Exhibition dates: 11th September – 11th October 2013
Curator: Unknown
Tony Ray-Jones (British, 1941-1972) Lady’s Day c. 1967 Vintage Gelatin Silver Print 12 x 20cm (5 x 8 inches)
What a loss to the world when this photographer died aged just thirty. His eye was magnificent. He seems to have instinctively known how to capture the quintessential British at work, rest and play in all that societies class-ridden glory – the fag hanging out of the mouth in Lady’s Day (c. 1967) combining beautifully with the aura of the patterned dresses; the isolation of the figures and their stop-frame movement in Day at the Races (c. 1967), a wonderfully balanced composition caught in the moment; and the orchestral ensemble that is the cast of Bacup, Lancashire, 1968 (1968), each figure playing its part in the overall tension of the picture plane: the brothers at right in matching duffle coats, the boy walking forward down the incline with head thrown sideways balanced at rear by another boy with hands in pockets tossing his head into the wind. Magical.
Just to see this image, to visualise it and have the camera ready to capture its “nature”, its undeniable presence for that one split second, then to develop and find this image on a proof sheet, what joy this would have been for the artist. Equally illustrious is the feeling of Bournemouth, 1969 (1969) with the nuanced use of shadow and light, the occlusion of the figure behind the screen with the turn of the head, and the placement of the two white tea cups at right. Ray-Jones wasn’t afraid to place figures in the foreground of his compositions either as can be seen in Brighton Beach, 1967 (1967) to great effect, framing the mise en scène behind.
These photographs take me way back to my childhood in the 1960s in England, going to Butlin’s Clacton-on-Sea and Bournemouth for our family holidays. Even the name says it all: Clacton “on sea” as though they have to remind people visiting that they are actually at the sea. The photographs perfectly capture the mood of the country in this utilitarian era where holidays at a seaside resort were often dour affairs, punctuated by stony beaches, bad weather and regulated activities. The freedom of the 1970s had yet to arrive and us kids went whether we liked it or not: Mablethorpe, 1967 (1967) perfectly epitomises such an environment, with the long days of pleasure / torture stretching off into the distance much as the sea wall in Ray-Jones’ photo.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to James Hyman for allowing me to publish these magnificent photographs. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Tony Ray-Jones (British, 1941-1972) Day at the Races c. 1967 Vintage Gelatin Silver Print 13 x 20cm (5 x 8 inches)
Tony Ray-Jones (British, 1941-1972) A Day at Richmond Park c. 1967 Vintage Gelatin Silver Print 17.5 x 25.6cm (7 x 10 inches)
Tony Ray-Jones (British, 1941-1972) Chatham May Queen, 1968 1968 Vintage Gelatin Silver Print 17.5 x 26.2cm (7 x 10 inches)
Tony Ray-Jones (British, 1941-1972) Bacup, Lancashire, 1968 1968 Vintage Gelatin Silver Print 17.5 x 26.5cm (7 x 10 inches)
James Hyman is delighted to stage an exhibition of rare, vintage photographs by Tony Ray-Jones to coincide with the opening exhibition of the Science Museum Media Space, Only in England, Photographs by Tony Ray-Jones and Martin Parr, in September 2013.
Tony Ray-Jones had a short life. He died in 1972 aged just thirty. But the pictures that he left behind are some of the most powerful British photographs of the twentieth century. His work of the late 1960s and early 1970s documents English culture and identity and brilliantly captures this period in English public life. Inspired by what he learnt in America in the mid-1960s, from photographers such as Lee Friedlander and Joel Meyerowitz, Ray-Jones was keen to make ‘new’ photographs of English life, which did not read simply as documentary, but also as art objects. As he explained in Creative Camera in 1968: “the spirit and the mentality of the English, their habits, and the way they do things, partly through tradition and the nature of their environment and mentality.”
The acclaim that Ray-Jones received after his death, especially from other photographers, testifies to the respect of his elders and his contemporaries. Bill Brandt praised the “very pronounced style all of his own” and lamented that “his death, at such a young age, is a terrible loss to British photography.” Jacques Henri-Lartigue praised Tony Ray-Jones as a “fantaisiste”: “young, free and whimsical with, in addition, a very sound technique and a vision of fire that was full of humour, truth and a sense of poetry” and Paul Strand praised his “remarkable formal organisation” and declared: “I found the photographs of Tony Ray-Jones very outstanding. In them I find that rather rare concurrence when an artist clearly attaining mastery of his medium, also develops a remarkable way of looking at the life around him, with warmth and understanding.”
These tributes are to be found in the most important book of Tony Ray-Jones work, A Day Off. An English Journal, published in 1974. They are included in a beautiful essay in which Ainslie Ellis, one of the photographer’s earliest champions, addresses not only the photographs but also Ray-Jones’s photographic process. Ellis stresses that what mattered to Ray-Jones was not just taking the picture, but also the creative process of deciding which pictures on a contact strip to print, and then making a master-print, from which all subsequent prints would be matched. We are, therefore, delighted that this exhibition should include many of the pictures reproduced in this celebrated book and that it present exclusively vintage prints, which, in a number of identifiable cases, are the actual photographs that Tony Ray-Jones exhibited in his lifetime.
Often playful and sometimes despondent, what Ray-Jones produced was unlike anything which came before, and was the catalyst for a generation of New British Photographers.
Press release from the James Hyman website
Tony Ray-Jones (British, 1941-1972) Bournemouth, 1969 1969 Vintage Gelatin Silver Print 16 x 25cm (6 x 10 inches)
Tony Ray-Jones (British, 1941-1972) Brighton Beach, 1967 1967 Vintage Gelatin Silver Print 17.5 x 26.5cm (7 x 10 inches)
Tony Ray-Jones (British, 1941-1972) Mablethorpe, 1967 1967 Vintage Gelatin Silver Print 14 x 21cm (6 x 8 inches)
Tony Ray-Jones (British, 1941-1972) Waxworks, Eastbourne, 1968 1968 Vintage Gelatin Silver Print 14 x 21cm (6 x 8 inches)
Tony Ray-Jones (British, 1941-1972) Durham Miners’ Gala 1969 Vintage Gelatin Silver Print 14 x 22.5cm (6 x 9 inches)
Tony Ray-Jones (British, 1941-1972) Sunday Best c. 1967 Vintage Gelatin Silver Print 30.5 x 20cm (12 x 8 inches)
Tony Ray-Jones (British, 1941-1972) Blackpool, 1968 1968 Vintage Gelatin Silver Print 21 x 14.5cm (8.25 x 5.70 ins)
James Hyman Gallery 16 Savile Row London W1S 3PL Phone: 020 7494 3857
Exhibition dates: 9th June 9 2013 – 17th May, 2015
Curator: Tamar Garb
Sammy Baloji (Congolese, b. 1978) Untitled 7 2006 From Mémoires
This is the last in my trilogy of postings on exhibitions titled Distance and Desire which have featured African art from The Walther Collection, this time focusing on contemporary art.
It is quite instructive to compare this posting with the last, the exhibition My Country, I Still Call Australia Home: Contemporary Art from Black Australia at The Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA), Brisbane. I feel (a critical word) that there is a completely different atmosphere to most of this contemporary art when compared to the Australian iteration. Despite both groups surviving horrendous experiences and the ongoing memories of those acts, there is a lightness of spirit to most of the contemporary African art, a delightful irony, self deprecating humour, less backward looking sadness than evidenced in the Australian work.
Of course there are intense moments when contemporary artists mine (and that is an appropriate word, for many Africans worked in servitude in the mines during the Apartheid period) the colonial archive, such as Carrie Mae Weems blood red tondos, You Became a Scientific Profile / An Anthropological Debate / A Negroid Type / A Photographic Subject (1995-1996, below) but what is more in evidence here is a dramatic sense of fashion and the performative and playful manner in which contemporary African identities are explored coupled with a strength in the representation of these identities. These are strong, forthright individuals not hidden off camera or dressed up in European dreamings imagin(in)g utopian “what ifs”; not the obvious crosses on black chests or deleted, delineated faces made of gum blossoms – but vital, alive, present human beings.
While both groups of artists use traditional symbology to explore issues of identity and representation, the Australian version often seems dragged down by the portrayed dichotomy between past and present, traditional and contemporary / subversive, as though there must always be a reckoning, a longing, a sadness constantly reiterated in / with the past.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to The Walther Collection for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. All images Courtesy of The Walther Collection.
