Exhibition: ‘Josef Koudelka: Nationality Doubtful’ at the Art Institute of Chicago

Exhibition dates: 7th June – 14th September, 2014

Curator: Matthew S. Witkovsky, the Richard and Ellen Sandor Chair and Curator of the Department of Photography

Josef Koudelka (Czech-French, b. 1938) 'Czechoslovakia (Kadañ)' 1963, printed 1967 from the exhibition 'Josef Koudelka: Nationality Doubtful' at the Art Institute of Chicago, June - September, 2014

Josef Koudelka (Czech-French, b. 1938)
Czechoslovakia (Kadañ)
1963, printed 1967
From the series Gypsies
Gelatin silver print
The Art Institute of Chicago, restricted gift of Artworkers Retirement Society
© Josef Koudelka/Magnum Photos. Courtesy of Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

One of the greats – mainly for his series Gypsies, Invasion and Exiles.

Powerful images: strong, honest, respectful, beautifully composed but above all gritty, gritty, gritty. There is a dark radiance here, an ether/reality, as though the air was heavy with melancholy, emotion, loss, violence, isolation and, sometimes, love. No wonder he describes his work as a “theater of the real.” Humanism, and photography at its most essential.

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.

“I try to be a photographer. I cannot talk. I am not interested in talking. If I have anything to say, it may be found in my images. I am not interested in talking about things, explaining about the whys and the hows. I do not mind showing my images, but not so much my contact sheets. I mainly work from small test prints. I often look at them, sometimes for a long time. I pin them to the wall, I compare them to make up my mind, be sure of my choices. I let others tell me what they mean. [To Robert Delpire] My photographs, you know them. You have published them, you have exhibited them, then you can tell whether they mean something or not.”

“There is still an enormous amount of hostility and racial prejudice towards Roma, especially in Eastern Europe, but not just there. It does not matter on which political spectrum you are, left or right, it is very universal, people are often very discriminatory against them.”

Josef Koudelka

Josef Koudelka (Czech-French, b. 1938) 'Romania' 1968, printed 1980s from the exhibition 'Josef Koudelka: Nationality Doubtful' at the Art Institute of Chicago, June - September, 2014

Josef Koudelka (Czech-French, b. 1938)
Romania
1968, printed 1980s
From the series Gypsies
Gelatin silver print
The Art Institute of Chicago, promised gift of Robin and Sandy Stuart
© Josef Koudelka/Magnum Photos. Courtesy of Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

Czech-born French artist Josef Koudelka belongs in the firmament of classic photographers working today. Honoured with the French Prix Nadar (1978), the Hasselblad Prize (1992), and the International Center of Photography Infinity Award (2004), Koudelka is also a leading member of the world-renowned photo agency Magnum. This exhibition, his first retrospective in the United States since 1988, is also the first museum show ever to emphasise his original vintage prints, period books, magazines, and significant unpublished materials.

Koudelka became famous in anonymity through the worldwide publication of his daring photographs of the Soviet-led invasion of Prague in August 1968. Just 30 years old at the time, Koudelka had already worked for a decade, principally on Gypsies, for which he visited Roma populations for weeks at a time in his home country and later abroad over the course of years. This ambitious series beautifully combines a sense of modern history with timeless humanism.

Choosing exile to avoid reprisals for his Invasion photographs, Koudelka travelled throughout Europe during the 1970s and 1980s, camping at village festivals from spring through fall and then printing in wintertime. His photographs of those decades became the series Exiles. Since the late 1980s Koudelka has made panoramic landscape photographs in areas massively shaped by industry, territorial conflict, or – in the case of the Mediterranean rim – the persistence of Classical civilisation.

Tracing this long and impressive career, this exhibition draws on Koudelka’s extensive holdings of his own work and on recent major acquisitions by the Art Institute, including the complete surviving contents of the debut presentation of Gypsies in 1967 (22 photographs), as well as ten Invasion images printed by the photographer just weeks after the event. Also on display are early experimental and theatre photographs and some of the photographer’s beautifully produced books – which stretch dozens of feet when unfolded. A fully illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition, which after its debut at the Art Institute travels to the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, and Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid.

Text from the Art Institute of Chicago website

Gypsies exists as an invaluable documentation of a people during a tumultuous time in their history. From an image of a trio of suited musicians engrossed in their instruments, to stirring portraits of families in cramped living conditions, the photoessay is both a testament to the strength of Roma culture and a stark document of the realities of these people’s lives. Having fully immersed himself in the project, Koudelka’s work presents an unbiased and honest portrait of a community whose nomadic way of life has been contested throughout history.

Anonymous text from the Magnum Photos website [Online] Cited 15/06/2021

Josef Koudelka (Czech-French, b. 1938)
Festival of gypsy music. Straznice, Czechoslovakia
1966
From the series Gypsies
Gelatin silver print

Josef Koudelka (Czech-French, b. 1938)
Slovakia
1967
From the series Gypsies
Gelatin silver print

Josef Koudelka (Czech-French, b. 1938)
Reconstruction of a homicide. In the foreground: a young gypsy suspected of being guilty. Jarabina, Czechoslovakia
1963
From the series Gypsies
Gelatin silver print

Josef Koudelka (Czech-French, b. 1938) 'Jarabina, Czechoslovakia' 1963. Various images from the series 'Gypsies'

Josef Koudelka (Czech-French, b. 1938)
Jarabina, Czechoslovakia
1963
From the series Gypsies
Gelatin silver print

Josef Koudelka (Czech-French, b. 1938)
Slovakia
1963
From the series Gypsies
Gelatin silver print

Josef Koudelka (Czech-French, b. 1938)
Velka Lomnica, Slovakia, Czechoslovakia
1963
From the series Gypsies
Gelatin silver print

Josef Koudelka (Czech-French, b. 1938)
Velka Lomnica, Slovakia, Czechoslovakia
1966
From the series Gypsies
Gelatin silver print

Josef Koudelka (Czech-French, b. 1938)
Slovakia. Zehra
1967
From the series Gypsies
Gelatin silver print

Josef Koudelka (Czech-French, b. 1938)
Gypsy. Okres Poprad, Slovakia, Czechoslovakia
1967
From the series Gypsies
Gelatin silver print

Josef Koudelka (Czech-French, b. 1938) Various images from the series 'Gypsies'

Josef Koudelka (Czech-French, b. 1938)
Images from the series Gypsies
Gelatin silver print
Book printed 1975; new Aperture edition 2011

Josef Koudelka (Czech-French, b. 1938)
Spain
1971
From the series Gypsies
Gelatin silver print

Aperture’s new edition of Koudelka: Gypsies (2011) rekindles the energy and astonishment of this foundational body of work by master photographer Josef Koudelka. Lavishly printed in a unique quadratone mix by artisanal printer Gerhard Steidl, it offers an expanded look at Cikáni (Czech for “gypsies” ) – 109 photographs of Roma society taken between 1962 and 1971 in then-Czechoslovakia (Bohemia, Moravia and Slovakia), Romania, Hungary, France and Spain. The design and edit for this volume revisits the artist’s original intention for the work, and is based on a maquette originally prepared in 1968 by Koudelka and graphic designer Milan Kopriva. Koudelka intended to publish the work in Prague, but was forced to flee Czechoslovakia, landing eventually in Paris. In 1975, Robert Delpire, Aperture and Koudelka collaborated to publish Gitans, la fin du voyage (Gypsies, in the English-language edition), a selection of 60 photographs taken in various Roma settlements around East Slovakia.

Josef Koudelka (Czech-French, b. 1938) 'Spain' 1971 'Slovakia (Rakúsy)' 1966, printed 1967

Josef Koudelka (Czech-French, b. 1938)
Slovakia (Rakúsy)
1966, printed 1967
From the series Gypsies
Gelatin silver print
The Art Institute of Chicago, restricted gift of Sandy and Robin Stuart and Photography Gala Fund
© Josef Koudelka/Magnum Photos. Courtesy of Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York.

The unforgettable photographs of acclaimed Czech-born, French photographer Josef Koudelka (b. 1938), including eyewitness images of the 1968 Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia, have not been shown at a major U.S. museum since 1988. These documentary works as well as extensive selections from the photographer’s work going back to 1958 – including his renowned series Gypsies, Exiles, and a variety of recent panoramic photographs – will feature in the major retrospective exhibition Josef Koudelka: Nationality Doubtful, from June 7 through September 14, 2014. It is the first museum show ever to emphasise Koudelka’s original vintage prints, period publications and unpublished study materials.

Josef Koudelka: Nationality Doubtful, which takes place in the Abbott (182-4) and Bucksbaum (188) galleries on the ground floor of the Modern Wing, draws primarily on Koudelka’s extensive holdings of his own work. For decades, the photographer has exhibited new and recent prints of images that have grown iconic through frequent exhibitions and reproductions, while holding back the earliest, vintage prints – until now. For example, over the years there have been more than one dozen solo exhibitions of Gypsies and numerous reprints of the book of the same name, which has appeared in two editions and six languages. Among the rarities that will be included in Josef Koudelka: Nationality Doubtful is the only surviving maquette for the first book version of Gypsies, which Koudelka had to leave unfinished at his exile from Prague in 1970.

Koudelka’s habit of revisiting past projects while simultaneously advancing into new territory will be squarely on view in Josef Koudelka: Nationality Doubtful. Twenty-two original photographs from the very first show of Gypsies, held in Prague in 1967, will be displayed for the first time since that date. In an adjacent room, a different selection from the series, printed at a different size and in another way, will also be shown. Similarly, extremely rare vintage prints of Invasion, made and circulated anonymously to the press directly following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, will be shown alongside much larger prints commissioned soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, when Koudelka returned from exile and had his first post-Soviet exhibition in Prague.

Also on display will be selections from his early experimental photographs and years of work with Prague theatre companies, made during the flowering of the Czech stage and cinema in the 1960s.

Koudelka was born in a small Moravian town in 1938 and moved to Prague, then the capital of Czechoslovakia, in the 1950s. He studied aeronautical engineering while practicing photography obsessively from 1958; in 1966, he turned full-time to a photographic career. Already in 1961, Koudelka had begun his most ambitious life project, Gypsies, for which he visited Roma populations for weeks at a time, principally in Slovakia. The rigorously humanist pictures became his calling card at home and internationally in the later 1960s after being published in the Swiss magazine Camera and shown to curators and photography representatives around Western Europe and the United States. Meanwhile, Koudelka’s Invasion photographs became famous after they appeared worldwide to commemorate the first anniversary of the events of August 1968. Worried about reprisals even though the images had been published anonymously, Koudelka chose to leave his country in May 1970.

In exile Koudelka adopted a semi-nomadic existence. He followed village festivals, pilgrimages, and Roma gatherings throughout the United Kingdom (his country of asylum in the 1970s), Spain, Italy, and France (his principal residence from 1981, and country of citizenship from 1986), photographing throughout the year and printing largely in wintertime. The world-famous photography agency Magnum, which had stewarded publication of the Invasion photographs, became Koudelka’s home base and as he says his “family.” Koudelka’s photographs of these years were gathered together in 1988 as Exiles, which will also be part of the exhibition.

Since the late 1980s Koudelka has made panoramic landscape photographs in areas massively shaped by industry, territorial conflict, or – in the case of the Mediterranean rim – the persistence of Classical civilisation. The final gallery of Josef Koudelka: Nationality Doubtful will showcase six of these mural-size black-and-white images, as well as three of the impressive accordion-fold books that Koudelka has made of them since 1989, some of which stretch to more than 100 feet long.

Despite his peripatetic life, Koudelka’s moving and stunning photographs have made him one of the most sought-after figures in print and at exhibition. Honoured with the French Prix Nadar (1978), the Hasselblad Prize (1992), and the International Center of Photography Infinity Award (2004), Koudelka remains today a leading member of Magnum.

A fully illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition, overseen closely by the artist and designed by the Czech firm Najbrt Studio. Edited by Matthew S. Witkovsky, the Richard and Ellen Sandor Chair and Curator of Photography at the Art Institute, the book provides extensive new information on Koudelka’s formative years in Prague during the thaw of the 1960s, as well as the first complete history of Gypsies, its twists and turns from 1961 through 2011. Amanda Maddox, assistant curator of photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum, which has co-organised the exhibition, provides fresh knowledge on Koudelka’s underrepresented decade in England and the UK. Stuart Alexander and Gilles Tiberghien, two longtime friends of the photographer, have contributed illuminating essays on Koudelka’s years in France and his fascination for panoramic landscape, respectively.

Press release from the Art Institute of Chicago

Josef Koudelka (Czech-French, b. 1938)
France
1987
Gelatin silver print

Josef Koudelka (Czech-French, b. 1938)
Lisbon, Portugal
1975
Gelatin silver print

Josef Koudelka (Czech-French, b. 1938) 'Lisbon, Portugal' 1975 'Ireland' 1972, printed 1987/88

Josef Koudelka (Czech-French, b. 1938)
Ireland
1972, printed 1987/88
From the series Exiles
Gelatin silver print
© Josef Koudelka/Magnum Photos. Courtesy of Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

Josef Koudelka (Czech-French, b. 1938)
Spain
1975
Gelatin silver print

Josef Koudelka (Czech-French, b. 1938)
St. Procopius Abbey graveyard, Lisle
Nd
Gelatin silver print

Josef Koudelka (Czech-French, b. 1938)
Poland
1958
Gelatin silver print
The Art Institute of Chicago, Photography Gala Fund and restricted gift of John A. Bross
© Josef Koudelka/Magnum Photos. Courtesy of Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

Drama was an important part of Koudelka’s early career: In a literal sense, because he worked for a theatre magazine in the ’60s, creating fantastically emotive images, but also because theatricality was, and still is, deeply embedded in the photographer’s world view. The week in 1968 when young Czechoslovakians stood up against invading Soviet forces occurred when he was working as a stage photographer, and so it became not only a tragedy but also a drama to be recorded. Likewise, his “Gypsies” series, created in the same period, is described by Koudelka as a “theater of the real.”

Through dynamic composition and juxtaposition, Koudelka’s work challenges us to differentiate between spectacle and reality, and while there is no positive indication that one is valued over the other, this is not at all the same as the disbelief in reality that is characteristic of postmodernism. As he puts it, “You form the world in your viewfinder, but at the same time the world forms you.”

In a sense, Koudelka does not want us to become too comfortable with his works as definitive statements. Instead, he crops bodies in images abruptly; we often see people cut off at the knees or ankles, visually and figuratively separating them from the Earth. In other works, disembodied arms and legs jut into the space of the photograph, making scenes surreal and reminding us that whatever coherency the composition has, we can never see the whole picture of what’s really going on. Even with the more poetic and purposefully aesthetic panorama prints of his later “Chaos” series – monumental testaments to the violence we enact both on the natural world and upon each other – through the pitted insistence of film grain and the lack of bright tones or highlights, we are not permitted redemption through “art” or the creation of “beautiful” objects.

In this respect Koudelka’s work, in its celebration of the imperfect, has more in common with the aesthetics of the haiku poet Basho, or the tea master Sen no Rikyu, than with the luscious highly detailed colour images that largely dominate the world of contemporary art photography.”

John L. Tran. “Josef Koudelka: the theatrics of life” on The Japan Times website 18 December 2013 [Online] Cited 15/06/2021. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Josef Koudelka (Czech-French, b. 1938)
Untitled (Student on tank, eyes crossed out)
1968
From the series Invasion
Gelatin silver print
© Josef Koudelka/Magnum Photos. Courtesy of Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

Josef Koudelka (Czech-French, b. 1938)
Invasion by Warsaw Pact troops in front of the Radio headquarters. Prague, Czechoslovakia
1968
From the series Invasion
Gelatin silver print
© Josef Koudelka/Magnum Photos. Courtesy of Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

Josef Koudelka (Czech-French, b. 1938) 'Untitled' Various images from the series 'Invasion'

Josef Koudelka (Czech-French, b. 1938)
Untitled
1968
Images from the series Invasion
Gelatin silver print

The Art Institute of Chicago
111 South Michigan Avenue
Chicago, Illinois 60603-6404
Phone: (312) 443-3600

Opening hours:
Thursday – Monday 10am – 11pm
Closed Tuesday and Wednesday

The Art Institute of Chicago website

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Exhibition: ‘The Sievers Project’ at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP), Fitzroy, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 13th June – 31st August, 2014

Artists: Jane Brown, Cameron Clarke, Zoë Croggon, Therese Keogh, Phuong Ngo, Meredith Turnbull, Wolfgang Sievers

Curators: Naomi Cass and Kyla McFarlane

Jane Brown (Australian, b. 1967) 'Triptych. The Paper Mill (former Amcor and APM site), Fairfield' 2014 (installation view)

Jane Brown (Australian, b. 1967)
Triptych. The Paper Mill (former Amcor and APM site), Fairfield
2014
3 panels of 9, 6 and 6 selenium toned, fibre-based, gelatin silver prints

Curated by CCP Director Naomi Cass and Kyla McFarlane, this intelligent exhibition features the work of six early career artists who respond in diverse ways to renowned Australian photographer Wolfgang Sievers (1913-2007). It was a joy to see again the large vintage silver gelatin, almost clinically composed photographs by Sievers. The light, tonality and stillness of the images make them seem mythic, modern and monumental.

Each artist offers a unique “take” on Sievers influence on Australian photography and design, including his interest in refugees and human rights issues and the representation of the dignity of labour (although the machine is more often represented in Sievers work with a distinct lack of human presence and the act of work itself).

My personal favourites were Phuong Ngo’s intimate silver gelatin photographs in four groups of sweat shop workers in Vietnam, people on boats coming to Australia, photographs of textile workers in Australia and photographs of his mother. Phuong Ngo’s shared stories of young Vietnamese refugees and the journeys taken by their mothers told through photographs is very moving, but only after you are told what the four bodies of images are about. Positioned in the small Gallery Four it was also difficult to associate this installation with the rest of the exhibition. Initially I thought it was a separate exhibition until the linkages were told, the light dawned, and the connections were made.

