Exhibition dates: 13th November 2010 – 23rd January 2011
Many thankx to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Sally Mann (American, b. 1951) Jessie #34 2004 Gelatin Silver enlargement print from 8 x 10 in. collodion wet-plate negative, with Soluvar matte varnish mixed with diatomaceous earth
Sally Mann (American, b. 1951) Untitled (Still Life) 2006 Ambrotype (unique collodion wet-plate positive on black glass), with sandarac varnish (15 x 13 in)
Sally Mann (American, b. 1951) Untitled 1983 Polaroid (8 x 10 in)
Sally Mann (American, b. 1951) Untitled 2000-2001 Gelatin silver enlargement prints from 8 x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4cm) collodion wet-plate negatives, with Soluvar matte varnish mixed with diatomaceous earth
Sally Mann (American, b. 1951) Untitled #4, Antietam 2001 Gelatin silver enlargement print from 8 x 10 in. collodion wet-plate
One of the first major presentations in the United States of the bold work of contemporary photographer Sally Mann opened at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts website (VMFA) on November 13, 2010. Exclusive to Richmond, the exhibition will continue until January 23, 2011.
Focusing on the theme of the body, the exhibition will revolve around several entirely new series while also incorporating little-known early work. Mann is admired for her passionate use of photography to address issues of love and loss, expressed in images of her children and southern landscapes. Her recent work uses obsolete photographic methods and nearly abstract images to push the limits of her medium and to dig deeper into themes of mortality and vulnerability. The images include several powerful series of self-portraits – an entirely new subject in her work – and figure studies of her husband. Some of the works in the exhibition include nudity and other graphic material. Viewer and parental discretion is advised.
“Sally Mann is among the top tier of photographers today. Although she is widely exhibited, we are fortunate to be one of the first U.S. museums to produce a major exhibition of her work,” says John Ravenal, the exhibition curator and Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. “The fearlessness, power and deeply emotional themes of her art are both captivating and unforgettable. We are pleased to exhibit one of Virginia’s, and the nation’s, finest artists.”
Self-examination, ageing, death, and decay are some of the subjects of the exhibition, and these are balanced by themes of beauty, love, trust, and the hopefulness of youth. Among the works are portraits of Mann’s husband, who suffers from a degenerative muscle disease. These are juxtaposed with colourful images of her children, forming a poignant comparison between youthful evanescence and the expressive capacity of the mature adult body.
Other works offer additional perspectives on the themes of ageing and mortality. Made during a trip to the University of Tennessee Forensic Anthropology Center, Mann’s “Body Farm” images explore her fascination with the thin line between animate and inanimate, form and matter. Multi-part self-portraits represent Mann’s first extended exploration of her own face as a subject. Two self-portrait pieces consist of multiple unique photographs printed on black glass – a format known as ambrotypes – arranged in monumental grids of Mann’s likeness.
“The focus on the body in the exhibition will offer a profound meditation on human experience,” continues Ravenal. “The sheer beauty, formal sophistication, and expressive power of the work is likely to appeal to art world and general audiences alike.”
For her landscapes, Mann developed the method she continues to use today, involving an antique large-format view camera and the laborious process of collodion wet-plate. This method, invented in the 1850s, uses sticky ether-based collodion poured on glass, which must be exposed and developed in a matter of minutes before it dries. Unlike her nineteenth-century predecessors, who strove for perfection, Mann embraces accident. Her approach produces spots, streaks, and scars, along with piercing focus in some areas and evaporation of the image in others. These distortions – “honest” artefacts of the process – add a profoundly emotional quality to Mann’s images.
Mann’s recent work continues to use this technique, but returns to the body as a principle subject after a decade of landscapes. Though the body has been an essential focus in Mann’s work from the beginning, this is the first time an exhibition and publication have explored it as a coherent theme.
Born in 1951, Sally Mann has played a leading role in contemporary photography for the past 25 years. Her career began in the 1970s and fully matured in the Culture Wars of the early 1990s, when photographs of her children became embroiled in national debates about family values. In the mid-1990s, Mann turned her attention to large-scale landscapes, specifically the evocative terrain of the South, where she was born, raised and continues to live. Her landscape work raised questions about history, memory and nostalgia, and also embraced a romantic beauty that proved as troubling to some critics as the sensual images of her children had to others. By the early 2000s, she had returned to figurative subjects, adding images of her husband and herself to her work.
Text from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts website
Sally Mann (American, b. 1951) Untitled (Self Portraits) 2006-2007 Ambrotypes (unique collodion wet-plate positives on black glass) with sandarac varnish
Sally Mann (American, b. 1951) Untitled (Self Portraits) (detail) 2006-2007 Ambrotypes (unique collodion wet-plate positives on black glass) with sandarac varnish
Sally Mann (American, b. 1951) Untitled (Self Portraits) (detail) 2006-2007 Ambrotypes (unique collodion wet-plate positives on black glass) with sandarac varnish
Sally Mann (American, b. 1951) Untitled (Self Portraits) (detail) 2006-2007 Ambrotypes (unique collodion wet-plate positives on black glass) with sandarac varnish
Sally Mann (American, b. 1951) Untitled 2007-2008 Ambrotypes (unique collodion wet-plate positives on black glass), with sandarac varnish
Sally Mann (American, b. 1951) Ponder Heart 2009 Gelatin silver contact print from 15 x 13 1/2-in. collodion wet-plate negative
Sally Mann (American, b. 1951) Hephaestus 2008 Gelatin silver contact print from 15 x 13 1/2 –in. collodion wet-plate negative
Sally Mann (American, b. 1951) Was Ever Love 2009 Gelatin silver contact print from 15 x 13 1/2 –in. collodion wet-plate negative
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts 200 N. Boulevard Richmond, Virginia USA 23220-4007
Here’s my pick of the eleven best exhibitions in Melbourne for 2010 that featured on the Art Blart: art and cultural memory archive (in no particular order). Enjoy!
Marcus
1/ Jenny Holzer at The Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA)
Jenny Holzer (American, b. 1950) Right Hand (Palm Rolled) 2007 Oil on linen 80 x 62 in (203.2 x 157.5cm) Text: U.S. government document
The reason that you must visit this exhibition is the last body of work. Working with declassified documents that relate to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan Holzer’s Redaction paintings address the elemental force that is man’s (in)humanity to man (in the study of literature, redaction is a form of editing in which multiple source texts are combined (redacted) and subjected to minor alteration to make them into a single work) … I left the exhibition feeling shell-shocked after experiencing intimacy with an evil that leaves few traces. In the consciences of the perpetrators? In the hearts of the living! Oh, how I wish to see the day when the human race will truly evolve beyond. We live in hope and the work of Jenny Holzer reminds us to be vigilant, to speak out, to have courage in the face of the unconscionable.
2/ ‘Pondlurking’ by Tom Moore at Helen Gory Galerie, Prahran
This exhibition produced in me an elation, a sense of exalted happiness, a smile on my dial that was with me the rest of the day. The installation features elegantly naive cardboard cityscape dioramas teeming with wondrous, whimsical mythological animals that traverse pond and undulating road. This bestiary of animals, minerals and vegetables (bestiaries were made popular in the Middle Ages in illustrated volumes that described various animals, birds and even rocks) is totally delightful … What really stands out is the presence of these objects, their joyousness. The technical and conceptual never get in the way of good art. The Surrealist imagining of a new world order (the destruction of traditional taxonomies) takes place while balanced on one foot. The morphogenesis of these creatures, as they build one upon another, turns the world upside down … Through their metamorphosed presence in a carnivalesque world that is both weird and the wonderful, Moore’s creatures invite us to look at ourselves and our landscape more kindly, more openly and with a greater generosity of spirit.
Tom Moore (Australian, b. 1971) Birdboat with passenger with a vengeance (left) and Robot Island (right) 2010 and 2009
3/ ‘Safety Zone’ by John Young at Anna Schwartz Gallery
What can one say about work that is so confronting, poignant and beautiful – except to say that it is almost unbearable to look at this work without being emotionally charged, to wonder at the vicissitudes of human life, of events beyond one’s control.
The exhibition tells the story of the massacre of 300,000 people in the city of Nanjing in Jiangsu, China by Japanese troops in December, 1937 in what was to become known as the Nanjing Massacre. It also tells the story of a group of foreigners led by German businessman John Rabe and American missionary Minnie Vautrin who set up a “safety zone” to protect the lives of at least 250,000 Chinese citizens. The work is conceptually and aesthetically well resolved, the layering within the work creating a holistic narrative that engulfs and enfolds the viewer – holding them in the shock of brutality, the poignancy of poetry and the (non)sublimation of the human spirit to the will of others.
Simply, this is the best exhibition that I have seen in Melbourne so far this year.
