Let us drop away all interpretation and look at the thing in itself. The literal feeling of standing before these objects.
Form
Balance
Colour
Surface
Precision
Will
Style
Silence
Quiet, precise works. Forms of insect-like legs and proboscises. They balance, seeming to almost teeter on the edge – but the objects are incredibly grounded at the same time. As you walk into the darkened gallery and observe these creatures you feel this pull – lightness and weight. Fantastic!
The surfaces, sublime matt grey colour and precision of their manufacture add to this sense of the ineffable. These are not mere renderings of content, but expressions of things that cannot be said.
Sontag observes, “Art is the objectifying of the will in a thing or performance, and the provoking or arousing of the will … Style is the principle of decision in a work of art, the signature of the artist’s will.”1
Sontag insightfully notes, “The most potent elements in a work of art are, often, its silences.”2
And so it came to pass in silence, for these works are still, quiet and have a quality of the presence of the inexpressible.
Funaki achieves these incredible silences through being true to her self and her style through an expression of her endearing will.
While Mari may no longer be amongst us as expressions of her will the silences of these objects will be forever with us.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Sontag, Susan. “On Style,” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Delta Book, 1966, pp. 31-32.
2/ Ibid., p. 36.
Many thanxk to Alison Murray, Jemma Altmeier and The National Gallery of Victoria for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. All individual photographs of work by Jeremy Dillon.
Opening 6 August, the National Gallery of Victoria will present Mari Funaki: Objects, an exhibition showcasing a range of sculptural objects by the renowned contemporary jeweller and metalsmith, Mari Funaki (1950-2010).
This exhibition will present a selection of Funaki’s distinctive objects, dating from the late 1990s to 2010 including four recent large scale sculptures. The artist was working on the exhibition right up until the time of her recent death.
Jane Devery, Acting Curator, Contemporary Art, NGV said: “It was a great privilege to work with Mari Funaki on this exhibition. She possessed a clarity of vision and a capacity for ongoing invention that is rare among artists. Funaki produced some of the most captivating works in the field of contemporary jewellery and metalwork. Her unique geometric objects, meticulously constructed from blackened mild-steel, stemmed from a desire to express the world around her.”
“Funaki was interested in the expressive and associative capacities of her objects, creating forms that might stir our imaginations or trigger something from our memories. It has been particularly thrilling to see her extend these concerns in large scale works,” said Ms Devery. In 1979 Funaki left her home in Japan for Melbourne where she pursued her creative ambitions, enrolling in Gold and Silversmithing at RMIT in the late 1980s. At RMIT she studied under the prominent jewellers Marian Hosking, Robert Baines and Carlier Makigawa.
In 1995, Mari Funaki established Gallery Funaki in Melbourne’s CBD which remains Australia’s most important space dedicated to contemporary jewellery. Throughout her career she exhibited widely within Australia and overseas and won many awards, twice winning the prestigious Herbert Hoffman prize in Munich. In 2007 she was awarded an Australian Council Emeritus Award for her work as an artist and for her success in promoting Australian and international contemporary jewellery.
Frances Lindsay, Deputy Director, NGV said: “The NGV is delighted to exhibit many never-before-seen works by such an innovative and celebrated Melbourne artist. The exquisite objects assembled in this exhibition allow us to appreciate Mari Funaki’s remarkable artistic achievements.”
Mari Funaki: Objects will be on display at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Federation Square from 6 August to 24 October, 2010. The exhibition will be open from 10am-5pm. Closed Mondays. Entry is free.
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 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 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) 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
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
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.
One of the most haunting photography books I have ever opened and inhaled is What Remains (2003) by Sally Mann.
People say the photographs are shocking – featuring as they do documentation of a deceased pet greyhound, photos of decaying bodies out in the open field of a forensics lab (see photograph below), “the almost invisible traces left by the death of a fugitive on Mann’s property”, the dark landscape of a civil war battlefield and close up photographs of her now grown up children – but there is a stillness and depth to these photographs that elevates them above such sentiments.
