Co-curators: Dr. Les Walkling and Stephen Zagala, Senior Curator at Monash Gallery of Art, as part of Melbourne’s Climarte Festival
Rosemary Laing (Australian, 1959-2024) Swanfires, Chris’s shed 2002-04 Chromogenic print 110 x 235.5cm Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection acquired 2011 Reproduction courtesy of the artist and Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne
“The term “landscape” can be ambiguous and is often used to describe a creative interpretation of the land by an artist and the terrain itself. But there is a clear distinction: the land is shaped by natural forces while the artist’s act of framing a piece of external reality involves exerting creative control. The terms of this ‘control’ have be theorised since the Renaissance and, while representations of nature have changed over the centuries, a landscape is essentially a mediated view of nature.”
Dr Isobel Crombie. ‘Stormy Weather. Contemporary Landscape Photography’ (exhibition catalogue). Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2010, p. 15.
What’s the story!
I wish I could say that this is a marvellous, magical exhibition, that it has value in its being in the world… but I can’t. The exhibition is very disappointing, dispiriting even. If this is the current state of contemporary photographers working in the landscape in Australia, then the Earth is in deep trouble (as if we didn’t know it already).
A large part of the exhibition is given over to the work of the ND5 photographic collective. I am not going to name the photographers here since most of the exhibited work does not contain specific names (unlike this posting). The work has been culled (an appropriate word given the theme of the exhibition) from numerous bodies of work spanning the years 2010-2013.
Pairs of photographs have been renamed with poetic titles such as The lie of the land and The walls of the world with seemingly scant regard for the origins and stories of the photographs from their respective series, and then cobbled together in this present form under the banal title Investigations (2010-2013). This process pays no heed to the original conceptualisation of each series and the concerns of the collective at that time they were made and here this produces a display that has little rhyme or reason. Text quotations (see below) try to remedy the situation to little avail.
Further, if you think of those lush coffee table books – “Australia from the air” or “The wonders of the Great Barrier Reef” then you get the picture. Technically, the work is superb but aesthetically and emotionally these images are invariably dead (perhaps that is the irony – I looked for irony but it was sadly lacking). The collective say that they are fascinated – in the broadest sense – by places and opposites
“We are fascinated in the broadest sense by places like the Pilbara, including our ignorance and insensitivity to them. We are not ‘in the Pilbara’ in the way that scientists collect and identify it. Rather, we are collecting what can’t be seen; evidence of our uncertainty, interaction, wanderings and pondering…
We were drawn to its boundaries and edges; between solid and liquid, weight and weightlessness, hot and cool, dry and wet, between ourselves and the rest of the world, and that line of habitation that encrusts, indeed misrepresents our nation … The problem is how we index, moralise and politicise land use, rather than appropriating or projecting country as an aesthetic object.”1
Firstly, the opposites thing is such an easy way out; and secondly, as Isobel Crombie notes in the quotation at the top of the posting, any artist’s view of the landscape is always a mediated view of nature.
Through their lurid, hyperreal photographs of the land these photographs do exactly what this collective said they didn’t want to do… appropriate and project country as an aesthetic object. Here the pastiche is the real.
The group also seems to want to have AGENCY in both its meanings – as in photographic agency (a business or organisation providing a particular service on behalf of another business, person, or group); or an action or intervention producing a particular effect. What the collective is doing, in the broadest sense (for that is what they are working with), is creating an ideology of the landscape.
It’s not an ideology that I buy into.
You could propose that a couple of the photographs build an argument around the conceit / concept of the sublime – to question whether it can be undermined through irony (the impression of multiple light sources in Stirling Ranges, 2013, below), or to question whether it actually belongs on the surface of the earth (the dust-storm, In my Garden, 2012, below), where it can only be viewed as if the lens is detached from the surface of the earth. But this is drawing a long bow when these are viewed in the context of the rest of the work.
It is worth quoting Joan Fontcuberta extensively here for he, much more eloquently than I, names this work for what it is:
“Arthus-Bertrand is a highly experienced and highly regarded professional who has taken more than 100,000 aerial shots, covering almost the entire surface of the globe [author of Earth from Above – “as magnificent a coffee-table book as you could hope to find, whose successive reprints have sold in astronomical numbers”]. There is no doubt as to the quality of his work, on the contrary, we can only celebrate the fact that he and his team at the specialised agency Altitude continue to be so prolific and so creative. But his popular and commercial impact and the eagerness of the cultural institutions to clasp him to their bosoms prompt reflections that go to the very heart of documentary photography and its current crisis.
When paparazzi and the celebrity/human interest-genre reign supreme, serious photo reportage gives way to mere illustration, to the aestheticisation of the world and the masking of conflicts rendered insignificant by distance. Something is wrong when readers can say, ‘How picturesque the favelas are, with those bright colours! What wonderful colours these polluted rivers have!’ Bretch said photographic realism bounces off the façade of things: a photo of the Krupp factories shows us smokestacks and sheds, but tells us nothing about the relations of exploitation inside them. What was needed to refute him were photographers with the talent and the guts to demonstrate that it was a matter of critical sense and eloquence, that photography was a language which really could penetrate the camouflaging surfaces of the real.”2
That photography was a language which really could penetrate the camouflaging surfaces of the real. In this case the wonderful, hyperreal, saturated colours of the polluted rivers – that really hits the nail on the head.
If, as the collective says, “they want to examine its particular confluxes of culture, industry, environment and history in order to begin to craft a stronger vision for its future” (The Pilbara Project – 2010) then they need to be more concerned about what is present in the landscape, what is present in the community not from several emotional steps removed. You only have to look at the work of Edward Burtynsky and his Australian Minescape series to understand that in his series the photographs are all made in a way, and with a concern that goes beyond technical competence and cinematic craft – something that can rarely be said of the work presented by ND5.
Personally, I believe one of the main reasons for being an artist is to seek to redefine the sets of opposites that we find, to excavate… to pull away the mundane description of things. And in my opinion, if you really LOOK AT THIS WORK – and that’s seems to be a simple thing to ask an artist to do, to really look at their own work – then you have to ask yourself ‘Why would I want to look at this?’
There is no story, no pulling away of the veil, for these are prosaic images cloaked, as Fontcuberta says, in the colours of polluted rivers, in the camouflaging surfaces of the hyperreal. Perhaps these contemporary “picturesque” images are the modern form of the end of Pictorialism?
The lack of a story continues to haunt the rest of the exhibition as well. If we address the title Earth Matters in both its forms – that Earth really does matter to us; and that Earth matters (as in we are all made up of atoms and that matter commonly exists in four states (or phases): solid, liquid and gas, and plasma) then the work can relate to the body, place, landscape, etc… what an opportunity!
The usually reliable Rosemary Laing provides a dirge-like image that took me nowhere. Siri Hayes supplies a wonderful, ironic image (Wanderer in a sea of images 2013, below) with chopped down trees in a grand vista, a person taking a photograph of a person taking a photograph with belching power stations in the background – and then prints it at a massive scale which over stretches the boundaries of the technical possibilities of the negative. At a distance it just about holds up, but as can be seen from the closeup below (click on it for the large version) the image is blurred and distorted when printed at this huge scale. Photographs have a correct proportion to their significance as an image which is completely destroyed here.
David Tatnall exposes black and white pinhole images of the landscape which really didn’t do much for me, especially with an extraneous blurred human figure that really meant very little in the context of the images, while Harry Nankin’s work fails to convince. His creatures crawling over photo-senstised plates of glass and then displayed on a light box left me cold – and yet another artist where you had to look up the meaning of the title / word ekkyklêma to try and understand the story being told. Christian Bumbarra Thompson supplies an image that means nothing to the uninitiated (another story that can only be guessed at – there is no text to explain), while Anne Ferran’s beautiful, luminous ink-jet print’s on aluminium, Untitled (2008) are just that – beautiful and luminous – unless you know the backstory which is nowhere explained in the gallery. (The photographs are “more than a decade’s exploration of a piece of ground on the outskirts of the small village of Ross in central Tasmania. Today little remains of its past as a female convict prison, apart from some mounds of earth and scattered stones. Her photographs and video works about this site reflect the ongoing difficulty of grasping and making sense of a ruined and fragmented past.”)
And last but not least, to the star of the show: Silvi Glattauer’s series Sanctuary (2014, below). These are gorgeous!
Beautiful photogravure prints on cotton paper give a wonderful soft tonality to these alien environments. The worlds are like liquid mercury. I did a double take trying to work out what they were for quite a few seconds before I got it. Beautifully composed, quiet, sensitive and eloquent these are everything that so much of the rest of the show isn’t. The story is in the macrocosm and the microcosm, the world at our fingertips that we never see, that we are forever destroying. Not the broadest of brush strokes picturesque but getting in and getting your hands dirty, paradoxically revealing cosmic worlds that we usually only dream of. Finally a story worth photographing: some matter that really does matter.
Christian Bumbarra Thompson (Australian, b. 1978) Bidjara man of the Kunja Nation I’m not going anywhere without you 2009 from the series Lost together Chromogenic print 100 x 99.3cm Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection acquired 2009 Reproduction courtesy of the artist
Siri Hayes (Australia, b. 1977) Wanderer in a sea of images 2013 Ink-jet print on polyester 220 x 280cm Collection of the artist Courtesy of the artist
Siri Hayes’s exquisitely detailed photographs depict picturesque landscapes but landscapes that are also disturbed, perhaps devastated by fire, littered with debris, or cleared of their native vegetation for plantation timber. By using the conventions of classical landscape painting to photograph the contemporary landscape, Hayes draws our attention to environmental themes in this unique, large-scale installation.
Siri Hayes (Australia, b. 1977) Wanderer in a sea of images (detail) 2013 Ink-jet print on polyester 220 x 280cm Collection of the artist Courtesy of the artist
Silvi Glattauer (born Argentina 1966; arrived Australia 1974) Sanctuary 2014 Six photogravure prints on cotton paper 27.6 x 27.7cm (each) Collection of the artist Courtesy of the artist
Silvi Glattauer (born Argentina 1966; arrived Australia 1974) Sanctuary I 2014 Six photogravure prints on cotton paper 27.6 x 27.7cm (each) Collection of the artist Courtesy of the artist
Silvi Glattauer (born Argentina 1966; arrived Australia 1974) Sanctuary VI 2014 Six photogravure prints on cotton paper 27.6 x 27.7cm (each) Collection of the artist Courtesy of the artist
Installation photographs of Earth Matters at the Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Harry Nankin (Australia, b. 1953) Minds in the cave / fragment 2 2014 Pigment ink-jet prints on cotton pape Collection of the artist
Harry Nankin (Australia, b. 1953) Ekkyklema #1 (installation view details) 2014 Gelatin silver chemogram films on starfire glass [on lightbox] 0.5 x 14 x 14cm (each) Courtesy of the artist Collection of the artist Note: 112 plein air silver gelatin shadowgram and chemogram films on starfire glass panes Photos: Marcus Bunyan
An ekkyklêma (“roll-out machine”) was a wheeled platform rolled out through a skênê in ancient Greek theatre. It was used to bring interior scenes out into the sight of the audience. Some ancient sources suggest that it may have been revolved or turned.
It is mainly used in tragedies for revealing dead bodies, such as Hippolytus’ dying body in the final scene of Euripides’ play of the same name, or the corpse of Eurydice draped over the household altar in Sophocles’ Antigone. Other uses include the revelation in Sophocles’ Ajax of Ajax surrounded by the sheep he killed whilst under the delusion that they were Greeks. The ekkyklêma is also used in comedy to parody the tragic effect. An example of this is in Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae when Agathon, portrayed as an effeminate, is wheeled onstage on an ekkyklêma to enhance the comic absurdity of the scene.
Anne Ferran (Australian, b. 1949) Untitled 2008 From the series Lost to worlds 2 ink-jet print on aluminium 120 x 120cm Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection acquired with assistance from the Robert Salzer Foundation 2009 Reproduction courtesy of the artist and Sutton Gallery (Melbourne)
Anne Ferran (Australian, b. 1949) Untitled 2008 From the series Lost to worlds 2 ink-jet print on aluminium 120.0 x 120.0cm Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection acquired with assistance from the Robert Salzer Foundation 2009 Reproduction courtesy of the artist and Sutton Gallery (Melbourne)
Intellectually and emotionally engaging, sometimes austere, her [Ferran’s] photographs have explored histories of incarceration in prisons, asylums, hospitals and nurseries. They play with invisibility and anonymity, and are often haunted by things lost or unseen. Lost to Worlds 2008 was the culmination of more than a decade’s exploration of a piece of ground on the outskirts of the small village of Ross in central Tasmania. Today little remains of its past as a female convict prison, apart from some mounds of earth and scattered stones. Her photographs and video works about this site reflect the ongoing difficulty of grasping and making sense of a ruined and fragmented past.
Ninety Degrees Five Earth matters (installation stills) 2015 Multimedia, 10.13 minutes Filmed and edited: Michael Fletcher Score: Jo Quail-Sonver Collection of the artists Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Earth matters: contemporary photographers in the landscape is an exhibition developed by MGA for ART+CLIMATE=CHANGE; a Melbourne-wide arts festival exploring climate change and environmental ethics. MGA’s contribution to this festival highlights the ecological sensitivity of contemporary Australian photographers. Moving away from the detached ‘picturesque’ views of nature, so prevalent in the history of photography, these artists engage with the earth in immersive and connected ways.
Siri Hayes and Christian Thompson wander into epic vistas to enact comical self-portraits that capture the capricious nature of human presence on this planet. Silvi Glattauer peers into the interiors of bromeliad plants to find fecund microcosms that bubble with humble but hopeful vitality. Rosemary Laing pays tribute to ecological tragedy with a monumental photograph of bushfire devastation, while Anne Ferran ruminates over the tragic scars of colonial history in the landscape. David Tatnall’s eerie photographs have been produced with a rudimentary pinhole camera, embed in the environment to bear witness to the earth’s passing. Harry Nankin does away with the camera and its singular perspective altogether, using raw photographic film to record ecological forces in nocturnal landscapes.
Earth matters features a new installation by the Ninety Degrees Five collective alongside the work of other contemporary landscape photographers including Anne Ferran, Silvi Glattauer, Siri Hayes, Harry Nankin, David Tatnall and Christian Thompson. Ninety Degrees Five (ND5) is a collective of five Australian artists established in 2010, featuring Peter Eastway, Christian Fletcher, Michael Fletcher, Tony Hewitt & Les Walkling.
Text from the MGA website
Installation view of Ninety Degrees Five Investigations 2010-2013 at the exhibition Earth Matters, Monash Gallery of Art
Ninety Degrees Five The lie of the land (installation view) (Christian Fletcher, left; Les Walkling, right) 2012-2013 From the series Investigations 2010-2013 Pigment ink-jet prints Collection of the artists Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Christian Fletcher (Australian, b. 1965) From the series South West Light (detail) 2012 Pigment ink-jet print
Ninety Degrees Five The walls of the world (installation view) (Tony Hewitt, left; Peter Eastway, right) 2012-2013 From the series Investigations 2010-2013 Pigment ink-jet prints Collection of the artists Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Tony Hewitt (Australian) From the series Shark Bay – Inscription (detail) 2013 Pigment ink-jet print
About Ninety Degrees Five
“Our work … seeks to encourage and reinforce public concern for the fate of the earth, and our responsibility to act on that awareness.”
~ Les Walkling
Ninety Degrees Five (ND5) is a unique collaboration of four photographers, Christian Fletcher, Peter Eastway, Tony Hewitt, Les Walkling and film maker Michael Fletcher.
ND5 initially came together for The Pilbara Project in 2010. The Pilbara Project was developed and produced by FORM, an independent, non-profit cultural organisation in Western Australia. Curated by William L. Fox, the Director of the Center for Art and Environment of the Nevada Museum of Art, and Mollie Hewitt (FORM), the collaboration resulted in the book, The Pilbara Project: Field Notes and Photographs Collected over 2010, and the first Pilbara Project exhibition: 52 Weeks On, in February 2011.
Subsequent ND5 projects, South West Light 2011, Shark Bay – Inscription 2012, EAST 2013 and NORTH 2014 consolidated the collective’s independence and artistic agenda. The result has been ten exhibitions on three continents since 2011. Each exhibition is supported by public performances and events, including broadcast media, workshops, master classes, and artist talks.
Investigations 2010-2013 is ND5’s latest installation that remixes works from the first three ND5 projects (The Pilbara Project, South West Light, and Shark Bay – Inscription) to highlight their transcending artistic projections and cultural concerns. In this sense ND5’s projects are a primary research model for their ongoing Investigations, and thereby demonstrate an engaging, enquiring, and speculative process, not just its resolved and published outcome. This is important because ND5 has also become a case study in what can happen when a group forms from diverse but supportive individuals who are secure enough in their own practice to experiment with it.
This model privileges something of the urgency and necessity surrounding our worryingly fragile relationship to land and landscape, place and belonging, rights and duties, environmental crisis and environmental justice, sovereignty and reconciliation, trust and despair.
Investigations 2010-2013 also extends ND5’s collaborative endeavour through the acknowledgement, quotation and incorporation of other voices no less concerned with such matters, and thereby seeks to promote this conversation beyond individuals and collectives.
ND5
Text that accompanies the Ninety Degrees Five series Investigations 2010-2013 Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Christian Fletcher (Australian, b. 1965) Stirling Ranges 2013 From the series South West Light 965mm x 2165mm
Tony Hewittt (Australian) Red Coast 2014 From the series Shark Bay – Inscription 965mm x 965mm
Peter Eastway (Australian) South of Faure Island 2014 From the series Shark Bay – Inscription 965mm x 965mm
Les Walkling (Australian, b. 1953) In my Garden 2012 From the series The Pilbara Project 965mm x 965mm
Monash Gallery of Art 860 Ferntree Gully Road, Wheelers Hill Victoria 3150 Australia Phone: + 61 3 8544 0500
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) Fifth Avenue Houses (5th Avenue and 8th Street) 1936, printed later Silver gelatin print
A selection of interesting images.
The Vanishing Race by Edward S. Curtis is simple, yet one of the best. Their shadows seem more substantial than their owners.
Any photographer worth their salt would recognise the light on the foliage in a certain location that they know, but the chance of it being as perfect as this are about a billion to one. Notice how the original frame extends the synthesis of man and landscape as well. Such a great amalgam of image and frame, such a perfect marriage where one complements the other without the frame being overpowering, as though the frame were an extension of the image (and organic nature of the landscape).
