Exhibition: ‘Ana Mendieta: Traces’ at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg

Exhibition dates: 29th March – 6th July 2014

Curators: Stephanie Rosenthal (Chief Curator of the Hayward Gallery, London) and Sabine Breitwieser (Director, Museum der Moderne Salzburg), with Tina Teufel (Curator, Museum der Moderne Salzburg)

PLEASE NOTE: THIS POSTING CONTAINS PHOTOGRAPHS WHICH MAY BE DISTRESSING TO SOME PEOPLE

Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985) 'Untitled (Facial Hair Transplant)' 1972 from the exhibition Ana Mendieta: Traces' at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg, March - July, 2014

Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985)
Untitled (Facial Hair Transplant)
1972
Suite of seven colour photographs, estate prints 1997
© The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, L.L.C.
Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York and Paris and Alison Jacques Gallery, London

If I had half of this artists courage, I might not even have a quarter of her talent.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the Museum der Moderne Salzburg for allowing me to publish the photographs and text in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

View the catalogue essays Ana Mendieta: Traces by Stephanie Rosenthal and Embers by Adrian Heathfield (2.66Mb pdf)

“Art is a material act of culture, but its greatest value is its spiritual role, and that influences society, because it’s the greatest contribution to the intellectual and moral development of humanity that can be made”

“My art is grounded on the belief in one universal energy which runs through everything; from insect to man, from man to spectre, from spectre to plant, from plant to galaxy.”

“To me, the work has existed on different levels. It existed on the level of being in nature and eventually being eroded away. But obviously when it’s shown to someone as a photograph, that’s what it is.”

Ana Mendieta

The few women working with the body at that time were in instant affinity with each other… The struggle for all of us was to keep the sensuousness of the body and to de-eroticize it in terms of cultural expectations. It was gratifying and exciting to discover her work. Those of us who had already been situating the body as central to our visual aesthetic could also anticipate the resistance that would be around her.

I see her death as part of some larger denial of the feminine. Like a huge metaphor saying, we don’t want this depth of feminine eroticism, nature, absorption, integration to happen. It’s too organic. It’s too sacral. In a way, her death also has a symbolic trajectory. More than Ana dies, when she dies.”

Carolee Schneeman quoted in Camhi, Leslie. “ART; Her Body, Herself,” on the New York Times website published June 20, 2004 [Online] Cited 20/06/2014. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

“You do feel the sadness that she’s not with us and you wonder where she would have gone with her work.”

Raquelin Mendieta

Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985) 'Untitled (Facial Cosmetic Variations)' 1972 (detail)

Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985)
Untitled (Facial Cosmetic Variations) (detail)
1972
Suite of eight colour photographs (estate prints, 1997)
Each 50.8 x 406cm
The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection; courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York and Paris

Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985)
Rape
1973
Colour photograph (lifetime print)
20.4 x 25.4cm
The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection; courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York and Paris

Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985)
Rape Scene
1973
Colour photograph (lifetime print)
39.8 x 31 x 3.2cm (framed)
Tate
Presented by the American Patrons of Tate, courtesy of the Latin American Acquisitions Committee 2010

Rape Scene (1973) was part of series of works devised in response to the rape and murder of a fellow student on the Iowa University campus, where Mendieta completed her BA, MA (painting) and an MFA (inter-media). She invited friends and fellow students to her apartment. The viewer entered through a slightly ajar door into a dark apartment into a room where the artist appeared under a single source of light revealing Mendieta stripped from the waist down. The artist stood slouched and bound over a table, nude from the waist down with her body smeared in blood. Around her was an assemblage of broken plates and blood on the floor. Her direct identification with a specific victim meant that she could not be seen as an anonymous object in a theatrical tableau.

Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985) 'Untitled (Self-Portrait with Blood)' 1973 (detail)

Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985)
Untitled (Self-Portrait with Blood) (detail)
1973
Suite of six colour photographs (estate prints 1997)
Each 50.8 x 40.6cm
Private collection, London; Courtesy Alison Jacques Gallery, London

Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985)
Untitled (Body Tracks)
1974
Colour photograph, lifetime print
Collection of Igor DaCosta
© The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, L.L.C.
Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York and Paris and Alison Jacques Gallery, London

Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985) 'Untitled (Glass on Body Imprints)' 1972 from the exhibition Ana Mendieta: Traces' at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg, March - July, 2014

Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985)
Untitled (Glass on Body Imprints)
1972
Suite of six colour photographs, estate prints
© The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, L.L.C.
Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York and Paris and Alison Jacques Gallery, London

Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985)
Untitled
1973
Lifetime colour photograph
Collection Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, T. B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 2011
© The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, L.L.C.
Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York and Paris and Alison Jacques Gallery, London

Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985)
Blood and Feathers #2
1974
Colour photograph, lifetime print
Collection Raquelín Mendieta Family Trust
© The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, L.L.C.
Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York and Paris and Alison Jacques Gallery, London

Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985)
Imagen de Yagul
1973
Lifetime colour photograph
Glenstone
© The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, L.L.C.
Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York and Paris and Alison Jacques Gallery, London

Ana Mendieta: Traces is the first comprehensive survey of this influential artist’s work to be presented in Great Britain or the German-speaking world. It persuasively demonstrates that her art, while very much rooted in the concerns of her day, maintains a powerful connection to our present moment. Born in Cuba in 1948, Mendieta was forced to immigrate to the United States as a child due to her father’s political situation, and much of her work is obliquely haunted by the exile’s sense of displacement, while also reflecting her position as a double minority in North America’s largely white, male art world of the 1970s and 1980s. From the beginning, motifs of transience, absence, violence, belonging, and an identity in flux animated her multidisciplinary art, which ranged nomadically across practices associated with body art, land art, performance, sculpture, photography and film. At its core lay her recurring use of her own body – its physical and photographic traces – and her interest in marginal outdoor sites and elemental materials.

Spanning her brief, yet remarkably productive, career, this exhibition explores the many distinct facets of her practice. It captures her powerfully visceral evocation of ritual and sacrifice, as well as cycles of life and decay, while also highlighting her pioneering role as a conceptual border-crosser. Including photographs, drawings, sculptures, Super-8 films and a substantial selection of photographic slides, most of which have not been exhibited until now, Ana Mendieta: Traces reveals an artist whose underlying concerns led her to bravely re-work and re-combine genres, to draw on different cultures, both archaic and contemporary, while challenging the limits of the art discourse of her time. Her work continues to profoundly challenge, disturb, influence and inspire.

The Museum der Moderne Salzburg will open an extensive retrospective of the work of Ana Mendieta, one of our era’s most important and influential artists. Mendieta was born to a politically active family in Havana, Cuba in 1948. In the wake of the Cuban revolution, when she was only twelve years old, her parents sent her together with her sister to the United States. In 1985, at just thirty-six years old, she died under tragic circumstance in New York. During her short yet prolific career, she developed a unique visual language that is mesmerising in its intimacy, and equally challenging. Her pioneering work has been acknowledged by large retrospectives in the United States and Europe, and is represented in the collections of major museums.

According to Sabine Breitwieser, director at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg, who has arranged the exhibition, “a comprehensive exhibition in the German-speaking area, especially in Austria, and the German monograph on Ana Mendieta are long overdue. The artist’s distinctive work, in which she stages her body within the landscape, seems to be ideally exhibited at this site, where nature and the theatrical take on such a major role. Due to the fragility of the work, this could possibly be one of the last extensive Mendieta exhibitions.”

Among the central themes in Mendieta’s artistic work are exile and cultural displacement. In her search for identity and finding her place in the world, she attempted to create a dialogue between the landscape and the female body. Her work reveals numerous points of contingency with the emerging art movements of the 1960s and 1970s – Conceptual art, land art, and performance art. Nonetheless, it refuses any kind of categorisation and instead addresses missing links or gaps between different media and art forms. “Through my art I want to express the immediacy of life and the eternity of nature,” wrote Mendieta in 1981. Using her own body and elementary materials, such as blood, fire, earth, and water, she created transitory pieces that combine rituals with metaphors for life, death, rebirth, and spiritual transformation. Her disembodied “earth body” sculptures were private, meditative ceremonies in nature documented in the form of slides and films. From them, Mendieta developed the so-called Siluetas (silhouettes), which form the core of her work. In the 1980s, Mendieta’s body disappeared from her artworks and she started to generate indoor works for galleries. Her engagement with nature continued in her sculptures and drawings, which she created as lasting works.

The exhibition presents roughly 150 works, which are organised throughout twelve spaces; two of these spaces are reconstructions of the original exhibitions by the artist. The works shown are in a multitude of media ranging from photography, film, and sculpture through to drawing. A further section will present the artist’s archive. Slides and photographs, notebooks and postcards offer insight into Mendieta’s working methods. The concern of Stephanie Rosenthal, chief curator of the Hayward Gallery London, is “to show Ana Mendieta’s outstanding work in all of its facets, and to place her artistic process at the center.”

While the artistic media that Mendieta utilises in her works could not be any more diverse, the pictures that she produces are characterised by an unmistakable, overwhelming and mystical poetry. This exhibition makes clear that almost thirty years after the artist’s premature death, her work has lost none of its singularity and uniqueness.

Text from the Museum der Moderne Salzburg website

Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985)
Untitled (Silueta Series)
1978
Gelatin silver print
20.3 x 25.4cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985) 'Alma, Silueta en Fuego' (Soul, Silhouette on Fire) 1975 (still)

Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985)
Alma, Silueta en Fuego (Soul, Silhouette on Fire) (still)
1975
Super-8 colour, silent film transferred to DVD
3:07 minutes
The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection; Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York and Paris, and Alison Jacques Gallery, London

Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985) 'Anima, Silueta de Cohetes (Firework Piece)' 1976 (still)

Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985)
Anima, Silueta de Cohetes (Firework Piece) (still)
1976
(Soul, Silhouette of Fireworks)
Super-8 colour, silent film transferred to DVD
2:22 minutes
The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection; courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York and Paris

Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985)
Untitled (Cuilapán Niche)
1973
Black and white photograph (lifetime print)
25.4 x 20.4cm
Private collection, London; Courtesy Gallery Lelong, New York and Paris, and Alison Jacques Gallery London

Ana Mendieta died at just 36 years old, but the imprint of her life digs deeper than most. Mendieta’s work occupies the indeterminate space between land, body and performance art, refusing to be confined to any one genre while working to expand the horizons of them all. With the immediacy of a fresh wound and the weightlessness of a half-remembered song, Mendieta’s artwork remains as haunting and relevant today as ever.

Her haunting imagery explores the relationship between earth and spirit while tackling the eternally plaguing questions of love, death and rebirth. Like an ancient cave drawing, Mendieta’s art gets as close as possible to her subject matter allowing no excess, using primal and visceral means to navigate her themes. Decades after her death, the Museum der Moderne Salzburg will show a retrospective of the late feminist artist’s work, simply titled “Ana Mendieta: Traces.”

Mendieta, who was born in Havana, Cuba in 1948, moved to the U.S. at 12 years old to escape Castro’s regime. There she hopped between refugee camps and foster homes, planting inside her an obsession with ideas of loss, belonging and the impermanence of place. As an artist in the 1970s, Mendieta embarked upon her iconic series “Silhouettes,” in which she merged body and earthly material, making nature both canvas and medium. In her initial “Silhouette,” Mendieta lay shrouded in an ancient Zapotec grave, letting natural forms eat up her diminutive form.

Her “earth-body” sculptures, as they came to be known, feature blood, feathers, flowers and dirt smothered and stuck on Mendieta’s flesh in various combinations. In “Imagen de Yagul,” speckled feverishly in tiny white flowers, she appears as ethereal and disembodied as Ophelia, while in “Untitled Blood and Feathers” Mendieta looks simultaneously the helpless victim and the guilty culprit. “She always had a direction – that feeling that everything is connected,” Ana’s sister Raquelin said of her work.