What Mann does so well is that she listens to the passing of time and then inscribes an ode to what remains. Her gift is the photography of mortality (and vice versa) with all the psychic weight that this entails. This is a revelatory book not for the faint hearted.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Sam Trenerry and the Photographers’ Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
This exhibition at The Photographers’ Gallery is the American photographer Sally Mann’s first solo exhibition in the UK. Combining several series from her long photographic career, The Family and the Land: Sally Mann reflects Mann’s artistic impulse to draw on the world around her as subject matter.
The ‘family’ element of the title comprises Mann’s early series Immediate Family and the newer series Faces, both of which depict her children at various ages. The series Deep South represents the landscape, portraying images made across the south of the United States. The more recent body of work, What Remains brings together both strands of the exhibition, through its examination of how bodies, as they decompose, merge into the land itself.
Sally Mann (b. 1951, USA) first gained prominence for Immediate Family (1984-1994) a series of intimate and revealing portraits of her three young children, Emmett, Jessie and Virginia. Taken over a ten-year period, Mann depicts them playing, swimming and acting to the camera in and around their homestead in Lexington, Virginia. Born out of a collaborative process between mother and child, the work encapsulates their childhood in all its rawness and innocence.
Mann followed Immediate Family by focusing on the land itself in her series Deep South (1996-1998). Here she is drawn to locations steeped in historical significance from the American Civil War, which left both literal and metaphoric scars on the trees and the land itself. Using antique cameras and processes throughout, Mann accentuates the sense of age in the subject while embracing the imperfect effects created by her printing process.
What Remains (2000-2004) seeks to further connect human contact to the land and how the body eventually returns to and becomes a part of the land itself. This concept led Mann to photograph decomposing cadavers at the University of Tennessee Anthropological Research Facility, Knoxville, where human decomposition is studied in a variety of, mainly outdoor, settings. What Remains deals directly with the subject of death, still a social taboo. As with her other work, Mann’s subjects are sensitively handled and beautifully realised, encouraging us to reflect upon our own mortality and place within nature’s order.
In the most recent series Faces (2004), Mann turns the camera once more on her children. Closing in on their faces and using several minutes of exposure time, these works act as a commemoration of the living. Again Mann takes the accidental drips and marks created by the wet collodion process and makes them a key feature of her work.
Exhibition dates: 24th August – 18th September 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.
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 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 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 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 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 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 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
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 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.
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.
“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.
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 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.
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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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
Ian Burns (Australian, b. 1964) AND THEN… 2010 Installation view at Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne
Two words: JUST GO!
Yes the work can be analysed as in the text (below) from the Anna Schwartz Gallery website but this is not necessary to enjoy the work. These are such fun assemblages, the created mis en scenes so magical and hilarious, guffaw inducing even, that they are entirely playful.
I delighted in how they were constructed, almost thrown together from found objects that relate to the theme of each work; in the miniature cameras and environments – the Jumbo jet flying through the ‘sky’ of clouds created by a boiling water heater; in every particle of light as the words AND THEN… were created through aligned lens prisms (A Moment Implied 2010); and I was in wonder at the shimmering, setting sun in Venus (2010).
There is so much to like here – the inventiveness, the freshness of the work, the insight into the use of images in contemporary culture. Still photographs of this work do not do it justice. I came away from the gallery uplifted, smiling, happy – and that is a wonderful thing to happen.
As I said at the beginning: JUST GO!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Ash Kilmartin and the Anna Schwartz Gallery for the photographs in the posting. Please click on the images for a larger version of the image. All images are courtesy the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery.
Ian Burns (Australian, b. 1964) 15 hours v.4 2010 Found object kinetic sculpture, live video and audio Image courtesy the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) Ford V-8 1935 Gelatin silver photograph 19.5 x 24.3cm George Eastman House, part purchase and part gift from Georgia O’Keeffe
Many thankx to Susanne Briggs and the Art Gallery of New South Wales for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“… much has happened in photography that is sensational, but very little that is comparable with what Stieglitz did. The body of his work, the key set – I think – is the most beautiful photographic document of our time.”