While Cameron Clarke’s photographs of Ford factory workers and machinery are meticulously lit and digitally observed, producing a strong body of work, it is Jane Brown’s gridded analogue triptych which steals the show (see photographs above and below). These are superbly rich and textured photographs, beautifully seen and resolved within the shifting mise-en-scène. Brown’s images kinetically flow from one image to another even as they are self contained within a modernist grid. In some instances the artist has used the same photograph within the triptych but cropped in a different manner, which pushes and pulls the viewer into a different perspective on the subject matter. This is highly intelligent art making that observes the self contained nature and monumentality of Sievers work and reworks it, lucidly commenting on the dis/integration of these spaces and industries in the present day.

This series of work is the best sequence of photographs I have seen this year and any institution worthy of their salt should snap up these works for their collection.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the Director Naomi Cass and the CCP for allowing me to publish the text and photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. All installation photographs © Marcus Bunyan 2014

Installation photographs of Jane Brown's 'Triptych. The Paper Mill (former Amcor and APM site), Fairfield' 2014 (installation view details) at the exhibition 'The Sievers Project' at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP)

Installation photographs of Jane Brown Triptych. The Paper Mill (former Amcor and APM site), Fairfield 2014 (details) at the exhibition The Sievers Project at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP)

Jane Brown (Australian, b. 1967) 'Staircase. The Paper Mill (former Amcor and APM site), Fairfield, 2014' 2014 from the exhibition 'The Sievers Project' at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP), Fitzroy, Melbourne, June- August, 2014

Jane Brown (Australian, b. 1967)
Staircase. The Paper Mill (former Amcor and APM site), Fairfield, 2014
2014
Fibre-based, gelatin silver print

Jane Brown (Australian, b. 1967) 'Mining machinery, Line of Lode Miners Memorial Complex, Broken Hill 2014-06-10' 2014 from the exhibition 'The Sievers Project' at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP), Fitzroy, Melbourne, June- August, 2014

Jane Brown (Australian, b. 1967)
Mining machinery, Line of Lode Miners Memorial Complex, Broken Hill 2014-06-10
2014
Brown toned, fibre-based, gelatin silver print
Courtesy the artist

Installation photograph of Jane Brown’s work at the exhibition The Sievers Project at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP)

Wolfgang Sievers (Australian born Germany, 1913-2007)
Gears for the Mining Industry, Vickers Ruwolt, Burnley, Victoria, 1967
1967
Gelatin silver photograph
49.6 x 39.3cm
National Library of Australia, Wolfgang Sievers Photographic Archive

Wolfgang Sievers (Australian born Germany, 1913-2007)
Sulphuric Acid Plant Electrolytic Zinc, Risoon, Tasmania, 1959
1959
Gelatin silver photograph

Installation photograph of the work of Meredith Turnbull (foreground) and Zoë Croggon (rear wall) at the exhibition The Sievers Project at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP)

Zoë Croggon (Australian, b. 1989)
John Holland Constructions, Ginninderra Bridge (after Wolfgang Sievers)
2014
Photocollage
70 cm x 86cm
Courtesy the artist and Daine Singer, Melbourne

Zoë Croggon (Australian, b. 1989)
Comalco Aluminium Used in the Construction of the National Gallery of Victoria [7] (after Wolfgang Sievers)
2014
Photocollage
Courtesy the artist and Daine Singer, Melbourne

Zoë Croggon (Australian, b. 1989)
Comalco Aluminium Used in the Construction of the National Gallery of Victoria [18] (after Wolfgang Sievers)
2014
Photocollage
Courtesy the artist and Daine Singer, Melbourne

Zoë Croggon (Australian, b. 1989)
Westgate Bridge (after Wolfgang Sievers)
2014
Photocollage
Courtesy the artist and Daine Singer, Melbourne

“Six early career artists, working in photography through to installation, have responded in diverse ways to renowned Australian photographer Wolfgang Sievers (1913-2007), icon of 20th century Australian photography. Sievers’ commercial practice exemplifies mid-century positivism and modernity, and the myth-making role of photography. As a German Jewish immigrant, he had a strong interest in refugees and human rights issues as well as an expressed commitment to representing the dignity of labour. The Sievers Project presents key historical works as a context for engaging the past through the present.

Photographers Jane Brown and Cameron Clarke have followed in his footsteps to industrial clients Sievers photographed and valorised, finding sites that are visually dynamic within industries now in decline. Through her intrepid, research-based practice, Therese Keogh has developed a materially-rich work from the starting point of a single, anomalous photograph Sievers took at the Roman Forum in 1953. Meredith Turnbull draws on his connections with Melbourne’s design community in the 1950s and 60s, including Gerard Herbst and Frederick Romberg. In Sievers’ photographs of industrial sewing machines and their machinists, Phuong Ngo finds shared stories of young Vietnamese refugees and the journeys taken by their mothers. Zoë Croggon positions fragments of Sievers’ iconic architectural photographs against found photographs of the human body in movement.”

Text from the CCP website

Foreword to the catalogue

The Sievers Project follows a number of exhibitions over the last five years where CCP has opened up a vista on contemporary practice by exhibiting early work by living artists such as Bill Henson, Kohei Yoshiyuki and Robert Rooney, as well as historical photography, alongside contemporary work. As a commissioning exhibition we have titled this a ‘project’ to point towards the year-long research period integral to the exhibition, capturing the curatorial gesture of inviting early career artists to engage with the past.

The Sievers Project represents a significant curatorial endeavour for CCP, the tale of which is recounted in the Introduction. It would simply not have taken place were it not for the willingness and generosity of Julian Burnside AO QC to participate, through allowing the artists research access to his Wolfgang Sievers collection and lending work from it for the exhibition, as well as contributing an essay for this catalogue.

I acknowledge the artists for setting out on this project and for returning with thoughtful and excellent work. It has been a pleasure to both engage with and exhibit the work of Jane Brown, Cameron Clarke, Zoë Croggon, Therese Keogh, Phuong Ngo and Meredith Turnbull.

The Sievers Project has been dignified by contributions by a number of experts and I wish to acknowledge Professor Helen Ennis, Australian National University School of Art who has also contributed a catalogue essay; Madeleine Say, Picture Librarian, Eve Sainsbury, Exhibitions Curator and Clare Williamson, Senior Exhibitions Curator, State Library of Victoria; Maggie Finch, Curator of Photography, National Gallery of Victoria and Professor Harriet Edquist and Kaye Ashton, Senior Coordinator, RMIT Design Archives, who all took time to speak about Sievers and share his work with the artists.

Opportunities to commission artists are relatively rare and funding through the inaugural Early Career Artist Commissions Grant from the Australia Council has enabled the project. CCP is pleased to acknowledge this recognition and support. We are delighted that Lovell Chen Architects & Heritage Consultants have provided further critical support to realise the project, for which we are grateful. We see a germane link between Lovell Chen and the premise of The Sievers Project.

The Besen Family Foundation are champions for enabling CCP to produce catalogues for selected exhibitions. I acknowledge the Foundation for their long-standing and generous engagement with CCP. We thank the National Library of Australia for providing permission to reproduce Sievers’ work in this catalogue.

The Sievers Project has provided a welcome opportunity for CCP to engage with colleagues in the fi eld of architecture and we are delighted to acknowledge a partnership with the Robin Boyd Foundation to present public programs. We are grateful to Tony Lee from the Foundation for his interest in the project.

Without doubt CCP’s ability to both present contemporary art well and look after artists is greatly enhanced through the longstanding and generous support of Tint Design and Sofi tel Melbourne on Collins. CCP is pleased to present a parallel exhibition of The Sievers Project at the 2014 Melbourne Art Fair and we thank the Melbourne Art Foundation for enabling CCP to bring the exhibition to broad new audiences. For the Art Fair exhibition we are also indebted to Christine Downer, previous CCP Board member and current supporter, for the loan of a major Sievers work.

The Sievers Project has been ably assisted by Philippa Brumby, curatorial intern. Co-curator Dr Kyla McFarlane and I thank Philippa for her wide-ranging skills over a substantial period of time. Lastly, I acknowledge Kyla for her excellent curatorial work and for the pleasure of collaborating with such a playful, dedicated and steely intellect.

Naomi Cass, Director, CCP

And what about his Legacy?

A response to this necessarily combines elements of certitude and speculation. Sievers himself was totally committed to ensuring his legacy as a photographer. He spent years meticulously cataloguing and documenting his work and was assiduous in placing as much of it as he could in major photography collections around the country – art galleries and libraries. The bulk of his archive, a staggering 65,000 negatives and prints, was acquired by the National Library where it has been digitised and is available online to users in perpetuity. But there is another aspect to his preoccupation with legacy that has troubled me over the years – his desire to control the readings of his work, to ensure that he ‘owned’ the contextualisation and interpretation of it. As I see it, some of the framing narratives he constructed were retrospective and are misleading because they are not borne out by the evidence, that is, by the photographs themselves. This is especially apparent in his insistence that the relationship between ‘man and machine’ was central to his industrial photography. In my assessment of his enormous archive, images that extol this interaction are actually relatively few in number. They are outweighed by thousands and thousands of other industrial scenes in which the worker is locked into the dreary, repetitive tasks associated with mass production, or is not present at all having been displaced by machines that are far more efficient than humans will ever be. In other words, the bulk of Sievers’ own photographs contradict his central tenet of the dignity of labour in the modern machine era. The most important aspect of his legacy is undoubtedly his photographs and the astonishingly vast, high quality body of architectural and industrial work he produced between 1938 and the early 1970s. My view is that his black and white photography is the best although he did not agree with me, arguing that his colour photography, with its expressive and dramatic qualities, was equally fine. For me, it is his black and white images that are visionary, their precision, clarity and drama embodying the belief in progress that underpinned modernity. I would also suggest Sievers’ legacy isn’t confined to his photography. As a man he cared deeply about the world and wanted it to be better. He was closely involved in the restoration of Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s buildings in Berlin in the 1990s and in the re-evaluation of his own father’s reputation (Professor Johannes Sievers was an expert on Schinkel and had used his young son’s photographs in his books on the architect in the 1930s). Wolfgang donated his photographs to fund-raising campaigns for human rights and remained a passionate antiwar activist until his death.

What would he have thought about this project?

I suspect that he would have been thrilled to know that his contribution to Australian life and photography is the touchstone for the six photographers involved in the project and that his work continues to be appreciated.

Professor Helen Ennis is Director of the Centre for Art History and Art Theory at ANU School of Art, Canberra.

Installation photographs of the exhibition 'The Sievers Project' at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP)

Installation photographs of the exhibition The Sievers Project at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP)

Installation photograph of the work of Therese Keogh (detail) in the exhibition The Sievers Project at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP)

Installation photograph of the work of Meredith Turnbull (detail) in the exhibition The Sievers Project at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP)

Therese Keogh. 'In the Forum Romanum (after Sievers)' 2013 (installation view)

Therese Keogh
In the Forum Romanum (after Sievers) (installation view)
2013
Graphite on paper
Courtesy the artist

Cameron Clarke
Loui Nedeski, Ford Motor Company, Geelong
2014
Archival inkjet print
50 x 63cm
Courtesy the artist

Cameron Clarke. 'Küsters Washer, Bruck Textiles, Wangaratta' 2014

Cameron Clarke
Küsters Washer, Bruck Textiles, Wangaratta (detail)
2014
Archival inkjet print

Cameron Clarke. 'Theis Dye Jets, Bruck Textiles, Wangaratta' 2014

Cameron Clarke
Theis Dye Jets, Bruck Textiles, Wangaratta (detail)
2014
Archival inkjet print

Phuong Ngo (Australian, b. 1983)
Untitled
2014
from the Mother Vietnam series
Inkjet print
Courtesy the artist

Centre for Contemporary Photography

As of 2025 CCP is without a permanent, dedicated space, and is instead presenting exhibitions and events in partnership with host institutions and organisations.

Centre for Contemporary Photography website

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Review / Interview: Simon Maidment, co-curator of the exhibition ‘David McDiarmid: When This You See Remember Me’ at NGV Australia, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 9th May – 31st August, 2014

Co-curators: Simon Maidment, NGV and Dr Sally Gray, guest curator

Unidentified photographer. 'David McDiarmid at his first one-man show 'Secret Love', Hogarth Gallery, Sydney, 1976' 1976 from the exhibition 'David McDiarmid: When This You See Remember Me' at NGV Australia, Melbourne, May- August, 2014

Unidentified photographer
David McDiarmid at his first one-man show ‘Secret Love’, Hogarth Gallery, Sydney, 1976
1976
Silver gelatin photograph
Dennis Altman Collection, Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives (ALGA)

Here’s winking at you, sweetie…

My apologies for the slightly out of focus nature of some of the installation photographs, but I had to take them quickly as I walked through the gallery with co-curator Simon Maidment. If you relied on the nine press images supplied by the NGV (bottom of the posting), you would have no idea of the complexity of this artists work nor would you possess an understanding of the scale, intimacy, brashness, beauty and confrontational visibility of the art. You would also have no idea what a stunning installation the NGV has produced to display the work.

Simply put, this is the best exhibition I have seen in Melbourne this year.

David McDiarmid – activist (the first gay person ever to be arrested in Australia) and multi-dimensional artist – proves the personal IS political AND influential. His work moves from early personal narratives through decorative to visually commanding and confrontational art. As homosexual identity transits from camp to gay to queer, McDiarmid deconstructs and redefines this identity using context as a FOIL for his art making. As Robert Nelson in his excellent review of the exhibition in The Age newspaper observes, “McDiarmid’s expression of the erotic is an act of protest as well as festivity. When McDiarmid began in full fervour, gay sex was not only reviled but illegal; and as he ended his career, homosexuality seemed to pass from the police to the undertaker. He began his expose of gay eroticism in the spirit of a demonstration and ended it as an act of compassion.”1

Well said. Homosexuality was illegal were McDairmid started making art and was deathly when he himself succumbed to the Grim Reaper. But during the journey that he took the key thing to remember is that McDiarmid never “passed” as something he was not. He was always up front, out there, doing his thing since he was first arrested in 1971. He was always pushing the boundaries, offering a wider perspective on social histories and political contexts. He questioned the marginalisation of minorities (Secret Love, 1976), the boundaries of self and society and examined taboo and transgression in a conservative society. He lived at the cutting edge of culture. Later, he waged a life and death struggle for HIV/AIDS funding, awareness and compassion with a fierce determination combined with sparkling wit, humour and sardonic aphorisms. Sexual politics and safe sex campaigns went hand in hand.

Of course, sexuality and sexual identity were at the core of his creativity. He explored the urban gay male world and the struggle for gay rights, sexual and emotional sensibilities and the cultural politics of HIV/AIDS. Early work was influenced by time spent in New York (where he knew Keith Haring) and San Francisco, where he experienced the development of the clone scene and the music of the clubs. His mode of construction has a lot in common with folk and women’s art (in particular patchwork and quilting) coupled with the use of contemporary materials (such as holographic foil).

McDiarmid’s later work becomes more symbolic and universal but still contains that cutting edge of the personal (DEMENTED QUEEN REMEMBERS HER NAME – forgets to die; POSITIVE QUEEN FEELS NEGATIVE – goes shopping). In the most amazing room of art I have seen this year, McDiarmid uses reflective cut and tiled holographic foils to create moving tribute and biting comment on the HIV/AIDS epidemic. In this darkened room the viewer is surrounded by tiles that “scintillate in spectral transience, changing their colours holographically according to your movement. The image is blunt and horny but also melancholy and scary; and similarly the medium impenetrable, deflecting the gaze and forcing you to change perspective.” (Robert Nelson)

But it’s more than that. You are surrounded by metallic flesh and embedded amongst the iridescence is both love and hate, life and death, winking eyes and holographic rainbow coloured skulls. Body language (1990, below) contains the names of McDairmid’s dead lovers woven into its fabric, a Swastika with the word AIDS for a head and the desire for the anus as a man pulls his arse cheeks apart. But here’s the rub – the tiny, puckered hole contains a holographic image of a winking eye, inviting you in, sharing the death/life joke with you. It’s a classic. In this room it feels as though you are surrounded by the fires of hell as the opalescence of the work changes from footstep to footstep, from positive to negative, from love to hate – and the pure beauty of the work is overwhelming. These are absolutely stunning works of art by any mark of the imagination, up there with the very best art ever made in Australia. His famous Rainbow Aphorisms series 1994 (below) are strong but they are are not a patch on the silver foil works. Less successful are the textile and costume designs, the weakest part of the exhibition.

One question springs to mind. Would his art have been as strong without the impetus of “death art” behind it? What would it have looked like?

I wonder which direction his art would have taken after his initial investigation of gay male identity had he not contracted HIV / AIDS and started making art about the disease. This strong focus gives the work the impetus and grunt it needed to move from the purely decorative and graphic, ney camp in some cases, to work with serious gravitas. In these later works McDiarmid lays it all on the line and just goes for it. I am so glad he did. They are powerful, concise, confrontational, beautiful, shimmering renditions of a soul living life to the full while he still had time.

It’s a pity the NGV has not advertised and promoted this exhibition more extensively. With a stunning catalogue, insightful research, amazing installation and world class art this is one exhibition you shouldn’t miss in Melbourne this winter.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

ART BLART: THE ONLY PLACE TO SEE INSTALLATION PHOTOGRAPHS OF THIS EXHIBITION ON THE WEB.

