Exhibition: ‘The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today’ at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York

Exhibition dates: 1st August – 1st November 2010

 

A huge posting of wonderful photographs!

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.

 

 

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) 'Rubber Dummies, Metro Goldwyn Mayer Studios, Hollywood' 1939 from the exhibition 'The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today' at MoMA, New York, Aug - Nov 2010

 

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Rubber Dummies, Metro Goldwyn Mayer Studios, Hollywood
1939
Gelatin silver print
7 9/16 x 9 5/8″ (19.3 x 24.4cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Edward Steichen
© 1981 Collection Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents

 

David Goldblatt (South African, 1930-2018) 'Monument to Karel Landman, Voortrekker Leader, De Kol, Eastern Cape' April 10, 1993 from the exhibition 'The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today' at MoMA, New York, Aug - Nov 2010

 

David Goldblatt (South African, 1930-2018)
Monument to Karel Landman, Voortrekker Leader, De Kol, Eastern Cape
April 10, 1993
Gelatin silver print
10 15/16 x 13 11/16″ (27.9 x 34.8cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase
© 2010 David Goldblatt. Courtesy David Goldblatt and the Goodman Gallery

 

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) 'Saint-Cloud' 1923 from the exhibition 'The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today' at MoMA, New York, Aug - Nov 2010

 

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 from the exhibition 'The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today' at MoMA, New York, Aug - Nov 2010

 

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

 

Bruce Nauman. 'Waxing Hot' from the portfolio 'Eleven Color Photographs' 1966–67/1970/2007

 

Bruce Nauman (American, b. 1941)
Waxing Hot from the portfolio Eleven Color Photographs
1966-1967/1970/2007
Inkjet print (originally chromogenic colour print)
19 15/16 x 19 15/16″ (50.6 x 50.6cm)
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Gerald S. Elliott Collection
© 2010 Bruce Nauman/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

 

Gilbert & George (Gilbert Proesch. British, b. Italy 1943. George Passmore. British, b. 1942) 'Great Expectations'. 1972

 

Gilbert & George (Gilbert Proesch. British, b. Italy 1943. George Passmore. British, b. 1942)
Great Expectations
1972
Dye transfer print
11 9/16 x 11 1/2″ (29.4 x 29.2cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Art & Project/Depot VBVR
© 2010 Gilbert & George

 

Hans Bellmer (German, 1902-1975) 'The Doll' 1935-1937

 

Hans Bellmer (German, 1902-1975)
The Doll
1935-1937
Gelatin silver print
9 1/2 x 9 5/16″ (24.1 x 23.7cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Samuel J. Wagstaff, Jr. Fund
© 2010 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris

 

 

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.

“In his 1947 book Le Musée Imaginaire, the novelist and politician André Malraux famously advocated for a pancultural ‘museum without walls,’ postulating that art history, and the history of sculpture in particular, had become ‘the history of that which can be photographed,'” said Ms. Marcoci.

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.

The Original Copy begins with Sculpture in the Age of Photography, a section comprising early photographs of sculptures in French cathedrals by Charles Nègre and in the British Museum by Roger Fenton and Stephen Thompson; a selection of André Kertész’s photographs from the 1920s showing art amid common objects in the studios of artist friends; and pictures by Barbara Kruger and Louise Lawler that 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 presents an impressive selection of Atget’s photographs, dating from the early 1900s to the mid 1920s, of classical statues, reliefs, fountains, and other decorative fragments in Paris, Versailles, Saint-Cloud, and Sceaux, which together amount to a visual compendium of the heritage of French civilisation at the time.

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.

Marcel Duchamp: The Readymade as Reproduction examines Box in a Valise (1935-41), a catalogue of his oeuvre featuring 69 reproductions, including minute replicas of several readymades and one original work that Duchamp “copyrighted” in the name of his female alter ego, Rrose Sélavy. Using collotype printing and pochoir – in which colour is applied by hand with the use of stencils – Duchamp produced “authorised ‘original’ copies” of his work, blurring the boundaries between unique object, readymade, and multiple. Cultural and Political Icons includes selections focusing on some of the most significant photographic essays of the twentieth century – Walker Evans’s American Photographs (1938), Robert Franks’s The Americans (1958), Lee Friedlander’s The American Monument (1976), and David Goldblatt’s The Structure of Things Then (1998) – many of which have never before been shown in a thematic context as they are here.

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) (American, 1890-1976) 'Noire et blanche' (Black and white) 1926

 

Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzky) (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

 

Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) 'Stamped Tin Relic' 1929 (printed c. 1970)

 

Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975)
Stamped Tin Relic
1929 (printed c. 1970)
Gelatin silver print
4 11/16 x 6 5/8″ (11.9 x 16.9cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Lily Auchincloss Fund
© 2010 Estate of Walker Evans

 

Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934) 'Mount Rushmore, South Dakota' 1969

 

Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934)
Mount Rushmore, South Dakota
1969
Gelatin silver print
8 1/16 x 12 1/8″ (20.5 x 30.8cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the photographer
© 2010 Lee Friedlander

 

Sibylle Bergemann (German, 1941-2010) 'Das Denkmal, East Berlin' (The monument, East Berlin)

 

Sibylle Bergemann (German, 1941-2010)
Das Denkmal, East Berlin (The monument, East Berlin)
1986
Gelatin silver print
19 11/16 x 23 5/8″ (50 x 60cm)
Sibylle Bergemann/Ostkreuz Agentur der Fotografen, Berlin
© 2010 Sibylle Bergemann/Ostkreuz Agentur der Fotografen, Berlin

 

Marcel Duchamp (American, born France, 1887-1968) and Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzky) (American, 1890-1976) 'Élevage de poussière (Dust breeding)' 1920

 

Marcel Duchamp (American, born France, 1887-1968)
Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzky) (American, 1890-1976)
Élevage de poussière (Dust breeding)
1920
Gelatin silver contact print
2 13/16 x 4 5/16″ (7.1 x 11cm)
The Bluff Collection, LP
© 2010 Man Ray Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris

 

Guy Tillim (South African, b. 1962) 'Bust of Agostinho Neto, Quibala, Angola' 2008

 

Guy Tillim (South African, b. 1962)
Bust of Agostinho Neto, Quibala, Angola
2008
Pigmented inkjet print
17 3/16 x 25 3/4″ (43.6 x 65.4cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Acquired through the generosity of the Contemporary Arts Council of The Museum of Modern Art
© 2010 Guy Tillim. Courtesy Michael Stevenson Gallery

 

 

Selected wall text from the exhibition

“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.

Sculpture was among the first subjects to be treated in photography. In his 1947 book Le Musée imaginaire, the novelist and politician André Malraux famously advocated for a pancultural “museum without walls,” postulating that art history, and the history of sculpture in particular, had become “the history of that which can be photographed.” There were many reasons for this, including the immobility of sculpture, which suited the long exposure times needed with the early photographic processes, and 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 not only interpret sculpture but create stunning reinventions of it.

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.

With the advent of the handheld portable camera in the early 1920s, photographers had the flexibility to capture contingent sculptural arrangements taken from elliptical viewpoints. André Kertész, for instance, recorded unexpected juxtapositions between art and common objects in the studios of artist friends, including Fernand Léger and Ossip Zadkine. His ability to forge heterogeneous materials and objects into visual unity inspired the novelist Pierre Mac Orlan to confer on him the title of “photographer-poet.”

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.

At Versailles, most intensely between 1901 and 1906 and again between 1921 and 1926, Atget photographed the gardens that André Le Nôtre, the landscape architect of King Louis XIV, had designed in the second half of the seventeenth century. In a series of pictures of allegorical statues punctuating the garden’s vistas, Atget focused on the scenic organisation of the sculptures, treating them as characters in a historical play. The pantomimic effect of the statues’ postures clearly appealed to Atget, who in 1880, before turning to photography, had taken acting classes at the Conservatory of the Théâtre national de France. Depicting the white marble statues from low viewpoints, in full length, and against the dark, unified tones of hedges and trees, Atget brought them into dramatic relief, highlighting the theatrical possibilities of sculpture.

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. 

Constantin Brancusi
The Studio as Groupe Mobile

“Why write?” Brancusi once queried. “Why not just show the photographs?” The sculptor included many great photographers among his friends – Edward Steichen was one of his early champions in the United States; Alfred Stieglitz organised in 1914 his first solo exhibition in New York; Man Ray helped him buy photographic equipment; Berenice Abbott studied sculpture under him; and he was on close terms with Brassaï, André Kertész, and László Moholy-Nagy. Yet he declined to have his work photographed by others, preferring instead to take, develop, and print his own pictures.

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.

 

Clarence John Laughlin (American, 1905-1985) 'The Eye That Never Sleeps' 1946

 

Clarence John Laughlin (American, 1905-1985)
The Eye That Never Sleeps
1946
Gelatin silver print
12 3/8 x 8 3/4″ (31.4 x 22.2cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase
© Clarence John Laughlin

 

Fischli/Weiss (Peter Fischli. Swiss, born 1952. David Weiss. Swiss, born 1946) 'Outlaws' 1984

 

Fischli/Weiss (Peter Fischli. Swiss, b. 1952. David Weiss. Swiss, b. 1946)
Outlaws
1984
Chromogenic colour print
15 ¾ x 11 13/16″ (40 x 30cm)
Courtesy the artists and Matthew Marks Gallery, New York
© Peter Fischli and David Weiss. Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York

 

Claes Oldenburg (American born Sweden. b. 1929) 'Claes Oldenburg - Projects for Monuments'. 1967

 

Claes Oldenburg (American born Sweden. b. 1929)
Claes Oldenburg: Projects for Monuments
1967
Offset lithograph
34 11/16 x 22 1/2″ (88.0 x 57.2 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Barbara Pine
© 2010 Claes Oldenburg

 

Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzky) (American, 1890-1976) 'L'Homme' (Man) 1918

 

Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzky) (American, 1890-1976)
L’Homme (Man)
1918
Gelatin silver print
19 x 14 1/2″ (48.3 x 36.8cm)
Private collection, New York
© 2010 Man Ray Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris

 

Herbert Bayer (American born Austria, 1900-1985) 'Humanly impossible' 1932

 

Herbert Bayer (American born Austria, 1900-1985)
Humanly impossible
1932
Gelatin silver print
15 3/8 x 11 9/16″ (39 x 29.3cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Thomas Walther Collection. Purchase
© 2010 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

 

Constantin Brancusi (French born Romania, 1876-1957) 'L'Oiseau' (Golden Bird). c. 1919

 

