Category: quotation

Exhibition: ‘Into the Sunset: Photography’s Image of the American West’ at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York

Exhibition dates: 29th March – 8th June, 2009

Curator: Eva Respini, Associate Curator, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art

 

Carelton Watkins (American, 1829-1916) 'View from the Sentinel Dome, Yosemite' 1865-1866 from the exhibition 'Into the Sunset: Photography's Image of the American West' at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, March - June, 2009

Carelton Watkins (American, 1829-1916) 'View from the Sentinel Dome, Yosemite' 1865-1866

Carelton Watkins (American, 1829-1916) 'View from the Sentinel Dome, Yosemite' 1865-1866

 

Carelton Watkins (American, 1829-1916)
Views from the Sentinel Dome, Yosemite
1865-1866
Albumen silver prints from glass negatives
Museum of Modern Art, New York

 

 

The Museum of Modern Art presents Into the Sunset: Photography’s Image of the American West, a survey of 138 photographic works dating from 1850 to 2008 that chart the West’s complex, rich, and often compelling mythology via photography. The exploration of a large part of the American West in the mid-nineteenth century by European Americans coincided with the advent of photography, and photography and the West came of age together. The region’s seemingly infinite bounty and endless potential symbolised America as a whole, and photography, with its ability to construct persuasive and seductive images, was the perfect medium with which to forge a national identity. This relationship has resulted in a complex association that shapes the perception of the West’s social and physical landscape to this day. With political, cultural, and social attitudes constantly shifting in the region over the last 150 years, Into the Sunset further examines the way photographers have responded to these changes. The exhibition is organised by Eva Respini, Associate Curator, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art, and is on view in the Special Exhibitions Gallery on the third floor from March 29 to June 8, 2009.

Organised thematically rather than chronologically, Into the Sunset brings together the work of over 70 photographers, including Robert Adams, John Baldessari, Dorothea Lange, Timothy O’Sullivan, Cindy Sherman, Joel Sternfeld, Carleton E. Watkins, and Edward Weston, among others. The exhibition draws extensively from MoMA’s collection, along with private and public collections in the United States, and features new acquisitions from Adam Bartos, Katy Grannan, and Dennis Hopper, with each work also on view for the first time at the Museum.

Ms. Respini states: “Ranging from grand depictions of paradise to industrial development, from pictures taken on the road to prosaic suburban scenes, the photographs included in Into the Sunset do not all picture the West from the same point of view, or even perhaps, picture the same West. Rather, each is one part in a continually shifting and evolving composite image of a region that has itself been growing and changing since the opening of the frontier.”

Into the Sunset begins with the birth of photography and the American West. In the mid-nineteenth century, the region’s seemingly infinite bounty and endless potential symbolised America as a whole, and Carleton E. Watkins (American, 1829-1916) captured the grand depictions of an American paradise in his photographs of Yosemite Valley in California. Arguably the world’s first renowned landscape photographer, Watkins made his first photographs there in 1861 – large sized prints made with an 18-by-22-inch mammoth plate camera, well suited to the grandeur of the land. Included are the three contiguous photographs that make up his extraordinarily detailed View from the Sentinel Dome (1865-1866).

The exhibition balances the early work of landscape photographers with the twentieth century focus on the failure of the West’s promised bounty. In Joel Sternfeld’s (American, b. 1944) After a Flash Flood, Rancho Mirage, California (1979), the photographer documents the impact of a natural disaster, specifically a landslide, shot with neutral tones softly camouflaging the extent of flash flood on this suburban neighbourhood. And in Karin Apollonia Müller’s (German, b. 1963) Civitas (1997), the photographer shows a very different view of California than that of Watkins, with Müller revealing a contemporary Los Angeles as a littered wasteland of freeways and anonymous glass towers.

As highways and interstate travel became more prevalent, the automobile and the open road became synonymous with the region, with Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) as the first great photographer of these open roads. Included is Weston’s iconic Hot Coffee, Mojave Desert (1937), a humorous black-and-white photograph of a road sign revealing a greater thematic shift to the highway and its signage as an inescapable element in picturing the West in the twentieth century.

Once the West became more populated, photographers began to showcase humans’ effects on the land, including images of industrial development. In the 1950s William Garnett (American, 1916-2006) was hired by a real estate company to record the efficiency of mass-produced housing. For this series, Lakewood, California (1950), Garnett took photographs of the neighbourhood from an airplane, resulting in images that are completely devoid of people and focus on the progress of mass-produced construction. However, the series subsequently came to represent all that was wrong with such development and the massive sprawl of the West in the eyes of its critics.

Photographs of the people of the West represent a diversity of archetypes: gold miners and loggers, Native Americans, cowboys, suburbanites, city dwellers, starlets, dreamers, and drifters. Into the Sunset explores these archetypes, and their mutability into the twenty-first century. Included is Half Indian / Half Mexican (1991), from the photographer James Luna (Native American, Pooyukitchum / Luiseno, b. 1950), an artist of Native American ancestry. This tongue-in-cheek self-portrait captures in profile both an identity photograph and a mug shot, and works as a counterpoint to the tokenised portrayals of Native Americans from the past 150 years.

A similar reevaluation of past archetypes occurs in Richard Prince’s (American, b. 1949) Cowboy series from 1980, with one work from the series included in the exhibition. For that series Prince famously photographed Marlboro advertisements, cutting out the text, cropping the images, and enlarging them, highlighting the artifice of the virile image of the cowboy and its potency as a deeply ingrained figure in American mythology.

The suburbs and their inhabitants have been a rich subject for photographers of the West, and included are Larry Sultan’s (American, b. 1946) Film Stills from the Sultan Family Home Movies (1943-1972), in which Sultan chose individual frames from his family’s home movies and enlarged them. Although the images feature the activities that epitomise suburban life, a sense of unease lurks beneath the surface of these images; cropped and grainy, they resemble surveillance or evidence photographs.

Into the Sunset concludes with the theme of the failed promise of Western migration. Dorothea Lange’s well-known 1936 photograph Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California, photographed when Lange was employed by the Farm Security Administration, is included and documents the conditions of the West in rural areas during the Great Depression. Her photographs had a humanist purpose and resulted in putting a face on the hardships of that era.

This tradition of capturing the downtrodden of the West continues into this century with Katy Grannan (American, b. 1969), a photographer who recently completed a series of new pioneers, individuals struggling to define themselves in the West of today. In Nicole, Crissy Field Parking Lot (I) (2006), a woman, “Nicole,” poses seductively on a gravel parking lot, with her makeup-streaked face and harsh light alluding to her perilous existence on the fringe of society.”

Text from the MoMA website [Online] Cited 12/04/2009. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research


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

 

 

Installation view of the exhibition 'Into the Sunset: Photography's Image of the American West' at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York showing Ed Ruscha's 'Every Building on the Sunset Strip' 1966

 

Installation view of the exhibition Into the Sunset: Photography’s Image of the American West at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York showing Ed Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip 1966

 

Joel Sternfeld (American, b. 1944) 'After a Flash Flood, Rancho Mirage, California' 1979 from the exhibition 'Into the Sunset: Photography's Image of the American West' at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, March - June, 2009

 

Joel Sternfeld (American, b. 1944)
After a Flash Flood, Rancho Mirage, California
1979
Chromogenic colour print, printed 1987
15 15/16 x 20″ (40.5 x 50.8cm)
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Gift of Beth Goldberg Nash and Joshua Nash

 

During the 1970s, Joel Sternfeld’s work reflected a trend towards a newly dispassionate, less idealised approach to nature and culture. His photographs have a seductive beauty, even though they often focus on those places where the natural and man-made worlds come together in uncomfortable ways. Working with a large-format camera and luminous colour to create images that are frequently ironic or even humorous, his compositions appear simple but in fact are surprisingly complex and often unsettling. In this photograph of a suburban California neighbourhood in the aftermath of a flash flood, the lovely monochrome tones trick us into not immediately seeing the car that has toppled into the gaping sinkhole or realising that the buildings above could be on the verge of falling, too.

Text from the Museum of Fine Arts Boston website

 

Apollonia Müller (German, b. 1963) 'Civitas' 1997

 

Apollonia Müller (German, b. 1963)
Civitas
1997
From Angels in Fall
Chromogenic colour print
19 3/4 x 24 1/2″ (50.1 x 62.2cm)
Gift of Howard Stein
Museum of Modern Art, New York
© 2018 Karin Apollonia Müller

 

William A. Garnett (American, 1916-2006) 'Foundations and Slabs, Lakewood, California' 1950

 

William A. Garnett (American, 1916-2006)
Foundations and Slabs, Lakewood, California
1950
Gelatin silver print
18.9 x 23.8cm (7 7/16 x 9 3/8 in.)
© J. Paul Getty Museum

 

William A. Garnett (American, 1916-2006) 'Grading, Lakewood, California' 1950

 

William A. Garnett (American, 1916-2006)
Grading, Lakewood, California
1950
Gelatin silver print
18.9 x 24cm (7 7/16 x 9 7/16 in.)
© J. Paul Getty Museum

 

William A. Garnett (American, 1916-2006) 'Trenching, Lakewood, California' 1950

 

William A. Garnett (American, 1916-2006)
Trenching, Lakewood, California
1950
Gelatin silver print
7 5/16 x 9 7/16 in.
© J. Paul Getty Museum

 

 

“I was hired commercially to illustrate the growth of that housing project. I didn’t approve of what they were doing. Seventeen thousand houses with five floor plans, and they all looked alike, and there was not a tree in sight when they got through.”

“I was discharged and heard you could hitchhike on the transport taking GIs home. The airplane was full, but the captain let me sit in the navigator’s seat so I had a command view. I was amazed at the variety and beauty of these United States. I had never seen anything like that – in a book, in school, or since then. So I changed my career.”


William A. Garnett

 

 

Lakewood, located on the outskirts of Los Angeles, was the location for the second major postwar housing development built in the United States. Some 17,500 tract houses were constructed assembly-line style on 3,500 acres of cleared farmland. Mass production made the houses affordable, so a greater number of people could take part in the American dream of home ownership. The developers hired William Garnett to document different phases of the subdivision’s construction from his Cessna airplane. He often photographed his subjects early in the day, so the angled light would emphasise their otherwise flat-looking forms. The photographs serve a utilitarian purpose but also demonstrate Garnett’s impeccable sense of design. In Trenching Lakewood, California, stacked lumber appears for the foundations, utility poles are installed, and the main roads are carved out. …

William Garnett took his first cross-country flight after serving as a United States Army Signal Corps cameraman during World War II. What he saw below inspired him to learn how to pilot a plane so he could photograph the American landscape. Garnett’s aerial photographs resemble abstract expressionist paintings or views through a microscope. As landscapes, they do not have the conventional grounding of a horizon line. All reveal astonishing patterns that are not seen from the ground. Garnett honed his elegant design sensibility well before earning a pilot’s license. Before the war, he attended Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles. Later, he headed the Pasadena Police Department’s photography lab. In the 1940s and 1950s, he began to rack up flying hours around Los Angeles, speaking out about the area’s increasing air pollution. He illustrated Nathaniel Owings’s American Aesthetic, a book about land-use practices. During ten thousand hours of flying, Garnett simultaneously piloted a plane while photographing out the window – traveling above every state and many parts of the world. His light 1956 Cessna plane allowed him to fly to just the right location to capture subjects with precision. At first, he experimented with a variety of camera formats and films but found that two 35mm cameras (one loaded with black-and-white film, the other with colour film) best suited his needs. Garnett’s work defies the stereotype of aerial photography as purely scientific and devoid of artistry. He became the first aerial photographer to earn a prestigious Guggenheim fellowship.