John Young (Australian, b. 1956) Flower Market (Nanjing 1936) #1 2010 digital print and oil on Belgian linen 240 x 331cm image courtesy of the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery
John Young (Australian, b. 1956) Safety Zone 2010 60 works, digital prints on photographic paper and chalk on blackboard-painted archival cotton paper Installation shot, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne Image courtesy of the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery
Kiko Gianocca (Swiss, b. 1974) Man & dog Found image, resin, silver 2009
A beautiful exhibition of objects by Swiss/Italian artist Kiko Gianocca at Gallery Funaki, Melbourne, one full of delicate resonances and remembrances.
Glass vessels with internal funnels filled with the gold detritus of disassembled objects, found pendants: Horse, Anchor, Four leaf clover, Swan, Hammer & sickle … Brooches of gloss and matt black resin plates. On the reverse images exposed like a photographic plate, found images solidified in resin.
The front: the depths of the universe, navigating the dazzling darkness The back: memories, forgotten, then remade, worn like a secret against the beating chest. Only the wearer knows!
As Kiki Gianocca asks, “I am not sure if I grasp the memories that sometimes come to mind. I start to think they hold me instead of me holding them.”
The photographs invite us to share not only the mapping of the surface of the skin and the mapping of place and identity but the sharing of inner light, the light of the imaginary as well – and in this observation the images become unstable, open to reinterpretation. The distance between viewer and subject is transcended through an innate understanding of inner and outer light. The photographs seduce, meaning, literally, to be led astray … I found myself looking at the photographs again and again for small nuances, the detail of hairs on the head, the imagining of what the person was thinking about with their eyes closed: their future, their fears, their hopes, the ‘active imagination as a means to visualise sustainable futures’ (Orr, 2010) …
In the imagination of the darkness that lies behind these children’s closed eyes is the commonality of all places, a shared humanity of memory, of dreams. These photographs testify to our presence and ask us to decide how we feel about our life, our place and the relation to that (un)placeness where we must all, eventually, return.
Jill Orr (Australian, b. 1952) Jacinta 2009
6/ ‘AND THEN…’ by Ian Burns at Anna Schwartz Gallery
These are such fun assemblages, the created mis en scenes so magical and hilarious, guffaw inducing even, that they are entirely delightful.
There is so much to like here – the inventiveness, the freshness of the work, the insight into the use of images in contemporary culture. Still photographs of this work do not do it justice. I came away from the gallery uplifted, smiling, happy – and that is a wonderful thing to happen.
Ian Burns (Australian, b. 1964) 15 hours v.4 2010 Found object kinetic sculpture, live video and audio Image courtesy the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery
Julia deVille (Australian, b. 1982) Nevermore 2010
This is an excellent exhibition by Julia deVille at Sophie Gannon Gallery in Richmond … This exhibition shows a commendable sense of restraint, a beautiful rise and fall in the work as you walk around the gallery space with the exhibits displayed on different types and heights of stand and a greater thematic development of the conceptual ideas within the work. There are some exquisite pieces.
In these pieces there is a simplification of the noise of the earlier works and in this simplification a conversant intensification of the layering of the conceptual ideas. Playful and witty the layers can be peeled back to reveal the poetry of de Sade, the stories of Greek mythology and the amplification of life force that is at the heart of these works. Good stuff.
Quiet, precise works. Forms of insect-like legs and proboscises. They balance, seeming to almost teeter on the edge – but the objects are incredibly grounded at the same time. As you walk into the darkened gallery and observe these creatures you feel this pull – lightness and weight. Fantastic!
And so it came to pass in silence, for these works are still, quiet and have a quality of the presence of the inexpressible. Funaki achieves these incredible silences through being true to her self and her style through an expression of her endearing will. While Mari may no longer be amongst us as expressions of her will the silences of these objects will be forever with us.
When looking at art, one of the best experiences for me is gaining the sense that something is open before you, that wasn’t open before. I don’t mean accessible, I mean open like making a clearing in the jungle, or being able to see further up a road, or just further on. And also like an open marketplace – where there were always good trades. There is the feeling that if you put in a certain amount of honesty, then you would get something back that made some room for you in front – some room that would allow you to look forward, and maybe even walk into that space. Seeing Jerrems work gives you that feeling.
This is a superlative survey exhibition of the work of John Davis at NGV Australia, Melbourne.
In the mature work you can comment on the fish as ‘travellers’ or ‘nomads’, “a metaphor for people and the way we move around the world.” You can observe the caging, wrapping and bandaging of these fish as a metaphor for the hurt we humans impose on ourselves and the world around us. You can admire the craftsmanship and delicacy of the constructions, the use of found objects, thread, twigs, driftwood and calico and note the ironic use of bituminous paint in relation to the environment, “a sticky tar-like form of petroleum that is so thick and heavy,” of dark and brooding colour.
This is all well and true. But I have a feeling when looking at this work that here was a wise and old spirit, one who possessed knowledge and learning … a human being who attained a state of grace in his life and in his work.
11/ ‘Mortality’ at The Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA)
Fiona Tan (Indonesian, b. 1966) Tilt 2002 DVD courtesy of the artist, Frith Street Gallery London
I never usually review group exhibitions but this is an exception to the rule. I have seen this exhibition three times and every time it has grown on me, every time I have found new things to explore, to contemplate, to enjoy. It is a fabulous exhibition, sometimes uplifting, sometimes deeply moving but never less than engaging – challenging our perception of life. The exhibition proceeds chronologically from birth to death. I comment on a few of my favourite works below but the whole is really the sum of the parts: go, see and take your time to inhale these works – the effort is well rewarded. The space becomes like a dark, fetishistic sauna with it’s nooks and crannies of videos and artwork. Make sure you investigate them all!
Simon Roberts (British, b. 1974) Skegness Beach, Lincolnshire, 12th August 2007 from the series We English 2007
Being an ex-pat English these photographs have a very special resonance for me. They are beautifully visualised and resolved photographs that do not rely too heavily on the artist’s conceptualisation of landscape (the ever present hand of the artist) in the construction of narrative within the picture plane.
In other words the artist allows the image to speak for itself, “a sensitive, resolved response to scenes of ordinary people and how they inhabit and utilise the spaces around them,” with the layering of meaning, the back stories (boundaries, sites of contestation, notions of identity and colonisation of spaces amongst others) kept in balance with the sublime elements of the constructed landscape.
The photographs work all the better for this restraint and offer the viewer sensual images that are open and receptive, spaces that are invigorating and enlightening, Roberts has created a magical series of photographs that poignantly capture the essence of what it is to be English.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Simon Roberts for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. The permission is much appreciated. Please click on the photographs to view a larger version of the image.
Simon Roberts (British, b. 1974) South Downs Way, West Sussex, 8th October 2007 from the series We English 2007
Simon Roberts (British, b. 1974) Heberdens Farm, Finchdean, Hampshire, 20th December 2007 from the series We English 2007
Simon Roberts (British, b. 1974) Rushey Hill Caravan Park, Peacehaven, East Sussex, 21st December 2007 from the series We English 2007
Simon Roberts (British, b. 1974) Fantasy Island, Ingoldmells, Lincolnshire, 28th December 2007 from the series We English 2007
Simon Roberts (British, b. 1974) Mad Maldon Mud Race, River Blackwater, Maldon, Essex, 30th December 2007 from the series We English 2007
Simon Roberts (British, b. 1974) The Haxey Hood, Haxey, North Lincolnshire, 5th January 2008 from the series We English 2008
“We English is the result of a year’s travel around England by Roberts, in a motorhome, documenting its landscape on a large format 5 x 4 camera. Informed by the photography of his predecessors Tony Ray Jones, John Davies and Martin Parr, and by the romantic tradition of English landscape painting, Roberts depicts the English at leisure within pastoral landscapes in a manner that is entirely his own. The work is beautiful, accessible and often heart-warming. This is the most significant contribution to the photography of England since John Davies’s ‘The British Landscape’.”
Chris Boot, Publisher, 2009
Artist statement
Initially, I was simply thinking about Englishness and how my upbringing had been quintessentially English. How much of this was an intrinsic part of my identity? In what ways was my idea of what constitutes an ‘English life’ or English pastimes (if there are such things) different to those of others’? My own memories of holidays, for example, were infused with very particular landscapes; the lush green-ness around Derwent Water or the flinty grey skies – and pebbles – of Angmering’s beaches. It seemed to me that these landscapes formed an important part of my consciousness of who I am and how I ‘remember’ England.
Seeking out ordinary people engaged in diverse pastimes, I aim to show a populace with a profound attachment to its’ local environments and homeland. We English explores the notion that nationhood – that what it means to be English – is to be found on the surface of contemporary life, encapsulated by banal everyday rituals and activities.
