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Texts Something Constructed, Something Invented: Short Notes for Tom Lovelace David Evans – 2011 A / Already in the 1840s, Fox Talbot identified various features of photography that could lead to different uses. The ‘pencil of nature’ seemed to generate truthful records of appearances that could be used in law courts to identify stolen property, for example. Yet the same ‘pencil’ could be employed for more elevated purposes if it was handled by erudite figures who knew their art history, and Fox Talbot was particularly interested in making photographs that evoked Dutch painting of the 17th Century. B / Fox Talbot’s basic distinction between photograph as document and photograph as art was given a twist in the 1920s. Take Breton and Bataille, at loggerheads about most things, but sharing a taste for new types of writing that incorporated the photograph as raw data. Hence their mutual admiration for the work of Boiffard. His seemingly artless, uneventful images of Parisian streets were used in the anti-novel Nadja (1928) as a foil to Breton’s prose that sought to evoke the ‘marvellous’. Meanwhile, Bataille promoted an almost antithetical ‘base materialism’ with an article like ‘The Big Toe’ (1929), complemented by Boiffard’s now famous, pseudo- scientific images. C / Brecht too was interested in the photograph as visual evidence about the world, with reservations. He felt that a mere photograph of a factory revealed nothing about how it functioned. Therefore, something has to be constructed, invented. His cryptic text of 1930 has been interpreted in various ways. In the late sixties and seventies, artists like Peter Kennard, Klaus Staeck or Martha Rosler assumed he was advocating photomontage with politically explicit messages. But others – like Victor Burgin, Karen Knorr and Mitra Tabrizian at The Polytechnic of Central London in the seventies and early eighties – used the text to legitimize forms of anti-naturalistic, staged photography, not unlike production shots from a play by Brecht. Brecht’s most sustained demonstration of what he had in mind was War Primer, first published in East Berlin in 1955, and only appearing in an English edition in 1998. It is mainly a collection of photographs about the Second World War, clipped from newspapers and magazines that he had collected as an exile in Scandinavia and the United States, and combined with alternative captions in the form of four-line verses. An apt caption could inflect the meaning of a photograph, he assumed, converting capitalist entertainment into Marxist pedagogy. D / Conceptual Art. What was it? When was it? Where was it? The jury is still out, amongst other things, considering fresh evidence confirming that it was a global phenomenon rather than a cozy Anglo-American affair. However, there is general agreement that photography was universally important, initially as a cheap and unpretentious way of documenting ephemeral or inaccessible activities, and later often treated as an artistic medium in its own right. Keith Arnatt and Richard Long are two obvious, but rich figures whose engagement with photography went through these two stages. E / The work of Tom Lovelace encourages wanderings across decades, re-considering the photograph as document or art (Fox Talbot), the photographic document as art or anti-art (Breton, Bataille, Brecht), and the endless permutations that are part of Conceptual Art and its legacy. Yet there is also a socio-political dimension to his work. An earlier series (published in Source 57, Winter 2008) displayed functionless machines, made for the camera, and then dismantled. That series got me thinking about Tom as the last factory worker, obliged to re-train as an artist. With his landscape interventions, Tom comes across as the last agricultural labourer, also trying to adapt. Worlds lost; worlds emerging.	David Evans – 2011 Guy Robertson – 2011 Claudia Corrieri - 2010 Richard West on Unit 2 - 2008