Well, everyone has an opinion. I guess that’s the ultimate message to take from these five days of reviews.
"Don’t change a thing!" admonished Rusty Freeman, of the Plains Museum in Fargo, at the end of my session. He thinks I may be a casualty in the battle against formalism, and I have a reading list from him to bone up on why. Jack Flam’s biography on Motherwell. "Art After Modernism" by Brian Wallis. This is in addition to Tony Bannon’s requirement that I read "Meditations On A Hobby Horse" by Ernst Gombrich. Fortunately, the hotel is 3 blocks from Powells, one of the largest bookstores on the planet. I have turned my back on postmodernism in my work for the past 30 years—now may be the time to turn around and battle it instead.
Steven Yates from the University of New Mexico was his usual irascable self. "This panoramic format. It’s unforgiving. It’s repetitive. It’s deadly." He liked them well enough for what some of them had, which was the compelling details that he wanted to see bigger. A lot bigger. But he didn't like how controlled they were. "They’re so tight. What can you do to loosen up? Do you have a digital camera?" I admitted that I shot a lot with it in Italy, but I wasn’t very interested in that work. I didn’t believe it was real. "It’s the 21st century. It’s real. Get used to it. Do you have any of that work on your laptop?" Well, no, but I did have what I’d been shooting in Portland. There was a run blocking my way to the hotel Sunday morning, and I had about a hundred shots of runners going by. "Here it is. Look at this shot—it’s amazing. And this, and this. This one—it’s ‘Nude descending A Staircase.’ Go back to that Italy work you shot on digital. You’re sitting on a gold mine. Do you have a way to do output?" Just a creaky 1270. "Get a printer. Make this work. Big."
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