Kyle Laidig is an artist currently studying at the Rhode Island School of Design.
Can you talk about where photography and paintings intersect?
There are several spaces where these two mediums come together. On the one hand they are related historically, whether it be the adversarial relationship that marked its inception in the early 19th century or even earlier the use of the camera obscura by Vermeer and others. In this way, the mediums have been conflated in a very formative way; they are linked modes of perception. They also seem to be used as modes of description, a painting that “is like a photograph” or, more commonly, a photograph that “is like a painting”. Then there is the literal synthesis of the mediums, Gerhard Richter and Sam Falls being good examples of such practices. The idea of painting though is based on ideas of combination, a painting is not broken down into unrelated elements “cadmium red” and “cobalt blue”, rather a painting is a sum of its parts, a soup. This ideology has become linked to contemporary photo manipulation practices. A digital image is composed of, at it’s foundation, bits of information, pixels. If we are to take these pixels, as the building blocks of an image, much like cadmium red, then we can see the resampling of these pixels an act that is inherently painterly. Similarly, painting is not an automated function but a performed act. In the same way we can look at the act of editing or manipulating an image as a performative intervention.
How does Photoshop affect your vision?
For a little while I had been thinking about Photoshop as a lens. I was trying to reverse the process of image making, that is image to Photoshop to final product, and to attempt to find images that appeared in life as though they had been mediated by this technology. It was a rather frustrating experience, and in hindsight I understand that it was a misguided gesture. It was misguided in that the images being created relied on a preformed understanding of contemporary image culture, to already know visually what kind of manipulations were being executed “right now”. Right now Photoshop doesn’t really affect my vision, outside of sometimes looking for textures or patterns for the purpose of sampling. On the other hand, Photoshop affects what I can envision, my understanding of where a work can be taken.
Are you images ever finished?
No. Images are fixed, finalized by their context. Maybe its function is to make a text comprehensible, and yet when you change the text the image is fundamentally altered. I am interesting in the fluidity meaning, the severing of signification, and so in that sense my images are never finished. Time is the ultimate variable.
Do you break your photographs down? How do you build them back up? Can you discuss your layering process?
Not immediately. Usually I will take the image as a starting point, a blank canvas, and then add or subtract as I see fit. My layering process is fundamentally intuitive, while there may be some rhyme or reason, I always shoot from the hip. ;)
What childhood memory most affects your work?
I don’t know how to answer that question so I will instead include an excerpt from a letter that Ted Hughes sent to his son, Nicholas:
“It’s something people don’t discuss, because it’s something most people are aware of only as a general crisis of sense of inadequacy, or helpless dependence, or pointless loneliness, or a sense of not having a strong enough ego to meet and master inner storms that come from an unexpected angle. But not many people realise that it is, in fact, the suffering of the child inside them. Everybody tries to protect this vulnerable two three four five six seven eight year old inside, and to acquire skills and aptitudes for dealing with the situations that threaten to overwhelm it. So everybody develops a whole armour of secondary self, the artificially constructed being that deals with the outer world, and the crush of circumstances. And when we meet people this is what we usually meet. And if this is the only part of them we meet we’re likely to get a rough time, and to end up making ‘no contact’. But when you develop a strong divining sense for the child behind that armour, and you make your dealings and negotiations only with that child, you find that everybody becomes, in a way, like your own child. It’s an intangible thing. But they too sense when that is what you are appealing to, and they respond with an impulse of real life, you get a little flash of the essential person, which is the child. Usually, that child is a wretchedly isolated undeveloped little being. It’s been protected by the efficient armour, it’s never participated in life, it’s never been exposed to living and to managing the person’s affairs, it’s never been given responsibility for taking the brunt. And it’s never properly lived. That’s how it is in almost everybody. And that little creature is sitting there, behind the armour, peering through the slits. And in its own self, it is still unprotected, incapable, inexperienced. Every single person is vulnerable to unexpected defeat in this inmost emotional self. At every moment, behind the most efficient seeming adult exterior, the whole world of the person’s childhood is being carefully held like a glass of water bulging above the brim. And in fact, that child is the only real thing in them. It’s their humanity, their real individuality, the one that can’t understand why it was born and that knows it will have to die, in no matter how crowded a place, quite on its own. That’s the carrier of all the living qualities. It’s the centre of all the possible magic and revelation. What doesn’t come out of that creature isn’t worth having, or it’s worth having only as a tool — for that creature to use and turn to account and make meaningful. So there it is. And the sense of itself, in that little being, at its core, is what it always was. But since that artificial secondary self took over the control of life around the age of eight, and relegated the real, vulnerable, supersensitive, suffering self back into its nursery, it has lacked training, this inner prisoner. And so, wherever life takes it by surprise, and suddenly the artificial self of adaptations proves inadequate, and fails to ward off the invasion of raw experience, that inner self is thrown into the front line — unprepared, with all its childhood terrors round its ears. And yet that’s the moment it wants. That’s where it comes alive — even if only to be overwhelmed and bewildered and hurt. And that’s where it calls up its own resources — not artificial aids, picked up outside, but real inner resources, real biological ability to cope, and to turn to account, and to enjoy. That’s the paradox: the only time most people feel alive is when they’re suffering, when something overwhelms their ordinary, careful armour, and the naked child is flung out onto the world. That’s why the things that are worst to undergo are best to remember. But when that child gets buried away under their adaptive and protective shells—he becomes one of the walking dead, a monster. So when you realise you’ve gone a few weeks and haven’t felt that awful struggle of your childish self — struggling to lift itself out of its inadequacy and incompetence — you’ll know you’ve gone some weeks without meeting new challenge, and without growing, and that you’ve gone some weeks towards losing touch with yourself. The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn’t live boldly enough, that they didn’t invest enough heart, didn’t love enough. Nothing else really counts at all.”
Can you imagine what the most perfect photograph you can make looks like?
No.
Ask yourself a question and respond.
Do you have any feelings about disco?
What an astute question! Of course I have feelings about disco! I see it as a totally misunderstood movement. Mark Motherbaugh referred to disco as being “like a beautiful woman with a great body and no brains”. However, I find disco to be an inherently intellectual movement. In disco one finds the coherent, sentient moment where one dismisses the dialectic… “shut up and dance”. It is not escapism but rather direct action. Intellectual discourse is one that so often marginalizes the physical, seeking to unfairly separate the mind from the body. Even still, disco was not speechless, in fact the club was a vibrant scene, only half dance floor, where the other half exchanged ideologies. Dance seems to function as an externalization of unconscious thought; just as the “walk” is instrumental in the development of thought so too is the “boogie”. This “four on the floor” of thought, the ever-present beat, syncopating dialogue, the unfiltered sex, you might call it a personal philosophy. I believe that the direct spirit of disco, it’s ephemeral and dramatic ethos (love is all times to be lost or gained, even if only for the night), should be integral in any imagining of the future. It’s no surprise that in Her, the most realistic and optimistic sci-fi I’ve ever seen, a longing gaze towards the 70’s marks the aesthetic of the future. As much as I want to intellectualize it, if I’m being totally honest, it all boils down to the fact that I would rather be dancing… from here to eternity.
vaporwave
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amandla
prguitarman
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