The most famous three words in mountaineering, apparently, are George Mallory’s: “Because it’s there.” These words, his response to a reporter who asked him why he wanted to climb Mt. Everest, were relayed to an audience by artist-curator Matthew Porter at the opening of Seven Summits, a photography exhibition on view through the summer. Porter’s talk, the first of five on the evening of Friday, July 16th, ignored direct description of the works on view and a straightforward explanation of his curatorial choices in favor of an in-depth look at Mallory’s final Everest climb. The talk implied a connection between the pioneering climber’s attempts to reach impossible summits back in the 1920s, and a curatorial vision of the photographer as adventurer. Here, each artist is represented by two pieces: one a studio investigation and the other shot out in the world at large.
“…This was back in the 70’s. I was sitting with my dad and his friends in a cloud of blue pot smoke looking at cigarette ads for subliminal messages. That’s how I learned about photography—that there could be a lot of meaning packed into a photographic image, whether it’s real or not.” Thus began “SIGNS and the Language of Photography,” the final installment in Mt. Tremper Arts’s Thursday Night Lecture Series. The above quote is from Tim Davis, who along with Lisa Kereszi and Mathew Pokoik (who curated SIGNS) showed slides of their work and talked about how and why they photograph signs....
Laurie Dahlberg starts her lecture, “Pirates, Pilferers, and Pranksters: A Brief History Of Photographic Appropriation,” with a photo of Duchamp’s “Fountain.” And then she dives into the juiciest questions about making art. In her talk she speaks about Duchamp’s shift from an old definition of aesthetic value (beauty, truth, and craftsmanship) to a new definition focusing on recognition and choice. She posits that this shift did nothing less than justify the practice of photography as an art form....
This Thursday night, July 31 at 7 pm, we will have a lecture by choreographer Jonah Bokaer, poet Anne Carson, and members of Jonah’s company. They’ll be integrating the following video into their lecture, “Possessives Used As Drink (Me): A Lecture On Pronouns In The Form of 15 Sonnets.” It should be fascinating. We hope to see you at the lecture and at their performance of STACKS on Saturday night!