Artists: Lionel Bawden, Penny Byrne, Nicholas Folland, Locust Jones, Rhys Lee, Rob McHaffie, Derek O’Connor, Alex Spremberg, Madonna Staunton
Lionel Bawden (Australian, b. 1974) formless worlds move through me 2010 Coloured Staedtler pencils, epoxy, incralac 51.0 x 51.0 x 9.5cm
Some good work in this exhibition – especially the Staedtler hexagonal coloured pencil constructions by Lionel Bawden. Beautifully crafted by hand they remind me of ghosts, the ‘millefiori’ (thousand flowers) of Italian glass and the inside of caverns with their stalactites.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Karen Woodbury Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Alex Spremberg (Australian born Germany, b. 1950) Inside skins 2002
These artists have been selected for their interest in ideas of assemblage and re-use of pre-existing materials. Working across a range of media, each artist in the exhibition employs a process of manipulation to create completely different concepts and forms with their finished works. These works comprise of found objects and assembled from disparate elements, scavenged or foraged by the artists and juxtaposed in inventive ways. All works included in The Navigators take on their own form and imbue a new meaning to the original source materials.
Not originally intended as art materials, yet these artists have seen potential for a new idea in the materials; creating a new thought for the object. The original useful element of the preformed material thus comes under more aesthetic and creative significance. The impetus for such artistic practice is located in a desire by these artists to re-use, re-model, reshape and recycle within their practices. Despite an obvious interest and emphasis in the materiality of the works, the conceptual underpinning are the key motivation within these varying works and pose questions regarding the value of the objects within society. The artists included in The Navigators are continuously surveying and navigating their practice, allowing for deeper exploration in their work.
The exhibition will include various two and three-dimensional objects that interact with each other in unique ways. In the example of Lionel Bawden’s sculptures, his work exploits hexagonal coloured pencils as a sculptural material, reconfiguring and carving into amorphous shapes. Here the rich qualities of colour are explored as pencils are carved, shaped and fused together. Bawden explores themes of flux, transformation, rhythm and repetition as preconditions to our experience of the physical world. Bawden’s wall mounted works ‘the caverns of temporal suspension’ explore shapes within and outside the work as they hover ominously, melting, conjoined, growing, in transformation. These works are at the forefront of his current practice.
Penny Byrne’s work makes use of vintage porcelain sculptures that are adorned with a range of materials. Through this process, Byrne makes the base sculptures appear starkly different to that of the original, taking on new connotations that are often humorous and quirky but also convey political and social issues. In her work Mercury Rising. Hunted, Slaughtered, Eaten vintage porcelain dolphins and new plastic Manga figurines are employed to relate to the annual Japanese slaughter of tens of thousands dolphins as highlighted in the documentary ‘The Cove’. The Japanese eat the dolphins and then suffer mercury poisoning due to the high mercury levels in the dolphins flesh, leading to symptoms of madness.
Nicholas Folland’s Navigator sculptures are indicative Folland’s continued interest in utilising, modifying and experimenting with various sourced materials. These sculptures comprise of various upturned intricately detailed crystal objects that sit above a wood panelled shelf. These glass object are lit and act as beacons or floating satellite cities. Folland personifies the intrepid creative explorer via his navigation of various found materials.
Locust Jones’ three-dimensional globes are made from papier mache and pictorially and graphically convey global issues. These works sit on the floor and allow the viewer to orient themselves around the works allowing for a detached, objective perspective on contemporary societal issues. The quickly worked surfaces reflect a stream of consciousness in process. Imagery and themes are taken from various media such as the Internet, photojournalism, film culture and nightly news broadcasts.
The two sculptures in the exhibition by Rhys Lee imbue associations of debris and deal with found objects such as a money box, a dead bird and a clowns face. These trophy-like pieces are decorated by old, worn and found vintage materials that engage with the everyday. The intimate scale of these works do not account for the potency of symbolism and accumulation of collected ideas. The blistered silver patina and bronze sculptures allude to a dark gothic sentiment that extends beyond the morphing forms. The shapes have been smashed, manipulated and stuck back together again resulting in frozen miniature icons that represent a contemporary zest for defiance.
Rob McHaffie’s works comprise a pastiche of painted anonymous unrelated objects and shapes that somehow come together to create unlikely compositions and formations. The highly skilled execution of McHaffie’s paintings attracts the viewer, who is then faced with a banality in subject matter, often of depictions of clothing, crumpled paper, plants and disfigured creatures and figures. These perfectly rendered images of everyday objects are unsettling in their clarity and realism, which are then skewed, moulded and displaced in unlikely relationships. There is a sense of a deliberate haphazard nature to McHaffie’s work that draws upon a range of elements brought together to mimic something else. Humour surfaces through this stylistic creative process.
Derek O’Connor’s re-worked painting collages resemble distorted and fragmented realities and stories via the manipulation and playful technique of alteration and re-use of book covers and record album and EP covers. O’Connor’s characteristic gestural sweeping luscious brushstrokes are employed with precision yet allow for organic spontaneity. The old material takes on new meaning and are given new life via O’Connor’s creations.
Alex Spremberg’s work Inside Skins highlights the artist’s accidental processes at work. This sculptural piece was made as an ancillary to his broader practice – working with acrylic, enamel and varnish on board and canvas. These objects where literally created via chance – an after thought that was noticed to be a finished piece in its own right. Left to dry within their containers these ‘skins’ were extracted and proved to provide aesthetic attraction and conceptual ideas of the ready-made.
The mainstay of Madonna Staunton’s practice surrounds the physicality of assemblage. Essentially she is a collage artist. The components of her two- and three-dimensional assemblages are usually drawn from old, faded and battered discards such as frames and chairs that are carefully put together in new ways and given another life. A play between precision and randomness animates her work. Her sensitivity to tonal and formal arrangement always remains acute during this process and the results are austerely and chaotically beautiful.
Press release from the Karen Woodbury Gallery website [Online] Cited 20/05/2010 no longer available online
Nicholas Folland (Australian, b. 1967) Navigators 1 2008 Glassware, table and lightbox 25.0 x 110.0 x 87.0cm
Nicholas Folland (Australian, b. 1967) Navigators 2 2008 Glassware, table and lightbox 25.0 x 110.0 x 87.0cm
These are fascinating photographs (and in part, more than a little what? marginal, disturbing, poetic, beautiful, creepy, voyeuristic, misogynist).
Tichy’s camera is such an amazing construction (click on the image above to see a larger version).
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Jim Edwards and the Michael Hoppen Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting.
“Women are just a motif to me. The figure – standing, bending, or sitting. The movement, walking. Nothing else Interests me. The erotic is just a dream anyway. The world is only an illusion, our illusion.”
“Everything is decided by the earth, which is turning. You can only live as long as the earth keeps turning. That is predetermined.
The recently unknown photographic work of Czech artist Miroslav Tichý has become a noteworthy presence in the worlds of photography and contemporary art over the last few years. Timeless and uncategorisable, Tichý’s work captures the women of Kijov, from the artist’s native city in Moravia. On 28 April 2010, the Michael Hoppen Gallery will bring together unique photographs, previously unseen in the UK, created in the 1960’s by Tichý with his makeshift cameras and enlargers.
Marginal and exceptionally voyeuristic, in his methods Tichý could be described as an “art brut photographer” yet he is marked by many classical influences. Though his images are produced with poor-quality equipment and carelessly shot, they offer an idiosyncratic and almost hallucinatory vision of a fantastical, eroticised reality. With his endless return to the same subject and the volume and regularity of his production, Tichý’s work draws many parallels to certain practices of conceptual art during the same period.
For thirty years Tichý took up to one hundred photographs each day, pursuing his artistic obsession with the female form. Dressed in rags and using a homemade camera, Tichy captured the universe of the people in the small town of Brno in the Czech Republic. This discovery of photography saved him from madness and the claustrophobia of political dictatorship. Though his work today is widely exhibited, Tichý worked for years as an unknown artist in complete isolation on the periphery of the art world.
A student at the Academy of Arts in Prague, Tichý left following the communist overthrow of 1948. Unwilling to subordinate to the political system he spent some eight years in prison and psychiatric wards for no reason, other than he was ‘different’ and considered subversive. Upon his release he became an outsider, occupying his time by obsessively taking photographs of the women of his home town, using homemade cameras constructed from tin cans, children’s spectacle lenses, rubber bands, scotch tape and other junk found on the streets.
He captured images of their ankles, faces and torsos whilst out strolling or sunbathing, shop-girls behind the counter, mothers pushing prams, and any others who caught his eye, sometimes finding himself in trouble with the police. These small objects of obsession, which might appear to the casual viewer to be simply voyeurism, are simultaneously melancholic and poetic.