Many thankx to Simon for allowing me to take the installation photographs during our discussion and to the NGV for allowing me to publish them, along with the nine press images at the bottom of the posting. All installation photographs © Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Installation photograph of early works by David McDiarmid in the exhibition 'David McDiarmid: When This You See Remember Me' at NGV Australia, Melbourne

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-1987)
Installation photograph of early works including, in the case, Vest (c. 1972), hand-embroidered by McDiarmid with the words ‘sydney gay liberation’ as a gift for John Lee with photographs of McDiarmid and artist Peter Tully used as a wallpaper on the wall behind at the exhibition David McDiarmid: When This You See Remember Me at NGV Australia, Melbourne
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Installation photograph of early works including 'Secret Love art show, poster' (1976, far left), 'Secret Love' (1976, top centre left), 'Ken's Karate Klub' (1976, centre below left) and 'Tube of joy' (1976, above right) - all from the 'Secret Love' series, 1976 except KKK by David McDiarmid in the exhibition 'David McDiarmid: When This You See Remember Me' at NGV Australia, Melbourne

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-1987)
Installation photograph of early works including Secret Love art show, poster (1976, far left), Secret Love (1976, top centre left), Ken’s Karate Klub (1976, centre below left) and Tube of joy (1976, above right) – all from the Secret Love series, 1976 except KKK – at the exhibition David McDiarmid: When This You See Remember Me at NGV Australia, Melbourne
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

David McDiarmid. 'Secret Love' 1976 (installation view)

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-1987)
Secret Love (installation view)
1976
From the Secret Love series, 1976
Metallic paint, red fibre-tipped pen, coloured pencil, collage of cut photo-offset lithograph and red and black ink on graph paper
78 x 66cm
Collection of Paul Menotti and Bryce Kerr, Sydney
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

David McDiarmid. 'Secret Love' 1978 (installation view)

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-1987)
Secret Love (installation view)
1978
Collage of cut colour photo-offset lithographs on plastic, metal and plastic
135 x 142.8cm
Collection of Bernard Fitzgerald, Sydney
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

David McDiarmid. 'Secret Love' 1978 (installation view detail)

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-1987)
Secret Love (installation view detail)
1978
Collage of cut colour photo-offset lithographs on plastic, metal and plastic
135 x 142.8cm
Collection of Bernard Fitzgerald, Sydney
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Various artworks by David McDiarmid from 1978 (installation view) in the exhibition 'David McDiarmid: When This You See Remember Me' at NGV Australia, Melbourne

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-1987)
Installation view of various artworks from 1978 including Strangers in the night (top second left), Mardi Gras (top fourth left), Juicy fruit (top second right) and Real confessions (bottom second left)
All National Gallery of Victoria
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Bush Couture, Sydney (fashion house) Linda Jackson (designer) David McDiarmid (painter) 'Paua kimono' 1984 (installation view)

Bush Couture, Sydney (fashion house) (front)
Linda Jackson (designer)
David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-1987) (painter)
Paua kimono (installation view)
1984
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Interview with co-curator Simon Maidment

MB: First of all Simon, can I ask how long have you been at the National Gallery of Victoria and what brought you to the institution?

SM: I’ve been at the NGV since June 2013 and I joined because of a new vision for the gallery which is making contemporary art a priority, both in collecting practices in the exhibitions that the NGV holds. Recently, there has been a real push for change, precipitated by the appointment of Max Delany who is a friend and colleague I respect a lot and who has been really supportive of my career.

MB: So what was your background in terms of training?

SM: I studied as an artist and immediately before coming to the NGV I was undertaking my PhD at The University of Melbourne’s Victorian College of the Arts Centre for Ideas with Elizabeth Presa as one of my supervisors.

MB: And what new knowledge was your PhD based around?

SM: It investigated curatorial practices that could be thought of as context responsive, looking at artists who seek to enact some sort of social and/or political change.

MB: So this exhibition would be perfect to fit into that…

SM: Yes, indeed… so largely my background has been working with living artists. I have done a few shows in which I have worked with existing bodies of work, but I have done a lot of shows where I have been facilitating artists works. I started as an artist working in media arts – sound, video, projection and digital technologies – and often worked as a studio assistant for more senior artists, people like Sue Ford, Susan Fereday, Ian de Gruchy and my role with them became more and more about facilitation. Then the directorship of Westspace came up and I got that, and my focus turned more from collaboration and working as a studio assistant to facilitation. I became a curator because basically that is what I was doing.

MB: So can you tell me Simon, what was the lead in time for this exhibition? I know it was postponed and delayed at various times, what were the reasons for that?

SM: It was kind of before my time so I am not really sure, but there have been different curators at different times from the NGV involved with the project. So Ted Gott was involved with the exhibition, even before he began work at the NGV. Ted was involved with David’s estate with Sally Gray, my co-curator, right from the start, so he’s been an advisor to Sally right from the start of this long journey. I think the initial discussion about the show was with Ted, and then when Jason Smith was in my position he was involved in this project. When I was talking with Sally the very first discussions about holding the exhibition at the NGV was maybe 15 years ago…

MB: So to finally get it here and up on the walls…

SM: So when I started 11 months ago there was really very little in place. So Max Delany and Sally started a conversation about working towards this show probably about 14 months ago. When Tony Ellwood started he was like, “We’re doing this show.” He’s a big fan of David McDiarmid. He was very familiar with his work so I think that helped speed things along and he really facilitated getting this exhibition done. It was scheduled for 2011.

MB: To get it together from start to finish in 14 months is pretty amazing really…

SM: It was a lot of work but bearing in mind how familiar Sally is with the material we kind of had a real head start.

MB: But then you have to pull it all together from lenders and institutions that hold works and that would have been very intensive. Then to design it all and to make it look like it does. It looks fantastic! Everyone at the opening was just smiling and having a good time, looking at the work, remembering.

SM: I knew the work en masse would blow people away.

MB: Reading the catalogue, you can see that David comes from a period where there was a ground swell of social movements, which was almost like one movement. Everybody went to everyone else’s rallies and they all protested together. David McDiarmid was the very first gay person to get arrested in Australia and at the moment I am digitally restoring the image of him being marched away by two policemen at the ABC protest in Sydney. It is so degraded it will take a long time to restore but it is a really important image. Out of that there comes a real social conscience, fighting for your rights and freedom. So leading on from that, when you think about having this exhibition here now (after Ted Gott’s seminal exhibition Don’t Leave Me This Way: Art in the Age of AIDS at the National Gallery of Australia in 1994), you observe that marginalised voices rarely enter institutional centres of art, rarely enter the mainstream art. It’s usually ARI’s or small public galleries. Not that the artist is gay (because they are just artists) but that the CONTENT addresses gay issues – which is why it’s so fantastic to see this exhibition here at the NGV.

So were there any barriers here to doing David’s show?

SM: No, not really. I think one of the really important things to note is that they show would not have really happened without the large gift from the estate. Becoming the key holder and custodian of David McDiarmid’s work added extra emphasis and responsibility about doing the right thing. At that point the organisation is implicated in that legacy and somehow we have to disseminate the work out into the community.

MB: It is quite a confronting show, how do you think the general public will respond to it?

SM: I have done a couple of tours of people through the exhibition, members and other, and one of the things that has been surprising to me, in a way, which has only become apparent when I have been describing the show in which David makes work in response to particular social and political conditions and contexts… is how different things are. AIDS is now not a terminal illness. To speak to a younger generation than even myself, they have no idea about dying from lack of a viable treatment, of AIDS being a death sentence.

MB: Last night I had a cry for all the people I had loved and lost. But it’s not just the public coming in to see this exhibition, it’s young gay men who don’t ever see anybody ill, don’t understand about the side effects of taking the medication, about what living with HIV is like. They don’t understand the struggle that went on for them to live as they do now. Do you think they will engage with that?

SM: We have structured the show in a way that teases those things out. One of the aspects of McDiarmid as a figure that I find very interesting is that, in 20 short years of practice, he spanned incredible key moments and periods of change in broader society and also within gay society. The legal, medical, institutional change… and really looking at that 20 years is looking at a period of immense social change. The narrative of the exhibition is then to reflect on that broader cultural shift through the biography of one person.

MB: It’s interesting when I looked at the show, when you start making work as an artist it’s always about personal narratives – lovers, friends, places – which then widens out into more universal concerns. You can see in David’s early work him scribbling, writing and really intimately notating his world, investigating his self and his relations to the world around him. And then to take that insight and then to mould it into these reflective images into the Rainbow Aphorisms at the end is an incredible journey. Stephen Alkins was saying to be last night that even the last works were still grounded in this humorous, ironic look at life. He as a really important multimedia artist when you actually study the work.

SM: Just to pick up on one aspect that you are mentioning, and going back into my own background, one of things that Max Delany and I have been talking about that has in some ways illuminated this project is that, in the 1970s and 80s that saying ‘The personal is political’, is very important. David’s work is talking very much about the political as his own biography. Perhaps there is a shift in his later work to a more symbolic realm, and I would argue that nowadays artists working in a political and social context and to affect social change is not so much now as a personal identity – a woman, a black man, a gay man – it’s not necessarily about individual identities anymore, in some ways those battles seem to have been won within Western society. Actually for artists now in this context it’s more about neo-liberalism or capitalism. So it tends to be more on an institutional level and people tackling that in a much more symbolic realm. For instance I am thinking of such people as Jeremy Deller, an English artist who engages with British history and in particular his Battle of Orgreave, a reenactment of the actual Battle of Orgreave which occurred during the UK miners’ strike in 1984.

MB: People like Tom Nicholson in Australia, then, who did the Monument for the flooding of Royal Park (2008-2010), a proposition for the scattering of nardoo sporocarp throughout Royal Park, a vast Park in Melbourne’s inner north which was Burke and Wills departure point, now commemorated by a small cairn.

SM: Exactly. Artists like Tom are working in very propositional ways about memory, social imagination, monuments and memorialisation. All those kind of things are very much within a symbolic realm now. McDiarmid’s work fills the personal and then moves into the symbolic.

MB: But then Stephen Alkins said it was always personal to David, still based in the personal. He was very loyal to his friends, he was a very quiet person, very loving person with great energy. But he didn’t suffer fools gladly, and I think that this comes out of that culture of standing up for yourself and being strong because of the stuff we had to go through to where we are today. Seeing this exhibition actually shows you that difference and what we had to fight for.

SM: There’s a real drive there in that last room. He made so much work, across so much media, at the end of his life – that impending death drive was the source of so much creativity.

MB: McDiarmid was heavily influenced by international artists such as Keith Haring but he never really showed overseas. What do you think about that diaspora, that going overseas and then returning home to then begin exhibiting?

SM: Well the earlier work is, as you say, heavily influenced by the New York scene, the clone scene that was prevalent in the 80s – San Francisco, New York – so he’s definitely channelling those places… Interestingly, unlike many other artists, his art practice is nearly all Australian.

MB: Finally, what do you think is is his legacy in terms of his standing as an artist?

SM: In the last ten years of his life he was heavily involved as a community artist. He was incredibly busy and incredibly involved with things like the organisation of the Sydney Gay Mardi Gras and the design of the posters and floats. He was director of Mardi Gras from 1988-90 and he worked up float designs for various groups. You really get a sense of, as you said, of the solitary work of an artist and a real commitment to that work. In terms of his legacy as an artist, I don’t think that we will know until the exhibition is over. His work, such as the Rainbow Aphorisms, has been distributed widely but not really in an art context, and certainly not in a museum show such as this. People have not had the opportunity to visualise his work as a whole body of work until now.

MB: That brings me to the international context. The Keith Haring Foundation relentlessly promotes his work through books, exhibitions and conferences throughout the world. Do you think that you will start promoting his work overseas to other galleries and getting it into international exhibitions?

SM: I think the book will open a lot of doors. Because his work reproduces so well, because his writing is so interesting there is a broad range of voices for the scholars to investigate. But I think because the work reproduces so beautifully that will be hugely important. One of the aspects that the book will hopefully communicate to a younger audience is that of an infected muscular, sexually active, virile man not an emaciated artist… but to understand that and where that came from, and how radical that was at the time. I think that is one of the legacies that people will take away from David’s work. He is one of the artists that has been really instrumental in redefining that imaginary representation of a dying gay man.

MB: I remember seeing those + and – posters in gay sex venues, and thinking to myself, wow those are so amazing, who did those!

SM: Yes, those posters are about not closing down, about always been open to possibilities.

MB: Thank you so much Simon for taking the time to talk to me, it’s been great.

SM: Always a pleasure.

Dr Marcus Bunyan with Simon Maidment for Art Blart, June 2014

Simon Maidment is Curator of Contemporary Art at the NGV.

Installation view by David McDiarmid of various Sydney party posters with a black and white background wallpaper of David and the HIV Living group's 'Day of the dead skeleton for the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, 1992' in the exhibition 'David McDiarmid: When This You See Remember Me' at NGV Australia, Melbourne

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-1987)
Installation views of various Sydney party posters with a black and white background wallpaper of David and the HIV Living group’s Day of the dead skeleton for the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, 1992 (commissioned by the AIDS Council of NSW) at the exhibition David McDiarmid: When This You See Remember Me at NGV Australia, Melbourne
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-1987) 'Sleaze Ball, Horden Pavilion, 12 October 1985' 1985 (installation view)

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-1987)
Sleaze Ball, Horden Pavilion, 12 October 1985 (installation view)
1985
Screenprint printed in black and gold ink
91.2 x 65cm (sheet)
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Gift of the artist, 1991
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-1987) 'So I walked into the theatre' 1984-1985 (installation view)

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-1987)
So I walked into the theatre (installation view)
1984-1985
Synthetic polymer paint, iron-on transfer, and cotton thread on cotton
Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne
Gift of the Estate of David McDiarmid, 1998
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-1987)
So I walked into the theatre (installation view detail)
1984-1985
Synthetic polymer paint, iron-on transfer, and cotton thread on cotton
Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne
Gift of the Estate of David McDiarmid, 1998
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

So I walked into the

theatre and lit a cigarette

I looked around. Then I

saw Tony. He lives in

Brooklyn and has a nice

beard and greasy hair.

He didn’t acknowledge

me, but I expected that.

I’d already made it with

him several times before

and each time, he pretended

was the first. He had

even told me his name

once, and that he lived

with a lover. We always

have great sex, but he doesn’t

want me to do anything

but stand there. He has

an incredible mouth…

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-1987) 'Disco kwilt' c. 1980 (installation view)

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-1987)
Disco kwilt (installation view)
c. 1980
Artbank collection
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of works by David McDiarmid, mainly from the series 'Kiss of Light', 1990-1992 including at left 'Mighty real' 1991 from the exhibition 'David McDiarmid: When This You See Remember Me' at NGV Australia, Melbourne

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-1987)
Installation view of works from the series Kiss of Light, 1990-1992 including at left Mighty real 1991 with Kiss of Light 1990 right at the exhibition David McDiarmid: When This You See Remember Me at NGV Australia, Melbourne
Collage of cut self-adhesive holographic film on enamel paint on plywood
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-1987) 'Mighty real' (detail) 1991 (installation view detail)

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-1987)
Mighty real (installation view detail)
1991
From the Kiss of light series 1990-1992
Collage of cut self-adhesive holographic film on enamel paint on plywood
144.5 x 123.6cm
Collection of Bernard Fitzgerald, Sydney
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Detail of one of David McDiarmid’s holographic film art works showing the winking eyes
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-1987) 'Body language' 1990 (installation view)

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-1987)
Body language (installation view)
1990
From the Kiss of light series 1990-1992
Collage of cut self-adhesive holographic film on enamel paint on plywood
152.4 x 121.8cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

There is a holographic winking eye in the arsehole of this work

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-1987) 'Thinking of you' 1990 (installation view detail)

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-1987)
Thinking of you (installation view detail)
1990
Collage of cut self-adhesive holographic film on enamel paint on plywood
140 x 120cm
Collection of Steven Alkins, Mullumbimby, New South Wales
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation photograph of the last room in the exhibition 'David McDiarmid: When This You See Remember Me' at NGV Australia, Melbourne showing, at left on the wall, work from the 'Rainbow Aphorisms' series 1994 with in front 'Totem works' 1992-1995

Installation photograph of the last room showing, at left on the wall, work from the Rainbow Aphorisms series 1994 with in front Totem works 1992-1995 at the exhibition David McDiarmid: When This You See Remember Me at NGV Australia, Melbourne
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-1987) 'Standard bold condensed' 1994 (installation view)

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-1987)
Standard bold condensed (installation view)
1994
Screenprint on mylar on colour laser print
255.7 x 242.3cm (overall)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gift of the Estate of David McDiarmid, 1998
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Peter Tully (Australian, 1947-1992), David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-1987), Ron Smith (Australian, b. 1950s) 'Totem works' 1992-1995 (installation view)

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-1987)
Works from the Rainbow Aphorisms series (installation views)
1994, printed 2014
Computer generated colour inkjet prints
149.1 x 110cm (image and sheet each)
Collection of the McDiarmid Estate, Sydney
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Peter Tully (Australian, 1947-1992)

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-1987)
Lived in United States 1979-1987

Ron Smith (Australian, b. 1950s)
Totem works
1992-1995
Anodised aluminium, found objects (installation)
Dimensions variable
Collection of Ron Smith, Woonona, New South Wales

Installation photograph of the last room showing, at right on the wall, work from the Rainbow Aphorisms series 1994 with in front Totem works 1992-1995, then at left on the wall Pictograms 1995 at the exhibition David McDiarmid: When This You See Remember Me at NGV Australia, Melbourne
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-1987) 'Pictograms' 1995 (installation view)

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-1987)
Pictograms
1995
Vinyl and reflective plastic on aluminium
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

“I never saw art as being a safe thing. I know that exists but that’s not something that involves me.”

~ David McDiarmid, 1993

The vibrant, provocative and pioneering work of leading Australian artist, designer and gay activist David McDiarmid will be presented in a retrospective exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria. Defying classification, McDiarmid’s work encompasses the complex and interconnected histories of art, craft, fashion, music, sex, gay liberation and identity politics.

