Review: ‘Unnerved: The New Zealand Project’ at NGV International, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 26th November 2010 – 27th February, 2011

A Queensland Art Gallery Touring Exhibition

 

Ava Seymour (New Zealand, b. 1967) 'Sate Highway 1' 1997 from the exhibition 'Unnerved: The New Zealand Project' at NGV International

 

Ava Seymour (New Zealand, b. 1967)
State Highway I
1997
From Health, happiness and housing series
Colour photograph of a photomontage

 

Ava Seymour (New Zealand b. 1967) 'Day Care Walkabouts' 1997 from the exhibition 'Unnerved: The New Zealand Project' at NGV International

 

Ava Seymour (New Zealand b. 1967)
Day Care Walkabouts
1997
From Health, happiness and housing series
Photomontage on colour photograph

 

 

New Zealand art adrift in a myriad of stories and symbols – not a brave ‘new world’

This is an underwhelming group exhibition of over 100 works drawn from the Queensland Art Gallery collection, a show to wander around on a lazy weekend afternoon and not get too excited about. The large number of works in the exhibition make it impossible to review each work individually (although I critique some works below) but one does get an overall sense of the investigation by New Zealand artists into their history, place, culture and identity. While there are a few good works in the exhibition there are also some very mediocre works as well and, other than a few splashes of self-deprecating humour (such as the wonderful The Horn of Africa (2006) by Michael Parekowhai, below) it all seems importantly earnest: an exhibition for serious people (apologies to Oscar Wilde).

On the evidence of this exhibition the country of New Zealand must be a very unnerving place to live, mainly because their artists can’t seem to keep their hand off it – cultural history that is.

Throughout this exhibition we have psychological unease, physical unease, a little humour, parody, poetry, symbology, allegory, mythology, colonialism, post-colonialism, nationalism, commercialisation, representation, anthropology, travel, landscape, topography, advertising, first contact, sacred spaces, indigenous politics, Māori culture, Pacific Islander culture, pakeha (non-indigenous) culture, tools, guns, rabbits, seals, pianos, traditional tattoos, tourist sites and museums, surfing, suburbia, personal journeys, family albums, androgyny, identity, public housing, ambiguous states, hyperreality, surreality, dislocation, disenfranchisement, alienation, bodies, portraits, subjects, past, present, future (and more!)

Ronnie van Hout exhibits three atmospheric, eerie, dark photographs of constructed model landscapes: of a Nazi doodlebug and the words ABDUCT and HYBRID. The wall text tries, unsuccessfully, to link the images to the obscure and haunted landscapes of New Zealand – a very long bow to draw indeed. Bill Cuthbert’s “nice” photographs offer generalised statements of light and place but really don’t take you anywhere and in fact could have been taken anywhere. The wall text offers that the photographs are a “self-conscious, critical response” to the dismantling of colonial ideas of empire and nation … this is art speak gobbledygook at its worst trying to justify basic photography.

Mark Adams panoramic photograph of one of the sites of first contact – an important historical moment of encounter between Māori and pakeha (non-Māori people of European descent) – are a beautiful photograph of a sound and mountains that has then been dissected, fragmented and individually framed and then mounted unevenly on the gallery wall – just to make sure we get the point about the ‘nature’ of the scenery and its cultural implications. Lonnie Hutchinson’s cut wall work Cinco “offers an interplay between paper and space and explores the ‘va’ or space between – a relation between the Samoan people and the landscape saturated with the dialogue of our ancestors … being adrift in a sea of memories caused by feelings related to cultural loss and uncertainty.” I know how they feel: adrift, underwhelmed by the art and overwhelmed by the text.

Other than the striking photograph of the Dandy (2007, below) Lisa Reihana’s series Digital Marae (2001- ) also fails to inspire. The marae is a highly structure space where Māori families come together – an outdoor, cleared area, a communal or sacred place which serves religious and social purposes in Polynesian societies. Here can be found male sculptures called poupou featuring diverse forms of masculinity, Māori gods and goddesses. The elder Mahuika, while sometimes described as male, is deliberately depicted in her female state in this series. In Reihanna’s digital interpretation of the marae her gods and goddesses become slick, media-inspired glossy magazine type images printed large, mounted on aluminium and lit for maximum theatrical effect. The unstructured spaces behind the figures have no context, no placement and give lie to the inspiration for the series (a highly structured space) and, as such, they land with a commercial thud onto the cleared earth.

The lowest point in the exhibition must be reserved for the 80 photographs of the series ‘The homely’ (1997-2000) by Gavin Hipkins. Usually when reviewing I refrain from saying anything bad about works of art. Robert Nelson in The Age describes the series as “visually and conceptually incoherent.” Taken over 4 years and supposedly “examining notions of nationhood that are unstable and fractured” Hipkins describes it as “a post-colonial gothic novel.” !!

The series features flat, one-dimensional images of symbols: sculptures, closed doors, open doors, flags, people, repeating circles and vertical elements – where the aggregate of all the images is supposed to MEAN SOMETHING. These are the most simple, most basic of year 12 images formed into a sequence that is conceptually irrelevant in terms of its symbolism and iconography vis a vis the purported critical examination it seeks to undertake. This artist needs to look at the sequences of Minor White to see how a master artist puts photographs together – not just in terms of narrative but the meaning in the spaces between the images, their spiritual resonance – or if wanting to be more literal, study that seminal book The Americans by Robert Frank to see how to really make a sequence.

On to better things. For me the absolute gem of this exhibition were the photomontages of Ava Seymour from her ‘Health, happiness and housing’ series (see photographs above). These are just fantastic! Featuring as a backdrop photographs of state houses built in the 1950s and 60s Seymour assembles her cast of characters – composite figures of found limbs, bodies and faces taken from old medical text books – and creates stark, psychological sites of engagement. The can be seen as family portraits, social documents of unseen alienation and dis-enfranchisement with communities and also a comment on the conduct of the welfare system and state housing, but in their ironic, self-deprecating humour they become so much more. Even though they use old photographs the artist recasts them ingenuously to become something new, a new space that the viewer can step into, unlike most of the work in this exhibition.

Most artists in this exhibition seem intent on a form of cultural excavation to make their work, digging and rooting around in cultural history and memory to find “meaning”, to make new forms from old that actually lead nowhere. They excavate symbols and signs and reform them hoping for what, exactly? All that appears is work that is stunted and fragmented, chopped up dislocations that offer nothing new in terms of a way forward for the culture from which these histories and memories emerge. There is no holistic, healing vision here, only a series of mined observations that fragment, distort and polarise, descending into the decorative, illustrative or the commercial. The same can be said of some Australian art (including the exhibition Stormy Weather: Contemporary Landscape Photography at NGV Federation Square that I will review next). As Robert Nelson succinctly observed in his review of this exhibition in The Age (Wednesday, December 29th, 2010), this exhibition “reveals a weakness that also exists in our scene: fertile tricks and noble intentions, but patchy skill or poetic imagination for connecting them.” Well said.

“”When the soul wants to experience something she throws out an image in front of her and then steps into it.” (Meister Eckhart) It is an evocation of the image as a threshold leading to new dimensions of meaning. Symbolic images are more than data; they are vital seeds, living carriers of possibility.”1


New dimensions of meaning, vital seeds, living carriers of possibility. Everyone of us is a living, breathing embodiment of cultural history and memory. We know that intimately in our bones, as human beings. What artists need to do is observe this legacy but offer a way forward, not constantly excavating the past and hoping this is enough when creating work. These are not new spaces to step into! The cohabitation of indigenous and ethnically mixed non-indigenous cultures in both Australia and New Zealand requires this holistic forward looking vision. It is a redemptive vision that is not mired in the symbols and archetypes of the past but, as Australia writer David Malouf envisages it, ‘a dream history, a myth history, a history of experience in the imagination’.2 It is a vision of the future that all post-colonial countries can embrace, where a people can come to know their sense of place more fully.

Rather than an escapist return to the past perhaps a redemptive vision of New Zealand’s cultural future, a history of experience in the imagination, would be less insular and more open to the capacity to wonder.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

 

1/ Ronnberg, Ami (ed.,). “Preface,” in The Book of Symbols. Cologne: Taschen, 2010, p. 6

2/ Footnote 6. Daniel, Helen. “Interview with David Malouf,” in Australian Book Review (September , 1996), p. 13 quoted in Ennis, Helen. “The Presence of the Past,” in Photography and Australia. London: Reaktion Books, 2007, p. 141


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

 

Lisa Reihana (Ngāpuhi: Ngāti Hine, Ngāi Tu New Zealander, b. 1964) 'Hinepukohurangi' 2001 from the exhibition 'Unnerved: The New Zealand Project' at NGV International

 

Lisa Reihana (Ngāpuhi: Ngāti Hine, Ngāi Tu New Zealander, b. 1964)
Hinepukohurangi
2001
From Digital Marae 2001-
Cibachrome photograph mounted on aluminium
200 x 100cm
Purchased 2002
© Lisa Reihana

 

Lisa Reihana (Ngāpuhi: Ngāti Hine, Ngāi Tu New Zealander, b. 1964) 'Dandy' 2007 from the exhibition 'Unnerved: The New Zealand Project' at NGV International

 

Lisa Reihana (Ngāpuhi: Ngāti Hine, Ngāi Tu New Zealander, b. 1964)
Dandy
2007
From Digital Marae 2001-
Colour digital print mounted on aluminium
200 x 120cm
Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane
Purchased 2008 with funds from the Estate of Vincent Stack through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane
© Lisa Reihana

 

Yvonne Todd (New Zealander, b. 1973) 'January' 2005 from the exhibition 'Unnerved: The New Zealand Project' at NGV International

 

Yvonne Todd (New Zealander, b. 1973)
January
2005
From the Vagrants’ reception centre series
Light jet photograph
100 x 73.8cm
Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane
Purchased 2007. Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Grant
©Yvonne Todd

 

Michael Parekowhai (Ngāti Whakarongo New Zealander, b. 1968) 'Kapa Haka (Whero)' 2003 from the exhibition 'Unnerved: The New Zealand Project' at NGV International

 

Michael Parekowhai (Ngāti Whakarongo New Zealander, b. 1968)
Kapa Haka (Whero)
2003
Automotive paint on fibreglass
188 x 60 x 50cm
Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane
Purchased 2009 with funds from Tim Fairfax AM, through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation
© Michael Parekowhai

 

 

The National Gallery of Victoria today opened a major exhibition celebrating the extraordinary work of 26 contemporary New Zealand artists in Unnerved: The New Zealand Project.

Unnerved explores a particularly rich, dark vein found in contemporary New Zealand art. The psychological or physical unease underlying many works in the exhibition is addressed with humour, parody and poetic subtlety by artists across generations and mediums. Bringing together more than 100 works ranging from intimate works on paper to large scale installations by both established and emerging artists, Unnerved engages with New Zealand’s changing social, political and cultural landscape as the country navigates its indigenous settler and migrant histories. These works explore a changing sense of place, the continued importance of contemporary Maori art, biculturalism, a complex colonial past, the creative reworking of memory, and the often interconnected mediums of performance, photography and video. If the vision is unsettling, it is also compelling and Unnerved: The New Zealand Project offers us new ways of seeing one of our closest neighbours.

This fascinating exhibition explores a rich and dark vein found in contemporary art in New Zealand, drawing on the disquieting aspects of New Zealand’s history and culture reflected through more than 100 works of art.

Jane Devery, Coordinating Curator, NGV said: “The works presented in Unnerved reveal a darkness and distinctive edginess that characterises this particular trend in New Zealand contemporary art. The psychological or physical unease underlying many works in the exhibitions is addressed with humour, parody and poetic subtlety.

The exhibition reflects the strength and vitality of contemporary art in New Zealand with works created by both established and emerging artists, across a range of mediums including painting, photography, sculpture, installation, drawing, film and video.

Unnerved engages with New Zealand’s changing social, political and cultural landscape, exploring a shifting sense of place, complex colonial past, the relationships between contemporary Māori, Pacific Islander and pakeha (non-indigenous) culture, and the interplay between performance, video and photography,” said Ms Devery.

A highlight of the exhibition is a group of sculptural works by Michael Parekowhai including his giant inflatable rabbit, Cosmo McMurtry, which will greet visitors to the exhibition, and a spectacular life-size seal balancing a grand piano on its nose titled The Horn of Africa. Also on display are a series of haunting photographs by Yvonne Todd, whose portrait photography often refers to B-grade films and pulp fiction novels.

Gerard Vaughan, Director, NGV said this exhibition demonstrates the NGV’s strong commitment to interesting and challenging contemporary art secured from around the world; he noted that the NGV has made a special commitment to exhibition the contemporary art of our region.

Unnerved will introduce visitors to the rich contemporary arts scene of one of our closest neighbours, fascinating audiences with works ranging from the life size installations by Parekowhai through to the spectacular 30 metre photographic essay by Gavin Hipkins. This truly is a must see show this summer!” said Dr Vaughan.

Unnerved will also offer a strong and engaging collection of contemporary sculpture, installations, drawings, paintings, photography, film and video art by artists including Lisa Reihana, John Pule, Gavin Hipkins, Anne Noble, Ronnie van Hout, Shane Cotton, Julian Hooper and many others.

Press release from the National Gallery of Victoria website

 

Michael Parekowhai (Ngāti Whakarongo New Zealander, b. 1968) 'The Horn of Africa' 2006

 

Michael Parekowhai (Ngāti Whakarongo New Zealander, b. 1968)
The Horn of Africa
2006
Automotive paint, wood, fibreglass, steel, brass
395 x 200 x 260cm
Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane
Purchased 2008 with funds from the Queensland Government’s Gallery of Modern Art Acquisitions Fund in recognition of the contribution to the Gallery by Wayne Goss (Chair of Trustees 1999-2008)
© Michael Parekowhai

 

Michael Parekowhai (Ngāti Whakarongo New Zealander, b. 1968) 'Cosmo McMurtry' 2006 from the exhibition 'Unnerved: The New Zealand Project' at NGV International

 

Michael Parekowhai (Ngāti Whakarongo New Zealander, b. 1968)
Cosmo McMurtry
2006
Synthetic polymer paint on polyvinyl chloride, fibreglass, air compressor
734.3 x 506.4 x 739.1cm (variable)
Presented by the Melbourne Art Fair Foundation with the assistance of funds donated by NGV Contemporary, 2006
National Gallery of Victoria
© Michael Parekowhai

 

Gavin Hipkins (New Zealander, b. 1968) 'Christchurch (Mask)' 1998 from the exhibition 'Unnerved: The New Zealand Project' at NGV International

 

Gavin Hipkins (New Zealander, b. 1968)
Christchurch (Mask)
1998
From The homely series 1997-2000
Type C photograph
60 x 40cm
Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane Purchased 2008. The Queensland Government’s Gallery of Modern Art Acquisitions Fund
© Gavin Hipkins

 

Fiona Pardington (Kai Tahu, Kati Mamoe, Kati Waewae New Zealander, b. 1961) 'Sweet Kiwi, from the collection 'Whanganui Museum'' 2008 from the exhibition 'Unnerved: The New Zealand Project' at NGV International

 

Fiona Pardington (Kai Tahu, Kati Mamoe, Kati Waewae New Zealander, b. 1961)
Sweet Kiwi, from the collection ‘Whanganui Museum’
2008
Gold-toned gelatin silver photograph
61 x 50.8cm
Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane
Purchased 2008 with funds from Gina Fairfax through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation
© Fiona Pardington

 

Max Gimblett (New Zealander / American, b. 1935) 'Balls' 1990-1997 from the exhibition 'Unnerved: The New Zealand Project' at NGV International

 

Max Gimblett (New Zealander/American, b. 1935)
Balls
1990-1997
Brush and ink, synthetic polymer paint and pencil on handmade paper
59.8 x 79.3cm
Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane
The Max Gimblett Gift.
Gift of the artist through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation 2000
© Max Gimblett

 

Anne Noble (New Zealander, b. 1954) 'Ruby's room no. 6' 1999 from the exhibition 'Unnerved: The New Zealand Project' at NGV International

 

Anne Noble (New Zealander, b. 1954)
Ruby’s room no. 6
1999
Colour digital print
67 x 100.2cm
Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane
Purchased 2006
© Anne Noble

 

 

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Exhibition: ‘Portraits and Power: People, Politics and Structures’ at Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina – Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Florence

Exhibition dates: 1st October 2010 – 23rd January, 2011

 

Many thankx to the Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. All text comes from the Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina website. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

 

Installation view of the exhibition 'Portraits and Power: People, Politics and Structures' at Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina - Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Florence

Installation view of the exhibition 'Portraits and Power: People, Politics and Structures' at Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina - Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Florence

 

Installation view of the exhibition Portraits and Power: People, Politics and Structures at Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina – Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Florence with the work of Rineke Dijkstra at right

 

 

Portraits and Power explores portraiture and the representation of political, economical and social power in the contemporary world through the works of contemporary artists. Portraits of famous political figures, investigations into the lifestyle of the social elite, as well as inquiries into the power structures of international institutions.

The exhibition explores its theme from three main standpoints: it analyses power as an expression of the charisma of those individuals who have become icons or symbols of their age; it probes the power of institutions and social models that either represent themselves or are represented in a critical light; and it investigates the hidden mechanisms of powerful authorities.

Portraits and Power is a project of the CCC Strozzina, with the consultancy of Peter Funnell (National Portrait Gallery, London), Walter Guadagnini (“UniCredit & Art” project) and Roberta Valtorta (Museum of Contemporary Photography, Cinisello Balsamo) coordinated by Franziska Nori (CCCS, Firenze).

Text from the Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina website [Online] Cited 02/02/2020

 

Tina Barney (American, b. 1945) 'The Ancestor' 2001 from the exhibition 'Portraits and Power: People, Politics and Structures' at Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina - Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Florence

 

Tina Barney (American, b. 1945)
The Ancestor
2001
C-print
Courtesy the artist and Janet Borden Inc., New York

 

Tina Barney (American, b. 1945) 'The Brocade Walls' 2004 from the exhibition 'Portraits and Power: People, Politics and Structures' at Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina - Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Florence

 

Tina Barney (American, b. 1945)
The Brocade Walls
2004
C-print
Courtesy the artist and Janet Borden Inc., New York

 

Installation view of the exhibition 'Portraits and Power: People, Politics and Structures' at Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina – Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Florence showing the work of Tina Barney

 

Installation view of the exhibition Portraits and Power: People, Politics and Structures at Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina – Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Florence showing the work of Tina Barney

 

The characters Tina Barney portrays are the representatives of a social class that normally exercises careful control over the circulation of pictures of its members, whether in the form of family photographs or official portraits, which are often published on the pages of glossy magazines. She is one of the first photographers to have made artistic use of this kind of representation. Hers is not merely the gaze of an onlooker, but that of a trusted person, who has personal relationships with her subjects. What she is interested in is not so much the idea of displaying the wealth of these families, but that of analysing social and family dynamics – such as the ambivalent relationship between children and parents. Her work is conceived as a means to improve self-understanding.

The people portrayed all come from families educated in the awareness of their own social role: discipline, self-control and rigour are features to be observed in all the subjects photographed, and they share the same high level of composure. For the series entitled The Europeans, which was produced over a period of about eight years, the author was introduced by one circle of friends to another, and thus given the opportunity to portray Italian nobles, Austrian bankers and landowners, proud representatives of the wealthy Spanish bourgeoisie, and English gentlemen in their sophisticated dwellings. Neither the formal way of dressing nor the furnishings can be traced back to any particular fashion: Tina Barney seeks to produce timeless pictures that at first sight will appear closer to traditional painting than to contemporary photography. Tina Barney creates her portraits through a careful observation of people in their everyday lives; to capture transient moments she asks her subjects to repeat something in front of the camera in such a way as to fix them. Her work tool is a fixed, large-size camera; an extended time exposure and high resolution enable her to render the details of each setting in detail. The figures portrayed have a rigid and formal countenance, which makes them appear markedly detached from one another, even though it is often brothers and sisters or parents and children who are photographed together: “this is the best that we can do. This inability to show physical affection is in our heritage”.

Tina Barney’s photographs give a sense of the fleetingness of their relationships behind the mask of self-controlled bearing. The artist thus unveils the game of social roles and attitudes conducted by her subjects, a veritable Theater of Manners (to quote the title of one of her most famous series) which demands enough sensitivity on the viewers’ part for them to focus on those details in the pictures that render hidden and non-immediately obvious features visible.

Since the mid-1970s, Tina Barney has been focusing her work on the portrayal of the privileged exponents of New York and New England high society, seen either in their own homes or on certain special occasions. The style of the pictures ranges from that of tableaux vivant to that of genre paintings, drawing expressive force from the interaction between wealthy settings and the people who move about in them.