Anonymous. “Historical Witness, Social Messaging,” from the J. Paul Getty Museum Education Department [Online] Cited 13/01/2019. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

 

William A. Garnett (American, 1916-2006) 'Framing, Lakewood, California' 1950

 

William A. Garnett (American, 1916-2006)
Framing, Lakewood, California
1950
Gelatin silver print
18.4 x 24.1cm (7 1/4 x 9 1/2 in.)
© J. Paul Getty Museum

 

Installation view of the exhibition 'Into the Sunset: Photography's Image of the American West' at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York showing at left, Robert Frank's 'Covered Car - Long Beach, California' (1956); and at centre right, photographs by William A. Garnett

 

Installation view of the exhibition Into the Sunset: Photography’s Image of the American West at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York showing at left, Robert Frank’s Covered Car – Long Beach, California (1956, below); and at centre right, photographs by William A. Garnett (above)

 

Robert Frank (American, 1924-2019) 'Covered Car - Long Beach, California' 1956

 

Robert Frank (American, 1924-2019)
Covered Car – Long Beach, California
1956
From The Americans (1955-1956)
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Modern Art, New York

 

Robert Frank (American, 1924-2019) 'Rodeo - New York City' 1954

 

Robert Frank (American, 1924-2019)
Rodeo – New York City
1954
From The Americans (1955-1956)
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Modern Art, New York

 

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) 'Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California' 1936

 

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California
1936
Gelatin silver print
11 1/8 x 8 9/16″ (28.3 x 21.8cm)
Museum of Modern Art, New York

 

Dorothea Lange took this photograph on assignment for the U.S. government’s Farm Security Administration (FSA) program, formed during the Great Depression to provide aid to impoverished farmers. FSA photographers documented the conditions that Americans faced throughout the course of the Great Depression, a period of economic crisis. Lange’s photograph suggests the impact of these harsh conditions on a 32-year-old mother of seven. She took a number of pictures of the mother with her children and chose this image as the most effective. Her keen sense of composition and attentiveness to the power of historical images of the Madonna and Child have helped this photograph transcend its original documentary function and become an iconic work of art.

Text from the MoMA website

 

Edward S. Curtis (1868 - 1952) 'Watching the Dancers' 1906

 

Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952)
Watching the Dancers
1906
Photogravure
Museum of Modern Art, New York

 

James Luna (American, 1950-2018) 'Half Indian/Half Mexican' 1991

 

James Luna (American, 1950-2018)
Half Indian/Half Mexican (installation view)
1991
Gelatin silver print

 

James Luna (February 9, 1950 – March 4, 2018) was a Payómkawichum, Ipi, and Mexican-American performance artist, photographer and multimedia installation artist. His work is best known for challenging the ways in which conventional museum exhibitions depict Native Americans. With recurring themes of multiculturalism, alcoholism, and colonialism, his work was often comedic and theatrical in nature. In 2017 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

 

Richard Prince (American, b. 1949) 'Untitled (Cowboy)' 1989

 

Richard Prince (American, b. 1949)
Untitled (Cowboy)
1989
Chromogenic print
127 x 177.8cm (50 x 70in.)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, and Jennifer and Joseph Duke Gift, 2000
© Richard Prince

 

In the mid-1970s Prince was an aspiring painter who earned a living by clipping articles from magazines for staff writers at Time-Life Inc. What remained at the end of the day were the advertisements, featuring gleaming luxury goods and impossibly perfect models; both fascinated and repulsed by these ubiquitous images, the artist began rephotographing them, using a repertoire of strategies (such as blurring, cropping, and enlarging) to intensify their original artifice. In so doing, Prince undermined the seeming naturalness and inevitability of the images, revealing them as hallucinatory fictions of society’s desires.

“Untitled (Cowboy)” is a high point of the artist’s ongoing deconstruction of an American archetype as old as the first trailblazers and as timely as then-outgoing president Ronald Reagan. Prince’s picture is a copy (the photograph) of a copy (the advertisement) of a myth (the cowboy). Perpetually disappearing into the sunset, this lone ranger is also a convincing stand-in for the artist himself, endlessly chasing the meaning behind surfaces. Created in the fade-out of a decade devoted to materialism and illusion, “Untitled (Cowboy)” is, in the largest sense, a meditation on an entire culture’s continuing attraction to spectacle over lived experience.

Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website

 

Robert Adams (American, b. 1937) 'East from Flagstaff Mountain, Boulder County, Colorado' 1975

 

Robert Adams (American, b. 1937)
East from Flagstaff Mountain, Boulder County, Colorado
1975
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Modern Art, New York

 

Robert Adams (American, b. 1937) 'Colorado Springs' 1968

 

Robert Adams (American, b. 1937)
Colorado Springs
1968
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Modern Art, New York

 

Robert Adams (American, b. 1937) 'Burning oil sludge, north of Denver, Colorado' 1973-1974

 

Robert Adams (American, b. 1937)
Burning oil sludge, north of Denver, Colorado
1973-1974
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Modern Art, New York

 

Stephen Shore (American, b. 1947) 'Beverly Boulevard and La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, California, June 21, 1975' From the series 'Uncommon Places', 1973-1986

 

Stephen Shore (American, b. 1947)
Beverly Boulevard and La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, California, June 21, 1975
1975
From the series Uncommon Places, 1973-1986
Museum of Modern Art, New York

 

Katy Grannan (American, b. 1969) 'Nicole, Crissy Field Parking Lot (I)' 2006

 

Katy Grannan (American, b. 1969)
Nicole, Crissy Field Parking Lot (I)
2006
Pigmented inkjet print
40 x 50″ (101.6 x 127cm)
Cornelius N. Bliss Memorial Fund
Museum of Modern Art, New York
© Katy Grannan

 

Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954) 'Untitled Film Still #43' 1979

 

Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954)
Untitled Film Still #43
1979
Gelatin silver print
7 9/16 x 9 7/16″ (19.2 x 24cm)
Acquired through the generosity of Sid R. Bass
Museum of Modern Art, New York

 

Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills is a suite of seventy black-and-white photographs in which the artist posed in the guises of various generic female film characters, among them, ingénue, working girl, vamp, and lonely housewife. Staged to resemble scenes from 1950s and ’60s Hollywood, film noir, B movies, and European art-house films, the printed images mimic in format, scale, and quality the often-staged “stills” used to promote films. By photographing herself in such roles, Sherman inserts herself into a dialogue about stereotypical portrayals of women. Whether she was the one to release the camera’s shutter or not, she is considered the author of the photographs. However, the works in Untitled Film Stills are not considered self-portraits.

Text from the MoMA website

 

Bill Owens (American, b. 1938) 'We're really happy. Our kids are healthy, we eat good food, and we have a really nice home' 1972

 

Bill Owens (American, b. 1938)
We’re really happy. Our kids are healthy, we eat good food, and we have a really nice home
1972
Gelatin silver print
8 1/16 x 9 15/16″ (20.4 x 25.3cm)
Gift of the photographer
Museum of Modern Art, New York
© Bill Owens

 

Richard Avedon (American, 1923-2004) 'Carl Hoefert, unemployed blackjack dealer, Reno, Nevada', from the series 'In the American West' August 30, 1983

 

Richard Avedon (American, 1923-2004)
Carl Hoefert, unemployed blackjack dealer, Reno, Nevada
August 30, 1983
From the series In the American West
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Modern Art, New York

 

 

The Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53 Street
New York, NY 10019
Phone: (212) 708-9400

Opening hours:
Sun – Fri 10.30am – 5.30pm
Sat 10.30am – 7.00pm

Monday mornings from 10.30am to 1.00pm are reserved exclusively for members and their guests.

MoMA website

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Exhibition: ‘Czech Photography of the 20th Century’ at the Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany, Bonn

Exhibition dates: 13th March – 26th July, 2009

Co-curators: Vladimir Birgus, photography professor and head of the Institute of Creative Photography at Silesian University in Opava, and Jan Mlčoch, the curator of the Photography Collection at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague

 

Jindřich Štreit (Czech, b. 1946) 'Arnoltice' 1985 from the exhibition 'Czech Photography of the 20th Century' at the Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany, Bonn, March - July, 2009

 

Jindřich Štreit (Czech, b. 1946)
Arnoltice
1985
From the Village Life series
Gelatin silver print

 

Jindřich Štreit (born 5 September 1946 in Vsetín) is a Czech photographer and pedagogue known for his documentary photography. He concentrates on documenting the rural life and people of Czech villages. He is considered one of the most important exponents of Czech documentary photography.

 

 

This looks like to be an interesting exhibition. I wish I had been able to see it.

Wouldn’t it be such a grand job flying around the world, reviewing photography exhibitions and bringing you my thoughts.

I can only wish…

Dr Marcus Bunyan


Many thankx to the Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

 

 

František Drtikol (Czech, 1883-1961) 'Wave' 1925 from the exhibition 'Czech Photography of the 20th Century' at the Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany, Bonn, March - July, 2009

 

František Drtikol (Czech, 1883-1961)
Wave
1925
Gelatin silver print

 

 

Czech photography produced and produces leading figures in all areas of photography – from classical documentary photojournalism to surrealism, realism or avant-garde works. From 13 March 2009 on, the Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany is presenting over 400 photographic works, a historical mosaic of Czech photography from 1900 until the late 20th century that underlines the international reputation enjoyed by Czech photography today. That reputation is not only apparent in the outstanding contributions by such renowned artists as Josef Sudek, Karel Hájek, Václav Jírů, Vilém Reichmann, Jan Reich, Jindřich Štreit, Frantisek Drtikol, Jaromír Funke, Jaroslav Rossler, Josef Koudelka and Jan Saudek, but also in works from a host of younger photographers. The exhibition does not only showcase famous names but also less well-known photographers, providing an overall impression of the variation and innovation in Czech photography.

From Surrealism and other avant-garde experimentation to realism and classic photo reportage, Czech photographers have long played a key role in all areas of photography and continue to do so to this day.

This exhibition is the first in Germany to present the history and development of Czech photography from 1900 to the turn of the millennium. Beginning with Art Nouveau-inspired Pictorialism, the comprehensive survey traces the rise of avant-garde photography and the development of photo montage in the 1920s to the 1940s. It examines the influence of ideological pressure on photography during the Second World War, the Stalinist 1950s and the period of Communist ‘normalisation’ after the occupation in 1968 and introduces the visitor to the multifaceted range of contemporary trends.

Text from the Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany website [Online] Cited 10/04/2009. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

 

František Drtikol (Czech, 1883-1961) 'Nude' 1927

 

František Drtikol (Czech, 1883-1961)
Nude
1927
Gelatin silver print

 

František Drtikol (3 March 1883, Příbram – 13 January 1961, Prague) was a Czech photographer of international renown. He is especially known for his characteristically epic photographs, often nudes and portraits.

From 1907 to 1910 he had his own studio, until 1935 he operated an important portrait photostudio in Prague on the fourth floor of one of Prague’s remarkable buildings, a Baroque corner house at 9 Vodičkova, now demolished. Jaroslav Rössler, an important avant-garde photographer, was one of his pupils. Drtikol made many portraits of very important people and nudes which show development from pictorialism and symbolism to modern composite pictures of the nude body with geometric decorations and thrown shadows, where it is possible to find a number of parallels with the avant-garde works of the period. These are reminiscent of Cubism, and at the same time his nudes suggest the kind of movement that was characteristic of the futurism aesthetic.

Text from the Wikipedia website

 

Eugen Wiskovsky (Czech, 1888-1964) 'Lunar Landscape or Collars' 1929

 

Eugen Wiskovsky (Czech, 1888-1964)
Lunar Landscape or Collars
1929
Gelatin silver print

 

The oeuvre of the leading Czech avant-garde photographer Eugen Wiskovsky (1888-1964) is not large in size or subject range, but it is noteworthy in its originality, depth of ideas, and mastery. Wiskovsky’s early New Objectivist works, from the late 1920s and early 1930s, sought artistic effect in apparently non-aesthetic objects: His inventive lighting and cropping allowed their elementary lines to stand out, to lose their worldly associations and take on potential metaphorical meanings. In his dynamic diagonal compositions, Wiskovsky was among the most radical practitioners of Czech Constructivism. His landscape work is similarly distinctive.

 

Jaroslav Rössler (Czech, 1902-1990) 'Untitled' 1931

 

Jaroslav Rössler (Czech, 1902-1990)
Untitled
1931
Gelatin silver print

 

Jaroslav Rössler (25 May 1902, Smilov – 5 January 1990, Prague) was a pioneer of Czech avant-garde photography and a member of the association of Czech avant-garde artists Devětsil (Butterbur).

Rössler was born to the Czech-German father, Eduard Rössler, and a Czech mother, Adela Nollova. From 1917 to 1920, Rössler studied in the atelier of the company owned by renowned Czech photographer František Drtikol. Subsequently, he worked with the company as a laboratory technician. As a 21 years old, he began collaboration with the art theorist Karel Teige, who assigned him to create typographic layout for magazines Pásmo, Disk, Stavba and ReD (Revue Devětsilu). While working on these tasks, Rössler deepened his knowledge of photographic methods. In his works he utilised and combined the techniques of photogram, photomontage, collage and drawing. The beginnings of his photographic work were influenced by Cubism and Futurism, but he also attempted to create the first abstract photographs. In 1923, he became a member of the avant-garde association Devětsil.