Part II: Contemporary Reconfigurations
Pieter Hugo (South African, b. 1976) Nandipha Mntambo, Cape Town 2012 From There’s a Place in Hell for Me and My Friends
Pieter Hugo’s There’s a Place in Hell for Me and My Friends is a series of close-up portraits of the artist and his friends, all of whom call South Africa home. Through a digital process of converting colour images to black and white while manipulating the colour channels, Hugo emphasises the pigment (melanin) in his sitters’ skins so they appear heavily marked by blemishes and sun damage. The resulting portraits are the antithesis of the airbrushed images that determine the canons of beauty in popular culture, and expose the contradictions of racial distinctions based on skin colour. As the critic Aaron Schuman writes, “although at first glance we may look ‘black’ or ‘white’, the components that remain ‘active’ beneath the surface consist of a much broader spectrum. What superficially appears to divide us is in fact something that we all share, and like these photographs, we are not merely black and white – we are red, yellow, brown, and so on; we are all, in fact, coloured.
Text from the Stevenson Gallery website [Online] Cited 01/10/2013. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Sabelo Mlangeni (South African, b. 1980) Outside King Mswati’s palace 2011 From Iimbali
Sabelo Mlangeni (South African, b. 1980) Imbali 2011 From Iimbali
David Goldblatt (South African, 1930-2018) Mineworkers in their hostel, Western Deep Levels, Carletonville 1970
Pieter Hugo (South African, b. 1976) Yasser Booley, Cape Town 2011 From There’s a Place in Hell for Me and My Friends
Pieter Hugo (South African, b. 1976) Pieter Hugo, Cape Town 2011 From There’s a Place in Hell for Me and My Friends
Pieter Hugo (South African, b. 1976) Themba Tshabalala, Cape Town 2011 From There’s a Place in Hell for Me and My Friends
Guy Tillim (South African, b. 1962) Mai Mai militia in training near Beni, eastern DRC, for immediate deployment with the APC (Armée Populaire du Congo), the army of the RCD-KIS-ML – Portraits I and II December 2002
Sabelo Mlangeni (South African, b. 1980) Lwazi Mtshali, “Bigboy” 2009 From Country Girls
Sabelo Mlangeni (South African, b. 1980) Xolani Ngayi, eStanela 2009 From Country Girls
Zanele Muholi (South African, b. 1972) Amogelang Senokwane, District Six, Cape Town 2009 From Faces and Phases
Zanele Muholi (South African, b. 1972) Sishipo Ndzuzo, Embekweni, Paarl 2009 From Faces and Phases
The Walther Collection is pleased to announce Part II of Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive, a three-part exhibition series curated by Tamar Garb. “Contemporary Reconfigurations” offers new perspectives on the African photographic archive, reimagining its diverse histories and changing meanings. The exhibition centres on photography and video by African and African American artists who engage critically with the archive through parody, appropriation, and reenactment.
Carrie Mae Weems introduces the themes of “Contemporary Reconfigurations” with her powerful series From Here I Saw What Happened And I Cried, a revision of nineteenth and twentieth-century anthropometric photographs of African Americans, overlaid with texts by the artist. Sammy Baloji, Candice Breitz, Zwelethu Mthethwa, and Zanele Muholi rethink the ethnographic archive in large-scale colour prints, while Samuel Fosso and Philip Kwame Apagya create exuberant studio portraiture.
Sabelo Mlangeni’s black and white photo-essay, Imbali, documents the reed dances of KwaZulu-Natal, showing the display of virgins vying to be chosen as brides. Pieter Hugo’s series There’s a Place in Hell for Me and My Friends examines ethnicity and skin tonalities through anthropological mug shots. Working in video, Berni Searle performs as a statuesque deity engaged in domestic labor in “Snow White,” and Andrew Putter gives an indigenous voice to the effigy of Marie van Riebeeck, wife of the first Dutch settler in the area known today as Cape Town, in “Secretly I Will Love You More.”
For this group of artists, a stereotype or ethnographic vision in one era may provide material for quotation, irreverent reworking, or satirical performance in another. Illustrating how the African archive – broadly understood as an accumulation of representations, images, and objects – figures in selected contemporary lens-based practices, the exhibition stages a dialogue between the distance of the past and the desiring gaze of the present.
Press release from The Walther Collection website
Zwelethu Mthethwa (South African, b. 1960) Untitled 2010 From The Brave Ones Courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery, New York
Samuel Fosso (Cameroonian, b. 1962) La femme américaine libérée des années 70 1997
Samuel Fosso (Cameroonian, b. 1962) Le Chef qui a vendu l’Afrique aux colons 1997
Zanele Muholi (South African, b. 1972) Miss D’vine I 2007
Zanele Muholi (South African, b. 1972) Miss D’vine II 2007
Candice Breitz (South African, b. 1972) Ghost Series #9 1994-1996
Candice Breitz (South African, b. 1972) Ghost Series #4 1994-1996
Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953) You Became a Scientific Profile / An Anthropological Debate / A Negroid Type / A Photographic Subject 1995-1996 From From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried Courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery, New York
Andrew Putter (South African, b. 1965) Secretly I Will Love You More (video still) 2007 Courtesy of the artist and Stevenson, Cape Town and Johannesburg
Sue Williamson (South African, b. 1941) Helen Joseph 1983 From A Few South Africans
Helen Joseph (South African, 1905-1992)
Helen Beatrice Joseph (née Fennell) (8 April 1905 – 25 December 1992) was a South African anti-apartheid activist.
Helen Joseph was born in Eastbourne near Midhurst West Sussex, England and graduated from King’s College London, in 1927. After working as a teacher in India for three years, Helen came to South Africa in 1931, where she met and married a dentist, Billie Joseph. In 1951 Helen took a job with the Garment Workers Union, led by Solly Sachs. She was a founder member of the Congress of Democrats, and one of the leaders who read out clauses of the Freedom Charter at the Congress of the People in Kliptown in 1955. Appalled by the plight of black women, she was pivotal in the formation of the Federation of South African Women and with the organisation’s leadership, spearheaded a march of 20,000 women to the Union Buildings in Pretoria to protest against pass laws on August 9, 1956. This day is still celebrated as South Africa’s Women’s Day.
She was a defendant at the 1956 Treason Trial. She was arrested on a charge of high treason in December 1956, then banned in 1957. The treason trial dragged on for four years but she was acquitted in 1961. In spite of her acquittal, in 13 October 1962, Helen became the first person to be placed under house arrest under the Sabotage Act that had just been introduced by the apartheid government. She narrowly escaped death more than once, surviving bullets shot through her bedroom and a bomb wired to her front gate. Her last banning order was lifted when she was 80 years old. Helen had no children of her own, but frequently stood in loco parentis for the children of comrades in prison or in exile. Among the children who spent time in her care were Winnie and Nelson Mandela’s daughters Zinzi and Zenani and Bram Fischer’s daughter Ilsa. Helen Joseph died on the 25 December 1992 at the age of 87.
Sue Williamson (South African, b. 1941) Miriam Makeba 1987 From A Few South Africans
Miriam Makeba (4 March 1932 – 9 November 2008), nicknamed Mama Africa, was a Grammy Award-winning South African singer and civil rights activist.
In the 1960s, she was the first artist from Africa to popularise African music around the world. She is best known for the song “Pata Pata”, first recorded in 1957 and released in the U.S. in 1967. She recorded and toured with many popular artists, such as Harry Belafonte, Paul Simon, and her former husband Hugh Masekela. Makeba campaigned against the South African system of apartheid. The South African government responded by revoking her passport in 1960 and her citizenship and right of return in 1963. As the apartheid system crumbled she returned home for the first time in 1990. Makeba died of a heart attack on 9 November 2008 after performing in a concert in Italy organised to support writer Roberto Saviano in his stand against the Camorra, a mafia-like organisation local to the region of Campania.
Curator: Bruce Johnson McLean, Curator of Indigenous Australian Art at QAGOMA
Tony Albert (Australia, Queensland b. 1981) Girramay people Sorry 2008 Found kitsch objects applied to vinyl letters The James C Sourris, AM, Collection. Purchased 2008 with funds from James C Sourris through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Collection: Queensland Art Gallery
R U SORRY?
Do you feel FORGIVEN?