 

Tina Barney (American, b. 1945) 'The Granddaughter' 2004 from the exhibition 'Portraits and Power: People, Politics and Structures' at Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina - Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Florence

 

Tina Barney (American, b. 1945)
The Granddaughter
2004
C-print
Courtesy the artist and Janet Borden Inc., New York

 

Installation view of the exhibition 'Portraits and Power: People, Politics and Structures' at Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina - Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Florence showing the work of Jim Dow

 

Installation view of the exhibition Portraits and Power: People, Politics and Structures at Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina – Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Florence showing the work of Jim Dow

 

Jim Dow (American, b. 1942) 'Library Metropolitan Club, New York' 1999 / 2010 from the exhibition 'Portraits and Power: People, Politics and Structures' at Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina - Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Florence

 

Jim Dow (American, b. 1942)
Library Metropolitan Club, New York
1999 / 2010
Chromogenic colour print
Courtesy the artist, Janet Borden, Inc., New York

 

Jim Dow (American, b. 1942) 'Dining Room, Morgan Library, New York' 1999 / 2010 from the exhibition 'Portraits and Power: People, Politics and Structures' at Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina - Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Florence

 

Jim Dow (American, b. 1942)
Dining Room, Morgan Library, New York
1999 / 2010
Chromogenic colour print
Courtesy the artist, Janet Borden, Inc., New York

 

By taking shots that are as objective as possible and completely devoid of any human presence, Dow gives a concentrated and authentic view of the architecture, furnishings and frameworks of these backdrops of life. “My interest in photography centres on its capacity for exact description. I use photography to try to record the manifestations of human ingenuity and spirit still remaining in our country’s everyday landscape.” For one of his most recent series, Dow has been able to make his way into some of the most exclusive private circles of New York City. He selected circles that are still active and have a long and significant history behind, such as the renowned Metropolitan Club, which was founded in 1891 by John Pierpont Morgan, and once listed James Roosevelt and William K. Vanderbilt among its most illustrious members. Most of these circles require strict adherence to rules consolidated by tradition. Only those introduced to the club by one of its members can join it, a practice that contributes to keep it a kind of network; a specific commission will then consider whether the candidate is fit for acceptance. Though there are over twenty circles of this kind in New York, outsiders will rarely notice their presence. While they no longer exercise the kind of political influence they used to as seats of power and decision making bodies, these clubs are now undergoing a new renaissance. An increasing number of politicians and businessmen are choosing to meet in their secluded rooms, which public opinion often perceives as places of intrigue and the setting for secret appointments of various kinds. With his descriptive and comparative photographs, Dow is giving a face to these exclusive meeting places, inviting viewers to join him in admiring the timeless opulence of their rooms. Architecture is the “primary and most powerful form of mass-communication”; at the same time, it is a mirror for power and its strategies, for the consolidation of authority and its effects on those who exercise it. “Architecture is power. The powerful build precisely because they are powerful. Yet architecture is also an expression of the capability and resoluteness – as well as resolve – of the powerful. Politicians intentionally exploit architecture to seduce, impress, and intimidate.” (Deyan Sudjic, The Edifice Complex: How the Rich and Powerful Shape the World, 2006).

American photographer Jim Dow approaches places as meeting points bearing visible traces of people’s mutual interactions. In different photographic series, the artist has portrayed American barbecue joints, pie and mash shops in London, tango halls in Buenos Aires, the workplaces of farmers, tinsmiths and iron-smiths, and baseball stadiums from one coast of the US to the other.

 

Clegg & Guttmann (Michael Clegg and Martin Guttmann) 'Grand Master' 1985 from the exhibition 'Portraits and Power: People, Politics and Structures' at Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina - Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Florence

 

Clegg & Guttmann (Michael Clegg and Martin Guttmann)
Grand Master
1985
Cibachrome
Courtesy Galerie Christian Nagel, Cologne, Berlin, Antwerp

 

For Grand Master, part of a photographic series produced in the 1980s, Clegg & Guttmann asked an actor to display certain poses characteristic of power, presenting him as the representative of a non-specified institution. The background of the image consists in a fictional architectural scenario – one simply simulated by using photographed space – the artificial nature of which is revealed by certain incongruities in the lighting effects. What is central here, once more, is the reflection offered on the controlled and never spontaneous construction of an image of power.

The tension conveyed by Clegg & Guttmann’s works springs from the subtle gap characterising the artists’ relationship with tradition. Their classical and apparently affirmative representations of people with power should be interpreted, within the context of their career spanning several decades, as different ways of visualising an analytical and deconstructive practice engaging with the mechanisms of authority.

 

Installation view of the exhibition 'Portraits and Power: People, Politics and Structures' at Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina - Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Florence showing the work of Clegg & Guttmann

 

Installation view of the exhibition Portraits and Power: People, Politics and Structures at Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina – Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Florence showing the work of Clegg & Guttmann

 

 

The CCCS – Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina – Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, will be staging an exhibition entitled Portraits and Power: People, Politics and Structures, from 1 October 2010 to 23 January 2011, which will run concurrently with the retrospective devoted to Bronzino, the undisputed master of the Mannerist portrait, on Palazzo Strozzi’s piano nobile.

The exhibition, based on an original project by the CCCS in consultation with Peter Funnell (curator and director of research programmes at the National Portrait Gallery in London), Walter Guadagnini (chairman of the “UniCredit & Art” project’s scientific committee) and Roberta Valtorta (director of the Cinisello Balsamo Museum of Contemporary Photography) and coordinated by Franziska Nori (director of the CCCS), will show the work of international artists and collectives such as Tina Barney, Christoph Brech, Bureau d’études, Fabio Cifariello Ciardi, Clegg & Guttmann, Nick Danziger, Rineke Dijkstra, Jim Dow, Francesco Jodice, Annie Leibovitz, Helmut Newton, Trevor Paglen, Martin Parr, Wang Qingsong, Daniela Rossell, Jules Spinatsch, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and The Yes Men – who have all proved capable of developing a critical analysis of the portrayal and depiction of political, economic and social power in the media.

The exhibition explores its theme from two main standpoints: it analyses power as an expression of the charisma of those individuals who have become icons or symbols of their age; and it probes the power of institutions and social models that either represent themselves or are represented in a critical light.

The role played by images has grown to such an extent that it has led to the predominant emergence of their value not only in terms of portrayal but also of the successful establishment of power. The works of art on display bear witness not only to the self-referential strategies of power, but also to the different approaches artists adopt in deconstructing or chipping away at the images that represent social, economic and political power in a way that can not only bolster a leadership but that can also undermine its authority.

The National Portrait Gallery in London will be contributing works by three famous international photographers that explore the image of political authority. The series devoted to Queen Elizabeth II by Annie Leibovitz evinces a celebrated contemporary artist’s dialogue with the great tradition of official portraiture, and the cycle entitled Blair at War by Nick Danziger gives an extraordinary vision of Tony Blair’s daily life in the days immediately preceding the outbreak of the war in Iraq. The portrait of Margaret Thatcher by Helmut Newton keeps alive the iconic role of one of the most influential politicians of recent decades despite the fact that her authority had waned.

Clegg & Guttmann show the photographs of three managing directors of the Deutsche Bank. These images, while based on the official portraiture genre, provide the opportunity for a conceptual reflection on the theme of the public presentation of individuals who are at the same time both subject and patron of the work. Christoph Brech portrays a modern patron of the arts in a video that dwells on a detail of the hull of his yacht, Sea Force One, a floating museum filmed from a distance in Venetian waters.

The role of the image not only as representation but also as a tool for the construction or exploration of power is analysed by artists such as Hiroshi Sugimoto, whose Portraits bring to life wax effigies of historical or contemporary political figures through the evocative power of photography, and Rineke Dijkstra whose series of images of a soldier with the French Foreign Legion prompts a reflection on what remains of the individual when he becomes the representative of a military authority. Francesco Jodice, in his video entitled Dubai Citytellers, analyses the development and the social impact of one of the new centres of global economic power.

In the photo triptych Past, Present and Future, Wang Qingsong portrays himself as a bystander, bearing witness to fighters in poses mimicking celebrative and monumental Socialist sculptures, reflecting upon the contradictory nature of the actual power of masses in contemporary China.

Tina Barney records the life and domestic environment of the beau monde, combining the spontaneous feel of a private snapshot with a sophisticated aesthetic approach strongly echoing the world of art and traditional photography. The provocative photo series Ricas y Famosas by Daniela Rossell portrays the taste and excesses of the new super wealthy social oligarchy in Mexico, while Martin Parr’s series entitled Luxury, which is devoted to fashion shows, horse-racing and art fairs in the world’s major capitals, probes the lifestyle of the upper class in a globalised Western world. The pictures of Jim Dow portray the luxurious rooms of the great private social clubs of New York City’s elite, fashionable places that are inaccessible to the general public.

A different critical approach to the theme of power is offered by the French collective Bureau d’études with its project involving mapping the links between political and economic power. The CIA’s secret missions and operations, on the other hand, provide the focus for the work of Trevor Paglen who reconstructs top secret movements and connections. Jules Spinatsch presents a new work taken from his Temporary Discomfort video-photographic series, denouncing the controversial transformation of a place such as the island of La Maddalena in Sardinia into the venue for the G8 summit that never took place. Also on view is the antagonistic activism of The Yes Men, a collective who will be presenting their spectacular media initiative that rocked the image and power of the multinational corporation responsible for the Bhopal environmental catastrophe in India.

Finally, the composer Fabio Cifariello Ciardi uses famous politicians’ public speeches as his raw material for the creation of electroacoustic music that will underline their rhetorical techniques of persuasion.

The exhibition catalogue, published in Italian and English, contains a series of essays by authors from different countries, backgrounds and disciplines, offering the visitor a chance to explore in greater depth the themes addressed by the exhibition.

Press release from the Strozzina website [Online] Cited 02/02/2020

 

Rineke Dijkstra (Dutch, b. 1959) 'Olivier' Quartier Vienot, Marseille, France, July 21, 2000 from the exhibition 'Portraits and Power: People, Politics and Structures' at Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina - Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Florence

 

Rineke Dijkstra (Dutch, b. 1959)
Olivier
Quartier Vienot, Marseille, France, July 21, 2000
On loan from The Bank of America Merrill Lynch Collection

 

Rineke Dijkstra (Dutch, b. 1959) 'Olivier' Quartier Monclar, Djibouti, July 13, 2003 from the exhibition 'Portraits and Power: People, Politics and Structures' at Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina - Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Florence

 

Rineke Dijkstra (Dutch, b. 1959)
Olivier
Quartier Monclar, Djibouti, July 13, 2003
On loan from The Bank of America Merrill Lynch Collection

 

A crucial feature of Dijkstra’s photography is her desire to show the true personality of her subjects, as opposed to any simulated one. Up against the contemporary mystifying quality of the Internet and digital manipulation, her images illustrate in a very convincing way how photography is still capable of transcending the surface of subjects to grasp their deeper and constantly evolving identities. Her series feature, for instance, young bullfighters immediately after a bullfight, young mothers with babies born only a few minutes before, and portraits of boys and girls from various parts of the world at the beach. Her work method, whereby subjects are given very few directions and are usually portrayed frontally, leads to the creation of bare and detached pictures in which people display an inevitably fragile and vulnerable air. The Olivier Silva project, which the artist has developed over the course of more than three years, centres on the figure of a young man who in July 2000 voluntarily enrolled in the French Foreign Legion. Dijkstra portrays crucial moments of his intense training in France and Africa – from the day of his enrolment, in Aubagne, near Marseille, to the missions he was sent to fulfil in various parts of the world (Gabon, Ivory Coast and Gibuti) in 2003. The photographs clearly illustrate the metamorphoses the young man underwent over the course of the years: the innocent looking boy becomes an energetic and professional elite soldier enlisted in one of the world’s toughest and most controversial army corps. The centrepiece of the work is the artist’s interest in Olivier as an individual whose personality evolves in the course of his training, as is clearly revealed by his attitude and the look in his eyes, as well as by the very way in which his facial features change. The training imparted in military units of this kind is aimed at annulling the recruit’s personality in order to then recreate it according to new parameters: the youngster draws closer and closer to the prototype of the soldier as we progress from one photograph to the next. Just as all new recruits of the Foreign Legion are assigned a new name and identity, after three years Olivier no longer looks (even physically) like the same person as before. Like an accelerated film sequence, this series shows the dissolution of the original identity of a man subjected to the conditions dictated by an apparatus of power. Every soldier is at the service of the country he fights for and becomes one of its official public representations, embodying its military power. The same power he now wields is that which in a few years has conditioned him – or even produced him, one may say. Through her aesthetically minimalist photographs, Rineke Dijkstra illustrates the paradox of opposition between individual values and those of the community, between identity and conformity.

Rineke Dijkstra has carried out profound research in the field of photographic portraiture. Her subjects are adolescents who are still searching for themselves and who are incapable of acting in front of a camera, as well as adults caught in decisive moments in their personal development. By portraying these subjects, the artist explores the theme of identity and its representation.

 

Martin Parr (British, b. 1952) 'France. Paris. Haute Couture' 2007 from the exhibition 'Portraits and Power: People, Politics and Structures' at Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina - Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Florence

 

Martin Parr (British, b. 1952)
France. Paris. Haute Couture
2007
from the series Luxury
Pigment print
© Martin Parr / Magnum Photos

 

Martin Parr (British, b. 1952) 'England. Epsom. The Derby' 2004 from the exhibition 'Portraits and Power: People, Politics and Structures' at Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina - Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Florence

 

Martin Parr (British, b. 1952)
England. Epsom. The Derby
2004
from the series Luxury
Pigment print
© Martin Parr / Magnum Photos

 

Martin Parr (British, b. 1952) 'Russia. Moscow. Fashion Week' 2004 from the exhibition 'Portraits and Power: People, Politics and Structures' at Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina - Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Florence

 

Martin Parr (British, b. 1952)
Russia. Moscow. Fashion Week
2004
From the series Luxury
Pigment print
© Martin Parr / Magnum Photos

 

Unlike most of his colleagues, Parr has little interest in the great themes of photographic reporting, such as the documenting of war and poverty. Working around the world, he finds his motifs in everyday life. At the beginning of his career, he focused in particular on the observation of people from lower middle class backgrounds engaged in different activities, in the context of themes such as consumption, communication and leisure. He has left it ambiguous as to whether these pictures of his are charged with critical overtones or intended to serve as a mere means of social documentation. Through this approach to his work, Parr has developed a highly distinctive and almost unmistakable style marked by dazzling colours obtained by the use of flash on top of natural light. Parr takes his camera near people and their social milieus, creating images that appear grotesque or exaggerated at first. Their motifs, which often coincide with moments of everyday life, are shot from unusual perspectives.

The feeling these pictures convey is that of being spontaneous photos, similar to snapshots. Only under closer scrutiny you understand they have been skilfully construed and arranged. While always highly charged and taking widespread social stereotypes as their starting point, Parr’s images are never banal. The perspective they convey stands out for the way in which it takes viewers by surprise and for the ironic detachment with which the photographer turns to his subjects.

According to Parr, his photographs never fail to elicit extreme emotions because they always show some truths: “We are so used to digesting pictures that are pure propaganda, that people are surprised when someone like me shows them images that are closely tied to reality. I, at least, don’t lie”. The photographer’s gaze takes the viewer into his confidence, leading him through the pictures to discover the absurdity of what we deem normal. Gathered in large series regularly published in volumes, these shots transcend the irony of individual images to concentrate on the analysis of a given social milieu.

The Luxury series portrays personages from the international jet set, photographed in different settings around the world – from the Miami Art Fair to horse races in Durban, from polo tournaments in Dubai to the Beijing Auto Show. With these images, Parr has intentionally moved away from his previous subjects to focus on the life of the upper classes: for, as he himself has noted, the main problem the world is facing is not poverty but wealth – excessive development and prosperity. These photographs offer the perspective of an external, noninvolved observer, whose gaze is drawn towards minor details that usually find no place in the common representations of these events.

The centrepieces of these photos are the superficial clichés that the people participating in the events adopt as tokens of their upper-class identity. The pictures fix moments in which this enactment reveals itself to be so fragile or so exaggerated that the people involved become extras in a comedy – one that the photographer’s eye has fallen upon, finding interest not in individuals as such, but in their belonging to a given social system with all its rules and values.

Martin Parr describes himself as a “chronicler of our times”. In his photographic series he records the behaviour of people of different social classes in different contexts, searching not so much for mutual differences as for what brings human beings together when they find themselves in certain roles.

 

Nick Danziger (British, b. 1958) 'Helicopter Flight from RAF Lyneham to Battersea, 3 April 2003' from the exhibition 'Portraits and Power: People, Politics and Structures' at Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina - Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Florence

 

Nick Danziger (British, b. 1958)
Helicopter Flight from RAF Lyneham to Battersea, 3 April 2003

Bromide print
Courtesy National Portrait Gallery, London
© Nick Danziger

 

This opportunity had arisen thanks to The Saturday Times Magazine, which had launched a project to produce a special report on the occasion of Blair’s fiftieth birthday, one based not on official photographs but on a way of perceiving and depicting power from the point of view of everyday life – the interior of private and usually inaccessible places, removed from the conventional and more distinctly representational ones. These were the very days in which Blair was facing one of the most challenging decisions of his mandate: that concerning Great Britain’s intervention in the Second Gulf War on the side of the United States.

Danziger was able to document moments and scenes that could otherwise never have been made visible, capturing apparently insignificant moments that actually express all the underlying tensions and dynamics of those crucial days in 2003. On his first day of work, 14 March, Danziger was in Blair’s so called “den” – the Prime Minister’s private workroom in Downing Street. While engaged in a telephone call with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, Blair is shown in a non-conventional and informal, rather than simply official, pose. A mirror here gives us a glimpse of Alastair Campbell, the Prime Minister’s ever-present spin doctor, and the person responsible for his public image. This reflection becomes a sort of picture within the picture, a reminder of the assemblage of Danziger’s photographic documents, which are never created by chance or artlessly, but always follow from a conscious decision on the photographer’s part.

Danziger seems to be providing an almost intimate depiction of power, one that catches its subjects unawares. Yet it is worth recalling that the Blair government had developed a very careful and well-thought strategy for controlling its own public identity. New Labour’s promotion of an image of its Prime Minister as a young man from next door and of its own political class as one close to ordinary people has been a central feature of its political platform – a way of making a break after the long years of Conservatism under Margaret Thatcher and John Major.

The power of Danziger’s photographs lies in their ability to suggest the moments preceding and following the one portrayed, as illustrated for instance by the pictures of the Prime Minister’s transfer by plane, or the conversation held by a group of politicians outside Blair’s cabinet as they wait for the imminent war decisions to be made. In these pictures the outside world is always cut off; still, as critic John Berger has noted, the importance of photographs lies precisely in their ability to show things they do not directly portray.

Danziger himself bears witness to this when he writes that “in some of the pictures, from where the Prime Minister is sitting, he could hear people shouting ‘stop the war’ outside”. Power censors what might damage or shed doubt upon the reassuring appearance of a politician, and always seeks to portray itself in a manner useful for its own preservation.

The work of photojournalist Nick Danziger features videos and photographs in a documentary style, which often accompany the diaries he writes during his many trips around the world – from Bosnia to Afghanistan, Great Britain to Brazil, and so on. Between March and April 2003, Danziger and journalist Peter Stothard spent thirty days in close contact with the then Prime Minister Tony Blair and his entourage.

 

Installation view of the exhibition 'Portraits and Power: People, Politics and Structures' at Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina - Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Florence showing the work of Hiroshi Sugimoto

 

Installation view of the exhibition Portraits and Power: People, Politics and Structures at Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina – Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Florence showing the work of Hiroshi Sugimoto

 

The Portraits series was first developed in 1999, starting from a portrait of King Henry VIII of England inspired by the work of Dutch painter Hans Holbein. Sugimoto’s self-professed aim was to become “the first sixteenth-century photographer.” The series then continued with different subjects, including famous contemporary figures who have entered the collective imagination, such as the Cuban lider máximo Fidel Castro and Pope John Paul II.

Sugimoto’s works are not portraits of the original subjects, but of wax sculptures reproducing them in the most hyper-realist way possible. The figures are illumined by a source of direct light and strongly stand out against a black background in an extremely theatrical way, imitating poses typical of the characters they represent, while removing them from all context and thus emphasising their nature as icons rather than human beings.

For these works Sugimoto has not made use of the 50 x 60 cm format that is typical of him. Yet, they stand in continuity with the artist’s unique reflection upon the nature of photography and its relation to history and time. Here he embarks upon a reflection on portraiture and the process whereby an image is translated using different media, emphasising the problematic “realistic effect” of photographic reproduction.

An attentive gaze will notice small disproportions in the various parts of the subjects’ bodies or strange lighting effects due to the way in which light reflects on wax as opposed to real skin. Still, these pictures invite us to look at them as we would other photographs. Thinking, that is, about the genuine subjects they portray, something that paradoxically makes them “more real” than the wax statues that constitute their actual subjects. Different levels of reproduction are at play here: from the original subject to an initial photograph that served as a model for the wax statue that Sugimoto then portrayed in his photographic work. Our gaze will strongly be drawn towards the extraordinary elegance and aesthetic refinement of these works, which reveal the uncommon technical abilities of Sugimoto, marked as they are by the endless range of white, grey and black shades typical of him. Despite all this, his works remain emotionally cold: they consist in conceptual reflections upon the very notion of portrait and its political and cultural value as an icon of the characters it represents, and explicitly forgo any realist view of the individuals they take as their subjects. The artist seems to be causing all sense of natural time to collapse – in such a way as to stress that of absolute time. He attains a balance between life and death that is characteristic of photography but also of portraiture, whereby what counts is not the reality or the life of a subject, but the latter’s value as an image in itself, beyond time and everyday life.

Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photographs convey a conceptual attitude aimed at stripping images down to their bare essence, thus emphasising the primacy of the idea over the object portrayed. His famous marine landscapes and dioramas express a view of photography as a sort of time machine – a way of preserving or constructing memories and emotions.

 

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japan, b. 1948) Pope John Paul II 1999 (installation view)

 

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japan, b. 1948)
Pope John Paul II (installation view)
1999
Black and white photograph
Courtesy Rosa e Gilberto Sandretto
© Hiroshi Sugimoto

 

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japan, b. 1948) 'Pope John Paul II' 1999 from the exhibition 'Portraits and Power: People, Politics and Structures' at Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina - Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Florence

 

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japan, b. 1948)
Pope John Paul II
1999
Black and white photograph
Courtesy Rosa e Gilberto Sandretto
© Hiroshi Sugimoto

 

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japan, b. 1948) 'Fidel Castro' 1999 (installation view)

 

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japan, b. 1948)
Fidel Castro (installation view)
1999
Black and white photograph
Courtesy Sonnabend Gallery, New York
© Hiroshi Sugimoto

 

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japan, b. 1948) 'Fidel Castro' 1999 from the exhibition 'Portraits and Power: People, Politics and Structures' at Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina - Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Florence

 

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japan, b. 1948)
Fidel Castro
1999
Black and white photograph
Courtesy Sonnabend Gallery, New York
© Hiroshi Sugimoto

 

 

Centre for Contemporary Culture Strozzina
Palazzo Strozzi, Piazza Strozzi, Firenze

Strozinna website

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Exhibition: ‘Bronzino. Artist and Poet at the Court of the Medici’ at the Palazzo Strozzi, Florence

Exhibition dates: 24th September 2010 – 23rd January, 2011

 

Bronzino. 'Holy Family with St Anne and St John' 1545 or 1546 from the exhibition 'Bronzino. Artist and Poet at the Court of the Medici' at the Palazzo Strozzi

 

Agnolo di Cosimo named Bronzino (Monticelli, Florence 1503 – Florence 1572)
Holy Family with St Anne and St John
1545 or 1546
Oil on panel
124.5 x 99.5cm
Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Gemäldegalerie, inv. n. 183

 

 

Despite the sensitivity of the religious paintings it is the portraits of strong yet somehow vulnerable women that move me most in this posting. The paintings are “often read as static, elegant, and stylish exemplars of unemotional haughtiness and assurance.” (Wikipedia)

I don’t agree. Of course they have the trappings of the rich and powerful, the knowledgeable books at hand, the elongated Mannerist hands, the lush colours and detail of their pleated robes falling from their shoulders like liquid opulence (imagine the shock of these colours in 1530!) but there is something in their open stare that seems to reach across time to tap me on the shoulder and say yes, I can still see into your soul as you can into mine. Incredibly moving this work of genius.