David McDiarmid: When This You See Remember Me will bring together more than 200 works, including the artist’s early gay liberation work; New York graffiti and disco quilts; fashion collaborations with Linda Jackson; his pioneering Rainbow aphorisms and Gothic aphorisms digital work; material he produced as Sydney Mardi Gras Artistic Director; posters created for the AIDS Council of NSW; and, his significant and highly influential international campaigns developed in the context of AIDS, sexual politics and safe sex in the 1990s.

Tony Ellwood, Director, NGV, said, “The NGV is pleased to be staging this retrospective of an artist whose work had enormous impact on both the gay liberation movement and the international dialogue around AIDS, and whose clear messages of liberation, equality and emancipation continue to resonate today. David McDiarmid: When This You See Remember Me explores the social history, as well as political and art historical context, that informed McDiarmid’s work, which inspires through its courage, poetry, exuberance and cultural impact.”

Defying classification, the work of David McDiarmid encompasses the complex and interconnected histories of art, craft, fashion, music, sex, gay liberation and identity politics; happily residing in the spaces between high and low art, popular culture and community engagement. At once kaleidoscopic, celebratory and darkly humorous in tone, the artist’s idiosyncratic, highly personal and at times, confessional work highlights the redefinition and deconstruction of identities – “from camp to gay to queer” – drawing on the experiences of a life intensely lived in Melbourne, Sydney and New York. Charting the shifts in politics and individual and community expression that unfold across the decades of the 1970s, 80s and 90s, this exhibition also reveals McDiarmid’s artistic and grassroots political response to the impact of HIV/AIDS during the 1980s and beyond, for which he is best known internationally.

Recognising the cultural climate in which the artist worked, including the burgeoning of the gay rights movement, and a decade later, the advent of the AIDS crisis, the playful and provocative nature of McDiarmid’s work was critically related to changes that were occurring throughout this time to sexual identity and politics in Australia.

Dr Sally Gray, Guest Curator, said, “McDiarmid’s work speaks so eloquently of its time yet its importance and relevance endures today. David McDiarmid: When This You See Remember Me is the first exhibition in which the full scope of McDiarmid’s creative oeuvre is on display and is the culmination of painstaking research, with the support of many of his collaborators, friends and fans.”

David McDiarmid: When This You See Remember Me will coincide with the 20th International AIDS Conference in Melbourne in July 2014.

This exhibition includes coarse language and sexual content. Press release from the NGV

William Yang (Australian, b. 1943) 'Artist David McDiarmid' May 1995

William Yang (Australian, b. 1943)
Artist David McDiarmid photographed at the Art Gallery of New South Wales adjacent to his giant ‘Q’ artwork on the gallery’s facade for ‘Perspecta’ May, 1995
1995
© Reproduced with permission of William Yang

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-1987)
Judy
1976
From the Secret love series 1976
Metallic paint, red fibre-tipped pen, cut photo-offset lithograph and red and black ink on graph paper
78.0 x 66.0cm
Collection of Paul Menotti and Bryce Kerr, Sydney
© Reproduced with the permission of the David McDiarmid estate

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-1987) 'Strangers in the night' 1978 (installation view)

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-1987)
Strangers in the night (installation view)
1978
Collage of cut coloured paper and photocopy on mulberry paper
62.6 x 50.7cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Proposed acquisition
© Reproduced with the permission of the David McDiarmid estate

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-1987)
Hand and heart
1984
Synthetic polymer paint on cotton
250.0 x 230.0cm
Powerhouse Museum, Sydney
Gift of the Estate of the late David McDiarmid, 1998
© Reproduced with the permission of the David McDiarmid estate

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-1987)
Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, poster
1989-1990
Colour photo-offset lithograph
69 x 49cm
Powerhouse Museum, Sydney
Gift of Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras Limited, 1995
© Reproduced with the permission of the David McDiarmid estate

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-1987)
Untitled
1990-1995
Self-adhesive holographic film and self-adhesive colour plastic on plastic
122.7 x 122.7cm
Collection of Bernard Fitzgerald, Sydney
© Reproduced with the permission of the David McDiarmid estate

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-1987)
Discard after use
1990
From the Kiss of light series 1990-1992
Collage of self-adhesive holographic film on enamel paint on plywood
61.2 x 61.2cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gift from the Estate of David McDiarmid, 1998
© Reproduced with the permission of the David McDiarmid estate

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-1987)
I want a future that lives up to my past
From the Rainbow aphorisms series 1994, printed 2014
Computer generated colour inkjet prints
149.1 x 110.0cm
Collection of the McDiarmid Estate, Sydney
© Reproduced with the permission of the David McDiarmid estate

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-1987)
Q
From the Rainbow aphorisms series 1994, printed 2014
Computer generated colour inkjet prints
149.1 x 110.0cm
Collection of the McDiarmid Estate, Sydney
© Reproduced with the permission of the David McDiarmid estate

The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia
Federation Square
Corner of Russell and  Flinders Streets, Melbourne

Opening hours:
Daily 10am – 5pm

National Gallery of Victoria website

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Review: ‘Sue Ford’ at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 17th April – 24th August, 2014

Curator: Maggie Finch, Curator of Photography at the NGV

Sue Ford (Australia, 1943-2009) 'Discussions between Bob Hawke and Galarrwuy Yunupingu' 1988, printed 2014 from the exhibition 'Sue Ford' at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne, April - August, 2014

Sue Ford (Australia, 1943-2009)
Discussions between Bob Hawke and Galarrwuy Yunupingu
1988, printed 2014
Gelatin silver photograph
51 x 61cm
Sue Ford Archive, Melbourne
© Sue Ford Archive, Melbourne

This is a hugely disappointing exhibition of the work of Sue Ford at NGV Australia, Melbourne. The artist deserved better.

There is no doubting the importance of Ford’s early black and white photographs. Images of this type had not been seen in Australia before, and looking back now it is hard to appreciate the impact that the Time series (1962-74), Self-portrait with camera (1960-2006) and images of women had on the photographic scene at the time. These muscular, robust photographs, while not possessing great technical skill, are rightly acknowledged as seminal images in the history of photography in Australia. I cannot praise them highly enough.

However, this exhibition and the important series in it have been ruined by a disastrous hang. The first room is spoiled by an ugly, cheap looking round central installation which is covered by pinned images from the much later series Somewhere in France, 1917 (1995, below) inside of which is projected the video Faces 1976-96 (below). This huge installation simply destroys the sensitivity, size and presence of the small silver gelatin works, overpowering them with repetitive images of a much larger scale.

The second room features a haphazard disposition of Ford’s important portraits of women from her book A Sixtieth of a Second: Portraits of Women 1961-1981, the arrangement of which seems to have no rhyme or reason. It’s all downhill from there. It doesn’t help that Ford’s work looses focus after the initial succinct statements as she begins to work with experimental photographic techniques – photograms, multiple exposures and mirroring of negatives – and, starting in the mid-1980s, branches out into research of Indigenous histories which only results in serviceable photographs at best.

What is more disturbing is how later work such as the powerful series Shadow portraits (1994, below) are displayed. I remember seeing this series many years ago at the NGV in St Kilda Road and being bowled over by their size and formal presence; here in a darkened room they are displayed piecemeal and all impact and import is lost. The whole room should have been dedicated to this series, surrounding you with scans of nineteenth-century cartes-de-visite, the empty silhouettes filled with magical photograms of indigenous Australian fauna. That would have been something.

Finally, the exhibition shows 1990s works such as Bima, Brenda and the Madonna (1992-93), Video land (Kakadu river tour) (1994) and Yellowcake (1991) which continue Ford’s interest in social and political issues relating to the Australian landscape. Featuring still images of video shot from a tv screen these fractured, distorted and oversaturated images are printed as colour photocopies and then displayed as fragmented images in a rigid grid system pinned to the wall. These are ugly works. They contain too many elements, the colour, distortion, and bounding box of the tv screen playing badly against the too rigid grid system of the colour photocopies. Ford’s work seems to tail off into something unnatural, a dissolution of identity that really has nothing constructive to say.

Perhaps these works do parallel the physical, ecological and spiritual gulf that Ford felt existed between many non-indigenous urban Australians but I don’t really feel that connection in the work and her investigation doesn’t lead to good art. If you want to see the most excellent use of colour, collage, montage, weaving and layering you only have to go up a level at NGV Australia to look at the David McDairmid exhibition to see how it should be done… it’s like night and day, one artist experimenting for abstraction’s sake, and the other really knowing their medium, what they are doing and what narrative / message they want to communicate.

What we cannot take away from Sue Ford is the utmost importance of those feminist images of strong, independent women and the precious, jewel-like, time travelling portrait works. For Ford the process of taking, looking at and using photographs was implicitly connected to a sense of time, time in flux in which the faces of a doubled past (1962-74, 1976-96) are reanimated in the present allowing for a consideration of the effects of ageing and change. Ultimately, these are conceptual works that have great power and integrity.

Unfortunately, the itsy bitsy design of this exhibition doesn’t allow any of the work to shine. It is not up to scratch and not worthy of the artist. Did the NGV run out of time, money and inspiration or where there other factors going on behind the scenes, such as access to the work?

I don’t know the answers to these questions, but when you put this exhibition side by side with the 2011 Time Machine: Sue Ford at the Monash Gallery of Art, there is no comparison as to which better conveys the importance of Ford’s work in the history of Australian photography.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

For some time I have been thinking about the camera itself. Trying to explore its particular UNIQUENESS, coming to terms with the fact that I had been trying to ignore for some years, that the camera is actually a MACHINE. The machine has an enormous power easily abused. Man seems to misuse his machines continuously, with disastrous results for this century. In Time series I tried to use the camera as objectively as possible. It was a time machine. For me it was an amazing experience. It wasn’t until I placed the photograph of the younger face beside the recent photograph that I could fully appreciate the change. The camera showed me with absolute clarity something I could only just perceive with my naked eye.

Sue Ford 1974

Sue Ford (Australia, 1943-2009) 'Ross', 1964; 'Ross', 1974 1964-1974, printed 1974 from the exhibition 'Sue Ford' at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne, April - August, 2014

Sue Ford (Australia 1943-2009)
Ross, 1964; Ross, 1974
1964-1974, printed 1974
From the Time series 1962-1974
Gelatin silver photograph
(a-b) 11.1 x 20.1cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased with the assistance of the Visual Arts Board and the KODAK (Australasia) PTY LTD Fund, 1974 (PH171.a-b-1974)
© Sue Ford Archive, Melbourne

Sue Ford (Australia, 1943-2009)
Annette, 1962; Annette, 1974
1962-1974, printed 1974
From the Time series 1962-1974
Gelatin silver photograph
11.1 x 20.1cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased with the assistance of the Visual Arts Board and the KODAK (Australasia) Pty Ltd Fund, 1974 (PH170.a-b-1974)
© Sue Ford Archive, Melbourne

Sue Ford (Australia, 1943-2009)
No title (Photogram of two hands and garden path)
c. 1970
Gelatin silver photogram
27.6 x 34.7cm irreg. (image and sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gerstl Bequest, 2000
© Sue Ford Archive, Melbourne

Sue Ford (Australia, 1943-2009)
Vietnam: the six o’clock news
c. 1970
Collage of cut gelatin silver photograph on offset-photo lithograph
19.1 x 24.3cm (image and sheet)
Sue Ford Archive, Melbourne
© Sue Ford Archive, Melbourne

Sue Ford (Australia 1943-2009)
Lyn and Carol
1961, printed 1988
Gelatin silver photograph
34.1 x 34.2cm
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
Purchased 1988 (372.1988)
© Sue Ford Archive, Melbourne

“The ground-breaking work of Australian photographer and filmmaker Sue Ford will be explored in a major retrospective opening at the National Gallery of Victoria on 17 April. One of the most important practitioners to emerge in the wave of 1970s feminist photographers, Ford is recognised for her inventive and unique approaches to the medium and passionate engagement with feminism and gender issues, contemporary politics and the histories of Australia and its Indigenous people.

The exhibition will bring together more than 150 photographs, digital prints, collages and films spanning the five decades of Ford’s career, as well as important archival materials and, poignantly, several unseen works that the artist was working on at the time of her death in 2009.

Tony Ellwood, Director, NGV, said, “Sue Ford has a long and significant history with the National Gallery of Victoria; she was the first Australian photographer to hold a solo exhibition at the Gallery with her renowned Time Series in 1974, and we have been honoured to present her work many times since. It is appropriate, then, that the NGV presents this retrospective exhibition surveying and celebrating her artistic work and life.”

Ford’s Time Series 1962-1974 is regarded as a key moment in Australian photography. In this work, black-and-white double portraits of Ford’s friends and associates were taken around ten years apart and displayed side by side. Some sitters were photographed for a third and even fourth time, producing a remarkable dialogue on the passage of time, identity and personal histories. The entirety of the Time Series will be on display in the exhibition, along with Ford’s long-term project Self-portrait with camera, an extraordinary series of 47 self-portraits taken between 1960 and 2006.

The exhibition will feature Ford’s social documentary and portraiture work; both political and personal, these images reveal intimate depictions of life in inner-city Melbourne along with powerful records of critical political and social milestones including the 1988 Barunga Festival in the Northern Territory. Her prolific output also allows for the exhibition to survey the development of her experimentation with photographic, film, printing and multimedia techniques since the 1960s, such as the photogram, multiple exposures and mirroring of negatives.”

Press release from the NGV website

Sue Ford (Australia, 1943-2009)
Somewhere in France, 1917
1999
Digital plan prints on paper
(1-54) 219.6 x 901.8cm (overall) (installation)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1999 (1999.96.1-54)
© Sue Ford Archive, Melbourne

Sue Ford (Australia 1943-2009)
Shadow portraits
1994
Colour photocopies (a-bbbb)
166.5 x 594.0cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1995 (1995.614.a-bbbb)
© Sue Ford Archive, Melbourne

Sue Ford (Australia 1943-2009)
Jim, 1964; Jim, 1969; Jim 1974; Jim 1979
1964-1979, printed 2014
From the Time series II 1962-1982
Gelatin silver photographs
(a-d) 11.1 x 8.2cm (each)
Sue Ford Archive, Melbourne
© Sue Ford Archive, Melbourne

Sue Ford (Australia 1943-2009) 'Fabian', 1966; 'Fabian', 1974; 'Fabian', 1980 1966-80, printed 1982

Sue Ford (Australia 1943-2009)
Fabian, 1966; Fabian, 1974; Fabian, 1980
1966-1980, printed 1982
From the Time series II 1962-1982
Gelatin silver photographs
(a) 11.0 x 7.6cm, (b) 11.8 x 8.4cm, (c) 11.3 x 8.2cm
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
Purchased with funds provided by the Art Gallery Society of New South Wales Contempo Group 2013 (265.1996)
© Sue Ford Archive, Melbourne

Sue Ford (Australia 1943-2009)
Self-portrait 1961
1961, printed 2011
Type C photograph
26.0 x 19.9cm
Sue Ford Archive, Melbourne
© Sue Ford Archive, Melbourne

Sue Ford (Australia 1943-2009)
Self-portrait 1974
1974, printed 2011
Selenium-toned gelatin silver photograph
19.9 x 18.0cm
Sue Ford Archive, Melbourne
© Sue Ford Archive, Melbourne

Sue Ford (Australia 1943-2009)
Self-portrait 1986
1986
Gelatin silver photograph
8.4 x 6.5cm
Sue Ford Archive, Melbourne
© Sue Ford Archive, Melbourne

Sue Ford (Australia 1943-2009)
Dissolution
2007
From the Last Light series 2007
Colour lightjet print
112 x 142cm
Sue Ford Archive, Melbourne
© Sue Ford Archive, Melbourne

Sue Ford (Australia 1943-2009)
Bima, Brenda and the Madonna
1992-1993
Colour laser prints
Sue Ford Archive, Melbourne

Sue Ford (Australia 1943-2009) 'Video land (Kakadu river tour)' 1992-1993 (detail)

Sue Ford (Australia 1943-2009)
Video land (Kakadu river tour) (detail)
1992-1993
Colour laser prints
Sue Ford Archive, Melbourne

The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia
Federation Square
Corner of Russell and  Flinders Streets, Melbourne

Opening hours:
Daily 10am – 5pm

National Gallery of Victoria website

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Exhibition: ‘Art and Alchemy. The Mystery of Transformation’ at the Stiftung Museum Kunstpalast (SMKP), Düsseldorf, Germany

Exhibition dates: 5th April – 10th August, 2014

Curators: Dedo von Kerssenbrock-Krosigk and Beat Wismer, with additional curatorial input from Anita Hachmann for the contemporary section

Theodor Galle nach Jan van der Straet (Stradanus) (Belgium, 1523-1605) 'Destillierlabor' (from the series "Nova reperta") c. 1589 - c. 1593 from the exhibition 'Art and Alchemy. The Mystery of Transformation' at the Stiftung Museum Kunstpalast (SMKP), Düsseldorf, Germany, April - August, 2014

Theodor Galle nach Jan van der Straet (Stradanus) (Belgium, 1523-1605)
Destillierlabor
c. 1589 – c. 1593
From the series Nova reperta
Stiftung Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf
Photo: Horst Kolberg, Neuss

Since I have 7 alchemy symbols tattooed on my right bicep in a vertical line to represent the 7 chakras, I thought this was a suitable exhibition for a posting.

I love anything alchemical, magical, spiritual – in art and in life. I have just had a couple of snowflakes tattooed on my forearms, one blue / green and the red / orange for an ice / fire combination. Each snowflake is unique and ephemeral, here and gone in the blink of an eye, just like we are. That is their, and our, magic.

