We Can’t Paint

The more tranquil side of life is also a staple of the cluster-fuck aesthetic, an emphasis on the common as magnificent. This can be seen in the photography of Melanie Schiff. Her photographs consist of intricate constructions around common photographic genres such as the still-life and the portrait. Where Abeles uses photography to charge her images with darkness, Schiff uses light to heighten our awareness of the mundane. This may be achieved by simply placing an empty Jack Daniel’s bottle in front of a sunset, or by using a Neil Young album as a proxy for the face of stoner culture.

Emergency, 2006© Melanie Schiff

Neil Young, Neil Young, 2006© Melanie Schiff

These are playful images, each using natural light to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary. In one image, the artist is seen spitting water in a suburban backyard, creating an optical rainbow. In another photo an empty CD case is transformed into glowing ephemera by way of a single beam of light.

Rainbow, 2006© Melanie Schiff

Prism, 2005© Melanie Schiff

The perceived construction of male identity is the focus of Boru O’Brien O’Connell’s series Mavericks & Day Dreamers. His portraits play with clichéd ideals of male identity by exploiting historical archetypes of man as explorer and eccentric prophet. The photographs point to the idea of masculinity as a socially constructed entity by portraying these characters with an air of sweetness through restrained humor. This can be seen in the prone positions in which O’Brien O’Connell has had these men pose. Often their faces are fixed and expressionless, a confidant demeanor which points out these ridiculous notions of the traditional image of man.

Mavericks & Day Dreamers© Boru O’Brien O’Connell

Mavericks & Day Dreamers© Boru O’Brien O’Connell

These examples do not cover the full spectrum of what makes up the cluster-fuck aesthetic, but they do give one a sense of this new shift in photographic representation. However, to understand where this shift first appeared we have to look back at the photographers as well as the cultural climate that influenced a cluster-fuck type of photography.

To be continued on Monday.