In 1925, he went on a six-month study visit to Paris. The same year he began working as a photographer in the Osvobozené divadlo in Prague. Before his second departure to Paris, he co-worked as a commercial photographer with the pictorial magazine Pestrý týden.

In 1927, Rössler moved to Paris together with his wife, Gertruda Fischerová (1894-1976). Initially, he focused on commercial photography. He collaborated with the experimental studio of Lucien Lorell, and worked on commissions for notable companies such as Michelin and Shell. However, later he found an interest in the “street life” of Paris, which influenced his future stay in the city. During a demonstration, he encountered the protesters and took photographs of the event. Shortly after that he was arrested, and after a six-month imprisonment he was expelled from the country, in 1935. The alleged reason for his expulsion was his German-sounding surname.

After his return from Paris, Rössler and his wife resided in Prague, Žižkov. He opened a small photographic atelier, but difficulties associated with the management of the studio caused a significant gap in his artistic work, lasting for almost two decades.

In the 1950s, he resumed his previous activities and again began experimenting with the camera and photographic techniques. He created so-called “prizmata” (prisms), photographs taken through a birefringent prism. Additionally, he experimented with solarisation and explored the possibilities of the Sabatier effect.

Text from the Wikipedia website

 

Jindřich Štyrský (Czech, 1899-1942) From the 'Man with Blinkers' series 1934

 

Jindřich Štyrský (Czech, 1899-1942)
From the Man with Blinkers series
1934
Museum of Decorative Arts, Prague

 

Eugen Wiskovsky (Czech, 1888-1964) 'Disaster' 1939

 

Eugen Wiskovsky (Czech, 1888-1964)
Disaster
1939
Gelatin silver print

 

Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) 'The Last Rose' 1956

 

Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976)
The Last Rose from the Rose series
1956
Gelatin silver print

 

Josef Sudek (17 March 1896, Kolín, Bohemia – 15 September 1976, Prague) was a Czech photographer, best known for his photographs of Prague.

Sudek was originally a bookbinder. During the First World War he was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian Army in 1915 and served on the Italian Front until he was wounded in the right arm in 1916 which led to the limb being amputated at the shoulder. After the war he studied photography for two years in Prague under Jaromir Funke. His army disability pension gave him leeway to make art, and he worked during the 1920s in the romantic Pictorialist style. Always pushing at the boundaries, a local camera club expelled him for arguing about the need to move forwards from ‘painterly’ photography. Sudek then founded the progressive Czech Photographic Society in 1924. Despite only having one arm, he used large, bulky cameras with the aid of assistants.

Sudek’s photography is sometimes said to be modernist. But this is only true of a couple of years in the 1930s, during which he undertook commercial photography and thus worked “in the style of the times”. Primarily, his personal photography is neo-romantic.

Text from the Wikipedia website

 

Josef Sudek was a Czech photographer best known for his elegiac black-and-white images of Prague, interiors, still lifes, and the landscapes of Bohemian forests. Many of Sudek’s most memorable images were taken from the window of his small studio, documenting his humble courtyard during changing weather and light conditions. “Everything around us, dead or alive, in the eyes of a crazy photographer mysteriously takes on many variations,” he explained, “so that a seemingly dead object comes to life through light or by its surroundings.”

Text from the artnet website [Online] Cited 10/01/2019

 

Jan Saudek (Czechoslovakia, b. 1935) 'Life' 1966

 

Jan Saudek (Czech, b. 1935)
Life
1966
Gelatin silver print

 

Josef Koudelka (Czech, b. 1938) 'France' 1987

 

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

 

 

The Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany
Museumsmeile Bonn
Helmut-Kohl-Allee 4
53113 Bonn
Telephone: +49 228 9171-200

Opening hours:
Thursday – Sunday and Tuesday 10am – 7pm
Closed Mondays

Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany website

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Review: ‘New 09’ at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 17th March – 17th May, 2009

Curator: Charlotte Day

ACCA’s annual commissions exhibition – this year curated by Charlotte Day with new works from eight contemporary Australian artists including Justine Khamara, Brodie Ellis, Marco Fusinato, Simon Yates, Matthew Griffin, Benjamin Armstrong and Pat Foster and Jen Berean.

 

Simon Yates (Australian, b. 1973) 'Rhabdomancy' 2009 from the exhibition 'New 09' at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), Melbourne, March - May, 2009

 

Simon Yates (Australian, b. 1973)
Rhabdomancy
Tissue paper, wood, fishing rods, tape, string, electrical components, helium balloons dimensions variable
2009
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

 

“That’s what art is, he said, the story of a life in all its particularity. It’s the only thing that really is particular and personal. It’s the expression and, at the same time, the fabric of the particular. And what do you mean by the fabric of the particular? I asked, supposing he would answer: Art. I was also thinking, indulgently, that we were pretty drunk already and that it was time to go home. But my friend said: What I mean is the secret story … The secret story is the one we’ll never know, although we’re living it from day to day, thinking we’re alive, thinking we’ve got it all under control and the stuff we overlook doesn’t matter. But every damn thing matters! It’s just that we don’t realise. We tell ourselves that art runs on one track and life, our lives, on another, we don’t even realise that’s a lie.”


From the story “Dentist” from the book ‘Last Evenings on Earth’ by Roberto Bolaño1

 

“A work of art reminds you of who you are now”


Kepesh from the film ‘Elegy’

 

 

The curator Charlotte Day has assembled an interesting selection of artists for New 09 at ACCA, Melbourne. It is an exhibition whose ‘presences’ challenge through dark and light, sound and light, contemplation and silence. The journey is one of here and now moments that transport the viewer to states of being that address the fabric of the particular: doubt, anxiety and enlightenment crowd every corner. The particularities of the experience (material, social, psychological and imaginative) impinge on the viewers interior states of being transcending the very physicality and symbolic realism of the works.2

On entering the gallery you are greeted by Simon Yates self-propelled figures that make up the work Rhabdomancy (2009, above). Suspended, tethered, floating just above the floor the figures move eerily about the entrance to the gallery, startling people who have not seen them move before. They stand silent witness, a simulation of self in tissue paper searching for meaning by using a dowsing rod. The word rhabdomancy has as one of it’s meanings ‘the art or gift of prophecy (or the pretence of prophecy) by supernatural means’. Here the figures are divining and divination rolled into one: grounded they seek release through the balloons but through augury they become an omen or portent from which the future is foretold.

“… cutting and slicing in order to see them better, willing them into three dimensions; an attempt to cheat death, or rather, to ward off forgetting of them as they are/were and as I was when the work was made.”

~ Justine Khamara

In the first gallery, a very minimal installation by Justine Khamara of two fractured faces stare out at you from the wall, my favourite work of the show. These are unsettling faces, protruding towards you like some topographical map, one eyes screwed shut the other beadily following you as you walk around the gallery space. Here the images of brother and sister presence anterior, already formed subjects not through memory (as photographs normally do) but through the insistence of the their multiple here and now planes of existence. Rather than ‘forgetting’ the images authenticate their identity through their ongoing presence in an ever renewing present.3 Their dissection of reality, the affirmation of their presence (not the photographic absence of a lost subject) embodies their secret story on the viewer told through psychological and imaginative processes: how do they make me feel – about my life, my death and being, here, now.

The pathos of the show is continued with the next work Noosphere (2008) by Brodie Ellis (the noosphere is best described as a sort of collective consciousness of human-beings).4 In this work a video above the clouds is projected onto a circular shape on the ceiling in a darkened room. The emotional and the imaginative impact of the message on the audience is again disorientating and immediate. The images look across the clouds to vistas of setting suns, look down on the clouds and the sea and land below. The images first move one way and then another, disorientating the viewer and changing their perspective of the earth; these are alien views of the earth accompanied by heart beat like ambient music. The perspective of the circle also changes depending on where the viewer stands like some anamorphic distortion of reality. On a stand a beaded yoke for a horse adds to the metaphorical allegory of the installation.

In the next gallery is the literal climax to the exhibition, Marco Fusinato’s Aetheric Plexus (2009). (Aether: medium through which light propagates; Plexus: in vertebrates, a plexus is an area where nerves branch and rejoin and is also a network of blood vessels).

Consisting of scaffolding that forms a cross and supports large numbers of silver spotlights with visible wiring and sound system the installation seems innocuous enough at first. Walking in front of the work produces no effect except to acknowledge the dull glow of red from the banks of dormant lights trained on the viewer. The interaction comes not in random fashion but when the viewer walks to the peripheries of the gallery corners triggering the work – suddenly you are are blasted with white light and the furious sound of white noise for about 15 seconds: I jumped half out of my skin! Totally disorientated as though one has been placed in a blast furnace or a heavenly irradiated crematorium one wonders what has just happened to you and it takes some time to reorientate oneself back in the afterlife of the here and now. Again the immediacy of the work, the particularities of the experience affect your interior states of being.

After a video installation by Matt Griffin you wander into the next gallery where two works by Benjamin Armstrong inhabit the floor of the gallery. And I do mean inhabit. Made of blown glass forms and wax coated tree branches the works have a strange affect on the psyche, to me seemingly emanations from the deep subconscious. Twin glass hemispheres of what look like a brain are surrounded by clasping synaptic nerve endings that support an egg like glass protrusion – a thought bubble? a spirit emanation? These are wonderful contemplative but slightly disturbing objects that have coalesced into shape only in another form to melt and disappear: molten glass and melted wax dissipating the very form of our existence.

Finally we come to the three part installation by Pat Foster and Jen Berean (below). On the right of the photograph you can see three aluminium and glass doors, closed, sealed leading to another gallery. What you can’t see in the photograph is the three pieces of gaffer tape stretched across the glass doors, like they do on the building sites of new homes. No entry here. Above your head is a suspended matrix of aluminium and glass with some of the glass planes smashed. Clean, clinical, safe but smashed, secure but threatening the matrix presses down on the viewer. It reminded me of the vertical standing shards of the World Trade Centre set horizontal suspended overhead. Only the steel cable seemed to ruin the illusion and seemed out of place with the work. It would have been more successful if the matrix was somehow suspended with fewer tethers to increase the sense of downward pressure. Finally you sit on the aluminium benches and contemplate in silence all that has come before and wonder what just hit you in a tidal wave of feelings, immediacies and emotions. The Doing and Undoing of Things.

An interesting journey then, one to provoke thought and emotion.
The fabric of the particular. The pathos of the art-iculate.

My only reservations are about the presence, the immediacy, the surface of it all. How persistent will these stories be? Will the work sustain pertinent inquiry above and beyond the here and now, the shock and awe. Or will it be like a meal one eats and then finds one is full but empty at the same time. A journey of smoke and mirrors.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

 

1/ Bolano, Robert. Last Evenings on Earth. New Directions, 2007. Available on Amazon.

2/ Blair, French. The Artist, The Body. [Online] Cited on 12/04/2009. No longer available online

3/ Ibid.,

4/ “For Teilhard, the noosphere is best described as a sort of ‘collective consciousness’ of human-beings. It emerges from the interaction of human minds. The noosphere has grown in step with the organisation of the human mass in relation to itself as it populates the earth. As mankind organizes itself in more complex social networks, the higher the noosphere will grow in awareness.” From the concept of Nooshpere on Wikipedia.


Many thankx to ACCA for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. All Images © Dr Marcus Bunyan and ACCA.

 

 

Justine Khamara (Australian, b. 1971) 'Dilated Concentrations' 2009 from the exhibition 'New 09' at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), Melbourne, March - May, 2009

Justine Khamara (Australian, b. 1971) 'Dilated Concentrations' 2009 (detail) from the exhibition 'New 09' at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), Melbourne, March - May, 2009

Justine Khamara (Australian, b. 1971) 'Dilated Concentrations' 2009 (detail) from the exhibition 'New 09' at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), Melbourne, March - May, 2009

Justine Khamara (Australian, b. 1971) 'Dilated Concentrations' 2009 (detail) from the exhibition 'New 09' at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), Melbourne, March - May, 2009

 

Justine Khamara (Australian, b. 1971)
Dilated Concentrations
2009
UV print on laser cut stainless steel
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

 

Benjamin Armstrong (Australian, b. 1975) 'Hold Everything Dear I' 2008

 

Benjamin Armstrong (Australian, b. 1975)
Hold Everything Dear I
2008
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Pat Foster (Australian, b. 1981) and Jen Berean (Canadian, b. 1981) 'Untitled’ from the series ‘The Doing and Undoing of Things’ 2009

 

Pat Foster (Australian, b. 1981) and Jen Berean (Canadian, b. 1981)
Untitled from the series The Doing and Undoing of Things
2009
Aluminium, safety glass, steel cable
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Pat Foster (Australian, b. 1981) and Jen Berean (Canadian, b. 1981) 'Untitled’ from the series ‘The Doing and Undoing of Things’ 2009 (detail)

 

Pat Foster (Australian, b. 1981) and Jen Berean (Canadian, b. 1981)
Untitled from the series The Doing and Undoing of Things (detail)
2009
Aluminium, safety glass, steel cable
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

 

Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA)
111 Sturt Street
Southbank
Victoria 3006
Australia

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Friday 10am – 5pm
Saturday – Sunday 11am – 5pm
Closed Monday

ACCA website

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Exhibition: ‘William Kentridge: Five Themes’ at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)

“His work is moving and compassionate as all great art should be.” Dr Marcus Bunyan

Exhibition dates: 14th March – 31st May, 2009

Curator: Curator of Media Arts Rudolf Frieling and Mark Rosenthal, adjunct curator of contemporary art at the Norton Museum of Art

 

William Kentridge (South African, b. 1955) 'Drawing for the film 'Stereoscope [Felix Crying]'' 1998-1999 from the exhibition 'William Kentridge: Five Themes' at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), March - May, 2009

 

William Kentridge (South African, b. 1955)
Drawing for the film Stereoscope [Felix Crying]
1998-1999

 

 

One of my favourite artists in the world.