The line of the riders in the image … they would have virtually ridden over the photographer and the tripod if they had kept that line! And the outrider – magnificent!!
Marcus
Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) The Vanishing Race – Navaho 1904 Orotone (in original frame)
“The passing of every old man or woman means the passing of some tradition, some knowledge of sacred rites possessed by no other… consequently the information that is to be gathered, for the benefit of future generations, respecting the mode of life of one of the great races of mankind, must be collected at once or the opportunity will be lost for all time.”
Paul Caponigro (American, 1932-2024) Redding Stream, Redding, Connecticut 1968, printed later Gelatin silver print
Paul Caponigro (American, 1932-2024) Nautilus Shell, Ipswich, Mass 1960 Silver gelatin print
Paul Caponigro (American, 1932-2024) Two Leaves, Brewster, New York 1963 Silver gelatin print
Harry Callahan (American, 1912-1999) Eleanor, Port Huron c. 1954 Silver gelatin print
With her raven hair and ripe figure, Eleanor Callahan is one of the most recognisable models in the history of 20th-century photography, an inseparable part of both the life and work of one of its most renowned artists. Clothed and standing among trees in a public park, or nude and turned to the wall while clutching a radiator in an empty room, she served as a formal element within Mr. Callahan’s austere compositions as well as a symbol of womanhood. From 1941 to his death in 1999, she allowed herself to be photographed by him, without complaint, hundreds of times…
“He just liked to take the pictures of me,” she told an interviewer in 2008. “In every pose. Rain or shine. And whatever I was doing. If I was doing the dishes or if I was half asleep. And he knew that I never, never said no. I was always there for him. Because I knew that Harry would only do the right thing.”
Text from Richard B. Woodward. “Eleanor Callahan, Photographic Muse, Dies at 95,” on the New York Times website 28th February 2012. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Potato truck in the field near Shafter, California 1937 Ferrotyped silver print
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) Fish Market near Birmingham, Alabama 1936 Silver gelatin print
Robert Doisneau (French, 1912-1994) Le gardien des géants du Nord Nd Silver gelatin print
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) Christopher Street Shop late 1940s Silver gelatin print
Francesca Woodman (American, 1958-1981) But Lately I Find a Sliver of a Mirror is Simply to Slice an Eyelid 1979-1980 Silver gelatin print
André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985) Fan, December 1937 1937 Silver gelatin print
“I am an amateur and I intend to stay that way for the rest of my life.”
~ André Kertész
Margaret Bourke-White (American, 1904-1971) Fort Peck Dam, Montana 1936 Silver gelatin print
This photograph became an icon of the machine age, not only because it was printed as the cover of the first issue of Life magazine (November 23, 1936), but also because it showed the power of modern technology to dwarf humankind. The giant buttresses and what seem to be crenellated battlements (actually the supports for an elevated highway) are meant to be as raw and impressive as the towering walls of ancient monuments. The engineers on the spillway provide the necessary indication of scale.
Margaret Bourke-White (American, 1904-1971) Terminal Tower [Cleveland] c. 1928 Silver gelatin print
“I stood on the deck to watch the city [Cleveland] come into view. As the skyline took form in the morning mist, I felt I was coming to my promised land … columns of machinery gaining height as we drew toward the pier, derricks swinging like living creatures. Deep inside I knew these were my subjects.”
~ Margaret Bourke-White 1927
François Kollar (Hungarian, 1904-1979) Double-impression of the Eiffel Tower 1931 Solarised silver gelatin print
In this unique and widely-reproduced photograph, the French modernist photographer has overlaid positive and negative images of the magnificent Eiffel Tower. The iconic structure is depicted from an unusual perspective, thrusting upward, with Kollar’s special solarised effect.
Edward J. Kelty (American, 1888-1967) X-ray of Ajax, the sword swallower 1928 Silver print 18 × 11 inches (45.7 × 27.9cm) With a New York X-ray lab credit in the negative
Edward J. Kelty (American, 1888-1967) Marcellus Golden Models 1933 Silver print 11 1/4 × 8 7/8 inches (28.6 × 22.5cm) With Kelty’s credit and title in the negative
Although I have ten tattoos by different artists – including a full back job by Alex Binnie of London – and scarification done in 1992, you always remember your first tattoo. I was in my early twenties when I decided to get inked. And the person recommended for the job was the legendary Alan Oversby (aka Mr. Sebastian), an S/M tattooist and one of the primary figures in the development of contemporary body piercing.
I remember travelling down to the East End of London and rocking up to this nondescript office block, climbing to the third floor I think it was, and entering a tiny square room, Alan’s studio. What an experience it was to be tattooed by him. Not so much the tattoo itself, which was a tiger on my upper left arm – first part of my earth, air, water, fire, void elemental sequence – but his presence and being surrounded by these fantastic, outrageous photographs on all four walls, floor to ceiling. Here was men’s tackle of all different shapes and sizes, the cocks and pubic area heavily tattooed and some of them heavily pierced, lying on pristine white dinner plates. Welcome to lunch.
For a young man this was an amazing, wondrous display. I totally loved him, the photographs, and his work. Unfortunately I don’t have any photographs of that studio and there are none that I could find online. Suffice it to say that the experience only confirmed me on my path of delicious deviancy that will not stop until the day I die.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg for allowing me to publish the photographs and text in the posting. The videos were all sourced from YouTube. Many thankx also to Becky Nunes who I contacted directly and who provided the wonderful photographs of Tã moko facial tattoos of the Maori in New Zealand.
Alan Oversby (Mr Sebastian)
Alan Oversby (Mr. Sebastian)
Alan Oversby (20 February 1933 – 8 May 1996) was one of the primary figures in the development of contemporary body piercing in Europe. He was better known by his professional name Mr. Sebastian.
Originally an art teacher, Alan Oversby left his initial profession to pursue his interests in tattooing and piercing instead. From his studio in London, he promoted both tattooing and body piercing, especially within the gay leather community. He was a correspondent of both Doug Malloy and Jim Ward. Sponsored by Malloy, he visited Los Angeles. Malloy also sponsored trips to London to visit him, bringing along Ward and Sailor Sid Diller. These exchanges were critical to the global spread of the techniques and technology used in contemporary body piercing.
Oversby was also responsible for the adoption of the use of topical and local anaesthetics as part piercing procedure in Europe. Although they are used less now, it used to be standard practice to use anaesthetics when performing piercings in England, where in North America this practice is almost unknown. He was interviewed in the fourth issue of PFIQ. He performed much of the tattooing and piercing on Psychic TV musicians Genesis P-Orridge and Paula P-Orridge. His vocals were used in the Psychic TV track “Message from The Temple” which appeared on their first album Force the Hand of Chance.
In 1987, Alan Oversby was one of 16 men charged as a part of Operation Spanner, a series of raids that resulted in the arrest of men who were all engaged in consensual homosexual BDSM activities. Alan, like the other men, was charged with assault occasioning actual bodily harm for performing a genital piercing on a client. He was also charged with using anaesthetic without a licence and for sending obscene material through the post (photographs of piercings). As the judge was not willing to take the consensuality of the participants into account, Alan pleaded guilty along with the other 15 men. He received a sentence of 15 months, which was suspended for two years.
The Tattoo exhibition is dedicated to old traditions and new stories. It takes a look at the vibrant, innovative and multifaceted tattoo culture, with a focus on artistic, artisanal and culture-specific issues. International exhibits from diverse perspectives are displayed and current debates considered. This is the first time that an exhibition has brought together such a broad range of references, presenting the phenomenon of the tattoo with a particular focus on art and design, since these enduring pictures, words and symbols inspire artists and designers. The theme of the exhibition is therefore the reciprocal influence of art, traditional and lived tattoo art and visual design. The exhibition Tattoo throws light on the ambivalence of the tattoo between a mark of distinction, a sign allocating its bearer to a social class, a badge of identity and a stigma in various cultures, social classes and epochs. Tattoo shows over 250 pieces of work, including photographs, coloured woodcuts, paintings and sculptures, as well as video clips and audio installations, stencils and historical specimens of tattooed skin. From tattooing instruments made of simple tools available in nature to intricate precision machines, colours and pigments convey an impression of the craft in practice. In this show the MKG also looks back on the long tradition of the Hamburg tattoo scene, which had its cradle in the port milieu of the late 19th century. Historical photos which have never before been on public show document the typical tattoos of the working class in Hamburg around 1890. Legendary tattooists such as Christian Warlich (“The Tattoo King”) and Herbert Hoffmann exemplify a many-facetted and highly expressive art form which generates ever new experimental designs. A glimpse into this is given by work from local tattoo artists who let themselves be inspired by the museum’s collection. A picture loop shows many pieces of work by celebrated tattooists, men and women, from the current international scene, which is marked by a huge diversity of stylistic approaches and new aesthetic movements.
The traditional cultural technique
All over the world, many cultures use the human skin as a surface to carry images. The tradition of tattooing is among the earliest art forms and the most ancient crafts. The exhibition shows selected examples. The facial tattoos of Chin women in Burma are part of a rite of passage marking the transition from childhood to adulthood. With the help of thorns or needles, female tattooists incise patterns into the skin which vary from one family clan to another. Tā Moko, the facial tattoos of the Maori in New Zealand, indicate a person’s family affiliation and social status. Each part of the face is reserved for a particular type of information. A tattoo on the centre of the forehead, for instance, testifies to high status. In Thailand, sacred tattoos – known as Sak Yant – are widespread. They are intended to protect their bearer from bad luck and to help them lead a morally impeccable life. Tattoos have a long tradition in Japan too, dating back to the 3rd century. Their design follows a particular harmony and elegance and is characterised by clearly demarcated areas of colour. The tattoos often cover wide expanses of the body surface and connect to a cohesive image. The motifs often reference subjects of traditional woodcuts or represent mythological beings which are supposed to exemplify particular qualities of their bearer’s character. For instance, the dragon stands for virility, power or heaven. Since tattoos were banned from 1870 to 1948 in Japan, they were for a long time associated with the criminal milieu of the Yakuza, a Japanese mafia organisation.
The spread of tattooing in the Western world
In the 18th and 19th centuries, illustrated travel reports were a major influence on the way people viewed other cultures in far-off lands and fired curiosity about the practice of tattooing, which seemed exotic in those days. The word tattow in the Polynesian language is first mentioned in James Cook’s reports of his expeditions to the South Seas in the 18th century. Modern tattooing became widespread in the West through the very popular early ethnographic drawings and prints as well as later through photographs. At the beginning, the art of tattooing often stood for the erotically titillating flair of the exotic and magic-mystical in a world attended by strange cults and rituals. Tattoos flourished in Europe and America during the years leading up to the World War I. For this reason, the members of the American upper class and of almost all European royal families – including the German imperial family – were tattooed. In this period, this form of body decoration was regarded as an expression of good taste. In the 19th century a more ambivalent attitude towards tattooing develops, however, above all among the bourgeoisie. In consequence, very little lies between fascination and rejection in the Western historical view of tattooing: this is what underlies the dual character of tattooing as stigma and mark of distinction.
Codes and their reinterpretation
The functions and meanings attributed to tattooing proliferate due to its diffusion throughout different social classes and groups over the last century. First and foremost, its ambiguity, signalling both stigma and distinction, is symptomatically revealed in the different tattooing practices followed in different milieus. While sailors and soldiers flaunt the record of their travels with exotic images, tattoos develop into veritable badges of recognition in the criminal underworld. In the context of photographic “mugshots”, first used in the hunt for criminals at the beginning of the 20th century, tattoos already take on great significance as a means of identifying suspects. In Russian prison camps of the late 19th century tattoos and branding are systematically employed by the state to mark out people as convicts. In response professional criminals in Russia, however, get around this form of stigmatisation by adopting their own informal tattoos. They modify traditional motifs and develop a system of secret signs, which reveals the group they belong to, their convictions or their rank in the criminal hierarchy. The French photographer and filmmaker Christian Poveda has documented the heavily tattooed members of the Latin American gangs of the Mara Salvatrucha and M-18, the lettering and symbols displayed on their skin have an important function in recognition and promotion of group affinity. The work of the Austrian Klaus Pichler traces the current significance of tattoos in prisons and offers a photographic glimpse into what are actually forms of coping with imprisonment within the penal system.
Women and tattoos
Another aspect of the exhibition are objects dealing with the relationship between women and tattoos. Historical photos highlight the vicissitude, ranging from the exhibition of the heavily tattooed female body as a fairground attraction in the 1920s up to the glamour girls in the vaudeville shows of the 1960s and the first female tattooists, who independently and with great determination carved out a place for themselves in a male-dominated profession. Tattoo culture is meanwhile unthinkable without women and they play an important role as artists in the contemporary scene.
Tattoos in contemporary art
The complex spectrum of meanings conveyed also plays a major role in contemporary art. The Japanese woman artist Fumie Sasabuche, for instance, takes as the theme of her sculptural and photographic works the interplay between the traditional Japanese tattoo motifs of the Yakuza and the aesthetic impulses of Western mass culture. Enrique Marty’s sculptures from his series Art is Dangerous, too, fall back on the Yakuza iconography in order to raise ironic questions about the role of art and the meaning conveyed by tattoos in combination with the grotesque effect created by the figures. The Spanish concept artist Santiago Sierra discusses the subject from the perspective of social and capitalistic criticism in his films. He pays members of socially marginalised groups to have a continuous line tattooed on their backs as part of a performance. With the deliberately unsteadily drawn line he is alluding to the precarious existence they lead and the social stigmatisation that goes with it. The Polish artist Artur Żmijewski addresses relentlessly and provocatively the practice of tattooing prisoners in the Nazi concentration camps. His video 80064, which sparked fierce and controversial debate among its viewers, shows Josef Tarnawa, a 92-year old survivor of Auschwitz, whom the artists persuaded to have his fading camp number freshly tattooed. On the one side, Tarnawa is being stigmatized all over again by this procedure, on the other side the number on his left forearm takes on the function of a shocking admonition not to forget. Active remembrance, Artur Żmijewski seems to be saying here, is channeled today into much too orderly forms. The burn mark and the involuntary tattoo have faded out of view today in the Western history of tattooing, but what was practiced during the Second World War remains deeply engraved on the artist’s memory.
The tension between the tattoo as a work of art and its existence on the “living canvas” is the subject of an exemplary treatment by the Belgian concept artist Wim Delvoye. The exhibition shows the tattooed pig Donata, which the artist decorated under anesthetic in 2005, with the help of several professional tattooists, on his Chinese “Art Farm”. Delvoye subsequently exhibited the animal as a living work of art, and had it stuffed after it died. The second work by Delvoye shown in the exhibition picks up on this idea and articulates critical questions about moral principles in the art market, power and the right to make use of the human body as an artistic object. The Swiss Tim Steiner had a work by the Belgian artist tattooed on his back between 2006 and 2008; in 2008 it was purchased by a Hamburg art collector, together with the right to pass Tim Steiner on as an item on loan, to sell him, to bequeath him and to have his skin conserved after his death. Since then the work Tim has been the subject of great international controversy. He will be on show in the Hamburg exhibition on 11 and 12 April and on 27 and 28 June 2015.
Pricking the skin with a needle demands the same aesthetic imagination and care, the same controlled craftsmanship and knowledge of materials and color sense as any other design technique. The contemporary tattooing scene is highly innovative, transcending the traditional language of tattooing and renewing the medium. A picture loop in the exhibition shows international work in a great variety of styles and in outstanding quality.
With contributors including: Masahiko Adachi (JP) / Diane Arbus (USA) / Imogen Cunningham (USA) / Wim Delvoye (BEL) / Chris Eckert (USA) / Goran Galić & Gian-Reto Gredig (CH) / Herbert Hoffmann (DE/CH) / Mario Marchisella (CH) / Enrique Marty (ESP) / The Rich Mingins Collection (GB) / Ralf Mitsch (NL) / Becky Nunes (NZ) / Jens Uwe Par¬kitny (DE) / Klaus Pichler (AUT) / Christian Poveda (FR) / Rodolphe Archibald Reiss (DE/CH) / Fumie Sasabuchi (JP) / Santiago Sierra (ESP) / Aroon Thaewchatturat (THA) / Timm Ulrichs (DE) / Christian Warlich (D) / Artur Żmijewski (POL). Work in the picture loop by: Luke Atkinson (DE) / Curly (GB) / Mike DeVries (USA) / Thea Duskin (USA) / Lionel Fahy (FR) / Sabine Gaffron (DE) / Valentin Hirsch (DE) / Saira Hunjan (GB) / Inma (GB) / Bastien Jean (FR) / Jon John (GB) / Guy LeTatooer, (FR) / Filip Leu, (CH) / Karl Marc, (FR) / Volko Merschky & Simone Pfaff, (DE) / Lea Nahon, (FR) / Roxx (USA) / Minka Sicklinger (USA) / Liam Sparkes (GB) / Jacqueline Spoerle (CH) / Kostek Stekkos (BE) / Amanda Wachob (USA) / Seth Wood (USA).
Tattoo is a production of the Gewerbemuseum Winterthur, Schweiz, curator Susanna Kumschick, and is being shown for the first time in Germany.
Press release from the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg website
Installation views of the exhibition Tattoo at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg showing in the bottom two images, photographs by Ralf Mitsch
Kept under wraps in winter and proudly displayed in summer: tattoos are now ubiquitous. However, they are much more than just a current mass phenomenon and trendy fashion accessory: many cultures throughout the world are familiar with the tradition of tattooing, and human skin has always been used as a canvas. Tattooing is one of the earliest art forms and oldest handicrafts.
Tattoos last for a lifetime. Pigments are inserted under the skin forever, yet they are as transient as the life of the person who bears them. They tell personal stories, create identity and affiliation, embellish, heal, protect – and they can both fascinate and repulse. For a long while they were most commonly known as a mark of social distinction or as a means of identifying social outcasts, and as a method of self stigmatisation used by sailors, criminals, prostitutes and gang members to distinguish themselves from “the other”. It is easy to forget that the craze for inking one’s body spread even to aristocratic circles in the later nineteenth century, in a trend that is now echoed by the current fashion for tattoos.
The Tattoo exhibition is dedicated to old traditions and new stories. It takes a look at the vibrant, innovative and multifaceted tattoo culture, with a focus on artistic, artisanal and culture specific issues. International exhibits from diverse perspectives are displayed and current debates considered. This is the first time that an exhibition has brought together such a broad range of references, presenting the phenomenon of the tattoo with a particular focus on art and design, since these enduring pictures, words and symbols inspire artists and designers. The theme of the exhibition is therefore the reciprocal influence of art, traditional and lived tattoo art and visual design.