Dr Marcus Bunyan


Many thankx to the Palazzo Strozzi, Florence for allowing me to publish the photographs of the paintings in the posting. Please click on photographs for a larger version of the image.

 

 

Bronzino. 'Holy Family with St John (Panciatichi Madonna)' c. 1540 from the exhibition 'Bronzino. Artist and Poet at the Court of the Medici' at the Palazzo Strozzi

 

Agnolo di Cosimo named Bronzino (Monticelli, Florence 1503 – Florence 1572)
Holy Family with St John (Panciatichi Madonna)
c. 1540
Oil on panel
116.5 x 89.5cm
Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi, Inv. 1890 n. 8377

 

Bronzino. 'Portrait of Eleonora of Toledo with her son Giovanni' c. 1545 from the exhibition 'Bronzino. Artist and Poet at the Court of the Medici' at the Palazzo Strozzi

 

Agnolo di Cosimo named Bronzino (Monticelli,Florence 1503 – Florence 1572 )
Portrait of Eleonora of Toledo with her son Giovanni
c. 1545
Oil on panel
115 x 96cm
Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi, Inv. 1890 n. 748

 

Bronzino. 'Holy Family with St John' c. 1555-1559 from the exhibition 'Bronzino. Artist and Poet at the Court of the Medici' at the Palazzo Strozzi

 

Agnolo di Cosimo named Bronzino and Alessandro Allori (Bronzino (Monticelli, Florence 1503) Allori (Florence 1535) – Bronzino (Florence 1572) Allori (Florence 1607))
Holy Family with St John
c. 1555-1559
Tempera on panel
117 x 99cm
Moscow, State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts. Inv.2699

 

 

Agnolo di Cosimo, known as Bronzino (1503-1572), was one of the greatest artists in the history of Italian painting. Court artist to Cosimo I de’ Medici (1519-1574), his work embodied the sophistication of the Mannerist style. Bronzino. Artist and Poet at the Court of the Medici, on view at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence from 24 September 2010 to 23 January 2011, will be the very first exhibition devoted to his painted work. Bronzino conveyed the elegance of the Medici court in his work with “naturalness” and, at the same time, austere beauty.

Florence is the perfect setting for a monographic exhibition on Bronzino. The son of a butcher, not only was he born and died here, the city houses some of his greatest masterpieces, particularly in the Uffizi but also in other museums and churches. This landmark exhibition, with loans from the world’s most important museums, presents presents 63 works attributed to Bronzino, and 10 to Bronzino and his workshop, along with others by his master Pontormo, with whom he had close ties throughout his life. Bronzino’s paintings, with their sculptural definition, will be shown alongside sculptures by such 16th century masters as Benvenuto Cellini, Tribolo, Baccio Bandinelli and Pierino da Vinci, who were his friends and with whom he exchanged sonnets. The exhibition concludes with a number of works by Alessandro Allori, his favourite pupil.

Most of these jewel-like masterpieces have never been shown together. Alongside the paintings from the Uffizi, the exhibition will include such works as The Adoration of the Shepherds and the Allegory of Venus, Cupid and Jealousy from the Szépmüvészeti Múzeum in Budapest, the Venus, Cupid and Satyr from the Galleria di Palazzo Colonna in Rome, the Portrait of a Young Man with a Book from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Holy Family with St Anne and St John in the versions in the Musée du Louvre in Paris and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, together with panel paintings from the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, and from the National Gallery of Art, in Washington.

The exhibition will show three hitherto ‘missing’ works by Bronzino, two of which, while recorded and mentioned by Giorgio Vasari, were thought to have been lost: the Crucified Christ which he painted for Bartolomeo Panciatichi, and the St Cosmas, the right-hand panel accompanying the Besançon altarpiece when it originally graced Eleonora da Toledo’s chapel in Palazzo Vecchio. Their rediscovery sheds new light on Bronzino’s work and on his ties with the heretical religious mood that permeated the Medici court before 1550. The third previously unknown picture is Christ Carrying the Cross ascribed to his later years.

The exhibition, which has taken over four years to prepare, is curated by Carlo Falciani and Antonio Natali, the foremost experts on Cinquecento painting who have also contributed to the scholarly catalogue. The exhibition, in conjunction with Drawings of Bronzino at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (20 January to 18 April 2010), will play a central role in fostering a new interpretation of this important artist. For those who enjoyed the New York show, this Florence exhibition is a must-see.

Press release from the Palazzo Strozzi website [Online[ Cited 17/01/2011 no longer available online

 

Bronzino. 'Portrait of Lorenzo Lenzi' 1527 from the exhibition 'Bronzino. Artist and Poet at the Court of the Medici' at the Palazzo Strozzi

 

Agnolo di Cosimo named Bronzino (Monticelli, Florence 1503 – Florence 1572 )
Portrait of Lorenzo Lenzi
1527
Oil on panel
90 x 71cm
Milan, Civiche Raccolte Artistiche – Pinacoteca del Castello Sforzesco

 

Bronzino. 'Portrait of Guidubaldo II della Rovere' 1531-1532 from the exhibition 'Bronzino. Artist and Poet at the Court of the Medici' at the Palazzo Strozzi

 

Agnolo di Cosimo named Bronzino (Monticelli,Florence 1503 – Florence 1572 )
Portrait of Guidubaldo II della Rovere
1531-1532
Oil on panel
114 x 86cm
Florence, Palazzo Pitti, Galleria Palatina, inv. 1912 n. 149

 

Bronzino. 'Portrait of a Women (Matteo Sofferoni's Daughter?)' c. 1530-1532 from the exhibition 'Bronzino. Artist and Poet at the Court of the Medici' at the Palazzo Strozzi

 

Agnolo di Cosimo named Bronzino (Monticelli, Florence 1503 – Florence 1572)
Portrait of a Women (Matteo Sofferoni’s Daughter?)
c. 1530-1532
Oil on panel
76.6 x 66.2 x 1.3cm
London, Lent by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, RCIN 405754

 

Bronzino. 'Portrait of Lucrezia Panciatichi' 1540 from the exhibition 'Bronzino. Artist and Poet at the Court of the Medici' at the Palazzo Strozzi

 

Agnolo di Cosimo named Bronzino (Monticelli,Florence 1503 – Florence 1572 )
Portrait of Lucrezia Panciatichi
1540
Oil on panel
101 x 82.8cm
Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi

 

Agnolo di Cosimo named Bronzino (Monticelli,Florence 1503 - Florence 1572) 'Christ on the Cross, Agnolo Allori' c. 1540

 

Agnolo di Cosimo named Bronzino (Monticelli,Florence 1503 – Florence 1572)
Christ on the Cross, Agnolo Allori
c. 1540
Oil on panel
145 x 115cm
Musée des Beaux-Arts

 

The Crucifixion (1540-1541 circa) is the third and most intriguing of the debuts in that it tells us something about the religious sensibilities of Bartolomeo and Lucrezia Panciatichi who were tried for heresy between 1551 and 1552. Only the direct intervention of Duke Cosimo I stayed off their conviction. Carlo Falciani and Philippe Costamagna used Vasari’s description and other historical records to identify the piece hanging in Nizza with the label “anonymous Italian work”. Reflectographic analysis shows that it was painted according to the modus operandi of Bronzino himself, who used a preparatory drawing modified several times. According to the original plan, Christ hung more heavily from the cross with head drooping, arms distended, and legs bent. Such a posture would have evoked the preaching of Savonarola, for whom the sufferings of Christ are a stark warning about the consequences of sin. To have extolled these sufferings in the painting would have emphasized the necessity of humans to suffer for their salvation. The Panciatichi, however, persuaded by the poetry of Juan de Valdès, wished that the painting show that salvation comes by faith alone, in such a way that suffering is no longer necessary since Christ himself has already suffered.

To reflect the theology of justification by faith alone, Bronzino ignored the original drawing and instead painted Christ already deceased rather than in the throes of agony. Vasari writes that the artist worked long and hard to render the composition more calm and serene. The statuesque corpse is affixed lightly to the cross, which in turn is situated in an altar-niche rather than on Mount Calvary, suggesting that the painting is a memorial in the same way the eucharist is but a memorial according to the theology the Panciatichi found so attractive.

Daniel B. Gallagher. “Bronzino; Medici Court Painter and poet at the palazzo Strozzi, Florence,” on the New York Arts website, January 10, 2011 [Online] Cited 21/02/2025

 

Agnolo di Cosimo named Bronzino (Monticelli,Florence 1503 - Florence 1572) 'Nano Morgante' Before 1553

 

Agnolo di Cosimo named Bronzino (Monticelli,Florence 1503 – Florence 1572)
Nano Morgante
Before 1553
Oil on canvas
Uffizi Gallery, Florence

 

Agnolo di Cosimo named Bronzino (Monticelli,Florence 1503 - Florence 1572 ) 'Venus, Cupid and Satyr' 1553-1554 from the exhibition 'Bronzino. Artist and Poet at the Court of the Medici' at the Palazzo Strozzi

 

Agnolo di Cosimo named Bronzino (Monticelli,Florence 1503 – Florence 1572)
Venus, Cupid and Satyr
1553-1554
Oil on panel
135 x 231cm
Palazzo Colonna

 

Bronzino. 'Portrait of Laura Battiferri' c. 1555-1560 from the exhibition 'Bronzino. Artist and Poet at the Court of the Medici' at the Palazzo Strozzi

 

Agnolo di Cosimo named Bronzino (Monticelli,Florence 1503 – Florence 1572 )
Portrait of Laura Battiferri
c. 1555-1560
Oil on panel
83 x 60cm
Florence, Palazzo Vecchio, Collezione Loeser

 

Agnolo di Cosimo named Bronzino (Monticelli, Florence 1503 - Florence 1572) 'Francesco I De Medici' between 1555 and 1565

 

Agnolo di Cosimo named Bronzino (Monticelli, Florence 1503 – Florence 1572)
Francesco I De Medici
between 1555 and 1565
Oil on panel
97.9 (38.5 in) x 76.4cm (30 in)
Art Institute of Chicago

 

 

Palazzo Strozzi
Piazza Strozzi, 50123
Firenze (Florence), Italy
Phone: +39 055 2645155

Opening hours:
Daily 10am – 8pm, Thursday 10am – 11pm
Last admission to the exhibition one hour before closing

Palazzo Strozzi website

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Exhibition: ‘Sally Mann: The Flesh and the Spirit’ at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA

Exhibition dates: 13th November 2010 – 23rd January 2011

 

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

 

Sally Mann (American, b. 1951) 'Jessie #34' 2004 from the exhibition 'Sally Mann: The Flesh and the Spirit' at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

 

Sally Mann (American, b. 1951)
Jessie #34
2004
Gelatin Silver enlargement print from 8 x 10 in. collodion wet-plate negative, with Soluvar matte varnish mixed with diatomaceous earth

 

Sally Mann (American, b. 1951) 'Untitled (Still Life)' 2006 from the exhibition 'Sally Mann: The Flesh and the Spirit' at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

 

Sally Mann (American, b. 1951)
Untitled (Still Life)
2006
Ambrotype (unique collodion wet-plate positive on black glass), with sandarac varnish (15 x 13 in)

 

Sally Mann (American, b. 1951) 'Untitled' 1983 from the exhibition 'Sally Mann: The Flesh and the Spirit' at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

 

Sally Mann (American, b. 1951)
Untitled
1983
Polaroid (8 x 10 in)

 

Sally Mann (American, b. 1951) 'Untitled' 2000-2001 from the exhibition 'Sally Mann: The Flesh and the Spirit' at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

 

Sally Mann (American, b. 1951)
Untitled
2000-2001
Gelatin silver enlargement prints from 8 x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4cm) collodion wet-plate negatives, with Soluvar matte varnish mixed with diatomaceous earth

 

Sally Mann (American, b. 1951) 'Untitled-#4, Antietam' 2001 from the exhibition 'Sally Mann: The Flesh and the Spirit' at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

 

Sally Mann (American, b. 1951)
Untitled #4, Antietam
2001
Gelatin silver enlargement print from 8 x 10 in. collodion wet-plate

 

 

One of the first major presentations in the United States of the bold work of contemporary photographer Sally Mann opened at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts website (VMFA) on November 13, 2010. Exclusive to Richmond, the exhibition will continue until January 23, 2011.

Focusing on the theme of the body, the exhibition will revolve around several entirely new series while also incorporating little-known early work. Mann is admired for her passionate use of photography to address issues of love and loss, expressed in images of her children and southern landscapes. Her recent work uses obsolete photographic methods and nearly abstract images to push the limits of her medium and to dig deeper into themes of mortality and vulnerability. The images include several powerful series of self-portraits – an entirely new subject in her work – and figure studies of her husband. Some of the works in the exhibition include nudity and other graphic material. Viewer and parental discretion is advised.

“Sally Mann is among the top tier of photographers today. Although she is widely exhibited, we are fortunate to be one of the first U.S. museums to produce a major exhibition of her work,” says John Ravenal, the exhibition curator and Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. “The fearlessness, power and deeply emotional themes of her art are both captivating and unforgettable. We are pleased to exhibit one of Virginia’s, and the nation’s, finest artists.”

Self-examination, ageing, death, and decay are some of the subjects of the exhibition, and these are balanced by themes of beauty, love, trust, and the hopefulness of youth. Among the works are portraits of Mann’s husband, who suffers from a degenerative muscle disease. These are juxtaposed with colourful images of her children, forming a poignant comparison between youthful evanescence and the expressive capacity of the mature adult body.

Other works offer additional perspectives on the themes of ageing and mortality. Made during a trip to the University of Tennessee Forensic Anthropology Center, Mann’s “Body Farm” images explore her fascination with the thin line between animate and inanimate, form and matter. Multi-part self-portraits represent Mann’s first extended exploration of her own face as a subject. Two self-portrait pieces consist of multiple unique photographs printed on black glass – a format known as ambrotypes – arranged in monumental grids of Mann’s likeness.

“The focus on the body in the exhibition will offer a profound meditation on human experience,” continues Ravenal. “The sheer beauty, formal sophistication, and expressive power of the work is likely to appeal to art world and general audiences alike.”

For her landscapes, Mann developed the method she continues to use today, involving an antique large-format view camera and the laborious process of collodion wet-plate. This method, invented in the 1850s, uses sticky ether-based collodion poured on glass, which must be exposed and developed in a matter of minutes before it dries. Unlike her nineteenth-century predecessors, who strove for perfection, Mann embraces accident. Her approach produces spots, streaks, and scars, along with piercing focus in some areas and evaporation of the image in others. These distortions – “honest” artefacts of the process – add a profoundly emotional quality to Mann’s images.

Mann’s recent work continues to use this technique, but returns to the body as a principle subject after a decade of landscapes. Though the body has been an essential focus in Mann’s work from the beginning, this is the first time an exhibition and publication have explored it as a coherent theme.

Born in 1951, Sally Mann has played a leading role in contemporary photography for the past 25 years. Her career began in the 1970s and fully matured in the Culture Wars of the early 1990s, when photographs of her children became embroiled in national debates about family values. In the mid-1990s, Mann turned her attention to large-scale landscapes, specifically the evocative terrain of the South, where she was born, raised and continues to live. Her landscape work raised questions about history, memory and nostalgia, and also embraced a romantic beauty that proved as troubling to some critics as the sensual images of her children had to others. By the early 2000s, she had returned to figurative subjects, adding images of her husband and herself to her work.

Text from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts website

 

Sally Mann (American, b. 1951) 'Untitled (Self Portraits)' 2006-2007 from the exhibition 'Sally Mann: The Flesh and the Spirit' at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

 

Sally Mann (American, b. 1951)
Untitled (Self Portraits)
2006-2007
Ambrotypes (unique collodion wet-plate positives on black glass) with sandarac varnish

 

Sally Mann (American, b. 1951) 'Untitled (Self Portraits)' 2006-2007 (detail)

 

Sally Mann (American, b. 1951)
Untitled (Self Portraits) (detail)
2006-2007
Ambrotypes (unique collodion wet-plate positives on black glass) with sandarac varnish

 

Sally Mann (American, b. 1951) 'Untitled (Self Portraits)' 2006-2007 (detail)

 

Sally Mann (American, b. 1951)
Untitled (Self Portraits) (detail)
2006-2007
Ambrotypes (unique collodion wet-plate positives on black glass) with sandarac varnish

 

Sally Mann (American, b. 1951) 'Untitled (Self Portraits)' 2006-2007 (detail)

 

Sally Mann (American, b. 1951)
Untitled (Self Portraits) (detail)
2006-2007
Ambrotypes (unique collodion wet-plate positives on black glass) with sandarac varnish

 

Sally Mann (American, b. 1951) 'Untitled' 2007-2008 from the exhibition 'Sally Mann: The Flesh and the Spirit' at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

 

Sally Mann (American, b. 1951)
Untitled
2007-2008
Ambrotypes (unique collodion wet-plate positives on black glass), with sandarac varnish

 

Sally Mann (American, b. 1951) 'Ponder Heart' 2009 from the exhibition 'Sally Mann: The Flesh and the Spirit' at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

 

Sally Mann (American, b. 1951)
Ponder Heart
2009
Gelatin silver contact print from 15 x 13 1/2-in. collodion wet-plate negative

 

Sally Mann (American, b. 1951) 'Hephaestus' 2008 from the exhibition 'Sally Mann: The Flesh and the Spirit' at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

 

Sally Mann (American, b. 1951)
Hephaestus
2008
Gelatin silver contact print from 15 x 13 1/2 –in. collodion wet-plate negative

 

Sally Mann (American, b. 1951) 'Was Ever Love' 2009 from the exhibition 'Sally Mann: The Flesh and the Spirit' at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

 

Sally Mann (American, b. 1951)
Was Ever Love
2009
Gelatin silver contact print from 15 x 13 1/2 –in. collodion wet-plate negative

 

 

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200 N. Boulevard
Richmond, Virginia USA
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melbourne’s magnificent eleven 2010

December 2010

 

Here’s my pick of the eleven best exhibitions in Melbourne for 2010 that featured on the Art Blart: art and cultural memory archive (in no particular order). Enjoy!

Marcus

 

1/ Jenny Holzer at The Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA)

Jenny Holzer (American, b. 1950) 'Right Hand (Palm Rolled)' 2007 from the exhibition 'Jenny Holzer' at The Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA)

 

Jenny Holzer (American, b. 1950)
Right Hand (Palm Rolled)
2007
Oil on linen
80 x 62 in (203.2 x 157.5cm)
Text: U.S. government document

 

The reason that you must visit this exhibition is the last body of work. Working with declassified documents that relate to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan Holzer’s Redaction paintings address the elemental force that is man’s (in)humanity to man (in the study of literature, redaction is a form of editing in which multiple source texts are combined (redacted) and subjected to minor alteration to make them into a single work) … I left the exhibition feeling shell-shocked after experiencing intimacy with an evil that leaves few traces. In the consciences of the perpetrators? In the hearts of the living! Oh, how I wish to see the day when the human race will truly evolve beyond. We live in hope and the work of Jenny Holzer reminds us to be vigilant, to speak out, to have courage in the face of the unconscionable.

 

2/ ‘Pondlurking’ by Tom Moore at Helen Gory Galerie, Prahran

This exhibition produced in me an elation, a sense of exalted happiness, a smile on my dial that was with me the rest of the day. The installation features elegantly naive cardboard cityscape dioramas teeming with wondrous, whimsical mythological animals that traverse pond and undulating road. This bestiary of animals, minerals and vegetables (bestiaries were made popular in the Middle Ages in illustrated volumes that described various animals, birds and even rocks) is totally delightful … What really stands out is the presence of these objects, their joyousness. The technical and conceptual never get in the way of good art. The Surrealist imagining of a new world order (the destruction of traditional taxonomies) takes place while balanced on one foot. The morphogenesis of these creatures, as they build one upon another, turns the world upside down … Through their metamorphosed presence in a carnivalesque world that is both weird and the wonderful, Moore’s creatures invite us to look at ourselves and our landscape more kindly, more openly and with a greater generosity of spirit.

 

Tom Moore (Australian, b. 1971) 'Birdboat with passenger with a vengeance' (left) and 'Robot Island' (right) 2010 and 2009 from the exhibition 'Pondlurking' by Tom Moore at Helen Gory Galerie, Prahran

 

Tom Moore (Australian, b. 1971)
Birdboat with passenger with a vengeance (left) and Robot Island (right)
2010 and 2009

 

3/ ‘Safety Zone’ by John Young at Anna Schwartz Gallery

What can one say about work that is so confronting, poignant and beautiful – except to say that it is almost unbearable to look at this work without being emotionally charged, to wonder at the vicissitudes of human life, of events beyond one’s control.

The exhibition tells the story of the massacre of 300,000 people in the city of Nanjing in Jiangsu, China by Japanese troops in December, 1937 in what was to become known as the Nanjing Massacre. It also tells the story of a group of foreigners led by German businessman John Rabe and American missionary Minnie Vautrin who set up a “safety zone” to protect the lives of at least 250,000 Chinese citizens. The work is conceptually and aesthetically well resolved, the layering within the work creating a holistic narrative that engulfs and enfolds the viewer – holding them in the shock of brutality, the poignancy of poetry and the (non)sublimation of the human spirit to the will of others.