An uncertain mythology runs throughout Mendieta’s oeuvre, a feeling at once primal, pagan and feminine. Admirers have cited the Afro-Cuban religion of Santeria as an influence, as well as the ancient rituals of Mexico, where Mendieta made much of her work. Yet many of Mendieta’s pieces removed themselves from the spiritual realm to address present day events, for example “Rape Scene,” a 1973 performance based off the rape and murder of a close friend. For the piece Mendieta remained tied to a table for two hours, motionless, her naked body smeared with cow’s blood. In another work, Mendieta smushes her face and body against glass panes, like a child eager to peek into an off-limits locale, or a bug that’s crashed into a windshield. Against the glass, her scrambled facial features almost resemble a Cubist artwork.

Mendieta died tragically young in 1985, falling from her New York City apartment window onto a delicatessen below. She was living with her husband of eight months, minimalist sculptor Carl Andre at the time. Andre was convicted of murder following the horrific incident and later acquitted. Though the art world remains captivated by the mysterious nature of Mendieta’s passing, her sister emphasised the importance of removing Ana’s work from her life story. “I don’t want it to get in the way of the work,” she said. “Her death has really nothing to do with her work. Her work was about life and power and energy and not about death.”

Fellow feminist performance artist Carolee Schneeman disagrees, however, telling The New York Times in 2004: “I see her death as part of some larger denial of the feminine. Like a huge metaphor saying, we don’t want this depth of feminine eroticism, nature, absorption, integration to happen. It’s too organic. It’s too sacral. In a way, her death also has a symbolic trajectory.”

Since many of Mendieta’s artworks were bodily performances, the ephemera that remain are but traces of her original endeavours. For an artist whose career was built on imprints, ghosts and impressions, this seems aptly fitting. Visceral yet distant, bodily yet spiritual, Mendieta’s images speak a language very distant from the insular artistic themes that so often populate gallery and museum walls. Mendieta’s works present the female body turned out, at once vulnerable and all-powerful, frail and supernatural. As her retrospective makes obvious, her artistic traces are still oozing lifeblood.

Priscilla Frank. “The Haunting Traces Of Ana Mendieta Go On View (NSFW),” on the Huffington Post website February 4, 2014 [Online] Cited 30/06/2014. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985)
Untitled
1976
“Silueta Series, Mexico”
Colour photograph (lifetime print)
39.8 x 31 x 3.2cm (framed)
Tate
Presented by the American Patrons of Tate, courtesy of the Latin American Acquisitions Committee 2010

Mendieta formed a silueta on the beach at La Ventosa, Mexico, filling it with red tempera that was ultimately washed away by the ocean waves. The artist documented the obliteration of the figure by the tide in a sequence of 35 mm slides.

Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985)
Tree of Life
1976
Colour photograph, lifetime print
Collection Raquelín Mendieta Family Trust
© The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, L.L.C.
Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York and Paris and Alison Jacques Gallery, London

Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985)
Untitled
1978
“Silueta Series, Iowa”
Colour photograph (lifetime print)
25.4 x 20.3cm
The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection; courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York and Paris

Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985)
Itiba Cahubaba (Esculturas Rupestres) [Old Mother Blood (Rupestrian Sculptures)]
1982
Black and white photograph, box mounted, exhibition copy
Collection Ignacio C. Mendieta
© The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, L.L.C.
Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York and Paris and Alison Jacques Gallery, London

Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985)
Untitled
1982
Graphite on leaf of a copey tree (Clusia major)
E. Righi Collection
© The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, L.L.C.
Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York and Paris and Alison Jacques Gallery, London

Ana Mendieta with Untitled wood sculpture, 1984-1985
© The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, L.L.C.
Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York and Paris and Alison Jacques Gallery, London

Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985)
El Laberinto de Venus (Labyrinth of Venus)
1985
Acrylic on paper
Collection Raquelín Mendieta Family Trust
© The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, L.L.C.
Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York and Paris and Alison Jacques Gallery, London

Museum der Moderne Salzburg
Mönchsberg 32
5020 Salzburg
Phone: +43 662 842220

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Sunday: 10.00am – 6.00pm
Wednesday: 10.00am – 8.00pm
Monday: closed

Museum der Moderne website

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Exhibition: ‘John Divola: As Far As I Could Get’ at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)

Exhibition dates: 6th October, 2013 – 6th July, 2014

Curator: Britt Salvesen

John Divola (American, b. 1949)
Cone, 87CN09
1987
Black and White Polapan Print (Polaroid)
20 x 24 inches
© John Divola

FINALLY… two postings on consecutive days by conceptual artists who use photography to document their staging, performance, sculpture, body, earth-body, action art, found art, land art – WORK THAT I REALLY LIKE AND CAN REALLY CARE ABOUT.

I care about both artists work not so much because of the quality of the photography but because of their passion, insight, ideas and general human nous, their need to understand humans and the worlds we inhabit: that INTELLIGENCE necessary for understanding what is true or real, using their intuition to root out, to dig down into the human psyche.

In this posting Divola eloquently investigates the mysterious process of creation through imagination (only for the original “model” then to be destroyed); the notion of photographic authenticity and an interrogation of the human impulse to master the natural world; photography at its most deceptively naturalistic revealing hidden, dead animals; and the landscape altered by human presence and staged to serve as a theatre for creative activity through the “captured” act of running away.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Installation view of 'John Divola: As Far As I Could Get' at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)

Installation views of John Divola: As Far As I Could Get at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)
© John Divola Photo
© 2013 Museum Associates/LACMA

John Divola (American, b. 1949)
Man in Vortex, 87CA2
1987
Black and White Polapan Print (Polaroid)
20 x 24 inches
© John Divola

In Divola’s words, the Polaroids feature “The photograph as an object has an relationship to that which it represents, something like the relationship the snake skin has to the snake that sheds it. The relationship of something dead to something living.” The Polapan prints especially lend themselves to this associate with skin. Their plasticity and their alchemical marks bear witness to a mysterious process of creation; their subject matter conjured up, and then discarded. Divola’s “studio constructions,” as he called them, were temporary structures made solely for the purpose of photographic depiction, including funnels, human and animal figures, and expressively painted backdrops. Divola’s photographs are themselves echo chambers: they replicate and reverberate light from objects that have long since vanished.

Divola’s process has important photo-conceptual precedents: Richard Long’s photographic records of lines made by walking, Jan Dibbets’ play with optical illusion through the camera’s lens, or Robert Smithson’s Yucatan Mirror Displacements. Divola’s work, though, is equally in conversation with the work of Jasper Johns. Johns, known for his paintings of numbers, flags, maps, and targets, focused on flat subjects as a means to conjoining the surface of subject matter with a painting’s flat picture plane. Divola has transmuted the achievements and medium-specificity of high modern painting into images that explore photography’s mimetic qualities and its sheer surface. These are images are about a recognisable reality we cannot access, dim echoes of a familiar world, yet one that has vanished.

Anonymous. “JOHN DIVOLA – Echo Chamber” on the Gallery Luisotti website [Online] Cited 01/07/2014. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

John Divola (American, b. 1949)
Rock and Water #1, 88RW1
1988
Black and White Polapan Print (Polaroid)
20 x 24 inches
© John Divola

John Divola (American, b. 1949)
Cells, 87CA1
1987-1989
Internal Dye-diffusion print
20 x 24 inches
© John Divola

John Divola (American, b. 1949)
Man on Hill, 89MHA1
1987-1989
Internal Dye-diffusion Print
20 x 24 inches
© John Divola

John Divola (American, b. 1949)
Moon, 88MOA1
1988
Internal Dye-diffusion print
20 x 24 inches
Courtesy of the artist
© John Divola

John Divola (American, b. 1949)
Rabbit, 87RBA1
1987
Internal Dye-diffusion print
20 x 24 inches
Courtesy of the artist
© John Divola

John Divola (American, b. 1949)
Artificial Nature (detail, 1 of 36)
2002
Gelatin Silver Print
8 x 10 in.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, purchased with funds provided by the Ralph M. Parsons Fund and the Photographic Arts Council, 2013
© John Divola

Across the gallery is a series of found photographs, “Artificial Nature” (2002), made up of continuity stills (the photographs taken on film sets to make ensure uniformity from scene to scene) from mid-century films. The photographs show fabricated landscapes created in studio backlots. The images zero in on the notion of photographic truth – the idea that when you look at a photograph, what you’re seeing is an accurate representation of the world – by presenting a false natural landscape. Without outside knowledge, upon first glance, the photographs look like ordinary landscapes.

Maxwell Williams. “John Divola’s SoCal Moment,” on the Art in America website [Online] Cited 01/07/2014. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

“Artificial Nature” (2002) stands out, and as with many of Divola’s series, the bluntness of the title belies the delicacy and actual locus of interest. Composed of thirty-six “continuity stills”, these black and white prints have been repurposed from movie studio archives, framed and hung in a tight grid. Ranging in provenance from the 1930s to the 1960s, each picture documents a movie set dressed as a lush, natural landscape. A clapperboard sign planted in the foreground might identify the scene as “wooded hillside” or “the beach.” At once romantic and businesslike, the series opens a delicious gap between intention and effect. To view these pictures only through the lens of nature vs. artifice would be reductive and superficial at best. Treat them instead as a peek into the cabinetry of early pop mechanics, or evidence of a peculiar temporality where worlds should be fixed with a sign because they so routinely congeal and vanish.

Kristin Posehn. “John Divola: As Far As I Could Get,” on The Miami Rail website [Online] Cited 01/07/2014. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

John Divola (American, b. 1949)
Artificial Nature (detail, 4 of 36)
2002
Gelatin Silver Print
8 x 10 in.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, purchased with funds provided by the Ralph M. Parsons Fund and the Photographic Arts Council, 2013
© John Divola

With a career compromising four decades, John Divola is as distinctive for his commitment to the photographic community as for his thought-provoking work, Divola’s influence within the field of photography is widely recognised by curators, critics, scholars and photographers throughout the country; yet, his work has remained largely uncelebrated. Many of his former students have achieved illustrious careers and far more recognition, even as Divola continues to mentor and inspire both undergraduate and graduate students in contemporary practice.

As Far As I Could Get is the first over-arching presentation of Divola’s work and is a collaborative project led by the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (SBMA), shown simultaneously at SBMA, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and the Pomona College Museum of Art (PCMA) in the fall of 2013. Though Divola’s photographic series are diverse in subject matter, this approach as one exhibition among three Southern California venues emphasises the consistent conceptual and performative threads that run through Divola’s entire body of work.

Divola was born in Los Angeles in 1949. After graduating with a BA from California State University, Northridge, he entered the MFA program at the University of California Los Angeles. There, under the tutelage of Robert Heineken, the artist began to develop his own unique photographic practice, one that merges photography, painting, and conceptual art. In addition to his own studio practice, he teaches contemporary art in the underserved California inland empire and writes on current photographic practice for a national audience.

John Divola’s photos of photographs range widely but the intellectual rigour from which they spring is unvarying. Whether testing the visual limits of photography by vandalising abandoned houses, interrogating the iconography of the divine through paint, flour, and film, or emphasising the distance between image and reality through the blurred figure of a running dog, Divola’s work is simultaneously fun and philosophical, visually appealing as well as intellectually stimulating.

LACMA On view: Four series of John Divola’s work in the Ahmanson Building, 2nd Floor

The series 20 x 24 Polaroids is Divola’s earliest work exhibited at LACMA, shot between 1987 and 1989. Hastily fabricated sculptures created out of impermanent materials attempt, on one level, to approximate actual physical objects in the world – branches, a rabbit, the moon, etc. At the same time, the roughly-hewn surfaces and ticky-tacky backdrops insist on the artificiality of what is depicted. These works express Divola’s ambivalence to the idea of photography as a descriptive medium with a one-to-one relationship to the real. Photography, in this case, is not employed in the service of documentary truth, but instead is held up as a crucial interlocutor in a creative exercise.