The same themes of identity, memory, history and attachment to place – of belonging – resonate throughout We English. To access these abstractions, I’ve produced a series of colour landscape photographs, which record places where groups of people congregate for a common purpose and shared experience. Since landscape has long been used as a commodity to be consumed, I focus on leisure activities as a way of looking at England’s shifting cultural and aesthetic identity. The photographs are rooted in a consciousness of my own attachment to my homeland and are an intentionally lyrical rendering of everyday English landscapes. They draw on issues of cultural geography and contemporary landscape theory, together with vestiges of English romanticism.
We English is not just a mode of social and anthropological commentary, although there are important elements of this in the work; more, it aims to constitute a sensitive, resolved response to scenes of ordinary people and how they inhabit and utilise the spaces around them. The photographs also explore the way in which landscapes can become a site of conflict or unease, where perceived notions of nationhood and quintessential Englishness are challenged, as diverse social groups seek to colonise shared public spaces. Notions of limits and boundaries re-appear throughout the work, reflected in the rivers, trees and hedges that create physical divisions, delineating and defining the limits of human interaction. Indeed, leisure activities often occur at boundary points: the edge of towns and cities, next to lakes and reservoirs, alongside footpaths and mountain ridges.
The project derives its title from the suggestion that photographer and subjects – we ‘English’ – are complicit in the act of representation. (During the five months that I travelled around England in a motorhome, people were invited to post their ideas about events I could photograph on a dedicated website and to share their experiences of living in their particular locality).
The project has been supported by Arts Council England, the National Media Museum and the John Kobal Foundation. A monograph of the photographs will be published in September 2009 by Chris Boot Ltd.
Simon Roberts (British, b. 1974) Grantchester Meadows, Cambridgeshire, 23rd January 2008 from the series We English 2008
Simon Roberts (British, b. 1974) Cotswold Water Park, Shornecote, Gloucestershire, 11th May 2008 from the series We English 2008
Simon Roberts (British, b. 1974) Paul Herrington’s 50th Birthday, Grantchester, Cambridgeshire, 15th June 2008 from the series We English 2008
Simon Roberts (British, b. 1974) Ratcliffe-on-Soar Power Station, Nottinghamshire, 16th June 2008 from the series We English 2008
Simon Roberts (British, b. 1974) Blackpool Promenade, Lancashire, 24th July 2008 from the series We English 2008
Simon Roberts (British, b. 1974) Chatsworth House, Bakewell, Derbyshire, 7th August 2008 from the series We English 2008
Simon Roberts (British, b. 1974) Bradford Bandits BMX Club, Peel Park, Bradford, West Yorkshire, 17th October 2009 from the series We English 2008
Many thankx to the Museum of Modern Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Saint-Cloud 1923 Albumen silver print 6 7/8 x 8 3/8″ (17.5 x 21.3cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Anonymous gift
Edward Steichen (American born Luxembourg, 1879-1973) Midnight – Rodin’s Balzac 1908 Pigment print 12 1/8 x 14 5/8″ (30.8 x 37.1cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the photographer Permission of Joanna T. Steichen
The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today presents a critical examination of the intersections between photography and sculpture, exploring how one medium informs the analysis and creative redefinition of the other. On view at The Museum of Modern Art from August 1 through November 1, 2010, the exhibition brings together over 300 photographs, magazines, and journals, by more than 100 artists, from the dawn of modernism to the present, to look at the ways in which photography at once informs and challenges the meaning of what sculpture is. The Original Copy is organised by Roxana Marcoci, Curator, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art. Following the exhibition’s presentation at MoMA, it will travel to Kunsthaus Zürich, where it will be on view from February 25 through May 15, 2011.
When photography was introduced in 1839, aesthetic experience was firmly rooted in Romanticist tenets of originality. In a radical way, photography brought into focus the critical role that the copy plays in art and in its perception. While the reproducibility of the photograph challenged the aura attributed to the original, it also reflected a very personal form of study and offered a model of dissemination that would transform the entire nature of art.
Sculpture was among the first subjects to be treated in photography. There were many reasons for this, including the desire to document, collect, publicise, and circulate objects that were not always portable. Through crop, focus, angle of view, degree of close-up, and lighting, as well as through ex post facto techniques of dark room manipulation, collage, montage, and assemblage, photographers have not only interpreted sculpture but have created stunning reinventions of it.
Conceived around ten conceptual modules, the exhibition examines the rich historical legacy of photography and the aesthetic shifts that have taken place in the medium over the last 170 years through a superb selection of pictures by key modern, avant-garde, and contemporary artists. Some, like Eugène Atget, Walker Evans, Lee Friedlander, and David Goldblatt, are best known as photographers; others, such as Auguste Rodin, Constantin Brancusi, and David Smith, are best known as sculptors; and others, from Hannah Höch and Sophie Taeuber-Arp to such contemporaries as Bruce Nauman, Fischli/Weiss, Rachel Harrison, and Cyprien Gaillard, are too various to categorise but exemplify how fruitfully and unpredictably photography and sculpture have combined.
Auguste Rodin: The Sculptor and the Photographic Enterprise includes some of the most memorable pictures of Rodin’s sculptures by various photographers, including Edward Steichen’s Rodin – The Thinker (1902), a work made by combining two negatives: one depicting Rodin in silhouetted profile, contemplating The Thinker (1880-82), his alter ego; and one of the artist’s luminous Monument to Victor Hugo (1901). Constantin Brancusi: The Studio as Groupe Mobile focuses on Brancusi’s uniquely nontraditional techniques in photographing his studio, which was articulated around hybrid, transitory configurations known as groupe mobiles (mobile groups), each comprising several pieces of sculpture, bases, and pedestals grouped in proximity. In search of transparency, kineticism, and infinity, Brancusi used photography to dematerialise the static, monolithic materiality of traditional sculpture. His so-called photos radieuses (radiant photos) are characterised by flashes of light that explode the sculptural gestalt.
The Studio without Walls: Sculpture in the Expanded Field explores the radical changes that occurred in the definition of sculpture when a number of artists who did not consider themselves photographers in the traditional sense, such as Robert Smithson, Robert Barry, and Gordon Matta-Clark, began using the camera to document remote sites as sculpture rather than the traditional three-dimensional object. Daguerre’s Soup: What Is Sculpture? includes photographs of found objects or assemblages created specifically for the camera by artists, such as Brassaï’s Involuntary Sculptures (c. 1930s), Alina Szapocznikow’s Photosculptures (1970-1971), and Marcel Broodthaers’s Daguerre’s Soup (1974), the last work being a tongue-in-cheek picture which hints at the various fluid and chemical processes used by Louis Daguerre to invent photography in the nineteenth century, bringing into play experimental ideas about the realm of everyday objects.
The Pygmalion Complex: Animate and Inanimate Figures looks at Dada and Surrealist pictures and photo-collages by artists, including Man Ray, Herbert Bayer, Hans Bellmer, Hannah Höch, and Johannes Theodor Baargeld, who focused their lenses on mannequins, dummies, and automata to reveal the tension between living figure and sculpture. The Performing Body as Sculptural Object explores the key role of photography in the intersection of performance and sculpture. Bruce Nauman, Charles Ray, and Dennis Oppenheim, placing a premium on their training as sculptors, articulated the body as a sculptural prop to be picked up, bent, or deployed instead of traditional materials. Eleanor Antin, Ana Mendieta, VALIE EXPORT, and Hannah Wilke engaged with the “rhetoric of the pose,” using the camera as an agency that itself generates actions through its presence.
Press release from the Museum of Modern Art website
Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzky)Â (American, 1890-1976) Noire et blanche (Black and white) 1926 Gelatin silver print 6 3/4 x 8 7/8″ (17.1 x 22.5cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of James Thrall Soby 2010 Man Ray Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris
“The advent of photography in 1839, when aesthetic experience was firmly rooted in Romanticist tenets of originality, brought into focus the critical role that the copy plays in the perception of art. The medium’s reproducibility challenged the aura attributed to the original, but it also reflected a new way of looking and offered a model for dissemination that would transform the entire nature of art. The aesthetic singularity of the photograph, the archival value of a document bearing the trace of history, and the combinatory capacity of the image, open to be edited into sequences in which it mixes with others – all these contribute to the status of photography as both an art form and a medium of communication.
The Original Copy presents a critical examination of the intersections between photography and sculpture, exploring how the one medium has been implicated in the analysis and creative redefinition of the other. Bringing together 300 pictures, magazines and journals by more than 100 artists from the dawn of modernism to the present, this exhibition looks at the ways in which photography at once informs and challenges our understanding of what sculpture is within specific historic contexts.
Sculpture in the Age of Photography
If we consider photography a child of the industrial era – a medium that came of age alongside the steam engine and the railroad – it is not surprising that one of its critical functions was to bring physically inaccessible worlds closer by means of reproduction. Among its early practitioners, Charles Nègre photographed sculpture in the cathedrals of Chartres, Amiens, and, in Paris, Notre Dame, circling them at different levels to capture perspectives of rarely seen sculptural details, while in London Roger Fenton and Stephen Thompson documented the ancient statuary in the British Museum, making visible the new power of collecting institutions.