Simply, this is the best exhibition that I have seen in Melbourne so far this year.

 

John Young (Australian, b. 1956) 'Flower Market (Nanjing 1936) #1' 2010 from the exhibition 'Safety Zone' by John Young at Anna Schwartz Gallery

 

John Young (Australian, b. 1956)
Flower Market (Nanjing 1936) #1
2010
digital print and oil on Belgian linen
240 x 331cm
image courtesy of the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery

 

John Young (Australian, b. 1956) 'Safety Zone' 2010

 

John Young (Australian, b. 1956)
Safety Zone
2010
60 works, digital prints on photographic paper and chalk on blackboard-painted archival cotton paper
Installation shot, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne
Image courtesy of the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery

 

4/ ‘To Hold and Be Held’ by Kiko Gianocca at Gallery Funaki

Kiko Gianocca (Swiss, b. 1974) 'Man & dog' found image, resin, silver 2009 from the exhibition 'To Hold and Be Held' by Kiko Gianocca at Gallery Funaki

 

Kiko Gianocca (Swiss, b. 1974)
Man & dog
Found image, resin, silver
2009

 

A beautiful exhibition of objects by Swiss/Italian artist Kiko Gianocca at Gallery Funaki, Melbourne, one full of delicate resonances and remembrances.

Glass vessels with internal funnels filled with the gold detritus of disassembled objects, found pendants: Horse, Anchor, Four leaf clover, Swan, Hammer & sickle … Brooches of gloss and matt black resin plates. On the reverse images exposed like a photographic plate, found images solidified in resin.

The front: the depths of the universe, navigating the dazzling darkness
The back: memories, forgotten, then remade, worn like a secret against the beating chest. Only the wearer knows!

As Kiki Gianocca asks, “I am not sure if I grasp the memories that sometimes come to mind. I start to think they hold me instead of me holding them.”

 

5/ ‘Jill Orr: Vision’ at Jenny Port Gallery, Richmond

The photographs invite us to share not only the mapping of the surface of the skin and the mapping of place and identity but the sharing of inner light, the light of the imaginary as well – and in this observation the images become unstable, open to reinterpretation. The distance between viewer and subject is transcended through an innate understanding of inner and outer light. The photographs seduce, meaning, literally, to be led astray … I found myself looking at the photographs again and again for small nuances, the detail of hairs on the head, the imagining of what the person was thinking about with their eyes closed: their future, their fears, their hopes, the ‘active imagination as a means to visualise sustainable futures’ (Orr, 2010) …

In the imagination of the darkness that lies behind these children’s closed eyes is the commonality of all places, a shared humanity of memory, of dreams. These photographs testify to our presence and ask us to decide how we feel about our life, our place and the relation to that (un)placeness where we must all, eventually, return.

 

Jill Orr (Australian, b. 1952) 'Jacinta' 2009 from the exhibition 'Jill Orr: Vision' at Jenny Port Gallery, Richmond

Jill Orr (Australian, b. 1952) 'Jacinta' 2009 from the exhibition 'Jill Orr: Vision' at Jenny Port Gallery, Richmond

 

Jill Orr (Australian, b. 1952)
Jacinta
2009

 

6/ ‘AND THEN…’ by Ian Burns at Anna Schwartz Gallery

These are such fun assemblages, the created mis en scenes so magical and hilarious, guffaw inducing even, that they are entirely delightful.

There is so much to like here – the inventiveness, the freshness of the work, the insight into the use of images in contemporary culture. Still photographs of this work do not do it justice. I came away from the gallery uplifted, smiling, happy – and that is a wonderful thing to happen.

 

Ian Burns (Australian, b. 1964) '15 hours v.4' 2010 from the exhibition 'AND THEN...' by Ian Burns at Anna Schwartz Gallery

 

Ian Burns (Australian, b. 1964)
15 hours v.4
2010
Found object kinetic sculpture, live video and audio
Image courtesy the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery

 

7/ ‘Night’s Plutonian Shore’ by Julia deVille at Sophie Gannon Gallery, Richmond

Julia deVille (Australian, b. 1982) 'Nevermore' 2010 from the exhibition 'Night's Plutonian Shore' by Julia deVille at Sophie Gannon Gallery, Richmond

 

Julia deVille (Australian, b. 1982)
Nevermore
2010

 

This is an excellent exhibition by Julia deVille at Sophie Gannon Gallery in Richmond … This exhibition shows a commendable sense of restraint, a beautiful rise and fall in the work as you walk around the gallery space with the exhibits displayed on different types and heights of stand and a greater thematic development of the conceptual ideas within the work. There are some exquisite pieces.

In these pieces there is a simplification of the noise of the earlier works and in this simplification a conversant intensification of the layering of the conceptual ideas. Playful and witty the layers can be peeled back to reveal the poetry of  de Sade, the stories of Greek mythology and the amplification of life force that is at the heart of these works. Good stuff.

 

8/ ‘Mari Funaki; Objects’ at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia

Mari Funaki (born Japan 1950, arrived Australia 1979, died 2010) 'Object' 2008 from the exhibition 'Mari Funaki; Objects' at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia

 

Mari Funaki (born Japan 1950, arrived Australia 1979, died 2010)
Object
2008
Heat-coloured mild steel
36 x 47.5 x 14.5cm
Collection of Johannes Hartfuss & Fabian Jungbeck, Melbourne
© The Estate of Mari Funaki

 

Quiet, precise works. Forms of insect-like legs and proboscises. They balance, seeming to almost teeter on the edge – but the objects are incredibly grounded at the same time. As you walk into the darkened gallery and observe these creatures you feel this pull – lightness and weight. Fantastic!

And so it came to pass in silence, for these works are still, quiet and have a quality of the presence of the inexpressible. Funaki achieves these incredible silences through being true to her self and her style through an expression of her endearing will. While Mari may no longer be amongst us as expressions of her will the silences of these objects will be forever with us.

 

9/ ‘Up Close: Carol Jerrems with Larry Clark, Nan Goldin and William Yang’ at Heide Museum of Modern Art

When looking at art, one of the best experiences for me is gaining the sense that something is open before you, that wasn’t open before. I don’t mean accessible, I mean open like making a clearing in the jungle, or being able to see further up a road, or just further on. And also like an open marketplace – where there were always good trades. There is the feeling that if you put in a certain amount of honesty, then you would get something back that made some room for you in front – some room that would allow you to look forward, and maybe even walk into that space. Seeing Jerrems work gives you that feeling.

 

Carol Jerrems (Australian, 1949-1980) 'Mark and Flappers' 1975 from the exhibition 'Up Close: Carol Jerrems with Larry Clark, Nan Goldin and William Yang' at Heide Museum of Modern Art

 

Carol Jerrems (Australian, 1949-1980)
Mark and Flappers
1975
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gift of James Mollison, 1994
© Ken Jerrems & the Estate of Lance Jerrems

 

10/ ‘John Davis: Presence’ at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia

John Davis (Australia 1936-1999) '(Spotted fish)' 1989 from the exhibition 'John Davis: Presence' at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia

 

John Davis (Australia 1936-1999)
(Spotted fish)
1989
Twigs, cotton thread, calico, bituminous paint
55 x 145 x 30cm
Private collection, Melbourne
© Penelope Davis & Martin Davis. Administered by VISCOPY, Australia

 

This is a superlative survey exhibition of the work of John Davis at NGV Australia, Melbourne.

In the mature work you can comment on the fish as ‘travellers’ or ‘nomads’, “a metaphor for people and the way we move around the world.” You can observe the caging, wrapping and bandaging of these fish as a metaphor for the hurt we humans impose on ourselves and the world around us. You can admire the craftsmanship and delicacy of the constructions, the use of found objects, thread, twigs, driftwood and calico and note the ironic use of bituminous paint in relation to the environment, “a sticky tar-like form of petroleum that is so thick and heavy,” of dark and brooding colour.

This is all well and true. But I have a feeling when looking at this work that here was a wise and old spirit, one who possessed knowledge and learning … a human being who attained a state of grace in his life and in his work.

 

11/ ‘Mortality’ at The Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA)

Fiona Tan (Indonesian, b. 1966) 'Tilt' 2002 from the exhibition 'Mortality' at The Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA)

 

Fiona Tan (Indonesian, b. 1966)
Tilt
2002
DVD
courtesy of the artist, Frith Street Gallery London

 

I never usually review group exhibitions but this is an exception to the rule. I have seen this exhibition three times and every time it has grown on me, every time I have found new things to explore, to contemplate, to enjoy. It is a fabulous exhibition, sometimes uplifting, sometimes deeply moving but never less than engaging – challenging our perception of life. The exhibition proceeds chronologically from birth to death. I comment on a few of my favourite works below but the whole is really the sum of the parts: go, see and take your time to inhale these works – the effort is well rewarded. The space becomes like a dark, fetishistic sauna with it’s nooks and crannies of videos and artwork. Make sure you investigate them all!

 

 

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Exhibition: ‘American Modern: Abbott, Evans, Bourke-White’ at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas

Exhibition dates: 2nd October, 2010 – 2nd January, 2011

 

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) 'Canyon, Broadway and Exchange Place' 1936 from the exhibition 'American Modern: Abbott, Evans, Bourke-White' at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas

 

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Canyon, Broadway and Exchange Place
1936
Gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Art, Gift of Marvin Breckinridge Patterson

 

 

Berenice Abbott – what a photographer! You couldn’t have thought of a better person to save the archive of Eugene Atget for the world. It’s all there at the bread store.

Marcus


Many thankx to Tracy Greene for her help and The Amon Carter Museum of American Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

 

 

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) 'The El at Columbus and Broadway' 1929 from the exhibition 'American Modern: Abbott, Evans, Bourke-White' at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas

 

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
The El at Columbus and Broadway
1929
Gelatin silver print

 

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) 'Hell Gate Bridge' 1937 from the exhibition 'American Modern: Abbott, Evans, Bourke-White' at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas

 

 

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Hell Gate Bridge
1937
Gelatin silver print
Collection of Norma B. Marin, Courtesy Meredith Ward Fine Art

 

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) 'Squibb Building with Sherry Netherland in Background' 1935 from the exhibition 'American Modern: Abbott, Evans, Bourke-White' at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas

 

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Squibb Building with Sherry Netherland in Background
1935
Gelatin silver print
Collection of Norma B. Marin, Courtesy Meredith Ward Fine Art

 

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) 'Manhattan Bridge Looking Up' 1936 from the exhibition 'American Modern: Abbott, Evans, Bourke-White' at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas

 

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Manhattan Bridge Looking Up
1936
Gelatin silver print
The Art Institute of Chicago, Works Progress Administration Allocation

 

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) 'Bread Store, 259 Bleecker Street' 1937 from the exhibition 'American Modern: Abbott, Evans, Bourke-White' at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas

 

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Bread Store, 259 Bleecker Street
1937
Gelatin silver print
Museum of the City of New York

 

Margaret Bourke-White (American, 1906-1971) 'Chrysler Building, New York' c. 1930-1931 from the exhibition 'American Modern: Abbott, Evans, Bourke-White' at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas

 

Margaret Bourke-White (American, 1906-1971)
Chrysler Building, New York
c. 1930-1931
Gelatin silver print
© Estate of Margaret Bourke-White/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Ford Motor Company Collection, Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell

 

Margaret Bourke-White (American, 1906-1971) 'Boy with hound dog' 1936 from the exhibition 'American Modern: Abbott, Evans, Bourke-White' at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas

 

Margaret Bourke-White (American, 1906-1971)
Boy with hound dog
1936
Gelatin silver print
13 1/4 x 17in (33.5 x 43.2cm)

 

Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) 'Penny Picture Display, Savannah' 1936 from the exhibition 'American Modern: Abbott, Evans, Bourke-White' at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas

 

Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975)
Penny Picture Display, Savannah
1936
Gelatin silver print
Amon Carter Museum

 

 

The Amon Carter Museum of American Art presents American Modern: Abbott, Evans, Bourke-White. This special exhibition explores the work of three of the foremost photographers of the twentieth-century and the golden age of documentary photography in America. American Modern will be on view through January 2, 2011; admission is free.

Featuring more than 140 photographs by Berenice Abbott (1898-1991), Margaret Bourke-White (1906-1971) and Walker Evans (1903-1975), American Modern was co-organised by the Amon Carter Museum of American Art and the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine. The exhibition is the result of a unique partnership between three curators: Jessica May and Sharon Corwin of the Carter and Colby, respectively, and Terri Weissman, assistant professor of art history at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Together, the three curators present the works of these three artists as case studies of documentary photography during the Great Depression and demonstrate how three factors supported the development of documentary photography during this important period in American history: first, the expansion of mass media; second, a new attitude toward and acceptance of modern art in America; and third, government support for photography during the 1930s.

“This exhibition considers the work of three of the best-loved American photographers in a new light, which is very exciting,” says curator Jessica May. “Abbott, Evans, and Bourke-White are undisputed masters of the medium of photography, but they have never been shown in relation to one another. This exhibition offers viewers an opportunity to see works together that have not been shown as such since the 1930s.”

In addition to vintage photographs from over 20 public and private collections, the exhibition also features rare first-edition copies of select books and periodicals from the 1930s. American Modern, May says, “reminds us that documentary photography was very much a public genre – this was the first generation of photographers that truly anticipated that their work would be seen by a vast audience through magazines and books.”

Press release from the Amon Carter Museum of American Art website [Online] Cited 01/12/2010. No longer available online

 

Installation view of the exhibition 'American Modern: Abbott, Evans, Bourke-White' at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas showing at second right, Walker Evans photograph 'Allie Mae Burroughs, Hale County, Alabama' (1936)

 

Installation view of the exhibition American Modern: Abbott, Evans, Bourke-White at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas showing at second right, Walker Evans photograph Allie Mae Burroughs, Hale County, Alabama (1936, below)

 

Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) 'Allie Mae Burroughs, Hale County, Alabama' 1936 from the exhibition 'American Modern: Abbott, Evans, Bourke-White' at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas

 

Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975)
Allie Mae Burroughs, Hale County, Alabama
1936
Gelatin silver print

 

Margaret Bourke-White (American, 1906-1971) '[Iron Mountain, Tennessee]' 1937 from the exhibition 'American Modern: Abbott, Evans, Bourke-White' at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas

 

Margaret Bourke-White (American, 1906-1971)
[Iron Mountain, Tennessee]
1937
Gelatin silver print
© Estate of Margaret Bourke-White/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Margaret Bourke-White Collection, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library

 

Installation view of the exhibition 'American Modern: Abbott, Evans, Bourke-White' at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas showing at second left, Margaret Bourke-White's photograph 'The Towering Smokestacks of the Otis Steel Co., Cleveland' (1927-1928); and at second right top, her photograph 'Delman Shoes' (1933)

 

Installation view of the exhibition American Modern: Abbott, Evans, Bourke-White at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas showing at second left, Margaret Bourke-White’s photograph The Towering Smokestacks of the Otis Steel Co., Cleveland (1927-1928, below); and at second right top, her photograph Delman Shoes (1933, below)

 

Margaret Bourke-White (American, 1906-1971) 'The Towering Smokestacks of the Otis Steel Co., Cleveland' 1927-1928
Screenshot

 

Margaret Bourke-White (American, 1906-1971)
The Towering Smokestacks of the Otis Steel Co., Cleveland
1927-1928
Gelatin silver print
© Estate of Margaret Bourke-White/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

 

Margaret Bourke-White (American, 1906-1971) 'Delman Shoes' 1933 from the exhibition 'American Modern: Abbott, Evans, Bourke-White' at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas

 

Margaret Bourke-White (American, 1906-1971)
Delman Shoes
1933
Gelatin silver print
© Estate of Margaret Bourke-White/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Margaret Bourke-White Collection, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library

 

Installation view of the exhibition 'American Modern: Abbott, Evans, Bourke-White' at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas
Installation view of the exhibition 'American Modern: Abbott, Evans, Bourke-White' at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas showing at left, pages from Berenice Abbott's 'Early New York Scrapbook' (1929-1930)

 

Installation views of the exhibition American Modern: Abbott, Evans, Bourke-White at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas showing in the bottom photograph at left, pages from Berenice Abbott’s Early New York Scrapbook (1929-1930)

 

Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) '[Lunchroom Window, New York City]' 1929 from the exhibition 'American Modern: Abbott, Evans, Bourke-White' at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas

 

Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975)
[Lunchroom Window, New York City]
1929
Gelatin silver print
© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Arnold H. Crane, 1971

 

Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) 'People in Downtown Havana' 1933 from the exhibition 'American Modern: Abbott, Evans, Bourke-White' at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas

 

Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975)
People in Downtown Havana
1933
Gelatin silver print
© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Lincoln Kirstein

 

Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) 'Posed Portraits, New York' 1932 from the exhibition 'American Modern: Abbott, Evans, Bourke-White' at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas

 

Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975)
Posed Portraits, New York
1932
Gelatin silver print
© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Mrs. James Ward Thorne

 

 

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Review: ‘Mortality’ at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 8th October – 28th November 2010

Exhibiting artists: Charles Anderson, George Armfield, Melanie Boreham, Bureau of Inverse Technology, Aleks Danko, Tacita Dean, Sue Ford, Garry Hill, Larry Jenkins, Peter Kennedy, Anastasia Klose, Arthur Lindsay, Dora Meeson, Anna Molska, TV Moore, Tony Oursler, Neil Pardington, Giulio Paolini, Mark Richards, David Rosetzky, Anri Sala, James Shaw, Louise Short, William Strutt, Darren Sylvester, Fiona Tan, Bill Viola, Annika von Hausswolff, Mark Wallinger, Lynette Wallworth, Gillian Wearing.

 

Fiona Tan (Indonesia, b. 1966) 'Tilt' 2002 from the exhibition 'Mortality' at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne

 

Fiona Tan (Indonesia, b. 1966)
Tilt
2002
DVD
Courtesy of the artist, Frith Street Gallery London

 

 

“… this immersive exhibition swallows us into a kind of spiritual and philosophical lifecycle. As we weave our way through a maze-like series of darkened rooms, we encounter life’s early years, a youth filled with mischief, wonderment, possibilities and choices, and a more reflective experience of mid and later life, preceding the eventual end.”


Dan Rule in The Age

 

 

I never usually review group exhibitions but this is an exception to the rule. I have seen this exhibition three times and every time it has grown on me, every time I have found new things to explore, to contemplate, to enjoy. It is a fabulous exhibition, sometimes uplifting, sometimes deeply moving but never less than engaging – challenging our perception of life. The exhibition proceeds chronologically from birth to death. I comment on a few of my favourite works below but the whole is really the sum of the parts: go, see and take your time to inhale these works – the effort is well rewarded. The space becomes like a dark, fetishistic sauna with it’s nooks and crannies of videos and artwork. Make sure you investigate them all!

There is only one photograph by Gillian Wearing from her Album series of self portraits, Self Portrait at Three Years Old (2004, see photograph below) but what a knockout it is. An oval photograph in a bright yellow frame the photograph looks like a perfectly normal studio photograph of a toddler until you examine the eyes: wearing silicon prosthetics, Wearing confronts “the viewer with her adult gaze through the eyeholes of the toddler’s mask, Wearing plays on the rift between interior and exterior and raises a multitude of provocative questions about identity, memory, and the veracity of the photographic medium.”1

Tilt (2002, see photograph above) is a mesmeric video by Fiona Tan of a toddler strapped into a harness suspended from a cluster of white helium-filled balloons in a room with wooden floorboards. The gurgling toddler floats gently into the air before descending to the ground, the little feet scrabbling for traction before gently ascending again –  the whole process is wonderful, the instance of the feet touching the ground magical, the delight of the toddler at the whole process palpable. Dan Rule sees the video as “enlivening and troubling, joyous and worrisome” and he is correct in this observation, in so far as it is the viewer that worries about what is happening to the baby, not, seemingly, the baby itself. It is our anxiety on the toddlers behalf, trying to imagine being that baby floating up into the air looking down at the floor, the imagined alienness of that experience for a baby, that drives our fear; but we need not worry for babies are held above the heads of fathers and mothers every day of the year. Fear is the adult response to the joy of innocence.

There are several photographs by Melbourne photographer Darren Sylvester in the exhibition and they are delightful in their wry take on adolescent life, girls eating KFC (If All We Have Is Each Other, Thats Ok), or pondering the loss of a first love – the pathos of a young man sitting in a traditionally furnished suburban house, reading a letter (in which presumably his first girlfriend has dumped him), surrounded by the detritus of an unfinished Subway meal (see photograph below).

An interesting work by Sue and Ben Ford, Faces (1976-1996, see photograph below) is a video that shows closely cropped faces and the differences in facial features twenty years later. The self consciousness of people when put in front of a camera is most notable, their uncomfortable looks as the camera examines them, surveys them in minute detail. The embarrassed smile, the uncertainty. It is fascinating to see the changes after twenty years.

A wonderful series 70s coloured photographs of “Sharps” by Larry Jenkins that shine a spotlight on this little recognised Melbourne youth sub-culture. These are gritty, funny, in your face photographs of young men bonding together in a tribal group wearing their tight t-shirts, ‘Conte’ stripped wool jumpers (I have a red and black one in my collection) and rat tail hair:

“Larry was the leader of the notorious street gang the “BLACKBURN SOUTH SHARPS” from 1972-1977 when the Sharpie sub-culture was at its peak and the working class suburbs of Melbourne were a tough and violent place to grow up. These photographs represent a period from 1975-1976 in Australian sub-cultural history and are one of the few photographic records of that time. Larry began taking photos at the age of 16 using a pocket camera, when he started working as an apprentice motor mechanic and spent his weekly wage developing his shots… He captured fleeting moments, candid shots and directed his teenage mates through elaborate poses set against the immediate Australian suburban backdrops.”2

Immediate and raw these photographs have an intense power for the viewer.

A personal favourite of the exhibition is Alex Danko’s installation Day In, Day Out (1991, see photograph below). Such as simple idea but so effective: a group of identical silver houses sits on the floor of the gallery and through a rotating wheel placed in front of a light on a stand, the sun rises and sets over and over again. The identical nature of the houses reminds us that we all go through the same process in life: we get up, we work (or not), we go to bed. The sun rises, the sun sets, everyday, on life. Simple, beautiful, eloquent.