Johann Baptist von Spix (German, 1781-1826) Journey to Brazil on command Maximilian Joseph I, King of Bavaria, in the years 1817-1820 / made and described by Johann Baptist von Spix and Carl Friedrich von Martius – Munich: [sn], 1823-1831 Loan: Museum of Ethnology, Hamburg
Expedition to Brazil
Johann Baptist von Spix, 1817-1820
Between 1817 and 1820, the zoologist Johann Baptist von Spix and the botanist Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius undertook an expedition to Brazil at the behest of Maximilian Joseph I, King of Bavaria. They were also interested in the culture of the Brazilian indigenous tribes on the Rio Yapurà, and they published their findings in a three-volume travel report. The illustration is a portrait of Juri, “The son of a cacique of the Juri nation”.
Illustrated travel books were very popular in the 18th and 19th centuries. They shaped western ideas about foreign cultures and also indicate the early interest in exotic tattooing practices. James Cook’s reports on his expeditions to the South Seas in the 18th century contain the mention of the word “tattow” derived from the Polynesian. The term quickly spread and tattooing became popular in the Western world soon afterwards.
Early ethnographic drawings and engravings such as those made by Georg Forster and Karl von den Steinen attracted widespread interest, as did photographs at a later date such as the studio portraits taken by Felice Beato in Japan. They helped to make the art of tattooing into a symbol of the eroticised alien, and a magico-mythical world of cults and rites. Tattoos elicited a mixture of fascination and revulsion right from the start, particularly in middle-class circles during the 19th century: tattooing thus developed a dual character as both stigma and mark of distinction.
Enrique Marty (Spanish, b. 1969) Pablo & Ruth 2010 From the series Art is Dangerous Oil paint on latex on polyurethane, human hair, textiles, metal 155 x 90 x 53.5 cm/143 x 60 x 35cm Loan: Deweer Gallery, Otegem, Belgium
Real portraits are always the starting point for Enrique Marty’s tragicomic sculptures. The tattoos of Pablo & Ruth in the Art is Dangerous series reflect the iconography of the tattoo motifs in Japanese yakuza which the artist has explored in detail and incorporated into his work. His grotesque figures also make reference to early sculptural traditions such as those used in the quaint waxworks exhibitions of the 19th century. He builds on these themes and develops an original sculptural world. Ironic inversions and humour are essential strategies which he uses as an effective weapon. “Art is dangerous”: protest or parody? An allegory of the market system? Can art be dangerous? Or should it be? What role does the art of tattooing play?
Tattoo equipment
Throughout the world tattooing is performed by introducing pigments to the dermis, or second layer of skin. Pieces of wood, thorns, bones, horns, tortoiseshells, metals and shards can be worked into tools. Depending on the shape of the tattooing implement, the patterns produced may be smooth or dotted, narrow or broad. The individual instruments have not changed greatly over the years. However, one notable step forward was the use of electricity which resulted in new techniques and styles at the beginning of the 20th century after Samuel O’Reilly had patented his rotary tattoo machine in 1891. The electric motor moves the needles up and down regularly, enabling the operator to work smoothly and steadily. It is also a less painful process for the client. These electric machines are in widespread use today. Nevertheless, traditional tools, which have hardly changed, are also still employed.
Tattoo inks
It was not until the 20th century that tattoo inks began to be manufactured as industrial products. Previously, they had been mixed in small quantities according to individual recipes using pigments, oils and plant juices. Synthetic pigments not only altered the colour spectrum and production techniques of tattoo inks, but also led to new requirements and constraints as is clear from developments over the last forty years. Today, challenges in the manufacturing process for tattoo inks primarily concern the purity of the ink production process and the quality of the pigments procured. Other requirements tend to be connected with new problems which are no longer to do with the actual pigment that is inserted into the skin. Nowadays the main focus is on the risks posed by laser treatment for tattoo removal.
The Rich Mingins Collection: 1288 Pictures of Early Western Tattooing from the Henk Schiffmacher Collection 2011
The Rich Mingins Collection
Rich Mingins (1916-1968) ran a tattoo studio with his father and his brother Alf Mingins in Cumbria, which is in the north-west of England, and later in London. Tattooing was his passion and he was a master of his craft. He also collected photographs and newspaper cuttings about tattoos. Today all that remains is his photo album which documents the history of tattooing from 1922 to 1949. Unfortunately, it lacks a chronology or any precise dates, and no accompanying commentary has been found. The digital version with extracts from the photo album shows his clients, other well-known tattoo artists of his era, copies of pictures that were in circulation at the time and the artist himself: Rich Mingins poses for the camera with clenched fists, displaying the picture of Jesus Christ with crown, that was tattooed on his chest by his brother Alf Mingins (no. 424).
Painting The Lily! (1936, 1.12 mins.)
In this documentary, George Burchett (1872-1953) tattoos two women with permanent makeup at his studio in the West End of London. His clientele included members of the English upper classes and European royalty such as King Alfonso XIII of Spain, King Frederick IX of Denmark and King George V of England. George Burchett also tattooed Horace Ridler, the legendary Zebra Man also known as “The Great Omi”.
Tattoo Soldiers (1942, 1.15 mins.)
Three Australian soldiers talk about their tattoos from all over the world.
Woman Tattooist (1952, 1 min.)
The first British female tattooist, Jessie Knight (1904-1994), tattoos young women soldiers in Aldershot, Hampshire. She ran a number of studios from the 1920s up to the 1980s.
Tattoo Club (1954, 1.51 mins.)
The well-known British tattooist Les Skuse (1912-1973) founded the Bristol Tattoo Club in 1953 and in 1955 he organised the world’s first tattoo competition, the precursor of the tattoo conventions of today. In the 1950s the Bristol Tattoo Club was the focal point of the tattoo scene, counting famous people such as Bob Maddison, Al Schiefley, Albert Cornelissen and Tattoo Peter among its members.
Photograph from the Christian Warlich estate, 1961 Loan: Hamburg Museum, Sammlung Fotografie
Christian Warlich: the “King of the tattoo artists”
During his lifetime, Christian Warlich (1890-1964) was held to be the greatest tattoo artist in Germany and gained an international reputation as “King of the tattoo artists”. He had taught the craft to the Hamburg tattoo legend Herbert Hoffmann and later made him to be his “Crown Prince”. Warlich himself is believed to have come into this profession by chance. After an apprenticeship as a boilermaker he had gone to sea and become acquainted with tattoo artists in the United States. From there, he brought back one of the first electric tattoo machines. In 1919, Warlich opened an inn in today’s Clemens-Schultz-Straße in St. Pauli, Hamburg, where one of the corners served as a “Modern Tattoo Studio”. Warlich took on tattooing as a serious business: he promoted the store, traded with tattoo machines and tools and in addition to his tattooing, he offered a residue-free and painless removal of tattoos by using a special tincture. Warlich was not only noticed because of his business sense, his work was characterized by craftsmanship and artistic standards, too. Unlike other tattoo artists of his time, he strove for a continuous improvement of the shapes and for the modernisation of the image repertoire. For these purposes, he developed new designs and collected all kinds of templates, for instance from Chinese sample books, movie posters or advertising images. In addition, Warlich kept in contact with tattooists all over Europe, North America and Asia. They exchanged sketches photographs and celluloid stencils with which the outlines of the motifs were transferred to the skin of the customers.
The tattooist Herbert Hoffmann: a legend
The world famous tattooist Herbert Hoffmann (1919-2010) lived through and helped shape various stages of the history of western tattooing. Throughout his life he was very keen to help tattoos gain acceptance and social approval. Having been trained by Christian Warlich, he later became the proprietor of Germany’s oldest tattoo studio in the St. Pauli district of Hamburg, where he worked until 1980. He then moved to Switzerland, where he lived with his partner Jakob Acker in Schwendi bei Heiden in the canton of Appenzell Ausserrhoden. Hoffmann was active in the tattoo scene right up to his death in 2010, attending conventions throughout Europe and acting as an important role model for younger tattoo artists. He himself bore tattoos by Christian Warlich, Tattoo Peter, Tatover Ole, Horst Streckenbach and others. Throughout his life he was also a keen photographer and collector. Many of his photographs were published in the photo book Living Picture Books, Portrait of a Tattooing Passion 1878-1952, which is now out of print. The images displayed in the exhibition are from his private archive and have rarely been shown before. These are photographs from his personal albums with portraits of his friends and clients. They depict Herbert Hoffmann himself at different stages of his life, as well as his environment. At the same time, they narrate an important chapter in the history of tattooing from the 1920s to the 1970s. Unfortunately his written comments can no longer be traced.
Women and tattoos from the private collection of Herbert Hoffmann
The picture archive of the tattooist and collector Herbert Hoffmann (1919-2010) also includes photographs of tattooed women from the 1920s up to the 1970s. Some of them are photographs he took himself but others are copies and images that were circulated in various forms by like-minded people. They are not systematically arranged, most of them are undated and there is no commentary. The collection also includes iconic photographs which had a decisive impact on how tattooed women were viewed at that period. This selection of Herbert Hoffmann’s pictures is a chronicle of women with tattoos, from circus attractions of the 1920s and glamour girls of the 1960s to the predecessors of the famous “new burlesque” artists like Dita Von Teese. However, there are also photos of “ordinary women” with tattoos in the prim-and-proper 1950s and – more rarely – of female tattooists. Herbert Hoffmann’s collection ends with the “renaissance” of tattooing in the 1970s. At that time, women in particular were discovering tattoos as a sign of self-empowerment and the number of female creative tattoo artists making their way in this male-dominated profession began to increase. Today there is a huge variety of (self-)expression by tattooed women, and female tattoo artists play an essential and influential role in the rich contemporary tattoo culture.
Maud Stevens Wagner, Tattoo Artist, USA (1877-1961, photo from 1907)
Maud Stevens Wagner (American, 1877-1961)
The American tightrope walker and contortionist Maud Wagner was the first well-known female tattooist in the Western world. Like others of the small number of female tattooists in the 1920s, she learned her craft from her husband, Gus Wagner, whom she met at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904.
Lady Viola (American, 1898-1977) Nd
Lady Viola (Ethel Martin) (American, 1898-1977)
Ethel Martin Vangi, who became famous as “Lady Viola”, was a circus performer and later tattooist; she had portraits of presidents Woodrow Wilson, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln tattooed on her chest. Her left thigh was tattooed with pictures of popular figures of the day, such as Babe Ruth and Charlie Chaplin.
Artoria Gibbons (American, 1893-1985) Nd
Artoria Gibbons (American, 1893-1985)
Like many tattooed circus attractions, Anna Mae Burlington Gibbons was a working-class woman who had herself tattooed when she fell on hard times, and then earned good money as a result (especially as a woman). She and her husband, the tattooist Charles Gibbons, travelled all over America in the 1920s and worked as a team in the circus business. She had one tattoo showing a section of Botticelli’s Annunciation, another depicting a part of Michelangelo’s Holy Family, and her chest featured a portrait of George Washington.
Cindy Ray (Bev Robinson) (Australian, 1942-2025) Untitled [Self-portrait] Nd
Cindy Ray (Bev Robinson) (Australian, 1942-2025)
The last great circus lady, Cindy Ray – also known as “Miss Technicolor” or “The Classy Lassie with the Tattooed Chassis” – toured Australia and New Zealand in the 1960s. She learned how to do tattooing and is still working today under her real name, Bev Nicholas, at the Moving Pictures Tattoo Studio near Melbourne.
Imogen Cunningham (American, 1883-1976) Irene “Bobbie” Libarry 1976 Silver gelatin estate print 19.3 x 17.8cm Loan: The Imogen Cunningham Trust, Lopez Island, USA
Irene “Bobbie” Libarry (American, 1893-1978)
Irene “Bobbie” Libarry (1893-1978) worked as a circus performer, magician and market vendor. She was tattooed by her husband in 1918, ran her own sideshow “The World’s Strangest People” in the 1930s and later worked as a tattoo artist in San Francisco.
Numerous historical portraits of tattooed men have been preserved in the inheritance of the tattoo artist Christian Warlich (1890-1964). The pictures probably originate in the 1880s to 1890s [see both images above]. Especially typical contemporary garments, the beard and hair fashion of the time, relevant tattoo motifs from the German Empire under William I or the symbol of the tenth World Expo in 1889, the Eiffel Tower, give information about this type. All images are carefully rear numbered and labeled with the names of the people portrayed. On display are mainly dock workers and seafarers; members of underprivileged workers who were not used to posing in front of a camera. In the late 19th century, the loading work in the ports was extremely cumbersome and labour intensive, roosts such as the Hamburg Gängeviertel hosted thousands of working families. In this milieu relevant subjects such as anchors, sailboats or professional characters show the belonging to a social group. The tattoos document but beyond the story of people’s lives. There are references to the military service or the crossing of the equator, as well as prison stays or religious motives.
Preserved tattoo specimens
The specimens date from around 1900. At the time they were used to identify unknown corpses. Photography was not yet in routine use at that period and preserved specimens offered almost the only opportunity to document a tattoo in detail and keep it for later identification. The oldest known report of successful identification thanks to a tattoo dates back to the 11th century: King Harold II of England fell in battle and is said to have been identified by the inscription “Edith and England” tattooed above his heart, thanks to which he was buried in a manner befitting his rank.
Emile Lavril, Romeo und Julia Tattoo 14 November 1913, front
Rudolf Archibald Reiss (German-Swiss, 1875-1929)
The criminologist, lecturer and photographer founded the “Institut de police scientifique” at the University of Lausanne in 1909. He also helped to set up courses in photography for investigative purposes at the same institution. Forensic photography, which was being carried out according to standard criteria for the first time was an essential component in his teaching. Since tattoos are important identification features, Reiss paid particular attention to them [see photograph above]. However, the technology available at the time made it difficult to obtain a sharp and accurate image. Reiss used photographs purely for forensic purposes. He refused to accept the then common opinion that offenders could be recognised simply because they had tattoos.
Eyes on the stomach denote homosexuality (the penis makes the ‘nose’ of the face). Stars on the shoulders show that an inmate is a criminal ‘authority’. The medals are awards that existed before the revolution and as such are signs of defiance towards the Soviet regime.
The devils on the shoulders of this inmate show a hatred of authority. This type of tattoo is known as an oskal (grin), a baring of teeth towards the system. They are sometimes accompanied by anti-Soviet texts.
The double-headed eagle is a Russian state symbol that dates back to the 15th century. After the fall of Communism, it replaced the hammer and sickle as the Russian Federation’s coat of arms. This Soviet-era photo is a bold symbol of rage against the USSR; the Statue of Liberty implies a longing for freedom.
Photographs of Russian convicts
Up until the end of the 19th century, it was usual for the government to burn the initials “B.O.R.” (Russian for thief) into thieves’ skin as a punishment. Subsequently, tattoos developed as a distinctive feature of professional criminals; serving as demarcation, identification, as well as a secret means of communication: they transmit information such as affiliation, profession, number of convictions or position in criminal hierarchies. This informal practice transliterated the original stigmatisation inflicted through the government, using a pictorial repertoire borrowed from traditional tattoo imagery while assigning a new meaning. Most of the prison tattoos were done with primitive instruments, such as modified electric shavers with attached needles. Oftentimes, a self-made mixture of rubber and urine was used as substitute ink, bearing great health risks. Arkady Bronnikov (b. 1926) was a leading forensic doctor at the interior ministry of the USSR. From the mid-1960s until the mid-1980s he interviewed and photographed numerous inmates of labour camps in the Urals and Siberia. Today, Bronnikov is a leading expert on tattoo iconography and owns what is considered to be one of the biggest photographic collections of Russian prison tattoos.
The Austrian photographer Klaus Pichler (b. 1977) spent eight years looking for ex-prisoners, photographing their tattoos and writing down the stories behind them. The result was an impressive documentary account of the still poorly researched history of prison tattoos. The pictures and interviews were published in the book Inked for Life. The World of Prison Tattoos.
The acceptance of tattoos in Japanese society is subject to constant change. In the 19th century, large tattoos were considered decorative and were carried openly by rickshaw drivers, for example. For the scantily clad men an ornate body was helpful for their business because it attracted the attention of customers. The image of bullies and petty criminals adhered to rickshaw drivers, as well as to other professions from the simple population which led to a long-term negative perception of the skin images. As an identifying feature of “outlaws” they also function in the criminal milieu of the yakuza. In the Japanese mafia organisation, tattoos still illustrate the milieu name of the bearer (“serpent”, “dragon”, etc.) and document his gang membership. The result was a social aversion to tattoos which continues to this day and also unjustly criminalises innocent citizens. Unlike their historical predecessors, taxi drivers today would only flaunt their tattoos for a photographer; because they are not good for business. Tattoos in Japan were rarely shown openly; in public bath houses they are even forbidden to this day. It was only through the appreciation of the Japanese tattoo tradition by the American tattoo scene of the 1960s and 1970s that the taboo was partially revised.
Masahiko Adachi (Japanese, b. 1983) Flesh Color 2010 Japan Animation / 4 Min.
Japanese colour woodcuts: The 108 heroes of the “Suikoden”
The Japanese name “Suikoden” stands for a famous Chinese adventure story that became very popular in both countries. In this story, a group of rebels fights against corruption and injustice, campaigning for the poor and the disadvantaged. The story originates in the 14th century and is set in the 12th century. For the first time, Kuniyoshi displays these rebels with naked, tattooed bodies which lead to a great success of the book. Until today, the Suikoden is a well-known theme of Japanese culture such as computer games and TV series.
Fumie Sasabuchi draws irezumi tattoos on the skin of pictures of young girls taken from the children’s fashion magazine Vogue Angels. The motifs of the tattoos are part of the traditional repertoire of the Japanese yakuza mafia, and symbolise mortal danger, superhuman strength and special protection, among other things. Sasabuchi unites two media from Western and Eastern popular culture: photography from modern fashion magazines and the traditional woodcut. She combines Japanese myths with Western picture subjects and plays with the ensuing ambivalent images.
Twelve years of civil war in El Salvador came to an end in 1992. Today, gang warfare is an everyday reality in San Salvador, mainly because of two gangs: the Mara Salvatrucha (MS) and the Mara 18 (18). Every year 2,000 people die as a result. Some 14,000 abandoned youths dedicate their lives to the gangs which replace their families. They are the successors of the US gangs that were founded in the 1980s by refugees from the Salvadoran civil war. The Mara gangs today, which originated in the ghettos of Los Angeles, have over 70,000 members in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. Members generally have a tattoo containing the letters M or MS, as well as the number 13 which refers to the position of M in the alphabet. Tattoos in the shape of teardrops represent the number of murders committed, or commemorate the death of a fellow Mara member and friend. The words “La vida loca” stand for “the crazy life” in the Mara, and a downward-pointing M formed with the fingers is used as a sign of recognition.