What do I have to feel sorry for
I only arrived here yesterday
I FORGIVE you for all the SADNESS and SORROW that COLONISATION has CAUSED
You gutless wonder
GUILT, GUILTY, GUILTLESS, GUILELESS, GUTLESS
The persistence of memory – how the past lingers and subverts
MEMORY – inflicting more DAMAGE on the already DAMAGED
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the The Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Arthur Koo-ekka Pambegan Jr (Australian, Queensland 1936-2010) Wik-Mungkan people Flying Fox Story Place 2002-2003 Carved milkwood (Alstonia muellerana) with synthetic polymer paint and natural pigments Commissioned 2002 with funds from the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Grant Collection: Queensland Art Gallery
Ron Yunkaporta (Australian, Queensland b. 1956) Wik-Ngathan people Thuuth thaa’ munth (Law poles) 2002-2003 Cottontree wood (Hibiscus tiliaceus), ibis feathers, bush string with natural pigments Commissioned 2002 with funds from the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Grant Collection: Queensland Art Gallery
Jennifer Mye Jr. (Australian, Queensland b. 1984) Meriam Mir people Basket with short handles 2011 Woven polypropylene tape (blue with Australian flag motif) Purchased 2011 with funds from Thomas Bradley through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation
Ken Thaiday Sr (Australian, Queensland b. 1950) Meriam Mir people Symbol of the Torres Strait 2003 Plywood, synthetic polymer paint, feathers, black bamboo, plastic tubing, fishing line Purchased 2004 with funds from Corrs Chambers Westgarth through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Collection: Queensland Art Gallery
Dinny McDinny (Australian, Northern Territory c. 1927-2003) Marnbaliya people, Balyarrinji skin group Kalajangu – Rainbow Dreaming came through Marnbaliya Country 2003 Synthetic polymer paint on canvas Purchased 2004 Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Collection: Queensland Art Gallery
Gabori created a body of work, which expressed sensations of life and cultural memory in diaspora, and differed from other known forms of Aboriginal painting, which focused on story-telling. Most of Gabori’s works represent places on Bentinck Island of deep personal significance to the artist: her husband’s place, Dibirdibi Country, her father’s place, Thundi, her own Country, Mirdidingki, and the first outstation, Nyinyilki.
Gabori lived on Bentinck Island in accordance with custom, developing knowledge of Kaiadilt cartography and cosmology, until the entire population was removed to Mornington Island mission by European settlers in 1948.
“When I paint, I think about my country and where I have been travelling across that couontry. I paint from here (points to head-thinking about country) and here (points to breasts, collarbone and shoulder blades which is reference to body painting). I think abut my people the old people and what they told me, I think about jumangkarni (Dreamtime). Nobody taught me how to paint, I put down my own ideas, I saw these palces for my self, I went there with the old people. I paint jiji (sand hills), jumu (soak water), jila (spring), jiwari (rock hole), pamarr (hills and rock country), I think about mangarri (vegetable food) and kuyu (game) from my country and when I was there. Whe I paint I am thinking about law from a long time ago, I am thinking about the country, my country. When I first painted we didn’t get money, nothing. I like painting, its good, I get pamarr (word for rock, stone money) for it, I can buy my food, tyres, fix my car, I give some money to family and I keep some for me.”
~ Wakartu Cory Surprise
Ruby Tjangawa Williamson (Australian, South Australia b. 1940) Pitjantjatjara people Nita Williamson (Australian, South Australia b. 1963) Suzanne Armstrong (Australian, South Australia b. 1980) Pitjantjatjara people (Collaborating artists) Ngayuku ngura (My country) Puli murpu (Mountain range) 2012 Synthetic polymer paint on linen Purchased 2012 with funds from Margaret Mittelheuser, AM, and Cathryn Mittelheuser, AM, through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Collection: Queensland Art Gallery
Ruby Tjangawa Williamson is a senior law woman committed to fostering traditional culture. She began painting in 2000. Her distinctive works are acclaimed and she is regarded as one of Amata’s most significant artists. Williamson also weaves tjanpi (desert grass) baskets and makes punu (wood carvings) with pokerwork designs.
My Country, I Still Call Australia Home: Contemporary Art from Black Australia is the Gallery’s largest exhibition of contemporary art by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists to date. The exhibition examines the strengths of the Gallery’s holdings and explores three central themes – presenting Indigenous views of history (My history), responding to contemporary politics and experiences (My life), and illustrating connections to place (My country).
From paintings and sculptures about ancestral epicentres to photographs and moving-image works that interrogate and challenge the established history of Australia, to installations responding to political and social situations affecting all Australians, the thread that binds these artists is their collective desire to share their experiences and tell their stories.
“Drawing on three decades of research, collaboration and Collection development, My Country, I Still Call Australia Home highlights the connection Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists have with country as both ‘land’ and ‘nation’, and features over 300 works by 116 artists from every state and territory,” Mr Saines said.
“Curated by Bruce McLean, a Wirri / Birri-Gubba man with heritage from the central coast of Qoeensland and the Gallery’s Curator of Indigenous Australian Art, the exhibition gives voice to artists who investigate historical and contemporary political and social issues. Many of these issues and works are confronting and controversial, and we are proud of the role our Gallery plays as a forum for discussion, debate and education.”
Mr Saines said the exhibition was divided in to three broad thematic strands that explore how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists depict the stories of their communities and highlight contemporary Indigenous experiences in Australia.
Press release from the Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) website
Michael Cook’s works depict an ethereal dreamworld, a timeless place that traverses both the colonial and contemporary worlds and is sustained on ‘what ifs’ and hypotheticals. It is a place of Cook’s own modern Dreaming. His central question is quite simple: what if the British, instead of dismissing Aboriginal society, had taken a more open approach to their culture and knowledge systems? This all-Aboriginal world is a sort of utopia where questions can be posed and answered without the complication of race – there is no black and white, no right or wrong. The figures within them are both conquerors and conquered. Through the use of images of Aboriginal people, often in roles opposite to the stereotypical, Cook ensures that an Aboriginal voice is ever-present.
Fiona Foley (Australian, Queensland/New South Wales b. 1964) Badtjala people, Wondunna clan, Fraser Island The Oyster Fishermen #1 2011 Inkjet print on Hahnemühle paper Purchased 2012 Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Collection: Queensland Art Gallery
Vernon Ah Kee (Australian, Queensland b. 1967) Kuku Yalanji/Waanyi/Yidinyji/GuuguYimithirr people Tall Man (still) 2010 Four-channel digital video installation from DVD Purchased 2012 Queensland Art Gallery Collection: Queensland Art Gallery
Gordon Hookey (Australian, Queensland/New South Wales b. 1961) Waanyi people Blood on the wattle, blood on the palm 2009 Oil on linen The James C Sourris, AM, Collection Gift of James C Sourris, AM, through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation 2012 Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program Collection: Queensland Art Gallery
Michael Riley (Australian, New South Wales 1960-2004) Kamilaroi/Wiradjuri people Sacrifice (portfolio) (detail) 1993 Colour cibachrome photograph Purchased 2002 Collection: Queensland Art Gallery
Christian Thompson (Australian, Queensland/New South Wales/Victoria b. 1978) Bidjarra/Kunja people Black Gum 2 (from Australian Graffiti series) 2008 Type C photograph Purchased 2008 The Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Grant Collection: Queensland Art Gallery
The Queensland Art Gallery (QAG) and Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) are located 150 metres from each other, on the south bank of the Brisbane River. Entrance to both buildings is possible from Stanley Place, and the river front entrance to the Queensland Art Gallery is on Melbourne Street. The Galleries are within easy walking distance to the city centre and South Bank Parklands.
This is a patchy exhibition by Michael Corridore at Edmund Pearce Gallery.
The four small images from the initial foray into digital collage (the photograph above and the top three photographs below, all 2001) are the most striking and effective works in the exhibition. Lucid in their Duchampian layering and movement, these beautiful photographs most clearly express the conceptual ideas behind the collages. The four pieces literally stopped me in my tracks when I saw them in the gallery space. The colours are bold, the overlapping and movement refined and the effect on this viewer was profound, so intense was the visualisation of the work.