His technique – the palimpsestic nature of his practice where the history, memories and spaces of previous drawings are overwritten again and again on a single piece of paper without their ever being lost (unlike traditional animation techniques) – is amazing.

His use of drawing, animation and the camera to record narratives of connection always has personal and archetypal themes – love, loss, bigotry, big business, persecution, reconciliation and social conflict in the stories of his homeland South Africa.

His perspective on the world, his knowledge of books and philosophy, his understanding that stories exist as faint, legible remains completes the perception that he is an artist drawn to the line of the world.

His work is moving and compassionate as all great art should be.

Dr Marcus Bunyan


Many thankx to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for allowing me to publish the art work in the posting.

 

 

Combining the political with the poetic, William Kentridge’s work has made an indelible mark on the contemporary art scene. Dealing with subjects as sobering as apartheid and colonialism, Kentridge often imbues his art with dreamy, lyrical undertones or comedic bits of self-deprecation, making his powerful messages both alluring and ambivalent. Perhaps best known for his stop-motion films of charcoal drawings, the internationally renowned South African artist also works in etching, collage, sculpture, and the performing arts, opera in particular. This exhibition explores five primary themes that have engaged Kentridge over the last three decades through a comprehensive selection of his work from the 1980s to the present. Concentrating on his most recent production and including many pieces that have not been seen in the United States, the exhibition reveals as never before the full arc of his distinguished career.

Text from the SFMOMA website [Online] Cited 01/04/2009. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

 

 

William Kentridge (South African, b. 1955)
“Invisible Mending” from 7 Fragments for Georges Méliès
2003
35-mm and 16-mm animation film

 

 

William Kentridge: Five Themes, a comprehensive survey of the contemporary South African artist’s work, will premiere at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) on March 14, 2009. Featuring more than 75 works in a range of media – including animated films, drawings, prints, theater models, sculptures, and books – the exhibition is co-organised by SFMOMA and the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Florida. The San Francisco presentation, overseen by SFMOMA Curator of Media Arts Rudolf Frieling, will be on view through May 31, 2009.

Curated by Mark Rosenthal, adjunct curator of contemporary art at the Norton Museum of Art, in close collaboration with the artist, the exhibition explores five primary themes that have engaged Kentridge over the past three decades. Although the exhibition highlights projects completed since 2000 (many of which have not been seen in the United States), it will also present, for the first time, Kentridge’s most recent work alongside his earlier projects from the 1980s and 1990s – revealing as never before the full arc of his distinguished career.

Following its debut at SFMOMA, the survey will travel to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the Norton Museum of Art, and The Museum of Modern Art in New York. Plans for the European tour – which will tentatively include Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Albertina Museum in Vienna, and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem – are being finalised. Accompanying the exhibition is a richly illustrated catalogue, complete with a DVD produced by the artist for this special occasion. The San Francisco presentation of William Kentridge: Five Themes is made possible by the generous support of the Koret Foundation and Doris and Donald Fisher.

William Kentridge is one of today’s most influential artists, and with this exhibition, SFMOMA continues its commitment to bringing such groundbreaking artists as Olafur Eliasson, Richard Tuttle, and Jeff Wall to local and international audiences,” says SFMOMA Director Neal Benezra, who co-curated the last major retrospective of the artist’s work in the United States in 2001. “Although Kentridge is primarily recognised for his animated films, he has devoted most of his time to making works on paper. The drawn line is completely inseparable from his work in other media, informing everything he creates. His transformation of drawing into animated film reflects his deep interest in how content evolves from process, how meaning accrues through making.”

Exhibition curator Rosenthal adds, “Even as Kentridge has established his reputation as a master draftsman, printmaker, and one of the preeminent artist–filmmakers of our time, he has also expanded the traditional notion of political art, evolving the genre from a conventional depiction of horrors to a more nuanced portrayal of the psychological effects of political events upon those who observe them, whether they be perpetrators, victims, or onlookers.”

Born in 1955 in Johannesburg, where he continues to live and work, Kentridge has earned international acclaim for his interdisciplinary practice, which often fuses drawing, film, and theater. Known for engaging with the social landscape and political background of his native South Africa, he has produced a searing body of work that explores themes of colonial oppression and social conflict, loss and reconciliation, and the ephemeral nature of both personal and cultural memory.

Kentridge first gained recognition in 1997, when his work was included in Documenta X in Kassel, Germany, and in the Johannesburg and Havana Biennials, which were followed by prominent solo exhibitions internationally. His art was widely introduced to American audiences in 2001 through a traveling retrospective – co-curated by Neal Benezra when he served as deputy director of the Art Institute of Chicago – which primarily included works made before 2000. William Kentridge: Five Themes brings viewers up to date on the artist’s work over the past decade, exploring how his subject matter has evolved from the specific context of South Africa to more universal stories. In recent years, Kentridge has dramatically expanded both the scope of his projects (such as recent full-scale opera productions) and their thematic concerns, which now include his own studio practice, colonialism in Namibia and Ethiopia, and the cultural history of post-revolutionary Russia. His newer work is based on an intensive exploration of themes connected to his own life experience, as well as the political and social issues that most concern him.

Although his hand-drawn animations are often described as films, Kentridge himself prefers to call them “drawings for projection.” He makes them using a distinctive technique in which he painstakingly creates, erases, and reworks charcoal drawings that are photographed and projected as moving image. Movement is generated within the image, by the artist’s hand; the camera serves merely to record its progression. As such, the animations explore a tension between material object and time-based performance, uniquely capturing the artist’s working process while telling poignant and politically urgent stories.

Concerning the artist’s innovative film installations of the past ten years, Rudolf Frieling adds: “Kentridge has been considered primarily as an artist who draws for projections. Yet his recent installation-based films explore an expanded cinema space and question the very foundation of what it means to produce and perceive a moving image.”

In light of SFMOMA’s history with Kentridge – in 2004 the museum acquired the artist’s landmark film Tide Table (2003) and a set of related drawings – and the rich holdings of his work in private Bay Area collections, the occasion to present the first major exhibition of his work in San Francisco has particular resonance and reflects the museum’s ongoing commitment to his art. In conjunction with the exhibition, SFMOMA will bring the artist’s multimedia opera The Return of Ulysses to San Francisco for performances at Project Artaud Theater from March 25 through 29, 2009. Kentridge will also present his lecture-format solo performance I am not me, the horse is not mine at SFMOMA on March 14, 2009.

The Five Themes

“Parcours d’Atelier: Artist in the Studio” 

The first section of the exhibition examines a crucial turning point in Kentridge’s work, one in which his own art practice became a subject. According to the artist, many of these projects are meant to reflect the “invisible work that must be done” before beginning a drawing, film, or sculpture. This theme is epitomised by the large-scale multiscreen projection 7 Fragments for Georges Méliès (2003), an homage to the early French film director, who, like Kentridge, often combined performance with drawing. The suite of seven films – each depicting Kentridge at work in his studio or interacting with his creations – has only been shown once before in the United States and will be accompanied by a rarely seen group of related drawings, forming an intimate portrayal of the artist’s process.

“Thick Time: Soho and Felix” 

A second section of the exhibition is dedicated to Kentridge’s best-known fictional characters, Soho Eckstein, a domineering industrialist and real estate developer whose troubled conscience reflects certain miens of contemporary South Africa, and his sensitive alter ego, Felix Teitlebaum, who pines for Soho’s wife and often functions as a surrogate for the artist himself. The centrepiece of this section, an ongoing work entitled 9 Drawings for Projection, comprises nine short animated films: Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City after Paris (1989), Monument (1990), Sobriety, Obesity & Growing Old (1991), Mine (1991), Felix in Exile (1994), History of the Main Complaint (1996), WEIGHING … and WANTING (1998), Stereoscope (1999), and Tide Table (2003). These projections, along with a key selection of related drawings, follow the lives of Soho and Felix as they struggle to navigate the political and social climate of Johannesburg during the final decade of apartheid. According to Kentridge, the Soho and Felix films were made without a script or storyboards and are largely about his own process of discovery.

“Occasional and Residual Hope: Ubu and the Procession” 

In 1975 Kentridge acted in Ubu Rex (an adaptation of Ubu Roi, Alfred Jarry’s satire about a corrupt and cowardly despot), and he subsequently devoted a large body of work to the play. He began with a series of eight etchings, collectively entitled Ubu Tells the Truth (1996), and in 1997 made an animated film of the same name, as well as a number of related drawings. These works also deal with the South African experience, specifically addressing the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings set up by the nation’s government in 1995 to investigate human rights abuses during apartheid. Other highlights in this grouping include the film Shadow Procession (1999), in which Kentridge first utilises techniques of shadow theatre and jointed-paper figures; the multi-panel collage Portage (2000); a large charcoal-and-pastel-on-paper work entitled Arc Procession (Smoke, Ashes, Fable) (1990); and some of the artist’s rough-hewn bronze sculptures.

 

William Kentridge (South African, b. 1955) 'Act IV Scene I from Ubu Tells the Truth' 1996-1997 from the exhibition 'William Kentridge: Five Themes' at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), March - May, 2009

 

William Kentridge (South African, b. 1955)
Act IV Scene I from Ubu Tells the Truth
1996-1997

 

“Sarastro and the Master’s Voice: The Magic Flute” 

A selection of Kentridge’s drawings, films, and theatre models inspired by his 2005 production of the Mozart opera The Magic Flute for La Monnaie, the leading opera house in Belgium, will be a highlight of the exhibition. The artist’s video projection Learning the Flute (2003), which started the Flute project, shifts between images of black charcoal drawings on white paper and white chalk drawings projected onto a blackboard, forming a meditation on darkness and light. Preparing the Flute (2005) was created as a large-scale maquette within which to test projections central to the production of the opera. Another theatre model, Black Box/Chambre Noire (2006), which has never been seen in the United States, addresses the opera’s themes, specifically through an examination of the colonial war of 1904 in German South-West Africa, and of the genocide of the Herero people. What Will Come (has already come) (2007), a consideration of colonialism in Ethiopia, presents an anamorphic film installation in which intentionally distorted images projected onto a tabletop right themselves only when reflected in a cylindrical mirror. This work was recently acquired, under the guidance of Rosenthal, by the Norton Museum of Art.

“Learning from the Absurd: The Nose” 

The fifth section comprises a multichannel projection made in preparation for Kentridge’s forthcoming staging of The Nose, a Metropolitan Opera production that will premiere in New York in March 2010. The Nose – a 1930 Dmitri Shostakovich opera based on Nikolai Gogol’s absurdist short story of 1836 – concerns a Russian official whose nose disappears from his face, only to turn up, in uniform, as a higher-ranking official moving in more respected circles. Kentridge’s related work, I am not me, the horse is not mine (2008), on view in the United States for the first time, is a room-size installation of projected films that use Gogol’s story as the basis for examining Russian modernism and the suppression of the Russian avant-garde in the 1920s and 1930s.

