Ordinary Aura

I suppose it's unsurprising coming from me, but I don't associate the word aura with this image. I don't think it's possible to do so unless you know the history of the image (that is, what used to be there), and even then, speaking as someone who sees technically similar things done with Photoshop all the time, my main reaction is "huh." He did a good job at that thing he did.

Speaking of Photoshop, here's an image I played around with some the other day, while I was on hold with the phone company. It's an image Chris posted last month; I took out the traffic cones. Does this image have aura? I sort of think it does, but the aura isn't that of the missing cones; I was attracted to the image in the first place because of the mysterious scribble, which I presume is on the window. The present but missing window is what makes the photo evocative for me.

For me, the sense of the missing, of something we're not seeing, needs to be present in the object itself; more plainly, the object needs to be an interesting object in itself. There's nothing intrinsically interesting about the non-porn image as an image, to me at least, and its antecedents don't interest me enough to make the image work once I know about them.

I have to say also that the question "does this have aura?" just sounds funny. Alan's comment in the other aura that "i am detecting major aura here" makes me think of ghostbusters. I hope this doesn't sound like I'm denigrating Alan's comment, which made some very good points; but I think that probably, to continue to get at what we're talking about, we're going to have to leave the word "aura" behind. We're bending it to meanings that it wasn't really meant to have. What I find myself thinking, as I look at these things, is as I said earlier, "is there something present but missing here?" And I think that for that sense to come through, it needs to be natural and detectable in the piece, image or sound or whatever. If you need to be told about it, it doesn't, to use the word one more time, have aura.

Interesting. Thanks Alan and Seth. I hope we can hear from some others. Though I recognize that some may prefer to discover through making rather than discussion, I still maintain that talking about these kinds of specifics is important to the experiment that is this blog.

My questions are, as Seth pointed out, blunt to the point of ridiculous. I also am suspect of the word aura - a lot of baggage there. I put it away myself for the same reasons that I put away my Arvo Part CD's and Tarkovsky videos. We've been using it though, and I don't understand how. For example, was it Adam that said a while back that cardboard on the floor of the gallery might have aura? I didn't understand that, so I'm trying to figure it out. Probably should have said so then.

Then there's that "ordinary" word too, which made me interested in this project.

To seth's point - talking about "is there something present but missing here" sounds like a great way of describing what we're up to.

However, if I understand you right, I greatly disagree on the need for the the Thing we're chasing to be "natural and detectable within the piece." I really don't believe this is possible, for any work to possess self-evident anything but the pixels or the molecules or whatever. (And even that's probably up for grabs some days.)

The examples I posted are interesting to me, not because I would attribute aura to them, but I'm trying to figure out where my interests intersect with those of this project. Lately, when it comes to gallery/museum art, I've found myself drawn to works that rely heavily on outside information or knowledge because of how it doesn't pretend to be self-evident.

The "non-porn" (great word seth) image really intrigues me because of the ways in which it triggers some kind of extra-sensory knowledge. It makes me "see" things that aren't there, things I'd rather not see. I'm also real interested in the role of the artist here, who has consumed these things on my behalf.

That said, the image alone does not do this, if by that I mean pretending I don't know anything and "just looking" at it (shades of Greenberg).

I gotta think about the window photo and your revision of it - there are some interesting comparisons here I need to figure out.