Tichý’s work surfaced in July 2005, when he won the ‘New Discovery Award’ at Arles. Within a year he had already been featured in two solo museum exhibitions, at the Wintertaur in Zurich and the Rudolfinum, Prague, and his work has been purchased by the Victoria & Albert Museum here in London. Tichý has now exhibited in museums from Holland to Canada, Finland to Ireland and Tokyo. In 2009, a seminal show was held at the Centre Pompidou in Paris where it received rave reviews. Since then, Tichý’s work has recently been on show at ICP in New York where The New York Times reviewed his work as … ‘intensely fascinating’. American artist Richard Prince wrote an essay for the catalogue. In his signature smart-aleck, red-blooded-male persona, Prince links Tichý to Bettie Page, Swanson’s TV dinners and the short stories of John Cheever. Tichý’s work will also appear at Tate Modern later this year as part of their Voyerism, Surveillance and Camera exhibition in May 2010.
Press release from the Michael Hoppen Gallery website [Online] Cited 21/05/2010 no longer available online
Miroslav Tichý (Czech, November 20, 1926 – April 12, 2011) was a photographer who from the 1960s until 1985 took thousands of surreptitious pictures of women in his hometown of Kyjov in the Czech Republic, using homemade cameras constructed of cardboard tubes, tin cans and other at-hand materials. Most of his subjects were unaware that they were being photographed. A few struck beauty-pageant poses when they sighted Tichý, perhaps not realising that the parody of a camera he carried was real.
His soft focus, fleeting glimpses of the women of Kyjov are skewed, spotted and badly printed – flawed by the limitations of his primitive equipment and a series of deliberate processing mistakes meant to add poetic imperfections. Of his technical methods, Tichý has said, “First of all, you have to have a bad camera”, and, “If you want to be famous, you must do something more badly than anybody in the entire world.”
During the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia, Tichý was considered a dissident and was badly treated by the government. His photographs remained largely unknown until an exhibition was held for him in 2004. Tichý did not attend exhibitions, and lived a life of self-sufficiency and freedom from the standards of society. Tichý died on April 12, 2011 in Kyjov, Czech Republic. …
An essay in Artforum International describes Tichý as “practically reinventing photography from scratch”, rehabilitating the soft focus, manipulated pictorial photography of the late 1800s,
“… not as a distortion of the medium but as something like its essence. What counts for him is not only the image – just one moment in the photographic process – but also the chemical activity of the materials, which is never entirely stable or complete, and the delimitation of the results via cropping and framing.”
Director Radek Horacek of the Brno House of Art, which held an exhibition of Tichý’s photographs in 2006, describes them thus:
“They are all very careful observations of women from Kyjov and of everyday trivial activities. But soon you realise that these trivial situations such as someone sitting on a bench, women waiting for a bus, someone taking a T-shirt off at a swimming pool, are somehow extraordinary. Tichý managed to give this banality a feeling of exceptionality and rarity. Just part of a female body in his pictures can look very esoteric. There are so many magazines that offer much more nudity than Tichý but his photographs are different. A woman’s tights between a knee and a skirt or a swimming costume in his pictures look somehow mysterious.”
Installation views of the exhibition A Shrine for Orpheus by Pip Stokes at fortyfivedownstairs, Melbourne Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Bees, books, bones… and biding (one’s) time, attaining the receptive state of being needed to contemplate this work.
This is a strong, beautiful installation by Pip Stokes at fortyfivedownstairs that rewards such a process.
What is memorable about the work is the physicality, the textures: the sound of the bees; the Beuy-esque yellowness and presence of the beeswax blocks; the liquidness of the honey in the bowl atop the beehives; the incinerated bones, books and personal photographs; the tain-less mirrors, the books dipped in beeswax; the votive offering of poems placed into the beehive re-inscribed by the bees themselves – and above all the luscious, warm smell of beeswax that fills the gallery (echoing Beuys concept of warmth, to extend beyond the material to encompass what he described as ‘spiritual warmth or the beginning of an evolution’).
This alchemical installation asks the viewer to free themselves from themselves – “the moment in which he frees himself of himself and… gives the sacred to itself, to the freedom of its essence…” as Maurice Blanchot put its – a process Carl Jung called individuation, a synthesis of the Self which consists of the union of the unconscious with the conscious. Jung saw alchemy as an early form of psychoanalysis in which the alchemist tried to turn lead into gold, a metaphor for the dissolving of the Self into the prima materia and the emergence of a new Self at the end of the process, changing the mind and spirit of the Alchemist. Here the process is the same. We are invited to let go the eidetic memory of shape and form in order to approach the sacred not through ritual but through the reformation of Self.
As Pip Stokes last few paragraphs of her artist statement succinctly observes,
“Maurice Blanchot, has interpreted this myth as the descent of the artist to the realm of death to gain the work of art. Out of the failure of the artist, a necessary failure, emerges the artwork, wounded and bearing the ash of its origins.
The work of mourning, the work of healing.
Reflection, apparition, illusion: what appears as image, disappears evaporatively. As we change our place the space is already gone: the mirror holds a trace. What is veiled, enigmatic, uncertain remains as shadow that casts a light.”
The space in which we stand falls away: the mirror may hold a trace but it is only ever a trace. Our visions elude the senses, slipping between dreaming and waking, between conscious and subconscious realms. As Orpheus turns back to look so Eurydice dissolves, “falling out of the skin into the soul.” We, the viewer, are changed.
So far so good.
Unfortunately what does not facilitate this engagement with change is the combined verbiage of both the artist’s statement and the catalogue essay by Lisa Jacobson. These texts, especially the latter one, with quotations by Blanchot, Rilke, Calasso, Beuys, Cocteau, Neruda, Cobb, Virgil, Rilke again, Cocteau again, Poe and Derrida and meditations on mythos, the sacred, resurrection, mourning et al are mostly unnecessary to support what is strong work – in fact they seem to put a physical, textual wall between the viewer and the work, between the installation and the proposed dissolution of Self into the sacred. The catalogue essay is confusing and needed a judicious edit with the understanding that sometimes less is more! The work needs to speak for itself, not to be didactically spoken for and knowing when to merely suggest an idea is one of the skills of good writing. Perhaps all that was needed was the quotation by Blanchot and the two paragraphs above by Pip Stokes – nothing more.
Approaching the sacred is, I believe, and act of letting go, of aware-less-ness. As we immerse ourselves in that enigma we find that it is our fluid shadow aspect that has cast the light, with all attendant expectations, beliefs, dreams, visions, weaknesses, shortcomings, and instincts. This exhibition asks us to reconcile the journey into darkness with the hope of redemption.
“The Greek myth says: one cannot create a work unless the enormous experience of the depths – an experience which the Greeks recognised as necessary to the work, an experience in which the work is put to the test by that enormousness – is not pursued for its own sake. The depth does not surrender itself face to face; it only reveals itself by concealing itself in the work. But the myth also shows that Orpheus’ destiny is not to submit to that law – and it is certainly true that by turning around to look at Eurydice, Orpheus ruins the work… and Eurydice returns to the shadows; under his gaze, the essence of the night reveals itself to be inessential. He thus betrays the work and Eurydice and the night. But if he did not turn around to look at Eurydice, he still would be betraying,… the boundless and imprudent force of his impulse, which does not demand Eurydice in her diurnal truth and her everyday charm, but in her nocturnal darkness, in her distance, her body closed, her face sealed, which wants to see her not when she is visible, but when she is invisible, and not as the intimacy of a familiar life, but as the strangeness of that which excludes all intimacy; it does not want to make her live, but to have the fullness of her death living in her.”
“The sacred night encloses Eurydice, encloses within the song something which went beyond the song. But it is also enclosed itself: it is bound, it is the attendant, it is the sacred mastered by the power of ritual – that word which means order, rectitude, law, the way of Tao and the axis of Dharma. Orpheus gaze unties it, destroys its limits, breaks the law which contains, which retains the essence. Thus Orpheus’ gaze is … the moment in which he frees himself of himself and…, gives the sacred to itself, to the freedom of its essence…”
Installation views of the exhibition A Shrine for Orpheus by Pip Stokes at fortyfivedownstairs, Melbourne Photos: Marcus Bunyan
A Shrine for Orpheus
Pip Stokes
The first temple was made by the bees with feathers, wax and honey.
~ Calasso
… it is Orpheus. His metamorphosis In this one and this. We should not trouble about other names. Once and for all It’s Orpheus when there’s singing.
~ Rilke. Sonnets to Orpheus
We are the bees of the invisible We frantically plunder the visible of its honey To accumulate it in the great golden hive Of the invisible
~ Rilke
In mythology, honey was regarded as a spiritual substance and the bees were godly… This belief was… influenced by the whole process of honey production as constituting a link between earthly and heavenly levels. The influx of a substance from the whole environment – plants, minerals, and sun – was the essence of the bee-cult… The whole builds a unity, … in a humane, warm way, through principles of cooperation and brotherhood.