Constantin Brancusi (French born Romania, 1876-1957)
L’Oiseau (Golden Bird)
c. 1919
Gelatin silver print
9 x 6 11/16″ (22.8 x 17cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Thomas Walther Collection. Purchase
© 2010 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris

 

Gillian Wearing (British, b. 1963) 'Self-Portrait at 17 Years Old' 2003

 

Gillian Wearing (British, b. 1963)
Self-Portrait at 17 Years Old
2003
Chromogenic color print
41 x 32″ (104.1 x 81.3cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Acquired through the generosity of The Contemporary Arts Council of The Museum of Modern Art
© 2010 Gillian Wearing. Courtesy the artist, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, and Maureen Paley, London

 

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

 

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

 

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) 'Father Duffy, Times Square' April 14, 1937

 

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Father Duffy, Times Square
April 14, 1937
Gelatin silver print
9 5/16 x 7 5/8″ (23.7 x 19.4cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Ronald A. Kurtz
© 2010 Berenice Abbott/Commerce Graphics, Ltd., New York

 

 

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
11, West Fifty-Third Street, New York

Opening hours:
Daily 10am – 5.30pm

MoMA website

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Exhibition: ‘Richard Misrach: After Katrina’ at The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Exhibition dates: 7th August – 31st October 2010

 

Many thankx to The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

 

Richard Misrach (American, b. 1949) 'Untitled (New Orleans and the Gulf Coast)' 2005 from the exhibition 'Richard Misrach: After Katrina' at The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Aug-  Oct 2010

 

Richard Misrach (American, b. 1949)
Untitled (New Orleans and the Gulf Coast)
2005, printed 2010
Inkjet print, ed. #3/5
2399 x 1795 mm
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, gift of the artist
© Richard Misrach

 

Richard Misrach (American, b. 1949) 'Untitled (New Orleans and the Gulf Coast)' 2005 from the exhibition 'Richard Misrach: After Katrina' at The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Aug-  Oct 2010

 

Richard Misrach (American, b. 1949)
Untitled (New Orleans and the Gulf Coast)
2005, printed 2010
Inkjet print, ed. #3/5
2400 x 1807 mm
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, gift of the artist
© Richard Misrach

 

Richard Misrach (American, b. 1949) 'Untitled (New Orleans and the Gulf Coast)' 2005 from the exhibition 'Richard Misrach: After Katrina' at The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Aug-  Oct 2010

 

Richard Misrach (American, b. 1949)
Untitled (New Orleans and the Gulf Coast)
2005, printed 2010
Inkjet print, ed. #3/5
2400 x 1801 mm
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, gift of the artist
© Richard Misrach

 

Richard Misrach (American, b. 1949) 'Untitled (New Orleans and the Gulf Coast)' 2005

 

Richard Misrach (American, b. 1949)
Untitled (New Orleans and the Gulf Coast)
2005, printed 2010
Inkjet print
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, gift of the artist
© Richard Misrach

 

Richard Misrach (American, b. 1949) 'Untitled (New Orleans and the Gulf Coast)' 2005

 

Richard Misrach (American, b. 1949)
Untitled (New Orleans and the Gulf Coast)
2005, printed 2010
Inkjet print
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, gift of the artist
© Richard Misrach

 

Richard Misrach (American, b. 1949) 'Untitled (New Orleans and the Gulf Coast)' 2005

 

Richard Misrach (American, b. 1949)
Untitled (New Orleans and the Gulf Coast)
2005, printed 2010
Inkjet print
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, gift of the artist
© Richard Misrach

 

 

Just after Hurricane Katrina devastated the city of New Orleans in 2005, photographer Richard Misrach used a 4-megapixel pocket camera to capture messages left behind by evacuees. Some are warnings; some are cries for help or encouragement; some are tallies of loss.

Misrach composed a visual narrative that reveals the wrenching anguish of dealing with the aftermath of this horrific storm. Commemorating the hurricane’s fifth anniversary, the exhibition Richard Misrach: After Katrina presents 69 photographs that Misrach has generously given to the MFAH.

Misrach (born 1949) is best known for his Desert Cantos series, initiated in 1979 and still ongoing. Each canto within the series investigates specific aspects of the American West, from issues of water, to tourism, to the presence of the U.S. military. While developing the Cantos, Misrach has also produced series on the Golden Gate Bridge and Hawaiian beaches. The MFAH collects Misrach’s work in depth and in 1996 organised the artist’s mid-career retrospective, Crimes and Splendors: The Desert Cantos of Richard Misrach.

Text from The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston website

 

Richard Misrach (American, b. 1949) 'Untitled (New Orleans and the Gulf Coast)' 2005

 

Richard Misrach (American, b. 1949)
Untitled (New Orleans and the Gulf Coast)
2005, printed 2010
Inkjet print, ed. #3/5
2400 x 1794 mm
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, gift of the artist
© Richard Misrach

 

Richard Misrach (American, b. 1949) 'Untitled (New Orleans and the Gulf Coast)' 2005

 

Richard Misrach (American, b. 1949)
Untitled (New Orleans and the Gulf Coast)
2005, printed 2010
Inkjet print, ed. #3/5
2400 x 1801 mm
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, gift of the artist
© Richard Misrach

 

Richard Misrach (American, b. 1949) 'Untitled (New Orleans and the Gulf Coast)' 2005

 

Richard Misrach (American, b. 1949)
Untitled (New Orleans and the Gulf Coast)
2005, printed 2010
Inkjet print, ed. #3/5
2400 x 1807 mm
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, gift of the artist
© Richard Misrach

 

Richard Misrach (American, b. 1949) 'Untitled (New Orleans and the Gulf Coast)' 2005

 

Richard Misrach (American, b. 1949)
Untitled (New Orleans and the Gulf Coast)
2005, printed 2010
Inkjet print, ed. #3/5
2400 x 1803 mm
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, gift of the artist
© Richard Misrach

 

Richard Misrach (American, b. 1949) 'Untitled (New Orleans and the Gulf Coast)' 2005

 

Richard Misrach (American, b. 1949)
Untitled (New Orleans and the Gulf Coast)
2005, printed 2010
Inkjet print
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, gift of the artist
© Richard Misrach

 

Richard Misrach (American, b. 1949) 'Untitled (New Orleans and the Gulf Coast)' 2005

 

Richard Misrach (American, b. 1949)
Untitled (New Orleans and the Gulf Coast)
2005, printed 2010
Inkjet print
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, gift of the artist
© Richard Misrach

 

Richard Misrach (American, b. 1949) 'Untitled (New Orleans and the Gulf Coast)' 2005

 

Richard Misrach (American, b. 1949)
Untitled (New Orleans and the Gulf Coast)
2005, printed 2010
Inkjet print
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, gift of the artist
© Richard Misrach

 

Richard Misrach (American, b. 1949) 'Untitled (New Orleans and the Gulf Coast)' 2005

 

Richard Misrach (American, b. 1949)
Untitled (New Orleans and the Gulf Coast)
2005, printed 2010
Inkjet print
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, gift of the artist
© Richard Misrach

 

Richard Misrach (American, b. 1949) 'Untitled (New Orleans and the Gulf Coast)' 2005

 

Richard Misrach (American, b. 1949)
Untitled (New Orleans and the Gulf Coast)
2005, printed 2010
Inkjet print
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, gift of the artist
© Richard Misrach

 

Richard Misrach (American, b. 1949) 'Untitled (New Orleans and the Gulf Coast)' 2005

 

Richard Misrach (American, b. 1949)
Untitled (New Orleans and the Gulf Coast)
2005, printed 2010
Inkjet print
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, gift of the artist
© Richard Misrach

 

Richard Misrach (American, b. 1949) 'Untitled (New Orleans and the Gulf Coast)' 2005

 

Richard Misrach (American, b. 1949)
Untitled (New Orleans and the Gulf Coast)
2005, printed 2010
Inkjet print
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, gift of the artist
© Richard Misrach

 

 

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
1001 Bissonnet Street
Houston, TX 77005

Opening hours:
Wednesday 11am – 5pm
Thursday 11am – 9pm
Friday 11am – 6pm
Saturday 11am – 6pm
Sunday 12.30 – 6pm
Monday Closed
Tuesday Closed

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston website

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Review: ‘The Feast of Trimalchio’ by AES+F at Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 7th October – 23rd October 2010

 

AES+F. 'The Feast of Trimalchio Panorama #1' 2009

 

AES+F
The Feast of Trimalchio Panorama #1
2009

 

 

Searching for identity like mould spore taking root

In one sense these large panoramic, digitally constructed mis en scene photographs by Russian collective AES+F at Anna Schwartz Gallery, (taken from the “celebrated” video of the same name which debuted at the Venice Biennale in 2009) are mere echoes of the lyrical, dance and fugue-like structures of the moving work.

In another sense they work well as still photographs. The balance inherent within the picture frame is exemplary, the use of colour and the feeling of rhythm and flow of the figures in pictorial space, wonderful. This rhythm can be called the physiognomy of the work, its style.1 In these photographs style is hard to miss and the photographs fulfil what Susan Sontag saw as one of the main prerequisites for good art: that of emotional distance from lived reality, that allows us to the look at the work dispassionately before bringing those observations back into the real world:

“All works of art are founded on a certain distance from the lived reality which is represented. This “distance” is, by definition, inhuman or impersonal to a certain degree; for in order to appear to us as art, the work must restrict sentimental intervention and emotional participation, which are functions of “closeness.” It is the degree and manipulating of this distance, the conventions of distance, which constitute the style of the work … But the notion of distance (and of dehumanisation, as well) is misleading, unless one adds that the movement is not just away from but toward the world.”2

.
In these photographs we have a pastiche of cultural attitudes and mores that allows us to reflect on the foibles, paradoxes, consumerism and stereotypes of identity formation of the contemporary world, mixed with a healthy serving of voyeurism. As Javier Panera notes, “AES+F’s work is nurtured from moral and cultural paradoxes: seduction and threat; hyperrealism and artificiality; classicism and contemporaneity; spirituality and sensuality; historicism and the end of history,”3 and they construct a new oligarchy within a dystopic, Arcadian world. Variously, we have masters and servants, oriental and neoclassical architecture, haute couture, lesbianism, adoration, a youth dressed in white falling out of a priests robes (or is a kimono?) onto an altar-like table, savages and beasts, homoerotic encounters and many more besides – all constructed in an imagined world of a temporary hotel performing rituals of leisure and pleasure, an orgiastic but chaste imagining in this world, looking back at lived reality.