Artificial Nature (2002) offers a clear example of Divola’s interrogation of the human impulse to master the natural world. The work is a collection of 36 continuity stills from films made between the 1930s and the 1960s. These photographs, taken on film sets to establish consistency across multiple cuts (to ensure that the placement of objects remains constant from take to take), document fabricated landscapes contained within the artificial space of the film studio. Representing the diversity of natural topographies add weather patterns, the images also include accessories such as signage and clapperboards, highlighting the distance between ourselves and the natural world – a distance that is only accentuated by cinematic representation.

Seven Songbirds and a Rabbit (1995) is a series of details from the Keystone Mast collection of stereographic negatives housed at the California Museum of Photography, University of California Riverside. Stereoscopy, a three-dimensional imaging technology popular from the mid 19th to the early 20th century, exemplifies photography at its most deceptively naturalistic. When Divola began to examine the original glass-plate negatives in the Keystone collection, he found a wealth of detail, such as the birds and rabbit nestled amidst the foliage that gave the series its title.

The series As Far As I Could Get (1996-2010), five works of which are included in the LACMA exhibition, has Divola once again engaging with the natural environment, but this time in a more performative vein. Divola positioned his camera on a tripod, set the timer for ten seconds, and then ran straight into the established frame. At one level, this was a completely dispassionate endeavour. On another level, because the resulting pictures depict a man in a landscape, not in a controlled experimental setting, the viewer cannot suppress a frisson of physical and emotional tension. The works engage the viewer with the natural landscape – a landscape altered by human presence and staged to serve as a theatre for creative activity.

Press release from the LACMA website

John Divola (American, b. 1949) 'Seven Songbirds and a Rabbit' 1995 (detail)

John Divola (American, b. 1949)
Seven Songbirds and a Rabbit (details)
1995
Gelatin Silver Print on Linen
20 x 20 inches
© John Divola

John Divola (American, b. 1949)
As Far As I Could Get (R02F09), 10 Seconds
1996-1997
Pigment Print
60 x 40 inches
© John Divola

John Divola (American, b. 1949)
As Far As I Could Get (R02F06), 10 Seconds
1996-1997
Pigment Print
60 x 40 inches
© John Divola

“Divola is a photographer who works in distinct conceptual series that span and stretch the reaches of photography as art. For instance, at LACMA, the works include a series called “As Far As I Could Get” (1996-2010), where Divola sets a 10-second timer and sprints as far from the camera as he can. It’s performative, simple, amusing and alienating – a tiny body in full physical exertion, far off in the landscape.”

Maxwell Williams. “John Divola’s SoCal Moment,” on the Art in America website [Online] Cited 01/07/2014. No longer available online.

John Divola (American, b. 1949)
As Far As I Could Get (R02F33), 10 Seconds
1996-1997
Pigment Print
60 x 40 inches
© John Divola

John Divola (American, b. 1949)
As Far As I Could Get, 10 Seconds
1996-1997
Pigment Print
60 x 40 inches
© John Divola

John Divola (American, b. 1949)
As Far As I Could Get (R02F33), 10 Seconds
1996-1997
Pigment Print
60 x 40 inches
© John Divola

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Phone: 323 857 6000

Opening hours:
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Friday: 11am – 8pm
Saturday, Sunday: 10am – 7pm
Closed Wednesday

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Review: ‘Concrete’ at the Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA), Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 3rd May – 5th July, 2014

Curator: Geraldine Kirrihi Barlow

Artists: Laurence Aberhart (NZ), Jananne al-Ani (IRQ/UK), Kader Attia (DEU/DZA), Saskia Doherty (AUS), Fabien Giraud & Raphaël Siboni (FRA), Igor Grubić (CRO), Carlos Irijalba (ESP), Nicholas Mangan (AUS), Rä di Martino (ITY), Ricky Maynard (AUS), Callum Morton (AUS), Tom Nicholson (AUS), Jamie North (AUS), Justin Trendall (AUS) and James Tylor (AUS)

Igor Grubic (Croatia, b. 1969) 'Monument' 2014 (still) from the exhibition 'Concrete' at the Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA), Melbourne, May - July, 2014

Igor Grubic (Croatia, b. 1969)
Monument
2014
Video still
Courtesy of the artist

While not as strong as previous exhibitions such as NETWORKS (cells & silos) (2011) and Reinventing the Wheel: the Readymade Century (2013), this exhilarating show at the Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA) confirms that this is the premier public gallery in Melbourne staging intellectually stimulating group exhibitions on specific ideas, concepts and themes.

There are some really interesting works here and I easily spent an hour and a half on each visit pondering, looking, thinking and inquiring. Some of the work is a little overexposed, such as Tom Nicholson’s Comparative monument (Palestine) (2012) – seen in Melbourne Now; Nicholas Mangan’s Some kinds of duration (2011), Ricky Maynard’s photographs and even more Callum Morton after his appearance in the Reinventing the Wheel exhibition. It’s about time some other local artists were given a go.

Justin Trendall’s white Lego buildings are stunning; Laurence Aberhart’s war memorials are printed too dark and seemed to be neither a record nor a feeling (they looked so much better in the recently published book); James Tylor’s photographs are adaptive as they seek to place traditional Indigenous dwellings back into the landscape but the base photographs from which he is working are not up to much; Rä di Martino’s Star Wars ruins are just too cute; and Carlos Irijalba’s drilling/tides are fascinating, but only if you know the context from which the work emanates. Video art was the highlight of the exhibition, and I don’t get to make that statement too often. Igor Grubic’s film Monument (2014, below) was mesmerising, as was Jananne al-Ani’s Shadow sites II (2011, below) – two of the best pieces of video art I have seen in a long time.

Monument features a series of meditative ‘portraits’ of the massive concrete memorials called ‘Spomenik’ built by the former Yugoslav communist state. Grubic abstracts these huge, cathedral-like memorials to various battles (usually of the Second World War) and events, instead focusing on textures, environments and seasons. He photographs the monuments in mist and accompanies the images with ambient soundscapes that are haunting and evocative. The film holds the viewer in the palm of its hand and you are unable to look away, as the artist’s camera scours the surface of concrete and steel, intercut with branches and leaves, angles and vistas, pulling back and pushing forward. Usually video art doesn’t hold my attention for all but a few minutes but this film you can’t take your eyes from. The screen flickers and crackles, fades to orange and back again – its almost like a failure of transmission, as though the signal is not strong enough to support these interstitial spaces.

In Jananne al-Ani’s immersive film Shadow sites II, the viewer sits in a darkened room and the screen is full width of the space. Here, we are constantly moving forward and the camera never pulls back from the image. The film offers a sequence of aerial views in sepia tones; second by second our perspective nears the ground – but we never arrive. Accompanied by a David Sylvian style ambient soundtrack, the images are absolutely beautiful and intriguing as they morph one to another. Are you looking at the earth, the ground or a closeup of the surface of concrete, such as the patterns in Man Ray’s Dust Breeding (1920), which documents Duchamp’s The Large Glass after it had collected a year’s worth of dust while he was in New York? You are never quite sure…

The other thing to note with this exhibition is that, like many contemporary exhibitions, there are no wall notes or even a hand-out at the beginning that would enable the casual visitor to gain insight into the nature and meaning of the works. If I had not read the press release and done my own research I would have had no idea about the origins of some of the concepts for the work. This really is not good enough for the casual visitor to the gallery, any gallery. Are visitors expected to spend hours before they arrive, researching what the work is about so that they might actually understand what is going on? I took a friend to the gallery and luckily I was on hand to explain to her the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of the works concepts and origins. For example, if you read the wall label for Monuments you would have no idea that these were in Yugoslavia and that they had mostly been built to honour the dead from World War II; similarly, if you read the wall label to Carlos Irijalba’s High Tides (drilling) (2012) you would gain only the vaguest idea that the soil drilling sample was taken from under the tarmac of a former weapons factory in the Urdaibai or Guernica Estuary, Basque Country. Guernica – that place of horror bombed in the Spanish Civil War and most notably memorialised in the painting by Picasso of the same name. We, the viewer, need to know these things… not as an addendum after hours of reading, or on getting home and reading the catalogue essay – but while we are at the gallery!

While artists hint at the meaning of a work, leaving interpretation open ended and up to the viewer’s imagination and what life history they bring to the work, it may be useful and indeed I think desirable to provide the viewer with some tangible clues. Not much, just a paragraph that they can take with them to help with interpretation. It’s not much to ask, is it?

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

“Concrete is an interesting metaphor in the sense that it’s an aggregate that’s then bonded together. In some ways, that might represent this positive idea of pluralism, or it could be this completely hideous idea of homogeneity. Many of the works deal with samples of time and cycles violence and trauma and how we go about representing that history.”

Geraldine Kirrihi Barlow

Igor Grubic (Croatia, b. 1969)
Monument
2014
Video still
Courtesy of the artist

Igor Grubic (Croatia, b. 1969)
Monument (work in progress)
Installation view, Monash University Museum of Art, 2014
2014
Video projection, colour, sound
53 minutes
Photo: Christian Capurro

Born in Zagreb, Croatia, 1969. Lives and works in Zagreb

In the film Monument Zagreb-based artist Igor Grubic offers a series of meditative ‘portraits’ of the massive concrete memorials built by the former Yugoslav state. With the rise of neo-fascism these mysterious sentinel forms, originally intended to honour World War II victims of fascism, are increasingly subject to neglect, even attack.

Emphasising the unexpected fragility of these monumental structures, Grubic sets human attempts to fix meaning, memory and the experience of loss against a backdrop of seasonal change. In a landscape which has witnessed so many cycles of trauma and upheaval, this work mirrors the rise and fall of many monuments built to preserve the memory of events which might otherwise be forgotten. Can such forms ever communicate a stable message through time?

“The work is void of explanation or commentary, instead concentrating on the surfaces of the monuments, their surrounding environments and the shifting seasons. We are left with little but their looming presence. “When we were filming, I was trying to read them without ideological background or context, but at the same time I couldn’t help but feel the fact that lots of people died and suffered at these sites – I could feel a real sense of spirituality. I began seeing them as new cathedrals in a way.””

Text from the Sydney Morning Herald website. Used under fair used conditions for the purposes of education and research

Jananne al-Ani (Iraq, b. 1966) 'Shadow sites II' 2011 (still) from the exhibition 'Concrete' at the Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA), Melbourne, May - July, 2014

Jananne al-Ani (Iraq, b. 1966)
Shadow sites II
2011
Video still
Courtesy of the artist

Born in Kirkuk, Iraq, 1966. Lives and works in London

Jananne al-Ani’s film Shadow sites II offers a sequence of aerial views in sepia tones; second by second our perspective nears the ground. Our appreciation of the formal beauty of these images co-exists with our unease as we try to determine what it is we are looking at. Are these archaeological sites, or housing compounds damaged by missile or drone strikes? Iraqi-born al-Ani notes as inspiration the ‘strange beauty’ of Edward Steichen’s 1918 photographs of the Western Front taken whilst he was a member of the US Aerial Expeditionary Force.

“UK-based Iraqi artist Jananne al-Ani’s striking video work saw her film archaeological sites in the Middle East from high up in a fixed-wing airplane, the shadows of the early morning and late evening revealing former buildings, structures and sites of significance in extraordinary resolution. While al-Ani’s work evokes the nightmarish recent histories of drone strikes and bombing campaigns, it also digs deep into the past.”