~ Beuys
This installation, A Shrine for Orpheus, comprises four hundred hand cast beeswax blocks and a traditional beebox, in use by the bees until recently, accompanied by found objects such as old mirrors as well as ephemera collected from nature including feathers, bones and the salt mummified skeleton of a rabbit. Over the past year I have worked with the living beehive, placing votive offerings associated with poetry, death and renewal into the hive: objects such as books, cast wax pages, vessels, textiles and bones. Melbourne writer, Paul Carter has engraved wax tablets with aphoristic poems to the bees. These objects have been transformed through the bees’ processes of honeycomb- building.
The metaphors of the beehive in this connection to poetry, death and renewal are explored in the materials and structures of the installation. The warm sweet- smelling wax of the bees, cast into six sided blocks, provides the building material for the Shrine and two mausoleums, each with a void space, a space of underworld. The void of the larger mausoleum contains, ashy, burnt books, personal photos from family albums scorched by fire, evoking ‘shades’, the shadowy dead – and porcelain-like bones which have been materially transformed by cremation in a kiln. The second beeswax ‘grave’ has two voids, one of which contains a beeswax- bound and dipped facsimile of handwritten poems by Keats and, in the other opening, a book of insect morphology, also dipped and bound in beeswax.
The traditional beebox in the centre of the ruin of the Shrine is placed on a lake of mirrors. The mirrors have lost their tain and been translucently washed with plaster of Paris to further dim our view into the obscurely reflective world that lies beneath. The Shrine is accompanied by offerings of honey, honeycomb, beeswax bound books and pages cast from beeswax awaiting new poems, laid at its entrance.
Myths of death, dismemberment, transformation and resurrection have haunted the Western imagination from Isis to Dionysus, Orpheus and Christ. In his essay, The Gaze of Orpheus, the French literary theorist, Maurice Blanchot, has interpreted this myth as the descent of the artist to the realm of death to gain the work of art. Out of the failure of the artist, a necessary failure, emerges the artwork, wounded and bearing the ash of its origins.
The work of mourning, the work of healing.
Reflection, apparition, illusion: what appears as image, disappears evaporatively. As we change our place the space is already gone: the mirror holds a trace. What is veiled, enigmatic, uncertain remains as shadow that casts a light.
The temple re admits this invisible.
Pip Stokes. May. 2010 A Shrine for Orpheus
Beeswax, beehive box, mirror. Mixed media, dimensions variable. Original texts by Paul Carter, writer. Sound by Kasimir Burgess, filmmaker.
Installation views of the exhibition A Shrine for Orpheus by Pip Stokes at fortyfivedownstairs, Melbourne Photos: Marcus Bunyan
A Shrine for Orpheus
Lisa Jacobson
If Orpheus is guardian of the sacred arts, then it is possible that never before has there been a century so much in need of his song. This is because the world insists, on a daily basis, that we lose ourselves rather than commune with loss, to be drawn to darkness as logos rather than seek out its mythos. The myth of Orpheus has an integral role today in that it returns us and brings us back into communion with the sacred through poetry, dance, music and art.
Pip Stokes’ most recent exhibition, A Shrine for Orpheus, provides a mythic language for the story of Orpheus. It is a contemplation of myth that reflects back on itself in an endless refraction of associations and images; a visual representation of the myth itself which is never simple or linear but, rather, layered with metaphor and re-imaginings. Stokes’ installation reveals the ways in which myth enters us, but does not belong to us. Rather, we are the conduit through which myth runs and Orpheus, indeed, does run and has run through the dreams of humankind for as long as we have been able to dream.
This is in keeping with the Neo-Platonic notion, in which Orpheus plays no small part, that the figures of myth occupy not only the rooms of the psyche, but the rooms of other houses outside of us. It is not the artist who invents these figures of the psyche, of Orpheus and Eurydice, of Persephone and Hades, but they who reinvent themselves. The zeitgeist or midrash (as the Jewish mystics call the spirit of the times) summons up those gods it needs most. In Stokes’ work, it is Orpheus who answers this call.
Orpheus, playing quietly on his lyre in the middle of the forest, coaxes the animals out to listen, as Rainer Maria Rilke writes in his first sonnet to Orpheus:
“… And where there had been just a makeshift hut to receive the music, a shelter nailed up out of their darkest longing, with an entryway that shuddered in the wind- you built a temple deep inside their hearing.”
Summoning the animals translates, perhaps, into an ecological sensibility; to hear the call of Orpheus is to answer the ecological call, to re-sacralise nature. At a time when the world seems intent on hurtling towards its own demise, A Shrine for Orpheus inclines towards meditation and the transformation of nature, the stillness of catacombs, the quietness of wax, the purposeful industry of bees and silkworms, the potential for flight, the distillation of air, the reflective gaze, the emptying out of all colour until there are only shades of white: bleached bones, wax, ash, silk and paper, feathers in contemplation of flight as if, as the poet Pablo Neruda writes, “we lived falling out of the skin into the soul.” Like the bees which flew in through the open window of Stokes’ studio to busy themselves on the beeswax, even the very act of art-making has summoned and sung up, in its own way, the problematic aspects of creation. As Jean Cocteau observes in his film, Orphée, “Look for a lifetime in mirrors and you will see Death at work, like bees in a hive of glass.”
The music of Orpheus, as Noel Cobb has said, is “the activity of the theologos, the one who spoke with and about the Gods.” His sanctuary also encompasses poetry and art. Orpheus’ lyre has to do with both dismemberment and re-membering, god-like attributes, as Stokes alludes to in her depiction of Orpheus’ wax heart awaiting resurrection. Orpheus’ lyre was said to be strung with human sinews, and the music he plays as he sings nature and animals into being dips, inevitably, into the underworld, into death and decay, dismemberment, a scattering of the psyche into fields not yet dreamt of, in the act of its resounding. The wax which forms the foundation of Stokes’ Shrine for Orpheus, the books on which bees have fed in order to make their own inscriptions (texts by writers from Keats to the contemporary Paul Carter) also hint at resurrection and immortality. At the centre of this ‘temple’ is the beehive, symbol of transformation.
As Virgil notes in The Georgics in a section entitled “The Peculiarly Wonderful Features of Bees”, bee stock is immortal in that the hive itself is passed on from generation to generation, the structure keeps on singing, and never really dies despite the passing of the bees who composed it. In a similar fashion, Orpheus’ own lyre is carried forth, made from the shell of a tortoise whose death made possible the music itself. The heart of Orpheus, like his own severed head in the myth, does not cease its previous musicality, the song of its rhythmic beating. So too might the artist reach down into the darkness of herself, even if she risks being torn apart, knowing that the heart remains intact and can be resurrected.
Rilke again:
Only the man who has also raised his lyre among the darkling shades may be allowed a sense of infinite praise.
Inside the Orphic vision which Pip Stokes’ art immerses itself in, everything is panoramic and ornamented by mythic figures whom we cannot ever really know, but only glimpse via the language of metaphor: the hand that plunges through the earth while one is gathering flowers, the hem of a beekeeper’s shroud-like coat, the thin silken thread of a worm, the trace of words upon wax, or feathers, burnt books or ash. These are the images that translate the emotion of the myth but which remain, nevertheless, untranslatable because should they be hardened into the prosaic everyday language of the world, they would cease to be mythos.
Perhaps it is for this very reason that Eurydice cannot be brought back up to the shining world of which Rilke writes, in a different poem on Orpheus, and that Orpheus himself rises into at the very moment Hermes ushers Eurydice once again below. Eurydice is too far into death to be brought back to life. She has sunk into the “dream within the dream” in which, as Edgar Allan Poe writes, we are all participants. All Orpheus can take with him is the imprint of her, the illicit gaze, the melancholic pathology of the backward glance, that perhaps was not so much hastily stolen as executed too quickly. How long must the artist gaze into the underworld? Is it ever enough? Must she not continually turn back and gaze at what cannot be brought to the surface but that she must, even so, attempt to translate? Is it this that Rilke refers to when he writes in his sonnets, “it is in overstepping that [Orpheus] obeys?” Cocteau, speaking about his film, commented that “Poets, in order to live must often die, and shed not only the red blood of their hearts, but the white blood of their souls, that flows and leaves traces which can be followed.”