And for me there is the problem. While the photographs offer this vision of temptation and delight in the end they just reinforce the basis of belief in the status quo, the power of cultural hegemony. Subversion as an act, a decorative performance imbued with titillation. As Marco Fusinato observed, using a quotation from an anarchist website in a work in his latest exhibition at Anna Schwartz Gallery (and the irony does not escape me, far from it!):

“The artist is also the mainstay of a whole social milieu – called a “scene” – which allows him to exist and which he keeps alive. A very special ecosystem: agents, press attachés, art directors, marketing agents, critics, collectors, patrons, art gallery managers, cultural mediators, consumers… birds of prey sponge off artists in the joyous horror of showbiz. A scene with its codes, norms, outcasts, favourites, ministry, exploiters and exploited, profiteers and admirers. A scene which has the monopoly on good taste, exerting aesthetic terrorism upon all that which is not profitable, or upon all that which doesn’t come from a very specific mentality within which subversion must only be superficial, of course at the risk of subverting.”4

.
The subversion of these images is superficial, a surface appearance of insurrection.

Despite protestations to the contrary (an appeal on the AES+F website to the idea of the Roman saturnalia, see text below) – where the masters serve the slaves at a dinner once a year, this reversal was only ever superficial at best: “the reversal of the social order was mostly superficial; the banquet, for example, would often be prepared by the slaves, and they would prepare their masters’ dinner as well. It was license within careful boundaries; it reversed the social order without subverting it.”5

It was a license within careful boundaries.
It reversed the social order without subverting


The same can be said of these wonderful, colourful, rhythmic, chaste, trite, in vogue, pale imitations of subversion. The images come from a very specific mentality within which subversion must only be superficial because they are, after all, images that are searching for an identity in order to access and survive in the Western art world.

ex nihilo nihil fit (Nothing comes of nothing) and please, don’t bite the hand that feeds you.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

 

1/ Sontag, Susan. “On Style,” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Delta Book, 1966, pp. 30-31

2/ Ibid.,

3/ Panera, Panera. “AES+F’s The  Feast of Trimalchio,” on FlashArtonline.com [Online] Cited 17/10/2010. No longer available online

4/ Anon. “Escapism has its price The artist has his income,” on Non Fides website Wednesday 17 September 2008 [Online] Cited 28/12/2019. No longer available online

5/ Anon. “Saturnalia,” on Wikipedia website [Online] Cited 28/12/2019


    Many thankx to The Melbourne International Arts Festival and Anna Schwartz Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting.

    Viewers: please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image as it is essential to see the freeze frame action, what is actually going on within the images. All images courtesy the artists and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne & Sydney.

     

     

     

    AES+F The Feast of Trimalchio – part 1, 2 and 3

     

    AES+F. 'The Feast of Trimalchio Panorama #2' 2009

     

    AES+F
    The Feast of Trimalchio Panorama #2
    2009

     

    AES+F. 'The Feast of Trimalchio Panorama #3' 2009

     

    AES+F
    The Feast of Trimalchio Panorama #3
    2009

     

    AES+F. 'The Feast of Trimalchio Panorama #4' 2009

     

    AES+F
    The Feast of Trimalchio Panorama #4
    2009

     

    AES+F. 'The Feast of Trimalchio Panorama #5' 2009

     

    AES+F
    The Feast of Trimalchio Panorama #5
    2009

     

     

    In the Satyricon, the work of the great wit and melancholic lyric poet of Nero’s reign, Gaius Petronius Arbiter, the best preserved part is The Feast of Trimalchio (Cena Trimalchionis). Thanks to Petronius’s fantasy, Trimalchio’s name became synonymous with wealth and luxury, with gluttony and with unbridled pleasure in contrast to the brevity of human existence.

    We searched for an analogue in the third millennium and Trimalchio, the former slave, the nouveau riche host of feasts lasting several days, appeared to us not so much as an individual as a collective image of a luxurious hotel, a temporary paradise which one has to pay to enter.

    The hotel guests, the ‘masters’, are from the land of the Golden Billion. They’re keen to spend their time, regardless of the season, as guests of the present-day Trimalchio, who has created the most exotic and luxurious hotel possible. The hotel miraculously combines a tropical coastline with a ski resort. The ‘masters’ wear white which calls to mind the uniform of the righteous in the Garden of Eden, or traditional colonial dress, or a summer fashion collection. The ‘masters’ possess all of the characteristics of the human race – they are all ages and types and from all social backgrounds. Here is the university professor, the broker, the society beauty, the intellectual. Trimalchio’s ‘servants’ are young, attractive representatives of all continents who work in the vast hospitality industry as housekeeping staff, waiters, chefs, gardeners, security guards and masseurs. They are dressed in traditional uniforms with an ethnic twist. The ‘servants’ resemble the brightly-coloured angels of a Garden of Eden to which the ‘masters’ are only temporarily admitted.

    On one hand the atmosphere of The Feast of Trimalchio can be seen as bringing together the hotel rituals of leisure and pleasure (massage and golf, the pool and surfing). On the other hand the ‘servants’ are more than attentive service-providers. They are participants in an orgy, bringing to life any fantasy of the ‘masters’, from gastronomic to erotic. At times the ‘masters’ unexpectedly end up in the role of ‘servants’. Both become participants in an orgiastic gala reception, a dinner in the style of Roman saturnalia when slaves, dressed as patricians, reclined at table and their masters, dressed in slaves’ tunics, served them.

    Every so often the delights of The Feast of Trimalchio are spoiled by catastrophes which encroach on the Global Paradise…

    AES+F, 2009
    Translated by Ruth Addison

    Text from the AES+F website [Online] Cited 28/12/2019

     

    AES+F. 'The Feast of Trimalchio Panorama #6' 2009

     

    AES+F
    The Feast of Trimalchio Panorama #6
    2009

     

    AES+F. 'The Feast of Trimalchio Panorama #7' 2009

     

    AES+F
    The Feast of Trimalchio Panorama #7
    2009

     

     

    Russian collective AES+F work with photography, video, sculpture and mixed media. Since 1987, they have interwoven imagery relating to modern technology, Hollywood cinema, fashion photography, advertising, death, religion, the British Royal Family, mass media, popular culture and youth obsession throughout their work.

    The Feast of Trimalchio is an interpretation of the witty but melancholy fiction Satyricon by the Roman poet Petronius. In the ancient version Trimalchio’s feast was portrayed as the ideal celebration that Trimalchio imagined for his own funeral. In the AES+F 21st Century version, an orgy of consumerism reflects on the contemporary state of Russia and indeed the world. Created from over 75,000 photographs, the complete work is a nine-channel panoramic media that made its celebrated debut at the 2009 Venice Biennale. For the Festival, Anna Schwartz Gallery features a set of three expansive photographic tableaux. These captivating images of a temporary hotel paradise portray opulence and excess overshadowed by a dark uneasiness.

    Text from the Melbourne International Arts Festival website

     

    AES+F. 'The Feast of Trimalchio Panorama #8' 2009

     

    AES+F
    The Feast of Trimalchio Panorama #8
    2009

     

    AES+F. 'The Feast of Trimalchio Panorama #9' 2009

     

    AES+F
    The Feast of Trimalchio Panorama #9
    2009

     

     

    Anna Schwartz Gallery
    185 Flinders Lane
    Melbourne, Victoria 3000

    Opening hours:
    Tuesday – Friday 12 – 5pm
    Saturday 1 – 5pm

    Anna Schwartz Gallery website

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    Exhibition: ‘Timelines: Photography and Time’ at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

    Exhibition dates: 7th May – 3rd October 2010

     

    Many thankx to Alison Murray 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.

     

    Lewis Hine (American, 1874-1940) 'Lacy, twelve years old and Savannah, eleven years old' 1908 from the exhibition 'Timelines: Photography and Time' at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, May - Oct 2010

     

    Lewis Hine (American, 1874-1940)
    Lacy, twelve years old and Savannah, eleven years old
    1908
    Gelatin silver print
    Image and sheet: 11.9 × 17.1cm
    National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
    Purchased, 1980

     

    ‘Perhaps you are weary of child labour pictures. Well, so are the rest of us, but we propose to make you and the whole country so sick and tired of the whole business that when the time for action comes, child labour pictures will be records of the past.’

    Lewis Hine, 1909

     

    Unknown photographer, 'No title (Ritual washing for funeral)' c. 1880 from the exhibition 'Timelines: Photography and Time' at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, May - Oct 2010

     

    Unknown photographer
    No title (Ritual washing for funeral)
    c. 1880
    Albumen silver photograph, colour dyes
    Image and sheet: 21.2 × 26.5cm
    National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
    Purchased, 2001

     

    Felice Beato (Italian/English, 1832-1909, worked throughout Europe and Asia, 1853-1890) 'No title (Maiko)' (1866-1868, printed 1877-1985)

     

    Felice Beato (Italian/English, 1832-1909, worked throughout Europe and Asia, 1853-1890)
    Stillfried and Anderson and the Japan Photographic Association (studio) (Japanese, 1877-1885)
    No title (Maiko)
    1866-1868, printed 1877-1885
    albumen silver photograph, coloured dyes
    24.4 x 19.6cm
    National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
    Purchased through the NGV Foundation with the assistance of The Herald & Weekly Times Limited, Fellow, 2001

     

    Christine Godden (Australian, b. 1947) 'Joanie with Jade' 1973; printed 1986 from the exhibition 'Timelines: Photography and Time' at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, May - Oct 2010

     

    Christine Godden (Australian, b. 1947)
    Joanie with Jade
    1973; printed 1986
    Gelatin silver photograph
    20.3 × 30.6cm
    National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
    Purchased from Admission Funds, 1991
    © Christine Godden

     

    Ruth Maddison (Australian, b. 1945) 'Molly O'Sullivan, 82' 1990

     

    Ruth Maddison (Australian, b. 1945)
    Molly O’Sullivan, 82
    1990
    From the After work series 1990
    Gelatin silver photograph, oil paint, fibre-tipped pen
    24.8 x 20.6cm
    National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
    Purchased through The Art Foundation of Victoria with the assistance of the Hugh Williamson Foundation, Founder Benefactor, 1990
    © Ruth Maddison

     

     

    Opening 7 May, the National Gallery of Victoria will present Timelines: Photography and Time, a captivating exhibition exploring the notion of time in photographs.

