My way to spend a few hours every week, outside of work and family, is to study for a degree in photography at the University Of Wolverhampton. You may know this if you’ve read any of this blog before, if not, that’s cool. My course leader is an artist named Euripides Altintzoglou and he has a broad range of experience in the art world and has a good network built up of fellow artists.
Chanarintroduction
One of these is Oliver Chanarin, a photographer and artist who currently has an exhibition at at Wolverhampton Art Gallery. I went in November last year and it is open until the 25th February this year. The work, titled A Perfect Sentence, featured many framed photographs and test prints that are stacked seemingly randomly in piles and many on the walls around the room. Alongside this volume of photography is a robot, suspended from the top that drives left and right along the wall to the spot it needs before using a vacuum sucker to pull a picture off the wall and then put it on a pile. It then moves to another pile, sucks a picture to its moving arm and then proceeds to fill the now empty spot.
It’s a slow process but it’s clever how it works slowly and methodically, not ever really giving a clue about its next intended move. The robot looks like it’s made from the same material as TARS in Interstellar, but moves a little less dynamically, and has not so great a sense of humour.
I like this robot. It’s simple, no-nonsense and does what it needs to do. I appreciate the effort it must have taken to program the device to do what it is tasked to do, even to the point of working out the hanging method that would work with this process. The moving parts are pretty much covered up so I don’t know if it drives from the top and hangs down or drives along the bottom of the wall, suspended by the rail on the top. I suspect the latter, that way it would be easy to use a position encoder to keep tabs on the location.
As well as the program to do the work, it must have a fairly precise calibration setup where the engineering must have a set of dimensions to stick to and then “knows” where the piles of frames are and where the wall is with the mountings.
50% Functional
Whilst I was there only one of the robots was working, the opposite walls automaton had ceased working and was therefore a stationery article with some photographs on the wall nearby. I think it worked like this as it showed the duality of working vs broken, changing versus static, useful vs useless.
The photos were interesting too, some were fully fledged portraits whilst others appear to be colour darkroom test prints, with the timings of exposure showing, any dodging and burning as well as crop notes and comments.
Walk In Wolves
In January however, Euripides was going to have a “conversation” with Oliver Chanarin at the Art Gallery and we had been invited. I picked up my free ticket on the art gallery booking site and had a walk around the city before heading to the show. I was concerned that parking might be tricky due to Wolves playing Arsenal at home on the day so got there early and parked in Faulkland Street car park, then shot some street photography around the city centre. There were a few footy fans around and traders selling commemorative scarves etc so it wasn;t a boring scene but I didn’t get many photos I liked. I did get two photos I was particularly happy with though which I posted to Instagram later that day. The Wulfrun Centre car park concrete carbuncle.
Gallery Chat
When the time arrived I was 15 minutes early so I could get a good seat and as I arrived they were setting up the room. There was no other attendee there at that point so I sat down and made some notes in my little book.
As I waited a few more people turned up and then Joel and Lilly from my course arrives so we sat together and had a bit of a chinwag about the exhibition the week before at Digbeth. Then Euripides arrived and took his place at the front with Oliver joining him soon after. They were both plonked on a comfy chair each with a handheld microphone so that their chat could be heard by everyone in the room.
It started off with Euripides asking Oliver a few questions about the work and a description of how it had been exhibited in the past. I didn’t know until this point that the exhibition downstairs had changed to remove the robots from the gallery, owing to breakdown/hardware failure. They discussed the issues and Chanarin said “I took something that was too big for me” and “it really hurts” as he felt like a failure that the work he’d produced didn’t make it until the end of the time it should have. He says that it has helped him “learn his own limits”. This may have been that the technical side of the exhibit took it out of him and he feels let down by the fact that once there was a pair of robots working together and now it’s down to just static photos on a wall.
Altintzoglou remarked about ho the viewer of the work was “powerless when the robots were functioning as they are controlling what and when the viewer will see”. Chanarin thought about this and agreed, he said that he had seen in the past that people looked more at the robot to see what it woudl do than the photography sometimes.
With the robots gone, the viewer is now once again in control and able to see the photography that makes up the exhibition.
Chanarin, when asked about the Algorithm that moved the pictures about, declines to discuss it as in his words “you would not ask a painter how he paints”. In this I disagree somewhat as one of the ways we learn as artists is by asking how and why something is done.
He referred also to a time when the show was exhibiting in a church in Europe and there was something missing. The exhibit felt like it was standalone and not connected to the church. The priest of the church asked if he could make a change and when agreed, he brought out a huge bible and put it on a table nearby and it seemed to knit the two experiences together.
Chanarin then used the words “we are story making machines” as a way to describe why people might see patterns and methods in the seemingly random nature of the robot movements and selections. Much the same way as humans experience pareidolia, noticing faces in clouds or pieces of burnt toast etc.. He mentioned briefly August Sander and New Objectivity and that these pictures were always factual rather than art based, although they are now an art from in themselves. New Objectivity is a German Expressionism movement that featured more realistic portraits and less abstract images.
He said that much of his work is similar and that he captures real life and people in natural circumstances, not necessarily dressin gup the facts but simply displaying them for what tehy are, the truth.
Chanarin then brought up an interesting topic of consent, when the photos he has captured of real people were made, he told them they were for a project. He had no end goal or method of presenting the images in mind so does it make it consensual to print photos and display them like this if the originallsitter or subject has not expressly agreed to it. He said that he obviously could not go back to evey subject and ask them for their opinion, but I imagine that being the nice bloke he is, if someone wanted their images to not be shown in a certain manner, he would respect that.