Text from the Sydney Morning Herald website. Used under fair used conditions for the purposes of education and research

Extracts from Jananne al-Ani’s film Shadow sites II 2011

James Tylor (Australia, b. 1986)
(Deleted scenes) From an untouched landscape #3
2013
Inkjet print on Hahemuhle paper with hole removed to a black velvet void, ed. 4/5
Photo: Christian Capurro

James Tylor (Australia, b. 1986)
(Deleted scenes) From an untouched landscape #1
2013
Inkjet print on Hahemuhle paper with hole removed to a black velvet void, ed. 4/5
Photo: Christian Capurro

James Tylor (Australia, b. 1986)
Un-resettling (stone footing for dome hut)
2013
Hand coloured archival inkjet prints
Courtesy of the artist

Born in Mildura, Victoria. Lives and works in Adelaide, South Australia

Australian cities and communities feature a wide array of memorials, however the long history of Indigenous Australia is almost entirely absent from such solid forms of public acknowledgement. In Un-resettling James Tylor presents the beginnings of a formal typology of Indigenous dwellings, a number of which relate to his own personal heritage. Tylor states, “Un-resettling seeks to place traditional Indigenous dwellings back into the landscape as a public reminder that they once appeared throughout the area.” Tylor’s photographs remind us of the invisible histories of this land, for instance the fertile volcanic plains west of Melbourne with remnants of stone dwellings and larger ceremonial sites of which there is little public knowledge.

Kader Attia (French Algerian, b. 1970) 'Rochers carrés' 2008

Kader Attia (French Algerian, b. 1970)
Rochers carrés [Square rocks]
2008
Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Nagel Draxler, Berlin and Cologne

Concrete installation view, Monash University Museum of Art, 2014
Justin Trendall (at right), Tom Nicholson (on floor, see below), James Tylor (back wall middle, see above), Kader Attia (back wall left, see above)
Photo: Christian Capurro

Concrete installation view, Monash University Museum of Art, 2014
Justin Trendall (back left), Tom Nicholson (on floor, see below), Rä di Martino (back wall right, see below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Rä di Martino (Italian, b. 1975) 'No More Stars (Abandoned Movie Set, Star Wars)' 2010 (detail)

Rä di Martino (Italian, b. 1975)
No More Stars (Abandoned Movie Set, Star Wars) 33°50’34 N 7°46’44 E Chot El-Gharsa, Tunisia 01 September 2010 (detail)
2010
Series of 9 photographs, unique edition, lambda prints, wooden frame
30cm x 30cm each

No More Stars (Abandoned Movie Set, Star Wars) 33°50’34 N 7°46’44 E Chot El-Gharsa, Tunisia 01 September 2010 is a series of photographs taken in the abandoned movie sets of the film saga Star Wars, filmed through the years in different locations in the south of Tunisia. Unexpectedly those sets have been left on the locations so after years have now mostly become ruins, almost as some sort strange archeological sites. The particular hot and dry climate has helped maintain intact many parts of the sets, or buried under the sand just sections of it. (Artist statement)

In September 2010, New York-based visual artist and filmmaker Rä di Martino set out on a quest to photograph and document old abandoned film sets in the North African deserts of Tunisia. The project had started when she discovered that it was common practice to abandon these sets without tearing them down, leaving them fully intact and crumbling over time, like archeological ruins. Martino spent that month traveling around Chott el Djerid in Tunisia, finding and photographing three Star Wars sets in all for her photo series No More Stars and Every World’s a Stage.

“I think is very interesting the amazing poetic potential of those ruins, being ruins of something that was the future in our imagination,” Martino explained in an email to The Huffington Post. “It’s bewildering to see the biological decay of those cheap materials, which once built perfect images of our past and future.”

Tom Nicholson. 'Comparative monument (Palestine)' 2012

Tom Nicholson (Australian, b. 1973)
Comparative monument (Palestine)
2012
9 stacks of 1000 two-sided off-set printed posters
50 x 50cm each

Proposition for a monument, articulated as 9 stacks of 1000 two-sided off-set printed posters, each 50 x 50cm, for visitors to take away, and also pasted up around Ramallah.

Comparative monument (Palestine) is a proposition for a future monument, which takes the form of nine stacks of posters, from which the audience is free to take a poster. The project began with a search for war monuments bearing the name ‘Palestine’ erected in and around Melbourne in the early 1920s to commemorate the presence of Australian troops in Palestine during WW1. This project rethinks possibilities for the monument and suggests new forms of connection between different parts of the world and their histories.

Throughout Australia, war monuments bear the name “Palestine” to commemorate the presence of Australian troops in Palestine during World War I and, in particular, Australian involvement in the 1917 British capture of Beersheba (in turn a critical city in the events of 1948 and the Nakba). These monuments also reflect the realities of the 1920s (when they were erected) and the era of the British Mandate, when the name Palestine implicitly invoked the shared position of Australia and Palestine within British imperialism. Comparative monument (Palestine) begins with a complete photographic record of these monuments bearing the name “Palestine” in and around Melbourne. Figuring this material into a Palestinian context – both a kind of “homecoming” and exile for these Australian monumental forms – becomes a way to reanimate these linkages between Australia and Palestine. In these forms dedicated to 1917, Nicholson implicates the events and repercussions of 1948 with their echoes of Australian Aboriginal experiences of dispossession and colonial violence. Comparative monument (Palestine) is an attempt to rethink the possibilities of the monument in the face of these histories of dispossession and the acts of imagination and solidarity these histories demand.

Nicholas Mangan (Australian, b. 1979) 'Some kinds of duration' 2011 (detail)

Nicholas Mangan (Australian, b. 1979)
Some kinds of duration (detail)
2011
Installation view, Monash University Museum of Art, 2014
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Nicholas Mangan (Australian, b. 1979)
Some kinds of duration
2011
Installation view, Monash University Museum of Art, 2014
Photo: Christian Capurro

MUMA’s second exhibition for 2014, Concrete brings together the work of twelve artists, both Australian and international. The exhibition explores the concrete, or the solid and its counter: change, the flow of time. As we prepare to mark the centenary of the First World War, the exhibition considers the impact of time upon built and monumental form, reading between materiality and emotion, form and memory.

Monuments reflect a desire for commemoration, truth, honour and justice. Equally, they may function to consolidate political power and national identity. Works in the exhibition locate the monumental in relation to longer cycles of construction, displacement and erasure; archaeology, geology and palaeontology; the shifting politics of memory and ways to describe a history of place.

“Concrete explores the human desire to mark our presence as a complex drive for memory – as well as the need for a blank or negative, a placeholder for the unknowable, the unsayable, the missing.”

Exhibition curator, Geraldine Kirrihi Barlow:

“Concrete introduces a number of artists to Australian audiences for the very first time. Continuing MUMA’s highly regarded series of thematic and discursive exhibitions, and presenting a broad range of significant projects, Concrete considers the function of monuments and ruins from poetic, material and political perspectives.”

Director, Charlotte Day

Text from the MUMA press release

Carlos Irijalba (Spanish, b. 1979) 'High Tides (drilling)' 2012 (installation view)

Carlos Irijalba (Spanish, b. 1979)
High Tides (drilling) (installation view)
2012
Installation view
Courtesy of the artist

Carlos Irijalba (Spanish, b. 1979) 'High Tides (drilling)' 2012 (installation view detail)

Carlos Irijalba (Spanish, b. 1979)
High Tides (drilling) (installation view detail)
2012
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Born in Pamplona, Spain, 1979. Lives and works in Amsterdam, Netherlands

High Tides (drilling) by Carlos Irijalba presents a 17 metre drilling core from the site of a former weapons factory in the Urdaibai or Guernica Estuary, Basque Country. Beneath an asphalt ‘cap’, layers of soil, clay, limestone and the sedimentary rock Marga are evident. The bombing of Guernica is remembered for its devastating impact upon the civilian population and was the subject of an iconic painting by Pablo Picasso. Irijalba offers a window into the history of this place, as well as longer geological measures of time and materiality.

Tides I, II and III 2012 is a series of three photographs of converging layers of asphalt from which the sample has been taken. Together, these images detail a common surface so ubiquitous we cannot value it as rare or particular. And yet these images record a very specific piece of ‘ground’ or earth, just as they also suggest a vast aerial view, perhaps the meeting of two oceans.

Concrete installation view, Monash University Museum of Art, 2014
Laurence Aberhart (left), Jamie North (doorway), Carlos Irijalba (right)
Photo: Christian Capurro

Laurence Aberhart (New Zealand, b. 1949)
Auroa Taranaki
1991
Silver gelatin photograph

Laurence Aberhart (New Zealand, b. 1949)
Matakana, North Auckland
1994
Silver gelatin photograph

Born in New Zealand, 1949. Lives and works in Russell, Northland, New Zealand

Photographer Laurence Aberhart is drawn to the edge of dominant historical narratives, creating archives of built and monumental forms particular to certain places and periods of time. He returns to these chosen subjects repeatedly. His photographs of the ANZAC memorials of Australia and New Zealand have been taken over the past thirty years. Familiar across both countries, the memorials were built after the First World War to commemorate those who served with the Australia and New Zealand Army Corps. Very few families were able to visit the graves of those who died, and so these monuments served the bereaved as well as larger national concerns. As we approach the centenary of the war, these memorials are the focus of greater attention, yet what they mean is difficult to lock down. In these images the single figure on each column is a fixed point against landscapes in states of constant change.

Saskia Doherty
Footfalls
2013-2014
Cast concrete and printed paper
Installation view, Monash University Museum of Art, 2014
Photo: Christian Capurro

Saskia Doherty poetically references the Samuel Beckett play Footfalls, expanding on an image of famed American palaeontologist Dr Barnum Brown discovering a dinosaur footprint with texts and concrete sculptural gestures, describing the footprint as “a vastly preserved index of a life”.

Jamie North (Australian, b. 1971)
Tropic cascade #1 and #2
2014
Cement, blast furnace slag, coal ash, galvanised steel, Australian native plants
Installation view, Monash University Museum of Art, 2014
Photo: Christian Capurro

Jamie North (Australian, b. 1971) 'Tropic cascade #2' 2014 (installation view detail)

Jamie North (Australian, b. 1971)
Tropic cascade #2 (installation view detail)
2014
Cement, blast furnace slag, coal ash, galvanised steel, Australian native plants
Installation view, Monash University Museum of Art, 2014
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA)
Ground Floor, Building F.
Monash University Caulfield campus
900 Dandenong Road
Caulfield East, VIC 3145
Phone: 61 3 9905 4217

Opening hours:
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Saturday 12 – 5pm

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Exhibition: ‘Hans Richter: Encounters – “From Dada till today”‘ at Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin

Exhibition dates: 27th March – 30th June, 2014

Curator: Timothy Benson

Hans Richter (German, 1888-1976) 'Blue Man' 1917 from the exhibition 'Hans Richter: Encounters – "From Dada till today"' at Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, March - June, 2014

Hans Richter (German, 1888-1976)
Blue Man
1917
Oil on canvas
61 x 48.5cm
© Kunsthaus Zürich, Geschenk Frida Richter, 1977
© Estate Hans Richter

Many thankx to Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin for allowing me to publish the art work in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Marcus

“One can also pursue politics with art.
Everything that intervenes in the processes of life, and transforms them, is politics.”

Hans Richter

The oeuvre of Hans Richter (1888-1976) spanned nearly seven decades. Born in Berlin, he was one of the most significant champions of modernism. Berlin, Paris, Munich, Zurich, Moscow and New York were the major stations of his life. He was a painter and draughtsman, a Dadaist and a Constructivist, a film maker and a theoretician, as well as a great teacher. His great scroll collages remain icons of art history to this day. His work is characterised by a virtually unparalleled interpenetration of different artistic disciplines. The link between film and art was his major theme. Many of the most famous artists of the first half of the twentieth century were among his friends.

Hans Richter (German, 1888-1976) 'Ghosts Before Breakfast' 1928

Hans Richter (German, 1888-1976)
Ghosts Before Breakfast (Vormittagsspuk)
1928
B/W, 35mm
Approx. 7 minutes
© Estate Hans Richter

Hans Richter Ghosts Before Breakfast – 1929 German DaDa silent film

Hans Richter created the film Ghosts Before Breakfast (Vormittagsspuk) in 1928. This was a silent experimental avant-garde film and it was the fifth film that he had made. The film is considered to be one of the first surrealist films ever made. Richter’s interest in Dadaism is shown directly in this work as he challenges the art standards of the time by presenting a theme of obscurity and fantasy. Clocks, legs, ladders, hats, and people undergo total irrational happenings in unusual settings. Men have beards magically appear and disappear before the viewer’s eyes. All strange manner of things are brought together by associative logic. The flying hats perform this function by continually reappearing in the sequence of shots to tie the film together. Richter tries to increase the viewer’s knowledge of reality of showing them surrealist fantasy. He accomplished this through his use of rhythm, and his use of the camera.