    Time is a slippery notion. It is everywhere and always moving but this powerful regulating force cannot be seen. It is only apparent in context: in the changing seasons, in another wrinkle on our faces, in the growth of children. Photography has a unique role to play in our sometimes poignant sense of time passing. The camera’s ability to depict ‘a moment in time’ – to stop the clock for a brief moment – gives photographs a unique capacity to direct our consideration towards the mechanics and poetics of this pervasive and mysterious cosmic force.

    In this exhibition one aspect of time is considered from a photographic perspective: namely, human life. Works have been selected from the permanent collection both by International and Australian photographers that show an interest in some aspect of lifecycles. Arranged, in part, in a ‘timeline’, these works provoke our understanding of the mediums capacity to suggest the concept of time in ways that may be surprising, moving or even confronting. The exhibition also looks at how photographers have extended a sense of time and duration through images that work in series

    Timelines will feature almost forty photographs from the NGV Collection by both Australian and international photographers including work by Diane Arbus, Micky Allan and Bill Brandt.

    Isobel Crombie, Senior Curator of Photography, NGV said photography has a unique role to play in capturing the way that time passes.

    “The camera’s ability to ‘stop the clock’ enables the medium to direct our consideration towards the mechanics and poetics of this pervasive and mysterious cosmic force.

    “The instant that the photograph captures can be a potent reminder to seize the day rather than dreaming about the past or worrying about the future,” said Dr Crombie.

    The exhibition also looks at how photographers have extended a sense of time and duration through images that work in series. From the 1960s onwards, photographers began experimenting with stretching time by creating a series or sequence of photographs.

    This is seen in Rod McNicol’s powerful series titled A portrait revisited (1986-2006), (pictured Jack, below). Purchased by the NGV in 2009, the series features portraits of men and women; each posed directly facing the camera against a plain backdrop. There are two portraits of each subject photographed twenty years apart, inviting the viewer to compare the portraits to see how time has changed them. The sense of time passing is highlighted with the portrait of Peter, who is photographed only once. The blank image next to him is a reminder that he died before the second portrait was made.

    Each phase of human existence has characteristic traits and features, and photographers have worked with these qualities in ways that evoke the passing of time and our place in this cycle. Arranged in part in a human timeline, the exhibition begins with the start of a new life as depicted in Christine Godden’s Joanie pregnant (1972) and Joanie with Jade (1973) and concludes with Kusakabe Kimbei’s Ritual washing for a funeral (c. 1880, see above – now labelled as ‘Unknown’ on the NGV website in 2019), an image of a deceased man being prepared in the traditional Japanese way for burial. This final scene captures the grief of the moment when a lifetime ends.

    Frances Lindsay, Deputy Director, NGV said: “The works in the exhibition show how artists have explored the concept of time in ways that may surprise, move or even confront viewers. This exhibition provides visitors with a special opportunity to view this remarkable collection of photographs from the NGV Collection, many of which are on display for the first time.”

    Timelines will include photographs by Micky Allan, Diane Arbus, Felice Beato, Bill Brandt, Brassaï, Harry Callahan, Imogen Cunningham, Walker Evans, Christine Godden, Ponch Hawkes, Petrina Hicks, Lewis Hine, Kusakabe Kimbei, Rosemary Laing, J.H. Lartigue, Ruth Maddison, Rod McNicol, David Moore, Jan Saudek, John Thompson, Roman Vishniac, and Edward Weston.

    Text from the National Gallery of Victoria International website [Online] Cited 17/09/2010 no longer available online

     

    Rosemary Laing (Australian, 1959-2024) 'a dozen useless actions for grieving blondes #10' 2009

     

    Rosemary Laing (Australian, 1959-2024)
    a dozen useless actions for grieving blondes #10
    2009
    Type C photograph
    76.3 x 132.1cm
    National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
    Purchased, Victorian Foundation for Living Australian Artists, 2010
    © Rosemary Laing and Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne

     

    Rod McNicol (Australian, b. 1946) 'Jack' 2006

     

    Rod McNicol (Australian, b. 1946)
    Jack
    2006
    From the A portrait revisited series 1986-2006
    Digital type C print
    48.0 x 67.1cm
    National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
    Purchased, Victorian Foundation for Living Australian Artists, 2009
    © Rod McNicol

     

    Ponch Hawkes (Australian, b. 1946) 'The watch that Lucy gave to Beci' (1987, printed 1989) from the exhibition 'Timelines: Photography and Time' at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, May - Oct 2010

     

    Ponch Hawkes (Australian, b. 1946)
    The watch that Lucy gave to Beci
    1987, printed 1989
    Gelatin silver photograph
    23.8 x 35.1cm
    National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
    Purchased with funds donated by Hallmark Cards Australia Pty Ltd, 1989
    © Ponch Hawkes

     

    David Moore (Australian, 1927-2003) 'Outback children, South Australia' 1963

     

    David Moore (Australian, 1927-2003)
    Outback children, South Australia
    1963
    Gelatin silver photograph
    36.8 x 57.6cm
    National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
    Purchased through the KODAK (Australasia) Pty Ltd Fund, 1969
    © David Moore Estate

     

     

    NGV International
    180 St Kilda Road

    Opening hours
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    Work in progress: Marcus Bunyan. ‘Missing in Action (red kenosis)’ 2010

    September 2010

     

    Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) 'Missing in Action (red kenosis)' 2010

     

     

    Missing in Action (red kenosis)

    A body of work is slowly taking shape. I have over 150 images at the moment (!!) and after I finish making them all the images will be culled to form the new series Missing in Action (red kenosis) (2010). Images from the new series are below. Please click on the photographs to see a larger version of the image. Enjoy!

    Dr Marcus Bunyan

     

    Photographs are available from this series for purchase. As a guide, a digital colour 16″ x 20″ costs $1000 plus tracked and insured shipping. For more information please see my Store web page.

     

     

    Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) 'Missing in Action (red kenosis)' 2010

     

    Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) 'Missing in Action (red kenosis)' 2010

     

    Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) 'Missing in Action (red kenosis)' 2010

     

    Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) 'Missing in Action (red kenosis)' 2010

     

    Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) 'Missing in Action (red kenosis)' 2010

     

    All images from the series Missing in Action (red kenosis) 2010

     

     

    Marcus Bunyan website

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    Exhibition: ‘Wolfgang Tillmans’ at the Serpentine Gallery, London

    Exhibition dates: 26th June – 19th September, 2010

     

    Installation view of the exhibition 'Wolfgang Tillmans' at the Serpentine Gallery, London, June - Sept, 2010

     

    Installation view of the exhibition Wolfgang Tillmans at the Serpentine Gallery, London, June- September, 2010
    Photograph: Gautier de Blonde

     

     

    “In the constellations of pictures, I try to approximate the way I see the world, not in a linear order but as a multitude of parallel experiences…  Multiple singularities, simultaneously accessible as they share the same space or room.”


    Wolfgang Tillmans

     

     

    Since I haven’t been to the exhibition I have tried to sequence the photographs of this wonderful artist in a small intimation of how he might have visualised them – I hope you get the idea. The installation photographs at the bottom give clues to the actual moments of what Minor White calls ‘ice/fire’ – the space between disparate images, the space that is just as important as the images themselves for the frisson that is evokes, the creation of that metaphorical leap into the void of meaning where malleable thoughts emerge; never linear, both singular and multiple at one and the same time.

    Dr Marcus Bunyan


    Many thankx to the Serpentine Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

     

     

    Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968) 'Anders pulling splinter from his foot' 2004 from the exhibition 'Wolfgang Tillmans' at the Serpentine Gallery, London, June - Sept, 2010

     

    Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
    Anders pulling splinter from his foot
    2004
    C-type print
    61 × 50.8cm
    Courtesy the artist and Maureen Paley, London

     

    Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968) 'Nanbei Hu' 2009 from the exhibition 'Wolfgang Tillmans' at the Serpentine Gallery, London, June - Sept, 2010

     

    Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
    Nanbei Hu
    2009
    Inkjet print
    207 x 138cm
    Courtesy the artist and Maureen Paley, London

     

    Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968) 'Roy' 2009 from the exhibition 'Wolfgang Tillmans' at the Serpentine Gallery, London, June - Sept, 2010

     

    Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
    Roy
    2009
    C-type print
    40.6 x 30.5cm
    Courtesy the artist and Maureen Paley, London

     

    Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968) 'Venus, transit' 2004

     

    Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
    Venus, transit
    2004
    C-type print
    40.6 × 30.5cm
    Courtesy the artist and Maureen Paley, London

     

    Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968) 'Dan' 2008

     

    Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
    Dan
    2008
    C-type print
    61 × 50.8cm
    Courtesy the artist and Maureen Paley, London

     

    Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968) 'Eierstapel' 2009

     

    Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
    Eierstapel
    2009
    C-type print
    61 x 50.8cm
    Courtesy the artist and Maureen Paley, London

     

    Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968) 'Muqarnas' 2006

     

    Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
    Muqarnas
    2006
    Framed C-type print
    214 × 145cm
    Courtesy the artist and Maureen Paley, London

     

    Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968) 'Urgency XXII' 2006

     

    Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
    Urgency XXII
    2006
    Framed C-type print
    238 × 181cm
    Courtesy the artist and Maureen Paley, London

     

    Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968) 'Zimmerlinde (Michel)' 2006

     

    Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
    Zimmerlinde (Michel)
    2006
    Framed C-type print
    211 × 145cm
    Courtesy the artist and Maureen Paley, London

     

     

    The Serpentine Gallery presents Wolfgang Tillmans’ first major exhibition in London since 2003. Conceived by the artist for the Serpentine Gallery, the exhibition will present both abstract and figurative work.

    Over the past 20 years, Tillmans has redefined photography and the way it is shown. Known by the early 90s for the seemingly casual images of the world he inhabited, his work reassessed photographic conventions and reflected the identity politics of the time, capturing the fragility of human life and focusing on everyday objects. This early work then expanded to engage with portraiture, landscape, the still-life and, more recently, abstraction. Tillmans’ abstract work, greatly celebrated in the last decade, continues to push the boundaries and definitions of the photographic form, and will be a particular focus of this exhibition.

    The wide-ranging themes in Tillmans’ photographs are combined in his reconfiguration of accumulated images, created in response to a given space. In this new exhibition, the explorations into abstraction sit alongside a new focus on the figurative – a focus that is increasingly informed by recent colour field works and experiments with process. Referring to his approach to installation making Tillmans said: “In the constellations of pictures, I try to approximate the way I see the world, not in a linear order but as a multitude of parallel experiences… Multiple singularities, simultaneously accessible as they share the same space or room.”