Georgia O’Keeffe 1978
The photographs Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) took around his summer house at Lake George, New York state, USA after 1915 are considered a major departure and dramatically influenced the course of photography. The desire to build a specifically ‘American’ art led Stieglitz to explore the essential nature of photography, released from contrivances and from intervention in print and negative. “Photography is my passion. The search for truth my obsession,” he would write in 1921.
This major exhibition is the first in Australia of Stieglitz’s photographs. 150 are included and are amongst the very best Stieglitz ever printed. They are also the rarest. One third of the exhibition is being lent by the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, which holds ‘the key set’ – selected by his lover, muse and wife, the artist Georgia O’Keeffe, and deposited there after Stieglitz’s death.
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) City of ambition 1911 Photogravure 33.9 x 26.0cm George Eastman House, Museum purchase from Museum of Modern Art, New York
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) Ellen Koeniger 1916 Gelatin silver photograph 11.1 x 9.1cm J Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) Waldo Frank 1920 Palladium photograph 25.1 x 20.2cm Art Institute of Chicago, Alfred Stieglitz Collection
Waldo David Frank was an American novelist, historian, political activist, and literary critic, who wrote extensively for The New Yorker and The New Republic during the 1920s and 1930s.
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) Spiritual America 1923 Gelatin silver photograph 11.7 x 9.2cm Philadelphia Museum of Art: the Alfred Stieglitz Collection 1949
The photographs Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) took around his summer house at Lake George, New York state, USA after 1915 are considered a major departure and dramatically influenced the course of photography. The desire to build a specifically ‘American’ art led Stieglitz to explore the essential nature of photography, released from contrivances and from intervention in print and negative.
‘Stieglitz’s mature photographs from the 1910s onwards are free from any sense that photography must refer to something outside of itself in order to express meaning,’ said Judy Annear, senior curator photography, Art Gallery of New South Wales.
This major exhibition is the first in Australia of Stieglitz’s photographs. 150 are included and are amongst the very best Stieglitz ever printed. They are also the rarest. One third of the exhibition is being lent by the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, which holds ‘the key set’ – selected by his lover, muse and wife, the artist Georgia O’Keeffe, and deposited there after Stieglitz’s death.
‘Passionate and provocative; charismatic, verbose and intellectually voracious; a self described revolutionist and iconoclast with an unwavering belief in the efficacy of radical action; competitive, egotistical, narcissistic and at times duplicitous, but also endowed with a remarkable ability to establish a deep communion with those around him – these are but some of the adjectives that can be used to describe Alfred Stieglitz,’ said Sarah Greenough, senior curator of photographs, National Gallery of Art, Washington.
Major loans are also coming from the J Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Museum of Modern Art and Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, and George Eastman House, Rochester amongst others.
The exhibition begins with a selection of Stieglitz’s photographs from the 1910s including those that he took at his gallery 291 in New York City of artists and collaborators, including O’Keeffe. Stieglitz was a superb photographic printer and dedicated to aesthetics in publishing. A number of the later editions (from 1911-1917) of his publication Camera work – described as the most beautiful journal in the world – are included.
Stieglitz’s portraits grew steadily in power in the 1910s and 20s, and continued to be a major part of his photographic practice. He would sometimes photograph his subjects over and over again and none more so than O’Keeffe, whom he met in 1916.
Stieglitz photographed O’Keeffe for the first time in 1917. He continued to photograph her from every angle, clothed and unclothed, indoors and out until his last photographs from 1936/1937. In all there are more than 300 photographs of O’Keeffe which convey all the nuances of their relationship in that 20-year period. A selection is included.
Stieglitz first visited Lake George in the 1870s with his parents. The visits slowed until the 1910s but from 1917 until his death he spent every summer there. Stieglitz’s ashes are buried at Lake George.
The photographs of people, buildings, landscapes and skies that Stieglitz took at Lake George form a collective portrait of a place which has not been rivalled in the history of photography worldwide for its subtlety of feeling expressed in the simplest of terms.
Stieglitz developed the idea for his cloud photographs in 1922 because he wanted to create images which carried the emotional impact of music and to disprove the idea being put about that he hypnotised his (human) subjects. The first title for the cloud photographs was simply Music: a sequence…; this was eventually superseded by Equivalent as Stieglitz believed that these photographs could exist as the visual equivalent to other forms of expression.