The Spanish-French photographer and documentary filmmaker Christian Poveda spent over a year with members of the Mara. He followed the lives of these “lost youths”, documenting them through interviews, impressive photographs and the film La vida loca (El Salvador / France / 2008 / 90 mins.). Poveda was killed by several shots to the head in San Salvador in 2009 while working on another film.
The face tattoos of the Chin women in Burma form part of a ritual to mark the transition from childhood to the adult world. Female tattoo artists use thorns 17 or needles to prick patterns into the skin. The symbolic meaning of the lines and dots cannot be ascertained, since no records exist. All that is known is that the patterns differentiate one clan from another. Although the tradition of facial tattooing has died out in many parts of Burma, it is now experiencing a partial revival.
The Tã moko facial tattoos of the Maori in New Zealand give information about family membership, ancestors and social position, as well as the specific abilities of the tattooed person. Each part of the face is dedicated to a particular type of information. Few people have a tattoo in the centre of the forehead, for example, since this indicates high status. Men can usually wear tattoos over the entire face, whereas women have them only on the chin area. This tattoo tradition has been suppressed for a long period, as also happened in other cultures, but the Tã moko have recently been experiencing a renaissance.
Mau Moko: photographic images of the world of Maori tattoo by Becky Nunes
“These are impressive and moving images, which deserve exhibition simply in their own right. More than that, they place moko in a contemporary context, expressing the art as a living, relevant force in our culture and not some struggling remnant of a distant past. They strongly counter the negative connotations of moko.”
Hamish Keith, Art Historian 2009
Mau Moko: the World of Maori Tattoo began as a research project at the University of Waikato, and evolved into a major publication, a scholarly yet entertaining journey from the art’s Pacific chisel origins to the marae workshops and sophisticated urban studios of Aotearoa today. It has been essentially a visual experience – the exacting portraiture of Parkinson and Jenner-Merrett, the iconic canvasses of Goldie and Lindauer, the pretty, ubiquitous postcard albums, and most recently, the brooding, elemental image-making of Westra and Friedlander, have all marked their own place, in their own time. With Mau Moko, and the consummate artistry of this collection, we reach the twenty first century. Becky Nunes’ eloquent lens engages the viewer, and the viewed, and one wonders who is saying “Tirohia, he moko!” It is about us. And yes, it is forever.
Ngahuia Te Awekotuku. May 2008
In December 2007 Penguin Books published Mau Moko, The World Of Maori Tattoo. The result of several years’ research, the book explores the cultural and spiritual issues around ta moko, and relates the stories of its wearers and practitioners. Mau Moko was authored by Ngahuia Te Awekotuku and Linda Waimarie Nikora with contemporary portraits photographed by Becky Nunes. Becky Nunes is a photographic artist and educator, making images for a range of commercial and editorial clients, as well as her own personal work. She heads the Photo Media department at Whitecliffe College of Arts & Design. For the Mau Moko project Nunes travelled through both the North and South Islands of Aotearoa / New Zealand meeting and photographing wearers and practitioners of ta moko.
Sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant are commonly found in Thailand. They protect the bearers from accidents, misfortune and crime. At the same time they help them to lead a morally upright life. However, the rules set by the tattooist must be obeyed or the tattoos lose their power. Sak Yants are not intended for public view and therefore often kept hidden. The motifs used are derived from ancient Khmer script writings and animal symbols such as tigers, dragons, birds, snakes and lizards. The tiger, or Yant Sua, is a popular subject and is associated with strength, fearlessness and power.
Tattoo Master
There are several hundred tattooists in Thailand. Monks tattoo in their temples, and tattoo masters in studios. They are authority figures and their followers also seek advice from them. The sacred tattoos link tattooist and tattooed for a lifetime. 38-year-old Achan Neng Onnut is a tattoo master in On Nut, a district of Bangkok. The pricked motif is called Pho Kae. It depicts a recluse, or hermit, and bestows wisdom, goodness and a peaceful mind to the bearer. The tattoo master recites a mantra in order to activate the tattoo.
Santiago Sierra (Spanish, b. 1966) 250 cm line tattooed on six paid people 1999 Espacio Aglutinador, Havanna / Cuba / doc. / 28.17 mins. / no sound Loan: Galerie Kow, Berlin
In 1999 Santiago Sierra recruited six young unemployed men in Havana to stand in a row and have a horizontal line tattooed on them, running continuously from one man’s back to the next, in exchange for 30 dollars each. Further versions of this performance were carried out and documented as simply as possible. It alludes to the unequal values of capitalist society and to the relative and haphazard nature of remuneration. The imprecise line drawn of the tattoos suggests scarring, so the participants in the performance – members of socially marginalised groups – were subjected to further stigmatisation.
Artur Żmijewski (Polish, b. 1966) 80064 2004 11 mins. Polish with English subtitles Loaned by the artist and Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zürich
The Polish artist Artur Żmijewski takes an unsparing and provocative look at the tattooing that took place in the Nazi concentration camps. His video shows 92-year-old Auschwitz survivor Josef Tarnawa whom the artist persuaded to have his fading camp number re-inked. While the tattooist is renewing the numbers, Josef Tarnawa recalls the most traumatic time of his life. Artur Żmijewski’s video work polarises opinions. On the one hand, Josef Tarnawa is stigmatised for a second time, but on the other, the number on his left forearm acts as a shocking memorial. According to Artur Żmijewski, nowadays active remembrance is often far too conventional.
In the history of western tattooing, brands and involuntary tattoos have receded into the background, although the practices used during the Second World War remain deep in people’s memories. Whereas the prisoners in Auschwitz were numbered, members of the SS had their blood group tattooed on their upper arms. This meant that after the war, what had started out as a useful medical information turned out to be an irreversible identification mark. The social connotations of a tattoo change over time, with proud insider symbols becoming the stigmata of an outsider group.
Wim Delvoye (Belgium, b. 1965) Tim 2006-08 Tattoo, loan: Sammlung Reinking, Hamburg
Tim Steiner, a Swiss citizen, has had a work by the Belgian conceptual artist Wim Delvoye tattooed on his back. In 2008 the tattoo was sold to a Hamburg-based art collector who acquired the right to lend, sell and bequeath Tim Steiner as a loan object and to preserve his skin after his death. Since then, the work, called Tim, has given rise to international controversy. It raises important questions about ethics in the art market, and about power and the right to dispose of the human body (and its organs, such as the skin).
Chris Eckert (American, b. 1968) Auto Ink 2010 Metal, paint, microelectronics 137 x 56 x 50cm Loaned by the artist
Auto Ink
The strongest indication of a person’s religion is geography. You are born into your religion. That doesn’t make it irrelevant or incorrect – religion provides a framework for basic morality that’s very powerful and it gives people a cultural identity that spans borders. I’ve attended mass in Dutch, German, French, and Spanish and I’ve always felt like I belonged. While my personal experience with religion is one of inclusion, a system that unites people from different regions and cultures, the public face of religion is often one of exclusion. Muslim, Christian, and Jewish zealots who know what God wants. More specifically they know what God doesn’t want and apparently God does not want me… or you. This public face of religion is always so certain, self-confident, even arrogant. That anyone could possibly know the “truth” when that truth is randomly assigned at birth is just funny.
Auto Ink is a three axis numerically controlled sculpture. Once the main switch is triggered, the operator is assigned a religion and its corresponding symbol is tattooed onto the persons arm. The operator does not have control over the assigned symbol. It is assigned either randomly or through divine intervention, depending on your personal beliefs.
The kinetic sculpture of American artist Chris Eckert draws a random religious symbol on the arm of a volunteer subject. Membership of a religion integrates, connects and offers an ethical and moral framework for living with others. Yet many faiths compete with each other and regard the others with resentment and politically motivated enmity. Chris Eckert’s tattooing machine explores how having a particular faith can affect peaceful coexistence in a globalised world.
In European history, the now defunct tradition of religious pilgrim tattoos is an example of the practice of tattooing as a mark of identity and segregation. Examples include the crusader tattoos and tattooed guild symbols in the Middle Ages.
Inking the skin requires the same aesthetic imagination and care, the same manual dexterity, and the same knowledge of materials and colour as other artistic processes. The innovative contemporary tattoo scene is transcend¬ing the language of classical tattooing and regenerating the medium. The image loop shows a diverse range of top quality works by international tattoo artists in a huge variety of styles.
Frank Taki Über(leben) 2014
Tradition and modernity
The rich and cross-cultural collection of the MKG has served as an inspiration for creative work to artists and craftspeople for over 130 years. The classic ornaments of historism, the floral patterns of art nouveau or the spirited characters of Japanese wood cuts: the continuous examination with this kind of historic artwork and its adaption into one’s own visual language are just as much a part of the art of tattooing as the creation of new images. In the autumn of 2014, the MKG has invited a selection of Hamburg tattoo artists to use the museum’s collection as a starting point for new tattoo designs.
Timm Ulrichs (German, b. 1940) The End Eyelid tattoo, 1970/1981/1997 Inkjet print on canvas on stretcher bars, 150 x 150cm Loaned by the artist
In 1981, Timm Ulrichs had THE END tattooed on his right eyelid by “Tattoo Samy” (Horst Heinrich Streckenbach). The tattoo, which can only be read when the eye is closed, recalls the final credits of a film, the last performance and the final moment. This tattoo event was also documented on film, created in the context of the video of the same name which juxtaposes 60 final images.
Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg Steintorplatz, 20099 Hamburg
For those of you that remember The Venue, St Kilda and Razor Club, this posting is for you.
This is a FAB exhibition of the life and times of Nick Cave, Roland S Howard, Genevieve McGuckin, Polly Borland, The Boys Next Door, The Birthday Party et al. Peter Milne… the photographs are fantastic, perfectly capturing the spirit, youth and electricity of the times. My god, everyone is so young, so lskinny and Roland is SO androgynous in quite a few of the photos – all eyeliner and come to bed eyes.
Although I never mixed in these circles I occasionally went to The Venue, but Razor was definitely the place to be. One enduring memory was of me, totally off my face on a big party night, climbing up past the ladies loo using the gutter down pipes up to the first floor balcony and clambering over, so that I could go and get someone from management to let us all in.
The hang of the exhibition is perfect. In a flow of images, here is Peter Milne at 17 sitting on a couch with Roland S Howard reading Playboy; Polly Borland at home with a broken, unlit fag hanging from her mouth; and the most beautiful, colour photograph of Nick Cave and Rowland S Howard after Birthday Party gig (1982, below) with arms around each, Nick planting a kiss on the dapper Roland, flocked wallpaper behind. Youth, innocence, life, love, beauty and nostalgia all rolled into one. Gen (Genevieve McGuckin), long-time partner of Roland, has been a friend of mine for years and so it was wonderful to see photographs of her in her youth, as vivacious and delightful then as now.
I loved every second of this exhibition. The creativity of the people, the vibrancy of the ad hoc poses and the sheer joy of living the life – coupled with the magic of the insightful, intuitive images – make this a must see exhibition. If you do anything in Melbourne this coming week, go see this show (ends Saturday, 28th March).
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Strange Neighbour and Peter Milne for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. All images courtesy of the artist and M.33. Download the Juvenilia web essay (2.7Mb pdf)
Installation photographs of the exhibition Juvenilia at Strange Neighbour, Melbourne Photography:Alex Bell Moffat
Juvenilia brings together for the first time 100 astonishing photographs of friends and family taken by renowned Victorian artist Peter Milne when he was a very young man. Warm, intimate, surprising and already displaying the great compositional skills, originality and humour for which Milne is known, these images offer an unprecedented peep into mid 1970s to mid 1980s Melbourne and a milieu of people who would go on to play pivotal roles in Melbourne’s burgeoning cultural scene.
Starting in 1976 when Milne was 16 and photographing school friends Gina Riley and Rowland S Howard, through to images of the legendary band, the Boys Next Door lounging in Nick Cave’s bedroom in his parents’ house, the first Boys Next Door gig and photo shoot, parties, trips to the country, outings to the beach, rehearsals and a full length photo essay tracing A Day in the Life of Rowland S Howard, the photographs feature a dazzling cast including Anita Lane, Blixa Bargeld, Tony Clark, Polly Borland and Mick Harvey as well as Milne’s less famous but equally interesting friends and family.
Peter Milne is based in Castlemaine. He has exhibited extensively around Australia and internationally. He has had three monographs of his work published: When Nature Forgets (M.33, Melbourne, 2013), Beautiful Lies – Notes Towards a History of Australia (QCP, Brisbane, 2011) and Fish in a Barrel – Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds on Tour (Tender Prey, London, 1993). He is represented by M.33, Melbourne.
I was initially quite dubious when curators Linsey Gosper and Helen Frajman approached me about exhibiting this work because it is so obviously the product of a callow youth (the earliest images on show here were shot when I was 16 years old, soon after the dismissal of the Whitlam government in the mid 1970s).
I was placated by the argument that the work had some kind of historical value that negated my concerns about poor technique and the visible signs of decay in an archive that has been poorly stored for the last four decades but I still felt uncomfortable. I think my key anxiety was the possibility that I would come across like one of those figures we’ve seen in numerous, recent documentaries about the Punk days in Melbourne – fat, balding, middle-aged individuals banging on about how amazing they were when 18 years old. As a fat, balding, middle-aged artist (with visible signs of decay) I try to be more focused on my next body of work than I am on images I produced so very, very long ago.
However, having pulled the negatives and slides out of their dusty boxes, I now see some merit in them. I am immediately struck by the evidence that I really did hang out with some lovely, clever people who went on to fulfil much of the creative potential that they so clearly promised.
I cannot say that life in Melbourne in the late 1970s and early 1980s was bliss (because the city had some meagre, stale and forbidding ways) but it was a time and a place where I found myself in the company of a cohort with great inventive energy and all the joyous arrogance of youth.
Looking at these images now, I see that my friends and family were every bit as beautiful as I remember them.
My friends and I were in our mid-teens and we’d heard about the coming of Australian punk: the Saints in Brisbane and Radio Birdman in Sydney. We’d been to a few gigs at Burnhearts, a gay venue housed in the old ‘Thumping Tum’ that had given up its Tuesday nights to punk. We’d seen Fiction, the Negatives and News there. Punk had exploded across the world, not that you’d know it in Melbourne unless you were one of the few hundred weirdo kids who listened to the new Community Radio station 3RMT FM.
Every form of popular music culture was about something from outside of Australia, untouchable and inaccessible to us. On the other hand, punk was raw and exciting, friends who could strum a few chords had started picking up guitars and all of a sudden, some of us were playing something that resembled music, sure it was dumb and clumsy but it was also empowering and exhilarating.
There was a girl at my high school, Jenny Shannon. Jenny had been telling me and my mates of when her good friend Anita Lane had taken her to see the coolest punk band in Melbourne, so we had to check them out, but each attempt was thwarted with false gig listings and cancellations. Finally, we heard of a gig in Footscray Gardens where Suicide Records were promoting the release of their ‘Lethal Weapons’ compilation LP with a free open air punk gig. We rolled across to Footscray on a beautiful sunny day with the occasional sun shower. In the old red rattler, we were amongst about 50 curious, pimply kids with our hair becoming shorter as our conviction for this new thing grew.
On this particular day punk bands played, loud, distorted music with no frills and minimal production. The Boys Next Door, a tall skinny gang of guys in black, stove pipe pants, long black duffel coats, high collars turned up and mean, superior stares saunter in. “Rowlands here” Jenny whispers “He’s not a member of the band he’s just a friend of Nicks.” Who’s Rowland? Who’s Nick I’m wondering? “We’re the Boys Next Door” one of them spits. With that, the sky suddenly opens and people run for the cover of the trees.
The promoter jumps onto the mic and announces that due to rain they won’t play. There’s a round of booing from 50 people who wanna witness the spectacle of some real punk bands like animals in a zoo. The tall skinny guy grabs the mic, “We’re not fucking playing!” “That’s Nick” says Jenny… more boos… “Fuck off” says skinny guy, so we’ve seen them now, they seem like real assholes and I can’t wait to actually hear ’em live. As we walk back to the station in the drizzle I’ve got Dum Dum Boys by Iggy Pop ringing in my head…
“The first time I saw the dum dum boys I was fascinated”
I didn’t get to catch the Boys Next Door properly until a few months later at the VCA, it was Rowlands 1st gig as the new member of the band…
“I was most impressed. No one else was impressed… they looked as if they put the whole world… down”
This era was exhilaration, bright, skinny, sharp, obnoxious vitality, compelling handsome boys with eyeliner, well-spoken brats with beautiful intelligent sharp witted girls hanging off their arms, the birth of a movement in popular culture that had come to kick the ass of everything that had come before it, to burn brightly and then splinter off into a million shiny pieces. Peter Milne was there at its birth, captured the first sparks of this Super Nova going off. Fortunately he was the only kid around at the time with a good camera who actually knew how to use it to recognise a bunch of ascending stars and shoot those “Fish in a Barrel.”
Quincy McLean 2015
The Birthday Party Nick The Stripper 1981
Band Location: Melbourne, VIC, Australia Track: Nick The Stripper Album: Prayers On Fire Composed By: Nick Cave Produced by: Tony Cohen & The Birthday Party
Co-curators: Elizabeth Siegel, Associate Curator of Photography, and Sarah Kelly Oehler, Gilda and Henry Buchbinder Associate Curator of American Art at the Art institute of Chicago
Again, I am drawn to these impressive avant-garde works of art. I’d have any of them residing in my flat, thank you very much. The Dalí, Delaunay and Léger in painting and drawing for me, and in photography, the muscular Ilse Bing, the divine Umbo and the mesmeric, disturbing can’t take your eyes off it, Witkiewicz self-portrait.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Art Institute of Chicago for allowing me to publish the art works in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“Everything had broken down in any case, and new things had to be made out of the fragments.”
Luis Buñuel (Spanish, 1900-1983) and Salvador Dalí (Spanish, 1904-1989) Un Chien Andalou 1929
Director – Luis Buñuel Writers – Salvador Dali, Luis Buñuel Cast – Simone Mareuil, Pierre Batcheff
Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog) is a 1929 Franco-Spanish silent surrealist short film by Spanish director Luis Buñuel and artist Salvador Dalí. Buñuel’s first film, it was initially released in a limited capacity at Studio des Ursulines in Paris, but became popular and ran for eight months.