    The Serpentine Gallery exhibition reflects the artist’s acute sensitivity to the politics of contemporary society, his ongoing fascination with colour, and his conceptual engagement with the technical processes of photography. These delicate yet challenging images capture the distinctive energetic balance between beauty and subversion that Tillmans has long embraced.

    Tillmans was born in 1968 in Remscheid, Germany. He studied in Great Britain at the Bournemouth & Poole College of Art & Design, graduating in 1992. In the 1990s, his work was shown at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Kunsthalle Zurich; and Portikus, Frankfurt, amongst others. In 2000 he won the Tate’s Turner Prize. A large survey exhibition in 2001-2003 toured to Deichtorhallen, Hamburg; Castello di Rivoli, Turin; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek, Denmark. His show called Freedom from the Known at P.S.1, New York (2006) was followed by a major tour of North American museums. In 2008, Tillmans had an extensive solo exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin entitled Lighter, and in 2009 was included in Making Worlds at the 53rd Venice Biennale. More than twenty monographic books on his work have been published to date and an exhibition catalogue will accompany the Serpentine Gallery exhibition.

    The exhibition will run concurrently with the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2010, designed by Jean Nouvel and opening on 10 July. Housed in the Pavilion will be artist Christian Boltanski’s Les Archives du Coeur installation.

    Press release from the Serpentine Gallery website [Online] Cited 11/09/2010 no longer available online

     

    Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968) 'Silver Installation VII' 2009 (installation view)

     

    Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
    Silver Installation VII (installation view)
    2009
    Unique C-type prints
    Installation view
    Photograph: Gautier de Blonde

     

    Installation view of the exhibition 'Wolfgang Tillmans' at the Serpentine Gallery, London, June-  September, 2010

    Installation view of the exhibition 'Wolfgang Tillmans' at the Serpentine Gallery, London, June-  September, 2010

    Installation view of the exhibition 'Wolfgang Tillmans' at the Serpentine Gallery, London, June-  September, 2010

     

    Installation views of the exhibition Wolfgang Tillmans at the Serpentine Gallery, London, June- September, 2010
    Photograph: Gautier de Blonde

     

     

    Serpentine Gallery
    Kensington Gardens
    London W2 3XA
    Phone: 020 7402 6075

    Opening hours:
    Tuesday – Sunday 10am – 6pm

    Serpentine Gallery website

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    Review: ‘How To Comfort Your Father’ by Martin Smith at Sophie Gannon Gallery, Richmond

    Exhibition dates: 24th August – 18th September 2010

     

    Martin Smith (Australian, b. 1971) 'Enough' 2010 from the exhibition 'How To Comfort Your Father' by Martin Smith at Sophie Gannon Gallery, Richmond, Aug - Sept, 2010

     

    Martin Smith (Australian, b. 1971)
    Enough
    2010

     

     

    Following on from last year’s exhibition My Jesus Lets Me Rub His Belly that examined issues of place and faith when the artist was growing up, Martin Smith now presents a slice of poignant son father love at Sophie Gannon Gallery, Richmond. The combination of images and text create narratives on growing up, life, male bonding and mortality.

    In Fix It Up (2010, below) the use of a circle of text on black (the circle of life) in this image paired with a dark photograph of moss covered twigs and branches is exemplary, the metaphor of the arborist chopping down a gum tree in the backyard as his father is waiting to be taken to hospital by ambulance with prostrate cancer, the last time he will be present in his house, incredibly moving. The use of blurred images, such as the central panel in the triptych Sydney (2010, below) adds emotional weight to the narratives, as though the stories told can only be fragmentary memories, as all memories are, of the events that have passed. The feeling of an excavation of the meaning of life and death is further enhanced by the incision of the letters into the photographs surface and the extrusion of the letters to form three-dimensional sculptural forms, as in the work Enough (2010, see photograph and detail below). The letters shape references the fungi on the tree behind, new life growing out of old, as though the words were being extruded out of the forest, archives of communal memory.

    My favourite image in the exhibition didn’t have any words at all, not even piled as detritus at the bottom of the frame as many of Smith’s works do. It didn’t need them. The triptyph Untitled 1 (2010, below) is simple and eloquently beautiful and almost brought me to tears. When read in combination with the other works and their texts, the moss covered trees on the left become two wrinkled elbows, the image on the right the wandering mind and the image in the centre – for me, the feeling of life force as it flows in the darkness. As my yoga teacher says to me, “You must learn to navigate the dazzling darkness.”

    This illumination of the mind, body, memory and spirit is what Smith’s work is all about. I adore it.

    Dr Marcus Bunyan


    Many thankx to Edwin and Sophie at Sophie Gannon Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. All photographs © and courtesy of the artist and Sophie Gannon Gallery. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image as it is important to read the text with the larger horizontal works (in some you can’t read the text, it is too small – apologies).

     

    Martin Smith (Australian, b. 1971) 'Regards Dad' 2010 from the exhibition 'How To Comfort Your Father' by Martin Smith at Sophie Gannon Gallery, Richmond, Aug - Sept, 2010

    Martin Smith (Australian, b. 1971)
    Regards Dad
    2010

     

    Martin Smith (Australian, b. 1971) 'Enough' 2010 (detail) from the exhibition 'How To Comfort Your Father' by Martin Smith at Sophie Gannon Gallery, Richmond, Aug - Sept, 2010

     

    Martin Smith (Australian, b. 1971)
    Enough (detail)
    2010

     

    Martin Smith (Australian, b. 1971) 'Fix it up' 2010

     

    Martin Smith (Australian, b. 1971)
    Fix it up
    2010

     

    Martin Smith (Australian, b. 1971) 'Sydney' 2010

     

    Martin Smith (Australian, b. 1971)
    Sydney
    2010

     

    Martin Smith (Australian, b. 1971) 'Untitled 1' 2010

     

    Martin Smith (Australian, b. 1971)
    Untitled 1
    2010

     

     

    Sophie Gannon Gallery
    2, Albert Street, Richmond, Melbourne

    Opening hours:
    Tuesday – Saturday 11 – 5pm

    Sophie Gannon Gallery website

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    Review: ‘Pat Brassington’ at Arc One Gallery, Melbourne

    Exhibition dates: 24th August – 18th September 2010

     

    Pat Brassington (Australian, b. 1942) 'Camouflage' 2010 from the exhibition 'Pat Brassington' at Arc One Gallery, Melbourne, Sun - Sept, 2010

     

    Pat Brassington (Australian, b. 1942)
    Camouflage
    2010

     

     

    I have a critically ambivalent attitude towards the work of artist Pat Brassington. While the exhibition at Arc One Gallery in Melbourne contains some wonderful ‘images’ her work never seems to move me in an emotional sense. What it does do admirably is constantly engage me in cerebral jousting and sensory debate. Intellectually and visually I find the images stimulating, emotionally I am left a little bit cold.

    Brassington’s sometimes fetishistic collage-like digital photographs occupy ambiguous spaces – fascinating ‘other’ worlds, constructed worlds that disturb and delight, drawing the viewer into subjective judgements on what, exactly, they are seeing. Brassington doesn’t need to speak about her work, much like Bill Henson never speaks about his work, because the viewer does that for her and that is the point – Brassington lets the viewer construct the story, a story that is open to multiple viewpoints and interpretations.

    To see the work as just “surrealist” is to do it a disservice for it is much more than that. Of course the work uses various surrealist tropes but the power of these images is in setting up psychological encounters that are often bizarre, confronting and disturbing at a deeper level than just surface juxtapositions. These images seem to haunt you long after you have seen them. Using a limited colour palette of washed out purples, greys, yellows and pinks with a hit of red or blue where applicable (only once a green, never any solid, bright, strong colours) Brassington’s work keeps repeating objects and themes throughout the years – the dress, fish, gloves, hands, legs and the sensual mouth – to “evoke uneasy tensions between bizarre, sinister intimations of menace and weirdly beautiful, benign harmonies.” (Diane Foster).

    In these new images the lascivious tongue is camouflaged, a woman marches determinedly and blindly over a hill, a child is wrapped and taped, two sateen gloves emanate and a boy breathes life into the sea (or is it the other way around, or is the boy destroying the sea through his breath?). The paradoxes are beautifully enacted and always challenging and that is the strength of the work of Brassington – offering us, the viewer, no easy way out as we stare at the red ribbons in a girl’s hair.

    Dr Marcus Bunyan


    Many thank to Angela Connor and all at Arc One Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. All images © and courtesy of the artist and Arc One Gallery.

     

     

    Pat Brassington. 'Ocean Child' 2009 from the exhibition 'Pat Brassington' at Arc One Gallery, Melbourne, Sun - Sept, 2010

     

    Pat Brassington (Australian, b. 1942)
    Ocean Child
    2009

     

    Pat Brassington. 'Like A Bird Now' 2010 from the exhibition 'Pat Brassington' at Arc One Gallery, Melbourne, Sun - Sept, 2010

     

    Pat Brassington (Australian, b. 1942)
    Like A Bird Now
    2010

     

    Pat Brassington (Australian, b. 1942) 'In Lieu' 2010 from the exhibition 'Pat Brassington' at Arc One Gallery, Melbourne, Sun - Sept, 2010

     

    Pat Brassington (Australian, b. 1942)
    In Lieu
    2010

     

    Pat Brassington (Australian, b. 1942) 'Sensors' 2010

     

    Pat Brassington (Australian, b. 1942)
    Sensors
    2010

     

    Pat Brassington (Australian, b. 1942) 'Radar' 2009

     

    Pat Brassington (Australian, b. 1942)
    Radar
    2009

     

    Pat Brassington (Australian, b. 1942) 'Double Vision' 2010

     

    Pat Brassington (Australian, b. 1942)
    Double Vision
    2010

     

    Pat Brassington (Australian, b. 1942) 'By the Way' 2010

     

    Pat Brassington (Australian, b. 1942)
    By the Way
    2010

     

    Pat Brassington (Australian, b. 1942) 'Stare' 2009

     

    Pat Brassington (Australian, b. 1942)
    Stare
    2009

     

     

    Arc One Gallery
    45 Flinders Lane
    Melbourne, 3000
    Phone: (03) 9650 0589

    Opening hours:
    Wednesday – Saturday 11am – 5pm

    Arc One Gallery website

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    Exhibition: ‘Haunted: Contemporary Photography / Video / Performance’ at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

    Exhibition dates: 26th March – 6th September, 2010

     

    Looks like a great exhibition – wish I was there to see it!