Another favourite is Louise Short’s series of found colour slides of family members displayed on one of those old Kodak carrousel slide projectors. This is a mesmeric, nostalgic display of the everyday lives of family caught on film. I just couldn’t stop watching, waiting for the next slide to see what image it brought (the sound of the changing slides!), studying every nuance of environment and people, colour and space: recognition of my childhood, growing up with just such images.

Anri Sala’s video Time After Time (2003, see photograph below) is one of the most poignant works in the exhibition, almost heartbreaking to watch. A horse stands on the edge of a motorway in the near darkness, raising one of it’s feet. It is only when the lights of a passing car illuminate the animal that the viewer sees the protruding rib cage and you suddenly realise how sick the horse must be, how near death.

The film Presentation Sisters (2005, see photographs below) by English artist Tacita Dean, “shows the daily routines and rituals of the last remaining members of a small ecclesiastical community as they contemplate their journey in the spiritual after-life.” Great cinematography, lush film colours, use of shadow and space – but it is the everyday duties of the sisters, a small order of nuns in Cork, Ireland that gets you in. It is the mundanity of washing, ironing, folding, cooking and the procedures of human beings, their duties if you like – to self and each other – that become valuable. Almost like a religious ritual these acts are recognised by Dean as unique and far from the everyday. We are blessed in this life that we live.

Finally two works by Bill Viola: Unspoken (Silver & Gold) 2001 and The Passing (1991, see photographs below). Both are incredibly moving works about the angst of life, the passage of time, of death and rebirth. For me the picture of Viola’s elderly mother in a hospital bed, the sound of her rasping, laboured breath, the use of water in unexpected ways and the beauty of cars travelling at night across a road on a desert plain, their headlights in the distance seeming like atomic fireflies, energised spirits of life force, was utterly beguiling and moving. What sadness with joy in life to see these two works.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

 

1/ Mann, Ted. “Self-Portrait at Three Years Old,” on the Guggenheim Collection website [Online] Cited 12/11/2010 no longer available online

2/ Anon. “History,” on the Blackburn South Sharps website [Online] Cited 12/11/2010 no longer available online


Many thankx to the Melbourne International Arts Festival and the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of some of the images.

 

 

Gillian Wearing (English, b. 1963) 'Self-Portrait at Three Years Old' 2004 from the exhibition 'Mortality' at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne

 

Gillian Wearing (English, b. 1963)
Self-Portrait at Three Years Old
2004
Digital C-type print
© Gillian Wearing

 

“To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt” Susan Sontag wrote. Gillian Wearing registers this, and revisits herself at the age of 3 through the uncanny process of entering her own body. This performance of self, created by the artist putting on a full body prosthetic mask of herself as she was professionally photographed as a child, and peering out at the viewer with her 40-something eyes is a weird sarcophagi of identity. Is Gillian still 3? Is the adult inside the one she has become, or the one who was always there? Is identity pre-determined? Perhaps she would prefer to go back there, and yet this portrait is tinged with a kind of sadness. The eyes betray too much that has passed in the adult life, not yet known by the small child.

Extract from Juliana Engberg About Mortality catalogue

 

Darren Sylvester (Australian, b. 1974) 'Your First Love Is Your Last Love' 2005 from the exhibition 'Mortality' at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne

 

Darren Sylvester (Australian, b. 1974)
Your First Love Is Your Last Love
2005
© Darren Sylvester

 

Sue Ford (Australian, 1943-2009) and Ben Ford 'Faces' 1976-1996 (still) from the exhibition 'Mortality' at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne

 

Sue Ford (Australian, 1943-2009) and Ben Ford
Faces (still)
1976-1996
Detail 
of 15 min b/w 
reversal silent film
16mm, shot on b/w 
reversal film

 

Photographer, Sue Ford, in her iconic work Faces uses the camera as a kind of mirror to register the changes that occur as we grow older. Without the sometimes pompous commentary of the filmic anthropological voice-over which narrates an imposed, meta-story, Ford allowed her straightforward, black and white, close-up images to suggest the accumulation of experience and the evolution of identity silently. In this version of the work, a video projection which brings old and newer faces together in a rolling sequence, we are able to register the passage of time in a number of ways. The face becomes a terrain of time travelled.

Extract from Juliana Engberg About Mortality catalogue

 

 

Faces

Sue Ford’s experimental film “Faces” consists of portraits of the artist and her friends and acquaintances. Ford filmed each subject for roughly 25 seconds, using a wind-up Bolex camera that frames their faces in close-up. Variously self-conscious, serious, amused and distracted, the camera captures every small gesture, expression and flicker of emotion on the person’s face. The result is an examination of portraiture and the performance of identity, demonstrating the artist’s interest in using the camera to capture reality, time and change.

Text from the Youtube website

 

Sue Ford (Australian, 1943-2009) and Ben Ford 'Faces' (still) 1976-1996

 

Sue Ford (Australian, 1943-2009) and Ben Ford
Faces (still)
1976-1996
Detail 
of 15 min b/w 
reversal silent film
16mm, shot on b/w 
reversal film

 

Continuing on from the Time series, in 1976 Ford created the experimental film Faces, in which she filmed portraits of herself, friends and acquaintances. Using a Bolex spring-wound clockwork camera where the film ran through the camera for approximately 25 seconds, Ford directed her subjects to behave as they liked for the duration of the portrait. The camera frames the subject’s face in close-up, steadfastly focusing on them; Memory Holloway described of the work, “While there is no acting, character is revealed by the comfort or uneasiness of the subject. Some laugh, others look romantically pensive, others blow clouds of smoke at the lens as a cover-up”[6]. By bringing an element of time into the creation of a portrait, the film both reveals a moment in that person’s subjective experience and experiments with the plasticity of time, extending and concentrating the 25-second span into a focused moment.

Julia Murphy. “The films of Sue Ford – now part of the ACMI Collection,” on the ACMI website Nd [ONline] Cited 11/03/2025

6/ Memory Holloway, ‘Reel Women: Narrative as a Feminist Alternative’, Art and Text, 1981

 

Larry Jenkins (Australian) 'Chad, Jono and Mig, Twig, Beatie and Whitey walking down the street at Blackburn South shops' 1975 from the exhibition 'Mortality' at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne

 

Larry Jenkins (Australian)
Chad, Jono and Mig, Twig, Beatie and Whitey walking down the street at Blackburn South shops
1975
© Larry Jenkins

 

The photographs of Larry Jenkins deliver an authentic tribalism. Taken with his instamatic camera, the photos of his sharpie friends, hanging out, posing, wrestling and testing out their manhood, are genuine documents of their time. Belonging to this group is an important and almost primate activity. Surviving the suburbs in the 70s was an ‘us and them’ kind of universe. These were the kinds of boys you crossed the street to avoid. Their collective power, while internally tumultuous as they each try to discover their own identities, nevertheless conveys externally a tight ball of testosterone. They are one, and if you are not them, you are nothing.

Extract from Juliana Engberg About Mortality catalogue

 

Alex Danko (Australian, b. 1950) 'Day In, Day Out' 1991 from the exhibition 'Mortality' at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne

 

Alex Danko (Australian, b. 1950)
Day In, Day Out
1991

 

 

From the cradle to the grave… ACCA’s major exhibition Mortality takes us on life’s journey from the moment of lift off to the final send off, and all the bits in between. Curated by Juliana Engberg to reflect the Festival’s visual arts themes of spirituality, death and the afterlife, this transhistorical event includes metaphoric pictures and works by some of the world’s leading artists.

Exhibiting artists include:

Tacita Dean, an acclaimed British artist who works in film and drawing and has shown at Milan’s Fondazione Trussardi and at DIA Beacon, New York.

Anastasia Klose, one of Australia’s most exciting young video artists whose works also include performance and installation.

TV Moore, an Australian artist who completed his studies in Finland and the United States and who has shown extensively in Sydney, Melbourne and overseas.

Tony Oursler, a New York-based artist who works in a range of media and who has exhibited in the major institutions of New York, Paris, Cologne and Britain.

Giulio Paolini, an Italian born artist who has been a representative at both Documenta and the Venice Biennale.

David Rosetzky, a Melbourne-born artist who works predominantly in video and photographic formats and whose work has featured in numerous Australian exhibitions as well as New York, Milan and New Zealand galleries.

Louise Short, an emerging British artist who works predominately with found photographs and slides. Anri Sala, an Albanian-born artist who lives and works in Berlin. He has shown in the Berlin Biennale and the Hayward, London.

Fiona Tan, an Indonesian-born artist, who lives and works in Amsterdam. Tan works with photography and film and has shown in a number of major solo and group exhibitions, including representing the Netherlands at the 2009 Venice Biennale.

Bill Viola, one of the leaders in video and new media art who has shown widely internationally and in Australia.

Gillian Wearing, one of Britain’s most important contemporary artists and a Turner Prize winner who has exhibited extensively internationally.

Highlights of the exhibition include:

Albanian born artist Anri Sala’s acclaimed video work Time After Time, featuring a horse trapped on a Tirana motorway, repeatedly, heartbreakingly raising its hind-leg (see photograph below). Anri first came to acclaim in 1999 for his work in After the Wall, the Stockholm Modern Museum’s exhibition of art from post-communist Europe, and his work is characterised by an interest in seemingly unimportant details and slowness. Scenes are almost frozen into paintings.

Peter Kennedy’s Seven people who died the day I was born – April 18 1945, 1997-98 – a work from a series begun by the artist following the death of his father which connects individual lives with political and historical events. Kennedy’s birth in the last year of World War II and the seven people memorialised imply the multitude of others that died during this catastrophic event as well as the perpetual cycle of life.

A series of slides collected by British artist Louise Short, offering a beguiling insight into the everyday lives of everyday people accumulated as a life narrative.

Acclaimed British artist Tacita Dean’s Presentation Sisters, which shows the daily routines and rituals of the last remaining members of a small ecclesiastical community as they contemplate their journey in the spiritual after-life.

Three works from the Time series by influential Australian photographer Sue Ford, who passed away last year, will also be shown. The photographs capture the artist in various stages of her life.

Text from the ACCA website

 

Annika von Hausswolff (Swedish, b. 1967) 'Hey Buster! What Do You Know About Desire?' 1995 from the exhibition 'Mortality' at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne

 

Annika von Hausswolff (Swedish, b. 1967)
Hey Buster! What Do You Know About Desire?
1995
Colour photograph
Courtesy of the artist and Moderna Museet

 

Anri Sala (Albanian, b. 1974) 'Time After Time' 2003 (still) from the exhibition 'Mortality' at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne

 

Anri Sala (Albanian, b. 1974)
Time After Time (still)
2003
Video, 5 minutes 22 seconds

 

Sometimes we stagger into dangerous territory. In life, some of us find ourselves on the wrong side of the track. Anri Sala’s Time After Time provides a metaphor for the unfortunate ones who have lost their way or who are marginalised or discarded. A horse has manoeuvred itself, or worse, been abandoned on the wrong side of the highway divider and is now trapped in an endless and shuddering encounter with heavy traffic. The horse visibly flinches and as viewers we are helpless to do anything to assist. It is past its prime and appears malnourished, injured and unwanted. Sala’s horse is symbolic of the scapegoat… the one sent away, or outcast in order for social cohesion to seem reinforced by its exclusion.

Extract from Juliana Engberg About Mortality catalogue

 

David Rosetzky (Australian, b. 1970) 'Nothing like this' DVD, 2007 (still) from the exhibition 'Mortality' at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne

 

David Rosetzky (Australian, b. 1970)
Nothing like this (still)
DVD
2007
Courtesy of the artist and Sutton Gallery, Melbourne

 

David Rosetzky’s two videos Weekender and Nothing Like This, hyper-construct the languor of these rites of passage for introspective types. One video uses the faded colours of the 1970s Levi’s, Lee’s and Wrangler’s where-do-you-go-to-my-lovely era, through a smudgy David Hamilton Bilitis-like lens. In the other, with a postmodern crispness, Rosetzky establishes scenarios of inner intensity in which the participants narrate their disaffections and doubts. As compared to Ford’s messy, shabby and experimental aesthetic, everything in Rosetzky’s plot is sanitary. This is the synthetic age.

Rosetzky’s videos reference films like The Big Chill which pushes a group together to explore identity. In the instance of Rosetzky’s works however, action is limited and the conventional narrative eliminated in order to zero in on the heightened meditations. Devices such as mirrors refer to a kind of twenty-something narcissism; the beach is presented as a dynamic character of identity flux; time is compressed and delivered in mediated bites.

Things happen on beaches. In Australian culture, as elsewhere they are places of fun, but also menace. When I was a child, the news of the disappearance of children and adults at beaches inflicted a fear into the cultural psyche; children’s freedom was forever altered after the Beaumont Children case.

Extract from Juliana Engberg About Mortality catalogue

 

David Rosetzky (Australian, b. 1970) 'Nothing like this' DVD 2007 (still) from the exhibition 'Mortality' at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne

 

David Rosetzky (Australian, b. 1970)
Nothing like this (still)
DVD
2007
Courtesy of the artist and Sutton Gallery, Melbourne

 

Tacita Dean (British, b. 1965) 'Presentation Sisters' 2005 (still) from the exhibition 'Mortality' at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne

 

Tacita Dean (British, b. 1965)
Presentation Sisters (still)
2005
16 mm film
courtesy of the artist, Frith Street Gallery London

 

 Some people find solace in religion. And in this exhibition Tacita Dean’s superb film The Presentation Sisters offers a quiet reflection space. Dean emphasises the aspects of quiet devotion, internal contemplation and external dedication that define the Sisters’ spiritual and earthly existence.

In the same way Vermeer suggested spiritualism through domesticity and by using the uplift of light through windows, Dean enlists the ethereal light that travels through the lives and rooms of this small order of nuns who go about their routines and mundane tasks. Dean’s film studies light as a part of metaphysical and theological transformation. However, Dean’s film is also about a kind of Newtonian light: scientific and alchemical.

Her interest in the transformations that occur when light passes through celluloid, and when light passes through glass is a study of the beautiful refractions discovered by scientific observation and written into philosophical enquiries by writers such as Goethe and Burke. As always with Dean’s work, there are layers of encounter in the seemingly simple.

Extract from Juliana Engberg About Mortality catalogue

 

Tacita Dean (British, b. 1965) 'Presentation Sisters' 2005 (still) from the exhibition 'Mortality' at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne

 

Tacita Dean (British, b. 1965)
Presentation Sisters (still)
2005
16 mm film
Courtesy of the artist, Frith Street Gallery London

 

Bill Viola (American, 1951-2024) 'The Passing' 1991 (still)

 

Bill Viola (American, 1951-2024)
The Passing (still)
1991
In memory of Wynne Lee Viola
Videotape, black-and-white, mono sound
54 minutes
© Bill Viola

 

Bill Viola (American, 1951-2024) 'The Passing' 1991 (still)

 

Bill Viola (American, 1951-2024)
The Passing (still)
1991
In memory of Wynne Lee Viola
Videotape, black-and-white, mono sound
54 minutes
© Bill Viola

 

 

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Australia

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Review: ‘An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar’ by Taryn Simon at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Fitzroy

Exhibition dates: 15th October – 12th December 2010

 

Taryn Simon (American, b. 1975) 'U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Contraband Room, John F. Kendedy International Airport, Queens, New York' 2005/2007 from the exhibition 'An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar' by Taryn Simon at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Oct - Dec 2010

 

Taryn Simon (American, b. 1975)
U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Contraband Room, John F. Kendedy International Airport, Queens, New York
2005/2007
Chromogenic colour print
37 1/4 x 44 1/2 inches framed (94.6 x 113cm)
© 2007 Taryn Simon
Courtesy Gagosian Gallery/Steidl

 

African cane rats infested with maggots, African yams (dioscorea), Andean potatoes, Bangladeshi cucurbit plants, bush meat, cherimoya fruit, curry leaves (murraya), dried orange peels, fresh eggs, giant African snail, impala skull cap, jackfruit seeds, June plum, kola nuts, mango, okra, passion fruit, pig nose, pig mouths, pork, raw poultry (chicken), South American pig head, South American tree tomatoes, South Asian lime infected with citrus canker, sugar cane (poaceae), uncooked meats, unidentified sub tropical plant in soil. All items in the photograph were seized from baggage of passengers arriving in the U.S. at JFK Terminal 4 from abroad over a 48-hour period. All seized items are identified, dissected, and then either ground up or incinerated. JFK processes more international passengers than any other airport in the Unites States.

Prohibited agricultural items can harbor foreign animal and plant pests and diseases that could damage U.S. crops, livestock, pets, the environment and the economy. Before entering the country, passengers are required to declare fruits, vegetables, plants, seeds, meats, birds, or animal products that they may be carrying. The CBP agriculture specialists determine if items meet U.S. entry requirements. The U.S. requires permits for animals and plants in order to safeguard against highly infectious diseases, such as foot-and-mouth disease and avian influenza.

 

 

This is an exhibition of large format colour photographs by Taryn Simon which features a body of work titled An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar (2006). The work investigates the hidden spaces, places, artefacts and rituals of American cultural warfare (here I mean warfare in the sense of good vs bad, natural vs unnatural (or mutated), safety vs danger, death vs life for example). The photographs are very much like opening a ‘cabinet of curiosities’ where the photographer is attempting to challenge the categorical boundaries of environments and objects, things that are yet to be defined and fixed in place. Some of the photographs work very well in their attempts to categorise, to index; others are far less successful.

Dan Rule in The Age sees the photographs as “slick, high-definition visuals … photographs [that] defy their gritty, documentarian sensibilities. Capturing an ominous vision of Bush-era America, her expansive series … doesn’t merely unearth a sinister vantage of the nation’s underbelly, but renders it in shocking clarity and detail … it ‘s a fascinating and troubling portrait. However, it’s not so much the subject matter but the luminous, hyper-realistic orientation that gives these images such resonance.”1

I see things differently. Where Rule sees luminous photographs I see photographs that are very formal and dull, photographs that are rather lifeless and maudlin. Printed on grey pearlised paper (meaning that the base colour of the photographic paper is not white) and placed in pale grey frames, these A3 high definition, large depth of field photographs possess limited photographic insight into the condition of the spaces and objects being photographed. My friend rather cuttingly, but correctly, noted that they were very National Geographic drained of colour (note: the images in this online posting have far more life and colour than the actual prints!).

This is photography as documentation used to disseminate information, documentation that reinforces the indexical nature of photography (the link between referent and reality) as a form of ‘truth’ – hence the ‘Index’ in the title of the body of work, a taxonomic ordering of reality. Even then some of the photographs have to be validated by text for them to have any meaning. “The visual is processed aesthetically and then redefined by its text” trumpets the wall text. Yes sure, but here the photographs are formalistically visualised, some to very limited effect, and what the text is really doing is semiotically decoding an image that has little meaning (until we are told) through words, words that are about memory, reminders of what we call and know of a thing.

When the photograph tells us very little in the first place, when we do not have knowledge of a thing and cannot construct memories from the photograph but rely solely on words for meaning this can lead to photographs that are intrinsically and inherently poor. An example of a poor photograph in this series is the image of the captured Great white shark. Another example is the photograph of a decomposing body at the Forensic Anthropology Research Facility (see photograph above). Compare this to Sally Mann’s photograph of the same subject matter: the resonance of Mann’s photograph is powerful, confronting yet ambiguous with an amorphous aura surrounding the body, that of Simon’s almost as though the artist was afraid to really approach the subject; there seems to be an obsequiousness to the subject matter. Hidden is hidden and this photograph is definitely not “transforming the unknown into a seductive and intelligible form” (Wall text).

Simon’s photographs are not visual enigmas that approach Atget’s The Marvellous in the Everyday, where he experimented with “the variable play between nature and art through minute changes in the camera’s angle, or as functions of the effects of light and time of day.” Nor do they possess that quality that I noted in my review of the work of Carol Jerrems – spaces that make some room for you in front – some room that would allow you to look forward, and maybe even walk into that space. Despite their ‘hidden’ and ‘unfamiliar’ context these photographs are very dull spaces. Simon’s camera angles are by the book. So are most of the photographs. Of course, I understand the revealing of meaning in the photograph by the text and the surprise this entails but this simply does not dismiss the fact that some of these works are just poor. In fact I would say only about 50% of these photographs could stand alone without the validation of the text. Does this matter? Is this important? Yes I think it is, for some of these works are just deadpan photographs of entropic spaces that are only given meaning because the photographer says they are important things to photograph (see my paper Spaces That Matter: Awareness and Entropia in the Imaging of Place, 2002). Even with text some of the photographs still have no resonance.

When the photographs do work they are astounding. There is delicious irony in the depiction of a Recreational Basketball Court in Cheyenne Mountains Directorate, Chamber D, Colorado Springs, Colorado (2006) a dark, oppressive print of a nuclear bunker with basketball court or the incongruous nature of Death Row, Outdoor Recreational Facility “The Cage” (2006), a barred metal cage situated inside another building for the recreation of death row inmates. Shocking, disorientating. My personal favourite in this human built, human-less world of Simon’s was one of the simplest photographs in the exhibition, a photograph that cuts away the surroundings to picture a labelled flask sitting on a non-descript background. A concise visualisation of a labelled flask given extra meaning when you read the accompanying text: Live HIV, HIV Research Laboratory (2006). Pause for thought. The photographs when understood aesthetically are like snapshots of an alien culture, almost mundane but disturbing. I believe the best photographs in the series combine the presence of the space or object, an understanding of the condition of that space or object without having to read the text. The text then supplements the visual interpretation not overrides it.

Human beings are secretive, unstable, paranoid creatures that are exclusory and fearful of Others. Fear is palpable in these photographs. Here is evidence of the human need for control (through the surveillance of photography) over conduct – control of contamination, death, disease, threat and Other. We investigate and document something in order to control it, in order that science can control it (think Foucault’s disciplinary systems of the prison and the madhouse). These photographs excavate meaning by bringing the shadow into the light in order to index our existence, to make the hidden less frightening and more controllable.