Altintzoglou also started a chat about how photography has changed over the last five years too, with selfies in the near past being about poses, puts and a mask that the subjexct/photographer hid behind to project their image into the worl, even though it isn’t the truth. Somehow this led into an anecdote from Chanarin about a factory in Derby that made photographs and if there were issues with the glass negatives they were dropped down a tube from the top floor to crash into a pile beneath the ground floor. A hundred years later and these images are still there, not perfect but still capturing the times that they were made.
Q & A
After a brief wrap up and thank you, the mic was handed to the first of the few questioners. The first, a lady on the front row, asked about why Chanarin was focused on the stereotyped “cleavage” photo when there were many other things to make images of. Chanarin then pointed out a photo that was on rotation behind the stage that featured a transitioned man who had recently had a double mastectomy to become who they really were and this photo he referred to as “Noel’s Nipples”, he explained that he was capturing people in their own chosen way to present themselves, and if it included cleavage or a lack of cleavage then it would still be a photo. His photos weren’t overly sexualised either in my opinion. There were a couple of male and female nudity in amongst kitchen sink drama type images and none of them were designed to titillate the viewer, but this audience member ha dreally taken against the practice. The word cleavage was said too many times in this ten minute slot. She also took umbrage at notes written on the photos, one read “BAD” bit she didn’t think it was bad. Chanarin had briefly explained the process of working in a colour darkroom developing prints and I think the lady had not understood his comments on the notes written on the photos as a way of processing further prints etc.
Another audience member asked the question “what have you learned as part of this exhibition?” and Chanarin explained the technical side of the works, the programming and hardware set up. He mentioned also that the “Electric Dreams” exhibiti on at the Tate Modern which also looks like a great place to go. It’s about “Art and Technology Before The Internet”.
Somebody behind me asked a question around Analogue vs Digital, Artificial Intelligence, Trump and the future of photography. There was some discussion about the fact that this could be both a positive and negative then used the term Smoke & Mirrors. Chanarin was discussing what he referred to as “Surveillance Capitalism” that allows devices and systems to monitor civilians and target advertising to the required people in order to sell more goods. There are countless ways to attract people into activities and pastimes that make money for wealthy organisations and the purpose of “free” social media applications is to keep you engaged for as long as possible time as possible, in order to gather more information and thus make your “record” as useful as possible to their advertisers.
Chanarin regarded this as “Commodification of human attention” and seemed concerned about the fate of humans who are constantly sucked into this vortex of attention harvesting, whether it is using silly filters or weird apps, He used the words “Humanness is under threat” and I think that he sees photography, especially analogue, as a way of maintaining the Human race. I guess that it is akin to the film “The Book Of Eli” where technology is all but gone and the valuable artefacts left behind and sought after by many are books, plain old fashioned books. Solar storms and all manner of dangerous astronomical events threaten our electronic methods of storage and paper photos and books are all that might survive. Woah, sorry I went into “prepper” mode for a moment then.
The last question of the session was aimed at Chanarin and asked him about the process of the making of the photos. He explained how he had started the project alone and travelling to take photos of people but over the course of the project he found that he was working with others, more of a collaborative approach than he thought originally. It was a social and joyous process with a communal vibe across the people he was working with and photographing.
The session ended with a brief round of applause and then it was nearly time to head out.
0% Functional
Before I did though I chose to enter the gallery space downstairs to have a Quick Look at the exhibition sans robots. It really was a different feeling. The photos are all on the walls with no piles of images anywhere, some of the images that are landscape are hung as portrait orientation so as to keep with the sameness of the rest of the show. The lack of robots did alter the sense of control, which I had originally been sceptical about. I could walk anywhere and look at the photos that I wanted to, knowing that the images would still be where they were if I wanted to revisit one. In the days of the robots a photo might have been removed from the wall whilst I was looking elsewhere. I wasn’t at all distracted by a robot and focussed more on the photos, taking in the details more and seeing the marks made that tell us more about the artists process.
As I was takign a few photos, see below, another patron came in and was asking me about photography as I had my camera with me and after a quick chat I realised I was talking to Mahtab Hussain, whom Euripides had organised a live brief with to take place in a couple of weeks time. I took a few more photos in here this time and then headed out.
Late Loss
Due to the time of the finish I hung around in the city centre until the match at Molineux got closer to finishing and then I headed back to take photos of the crowds exiting the ground. It was a busy time, people everywhere and standing still to let the sea of fans walk past me was a bit tense but people were not really interested in a photographer, they were discussing the foibles of the manager that resulted in a last minute loss for the home team.
A quick walk back to the car park and then a 70 minute wait for the traffic to clear before heading off home and starting a bit of editing before bedtime.
Reflection
Overall, the session in the art gallery was interesting to listen to. Chanarin was beside himself a couple of times calling himself a failure for the fact that the robots were no longer serviceable. It was particularly interesting as the exhibition seems to have been a success especially as it was his first UK Solo Exhibition.
The fact that there was no robot does make a huge difference to the artwork itself due to the reasons mentioned above and it does give me food for thought as to how I present work in the future.
Some of the questions were insightful and prompted some very interesting back and forth probing of subjects that we could all learn from. The format of having two artists talking to each other was very useful too as it didn’t sound like a lecture or presentation, death by powerpoint but more like two mates chatting about their passion.
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