Focusing on details in this way, photographers have interpreted not only sculpture itself, as an autonomous object, but also the context of its display. The results often show that the meaning of art is not fixed within the work but open to the beholder’s reception of it at any given moment. Taking a place in the tradition of institutional critique, Barbara Kruger’s and Louise Lawler’s pictures foreground issues of representation to underscore photography’s engagement in the analysis of virtually every aspect of art.
Eugène Atget The Marvelous in the Everyday
During the first quarter of the twentieth century, Atget took hundreds of photographs of sculptures – classical statues, reliefs, fountains, door knockers, and other finely wrought decorative fragments – in Paris and its outlying parks and gardens, especially at Versailles, Saint-Cloud, and Sceaux. These images amount to a visual compendium of the heritage of French civilisation at that time.
Among the pictures taken at Saint-Cloud is a series centred on a melancholy pool surrounded by statues whose tiny silhouettes can be seen from a distance. Atget’s interest in the variable play between nature and art through minute changes in the camera’s angle, or as functions of the effects of light and time of day, is underscored in his notations of the exact month and sometimes even the hour when the pictures were taken.
Auguste Rodin The Sculptor and the Photographic Enterprise
Rodin never took pictures of his sculptures but reserved the creative act for himself, actively directing the enterprise of photographing his work. He controlled staging, lighting and background, and he was probably the first sculptor to enlist the camera to record the changing stages through which his work passed from conception to realisation. The photographers working with Rodin were diverse and their images of his work varied greatly, partly through each individual’s artistic sensibility and partly through changes in the photographic medium. The radical viewing angles that Eugène Druet, for instance, adopted in his pictures of hands, in around 1898, inspired the poet Rainer Maria Rilke to write: “There are among the works of Rodin hands, single small hands which without belonging to a body, are alive. Hands that rise, irritated and in wrath; hands whose five bristling fingers seem to bark like the five jaws of a dog of Hell.”
Among the most memorable pictures of Rodin’s sculptures is Edward Steichen’s Rodin – The Thinker (1902), a work made by combining two negatives: Rodin in dark silhouetted profile contemplating The Thinker (1880-1882), his alter ego, is set against the luminous Monument to Victor Hugo (1901), a source of poetic creativity. Steichen also photographed Rodin’s Balzac, installed outdoors in the sculptor’s garden at Meudon, spending a whole night taking varying exposures from fifteen minutes to an hour to secure a number of dramatic negatives. The three major pictures of the sculpture against the nocturnal landscape taken at 11 p.m., midnight, and 4 a.m. form a temporal series.Â
Pushing photography against its grain, Brancusi developed an aesthetic antithetical to the usual photographic standards. His so-called photos radieuses (radiant photos) are characterised by flashes of light that explode the sculptural gestalt. In search of transparency, kineticism, and infinity, Brancusi used photography and polishing techniques to dematerialise the static, monolithic materiality of traditional sculpture, visualising what Moholy-Nagy called “the new culture of light.”
Brancusi’s pictures of his studio underscore his scenographic approach. The artist articulated the studio around hybrid, transitory configurations known as groupes mobiles (mobile groups), each comprising several pieces of sculpture, bases, and pedestals grouped in proximity. Assembling and reassembling his sculptures for the camera, Brancusi used photography as a diary of his sculptural permutations. If, as it is often said, Brancusi “invented” modern sculpture, his use of photography belongs to a reevaluation of sculpture’s modernity.
Cultural and Political Icons
How do we remember the past? What role do photographs play in mediating history and memory? In an era resonating with the consequences of two world wars, the construction and then dismantling of the Berlin Wall, the Vietnam War, and the after effects of the colonialist legacy in South Africa, commemoration has provided a rich subject for photographic investigation.
Some of the most significant photographic essays of the twentieth century – Walker Evans’s American Photographs (1938), Robert Frank’s The Americans (1958), Lee Friedlander’s The American Monument (1976), and David Goldblatt’s The Structure of Things Then (1998) – articulate to different degrees the particular value of photography as a means of defining the cultural and political role of monuments.
Evans’s emblematic image of a crushed Ionic column made of cheap sheet metal; Frank’s picture of a statue of St. Francis preaching, cross and Bible in hands, to the bleak vista of a gas station; Friedlander’s photograph of World War I hero Father Duffy, engulfed in the cacophony of Times Square’s billboards and neon, which threaten to jeopardise the sculpture’s patriotic message; and Goldblatt’s pictures of monuments to some of the most potent symbols of Afrikaner triumphalism – all take a critical look at the world that public statues inhabit.
The Studio without Walls Sculpture in the Expanded Field
In the late 1960s a radical aesthetic change altered both the definition of the sculptural object and the ways in which that object was experienced. A number of artists who did not consider themselves photographers in the traditional sense began using the camera to rework the idea of what sculpture is, dispensing with the immobile object in favour of an altered site: the built environment, the remote landscape, or the studio or museum space in which the artist intervened.
This engagement with site and architecture – undoubtedly a function of early critiques of art’s institutional status – meant that sculpture no longer had to be a permanent three-dimensional object; it could, for instance, be a configuration of debris on the studio floor, a dematerialised vapour released into the landscape, a dissected home reconfigured as gravity-defying walk-through sculpture, or a wrapped-up building. Bruce Nauman, Robert Barry, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Christo respectively, as well as Michael Heizer, Richard Long, Dennis Oppenheim, and Robert Smithson made extensive use of photography, collecting and taking hundreds of pictures as raw material for other pieces, such as collages and photomontages.
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, artists such as Zhang Dali, Cyprien Gaillard, and Rachel Whiteread have continued this dialogue through photographs contemplating examples of architecture and sculpture in states of dilapidation and entropy, remnants of a society in demise.
Daguerre’s Soup What Is Sculpture?
In 1932, Brassaï challenged the established notions of what is or is not sculpture when he photographed a series of found objects – tiny castoff scraps of paper that had been unconsciously rolled, folded, or twisted by restless hands, strangely shaped bits of bread, smudged pieces of soap, and accidental blobs of toothpaste, which he titled Involuntary Sculptures. In the 1960s and ’70s artists engaging with various forms of reproduction, replication, and repetition used the camera to explore the limits of sculpture. The word “sculpture” itself was somewhat modified, no longer signifying something specific but rather indicating a polymorphous objecthood. For instance, in 1971 Alina Szapocznikow produced Photosculptures, pictures of a new kind of sculptural object made of stretched, formless and distended pieces of chewing gum.
At the same time, Marcel Broodthaers concocted absurdist taxonomies in photographic works. In Daguerre’s Soup (1975), Broothaers hinted at the various fluids and chemical processes used by Louis Daguerre to invent photography in the nineteenth century by bringing into play experimental ideas about language and the realm of everyday objects. A decade later, the duo Fischli/Weiss combined photography with wacky, ingeniously choreographed assemblages of objects. Their tongue-in-cheek pictures of assemblages shot on the verge of collapse convey a sense of animated suspension and deadpan comedy.
In 2007, Rachel Harrison drew on Broodthaers’s illogical systems of classification and parodic collections of objects to produce Voyage of the Beagle, a series of pictures that collectively raise the question “What is sculpture?” Ranging from images of prehistoric standing stones to mass-produced Pop mannequins, and from topiaries to sculptures made by modernist masters, Harrison’s work constitutes an oblique quest for the origins and contemporary manifestations of sculpture.
The Pygmalion Complex Animate and Inanimate Figures
The subject of the animated statue spans the history of avant-garde photography. Artists interested in Surrealist tactics used the camera to tap the uncanniness of puppets, wax dummies, mannequins, and automata, producing pictures that both transcribe and alter appearances. Laura Gilpin explored this perturbing mix of stillness and living, alluring lifelikeness in her mysterious portrait George William Eggers (1926), in which Eggers, the director of the Denver Art Museum, keeps company with a fifteenth-century bust whose polychrome charm is enhanced by the glow of the candle he holds next to her face. So does Edward Weston, in his whimsical Rubber Dummies, Metro Goldwyn Mayer Studios, Hollywood (1939), showing two elastic dolls caught in a pas de deux on a movie-studio storage lot; and Clarence John Laughlin, in his eerie photomontage The Eye That Never Sleeps (1946), in which the negative of an image taken in a New Orleans funeral parlour has been overlaid with an image of a mannequin – one of whose legs, however, is that of a flesh-and-blood model.
The tension between animate object and inanimate female form lies at the crux of many of Man Ray’s photographs, including Black and White (1926), which provocatively couples the head of the legendary model, artist, and cabaret singer Alice Prin, a.k.a. Kiki of Montparnasse, with an African ceremonial mask. Hans Bellmer’s photographs of dismembered dolls, and the critical photomontages of Herbert Bayer, Hannah Höch, and Johannes Theodor Baargeld, probe the relationship between living figure and sculpture by invoking the unstable subjectivity and breakdown of anatomic boundaries in the aftermath of the Great War.