Related Performances 

Acknowledging the profound importance of theatrical work in Kentridge’s oeuvre, SFMOMA will bring the artist’s opera The Return of Ulysses to San Francisco in conjunction with the exhibition. First performed in Brussels in 1998, Kentridge’s acclaimed reinterpretation of Claudio Monteverdi’s classic 1640 opera (based on Homer’s epic poem) is transposed to a mid-20th-century Johannesburg setting. This limited-engagement performance features live actors and musicians, as well as 13 life-size, artisan-crafted wooden puppets and projections of Kentridge’s animated charcoal drawings. The Return of Ulysses will run at Project Artaud Theater from Tuesday, March 24, through Saturday, March 28 (preview March 24, opening March 25), and is a production of Pacific Operaworks, in Seattle, incorporating puppeteers from Kentridge’s longtime collaborator, the Handspring Puppet Company of Cape Town, in South Africa.

In a special opening-night event on March 14, Kentridge will present a lecture-format solo performance of I am not me, the horse is not mine, which premiered at the 16th Biennale of Sydney in June 2008 (and shares the same title of the related multichannel projection making its U.S. debut with the exhibition). This live performance focuses on the development process of Kentridge’s upcoming opera production, The Nose.

Definitive Publication with Companion DVD

To coincide with the exhibition, SFMOMA and the Norton Museum of Art, in association with Yale University Press, will publish a richly illustrated catalogue (hardcover, $50). In the catalogue’s principal essay, exhibition curator Mark Rosenthal presents a portrait of the artist, showing the interrelationship between aspects of Kentridge’s character and the protagonists that populate his work. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, chief curator at the Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, examines the artist’s themes and iconography in closer detail, addressing Kentridge’s working methods as he moves freely between disciplines. Rudolf Frieling demonstrates that although Kentridge is not typically discussed as an installation artist, there are compelling reasons to consider him as such. Cornelia H. Butler, Judith B. Hecker, and Klaus Biesenbach, curators at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, explore the subject of performance in Kentridge’s work. Finally, a conversation between Kentridge and Michael Auping, chief curator at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, focuses on the artist’s drawing practice. In addition, the artist has written texts to introduce each of the book’s five plate sections.

For the first time, Kentridge will produce a DVD for distribution with the publication, making the catalogue unique among existing literature on the artist. Combining intimate studio footage of the artist at work with fragments from significant film projects, the DVD offers a fascinating look at how Kentridge’s ideas evolve from raw concept to finished work.

Press release from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

 

 

William Kentridge (South African, b. 1955)
Johannesburg
1989

 

William Kentridge (South African, b. 1955) 'Felix in Exile' 1994 from the exhibition 'William Kentridge: Five Themes' at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), March - May, 2009

 

William Kentridge (South African, b. 1955)
Drawing for the projection Felix in Exile
1994

 

 

William Kentridge (South African, b. 1955)
Felix in Exile
1994

 

More videos of William Kentridge’s work are available on You Tube

 

 

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
151 Third Street
San Francisco CA 94103
Phone: 415.357.4000

Opening hours:
Monday 10am – 5pm
Tuesday and Wednesday Closed
Thursday 1pm – 8pm
Friday – Sunday 10am – 5pm

SFMOMA website

William Kentridge on Wikipedia

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Around the galleries: Derek O’Connor at Karen Woodbury Gallery, Peter Cole ‘Elements + Memories’ at John Buckley Gallery, Melbourne

April 2009

 

In a mad dash around town I managed to see the Derek O’Connor and Peter Cole exhibitions before they finished and also the Siri Hayes En Plein Air exhibition of photographs at Gallerysmith (see next post).

Dr Marcus Bunyan


Please click on the art work for a larger version of the image.

 

Derek O’Connor paintings at Karen Woodbury Gallery

An intense show of small oil paintings that really draw you into their composition. They are paintings of tremendous energy and layering, the surface being in a constant state of flux. The paintings become metaphors for the bodies existence in space, corporeal landscapes full of sensation ‘neither rational nor cerebral’. They become a mediation and a meditation upon life itself – complex, convulsive, concentrated energy that focuses the viewers attention so that they cannot look away.

 

Derek O'Connor (Australian born England, b. 1959) 'Horizontal' 2008 from the exhibition Derek O'Connor paintings at Karen Woodbury Gallery

 

Derek O’Connor (Australian born England, b. 1959)
Horizontal
2008

 

Derek O'Connor (Australian born England, b. 1959) 'Horizontal' 2008 from the exhibition Derek O'Connor paintings at Karen Woodbury Gallery

 

Derek O’Connor (Australian born England, b. 1959)
Horizontal
2008

 

“Working with his tools of palette knives and brushes, he sets into motion a train of repetitions, of speeds and slowness1 applying and scrapping paint away in an attempt to move from a position of not knowing towards knowing. He brings … an intense physical and mental awareness to the rhythms of his own movements, his own body. At such moments time seems to expand – to become infinite.

In erasing from his project the world of appearances, Derek O’Connor embraces something else – the realm of ‘sensation’. Sensation is an open painterly expression which resists definition. The Modernist painter Paul Cezanne described sensation as a “logic of the senses” which is neither rational nor cerebral2 … For Derek, the subject of his painting appears to be the act of making itself. Here subject and object collapse (folding into itself) so that sensation is experienced through the materiality of paint, via the movements of the artists’ body to affect the bodies of others.”

Paul Uhlmann from the catalogue essay

 

1/ Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. A Thousand Plateaus. London: Continuum, 1987, pp. 292-300
2/ Deleuze, G. The Logic of Sensation. London: Continuum, 2003, p. 42

 

Derek O'Connor (Australian born England, b. 1959) 'Irregular' 2008

 

Derek O’Connor (Australian born England, b. 1959)
Irregular
2008

 

Karen Woodbury Gallery

This gallery has closed.

 

Peter Cole ‘Elements + Memories’ at John Buckley Gallery 18th March – 9th April 2009

A decidedly underwhelming show by Peter Cole at John Buckley Gallery only redeemed by the amazing Elemental Landscape series of 64 small sculptural pieces displayed as a frieze (see below).

The large free standing sculptural works fail to impress with their minimalist Ikea-esque cut out style – especially when viewed from the rear of the work. One would have thought that a sculptor, making several free standing pieces that are going to be walked around in a gallery space, would have designed the work to be viewed ‘in the round’.

As it is all the perfection of the clinical front of the works is undone by brackets and screws holding the whole thing together when viewed from the flattened rump. This is pretty, surface work that lacks substance and insight, pretty shapes and cut outs and targets that allude to memory but are just stylised glossy magazine representations of it.

On the other hand the Elemental Landscape series of sculptures is just magical – playful, ever inventive, wonderfully contemporary, beautifully resolved in concept and manufacture, in their use and bending of geometric shapes, the sculptures really are fantastic when seen ‘in situ’ as a whole. Visit the exhibition just to see this work – buy some pieces and make your own elemental landscape!

Dr Marcus Bunyan

 

Peter Cole (Australian, b. 1947) 'Elements + Memories' installation views at John Buckley Gallery, Melbourne

 

Peter Cole (Australian, b. 1947)
Elements + Memories installation views at John Buckley Gallery, Melbourne (first and second image)
Bar 4 – Shibuya 2009 (third image)
Garden – Yoyogi 2009 (fourth image)

 

In Peter D Cole’s stunning and ambitious exhibition Elements + Memories he creates a playful interactive work titled Elemental Landscape. Utilising his highly stylised modernist and reductionist technique – influenced at an early age by studies of Miro and Calder – Cole presents 64 small sculptural pieces of varying colour and shape of which the audience is encouraged to create their own compositions. Cole also presents three large-scale sculptures drawing on memories of his times in Japan.

Cole’s distinct skill of distilling the landscape and architecture into separate elements and symbols is in itself evocative of traditional minimal Japanese aesthetic and he has created a series of works which draw upon Japanese interiors and streetscapes and the gardens of the Sakura Matsuri (Cherry Blossom festival).

Text from John Buckley Gallery website [Online] Cited 01/04/2009. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

 

Peter Cole. 'Elemental Landscape' 2009

Peter Cole (Australian, b. 1947) 'Elemental Landscape' 2009

Peter Cole (Australian, b. 1947) 'Elemental Landscape' 2009

Peter Cole (Australian, b. 1947) 'Elemental Landscape' 2009

 

Peter Cole (Australian, b. 1947)
Elemental Landscape
2009

 

 

John Buckley Gallery

This gallery has closed.

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Opening 2: ‘Colour, Time’ by David Thomas at Nellie Castan Gallery, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 2nd April – 2nd May, 2009

Opening: Thursday 2nd April 2009

 

Opening night crowd at 'Colour, Time' by David Thomas at Nellie Castan Gallery, Melbourne, 2nd April, 2009

 

Opening night crowd at Colour, Time by David Thomas with from right to left Farbenfreude Series: Movement of Colour, Heart (Large) 2008; Farbenfreude Series: Amid Dark and Light (Dark Painting) 2008; and Farbenfreude Series: A Gentle Pasing (Large) 2008 on back wall
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

 

“A photographed real space and an expanding undefinable painting space (the non-figurative form) confront each other. The result is a coexistence of various models of space, a coexistence and entanglement of inconsistent things.”


Christoph Dahlhausen. David Thomas EIKON nr 53, Vienna, Austria, 2006

 

 

This exhibition just didn’t hit the spot for me.

A slow burn painting, photography and composites show at Nellie Castan Gallery. Minimalist grid paintings combine with squares of colour taken out of photographs (again! as at the recent Richard Grigg show at Block Projects).

This supposedly imparts profundity to insubstantial and mundane photographs that aim to comment on the existential nature of our being through the presence / absence of the missing spatio-temporal slice.

Nice to catch up with Jason Smith Director of Heide Museum of Modern Art who was in attendance.

Dr Marcus Bunyan


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

 

 

Opening night crowd at 'Colour, Time' by David Thomas at Nellie Castan Gallery, Melbourne, 2nd April, 2009

 

Opening night crowd at Colour, Time by David Thomas with the series Length of Time 2009 on table
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

David Thomas (Australian born Northern Ireland, b. 1951) 'Length of Time Series: Blue tape on red monochrome' 2009

 

David Thomas (Australian born Northern Ireland, b. 1951)
Length of Time Series: Blue tape on red monochrome
2009
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

David Thomas (Australian born Northern Ireland, b. 1951) 'End of Summer: Homage a Tati (small splash) 2009

 

David Thomas (Australian born Northern Ireland, b. 1951)
End of Summer: Homage a Tati (small splash)
Enamel on photograph
2009

 

Opening night crowd in front of David Thomas' 'Black Reflection Painting: For William Barak' 2009

 

Opening night crowd in front of David Thomas’ Black Reflection Painting: For William Barak 2009
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

 

Nellie Castan Gallery

This gallery closed in 2013.

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Exhibition: ‘Picturing America: Photorealism in the 1970s’ at Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin

Exhibition dates: 7th March – 10th May, 2009

Curator: Valerie L. Hillings, Assistant Curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

 

Richard Estes (American, b. 1932) 'Telephone Booths' 1967 from the exhibition 'Picturing America: Photorealism in the 1970s' at Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin, March - May, 2009

 

Richard Estes (American, b. 1932)
Telephone Booths
1967

 

 

Many thankx to the Deutsche Guggenheim for allowing me to publish the art work in the posting. Please click on the artwork for a larger version of the image.

 

 

“My paintings are about light, about the way things look in their environment and especially about how things look painted. Form, colour and space are at the whim of reality, their discovery and organisation is the assignment of the realist painter.”


Ralph Goings

 

 

Richard Estes (American, b. 1932) 'Supreme Hardware' 1974 from the exhibition 'Picturing America: Photorealism in the 1970s' at Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin, March - May, 2009

 

Richard Estes (American, b. 1932)
Supreme Hardware
1974

 

Audrey Flack (American, b. 1931) 'Queen' 1976

 

Audrey Flack (American, 1931-2024)
Queen
1976

 

Audrey Flack (American, 1931-2024) 'Strawberry Tart' 1974

 

Audrey Flack (American, 1931-2024)
Strawberry Tart
1974
Oil on canvas
24 x 30 inches

 

Don Eddy (American, b. 1944) 'Untitled' 1971

 

Don Eddy (American, b. 1944)
Untitled
1971

 

Chuck Close (American, 1940-2021) 'Leslie' 1973

 

Chuck Close (American, 1940-2021)
Leslie
1973

 

Ralph Goings (American, 1928-2016) 'McDonalds Pick Up' 1970 (installation view)

 

Ralph Goings (American, 1928-2016)
McDonalds Pick Up (installation view)
1970
41 x 41 inches
Oil on canvas
Collection of Marilyn and Ivan Karp

 

Ralph Goings (American, 1928-2016) 'Airstream' 1970

 

Ralph Goings (American, 1928-2016)
Airstream
1970

 

Ralph Goings (American, 1928-2016) 'Dicks Union General' 1971

 

Ralph Goings (American, 1928-2016)
Dicks Union General
1971
Oil on canvas

 

 

By the end of the 1960s, a number of young artists working in the United States had begun making large-scale realist paintings directly from photographs. With often meticulous detail, they portrayed the objects, places, and people that defined urban and suburban everyday life in America. In contrast to the Pop artists, they did not present their ubiquitous, often mundane, subject matter in a glamorised or ironic manner. They sought instead to achieve a great degree of objectivity and precision in the execution of their work in an effort to stay more or less faithful to the mechanically generated images that served as their source material. They developed various means of systematically translating photographic information onto canvas. In prioritising the way the camera sees over the way the eye sees, they underscored the complexity of the relationship between the reproduction and the reproduced as well as the impact of photography on the perception of both daily life and reality in general.

