sin_blog

touch 4 by Steven Schkolne
http://schkolne.com

Moments of life shown in Steven Schkolne’s works are decisively ambiguous. They are the intermediate actions of strangers, providing no clue of meanings they carry. Just when you think you are looking at photographic works, the computer generated traces lead you to another mode of ambiguity. The characters look very real but artificial at the same time, all rendered by Spidermesh, an image-editing software developed by Schkolne himself. In conducting a research for a curatorial programme that I’m taking, I was lucky to have an email dialogue with this artist who brings (his own) technology into his works.

LHS: The works showcased in your website share a consistency in technical and aesthetic qualities. It would be nice if you could tell about the initiative in creating these works, thoughts about the particular graphic execution, intention, if any, of how the audience would perceive your works, and any important (or unimportant) aspects of them.

SS: Recently I’ve been working with images of people performing cosplay in public, dressing up like characters from anime and videogames [see http://schkolne.com/photoLA.pdf]. To summarize this series, I’d say it’s about examining a continuum, a gradation between point A and point B. By “point A” I mean the projected image of oneself. Point A is how one wants to appear to other people. I photographed people dressed as characters, trying to look like characters from anime, and I made them more anime, taking them further towards this projected, external self (point A). Point B is the opposite, the internal self. To represent this, I show more of the biological details of people, the parts of themselves that they cannot change - their internal self, the part that cannot be costumed, or the part of someone that you see underneath the costume. In these anime images, I take a photo and make from it several images, some towards point A and others towards point B. And in the websites, you can actually see animated transitions from point A to point B.

LHS: For this new series, there are versions as your usual Spidermesh style, while they are juxtaposed with or when zoomed, a version (of “point B”) that appears photographs. Is the latter altered original photographs or rendered with Spidermesh still? As they resemble photographs rather than rendered images (e.g. the closest view of http://gothlolimaids2008.com). The same question to fractions such as the pixelated hands of distance 5. This is a technical aspect that I would know about.

SS: Yes these are traditional digital photographs. In the anime images they are just straight photographs, and aren’t at all taken into Spidermesh. In the distance series, Spidermesh is used - the pixelated part is put in as one of the layers in Spidermesh. I have some tools in Spidermesh that allow me to pull pixels from a digital photograph in a variety of ways and pull it into the composition.

LHS: First view of your works give a (photo)realistic impression, though it comes with the paradox of simplification and abstraction of reality. Do you consider your works photorealistic in nature? Or are there certain references/influences for your artistic development?

SS: I don’t have much to say about photorealism. I saw it in an art history book when I was growing up and some people, like you, have mentioned it to me recently, because there is a visual similarity.  So I looked at a bunch of those pictures, Ralph Goings and Richard Estes and those people, and that work really doesn’t make any sense to me, it doesn’t resonate with me. It seems they are trying to be as loyal to the photograph as possible, with paint, but hiding the impact of the hand. Maybe I am the opposite - I am trying to go away from the photograph, to distort the photograph in a way that reflects the hand. I think my visual rendering is more influenced by a painterly way of making images, perhaps Edward Hopper is a good example. There is this crispness of light, in the touch and distance series, that is painterly.

In terms of influences, a while ago I was very into Thomas Demand and Julian Opie, the way they distort the world, the way they re-present the world in this fictional sense had a strong impact on me a few years ago when I first saw their stuff. Also I always like the way Jeff Wall has this implication of narrative, but I kinda like that feeling but to have actually an absence of narrative, a kind of Jeff Wall feeling but without any way of seeing what could be going on. These days I am thinking a lot about some of Roni Horn’s serial photos - the one where she photographs the same subject over and again, presenting dozens of images that are barely distinguishable. And also Rineke Dijkstra, when she photographs the same person but at different points in their life. But I am probably more influenced by videogames than all of these artists put together.

…also I was very influenced by studying wavelets, subdivision surfaces, and other kinds of multiresolution representations. Spidermesh allows me to make adaptive-resolution worlds, where the amount of detail varies across the image surface. This is exactly what wavelet representations do well, but they do it in an orderly mathematically optimal way, whereas in my images I do it based on a hierarchy of meaning in the photograph that I determine.

LHS: It could be seen that Spidermesh allows the execution of depicting ambiguity. Please share a little of how you came up with the idea of Spidermesh for creating this type of artworks.

SS: I started on working on Spidermesh at a time when I was looking to expand my work, what I had been doing didn’t mean enough to me, and I wanted to engage more with reality. For me social space is a difficult place, Spidermesh was a way of distorting reality, to mirror how I feel to be in the world, and also it makes things look synthetic. Now for me “synthetic” is a kind of loaded word, a word I use a lot, so much that it has a very personal meaning to me. Synthetic is the space of videogames, it is being in computers, without a body. It is also the world of psychedelic drugs, where you see the distortions of your psyche, how your mind distorts things. It is also the world you see in books, when you imagine things as you are reading them, you can kind of only see so much detail. Certain things aren’t there. And for me the outside world is often at a distance in this way, things are not quite resolved. The people around me are abstractions, shells, they are surfaces and I wonder - do these surfaces have an inside?  So for me, the Spidermesh visual language, as I was developing it, was a way to work with this sensibility, and also work with the real world and things that I see, in my work.