Personally, I prefer my world to remain the mutation that is the catastrophe in the pattern / randomness dialectic. I like the chthonic darkness of difference and the rupture of pattern, the dislocation of identity and the challenge of mutation. Even though these photographs address the context of the hidden and unfamiliar there is nothing in the least unusual about them. Here is the paradox of these works: their (ab)normality vs their lack of humanity. The photographs in this exhibition all too easily confirm our prejudices and limit our understanding of difference through their need to document, label, order and exhibit the fear of (in)difference, all the better to control the mutations of disturbance.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

 

1/ Rule, Dan. “Taryn Simon: An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar” in The Age newspaper A2. Melbourne: Saturday, October 23rd 2010


Many thankx to the Melbourne International Arts Festival, Institute of Modern Art and the Centre for Contemporary Photography for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. All photographs © 2007 Taryn Simon. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery/Steidl.

 

 

Taryn Simon (American, b. 1975) 'Forensic Anthropology Research Facility, Decomposing Corpse, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tennessee' 2003/2007

 

Taryn Simon (American, b. 1975)
Forensic Anthropology Research Facility, Decomposing Corpse, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tennessee
2003/2007
Chromogenic colour print
37 1/4 x 44 1/2 inches framed (94.6 x 113cm)
© 2007 Taryn Simon
Courtesy Gagosian Gallery/Steidl

 

The decomposing body of a young boy is studied by researchers who have re-created a crime scene.

The Forensic Anthropology Research Facility, popularly known as The Body Farm, is the world’s chief research center for the study of corpse decomposition. Its six-acre plot hosts approximately 75 cadavers in various stage of decomposition. The farm uses physical anthropology (skeletal analysis of human remains) to help solve criminal cases, especially murder cases. Forensic anthropologists work to establish profiles for deceased persons. These profiles can include sex, age, ethnic ancestry, stature, time elapsed since death, and sometimes, the nature of trauma on the bones.

 

Sally Mann (American, b. 1951) 'Untitled WR Pa 59' 2001 from the series 'What Remains'

 

Sally Mann (American, b. 1951)
Untitled WR Pa 59
2001
From the series What Remains
© Sally Mann. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery

 

Taryn Simon (American, b. 1975) 'White Tiger (Kenny), Selective Inbreeding, Turpentine Creek Wildlife Refuge and Foundation, Eureka Springs, Arkansas' 2006/2007 from the exhibition 'An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar' by Taryn Simon at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Oct - Dec 2010

 

Taryn Simon (American, b. 1975)
White Tiger (Kenny), Selective Inbreeding, Turpentine Creek Wildlife Refuge and Foundation, Eureka Springs, Arkansas
2006/2007
Chromogenic colour print
37 1/4 x 44 1/2 inches framed (94.6 x 113cm)
© 2007 Taryn Simon
Courtesy Gagosian Gallery/Steidl

 

In the United States, all living white tigers are the result of selective inbreeding to artificially create the genetic conditions that lead to white fur, ice-blue eyes and a pink nose. Kenny was born to a breeder in Bentonville, Arkansas, on February 3, 1999. As a result of inbreeding, Kenny is mentally retarded and has significant physical limitations. Due to this deep-set nose, he has difficulty breathing and closing his jaw, his teeth are severely malformed and he limps from abnormal bone structure in his forearms. The three other tigers in Kenny’s litter are not considered to be quality white tigers as they are yellow-coated, cross-eyed, and knock-kneed.

White tigers are extremely rare in their natural habitats in Asia. In the U.S., all living white tigers are the result of selective inbreeding in captivity to artificially create the genetic conditions that lead to white fur, ice-blue eyes and a pink nose. Currently, inbreeding such as father to daughter, brother to sister, mother to son has become commonplace. It produces a white cub less than 25% of the time, with only approximately 3% of those considered “quality.” The three other tigers in Kenny’s litter are not considered to be quality white tigers as they are yellow coated, cross-eyed, and knock-kneed.

Conservation experts challenge the perception that white tigers are a rare and endangered species. Instead, they state that zoos, breeders, and entertainment acts have over-bred white tigers for financial gain, citing instances where private breeders and zoos have sold “quality” white tigers for over $60,000. The grave health consequences of inbreeding and over-breeding have led to abortions, stillbirths and a high mortality rate among infants. The Species Survival Plan has condemned the practice. In recent years there has been a significant drop in their market value.

 

Taryn Simon (American, b. 1975) 'Hymenoplasty, Cosmetic Surgery, P.A., Fort Lauderdale, Florida' 2005/2007 from the exhibition 'An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar' by Taryn Simon at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Oct - Dec 2010

 

Taryn Simon (American, b. 1975)
Hymenoplasty, Cosmetic Surgery, P.A., Fort Lauderdale, Florida
2005/2007
Chromogenic colour print
37 1/4 x 44 1/2 inches framed (94.6 x 113cm)
© 2007 Taryn Simon
Courtesy Gagosian Gallery/Steidl

 

The patient in this photograph is 21 years old. She is of Palestinian descent and living in the United States. In order to adhere to cultural and familial expectations regarding her virginity and marriage, she underwent hymenoplasty. Without it she feared she would be rejected by her future husband and bring shame upon her family. She flew in secret to Florida where the operation was performed by Dr. Bernard Stern, a plastic surgeon she located on the internet. The purpose of hymenoplasty is to reconstruct a ruptured hymen, the membrane which partially covers the opening of the vagina. It is an outpatient procedure which takes approximately 30 minutes and can be done under local or intravenous anesthesia. Dr. Stern charges $3,500 for hymenoplasty. He also performs labiaplasty and vaginal rejuvenation.

The hymen has not been proven to serve any biological function. Some girls are born with an imperforate hymen. Rupture most often occurs during first intercourse, but some girls tear their hymen during sports activities or as a result of injuries. The majority of the time there is a correlation between an intact hymen and a woman’s virginity; many cultures view the tearing of the hymen as a critical symbol of that loss. While similar attempts to alter the hymen predate modern plastic surgery, hymenoplasty is now just one of several vaginal cosmetic surgeries that are growing in popularity worldwide. Dr. Stern charges $3,500 for hymenoplasty. He also performs labiaplasty and vaginal rejuvenation.

 

 

“Inspired by rumours of weapons of mass destruction and secret sites in Iraq, American photographic artist Taryn Simon focuses her lens on the hidden and inaccessible places in her own country.

An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar (2006) takes the viewer behind closed doors to uncover some extraordinary things inside places usually hidden from the public’s view. Ranging across the realms of science, government, medicine, entertainment, nature, security, and religion, Simon’s photographic subjects include glowing radioactive capsules in an underwater nuclear-waste storage facility, a Braille edition of Playboy, a deathrow prisoners’ exercise yard, an inbred tiger, corpses rotting in a Forensic Research Facility, and a Scientology screening room.

Shot over four years, mostly with a large-format view camera, the images in this fascinating exhibition are in turn ethereal, foreboding, deadpan and cinematic. In examining what is integral to America’s foundation, mythology and daily functioning, the Index provides a surprising map of the American mindset and creates a vivid portrayal of the contemporary United States.

Inspired by rumours of WMDs and secret sites in Iraq, Taryn Simon decided to address secret sites in her own country, photographing hidden places and things within America’s borders. Ranging across the realms of science, government, medicine, entertainment, nature, security and religion, her subjects include glowing radioactive capsules, a braille edition of Playboy, a death-row prisoners’ exercise yard, an inbred tiger, a teenage corpse rotting in a forensic research facility, and a Scientology screening room. An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar explores a dialectic of security and paranoia that is distinctly American. Offering a heart-of-darkness tour of Bush-period America, it also reflects on photography’s role in revealing and concealing.

In his foreword,1 Salman Rushdie writes ‘In a historical period in which so many people are making such great efforts to conceal the truth from the mass of the people, an artist like Taryn Simon is an invaluable counter-force. Democracy needs visibility, accountability, light. It is in the unseen darkness that unsavoury things huddle and grow. Somehow, Simon has persuaded a good few denizens of hidden worlds not to scurry for shelter when the light is switched on, as cockroaches do, and vampires, but to pose proudly for her invading lens, brandishing their tattoos and Confederate flags.

Simon’s is not the customary aesthetic of reportage – the shaky hand-held camera, the grainy monochrome film stock of the ‘real’. Her subjects… are suffused with light, captured with a bright, hyper-realist, high-definition clarity that gives a kind of star status to these hidden worlds, whose occupants might be thought to be the opposite of stars. In her vision of them, they are dark stars brought into the light. What is not known, rarely seen, possesses a form of occult glamour, and it is that black beauty which she so brightly, and brilliantly, reveals.’

1/ Salman Rushdie, ‘Foreword’ in Taryn Simon, An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar, Steidl Gottingen, Germany, 2007, p. 7.


Text from the Melbourne International Art Festival and the Centre for Contemporary Photography websites

 

Taryn Simon (American, b. 1975) 'Cryopreservation Unit, Cryonics Institute, Clinton Township, Michigan' 2004/2007

 

Taryn Simon (American, b. 1975)
Cryopreservation Unit, Cryonics Institute, Clinton Township, Michigan
2004/2007
Chromogenic colour print
37 1/4 x 44 1/2 inches framed (94.6 x 113cm)
© 2007 Taryn Simon
Courtesy Gagosian Gallery/Steidl

 

This cryopreservation unit holds the bodies of Rhea and Elaine Ettinger, the mother and fist wife of cryonics pioneer, Robert Ettinger. Robert, author of The Prospect of Immortality and Man into Superman is still alive. The Cryogenics Institute offers cryostasis (freezing) services for individuals and pets upon death. Cryostasis is practiced with the hope that lives will ultimately be extended through future developments in science, technology, and medicine. When, and if, these developments occur, Institute members hope to awake to an extended life in good health, free from disease or the ageing process. Cryostasis must begin immediately upon legal death. A person or pet is infused with ice-preventive substances and quickly cooled to a temperature where physical decay virtually stops.

At present, the Cryonics Institute cryopreserves 74 legally dead human patients and 44 legally dead pets. It charges $28,000 for the process if it is planned well in advance of legal death and $35,000 on shorter notice. The cost has not increased since 1976 when the Cryonics Institute was established. The Institute is licensed as a cemetery in the state of Michigan.

 

Taryn Simon (American, b. 1975) 'Nuclear Waste Encapsulation and Storage Facility, Chernekov Radiation, Hanford Site, U.S. Department of Energy, Southeastern Washington State' 2005/2007

 

Taryn Simon (American, b. 1975)
Nuclear Waste Encapsulation and Storage Facility, Chernekov Radiation, Hanford Site, U.S. Department of Energy, Southeastern
Washington State
2005/2007
Chromogenic color print
37 1/4 x 44 1/2 inches framed (94.6 x 113cm)
© 2007 Taryn Simon
Courtesy Gagosian Gallery/Steidl

 

Submerged in a pool of water at Hanford Site are 1,936 stainless-steel nuclear-waste capsules containing cesium and strontium. Combined, they contain over 120 million curies of radioactivity. It is estimated to be the most curies under one roof in the United States. The blue glow is created by the Cherenkov Effect which describes the electromagnetic radiation emitted when a charged particle, giving off energy, moves faster than light through a transparent medium. The temperatures of the capsules are as high as 330 degrees Fahrenheit. The pool of water serves as a shield against radiation; a human standing one foot from an unshielded capsule would receive a lethal dose of radiation in less than 10 seconds. Hanford is among the most contaminated sites in the United States.

Hanford is a 586 square mile former plutonium production complex. It was built for the Manhattan Project, the U.S.-led World War II defense effort that developed the first nuclear weapons. Hanford plutonium was used in the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki in 1945. For decades afterwards Hanford manufactured nuclear materials for use in bombs. At Hanford there are more than 53 million gallons of radioactive and chemically hazardous liquid waste, 2,300 tons of spent nuclear fuel, nearly 18 metric tons of plutonium-bearing materials and about 80 square miles of contaminated groundwater. It is among the most contaminated sites in the United States.

 

 

Centre for Contemporary Photography
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Collingwood Yards, Collingwood
Victoria 3066

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Exhibition: ‘Engaged Observers: Documentary Photography since the Sixties’ at The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Exhibition dates: 29th June – 14th November 2010

 

Many thankx to the The J. Paul Getty Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting.

 

Leonard Freed (American, 1929-2006) 'New York City' 1963

 

Leonard Freed (American, 1929-2006)
New York City
1963
Gelatin silver print
24.6 x 16.4cm (9 11/16 x 6 7/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Leonard Freed / Magnum Photos, Inc.

 

W. Eugene Smith (American, 1918-1978) 'Industrial Waste from the Chisso Chemical Company' 1972

 

W. Eugene Smith (American, 1918-1978)
Industrial Waste from the Chisso Chemical Company
1972
Gelatin silver print
24.4 x 34cm (9 5/8 x 13 3/8 in.)
Minamata photographs by W. Eugene Smith & Aileen M. Smith
Courtesy of Robert Mann Gallery, New York, New York
© Aileen Smith H. Christopher Luce

 

 

In the decades following World War II, an independently minded and critically engaged form of photography began to gather momentum. Situated between journalism and art, its practitioners created extended photographic essays that delved deeply into topics of social concern and presented distinct personal visions of the world. On view at the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Getty Center, June 29 – November 14, 2010, Engaged Observers: Documentary Photography since the Sixties looks in depth at projects by a selection of the most vital photographers who have contributed to the development of this documentary approach. Passionately committed to their subjects, these photographers have captured both meditative and searing images, from the deep south in the civil rights era to the war in Iraq in 2006. Their powerful visual reports, often published extensively as books, explore aspects of life that are sometimes difficult and troubling but are worthy of attention.

“This exhibition focuses on the tradition of socially engaged photographic essays since the 1960s,” explains Brett Abbott, associate curator of photographs and curator of the exhibition. “Working beyond traditional media outlets, these photographers have authored evocative bodies of work that transcend the realm of traditional photojournalism.”

Engaged Observers is structured around suites of photographs from the following projects: “Girl Culture” by Lauren Greenfield, “The Mennonites” by Larry Towell, “Streetwise” by Mary Ellen Mark, “Black in White America” by Leonard Freed, “Nicaragua, June 1978 – July 1979” by Susan Meiselas, “Vietnam Inc.” by Philip Jones Griffiths, “The Sacrifice” by James Nachtwey, “Migrations: Humanity in Transition” by Sebastião Salgado, and “Minamata” by W. Eugene and Aileen M. Smith.

Although one does not always associate style with photojournalism, where objectivity and neutrality are traditionally valued, aesthetics have been an important consideration for all of the photographers represented in the exhibition. One of the strengths of this tradition has been its ability to harness artistic decisions in reporting on the world. Meiselas chose colour film for her Nicaragua project because she felt it better conveyed the spirit of the revolution as she experienced it. Salgado noted that the solemn beauty so characteristic of his approach is important in conjuring a persistent grace among his migrant subjects, allowing him to present them in a dignified way while calling attention to their plight. Nachtwey used tight framing of messy conglomerations of tubes, instruments, and arms in The Sacrifice as a way of conjuring the atmosphere of controlled chaos that he experienced in trauma centres in Iraq. In this kind of work, subject and style, message and delivery, are deliberately intertwined.

All of the photographers in this exhibition use a series of images to address conceptual issues. For instance, Freed was concerned with bridging cultural divides to engender support of basic civil rights, while Griffiths denounced violent commercialisation; Salgado pointed to the effects of globalisation, while the Smiths addressed the related issue of industrial pollution; Meiselas engaged and countered the fragmented process by which we receive news and understand history, while Towell challenged the meaning of “newsworthy” and explored, as did Greenfield, how cultural values affect life; Nachtwey found the human toll of war unacceptable, and Mark, the idea of homeless street kids in one of the wealthiest nations in the world.

Many of the photographers have published books to further convey their socially engaged messages. Books allow for a greater depth of reporting than magazine articles since their length can be tailored to the needs of a particular project. And because they can be read in private, books are conducive to extended contemplation and the slow absorption of ideas, both of which are important to understanding projects that are broad in scope and have layers of meaning that, in many cases, were developed over the course of years. Moreover, they provide photographers authorial control over the presentation of their work. Each artist has the ability to decide how pictures are captioned and with what information.

A final section of the exhibition is devoted to tracing the origins of the documentary photography tradition, touching on American Civil War photographs by Alexander Gardner, turn-of-the-century activism by Lewis Hine, Depression-era photography, and photojournalism in pre-World War II picture magazines. This section also looks closely at the formation of Magnum Photos. Founded in 1947 by Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Besson, and several other photographers, Magnum provided a new platform for an independent documentary approach to photojournalism and became one of the world’s most prestigious photographic organisations. Magnum was structured to allow its members to pursue stories of their own choosing, spend as much time as they wanted on a particular topic, and be as involved as they desired in the editing, captioning, and publication of their work. The organisation was meant to harness commercial assignments as a base from which to pursue independent work, and the concept has given rise to generations of independent photographers, including many of those in Engaged Observers.

Press release from The J. Paul Getty Museum website [Online] Cited 28/12/2019

 

Lewis W. Hine (American, 1874-1940)
'[Crowd of Newsies, Including One Girl]' 1910

 

Lewis W. Hine (American, 1874-1940)
[Crowd of Newsies, Including One Girl]
1910
Gelatin silver print
Sheet: 11.4 × 16.5cm (4 1/2 × 6 1/2 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum

 

Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) 'Sharecropper's Family, Hale County, Alabama / Bud Fields and His Family, Hale County, Alabama / Bud Woods and His Family' 1936

 

Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975)
Sharecropper’s Family, Hale County, Alabama / Bud Fields and His Family, Hale County, Alabama / Bud Woods and His Family
1936
Gelatin silver print
19.4 x 24.3cm (7 5/8 x 9 9/16 in.)
© The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

 

Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) 'Alabama Tenant Farmer's Kitchen Near Moundville' 1936

 

Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975)
Alabama Tenant Farmer’s Kitchen Near Moundville
1936
Gelatin silver print
21.7 × 24.1cm (8 9/16 × 9 1/2 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

 

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) 'Abandoned Dust Bowl Home'
About 1935-1940

 

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Abandoned Dust Bowl Home
About 1935-1940
Gelatin silver print
18.9 × 24.4cm (7 7/16 × 9 5/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

 

Leonard Freed (American, 1929-2006) 'Johns Island, South Carolina' 1964

 

Leonard Freed (American, 1929-2006)
Johns Island, South Carolina
1964, printed later
Gelatin silver print
16 × 24 cm (6 5/16 × 9 7/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Leonard Freed / Magnum Photos

 

Philip Jones Griffiths (Welsh, 1936-2008) 'Vietnam' 1967

 

Philip Jones Griffiths (Welsh, 1936-2008)
Vietnam
1967
Gelatin silver print
21.3 x 31.8cm (8 3/8 x 12 1/2 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© The Philip Jones Griffiths Foundation / Magnum Photos

 

Limits of friendship. A Marine introduces a peasant girl to king-sized filter-tips. Of all the U.S. forces in Vietnam, it was the Marines that approached Civic Action with gusto. From their barrage of handouts, one discovers that, in the month of January1967 alone, they gave away to the Vietnamese 101,535 pounds of food, 4,810 pounds of soap, 14,662 books and magazines, 106 pounds of candy, 1,215 toys, and 1 midwifery kit. In the same month they gave the Vietnamese 530 free haircuts.

 

James Nachtwey (American, b. 1948) "The Sacrifice" negative 2006-2007; print 2010

 

James Nachtwey (American, b. 1948)
The Sacrifice
negative 2006-2007; print 2010
Inkjet print
111.8 x 983cm (44 x 387 in.)
James Nachtwey, New York, New York
© James Nachtwey

 

Sebastião Salgado (Brazilian, b. 1944) "Church Gate Station, Western Railroad Line, Bombay, India" negative 1995; print 2009

 

Sebastião Salgado (Brazilian, b. 1944)
Church Gate Station, Western Railroad Line, Bombay, India
negative 1995; print 2009
Gelatin silver print
34.3 x 51.4cm (13 1/2 x 20 1/4 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Sebastião Salgado

 

 

Photographic essays

Leonard Freed

BLACK IN WHITE AMERICA

“Photography shows the connection between things, how they relate. Photography is not entertaining, this is not decoration, this is not advertising. Photographing is an emotional thing, a graceful thing. Photography allows me to wander with a purpose.”

Leonard Freed (American, 1923-2006), interview in Worldview, 2007


While working in Germany in 1962, photographer Leonard Freed happened to notice a black American soldier guarding the divide between East and West as the Berlin Wall was being erected. It was not the partition between the forces of Communism and Capitalism that captured Freed’s imagination, however. Instead, he was haunted by the idea of a man standing in defence of a country in which his own rights were in question. The experience ignited the young photographer’s interest in the American civil rights movement raging on the other side of the globe. In June 1963 Freed headed back to the United States to embark on a multiyear documentary project, published in about 1968 as Black in White America, that would become the signature work of his career.

The Black in White America series is a kind of visual diary with a moralising purpose. It is highly personal and socially engaged with an implicit goal of effecting change through communication. While Freed made pictures of important events in the civil rights struggle, including the 1963 March on Washington, he quickly found that his interests lay not in recording the progress of the civil rights movement per se but in exploring the diverse, everyday lives of a community that had been marginalised for so long. Penetrating the fabric of daily existence, his work portrays the common humanity of a people persevering in unjust circumstances. His sensitive and empathetic approach sought not to stimulate outrage but to foster understanding and bridge cultural divides as a means of transcending racial antipathy.

Lauren Greenfield

FAST FORWARD and GIRL CULTURE

“Girl Culture has been my journey as a photographer, as an observer of culture, as part of the media, as a media critic, as a woman, as a girl… I was… thinking about my chronic teenage dieting, my gravitation toward good-looking and thin friends for as long as I can remember, and the importance of clothes and status symbols in the highly materialistic, image-oriented Los Angeles milieu in which I grew up.”

