Chris Reid‘s Super Soaker Collection. Via: Guthrie Lonergan
When it rains, it rains. Coinciding with The New York Times‘ tiresome obsession with the perils of professionalism in the art world, Rhizome’s Ed Halter produced a text this April describing the professional, the amateur, and a new category he calls the sub-amateur. The paper is amongst the clearest and most well-researched works I’ve read to date on the subject. A few highlights:
- One can fail to be a professional, but one cannot fail to be an amateur. A simple observation, but one not commonly thought to be described. Part of section 1, which outlines the basic distinctions between professional and amateur.
- The culture of MFA programs: a simultaneous embrace and disavowal of professional status, even as the degree functions specifically to enforce and validate a categorical distinction from the amateur.
(amateur = “too sloppy”, professional = “too perfect” ?)
(amateur = “not careful enough”, professional = “too careful” ?)
(amateur = “not finished enough”, professional = “too finished” ?)While amateurishness and slickness can be recouped as conceptual maneuvers, a distancing and thus partial disavowal of one’s own production, this gesture itself might be denounced as “too studied.” From section 2b
And most importantly, Halter’s notes on the sub-amateur category assigned to artists engaged with the Internet.
The price of a snapshot’s ease is a loss of control. The world seeps back into the frame like the messy monsters of the unconscious.
Thus, “Robert Frank’s terrible Polaroid pictures of his friends are like anyone else’s terrible Polaroid pictures”—save, Malcolm argues, for the Duchampian valence that emerges in the gallery context.
As Sontag or Deren defined them, amateurs are lovers of beauty. They invest a certain level of devotion to the technologies they employ—so much that a talented amateur may achieve the same level of technical sophistication as the professional, even if they miss the subtlety of art.
But as the very word reveals, the snapshot is the epitome of photography at its most automatic (its “most purely photographic”—but only in one sense). Snapshots are the result of corporate interest in broadening the market for photography as widely as possible by lowering the learning curve for the successful use of cameras.
But as the very word reveals, the snapshot is the epitome of photography at its most automatic (its “most purely photographic”—but only in one sense). Snapshots are the result of corporate interest in broadening the market for photography as widely as possible by lowering the learning curve for the successful use of cameras.
Similar motivations can be found in film: the devolution from 35mm to 16mm to 8mm to Super-8 to the video camcorder to the webcam is driven by a desire to increase user-friendliness and decrease the need for learning the technology.
The ideal camera would be one that involved no training whatsoever. Lack of formal control is traded for the assurance of image-capturing. This is the greater socio-economic mechanism that produces the default.
This historical process allows for—and encourages—the removal of the amateur’s “love” that had always been implicated in the devotion necessary to learn the technology.
The amateur enjoyed spending time with the camera, and thus could become caught up in its formal possibilities; the sub-amateur sees the camera in terms of pure and immediate functionality. Section 3.
We’ll have more comments on this in the future, but in the meantime, read the full piece here.