The photographer Minor White said it is not just the images that matter, but the space between them that causes an ice / fire frisson. When looking at an exhibition I note how images play off of each other – in pairs, sequences and across the gallery space. It is a relatively simple thing for a photographer to take one good image, more difficult to put a pair of images together that actually says something, but when you get to a sequence of images (as in MW) or a body of work, this is were a lot of artists wane. The intertextual narrative, one woven from the imagination of the artist, does not resolve itself into a satisfying, stimulating whole. How many exhibitions do I see that have some good images but do not access the magic of the music.

Further, we must also remember that in Psychology and Alchemy, Volume 12 in The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, alchemy is central to Jung’s hypothesis of the collective unconscious. “Jung reminds us of the dual nature of alchemy, comprising both the chemical process and a parallel mystical component. He also discusses the seemingly deliberate mystification of the alchemists. Finally, in using the alchemical process to provide insights into individuation, Jung emphasises the importance of alchemy in relating to us the transcendent nature of the psyche.” (Wikipedia)

Jung sees alchemy as an early form of psychoanalysis. The melting of base metal in a crucible and its reforming into gold can be seen as a form of individuation – the dissolution of the ego and its integration into the whole self. Basically the recasting or reforming of identity into a new Self. As the instructive text on Wikipedia notes,

“For the alchemist trying to understand matter and develop base metals into their purest form, gold, substances are grouped as being alike based on their perceived value. Jung documents as these alchemists collectively come to understand that they themselves must embody the change they hope to effect within their materials: for instance, if they hope to achieve the philosopher’s stone that can redeem ‘base’ or ‘vulgar’ metals, then the alchemist too must become a redeemer figure. It became apparent to the alchemists that they were trying to redeem nature as Christ had redeemed man, hence the identification of the Lapis Philosophorum with Christ the Redeemer. The Opus (work) of alchemy, viewed through this interpretation, becomes a symbolic account of the fundamental process the human psyche undergoes as it re-orients its value system and creates meaning out of chaos. The opus beginning with the nigredo (blackening, akin to depression or nihilistic loss of value) in order to descend back into the manipulable prima materia and proceeding through a process of spiritual purification that must unite seemingly irreconcilable opposites (the coniunctio) to achieve new levels of consciousness.”

Much of my early black and white work was based on an understanding of the magical nature of the (art)work. This is a fascinating area of enquiry for all artists because this is what they do – they see the world differently, reform it through their art and present it as a pathway for the future.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

PS The catalogue to this exhibition is excellent with lots of interesting essays.

Many thankx to the Stiftung Museum Kunstpalast for allowing me to publish the art work in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Marcus new tattoos February 2014

Pieter Brueghel the Younger (Belgium, 1564-1636) (after Pieter Brueghel the Elder) 'The Alchemist' c. 1600 from the exhibition 'Art and Alchemy. The Mystery of Transformation' at the Stiftung Museum Kunstpalast (SMKP), Düsseldorf, Germany, April - August, 2014

Pieter Brueghel the Younger (Belgium, 1564-1636)
after Pieter Brueghel the Elder
The Alchemist
c. 1600
Oil on wood
68.8 x 96cm
Private collection

David Teniers d.J. (Flemish, 1610-1690)
Alchemist in his Workshop
c. 1650
Courtesy of Roy Eddleman, Chemical Heritage Foundation Collections
Photo: Will Brown

Adriaen van Ostade (Dutch, 1610-1685)
The Alchemist
1661
The National Gallery, London, Bought 1871
© The National Gallery, London, 2013

Hendrick Goltzius (Dutch, born Germany 1558-1617)
Allegory of the Arts
1611
Oil on canvas
181 x 256.6cm
Kunstmuseum Basel
© Kunstmuseum Basel
Photo: Martin P. Bühler

Johan Moreelse (Dutch, 1603-1634)
The Alchemist
1630
Oil on canvas
90.5 x 107.5cm
Robilant + Voena, London und Mailand

Giovanni Antonio Grecolini (Italian, 1675-1725)
The Education of Cupid by Venus and Vulcan
1719
Oil on canvas
48.9 × 64cm
Museum Kunstpalast
Photo: Horst Kolberg

Neo Rauch (German, b. 1960)
Goldgrube [Goldmine]
2007
Oil on canvas
80 x 160cm
Private collection
© Courtesy Galerie EIGEN + ART Leipzig/Berlin / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014
Photo: Uwe Walter, Berlin

For the first time in Germany, an exhibition spanning all epochs and genres will be introducing the exciting link between art and alchemy in past and present times. 250 works from antiquity to the present, encompassing Baroque art, Surrealism, through to contemporary art from collections and museums in the USA, Great Britain, France, Mexico and Israel reveal the fascination which alchemy exerted for many visual artists. Artists featured in the exhibition, such as Joseph Beuys, Jan Brueghel the Elder, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Max Ernst, Hendrick Goltzius, Rebecca Horn, Anish Kapoor, Yves Klein, Sigmar Polke, Rembrandt van Rijn, Peter Paul Rubens and David Teniers the Younger invite visitors to explore the mystery of transformation.

Alchemy was invariably practised in secret, but was by no means a rare occurrence until well into the 18th century: Eminent personalities, including Paracelsus, Isaac Newton and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, were alchemists, too. It was not until the Age of the Enlightenment that alchemy was ousted and became intermingled with occultism, sorcery and superstition. In connection with 19th and early 20th-century psychoanalysis alchemy was brought to new life.

The exhibition is divided into two major periods: pre-Enlightenment art, in particular works from the 16th and 17th centuries and the art of the 20th and 21st centuries.

In the pre-Enlightenment era both artists and alchemists laid claim to the ability to not only imitate nature but to even perfect it. This ambition is illustrated in the exhibition by casts from nature made by Bernard Palissy and Wenzel Jamnitzer. Their lizards and other creatures are extraordinarily life-like and yet have been immortalised in precious metal or ceramic as if petrified. The circumstance that artists and alchemists were ultimately rivals is exemplified by the Dutch artist Adriaen van Ostade with his painting depicting an alchemist in his laboratory, having failed to produce gold.

By contrast, the exhibition also includes works by artists presenting alchemy in a favourable light, such as portraits by Rubens and David Teniers the Younger, allegorical paintings by Jan Brueghel the Elder and Hendrick Goltzius, as well as three copies of the “Splendor Solis”, the most richly illuminated manuscript in the history of alchemy. Furthermore, an original manuscript by physicist Isaac Newton, contributed by the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia, will be presented here for the first time in Europe.

The modern section of the show begins with Surrealism. Max Ernst, for instance, repeatedly took up the theme of the “Chymical Wedding” in his work. A particular highlight is the painting “The Creation of the Birds”, a key work by the Surrealist artist Remedios Varo. The Androgyne is an important theme, for instance, in the exhibits by Rebecca Horn. Joseph Beuys will be represented by a number of sculptures, drawings and collages, as well as a film and photo documentation of his action at the 1982 documenta. Moreover, the exhibition includes works by Anish Kapoor displaying his characteristic use of intensely coloured pigments. Further exhibits include selected works by representatives of contemporary art, such as Anselm Kiefer, Yves Klein, Alicja Kwade, Sigmar Polke, Neo Rauch and Gerda Steiner and Jörg Lenzlinger.

The exhibition was conceived by Museum Kunstpalast in cooperation with the research group “Art and Knowledge in Pre-Modern Europe” at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, as well as a group of experts at the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia, which also provided many pieces on loan. A Wunderkammer of curious and exotic treasures from flora and fauna is offered for visitors to explore. In an extensive accompanying programme the subject of art and alchemy will be expanded upon by means of lectures, talks and guided tours.

Press release from the SMKP website

Jörg Breu the Elder (German, 1475-1537) (attributed) (attributed) 'Splendor Solis' (Splendor of the Sun) 1531/1532

Jörg Breu the Elder (German, 1475-1537) (attributed)
Splendor Solis (Splendor of the Sun)
1531-1532
Manuscript; parchment, miniatures in opaque color; calfskin cover
33.1 × 22.8cm
Staatliche Museen zu Berlin – Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Kupferstichkabinett
© bpk – Bildagentur für Kunst, Kultur und Geschichte / Staatliche Museen zu Berlin – Kupferstichkabinett
Photo: Jörg P. Anders

Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (Dutch, 1606-1669)
Sogenannter Faust [Allegedly Faust]
c. 1651‑1653
Drypoint
21.1 × 16.2cm
Stiftung Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf, Sammlung der Kunstakademie (NRW)
Photo: Horst Kolberg, Neuss

Francois-Marius Granet (French, 1775-1849)
The Alchemist
1st half of the 19th century
Oil on canvas
61 x 48.3cm
Gift of Roy Eddleman Chemical Heritage Foundation Collections, Philadelphia
Photo: Will Brown

Max Ernst (German, 1891-1976)
Men Shall Know Nothing of This
1923
Oil on canvas
80.3 x 63.8cm
Tate, London
Photo: © Tate, London 2013, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014

Victor Brauner (Romanian, 1903-1966)
Le Surréaliste (“The Surrealist”)
1947
Oil on canvas
60 x 45cm
Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, NY)
© Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, NY) / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014

Rebecca Horn (German, b. 1944)
Zen of Ara
2011
Springs, motor, brass, electrical
D: 73cm
Private collection Rebecca Horn
Photo: Karin Weyrich
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014

Yves Klein (French, 1928-1962)
Relief éponge bleu (RE 18) (blue sponge relief [re 18])
1960
Wood, sponges, pigment dissolved in acetone
230 × 154cm
Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf, Modern Art
© Stiftung Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf / ARTOTHEK / Photo: Horst Kolberg, Neuss / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014

Richard Meitner (Dutch born America, b. 1949)
Reductio ad Absurdum
1977
Glass and gold
25 x 80cm
Privatsammlung
Photo: Ron Zijlstra
© Richard Meitner

John Isaacs (British, b. 1968)
Thinking about it
2002
Wax, wire, plaster of paris
15 1/2 x 12 x 13 inches (30 x 30 x 50cm)
Olbricht collection, Germany

Stiftung Museum KunstPalast
Ehrenhof 4-5, 40479
Düsseldorf, Germany
+49 211 56642100

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Sunday 11am – 6pm
Thursday 11am – 9pm
Closed on Monday

Stiftung Museum Kunstpalast website

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Exhibition: ‘Knud Lonberg-Holm: The Invisible Architect’ at Ubu Gallery, New York Part 2

Exhibition dates: 6th May – 30th September, 2014

Curated from the private collection of Marc Dessauce

Knud Lonberg-Holm (Danish, 1895-1972)
Design for the Chicago Tribune Tower Competition
West elevation
1922
Vintage photograph mounted on board
9 1/8 x 3 5/8 inches (23.2 x 9.2cm)
The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection; Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York

The second part of this posting about the work of architect Knud Lonberg-Holm. “Backside-views of buildings and fire escapes, rather than historicist ornamental facades, are presented in their “unselfconscious beauty” in opposition to traditional, Pictorialist architectural photography.” You only have to look at the photographs of the city by Alfred Stieglitz or Berenice Abbott taken at around the same time to notice the difference – less romantic, more “modern” in their geometry and form.

If it weren’t for the shock of seeing 1920s cars at the bottom of some of the images (for example, Detroit, Rear Façade of a Hotel, 1924 below) you could almost believe that they had been made 40 years later, around the time of Bernd and Hilla Becher. These photographs are monumental, industrial, but are tinged with humanity – the billboards, cars, people and advertising signs that hover at the bottom or in the deep shadows of the image. Then look at the tonality and atmosphere of the images, including the vibration of light in the two Dazzlescapes (New York, Madison Square and New York, Times Square, both 1923 below).

I don’t think I have ever seen a better collection of images of city architecture.

See Part 1 of the posting.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

“I’ve always been annoyed by rummaging through the past; the future interests me much more.”

Knud Lonberg-Holm

Knud Lonberg-Holm (Danish, 1895-1972)
Design for the Chicago Tribune Tower Competition
West view axonometric
1922
Vintage photograph mounted on board
8 7/8 x 4 5/8 inches (22.5 x 11.7cm)
The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection; Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York

Knud Lonberg-Holm (Danish, 1895-1972)
Equity Trust Building – Oblique View
1923
Reproduced in Erich Mendelsohn’s Amerika, p. 41
Vintage gelatin silver print
4 3/8 x 3 1/4 inches (11.1 x 8.3cm)
The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection
Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York

Knud Lonberg-Holm (Danish, 1895-1972)
Woolworth Building – Oblique View
1923
Reproduced in Erich Mendelsohn’s Amerika, p. 40
Vintage gelatin silver print
4 1/4 x 3 1/4 inches (10.8 x 8.3cm)
The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection
Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York

Knud Lonberg-Holm (Danish, 1895-1972)
Design for the Chicago Tribune Tower Competition
Side elevation with Tribune sign visible
1922
Vintage photograph mounted on board
9 1/8 x 4 7/8 inches (23.2 x 12.4cm)
The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection
Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York

Knud Lonberg-Holm (Danish, 1895-1972)
Design for the Chicago Tribune Tower Competition
Preliminary side elevation
1922
Photograph mounted on board
9 x 4 5/8 inches (22.9 x 11.7cm)
The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection
Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York

Throughout the 1920s, he traveled to other American cities like Chicago and New York City, where, with a 35-millimetre handheld Leica, he took worm’s-eye views and extreme close-ups of skyscrapers, the back sides of buildings, fire escapes, billboards, and dazzling “lightscapes,” ignoring – for the most part – the facades of the buildings. Some of these images would appear, uncredited, in Erich Mendelsohn’s 1926 publication Amerika: Bilderbuch eines Architekten, the first book on the “International Style” in American architecture. (Only in an expanded, later edition from 1928 is Lonberg-Holm credited for 17 of the images.)

Soon the photographs cropped up in design and architecture journals in Holland, Germany, and Russia. “They received acclaim for being progressive and dynamic presentations of technology, commerce, and urbanisation,” says Adam Boxer, founder and owner of Ubu Gallery. “To expose Lonberg-Holm’s role as photographer means one can situate him in his deserved role – a pioneer of New Photography.” As a correspondent for the avant-garde, having his images and writings appear in radical European Modernist reviews – such as the Functionalist-Constructivist Swiss bulletin ABC Beitrage zum Bauen (Contributions on Building) and the Dutch i10 – were of crucial importance, since they circulated amongst members of the European vanguard. By the 1930s, however, Lonberg-Holm had given up architecture for marketing research, and his photographs, never signed or dated, no longer circulated. …

Lonberg-Holm also questioned how architecture was practiced and he pioneered the idea of the life cycle of a building. Decades before William McDonough discovered cradle-to-cradle thinking, Lonberg-Holm had been trying to put across the concept that all buildings, like all organisms, are subject to a life cycle, as predictable and as inevitable as the cycles in nature. “The building cycle involves research, design, construction, use, and elimination – and repeat,” wrote an editor in the January 1960 issue of Architectural Forum. “One of Lonberg-Holm’s chief contentions is that design that anticipates the cycle as a whole makes each succeeding step more rational and easier… Lonberg-Holm’s principle, ‘Anticipate remodelling in the initial design’, carries a corollary, which might be put this way, in keeping with the very important principle of design articulation: ‘Design each “system” in the building – the structural system, the heating or the air-conditioning system, the wiring, the plumbing, etc. – to be self-contained for easy assembly, with interconnections to other systems held to a minimum and made easy to alter’.

Extract from Paul Makovsky. “The Invisible Architect of Invisible Architecture,” on the Metropolis website [Online] Cited 18/07/2014. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Knud Lonberg-Holm (Danish, 1895-1972)
Detroit
1924
Reproduced in Erich Mendelsohn’s Amerika, p. 67
Vintage gelatin silver print
4 1/4 x 3 1/4 inches (10.8 x 8.3cm)
The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection
Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York

Knud Lonberg-Holm (Danish, 1895-1972)
Detroit, Rear Areaway
1924
Reproduced in Erich Mendelsohn’s Amerika, p. 91
Vintage gelatin silver print
4 1/2 x 3 1/2 inches (11.4 x 8.9cm)
The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection
Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York

During the 1920s, Lonberg-Holm traveled to American cities like Detroit, Chicago, and New York. With his 35-millimetre Leica camera, he took extreme close-ups of skyscrapers (such as this rear view Detroit Hotel, above), the back sides of buildings, fire escapes, billboards, and dazzling nighttime views.

Knud Lonberg-Holm (Danish, 1895-1972)
Detroit
1924
Variant cropping reproduced in Erich Mendelsohn’s Amerika, p. 21
Vintage gelatin silver print
4 3/8 x 3 3/8 inches (11.1 x 8.6cm)
The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection; Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York

Knud Lonberg-Holm (Danish, 1895-1972)
Detroit, Rear Façade of a Hotel
1924
Reproduced in Erich Mendelsohn’s Amerika, p. 89
Vintage gelatin silver print
4 1/2 x 3 3/8 inches (11.4 x 8.6cm)
The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection
Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York

Knud Lonberg-Holm (Danish, 1895-1972)
Chicago, Skyscraper of the Second Period
c. prior to 1926
Reproduced in Erich Mendelsohn’s Amerika, p. 77 (right)
Vintage gelatin silver print
4 3/8 x 3 3/8 inches (11.1 x 8.6cm)
The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection
Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York

Knud Lonberg-Holm (Danish, 1895-1972)
Chicago, 2 Skyscrapers
c. prior to 1926
Reproduced in Erich Mendelsohn’s Amerika, p. 75
Vintage gelatin silver print
4 1/2 x 3 1/2 inches (11.4 x 8.9cm)
The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection
Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York

Knud Lonberg-Holm: The Invisible Architect

“Lonberg-Holm was the first architect in my knowledge to talk about the ultimately invisible architecture. In 1929, when I first met him, he said the greatest architect in history would be the one who finally developed the capability to give humanity completely effective environmental control without any visible structure and machinery. Thus we have in our day an unsung Leonardo of the building industry, whose scientific foresight and design competence are largely responsible for the present world-around state of advancement of the building arts.”