Stieglitz changed the course of photography worldwide and has influenced major figures in photography from Minor White to Robert Mapplethorpe, Max Dupain to Tracey Moffatt and Bill Henson.”
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) Georgia O’Keeffe: a portrait 1918 Platinum photograph 24.6 x 19.7cm The J. Paul Getty Museum Copyright J. Paul Getty Trust
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) Georgia O’Keeffe 1920 Gelatin silver photograph 23.5 x 19.69cm San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Alfred Stieglitz Collection. Gift of Georgia O’Keeffe
“Stieglitz is too easily bundled in amongst a rush to the reductions of modernism and cubism, the time he inhabits and the new technology he is stretching make that almost inevitable. On looking at the images here it feels like a mistake to label him that simply. We can see hints of the abstract, the grids of Mondrian or the blocks of Braque, but his work is as human and as smudged as a fingerprint. It is this sense of flaw and serendipity is what makes him so different to photographers like Man Ray for Stieglitz seems to embrace the beauty of imperfection. The memorable works here inhabit a world of infinite shining gradations between black and white, they are expansive and open rather than reductive and finished, in doing this Stieglitz’s greatest innovation might be to take a static form and make it so intensely moving.”
John Matthews on his Art Kritique blog Sunday 15 August 2010 [Online] Cited 22/12/2019
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) Self-portrait 1907, printed 1930 Gelatin silver photograph 24.8 x 18.4cm J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) From the Back Window – 291 1915 Platinum print 25.1 x 20.2cm (9 7/8 x 7 15/16 in.) Metropolitan Museum of Art Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949
From the Back Window – 291 is a black and white photograph taken by Alfred Stieglitz in 1915. The picture was taken at night from a back window of his 291 gallery in New York. Its one of the several that he took that year from that window, including at a snowy Winter.
The night photograph depicts an urban cityscape of New York. The reigning darkness is leavened by several sources of artificial light. The background building is the 105 Madison Avenue, at the southeast corner of Madison and 30th Street, while the smaller building with the advertisements is 112 Madison Avenue.
Stieglitz seems to have taken inspiration from a recent exhibition of Cubist painters Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque at the 291 gallery, which would explain his interest in the geometrical forms and lines, but also of the 19th century photographers, like David Octavius Hill. He wrote then to R. Child Bailey: “I have done quite some photography recently. It is intensely direct. Portraits. Buildings from my back window at 291, a whole series of them, a few landscapes and interiors. All interrelated. I know nothing outside of Hill’s work which I think is so direct, and quite so intensely honest.” The picture also seems still reminiscent of Pictorialism, while being more in the straight photography style.
There are prints of this photograph at several public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C., the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and at the Williams College Museum of Art, in Williamstown, Massachusetts.
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) The Steerage 1907 Gelatin silver print Gift of Miss Georgia O’Keeffe
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) Hodge Kirnon 1917 Palladium print 9 11/15 x 7 13/16 in The Metropolitan Museum of Art Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949
The noted West Indian scholar and historian Hodge Kirnon leaning against a doorframe.
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) Georgia O’Keeffe – Torso 1918 Gelatin silver print 23.6 x 18.8cm (9 5/16 x 7 3/8 in.) Metropolitan Museum of Art Gift of Mrs. Alma Wertheim, 1928
Stieglitz took dozens of pictures of O’Keeffe’s body, including her hands and her nude torso. The photograph depicts her naked torso, seen from below, with her arms only partially visible and without showing her head. The Torso, with its uplifted arms and muscular thighs, has a sculptoric quality that seems influenced by Auguste Rodin, whose work Stieglitz knew well and had shown at the Photo-Secession.
The Torso was in the Stieglitz exhibition at the Anderson Galleries in New York, where he presented pictures of several parts of the body of O’Keeffe, and which had a particular impact. Herbert Seligmann wrote that “Hands, feet, hands and breasts, torsos, all parts and attitudes of the human body seen with a passion of revelation, produced an astonishing effect on the multitudes who wandered in and out of the rooms”.
A print of this picture sold for $1,360,000 at Sotheby’s New York, on 14 February 2006, making it the second most expensive price reached by a Stieglitz photograph.