There is loss in this of course, great loss, that Stokes’ art both acknowledges and makes a place for. As Orpheus travels along “the path ascending steeply into life” towards “the shining exit-gates,” he cannot help but glance back. In the sonnets Rilke cautions, “Be ahead of all parting as though it already were / behind you.” This has echoes of Jacques Derrida’s The Work of Mourning, in which he argues that mourning begins the moment friendship begins; that we cannot enter into relationship without becoming conscious of the loss that will inevitably come with the other’s death. Indeed, the very idea of this loss precipitates the event itself, leaves us prematurely bereft and continually turning back towards the absent loved one in our grief. And if we are always turning back, is not the artist most required to do so, is not the artist most compelled to incline her head towards the darkness in order to write of what stirs beneath the shining surface of the world, of what calls to be heard? Is this not the invisible that Orpheus calls into being through poetry, music and art? Orpheus rises in Rilke’s poem, and in Pip Stokes’ work. In fact, if we dare to journey with him, he will rise in us all.
Installation views of the exhibition A Shrine for Orpheus by Pip Stokes at fortyfivedownstairs, Melbourne Photos: Marcus Bunyan
fortyfivedownstairs 45, Flinders Lane Melbourne 3000
THE classic William Eggleston, the one and only. Feel the heat of sun on body. Look at the construction of the image plane, all angles and fractures. The slight movement of the woman’s hand as she sits on a cracked yellow wall. The distance between her body and the metal pole with wrapped chain and padlock, that ice/fire tension as Minor White would say. Man with gun vs melancholy monochromatic self portrait, the reverie of the lone thinker. Colour and light as emotional sounding board, “colour as a means of discovery and expression, and as a way to highlight aspects of life hidden in plain sight.” This is what Eggleston points his democratic camera at – life hidden in plain sight, revealed in all its intricacies, in all its mundanity and glory.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Chai Lee and the Art Institute of Chicago for allowing to me reproduce the photographs in this posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
The unconventional beauty and artistry of works by photographer William Eggleston will be showcased in a major exhibition opening at the Art Institute of Chicago this winter. William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008 – on view from February 27 through May 23, 2010, in the Modern Wing’s Abbott Galleries (G182, G184) and Carolyn S. and Matthew Bucksbaum Gallery (G188) – is the most comprehensive retrospective to date of the Memphis-based contemporary photographer. The exhibition brings together more than 150 extraordinary images of familiar, everyday subjects with lesser-known, early black-and-white prints and provocative video recordings, all produced over a five-decade period.
Born in 1939 in Memphis, Tennessee, and raised on his family’s cotton plantation in Mississippi, William Eggleston held a casual interest in photography until 1959, when he came across photo books by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Walker Evans. Among his earliest pictures, made during stints at universities in Tennessee and Mississippi, were black-and-white scenes found in his native South, as well as portraits of friends and family members.
By the 1960s and early 1970s he had begun experimenting with colour film, and he eventually produced rich, vivid prints through the dye transfer process – prints that are created through the alignment of three separate matrices (cyan, magenta, and yellow) generated from three separate negatives (red, green, and blue filters). The resulting prints are known for the vividness and permanence of their colours. Hence, Eggleston is often credited for single-handedly ushering in the era of colour art photography.
Eager to show his work to a broader audience, Eggleston traveled to New York with a suitcase of slides and prints to meet with Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) curator John Szarkowski. This visit eventually yielded a controversial but revolutionary exhibition in 1976 – MoMA’s first solo show to feature colour photographs – and a classic accompanying book, William Eggleston’s Guide. At this point in his career, Eggleston had already distinguished himself by treating colour as a means of discovery and expression, and as a way to highlight aspects of life hidden in plain sight.
William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008 demonstrates Eggleston’s “democratic” approach to his photographic subjects in both colour and black-and-white. Everything that happens in front of the camera is worthy of becoming a picture for the artist – no matter how seemingly circumstantial or trivial. Eggleston finds his motifs in everyday life, resulting in telling portrayals of American culture. His iconic images such as Elvis’s Graceland, a supermarket clerk corralling grocery carts in the afternoon sunlight, and a freezer stuffed with food proves that the photographer points his “democratic camera” at everything. Eggleston’s quiet, thoughtful pictures have profoundly impacted subsequent generations of photographers, filmmakers, and scholars.
The exhibition also includes Eggleston’s cult video work, Stranded in Canton. In the 1960s, Eggleston used film to document Fred McDowell, a well-known Delta blues musician, but ultimately abandoned the film project. Eggleston later acquired a video camera and began using video to shoot in bars and in people’s homes; sometimes he shot monologues friends delivered for his video camera, most often at night. The result, Stranded in Canton, recently restored and re-edited, is a portrait of a woozy subculture that adds dimension and texture to the world of Eggleston’s colour photographs.
Internationally acclaimed, Eggleston has spent the past four decades photographing around the world, responding intuitively to fleeting configurations of cultural signs and specific expressions of local colour. By not censoring, rarely editing, and always photographing even the seemingly banal, Eggleston convinces us completely of the idea of the democratic camera.
Press release from the Art Institute of Chicago website [Online] Cited 15/05/2010 no longer available online
Paul Ogier (Australia born New Zealand, b. 1974) Saint Stephen 2009 Courtesy of the artist
Mark Hislop from the Monash Gallery of Art (MGA) has asked me to post details of the William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize 2010. More than happy too. To see the standard take a look at the 2009 Finalists online. Details on how to enter are posted below. Have a go, get your entries in, you never know who will win!
Many thankx to the MGA for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a large version of the image.
Simon Terrill (Australian, b. 1969) Bank of England 9AM 2009 Courtesy of the artist
The Monash Gallery of Art Foundation is pleased to announce the CALL FOR ENTRIES for the William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize 2010.
The MGA Foundation will once again showcase the work of Australia’s best photographers in Australia’s most coveted photography award. Photographers from all over Australia are encouraged to submit entries to this year’s Bowness Photography Prize. Each year, finalists are drawn from the breadth of Australian photographic practice: editorial, commercial, street and fine art.
In recognition of the support shown the prize by Australian photographers, prize money for this year’s award has increased substantially. Last year, a record 459 photographers submitted entries in anticipation of the $20,000 non-acquisitive first prize. In 2010, photographers will be competing for $25,000 first prize and $1,000 People’s Choice Award.
The winner of the 2010 Bowness Photography Prize and Honourable Mentions will be announced on Thursday night 23 SEP 2010 during a cocktail party held at MGA. Winners and finalists will enjoy unprecedented visibility for their work. All finalists will be published on MGA’s flickr page and included in a substantial catalogue. The winner will receive the $25,000 first prize. And in recognition of the strength of the prize and MGA’s commitment to promoting the best of contemporary Australian photography, Honourable Mentions will have the opportunity to stage an exhibition at MGA.
This year’s entries will be judged by Gael Newton, Senior Curator of Photographs, National Gallery of Australia, Max Pam, Australian photographer, and Shaune Lakin, Director of MGA.
About the BOWNESS Photography Prize
Established in 2006 to promote excellence in photography, the annual non-acquisitive William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize is an initiative of the MGA Foundation. The Bowness Photography Prize has quickly become Australia’s most coveted photography prize. It is also one of the country’s most open prizes for photography. In the past, finalists have included established and emerging photographers, art and commercial photographers. All film-based and digital work from amateurs and professionals is accepted. There are no thematic restrictions.
The 2009 Bowness Prize recipient was Paul Knight. Since winning the Prize, Knight has received an Australia Council for the Arts Skills and Development Grant and is currently presenting new work at the prestigious international artfair Art Cologne.
Jane Burton (Australian, b. 1966) Ivy # 3 2009 Courtesy of the artist and Karen Woodbury Gallery, Melbourne
Owen Leong (Australian, b. 1979) Justin 2009 Courtesy of the artist and Anna Pappas Gallery, Melbourne
Paul Knight (Australian, b. 1976) 14 months # 01 2008 Courtesy of the artist and Neon Parc, Melbourne Winner of the William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize 2009
Monash Gallery of Art 860 Ferntree Gully Road Wheelers Hill Victoria 3150 Phone: +61 3 8544 0503
John Young (Australian born Hong Kong, b. 1956) Flower Market (Nanjing 1936) #2 2010 Digital print and oil on Belgian linen 240 x 331cm image courtesy of the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery
What can one say about work that is so confronting, poignant and beautiful – except to say that it is almost unbearable to look at this work without being emotionally charged, to wonder at the vicissitudes of human life, of events beyond one’s control.
Simply, this is the best exhibition that I have seen in Melbourne so far this year.
The exhibition tells the story of the massacre of 300,000 people in the city of Nanjing in Jiangsu, China by Japanese troops in December, 1937 in what was to become known as the Nanjing Massacre. It also tells the story of a group of foreigners led by German businessman John Rabe and American missionary Minnie Vautrin who set up a “safety zone” to protect the lives of at least 250,000 Chinese citizens. The work is conceptually and aesthetically well resolved, the layering within the work creating a holistic narrative that engulfs and enfolds the viewer – holding them in the shock of brutality, the poignancy of poetry and the (non)sublimation of the human spirit to the will of others.