Rhythm is a very important element in all of Richter’s works. In this film rhythm is shown in the use of movement in the characters. All of the characters seem to move at the same space distance from one another and at the same speed. This clarifies a sense of rhythm and intensifies a sense of stability within the frame. The same number of characters or items also seems to preserve rhythm… if there are three hats then in the next shot there are three men. The numbers do fluctuate, but a number would remain constant throughout a couple of shots. Shapes in the film also preserve rhythm. This can be seen in Richter’s bulls-eye scene, where the circles of the bulls-eye fill the screen and are spaced equally apart from one another. The target then breaks up and the circles the spread out in the frame to relocate in different areas continuing the rhythm.

The original score, attributed to Paul Hindemith, was destroyed in the Nazi purge of ‘degenerate art’.

Unknown artist. 'Hans Richter, Sergei Eisenstein and Man Ray, Paris' 1929 from the exhibition 'Hans Richter: Encounters – "From Dada till today"' at Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, March - June, 2014

Unknown artist
Hans Richter, Sergei Eisenstein and Man Ray, Paris
1929
© Estate Hans Richter
© 2013 Man Ray Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

Dreams That Money Can Buy 1947 (Fantasy Film) Hans Richter, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray

A young man discovers he can create dreams and sells them to others. The film as a whole is an exploration of the subconscious mind and the interplay between dreams and reality. This frame story serves as a link between several dream sequences created by leading visual artists. An attempt to bring the work of surrealist artists to a wider public. The avant-garde / surrealism / dadaism artists who contributed to the film include Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Alexander Calder, Fernand Léger, and Richter himself.

Text from the YouTube website

Dreams That Money Can Buy excerpt – John Cage dream sequence

Joe/Narcissus (Jack Bittner) is an ordinary man who has recently signed a complicated lease on a room. As he wonders how to pay the rent, he discovers that he can see the contents of his mind unfolding whilst looking into his eyes in the mirror. He realises that he can apply his gift to others (“If you can look inside yourself, you can look inside anyone!”), and sets up a business in his room, selling tailor-made dreams to a variety of frustrated and neurotic clients. Each of the seven surreal dream sequences in the diegesis is in fact the creation of a contemporary avant-garde and / or surrealist artist (such as Marcel Duchamp, Alexander Calder, Max Ernst et al). Joe’s waiting room is full within minutes of his first day of operation, “the first instalment of the 2 billion clients” according to the male narrator in voiceover, whose voice is the only one we hear in the non-dream sequences.

Hans Richter (German, 1888-1976)
Dreams That Money Can Buy
1944-1947
Color, 16mm
Approx. 83 minutes
© Estate Hans Richter

HR Productions
Production still of Dreams That Money Can Buy
1944-1947
Left: Jack Bittner, Middle: Hans Richter
© Estate Hans Richter
Foto: HR Productions

Hans Richter (1888-1976) life’s work spans nearly 70 years. Born in Berlin, he is one of the most important protagonists of modernity. Berlin, Paris, Munich, Zurich, Moscow and New York are stages of his life. He was a painter and draftsman, Dadaist and Constructivist, filmmakers and theorists, and also a great teacher. His great scroll collages remain icons of art history to this day. His work is characterised by a virtually unparalleled interpenetration of different artistic disciplines. The link between film and art was his major theme. Many of the most famous artists of the first half of the 20th Century were his friends.

Hans Richter: Encounters from Dada to the Present is the title of one of his books, published in the 1970s. By that time in the West in postwar Germany there had been a rediscovery of this important artist, outlawed by the Nazis, whose work was shown in 1937 in the infamous exhibition “Degenerate Art”. For the first time since the 1980s, this big Berlin artist has a dedicated exhibition in his home town, with over 140 works, including his important films and about 50 works of those artists who were influenced by Hans Richter. Hans Richter worked with multimedia in an era when this term hadn’t even been invented. The movie he saw as part of Modern Art: “Film absolutely opens your eyes to what the camera is and what it can and wants to do.”

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has developed the exhibition with the Martin-Gropius-Bau and the Centre Pompidou Metz. Timothy Benson has curated it. The program explains how Richter understood his cross-disciplinary work and what effect his work had on the art of the 20th century. In ten chapters, the exhibition describes the extensive work of the artist: Early Portraits / War and Revolution / Dada / Richter and Eggeling / Magazine “G” / Malevich and Richter / Film and Photo (FIFO) / Painting / Series / Confronting the Object. Important works of the avant-garde as well as films, photographs, and extensive documentary material make this exhibition an important artistic event.

Hans Richter was active in the broad field of the European avant-garde beginning in the 1910s. Not only art, but also the new medium of film interested him from the very start of his artistic career. In 1908 Hans Richter began his studies at the School of Fine Arts in Berlin. He switched to Weimar the following year. In 1910 he studied at the Académie Julian in Paris. Starting in 1913 he was associated with Herwarth Walden’s gallery Der Sturm and became acquainted with the artists of the “Brücke” and the “Blauer Reiter”. He distributed Marinetti’s “Futurist Manifesto” to hackney drivers in Berlin. In 1914 he also drew for Franz Pfemfert’s magazine Die Aktion and was called up to military service in the summer of that year. In 1916, having suffered severe wounds, he travelled to Zurich (“an island in a sea of fire, steel and blood”) where, together with Tristan Tzara, Hugo Ball and others, he founded the Dada movement, about which he would one day write: ” … it was a storm that broke over the art of that time just as the war broke over the peoples.”

In 1918 he met Viking Eggeling, with whom he conducted his first film experiments as precursors of “abstract film”. Both dreamt of discovering a universal language within film which could promote peace among human beings. In 1919 Richter served as chairman of the “Action Committee for Revolutionary Artists” in the Munich Soviet Republic. He was arrested shortly after the entry of Reichswehr troops. His mother Ida secured his release.

Richter’s first film, Rythmus 21 in 1921 [see below], was a scandal – the audience attempted to beat up the pianist. Moholy-Nagy regarded it as “an approach to the visual realisation of a light-space-continuum in the movement thesis”. The film, which is now recognised as a classic, also attracted the attention of Theo van Doesburg, who invited Richter to work on his magazine De Stijl. In 1922 Richter attended two famous congresses where many of the most significant avant-gardists of the era assembled: The Congress of International Progressive Artists in Düsseldorf and the International Congress of Constructivists and Dadaists – the Dada movement was dismissed on this occasion. In 1923 Richter and other artists founded the short-lived but celebrated Magazine G: Material zur Elementaren Gestaltung (G: Materials for Elemental Form-Creation) (G for “Gestaltung”, i.e. design), which sought to build a bridge between Dadaism and Constructivism. Prominent contributors included Arp, Malevich, El Lissitzky, Mies van der Rohe, Schwitters and van Doesburg.

In 1927 Richter worked with Malevich, who was then visiting Berlin for his first large exhibition, on a – naturally, “suprematist” – film, which, however, was never completed due to the political situation.

Text from Martin-Gropius-Bau website

Rhythmus 21 (1921) | MoMA

Hans Richter was convinced that he invented abstract cinema with Rhythmus 21. He didn’t, but he was an important early figure who quickly became one of the biggest names among the avant-garde, producing an impressive body of work that continuously pushed the boundaries of cinema for more than 40 years. Richter believed that film appealed more to the sense of sight than painting could, and he used his roots as a Cubist painter to explode the rectangle of the film frame.

The first in Richter’s series of animated “rhythm” shorts, Rhythmus 21 plays with form and depth, as squares and rectangles pulse and change size in comparison both to one another and to the film frame itself. Animated completely by hand, the work sets the stage for Richter’s subsequent explorations of the time-based medium of film – and for the burgeoning field of experimental animation and the artists who would come after him, such as Len Lye, Oskar Fischinger, and John and Faith Hubley. Additionally, Richter’s creative, radical use of light, shadow, and shape were a markedly different viewing experience for 1910s and ’20s audiences accustomed to seeing newsreels, serials, and narrative films, and whose exposure to animation would likely have been limited to nickelodeons and cartoons based on comic strips, like Gertie the Dinosaur. Richter embraced the Dadaist ethos of collaboration and worked with many Dada artists – most famously with Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Fernand Léger, and Man Ray in Dreams That Money Can Buy – while inspiring younger experimental filmmakers like Shirley Clarke.

Text from the YouTube website

Hans Richter’s first truly surrealist film was Rhythmus 21. Richter broke from conventions of the time when rather than attempting to visually orchestrate formal patterns, he focused instead on the temporality of the cinematic viewing experience. He emphasised movement and the shifting relationship of form elements in time. His major creative breakthrough, in other words, was the discovery of cinematic rhythm…

For Richter, rhythm, “as the essence of emotional expression”, was connected to a Bergsonian life force:

Rhythm expresses something different from thought. The meaning of both is incommensurable. Rhythm cannot be explained completely by thought nor can thought be put in terms of rhythm, or converted or reproduced. They both find their connection and identity in common and universal human life, the life principle, from which they spring and upon which they can build further. (Richter, Hans. “Rhythm,” in Little Review, Winter 1926, p. 21)

Completed by using stop motion and forward and backward printing in addition to an animation table, the film consists of a continuous flow of rectangular and square shapes that “move” forward, backward, vertically, and horizontally across the screen (Gideon Bachmann and Jonas Mekas. “From Interviews With Hans Richter during the Last Ten Years,” in Film Culture, No. 31, Winter 1963-1964, p. 29). Syncopated by an uneven rhythm, forms grow, break apart and are fused together in a variety of configurations for just over three minutes (at silent speed). The constantly shifting forms render the spatial situation of the film ambivalent, an idea that is reinforced when Richter reverses the figure-background relationship by switching, on two occasions, from positive to negative film. In so doing, Richter draws attention to the flat rectangular surface of the screen, destroying the perspectival spatial illusion assumed to be integral to film’s photographic base, and emphasising instead the kinetic play of contrasts of position, proportion and light distribution. By restricting himself to the use of square shapes and thus simplifying his compositions, Richter was able to concentrate on the arrangement of the essential elements of cinema: movement, time and light. Disavowing the beauty of “form” for its own sake, Rhythmus ’21 instead expresses emotional content through the mutual interaction of forms moving in contrast and relation to one another. Nowhere is this more evident than in the final “crescendo” of the film, in which all of the disparate shapes of the film briefly coalesce into a Mondrian-like spatial grid before decomposing into a field of pure light.

Suchenski, Richard. “Hans Richter” on the Senses of Cinema website [Online] Cited 19/06/2014. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Hans Richter (German, 1888-1976) 'Neither Hand nor Foot' 1955/56

Hans Richter (German, 1888-1976)
Neither Hand nor Foot
1955-1956
Paint and collages on board (with doorbell)
16 1/2 x 18 1/4 in. (41.9 x 46.4cm)
Private collection
© Estate Hans Richter

Hans Richter (German, 1888-1976)
Justitia Minor
1917/1960s
Assemblage (wood, copper, plastic, iron file and string, Christmas decoration)
24 x 18 x 10 in (61 x 45.7 x 25.4cm)
Private Collection
© Estate Hans Richter
Foto © 2013 Museum Associates/LACMA

Hans Richter (German, 1888-1976)
Houses
1917
Ink wash on paper
8 1/4 x 6 1/2 in. (20.9 x 16.5cm)
Private collection
© Estate Hans Richter Foto
Foto © 2013 Museum Associates/LACMA

“Influenced by cubism and its search for structure, but not satisfied with what it offered, I found myself between 1913-1918 increasingly faced with the conflict of suppressing spontaneous expression in order to gain an objective understanding of a fundamental principle with which I could control the ‘heap of fragments’ inherited from the cubists. Thus I gradually lost interest in the subject – in any subject – and focused instead on the positive-negative (white-black) opposition, which at least gave me a working hypothesis whereby I could organise the relationship of one part of a painting to the other.”