The Performing Body as Sculptural Object
In 1969, Gilbert & George covered their heads and hands in metallic powders to sing Flanagan and Allen’s vaudeville number “Underneath the Arches” in live performance. Declaring themselves living sculptures, they claimed the status of an artwork, a role they used photography to express. Charles Ray and Dennis Oppenheim, placing a premium on their training as sculptors, articulated the body as a prop that could be picked up, bent, or deployed instead of more traditional materials as a system of weight, mass, and balance.
In the radicalised climate of the 1970s, artists such as Eleanor Antin, Ana Mendieta, VALIE EXPORT, and Hannah Wilke engaged with the “rhetoric of the pose,” underscoring the key role of photography in the intersection of performance, sculpture and portraiture.
Other artists as diverse as Robert Morris, Claes Oldenburg, Otto Muehl, Bas Jan Ader, and Bruce Nauman, experimented with the plasticity of the body as sculptural material. Several of Nauman’s pictures from his portfolio Eleven Color Photographs (1966-1967 / 1970) spoof the classic tradition of sculpture. Yet the signature image of the group – Self-Portrait as a Fountain, in which a stripped-to-the-waist Nauman spews water from his mouth like a medieval gargoyle – is a deadpan salute to Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917). In this spirit, Erwin Wurm’s series of One Minute Sculptures (1997-98) evoke gestural articulations in which the artist’s body is turned into a sculptural form. Wurm, like the other artists presented in this exhibition, focuses attention on what one can do with and through photography, using the camera not to document actions that precede the impulse to record them but as an agency that itself generates actions through its own presence.
Johannes Theodor Baargeld (Alfred Emanuel Ferdinand Gruenwald) (German, 1892-1927) Typische Vertikalklitterung als Darstellung des Dada Baargeld (Typical vertical mess as depiction of the Dada Baargeld) 1920 Photomontage 14 5/8 x 12 3/16″ (37.1 x 31cm) Kunsthaus Zürich, Grafische Sammlung
Let us drop away all interpretation and look at the thing in itself. The literal feeling of standing before these objects.
Form
Balance
Colour
Surface
Precision
Will
Style
Silence
Quiet, precise works. Forms of insect-like legs and proboscises. They balance, seeming to almost teeter on the edge – but the objects are incredibly grounded at the same time. As you walk into the darkened gallery and observe these creatures you feel this pull – lightness and weight. Fantastic!
The surfaces, sublime matt grey colour and precision of their manufacture add to this sense of the ineffable. These are not mere renderings of content, but expressions of things that cannot be said.
Sontag observes, “Art is the objectifying of the will in a thing or performance, and the provoking or arousing of the will … Style is the principle of decision in a work of art, the signature of the artist’s will.”1
Sontag insightfully notes, “The most potent elements in a work of art are, often, its silences.”2
And so it came to pass in silence, for these works are still, quiet and have a quality of the presence of the inexpressible.
Funaki achieves these incredible silences through being true to her self and her style through an expression of her endearing will.
While Mari may no longer be amongst us as expressions of her will the silences of these objects will be forever with us.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Sontag, Susan. “On Style,” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Delta Book, 1966, pp. 31-32.
2/ Ibid., p. 36.
Many thanxk to Alison Murray, Jemma Altmeier and The National Gallery of Victoria for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. All individual photographs of work by Jeremy Dillon.
Opening 6 August, the National Gallery of Victoria will present Mari Funaki: Objects, an exhibition showcasing a range of sculptural objects by the renowned contemporary jeweller and metalsmith, Mari Funaki (1950-2010).
This exhibition will present a selection of Funaki’s distinctive objects, dating from the late 1990s to 2010 including four recent large scale sculptures. The artist was working on the exhibition right up until the time of her recent death.
Jane Devery, Acting Curator, Contemporary Art, NGV said: “It was a great privilege to work with Mari Funaki on this exhibition. She possessed a clarity of vision and a capacity for ongoing invention that is rare among artists. Funaki produced some of the most captivating works in the field of contemporary jewellery and metalwork. Her unique geometric objects, meticulously constructed from blackened mild-steel, stemmed from a desire to express the world around her.”
“Funaki was interested in the expressive and associative capacities of her objects, creating forms that might stir our imaginations or trigger something from our memories. It has been particularly thrilling to see her extend these concerns in large scale works,” said Ms Devery. In 1979 Funaki left her home in Japan for Melbourne where she pursued her creative ambitions, enrolling in Gold and Silversmithing at RMIT in the late 1980s. At RMIT she studied under the prominent jewellers Marian Hosking, Robert Baines and Carlier Makigawa.
In 1995, Mari Funaki established Gallery Funaki in Melbourne’s CBD which remains Australia’s most important space dedicated to contemporary jewellery. Throughout her career she exhibited widely within Australia and overseas and won many awards, twice winning the prestigious Herbert Hoffman prize in Munich. In 2007 she was awarded an Australian Council Emeritus Award for her work as an artist and for her success in promoting Australian and international contemporary jewellery.
Frances Lindsay, Deputy Director, NGV said: “The NGV is delighted to exhibit many never-before-seen works by such an innovative and celebrated Melbourne artist. The exquisite objects assembled in this exhibition allow us to appreciate Mari Funaki’s remarkable artistic achievements.”
Mari Funaki: Objects will be on display at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Federation Square from 6 August to 24 October, 2010. The exhibition will be open from 10am-5pm. Closed Mondays. Entry is free.
David Goldblatt (South Africa, 1930-2018) Steven with Sight Seeing Bus, Doornfontein, Johannesburg, 1960 1960 Silver gelatin print on fiber-pressed paper Courtesy of David Goldblatt and the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg
2019
Now that he has gone, these seem, if possible, more powerful, poignant and prescient / ancient than ever.
Marcus
Many thankx to the Jewish Museum in New York for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
David Goldblatt (South Africa, 1930-2018) Holdup in Hillbrow, Johannesburg, November 1963 1963 Silver gelatin print on fibre-pressed paper Courtesy of David Goldblatt and the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg
David Goldblatt (South Africa, 1930-2018) A plot-holder with the daughter of a servant, Wheatlands, Randfontein, September 1962 1962 Silver gelatin print on fibre-pressed paper Courtesy of David Goldblatt and the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg
David Goldblatt (South Africa, 1930-2018) The farmer’s wife, Fochville, 1965 1965 Silver gelatin print on fibre-pressed paper Courtesy of David Goldblatt and the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg
David Goldblatt (South African, 1930-2018) “Boss Boy” detail, Battery Reef, Randfontein Estates Gold Mine 1966 Silver gelatin print on fibre-pressed paper Courtesy of David Goldblatt and the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg
The Jewish Museum currently offers visitors an opportunity to see 150 black-and-white silver gelatin prints taken between 1948 and 2009 in South African Photographs: David Goldblatt. The photographs on display focus on South Africa’s human landscape in the apartheid and post-apartheid eras and are accompanied by Goldblatt’s own written commentary. Growing up in segregated South Africa, he witnessed the deep humiliation and discrimination suffered by blacks and experienced anti-Semitism personally.
Goldblatt’s photographs expose the complex and evolving nature of apartheid through the diversity and subtlety of his approach while instilling “… emotional complexity that rewards repeated viewing” (The New Yorker). Instead of documenting major political events or horrifying incidents of violence, he focuses on the details of daily life and the world of ordinary people, a world where the apartheid system penetrates every aspect of society. In his photographs you will find “great beauty and the most profound humanity” (The Wall Street Journal).
For more than half a century, David Goldblatt has been photographing his native South Africa, documenting the social, cultural and economic divides that characterise the country. Recipient of the 2009 Henri Cartier-Bresson Award and the prestigious 2006 Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography, David Goldblatt is his country’s most distinguished photographer.
Goldblatt’s photographs expose the complex and evolving nature of apartheid through the diversity and subtlety of his approach. He has not documented major political events or horrifying incidents of violence. Instead, he focuses on the details of daily life and the world of ordinary people, a world where the apartheid system penetrates every aspect of society. He is constantly searching for the substance beneath the surface of human situations. As Nadine Gordimer comments in the exhibition audio guide, Goldblatt captures “… these moments when everything that has happened to an individual is somehow in that image at that time. All the person has felt and known is contained, indeed, in the way he comports himself, the way he’s sitting, the way he looks, and the kind of setting in which he is.” Goldblatt frequently addresses a complex question in his work: how is it possible to be reasonable, decent, and law-abiding, and at the same time, complicit in and even actively supportive of a system that is fundamentally immoral and evil? Each photograph in this exhibition is an intimate portrayal of a culture living with racism and injustice.