Buckminster Fuller, 1968

The historical documents in this collection represent a hitherto unexplored aspect of the influence of European modernist architects – specifically, those who emigrated to the United States early and voluntarily, before the rise of fascism necessitated the wholesale evacuation of the European avant-garde. The seemingly disparate archive of photographs, drawings, diagrams and correspondence can be grouped around a unifying theme: the realisation of the avant-garde ambition of integration and control of architectural production through industrialisation; and around a central figure: the architect Knud Lonberg-Holm. The documents bear witness to a complex history that is not easily tracked elsewhere. This is due, in part, to the fact that they bridge two continents, and in part because they unveil processes of reform, such as the scientific conversion of the institutions of architectural practice and the transformation of the project, that were aimed at the most mundane level of building, not at exceptional structures. Moreover, the documents show this professional and anonymous destiny together in line with inversely artistic and revolutionary origins. Thus, the archive documents a phenomenon of cultural disappearance, bringing missing substance to the link between the Americanism of the European avant-garde and the history of modern architecture in the United States.

A native of Denmark, which he leaves in 1923 for the United States, Knud Lonberg-Holm (1895-1972) is the emblematic figure of this disappearance. Initially considered a “pioneer of modern architecture” by the anthropologists of the 1920s, and even held representative of “the space-time conception” by Henry Russell Hitchcock, his true contributions will be ever more unacknowledged as they become more fundamental. First of the modernist émigrés in the United States, he becomes the obliged correspondent for the European avant-garde, in particular for the De Stijl group and also the Berlin Constructivists, with whom he was closest. He was a contributor to both ABC and i10, a member of ASNOVA, a collaborator of Buckminster Fuller, and also the American delegate to CIAM with Richard Neutra. His experiments with photography in the early 1920s (diffused widely by J.J.P. Oud, Moholy-Nagy, Erich Mendelsohn, and others) were received with critical success in Europe and the USSR. This is due as much to the revolutionary use of extreme viewpoints from below and above, as to the renewal of the iconographic sources of modernism: the substitution of the imagery of the grain elevators and the “balancing of the masses,” for an aesthetic of structure and tension gleaned from the metallic skeletons of unfinished skyscrapers. In Lonberg-Holm, this aesthetic schism is accompanied by a renouncement of the project – a sort of Duchampian abandonment of the traditional identity of the architect, which intervenes at the moment he arrives in his work at a controlled resolution of the opposing influences of rationalism and neo-plasticism, for example in the McBride Residence project of 1926.

Lonberg-Holm’s institutional itinerary begins at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1924-1925, where he introduces a basic design course similar to that of the Soviet Vkhutemas. Moving to New York in 1929, he enters the organisation of the F.W. Dodge publishing corporation, initially at the journal The Architectural Record, where he devises both content and format, and then as the head of the research department of Sweet’s Catalog Service, the indispensable architect’s handbook of building products. The reorganisation of Sweet’s Catalog, perhaps Lonberg-Holm’s most tangible contribution to modern architectural production in America, gives substance to his doctrinaire activity of the 1930s, concerned with urban obsolescence, cycles of production, and information theory. In collaboration with Czech designer Ladislav Sutnar, Sweet’s Catalog becomes a complete oeuvre of industrial and plastic organisation. Its critical and enduring importance in the process of architectural production makes it an implemented avant-garde project, at an appreciable scale, and testament to Lonberg-Holm’s heretofore-unacknowledged influence on the development of a truly modern American architecture.

Marc Dessauce, 2003

Marc Dessauce (1962-2004) was an architectural historian who lived and worked in NYC and Paris. His research, exhibitions, and writings focused on the foundations of both American and European avant-garde architecture in the twentieth century. Marc assembled this archive between 1986 and 1995 when he was a PhD candidate at Columbia University in the department of Art History. His book The Inflatable Moment: Pneumatics and Protest in ’68, was published by Princeton Architectural Press in 1999.

Knud Lonberg-Holm (Danish, 1895-1972)
New York, Madison Square
1923
Reproduced in Erich Mendelsohn’s Amerika, p. 31
Vintage gelatin silver print
4 1/8 x 3 1/4 inches (10.5 x 8.3cm)
The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection; Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York

Knud Lonberg-Holm (Danish, 1895-1972)
New York, Times Square
1923
Reproduced in Erich Mendelsohn’s Amerika, p. 6
Vintage gelatin silver print
4 1/4 x 3 3/8 inches (10.8 x 8.6cm)
The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection
Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York

Amerika: Bilderbuch eines Architekten

Seventeen of Lonberg-Holm’s photographs appeared uncredited in Erich Mendelsohn’s 1926 book, a very influential volume on modern American architecture. Only in a later, expanded edition was Lonberg-Holm given credit. El Lissitzky was so impressed with Amerika that he said the volume “thrills us like a dramatic film. Before our eyes move pictures that are absolutely unique. In order to understand some of the photographs you must lift the book over your head and rotate it.”

Knud Lonberg-Holm (Danish, 1895-1972)
Sweet’s Display
Exposition des Techniques Américianes de l’Habitation et de l’Ubranisme (Information 1, 2, 3)
Paris, Grand Palais, June 14-July 21, 1946
Vintage gelatin silver print
7 1/8 x 7 1/4 inches (18.1 x 18.4cm)
The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection
Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York

Knud Lonberg-Holm (Danish, 1895-1972)
Sweet’s Display
Exposition des Techniques Américianes de l’Habitation et de l’Ubranisme (Biblioteque SS)
Paris, Grand Palais, June 14-July 21, 1946
Vintage gelatin silver print
7 1/8 x 7 1/8 inches (18.1 x 18.1cm)
The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection
Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York

A diagram from Development Index illustrating the interrelations of cultural and social factors, which Lonberg-Holm and Larson considered necessary to the practice of design. The index was a screening system intended to manage incoming and outgoing streams of data.

Larson and Knud Lonberg-Holm later collaborated on the idea of a “Development Index” – a systems-thinking approach and research tool that studied the interaction of human activity, environmental relations, and communications with the idea to improve the built environment. It was an attempt to manage information flow and, in a pre-Internet sort of way, provide relevant data through a centralised system, using what was then state-of-the-art media such as microfilm, microfiche, and electronics.

Wendingen
“Skyscraper as a solution of the Housing Problem”
No. 3, 1923
Paperbound volume
12 7/8 x 13 inches (32.7 x 33cm)
The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection
Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York

Shelter
Cover design by Knud Lonberg-Holm
April 1938
Magazine cover
11 x 9 inches (27.9 x 22.9cm)
The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection
Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York

Shelter now
Cover design by Knud Lonberg-Holm
Vol. 2, No. 4, May 1932
Magazine cover
12 x 9 inches (30.5 x 22.9cm)
The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection
Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York

Knud Lonberg-Holm with Latislav Sutnar. 'Multi-Measure (MM) Metal Enclosures' catalog cover c. 1942-1944

Knud Lonberg-Holm with Latislav Sutnar
Multi-Measure (MM) Metal Enclosures
c. 1942-1944
Cover of catalog
11 x 8 1/2 inches (27.9 x 21.6cm)
The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection
Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York

The cover of a catalog for Multi-Measure Metal Enclosures, Inc., designed with Ladislav Sutnar between 1942 and 1944. Lonberg-Holm collaborated with architect C. Theodore Larson at F.W. Dodge Corporation’s Sweet’s Catalog division to develop a systematic approach to organising the information needed by the building industry. When graphic designer Ladislav Sutnar later joined him, they radically altered the way business information was streamlined, designed, and packaged, becoming pioneers of “information design” along the way.

i10
“America, Reflections” (by Knud Lonberg-Holm)
No. 15, October 20, 1928
Paperbound volume
11 3/4 x 8 1/4 inches (29.8 x 21cm)
The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection
Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York

Lonberg-Holm’s 1928 essay on America for i10 – focused on the country’s obsession with time and efficiency – shows that the fields of communications, the car industry, elevators, railways, and the movie industry were more important to him. He wrote: “Time-study is a profession. And a highly paid profession. What the [Saint] Peters church was for the European Renaissance, Henry Ford’s assembly line is for America of today. The most perfect expression for a civilisation whose god is efficiency. Detroit is the Mecca of this civilisation. And the pilgrims come from all over the world to meditate before this always-moving line.”

Knud Lonberg-Holm (Danish, 1895-1972)
Photograph of “Modern Architecture” at Fifth Avenue
c. 1923-1924
Vintage gelatin silver print
4 1/2 x 2 3/4 inches (11.4 x 7cm)
The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection
Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York

Knud Lonberg-Holm (Danish, 1895-1972)
Automobile Plant
Detroit, 1931
Vintage gelatin silver print
5 1/4 x 4 1/4 inches (13.3 x 10.8cm)
Titled on verso
The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection
Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York

Knud Lonberg-Holm (Danish, 1895-1972)
Photograph of Longberg-Holm
c. 1923-1924
Vintage gelatin silver print
4 1/2 x 2 3/4 inches (11.4 x 7cm)
The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection
Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York

Knud Lonberg-Holm (Danish, 1895-1972)
48th Street/St. Nicholas Church scaffolding
c. 1923-1924
Vintage gelatin silver print
4 1/2 x 2 3/4 inches (11.4 x 7cm)
The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection
Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York

Knud Lonberg-Holm (Danish, 1895-1972)
Photograph of Antenna
c. 1923-1924
Vintage gelatin silver print
4 1/2 x 3 1/2 inches (11.4 x 8.9cm)
The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection
Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York

Note from Iwao Yamawaki to Knud Lonberg-Holm
Dessau, July 9, 1931
The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection
Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York

Knud Lonberg-Holm (Danish, 1895-1972) and Iwao Yamawaki (Japanese, 1898-1987) (attributed) 'Knud & his wife Ethel outside of Bauhaus' 1931

Knud Lonberg-Holm (Danish, 1895-1972)
Iwao Yamawaki (Japanese, 1898-1987) (attributed)
Knud & his wife Ethel outside of Bauhaus
1931
Vintage gelatin silver print
4 3/8 x 3 3/8 inches (11.1 x 8.6cm)
Dated & inscribed on verso
The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection
Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York

This photo, attributed to the Japanese Bauhaus-trained photographer Iwao Yamawaki, shows Lonberg-Holm and his wife, Ethel (who later became an art director for J. Walter Thompson advertising agency), at the Bauhaus in 1931. A friend of Bauhaus instructors László Moholy-Nagy, Josef Albers, Hannes Meyer, Walter Gropius, and Mies van der Rohe, Lonberg-Holm taught the first foundational course based on the Bauhaus model at the University of Michigan in 1924.

Knud Lonberg-Holm (1895-1972), an overlooked but highly influential Modernist architect, photographer, and pioneer of information design
The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection
Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York

Ubu Gallery
416 East 59th Street
New York 10022
Phone: 212 753 4444

Opening hour:
Monday – Friday 11am – 6pm

Ubu Gallery website

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Exhibition: ‘Knud Lonberg-Holm: The Invisible Architect’ at Ubu Gallery, New York Part 1

Exhibition dates: 6th May – 30th September 2014

Curated from the private collection of Marc Dessauce

Knud Lonberg-Holm (Danish, 1895-1972)
The New – The Coming, Detroit, Streetcars
1924
Reproduced in Erich Mendelsohn’s Amerika, p. 73
Vintage gelatin silver print
3 1/4 x 4 1/4 inches (8.3 x 10.8cm)
The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection; Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York

I am so excited by this monster two-part posting about the work of architect Knud Lonberg-Holm. His drawings and models are incredible and his photographs of industry and skyscrapers a revelation. The textures and inky blackness of his Dazzlescapes and the New Photography images of skyscrapers (both in Part 2) mark these images as the greatest collection of photographs of skyscrapers that I have ever seen. More comment tomorrow but for now just look at the dark Gotham-esque photograph The New – The Coming, Detroit, Streetcars (1924, below). The streetcar reminds me of the armoured trains so popular during the inter-war years and during World War II. And what a title: The New – The Coming…

Dr Marcus Bunyan

See Part 2 of the posting.

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

“Lonberg-Holm was the first architect in my knowledge ever to talk about the ultimately invisible architecture. In 1929, when I first met him, he said the greatest architect in history would be the one who finally developed the capability to give humanity completely effective environmental control without any visible structure and machinery.”

Buckminster Fuller

Knud Lonberg-Holm (Danish, 1895-1972)
View from the roof
Detroit, 1924
Vintage gelatin silver print
2 3/4 x 4 1/2 inches (7 x 11.4cm) approx.
The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection; Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York

Knud Lonberg-Holm (Danish, 1895-1972)
Detroit
1924
Reproduced in Erich Mendelsohn’s Amerika, p. 71 (top)
Vintage gelatin silver print
3 3/8 x 4 3/8 inches (8.6 x 11.1cm)
The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection; Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York

Knud Lonberg-Holm (Danish, 1895-1972)
Detroit, A New Street
1924
Reproduced in Erich Mendelsohn’s Amerika, p. 71 (bottom)
Vintage gelatin silver print
3 3/8 x 4 3/8 inches (8.6 x 11.1cm)
The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection; Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York

Ubu Gallery is pleased to present Knud Lonberg-Holm: The Invisible Architect, a debut exhibition devoted to this overlooked, yet highly influential, 20th Century modernist. Never-before-seen photographs, architectural drawings, letters, graphic design, and ephemera from Lonberg-Holm’s remarkably diverse career will be on view through August 1, 2014. The exhibition, which consists of selections from the extensive archive assembled by architectural historian Marc Dessauce, will solidify the importance of this emblematic figure in early 20th Century cultural and architectural history. Metropolis Magazine, the national publication of architecture and design, will publish an article on Knud Lonberg-Holm to coincide with this groundbreaking exhibition.

Born in Denmark, Knud Lonberg-Holm (January 15, 1895 – January 2, 1972), was an architect, photographer, author, designer, researcher, and teacher. Lonberg-Holm’s early work in Denmark and Germany initially associated him with the Berlin Constructivist and Dutch De Stijl groups. An émigré to America in 1923, Lonberg-Holm was a fundamental correspondent with prominent European architects and their modernist counterparts in the U.S. The exhibition will feature a selection of letters to Lonberg-Holm from a pantheon of the European avant-garde including László Moholy-Nagy, Walter Gropius, Theo Van Doesburg, Buckminster Fuller, Hannes Meyer, J.J.P. Oud, El Lissitzky, and Richard Neutra.

From 1924–1925, Lonberg-Holm was a colleague of Eliel Saarinen at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where he taught a course in basic design modeled on the famed Bauhaus Vorkurs, the first-ever introduced in U.S. design schools. An agent of inter-continental communication, his reports on the state of American architecture appeared abroad. Lonberg-Holm’s 1928 article, Amerika: Reflections, featured buildings on the University of Michigan campus and appeared in the Dutch avant-garde publication i10, which employed Moholy-Nagy as its photo editor. The article not only contributed to international discourse on the building industry, but also touched on the “time-space convention,” a subject Lonberg-Holm would explore throughout his career. This publication, among others, will be on display.

Lonberg-Holm’s interest in American industry is best viewed in his collection of photographs taken between 1924-1926. These works document his pioneering views of industry and technology in burgeoning, jazz-age New York, Detroit, and Chicago; they would appear later, un-credited, in Erich Mendelsohn’s seminal 1926 publication Amerika, the first book on the ‘International Style’ in American architecture. Thirteen vintage photographs reproduced in Amerika will be on exhibit, as well as additional early photographs depicting technological advancements, such as cable cars and radio antennae, American culture in mass crowds and billboards, and the commercial architecture of skyscrapers and factories. Backside-views of buildings and fire escapes, rather than historicist ornamental facades, are presented in their “unselfconscious beauty” in opposition to traditional, pictorialist architectural photography. The content of the works coupled with progressive view points, like worm’s eye perspectives and extreme close-ups, align them squarely within the then emerging ‘New Photography’. El Lissitzky wrote that the dynamic photos “grip us like a dramatic film.”1 Mendelsohn’s publication, featuring Lonberg-Holm’s dynamic photography, received immediate acclaim, domestically and abroad.

While still in Germany, Lonberg-Holm created a submission for the Chicago Tribune Tower competition of 1922. Although never officially submitted, the project was published widely in magazines and newspapers, alongside other prominent architects’ designs. From his office in the historically designed Donner Schloss in Altona, Germany, Lonberg-Holm envisioned a modern construction for Chicago that incorporated references to American mass culture, specifically the automobile. The West elevations on view show the Chicago Tribune sign, which includes circular signage reminiscent of headlights. The Side elevation exhibited clearly demonstrates how the printing plant function of the ground floors of the building, rendered in black, are visually distinct from the offices of the higher floors, rendered in white with black accents for visual continuity throughout the building. Lonberg-Holm’s proposed construction, whose outward visual design distinguished its internal functions, was reproduced in L’Architecture vivante, La Cite, Le Courbusier’s Almanach d’architecture in France and Walter Gropius’ Internationale Architektur in Munich; the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung displayed his building next to that of Mies van der Rohe and a full spread devoted to the skyscraper, featuring Lonberg-Holm’s Chicago design adjacent to plans by Walter Gropius, Saarinen and van der Rohe, appeared in H. Th. Wijdeveld’s November / December 1923 issue of the innovative publication Wendingen.

The drawings Lonberg-Holm created during this first decade as an émigré are striking for their early use of European modernist, particularly Neo-plastic, influences. He was close with the DeStijl movement in Holland, and corresponded with both Theo van Doesburg and J.J.P. Oud, with whom he would continue to work within CIAM, the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Modern. Early renderings done by Lonberg-Holm in the U.S. demonstrate an affinity for DeStijl principles. His plans for the 1926 MacBride residence in Ann Arbor are dynamic and asymmetrical, with intersecting planes in simple primary colors. Surely the first American allusion to Gerrit Rietvel’s iconic 1924 Schröder House in Utrecht, Holland, the MacBride residence is one of the first ‘International Style’ modernist houses designed in the Western hemisphere.