Richter, Hans. “Easel-Scroll-Film,” in Magazine of Art, No. 45 (February 1952), p. 82.

Unknown artist
Hans Arp, Tristan Tzara and Hans Richter, Zurich
1918
© Estate Hans Richter

In 1929 Richter curated the film section of the famous FiFo exhibition (Film und Foto), a milestone in the history of the cinematic and photographic arts. More than 1,000 photos were presented – curated by, among others, Edward Weston and Edward Steichen for the USA and El Lissitzky for the USSR. More than sixty silent films were shown, including works by Duchamp, Egeling, Léger, Man Ray and Chaplin. This important exhibition, initiated by the German Werkbund (which was founded in 1907), was also shown in the Martin-Gropius-Bau, which in those days was called “the former Museum of Applied Arts” – a fact that is rarely mentioned in current photographic histories. On this occasion, Richter published his first film book: Film Enemies of Today, Film Friends of Tomorrow.

That same year, the first Congress of Independent Film was held in the remote Swiss castle of “La Sarraz”: Hans Richter was invited along with Sergei Eisenstein, Bela Balazs, Walter Ruttmann and others. He made a film with Eisenstein, which has since been lost. The Congress is still regarded as the first festival dedicated solely to film. Back then, the still young art of film-making had to struggle for recognition. Also in 1929 the SA (“Sturmabteilung” or Nazi “Brown Shirts”) declares him the first time a “Kulturbolschewisten” – a “cultural Bolshevik”.

In 1930 he travelled to Moscow to make the film Metal. But objections by the Soviet government prevented its completion. In 1933, when the Nazis seized power and Richter was living in Moscow, storm troopers sacked his Berlin flat and made off with his art collection. Fearing for his life, he was soon forced to flee Moscow without a penny to his name. In the Netherlands he made advertising films for Philips. He also worked for a number of chemical companies that were eager to invest in film as an advertising medium. He sought permanent residency in France and Switzerland. In Switzerland, he and Anna Seghers cooperated on a script, and in 1939 Jean Renoir arranged for him to create a major film project in Paris. But the outbreak of war prevented this film as well.

When the Swiss Foreign Police ask him to leave the country he succeeds in 1941, with emigration to the United States. Hilla Rebay, artist and once a member of Ricther’s famous Berlin “November Group” is at this time advisor to the New York art patron Solomon Guggenheim. With his help they can implement their idea of a “Temple of Non-Objectivity” – the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (1939), later the Guggenheim. The museum provided Richter with the necessary invitation and a Jewish support fund for refugees sponsored his long journey. In 1942 Richter became a teacher for film – and later director – at the Institute of Film Techniques at the College of the City of New York. Until 1956 he trained students who were later counted among the great figures of American independent film, including Stan Brackhage, Shirley Clarke, Maya Deren and Jonas Mekas.

In 1940s America, after a fifteen-year pause, Richter began painting again. In 1943/44 he created his great scroll paintings and collages about the war: Stalingrad, Invasion and Liberation of Paris. After the war he made the episodic film Dreams That Money Can Buy, working alongside five of the most famous artists of the twentieth century: Léger, Ernst, Calder, Ray and Duchamp. In 1946 he presented his first great American art exhibition in Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery.

In the 1950s, Richter returned to Europe for the first time following his emigration to deliver lectures. Portions of his art collection, which he had left behind in Germany following his move to Moscow, were returned to him. Numerous exhibitions led to the rediscovery of Hans Richter’s works in Western Europe as well. He worked in Connecticut during the summers and spent his winters in Ascona near his artist friends. Richter experienced an extraordinarily prolific creative phase during which – after he set aside his painting utensils in the late 1960s – many works appeared using special collage techniques. In 1971 he became a member of the Berlin Academy of the Arts. By the time of his death in Switzerland in 1976, his work was shown and appreciated in many exhibitions in Western Europe. Now, for the first time in over thirty years, Hans Richter can be rediscovered in an exhibition from Los Angeles.

Press release from the Martin-Gropius-Bau website

Hans Richter (German, 1888-1976)
Visionary Portrait
1917
Oil on canvas
53 x 38cm
© Estate Hans Richter
Foto: Galerie Berinson

Hans Richter (German, 1888-1976) 'Triptych in Gray, Red, and Green' 1959 (detail)

Hans Richter (German, 1888-1976)
Triptych in Gray, Red, and Green (detail)
1959
Oil on canvas on boards
Three parts, each: 15 1/2 x 19 1/2 in. (39.4 x 49.5cm); all: 20 1/2 x 49 1/2 in. (52 x 125.7cm)
Private collection
© Estate Hans Richter
Foto © 2013 Museum Associates/LACMA

Hans Richter (German, 1888-1976)
Dragonfly (Counterpoint in Red, Black,Gray, and White)
1943
Oil on canvas
29 1/2 x 15 1/2 in. (74.9 x 39.4cm)
Private collection
© Estate Hans Richter
Foto © 2013 Museum Associates/LACMA

Hans Richter (German, 1888-1976)
Orchestration of Colors
1923/1970
Serigraph on linen
54 x 16 in. (137.2 x 40.6cm)
Private collection
© Estate Hans Richter Foto
Foto © 2013 Museum Associates/LACMA

Martin-Gropius-Bau Berlin
Niederkirchnerstraße 7
Corner Stresemannstr. 110
10963 Berlin
Phone: +49 (0)30 254 86-0

Opening hours:
Wednesday to Monday 10 – 19 hrs
Tuesday closed

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Video: ‘Tom Butler: Concealment, barriers and masks’

Published 30th April 2014

Tom Butler
Tucker
2014
Gouache on albumen print / Cabinet card
16.5 x 10.5cm

Phenomenal, wondrous!

The original video from The Photographers’ Gallery that was in this posting is unfortunately no longer available. I have replaced it with a few images of hand-painted cabinet cards by Tom Butler from 2014, examples of which were in the missing video.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Tom Butler
Locke
2014
Gouache on albumen print / Cabinet card
16.5 x 10.5cm

Tom Butler
Jackson
2014
Gouache on albumen print / Cabinet card
16.5 x 10.5cm

The Photographers’ Gallery
16-18 Ramillies Street,
London W1F7Lw

Opening hours:
Monday – Saturday 10.00 – 18.00
Thursday 10.00 – 20.00
Sunday 11.30 – 18.00

The Photographers’ Gallery website

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Exhibition: ‘Feuerbach’s Muses – Lagerfeld’s Models’ at Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg

Exhibition dates: 21st February – 15th June, 2014

Curators: Professor Hubertus Gaßner and Luisa Pauline Fink

Installation view of Feuerbach’s Muses – Lagerfeld’s Models at Hamburger Kunsthalle

Don’t give up your day job

From the sublime (Feuerbach) to the downright awful (Lagerfeld).

From gorgeous, sensitive portrait paintings of women, full of detail and texture, colour and stillness to what I would term soft-cock porn. Fashion influenced, hyper airbrushed faces; Saint Sebastian poses referencing classical ideals of male beauty (done so much more authentically and grittily by Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden), all staged in sylvan settings. Then printed onto silver- and gold-coloured fabric. Can’t wait to see that…

Not absolutely fabulous, just absolutely hideous.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to Hamburger Kunsthalle for allowing me to publish the art work and photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Installation views of Feuerbach’s Muses – Lagerfeld’s Models at Hamburger Kunsthalle

Anselm Feuerbach (German, 1829-1880)
Nanna
1864
Oil on canvas
61 x 47.2cm
© Niedersächsisches Landesmuseum Hannover
Photo: Ursula Bohnhorst

Anselm Feuerbach (German, 1829-1880)
Studienkopf zur Stuttgarter Iphigenie [Study of a Head for Stuttgart Iphigenia]
1870
Oil on canvas
62.5 x 49.5cm
© Museum Oskar Reinhart, Winterthur
Photo: SIK-ISEA (Philipp Hitz)

Iphigenia (Greek mythology) the daughter of Clytemnestra and Agamemnon; Agamemnon was obliged to offer her as a sacrifice to Artemis when the Greek fleet was becalmed on its way to Troy; Artemis rescued her and she later became a priestess.

Anselm Feuerbach (German, 1829-1880)
Poesie, Zweite Fassung [Poetry, Second Version]
1863
Oil on canvas
62 x 50cm
© Kunstbesitz der Stadt Speyer
Photo: G. Kayser

Anselm Feuerbach (German, 1829-1880)
Lucrezia Borgia, Bildnis einer Römerin in weißer Tunika und rotem Mantel [Lucrezia Borgia, Portrait of a roman in white tunic and red cloak]
1864-1865
Oil on canvas
98 x 81cm
© Städel Museum, Frankfurt a. M.
Photo: Städel Museum – ARTOTHEK

Anselm Feuerbach (German, 1829-1880)
Nanna
1861
Oil on canvas
137.8 x 99.3cm
© München, Bayerische
Staatsgemäldesammlungen – Neue Pinakothek
Photo: bpk I Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlung

From February 2014 the Hamburger Kunsthalle is presenting an unusual double exhibition on beauty, eroticism and the adoration of muses and models that brings together paintings by Anselm Feuerbach and hit her to unseen photographs by Karl Lagerfeld. In a similar way both Feuerbach and Lagerfeld seek an actualisation of an ideal of timeless beauty founded in the ancient world. The exhibition examines the cult of beauty, which stylises the model to an icon. Over forty works by Feuerbach, most of them from the years 1860-70, will be on show. They are loans from the Feuerbachhaus Speyer and from numerous German, Swiss and Austrian museums ad private collections. Karl Lagerfeld has created a series of around sixty black-and-white photographs specially for the exhibition. Mostly in large formats, they have been printed in a complex procedure onto silver- and gold-coloured fabric.

Anselm Feuerbach (1829-80) one of the most important German painters of the late nineteenth century, lived in Rome from 1856 onwards. The city, with its magnificent architecture and heroic surrounding landscape, was a place of yearning that seemed eligible like no other to revive the classical ideal of ancient times. Feuerbach devoted himself to antique subject matter, which he filled with imagination and personal feeling. This is most excitingly shown in the series of unique portraits, begun in 1860, which portray Feuerbach’s model and muse, Anna Risi, known as Nanna. Feuerbach painted Nana in a wide variety of roles and sensitively staged settings that reveal an almost cultic veneration for his model. When Nanna left Feuerbach in 1865, she was followed by Lucia Brunacci. Similarly to Nanna she matched the classical ideal of beauty of the time, with her Greek profile and thick dark hair. Lucia inspired Feuerbach to impressive portrayals of mythological themes that form the highpoint of his ouevre.

‘Happy is he whom the muses love’, wrote the Greek poet Hesiod, and so the muses are a symbol of the higher power that is needed, according to the ancients, to be creative. The photographic series Modern Mythology (2013) by Karl Lagerfeld, explores the love story of Daphnis and Chloe, and shows models such as Baptiste Giabiconi and Bianca Balti, who have accompanied Lagerfeld in his work for several years. The story, by the poet Longus, tells of a boy and a girl who grow up without parents among shepherds and over the years develop a strong affection for one another. The narration has been taken up many times since the Renaissance. Lagerfeld’s photographs belong to a series of works by Pierre Bonnard, François Boucher or Aristide Maillol which present the ancient text as a symbol of the idyllic life. Karl Lagerfeld’s stagings were shot against the picturesque natural background of the South of France, and are the actualisation of an ancient theme.