    Many thankx to Claire Laporte and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

     

    Adam Helms (American, b. 1974) 'Untitled Portrait (Santa Fe Trail)' 2007 from the exhibition 'Haunted: Contemporary Photography / Video / Performance' Guggenheim Museum, March - Sept, 2010

     

    Adam Helms (American, b. 1974)
    Untitled Portrait (Santa Fe Trail)
    2007
    Double-sided screenprint on paper vellum edition 2/2
    101.3 x 65.7cm
    Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Purchased with funds contributed by the Photography Committee 2007.131

     

    Idris Khan (British, b. 1978) 'Homage to Bernd Becher' 2007 from the exhibition 'Haunted: Contemporary Photography / Video / Performance' Guggenheim Museum, March - Sept, 2010

     

    Idris Khan (British, b. 1978)
    Homage to Bernd Becher
    2007
    Bromide print edition 1/6
    49.8 x 39.7cm
    Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Purchased with funds contributed by the Photography Committee

     

    Bernd Becher (German, 1931-2007) and Hilla Becher (German, 1934-2015) 'Water Towers' 1980 from the exhibition 'Haunted: Contemporary Photography / Video / Performance' Guggenheim Museum, March - Sept, 2010

     

    Bernd Becher (German, 1931-2007) and Hilla Becher (German, 1934-2015)
    Water Towers
    1980
    Nine gelatin silver prints
    155.6 x 125.1cm
    Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Purchased with funds contributed by Mr. and Mrs. Donald Jonas

     

    Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987) 'Orange Disaster #5' 1963

     

    Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
    Orange Disaster #5
    1963
    Acrylic and silkscreen enamel on canvas
    269.2 x 207cm
    Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Gift, Harry N. Abrams Family Collection 74.2118

     

    Joan Jonas (American, b. 1936) 'Mirror Piece I' 1969

     

    Joan Jonas (American, b. 1936)
    Mirror Piece I
    1969
    Chromogenic print
    101 x 55.6cm
    Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Purchased with funds contributed by the Photography Committee

     

    Zhang Huan (Chinese, b. 1965) '12 Square Meters' 1994

     

    Zhang Huan (Chinese, b. 1965)
    12 Square Meters
    1994
    Chromogenic print A.P. 3/5, edition of 15
    149.9 x 99.7cm
    Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Purchased with funds contributed by Manuel de Santaren and Jennifer and David Stockman

     

     

    Much of contemporary photography and video seems haunted by the past, by the history of art, by apparitions that are reanimated in reproductive mediums, live performance, and the virtual world. By using dated, passé, or quasi-extinct stylistic devices, subject matter, and technologies, such art embodies a longing for an otherwise unrecuperable past.

    From March 26 to September 6, 2010, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum presents Haunted: Contemporary Photography / Video / Performance, an exhibition that documents this obsession, examining myriad ways photographic imagery is incorporated into recent practice. Drawn largely from the Guggenheim’s extensive photography and video collections, Haunted features some 100 works by nearly 60 artists, including many recent acquisitions that will be on view at the museum for the first time. The exhibition is installed throughout the rotunda and its spiralling ramps, with two additional galleries on view from June 4 to September 1, featuring works by two pairs of artists to complete Haunted’s presentation.

    The works in Haunted: Contemporary Photography / Video / Performance range from individual photographs and photographic series to sculptures and paintings that incorporate photographic elements; projected videos; films; performances; and site-specific installations, including a new sound work created by Susan Philips for the museum’s rotunda. While the show traces the extensive incorporation of photography into contemporary art since the 1960s, a significant part of the exhibition will be dedicated to work created since 2001 by younger artists.

    Haunted is organised around a series of formal and conceptual threads that weave themselves through the artworks on view:

    Appropriation and the Archive

    In the early 1960s, Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol began to incorporate photographic images into their paintings, establishing a new mode of visual production that relied not on the then-dominant tradition of gestural abstraction but rather on mechanical processes such as screenprinting. In so doing, they challenged the notion of art as the expression of a singular, heroic author, recasting their works as repositories for autobiographical, cultural, and historical information. This archival impulse revolutionised art production over the ensuing decades, paving the way for a conceptually driven use of photography as a means of absorbing the world at large into a new aesthetic realm. Since then, a number of artists, including Bernd and Hilla Becher, Sarah Charlesworth, Douglas Gordon, Luis Jacob, Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, and Sara VanDerBeek, have pursued this archival impulse, amassing fragments of reality either by creating new photographs or by appropriating existing ones.

     

    Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954)
'Untitled Film Still #58' 1980

     

    Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954)
    Untitled Film Still #58
    1980
    Gelatin silver print
    20.3 x 25.4cm
    Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Gift, Ginny Williams

     

    “I’ve always played with make-up to transform myself, but everything, including the lighting, was self taught. I just learned things as I needed to use them. I absorbed my ideas for the women in these photos from every cultural source that I’ve ever had access to, including film, TV, advertisements, magazines, as well as any adult role models from my youth.”1

    Cindy Sherman (b. 1954, Glen Ridge, N.J.) emerged onto the New York art scene in the early 1980s as part of a new generation of artists concerned with the codes of representation in a media-saturated era. Along with many artists working in the 1980s, Sherman explored photography as a way to reveal and examine the cultural constructions we designate as truth. Confronting the belief that photographs are truthful documents, Sherman’s fictional narratives suggested that photographs, like all forms of representation, are ideologically motivated. She is aware that the camera is not a neutral device but rather a tool that frames a particular viewpoint.

    Sherman’s reputation was established early on with her Untitled Film Stills, a series of 69 black-and-white photographs that she began making in 1977, when she was twenty-three. In this series, the artist depicted herself dressed in the various melodramatic guises of clichéd B-movie heroines presented in 8 x 10 publicity stills from the 1950s and 1960s. In photograph after photograph, Sherman both acts in and documents her own productions. Although Sherman is both model and photographer, these images are not autobiographical. Rather, they memorialise absence and leave us searching for a narrative and clues to what may exist beyond the frame of the camera.

    By the time Sherman made the Untitled Film Stills, black-and-white photography was already recognised as belonging to the past, and the styles she replicated were taken not from her own generation but from that of her mother’s. Sherman used wigs and makeup as well as vintage clothing to create a range of female characters. She sets her photos in a variety of locations, including rural landscapes, cities, and her own apartment. Although many of the pictures are taken by Sherman herself using an extended shutter release, for others she required help, sometimes enlisting friends and family. The characters she created include an ingénue finding her way in the big city, a party girl, a housewife, a woman in distress, a dancer, and an actress. In 1980 she completed the series and has said that she stopped when she ran out of clichés to depict. Unlike the media images they refer to, Sherman’s stills have a deliberate artifice that is heightened by the often-visible camera cord, slightly eccentric props, unusual camera angles, and by the fact that each image includes the artist rather than a recognisable actress or model. Sherman remains an important figure, with works in major collections around the globe, and continues to create striking, imaginative art.

    Text from the Teacher’s Guide to the exhibition

    1/ Cindy Sherman, quoted in Monique Beudert and Sean Rainbird, eds., Contemporary Art: The Janet Wolfson de Botton Gift, p. 99.

     

    Landscape, Architecture, and the Passage of Time

    Historically, one of photography’s primary functions has been to document sites where significant, often traumatic events have taken place. During the Civil War, which erupted not long after the medium was invented, a new generation of reporters sought to photograph battles, but due to the long exposure times required by early cameras, they could only capture the aftermath of the conflicts. These landscapes, strewn with the dead, now seem doubly arresting, for they capture past spaces where something has already occurred. Their state of anteriority, witnessed at such an early stage in the medium’s development, speaks to the very nature of a photograph, which possesses physical and chemical bonds to a past that disappears as soon as it is taken. As viewers, we are left with only traces from which we hope to reconstruct the absent occurrences in the fields, forests, homes, and offices depicted in the works in the exhibition. With this condition in mind, many artists, among them James Casebere, Spencer Finch, Ori Gersht, Roni Horn, Luisa Lambri, An-My Lê, Sally Mann, and Hiroshi Sugimoto, have turned to empty spaces in landscape and architecture, creating poetic reflections on time’s inexorable passing and insisting on the importance of remembrance and memorialisation.

     

    Christian Boltanski (French, 1944-2021) 'Autel de Lycée Chases' 1986-1987

     

    Christian Boltanski (French, 1944-2021)
    Autel de Lycée Chases
    1986-1987
    Six photographs, six desk lamps, and twenty-two tin boxes
    170.2 x 214.6 x 24.1cm
    Rubell Family Collection, Miami
    © 2010 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris

     

    “A good work of art can never be read in one way. My work is full of contradictions. An artwork is open – it is the spectators looking at the work who make the piece, using their own background. A lamp in my work might make you think of a police interrogation, but it’s also religious, like a candle. At the same time it alludes to a precious painting, with a single light shining on it. There are many way of looking at the work. It has to be ‘unfocused’ somehow so that everyone can recognize something of their own self when viewing it.”1

    The power of photography to recall the past has inspired many contemporary artists to use photographs to revisit the experience of historical events. In so doing, artists reconsider the photograph itself as an object imbued with history. They became aware that using the medium of photography would lend the elements of specificity and truth to their work.

    Since the late 1960s, Christian Boltanski (b. 1944, Paris) has worked with photographs collected from ordinary and often ephemeral sources, endowing the commonplace with significance. Rather than taking original photographs to use in his installations, he often finds and rephotographs everyday documents – passport photographs, school portraits, newspaper pictures, and family albums – to memorialise everyday people. Boltanski seeks to create an art that is indistinguishable from life and has said, “The fascinating moment for me is when the spectator hasn’t registered the art connection, and the longer I can delay this association the better.”2 By appropriating mementos of other people’s lives and placing them in an art context, Boltanski explores the power of photography to transcend individual identity and to function instead as a witness to collective rituals and shared cultural memories.

    In Boltanski’s 1986-1987 work Autel de Lycée Chases (which means “Altar to the Chases High School”) enlarged photographs of children are hung over a platform constructed from stacked tin biscuit boxes, which are rusted as if they have been ravaged by time. The black-and-white photographs look like artefacts from another era. An electric light illuminates each face while at the same time obscuring it. The arrangement gives no way to identify or connect the unnamed individuals.

    The photos used in Autel de Lycée Chases were taken from a real-world source, the school photograph of the graduating class of 1931 from a Viennese high school for Jewish students. These students were coming of age in a world dominated by war and persecution, and it is likely that many perished over the next decade.

    At once personal and universal in reference, Boltanski’s work serves as a monument to the dead, hinting at the Holocaust without naming it. Within this haunting environment, Boltanski intermingles emotion and history, sentimentality and profundity.