Un Chien Andalou has no plot in the conventional sense of the word. With disjointed chronology, jumping from the initial “once upon a time” to “eight years later” without events or characters changing, it uses dream logic in narrative flow that can be described in terms of the then-popular Freudian free association, presenting a series of tenuously related scenes.
Ballet Mécanique (1923-1924) is a Dadaist post-Cubist art film conceived, written, and co-directed by the artist Fernand Léger in collaboration with the filmmaker Dudley Murphy (with cinematographic input from Man Ray). It has a musical score by the American composer George Antheil. However, the film premiered in silent version on 24 September 1924 at the Internationale Ausstellung neuer Theatertechnik (International Exposition for New Theater Technique) in Vienna presented by Frederick Kiesler. It is considered one of the masterpieces of early experimental filmmaking.
Ballet mécanique (1924) | MoMA
Ballet mécanique, conceived by painter Fernand Léger and photographed by filmmaker Dudley Murphy (possibly with some involvement from Man Ray), is a rhythmic interplay between human and object. Affected by his experience of fighting in World War I, and in particular by the mustard gas attack that left him hospitalised for a year, Léger became fascinated with mechanical technology, which would feature heavily in his post-1917 art. Ballet mécanique, his only film, is an example of this juxtaposition of man and machine: gears and pendulums vs. eyes and mouths, pistons pumping vs. a woman’s endless climb up the stairs, clocks vs. legs. A kaleidoscopic combination of faces and kitchen utensils, Ballet mécanique was completely unlike contemporary commercial movies, and would pave the way for other revolutionary films like Metropolis and Limite.
If you were to see Ballet mécanique installed in one of our galleries or projected in one of our theaters, it would look a little different than it does here – the frameline would be stabilised and the edges of the picture would either be cropped or camouflaged with masking around the screen. However, we are presenting this version the way a scholar visiting the Film Study Center would see it on a flatbed viewing machine, with a slight bounce to the image and the sprocket holes visible, and without live musical accompaniment. (The score, composed by George Antheil and usually performed as a separate concert piece, was finished several years after Ballet mécanique premiered and is significantly longer than the film.)
MoMA text from the YouTube website
Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954) Object 1936 The Art Institute of Chciago Through prior gift of Mrs. Gilbert W. Chapman
A century ago, society and life were changing as rapidly and radically as they are in today’s digital age. Quicker communication, faster production, and wider circulation of people, goods, and ideas – in addition to the outbreak of World War I – produced a profoundly new understanding of the world, and artists in the early years of the 20th century responded to these issues with both exhilaration and anxiety. Freeing themselves from the restraints of tradition, modern artists developed groundbreaking pictorial strategies that reflect this new shift in perception.
Shatter Rupture Break, the first exhibition in The Modern Series, explores the manifold ways that ideas of fragmentation and rupture, which permeated both the United States and Europe, became central conceptual and visual themes in art of the modern age. Responding to the new forms and pace of the metropolis, artists such as Robert Delaunay and Gino Severini disrupted traditional conventions of depth and illusionism, presenting vision as something fractured. Kurt Schwitters and George Grosz explored collage, using trash and bits and pieces of printed material in compositions to reflect social and political upheaval and produce something whole out of fragments. In the wake of new theories of the mind as well as the literal tearing apart of bodies in war, artists such as Hans Bellmer, Salvador Dalí, and Stanisław Witkiewicz produced photographs and objects revealing the fractured self or erotic dismemberment. The theme of fragmentation was ubiquitous as inspiration for both the formal and conceptual revolutions in art making in the modern age.
Shatter Rupture Break unites diverse objects from across the entire holdings of the Art Institute – paintings, sculpture, works on paper, photographs, decorative arts and designed objects, textiles, books, and films – to present a rich cacophony that exemplifies the radical and generative ruptures of modern art.
The Modern Series
A quintessentially modern city, Chicago has been known as a place for modern art for over a century, and the Art Institute of Chicago has been central to this history. The Modern Series exhibitions are designed to bring together the museum’s acclaimed holdings of modern art across all media, display them in fresh and innovative ways within new intellectual contexts, and demonstrate the continued vitality and relevance of modern art for today.
Text from the Art Institute of Chicago website
Robert Delaunay (French, 1885-1941) Champs de Mars: The Red Tower 1911/1923 The Art Institute of Chicago Joseph Winterbotham Collection
Stuart Davis (American, 1892-1964) Ready-to-Wear 1955 The Art Institute of Chicago Restricted gift of Mr. and Mrs. Sigmund W. Kunstadter; Goodman Endowment
Designed by Ruben Haley Made by Consolidated Lamp and Glass Company “Ruba Rombic” Vase 1928/1932 Art Institute of Chicago Raymond W. Garbe Fund in honor of Carl A. Erikson; Shirley and Anthony Sallas Fund
The Art Institute of Chicago is introducing an innovative new series of exhibitions that presents works from the museum’s acclaimed collection of modern art in reimagined ways that demonstrate the continued vitality and significance these works have today.
The Modern Series debuts with Shatter Rupture Break, opening Sunday, February 15, in Galleries 182 and 184 of the museum’s Modern Wing. The exhibition unites such diverse objects as paintings, sculpture, works on paper, photographs, decorative arts and designed objects, textiles, books, and films.
“We wanted to explore how the idea of rupture permeated modern life in Europe and the Americas,” said Elizabeth Siegel, Associate Curator of Photography, who, with Sarah Kelly Oehler, the Gilda and Henry Buchbinder Associate Curator of American Art, took the lead in organising the first exhibition. “It served as an inspiration for revolutionary formal and conceptual developments in art making that remain relevant today.”
A century ago, society was changing as rapidly and radically as it is in today’s digital age. Quicker communication, faster production, and wider circulation of people, goods, and ideas – in addition to the outbreak of World War I – produced a profoundly new understanding of the world, and artists responded with both anxiety and exhilaration. Freeing themselves from the restraints of tradition, modern artists developed groundbreaking pictorial strategies that reflected this new shift in perception.
Responding to the new forms and pace of cities, artists such as Robert Delaunay (French, 1885-1941) and Gino Severini (Italian, 1883-1966) disrupted traditional conventions of depth and illusionism, presenting vision as something fractured. Delaunay’s Champs de Mars: The Red Tower fragments the iconic form of the Eiffel Tower, exemplifying how modern life – particularly in an accelerated urban environment – encouraged new and often fractured ways of seeing. Picturesque vistas no longer adequately conveyed the fast pace of the modern metropolis.
The human body as well could no longer be seen as intact and whole. A devastating and mechanised world war had returned men from the front with unimaginable wounds, and the fragmented body became emblematic of a new way of understanding a fractured world. Surrealists such as Hans Bellmer (German, 1902-1975), Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954) and Salvador Dalí (Spanish, 1904-1989) fetishised body parts in images, separating out eyes, hands, and legs in suggestive renderings. A more literal representation of the shattered body comes from Chicago’s own Ivan Albright, who was a medical draftsman in World War I. In his rarely shown Medical Sketchbook, he created fascinatingly gruesome watercolours that documented injured soldiers and the x-rays of their wounds.
Just as with the body, the mind in the modern era also came to be seen as fragmented. Stanislaw Witkiewicz (Polish, 1885-1939) produced a series of self-portraits as an act of psychological exploration. His work culminated in one stunning photograph made by shattering a glass negative, which he then reassembled and printed, thus conveying an evocative sense of a shattered psyche. The artistic expression of dreams and mental imagery perhaps reached a pinnacle not in a painting or a sculpture, but in a film. Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s film Un chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog) mystified viewers with its dreamlike narrative, dissolves from human to animal forms, dismembered body parts, and shockingly violent acts in an attempt to translate the unconscious mind onto a celluloid strip.
Kurt Schwitters (German, 1887-1948) and George Grosz (German, 1893-1959) explored collage, which took on new importance for avant-garde artists thanks to the aesthetic appeal and widespread availability of mass-produced media. Schwitters used the ephemera of German society to create what he called Merz, an invented term signifying an artistic practice that included collage, assemblage, painting, poems, and performance. The Art Institute owns a significant group of these collages by Schwitters, and six will appear in the exhibition. The use of thrown-away, ripped up, and scissored-out pieces of paper, divorced from their original meaning and reassembled with nails and glue into new objects, was an act that exposed the social and political disruptions of a German society that seemed broken and on the edge of collapse in the aftermath of World War I.
Shatter Rupture Break is unusual in that it unites objects from across the entire museum – from seven curatorial departments as well as the library. This multiplicity is significant because modern artists did not confine themselves to one medium, but explored different visual effects across a variety of media. As well, the show prominently features the voices of artists, writers, scientists, and other intellectuals of the period. The goal is to create a dynamic space that evokes the electrifying, disruptive, and cacophonous nature of modern art at the time.
“We hope to excite interest in the modern period as a crucial precursor to the changes of our own time, to show how what might seem old now was shockingly fresh then,” said Oehler.
Considered one of the finest and most comprehensive in the world, the Art Institute’s collection of modern art includes nearly 1,000 works by artists from Europe and the Americas. The museum was an early champion of modern artists, from its presentation of the Armory Show in 1913 to its early history of acquiring major masterpieces. This show highlights some recent acquisitions of modern art, but also includes some long-held works that have formed the core of the modern collection for decades. Shatter Rupture Break celebrates this history by bringing together works that visitors may know well, but have never seen in this context or with this diverse array of objects.”
Florence Henri is rapidly becoming one of my favourite photographers, an artist who emerged during one of the golden periods of photography, the avant-garde of the 1920s-30s. While we have seen some of these photographs before in a previous posting, there are some new and delightful images to enjoy here.
If you believe the text by Priscilla Frank, “Meet Florence Henri, The Under-Acknowledged Queen Of Surrealist Photography,” on the Huffington Post website [02/20/2015], you could be forgiven for thinking that her photography is based on Surrealist themes. Nothing could be farther from the truth. There is nothing about Henri’s photographs to suggest that they are based on the creative potential of the unconscious mind exemplified by the irrational juxtaposition of images. Henri’s photographs are quite logical and ordered, being an investigation into space, time and object using the “extension of the formal and structural aesthetics of Cubism, Purism and Constructivism.”
Her geometric abstractions “exploited the dialogue between realism and abstraction… and she explored spatial extension and fragmentation in her utter modern vocabulary. Her still life and abstract compositions achieved by balancing abstraction with a pure and essential subject were created in the spirit of the machine age. She viewed space as if it were elastic, distorting figure and ground and altering planes through the use of mirrors and lenses.”
Through attention and attentiveness to subject, Henri achieved her results by using created space to investigate the fragmentation and distortion of the world. Her art is not about the production of phenomena (the spectacle), but about the creation of volumes that are in an of space itself. As Donald Judd’s observes of his created volumes in 1981: “… familiar objects, objects as we habitually perceive them, assume physical neutrality because they and their environment are deactivated: “They are points in space, and space is an empty surround. Instead, what is needed is a created space, space made by someone, space that is formed as a solid, the two the same, with the space and the solid defining each other.” Objects in and of space, the two the same: this was the crux. Judd did more than set new solids into existing voids. He formed solids and their correlative spaces as an integrated operation, as if he were establishing an architecture from the ground up, creating the entire environment, intensifying it, saturating it with its own sensation.”1
In a photographic sense, Henri can be seen as a precursor to Judd’s volumes, creating her own worlds from the ground up, creating the entire environment where the space and the object are one and the same thing… only to then record and flatten that space into the essential nature of the photograph, its physicality. Her sensory affects “remain fixed in the concatenation of materials, structure and placement that generates it. They are the lived equivalent of those conditions, experienced as continuous in time – hence, timeless – remaining wholly the same until interrupted.”2 How appropriate for Henri’s photographs for they do indeed have a timeless “air”, a transcendence of the time and place they were taken, a transcendence of the space which her volumes inhabit. Objects in and of space, the two the same.
As Judd observes, “Time and space don’t exist [as idealised abstractions]; they are made by events and positions. Time and space can be made and don’t have to be found like stars in the sky or rocks on a hillside.” Time and space are grounded in being human: they exist when someone experiences them.”3 Here is the nub of the matter, for it matters that we experience Henri’s photographs each in its definite time and space. Henri’s being is immersed in these volumes and they hold our interest because the created environments are saturated with her own sensations.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Footnotes
1/ Donald Judd quoted in Richard Shiff. “Sensous Thoughts,” in Marianne Stockebrand (ed.,). Donald Judd. The Multicolored Works. Yale University Press, 2014, p. 106
2/ Ibid.,
3/ Ibid., p. 107.
Many thankx to the Jeu de Paume for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“With photography, what I really want to do is compose the image, as I do in painting. The volumes, lines, shadows and light should submit to my will and say what I would like them to say. All of this under the strict control of the composition, because I do not claim to be able to explain the world or to explain my own thoughts.”
Florence Henri in an interview with Attilio Colombo, “Specchio, essenzialità, geometría,” in ‘Florence Henri’ (Milan: Gruppo Editoriale Fabbri, 1983)
“Henri soon recognised the medium’s capacity as a pictorial language and outlet for creative expression. Upon returning to France [from the Bauhaus], Henri began to develop a large body of photographic work based upon her Bauhaus experience and an extension of the formal and structural aesthetics of Cubism, Purism and Constructivism. These non-objective principles forged an alternative to the then-dominant French art movement Surrealism. Henri transcended the avant-garde of one art form to that of another…
Henri’s greatest experimentation with geometric abstraction occurred during the period between 1929-1930… In the photographic work, Florence Henri exploited the dialogue between realism and abstraction, but always maintained a recognisable subject. She was concerned with transparency and movement, and she explored spatial extension and fragmentation in her utter modern vocabulary.
Her still life and abstract compositions achieved by balancing abstraction with a pure and essential subject were created in the spirit of the machine age. She viewed space as if it were elastic, distorting figure and ground and altering planes through the use of mirrors and lenses.”
Lynne Warren. ‘Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Photography’, 3-Volume set. Routledge, 2005, p. 691.
Florence Henri. Mirror of the avantgarde illustrates the desire of the Jeu de Paume to highlight the important role played by women photographers from the 1920s to the 1950s, and follows on from previous exhibitions devoted to Claude Cahun, Kati Horna, Eva Besnyö, Berenice Abbott, Lisette Model, Laure Albin Guillot and indeed, Lee Miller.
The exhibition brings together, for the first time in France, over 130 vintage prints by Florence Henri, as well as rare documents and publications, revealing the artist’s photographic production. Influenced by Constructivism, Cubism and Surrealism, Florence Henri’s work is part of the exciting creative tenor of the period, during which, photography, like cinema or architecture, embodied a spirit of innovation and progress, as well as a certain unconventionality in terms of the dominant visual order.
Familiar with Bauhaus, Florence Henri was one of the figures of the European artistic intelligentsia of the time. Her friendship with Fernand Léger, the Delaunays, Hans Arp, László Moholy-Nagy and Theo van Doesburg would have a profound influence on her work. In 1929, Florence Henri opened a photography studio in Paris. It soon rivalled that of Man Ray’s. Her classes were very well-attended and her talents as a portrait photographer were quickly recognised.
It is not so much the image alone as the constant research that brings Florence Henri’s work to life. Lines and geometric compositions are recurring elements in her photographs. Over the years, she made her compositions increasingly complex through the use of mirrors, industrial and natural objects, or through collage and superposition. The exhibition attempts to both decipher and highlight the work of Florence Henri in terms of reflections, perspective, the depth of field and photomontage – key technical experimentations in the history of modern photography.
“All that I know, and how I know this, is primarily made up of abstract elements: spheres, planes, and grids whose parallel lines provide numerous opportunities, without taking into account the mirrors I use, to present the same object from several different angles within a single photograph, in order to yield, in the same way, different visions that complement and complete each other, and which when taken as a whole, are better able to explain it. Essentially, all of this is much more difficult to explain than to do.”
Florence Henri in an interview with Attilio Colombo, “Specchio, essenzialità, geometría,” in ‘Florence Henri’ (Milan: Gruppo Editoriale Fabbri, 1983)
Florence Henri (New York 1893 – Compiègne (France) 1982) was a multi-faceted artist, who was first known for her paintings before making a name for herself as a major figure in avant-garde photography between the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1940s. She lived in Silesia, Munich, Vienna, Rome and above all Berlin, before finally settling in Paris in 1924 and devoting herself to photography. This medium enabled her to experiment new relationships with space, in particular by the use of mirrors and other objects in her compositions.
The Jeu de Paume is presenting a vast panorama of Florence Henri’s photographic production from 1927 to 1940, including her self-portraits, abstract compositions, portraits of artists, nudes, photomontages, photocollages, as well as documentary photos taken in Rome, Paris and Brittany. The exhibition comprises vintage prints, various documents and published material.
When she was young, Florence Henri studied music and painting in England and Germany. In 1919, when she was a student at the Berlin Academy of Arts, she made the acquaintance of writer and art historian Carl Einstein and became friends with several figures of the avant-garde, including Hans Arp, Adrian Ludwig Richter, John Heartfield and Lázló Moholy-Nagy. She took classes with Paul Klee and Vassily Kandinsky at the Bauhaus in Weimar. In 1924 she moved to Paris, where she followed classes at the Académie Montparnasse, whose director was André Lhote, then at the Académie moderne (founded by Fernand Léger and Amédée Ozenfant). In 1927, after a visit to Bauhaus in Dessau, she abandoned painting in favour of photography. It was at this time that she produced her famous self-portraits in mirrors and her still lifes; the result of her first steps in the spatial research that she would carry out through the medium of photography.
Between the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s, three mythical exhibitions in terms of the history of European photography took place in Germany: “Fotografie der Gegenwart” at the Folkwang Museum in Essen (1929); “Film ind Foto” (Fifo) organised the same year by the Deutscher Werkbund in Stuttgart and “Das Lichtbild” held in Munich (1931). These exhibitions bore witness to the rapid expansion of new photographic concepts and a rupture with tradition. Fifo marked the zenith of the Neues Sehen (New Vision) movement of which László Moholy-Nagy was an exponent and “Das Lichtbild” marked the triumph of Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), whose leading representative was Albert Renger-Patzsch.
Florence Henri was invited to show an important number of prints at these three exhibitions in recognition of her photographic production during this fundamental period that saw the photography used to free our vision and open out onto new experiences.
