What's up with all the photographs?

I've been trying to make pictures since university, mainly as a way of studying the work of photographers I admire (Stephen Shore; Walker Evans; Jeff Wall; Hill & Adamson). Pre-digital technology and I never got along, owing to the expense involved in shooting and printing 200+ mediocre pictures just to claim one good one. Digital photography has rendered most of these economic issues irrelevent; with the advent of lithium batteries and 1G cards, pictures just became, for all intents and purposes, free.

So are you an "artist" now?

No. I still see myself as a critic and curator who makes pictures as part of that practice, much like Michael Fried or Peter Schjeldahl, who primarily work as critics, but also write and publish poetry from time to time. One thing inflects the other. And I have always admired people like Donald Judd, Dan Graham, Robert Smithson, and Ian Wallace, whose art really can't be seperated from their writing, curating, gallery managing, polemicizing & etc.

What format are these works?

C-type prints from digital files, approx. 11" x 14", editions of 2.

Editions of 2? Isn't that just another name for an unique luxury object?

No, it's a way of short-circuiting the art market all together, of seeing whether or not images proposed as "art objects" can circulate outside of the established "artist-run center" / commerical gallery schism that dominates Canadian art production and dissemination. This way, I retain a copy, and anyone who really wants one gets one, but no easily reproducible "product" exists, complicating the work's entry into your typical market economy.

Any picture on the blog that isn't titled and dated is just a snapshot, sketch, or footnote, and is not neccessarily claimed by me as art.

- posted by cjb @ 9:13 PM