Rachel Thorlby seminar: Face Value?

We used the text The ontology of the Photographic Image from Andre Bazin’s What is Cinema? as a starting point. We felt this was a way into the issues surrounding the effect photography had on the plastic arts and their ability to represent reality.

Based on looking at the work of Rachel Thorlby and our own areas of interest we arrived and three core questions to be explored in the seminar:

The object/image relationship in Rachel’s work

The use of impoverished materials in the construction of artworks

What is the contemporary relevance of the romantic and how does that relate to our ‘idea’ of landscape?


Discussion:

Briony asked a question about whether Rachel’s criteria for choosing images was purely aesthetic/formal or if she selected images because she was interested in their history.

This sparked a discussion centering around the undermining of any claims to ‘truth’ in images both painted and photographed. Rachel was drawn to images that could have a slippage of meaning, i.e. a dress becomes a type of landscape. She did not select images on the basis of their historical narrative but once selected she became involved in their background stories.

The discussion moved on to Rachel’s use of impoverished materials vis a vis the elevated status traditionally associated with portraiture or landscape painting. The low-value, low-tech use of materials like cardboard and polystyrene within Rachel’s work was a mixture of experimentation allowing the materials to ‘do what they do’ and a desire to reconfigure and re-invent the original source material.

Rachel talked about the masking or intervention in a straight reading of the face within her work on portraiture. She wanted to direct attention away from this figurative aspect of portraiture as she was not interested in the figurative. By using strategies related to Surrealist ideas of juxtaposition and masking out the figures within a landscape she hoped to provoke a sense of the uncanny and in some way reinvent the image.

The consensus of opinion was that to merely represent reality was not central to what is considered interesting within contemporary art practice today.

We ran out of time to really cover the third question in our framework: What is the contemporary relevance of the romantic and how does that relate to our ‘idea’ of landscape?

Please feel free to discuss this here on the blog. As a starting point we thought that the romantic movement has a huge influence on how we represent and construct visual and mental ideas of what landscape is even if it’s ideals have been superceeded by a more naturalist/realist sensibility.


Posted By Sue Warlock and Sarah Tullock