk on November 10, 2009. His large-scale colour photographs of downtown Chicago’s buildings and their inhabitants examine public versus private space in the context of 21st-century urban life.

Michael Wolf: 1

In this excerpt of Michael Wolf's talk at Aperture, he describes his aesthetic of photographing architecture in both Hong Kong and Chicago. By not including the sky in his images of buildings, the scale becomes much more ambiguous and the images have a more awe-inspiring feel to them. Wolf talks further about how the images work both as a graphic abstract depiction of the buildings and an incredibly detailed portrait of them depending on the distance you view them from. Taking these ideas of scale, he also speaks about his decision to digitally enlarge the minute details of the buildings, creating pixelated portraits of the inhabitants inside these buildings.

Notes on the Presentation

In the cases of Baudelaire and Benjamin's ‘flaneur’ and Benjamin’s ‘derivear’ we see models for urban observing

These models involve physical interaction with the environment

With “digital technologies words, virtual spaces are instantly accessible (and) can be distorted and reconceptualised”.

“…one becomes a flaneur of virtual space; the distant invisible viewer”

“The controller and manipulator of information” Doug Hall, Thoughts of the Neighborhood Watch 1995

Notes on the presentation

Picasso’s collages: “The Collaged City”

The modernist dream of the café as a(n effective and radical) medium of discourse

The cubist idea of representing any sight as a sum of glimpses

“For the Cubists (influenced by Cezanne) the visible was no longer what confronted the single eye, but the totality of possible views taken from points all around the object (or ) person depicted” (Berger, 1972 p.18)

To represent our knowledge of an object and compress it into one moment- one synthesized    (Hughes or Berger: collage/montage/mosaic not synthesis) view.

Man Ray: The Return to Reason

Man Ray’s ironically Le Retour à la raison (‘Return to Reason’) is one of a few films made by a Dadaist. The other film-makers associated with the movement include Hans Richter and Rene Clair. Man Ray’s film was shown as part of the ‘Soiree du couer de à barbe’ which marked the demise of the movement in Paris in 1923.

Man Ray applied his rayogram to cinematography. I did not place Man Ray with the other abstract filmmakers featured in the blog because the quality is not related to painterly forms (Ruttmen, Richter, Fishinger) but a direct physical action on to the film and a process that relates to material nature of film. The abstract quality relates to the films “mechanics, materials, chemistry and techniques of cinematography” (Le Grice, 1977, p.34). The emphasis therefore is upon the physicality of the medium.

Sources:

Le Grice, M., Abstract Film and Beyond, Cambridge, Mass, London, UK: MIT Press