Lauren Greenfield (American, born 1966), Girl Culture, 2002


Photographer and documentary filmmaker Lauren Greenfield has built her reputation as a chronicler of mainstream American culture. In 2002 she published a photographic project, Girl Culture, that delves into the ways consumer society affects the lives of women in America. Of central concern to Greenfield was the exhibitionist tendencies of contemporary American femininity. Visiting girls of all ages at home, in doctors’ offices, and out with friends,

Greenfield examined personal issues of public consequence, providing an intense and intimate exploration of girls’ relationships to their bodies and the effects of popular culture on self-image.

Many of her pictures and accompanying interviews focus on what she refers to as “body projects,” the daily grooming rituals undertaken in an effort to express identity through appearance. Others look at the social and consumerist influences from which these young women take their cues as well as the difficulty of living up to such expectations.

Girl Culture grew out of an earlier study, Fast Forward, that critically surveyed what life is like for children growing up in Los Angeles. The work revolves around her perception of an early loss of innocence among her young subjects and traces Hollywood’s role as a homogenising force in their lives.

Greenfield’s lens becomes a mirror in which to reflect upon ourselves. Together Fast Forward and Girl Culture sensitively explore how culture leaves its imprint on individuals.

Philip Jones Griffiths

VIETNAM INC.

“The “bang-bang” aspect of any war is the least likely to offer any explanation of the underlying causes. My task is to discover the why, so it’s the actions surrounding the battlefields that present the best clues.”

Philip Jones Griffiths (Welsh, 1936-2008), Aperture, spring 2008


A lifelong desire to leave the world a better place drove Philip Jones Griffiths, whose work is marked by a fiercely independent approach, deep engagement with his subjects, and a skeptical view of authority. Vietnam Inc., the photographer’s critical 1971 account of America’s armed intervention in Southeast Asia, is one of the most detailed photographic stories of a war published by a single photographer. The project’s exploration of the why, and not just the what, behind the war’s failures made it a particularly engaging and ambitious work of advocacy journalism and a model to which many photographers still aspire.

Griffiths’s independent approach is remarkable because of its sensitivity to the people of Vietnam and its eschewing of a Western point of view. In Vietnam Inc. there are few photographs documenting American troops and the might of their military prowess. Instead, his primary focus was on Vietnamese civilians and a culture in crisis. His book put the conflict in the context of Vietnam’s history and culture, showing the ways in which the Capitalist values that America promoted in its efforts to contain the spread of Communism were out of sync with Vietnam’s predominantly communal and agrarian way of life.

Vietnam, for Griffiths, became a “goldfish bowl where the values of Americans and Vietnamese can be observed, studied, and, because of their contrasting nature, more easily appraised.” And in Griffiths’s appraisal, it was America’s “misplaced confidence in the universal goodness” of its own values that would ultimately lead to an imperialist failure and, more importantly, the unjust devastation of a people.

Mary Ellen Mark

STREETWISE

“One of the reasons we chose Seattle was because it is known as “America’s most liveable city.” Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York were well known for their street kids. By choosing America’s ideal city we were making the point “If street kids exist in a city like Seattle then they can be found everywhere in America, and we are therefore facing a major social problem of runaways in this country.””

Mary Ellen Mark (American, 1940-2015), Streetwise, 1988


Mary Ellen Mark has reported on the state of our social environment for more than four decades. Far removed from the immediacy of war and conflict, her work plumbs the basic commonality of human experience.

In 1983 Mark traveled to Seattle to do an article for Life magazine on runaway children. Focusing on a set of streets in the city’s downtown area, she began building a sense of trust with the community of runaways and learning about their survival methods. Her pictures showed teenagers who managed to survive on the tough streets through petty crime, prostitution, foraging in dumpsters, and panhandling. She presented the abandoned buildings and underpasses they inhabited and the bonds they built with one another in the absence of family. Mark’s compositions are striking and uncomfortable, emphasising her subjects’ youth while capturing them engaged in activities beyond their years.

Following publication of an article in Life, she continued to develop the story as both a documentary film and still photographic project with her husband, filmmaker Martin Bell, and reporter Cheryl McCall. The film, titled Streetwise, was released the following year and was nominated for an Academy Award. Mark published her still photographs from the project in a book of the same title in 1988.

The Streetwise project provided dimension to an important issue of its day. In giving specific shape, individuality, and visibility to the problem of runaway children, it called for greater social and political commitment to addressing America’s epidemic of broken families.

Susan Meiselas

NICARAGUA, JUNE 1978 – JULY 1979

“We all cross histories, and the ones that we cross shape us as much as we shape them.”

Susan Meiselas (American, born 1948), in conversation with the curator, 2010


In 1978 Magnum photographer Susan Meiselas traveled to Nicaragua. Tensions were high following the assassination of Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, the editor of an opposition newspaper critical of the repressive, hard-line government. Meiselas witnessed the eruption of a full-scale revolution in August of that year. Aware that a momentous process was taking place, she stayed to record its unfolding, including the celebration of the revolutionaries’ victory in the central plaza of Managua in July 1979.

Meiselas was taken by the bravery of those who were willing to risk their lives against the dictatorship for the promise of a better future, and she took pains to photograph the action from the perspective of those involved in it. The record of her movements around the country formed a narrative about the progress of their insurrection. She made a decision, which at the time was still considered somewhat unusual in serious war reportage, to record the revolution on colour film, seeing it as a more appropriate medium for capturing the vibrancy and optimism of the resistance.

The photographer’s compelling pictures were picked up by major newspapers and magazines around the world, giving individual images a public life, but one that was beyond her immediate control with regard to captioning and that was fragmented from the context of her larger body of pictures. In collecting seventy-one of her photo-graphs into a book, first published in 1981 as Nicaragua, June 1978 – July 1979, Meiselas reasserted the narrative of the revolution as she experienced it and gave greater permanence and coherence to her documentary endeavour.

James Nachtwey

THE SACRIFICE

“For me, the strength of photography lies in its ability to evoke a sense of humanity. If war is an attempt to negate humanity, then photography can be perceived as the opposite of war. And if it is used well, it can be a powerful ingredient in the antidote to war.”

James Nachtwey (American, born 1948), from the film The War Photographer, 2001


For nearly thirty years James Nachtwey has dedicated himself to delivering an antiwar message by documenting those around the world affected by conflict. Traveling with emergency medical units in Iraq in 2006, the photographer began a photo essay, The Sacrifice, that documents the struggle to save and rebuild lives. The series depicts the helicopter transfers from battle sites to treatment centers, the emergency rooms where lives hang in the balance, and the difficult process of recovery.

In anticipation of showing the work, Nachtwey created a monumental installation print, consisting of sixty individual trauma-center images, tightly framed and digitally collaged into a grid. The work stands as a grim reminder of the human costs of war. The object’s sheer size, in which one picture gives way to the next in a seemingly endless stream of torn flesh, metal instruments, snaking tubes, and bloodied hands, effectively conveys a sense of the controlled chaos that permeates these medical centres as well as the overwhelming volume of casualties flowing through the medics’ hands on a daily basis.

While it may be easy to contemplate and even support war in abstract, strategic terms, it is difficult to face Nachtwey’s portrayal of its inevitable results. In its aggressive scale, his intentionally unsettling work demands that we reconcile the goals and achievements of armed conflict with its human costs, that we be prepared to acknowledge in particular visual terms the sacrifice it entails and the valiant work of those who do their best to mend its path of destruction.

Sebastião Salgado

MIGRATIONS: HUMANITY IN TRANSITION

“My hope is that, as individuals, as groups, as societies, we can pause and reflect on the human condition at the turn of the millennium. Can we claim “compassion fatigue” when we show no sign of consumption fatigue?”

Sebastião Salgado (Brazilian, born 1944), Migrations, 2000


Trained in economics before taking up photography, Sebastião Salgado has used his camera to raise awareness of the world’s economic disparities and provoke discussion about the state of our international social environment. Between 1994 and 1999 Salgado pursued an enormous project to document migrant populations around the world. Published in 2000 as Migrations: Humanity in Transition, this epic work of twentieth-century photojournalism documents people across forty-three countries who have been uprooted by globalisation, persecution, or war. The pictures in this exhibition represent several themes in Salgado’s study, including the effects of population surges in cities of developing countries, the conditions of refugees fleeing war in Africa, and the process of migration from Latin America to the United States.

Salgado’s work is marked by a heightened attention to aesthetic grace that attempts to endow his subjects with dignity even as it communicates the discomfort of their circumstances. His photographs are constructed with careful attention to dramatic lighting, elegant contours, and striking visual impact. Ultimately, Salgado sees himself as a storyteller and a communicator, a bridge between the fortunate and the unfortunate, the developed and the undeveloped, the stable and the uprooted. Portrayed lyrically and sensitively, his subjects are transformed into metaphors for complex inequities that exist in the world – problems that must be recognised and acknowledged before they can be addressed.

W. Eugene Smith and Aileen M. Smith

MINAMATA

“[Pollution] is closing more tightly upon us each day… After reflecting on the rights and wrongs of the situation in Minamata, we hope through this book to raise our small voices of words and photographs in a warning to the world. To cause awareness is our only strength.”

W. Eugene Smith (American, 1918-1978) and Aileen M. Smith (American, born 1950), Minamata, 1975


In 1971 W. Eugene Smith, a major figure in the history of socially concerned photography, and his wife, Aileen M. Smith, were told of a controversy over industrial pollution taking place in the small Japanese fishing village of Minamata. Beginning in the 1950s, thousands of people in the area were severely affected by mercury poisoning, brought about by eating fish contaminated with chemical waste dumped in the bay by the Chisso Corporation. Victims were afflicted with brain damage, paralysis, and convulsions. The ailment, which came to be known as Minamata Disease, is not reversible.

When the Smiths arrived in Minamata, lawsuits had already begun, and the couple set out to document the progress of the claims. They spent three years on the project, calling attention to the victims’ cause. Aileen acted as an equal collaborator, making pictures and writing texts with W. Eugene. The work resulted in numerous magazine publications, exhibitions, and a coauthored book, Minamata, published in 1975.

The Smiths’ study records the course of the trial through the court’s ruling in favour of the plaintiffs in 1973. The essay relates the importance of the sea and fishing to the town’s culture, reports on the company’s drainage pipes into the sea, chronicles the lives transformed by the disease, and depicts the demonstrations that took place in opposition to Chisso. As a tale of the dangers of industrial pollution, the project gained traction within the political atmosphere of the 1970s, when the environmental movement was taking off.

Larry Towell

THE MENNONITES

“When a Mennonite loses his land, a bit of his human dignity is forfeited; so is his financial solvency. He becomes a migrant worker, an exile who will spend the rest of his life drifting among fruit trees and vegetable vines, dreaming of owning his own farm some day. But for these who struggle with God at the end of a hoe, the refuge of land, Church, and community may be at least a generation away.”

Larry Towell (Canadian, born 1953), The Mennonites, 2000


Wary of the media’s commitment to speed, photographer Larry Towell insists on the integrity of extended-coverage reporting. In 1989 he came into contact with members of a Mennonite community near his home in Canada. The Old Colony Mennonites are a nonconformist Protestant sect related to the Amish that originated in Europe in the 1500s.

Over the centuries, they have migrated between countries to preserve their way of life, living in colonies where faith and tradition are intertwined and modern amenities, such as cars, rubber tires, and electricity, are not welcome.

The Mennonites Towell befriended had migrated to Canada from colonies in Mexico in search of seasonal work. Due to shrinking water tables in Mexico, the effects of international trade, and a rising population in the colonies, many Mennonites have found themselves landless and economically marginalised, forced to compromise their beliefs in order to survive. Towell was eventually invited to join them in their treks back to Mexico for the winter. With his unique and intimate access, he spent the next ten years photographing their activities, capturing their struggle to preserve a lifestyle incongruent with the larger world on which they have become interdependent.

Towell’s work documented the Mennonites’ way of life for the historical record and inspires greater understanding today for a group whose attempts to embrace life could be easily overlooked. In spending a decade on a subject that would be of only passing interest to mainstream media, he asserts a form of visual reporting in which reflection takes precedence over profitability and immediacy.

Text from the J. Paul Getty Museum

 

Sebastião Salgado (Brazilian, b. 1944) 'Mexico Border, desert of San Ysidro, California' negative 1997; print 2009

 

Sebastião Salgado (Brazilian, b. 1944)
U.S. – Mexico Border, desert of San Ysidro, California
Negative 1997; print 2009
Gelatin silver print
34.4 x 51.4cm (13 9/16 x 20 1/4 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Sebastião Salgado

 

Mary Ellen Mark (American, 1940-2015) 'Lillie with Her Rag Doll, Seattle' 1983

 

Mary Ellen Mark (American, 1940-2015)
Lillie with Her Rag Doll, Seattle
1983
Gelatin silver print
22.6 x 34cm (8 7/8 x 13 3/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Mary Ellen Mark

 

Mary Ellen Mark (American, 1940-2015) '"Rat" and Mike with a Gun, Seattle' 1983

 

Mary Ellen Mark (American, 1940-2015)
“Rat” and Mike with a Gun, Seattle
1983
Gelatin silver print
22.8 x 34.2cm (9 x 13 7/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Mary Ellen Mark

 

Susan Meiselas (American, b. 1948)
'Muchachos attendant la riposte de la Garde nationale, Matagalpa, Nicaragua' (Awaiting counterattack by the Guard in Matagalpa, Nicaragua) 1978, printed 1980s

 

Susan Meiselas (American, b. 1948)
Muchachos attendant la riposte de la Garde nationale, Matagalpa, Nicaragua (Awaiting counterattack by the Guard in Matagalpa, Nicaragua)
1978, printed 1980s
Silver-dyer bleach print
22.4 × 34.3cm (8 13/16 × 13 1/2 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Susan Meiselas / Magnum Photos

 

Susan Meiselas (American, b. 1948)
'Traditional Indian dance mask adopted by the rebels during the fight against Somoza, Nicaragua'
1978, printed 1980s

 

Susan Meiselas (American, b. 1948)
Traditional Indian dance mask adopted by the rebels during the fight against Somoza, Nicaragua
1978, printed 1980s
Silver-dye bleach print
49.5 × 33cm (19 1/2 × 13 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Susan Meiselas / Magnum Photos

 

Lauren Greenfield (American, b. 1966) 'Sheena tries on clothes with Amber, 15, in a department store dressing room, San Jose, California' negative 1999; print 2002

 

Lauren Greenfield (American, b. 1966)
Sheena tries on clothes with Amber, 15, in a department store dressing room, San Jose, California
Negative 1999; print 2002
Dye destruction print
32.5 x 49.1cm (12 13/16 x 19 5/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Lauren Greenfield/INSTITUTE

 

Lauren Greenfield (American, b. 1966) 'Erin, 24, is blind-weighed at an eating-disorder clinic, Coconut Creek, Florida. She has asked to mount the scale backward so as not to see her weight gain' negative 2001; print 2002

 

Lauren Greenfield (American, b. 1966)
Erin, 24, is blind-weighed at an eating-disorder clinic, Coconut Creek, Florida. She has asked to mount the scale backward so as not to see her weight gain
Negative 2001; print 2002
Dye destruction print
32.5 x 49.1cm (12 13/16 x 19 5/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Lauren Greenfield/INSTITUTE

 

 

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1200 Getty Center Drive
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Exhibition: ‘The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today’ at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York

Exhibition dates: 1st August – 1st November 2010

 

A huge posting of wonderful photographs!

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

 

 

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) 'Rubber Dummies, Metro Goldwyn Mayer Studios, Hollywood' 1939 from the exhibition 'The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today' at MoMA, New York, Aug - Nov 2010

 

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Rubber Dummies, Metro Goldwyn Mayer Studios, Hollywood
1939
Gelatin silver print
7 9/16 x 9 5/8″ (19.3 x 24.4cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Edward Steichen
© 1981 Collection Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents

 

David Goldblatt (South African, 1930-2018) 'Monument to Karel Landman, Voortrekker Leader, De Kol, Eastern Cape' April 10, 1993 from the exhibition 'The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today' at MoMA, New York, Aug - Nov 2010

 

David Goldblatt (South African, 1930-2018)
Monument to Karel Landman, Voortrekker Leader, De Kol, Eastern Cape
April 10, 1993
Gelatin silver print
10 15/16 x 13 11/16″ (27.9 x 34.8cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase
© 2010 David Goldblatt. Courtesy David Goldblatt and the Goodman Gallery

 

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) 'Saint-Cloud' 1923 from the exhibition 'The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today' at MoMA, New York, Aug - Nov 2010

 

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Saint-Cloud
1923
Albumen silver print
6 7/8 x 8 3/8″ (17.5 x 21.3cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Anonymous gift

 

Edward Steichen (American born Luxembourg, 1879-1973) 'Midnight - Rodin’s Balzac'. 1908 from the exhibition 'The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today' at MoMA, New York, Aug - Nov 2010

 

Edward Steichen (American born Luxembourg, 1879-1973)
Midnight – Rodin’s Balzac
1908
Pigment print
12 1/8 x 14 5/8″ (30.8 x 37.1cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the photographer
Permission of Joanna T. Steichen

 

Bruce Nauman. 'Waxing Hot' from the portfolio 'Eleven Color Photographs' 1966–67/1970/2007

 

Bruce Nauman (American, b. 1941)
Waxing Hot from the portfolio Eleven Color Photographs
1966-1967/1970/2007
Inkjet print (originally chromogenic colour print)
19 15/16 x 19 15/16″ (50.6 x 50.6cm)
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Gerald S. Elliott Collection
© 2010 Bruce Nauman/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

 

Gilbert & George (Gilbert Proesch. British, b. Italy 1943. George Passmore. British, b. 1942) 'Great Expectations'. 1972

 

Gilbert & George (Gilbert Proesch. British, b. Italy 1943. George Passmore. British, b. 1942)
Great Expectations
1972
Dye transfer print
11 9/16 x 11 1/2″ (29.4 x 29.2cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Art & Project/Depot VBVR
© 2010 Gilbert & George

 

Hans Bellmer (German, 1902-1975) 'The Doll' 1935-1937

 

Hans Bellmer (German, 1902-1975)
The Doll
1935-1937
Gelatin silver print
9 1/2 x 9 5/16″ (24.1 x 23.7cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Samuel J. Wagstaff, Jr. Fund
© 2010 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris

 

 

The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today presents a critical examination of the intersections between photography and sculpture, exploring how one medium informs the analysis and creative redefinition of the other. On view at The Museum of Modern Art from August 1 through November 1, 2010, the exhibition brings together over 300 photographs, magazines, and journals, by more than 100 artists, from the dawn of modernism to the present, to look at the ways in which photography at once informs and challenges the meaning of what sculpture is. The Original Copy is organised by Roxana Marcoci, Curator, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art. Following the exhibition’s presentation at MoMA, it will travel to Kunsthaus Zürich, where it will be on view from February 25 through May 15, 2011.

When photography was introduced in 1839, aesthetic experience was firmly rooted in Romanticist tenets of originality. In a radical way, photography brought into focus the critical role that the copy plays in art and in its perception. While the reproducibility of the photograph challenged the aura attributed to the original, it also reflected a very personal form of study and offered a model of dissemination that would transform the entire nature of art.

“In his 1947 book Le Musée Imaginaire, the novelist and politician André Malraux famously advocated for a pancultural ‘museum without walls,’ postulating that art history, and the history of sculpture in particular, had become ‘the history of that which can be photographed,'” said Ms. Marcoci.

Sculpture was among the first subjects to be treated in photography. There were many reasons for this, including the desire to document, collect, publicise, and circulate objects that were not always portable. Through crop, focus, angle of view, degree of close-up, and lighting, as well as through ex post facto techniques of dark room manipulation, collage, montage, and assemblage, photographers have not only interpreted sculpture but have created stunning reinventions of it.

Conceived around ten conceptual modules, the exhibition examines the rich historical legacy of photography and the aesthetic shifts that have taken place in the medium over the last 170 years through a superb selection of pictures by key modern, avant-garde, and contemporary artists. Some, like Eugène Atget, Walker Evans, Lee Friedlander, and David Goldblatt, are best known as photographers; others, such as Auguste Rodin, Constantin Brancusi, and David Smith, are best known as sculptors; and others, from Hannah Höch and Sophie Taeuber-Arp to such contemporaries as Bruce Nauman, Fischli/Weiss, Rachel Harrison, and Cyprien Gaillard, are too various to categorise but exemplify how fruitfully and unpredictably photography and sculpture have combined.

The Original Copy begins with Sculpture in the Age of Photography, a section comprising early photographs of sculptures in French cathedrals by Charles Nègre and in the British Museum by Roger Fenton and Stephen Thompson; a selection of André Kertész’s photographs from the 1920s showing art amid common objects in the studios of artist friends; and pictures by Barbara Kruger and Louise Lawler that foreground issues of representation to underscore photography’s engagement in the analysis of virtually every aspect of art. Eugène Atget: The Marvelous in the Everyday presents an impressive selection of Atget’s photographs, dating from the early 1900s to the mid 1920s, of classical statues, reliefs, fountains, and other decorative fragments in Paris, Versailles, Saint-Cloud, and Sceaux, which together amount to a visual compendium of the heritage of French civilisation at the time.

Auguste Rodin: The Sculptor and the Photographic Enterprise includes some of the most memorable pictures of Rodin’s sculptures by various photographers, including Edward Steichen’s Rodin – The Thinker (1902), a work made by combining two negatives: one depicting Rodin in silhouetted profile, contemplating The Thinker (1880-82), his alter ego; and one of the artist’s luminous Monument to Victor Hugo (1901). Constantin Brancusi: The Studio as Groupe Mobile focuses on Brancusi’s uniquely nontraditional techniques in photographing his studio, which was articulated around hybrid, transitory configurations known as groupe mobiles (mobile groups), each comprising several pieces of sculpture, bases, and pedestals grouped in proximity. In search of transparency, kineticism, and infinity, Brancusi used photography to dematerialise the static, monolithic materiality of traditional sculpture. His so-called photos radieuses (radiant photos) are characterised by flashes of light that explode the sculptural gestalt.