David Goldblatt has used his camera to explore South Africa’s mines; the descendants of seventeenth-century Dutch settlers called Afrikaners who were the architects of apartheid; life in Boksburg, a small middle-class white community; the Bantustans or “puppet states” in which blacks were forced to live; structures built for purposes ranging from shelter to commemoration; and Johannesburg, the city in which Goldblatt lives.
The photographer once wrote, “I am neither an activist nor a missionary. Yet I had begun to realise an involvement with this place and the people among whom I lived that would not be stilled and that I needed to grasp and probe. I wanted to explore the specifics of our lives, not in theories but in the grit and taste and touch of things, and to bring those specifics into that particular coherence that the camera both enables and demands.”
David Goldblatt has been photographing the changing political landscape of his country for more than five decades. He is descended from Lithuanian Jews who fled Europe in the 1890s to escape religious persecution. His father passed on to him, the artist said, “a strong sense of outrage at anything that smacked of racism.” Growing up in segregated South Africa, he witnessed the deep humiliation and discrimination suffered by blacks and experienced anti-Semitism personally. These experiences have informed his work.
Goldblatt’s written commentary is an essential part of his work and is presented throughout the exhibition in the texts and labels that accompany the photographs. A context room in the exhibition features a timeline juxtaposing events in South African history and David Goldblatt’s life; books published by the photographer; photography magazines that inspired him; a large map of South Africa; and a 22-minute excerpt of David Goldblatt: In Black and White, a 1985 film originally aired on Channel 4 Television in Great Britain.
The exhibition has been organised by The Jewish Museum’s Senior Curator, Susan Tumarkin Goodman. All the works in the exhibition are silver gelatin prints on fibre-pressed paper.
About David Goldblatt
David Goldblatt was born in 1930, the youngest of the three sons of Eli and Olga Goldblatt. His grandparents arrived in South Africa from Lithuania around 1893, having fled the persecution of Jews in the Baltic countries. David’s paternal grandfather owned a general store in Randfontein, a gold-mining town near Johannesburg. Eli Goldblatt built the business into a respected men’s clothing store and for some years David assisted with the running of the shop when his father’s poor health necessitated it. But he was only biding his time. He had become interested in photography in high school, and after his father’s death in 1962, he sold the business to devote all of his time to being a photographer.
Press release from The Jewish Museum website [Online] Cited 13/09/2010 no longer available online
David Goldblatt (South Africa, 1930-2018) Farmers at a cattle auction, Vryburg, 1965 1965 Silver gelatin print on fibre-pressed paper Courtesy of David Goldblatt and the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg
Screenshot
David Goldblatt (South Africa, 1930-2018) On an ostrich farm near Oudtshoorn, Cape Province (Western Cape) 1967 From the series Some Afrikaners Photographed Silver gelatin print on fibre-pressed paper Courtesy of David Goldblatt and the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg
David Goldblatt (South Africa, 1930-2018) Baby with childminders and dogs in the Alexandra Street Park, Hillbrow, Johannesburg, 1972 1972 Silver gelatin print on fibre-pressed paper Courtesy of David Goldblatt and the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg
David Goldblatt (South Africa, 1930-2018) Three women at 39 Soper Road, Berea, Johannesburg, May 1972 1972 Silver gelatin print on fibre-pressed paper Courtesy of David Goldblatt and the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg
David Goldblatt (South Africa, 1930-2018) A farmer’s son with his nursemaid, Heimweeberg, Nietverdiend, 1964 1964 Silver gelatin print on fibre-pressed paper Courtesy of David Goldblatt and the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg
David Goldblatt (South Africa, 1930-2018) Landscape with 1500 lavatories, Frankfort, Ciskei 12 July 1983 From the series Bantustans Silver gelatin print on fibre-pressed paper Courtesy of David Goldblatt and the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg
David Goldblatt (South African, 1930-2018) 9:00 Going home: Marabastad-Waterval bus: For most of the people in this bus the cycle will start again tomorrow at between 2:00 and 3:00 a.m. 1983-1984 From the series The Transported of KwaNdebele. A South African Odyssey Silver gelatin print on fibre-pressed paper Courtesy of David Goldblatt and the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg
David Goldblatt (South Africa, 1930-2018) Travellers from KwaNdebele buying their weekly tickets at the bus depot in Marabastad, Pretoria, February 1984 1984 Silver gelatin print on fibre-pressed paper Courtesy of David Goldblatt and the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg
David Goldblatt (South Africa, 1930-2018) Luke Kgatitsoe at His House, Magopa, Ventersdorp District, Western Transvaal 21 October 1986 Silver gelatin print on fibre-pressed paper Courtesy of David Goldblatt and the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg
The Jewish Museum 1109 5th Ave at 92nd St New York NY 10128
One of the most haunting photography books I have ever opened and inhaled is What Remains (2003) by Sally Mann.
People say the photographs are shocking – featuring as they do documentation of a deceased pet greyhound, photos of decaying bodies out in the open field of a forensics lab (see photograph below), “the almost invisible traces left by the death of a fugitive on Mann’s property”, the dark landscape of a civil war battlefield and close up photographs of her now grown up children – but there is a stillness and depth to these photographs that elevates them above such sentiments.
What Mann does so well is that she listens to the passing of time and then inscribes an ode to what remains. Her gift is the photography of mortality (and vice versa) with all the psychic weight that this entails. This is a revelatory book not for the faint hearted.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Sam Trenerry and the Photographers’ Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
This exhibition at The Photographers’ Gallery is the American photographer Sally Mann’s first solo exhibition in the UK. Combining several series from her long photographic career, The Family and the Land: Sally Mann reflects Mann’s artistic impulse to draw on the world around her as subject matter.
The ‘family’ element of the title comprises Mann’s early series Immediate Family and the newer series Faces, both of which depict her children at various ages. The series Deep South represents the landscape, portraying images made across the south of the United States. The more recent body of work, What Remains brings together both strands of the exhibition, through its examination of how bodies, as they decompose, merge into the land itself.
Sally Mann (b. 1951, USA) first gained prominence for Immediate Family (1984-1994) a series of intimate and revealing portraits of her three young children, Emmett, Jessie and Virginia. Taken over a ten-year period, Mann depicts them playing, swimming and acting to the camera in and around their homestead in Lexington, Virginia. Born out of a collaborative process between mother and child, the work encapsulates their childhood in all its rawness and innocence.
Mann followed Immediate Family by focusing on the land itself in her series Deep South (1996-1998). Here she is drawn to locations steeped in historical significance from the American Civil War, which left both literal and metaphoric scars on the trees and the land itself. Using antique cameras and processes throughout, Mann accentuates the sense of age in the subject while embracing the imperfect effects created by her printing process.
What Remains (2000-2004) seeks to further connect human contact to the land and how the body eventually returns to and becomes a part of the land itself. This concept led Mann to photograph decomposing cadavers at the University of Tennessee Anthropological Research Facility, Knoxville, where human decomposition is studied in a variety of, mainly outdoor, settings. What Remains deals directly with the subject of death, still a social taboo. As with her other work, Mann’s subjects are sensitively handled and beautifully realised, encouraging us to reflect upon our own mortality and place within nature’s order.
In the most recent series Faces (2004), Mann turns the camera once more on her children. Closing in on their faces and using several minutes of exposure time, these works act as a commemoration of the living. Again Mann takes the accidental drips and marks created by the wet collodion process and makes them a key feature of her work.
Space [ ] the final frontier … where silence is golden !
Many thankx to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. See all the Hirshhorn Flicker photosets of Yves Klein.
“I am the painter of space. I am not an abstract painter but, on the contrary, a figurative artist, and a realist. Let us be honest, to paint space, I must be in position. I must be in space.”
One of the 20th century’s most influential artists, Yves Klein (French, b. Nice, 1928; d. Paris, 1962), took the European art scene by storm in a prolific but brief career that lasted only from 1954 to 1962. Yves Klein: With the Void, Full Powers, on view at the Hirshhorn May 20 through Sept. 12, is the first major retrospective of the artist’s work in the United States since 1982. Co-curated by the Hirshhorn’s deputy director and chief curator Kerry Brougher and Dia Art Foundation director, former chief curator and deputy director at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the exhibition is co-organised by the Hirshhorn and the Walker and developed in full collaboration with the Yves Klein Archives in Paris.
Presenting approximately 200 works, Yves Klein: With the Void, Full Powers explores the full range of the artist’s body of work and offers an essential overview and examination of a career that marked a key transition in 20th-century art. His work embodied an understanding of art beyond a western conception of modernity, beyond the object and beyond traditional notions of what art can be.
“Klein’s short but intense career is a pivotal moment in contemporary art history,” said Brougher. “His work questioned what art and even society could be in the future, and it provided new pathways leading to pop art, minimalism, conceptual art, installation and performance.”
