Making a Mark: Steven Laurie's Instagram
By Anthony Easton
Photo courtesy of Steven Laurie.
One of my favourite things on Instagram is Steven Laurie’s (Username: _steven_laurie_) use of the mark making tag. Laurie’s tradition is one of found or street photography, and it might be easy to liken him within that space to photographers William Eggleston or Helen Levitt. I am not sure that this would be a wrong opinion— although Laurie photographs very few people.
The mark making hashtag separates him from this tradition. When I say there are very few people in his work, there still remains the influence of people, hints rather than direct portraits. So when he uses the tag #markmaking, it is the ghost of a physical presence, a digital abstraction of a material abstraction of a human intervention. It doesn’t even have to be human— for Laurie, a mark can be made by the excretion of a pigeon as much as it can be made by the tire treads of a car or the orange paint on a utility pole.
Photo courtesy of Steven Laurie.
Part of this is a very old tack. A picture of a mark is a mark itself, just as Magritte’s pipe is both a pipe, and a picture of a pipe. Laurie makes the mark a Duchampian readymade— more complex than the representation of photography, by claiming found marks as drawings. More complex, but not more novel. Having them on Instagram, and having that mark be part of a conversation, suggests that it is liberated from this modernist tradition.
Photo courtesy of Steven Laurie.
When Laurie chronicles mark making, he is doing three things:
This is a mark, because someone or something made it and considered it a mark. This mark does not have to be considered art.
This is a mark, because it can be understood in a tradition of mark making, and as an artist to be part of that space.
This is a mark because I noted this was a mark to a larger community of people who might be interested in mark making. (Laurie has 990 or so followers, and additional people who comment on his photos, and who use the tag #markmaking, without interacting with Laurie.)
The emphasis on these forms is on making— more important than the mark is noting how a mark is constructed, and how a mark is noted.
Making here, can deepen three photographic possibilities:
Making as a curatorial instinct— because I noted that the utility worker, and the tagger and the pigeon are making marks, that I am making an argument about how paint or mud or the like on a surface is constructed. I am arguing about how things are made, by taxonomic category.
This category can be conceptual. Laurie’s generosity plays with the idea of the mark as an aesthetic category— suggesting that it might not be an autonomous gesture, or that it might be a utilitarian one. Bringing us back to the birth of the photograph, where the aesthetic, or the ideological or the prescriptive abutted with the simply documentary.
It marks an extension of Laurie’s own aesthetic. The blankness of his photographic eye, and his noting of the chaos in the midst of the a tightly composed shot, can extend to a larger understanding of an artist's practice, or can be an artist’s practice.
Photo courtesy of Steven Laurie.
This work can function as a sketchbook, or as an ephemeral form, and because it becomes difficult to right click Instagrams, means that the intervention is performative. The making of the mark, and the noting of the mark, entwine in an ongoing mutual problem of erasure. Plus, nestled in the midst of a thicket of other hashtags— some seemingly more serious than others, it might just be a wry joke— which is its own kind of mark.
Anthony Easton is a writer, artist, and theologian. They are interested in class, sex, gender and the west. They have been published in Spin, The Atlantic, Pitchfork, Globe and Mail, and others. They have presented at conferences throughout North America, and in Europe. Their art has been shown in Toronto, New York, Chicago, and is in the collection of the library of the National Gallery of Canada.