Florence Henri’s studio rivalled that of Man Ray, even if she had also opened a school of photography where Lisette Model and Gisèle Freund, amongst others, would enrol. In fact, despite the central position that her oeuvre occupied in avant-garde photography at the end of the 1920s, her reputation as a portraitist in Paris, and the fact that her photos had been published in many of the period’s illustrated magazines such as Arts et Métiers and Lilliput etc, Florence Henri’s body of work remains largely unknown.
László Moholy-Nagy’s* comments are a perfect illustration of Florence Henri’s position: “With Florence Henri’s photos, photographic practice enters a new phase, the scope of which would have been unimaginable before today. Above and beyond the precise and exact documentary composition of these highly defined photos, research into the effects of light is tackled not only through abstract photograms, but also in photos of real-life subjects. The entire problem of manual painting is taken onboard by the photographic process and is manifestly given a whole new depth thanks to this new optical instrument. Reflections and spatial relationships, superposition and intersections are just some of the areas explored from a totally new perspective and viewpoint.”
*László Moholy-Nagy, “Zu den Fotografien von Florence Henri”, i10, No 17-18, Amsterdam, December 20, 1928.
Her most well-known work is a self-portrait, in which Henri sits before a mirror, dolled up almost as if in drag. Two silver balls lay reflected up against the mirror, equivocal symbols of both testicles and breasts. Henri, influential in both her artistic style and personal styles, toyed with gender binaries, using her personal appearance to emphasise the performative nature of gender. The artist was married to a Swiss house servant, but went on to have other relationships with both men and women, including a longtime affair with artist and model Margarete Schall.
Henri established herself as a formidable photographer, and remained consistent in her work up until World War II. Then her work declined considerably, both due to lack of materials and the prohibitions imposed under the Nazi occupation. Henri briefly returned to painting, but her central period of output remained in the 1920s and 1930s. Her compositions, simultaneously warm, playful, clever and inquisitive, set the stage for future explorations into the limits of photography, or lack thereof.
Her earliest compositions introduce an element that would be fundamental for her artistic investigations, namely the mirror. Using a very limited number of elements, Henri created extremely complex images characterised by the fragmentation of space and the use of multiple viewpoints. They include one of her best-known works, the self-portrait looking in the mirror with two metal spheres, which may be said to embody the spirit of freedom typical of that period, conveying the image of a modern and emancipated female artist, one who failed to conform to the societal status traditionally assigned to women.
Multiple exposure
Florence Henri uses methods such as multiple exposures when shooting, or a combination of several negatives, some inverted, to obtain abstract images, in which she manages to bestow static objects with a sense of dynamism. Florence Henri’s output during this early phase can be described as a perfect synthesis between abstract geometrical painting and the innovations of New Vision photography.
“Florence Henri’s work lured me to come to Paris in 1929. I wanted to live in a place where images were made that coincided with my own concepts.”
~ Ilse Bing, quoted in Gisèle Freund’s preface to Ilse Bing 1929/1955: Femmes de l’enfance à la vieillesse
Advertising photography
In the field of professional photography, Florence Henri stands out for her very personal approach to advertising photography. Indeed, her images are the natural extension of her photographic experimentation and investigations using objects and mirrors.
Collages
She quickly substitutes industrial objects with natural elements in her compositions. In addition, she introduces a new tool in her work: collage. She makes them with fragments of prints, and then reproduces them to create the final print. She also introduces a new technique into her work – collage – thereby underlining her interest in autonomous images that move away from a simple reproduction of reality, all the while emphasising the conceptual work of the artist.
Shadows
Her quest for experimentation leads Florence Henri to work on the shadows passing vertically through the frame, creating a dark gap that interrupts and fragments the continuity of the image.
Nu composition
Their aesthetic characteristics clearly place the works grouped under the title Nu composition as part of the formal research Florence Henri carried out from the early 1930s, where the mastery of the composition obviously remains the central concern of her work.
Here, the camera is positioned at a slight distance in order to capture the sensuality of the female form, while natural objects – hyacinths and shells – or other more enigmatic elements, such as a comb or cards, also appear in the frame.
Rome
In late 1931 and early 1932, Florence Henri visits Rome where she takes a series of photographs, notably at the Roman Forum, but also at Saint Peter’s Square, which she uses, upon her return to Paris, as material for numerous collages, developing the technique she had already used in certain of her still lifes.
Portrait composition
The series Portrait Composition, is characterised by the tight framing of the central figurer – though some are models, most are her friends, including Grete Willers, Sonia Delaunay, Woty Werner, Kurt Wilhelm-Kästner, Fernand Léger, and Tulia Kaiser. The artist often makes use of harsh lighting, which marks the traits or make-up of her subjects with a diagonal composition or even distorts the image.
Brittany
The photographs taken in Brittany, which at first glance could be seen as purely documentary, reveal a very carefully considered attention to structure. In some of the more general shots, Florence Henri inserts a blurred, graphic element between the lens and the landscape, thereby going against the idea of photography as merely capturing reality, and once again, reinforcing the notion of composition.
Store windows
When Florence Henri strolls through Paris with her camera, her images reveal a very different preoccupation to that of other photographers. Faithful to her attention to structure, in the reflections of store windows she finds the same spirit that brings life to her studio compositions using mirrors. In 1936, Florence Henri moves to the Rue Saint-Romain in Montparnasse, where she makes use of the terrace to work in natural light, and to pursue her study of the fragmentation of the image through the use of shadows and reflections. She also returns to her self-portrait work.
Used under fair use conditions for the purpose of art criticism.
I freely admit that I knew little about this artist’s work before starting to assemble this posting.
Strong, focused, conceptually driven bodies of work that have real guts and presence. Tough, no compromise realist photographs with Gossage not afraid to challenge convention… through dark, almost totally black, chthonic images; through over exposure, sprocket holes of the film, out of focus foregrounds, and an elemental consciousness pushing at reality.
While there are only 12 images in the posting (I wish there were more!), there are 600 more on the Art Institute of Chicago website in the collection and I have spent a lot of time immersing myself in his worlds, his heterotopic spaces (Foucault), spaces of otherness, which are neither here nor there, that are simultaneously physical and mental. The series Berlin in the Time of the Wall is a particular favourite. Just look at the image Stallschreiberstr., (1989, below) and grasp the atmosphere and allusion of the image – the light that emanates from the yin/yang puddle and the symbolic quality of that division with the looming presence of the towering wall, being reflected into the water and next to the only specular highlight of the image.
I am deeply impressed by the profundity of his artistic enquiry, his visioning of a reality that takes the viewer places that they have never been before. And holds them there. Gossage does more than just gather, record, and sequence memories from our contemporary world… he creates those memories afresh, anew. Some photographs in his series work better than others but that is bound to happen when you are really trying to engage with the world that you are imag(in)ing. The force is strong in this one. He got me hook, line and sinker.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to The Art Institute of Chicago for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“For ‘There and Gone’, [Gossage] is photographing on the beach of Tijuana in Mexico; ‘Berlin in the Time of The Wall’ is taking place in Berlin; ‘The Romance Industry’ in Marghera, a desolated industrial area located across the lagoon from Venice in Italy. With these series John Gossage is established as an anthropologist of the ordinary.
In his work, objects, places, situations are also clues, traces to build a photographic memory of past and contemporary history… The choice of the title “Routine” for both of these exhibitions shouldn’t surprise us. John Gossage is using photography as a mastered routine. He gathers, records, and sequences memories from our contemporary world.”
Agathe Cancellieri. “Chicago: Three Routines by John Gossage,” on The Eye of Photography website 2nd March 2015 [Online] Cited 10/03/2015. No longer available online
The first museum survey of American photographer John Gossage’s career ever mounted, this “retrospective in a room” brings together several decades’ worth of work to show three distinct ways, or routines, in which the artist has approached photography.
One routine concentrates on his intensely productive time in Berlin in the 1980s; on display are two dozen images from the nearly 600 that make up his Berlin series, which the Art Institute is fortunate to own in its entirety. The second routine comes from Gossage’s recent year spent traveling the United States on a prestigious Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, making portraits of art students and capturing views in smaller towns and cities, from Albuquerque, New Mexico, to Rochester, Minnesota. The third offers a “medley” of images from across his career, which he began in his teenage years as a student of Lisette Model, Alexey Brodovich, and Bruce Davidson. In addition to highlighting the various photographic methods Gossage has used throughout his career, the exhibition includes a reading table with a selection of the artist’s publications, showcasing his talents as a consummate printer and an ingenious book artist.
Jim Iska Untitled [Installation views of the exhibition John Gossage: Three Routines at The Art Institute of Chicago] 2015
The Art Institute of Chicago is presenting the first museum survey ever mounted of American photographer John Gossage’s career. John Gossage: Three Routines opened Jan. 22, 2015, and continues through May 3, 2015, in Galleries 188 and 189 in the museum’s Modern Wing.
Gossage, who was born in New York City in 1946, began his photographic career at age 14, taking pictures for the local newspaper in Staten Island, New York. Within a year he advanced to intensive studies with photographers Lisette Model and Bruce Davidson, as well as with art director Alexey Brodovitch.
His only formal education came in 1964, at the experimental Walden School in Washington, D.C. Gossage continued to live in Washington after he graduated, even though New York remained central to his development. He showed his own work there – most frequently with the Leo Castelli Gallery in Manhattan – and organised shows of work by others, including a three-part exhibition on the New York School at the Corcoran Gallery in 1992.
The Art Institute’s “retrospective in a room” brings together several decades’ worth of work to show three distinct ways, or routines, in which the artist has approached photography. One routine concentrates on his intensely productive time in Berlin in the 1980s; on display are two dozen images from the nearly 600 that make up his Berlin series, which the Art Institute is fortunate to own in its entirety. The second routine comes from Gossage’s recent year spent traveling the United States on a prestigious Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, making portraits of art students and capturing views in small towns, particularly in Colorado. The third offers a “medley” (a fitting approach, as Gossage once played blues guitar professionally) of images from across his career. In addition to highlighting the various photographic methods Gossage has used throughout his career, the exhibition includes a reading table with a selection of the artist’s publications, showcasing his talents as a consummate printer and an ingenious book artist.
While Gossage plays with narrative in his works, he only partly accepts the general expectation that photographs will explain and replicate the world. Extending from Berlin in 1982 to Albuquerque, N.M., in 2014, Three Routines displays a permutating approach to creativity that suggests a reflection on individual continuity in the face of massive historical change. The grouping of so many projects illuminates how Gossage works to maintain authorial consistency while regularly challenging his habits and even questioning the value of a personal style.
John Gossage: Three Routines was organised by Matthew Witkovsky, Richard and Ellen Sandor Chair and Curator, Department of Photography, at the Art Institute. Major funding for the exhibition has been provided by the Trellis Fund. Additional support has been generously contributed by Stephen G. Stein and Edward Lenkin. The exhibition is part of Photography Is ____________ , a nine-month celebration of photography at the Art Institute that includes pop-up gallery talks, online events, and the presentation of the museum’s most treasured photographs.”
“There and Gone is a book in three chapters … the first chapter being the bathing beach in the city of Tijuana. My wife, Terri Weifenbach, took me to this beach. It’s one of those funny places in the world where everything comes together. It’s like a stage set almost. The landscape, what’s going on there and what it means is all concentrated in a relatively small area; it’s exceedingly intense. There’s a lot of illegal border crossing and at the same time it’s the beach of the people of Tijuana.
Robert Adams made a comment in his book Beauty in Photography that always stuck with me. [He wrote] that no photographer of major ambition had ever sustained important work taken with long telephoto lenses. It seemed on obvious loophole. There’s got to be something out there worth taking, something like the periphery of your vision at a great distance. What are things at a great distance?
What seemed interesting to me was the photographing of strangers. Here was a culture whose language I did not speak, which I didn’t really know anything about … I could go on the beach and do the standard photojournalist pantomime where you spend a couple of days blending in, getting to know the people, but it’s a lie, an illusion. Given this I decided to stay at a distance and photograph people who didn’t know that they were being photographed. All of the pictures taken of Mexico are done from America, about a quarter mile down the beach. I could just stand there and shoot all day, anything that went on, taking another culture on its own terms.”
At this moment in time, I believe that Pieter Hugo is one of the best photographers in the world.
Approaching photography with a keen awareness of the problems inherent in pointing a camera at anything, Hugo’s latest series Kin is a tour de force where concept meets clarity of vision and purpose; where a deep suspicion of photography and what it can accurately portray is used in the most incisive way to interrogate identity formation and power structures, colonisation, racial diversity and economic disparity in Hugo’s homeland of South Africa. This is intelligent, beautiful, focused art.
While there is a deep suspicion about what photography can achieve, Hugo uses that suspicion… and balances it with sensitivity, respect and dignity towards subject. An enquiring mind coupled with a wonderful eye, fantastic camera position and understanding of his colour palette complete the picture. These are beautiful, classical and yes, iconic images. Not for Hugo the interchangeability of so much contemporary photobook photography, where one image, one artist, can be replaced by another with no discernible difference in feeling or form. Where single images, whole series of work even, mean very little. The re/place ability of so much post-photography.
Just look at those eyes and face in Daniel Richards, Milnerton (2013, below), eyes that bore right through you; or the human being in At a Traffic Intersection, Johannesburg (2011, below) and tell me you’re not moved. Hugo is one of the brightest of stars in the photographic firmament.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Created over the past eight years, Pieter Hugo’s series Kin confronts complex issues of colonisation, racial diversity and economic disparity in Hugo’s homeland of South Africa. These subjects are common to the artist’s past projects in Nigeria, Ghana, Liberia and Botswana; however, this time, Hugo’s attention is focused on his conflicted relationship with the people and environs closest to home. Hugo depicts locations and subjects of personal significance, such as cramped townships, contested farmlands, abandoned mining areas and sites of political influence, as well as psychologically charged still lives in people’s homes and portraits of drifters and the homeless. Hugo also presents intimate portraits of his pregnant wife, his daughter moments after her birth and the domestic servant who worked for three generations of Hugo’s family. Alternating between private and public spaces, with a particular emphasis on the growing disparity between rich and poor, Kin is the artist’s effort to locate himself and his young family in a country with a fraught history and an uncertain future.
Text from the Fondation Henri-Cartier Bresson website
“I have a deep suspicion of photography, to the point where I do sometimes think it cannot accurately portray anything, really. And, I particularly distrust portrait photography. I mean, do you honestly think a portrait can tell you anything about the subject? And, even if it did, would you trust what it had to say?… It sounds extreme, but for me to work at all as a photographer, I have to be conscious always of the problems inherent in what I do. I have to be conscious, if you like, of the impossibility of photography…
I matriculated at the end of apartheid and the photographs I grew up looking at were directly political in that they attempted to reveal, or change, what was happening. Back then, the lines were clear. You tried to tell the world what was going on with your photographs. It’s much more complex now. I am of a generation that approaches photography with a keen awareness of the problems inherent in pointing a camera at anything.
My homeland is Africa, but I’m white. I feel African, whatever that means, but if you ask anyone in South Africa if I’m African, they will almost certainly say no. I don’t fit into the social topography of my country and that certainly fuelled why I became a photographer.”
Pieter Hugo quoted in Sean O’Hagan. “Africa as you’ve never seen it,” on the Guardian website 20th July 2008 [Online] Cited 24/02/2015
From January 14th to April 26th, Fondation HCB is showing Kin, the last project of the south-african photographer Pieter Hugo. Through landscapes, portraits and still life photography exhibited for the first time in France, the photographer offers a personal exploration of South Africa. The exhibit, accompanied by a book published by Aperture is coproduced with Foto Colectania Foundation, Barcelone and Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town/Johannesburg.
Created over the past eight years, Pieter Hugo’s series Kin confronts complex issues of colonisation, racial diversity and economic disparity in Hugo’s homeland of South Africa. These subjects are common to the artist’s past projects in Nigeria, Ghana, Liberia and Botswana; however, this time, Hugo’s attention is focused on his conflicted relationship with the people and environs closest to home.
Hugo depicts locations and subjects of personal significance, such as cramped townships, contested farmlands, abandoned mining areas and sites of political influence, as well as psychologically charged still lives in people’s homes and portraits of drifters and the homeless. Hugo also presents intimate portraits of his pregnant wife, his daughter moments after her birth and the domestic servant who worked for three generations of Hugo’s family. Alternating between private and public spaces, with a particular emphasis on the growing disparity between rich and poor, Kin is the artist’s effort to locate himself and his young family in a country with a fraught history and an uncertain future.
“South Africa is such a fractured, schizophrenic, wounded and problematic place. It is a very violent society and the scars of colonialism and Apartheid run deep. Issues of race and cultural custodianship permeate every aspect of society here and the legacy of Apartheid casts a long shadow … How does one live in this society? How does one take responsibility for history, and to what extent does one have to? How do you raise a family in such a conflicted society? Before getting married and having children, these questions did not trouble me; now, they are more confusing. This work attempts to address these questions and to reflect on the nature of conflicting personal and collective narratives. I have deeply mixed feelings about being here. I am interested in the places where these narratives collide. ‘Kin’ is an attempt at evaluating the gap between society’s ideals and its realities.”
Biography
Born in Johannesburg in 1976, Pieter Hugo grew up in Cape Town where he currently lives. His work is held in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne; Huis Marseille, Amsterdam; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, among others. He is the winner of numerous awards, including in 2008 the KLM Paul Huf Award and the Discovery Award at Rencontres d’Arles. He won the Seydou Keita Award at the ninth Rencontres de Bamako African Photography Biennial, Mali, in 2011, and was short-listed for the 2012 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize.
Press release from the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson
Artists: Jules Andrieu, Pierre Antony-Thouret, Nobuyoshi Araki, George Barnard, Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Luc Delahaye, Ken Domon, Roger Fenton, Ernst Friedrich, Jim Goldberg, Toshio Fukada, Kenji Ishiguro, Kikuji Kawada, An-My Lê, Jerzy Lewczyński, Emeric Lhuisset, Agata Madejska, Diana Matar, Eiichi Matsumoto, Chloe Dewe Mathews, Don McCullin, Susan Meiselas, Kenzo Nakajima, Simon Norfolk, João Penalva, Richard Peter, Walid Raad, Jo Ratcliffe, Sophie Ristelhueber, Julian Rosefeldt, Hrair Sarkissian, Michael Schmidt, Ursula Schulz-Dornburg, Indre Šerpytyte, Stephen Shore, Harry Shunk and János Kender, Taryn Simon, Shomei Tomatsu, Hiromi Tsuchida, Marc Vaux, Paul Virilio, Nick Waplington, Jane and Louise Wilson, and Sasaki Yuichiro.