A number of terms were proposed in quick succession to describe this novel approach to painting, chief among them Super-Realism, Hyperrealism, and Photorealism. The artists identified as Photorealists neither formed a coherent group nor considered themselves to be part of a movement, and a number of them actively challenged their association with the label. Nevertheless, in the late 1960s and 1970s, the seventeen artists in Picturing America: Photorealism in the 1970s – Robert Bechtle, Charles Bell, Tom Blackwell, Chuck Close, Robert Cottingham, Don Eddy, Richard Estes, Audrey Flack, Franz Gertsch, Ralph Goings, Ron Kleemann, Richard McLean, Malcolm Morley, Stephen Posen, John Salt, Ben Schonzeit, and Paul Staiger – were exploring a related set of issues, methods, and subjects that led critics, curators, and art historians to both exhibit and write about their work as a coherent trend in contemporary art. Picturing America focuses on this formative, defining period in the history of Photorealism.

The exhibition includes thirty-one paintings, a number of them the most iconic and masterful works of 1967-1982, for example Richard Estes’s Telephone Booths (1967, above) and Chuck Close’s Leslie (1973, above). Picturing America is divided into four sections, three exploring key themes of Photorealist painting during the 1970s – Reflections on the City, Culture of Consumption, and American Life – and a fourth dedicated to a portfolio of ten lithographs made on the occasion of Documenta 5 in 1972, which featured the first major group showing of Photorealism.

Text from the Deutsche Guggenheim website

 

  

Picturing Americas – American Photorealism in the 70s

Vernissage video of “Picturing Americas”, an art exhibition about American Photorealism in the 1970s, presented in Berlin by Deutsche Guggenheim, a joint venture between Deutsche Bank and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in New York. The exhibition (March – May 2009) was the first major showing of American Photorealism in Germany since “documenta 5” in 1972.

The video includes interviews of Valerie Hillings, Assistant Curator, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and interviews with the following artists: Ron Kleemann, Robert Bechtle, Tom Blackwell. You can also enjoy stills of selected pictures shown at the exhibition. Video courtesy of VernissageTV (VTV).

Text from the YouTube website

 

Robert Bechtle (American, 1932-2020) 'Foster's Freeze, Escalon' 1975

 

Robert Bechtle (American, 1932-2020)
Foster’s Freeze, Escalon
1975

 

Charles Bell (American, 1935-1995) 'Gum Ball No. 10: "Sugar Daddy"' 1975

 

Charles Bell (American, 1935-1995)
Gum Ball No. 10: “Sugar Daddy”
1975
Oil on canvas
66 x 66 inches

 

Charles Bell was born in 1935 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Although Bell became interested in art at a young age, he never received formal training. In 1957, he completed a BBA at the University of Oklahoma, Norman, and did not decide to pursue an artistic career until the early 1960s after touring in the U.S. Navy. At this point in time, he was working in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he was drawn to the vibrantly colored paintings of Richard Diebenkorn and Wayne Thiebaud. Other artistic influences Bell has cited range from Pop art to the realisms of Jan Vermeer and Salvador Dalí. It was through the painter Donald Timothy Flores, however, that Bell learned technique, most notably trompe l’oeil, while working in the former’s San Francisco studio. Under Flores, Bell painted mostly small-scale landscapes and still lifes, which earned him the Society of Western Artists Award in 1968.

In 1967 Bell relocated to New York, where he set up his first studio. Two years later he began showing at New York’s Meisel Gallery run by Louis K. Meisel, who popularized the term “Photorealism” and helped establish the style as a movement. Bell embraced a photo-based technique in his work not only for the way it renders imperceptible details visible, but also for how he saw the close-up photographic view as emblematic of contemporary visual experience steeped in a daily bombardment of media imagery. Bell carried out his Photorealist works by photographing his subjects in still-life compositions and painting from his image. 

Although Photorealism emerged as a national phenomenon, certain general qualities distinguish the coastal approaches to the movement. While the majority of the West Coast Photorealists preferred landscapes, particularly images of cars, trucks, and homes within an overall landscape, Bell, like many of the New York–based Photorealists, focused on still life. Bell transformed everyday subject matter by enlarging ordinary objects like Raggedy Ann dolls and gumball machines to an unusually grand scale. His subjects are typically familiar objects associated with childhood, consumer culture, and play, and thus capable of resonating with a broad audience. By focusing on larger-than-life subjects, Bell’s paintings also deny narrative readings of his work. He has described his approach to selecting subject matter as more of an emotional than intellectual process. The hyperrealistic precision of his technique, combined with an exaggerated scale, produces a sensation that oscillates between familiarity and unfamiliarity, thus engaging the viewer sensually and emotionally. The exploration of light remains a persistent theme throughout Bell’s oeuvre, from his earliest treatments of light on mostly opaque surfaces to his interest in reflected and refracted light on transparent materials, as seen in the gumball machine series (1971-77). These investigations gave way to his subsequent interest in objects illuminated from within, such as pinball machines, which he began in 1977.

Text from the Guggenheim website [Online] Cited 01/04/2009. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

 

Robert Bechtle (American, 1932-2020) 'Alameda Gran Torino' 1974

 

Robert Bechtle (American, 1932-2020)
Alameda Gran Torino
1974

 

Ron Kleemann (American, 1937-2014) 'Big Foot Cross' 1977-1978

 

Ron Kleemann (American, 1937-2014)
Big Foot Cross
1977-1978
Acrylic on canvas
54 x 78 inches

 

 

Deutsche Guggenheim

This museum closed in 2013.

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Review: ‘reENLIGHTENMENT’ exhibition by Peter James Smith at Gallery 101, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 18th March – 4th April, 2009

 

Peter James Smith. 'reENLIGHTENMENT' installation view 2009

Peter James Smith. 'reENLIGHTENMENT' installation view 2009

 

Peter James Smith (New Zealand, b. 1954)
reENLIGHTENMENT installation views
2009

 

 

“Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories. More than that: the chance, the fate, that suffuse the past before my eyes are conspicuously present in the accustomed confusion of these books. For what else is this collection but a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order?”


Walter Benjamin1

 

“Thus the claim is that texts themselves can actually be intrinsically ‘genuine’, but that authenticity is a ‘social construct’. In other words, a certain kind of authenticity is created through the interaction of the users, situations and the texts.”


Winnie Yuk-Chun Lee2

 

 

Peter James Smith links the culture of science and of human experience, bringing together mathematics and the power of nature in realist imagery that is balanced by strong mark making and text. Redolent still life and landscape images juxtapose with astronomical, poetic and historical observations in the painted images. Handwritten citations, notes, jottings, diagrams and erasures float on the loosely painted surfaces of stretched linen, paper collage and found pieces which bring a Beuysian sense of the charismatic object. A sunset, a violin, a book of verse, an installation of old bells or delicate Jasperware porcelain provide a resonant foil for the artist and viewer – and create a space for the imagination, for mathematical wonder and contemplation.

“Beyond painting, in the current work there is a sense of history allowing us to privilege its objects, their collecting and their housing on walls, in vitrines, on shelves and on plinths. Like any true collector I am keen to bring them to an audience, to show them in a revelatory way. If they are inflected by hand markings it is to personalise the revelation. There are no plastic imitations: the Jasperware vases are authentic collected Wedgwood; the small Greek Pelike is indeed a c 300 BC vase; the Roman glass is a c 300 AD; the collected Wollemi pine needles are indeed from this prehistoric plant. These and other antiquities have a long museological tradition. The narratives of Wedgwood blue and white Jasperware designs are of Greek antiquity – the firing of the white clay over a cobalt blue base (in around) 1772 was a triumph of chemistry over alchemy. With these objects, it is not a postmodernist kitsch that is revealed, but rather the resuscitated fabric of authenticity. I am re-enlightened by their tactile physical presence that has a timeless beauty. To render such things as a painted image is to engage in a different act, with different rules referring to different histories.”

~ Peter James Smith, 2009. Notes from the exhibition catalogue.

 
Enlightenment, Romanticism, reason, authenticity, revelation.

I am a collector like Peter James Smith. I display my collection of early 20th century English vases. I have a collection of 300 ties that span from the 1930s to the 1970s. I have eight rare 1940s suits, those suits that Humphrey Bogart used to wear with the wide lapels that nearly reach the seam of the sleeve.

Rare, fragile, beautiful, genuine.

In this exhibition Smith appeals not to the genuineness of the objects but to the authenticity of the objects he displays: “There are no plastic imitations … With these objects, it is not a postmodernist kitsch that is revealed, but rather the resuscitated fabric of authenticity.” He wants to show these objects in a revelatory way, for us to once more appreciate their authenticity.

To make order out of disorder.

But then Smith wants to personalise this revelation and overlays the objects with texts that re-order the taxonomy through a re-inscription that is both a de-territorialization and re-territorialization of meaning, a loss of original meaning and the production of new meanings. This is the faint silver flicker of re-enlightenment the artist seeks. It is above all authentication as individual spectacle, as social construct.

“Authenticity is an issue for us today because of a widespread sense that there is something inauthentic in the way we experience the modern world.”3

In some of the works this process is effective and in other works it falls flat on it’s proverbial, intertextual backside. The process works well in the less cerebral works. The use of black paint in Paradise Lost IV (below) is particularly effective as the re-inscription of paint invades and threatens the motifs of the classical figures with the text and cross reinforcing the idea of a lost paradise. Cathedral (2009, below) is also a stunning installation of different bells hung at various heights within a locked cabinet, complicit in their silence as they would not be inside a cathedral. For me this was probably the best piece in the show for its simplicity of thought, eloquence of execution and understanding of how the installation re-enlightens the viewers socially constructed authenticity in a revelatory way. No double marking is needed – a zen balance is proposed and achieved in the quietness of the viewers mind.

Other pieces are less successful. Amphora in grey terracotta Han Dynasty c 100BC (2008), the amphora inscribed with text sitting on a painted black video recorder is particularly unappealing – there is no revelatory experience to be had here. The Greek Pileke (see below) inscribed with lines from John Keats Ode on a Grecian Urn seems an appropriate intervention but sometimes in this exhibition one just longs to appreciate the sanctity of the object, it’s presence, in silence without the personalising of the revelation by the hand of the artist. To see the object clearly for what it is.

The large installation reELIGHTENMENT (2009 below, and installation photo at top) falls into darkness. The use of the doors as a metaphor is clumsy, book covers have been more successfully used by other artists and the black paint is heavy and oppressive.

More interesting are some of the paintings, for example The slow dance of an astronomical twilight (2009, below) where the poem of William Wordsworth

… a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns

illuminates the poetry of the painting, adding an insightful double meaning to the universal revelation. A vibration of spirit is present both in the landscape and the markings upon the landscape. Unfortunately all too often in this exhibition access to the sublime is denied. Appeals to neo-authenticity fall on deaf ears. The motifs of this exhibition are universal, archetypal but the elements that go to make up this exhibition are too many and lack focus. Sometimes in art less is more and this exhibition is a classic example of this fact. There are some interesting elements but overall the whole is not the sum of its parts.

As John Donne observed

“All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated … No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.”4

Our authentic place in the world, our spiritual space, our re-enlightenment needed to be better defined, more lucidly enunciated in this exhibition NOT IN CAPITAL LETTERS but in the quietness of our hearts.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

 

1/ Benjamin, Walter. “Unpacking my Library: A Talk about Book Collecting,” in Illuminations. English translation. London: Fontana, 1982, pp. 59-60

2/ Lee, W. “Authenticity revisited: text authenticity and learner authenticity,” in ELT Journal, 49(4). 1995, pp. 323-328 cited in Shomoossi, Nematullah and Ketabi, Saeed. “A Critical Look at the Concept of Authenticity,” in Electronic Journal of Foreign Language Teaching, 2007, Vol. 4, No. 1, pp. 149-155 [Online] cited on 29th March, 2009 at http://e-flt.nus.edu.sg/v4n12007/shomoossi.pdf

3/ McClure, Christoper. The Concept of Authenticity in Charles Taylor and Martin Heidegger. [Online] cited on March 29th, 2009 (no longer available online)

4/ Donne, John. Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, Meditation XVII: Nunc Lento Sonitu Dicunt, Morieris. 1624.