On the left wall of the gallery are three large mixed-media paintings of screen printed photographs of the Nanjing Flower Market taken the year before the massacre (see three images directly below). The printing of the press photographs at such a scale (a la Marco Fusinato) emphasises the dot structure of the photograph, the intensity of a newspaper reality ‘blown up’ to a huge scale. Unfortunately, you cannot see this deconstruction of the image very well in the examples below (clicking on the lower two images to get a larger version will give you a better idea), but believe me it most effective in creating a spatio-temporal distance between the viewer and the image. The dissolution of the image into dots is surmounted by painted cherry blossoms, bleached corals and piles of logs that overlay the photographic text. The reason-ances are sublime. The mind tries to process the distance between the death of the people and the photograph, the knowledge of what is about to happen to them, and the sensuality of the buds and flowers: new life!
To my friend and I the coral in the last painting reminded us both of the emanations of psychic phenomena at a seance, a series of radiations originating in the godhead.
On the right wall of the gallery is a grid of three rows of twenty images that make up the work Safety Zone (2010, see bottom image). Made up of chalk drawings on black paper (a la Rudolf Steiner), writings by the Europeans including Vautrin and Rabe, statistics, gruesome photographs of the massacre and observations by the artist, this is in part both a confronting and benevolent work.
Archival photographs are printed digitally (the dot structure working to less affect here); some vertical photographs are shown horizontally. Text written in chalk is erased with a sweep of the hand. Thoughts of the Buddha, the infinity symbol linked to the Buddha’s Ray and the Buddha’s Heart are a physical presence. Two blue chalk lines intersect and cross over, so poignant and sublime amongst the destruction that surrounds. Golf clubs, beer bottles, bayonets.
‘THERE IS NOTHING LEFT’ 13.12.37 (Robert Wilson)
‘HOME SICKNESS’
‘Simulacrum > Heart’
A simply drawn coffin shape on black ground
‘I began to roam around the city preventing further atrocities myself’
‘They will not do so, if it is in my power to prevent it’ (Minnie Vautrin)
UNSPEAKABLE ACTS OF EVIL … BECOMING BANAL
At both ends of the gallery is the last element in this play of hope, mutability and madness. Two large oil-on-linen paintings, titled The Crippled Tree #1 & #2 (see images below) “provide another register to the memory of the event. According to Young, the battered and split logs, painted in the negative, resonate and recollect the violence done to the victims of the massacre.” Unfortunately the two small images below cannot really give you an idea of the metaphorical power of these paintings. Like twisted and broken bodies larger than life size they become the glue that holds the other elements of the exhibition together. Without them there would be no transition from one side of the gallery, one element of the work to another. In their solarisation they emote an energy that flows down the length of the gallery = is this possible? Yes it is!
You feel the cracking of their branches, the amputation of their limbs but their spirit, their efflorescence (which, most appropriately considering the use of the Flower Market photographs, means “to flower out” in French) shines on. Such is the nature of the human spirit. Take the time and see this work. It is well worth the journey.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the artist, Serena Bentley and Anna Schwartz Gallery for allowing me to reproduce the images in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
John Young (Australian born Hong Kong, b. 1956) Flower Market (Nanjing 1936) #3 2010 Digital print and oil on Belgian linen 240 x 331cm image courtesy of the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery
John Young (Australian born Hong Kong, b. 1956) Flower Market (Nanjing 1936) #1 2010 digital print and oil on Belgian linen 240 x 331cm image courtesy of the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery
Safety Zone, John Young’s latest project presents a series of intricate paintings that reassemble historical reminiscences of human survival by linking experimental contemporary art with investigative visual reports, in historical photographs and documents.
This body of work draws attention to incidents across the city of Nanjing in Jiangsu, China, just moments before the onset of the Nanjing Massacre, which followed the capture of the city by Japanese Imperial Forces on 13 December 1937. In the six weeks following the invasion, a quarter of a million Chinese citizens were killed in what the American historian Iris Chang described as the ‘forgotten holocaust of World War II’.
Through Chang’s book, The Rape of Nanking, the world was introduced to the personal memoirs of foreigners living in Nanjing who had been working on creating a ‘safety zone’ that would protect 250,000 Chinese citizens from the invading Japanese troops. Two of the twenty-one foreigners who stayed in the city to help set up the Nanjing Safety Zone were the American missionary Minnie Vautrin and the German businessman John Rabe. Their experiences have been noted by Young, who travelled to Nanjing, Berlin and Heidelberg, conducting first hand interviews and research for this compelling multi-layered project which exemplifies the transformative function of art.
The installation Safety Zone consists of three series of works which reference acts of resistance by individuals to protect fellow human beings against these atrocities that were underpinned by autocratic regimes and nationalist ideologies.
In the Flower Market (Nanjing 1936) series, carefully painted spring flowers and bleached corals are superimposed over historical photographs taken in Nanjing a year prior to the massacre. The meticulously rendered impressions of logs in The Crippled Tree #1 & #2 provide another register to the memory of the event. According to Young, the battered and split logs, painted in the negative, resonate and recollect the violence done to the victims of the massacre.
The carefully assembled bank of 60 chalk drawings and digital prints that make up the centerpiece of Safety Zone provides an intricate understanding of the humanity that lies beneath this tragic event through the revelation of extraordinary acts of self-sacrifice.
Dr Thomas J. Berghuis Department of Art History and Film, The University of Sydney
John Young (Australian born Hong Kong, b. 1956) The Crippled Tree #1 2010 Oil on linen 274 x 183cm image courtesy of the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery
John Young (Australian born Hong Kong, b. 1956) The Crippled Tree #2 2010 Oil on linen 274 x 183cm image courtesy of the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery
John Young (Australian born Hong Kong, b. 1956) Safety Zone (installation view) 2010 60 works, digital prints on photographic paper and chalk on blackboard-painted archival cotton paper Image courtesy of the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery
Anna Schwartz Gallery 185 Flinders Lane Melbourne, Victoria 3000
Many thankx to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the images in this posting. Please click on the photographs for more information about the images from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Kate Edith Gough (English, 1856-1948) Untitled page from the Gough Album Late 1870s Collage of watercolour and albumen silver prints 14 5/8 x 11 5/8 in. (37 x 29.5cm) V&A Images / Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Kate Gough was one of fourteen children born to the wealthy businessman Thomas Rolls Hoare and his wife, Emma. Although the Hoares possessed neither title nor land, their vast accumulated fortune allowed them to emulate the aristocratic lifestyle, renting a Sussex estate and dividing their time between the country and the city, where they enjoyed a variety of cultural amusements. Kate read widely, from Charles Dickens to Punch magazine, while also learning such feminine accomplishments as sketching and china painting. In 1878 she met Hugh Gough, a lieutenant in the Royal Navy. The couple married in January 1879 and lived the peripatetic life that Lieutenant Gough’s service and their lack of children enabled. Gough probably assembled her album during her courtship and early years of marriage.
A remarkable number of images found in photocollage albums combine humans and animals in fantastical ways; the temptation to cut out a photographed head and place it atop a painted animal seems to have been irresistible. This composition of ducks bearing ladies’ faces – one of them Kate herself, or her identical twin sister, Grace – may have been inspired by Charles Darwin’s new theories of evolution or by political cartoons from magazines such as Punch. On other pages of the Gough Album as well, an irreverent humor, disorienting scale shifts, mischievous visual puns, and whimsical fantasies reveal a sophisticated mind and very accomplished hand.
Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Frances Elizabeth, Viscountess Jocelyn (English, 1820-1880) Diamond Shape with Nine Studio Portraits of the Palmerston Family and a Painted Cherry Blossom Surround from the Jocelyn Album 1860s Collage of watercolour and albumen silver prints 11 x 9 1/8 in. (28 x 23.2cm) National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
The daughter of the exceedingly wealthy Peter Clovering-Cowper, Earl Cowper, and the legendary society hostess Emily Lamb, Countess Cowper, Viscountess Jocelyn was born into a life of privilege and social connections. When her mother remarried after her father died, Frances (known as Fanny) became the stepdaughter of Henry Temple, Viscount Palmerston, who would become the prime minister in 1855. Fanny also garnered the favor of Queen Victoria, serving as a bridesmaid at her wedding to Prince Albert and later as a Lady of the Bedchamber. In 1841 she wed Robert, Viscount Jocelyn, and bore six children over the next decade. Her husband died in 1854, and she lost each of her children to illness before her own death in 1880.
Unlike the other album makers in this exhibition, Jocelyn practiced amateur photography, using the wet-collodion process, a cumbersome technique that required time, money, education, and skill. A separate section of this album, entitled The Bygone Hours of the Viscountess Jocelyn, features nine photographs that she made of herself and her children in the garden of their estate. Most of the pages in the album, however, are photocollages employing amateur photographs and commercial cartes de visite in highly skilled watercolour designs that honour her aristocratic lifestyle, depicting family and friends, the estates they owned or visited, the jewellery and finery they wore, and the various pastimes they enjoyed.
Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website
The Johnstone Album represents the appropriation by the commercial printing press of an activity that was originally aristocratic and handmade. Here the grids are commercially printed and the collage maker need only paste within the shapes, offering the opportunity for those with less leisure time to create similar family albums.
Maria Harriet Elizabeth Cator (English, d. 1881) Untitled page from the Cator Album Late 1860s/1870s Collage of watercolour and albumen silver prints 10 7/8 x 8 1/2 in. (27.7 x 21.7cm) Hans P. Kraus, Jr., New York
Maria Harriet Elizabeth Cator, the likely maker of this album, filled its pages in the 1860s and 1870s with scenes of her childhood home, portraits of family members, and commemorative collages memorializing her father, who died in 1864, and a young niece who died as a child in 1866. Family mottoes and photographs of country seats belonging to relatives appear throughout the album, suggesting that it was intended more for family than for society. Set among all this seriousness, this image of a playful jester carelessly strewing photographs on the ground is surprising. Instead of serving as mementos of a loved one or records of an ancestral home, the jester’s photographs are stripped of symbolic meaning and used in the service of a lighthearted composition.
Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Viscount Jocelyn (Great Britain, 1820-1880) attributed to Circular design containing five male studio portraits and two ships c. 1860 Leaf 3 from an Untitled Album Collage (albumen silver photographs, water colour, pencil) Printed image 28.0 h x 23.2 w cm Purchased 1985 National Gallery of Canberra
Eva Macdonald (English, 1846/1850-?) “What Are Trumps?,” from the Westmorland Album 1869 Collage of watercolour and albumen prints The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
A common leisure pastime in Victorian high society, card playing provided opportunities for socializing and flirting. Compositions involving cards are commonly found in photocollage albums, as if to emphasise the playfulness of the process of making such images. In many of these collages, photographic portraits replace the heads of kings and queens, elevating the subjects in rank and giving new meaning to the term “face cards.”
Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Elizabeth Pleydell-Bouverie (English, d. 1889) and Jane Pleydell-Bouverie (English, d. 1903) or Ellen Pleydell-Bouverie (English, 1849-?) and Janet Pleydell-Bouverie (English, 1850-1906) Untitledpage from the Bouverie Album 1872/1877 Collage of watercolour and albumen prints Courtesy of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film
Popular children’s tales by the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Anderson, and Lewis Carroll became fertile material for photocollages, including this one, which appears to relate the story of Thumbelina. Although the identity of the maker of this collection remains a mystery, the initials E.P.B. and J.P.B and the name Bouverie on various pieces suggest that it belonged to the Pleydell-Bouverie family.
Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website
In the 1860s and 1870s, long before the embrace of collage techniques by avant-garde artists of the early 20th century, aristocratic Victorian women were experimenting with photocollage. Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage, on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art February 2 – May 9, 2010, is the first exhibition to comprehensively examine this little-known phenomenon. Whimsical and fantastical Victorian photocollages, created using a combination of watercolour drawings and cut-and-pasted photographs, reveal the educated minds as well as accomplished hands of their makers. With subjects as varied as new theories of evolution, the changing role of photography, and the strict conventions of aristocratic society, the photocollages frequently debunked stuffy Victorian clichés with surreal, subversive, and funny images. Featuring 48 works from public and private collections – including many that have rarely or never been exhibited before – Playing with Pictures will provide a fascinating window into the creative possibilities of photography in the 19th century.
“In other recent exhibitions at the Metropolitan, we’ve shown masterpieces of 19th-century British photography by the period’s most prominent professionals and serious amateurs (almost always men), whose works were often displayed at the annual salons of the photographic societies and sold by printsellers throughout England and Europe,” commented Malcolm Daniel, Curator in Charge of the Department of Photographs. “What is so exciting about this exhibition is that we see a different type of artist – almost exclusively aristocratic women – using photography in highly imaginative ways, and creating pictures meant for private pleasure rather than public consumption. It is an aspect of photography’s history that has rarely been seen or written about.”
In England in the 1850s and 1860s, photography became remarkably popular and accessible as people posed for studio portraits and exchanged these pictures on a vast scale. The craze for cartes de visite – photographic portraits the size of a visiting card – led to the widespread hobby of collecting small photographs of family, friends, acquaintances, and celebrities in scrapbooks. Rather than simply gathering such portraits in the standard albums manufactured to hold cartes de visite, the amateur women artists who made the photocollages displayed in Playing with Pictures cut up these photographic portraits and placed them in elaborate watercolour designs in their personal albums.
With sharp wit and dramatic shifts of scale akin to those Alice experienced in Wonderland, Victorian photocollages stand the rather serious conventions of early photography on their heads. Often, the combination of photographs with painted settings inspired dreamlike and even bizarre results: placing human heads on animal bodies; situating people in imaginary landscapes; and morphing faces into common household objects and fashionable accessories. Such albums advertised the artistic accomplishments of the aristocratic women who made them, while also serving as a form of parlour entertainment and an opportunity for conversation and flirtation with the opposite sex.
Playing with Pictures showcases the best Victorian photocollage albums and loose pages of the 1860s and 1870s, on loan from collections across the United States, Europe, and Australia, including the Princess Alexandra Album lent by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. Thirty-four photocollage album pages will be shown in frames on the wall and 11 separate albums will be displayed in cases, open to a single page. These works will be accompanied by “virtual albums” on computer monitors that allow visitors to see the full contents of the albums displayed nearby. As an introduction, the exhibition also includes two carte-de-visite albums of the period and a rare uncut sheet of carte-de-visite portraits from 1859.
Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage is curated by Elizabeth Siegel, Associate Curator of Photography at The Art Institute of Chicago. The exhibition is organised at the Metropolitan Museum by Malcolm Daniel.
Ann Bermingham, professor, Department of the History of Art and Architecture, University of California, Santa Barbara
Sixty years before the embrace of collage techniques by avant-garde artists of the early twentieth century, aristocratic Victorian women were already experimenting with photocollage. The compositions they made with photographs and watercolours are whimsical and fantastical, combining human heads and animal bodies, placing people into imaginary landscapes, and morphing faces into common household objects. Such images, often made for albums, reveal the educated minds as well as the accomplished hands of their makers. With sharp wit and dramatic shifts of scale akin to those Alice experienced in Wonderland, these images stand the rather serious conventions of early photography on their heads. The exhibition features forty-eight works from the 1860s and 1870s, from public and private collections.
Text from the YouTube website
Society Cut-ups: Victorians and the Art of Photocollage
Elizabeth Siegel, Associate Curator of Photography, The Art Institute of Chicago
Sixty years before the embrace of collage techniques by avant-garde artists of the early twentieth century, aristocratic Victorian women were already experimenting with photocollage. The compositions they made with photographs and watercolors are whimsical and fantastical, combining human heads and animal bodies, placing people into imaginary landscapes, and morphing faces into common household objects. Such images, often made for albums, reveal the educated minds as well as the accomplished hands of their makers. With sharp wit and dramatic shifts of scale akin to those Alice experienced in Wonderland, these images stand the rather serious conventions of early photography on their heads. The exhibition features forty-eight works from the 1860s and 1870s, from public and private collections.
Text from the YouTube website
Marie-Blanche-Hennelle Fournier (French, 1831-1906) Untitled page from the Madame B Album 1870s Collage of watercolour, ink, and albumen silver prints 11 1/2 x 16 1/2 in. (29.2 x 41.9cm) The Art Institute of Chicago, Mary and Leigh Block Endowment
Marie-Blanche-Hennelle Fournier probably made the album from which this page was taken. Known as Blanche, she was the second wife of the career diplomat Hugues-Marie-Henri Fournier, who was posted in Stockholm and then in Rome during the years the album was made. Among the clues to the maker’s identity are the large painted B that graces the opening page, the many diplomats and Swedish figures and sites that fill the album, and the frequent depictions of the Fourniers and their daughter, Pauline (born 1855).
Because photocollage albums were almost exclusively made by upper-class English women, this album, with its French maker, is a rare exception. Fournier, however, likely was exposed to English diplomats in the international circles in which she traveled, and she may have been inspired to create her own album after seeing other examples or learning of the practice from her English acquaintances. As the second wife of a diplomat, Fournier may have used her album to help establish herself and her family within a specific social set or to demonstrate her role as a new wife. The album may also have functioned as a sort of travelogue, depicting places she visited or was stationed with her husband. The painted elements reveal that the maker of the album was knowledgeable about the artistic styles of various cultures and skilled in botanical and zoological drawing. Together, the photographs and watercolors often combine to create daring and fantastic compositions, transcending the simple recording of friends, family, and sites.