The new photographs possess a different order of being. Subtle and requiring greater contemplation there were only five images that impinged on my consciousness in the rest of the exhibition (the first five photographs after the press release below, all 2013). Even the best of them seem more an exercise in the formal qualities of digital collage rather than the élan vital of the earlier work. While Corridore re-interprets “what we see from differing perspectives and synthesise[s] those components of our observations and memory information into a two-dimensional image,” what he produces are images that are not that memorable. Interesting exercises, perhaps, in the topography of being, but not that memorable or emotive as images.
The rest of the new photographs simply did not work for me. Either there was not enough for this viewer to hang his hat on (visually speaking) or the image was so subtle and occluded behind the glass of the frame that the viewer gets no feeling, no presence from the image at all. (Of course, this is the perennial difficulty of framing dark or subtle work in a gallery environment, the ability of the viewer to actually see the work if glass or perspex is placed in front of it. Either you pin the work to the wall, or frame it without glass, or mount on aluminium – unfortunately all but the latter precludes the easy sale to customers who want an artwork ready to purchase off the gallery wall). Tangentially speaking, it is as if the train of thought of the artist has wandered as he seeks other pathways to creation, pathways that fail to interestingly develop the initial topic of conversation.
It is all very well to go off at a tangent (defined as a line, curve, or surface meeting another line, curve, or surface at a common point and sharing a common tangent line or tangent plane at that point; a sudden digression or change of course), but the meeting point between artist’s intentions and the viewer’s reception have to at some point possess some common ground of interest and understanding. As it stands, I will always, always remember Corridore’s initial ‘fictional realities’ for their intensity and beauty but the later work will seep from my mind as easily as thought placed it there.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Edmund Pearce Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Although a departure from the Angry Black Snake series and ongoing landscape work, Tangents reflects Michael’s deep artistic practise and an ability to experiment confidently with different techniques and styles. Such strong technique reflects this photographer’s mastery of his craft.
Michael Corridore’s primary interest in his fine-art and commercial photography has been in inventing new narratives. Whether it is spectators shrouded in the smoke of burning rubber, his unique portraits of the famous and not so famous, capturing empty urban everyday spaces, or external landscapes that are at times exceptionally beautiful or beautifully strange and mysterious, you cannot help but be drawn in by Corridore’s ‘fictional realities’.
In this new series, Tangents,Corridore uses references to Cubism and art history, redefining such ideas in a modern photographic context. This project was commenced in 2000 and now in 2013 it has been fully realised by the artist due to advances in digital capture technology. Vibrant and subtle colour can now be fully preserved in the collage process.
“In this series of collages, I have returned to a series that I had started in 2000. The original series resulted in about a dozen or so photographs. My first attempts at collage were through printing negatives onto black and white Lithographic film and layering multiple sheets of those films onto a light box and photographing the assembled sheets as collages.
From there I decided to experiment with digital capture of the original components and assemble the layers in photoshop so that I could preserve colour, which was lost in the lithographic printing process. This was my first foray into working with digital capture technology.
In the past year I began to explore this collage process again photographing various forms working with life models, mannequins and various household objects which offered me the opportunity to explore both malleable and solid forms and shapes that could be layered together in the assembled collages.
This exploration in collage stems from my interest in the Cubists approach to re-interpreting what we see from differing perspectives and synthesise those components of our observations and memory information into a two-dimensional image.”
Many thankx to the Santa Barbara Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Installation photographs of the exhibition Un/Natural Color at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art
This exhibition looks at the powerful relationship between colour and memory by considering photographs and the ways in which their unique colour palettes evoke specific moments of the historical past. From the pastel hues of 19th-century hand-painted portraits, to the vibrant colours of late-1930s Kodachrome transparencies, and the faded, shifted tones of snapshots from the 1970s, different kinds of colour reproduction are closely associated with the time periods that they most frequently represent. Each experiment in colour photography was originally meant to convey a sense of the natural hues of the world, but as our expectations for realistic representation have evolved, these earlier technologies for representing colour have also taken on new meaning. Today, the distinctive colours found in many vintage photographs speak as loudly to contemporary viewers about the period in which they were made as the content that they render visible. The exhibition suggests that the aesthetics of colour are closely related to the evolution of photographic technology over the past 100 years, and encourages visitors to rethink the significance of colour in contemporary photography through the lens of its multi-coloured past. This exhibition was organised by Kim Beil, an art historian who teaches at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Text from the Santa Barbara Museum of Art website
Jack Delano (American, 1914-1997) Barker at the Grounds of the Vermont State Fair, Rutland 1941, printed 1983 Dye transfer print Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Gift of the Bruce Berman and Nancy Goliger Berman Collection
Jack Delano (American, 1914-1997) At the Vermont State Fair, Rutland 1941, printed 1985 Dye transfer print Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Gift of the Bruce Berman and Nancy Goliger Berman Collection
William Eggleston (American, b. 1939) Farm truck, Memphis, Tennessee 1972 Dye-transfer print
Leroy Grannis (American, 1917-2011) Greg Noll Surf Team at Duke Kahanamoku Invitational, Sunset Beach 1966, printed 2005 C-print, ed. 1/9 Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Museum purchase with funds provided by Janet and Michael G. Wilson
LeRoy “Granny” Grannis (August 12, 1917 – February 3, 2011) was a veteran photographer. His portfolio of photography of surfing and related sea images from the 1960s enjoys a reputation that led The New York Times to dub him “the godfather of surfphotography.”
Un/Natural Color, an exhibition of colour photography from the Santa Barbara Museum of Art’s (SBMA) permanent collection, illustrates the history of colour photography since the 19th century and examines how the shifted or faded colours of old photographs can evoke moments in the historical past. Responding to the widespread use of nostalgic filters in popular photography and social media apps, such as Instagram and Twitter, this presentation enables visitors to see first-hand the historical processes that inspired the aesthetics of these digital manipulations. Despite their reputation for preserving memories and stopping time, photographs themselves are susceptible to material changes over time. These changes are often most visible in the radical colour shifts seen in old photographs, from the characteristic pink hue of snapshots from the 1950s to the yellowed borders and cool cast of prints from the 1970s. These changes also serve to complicate any simple belief in the ability of photography to faithfully represent the natural colours of the world.
While the exhibition includes a number of experimental early processes, including the chromolithographically-derived Photochrom process as well as an early Autochrome, the bulk of the imagery is drawn from the decades following the pivotal invention of Kodachrome, the first colour slide film, which was made commercially available in 1936. Because this film, as well as Kodacolor negative film (1942), was sent back to Eastman-Kodak for processing, photographers’ control over their imagery was greatly reduced, leading many art photographers to resist the transition to colour until decades later.
Un/Natural Color includes rarely-seen colour work by two notable documentary photographers of the Depression era, Jack Delano and Marion Post Wolcott. Both worked for the Farm Security Administration (a government program associated with the New Deal) and made limited use of colour film while on assignment documenting the effects of the Great Depression on rural American. Very few (if any) of these images were reproduced in the popular press, however, owing to the difficulty and cost of reproducing colour photographs, and to colour photography’s overwhelming association with commercial advertising at this time (as in Elmar Ludwig and Edmund Nägele’s image of the popular resort chain, Butlin’s).
The art establishment at large expressed little interest in colour photography until the mid-1970s, following the inclusion of colour work in two groundbreaking exhibitions: Stephen Shore’s vernacular landscapes in New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape at the George Eastman House in Rochester, NY (1975) and the solo exhibition of William Eggleston’s colour photography at the Museum of Modern Art, NY (1976). Both of these important photographers are represented in Un/Natural Color, as well as work by photographers exploring similar uses of colour to record everyday American scenes, including Jeff Brouws, Jim Dow, and Joel Meyerowitz.
Prior to the 1970s, some tentative forays into colour photography were made by art photographers primarily known for their work in black-and-white (notably Harry Callahan), but colour was more often derided for its populist associations and was typically allied with either snapshot photography or advertising and Hollywood. The negative connotation that colour photography had acquired over the years in the art world was critical to its adoption by photographers like Shore and Eggleston, who used it to challenge conventional expectations for photographic art and to force viewers to look with new eyes at the familiar world around them.
An image such as Greg Noll Surf Team at Duke Kahanamoku Invitational, Sunset Beach by Leroy Grannis highlights the powerful ability of colour photography to summon a unique historical moment. It is not just the classic haircut and short surf trunks sported by the surf legend, Greg Noll, that situates this photograph in the 1960s. Colour photography at this time typically recorded colour in a highly saturated, though fairly uniform manner, leaving some aspects of this photograph looking flat, rather than mimicking the subtle modulation of tone that is more commonly associated with the perception of depth by human vision.