The exhibition is accompanied by two publications: the catalogue on Anselm Feuerbach is published jointly with the Museum Wiesbaden and introduces Feuerbach’s paintings and drawings from an art-historical perspective; the second book combines Karl Lagerfeld’s photographs and Longus’s mythological narrative of Daphnis and Chloe in a bibliophile volume that will be elaborately produced by the publisher Gerhard Steidl.

Curators: Professor Hubertus Gaßner and Luisa Pauline Fink

Press release from the Hamburger Kunsthalle website

Anselm Feuerbach (German, 1829-1880)
Das Urteil des Paris [The Judgement of Paris]
1870
Oil on canvas
228 x 443cm
© Hamburger Kunsthalle / bpk
Photo: Elke Walford

Anselm Feuerbach (German, 1829-1880)
Ruhende Nymphe [Resting Nymph]
1870
Oil on canvas
112 x 190cm
© Germanisches Nationalmuseum Nürnberg, Leihgabe Privatbesitz
Photo: Monika Runge

Karl Lagerfeld (German, 1933-2019)
Modern Mythology
2013
© 2013 Karl Lagerfeld

Karl Lagerfeld (German, 1933-2019) 'Modern Mythology' 2013 from the exhibition 'Feuerbach's Muses – Lagerfeld's Models' at Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, February - June, 2014

Karl Lagerfeld (German, 1933-2019)
Modern Mythology
2013
© 2013 Karl Lagerfeld

Hamburger Kunsthalle
Glockengießerwall 20095
Hamburg
Phone: +49 (0) 40 – 428 131 200

Opening hours:
Tuesdays to Sundays 10am – 6pm
Thursdays 10am – 9pm
Closed Mondays

Hamburger Kunsthalle website

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Exhibition: ‘Hiroshi Sugimoto: Past Tense’ at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center, Los Angeles

Exhibition dates: 4th February – 8th June, 2014

Curator: Arpad Kovacs, assistant curator in the Department of Photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Sam Eric, Pennsylvania
1978
Gelatin silver print
42.5 x 54.5cm
Private collection, Frankfurt
© Hiroshi Sugimoto / Courtesy The Pace Gallery

I loved Sugimoto’s time lapse movie screens, where the exact length of a movie was captured by the open lens of the camera, the substance of time and space evidenced by a seemingly empty screen. There was something wonderfully poetic and transformational about that gesture, about the notion of compressing the narrative, reality and action of a movie into a single frame of light: “the ‘annihilation of time and space’ as a particular moment in a dynamic cycle of rupture and recuperation enables a deliberate focus on the process of transition.”1 The process of transition in the flow of space and time.

Sugimoto’s art since that ground breaking body of work has been a bit of a let down. Where the movie theatres photographs were transubstantiationalist, the three series presented here – Dioramas (1975-1994), Portraits (1999) and his newest series, Photogenic Drawings (2008-present) play, if that is the right word, with the re/animation of death. The stuffed animals, the wax figures, the redrawing of William Henry Fox Talbot photogenic drawings, the redrawing of a light already past, just seem DEAD to me – a kind of double death or even triple death – the death of the animal / the death of the photograph, the unreality (the undead) of the wax figures and their death in the photograph, the death of the plant, their capture not once but twice by the death of the photograph. We know exactly what Sugimoto is doing, but the images are stilted and lifeless and I am not convinced by them.

The diorama images are just OK – almost good undergraduate work but nothing more. My problem with the waxworks images and the pencil of nature is “other images”. We all know Cindy Sherman and her images of historical figures, and we know the work of William Henry Fox Talbot. Somehow these earlier images crowd Sugimoto’s work in a way that doesn’t often happen. Winogrand never crowded Friedlander or vice versa – and you can think of many other examples where comparing is actually beneficial… but not here.

I’m not saying Sugimoto is derivative but because of these other works, they don’t have much room to move. Indeed, they hardly move at all. They are so frozen in attitude that all the daring transcendence of light, the light! of space time travel, the transition from one state to another, has been lost. The Flame of Recognition (Edward Weston) – has gone.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ McQuire, Scott. The Media City. London: Sage Publications, 2008, p. 14.

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

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948) 'Polar Bear' 1976 from the exhibition 'Hiroshi Sugimoto: Past Tense' at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center, Los Angeles, February - June, 2014

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Polar Bear
1976
Gelatin silver print
42.1 x 54.6cm (16 9/16 x 21 1/2 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Purchased with funds provided by the Photographs Council
© Hiroshi Sugimoto

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Wapiti
1980
Gelatin silver print
34.9 x 58.7cm (13 3/4 x 23 1/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Purchased with funds provided by the Photographs Council
© Hiroshi Sugimoto

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Sable Antelope
1994
Gelatin silver print
42.4 x 54.1cm (16 11/16 x 21 5/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Purchased with funds provided by the Photographs Council
© Hiroshi Sugimoto

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Manatee
1994
Gelatin silver print
42.2 x 54.1cm (16 5/8 x 21 5/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Purchased with funds provided by the Photographs Council
© Hiroshi Sugimoto

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Birds of Japan
1994
Gelatin silver print
38.7 x 58.4cm (15 1/4 x 23 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Purchased with funds provided by the Photographs Council
© Hiroshi Sugimoto

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Cheetah
1980
Gelatin silver print
36.5 x 58.7cm (14 3/8 x 23 1/8 in.)
Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
© Hiroshi Sugimoto

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
White Rhinoceros
1980
Gelatin Silver Print
34.1 x 58.6cm (13 7/16 x 23 1/16 in.)
Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
© Hiroshi Sugimoto

Since the mid-1970s, Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, born 1948) has used photography to investigate how history pervades the present. Featuring photographs of habitat dioramas, wax portraits, and early photographic negatives, Hiroshi Sugimoto: Past Tense, on view February 4 – June 8, 2014 at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center, brings together three separate bodies of work that present objects of historical and cultural significance in the collections of various museums. By photographing subjects that reimagine or replicate moments from the distant past and diverse geographical locations, Sugimoto critiques the medium’s presumed capacity to portray history with accuracy.

“This exhibition presents work that inventively reframes objects from the collections of a variety of museums, including from our extensive holdings of prints from the early days of photography,” explains Timothy Potts, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. “Mr. Sugimoto has generously donated eighteen prints from his recent Photogenic Drawings series, which reprise a selection of important experiments by William Henry Fox Talbot that are in the Getty Museum’s collection.”

Sugimoto’s meticulously crafted prints are the result of a rigorous working method that includes extensive preparatory research, the use of a large-format view camera, and long exposures. Each of his projects is rooted in a sustained exploration of a singular motif and often carried out over many years. The exhibition will present a selection of prints from three bodies of work, Dioramas (1975-1994), Portraits (1999) and, his newest series, Photogenic Drawings (2008-present).

Dioramas

The diorama was first introduced in Paris in 1822 by the stage designer Jacques Louis Mandé Daguerre (French, 1787-1851), who later developed the daguerreotype photographic process. Situated in a darkened room, the first diorama consisted of a large painted scene on a semi-transparent curtain that was illuminated by the opening and closing of skylights and the constant shifting or dimming of lamps to create the impression of movement. In the early 20th century, habitat dioramas in natural history museums became popular, staging creatures in their faithfully replicated “natural” environments.

Sugimoto first encountered elaborate animal dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History after moving to New York in 1974, and began to focus his camera on individual scenes shortly thereafter. Omitting the educational text surrounding each display, the works heighten the illusion that animals such as manatees, wapiti, and sea lions were photographed in their natural habitats. While each photograph appears to be a candid moment captured by an experienced nature photographer, the subjects are – in actuality – depicted in poses they hold indefinitely.

Wax Portraits

While waxworks have a long history, contemporary wax museums can be traced to the French sculptor Marie Grosholz (French, 1761-1850), who achieved success in the Parisian entertainment market by creating waxworks of popular politicians and cultural figures. After moving to London in 1802, she established a commercial enterprise under the name Madame Tussaud, specialising in the production and display of full-length wax figures modelled after commissioned portraits.

Posed against pitch-black backdrops and framed by the camera in a manner suggesting old master portrait-painting traditions, each of Sugimoto’s subjects was captured with a nine-minute exposure that illuminates the finely modelled expressions and the sumptuous costumes. These life-size photographs record likenesses that have been distilled through multiple reproductions of the original sitter. The source material for the wax figures of Henry VIII and his wives is based on 16th-century panel paintings, while the portrait of Queen Victoria’s likeness is taken from a photograph of her from the 1890s, around the time of her Diamond Jubilee celebration.

“Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photographic practice is deeply rooted in a tradition of image making that was developed and perfected during the 19th century,” explains Arpad Kovacs, assistant curator in the Department of Photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum and curator of the exhibition. “By employing century-old techniques and turning his lens to subjects and compositions that recreate or simulate moments from the past, Sugimoto intimately connects himself to the historical moments depicted.”

Photogenic Drawings

In the early 1830s, William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877) began trying to create pictures without the aid of a pencil. After coating small pieces of writing paper with a salt solution and silver nitrate, he successfully captured the outlines of leaves and lace placed on the paper and exposed to sunlight. He continued his experiments with a camera obscura, placing a sheet of paper in this precursor to the camera to produce the first negatives, with highlights and shadows reversed. Talbot called the results of these experiments photogenic drawings.

In 2007, Hiroshi Sugimoto visited the J. Paul Getty Museum to study the earliest photographs in the collection. After photographing some of Talbot’s photogenic drawing negatives, he produced large-scale prints and coloured them with toning agents during the processing to replicate the often-bright hues of the original sheets. The scale of the enlarged prints reveals the fibres of the original writing paper, which create subtle and delicate patterns embedded in the images.

The artist’s gift of eighteen gelatin silver prints from his Photogenic Drawings series significantly enhances the Museum’s holdings of work by Sugimoto. His photographic practice, rooted in a serial approach and primarily concerned with the medium’s relationship to the passage of time, has long been an important source of influence for a younger generation of artists. The prints greatly enhance the Getty Museum’s growing collection of contemporary photographs.

Hiroshi Sugimoto: Past Tense is on view February 4 – June 8, 2014 at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center. The exhibition will run concurrently in the Center for Photographs with A Royal Passion: Queen Victoria and Photography, an exhibition featuring rare private and public photographs from the Victoria era.

Press release from the J. Paul Getty Museum website

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948) 'Henry VIII' 1999 from the exhibition 'Hiroshi Sugimoto: Past Tense' at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center, Los Angeles, February - June, 2014

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Henry VIII
1999
Gelatin silver print
148.9 x 119.1cm (58 5/8 x 46 7/8 in.)
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Commissioned by Deutsche Bank AG in consultation with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation for the Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin
© Hiroshi Sugimoto

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Queen Victoria
1999
Gelatin silver print
148.9 x 119.1cm (58 5/8 x 46 7/8 in.)
Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
© Hiroshi Sugimoto

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Anne Boleyn
1999
Gelatin silver print
148.9 x 119.1cm (58 5/8 x 46 7/8 in.)
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Commissioned by Deutsche Bank AG in consultation with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation for the Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin
© Hiroshi Sugimoto

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Asplenium Halleri, Grande Chartreuse 1821 – Cardamine Pratensis, April 1839
2008
Toned gelatin silver print
93.7 x 74.9cm (36 7/8 x 29 1/2 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles,
Gift of the Artist
© Hiroshi Sugimoto

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Roofline of Lacock Abbey, circa 1835-1839
2008
Gelatin silver print
93.7 x 74.9cm (36 7/8 x 29 1/2 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Gift of the Artist
© Hiroshi Sugimoto

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Bust of Venus, November 26, 1840
2009
Gelatin silver print
93.7 x 74.9cm (36 7/8 x 29 1/2 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Gift of the Artist
© Hiroshi Sugimoto

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
A Stem of Delicate Leaves of an Umbrellifer, circa 1843-1846
2009
Gelatin silver print
93.7 x 74.9cm (36 7/8 x 29 1/2 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Gift of the Artist
© Hiroshi Sugimoto