Lonberg-Holm’s importance to and knowledge of European architectural trends resulted in an invitation by Jane Heap to participate in the 1927 landmark New York exhibition, Machine Age, which was heralded as “the first international exposition of architecture held in America.” This exhibition, held at the New York Scientific American Building, May 16-28, stressed the new mechanical world and its key player, the Engineer. Lonberg-Holm’s 1925 Detroit project, Radio Broadcasting Station, was featured. The New York’s review of the exhibition explicitly referenced Lonberg-Holm’s project, noting its “delicacy and exquisite technique of execution.”

Lonberg-Holm worked with the F.W. Dodge corporation for 30 years, first in the division responsible for The Architectural Record (1930-1932), and then as head of the research department of Sweet’s Catalog Service (1932-1960.) At The Architectural Record, Lonberg-Holm acted as research editor and wrote technical news, a precursor to his lifelong interest in data-driven analytics. During his New York based employment, Lonberg-Holm’s involvement with international architectural trends did not diminish. In addition to prolonged correspondence with the various directors of the Bauhaus, including Hannes Meyer, he and his wife Ethel would visit the Bauhaus at Dessau in 1931. In 1946, Lonberg-Holm was also ultimately a candidate to replace Moholy-Nagy as director of the Institute of Design in Chicago.

At the same time, Lonberg-Holm was involved in domestic architecture and building theory. Richard Neutra would reach out to Lonberg-Holm in 1928 for illustrations and photographs to include in his account of the modern architecture movement in the US; he would approach him again in 1932 to lecture on the West Coast. Lonberg-Holm and Neutra were the “American” representatives to CIAM. It was Lonberg-Holm who nominated Buckminster Fuller and Theodore Larson for membership into CIAM in 1932.

What little scholarship exists about Knud Lonberg-Holm briefly examines his nearly twenty-year relationship with the Czech pioneering graphic designer Ladislav Sutnar, with whom Lonberg-Holm worked at Sweet’s Catalog Service. From 1942 through 1960 at the research department of Sweet’s, the bible for all the building trades, Lonberg-Holm and Sutnar revolutionized the catalog by standardising information techniques. They presented systemised communication through a simple, modern, and intelligible visual language that influenced all areas of architectural and graphic design. Together, Lonberg-Holm and Sutnar co-authored Catalog Design (1944), Designing Information (1947), and Catalog Design Progress (1950).

The vital roles and communication between city planning, architecture, and civil productivity where important to Lonberg-Holm and would be explored throughout his career. In A. Lawerence Kocher’s letter to Lonberg-Holm, the article “Architecture-or organized space” is referenced. This 1929 essay, published in Detroit, addressed the “building problem” in the US – the “an-organic structure of its cities” – and proposed “a new conception of city-planning based on a clearer understanding of the organic functions of a community.” Lonberg-Holm would be an important participant in the city planning survey of Detroit, one of CIAM’s analytical initiatives in 1932-1933. Field Patterns and Fields of Activity, a visual diagram further illustrating the interconnectivity of intelligence, welfare, production, and control in a community, graphically illustrates these early principles.

Collaboration was critical to Lonberg-Holm, who would work with Theodore Larson to improve information indexing and the production cycle. Field Patterns, as well as the visuals for Planning for Productivity (1940), were components of Lonberg-Holm’s collaboration with Theodore Larson. Lonberg-Holm sought to apply some of the theories set forth in Development Index. This collaborative project with Larson was published by the University of Michigan in 1953 and focused on the relationship between community, industry, and education, analytical theories that were proposed by Lonberg-Holm during the formation of the University’s Laboratory of Architectural Research. Lonberg-Holm’s 1949 visual diagram of the relationship between the university, the building industry, and the community, is on view, as well as the Sutnar-designed steps of Planning for Productivity. Lonberg-Holm had returned to the University as a guest lecturer and professor in the late 1940s and early 1950s. At the suggestion of Lonberg-Holm, Theordore Larson was among the new faculty hired at the University in 1948, along with Walter Sanders and William Muschenheim, whom Lonberg-Holm had worked with in the Detroit survey.

In 1949, Lonberg-Holm was issued a Dymaxion License and became a trustee to the Fuller Institute/Research Foundation; among the trustees are his contemporaries George Nelson and Charles Eames. Initially meeting Buckminster Fuller in c. 1929, he and Fuller would correspond throughout Lonberg-Holm’s life. Lonberg-Holm was a member of the Structural Studies Associates (SSA), a short-lived group of architects in the 1930s surrounding Fuller and his briefly published architectural magazine Shelter. A number of Shelter issues are on view, many of which have contributions by Lonberg-Holm; the cover of the May 1932 issue was designed by Lonberg-Holm. Planning for Productivity and Development Index were later data-driven projects that furthered the SSA’s and Fuller’s principles – that the evolution of science and technology would influence social progress and could be beneficial to the community only through research, analysis and macroapplication.

Arriving to the US a decade before his European contemporaries, Lonberg-Holm occupied a unique position as a cultural bridge, communicating between the US and Europe in a period when the state of art and architecture was radically changing. He exposed his students and colleagues to European protagonists of avant-garde architecture theory while enthusiastically exploring American industry and building. Exclusively through collaboration, Lonberg-Holm worked to modernise both architecture and design. Integral to Lonberg-Holm’s principles was that technology alone could not suffice as the sole perpetuator of architecture – advancements in building and new designs needed to promote human culture in an ever-evolving manner where new information was continuously integrated into design theory. Throughout his career, Lonberg-Holm embodied the antithesis of the stereotype architect, egocentric and insulated from the community in which his designs were to exist. From his beginnings at The Architectural Record to his final project, Plan for Europe 2000: Role of the Mass Media in Information and Communication, Lonberg-Holm held to the belief that a collective approach, with applied research, could form a generative knowledge base that could be cultivated for altruistic means.

Text from the Ubu Gallery website

1/ Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography from 1839 to the Present, London, Seeker & Warburg, 1982, p. 1.

Unknown photographer
Portrait of Knud Lonberg-Holm
New York, 1950s (prior to 1960)
Vintage gelatin silver print
6 7/8 x 10 inches (17.5 x 25.4cm)
The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection
Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York

Unknown photographer
Portrait of Knud Lonberg-Holm
New York, 1950s (prior to 1960)
Vintage gelatin silver print
7 7/8 x 9 1/2 inches (20 x 24.1cm)
The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection
Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York

Knud Lonberg-Holm (Danish, 1895-1972)
Le Corbusier at CIAM Conference
c. 1954-1964
Vintage gelatin silver print
5 5/8 x 8 3/8 inches (14.3 x 21.3cm)
The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection
Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York

Knud Lonberg-Holm (Danish, 1895-1972)
Buckminster Fuller, Lonberg-Holm and other
Bayside, New York
Nd
Vintage gelatin silver print
3 x 4 1/4 inches (7.6 x 10.8cm)
The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection
Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York

Knud Lonberg-Holm (Danish, 1895-1972)
Photograph of the Dymaxion Car
Bridgeport, Connecticut, July 21, 1933
Vintage gelatin silver print
7 5/8 x 9 3/4 inches (19.4 x 24.8cm)
Stamped on verso
The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection
Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York

In July of 1933, the Dymaxion car was introduced in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where it caused a great stir. Lonberg-Holm can be seen holding the car door open while the artist Diego Rivera (who was in attendance with his wife and artist Frida Kahlo) looks on, coat on his arm.

Knud Lonberg-Holm (Danish, 1895-1972)
Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo
Bridgeport, Connecticut, July 21, 1933
Vintage gelatin silver print
The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection
Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York

Knud Lonberg-Holm (Danish, 1895-1972)
Radio Broadcasting Station
Photograph of Model
Detroit, 1925
Vintage gelatin silver print
4 7/8 x 6 7/8 inches (12.4 x 17.5cm)
The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection
Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York

Knud Lonberg-Holm (Danish, 1895-1972)
Radio Broadcasting Station
Photograph of Model
Detroit, 1925
Vintage gelatin silver print
5 3/8 x 7 1/2 inches (13.7 x 19.1cm)
The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection
Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York

Knud Lonberg-Holm (Danish, 1895-1972)
Photograph of Chicago’s new skyline
North of Randolph Street
All new since 1926 except Wrigley and Tribune buildings
May 1929
Vintage gelatin silver print
2 1/4 x 4 1/2 inches (5.7 x 11.4cm)
Titled on verso
The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection
Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York

Ubu Gallery
416 East 59th Street
New York 10022
Phone: 212 753 4444

Opening hours:
Monday – Friday 11am – 6pm

Ubu Gallery website

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Exhibition: ‘Posing Beauty in African American Culture’ at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia

Exhibition dates: 26th April – 27th July, 2014

Curator: Dr Deborah Willis

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Body Builder on Venice Beach, California
1964
Gelatin silver print
8 1/4 x 12 1/4 in.
Courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

An exhibition that questions the ways in which our contemporary understanding of beauty has been constructed and framed through the body and invites a deeper reading of beauty, its impact on mass culture and individuals and how the display of beauty affects the ways in which we see and interpret the world and ourselves. According to author and historian Barbara Summers: “Beauty is power. And the struggle to have the entire range of Black beauty recognised and respected is a serious one.”

If beauty is only skin deep, and colour deep, why the need to differentiate? Surely it doesn’t matter what colour your skin, beauty just is. You know it when you see it, regardless of colour. Not everything is about power; not everything is a site of contestation… to me, recognising true beauty is an acknowledgement of the light that shines from within, not something that is imposed from without. When you see true beauty, you know it instinctively. Intuitively. Enough of this posing – are you image or essence?

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

“That there are so few images of African-American women circulating in popular culture or in fine art is disturbing; the pathology behind it is dangerous … We got a sistah in the White House, and yet mediated culture excludes us, denies us, erases us. But in the face of refusal, I insist on making work that includes us as part of the greater whole,” said Carrie Mae Weems in a 2009 interview conducted by Dawoud Bey for ‘BOMB Magazine’.

Edward Curtis (American, 1868-1952)
A Desert Queen
1898 (printed 2009)
Modern digital print
20 x 16 inches
Special Collections, University of Washington Libraries

Theodore Fonville Winans (American, 1911-1992)
Dixie Belles, Central Louisiana
1938
Courtesy of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art and Bob Winans

Charles “Teenie” Harris (American, 1908-1998)
Mary Louise Harris on Mulford Street, Homewood, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
c. 1930-1939
Gelatin silver print
20 x 16cm
© 2004 Carnegie Museum of Art, Charles “Teenie” Harris Archive

Dave Heath (American, 1931-2016)
Washington Square, New York City
1960
Silver gelatin print

Malick Sidibé (Malian, 1935-2016)
Regardez-moi!
1962
Gelatin silver print
50 x 60cm – 19.5 x 23.5 inches
© Malick Sidibé

Leonard Freed (American, 1929-2006)
Harlem Fashion Show, Harlem
1963
Gelatin silver print
17 x 21 1/4 inches
Magnum Photos

Anthony Barboza (African-American, b. 1944)
Pat Evans
c. 1970s
Digital print
24 1/2 x 24 inches
Courtesy of the photographer

Anthony Barboza (African-American, b. 1944)
‘Marvelous’ Marvin Hagler, boxer
1981
Gelatin silver print

Exploring contemporary understandings of beauty, Posing Beauty in African American Culture frames the notion of aesthetics, race, class, and gender within art, popular culture, and political contexts. The exhibition – and its companion, Identity Shifts – will be on view April 26 – July 27, 2014.

Posing Beauty in African American Culture examines the contested ways in which African and African American beauty has been represented in historical and contemporary contexts through a diverse range of media including photography, film, video, fashion, advertising, and other forms of popular culture such as music and the Internet. The exhibition explores contemporary understandings of beauty by framing the notion of aesthetics, race, class, and gender within art, popular culture, and political contexts. The exhibition is organised by the Department of Photography & Imaging at New York University, Tisch School of the Arts, traveled by Curatorial Assistance Traveling Exhibitions, and curated by Dr. Deborah Willis. The touring exhibition is made possible in part by the JP Morgan Chase Foundation. Additional support has been provided by grants from the Tisch School of the Arts Office of the Dean’s Faculty Development Fund, Visual Arts Initiative Award from the NYU Coordinating Council for Visual Arts, and NYU’s Advanced Media Studio. Drawn from public and private collections, Posing Beauty features approximately 85 works by artists such as Carrie Mae Weems, Charles “Teenie” Harris, Eve Arnold, Gary Winogrand, Sheila Pree Bright, Leonard Freed, Renee Cox, Anthony Barboza, Bruce Davidson, Mickalene Thomas, and Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe.

Posing Beauty is divided into three thematic sections. The first theme, Constructing a Pose, considers the interplay between the historical and the contemporary, between self-representation and imposed representation, and the relationship between subject and photographer. The second theme, Body and Image, questions the ways in which our contemporary understanding of beauty has been constructed and framed through the body. The last section, Modeling Beauty and Beauty Contests, invites a deeper reading of beauty, its impact on mass culture and individuals and how the display of beauty affects the ways in which we see and interpret the world and ourselves.

According to author and historian Barbara Summers: “Beauty is power. And the struggle to have the entire range of Black beauty recognised and respected is a serious one.”

Press release from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts website

John W. Mosley (American, 1907-1969)
Atlantic City, Four Women
c. 1960s
Gelatin silver print
20 x 16 inches
Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection, Temple University

Stephen Shames (American, b. 1947)
Huey P Newton holds a Bob Dylan album at home after he was released from jail
c. 1967
Photograph
© Stephen Shames

Huey Percy Newton (February 17, 1942 – August 22, 1989) was an African-American political and urban activist who, along with Bobby Seale, co-founded the Black Panther Party in 1966. Newton had a long series of confrontations with law enforcement, including several convictions, while he participated in political activism. He continued to pursue an education, eventually earning a Ph.D. in Social Science. Newton spent time in prison for manslaughter and was involved in a shooting that killed a police officer, for which he was later acquitted. In 1989 he was shot and killed in Oakland, California by Tyrone “Double R” Robinson, a member of the Black Guerrilla Family.

Text from Wikipedia website

Ken Ramsay (Jamaican, 1935-2008)
Susan Taylor, as Model
c. 1970s
Gelatin silver print
26.5 x 20 inches
Courtesy of the photographer

Jeffrey Henson Scales (American, b. 1954)
Denzel Washington, Los Angeles
1990s

Jeffrey Henson Scales (American, b. 1954)
Young Man in Plaid, New York City
1992
Digital print
44.5 x 44 inches
Courtesy of the photographer

Renee Cox (American, b. 1960)
Baby Back, from the series American Family
2001
Archival digital print
30 x 40 in.
Courtesy of the artist

Lauren Kelley (American, b. 1975)
Pickin’
2007
Colour-coupler print
23 x 23 1/8 inches
Courtesy of the photographer

Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
200 N. Boulevard
Richmond, Virginia USA

Opening hours:
Saturday – Tuesday: 10am – 5pm
Wednesday – Friday: 10am – 9pm

Virginia Museum of Fine Arts website

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Exhibition: ‘Out of the closets, into the streets: gay liberation photography 1971-73’ at Edmund Pearce Gallery, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: Tuesday 22nd July – Saturday 26th, July, 2014

Opening: Tuesday 22nd July 6-8pm

Nite Art: Wednesday 23rd July until 11pm
Artists represented: Philip Potter, John Storey, John Englart, Barbara Creed, Ponch Hawkes, Rennie Ellis
Curators: Dr Marcus Bunyan and Nicholas Henderson
Catalogue essays: Professor Dennis Altman (below) and Dr Marcus Bunyan (Being (t)here)

Barbara Creed (Australian, b. 1943) 'Julian Desaily and Peter McEwan in the back of a VW Combi van, Melbourne' Melbourne, c. 1971-1973 from the exhibition Exhibition: 'Out of the closets, into the streets: gay liberation photography 1971-73' at Edmund Pearce Gallery, Melbourne, July 2014

Barbara Creed (Australian, b. 1943)
Julian Desaily and Peter McEwan in the back of a VW Combi van, Melbourne
Melbourne, c. 1971-1973
Digital C type print on Kodak Endura Matte
© Barbara Creed

Five days, that’s all you’ve got! Just five days to see this fabulous exhibition. COME ALONG TO THE OPENING (Tuesday 22nd July 6-8pm) or NITE ART, the following night!

The exhibition Out of the closets, into the streets: gay liberation photography 1971-73 pictures the very beginning of the gay liberation movement in Australia through the work of Philip Potter, John Storey, John Englart, Barbara Creed, Ponch Hawkes and Rennie Ellis. The exhibition examines for the first time images from the period as works of art as much as social documents. The title of the exhibition is a slogan from the period.

As gay people found their voice in the early 1970s artists, often at the very beginning of their careers, were there to capture meetings in lounge rooms, consciousness raising groups and street protests. The liberation movement meant ‘being there’, putting your body on the line. “It was a key feature of the new left that this embodied politics couldn’t stop in the streets: that is, the public arena as conventionally understood. ‘Being there’ politically also applied to households, classrooms, sexual relations, workplaces and the natural environment.”1

Curated by Dr Marcus Bunyan and Nicholas Henderson and with catalogue essays by Professor Dennis Altman (below) and Dr Marcus Bunyan (Being (t)here: Gay Liberation Photography in Australia 1971-73), the show is a stimulating experience for those who want to be inspired by the history and art of the early gay liberation movement in Australia.