Marcel Duchamp: The Readymade as Reproduction examines Box in a Valise (1935-41), a catalogue of his oeuvre featuring 69 reproductions, including minute replicas of several readymades and one original work that Duchamp “copyrighted” in the name of his female alter ego, Rrose Sélavy. Using collotype printing and pochoir – in which colour is applied by hand with the use of stencils – Duchamp produced “authorised ‘original’ copies” of his work, blurring the boundaries between unique object, readymade, and multiple. Cultural and Political Icons includes selections focusing on some of the most significant photographic essays of the twentieth century – Walker Evans’s American Photographs (1938), Robert Franks’s The Americans (1958), Lee Friedlander’s The American Monument (1976), and David Goldblatt’s The Structure of Things Then (1998) – many of which have never before been shown in a thematic context as they are here.

The Studio without Walls: Sculpture in the Expanded Field explores the radical changes that occurred in the definition of sculpture when a number of artists who did not consider themselves photographers in the traditional sense, such as Robert Smithson, Robert Barry, and Gordon Matta-Clark, began using the camera to document remote sites as sculpture rather than the traditional three-dimensional object. Daguerre’s Soup: What Is Sculpture? includes photographs of found objects or assemblages created specifically for the camera by artists, such as Brassaï’s Involuntary Sculptures (c. 1930s), Alina Szapocznikow’s Photosculptures (1970-1971), and Marcel Broodthaers’s Daguerre’s Soup (1974), the last work being a tongue-in-cheek picture which hints at the various fluid and chemical processes used by Louis Daguerre to invent photography in the nineteenth century, bringing into play experimental ideas about the realm of everyday objects.

The Pygmalion Complex: Animate and Inanimate Figures looks at Dada and Surrealist pictures and photo-collages by artists, including Man Ray, Herbert Bayer, Hans Bellmer, Hannah Höch, and Johannes Theodor Baargeld, who focused their lenses on mannequins, dummies, and automata to reveal the tension between living figure and sculpture. The Performing Body as Sculptural Object explores the key role of photography in the intersection of performance and sculpture. Bruce Nauman, Charles Ray, and Dennis Oppenheim, placing a premium on their training as sculptors, articulated the body as a sculptural prop to be picked up, bent, or deployed instead of traditional materials. Eleanor Antin, Ana Mendieta, VALIE EXPORT, and Hannah Wilke engaged with the “rhetoric of the pose,” using the camera as an agency that itself generates actions through its presence.

Press release from the Museum of Modern Art website

 

Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzky) (American, 1890-1976) 'Noire et blanche' (Black and white) 1926

 

Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzky) (American, 1890-1976)
Noire et blanche (Black and white)
1926
Gelatin silver print
6 3/4 x 8 7/8″ (17.1 x 22.5cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of James Thrall Soby
2010 Man Ray Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris

 

Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) 'Stamped Tin Relic' 1929 (printed c. 1970)

 

Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975)
Stamped Tin Relic
1929 (printed c. 1970)
Gelatin silver print
4 11/16 x 6 5/8″ (11.9 x 16.9cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Lily Auchincloss Fund
© 2010 Estate of Walker Evans

 

Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934) 'Mount Rushmore, South Dakota' 1969

 

Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934)
Mount Rushmore, South Dakota
1969
Gelatin silver print
8 1/16 x 12 1/8″ (20.5 x 30.8cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the photographer
© 2010 Lee Friedlander

 

Sibylle Bergemann (German, 1941-2010) 'Das Denkmal, East Berlin' (The monument, East Berlin)

 

Sibylle Bergemann (German, 1941-2010)
Das Denkmal, East Berlin (The monument, East Berlin)
1986
Gelatin silver print
19 11/16 x 23 5/8″ (50 x 60cm)
Sibylle Bergemann/Ostkreuz Agentur der Fotografen, Berlin
© 2010 Sibylle Bergemann/Ostkreuz Agentur der Fotografen, Berlin

 

Marcel Duchamp (American, born France, 1887-1968) and Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzky) (American, 1890-1976) 'Élevage de poussière (Dust breeding)' 1920

 

Marcel Duchamp (American, born France, 1887-1968)
Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzky) (American, 1890-1976)
Élevage de poussière (Dust breeding)
1920
Gelatin silver contact print
2 13/16 x 4 5/16″ (7.1 x 11cm)
The Bluff Collection, LP
© 2010 Man Ray Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris

 

Guy Tillim (South African, b. 1962) 'Bust of Agostinho Neto, Quibala, Angola' 2008

 

Guy Tillim (South African, b. 1962)
Bust of Agostinho Neto, Quibala, Angola
2008
Pigmented inkjet print
17 3/16 x 25 3/4″ (43.6 x 65.4cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Acquired through the generosity of the Contemporary Arts Council of The Museum of Modern Art
© 2010 Guy Tillim. Courtesy Michael Stevenson Gallery

 

 

Selected wall text from the exhibition

“The advent of photography in 1839, when aesthetic experience was firmly rooted in Romanticist tenets of originality, brought into focus the critical role that the copy plays in the perception of art. The medium’s reproducibility challenged the aura attributed to the original, but it also reflected a new way of looking and offered a model for dissemination that would transform the entire nature of art. The aesthetic singularity of the photograph, the archival value of a document bearing the trace of history, and the combinatory capacity of the image, open to be edited into sequences in which it mixes with others – all these contribute to the status of photography as both an art form and a medium of communication.

Sculpture was among the first subjects to be treated in photography. In his 1947 book Le Musée imaginaire, the novelist and politician André Malraux famously advocated for a pancultural “museum without walls,” postulating that art history, and the history of sculpture in particular, had become “the history of that which can be photographed.” There were many reasons for this, including the immobility of sculpture, which suited the long exposure times needed with the early photographic processes, and the desire to document, collect, publicise and circulate objects that were not always portable. Through crop, focus, angle of view, degree of close-up, and lighting, as well as through ex post facto techniques of dark room manipulation, collage, montage, and assemblage, photographers not only interpret sculpture but create stunning reinventions of it.

The Original Copy presents a critical examination of the intersections between photography and sculpture, exploring how the one medium has been implicated in the analysis and creative redefinition of the other. Bringing together 300 pictures, magazines and journals by more than 100 artists from the dawn of modernism to the present, this exhibition looks at the ways in which photography at once informs and challenges our understanding of what sculpture is within specific historic contexts.

Sculpture in the Age of Photography

If we consider photography a child of the industrial era – a medium that came of age alongside the steam engine and the railroad – it is not surprising that one of its critical functions was to bring physically inaccessible worlds closer by means of reproduction. Among its early practitioners, Charles Nègre photographed sculpture in the cathedrals of Chartres, Amiens, and, in Paris, Notre Dame, circling them at different levels to capture perspectives of rarely seen sculptural details, while in London Roger Fenton and Stephen Thompson documented the ancient statuary in the British Museum, making visible the new power of collecting institutions.

With the advent of the handheld portable camera in the early 1920s, photographers had the flexibility to capture contingent sculptural arrangements taken from elliptical viewpoints. André Kertész, for instance, recorded unexpected juxtapositions between art and common objects in the studios of artist friends, including Fernand Léger and Ossip Zadkine. His ability to forge heterogeneous materials and objects into visual unity inspired the novelist Pierre Mac Orlan to confer on him the title of “photographer-poet.”

Focusing on details in this way, photographers have interpreted not only sculpture itself, as an autonomous object, but also the context of its display. The results often show that the meaning of art is not fixed within the work but open to the beholder’s reception of it at any given moment. Taking a place in the tradition of institutional critique, Barbara Kruger’s and Louise Lawler’s pictures foreground issues of representation to underscore photography’s engagement in the analysis of virtually every aspect of art.

Eugène Atget
The Marvelous in the Everyday

During the first quarter of the twentieth century, Atget took hundreds of photographs of sculptures – classical statues, reliefs, fountains, door knockers, and other finely wrought decorative fragments – in Paris and its outlying parks and gardens, especially at Versailles, Saint-Cloud, and Sceaux. These images amount to a visual compendium of the heritage of French civilisation at that time.

At Versailles, most intensely between 1901 and 1906 and again between 1921 and 1926, Atget photographed the gardens that André Le Nôtre, the landscape architect of King Louis XIV, had designed in the second half of the seventeenth century. In a series of pictures of allegorical statues punctuating the garden’s vistas, Atget focused on the scenic organisation of the sculptures, treating them as characters in a historical play. The pantomimic effect of the statues’ postures clearly appealed to Atget, who in 1880, before turning to photography, had taken acting classes at the Conservatory of the Théâtre national de France. Depicting the white marble statues from low viewpoints, in full length, and against the dark, unified tones of hedges and trees, Atget brought them into dramatic relief, highlighting the theatrical possibilities of sculpture.

Among the pictures taken at Saint-Cloud is a series centred on a melancholy pool surrounded by statues whose tiny silhouettes can be seen from a distance. Atget’s interest in the variable play between nature and art through minute changes in the camera’s angle, or as functions of the effects of light and time of day, is underscored in his notations of the exact month and sometimes even the hour when the pictures were taken.

Auguste Rodin
The Sculptor and the Photographic Enterprise

Rodin never took pictures of his sculptures but reserved the creative act for himself, actively directing the enterprise of photographing his work. He controlled staging, lighting and background, and he was probably the first sculptor to enlist the camera to record the changing stages through which his work passed from conception to realisation. The photographers working with Rodin were diverse and their images of his work varied greatly, partly through each individual’s artistic sensibility and partly through changes in the photographic medium. The radical viewing angles that Eugène Druet, for instance, adopted in his pictures of hands, in around 1898, inspired the poet Rainer Maria Rilke to write: “There are among the works of Rodin hands, single small hands which without belonging to a body, are alive. Hands that rise, irritated and in wrath; hands whose five bristling fingers seem to bark like the five jaws of a dog of Hell.”

Among the most memorable pictures of Rodin’s sculptures is Edward Steichen’s Rodin – The Thinker (1902), a work made by combining two negatives: Rodin in dark silhouetted profile contemplating The Thinker (1880-1882), his alter ego, is set against the luminous Monument to Victor Hugo (1901), a source of poetic creativity. Steichen also photographed Rodin’s Balzac, installed outdoors in the sculptor’s garden at Meudon, spending a whole night taking varying exposures from fifteen minutes to an hour to secure a number of dramatic negatives. The three major pictures of the sculpture against the nocturnal landscape taken at 11 p.m., midnight, and 4 a.m. form a temporal series. 

Constantin Brancusi
The Studio as Groupe Mobile

“Why write?” Brancusi once queried. “Why not just show the photographs?” The sculptor included many great photographers among his friends – Edward Steichen was one of his early champions in the United States; Alfred Stieglitz organised in 1914 his first solo exhibition in New York; Man Ray helped him buy photographic equipment; Berenice Abbott studied sculpture under him; and he was on close terms with Brassaï, André Kertész, and László Moholy-Nagy. Yet he declined to have his work photographed by others, preferring instead to take, develop, and print his own pictures.

Pushing photography against its grain, Brancusi developed an aesthetic antithetical to the usual photographic standards. His so-called photos radieuses (radiant photos) are characterised by flashes of light that explode the sculptural gestalt. In search of transparency, kineticism, and infinity, Brancusi used photography and polishing techniques to dematerialise the static, monolithic materiality of traditional sculpture, visualising what Moholy-Nagy called “the new culture of light.”

Brancusi’s pictures of his studio underscore his scenographic approach. The artist articulated the studio around hybrid, transitory configurations known as groupes mobiles (mobile groups), each comprising several pieces of sculpture, bases, and pedestals grouped in proximity. Assembling and reassembling his sculptures for the camera, Brancusi used photography as a diary of his sculptural permutations. If, as it is often said, Brancusi “invented” modern sculpture, his use of photography belongs to a reevaluation of sculpture’s modernity.

Cultural and Political Icons

How do we remember the past? What role do photographs play in mediating history and memory? In an era resonating with the consequences of two world wars, the construction and then dismantling of the Berlin Wall, the Vietnam War, and the after effects of the colonialist legacy in South Africa, commemoration has provided a rich subject for photographic investigation.

Some of the most significant photographic essays of the twentieth century – Walker Evans’s American Photographs (1938), Robert Frank’s The Americans (1958), Lee Friedlander’s The American Monument (1976), and David Goldblatt’s The Structure of Things Then (1998) – articulate to different degrees the particular value of photography as a means of defining the cultural and political role of monuments.

Evans’s emblematic image of a crushed Ionic column made of cheap sheet metal; Frank’s picture of a statue of St. Francis preaching, cross and Bible in hands, to the bleak vista of a gas station; Friedlander’s photograph of World War I hero Father Duffy, engulfed in the cacophony of Times Square’s billboards and neon, which threaten to jeopardise the sculpture’s patriotic message; and Goldblatt’s pictures of monuments to some of the most potent symbols of Afrikaner triumphalism – all take a critical look at the world that public statues inhabit.

The Studio without Walls
Sculpture in the Expanded Field

In the late 1960s a radical aesthetic change altered both the definition of the sculptural object and the ways in which that object was experienced. A number of artists who did not consider themselves photographers in the traditional sense began using the camera to rework the idea of what sculpture is, dispensing with the immobile object in favour of an altered site: the built environment, the remote landscape, or the studio or museum space in which the artist intervened.

This engagement with site and architecture – undoubtedly a function of early critiques of art’s institutional status – meant that sculpture no longer had to be a permanent three-dimensional object; it could, for instance, be a configuration of debris on the studio floor, a dematerialised vapour released into the landscape, a dissected home reconfigured as gravity-defying walk-through sculpture, or a wrapped-up building. Bruce Nauman, Robert Barry, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Christo respectively, as well as Michael Heizer, Richard Long, Dennis Oppenheim, and Robert Smithson made extensive use of photography, collecting and taking hundreds of pictures as raw material for other pieces, such as collages and photomontages.

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, artists such as Zhang Dali, Cyprien Gaillard, and Rachel Whiteread have continued this dialogue through photographs contemplating examples of architecture and sculpture in states of dilapidation and entropy, remnants of a society in demise.

Daguerre’s Soup
What Is Sculpture?

In 1932, Brassaï challenged the established notions of what is or is not sculpture when he photographed a series of found objects – tiny castoff scraps of paper that had been unconsciously rolled, folded, or twisted by restless hands, strangely shaped bits of bread, smudged pieces of soap, and accidental blobs of toothpaste, which he titled Involuntary Sculptures. In the 1960s and ’70s artists engaging with various forms of reproduction, replication, and repetition used the camera to explore the limits of sculpture. The word “sculpture” itself was somewhat modified, no longer signifying something specific but rather indicating a polymorphous objecthood. For instance, in 1971 Alina Szapocznikow produced Photosculptures, pictures of a new kind of sculptural object made of stretched, formless and distended pieces of chewing gum.

At the same time, Marcel Broodthaers concocted absurdist taxonomies in photographic works. In Daguerre’s Soup (1975), Broothaers hinted at the various fluids and chemical processes used by Louis Daguerre to invent photography in the nineteenth century by bringing into play experimental ideas about language and the realm of everyday objects. A decade later, the duo Fischli/Weiss combined photography with wacky, ingeniously choreographed assemblages of objects. Their tongue-in-cheek pictures of assemblages shot on the verge of collapse convey a sense of animated suspension and deadpan comedy.

In 2007, Rachel Harrison drew on Broodthaers’s illogical systems of classification and parodic collections of objects to produce Voyage of the Beagle, a series of pictures that collectively raise the question “What is sculpture?” Ranging from images of prehistoric standing stones to mass-produced Pop mannequins, and from topiaries to sculptures made by modernist masters, Harrison’s work constitutes an oblique quest for the origins and contemporary manifestations of sculpture.

The Pygmalion Complex
Animate and Inanimate Figures

The subject of the animated statue spans the history of avant-garde photography. Artists interested in Surrealist tactics used the camera to tap the uncanniness of puppets, wax dummies, mannequins, and automata, producing pictures that both transcribe and alter appearances. Laura Gilpin explored this perturbing mix of stillness and living, alluring lifelikeness in her mysterious portrait George William Eggers (1926), in which Eggers, the director of the Denver Art Museum, keeps company with a fifteenth-century bust whose polychrome charm is enhanced by the glow of the candle he holds next to her face. So does Edward Weston, in his whimsical Rubber Dummies, Metro Goldwyn Mayer Studios, Hollywood (1939), showing two elastic dolls caught in a pas de deux on a movie-studio storage lot; and Clarence John Laughlin, in his eerie photomontage The Eye That Never Sleeps (1946), in which the negative of an image taken in a New Orleans funeral parlour has been overlaid with an image of a mannequin – one of whose legs, however, is that of a flesh-and-blood model.

The tension between animate object and inanimate female form lies at the crux of many of Man Ray’s photographs, including Black and White (1926), which provocatively couples the head of the legendary model, artist, and cabaret singer Alice Prin, a.k.a. Kiki of Montparnasse, with an African ceremonial mask. Hans Bellmer’s photographs of dismembered dolls, and the critical photomontages of Herbert Bayer, Hannah Höch, and Johannes Theodor Baargeld, probe the relationship between living figure and sculpture by invoking the unstable subjectivity and breakdown of anatomic boundaries in the aftermath of the Great War.

The Performing Body as Sculptural Object

In 1969, Gilbert & George covered their heads and hands in metallic powders to sing Flanagan and Allen’s vaudeville number “Underneath the Arches” in live performance. Declaring themselves living sculptures, they claimed the status of an artwork, a role they used photography to express. Charles Ray and Dennis Oppenheim, placing a premium on their training as sculptors, articulated the body as a prop that could be picked up, bent, or deployed instead of more traditional materials as a system of weight, mass, and balance.

In the radicalised climate of the 1970s, artists such as Eleanor Antin, Ana Mendieta, VALIE EXPORT, and Hannah Wilke engaged with the “rhetoric of the pose,” underscoring the key role of photography in the intersection of performance, sculpture and portraiture.

Other artists as diverse as Robert Morris, Claes Oldenburg, Otto Muehl, Bas Jan Ader, and Bruce Nauman, experimented with the plasticity of the body as sculptural material. Several of Nauman’s pictures from his portfolio Eleven Color Photographs (1966-1967 / 1970) spoof the classic tradition of sculpture. Yet the signature image of the group – Self-Portrait as a Fountain, in which a stripped-to-the-waist Nauman spews water from his mouth like a medieval gargoyle – is a deadpan salute to Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917). In this spirit, Erwin Wurm’s series of One Minute Sculptures (1997-98) evoke gestural articulations in which the artist’s body is turned into a sculptural form. Wurm, like the other artists presented in this exhibition, focuses attention on what one can do with and through photography, using the camera not to document actions that precede the impulse to record them but as an agency that itself generates actions through its own presence.

 

Clarence John Laughlin (American, 1905-1985) 'The Eye That Never Sleeps' 1946

 

Clarence John Laughlin (American, 1905-1985)
The Eye That Never Sleeps
1946
Gelatin silver print
12 3/8 x 8 3/4″ (31.4 x 22.2cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase
© Clarence John Laughlin

 

Fischli/Weiss (Peter Fischli. Swiss, born 1952. David Weiss. Swiss, born 1946) 'Outlaws' 1984

 

Fischli/Weiss (Peter Fischli. Swiss, b. 1952. David Weiss. Swiss, b. 1946)
Outlaws
1984
Chromogenic colour print
15 ¾ x 11 13/16″ (40 x 30cm)
Courtesy the artists and Matthew Marks Gallery, New York
© Peter Fischli and David Weiss. Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York

 

Claes Oldenburg (American born Sweden. b. 1929) 'Claes Oldenburg - Projects for Monuments'. 1967

 

Claes Oldenburg (American born Sweden. b. 1929)
Claes Oldenburg: Projects for Monuments
1967
Offset lithograph
34 11/16 x 22 1/2″ (88.0 x 57.2 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Barbara Pine
© 2010 Claes Oldenburg

 

Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzky) (American, 1890-1976) 'L'Homme' (Man) 1918

 

Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzky) (American, 1890-1976)
L’Homme (Man)
1918
Gelatin silver print
19 x 14 1/2″ (48.3 x 36.8cm)
Private collection, New York
© 2010 Man Ray Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris

 

Herbert Bayer (American born Austria, 1900-1985) 'Humanly impossible' 1932

 

Herbert Bayer (American born Austria, 1900-1985)
Humanly impossible
1932
Gelatin silver print
15 3/8 x 11 9/16″ (39 x 29.3cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Thomas Walther Collection. Purchase
© 2010 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

 

Constantin Brancusi (French born Romania, 1876-1957) 'L'Oiseau' (Golden Bird). c. 1919

 

Constantin Brancusi (French born Romania, 1876-1957)
L’Oiseau (Golden Bird)
c. 1919
Gelatin silver print
9 x 6 11/16″ (22.8 x 17cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Thomas Walther Collection. Purchase
© 2010 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris

 

Gillian Wearing (British, b. 1963) 'Self-Portrait at 17 Years Old' 2003

 

Gillian Wearing (British, b. 1963)
Self-Portrait at 17 Years Old
2003
Chromogenic color print
41 x 32″ (104.1 x 81.3cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Acquired through the generosity of The Contemporary Arts Council of The Museum of Modern Art
© 2010 Gillian Wearing. Courtesy the artist, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, and Maureen Paley, London

 

Johannes Theodor Baargeld (Alfred Emanuel Ferdinand Gruenwald) (German, 1892-1927) 'Typische Vertikalklitterung als Darstellung des Dada Baargeld' (Typical vertical mess as depiction of the Dada Baargeld). 1920

 

Johannes Theodor Baargeld (Alfred Emanuel Ferdinand Gruenwald) (German, 1892-1927)
Typische Vertikalklitterung als Darstellung des Dada Baargeld (Typical vertical mess as depiction of the Dada Baargeld)
1920
Photomontage
14 5/8 x 12 3/16″ (37.1 x 31cm)
Kunsthaus Zürich, Grafische Sammlung

 

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) 'Father Duffy, Times Square' April 14, 1937

 

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Father Duffy, Times Square
April 14, 1937
Gelatin silver print
9 5/16 x 7 5/8″ (23.7 x 19.4cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Ronald A. Kurtz
© 2010 Berenice Abbott/Commerce Graphics, Ltd., New York

 

 

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