In the accomplished depiction of a peacock butterfly seen here, the “eye” spots on the wings have been replaced with portraits. Such a composition allowed Fournier to exhibit her artistic talents and her knowledge of natural history.
Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Georgina Berkeley (English, 1831-1919) Untitled page from the Berkeley Album 1867/71 Collage of watercolour and albumen silver prints 10 x 12 5/8 in. (25.5 x 32cm) Musée d’Orsay, Paris Photo credit: Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, NY
Despite her lack of title or inheritance, Georgina Berkeley maintained the sophisticated lifestyle that her ancestry provided. Her collages reveal her fascination with London’s urban pastimes as well as her cutting social commentary.
Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Georgina Berkeley (English, 1831-1919) Untitled page from the Berkeley Album 1867/71 Collage of watercolour and albumen silver prints 10 x 12 5/8 in. (25.5 x 32cm) Musée d’Orsay, Paris Photo credit: Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, NY
As the great-granddaughter of the 4th Earl of Berkeley, Georgina Louisa Berkeley occupied the lower echelon of aristocratic society. Despite her lack of title or inheritance, she maintained the sophisticated lifestyle that her ancestry provided. Georgina and her older sister, Alice, participated in the country-house party circuit, enjoying the hospitality of their many landed and titled relatives. Their home in London’s prestigious Belgravia district also offered them access to the city’s cultural amenities. At age forty-six, Berkeley married a man seven years her junior, Sydney Kerr Buller Atherley, the grandson of the 5th Marquess of Lothian. Sadly, Atherley died just ten months after the wedding. Rather than move back to the home of her father and sister, Georgina upheld her independence, keeping her own household and traveling with or visiting her relatives until her death in 1919.
Berkeley began to assemble the album from which this page is drawn about a decade before her marriage, when she was in her mid-thirties. In her designs, Berkeley constructed a vision of modern life far removed from the secluded domesticity of women that was idealised by middle-class Victorian culture. Many of the pages convey a fascination with London’s cosmopolitan pastimes, depicting bustling streets, theatrical entertainments, and various modes of travel. Berkeley’s photocollages reveal how this particularly modern medium enabled upper-class album makers to represent themselves as independent, urban women.
Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Mary Georgiana Caroline, Lady Filmer (English, 1838-1903) Untitled loose page from the Filmer Album mid-1860s Collage of watercolour and albumen silver prints 8 3/4 x 11 1/4 in. (22.2 x 28.6cm) Paul F. Walter
Constance Sackville-West (English, 1846-1929) or Amy Augusta Frederica Annabella Cochrane Baillie (English, 1853-1913) Untitled page from the Sackville-West Album 1867/73 Collage of watercolour and albumen silver prints 9 5/8 x 11 13/16 in. (24.5 x 30cm) Courtesy of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film
This album’s scenes of country-house life and London cosmopolitanism provide tongue-in-cheek commentary regarding the aristocratic society in which the Cochrane-Baille sisters grew up. The album contains a variety of styles suggesting more than one artist. Constance Sackville-West or Amy Augusta Frederica Annabella Cochrane-Baillie.
Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Metropolitan Museum of Art 1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street New York, New York 10028-0198 Information: 212-535-7710
Opening hours: Sunday – Tuesday and Thursday: 10am – 5pm Friday and Saturday: 10am – 9pm Closed Wednesday
Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American, 1840-1882) Sand Dunes, Carson Desert, Nevada 1867 Albumen print Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
The photograph shows O’Sullivan’s photographic wagon in which he developed his glass plates.
O’Sullivan died at the age of forty two but what photographs he left us! The human scales the sublime, literally; figures in the descriptive landscape. The last photograph is, if you will forgive the colloquialism, a doozy.
Marcus
“If the world is unfair or beyond our understanding, sublime places suggest it is not surprising things should be thus. We are the playthings of the forces that laid out the oceans and chiselled the mountains. Sublime places acknowledge limitations that we might otherwise encounter with anxiety or anger in the ordinary flow of events. It is not just nature that defies us. Human life is as overwhelming, but it is the vast spaces of nature that perhaps provide us with the finest, the most respectful reminder of all that exceeds us. If we spend time with them, they may help us to accept more graciously the great unfathomable events that molest our lives and will inevitably return us to dust.”
Alain de Botton. The Art of Travel. London: Penguin, 2002, pp. 178-179.
Many thankx to Laura Baptiste and the Smithsonian American Art Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American, 1840-1882) Lake in Conejos Cañon, Colorado 1874 Albumen print Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American, 1840-1882) Black Cañon, Colorado River, From Camp 8, Looking Above 1871 Albumen print Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American, 1840-1882) Buttes near Green River City, Wyoming 1872 Albumen print Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American, 1840-1882) Cañon de Chelle, Walls of the Grand Canon about 1200 feet in height 1873 Albumen print Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase from the Charles Isaacs Collection made possible in part by the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment
Framing the West: The Survey Photographs of Timothy H. O’Sullivan is the first major exhibition devoted to this remarkable photographer in three decades. The exhibition is on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., from Feb. 12 through May 9. The museum is the only venue for the exhibition.
Marcus
“Framing the West” – a collaboration between the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Library of Congress – offers a critical reevaluation of O’Sullivan’s images and the conditions under which they were made, as well as an examination of their continued importance in the photographic canon. It features more than 120 photographs and stereo cards by O’Sullivan, including a notable group of King Survey photographs from the Library of Congress that have rarely been on public display since 1876. The installation also includes images and observations by six contemporary landscape photographers that comment on the continuing influence of O’Sullivan’s photographs. Toby Jurovics, curator of photography, is the exhibition curator.
“Timothy H. O’Sullivan is widely recognised as an influential figure in the development of photography in America, so I am delighted that we have partnered with our colleagues at the Library of Congress to present this new assessment of his work and to expose a new generation to his forceful images,” said Elizabeth Broun, The Margaret and Terry Stent Director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
“In the years following the Civil War, the West was fertile ground for American photographers, but Timothy H. O’Sullivan has always stood apart in his powerful and direct engagement with the landscape,” said Jurovics. “Almost a century and a half after their making, his photographs still speak with an unparalleled presence and immediacy.”
O’Sullivan was part of a group of critically acclaimed 19th-century photographers – including A.J. Russell, J.K. Hillers and William Bell – who went west in the 1860s and 1870s. O’Sullivan was a photographer for two of the most ambitious geographical surveys of the 19th century. He accompanied geologist Clarence King on the Geologic and Geographic Survey of the Fortieth Parallel and Lt. George M. Wheeler on the Geographical and Geological Surveys West of the 100th Meridian. During his seven seasons (1867-1874) traversing the mountain and desert regions of the Western United States, he created one of the most influential visual accounts of the American interior.
His assignments with the King and Wheeler surveys gave O’Sullivan the freedom to record the Western landscape with a visual and emotional complexity that was without precedent. His photographs illustrated geologic theories and provided information useful to those settling in the West, but they also were a personal record of his encounter with a landscape that was challenging and inspiring.
Of all his colleagues, O’Sullivan has maintained the strongest influence on contemporary practice. The formal directness and lack of picturesque elements in his work appealed to a later generation of photographers who, beginning in the 1970s, turned away from a romanticised view of nature to once again embrace a clear, unsentimental approach to the landscape. Observations about his images by Thomas Joshua Cooper, Eric Paddock, Edward Ranney, Mark Ruwedel, Martin Stupich and Terry Toedtemeier appear in the exhibition and the catalog.
O’Sullivan (1840-1882) was born in Ireland. He emigrated to the United States with his family at the age of two, eventually settling in Staten Island, N.Y. Biographical details about O’Sullivan are spare, yet he is thought to have had his earliest photographic training in the New York studio of portrait photographer Mathew Brady. He is believed to have accompanied Alexander Gardner to Washington, D.C., to assist in opening a branch of the Brady studio in 1858, and when Gardner opened his own studio in Washington in 1863, O’Sullivan followed. O’Sullivan first gained recognition for images made during the Civil War, particularly those from the Battle of Gettysburg, and 41 of his images were published in Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War. O’Sullivan’s experience photographing in the field helped earn him the position as photographer for King’s survey. After his survey work, he held brief assignments in Washington with the U.S. Geological Survey and the U.S. Treasury. O’Sullivan died of tuberculosis on Staten Island at the age of 42.
Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American, 1840-1882) Green River Cañon, Colorado 1872 Albumen print Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American, 1840-1882) Horse Shoe Cañon, Green River, Wyoming 1872 Albumen print Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American, 1840-1882) Summit of Wahsatch Range, Utah (Lone Peak) 1869 Albumen print Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American, 1840-1882) Shoshone Falls, Snake River, Idaho, View Across Top of Falls 1874 Albumen print Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American, 1840-1882) The Pyramid & Domes, Pyramid Lake, Nevada 1867 Albumen print Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
Smithsonian American Art Museum 8th and F Streets, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20004
Featuring Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk by Andrea Fraser (USA) as well as works from the collections of Hany Armanious, Liv Barrett, Polly Borland (UK), Steve Carr (NZ), Lane Cormick, Chantal Faust, Marco Fusinato, Tony Garifalakis, Matthew Griffin, Irene Hanenbergh, Christopher Hanrahan, Hotham Street Ladies, the Kingpins, Paul Knight, Andrew Liversidge, Rob McLeish, Callum Morton, Nat & Ali, Geoff Newton, Martin Parr (UK), Stuart Ringholt, David Rosetzky, Darren Sylvester, Christian Thompson, Lyndal Walker and Caroline Williams.
Curated by Mark Feary, this is a deliciously ironic exhibition that asks the audience to question the social and political construction of the blockbuster exhibitions regularly held by large museums around Australia; to question the role of the curator in assembling such exhibitions; and to question the cultural value of permanent collections of ‘Masterpieces’. Autumn Masterpieces displays work that is anything but permanent and undermines the process whereby museums construct frameworks for social understanding. The work, displayed in a roped off space on plinths of various heights, in cheap frames and at skew-whiff angles, seems ephemeral and transitory all the more to contradict both main tenants of the title of the exhibition: masterpiece and permanence.
Sitting on plinths that are adorned with plastic gold name plaques emblazoned with the condition of the possibility of the works existence, “From the collection of …” , the untitled works reinforce the conceptual thrust of the exhibition. In one sense the content of the specific images seemed almost irrelevant; in another the collective dialectical argument of the images deconstructs normative interpretations of the masterpiece. ‘Instructions for the Tourist’ and ‘Rules for How to use the playground’ sit next to photographs of dejected clowns; ‘Confusion & Reversals’ sit next to ambiguous photographs of events and actions: people doing ‘normal’ things displayed though Polaroids, newspaper clippings, snapshots, photographs from albums, black and white and colour, framed and in museological glass cases.
The highlight of the exhibition for me was the guffaw inducing DVD Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk (1989) by American artist Andrea Fraser. Where Mark Feary found this post-cultural gem is beyond me but I am so glad he did! I stood transfixed as the narrator / curator takes us on a virtual tour of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, along the way pointing out the magnificence and subliminal beauty of the objects in the museum. She stresses the decorum of the institution, it’s tradition in measured, ordered, dignified arrangements that are fine and simple while addressing a water fountain. Oh the deliciousness! She continues with the exultation of the institution, that is to develop an appreciation of values – true / false, better / worse, right / wrong, what is good for you / what is good for society – standards that should be adopted by a discriminating public, while addressing a broom cupboard. The piece subverts an approach “in which visitors’ individual meanings are only validated by the extent to which they concord with the conclusions intended by exhibition-makers or to which they conform to some predetermined and fixed standard truth.”1 And so it goes in an ever so serious, side-splitting soliloquy, critiquing the functions of art, linking the aspirations of humanity with the highest privileges of wealth and leisure. Wonderful!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Hein, George E. Learning in the Museum. London: Routledge, 1998 quoted in Sandell, Richard. “Reframing conversations,” in Museums, Prejudice and the Reframing of Difference. London and New York: Routledge, p. 179.
Installation views of the exhibition Autumn Masterpieces: Highlights from the Permanent Collection at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Courtesy of the collection of Tony Garifalakis
Courtesy of the collection of Irene Hanenbergh
Courtesy of the collection of Hany Armanious
Andrea Fraser (American, b. 1965) Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk 1989 DVD (colour video with sound. 29′) Courtesy of the artist and Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York
Many thankx to the Blanton Museum of Art for allowing me to reproduce images from the exhibition in the post. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Marcus
Olaf Breuning (Swiss, b. 1970) Brian 2008 C-print 60 x 70 inches Courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures, New York
Glenn Ligon (American, b. 1960) Lest We Forget 1998 Series including cast aluminium or bronze plaques, colour photographs of plaques on site Courtesy the artist and Luhring Augustine Gallery, New York
Valeska Soares (Brazilian, b. 1957) Duet 2008 Hand-carved white marble Installation dimensions variable Private Collection
Tracey Emin (English, b. 1963) You Should Have Loved Me 2008 Warm white neon Courtesy of Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York
This February, The Blanton Museum of Art at The University of Texas at Austin investigates the notion of desire in an exhibition of the same name. Curated by Annette DiMeo Carlozzi, Blanton curator of American and contemporary art and director of curatorial affairs, the exhibition features over fifty works from an international group of contemporary artists working in all media, including Glenn Ligon, Marilyn Minter, Petah Coyne, Bill Viola, Tracey Emin, Isaac Julien and many others. The accompanying illustrated catalogue will contain texts by art critics, fiction writers, poets, performing and visual artists, all written in direct response to the works of art in the exhibition.
Carlozzi states, “”Desire” is a complex human emotion and a driving force in our lives from childhood through old age. We all can recall examples of literature, film, and music that are rife with expressions of physical desire, but how do contemporary visual artists portray it, and all its attendant psychological states – anticipation, arousal, longing, regret, and so on? “Desire” assembles a really broad range of compelling works that together present a surprisingly diverse portrait of the experience.”
One provocative aspect of the exhibition is not its imagery, per se, but the manner by which many of the works translate intimate experiences into art a public expression. Marilyn Minter’s Crystal Swallow would seem to capture a private moment of visceral response, yet in such detail and exaggerated scale that it becomes a grotesque advertisement for arousal. Glenn Ligon’s series, Lest We Forget, commemorates those flickers of romantic fantasy that sometimes occur while people watching. And Tracey Emin’s You Should Have Loved Me is an accusation from a lover scorned, created with the neon light of public signage as if to broadcast raw feeling to an uncaring world.
Works by Kalup Linzy, William Villalongo, Olaf Breuning, James Drake, Petah Coyne, Gajin Fugita, Georganne Deen, Adam Pendleton, Peter Saul, Valeska Soares, Danica Phelps, Miguel Angel Rojas, Mads Lynnerup, Rochelle Feinstein, Richard Prince, Laurel Nakadate, Jesse Amado, Isabell Heimerdinger, Alejandro Cesarco, Eve Sussman, Robert Kushner, Luisa Lambri, Chris Doyle, and a dozen others, provide an engaging multi-generational exploration of desire. In addition, an informed selection of works of art from The Blanton’s print collection will add a historic counterpoint to the contemporary works on view.
Will Villalongo (American, b. 1975) The Last Days of Eden 2009 Cut velour paper Courtesy the artist and Susan Inglett Gallery, New York
William Villalongo (born December 14, 1975 in Hollywood, Florida) is an American artist working in painting, printmaking, sculpture, and installation. Currently based in Brooklyn, New York, Villalongo is also a professor at the Cooper Union School of Art in New York.
Villalongo typically focuses in his works on the politics of historical erasure, with a particular focus on the artistic reassessment of Western, American, and African Art histories. The artist states that his intention toward these reassessments evolves in part from the West’s histories of “taking African art objects and placing them on the side of the sofa to decorate, although that is not their purpose. We are obsessed with fitting a narrative, a story.”
His works engage with the black body, examining the influences of socialisation, history, occupation, dress, and speech on it. In many of his portraits, bodies emerge from “a tumult of white negative space cut out of black velour paper,” in ways that evoke leaves, branches, feathers, or slashes.
Villalongo is also influenced by Pablo Picasso, who incorporated African masks into his primitivist works, and Aaron Douglas who he credits as inspiring him. Villalongo reexamines the power dynamics of history and representation in his own pieces. “It’s problematic and interesting, and I wanted to think about how to use it and tell a story.”
Petah Coyne (American, b. 1953) Untitled #1103 (Daphne) 2002-2003 Mixed media 77 x 83 x 86 inches Collection of Julie and John Thornton
Petah Coyne (born 1953) is an American sculptor and photographer. She is known for her large-scale sculptures composed of unconventional, and often organic, materials, such as clay, silk, wax, and hair.
Bill Viola (American, 1951-2024) Becoming Light (still) 2005 Colour High-Definition video on plasma display mounted on wall 47.6 in x 28.5 in x 4 in (121 x 72.5 x 10.2cm) Performers: John Hay, Sarah Steben Photo: Kira Perov Courtesy Bill Viola Studio
Marilyn Minter (American, b. 1948) Crystal Swallow 2006 Enamel on metal Promised gift of Jeanne and Michael Klein, 2007
Blanton Museum of Art MLK at Congress (200 East MLK) Austin, Texas 78701
Art Blart _ art and cultural memory archive 
You must be logged in to post a comment.