The exhibition coincides with AIDS 2014: 20th International AIDS Conference (20-25 July 2014) and Nite Art which occurs on the Wednesday night (23rd July 2014). The exhibition will travel to Sydney to coincide with the 14th Australia’s Homosexual Histories Conference in November at a venue yet to be confirmed.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Connell, Raewyn. “Ours is in colour: the new left of the 1960s,” in Carolyn D’Cruz and Mark Pendleton (eds.,). After Homosexual: The Legacies of Gay Liberation. Perth: UWA Publishing, 2013, p. 43.

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

Ponch Hawkes (Australian, b. 1946) 'Gay Liberation march, Russell Street, Melbourne' Melbourne, 1973 from the exhibition Exhibition: 'Out of the closets, into the streets: gay liberation photography 1971-73' at Edmund Pearce Gallery, Melbourne, July 2014

Ponch Hawkes (Australian, b. 1946)
Gay Liberation march, Russell Street, Melbourne
Melbourne, 1973
Digital C type print on Kodak Endura Matte
© Ponch Hawkes

John Englart (Australian, b. 1955)
Gay Pride Week poster, outside the Town Hall Hotel, Sydney Town Hall
Sydney, 1973
Digital C type print on Kodak Endura Matte
© John Englart

Out of the closets, onto the streets

Professor Dennis Altman

This exhibition chronicles a very specific time in several Australian cities, the period when lesbians and gay men first started demonstrating publicly in a demand to be accorded the basic rights of recognition and citizenship. Forty years ago to be homosexual was almost invariably to lead a double life; the great achievement of gay liberation was that a generation – although only a tiny proportion of us were ever Gay Liberationists – discovered that was no longer necessary.

The Archives have collected an extraordinary range of materials illustrating the richness of earlier lesbian and gay life in Australia, but this does not deny the reality that most people regarded homosexuality as an illness, a perversion, or a sin, and one for which people should be either punished or cured. It is revealing to read the first avowedly gay Australian novel, Neville Jackson’s No End to the Way [published in 1965 – in Britain – and under a pseudonym] to be reminded of how much has changed in the past half century.

Gay Liberation had both local and imported roots; the Stonewall riots in New York City, which sparked off a new phase of radical gay politics – when ‘gay’ was a term understood to embrace women, men and possibly transgender – took place in June 1969. They were barely noticed at the time in Australia, where a few people in the civil liberties world, most of them not homosexual, had started discussing the need to repeal anti-sodomy laws.

Small law reform and lesbian groups had already existed, but the real foundation of an Australian gay movement came in September 1970 when Christabel Pol and John Ware announced publicly the formation of CAMP, an acronym that stood for the Campaign Against Moral Persecution but also picked up on the most used Australian term for ‘homosexual’. Within two years there were both CAMP branches in most Australian capital cities, as well as small gay liberation groups that organised most of the demonstrations illustrated in this exhibition.

The differences between gay liberation and CAMP were in practice small, but those of us in Gay Liberation prided ourselves on our radical critique, and our commitment to radical social change. CAMP, with its rather daggy social events and its stress on law reform – at a time in history when homosexual conduct between men was illegal across the country – seemed to us too bourgeois, though ironically it was CAMP which organised the first open gay political protest in Australia [immediately identified by the balloons in the Exhibition photos].

It is now a cliché to say “the sixties” came to Australia in the early 1970s, but a number of forces came together in the few years between the federal election of 1969, when Gough Whitlam positioned the Labor Party as a serious contender for power, and 1972, the “It’s Time” election, when the ALP took office for the first time in 23 years. We cannot understand how a gay movement developed in Australia without understanding the larger social and cultural changes of the time, which saw fundamental shifts in the nature of Australian society and politics.

The decision of the Menzies government in 1965 to commit Australian troops to the long, and ultimately futile war in Vietnam, led to the emergence of a large anti-war movement, capable of mobilising several hundred thousand people to demonstrate by the end of the decade. Already under the last few years of Liberal government the traditional White Australia Policy was beginning to crumble, as it became increasingly indefensible, and awareness of the brutal realities of dispossession and discrimination against indigenous Australians was developing. Perhaps most significant for a movement based on sexuality, the second wave feminist movement, already active in the United States and Britain, began challenging the deeply entrenched sexist structures of society.

To quote myself, this at least reduces charges of plagiarism: “Anyone over fifty in Australia has lived through extraordinary changes in how we imagine the basic rules of sex and gender. We remember the first time we saw women bank tellers, heard a woman’s voice announce that she was our pilot for a flight, watched the first woman read the news on television. Women are now a majority of the paid workforce; in 1966 they made up twenty-nine per cent. When I was growing up in Hobart it was vaguely shocking to hear of an unmarried heterosexual couple living together and women in hats and gloves rode in the back of the trams (now long since disappeared). As I look back, it seems to me that some of the unmarried female teachers at my school were almost certainly lesbians, although even they would have been shocked had the word been uttered.”

In Australia Germaine Greer’s book The Female Eunuch became a major best seller, and Germaine appeared [together with Liz Fell, Gillian Leahy and myself] at the initial Gay Liberation forum at Sydney University in early 1972; looking back it is ironic that a woman who has been somewhat ambivalent in her attitudes to homosexuality was part of the public establishment of the gay movement.

But the early demonstrations illustrated in this exhibition did often include sympathetic “straights” – a term that seems to have disappeared from the language – for whom gay liberation was part of a wider set of cultural issues. It is essential to recognise that while political demonstrations may seem to assert certain claims they play widely different roles for those who participate. For some of us a public protest is a form of “coming out”; indeed many people had never been public about their sexuality before they attended their first demonstration. For others a demonstration is primarily a place to find solidarity, friendship, and, if lucky, sex.

For the gay movement more than any other just to declare oneself as gay was to take an enormous step, a step that some found remarkably easy while others had to wait until late in life to discover that actually almost everyone knew anyway. I remember the now dead Sydney playwright, Nick Enright, who was one of the first people to be open about his homosexuality, and was so without any sense of difficulty; at the same time there are still people who go to great lengths to hide their sexuality even while acknowledging they would face little risk of discrimination were they not to do so

Maybe there is a parallel for people who now declare their lost Aboriginal heritage, unsure how they will be regarded but aware that this is crucial to their sense of self. Every generation has its own version of coming out stories, this exhibition hones in on that time in our national history when everything seemed in flux, and gay liberation seemed a small part of creating a brave new world in which old hierarchies and restraints would disappear.

Looking back at the photos creates a certain nostalgia – we all look so young, so sure that we were changing the world, though in reality most of us were putting on a brave front. The oddest thing is that in some ways we did change the world. Forty years ago we looked at the police as threatening, symbolised in the photograph from Melbourne Gay Pride 1973 where the policeman is clearly telling people to move on. Today openly lesbian and gay cops march with us in the streets, and the very idea that homosexuality could be criminalised, as it still is in many parts of the world, has largely disappeared from historical memory. Indeed to many people attending this exhibition that may be the first time they confront the reality that being gay in Australia in the early 1970s was to live in a world of silence, evasion and fear.

Professor Dennis Altman
July 2014

Anonymous photographer
I am a Lesbian, Gay Pride Week
Adelaide, 1973
Digital C type print on Kodak Endura Matte
© Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives

Anonymous photographer
Man in black hat and red shirt, Gay Pride Week
Adelaide, 1973
Digital C type print on Kodak Endura Matte
© Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives

Supported by

Rennie Ellis is an award winning photographer and writer (03) 9525 3862 www.rennieellis.com.au

AIDS 2014: 20th International AIDS Conference
20 July – 25 July 2014
Melbourne, Australia

Edmund Pearce Gallery

This gallery has now closed.

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Exhibition: ‘View from the Window’ at Edmund Pearce Gallery, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 2nd – 19th July, 2014

Curated by: Vivian Cooper Smith and Jason McQuoid

Artists include: Sean Barrett, Danica Chappell, Kim Demuth, Jackson Eaton, Mike Gray, Megan Jenkinson, Benjamin Lichtenstein, Phuong Ngo, Izabela Pluta, Kate Robertson, Jo Scicluna, Vivian Cooper Smith, Melanie Jayne Taylor and Justine Varga

Installation view of the exhibition View from the Window at Edmund Pearce Gallery, Melbourne, July 2014 showing at right the work of Justine Varga including Morning and Evening from the series Sounding Silence (both 2014, below)

Photography can be anything your heart desires (or so they say)…

Another stimulating exhibition at Edmund Pearce Gallery, Melbourne.

My personal favourites are the works of Jo Scicluna and the two large “sculptural” photographs by Kim Demuth, but every artist in the exhibition had something interesting to offer.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Justine Varga (Australian, b. 1984) 'Morning' from the series 'Sounding Silence' 2014 from the exhibition 'View from the Window' at Edmund Pearce Gallery, Melbourne, July 2014

Justine Varga (Australian, b. 1984)
Morning from the series Sounding Silence
2014
Type C print
77 x 61cm
Edition of 6 + 1AP
Images courtesy of the artist, Stills Gallery, Sydney and Hugo Michell Gallery, Adelaide

Justine Varga (Australian, b. 1984)
Evening from the series Sounding Silence
2014
Type C print
47 x 38.5cm
Edition of 6 + 1AP
Images courtesy of the artist, Stills Gallery, Sydney and Hugo Michell Gallery, Adelaide

Izabela Pluta (Australian born Poland, b. 1979) 'Study for a sham ruin #7 and #8' 2012 (installation view)

Izabela Pluta (Australian born Poland, b. 1979)
Left: Study for a sham ruin #7, pigment print, 50 x 50cm, 2012 (installation view)
Right: Study for a sham ruin #8, acrylic on pigment print, 50 x 50cm, 2012 (installation view)
Images courtesy of the artist, Dianne Tanzer Gallery + Projects, Melbourne and Galerie pompom, Sydney

Izabela Pluta (Australian born Poland, b. 1979) 'Study for a sham ruin #7 and #8' 2012 from the exhibition 'View from the Window' at Edmund Pearce Gallery, Melbourne, July 2014

Izabela Pluta (Australian born Poland, b. 1979)
Left: Study for a sham ruin #7, pigment print, 50 x 50cm, 2012
Right: Study for a sham ruin #8, acrylic on pigment print, 50 x 50cm, 2012
Images courtesy of the artist, Dianne Tanzer Gallery + Projects, Melbourne and Galerie pompom, Sydney

Megan Jenkinson (New Zealand, b. 1958)
Promise – Morrell’s Islands
2009
Type lenticular
22.6 x 38cm
Edition of 5
Image courtesy the artist and Stills Gallery, Sydney

Megan Jenkinson (New Zealand, b. 1958)
Solace – Morrell’s Islands
2009
Type lenticular
21.7 x 38cm
Edition of 5
Image courtesy the artist and Stills Gallery, Sydney

View from the Window presents current thinking around photography (if we can even talk of something called photography any more).

The exhibition adapts its name from the oldest existing camera photograph, View from the Window at Le Gras by Nicéphore Niépce. Created with a cumbersome process using Bitumen of Judeah, it remains a trace of a day nearly two hundred years ago and a fragile, enigmatic object today. Since that time, photography has undergone continual seismic shifts in its short history. Given its technological foundations it was inevitable that as new processes and techniques were discovered they would influence current photographic practice. From daguerreotypes, cyanotypes through to Kodachrome, C-41, digital negatives and Photoshop just about everything has changed how we engage with the medium.

With the ubiquity of the modern photographic image View from the Window attempts to highlight the need for considered reflection upon the place and value of current photographic practices. The artists respond to this by considering what ‘photography’ is, and in doing so re-shape, re-imagine, expand and break it down. They explore new thinking with traditional techniques and invent new methods of image making. The work is digital and analogue, flat and sculptural, conceptual and experiential, whole and fragmented. Despite all this, the photographic ‘idea’ remains – reshaping the way we see the world.

Press release from the Edmund Pearce Gallery website

Installation view of the exhibition View from the Window at Edmund Pearce Gallery, Melbourne, July 2014 showing in the background works by Jo Scicluna

Jo Scicluna (Australian, b. 1969) 'Where A Circle Meets A Line (#4)' 2014 (installation view)

Jo Scicluna (Australian, b. 1969)
Where A Circle Meets A Line (#4) (installation view)
2014
Archival pigment ink on cotton rag, victorian ash timber, tinted acrylic
37.5 x 37.5cm
Edition of 5
Image courtesy of the artist

Jo Scicluna (Australian, b. 1969) 'Where I Have Always Been (An Island)' 2014 (detail)

Jo Scicluna (Australian, b. 1969)
Where I Have Always Been (An Island) (detail)
2014
Archival pigment ink on cotton rag, Victorian Ash timber, acrylic
45 x 45cm
Edition of 5
Image courtesy of the artist

Extracts from the catalogue essay View from the Window

Over 180 years ago, the French inventor Nicéphore Niépce produced View from the Window at Le Gras. Depicting the view over a series of buildings and the countryside surrounding a French estate, this fragile work was produced in a camera obscura by focusing light onto a pewter plate coated with Bitumen of Judea. Its archaic form and production seem far removed from the digitally-augmented, large-scale work of many contemporary artists, yet it still haunts photography. As well as recalling the origins of photography, it indicates a number of enduring polarities: analogue and digital; image and object; physical darkroom practices and digital post-production; personal and institutional or collective experiences; and duration and snapshot…

As these artists’ works demonstrate, the field of contemporary photography is fundamentally multifarious, constantly eluding attempts to delimit and define it. Despite the diversity of these practices, they share a sense of critical inquiry. Whether working with analogue photographs in darkrooms or digital images in post-production, building physical objects or emphasising the immaterial, these artists all foreground the capacity for photography to interrogate our understanding of the world. Consequently these practices recall art historian Bernd Stiegler’s vision of photography as a ‘reflective medium’.5 By this term Stiegler refers to the inextricable link between photography and realism, but importantly not a form of realism understood as naïve mimesis. Rather, for Stiegler, photography reflects upon the structures and assumptions through which we perceive the world, it ‘plumbs the conditions and limits of our understanding of reality’.6 More than a veridical document or hollow simulacrum, photography thus exists as image, object and process, potentially all simultaneously.

The complexity of these works signals a second common element: the investment of time. All these artists expend considerable time and effort in producing their work, as do any dedicated artists. However, the relevance of this observation is that this temporal investment differentiates such work from the overwhelming glut of photographic images that circulate through the electronic networks of globalised society. Although it would be disingenuous and insensitive to claim that tourist snaps of well-travelled monuments are only meaningless ephemera or signs of globalised homogeneity,7 the near ubiquity of photographic images highlights the need for considered reflection upon the place and value of photographic practices. Committed to extended periods of observation and experimentation, these artists display the patience and persistence to interrogate the problems and possibilities of photography. At their gentle request we repay this dedication through our own extended viewing, for without the time to look we might lose the time to think.

Christopher Williams-Wynn
2014

Christopher Williams-Wynn is an art history honours graduate of The University of Melbourne, and co-founder and co-editor of Dissect Journal.

5/ Bernd Stiegler, “Photography as the Medium of Reflection,” in Robin Kelsey and Blake Stimson (eds), The Meaning of Photography. Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2008, pp. 194-197
6/ Ibid., p. 197
7/ John Urry and Jonas Larsen, The Tourist Gaze 3.0. London: SAGE Publications, 2011, pp. 155-187

Kim Demuth (Australian born England)
12.16am 18.02.2009
2012
Sculptural photography
110 x 92 x 6.5cm
Edition of 3
Image courtesy of the artist

Kim Demuth (Australian born England)
9.55am 11.06.2008
2012
Sculptural photography
110 x 88 x 6.5cm
Edition of 3
Image courtesy of the artist

Sean Barrett
Cool Aether
2014
Duratrans on blackwood lightbox
80 x 60cm
Edition of 3
Image courtesy of the artist

Sean Barrett
Bright Swarm
2014
Duratrans on blackwood lightbox
80 x 60cm
Edition of 3
Image courtesy of the artist

Sean Barrett
Dual Aurora
2014
Duratrans on blackwood lightbox
80 x 60cm
Edition of 3
Image courtesy of the artist

Edmund Pearce Gallery

This gallery has now closed.

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Category: quotation

Exhibition: ‘The Sievers Project’ at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP), Fitzroy, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 13th June – 31st August, 2014

Foreword to the catalogue

And what about his Legacy?

What would he have thought about this project?

Review / Interview: Simon Maidment, co-curator of the exhibition ‘David McDiarmid: When This You See Remember Me’ at NGV Australia, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 9th May – 31st August, 2014

Here’s winking at you, sweetie…

Interview with co-curator Simon Maidment

Review: ‘Sue Ford’ at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 17th April – 24th August, 2014

Exhibition: ‘Art and Alchemy. The Mystery of Transformation’ at the Stiftung Museum Kunstpalast (SMKP), Düsseldorf, Germany

Exhibition dates: 5th April – 10th August, 2014

Exhibition: ‘Knud Lonberg-Holm: The Invisible Architect’ at Ubu Gallery, New York Part 2

Exhibition dates: 6th May – 30th September, 2014

Knud Lonberg-Holm: The Invisible Architect

Amerika: Bilderbuch eines Architekten

Exhibition: ‘Knud Lonberg-Holm: The Invisible Architect’ at Ubu Gallery, New York Part 1

Exhibition dates: 6th May – 30th September 2014

Exhibition: ‘Posing Beauty in African American Culture’ at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia

Exhibition dates: 26th April – 27th July, 2014

Exhibition: ‘Out of the closets, into the streets: gay liberation photography 1971-73’ at Edmund Pearce Gallery, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: Tuesday 22nd July – Saturday 26th, July, 2014

Opening: Tuesday 22nd July 6-8pm

Out of the closets, onto the streets

Professor Dennis Altman

Sponsored by

Supported by

Exhibition: ‘View from the Window’ at Edmund Pearce Gallery, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 2nd – 19th July, 2014

Extracts from the catalogue essay View from the Window