Curators: Simon Baker, Curator Photography and International Art, Shoair Mavlian, Assistant Curator, and Professor David Alan Mellor, University of Sussex
Roger Fenton (British, 1819-1869) The Valley of the Shadow of Death 1855
Another fascinating exhibition. The concept, that of vanishing time, a vanquishing of time – inspired by Kurt Vonnegut’s 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five and the Japanese photographer Kikuji Kawada’s 1965 photobook The Map – is simply inspired. Although the images are not war photography per se, they are about the lasting psychological effects of war imaged on a variable time scale.
While the images allow increasing passages of time between events and the photographs that reflect on them – “made moments after the events they depict, then those made days after, then months, years and so on” – there settles in the pit of the stomach some unremitting melancholy, some unholy dread as to the brutal facticity and inhumanness of war. The work which “pictures” the memory of the events that took place, like a visual ode of remembrance, are made all the more powerful for their transcendence – of time, of death and the immediate detritus of war.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Tate Modern for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“… taking its cue from Vonnegut, ‘Conflict, Time, Photography’ is arranged differently, following instead the increasing passages of time between events and the photographs that reflect on them. There are groups of works made moments after the events they depict, then those made days after, then months, years and so on – 10, 20, 50, right up to 100 years later.”
Simon Baker
Shomei Tomatsu (Japanese, 1930-2012) Atomic Bomb Damage – Wristwatch Stopped at 11.02, August 9, 1945, Nagasaki 1961 Gelatin silver print on paper 253 x 251mm Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tokyo
Shomei Tomatsu (Japanese, 1930-2012) Steel Helmet with Skull Bone Fused by Atomic Bomb, Nagasaki 1963 Gelatin silver print on paper 226 x 303mm Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tokyo
“From the seconds after a bomb is detonated to a former scene of battle years after a war has ended, this moving exhibition focuses on the passing of time, tracing a diverse and poignant journey through over 150 years of conflict around the world, since the invention of photography.
In an innovative move, the works are ordered according to how long after the event they were created from moments, days and weeks to decades later. Photographs taken seven months after the fire bombing of Dresden are shown alongside those taken seven months after the end of the First Gulf War. Images made in Vietnam 25 years after the fall of Saigon are shown alongside those made in Nakasaki 25 years after the atomic bomb. The result is the chance to make never-before-made connections while viewing the legacy of war as artists and photographers have captured it in retrospect…
The exhibition is staged to coincide with the 2014 centenary and concludes with new and recent projects by British, German, Polish and Syrian photographers which reflect on the First World War a century after it began.”
Text from the Tate Modern website
“The original idea for the Tate Modern exhibition Conflict, Time, Photography came from a coincidence between two books that have captivated and inspired me for many years: Kurt Vonnegut‘s classic 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five and the Japanese photographer Kikuji Kawada’s 1965 photobook The Map. Both look back to hugely significant and controversial incidents from the Second World Warfrom similar distances.
Vonnegut was a prisoner of war in Dresden when what he called ‘possibly the world’s most beautiful city’ was destroyed by incendiary bombs, and struggled to write his war book for almost 25 years. Kawada was a young photographer working in post-war Hiroshima when he began to take the strange photographs of the scarred, stained ceiling of the A-bomb Dome – the only building to survive the explosion – that he would eventually publish on August 6 1965, 20 years to the day since the atomic bomb was dropped on the city.
It may seem odd that these great works of art and literature took so long to emerge from the aftermath of the events they concern. But many of the most complex and considered accounts of conflict have taken their time. To Vonnegut’s painfully slow response to the war, for example, we might add Joseph Heller’s brilliantly satirical Catch-22, published in 1961, and, even more significantly, JG Ballard’s memorial masterpiece Empire of the Sun, which did not see the light of day until 1984.
And today, in 2014, 100 years since the start of the First World War, it seems more important than ever not only to understand the nature and long-term effects of conflict, but also the process of looking back at the past…”
Extract from Simon Baker. “War photography: what happens after the conflict?” on The Telegraph website, 7th November 2014 [Online] Cited 09/02/2015. Used under fair use conditions for the purposed of education and research
An-My Lê (Vietnamese-American, b. 1960) Untitled, Hanoi 1994-1998 Gelatin silver print on paper 508 x 609mm Courtesy the artist and Murray Guy, New York
Jane Wilson (British, b. 1967) Louise Wilson (British, b. 1967) Urville 2006 Gelatin silver print, mounted onto aluminium 1800 x 1800mm Tate Purchased 2011
Jane Wilson (British, b. 1967) Louise Wilson (British, b. 1967) Azeville 2006 Gelatin silver print, mounted onto aluminium 1800 x 2900mm Tate Purchased 2011
Jo Ractliffe (South African, b. 1961) As Terras do fim do Mundo (The Lands of the End of the World) 2009-2010 Courtesy Mark McCain collection
“At first glance, Jo Ractliffe’s black-and-white shots of sun-baked African landscapes look random and bland: rocks, dirt, scrubby trees; some handwritten signs but no people. Only when reading the titles – “Mass Grave at Cassinga,” “Minefield Near Mupa” – do you learn where the people are, or once were, and the pictures snap into expressive focus.
Ms. Ractliffe, who lives in Johannesburg, took the photographs in 2009 and 2010 in Angola on visits to now-deserted places that were important to that country’s protracted civil war and to the intertwined struggle of neighbouring Namibia to gain independence from South Africa’s apartheid rule. South Africa played an active role in both conflicts, giving military support to insurgents who resisted Angola’s leftist government, and hunting down Namibian rebels who sought safety within Angola’s borders.
It’s through this historical lens that Ms. Ractliffe views landscape: as morally neutral terrain rendered uninhabitable by terrible facts from the past – the grave of hundreds of Namibia refugees, most of them children, killed in an air raid; the unknown numbers of land mines buried in Angola’s soil. Some are now decades old but can still detonate, so the killing goes on.”
My first published photo book, The Map, took me five years to complete, beginning in 1960. In late 1961 a solo show with work from the series was held at Fuji Photo Salon in Tokyo, organised in three parts.
The first featured a ruined castle that was blown up intentionally by the Japanese army during the Second World War. The second comprised photographs taken a decade after the atomic bomb exploded in Hiroshima. They showed the stains and flaking ceilings of the Atomic Bomb Dome, the only structure left standing at the heart of the detonation zone. The third part concerned Tokyo during the period of economic recovery: images of advertising, scrap iron, the trampled national flag and emblems of the American Forces such as Lucky Strike and Coca-Cola, all twisted together, their order shuffled again and again. Some appeared as a montage to be presented as a metaphor. I dare not say the meaning of it.
These works led me to attempt to create this photographic book, using the notion of the map as a clue to the future and to question the whereabouts of my spirit. Discarded memorial photographs, a farewell note, kamikaze pilots – the illusions of various maps that emerge are to me like a discussion with the devil. The stains are situated as a key image of the series by drawing a future stratum and sealing the history, the nationality, the fear and anxiety of destruction and prosperity. It was almost a metaphor for the growth and the fall.
On the back of the black cover box are written rhyming words that are almost impossible to read. The front cover shows that the words are about to burn out. Inside, the pages are laid out as hinged double fold-out spreads. The repetition of the act of opening and closing makes the images appear and disappear. I wanted to have a book design as a new object and something that goes beyond the contents. With the rich and chaotic nature of monochrome, it might be that I tried to find my early style within the illusion of reality by abstracting the phenomenon. As an observer, I would like to keep forcing myself into the future, never losing the sense of danger which emerges in the conflicts of daily life. I wish to harmonise my old distorted maps with the heartbeat of this exhibition at Tate Modern, twisting across the bridges of the centuries through conflicting space and time.
Conflict, Time, Photography brings together photographers who have looked back at moments of conflict, from the seconds after a bomb is detonated to 100 years after a war has ended. Staged to coincide with the centenary of the First World War, this major group exhibition offers an alternative to familiar notions of war reportage and photojournalism, instead focusing on the passing of time and the unique ways that artists have used the camera to reflect on past events.
Conflicts from around the world and across the modern era are depicted, revealing the impact of war days, weeks, months and years after the fact. The works are ordered according to how long after the event they were created: images taken weeks after the end of the American Civil War are hung alongside those taken weeks after the atomic bombs fell on Japan in 1945. Photographs from Nicaragua taken 25 years after the revolution are grouped with those taken in Vietnam 25 years after the fall of Saigon. The exhibition concludes with new and recent projects by British, German, Polish and Syrian photographers which reflect on the First World War a century after it began.
The broad range of work reflects the many different ways in which conflict impacts on people’s lives. The immediate trauma of war can be seen in the eyes of Don McCullin’s Shell-shocked US Marine 1968, while the destruction of buildings and landscapes is documented by Pierre Antony-Thouret’s Reims After the War (published in 1927) and Simon Norfolk’s Afghanistan: Chronotopia 2001-2002. Other photographers explore the human cost of conflict, from Stephen Shore’s account of displaced Jewish survivors of the Second World War in the Ukraine, to Taryn Simon’s meticulously researched portraits of those descended from victims of the Srebrenica massacre.
Different conflicts also reappear from multiple points in time throughout the exhibition, whether as rarely-seen historical images or recent photographic installations. The Second World War for example is addressed in Jerzy Lewczyński’s 1960 photographs of the Wolf’s Lair / Adolf Hitler’s War Headquarters, Shomei Tomatsu’s images of objects found in Nagasaki, Kikuji Kawada’s epic project The Map made in Hiroshima in the 1960s, Michael Schmidt’s Berlin streetscapes from 1980, and Nick Waplington’s 1993 close-ups of cell walls from a Prisoner of War camp in Wales.
As part of Conflict, Time, Photography, a special room within the exhibition has been guest-curated by the Archive of Modern Conflict. Drawing on their unique and fascinating private collection, the Archive presents a range of photographs, documents and other material to provide an alternative view of war and memory.
Conflict, Time, Photography is curated at Tate Modern by Simon Baker, Curator of Photography and International Art, with Shoair Mavlian, Assistant Curator, and Professor David Mellor, University of Sussex. It is organised by Tate Modern in association with the Museum Folkwang, Essen and the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden, where it will tour in spring and summer 2015 respectively. The exhibition is also accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue from Tate Publishing and a programme of talks, events and film screenings at Tate Modern.
Susan Meiselas (American, b. 1948) Managua, July 2004 2004 From the series Reframing History
“Cuesto del Plomo,” hillside outside Managua, a well-known site of many assassinations carried out by the National Guard. People searched here daily for missing persons. July 1978, from the series, “Reframing History,” Managua, July 2004
In July 2004, for the 25th anniversary of the overthrow of Somoza, Susan returned to Nicaragua with nineteen mural-sized images of her photographs from 1978-1979, collaborating with local communities to create sites for collective memory. The project, “Reframing History,” placed murals on public walls and in open spaces in the towns, at the sites where the photographs were originally made.
Reframing History: Excerpt, Bus (2004)
Nick Waplington (British, b. 1965) Untitled 1993 From the series We Live as We Dream, Alone
Nick Waplington (British, b. 1965) Untitled 1993 From the series We Live as We Dream, Alone
Nick Waplington’s deeply moving and once controversial photographs of the cells of Barry Island prison, where Nazi SS Officers were held prisoner before the Nuremburg trials, were taken in 1993, almost 50 years after the prisoners had embellished the cell walls with Germanic slogans and drawings of pin-up girls and Bavarian landscapes will be displayed. The half-century that elapsed between the photographs and the creation of their subject is grim testament to the enduring legacy of conflict…
“In 1992 I was commissioned to make work by the Neue galerie in Graz, Austria and the theme was war or “krieg” as it is in German. Graz is on the border with Yugoslavia and there was war in Yugoslavia at the time. I think they were hoping that I would make something to do with the war that was taking place between Croatia and Serbia and Bosnia. I did go to the war; you went to Zagreb and got a UN pass and went in to the war zone. It was very interesting to be taken into the war zone but ultimately I got back to England and I decided – to the annoyance of the gallery – that I was thinking about Austria instead. At the time, the president of Austria, Kurt Waldheim, had been exposed as a member of the SS and had been informing Yugoslavia during the war [World War Two] and the Austrians were very unconcerned about this. I thought I’d much prefer to make work that had the Austrians confronting their Nazi past rather than about the current conflict. I knew about the prison in Barry Island in South Wales where the SS were held before they were sent to Nuremberg for the trial and I started taking a series of photographs in the prison. It was lucky that I did because it was demolished the following year by the MOD. It’s gone now. When I got there, I saw the prisoners had been drawing on the walls. They’re mossy and crumbling but you can see Germanic lettering and Bavarian landscapes and women with 1940s haircuts. They are evocative and powerful given the emotive history. “
Extract from Elliot Watson. “Nick Waplington: Conflict, Rim, Photography,” on the Hunger TV website, 26th November 2014 [Online] Cited 09/02/2015. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposed of education and research
Sophie Ristelhueber (French, b. 1949) Fait #25 1992 71 photographs, gelatin silver prints mounted on aluminium Object, each: 1000 x 1240 x 50mm National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Purchased 2013
Sophie Ristelhueber (French, b. 1949) Fait #44 1992 71 photographs, gelatin silver prints mounted on aluminium Object, each: 1000 x 1240 x 50mm National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Purchased 2013
Sophie Ristelhueber (French, b. 1949) Fait #46 1992 71 photographs, gelatin silver prints mounted on aluminium Object, each: 1000 x 1240 x 50mm National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Purchased 2013
Luc Delahaye (French, b. 1962) US Bombing on Taliban Positions 2001 C-print 238.6 x 112.2cm Courtesy Luc Delahaye and Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris/Bruxelles
“This is a challenge still faced by photographers today. Two years ago, the British documentary photographer Chloe Dewe Mathews set about creating a series of her own responding to the World War One. Called Shot at Dawn, it expresses her shock upon discovering that during the conflict around a thousand British, French and Belgian troops were condemned for cowardice or desertion before being executed the following morning by firing squads consisting of comrades from their own battalions. “I never knew this happened,” she tells me. “Until quite recently, no one really talked about it, because the subject was so contentious and taboo.”
Researching her series, Dewe Mathews worked closely with academics to locate the forgotten places along the western front where these unfortunate combatants had been shot. She then travelled to each spot and set up her camera there at dawn, recording whatever could be seen a century after the executions had taken place.
The results are eerie and elegiac – otherwise unremarkable, empty landscapes infused with a powerful sense of mourning, outrage and loss.”
Stephen Shore (American, b. 1947) Tzylia Bederman, Bucha, Ukraine, July 18, 2012 2012 Courtesy of Stephen Shore
Pierre Anthony-Thouret (French, 1861-1926) Plate I 1927 from Reims after the war. The mutilated cathedral. The devastated city. Private collection, London
The limits of realism
“So how can photographers respond to conflict if not by employing strategies commonly found in photojournalism about war? One alternative approach is to focus less on documenting the heat of battle and more on remembrance – something that feels relevant this year, which marks the centenary of the start of the World War One.
Some of the most moving evocations of the Great War were captured by commercial photographers who arrived in northeast France in the wake of the conflict, when people began travelling to the region in order to see for themselves the extent of the devastation of local villages, towns, and cities. There was enormous appetite for images recording the destruction, available in the form of cheap guidebooks and postcards.
“This is one of the first episodes of mass tourism in the history of the world,” explains [curator Simon] Baker. “There were 300 million postcards sent from the western front, for instance by people visiting the places where their relatives had died. And the photographers had to make these incredible compromises: making photographs of places that weren’t there anymore.”
In the case of Craonne, which was entirely obliterated by artillery, the village had to be rebuilt on a nearby site, while the ruins of the original settlement were abandoned to nature. As a result, the only way for photographers to identify Craonne was by providing a caption.
“The idea of photographing absence became really important,” says Baker. “War is about destruction, removing things, disappearance. A really interesting photographic language about disappearance in conflict emerged and it is extremely powerful. How does one record something that is gone?””
Pierre Anthony-Thouret (French, 1861-1926) Plate XXXVIII 1927 from Reims after the war. The mutilated cathedral. The devastated city. Private collection, London
Tate Modern Bankside London SE1 9TG United Kingdom
Curator: Clare Williamson, with specialist advice from historian Dr. Tony Moore
Unknown photographer Members of the Ishmael Club c. 1900 Gelatin silver photograph State Library Victoria
Definition
Bohemianism is the practice of an unconventional lifestyle, often in the company of like-minded people, with few permanent ties, involving musical, artistic, or literary pursuits. In this context, Bohemians may be wanderers, adventurers, or vagabonds. (Wikipedia)
A Bohemian is a person, as an artist or writer, who lives and acts free of regard for conventional rules and practices.
This is a fantastic exhibition at the State Library of Victoria, one of the best I have seen so far in Melbourne this year. I have seen it three times and each time it has been a thoroughly rewarding experience.
~ Visually and intellectually stimulating, with a plethora of artefacts, texts and photographs
~ Excellent curatorship, with the exhibition logically structured in order to cohesively display the history, characters and stories, and strands of creativity and rebellious spirit that make up Melbourne’s cultural life
~ A great hang, with disparate elements and mediums all informing each other, pithy quotes, unique film footage, video, music
~ Not too big, just the right size to indulge your senses and brain power
One downside was that the exhibition needed a book or exhibition catalogue to flesh out the themes. Hopefully this will eventuate down the track. Also, it would have been nice to see more of what I would call ‘vernacular bohemianism’ – not just the famous people in each era, but the people that lived the life out on the streets, that supported the subcultures that sprung up from the 1950s onwards, but in a small exhibition it is understandable that there was not enough space.