The characteristic manner by which different colour processes represent the colours of the world, as well as the changes that such colour photographs suffer over time, are powerful indicators of the photograph’s history. When we look at colour photographs, all of these markers are brought to bear on our interpretation of their subjects, leading us to question: what is natural colour anyway?
Press release from the Santa Barbara Museum of Art website
Roman Freulich (American born Poland, 1898-1974) Gloria Swanson Nd Dye transfer print Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Gift of Judith Caditz, Allan M. Caditz, Ellen Joan Abramson and Norman Abramson
Roman Freulich (1898-1974) was a photographer in the United States known for his movie stills and glamour shots. He immigrated from Poland.
William Edwin Gledhill (Canadian, 1888-1976) Amanda Duff 1935 Dye transfer print Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Gift of Keith Gledhill
In 1907, the recently married Carolyn and Edwin Gledhill opened their first portrait studio on Chapala Street [Santa Barbara], one block from the luxurious oceanfront Potter Hotel, a destination for wealthy and prominent visitors at the time. During an era of extensive industrial growth and expansion for many burgeoning California cities, Santa Barbarans instead made the collective choice to focus on the city’s architecture, civic value and pageantry, making it an ideal haven for a diverse and growing community of artists and professionals. This unique social climate allowed the Gledhills access to the cultural elite, both visitors and residents alike, from which they chose the subjects of their portraits.
The Gledhills were fairly radical for their time, which was reflected both in their craft and in their personal life. At the time of their marriage, Edwin was only 19, while Carolyn was already in her 30s. This age disparity, which might be viewed as unorthodox today, was borderline scandalous in the early 20th century.
Carolyn Gledhill also showed a propensity for early feminism in her work. Before her untimely death in 1935, she would pose many of her female subjects in subtly defiant ways, reflecting the fundamental shift in the paradigm of women’s roles in America during the 1920s.
Following Carolyn’s death, Edwin continued his work as a photographer and preservationist of Santa Barbara’s historic resources; he even served for many years as the executive director of the Santa Barbara Historical Museum, helping build it into the cultural institution it is today.
Elmar Ludwig (German, b. 1935) and Edmund Nägele (German, b. 1942) The Indoor-Heated Pool, Butlin’s Mosney Nd
Elmar Ludwig (born 1935) is a German photographer. Ludwig was born in Halle in 1935. In 1961, John Hinde recruited two German photographers, Ludwig (as head of photographic department) and Edmund Nägele, and one British, David Noble to expand his eponymous postcard business. Ludwig travelled the world for John Hinde, before establishing his own Munich studio at the end of the 1960s, focused on architecture, product and advertising photography.
Edmund Nägele FRPS is a German photographer. Nägele started his career in a Munich advertising studio, before relocating to Ireland. In 1962, John Hinde recruited two German photographers, Elmar Ludwig and Edmund Nägele and one British, David Noble to expand his eponymous postcard business. John Hinde Ltd. sent Nägele to Cyprus around 1969, where he recorded the life and scenery of this beautiful island. Large format film was used to produce postcard subjects, with colour separation and other post-processing being done in Milan – this included removing telegraph poles, television aerials and adding bright colours to vehicles and peoples clothing. Nägele is remembered for his elaborately staged, colour-saturated images of Butlin’s holiday camps taken in the 1960s.
Exhibition dates: 9th April – 29th September, 2013
Co-curators: Virginia Heckert, curator in the Department of Photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum, and John Tain, assistant curator for Collection Development at the Getty Research Institute
“Yes, there’s a certain power to a photograph. The camera has a way of disorienting a person, if it wants to and, for me, when it disorients, it’s got real value.”
“My pictures are not that interesting, nor the subject matter. They are simply a collection of “facts”; my book is more like a collection of “Ready-mades”.”
Ed Ruscha
Cultural curiosities. A language of the street.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the J. Paul Getty Museum for allowing me to publish some of the photographs in the posting. The rest I sourced from the internet (and spent hours cleaning) to make a better posting about the exhibition. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
In Focus: Ed Ruscha, on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum, at the Getty Center, April 9 – September 29, 2013, offers a concentrated look at Ruscha’s deep engagement with Los Angeles’s vernacular architecture and the urban landscape. The exhibition is part of Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in Los Angeles, and opens simultaneously with Overdrive: L.A. Constructs the Future, 1940-1990, another exhibition presented at the Getty Museum as part of this regional initiative. The Overdrive exhibition also contains images by Ruscha.
One of the most influential American artists working today, Ed Ruscha moved to Los Angeles in 1956 and continues to live and work in the city, incorporating local architecture, streets, and even the city’s attitude into paintings, prints, drawings, and photographs that are known for their graphic directness. Beginning in the 1960s, he began publishing photo books and using photographs to document thoroughfares in the Los Angeles area.
“Throughout his career, photography has played an important role in Ruscha’s exploration of the vernacular architecture, urban landscape, and car culture of Los Angeles,” commented Timothy Potts, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. “By bringing together photographs from our collection and archival materials from the Getty Research Institute, we have been able to present a much richer understanding of Ruscha’s work and process.”
Highlighting an important joint acquisition of the artist’s work by the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Getty Research Institute in 2011, this exhibition features a selection of vintage prints related to Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963) and Some Los Angeles Apartments (1965), the original camera-ready maquettes for Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966), and contact sheets from this documentation of the Pacific Coast Highway (1974). The exhibition is co-curated by Virginia Heckert, curator in the Department of Photographs at the Getty Museum, and John Tain, assistant curator in Collection Development at the Getty Research Institute.
“Gas stations and apartment buildings are among the quintessentially Southern Californian motifs that feature in Ruscha’s work,” says Heckert. “The Getty Museum’s acquisition of photographs made in conjunction with his photo books of the early 1960s gives us the opportunity to share his enthusiasm for the logos, signage, and language that enliven even the most banal architecture.”
Adds Tain, “What’s exciting about the photography that came out of Ruscha’s documentation of the Sunset Strip is that it really altered the sense of what was possible with street photography, which had always been from the viewpoint of the pedestrian. Today we have the Google Maps roving fleet of camera cars, but Ruscha was doing this kind of photography more than forty years ago.”
The exhibition gives visitors the opportunity to appreciate Ruscha’s photographs not as halftone reproductions in modest, mass-produced books, but as prints of the period. One of the best known images included in the exhibition is Standard, Amarillo, Texas (1962), which Ruscha used as the basis for his iconic oil painting Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas (1963). Other unpublished images from the iconic series of gasoline stations will be on view as well. Also included are the original camera-ready maquettes and press pulls for Every Building on the Sunset Strip, Ruscha’s fourth and arguably best-known photo book. Due to light sensitive annotations, each panel will be on view for eight weeks. The complete set of three maquettes will be on view during the first week of the exhibition only, April 9-14.
On display for the first time is a selection of contact sheets of the Pacific Coast Highway, representing a small sample of this monumental undertaking. Ruscha’s documentation captures the dramatically different landscapes of both the view west toward the Pacific Ocean and the view east toward the cliffs. The Pacific Coast Highway is just one of several streets that Ruscha has photographed over the past four and a half decades, beginning in 1965 with Sunset Boulevard. These contact sheets are part of Ruscha’s Streets of Los Angeles archive, including thousands of photographic negatives, proof sheets, contact prints, and related documents and ephemera, which was acquired by the Getty Research Institute in 2011. Nearly sixty photographs were acquired by the Getty Museum at the same time, making the Getty a preeminent resource for understanding the role of photography in Ruscha’s practice.
In Focus: Ed Ruscha is co-organised by the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Getty Research Institute, and features 50 works from both collections.
Press release from the J. Paul Getty Museum website
“The pity is that Jerrems died so young for what this exhibition brought home to me was that here was an artist still defining, refining her subject matter.” Dr Marcus Bunyan
Exhibition dates: 6th July – 30th September, 2013
A National Gallery of Australia exhibition
Curator: Gael Newton and Anne O’Hehir
PLEASE NOTE: THIS POSTING CONTAINS ART PHOTOGRAPHS OF FEMALE NUDITY – IF YOU DO NOT LIKE PLEASE DO NOT LOOK, FAIR WARNING HAS BEEN GIVEN
Carol Jerrems (Australian, 1949-1980) A poem (installation view)
1970
Gelatin silver photographs, letterpress, installed at Monash Gallery of Art Photograph: Katie Tremschnig
The one and only…
This is a fascinating National Gallery of Australia exhibition about the work of Australian photographer Carol Jerrems at Monash Gallery of Art, Wheelers Hill – in part both memorable, intimate, informative, beautiful, uplifting and disappointing. Let me explain what I mean.