The exhibition features examples from all of Klein’s major series, from his iconic blue monochromes and Anthropometries to sponge reliefs, Fire Paintings, “air architecture” projects, Cosmogonies and planetary reliefs as well as many works that have rarely been on view. The installation provides insight into the artist’s process and conceptual endeavours through an array of ephemera, including sketches, photographs, letters and writings. Several films, including performances and documentaries, further demonstrate Klein’s creative practice.
“I would like that when people leave the exhibition they leap into a void, leaving behind traditional notions of art and representation, but even more importantly, questioning the notion of materiality and materialism in art as well as in their lives,” said Vergne. “Ultimately, Klein’s lesson is about a different way of being together.”
Klein was an innovator and visionary whose goal was no less than to radically reinvent what art could be in the postwar world. Through a diverse practice, which included painting, sculpture, performance, photography, music, architecture and writing as well as plans for projects in theatre, dance and cinema, he shifted the focus of art from the material to “immaterial sensibility”; he levitated art above the weariness induced by the Second World War, resurrecting its avant-garde tendencies, injecting a new sense of spirituality and opening doors for much that followed in the 1960s and beyond.
Self-identified as “the painter of space,” Klein sought to achieve immaterial sensibility through pure colour, primarily an ultramarine blue of his own invention – International Klein Blue. This exhibition begins by examining Klein’s early explorations of colour with works in pastels, watercolours and more than 15 coloured monochromes created during the mid-to-late 1950s. Several significant blue monochromes, dating from as early as 1955 up through 1961, are on view. Klein further pushed boundaries in his engagement with colour and form by using pure pigment in tandem with unconventional materials, such as natural sponges. The sponge, which Klein incorporated into his practice in the late 1950s, became a metaphor, as its porous surface completely absorbed his signature colour, giving a material presence to the immaterial.
Among Klein’s best-known works are the Anthropometries, begun in 1958. Under the artist’s direction, nude female models were smeared with International Klein Blue paint and used as “living brushes” to make body prints on prepared sheets of paper. Klein wanted to record the body’s physical energy, and the resulting images represent the model’s temporary physical presence. More than an expression of the inner psyche of the artist, these paintings offer one method of giving visual presence to a cosmic, spiritual body, which neither photography nor film can fully capture. Seven works from this series are on view, including People Begin to Fly (1961) from The Menil Collection and Untitled Anthropometry (1960) from the Hirshhorn’s collection, which features the bodies of Klein and his future wife Rotraut Uecker.
In the late 1950s, but most notably in 1961, Klein began to use fire, which he considered “the universal principle of expression,” as part of his creative process. His Fire Paintings, such as Untitled Fire Painting (1961), in which fire either replaced or was combined with paint, embody concepts of process, transformation, creation, destruction, dissolution and elemental cosmology that were so essential throughout his career. The final galleries of the exhibition include examples from Klein’s “air architecture” projects, including drawings, plans and models for architectural spaces, such as fountains and walls, constructed out of natural elements like air, water and fire – elements that were not traditionally associated with architecture.
Klein created what he considered his first artwork when he signed the blue sky above Nice in 1947, making his first attempt to capture the immaterial. In his celebrated 1958 exhibition Specialization of Sensibility in the Raw Material State of Stabilized Pictorial Sensibility, better known as The Void, at Galerie Iris Clert in Paris, Klein went further by emptying the gallery of all artworks and painting the walls white. Among those who attended the renowned exhibition was Albert Camus, who reacted with a notable entry into the visitors’ album: “with the void, full powers.” In his famous Leap into the Void (1960) image by Harry Shunk and Janos Kender, which was published Nov. 27, 1960, in the faux newspaper Dimanche, which he created for the second Avant-Garde Art Festival, Klein is actually depicted leaping into space himself; the accompanying text asserts: “… to paint space, I must be in position. I must be in space.”
Defying the common understanding and definitions of art – from his experiments with architecture made of air to his leap into the void – Klein aimed to rethink the world in spiritual and aesthetic terms. His philosophy was revolutionary and demonstrated his acute grasp of the contemporary moment, from the horror of the Second World War to the promise of space travel. This presentation of his full oeuvre is essential to discern the shift from modern to contemporary practice and to reveal the extent of the artist’s influence.
Press release from the Hirshhorn website [Online] Cited 04/09/2010 no longer available online
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden The Hirshhorn is located on the National Mall at the corner of 7th Street and Independence Avenue SW, Washington, D.C.
Opening hours: Open daily except December 25 10am – 5.30pm
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) Ford V-8 1935 Gelatin silver photograph 19.5 x 24.3cm George Eastman House, part purchase and part gift from Georgia O’Keeffe
Many thankx to Susanne Briggs and the Art Gallery of New South Wales for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“… much has happened in photography that is sensational, but very little that is comparable with what Stieglitz did. The body of his work, the key set – I think – is the most beautiful photographic document of our time.”
Georgia O’Keeffe 1978
The photographs Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) took around his summer house at Lake George, New York state, USA after 1915 are considered a major departure and dramatically influenced the course of photography. The desire to build a specifically ‘American’ art led Stieglitz to explore the essential nature of photography, released from contrivances and from intervention in print and negative. “Photography is my passion. The search for truth my obsession,” he would write in 1921.
This major exhibition is the first in Australia of Stieglitz’s photographs. 150 are included and are amongst the very best Stieglitz ever printed. They are also the rarest. One third of the exhibition is being lent by the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, which holds ‘the key set’ – selected by his lover, muse and wife, the artist Georgia O’Keeffe, and deposited there after Stieglitz’s death.
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) City of ambition 1911 Photogravure 33.9 x 26.0cm George Eastman House, Museum purchase from Museum of Modern Art, New York
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) Ellen Koeniger 1916 Gelatin silver photograph 11.1 x 9.1cm J Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) Waldo Frank 1920 Palladium photograph 25.1 x 20.2cm Art Institute of Chicago, Alfred Stieglitz Collection
Waldo David Frank was an American novelist, historian, political activist, and literary critic, who wrote extensively for The New Yorker and The New Republic during the 1920s and 1930s.
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) Spiritual America 1923 Gelatin silver photograph 11.7 x 9.2cm Philadelphia Museum of Art: the Alfred Stieglitz Collection 1949
The photographs Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) took around his summer house at Lake George, New York state, USA after 1915 are considered a major departure and dramatically influenced the course of photography. The desire to build a specifically ‘American’ art led Stieglitz to explore the essential nature of photography, released from contrivances and from intervention in print and negative.
‘Stieglitz’s mature photographs from the 1910s onwards are free from any sense that photography must refer to something outside of itself in order to express meaning,’ said Judy Annear, senior curator photography, Art Gallery of New South Wales.
This major exhibition is the first in Australia of Stieglitz’s photographs. 150 are included and are amongst the very best Stieglitz ever printed. They are also the rarest. One third of the exhibition is being lent by the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, which holds ‘the key set’ – selected by his lover, muse and wife, the artist Georgia O’Keeffe, and deposited there after Stieglitz’s death.
‘Passionate and provocative; charismatic, verbose and intellectually voracious; a self described revolutionist and iconoclast with an unwavering belief in the efficacy of radical action; competitive, egotistical, narcissistic and at times duplicitous, but also endowed with a remarkable ability to establish a deep communion with those around him – these are but some of the adjectives that can be used to describe Alfred Stieglitz,’ said Sarah Greenough, senior curator of photographs, National Gallery of Art, Washington.
Major loans are also coming from the J Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Museum of Modern Art and Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, and George Eastman House, Rochester amongst others.
The exhibition begins with a selection of Stieglitz’s photographs from the 1910s including those that he took at his gallery 291 in New York City of artists and collaborators, including O’Keeffe. Stieglitz was a superb photographic printer and dedicated to aesthetics in publishing. A number of the later editions (from 1911-1917) of his publication Camera work – described as the most beautiful journal in the world – are included.
Stieglitz’s portraits grew steadily in power in the 1910s and 20s, and continued to be a major part of his photographic practice. He would sometimes photograph his subjects over and over again and none more so than O’Keeffe, whom he met in 1916.
Stieglitz photographed O’Keeffe for the first time in 1917. He continued to photograph her from every angle, clothed and unclothed, indoors and out until his last photographs from 1936/1937. In all there are more than 300 photographs of O’Keeffe which convey all the nuances of their relationship in that 20-year period. A selection is included.
Stieglitz first visited Lake George in the 1870s with his parents. The visits slowed until the 1910s but from 1917 until his death he spent every summer there. Stieglitz’s ashes are buried at Lake George.
The photographs of people, buildings, landscapes and skies that Stieglitz took at Lake George form a collective portrait of a place which has not been rivalled in the history of photography worldwide for its subtlety of feeling expressed in the simplest of terms.
