The science of one's project...

Posted by J. Kim on August 09, 2003

Hi,
Being a learner of English as a foreign language, I am always grateful to you guys for your discussions here.
This morning, I was reading a short writing about works of Andreas Gursky, a German photographer, and came upon the phrase SCIENCE OF HIS PROJECT. If it was a sciebce talk, I might have understand the meaning easily. But it was a talk about art, and I couldn't quite grasp the exact meaning the writer was trying to convay.

The para goes:
Despite the traditions he invokes both formally and conceptually, Gursky has no pretense to objectivity. He digitally manipulates his images-combining discrete views of the same subject, deleting extraneous details, enhancing colors-to create a kind of "assisted realism." The traders on the floor of the Singapore stock exchange, in Gursky's version, all wear the same shade of red, yellow, or blue jacket. And his epic view of the Stockholm public library, a perfect hemisphere of color-coded books, omits the actual floor, which, in reality, includes an escalator that would have marred the symmetrical beauty of the image. According to art historian Norman Bryson, the critical paradox of Gursky's photography lies in its dual commitment to objectively observing the social strata at work in the world and to aestheticizing empirical reality, an impulse that almost sabotages the science of his project. In this dialectic, the artist provocatively undermines photography's claims for "truth," offering, instead, as Bryson suggests, an inquiry into the subjective dimensions of all representations of the social.

• Sorry. This is a reposting of the above ( that was was posred incomplete). J. Kim 09/August/03
  • Science of his project ESC 09/August/03
    • Science of his project Bob 09/August/03
      • Thanks, guys. J. Kim 10/August/03