The first section of the exhibition is devoted to Jerrems student work, notably her experiments with overlapping bodies, depth of field, movement and the layering of space and time that can be seen in her vibrant photo boooks and concertina books (see installation photographs below), accompanied by her own poems. This early work, which I had never seen, provides a wonderful insight into how the later images came to be: the shooting down hallways into the light, the pairing and tripling of bodies one behind the other, and how she constructed narrative in her later set piece photographs. This is the informative part of the exhibition.
As the exhibition moves on to the main body of Jerrems work there, in all their glory, are the famous images: Evonne Goolagong, Melbourne (1973), Flying dog (1973), Vale Street (1975), Mark and Flappers (1975), Mark Lean: rape game (1975), Mozart Street (1975), Butterfly behind glass [Red Symons from Skyhooks] (1975), Lyn (1976), Lyn and the Buick (1976), Dusan and Esben, Cronulla (1977), the self portraits and the lads with their car down by the river bank. These are memorable, intimate images, at the top of tree in terms of their importance as some of the greatest images taken by any Australian photographer of all time. They are right up there with the very best and there is no denying this. But what else is there? Take away the top dozen images of any photographer and look at the next twenty images. Now, what do you see? In Jerrems case, the results (as evidenced by this exhibition) are a little disappointing. Of course, this is not unusual with any artist.
In her low key, diaristic documentary style, Jerrems focuses on life before her lens. She finds joy, intimacy, love, danger, transgression and rape; she portrays women and gay liberation, youth on the streets, sharpies and the Indigenous population. As Christopher Allen notes, sexuality and its darker side was never far from the surface in Jerrems work and there was a “mix of defiance, erotic assertiveness and vulnerability of that time… [an] intimate closeness to the subject and the direct and unmodified transcription of the world before her.”1 Her intelligent imaging of everyday subject matter “produced a body of photographs that symbolised the hopes and aspirations of the counter-culture in Australia in the 1970s,” but this investigation did not produce particularly memorable photographs. Outside the top group of images I am struggling to remember her other images.
But what we must remember is that this Australia was another time and place. Art photography books had only just arrived in Melbourne in 1970 and Jerrems was one of the first women to point her camera at other women (producing with Virginia Fraser the book A Book About Australian Women in 1974) and people of the revolution. These are socially important documents in terms of Australian (photographic) history. I believe that she said to herself – I know who I am, but I want to know what other people are like – and she transcribed how she was thinking about the world to the people around her through her photographs. Building on the legacy of artists like Henri Cartier-Bresson, André Kertész and Robert Frank, her photographs are like an after-image of some other place, some other Australia that is only forty five years ago but now seems eons away in time and space.
What we take for granted, in terms of sexual liberation, freedom of action and speech, she had to fight for. She had to fight for photographic, conceptual and technical knowledge to arm herself as an intelligent women (for that is what she was), so that she could image / imagine the world. She had to fight damn hard for these things – and then she upped the ante and pushed even harder, even further. These are dangerous photos, for women and gay men were vulnerable and threatened, marginalised and they were a target. Even in the act of photographing, her going into these places (brothels for example), she would have been a target. Does this make for memorable photographs? Not necessarily, and you can see this in the unevenness of the results of her investigation. But socially, these are very important images.
The pity is that she died so young for what this exhibition brought home to me was that here was an artist still defining, refining her subject matter. She never had to time to develop a mature style, a mature narrative as an artist (1975-1976 seems to be the high point as far as this exhibition goes). This is the great regret about the work of Carol Jerrems.
Yes, there is some mediocre work in this exhibition, stuff that really doesn’t work at all (such as the brothel photographs), experimental work, individual and collective images that really don’t impinge on your consciousness. But there are also the miraculous photographs (and for a young photographer she had a lot of those), the ones that stay with you forever. The right up there, knock you out of the ball park photographs and those you cannot simply take away from the world. They live on in the world forever.
Does Jerrems deserve to be promoted as a legend of Australian photography as some people are doing? Not on the evidence of this exhibition, but my god, those top dozen or so images are something truly special to behold. Their ‘presence’ alone – their physicality in the world, their impact on you as you stand before them – guarantees that Jerrems will forever remain in the very top echelons of Australian photographers of all time not as a legend, but as a women of incredible strength, intelligence, passion, determination and vision.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Allen, Christopher. “Between suburbia and radicalism,” in The Australian newspaper, October 20th, 2012 [Online] Cited 20/09/2013 no longer available online.
Many thankx to Mark Hislop for his help and Monash Gallery of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Carol Jerrems (Australian, 1949-1980) A poem 1970 Gelatin silver photographs, letterpress, installed at Monash Gallery of Art Photo: Katie Tremschnig
Carol Jerrems (Australian, 1949-1980) Jim Fields, a portrait (installation view) 1970 Gelatin silver photographs, letterpress, installed at Monash Gallery of Art Photo: Katie Tremschnig
Carol Jerrems (Australian, 1949-1980) The Royal Melbourne Show…1968, an essay (L) and Movement with Zara (R) 1968 Gelatin silver photographs, letterpress, installed at Monash Gallery of Art Photo: Katie Tremschnig
Living in the seventies
Carol Jerrems’s gritty, poetic and elusive images show people trying to find a new way of life and action in the 1970s. Her images have come to define a decade in Australia’s history. In contrast to an earlier generation of internationally renowned magazine photojournalists such as David Moore, the new generation did not seek commissioned commercial or magazine work and took instead a low key intimate approach with a diaristic personal-documentary style of imagery focussed on themselves and their own, mostly urban, environments. Jerrems put her camera where the counter culture suggested; women’s liberation, social inclusiveness for street youths and Indigenous people in the cities who were campaigning for justice and land rights.
Carol Jerrems was the first contemporary Australian woman photographer to have work acquired by a number of museums including the National Gallery of Australia. The National Gallery holds an extensive archive of Jerrems photographs and film work gifted by the artist’s mother Joy Jerrems in 1983. The current exhibition concentrates on prints signed or formally exhibited, by Carol Jerrems in her lifetime dating from 1968-1978. MGA is the only Victorian venue to host the National Gallery of Australia’s major new exhibition Carol Jerrems: photographic artist. This extraordinary exhibition tells the story of Jerrems’ complex and highly influential practice. Drawn from the National Gallery of Australia’s massive holdings of the artist’s work, Carol Jerrems: photographic artist features more than 100 works, most of which have not been seen in Melbourne since Jerrems lived here during the late ’60s and ’70s.
Jerrems was born in Melbourne in 1949 and studied photography at Prahran Technical College under Paul Cox and Athol Shmith. Although she practised as an artist for only a decade, Jerrems has acquired a celebrated place in the annals of Australian photography. Her reputation is based on her intensely compassionate, formally striking pictures, her intimate connection with the people involved in social movements of the day, and her role in the promotion of ‘art photography’ in this country.
Jerrems was one of several Australian women whose work during the 1970s challenged the dominant ideas of what a photographer was and how they worked. She adopted a collaborative approach to making photographs, often featuring friends and associates, and sought a photographic practice that would bring about social change. Her gritty, poetic and elusive images show people trying to find a new way of life in the 1970s. Her images have come to define Melbourne in a decade of great social and political upheaval.
Carol Jerrems: photographic artist pays tribute to this important period in recent Australian history, showing how Jerrems participated in and helped to define Melbourne’s subculture and style in the 1970s. MGA Director Shaune Lakin said Jerrems’ vision would particularly resonate with Melbourne audiences, especially as her vision was revealed across the full breadth of her work. “Carol Jerrems: photographic artist is a perfect story for MGA to tell, as it is also the story of Melbourne in the 1970s. Jerrems captured Melbourne’s sub-cultures – sharpies, mods, hippies, feminists and gay liberationists – with powerful images that engage the viewer intimately with her subjects.”