Stieglitz developed the idea for his cloud photographs in 1922 because he wanted to create images which carried the emotional impact of music and to disprove the idea being put about that he hypnotised his (human) subjects. The first title for the cloud photographs was simply Music: a sequence…; this was eventually superseded by Equivalent as Stieglitz believed that these photographs could exist as the visual equivalent to other forms of expression.
Stieglitz changed the course of photography worldwide and has influenced major figures in photography from Minor White to Robert Mapplethorpe, Max Dupain to Tracey Moffatt and Bill Henson.”
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) Georgia O’Keeffe: a portrait 1918 Platinum photograph 24.6 x 19.7cm The J. Paul Getty Museum Copyright J. Paul Getty Trust
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) Georgia O’Keeffe 1920 Gelatin silver photograph 23.5 x 19.69cm San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Alfred Stieglitz Collection. Gift of Georgia O’Keeffe
“Stieglitz is too easily bundled in amongst a rush to the reductions of modernism and cubism, the time he inhabits and the new technology he is stretching make that almost inevitable. On looking at the images here it feels like a mistake to label him that simply. We can see hints of the abstract, the grids of Mondrian or the blocks of Braque, but his work is as human and as smudged as a fingerprint. It is this sense of flaw and serendipity is what makes him so different to photographers like Man Ray for Stieglitz seems to embrace the beauty of imperfection. The memorable works here inhabit a world of infinite shining gradations between black and white, they are expansive and open rather than reductive and finished, in doing this Stieglitz’s greatest innovation might be to take a static form and make it so intensely moving.”
John Matthews on his Art Kritique blog Sunday 15 August 2010 [Online] Cited 22/12/2019
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) Self-portrait 1907, printed 1930 Gelatin silver photograph 24.8 x 18.4cm J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) From the Back Window – 291 1915 Platinum print 25.1 x 20.2cm (9 7/8 x 7 15/16 in.) Metropolitan Museum of Art Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949
From the Back Window – 291 is a black and white photograph taken by Alfred Stieglitz in 1915. The picture was taken at night from a back window of his 291 gallery in New York. Its one of the several that he took that year from that window, including at a snowy Winter.
The night photograph depicts an urban cityscape of New York. The reigning darkness is leavened by several sources of artificial light. The background building is the 105 Madison Avenue, at the southeast corner of Madison and 30th Street, while the smaller building with the advertisements is 112 Madison Avenue.
Stieglitz seems to have taken inspiration from a recent exhibition of Cubist painters Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque at the 291 gallery, which would explain his interest in the geometrical forms and lines, but also of the 19th century photographers, like David Octavius Hill. He wrote then to R. Child Bailey: “I have done quite some photography recently. It is intensely direct. Portraits. Buildings from my back window at 291, a whole series of them, a few landscapes and interiors. All interrelated. I know nothing outside of Hill’s work which I think is so direct, and quite so intensely honest.” The picture also seems still reminiscent of Pictorialism, while being more in the straight photography style.
There are prints of this photograph at several public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C., the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and at the Williams College Museum of Art, in Williamstown, Massachusetts.
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) The Steerage 1907 Gelatin silver print Gift of Miss Georgia O’Keeffe
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) Hodge Kirnon 1917 Palladium print 9 11/15 x 7 13/16 in The Metropolitan Museum of Art Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949
The noted West Indian scholar and historian Hodge Kirnon leaning against a doorframe.
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) Georgia O’Keeffe – Torso 1918 Gelatin silver print 23.6 x 18.8cm (9 5/16 x 7 3/8 in.) Metropolitan Museum of Art Gift of Mrs. Alma Wertheim, 1928
Stieglitz took dozens of pictures of O’Keeffe’s body, including her hands and her nude torso. The photograph depicts her naked torso, seen from below, with her arms only partially visible and without showing her head. The Torso, with its uplifted arms and muscular thighs, has a sculptoric quality that seems influenced by Auguste Rodin, whose work Stieglitz knew well and had shown at the Photo-Secession.
The Torso was in the Stieglitz exhibition at the Anderson Galleries in New York, where he presented pictures of several parts of the body of O’Keeffe, and which had a particular impact. Herbert Seligmann wrote that “Hands, feet, hands and breasts, torsos, all parts and attitudes of the human body seen with a passion of revelation, produced an astonishing effect on the multitudes who wandered in and out of the rooms”.
A print of this picture sold for $1,360,000 at Sotheby’s New York, on 14 February 2006, making it the second most expensive price reached by a Stieglitz photograph.
The suspension, the feathers, the monumental scale of both of the forms, the shiny surface of the Jaguar, the beauty and the subversion of the values and purpose of the war machine: bringing the body and the machine into close physical proximity. Light the blue touch paper and step well back … (my English heritage coming in there, on Guy Fawkes night lighting the fireworks)
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Susannah Lally at The Tate for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Tate Britain today unveils its new Duveens Commission, Harrier and Jaguar, by Fiona Banner. Banner’s largest work to date, Harrier and Jaguar brings the highly-charged physicality of two real fighter jets, both previously in active military service, into the unexpected setting of the neoclassical Duveen Galleries. Harrier and Jaguar has been specially devised for the Tate Britain Duveens Commission 2010, supported by Sotheby’s.
In the South Duveens, a Sea Harrier jet is suspended vertically, its bulk spanning floor to ceiling, wall to wall. Mimicking its namesake the harrier hawk, the aircraft’s surface has been reworked with handpainted graphic feather markings – the cockpit, the eyes, the nose cone, the beak – and hung nose pointing towards the floor, bringing to mind a trussed bird.
In the North Duveens, a Sepecat Jaguar lies belly-up on the floor, its elegant, elongated body traces the length the gallery. Stripped of paint and polished to reveal a metallic surface, the aircraft becomes a mirror that reflects back its surroundings and exposes the audience to its own reactions. Harrier and Jaguar achieves a powerful presence loaded with the seductive and yet troubling qualities of these objects of war.
Here, Banner places recently decommissioned fighter planes in the incongruous setting of the Duveen Galleries. For Banner these objects represent the ‘opposite of language’, used when communication fails. In bringing body and machine into close proximity she explores the tension between the intellectual perception of the fighter plane and physical experience of the object. The suspended Sea Harrier transforms machine into captive bird, the markings tattooing its surface evoking its namesake the Harrier Hawk. A Jaguar lies belly up on the floor, its posture suggestive of a submissive animal. Stripped and polished, its surface functions as a shifting mirror, exposing the audience to its own reactions. Harrier and Jaguar remain ambiguous objects implying both captured beast and fallen trophy.
“I remember long sublime walks in the Welsh mountains with my father, when suddenly a fighter plane would rip through the sky, and shatter everything. It was so exciting, loud and overwhelming; it would literally take our breath away. The sound would arrive from nowhere, all you would see was a shadow and then the plane was gone.
At the time harrier jump jets were at the cutting edge of technology but to me they were like dinosaurs, prehistoric, from a time before words.”
Fiona Banner said: “It’s hard to believe that these planes are designed for function, because they are beautiful. But they are absolutely designed for function, as a bird or prey is, and that function is to kill. That we find them beautiful brings into question the very notion of beauty, but also our own intellectual and moral position. I am interested in that clash between what we feel and what we think.”
Penelope Curtis, Director of Tate Britain, said: “The power of Banner’s project lies in its simple but unlikely juxtaposition: two fighter jets in a suite of neo-classical galleries.”
A fascination with language and signs is central to Fiona Banner’s practice. The emblem of the fighter jet recurs throughout her work, part of an ongoing enquiry into how signs translate experience. They appeared in pencil drawings she made at art college and then later in her first ‘wordscape’ in 1994 which transcribed the film Top Gun into a frame-by-frame written account. Aircraft are also present in more recent work where the artist has created Airfix models of all the war planes currently in service throughout the world and a taxonomy of fighter-plane nicknames. Harrier and Jaguar extends the artist’s exploration of these themes whilst constituting a dramatic new departure in terms of its monumental scale and the use of actual fighter jets.
Deputy Chairman, Sotheby’s Europe, Lord Poltimore, commented: “Tate Britain’s Duveens Commission is among the art scene’s most celebrated events and Sotheby’s is extremely proud to once again be supporting it, and Tate, one of the world’s leading public art institutions.”
Banner’s Harrier and Jaguar is the latest in a series of sculpture displays in the Duveen Galleries at Tate Britain. The contemporary sculpture commissions have been an annual event for three years since 2008, through the generous support of Sotheby’s. Artists who have previously undertaken the Commission include Eva Rothschild (2009), Martin Creed (2008), Mark Wallinger (2007), Michael Landy (2004), Anya Gallaccio (2002) and Mona Hatoum (2000). The series builds on a long tradition of exhibitions in the Duveen Galleries, which has included memorable installations by Richard Long, Richard Serra and Luciano Fabro.
Art Blart _ art and cultural memory archive 
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