    Text from the Teacher’s Guide to the exhibition

    1/ Christian Boltanski, “Tamar Garb in conversation with Christian Boltanski,” in Christian Boltanski (London: Phaidon Press, 1997), p. 24.
    2/ “Christian Boltanski: Lessons of Darkness”

     

    Documentation and Reiteration

    Since at least the early 1970s, photographic documentation, including film and video, has served as an important complement to the art of live performance, often setting the conditions by which performances are staged and sometimes obviating the need for a live audience altogether. Through an ironic reversal, artworks that revolved around singular moments in time have often come to rely on the permanence of images to transmit their meaning and sometimes even the very fact of their existence. For many artists, these documents take on the function of relics-objects whose meaning is deeply bound to an experience that is always already lost in the past. Works by artists such as Marina Abramović, Christian Boltanski, Sophie Calle, Tacita Dean, Joan Jonas, Christian Marclay, Robert Mapplethorpe, Ana Mendieta, and Gina Pane examine various aesthetic approaches inspired by the reiterative power of the photograph. Using photography not only to restage their own (and others’) performances but to revisit the bodily experience of past events, these artists have reconsidered the document itself as an object embedded in time, closely attending to its material specificity in their works.

     

    James Casebere (American, b. 1953) 'Garage' 2003

     

    James Casebere (American, b. 1953)
    Garage
    2003
    Chromogenic print, face-mounted to acrylic
    181.6 x 223.5cm
    Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
    Anonymous gift

     

    “Black and white had more to do with memory and the past. Color was too much about the present, I associated it with color TV, which was not a part of my past. I wanted the images to be related to a sense of history, let’s say, whether personal or social. And I think black and white adds a certain level of abstraction.”1

    Since the mid-1970s James Casebere (b. 1953, Lansing, Michigan) has been carefully constructing architectural models and photographing them, yielding images somewhere between realism and obvious fabrication. His photographs are stripped of color and detail to evoke a sense of emotional place rather than the physicality of a place’s forms. Casebere is interested in the memories and feelings that are brought to mind by the architectural spaces he represents. The resulting works are dramatic, surreal, and remarkably true to life, embracing qualities of photography, architecture, and sculpture.

    His tabletop models imitate the appearance of architectural institutions (home, school, library, prison) or common sites (tunnel, corridor, archway), representing the structures that occupy our everyday world. These models, made from such featureless materials as Foamcore, museum board, plaster, and Styrofoam, remain empty of detail and human figures. It is only when Casebere casts light on their bland surfaces and spartan interiors that the models are transformed. By eliminating the details, and taking advantage of dramatic lighting effects and the camera’s ability to flatten space, Casebere is able to transform familiar domestic spaces to find the extraordinary in the everyday. He asks viewers to rely on their memory to fill in the gaps and to create a context in which to understand his images.

    Casebere stages his photographs to construct realities inspired by contemporary American visual culture that blur the line between fiction and fact. In this way, his images suggest psychologically charged spaces and have an otherworldly quality. The notion that these may be actual places seems plausible, but the lack of human presence leads us to wonder what has happened here. The viewer may imagine a human story within the abandoned spaces. Without people or colour, the photographs are about our own associations with these spaces and what they may represent.

    Text from the Teacher’s Guide to the exhibition

    1/ Roberto Juarez, “James Casebere,” Bomb 77 (Fall 2001)

     

    Trauma and the Uncanny

    When Andy Warhol created his silkscreen paintings of Marilyn Monroe in the wake of her death, he touched on the darker side of a burgeoning media culture that, during the Vietnam War, became an integral part of everyday life. Today, with vastly expanded channels for the propagation of images, events as varied as the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the deaths of celebrities such as Princess Diana and Michael Jackson have the ability to become traumatic on a global scale. Many artists, including Adam Helms, Nate Lowman, Adam McEwen, Cady Noland, and Anri Sala, have reexamined the strategy of image appropriation Warhol pioneered, attending closely to the ways political conflict can take on global significance. At the same time, photography has altered, or as some theorists argue, completely reconfigured our sense of personal memory. From birth to death, all aspects of our lives are reconstituted as images alongside our own experience of them. This repetition, which is mirrored in the very technology of the photographic medium, effectively produces an alternate reality in representation that, especially when coping with traumatic events, can take on the force of the uncanny. Artists such as Stan Douglas, Anthony Goicolea, Sarah Anne Johnson, Jeff Wall, and Gillian Wearing exploit this effect, constructing fictional scenarios in which the pains and pleasures of personal experience return with eerie and foreboding qualities.

    Press release from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum website [Online] Cited 22/08/2010 no longer available online

     

    Gillian Wearing (British, b. 1963) 'Self-Portrait at Three Years Old' 2004

     

    Gillian Wearing (British, b. 1963)
    Self-Portrait at Three Years Old
    2004
    Chromogenic print
    182 x 122cm
    Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
    Purchased with funds contributed by the International Directors Council and Executive Committee Members: Ruth Baum, Edythe Broad, Elaine Terner Cooper, Dimitris Daskalopoulos, Harry David, Gail May Engelberg, Shirley Fiterman, Nicki Harris, Dakis Joannou, Rachel Lehmann, Linda Macklowe, Peter Norton, Tonino Perna, Elizabeth Richebourg Rea, Mortim

     

    “I taught myself to use a camera – it’s not very difficult to use a camera, but I never bothered looking at any textbooks on how to make a picture. I had a much more casual relation to it. For me at the time it was much more about the process rather than the results.”1

    Photography has not only profoundly impacted our understanding of historical events, it has also changed the way we remember our personal histories. Beginning at birth, all aspects of our lives are recorded as images alongside our own experiences of them. These parallel recording devices, the camera and personal memory, produce alternate realities that may sometimes be synchronised but at other times are askew.

    Gillian Wearing (b. 1963, Birmingham, England) uses masks as a central theme in her videos and photographs. The masks, which range from literal disguises to voice dubbing, conceal the identities of her subjects and free them to reveal intimate secrets. For her 2003 series of photographs Album, Wearing used this strategy to create an autobiographical work. Donning silicon prosthetics, she carefully reconstructed old family snapshots, transforming herself into her mother, father, uncle, and brother as young adults or adolescents. In one of the works, Wearing recreated her own self-portrait as a teenager – and in fact the artist considers all the photographs in this series as self-portraits. She explains: “I was interested in the idea of being genetically connected to someone but being very different. There is something of me, literally, in all those people – we are connected, but we are each very different.”2

    To make the Album series, Wearing collaborated with a talented team (some of whom have worked for Madame Tussaud’s wax works) who sculpted, cast, painted, and applied hair to create the masks, wigs, and body suits used in these photographs. The elaborate disguises the artist wears, when combined with the snapshot “realism” of the original images on which they are based, create an eerie fascination that serves to reveal aspects of her identity rather than conceal it.

    Self-Portrait at Three Years Old (2004) carries this role-playing further back in time. Confronting the viewer with her adult gaze through the eyeholes of the toddler’s mask, Wearing plays on the rift between interior and exterior and raises a multitude of provocative questions about identity, memory, and the truthfulness of the photographic medium. Wearing says, “What I love about photographs is that they give you a lot and also they withhold a lot.”3

    Text from the Teacher’s Guide to the exhibition

    1/ “Gillian Wearing,” interview by Leo Edelstein, Journal of Contemporary Art
    2/ Quoted in Jennifer Bayles, “Acquisitions: Gillian Wearing,” Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY (accessed January 25, 2010)
    3/ Sebastian Smee, “Gillian Wearing: The art of the matter,” The Independent (London), October 18, 2003

     

    Sophie Calle (French, b. 1953) 'Father Mother (The Graves, #17)' 1990

     

    Sophie Calle (French, b. 1953)
    Father Mother (The Graves, #17)
    1990
    Two gelatin silver prints in artist’s frames edition 2/2
    181.0 x 111.1cm each
    Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Gift, The Bohen Foundation

     

    Ana Mendieta (Cuban American, 1948-1985) 'Untitled (Silueta Series)' 1978

     

    Ana Mendieta (Cuban American, 1948-1985)
    Untitled (Silueta series)
    1978
    Gelatin silver print
    20.3 x 25.4cm
    Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Purchased with funds contributed by the Photography Committee

     

    Anne Collier (American, b. 1970) 'Crying' 2005

     

    Anne Collier (American, b. 1970)
    Crying
    2005
    Chromogenic print edition 1/5
    99.1 x 134 x 0.6cm
    Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Purchased with funds contributed by Mr. and Mrs. Aaron M. Tighe

     

    Miranda Lichtenstein (American, b. 1969) 'Floater' 2004

     

    Miranda Lichtenstein (American, b. 1969)
    Floater
    2004
    Chromogenic print edition 5/5
    104.1 x 127cm
    Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Purchased with funds contributed by the Photography Committee

     

    Sarah Anne Johnson (Canadian, b. 1976) 'Morning Meeting (from Tree Planting)' 2003

     

    Sarah Anne Johnson (Canadian, b. 1976)
    Morning Meeting (from Tree Planting)
    2003
    Chromogenic print edition
    73.7 x 79.7cm
    Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Purchased with funds contributed by Pamela and Arthur Sanders; the Harriett Ames
    Charitable Trust; Henry Buhl; the Heather and Tony Podesta Collection; Ann and Mel Schaffer; Shelley Harrison; and the Photography Committee

     

    Sally Mann (American, b. 1951) 'Virginia' from the 'Mother Land' series 1992

     

    Sally Mann (American, b. 1951)
    Virginia from the Mother Land series
    1992
    Gelatin silver print
    76.2 x 96.5cm
    Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Gift, The Bohen Foundation

     

     

    Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
    1071 5th Avenue (at 89th Street)
    New York

    Opening hours:
    Sunday – Monday, 11am – 6pm
    Closed Tuesday
    Wednesday – Friday 11am – 6pm
    Saturday 11am – 8pm

    Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum website

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    Exhibition: ‘Climate Capsules: Means of Surviving Disaster’ at Museum fur Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg

    Exhibition dates: 28th May – 12th September, 2010

     

    Many thankx to Michaela Hille and Museum fur Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

     

     

    Haus-Rucker-Co (Laurids Ortner, Günter Zamp Kelp, Klaus Pinter) 'Flyhead (Environment Transformer)', Vienna, 1968 from the exhibition 'Climate Capsules: Means of Surviving Disaster' at Museum fur Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg, may - September, 2010

     