As Dr Lakin notes, this is a rare chance to see the works Jerrems intended for exhibition: “Carol Jerrems: photographic artist concentrates on prints signed or formally exhibited by Jerrems in her lifetime, most returning to Melbourne for the first time. In addition to many of the images for which Jerrems is rightly famous, visitors to MGA can see Jerrems’ early work, including her extraordinary concertina books and other photo books,” Lakin said.”
Press release from the Monash Gallery of Art website
From the outset, Jerrems was interested in the expressive possibilities of the photographic medium, declaring that she was ‘an artist whose tool of expression is the camera’. She concentrated on photographing people; her subjects included her students, and her friends and acquaintances. Her first photographs were documentary in style, but by the mid-1970s the scenes she photographed were often contrived. She used a non-exploitative approach, based on the consent of her subjects. For Jerrems, photography had a crucial social role: ‘the society is sick and I must help change it’. Her photographs were a means of ‘bringing people together’ and offered affirmative views of certain aspects of contemporary life. With Virginia Fraser, she published A Book About Australian Women (Melbourne, 1974), to which she contributed the photographs…
Although one critic regarded her work as uneven – ‘she took a casual approach’ – Jerrems’s talents as a photographer were widely recognised. With her camera ‘firmly pointed at the heart of things’, she produced a body of photographs that symbolised the hopes and aspirations of the counter-culture in Australia in the 1970s.
Exhibition dates: 27th August – 21st September, 2013
Curator: Marcus Bunyan
Andrew Follows (Australian, d. 2019) Number 31, Eltham 2013 Digital photograph on archival cotton rag 130 cm x 86.5cm
Only 2 days to go before the ending of Andrew Follows’ exhibition Density at Anita Traverso Gallery, 7 Albert Street Richmond.
You have to see these images in person, they are impressively immersive!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
PS. Preview all the images in the exhibition and read the catalogue essay at this previous posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Curators: Daniel Birnbaum, Lena Essling, Gunnar B. Kvaran, and Hanne Beate Ueland in collaboration with the artist
Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954) Untitled #92 1981 Chromogenic colour print 61 x 121.9cm The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo
Like a mouthful of cinders.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Astrup Fearnley Museet for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954) Untitled #167 1985 Chromogenic colour print 150 x 225cm Astrup Fearnley Collection
Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954) Untitled Film Still #32 1979 Gelatin silver print 69.5 x 87.2cm Astrup Fearnley Collection
Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954) Untitled #150 1985 Chromogenic colour print 121 x 163.8cm Collection of Cynthia and Abe Steinberger
Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954) Untitled Film Still #56 1980 Gelatin silver print 15.5 x 22.8cm Moderna Museet Donation from The American Friends of the Moderna Museet, Inc., 2010
Cindy Sherman (born 1954) is one of the leading and most influential artists of our time. She belongs to a generation of postmodern artists who redefined the photograph and its place in an ever more visually oriented culture. Taking female roles in photographic representations as her starting point, Sherman creates recognisable pictures that mirror the human condition in its many nuances. Sherman’s pictures became key works in a time of turbulence for the very concept of art, and continue to challenge concepts of representation, identity and portrait.
Cindy Sherman’s allegorical pictures reflect our own conception of the world and open up for new interpretations of familiar phenomena. She uses herself as a model and equally portrays film stars and pin-up girls, as well as abnormal monsters from fantasy worlds. Sherman’s assertive use of masks, wigs and prosthetics has a disturbing effect, which is further reinforced in pictures where the human presence is gradually reduced in favour of posed dolls or traces of waste and decay.
The exhibition Cindy Sherman – Untitled Horrors has been composed to emphasise the disturbing, grotesque and disquieting sides of Sherman’s pictures. These are aspects that are visible in her exploration of well-established photographic genres such as film stills, fashion photography or classic portraits, as well as in series with titles such as Fairy Tales, Disasters, Sex Pictures, Civil War and Horror & Surrealist. This exhibition seeks to highlight these key aspects in her artistry and to examine their relevance through a dedicated selection of works from the beginning of her career in the mid-1970s up to the present day.
In conjunction with the exhibition, a richly illustrated catalogue is being published in cooperation with art publishers Hatje Cantz Verlag. The idea behind the catalogue is to explore and examine the more disquieting sides of Sherman’s art by inviting contributions from authors who have touched on similar themes in their own works. Contributors are well-known artists, dramatists and authors including Lars Norén, Miranda July, Sibylle Berg, Sjón, Sara Stridsberg, Karl Ove Knausgård and Kathy Acker.
Press release from the Astrup Fearnley Museet website
Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954) Untitled #402 2000 Chromogenic colour print 88 x 60cm Astrup Fearnley Samlingen / Collection
Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954) Untitled #132 1984 Chromogenic colour print 176.3 x 119.2cm Kunsthaus Zürich
Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954) Untitled #199-A 1989 Chromogenic colour print 63.3 x 45.7cm Astrup Fearnley Collection
Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954) Untitled #152 1985 Chromogenic colour print 184.2 x 125.4cm Astrup Fearnley Samlingen/ Collection
Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954) Untitled #470 2008 Chromogenic colour print 216.5 x 147.5cm Acquired with founding from The American Friends of the Moderna Museet Inc.,
Exhibition dates: 23rd June – 22nd September, 2013
Curator: Siri Engberg
Daniel Douke (American, b. 1943) Ace
1979
Acrylic on masonite
8 x 8 x 12 1/4 in.
Courtesy Minnesota Museum of American Art, Saint Paul
Life (like).
“For the French theorist Jean Baudrillard, this consciousness of construction finds its most powerful expression in the concept of hyperreality. To appreciate Baudrillard’s view, recall the treatment of literary deconstruction… Deconstruction theorists propose that words gain their meaning through their reference to other words; literary works gain their significance by the way they are related to other writings. Thus language does not derive its character from reality, but from other language. Now consider the media – newspapers, television, the movies, radio. For Baudrillard, media portrayals of the world are not driven by the way the world “is,” but by the steadily emerging histories of portrayal itself. As these histories unfold, each new lamination is influenced by the preceding, accounts are layered upon accounts, and reality is transformed into hyperreality. For example, Baudrillard asks, what is the reality of the “Holocaust”? One cannot deny that certain events took place, but as time goes on these events become subject to myriad re-presentations. Diaries become subject to redefinition by television and movies; biographies influence the writing of historical novels; narrated history is transformed into plays, and each “telling” lays the experiential groundwork for subsequent retellings. Realities accumulate, accentuate, interpenetrate, and ultimately create the world of hyperreality – itself in continuous evolution into the future. We feel we possess an intimate acquaintance of the events in themselves; they are sharply etched in our consciousness. For Baudrillard, however, this consciousness moves increasingly toward hyperreality.
And thus the culture opens to the possibility of selves as artifacts of hyperreality. As political events, health and illness, and world history slip from the realm of the concrete into the domain of representation, so a commitment to obdurate selves becomes increasingly difficult to maintain. What, after all, is the reality of our motives, intentions, thoughts, attitudes, and the like? …
As we find, the current texts of the self are built upon those of preceding eras, and they in turn upon more distant forms of discourse. In the end we have no way of “getting down to the self as it is.” And thus we edge toward the more unsettling question: On what grounds can we assume that beneath the layers of accumulated understandings there is, in fact, an obdurate “self” to be located? The object of understanding has been absorbed into the world of representations.”
Gergen, Kenneth. The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life. New York: Harper Collins, 1991, pp. 121-122.
Many thankx to The Blanton Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the artwork in this posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the art.
Vija Celmins (Latvian American, b. 1938) Eraser 1967 Acrylic on balsa wood 6 5/8 x 20 x 3 1/8 in. Collection Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA Gift of Avco Financial Services, Newport Beach
Maurizio Cattelan (Italian, b. 1960) Untitled 2001 Stainless steel, composition wood, electric motor, electric light, electric bell, computer 23 1/2 x 33 5/8 x 18 5/8 in. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York
Keith Edmier (American, b. 1967) Bremen Towne 2008 Installation dimensions variable Courtesy of the artist and Friedrich Petzel Gallery
Bremen Towne was an idea I’d been thinking about prior to [my 2008] show at Bard College. It had been floating in my head for a number of years based on the sales brochure of my parents’ home I had obtained around 1999 off of eBay. It was just one of these things I had around… I didn’t really have the idea of constructing this house back then… As it turned out, the interior dimensions of my parents’ home from the original blueprints fit directly into one of the galleries at the museum. At that point I started considering it more as an art object, or as a sculpture more than an installation… The main visual references were family photographs, mostly taken during critical events or holidays or birthday parties. My process involved going through the photo album – everything. They were all pictures of people posing, so I started looking at the spaces [in the background]… I ended up buying the whole decade of both Sears and JCPenney catalogues up until that time, the early ’70s. Through that I was able to identify some products based on visual descriptions or in the family photographs… I initially went to a place that has all kinds of wallpapers and floorings from other periods, used a lot for movies and things like that. I heard they had thousands of wallpapers. It turned out I couldn’t find the exact wallpaper that was in the house. I guess at that point I started thinking it was more interesting for me to remake it, and to remake it more or less new. I wanted to represent the time element, the moment before the day of the family moving into the new house. It wasn’t supposed to look lived in.