LHS: As research for curatorial practice, I would like to know how you feel about your works being reinterpreted in an exhibition setting. The topic we are studying is the Gaze (the term and concept as discussed in philosophy and cultural theories), take it as example. I’m particularly interested in your work distance 4 where there are three small groups of spectators, and the different directions they are looking at and out of the picture simply create wonderment. These spectators would bring out certain perceptions of the Gaze, and the ambiguity and discrepancy between reality and rendered world of your work would add layers of thought. Please comment on such a positioning of your work. Also by tackling the Gaze, voyeurism is involved. While the inspectors in your works act as viewers, they are also viewed by the audience, who may also be viewed by the others. Though there is an extent of voyeuristic nature in photography, e.g. in street snaps for your creations, I’d like to hear your comment on the role of voyeurism in your works, for you may not consider it so.

SS: Your insight is consistent with my understanding of the images. In all the distance pictures, I was very conscious when I made them that in these images there is no eye contact. I am pretty familiar with discussion of the Gaze, this seems to fit in somewhere there. In the touch images the face is always obstructed, this absent/disconnected gaze gives me feelings of displacement, coldness, objectification…interpersonal distance.

You are not the first to mention voyeurism… it’s funny to me that it comes up, people have been photographing strangers for a century, but when I do it, it is voyeuristic! The effect is partially because I’m shooting from far away with a long lens. Also this is due to the people being unaware of me. It always feels like I am using people, taking advantage somehow…

Besides answers to the above questions, Schkolne shared his artist statement about his works, allowing us to get better knowledge of the mind behind them:

Speech bubbles on found image

An excerpt from Existentialism and Humanism by Jean-Paul Sartre (Eyre Methuen, 1973):

“Quietism is the attitude of people who say, ‘let others do what I cannot do.’ The doctrine I am presenting before you is precisely the opposite of this, since it declares that there is no reality except in action. It goes further, indeed, and adds, ‘Man is nothing else but what he purposes, he exists only in so far as he realises himself, he is therefore nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is.’ Hence we can well understand why some people are horrified by our teaching. For many have but one resource to sustain them in their misery, and that is to think, ‘Circumstances have been against me, I was worthy to be something much better than I have been. I admit I have never had a great love or a great friendship; but that is because I never met a man or a woman who were worthy of it; if I have not written any very good books, it is because I had not leisure to do so; or, if I have had no children to whom I could devote myself it is because I did not find the man I could have lived with. So there remains potentialities, unused but perfectly viable, which endow me with a worthiness that could never be inferred from the mere history of my actions.’ But in reality and for the existentialist, there is no love apart from the deeds of love; no potentiality of love other than that which is manifested in loving; there is no genius other than that which is expressed in works of art. The genius of Proust is the totality of the works of Proust; the genius of Racine is the series of his tragedies, outside of which there is nothing. Why should we attribute to Racine the capacity to write yet another tragedy when that is precisely what he did not write? In life, a man commits himself, draws his own portrait and there is nothing but that portrait. No doubt this thought may seem comfortless to one who has not made a success of his life. On the other hand, it puts everyone in a position to understand that reality alone is reliable; that dreams, expectations and hopes serve to define a man only as deceptivce dreams, abortive hopes, expectations unfulfilled; that is to say, they define him negatively, not positively. Nevertheless, when one says, ‘You are nothing else but what you live,’ it does not imply that an artist is to be judged solely by his works of art, for a thousand other things contribute no less to his definition as a man. What we mean to say is that a man is no other than a series of undertakings, that he is the sum, the organisation, the set of relations that constitute these undertakings.”

I totally believe that we are no more than what we are and what we’ve done; for the flesh we possess is the person that we present, and the actions that we have done are the only manifestation of our own being. There is no excuse to claim we are more than that, though when someone says “I could have done that, only that I didn’t”, it is not necessarily false that they have the capacity to do so. When a person of normal physicality holds a glass of water and says “I could have taken three sips of water, only that I did not”, it is almost certain that he has the ability to drink the water in his hand, and that it is true that it is his decision not to drink, unlimited by his physical ability. Yet it is exactly this decision that he made that he should be responsible for, and this deed and the corresponding consequence would still leave a mark in (his) history and contribute to evaluation, if any, of him as a whole. We can always throw excuses, but in the end oneself is the only person who is responsible for what he does. And that is the existentialist teaching.

*Seeing what he said in the second lesson, Jimmy could well be an existentialist, despite he does not exist.

Yet another demonstration of music-drawing. The perfect one by the most appropriate person, indeed. As I said I wasn’t acquainted with Surrealism before I started practising music-drawing. Therefore I could not be aware of myself doing anything surrealistic. It was only after I fell in love with Dalí(’s artwork) that I started knowing about Surrealism and automatic drawing, thus recognising the connection. Since it is about the subconscious after all, it makes no wonder that one would start so without realising. Different from music-drawing, however, surrealistic influence was obvious to me when I started Interpretation. The first piece was directly inspired by Dalí.