 

Variously

Wedgwood Jasperware, Roman glass, Greek Pileke, books, doors, texts, paintings, bells, video, video machine, wooden boxes, black paint, crosses, albatross, Wollemi Pine needles, Paradise Lost, astronomy, linen, stars, photography, Chinese porcelain, collage, mathematical equations, mirrors, Amphora from the Han Dynasty, a violin, a sunset, a book of verse, notes, shelves, jottings, citations.

Notes to myself

~ Golden ratio
~ The archive
~ Topographical markings, inscriptions and decodings
~ The ‘nature’ of authenticity
~ The ‘voice’ of revelation
~ Re-possession of clarity and logic
~ Re-production of mystery, tenderness and love
~ Reverence for the object itself
~ Referentiality between image and text
~ The colour black: transcendent, the depths of the night sky but also the closing in of darkness at the end of days
~ Never one truth but many truths
~ Less is more


Many thankx to Gallery 101 for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

 

 

Peter James Smith (New Zealand, b. 1954) 'The slow dance of an astronomical twighlight' 2009 from the exhibition 'reENLIGHTENMENT' exhibition by Peter James Smith at Gallery 101, Melbourne, March - April, 2009

 

Peter James Smith (New Zealand, b. 1954)
The slow dance of an astronomical twighlight
2009

 

Peter James Smith (New Zealand, b. 1954) 'Paradise Lost IV' 2008 from the exhibition 'reENLIGHTENMENT' exhibition by Peter James Smith at Gallery 101, Melbourne, March - April, 2009

 

Peter James Smith (New Zealand, b. 1954)
Paradise Lost IV
2008

 

Peter James Smith (New Zealand, b. 1954) 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' 2008

 

Peter James Smith (New Zealand, b. 1954)
Ode on a Grecian Urn
2008

 

Peter James Smith (New Zealand, b. 1954) 'Cathedral' 2009

 

Peter James Smith (New Zealand, b. 1954)
Cathedral
2009

 

Peter James Smith (New Zealand, b. 1954) 'reENLIGHTENMENT' 2009

 

Peter James Smith (New Zealand, b. 1954)
reENLIGHTENMENT
2009

 

 

Gallery 101

This gallery is now closed.

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Exhibition: ‘Plant Studies by Karl Blossfeldt and Related Works’ at Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne

Exhibition dates: March 13th – 17th June, 2009

Curators: Gabriele Conrath-Scholl, Rajka Knipper, and Claudia Schubert

 

Many thankx to the Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

 

Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932) 'Acanthus - Bear's breech' before 1928 from the exhibition 'Plant Studies by Karl Blossfeldt and Related Works' at Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne, March - June, 2009

 

Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932)
Acanthus – Bear’s breech
before 1928
Gelatin silver print
Karl Blossfeldt Collection at the University of the Arts Berlin

 

 

Die Photographische Sammlung presents Plant Studies by Karl Blossfeldt and Related Works, an exhibition presented by Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne in co-operation with the Berlin University of the Arts, compiled by Gabriele Conrath-Scholl, Rajka Knipper and Claudia Schubert. The exhibition will present for the first time in this volume the famous and influential plant studies by Karl Blossfeldt (1865-1932) from the collection of the Berlin University of the Arts as original prints. Blossfeldt’s photographs will be accompanied by the artist’s herbaria and sculptures based on plants, the latter produced in cooperation with his teacher Moritz Meurer.

The amalgamation and presentation of the various groups of work from the Berlin Blossfeldt collection provides detailed insight into the working style of the artist, who taught the study of natural forms in Berlin for over thirty years. His plant photographs were used primarily as reference aids during lessons in his classes. It was only towards the end of his working life that his photographs became known to the larger public through an exhibition at the Galerie Nierendorf in Berlin in 1926.The publication of the book Art Forms in Nature in 1928 led to an ongoing appreciation of his photographs. Karl Blossfeldt developed in year-long concentration on one theme a highly aesthetic picture language which up until today still fascinates the viewer with its clarity and focus on the object.

The exhibition highlights the topic of plant studies against a background of research into form and structure using selected historical and contemporary works. They mirror the development and technical possibilities of the medium, as well as the artistic reflection into their characteristics and decorative aspects. Thus the scope of the 300 exhibits reaches from detailed analyses of the form of individual botanical structures to the documentation of complex natural and populated areas, up to a symbolic contemplation of plants.

The exhibition is the result of years of cooperation between the Universität der Künste Berlin and Die Photographische Sammlung / SK Stiftung Kultur, two institutions committed to the ongoing academic study and extensive public presentation of the Karl Blossfeldt collection in the possession of the Universität der Künste.

The presentation gives Die Photographische Sammlung once again an opportunity to draw attention to its own institutional orientation. In addition to the co-operation on the work by Karl Blossfeldt these include avant-garde objective and conceptual photographic works, which developed in particular in line with the sense of a new era in the 1920s and the 1960s / 1970s or are artistically related to them. Works which the Cologne institution purchased during the past years in connection with the botanical subject or were obtained as permanent loans, are now part of the current presentation. They include works by Pietro Guidi, August Kotzsch, Paul Dobe, works from the Folkwang-Auriga Verlag, by Fred Koch, Albert Renger-Patzsch, Else Thalemann, August Sander, Ruth Lauterbach-Baehnisch, Ruth Hallensleben, Dr. Herbert W. Franke and Lawrence Beck. Although works by the younger artists Natascha Borowsky and Simone Nieweg are already part of the collection, in light of their more recent work both artists have made photographs from their own collections available for the show.

The current show is a thematically oriented insight into Die Photographische Sammlung’s collection which ranges from the historical to the contemporary and in the last few years has been extended by a number of corresponding groups of photographic works. In order to provide a comprehensive, but lively background to Karl Blossfeld’s work and to display illuminative positions, which were frequently mentioned in connection with the reception of Blossfeldt’s work, but were rarely, if ever, presented together in exhibitions, and also to permit new assessments and links, important loans have been integrated into the exhibition. They have been borrowed from the Karl-Blossfeldt-Archiv / Ann and Jürgen Wilde, Zülpich, which contains the largest collection of original photographs by the artist.

Karl Blossfeldt received essential support from Moritz Meurer (1839-1916) who worked as a graphic artist and painter, and for whom Blossfeldt worked as an assistant in Rome from 1892 to 1895. On the basis of Meurer’s concept, reference aids in the form of sculptures and drawings, as well as photographs, were developed for later use in lessons. Meurer’s idea, to take the basic forms in nature, which could be seen in the composition of a plant, as models for architecture, artistic and craftwork objects or ornaments, was integrated by Blossfeldt into his photographs.

According to the records, attention was drawn to Karl Blossfeldt’s work in particular by the fact that the Berlin gallerist Karl Nierendorf heard about his work and presented the first exhibition of his photographs outside the school context in 1926. The plant photographs, still under the influence of the ornamental art nouveau although more as a reaction to it were highly appreciated in the early days of New Objectivity. These studies seemed to put into practice the newly formed principles contained in the art of the 1920s, in which there was a demand for things to be presented without artistic digression, in a clear, authentic pictorial language, at the same time providing insight into their nature. It is therefore even more surprising that Blossfeldt was able to achieve this so easily, considering that he accomplished it seemingly uninfluenced by questions of artistic or photographic history categories. His motivation stemmed from his didactic and pragmatic aims to depict plant forms with precise accuracy, in order to provide flawless reference aids which would encourage his students to transform them artistically. His straightforward, passionate concentration on one theme, which he almost endlessly varied within a limited field, opened it up for comparative viewing. In particular since the 1970s, in the light of a new-orientation of the medium, his work was highly regarded and gained indirect influence on contemporary art, to the extent that knowledge of his images influences today s viewing perspectives.

On the occasion of the exhibition Plant Studies by Karl Blossfeldt and Related Works Die Photographische Sammlung / SK Stiftung Kultur is presenting on its website a directory they have created of all 631 photographs, 39 herbaria and 57 sculptures from the Universität der Künste’s Karl Blossfeldt collection together with documents from the University archive. A distinctive feature of the research is the fact that every photograph is accompanied not only by a concordance of primary and secondary literature but also Blossfeldt negatives and transparencies from the Deutsche Fotothek in Dresden and, in the near future, from the Karl Blossfeldt Archive/Ann and Jürgen Wilde. The website provides a text forum on the topic, which uses selected documents to illustrate Blossfeldt’s teaching work in the context of the history of the University and includes various aspects of his reception in publications and exhibitions.

Press release from Die Photographische Sammlung

 

Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932) 'Cucurbita - Pumpkin tendrils' before 1928 from the exhibition 'Plant Studies by Karl Blossfeldt and Related Works' at Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne, March - June, 2009

 

Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932)
Cucurbita – Pumpkin tendrils
before 1928
Gelatin silver print
Karl Blossfeldt Collection at the University of the Arts Berlin

 

Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932) 'Allium ostrowskianum - garlic plant' before 1928

 

Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932)
Allium ostrowskianum – garlic plant
before 1928
Gelatin silver print
Karl Blossfeldt Collection at the University of the Arts Berlin

 

“In 1928 Karl Blossfeldt (1865-1932) published the now legendary photographic book “Art Forms in Nature.” Brought together were a selection of images of plants that this craftsman had photographed only as illustrative material for his students at the college in Berlin. He photographed the plants isolated in front of a neutral background, their blossoms, buds, stems, umbels and seed capsules often greatly magnified to serve as a distinct model for the decorative art forms of the Art Nouveau movement, whose own bloom period was already fading …

It is quite clearly the particular combination of subject matter and photographic style that gives the works a classic timelessness, allowing them to be discovered “afresh” again and again. So the isolating, monumental and formalistic approach to nature not only tied in well with concepts of New Functionalism, but was also successively interpreted as illustrating the relationship between Art and Nature and as a precursor of Conceptual Art.”

Text from the Karl Blossfeldt Archive website

 

Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932) 'Chrysanthemum segetum - Feverfew' before 1928

 

Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932)
Chrysanthemum segetum – Feverfew
before 1928
Gelatin silver print
Karl Blossfeldt Collection at the University of the Arts Berlin

 

Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932) 'Dipsacus laciniatus - Cutleaf Teasel' before 1928

 

Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932)
Dipsacus laciniatus – Cutleaf Teasel
before 1928
Gelatin silver print
Karl Blossfeldt Collection at the University of the Arts Berlin

 

Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932) 'Thorned Bulbous Plant' before 1928

 

Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932)
Thorned Bulbous Plant
before 1928
Gelatin silver print
Karl Blossfeldt Collection at the University of the Arts Berlin

 

 

“He photographed plants by the thousands – photographs which feature flowers, buds, branched stems, clusters or seed capsules shot directly from the side, seldom from an overhead view, and rarely from a diagonal perspective. He usually placed the subjects of his photographs against white or grey cardboard, sometimes against a black background. Hardly ever can details of the rooms be detected. The light for his shots was obtained from northern windows, making it diffuse, but it fell from the side, creating volume. The technique and processing conditions were very simple; only the medium size of the negative format was somewhat out of the ordinary. Nothing detracted from the subject. This man produced such pictures for over thirty years.

The man’s name was Karl Blossfeldt, and his life’s achievement occupies a firm place in the history of 20th-century art, although the aims of his undertaking place him firmly within the 19th century. Blossfeldt shares this bridging of two centuries with other great collectors in the history of photography, such as the Parisian Eugene Atget, and it is to this bridging of two centuries that his influence may be attributed today …

The plant photographs were produced by simple means. Legend has it that a relatively straight-forward homemade camera was used, one common in its time and not very large, with a format of 9 x 12cm. The glass plates which served as negatives were coated with inexpensive but not completely neutral-coloured orthochromatic emulsion, and occasionally – after 1902, as they became more widely available – with panchromatic emulsions, making possible a neutral reproduction of the colour red in halftones. Since the first emulsion was thin and therefore enabled high contrast with extremely sharp edges, it served especially to stress the structural elements. It was thus used primarily for photographs with white or grey backgrounds. The rarer photos with panchromatic emulsions were used to illustrate entire clusters or beds of flowers with a wider variation of chromatic values or halftones.”