I think I was initially interested in doing that to have some kind of separation from taking a real object that was loaded with personal history or some sentimental thing. It was a way of moving from a subjective to an objective position… [I was interested] in just thinking about the whole interior of the house itself as a cast, or this negative space. I thought about how the house is essentially the space that shapes us, that shapes oneself… I think that my reason to make it, or to make almost anything, went beyond just the visual aspects of it, or the idea of re-creating an illusion of the thing. I’ve always been more interested in a certain level of representation or pictorial literalness… I like words or descriptions like “actual” or “actual scale.” I like the idea of “what is real?”
The exhibition Lifelike, on view at the Blanton Museum of Art at The University of Texas at Austin June 23 to September 22, 2013, invites a close examination of artworks based on commonplace objects and situations, which are startlingly realistic, but often made of unusual materials in unexpected sizes.
Organised by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, this international, multigenerational group exhibition features 75 works from the 1960s to the present by leading figures in contemporary art, such as Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, James Casebere, Vija Celmins, Keith Edmier, Robert Gober, Ron Mueck, Mungo Thomson, and Ai Weiwei, and illuminates artists’ enduring fascination with realism.
Avoiding the flashiness embraced by 1960s Pop Artists and the slick urban scenes introduced at that time by the Photorealists, the contemporary artists in Lifelike investigate often overlooked items and moments as subject matter: a paper bag, an eraser, an apple core, a waiting roo, an afternoon nap. Favouring a handmade, labour intensive practice rather than technological enhancements, the works in the exhibition – including painting, sculpture, photography, drawing and video – transform the seemingly ordinary into something beguiling, loaded with narrative and metaphor.
The exhibition explores the many ways artists have pursued realism through a range of media. Some artists featured, such as Vija Celmins, Chuck Close, and Peter Rostovsky, paint from photographs, creating works that exhibit an astonishing degree of likeness and detail. Others work in sculpture often fashioning objects from materials that belie the pedestrian nature of the subject – Ai Weiwei’s jar of hundreds of sunflower seeds, hand painted on to cast porcelain, or Tom Friedman’s bee, made out of clay, plastic, and paint. In photography, artists including James Casebere and Isaac Layman play with the hyperreal, through fabricated scenes or clever layering of images. In video, artists including Thomas Demand and Jeon Joonho create moving images that at first seem familiar, but deceive us through sly use of animation.
Conspicuously absent in most of the works in Lifelike is a reliance on technological intervention. Instead, in seemingly inverse proportion to the ease of producing goods for the marketplace, many artists are slowing and complicating their own working methods, remaking banal things into objects of fixation and desire: Catherine Murphy’s details of textured fabric on the seat of a chair, or Ron Mueck’s strikingly “real” sculpture – down to the last hair and pore – of human subjects. Frequently these artists work from photographs, but just as often, their inspiration is the observed world, and the notion that a tangible, perhaps ephemeral object or moment can somehow be brought back to life æ reinterpreted through the artist’s hand as re-made readymades.
To address the nuances of this subject, the exhibition presents several key conceptual sections:
Common Objects gathers a group of late 1960s and early 1970s works that borrowed strategies from Pop, but rejected that movement’s brand-name emphasis in favour of conceptual, more process-oriented approaches to subject matter.
Another section presents the notion of The Uncanny, which features work by a generation of artists in the 1980s and 1990s who inflected realism with a psychologically-laden, surreal sensibility, such as Robert Gober’s child-sized chair and flower-covered box of tissues, resting mysteriously atop a floor drain; or Charles Ray’s disarming photograph of himself as a mannequin.
A third section entitled Realism into Abstraction presents a range of works by artists such as Peter Rostovsky, Catherine Murphy and Tauba Auerbach, in which lushly painted surfaces such as velvet curtains, the seat of a chair, and other ordinary items are cropped in such a way that they resemble abstract paintings, their original sources difficult to discern.
Handmade Sleight of Hand, the fourth section, presents work by artists who make objects that are indistinguishable from their real-life counterparts, but made with the traditional techniques of painting, sculpture, or drawing. Highlights include Jud Nelson’s trash bag carved from Carrara marble and Susan Collis’s checkered plastic shopping bag painstakingly rendered in ballpoint pen on paper.
A fifth section, Special Effects: The Real as Spectacle, presents artists making work that engages an instant response – be it astonishment, fear, confusion, or delight – through their surprising size or unusual installation.
Press release from The Blanton Museum of Art website
Peter Rostovsky (Russian, b. 1970) Curtain 2010 Oil on linen 72 x 48 in. Courtesy of the artist
What does it mean in Warholian fashion to “want to be a machine,” to long for a kind of inhumanity that has to be constantly performed and repeated? Is this not a radical disavowal of an all too human vulnerability? Can we not read in the mechanical appeals of photorealism a kind of excessive sentimentality, a naïve expressionism that uses the camera and the photograph as a shield against trauma?
And likewise in expressionism’s hyperbolic restatement of its humanity, is there not a silent concession to its opposite, a founding anxiety about inauthenticity, a mortal dread regarding the total triumph of simulation and technology?
However, it is important to stress that these are unfulfilled desires. No photorealist painting completely fools the viewer into the fact that it is machine-made; it entertains the fantasy, much like electronic music. And each autonomous artwork is only a temporary escape, a utopian space, “an orchid in the land of technology,” to borrow a phrase that Walter Benjamin applied to the illusion of reality in film.
What these two positions in fact represent are two negative theologies that stand as sentinels, forever pointing to and away from a traumatically unresolved subject position – a position of the never sufficiently technological, and the never completely human. They are both Romantic positions and should be read as such: as positions of longing and disavowal, not of identity.
Why would this be important to emphasise? Because it answers the familiar question asked to every painter painting photographs. It’s not about the ends, it’s about the means. It’s about the performance of painting that re-states the position, not the photo-like product that it yields. In other words, it’s about trying and failing to be a machine. Therein resides the futility and poetic nature of the practice. The failure marks the fragility and evanescence of the subject negatively, knowing that the alternative is to misname, to misrepresent, to conjure the opposite. This poetic is more latent, and seldom acknowledged in art that aspires toward indifference and inhumanity, but I hope that I have shown that every tin man has a heart, just like every photorealist hides an abstract painter.
Ron Mueck (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled (Seated Woman) 1999 Silicone, acrylic, polyurethane foam and fabric 25 1/4 x 17 x 16 1/2 in. Collection of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
![Ed Ruscha (American, b. 1937) '708 S. Barrington Ave. [The Dolphin]' 1965](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/708-s-barrington-ave-the-dolphin-1965-web.jpg "Ed Ruscha (American, b. 1937) '708 S. Barrington Ave. [The Dolphin]' 1965")
![Carol Jerrems (Australian, 1949-1980) 'Butterfly behind glass [Red Symons from Skyhooks]' 1975](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/butterfly_174882_web.jpg "Carol Jerrems (Australian, 1949-1980) 'Butterfly behind glass [Red Symons from Skyhooks]' 1975")
![Carol Jerrems (Australian, 1949-1980) 'Performers on stage,' Hair', Metro Theatre Kings Cross, Sydney, January 1970 [Jim Sharman Director cast included Reg Livermore]' 1970](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/jerrems_performers-on-stage-hair-web.jpg "Carol Jerrems (Australian, 1949-1980) 'Performers on stage,' Hair', Metro Theatre Kings Cross, Sydney, January 1970 [Jim Sharman Director cast included Reg Livermore]' 1970")
Art Blart _ art and cultural memory archive 
You must be logged in to post a comment.