The suspension, the feathers, the monumental scale of both of the forms, the shiny surface of the Jaguar, the beauty and the subversion of the values and purpose of the war machine: bringing the body and the machine into close physical proximity. Light the blue touch paper and step well back … (my English heritage coming in there, on Guy Fawkes night lighting the fireworks)
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Susannah Lally at The Tate for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Tate Britain today unveils its new Duveens Commission, Harrier and Jaguar, by Fiona Banner. Banner’s largest work to date, Harrier and Jaguar brings the highly-charged physicality of two real fighter jets, both previously in active military service, into the unexpected setting of the neoclassical Duveen Galleries. Harrier and Jaguar has been specially devised for the Tate Britain Duveens Commission 2010, supported by Sotheby’s.
In the South Duveens, a Sea Harrier jet is suspended vertically, its bulk spanning floor to ceiling, wall to wall. Mimicking its namesake the harrier hawk, the aircraft’s surface has been reworked with handpainted graphic feather markings – the cockpit, the eyes, the nose cone, the beak – and hung nose pointing towards the floor, bringing to mind a trussed bird.
In the North Duveens, a Sepecat Jaguar lies belly-up on the floor, its elegant, elongated body traces the length the gallery. Stripped of paint and polished to reveal a metallic surface, the aircraft becomes a mirror that reflects back its surroundings and exposes the audience to its own reactions. Harrier and Jaguar achieves a powerful presence loaded with the seductive and yet troubling qualities of these objects of war.
Here, Banner places recently decommissioned fighter planes in the incongruous setting of the Duveen Galleries. For Banner these objects represent the ‘opposite of language’, used when communication fails. In bringing body and machine into close proximity she explores the tension between the intellectual perception of the fighter plane and physical experience of the object. The suspended Sea Harrier transforms machine into captive bird, the markings tattooing its surface evoking its namesake the Harrier Hawk. A Jaguar lies belly up on the floor, its posture suggestive of a submissive animal. Stripped and polished, its surface functions as a shifting mirror, exposing the audience to its own reactions. Harrier and Jaguar remain ambiguous objects implying both captured beast and fallen trophy.
“I remember long sublime walks in the Welsh mountains with my father, when suddenly a fighter plane would rip through the sky, and shatter everything. It was so exciting, loud and overwhelming; it would literally take our breath away. The sound would arrive from nowhere, all you would see was a shadow and then the plane was gone.
At the time harrier jump jets were at the cutting edge of technology but to me they were like dinosaurs, prehistoric, from a time before words.”
Fiona Banner said: “It’s hard to believe that these planes are designed for function, because they are beautiful. But they are absolutely designed for function, as a bird or prey is, and that function is to kill. That we find them beautiful brings into question the very notion of beauty, but also our own intellectual and moral position. I am interested in that clash between what we feel and what we think.”
Penelope Curtis, Director of Tate Britain, said: “The power of Banner’s project lies in its simple but unlikely juxtaposition: two fighter jets in a suite of neo-classical galleries.”
A fascination with language and signs is central to Fiona Banner’s practice. The emblem of the fighter jet recurs throughout her work, part of an ongoing enquiry into how signs translate experience. They appeared in pencil drawings she made at art college and then later in her first ‘wordscape’ in 1994 which transcribed the film Top Gun into a frame-by-frame written account. Aircraft are also present in more recent work where the artist has created Airfix models of all the war planes currently in service throughout the world and a taxonomy of fighter-plane nicknames. Harrier and Jaguar extends the artist’s exploration of these themes whilst constituting a dramatic new departure in terms of its monumental scale and the use of actual fighter jets.
Deputy Chairman, Sotheby’s Europe, Lord Poltimore, commented: “Tate Britain’s Duveens Commission is among the art scene’s most celebrated events and Sotheby’s is extremely proud to once again be supporting it, and Tate, one of the world’s leading public art institutions.”