Another perspective is that, in ordering such a diverse group of people who don’t want to be classified, who lived on the edge of society – you remove their cultural and historical ability to be transgressive, to cross moral and social taboos. By naming them as “bohemian” you seek to classify and order their existence and bring them within a frame of reference that is about control, power and visibility. This disciplinary power, Michel Foucault maintains, relies on surveillance to transform the subjects and the exhibition taxonomy is just that… a form of surveillance of the subject as well as a form of ordering it. Under this phenomena of power, dissonance / dissidence is neutralised and human beings are made subjects: through ‘the systematic linking of the categories of power and knowledge to form a hybrid, power-knowledge.’ (Hirst, 1992, “Foucault and Architecture,” in AA Files, No. 26, Autumn, pp. 52-60)
As John Tagg notes in his book The Burden of Representation (and this is what this exhibition does, it ‘represents’ a particular construction of identity as seen from the viewpoint of the establishment, the institution), “when Foucault examines power he is not just examining a negative force operating through a series of prohibitions … We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms – as exclusion, censorship, concealment, eradication. In fact, power produces. It produces reality. It produces domains of objects, institutions of language, rituals of truth.” (Tagg, John. The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988, p. 87)
Ultimately, that is what this exhibition does, it produces a reality that many of these bohemians would not have bought into, for they lived outside the fold. It produces domains of objects, institutions of language, rituals of truth that, through their naming, seek to classify and negate the transgressive and subversive nature of many of these people and groups. These people lived in opposition to the tenants and morals of everyday society and that is why we still love them – for their creativity, their individuality, their thoughts and above all their panache, stepping outside the orthodoxies and regi/mentality of everyday life. Against the system, for life.
“The mania of young artists to wish to live outside of their time, with other ideas and other customs, isolate them from the world, render them strange and bizarre, puts them outside the law, banished from society. These are today’s bohemians.”
Félix Pyat (French, 1810-1889)
Artist, rebel, hippie, hipster?
Revealing Melbourne’s enduring counter-cultures, Bohemian Melbourne celebrates a who’s who of creative free spirits through their art and the bohemian legacy that has shaped the character of this city. The exhibition shines a light on Melbourne’s cultural bohemians from 1860 to today, tracing individuals who have pushed against convention in their lives and art, from Marcus Clarke, Albert Tucker and Mirka Mora to Barry Humphries, Vali Myers and Nick Cave.
Venture into history’s backstreets and smoky salons to discover the stories of the daring poets, artists, visionaries, rebels and rock stars who changed Melbourne forever.
Text from the State Library of Victoria website
Marcus Clarke: “A Punk in the Age of Steam”
Marcus Clarke, writer, journalist and later a librarian at the Melbourne Public Library, is generally celebrated as the father of Bohemian Melbourne – although he was more its wild child. After a privileged start in a wealthy English family, which allowed him to cultivate the life of a young dandy and to indulge his passion for the writings of Honoré de Balzac and others, a 16-year-old Clarke suddenly found himself in colonial Melbourne in 1863, thanks to a turn in the family fortune.
Determined to maintain a semblance of the life to which he had become accustomed, Clarke was soon to be found strolling the streets of Melbourne as a flâneur, an observer of the city spectacle. A short-lived post as a bank clerk was followed by a stint on the land as a jackaroo, but by the age of 21 he was back in Melbourne and working as a journalist for the Argus newspaper.
Clarke’s bohemian ways soon attracted other young journalists and writers, and they began to congregate at various Melbourne watering holes, in particular the Cafe de Paris establishing the Yorick Club, the early members of which included fellow writers Henry Rendall, George Gordon McCrae and Adam Lindsay Gordon. The Yorick had a human skull for a mascot and rules that parodied the gentleman’s clubs of establishment Melbourne. Its members gathered in rooms adjoining the office of Melbourne Punch to smoke clay pipes, drink from pewter mugs, recite poetry and generally engage in horseplay. Bohemian society had found a Melbourne home and a creative community was born.
Wall text from exhibition
Unknown photographer Marcus Clarke 1866 Albumen silver photograph State Library Victoria
Bohemian culture in marvellous Melbourne
Marvellous Melbourne, which arose out of the egalitarianism of the gold rushes, gave birth to a strong bohemian culture. Marcus Clarke, the London-born journalist, writer, librarian and professional bohemian, joined the Athenaeum Club and founded in 1868 the Yorrick Club, Australia’s first bohemian club, which became a magnet for men of letters.
He was a dressed-up dandy, a flâneur and a heavy drinker, but had a touch of genius with his novel, For the Term of His Natural Life (1874/75), one of the classics of Australian colonial literature. He was dead by the age of 35, with suicide rumoured but rejected by his actress wife, Marian Dunn, the mother of his six children. Clarke in his behaviour and creative achievement became a model for other Australian bohemians to follow.
Unknown photographer Marcus Clarke (detail) 1866 Albumen silver photograph State Library Victoria
In 1863, when the young Marcus Clarke arrived in Melbourne, he could have slipped easily into what passed for mannered society in the booming gold-rush city. His uncle was a County Court judge, his cousin a politician, and Clarke himself was granted honorary membership of the elite Melbourne Club. But he chose to turn his back on the bunyip aristocracy. “I am a bohemian,” declared the man who would go on to write the first great Australian novel. “I live, I walk, I eat, drink and philosophise.”
All of which sounds perfectly normal – except, perhaps, for the philosophising – but in reality, Marcus Clarke’s life was far from average. He became a celebrated satirist of Marvellous Melbourne, by turns outraging and titillating 19th-century sensibilities in Australia’s modern metropolis. He befriended fellow intellectuals and bon vivants to form underground literary clubs that didn’t so much turn their backs on as raise an insulting finger to colonial mores. He was a poet and a playwright, a journalist and a novelist, a jackaroo, a wastrel and, above all, quite the tremendous wit.
Clarke’s most enduring gift is his writing, particularly the classic convict novel For The Term Of His Natural Life. But a new exhibition at the State Library of Victoria pays tribute to his other major legacy – that of Australia’s first bona fide bohemian.
“Clarke was an iconoclast, dangerous to know and a dandy about town,” explains historian Dr Tony Moore, author of Dancing With Empty Pockets: Australia’s Bohemians…
“Most people think of him as a venerable old Victorian gentleman, but I characterise him as a punk in the age of steam.” [Marcus: I don’t know why a venerable old Victorian gentleman – he was dead at 35]
Moore, who is a Monash University academic and passionate chronicler of unconventional Australians, was an adviser to the exhibition and worked alongside curator Clare Williamson to create this retrospective of radicals. Melbourne’s roaming free spirits have been corralled together for the first time using material – some of it never previously displayed in public – drawn from State Library archives and borrowed from public and private collections. Viewed en masse, they comprise a rogues’ gallery of some of the country’s most indelible cultural icons…
His [Clarke’s] image adorns the exhibition posters, a larger-than-life bohemian in breeches and knee-high boots with a cabbage-tree hat perched jauntily above his broad, handsome face. Melbourne’s original radical would be thrilled to see that his notoriety lives on, more than a century after his death.
Extract from Kendall Hill. “Bohemian Melbourne: Exhibition” on the Qantas Travel Insider website [Online] Cited 03/02/2015. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Installation views of the exhibition Bohemian Melbourne at the State Library of Victoria, Melbourne Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Wall text from the exhibition Bohemian Melbourne at the State Library of Victoria, Melbourne Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Justus Jörgensen (Australian, 1893-1975) Fifteen of the Founders (installation view) 1944 Oil on canvas and gauze mounted on panel Collection of the Montsalvat Trust Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Montsalvat is the result of Justus Jörgensen’s vision for a collective experience of art and life. Jörgensen had trained in architecture and then in painting with earlier bohemian Max Meldrum. His studio in Queen Street, the Mitre Tavern and the Latin and Chung Wah restaurants were sites for lively discussions in which Jörgensen put forward his philosophies of art, the revival of medieval craftsmanship and communal living. This vision began to take shape in 1934 when he and his wife, Lily, brought land at Eltham; with the assistance of friends and followers, he built Montsalvat, an artists’ colony of studios, workshops and the communal Great Hall.
While Justus Jörgensen rarely exhibited, his great love was painting. This multi-panelled work comprises portraits by Jörgensen of 15 significant figures from the early years of Montsalvat. They are, from top to bottom, left to right:
Ian Robertson – student of Jorgensen who also ran an antiques shop Leo Brierley – businessman and backer of Mervyn Skipper’s Pandemonium journal Helen (Nell) Lempriere – niece of Dame Nellie Melba, painter, sculptor, and an earl student of Jorgensen Norman Porter – friend and student of Jorgensen and lecturer in philosophy Mervyn Skipper – author, journalist and Melbourne editor of the Bulletin Helen Skipper – Mervyn’s first daughter, Jorgensen’s partner for many years, and mother of Sebastian and Sigmund Jorgensen Justus Jorgensen – founder and architect of Montsalvat, painter, assistant to artist Max Meldrum and teacher. Sonia Skipper – second daughter of Mervyn Skipper, and painter and teacher Arthur Munday – law student, sculptor and stonemason trained by Jorgensen William (Bill) Cook – teacher, philosophy and president of the Victorian Rationalist Society Norman Radcliffe – student and friend of Jorgensen, and philosopher Ray Grant – student of Jorgensen and philosopher Edward Goll – internationally renowned pianist and teacher at Melbourne Conservatorium of Music Arthur (George) Chalmers – pharmacist, student of Jorgensen, stonemason and carver, who also planted the first vineyard at Montsalvat
(Label texts)
Montsalvat is an artist colony in Eltham, Victoria, Australia, established by Justus Jörgensen in 1934. It is home to over a dozen buildings, houses and halls set amongst richly established gardens on 48,562 m2 (12 acres) of land.The colony of Montsalvat has a detailed history that reflects the life of Jörgensen and his friends and family; there is also a legend behind its name, while its buildings and gardens are steeped in the art and culture of Melbourne and its surroundings.
Visitors can pay a small fee to walk throughout the colony’s historical gardens, artists’ houses/workshops and explore the surrounding buildings. All of the buildings on the site were designed and built by residents with locally available materials, from various sources. The Great Hall offers an extensive network of spaces from extravagant halls and vast exhibition spaces, to small corridors and tiny balconies overlooking the gardens.
Percy Grainger (Australian, 1882-1961) Ella Grainger (Australian, 1889-1979) Towelling tunic, shirt, leggings, belt, shoes worn by Percy Grainger (installation view) c. 1934 Cotton bath towels, plastic, leather and metal Grainger Museum collection, University of Melbourne Photo: Marcus Bunyan
“In 1932 or 1933 my wife and I took up again this idea of clothing made of towelling and when in Australia in 1934 and 1935 we were amazed by the beauty of the bath towels on sale in Australia – some imported from England, Czechoslovakia and America, but most of them (and among them the most beautiful ones) manufactured in Australia. Here was a chance to show what could be done with the beauty born of machinery – a beauty as rich and subtle, in its own way, as anything made by hand or loom.”
Percy Grainger, c. 1955-1956
Unknown photographer, New York Percy Grainger wearing a towelling clothes outfit at his home in White Plains 1936 Silver gelatin print Grainger Museum collection, University of Melbourne
Installation photograph of the exhibition Bohemian Melbourne at the State Library of Victoria February 2015, including at left Albert Tucker, Self-portrait with Joy Hester, 1939 (see below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Albert Tucker (Australian, 1914-1999) Self-portrait with Joy Hester 1939 Gelatin silver photograph State Library Victoria
Albert Tucker Interview with an Australian Artist – Heide Museum
An Interview with Albert Tucker conducted by Justin O’Brien in 1997.
Albert expands on his many insights,during the time he spent with John and Sunday Reed and other artists at Heide during the1940’s. An intimate insight into a unique man.
Unknown photographer Opening of Mirka Café 1954 Gelatin silver photograph Courtesy of Heide Museum of Modern Art and William Mora Galleries
Unknown photographer Opening of Mirka Café (detail) 1954 Gelatin silver photograph Courtesy of Heide Museum of Modern Art and William Mora Galleries
These clips features home movie footage taken by Gertie Anschel (c. 1953-1954) with audio commentary by film director Philippe Mora.
Part 1 of 3 features scenes of Melbourne, The Mirka Café and Joy Hester and Gray Smith’s property. Philippe reflects on his childhood and identifies key figures of the Melbourne art scene.
Part 2 of 3 features the property of Roger de Stoop, artist friends and Arthur Boyd at work on his 1956 Melbourne Olympic statue. Philippe reflects on his childhood identifies key figures of the Melbourne art scene.
Part 3 of 3 features the Moras, the art gang at a balcony party and late American actor Melvyn Douglas. Philippe reflects on his childhood, parents and identifies key figures of the Melbourne art scene.
Making Your Own Fun in the 50s
On the surface at least, Melbourne in the 1950s was a rather dour affair. For some non-conformists, such as Vali Myers and Barry Humphries, it was a place to escape rather than a place to be. For others, however, it was a site for creating underground cultures that were largely invisible to the mainstream.
This was no more so than in the case of gay and lesbian, or ‘camp’, culture, as it was known at the time. Homosexuality was illegal in Victoria until 1960, and in the 1950s it was sensationalised in the tabloid press as a subject for mockery if not horror. As a result, homosexual men and women developed alternative bohemian cultures and communities, with their own covert venues, house parties, secret languages and dress codes.
The gala costume arts balls that raised money for mainstream theatre and other arts charities were grand exceptions to the generally underground clubs and private parties. They offered rare moments in which camp culture could be expressed in public without fear for reprisal. Theatres and dance companies provided employment for many, and bars, such as the one nicknamed the Snake Pit at the Hotel Australia, and restaurants such as Val’s Coffee Lounge, provided opportunities for the camp community to meet and to mix with others who were outside the establishment.
Norman Ikin (Australian, 1925-1962) Vali Myers c. 1949 Gelatin silver photograph State Library Victoria
Mark Strizic (Australian, 1928-2012) Barry Humphries in Melbourne 1969 Exhibition print from flexible-base negative State Library of Victoria Courtesy of the Estate of the artist
A never seen on broadcast TV programme with Barry Humphries as Dame Edna Everage made in 1975. Barry Humphries was promoting his film ‘Barry McKenzie holds his own’. Films clips were provided officially by EMI. The interviewer trying to hold things together is Mark Caldwell. The programme was made in black and white.
Wall text from the exhibition Bohemian Melbourne at the State Library of Victoria, Melbourne Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation photograph of the exhibition Bohemian Melbourne at the State Library of Victoria February 2015 with, in the distance, Henry Talbot Portraits of actor Frank Thring 1963, with Thring’s jewellery box and contents in the foreground Photo: Marcus Bunyan
It has been said of Frank Thring that he could make most stages or foyers seem small. His larger-than-life personality was almost matched by his frame, often decked out in imposing black and with flamboyant jewellery. Son of Frank Thring snr, founder of Efftee Films and 3XY Radio, Thring jnr earned fame as an actor in London’s West End and in Hollywood films such as Ben Hur, often playing sinister or decadent characters. In the 1950s, he would recite poems laden with innuendo and hold court at the ‘head table’ at Val’s Coffee Lounge. To be welcome at his table was a sign one was part of the ‘in’ crowd.
Label text
Unknown photographer Arts Ball, Palais de Danse – John Anderson as Sun God c. 1963-1964 Gelatin silver photograph Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives
John Anderson was first-prize winner at a number of arts balls in the 1960s. His costume shown here reflects the creativity and effort that many put into their outfits. Costumes and headdresses were sometimes so large that Anderson and others regularly hired furniture vans to take them to the ball. One year the van that was transporting Anderson broke down and he completed the journey strapped upright on the back of a ute. His Sun God costume wowed new audiences when he was invited to take part in a pageant on ice base on the theme of The Kind and I – with Anderson as the King – at the Southland shopping centre ice rink around 1970.
Label text
But you will go to the ball, you will sweetie!
Richard Walsh (editor) The Review, Vol. 22, No. 22 Melbourne incorporated Newsagencies Co., March 1972 State Library of Victoria Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Before editing the irreverent Melbourne weekly The Review (Nation Review from July 1972, Richard Walsh edited counter-cultural Oz magazine with Richard Neville and Martin Sharp. Contributors to Nation Review included Max Harris, Bob Ellis, Phillip Adams, Michael Leunig and Germaine Greer. Greer had been part of the Drift in Melbourne, a loose association of artists, students and graduates. Enrolling in a Masters degree at Sydney University, in 1962 she becomes a leading light in the Sydney libertarian Push, an intellectual bohemia of larrikin anarchists. Gaining her PhD at Cambridge University, Greer then published her groundbreaking book The Female Eunuch.
Label text
Ashley Mackevicius (Australian, b. 1958) Nick Cave 1973 Gelatin silver photograph National Portrait Gallery, Canberra Gift of the artist 2006
Installation photograph of the exhibition Bohemian Melbourne at the State Library of Victoria February 2015 with artist Ponch Hawkes’ work at right Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Vali Myers (Australian, 1930-2003) Passions 1981-1982 Pen, black ink, sepia, burnt sienna and watercolour Vali Myers Art Gallery Trust
Vali Myers discovered a love of drawing at an early age. Over the years it became her primary mode of artistic expression in place of contemporary dance. She dedicated her life to her art and would spend up to two years creating each of her intricately drawn artworks. Passions contains many elements that symbolically represent aspects of Vali Myers’ art and life. These include a fox (referencing her pet Foxy), ravens (Edgar Allan Poe’s The Ravenbeing one of her favourite poems, a gypsy-like figure playing a violin and, at the centre of it all, a woman with flaming red hair.
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Liz Ham (Australian born England, b. 1975) Vali Myers in her studio in the Nicholas Building 1997 Gelatin silver photograph State Library Victoria
Ed van der Elsken “Vali” 1972
Australian artist Vali Myers moved to Paris from Australia at age 19 where she lived on the streets, danced in cafes, met Satre, Cocteau, Genet and Django Reinhardt. She moved to New York, tattooed Patti Smith’s knee, befriended Salvador Dali and met Andy Warhol and Tennessee Williams.
Vali was a great influence on lots of famous people Tennessee Williams, Jean Cocteau, Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull, Debbie Harry, Patti Smith, Jean Genet and Kate Bush.
Installation photograph of the exhibition Bohemian Melbourne at the State Library of Victoria February 2015 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Howard Arkley
Australian artist Howard Arkley interviewed by ABC television shortly before his untimely death in 1999.
Howard Arkley (Australian, 1951-1999) The Ritual 1986 Synthetic polymer paint on canvas State Library of Victoria
Howard Arkley is recognised as one of Australia’s most significant 20th-century artists. He is unique in embracing not only urban culture but also life in suburbia, a space generally shunned or scorned by bohemians, with exception of that other flaneur of suburbia, Barry Humphries. Like many bohemians before him, Arkley lived on the edge and experimented with mind-altering substances, and, like a good proportion of them, his life was tragically cut short as a result. Despite its large scale, comic-book style and pop colours, The Ritualis as much a cool and judgment-free study in composition and the human form as it is in the rituals or ‘habits’ associated with drug use.
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State Library of Victoria 328 Swanston St, Melbourne VIC 3000 Phone: (03) 8664 7000
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