Text by Rolf Sachse from the book Karl Blossfeldt Benedikt Taschen Verlag (April 1997) available on Amazon.

 

Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932) 'Papaver orientale - Oriental Poppy' before 1928

 

Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932)
Papaver orientale – Oriental Poppy
before 1928
Gelatin silver print
Karl Blossfeldt Collection at the University of the Arts Berlin

 

 

Originally developed from a practice at the Unterrichtsanstalt des Königlichen Kunstgewerbemuseums Berlin [Institute of the Berlin Royal Arts and Crafts Museum] at the end of the 19th century and designed specifically for use as teaching materials, Karl Blossfeldt’s plant photographs rank today among the classic works of art and photography history.

Blossfeldt taught “Modelling from Live Plants” from 1899 to 1930, first at the Unterrichtsanstalt des Königlichen Kunstgewerbemuseums, later at the Vereinigte Staatsschulen für Freie und Angewandte Kunst [United State Schools for Fine and Applied Arts] that emerged from the Unterrichtsanstalt’s amalgamation with the Hochschule für Bildende Künste [University of the Visual Arts] – predecessors of the present-day Berlin University of the Arts. A major role in the introduction of that subject was played by Moritz Meurer, for whom Karl Blossfeldt worked as a scholarship-holder in Rome from 1892 to 1895. There, prepared plant specimens, sculptures, castings, drawings and photographs were made as models for classroom use. Blossfeldt took up and systematically developed Meurer’s idea of using the basic natural forms inherent in the structure of a plant for the design of architectural, art or craft objects and ornaments.

A letter written to the director of the Arts and Crafts Museum in 1906 shows that Blossfeldt was already in possession of thousands of photographs, from which he intended gradually to make prints. The plan to enlarge the images came about for a number of reasons:

~ The plants that Blossfeldt collected for his students underwent relatively rapid change, either because they grew or because they wilted and withered. Captured in a photograph, they became a lasting model

~ Photographic enlargements allowed even the tiniest natural forms to be made out

~ Photographic enlargements offered the opportunity to present “unadulterated nature” – in contrast to sketched enlargements, which Blossfeldt contended “always contain a subjective element”

~ Blossfeldt wanted his material seen as a specimen collection that would also be available for future generations of students


There is no detailed record showing the technical facilities at Karl Blossfeldt’s disposal. The Karl Blossfeldt Archive/Ann and Jürgen Wilde and the Deutsche Fotothek in Dresden have preserved glass plates and transparencies of various formats (6/6.5 x 9cm, 9 x 12cm, 9 x 18cm and 13 x 18cm). Blossfeldt’s camera – or cameras, because he may have had several – is known to have been an entirely or partly home-made affair. The work collages in the collection of the Karl Blossfeldt Archive / Ann and Jürgen Wilde give a good idea of his negatives because the images that appear in them are from contact prints made by Blossfeldt.

The fact that Karl Blossfeldt became a major celebrity was due to the fortunate circumstance that his photographs came to the attention of the Berlin gallerist Karl Nierendorf. He staged the first exhibition of Blossfeldt’s work in a non-school context in 1926, presenting it alongside sculptures from Africa and New Guinea and work by the artist Richard Janthur. In 1928, in another Nierendorf initiative, Urformen der Kunst [Art Forms in Nature] was published with 120 plates of plants by Blossfeldt. The book was given such a rapturous reception that the following years saw more editions published and foreign-language editions launched in English, French and Swedish. These studies were very much in tune with the new maxim of 1920s art that called for things to be represented authentically, with no artistic frills, in a clear visual idiom designed to explore and reveal their nature. The fact that Blossfeldt succeeded in this is all the more astonishing since he started out working with no thoughts of pushing forward any boundaries in art or photography. He was primarily motivated by a didactic and pragmatic intention to produce highly accurate plant images which, as models for study, would reveal natural forms to the human eye and inspire students to turn them into art.

With his passionate concentration on a single subject, addressed in close-up in almost infinite variations and thus revealed for comparative examination, Blossfeldt became a highly respected figure, especially after the re-think on photography in the 1970s. As a result, he has had an indirect influence on contemporary art and knowledge of his work helps shape the way we view art today. Karl Blossfeldt did not experience his success for long. He died in December 1932, the year in which his second book Wundergarten der Natur (Art Forms in Nature) was published. The largest collections of his photographs are in the Karl Blossfeldt Archive/Ann and Jürgen Wilde, the Archive of the Berlin University of the Arts and the Deutsche Fotothek Dresden.

Text from the Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur website [Online] Cited 25/03/2009. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

 

Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932) 'Papaver Orientalis - Oriental Poppy capsules' before 1928

 

Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932)
Papaver Orientalis – Oriental Poppy capsules
before 1928
Gelatin silver print
Karl Blossfeldt Collection at the University of the Arts Berlin

 

Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932) 'Dryopteris filix mas - Common male fern' before 1928

 

Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932)
Dryopteris filix mas – Common male fern
before 1928
Gelatin silver print
Karl Blossfeldt Collection at the University of the Arts Berlin

 

 

Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur
Im Mediapark 7
50670 Cologne
Phone: 0049-(0)221-88895 300

Opening hours:
Open daily 14 – 19hrs
Closed Wednesdays

Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur website

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Photograph: The Passing of Memory: resurrecting a photograph for the series ‘The Shape of Dreams’

“Remembering is an ethical act. It is also a voluntary act. We can choose not to remember. We can choose to forget. In this photograph I choose to remember, to not let pass into the dark night of the soul.” Dr Marcus Bunyan

March 2009

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian born England, b. 1958) 'Oakland, 7-'51' from the series 'The Shape of Dreams' 2009

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian born England, b. 1958)
Oakland, 7-’51 from the series The Shape of Dreams (restored)
2009

 

 

“Fragments of harmonic lines assemble and collapse as the meaning of each interval must be continually revised in light of the unfolding precession of further terms in an ultimately unsustainable syntax. The mind’s ear tries to remember the sum of passing intervals, but without the ability to incorporate them into larger identifiable units each note inevitably lapses back into silence, surrendered to the presence of the currently sounding tone, itself soon to give way to another newly isolated note in its turn.”


Craig Dworkin1

 

 

The Passing of Memory

Thinking about this photograph

I bought an album on Ebay that contained an anonymous aviator with snapshots of his life: photographs of him in Oakland, California, Cologne in Germany and flying out of Italy – photos of his buddies and the work they did, the places they visited, the fun they had.

This one photograph has haunted me more than the rest.

Who was he? What was his life like? Do he get married and have children? Is he still alive?

When scanned the image was so dirty, so degraded, that I spent 7 weeks of my life cleaning and restoring the photograph working all hours of the day and night. I was obsessive almost to the point of obstinacy. Many times I nearly gave up as I thought the task impossible – thousands of dots and hairs inhabited the surface of the image and, surely, it was just another photograph one of millions that circle the world. Why expend so much energy just to resurrect this one particular image?

Some things that can be said about this photograph

It is small measuring only 9cm high by 7.5 cm wide

It is printed on cheap glossy photographic paper which now has a slight yellow tinge to it.

The image is creased at top left.

The back is annotated ‘Oakland, 7-’51’

The dark roundel with the wing on the side of the aircraft has faint text that spells out the words ‘AERO ACE’.

There is no engine in the aircraft and it looks from the parts lying on the ground that the aircraft is being broken up or used for spares.

The man is wearing work overalls with unidentifiable insignia on them, a worker on the aircraft being dismantled or just a fitter on the base.

Someone standing on the ground has obviously called out the man’s name and he has turned around in response to the call and lent forward and put out his hand in greeting – a beautiful spontaneous response – and the photograph has been taken.

Some other things that can be said about this photograph, in passing

The sun splashes the man’s face. He smiles at the camera.

His arm rests gently on the metal of the aircraft, shielded from the sun.

Perhaps he wears a ring on his fifth finger.

He is blind.

This photograph is an individual, isolated note in the fabric of time. It could easily pass into silence as memory and image fade from view. Memories of the individual form the basis for remembering and photographs act as an aide-memoire both for individual memory and the collective memory that flows from individual memory. Memory is always and only partial and fragmentary – who is remembering, what are they remembering, when do they remember, what prompts them to remember and how these memories are incorporated into the collective memory, an always mediated phenomenon that manifests itself in the actions and statements of individuals, are important questions.

Images are able to trigger memories and emotional responses to a particular time and place, but since this photograph has no personal significance what is going on here? Why did I cry when I was restoring it? What emotional association was happening inside me?

“To remember is always to give a reading of the past, a reading which requires linguistic skills derived from the traditions of explanation and story-telling within a culture and which [presents] issues in a narrative that owes its meaning ultimately to the interpretative practices of a community of speakers. This is true even when what is remembered is one’s own past experience… [The] mental image of the past … becomes a phenomenon of consciousness only when clothed with words, and these owe their meaning to social practices of communication.”2


His blindness stares at us while underneath his body walks away into his passing.

I have become the speaker for this man, for this image.

His brilliant face is our brilliant face.

In this speaking, the phenomenon of making the image conscious, the gap between image and presence, between the photo and its shadow has collapsed. There is no past and present but a collective resonance that has presence in images.

“Such reasoning questions the separation of past and present in a fundamental way. As a consequence it becomes fruitless to discuss whether or not a particular event or process remembered corresponds to the actual past: all that matters are the specific conditions under which such memory is constructed as well as the personal and social implications of memories held.”3

‘The personal and social implications of memories held’. Or not held, if images are lost in passing.

It is such a joyous image, the uplifted hand almost in supplication. I feel strong connection to this man. I bring his presence into consciousness in my life, and by my thinking into the collective memory. Perhaps the emotional response is that as I get older photographs of youth remind me of the passing of time more strongly. Perhaps the image reminds me of the smiling father I never had. These are not projections of my own feelings but resonances held in the collective memory.

As Susan Sontag has observed,

“Remembering is an ethical act, has ethical value in and of itself. Memory is, achingly, the only relation we can have with the dead. So the belief that remembering is an ethical act is deep in our natures as humans, who know we are going to die, and who mourn those who in the normal course of things die before us – grandparents, parents, teachers and older friends.”4


Remembering is an ethical act. It is also a voluntary act. We can choose not to remember. We can choose to forget. In this photograph I choose to remember, to not let pass into the dark night of the soul. My mind, eyes and heart are open.

This is not a simulacra of an original image but an adaptation, an adaptation that tries to find resonances between past and present, between image and shadow. As such this photograph is no longer an isolated tone that inevitably lapses back into silence but part of a bracketing of time that is beautiful in its illumination, its presence. The individual as collective, collected memory present for all to see.

The form of formlessness, the shape of dreams.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

 

1/ Dworkin, Craig. “Grammar Degree Zero (Introduction to Re-Writing Freud)” (2005) [Online] Cited 23rd March, 2009. No longer available online

2/ Holtorf, Cornelius. “Social Memory,” part of a doctoral thesis Monumental Past: The Life-histories of Megalithic Monuments in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern (Germany) submitted 1998 [Online] Cited 23/03/2009

3/ Ibid.,

4/ Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2003, p. 103

 

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian born England, b. 1958) 'Oakland, 7-'51' from the series 'The Shape of Dreams' 2009 (detail before cleaning)

Before

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian born England, b. 1958) 'Oakland, 7-'51' from the series 'The Shape of Dreams' 2009 (detail after cleaning)

After

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian born England, b. 1958) 'Oakland, 7-'51' from the series 'The Shape of Dreams' 2009 (detail before cleaning)

Before

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian born England, b. 1958) 'Oakland, 7-'51' from the series 'The Shape of Dreams' 2009 (detail after cleaning)

After

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian born England, b. 1958) 'Oakland, 7-'51' from the series 'The Shape of Dreams' 2009 (detail before cleaning)

Before

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian born England, b. 1958) 'Oakland, 7-'51' from the series 'The Shape of Dreams' 2009 (detail after cleaning)

After

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian born England, b. 1958) 'Oakland, 7-'51' from the series 'The Shape of Dreams' 2009 (detail before cleaning)

Before

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian born England, b. 1958) 'Oakland, 7-'51' from the series 'The Shape of Dreams' 2009 (detail after cleaning)

After

 

Marcus Bunyan (Australian born England, b. 1958) 'Oakland, 7-'51' from the series 'The Shape of Dreams' 2009 (detail before cleaning)

Before

 

Marcus Bunyan. 'Oakland, 7-'51' from the series 'The Shape of Dreams' 2009

After

 

 

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top