Banner’s Harrier and Jaguar is the latest in a series of sculpture displays in the Duveen Galleries at Tate Britain. The contemporary sculpture commissions have been an annual event for three years since 2008, through the generous support of Sotheby’s. Artists who have previously undertaken the Commission include Eva Rothschild (2009), Martin Creed (2008), Mark Wallinger (2007), Michael Landy (2004), Anya Gallaccio (2002) and Mona Hatoum (2000). The series builds on a long tradition of exhibitions in the Duveen Galleries, which has included memorable installations by Richard Long, Richard Serra and Luciano Fabro.
Installation view of Night’s Plutonian Shore by Julia deVille at Sophie Gannon Gallery, Richmond Photo: Marcus Bunyan
This is an excellent exhibition by Julia deVille at Sophie Gannon Gallery in Richmond. Compared to last year’s ‘shock and paw’ exhibition Cineraria reviewed on this blog, this exhibition shows a commendable sense of restraint, a beautiful rise and fall in the work as you walk around the gallery space with the exhibits displayed on different types and heights of stand and a greater thematic development of the conceptual ideas within the work. There are some exquisite pieces.
From the bejewelled Golden Gosling (2010), the goose that wears the gold not lays it to the cute stillborn fawn Lenore (2010), named after Edgar Allan Poe’s poem of the same name that discusses “the proper decorum in the wake of the death of a young woman, described as “the queenliest dead that ever died so young”,” (Wikipedia text) there is a delicacy to these sculptures that seemed absent in the last exhibition. The sleeping fawn wears a little golden bridle and is covered in golden hearts, the harness bringing in the element of control (of life, of death, of the body, of identity) into the pieces not seen in the earlier work. This sense of control is reinforced in other pieces in the exhibition including the three pieces Charon (2010), Nevermore (2010) and Kitten drawn hearse (2010, see photographs below).
In Charon the kitten has an amazing beaded saddle and stirrups to allow the occupant to control the dead stead because in Greek mythology Charon is the ferryman who carries the souls of the newly deceased across the river Styx. Nevermore also features the saddle and bridle whilst the standout piece of the whole exhibition, Kitten drawn hearse just wows you with it’s delicacy and showmanship – the plume atop the harnessed kitten’s head faithfully replicating the dressage of a Victorian horse drawn funeral cortege.
In these pieces there is a simplification of the noise of the earlier works and in this simplification a conversant intensification of the layering of the conceptual ideas. Playful and witty the layers can be peeled back to reveal the poetry of de Sade, the stories of Greek mythology and the amplification of life force that is at the heart of these works.
Good stuff.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Edwin and Sophie Gannon Gallery for allowing me publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Another well considered response to the exhibition can be found on Karen Thompson’s Melbourne Jeweller blog.
Julia deVille (Australian, b. 1982) Nameless here for evermore 2010 Emu egg, black garnet beads, sterling silver, bronze, enamel paint, egret feathers 31 x 16 x 16cm Courtesy Sophie Gannon Gallery
Julia deVille (Australian, b. 1982) Golden Gosling 2010
Julia deVille (Australian, b. 1982) Ghastly grim and ancient raven 2010
Julia deVille (Australian, b. 1982) Nevermore 2010 Still-born fawn, black garnet beads, sterling silver, coque feathers, chain mail, glass 27 x 41 x 59cm Courtesy Sophie Gannon Gallery
Julia deVille (Australian, b. 1982) Charon 2010 Kitten, hematite beads, mystic spinel beads, sterling silver, chain mail, glass 30 x 12 x 19cm Courtesy Sophie Gannon Gallery
Julia deVille (Australian, b. 1982) Lenore 2010 Stillborn fawn, black garnet beads, sterling silver, gold plate, glass 35 x 17 x 12cm Courtesy Sophie Gannon Gallery
Julia deVille (Australian, b. 1982) Kitten drawn hearse 2010 Kitten, black garnet beads, sterling silver, egret feathers, wood, glass 83 x 30 x 15cm Courtesy Sophie Gannon Gallery
Julia deVille (Australian, b. 1982) Bird or beast 2010 Ostrich skeleton, ostrich feathers, smoky quartz, sterling silver, leather and wood Courtesy Sophie Gannon Gallery
Sophie Gannon Gallery 2, Albert Street, Richmond, Melbourne
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