Shawn's AIB blog Shawn Saumell AIB MFA blog

Peanuts

Here's another Peanuts comic that grapples with the subjectivity and definition of art.

words from the wise [Christopher James]

I came across this in Christopher James' Introduction to his The Book of Alternative Photographic Processes:

"Reality is not as dire as this allegory. True, all the cherished family albums recently burned onto CDs are doomed. All it will take is a decent solar storm, like the one that occurred in 1859, and 17 hours and 40 minutes later it's likely that every hard drive on the receiving end of that solar flare will have instantly become a good doorstop." - Christopher James

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flashes in the sky

Here's a short silent video that I shot last night.

Jabez Hogg – earliest at work…

While researching with Liz Wells book, Photography: A Critical Introduction, I came across an extraordinary photograph. The above photograph is the "Earliest known daguerrotype of a photographer at work. Jabez Hogg photographs Mr Johnson, c. 1843." The composition, exposure, contrast, focal plane, subject, subject matter, and moment are stunning to me.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Philosophy of Fine Art

Here is some old school knowledge and perspectives coming from Hegel to explain Fine Art from his Division of the Subject:

“It has already been said that the content of art is the Idea, while its form is the configuration of sensuous material. Now art has to harmonize these two sides and bring them into a free reconciled totality. The first point here is the demand that the content which is to come into artistic representation should be in itself qualified for such representation. …The second demand, derived from the first, requires of the content of art that it be not anything abstract in itself, but concrete, though not concrete in the sense in which the sensuous is concrete when it is contrasted with everything spiritual and intellectual and these are taken to be simple and abstract. …Now, thirdly, if a sensuous form and shape is to correspond with a genuine and therefore concrete content, it must likewise be something individual, in itself completely concrete and single. …But since art has the task of presenting the Idea to immediate perception in a sensuous shape and not in the form of thinking and pure spirituality as such, and since this presenting has its value and dignity in the correspondence and unity of both sides, i.e. the Idea and its outward shape, it follows that the loftiness and excellence of art in attaining a reality adequate to its Concept will depend on the degree of inwardness and unit in which Idea and shape appear fused into one” – G.W.F. Hegel (Preziosi 80-81).

"The third sub-division of the fourth stage of pre-art [Symbolic Art] is that in which there is the clearest break between spirit and the realm of the natural or sensuous. At this stage, the spiritual aspect—that which is inner and, as it were, invisible—takes the form of something quite separate and distinct. It is also something finite and limited: an idea or meaning entertained by human beings. The sensuous element is in turn something separate and distinct from the meaning. It has no intrinsic connection to the meaning, but is, as Hegel puts it, “external” to that meaning. The sensuous element—the pictorial or poetic image—is thus connected with the meaning by nothing but the subjective “wit” or imagination of the poet (PKÄ, 95). This occurs, Hegel maintains, in fables, parables, allegories, metaphors and similes."

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