    Haus-Rucker-Co (Laurids Ortner, Gunter Zamp Kelp, Klaus Pinter)
    Flyhead (Environment Transformer)
    Vienna, 1968
    Helmet consisting of two transparent green, symmetrical, hemispherical plastic fragments partially covered with foil. Inside the helmet, with the aid of a metal construction, audio-visual filters are arranged by means of which the normality of the surroundings is acoustically distorted and visually faceted.
    Photo: Ben Rose, New York

     

    Ingo Vetter (Germany, b. 1968) 'Adaptation Laboratory' 2004 from the exhibition 'Climate Capsules: Means of Surviving Disaster' at Museum fur Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg, may - September, 2010

     

    Ingo Vetter (Germany, b. 1968)
    Adaptation Laboratory
    2004
    Exhaust-operated greenhouse with tree of heaven (Ailanthus altissima)
    Ingo Vetter
    © Ingo Vetter for the Detroit Tree of Heaven Woodshop, 2004

     

    Lawrence Malstaf (Belgian, b. 1972) 'Shrink' 1995 from the exhibition 'Climate Capsules: Means of Surviving Disaster' at Museum fur Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg, may - September, 2010

     

    Lawrence Malstaf (Belgian, b. 1972)
    Shrink
    1995
    Performative Installation
    © Lawrence Malstaf/Galerie Fortlaan 17, Ghent (B)

     

     

    In view of the advancing climate change, the exhibition Climate Capsules: Means of Surviving Disaster at the Museum fur Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg poses the question: “How do we want to live in the future?” and draws attention to the socio-political consequences of coexistence under new climatic conditions. In view of the fact that the politicians are hesitant to enforce strict measures for climate protection and the citizens very sluggish about changing their habits, the change appears inevitable. The world community is accordingly confronted with the challenge of investigating various possible means of adapting to the climate change. This exhibition is the first to bring together historical and current climate-related models, concepts, strategies, experiments and utopias from the areas of design, art, architecture and urban development – pursuing not the aim of stopping the climate change, but envisioning means of surviving after disaster has struck. More than twenty-five mobile, temporary and urban capsules intended to make human life possible independently of the surrounding climatic conditions will be on view – from floating cities and body capsules to concepts for fertilising sea water or injecting the stratosphere with sulphur. A symposium, film programme, readings, performances and workshops will revolve around the interplay between design processes and political factors such as migration, border politics and resource conflicts, and investigate the consequences for social and cultural partitioning and exclusion.

    The public discussion on the climate change concentrates primarily on preventing change by reducing climate damaging emissions. This reduction is to be achieved through new means of obtaining energy as well as the optimisation of energy consumption. The consumption-oriented lifestyle of the industrial nations is also to become more “environmentally friendly”; the citizens are called upon to change their habits. Emerging nations are admonished to avoid the mistakes made by the West from the start. There is not the slightest guarantee, however, that enough nations and enough people around the world will participate in such reductions, and that a “low-carbon culture” will become the globally predominant lifestyle. Nor does anyone know for sure whether the reduction goals presently being discussed will suffice to delay or stop the climate change, which is already measurable today. In the search for alternative solutions, there is a category discussed substantially less often in public: adaptation. Here strategies are developed which aim not to slow or stop the climate change but to adapt to its expected consequences. They include protective measures against flooding and overheating as well as geo-engineering, i.e. large-scale interventions in the global climate.

    These technologies are usually subjected only to critical discussion with regard to their technical feasibility. Until now, their possible socio-political effects have for the most part been ignored. Their impact on the structure of the global society, however, can hardly be overestimated: in the endeavour to make life possible independently of outward climatic conditions, these strategies encourage spatial, social and political isolation. Ostensibly motivated by climate-related considerations, they could well lead to inclusion and exclusion on all levels of life, from the interpersonal to the global. They create the conditions for social segregation and global polarisation.

    The exhibition Climate Capsules: Means of Surviving Disaster will focus primarily on application-oriented projects for climatological capsules from the areas of design, art, architecture, urban development and geoengineering. The show will reflect on the (political, cultural, socio-spatial) impact of these current adaptation strategies on society by means of contemporary artistic approaches and avant-garde concepts of the twentieth century. Historical projects in the context of the climate change will thus assume new meaning. The current artistic projects question the positivist perspective of their counterparts of the past, and offer the exhibition visitor a further level of sensory experience. The exhibition objects can be divided into five types: body capsules, living capsules, urban capsules, nature capsules and atmosphere capsules.

    Body capsules

    The exhibition begins with the interactive installation La Parole by Pablo Reinoso. Two visitors at a time can poke their heads into the inflatable textile construction and share the air they breathe as well as a common visual and audio space. The experience of this work raises the question as to how people can protect their bodies from contaminated air, pollutants, storms and aggressive solar radiation. Again and again in the course of the show, the visitor encounters “body capsules” addressing the topic of clothing as bodily protection from climatic conditions.

    Living capsules

    The objects belonging to this group extend the encapsulated space from the body encasement to the immediate living space. Utopian designs for mobile capsules of the 1960s such as the Walking City by Ron Herron (Archigram) still figured in the discussion emphasising temporary and mobile structures as experimental free spaces after ideas introduced by such architects as Constant or Yona Friedman. Today mobility is no longer just a question of freedom – the counterpart to voluntary mobility is flight, the spatial equivalent the temporary camp. The visitor thus stumbles across Michael Rokowitz’s paraSITE, for example, an inflatable tent which the artist developed in collaboration with the homeless person Bill Stone. Like the other tents in the series, it is designed for use in an exhaust air shaft. It can dock onto a building as a temporary parasite. In this context of precarious modi vivendi – brought about not least of all by global inequality (which is further aggravated by the climate change) and the resulting mass migration – what were once visionary temporary living concepts appear in a new light. They are not spaces of liberation, but of isolation.

    Urban capsules

    Cities are the largest energy consumers, and urbanisation continues to increase worldwide. Zero waste, zero emission, zero energy are the creeds of the present. Already in the 1950s, Richard Buckminster Fuller and Shoji Sadao sketched the utopia of a climatically self-sufficient reorganisation of the city with their Dome over Manhattan. In this vision, a huge dome covers a large proportion of the island. Today, these encapsulations from the outside are already being realised in conjunction with the design of internal climate worlds, whether on the scale of large building complexes or energy-self-sufficient cities such as Masdar by Norman Foster. Other concepts show that, against the background of imminent climate disasters, the urban system is conceived of increasingly as an autarchic unit, sealed from the outside world, and confronted with the need for the self-contained management of its ecological resources. This debate is carried to the furthest extreme by Vincent Callebaut’s conception for a floating city – Lilypad – intended as a haven for climate refugees.

    Nature capsules

    Just as the city is to be protected from the climatologically changing environment, nature is also to be elevated into a sphere of safe artificiality and preserved in nature capsules. Ecosystems are replicated by human hand on the micro level and sealed off from the outside. A concept which initially presents itself as a protective mechanism robs the flora and fauna assembled within it of their connection to the macrolevel ecosystem: Earth. The question arises: can that which is being protected inside such a capsule still be thought of as nature? Or is it a deceptively genuine human artefact? These considerations are made very vivid in Ilkka Halso’s photo series Museum of Nature, consisting of digital montages which insert forests, lakes and rivers into imaginary museum buildings.

    Atmosphere capsules

    The maximum scale of adaptive design strategies is reached with geo-engineering. With chemical or physical interventions, attempts are made to control climatological, geochemical and biochemical systems actively on the global level, and thus to moderate the climate. The historical forerunners of this development are psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich’s para-scientific Cloudbusters and the U.S. Army’s Project Cirrus, both of which sought to influence the weather technically by different means. Today, various well-known scientists and research institutes are working on large-scale interventions aiming to protect the global climate from negative influences. Utopian proposals are juxtaposed with feasible projects such as endeavours to reduce global warming through the use of reflective white paint on roofs and streets. To date it is impossible to calculate the consequences of such far-reaching interventions, and they are nowhere near realisation. Yet the fact that they are discussed seriously indicates how close climatological developments have already come to the point where emission-reduction strategies become obsolete.

    Participating artists, designers and architects: Anderson Anderson Architecture (US), Ant Farm (US), Richard Buckminster Fuller (US), Vincent Callebaut (B), Juan Downey (US), David Greene (GB), Tue Greenfort (DK), Ilkka Halso (FI), Haus-Rucker-Co (AT), Ron Herron (GB), Kouji Hikawa (JP), Christoph Keller (D), Lawrence Malstaf (B), Gustav Metzger (D), N55 (DK), Lucy Orta (GB), Michael Rakowitz (US), Pablo Reinoso (ARG/F), Shoji Sadao (US), Tomás Saraceno (planet earth), Werner Sobek (D), Jan-Peter E.R. Sonntag (D), Matti Suuronen (FI), Ingo Vetter (D).

    Press release from the Museum fur Kunst und Gewerbe website [Online] Cited 17/08/2010 no longer available online

     

    Pablo Reinoso (Argentine-French, b. 1955) 'La Parole' 1998

     

    Pablo Reinoso (Argentine-French, b. 1955)
    La Parole
    1998
    Fabric and electrically powered ventilators
    length. 620cm, diam. 200cm
    Pablo Reinoso
    © Pablo Reinoso Studio

     

    Lucy Orta (English, b. 1966) 'Refuge Wear – Habitent' 1992

     

    Lucy Orta (English, b. 1966)
    Refuge Wear – Habitent
    1992
    Polyamide encased in aluminium, polar fleece, aluminium tent poles, whistle, lantern, compass
    125 x 125 x 125cm
    Galleria Continua
    Photo: Galerie Anne de Villepoix, Courtesy Galleria Continua, San Gimignano / Beijing / Le Moulin

     

    Vincent Callebaut (Belgium, c. 1977) 'Lilypad, A Floating Ecopolis for Climate Refugees' 2008

     

    Vincent Callebaut (Belgium, c. 1977)
    Lilypad, A Floating Ecopolis for Climate Refugees
    2008
    Digital rendering, dimensions variable
    © Vincent Callebaut Architectures

     

    Richard Buckminster Fuller, Shoji Sadao. 'Dome over Manhattan' c. 1960

     

    Richard Buckminster Fuller, Shoji Sadao
    Dome over Manhattan
    c. 1960
    Silver gelatine print
    34.9 x 46.7cm
    Courtesy the Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller

     

    Ilkka Halso (Finnish, b. 1965) 'Museum I' 2003

     

    Ilkka Halso (Finnish, b. 1965)
    Museum I
    2003
    from the work Museum of Nature

     

     

    Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg
    Steintorplatz, 20099 Hamburg

    Opening hours:
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    Thursday 10am – 9pm

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