“Turning from spatial to sequential syntagms brings us to narrative (which, as noted, may even underlie left/right spatial structures). Some critics claim that differences between narratives and non-narratives relate to differences among media, instancing individual drawings, paintings and photographs as non-narrative forms; others claim that narrative is a ‘deep structure’ independent of the medium.”
Daniel Chandler, Semiotics for Beginners
“We think only in signs.”
“Nothing is a sign unless it is interpreted as a sign.”
Charles Peirce
“Many postmodernist theorists postulate a complete disconnection of the signifier and the signified. An ‘empty’ or ‘floating signifier’ is variously defined as a signifier with a vague, highly variable, unspecifiable or non-existent signified. Such signifiers mean different things to different people: they may stand for many or even any signifieds; they may mean whatever their interpreters want them to mean. In such a state of radical disconnection between signifier and signified, ‘a sign only means that it means’.”
Daniel Chandler, Semiotics for Beginners
“I began seeing paintings in a row in a museum as being like frames in a movie. So I got to fantasising… what was the frame before this Van Gogh painting and what was the frame after? If you had a wide-angle shot of the painting what would it look like? I started thinking about painting in cinegraphic terms.”
John Baldessari
“…just as the past is always influencing the present, the presentjustgone is also influencing the immediate present.”
Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct
“…a reading of images as part of a sequence similar to film stills, such that meaning, like language, is to be constructed only from context.”
Jessica Morgan, Choosing (A Game For Two Curators), Pure Beauty: John Baldessari
“The creative process is a combination of perceiving abstract gestalt patterns and engaging in a syncretic merging with the environment with the intent of experiencing limitlessness.”
Anton Ehrenzweig, The Hidden Order of Art
“Ideas are a dime a dozen and the real struggle is with finding a form.”
David Salle
“The student who would become a landscape photographer, must go to the country and live there for long periods; for in no other way can he get any insight into the mystery of nature”
Peter Henry Emerson, Naturalistic Photography, 1890
I caught the number 97 bus to Chingford for a day out in Epping Forest…
Site/Nonsite
Robert Smithson
“A desire path (also known as a desire line or social trail) is a path developed by erosion caused by footfall. The path usually represents the shortest or most easily navigated route between an origin and destination. The width and amount of erosion of the line represents the amount of demand.”
Wikipedia
“Mirror surfaces cannot be understood by reason and mirrors display a conspiracy of muteness concerning their very existence.”
Robert Smithson
“The mirror is the perfect work of art. It is the only image that always looks different. And just like a picture, it shows something that is not there at all, at least not where we see it.”
Gerhard Richter
My name is Ian Talbot and I am an artist and photographer living in London.
This blog is intended as an insight into the research, thinking and connections that precede the projects I undertake. I will also show new and experimental work. Naturally, not all of the work shown here will eventually make the cut. These are very much 'works in progress'...
You can see a complete collection of my work at my website:
Ian Talbot :: Objectively Speaking