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Arrangement of Botanical Specimens, 1839
2008
Toned gelatin silver print
93.7 x 74.9cm (36 7/8 x 29 1/2 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Gift of the Artist
© Hiroshi Sugimoto

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Nicolaas Henneman, circa 1841
2008
Toned gelatin silver print
93.7 x 74.9cm (36 7/8 x 29 1/2 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Gift of the Artist
© Hiroshi Sugimoto

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Bust of Patroclus, September 8, 1841
2009
Toned gelatin silver print
93.7 x 74.9cm (36 7/8 x 29 1/2 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Gift of the Artist
© Hiroshi Sugimoto

The J. Paul Getty Museum
1200 Getty Center Drive
Los Angeles, California 90049

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Friday, Sunday 10am – 5.30pm
Saturday 10am – 8pm
Monday Closed

The J. Paul Getty Museum website

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Exhibition: ‘Frank Lloyd Wright and the City: Density vs. Dispersal’ at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York

Exhibition dates: 1st February – 1st June 2014

Curators: Organised by Barry Bergdoll (Acting Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, MoMA) and Carole Ann Fabian (Director, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library), with Janet Parks (Curator of Drawings & Archives, Avery) and Phoebe Springstubb (Curatorial Assistant, MoMA)

Frank Lloyd Wright (American, 1867-1959) 'Grouped Towers, Chicago Project' 1930 from the exhibition 'Frank Lloyd Wright and the City: Density vs. Dispersal' at The Museum of Modern Art, February - June, 2014

Frank Lloyd Wright (American, 1867-1959)
Grouped Towers, Chicago Project
1930
Perspective
Pencil on tracing paper
19 x 28 1/4″ (48.3 x 71.8cm)
The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York)

A change of pace now… some exquisite drawings in this posting about the work of Frank Lloyd Wright. It’s a pity they can’t build a skyscraper such as the beautiful Mile High in Melbourne, instead of all the non-descript towers that are going up all over the place. At least we would then have a masterpiece on our hands.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Frank Lloyd Wright (American, 1867-1959)
Grouped Towers, Chicago Project
1930
Plan of the five towers and shared pedestal
Pencil on tracing paper
13 3/4 x 35 3/8″ (34.9 x 89.9cm)
The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York)

Frank Lloyd Wright (American, 1867-1959)
Broadacre City Project
1934-1935
Study for a plan of a highway interchange
Pencil and coloured pencil on tracing paper
22 x 35″ (55.9 x 88.9cm)
The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York)

Installation view of the exhibition 'Frank Lloyd Wright and the City: Density vs. Dispersal' at MoMA

Installation views of the exhibition Frank Lloyd Wright and the City: Density vs. Dispersal at The Museum of Modern Art, New York
February 1 – June 1, 2014
© 2014 The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Photos: Thomas Griesel

Frank Lloyd Wright and the City: Density vs. Dispersal celebrates the recent joint acquisition of Frank Lloyd Wright’s extensive archive by MoMA and Columbia University’s Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library. Through an initial selection of drawings, films, and large-scale architectural models, the exhibition examines the tension in Wright’s thinking about the growing American city in the 1920s and 1930s, when he worked simultaneously on radical new forms for the skyscraper and on a comprehensive plan for the urbanisation of the American landscape titled “Broadacre City.” Visitors encounter the spectacular 12-foot-by-12-foot model of this plan, which merges one of the earliest schemes for a highway flyover with an expansive, agrarian domain.

Promoted and updated throughout Wright’s life, the model toured the country for several years in the 1930s, beginning with a display at Rockefeller Center. This dispersed vision is paired with Wright’s innovative structural experiments for building the vertical city. Projects, from the early San Francisco Call Building (1912), to Manhattan’s St. Mark’s-in-the-Bouwerie Towers (1927-1931), to a polemical mile-high skyscraper, engage questions of urban density and seek to bring light and landscape to the tall building. Highlighting Wright’s complex relationship to the city, the material reveals Wright as a compelling theorist of both its horizontal and vertical aspects. His work, in this way, is not only of historic importance but of remarkable relevance to current debates on urban concentration.

Text from the MoMA website

Frank Lloyd Wright and his assistant Eugene Masselink installing the exhibition Frank Lloyd Wright: American Architect at The Museum of Modern Art, November 13, 1940 – January 5, 1941. Photographic Archive. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York
Photo: Soichi Sunami

Frank Lloyd Wright (American, 1867-1959) 'Broadacre City Project' 1934-1935 from the exhibition 'Frank Lloyd Wright and the City: Density vs. Dispersal' at The Museum of Modern Art, February - June, 2014

Frank Lloyd Wright (American, 1867-1959)
Broadacre City Project
1934-1935
Model under construction in Chandler, Arizona, 1935
Gelatin silver print on paper
4 1/4 x 6 5/8″ (10.8 x 16.8cm)
The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York)
Photo: Roy E. Peterson

Frank Lloyd Wright (American, 1867-1959)
Broadacre City Project
1934-1935
Taliesin fellows working on the model. Chandler, Arizona, 1935
Gelatin silver print on paper
9 9/16 x 7″ (24.3 x 17.8cm)
The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York)

Frank Lloyd Wright (American, 1867-1959)
Broadacre City Project
1934-1935
Model in four sections
Painted wood, cardboard, and paper
152 x 152″ (386.1 x 386.1cm)
The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York)

Frank Lloyd Wright (American, 1867-1959)
H. C. Price Company Tower, Bartlesville, Oklahoma
1952-1956
Apprentices working on the model in the Taliesin drafting room. Spring Green, Wisconsin, c. 1952
Gelatin silver print on paper
7 3/4 x 9 1/2″ (19.7 x 24.1cm)
The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York)

The Museum of Modern Art presents Frank Lloyd Wright and the City: Density vs. Dispersal, which celebrates the recent joint acquisition of Frank Lloyd Wright’s extensive archive by MoMA and Columbia University’s Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, on view from February 1 to June 1, 2014. Frank Lloyd Wright (1867- 1959) – perhaps the most influential American architect of the 20th century – was deeply ambivalent about cities. For decades, Wright was seen as the prophet of America’s post–World War II suburban sprawl, yet the dispersed cities that he envisaged were also carefully planned – quite distinct from the disorganised landscapes that often developed instead. Paradoxically, Wright was also a lifelong prophet of the race for height that has played out around the world. Through an initial selection of drawings, films, and large-scale architectural models, the exhibition examines the tension in Wright’s thinking about the growing American city from the 1920s to the 1950s, when he worked simultaneously on radical new forms for the skyscraper and on a comprehensive plan for the urbanisation of the American landscape titled “Broadacre City.” The exhibition is organised by Barry Bergdoll, Acting Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, MoMA, and Carole Ann Fabian, Director, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, with Janet Parks, Curator of Drawings & Archives, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, and Phoebe Springstubb, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Architecture and Design, MoMA.

On view is Wright’s 1934-35 manifesto project, for what he called “Broadacre City,” which embodied his quest for a city of private houses set in nature and spread across the countryside. He believed that advances in technology had rendered obsolete the dense cities created by industry and immigration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Distributed along a rectilinear grid, these one-acre homesteads were to be combined with small-scale manufacturing, community centers, and local farming, and interspersed with parklands to form a carpet-like pattern of urbanisation. Visitors encounter the spectacular 12-foot-by-12-foot model of this plan, which merges one of the earliest schemes for a highway flyover with an expansive, agrarian domain. Promoted and updated throughout Wright’s life, the model toured the country for several years in the 1930s, beginning with a display at New York City’s Rockefeller Center. It is juxtaposed with the monumental models and drawings produced of his skyscraper visions: the six-foot tall model of his 1913 San Francisco Call Building; the model of his only built residential tower, the Price Tower, in Bartlesville, Oklahoma of 1952-56; and the eight-foot drawings of the Mile High tower project.

This dispersed vision is paired with Wright’s innovative structural experiments for building the vertical city, which engaged questions of urban density and sought to bring light and landscape settings to tall buildings. His ambitions grew from a 24-story design for the offices of the San Francisco Call newspaper (1913) to the 548-story, mile-high tower he envisioned in Chicago (1956) – a building large enough to house the entire population of Broadacre City. Wright’s proposal for the San Francisco Call Building celebrates verticality: repeated piers emphasise the height, drawing the eye up to a startlingly cantilevered cornice pierced with slots that frame the sky and allow daylight to wash the facades for dramatic effect. His design for the National Life Insurance Company Building (1924-1925) features a tower clad entirely in glass, setting aside the load-bearing frame of the Call Building to experiment with the curtain wall and other new building technologies. The project reveals Wright as a key participant in international debates on the possibility of cladding a tall building with a transparent glass facade, rather than cladding it in ornamental masonry for decorative effect.

An unregulated building boom in the 1920s in New York and Chicago resulted in an unprecedented urban density that Wright described as “congestion.” In response, he devised the Skyscraper Regulation – a set of design rules governing the lateral and vertical growth of American cities. By regulating the location and height of tall buildings, Wright sought to optimise light and views and to minimise the effects of closely spaced tall buildings that were turning urban streets into shadowy canyons. Wright’s Skyscraper Regulation was his last attempt to address the inherited city. He would turn instead to devising a set of regulations for an entirely new and dispersed urban fabric (Broadacre City), in which the unit of the city block was exchanged for the farmed acre.

In 1927, Wright’s design for the financially troubled Church of St. Mark’s-in-the-Bowery dramatically transformed the building by having the floors project outward from a single central core plunged deep into the ground. The concrete floors tapered toward the periphery, which he compared to the structural concept of the “taproot” of a tree. This “taproot” structure was finally tested in built form in the S.C. Johnson & Son Research Laboratory Tower (1943-1950) in Racine, Wisconsin. In 1956, Wright unveiled a 26-foot-tall rendering of a gleaming, vertiginously tapered skyscraper – which he said would house 100,000 employees of the state of Illinois. The mile-high tower adopts the “taproot” structure he had articulated 30 years before, in which a skyscraper’s vertical ascent is stabilised by a foundation plunged deep into the ground. Both a polemic and a rationalised proposal for the future of tall buildings, the Mile High marks the definitive return of Wright’s tower to the city. The Mile High embodies Wright’s paradoxical attitude toward the American city: meant to condense the experience of urban life and work within a single telescoping form, freeing the ground for the realisation of Broadacre, holding in tension two idealized images of the city – its extraordinary vertical reach and its extreme horizontal extension.

Press release from the MoMA website

Frank Lloyd Wright (American, 1867-1959)
National Life Insurance Company Building, Chicago Project
1924-1925
Axonometric view
Coloured pencil on tracing paper
40 x 24″ (101.6 x 61cm)
The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York)

Frank Lloyd Wright (American, 1867-1959)
S.C. Johnson & Son Inc. Research Laboratory Tower, Racine, Wisconsin
1943-1950
Section
Pencil, coloured pencil, and ink on tracing paper
35 1/8 x 20″ (89.2 x 50.8cm)
The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York)

Frank Lloyd Wright (American, 1867-1959)
St. Mark’s-in-the-Bouwerie Towers, New York Project
1927-1931
Aerial perspective
Pencil and coloured pencil on tracing paper
23 3/4 x 15″ (60.3 x 38.1cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Jeffrey P. Klein Purchase Fund, Barbara Pine Purchase Fund, and Frederieke Taylor Purchase Fund

Frank Lloyd Wright (American, 1867-1959)
St. Mark’s-in-the-Bouwerie Tower, New York Project
1927-1931
Perspective, 1928
Pencil and coloured pencil on tracing paper
28 1/4 x 10 1/8″ (71.8 x 25.7cm)
The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York)

Frank Lloyd Wright (American, 1867-1959)
St. Mark’s-in-the-Bouwerie Tower, New York Project
1927-1931
Section and perspective cutaway of a duplex apartment with balcony and living-room floor plans, 1929
Ink, pencil, and coloured pencil on linen window shade
47 x 35″ (119.4 x 88.9cm)
The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York)

Frank Lloyd Wright (American, 1867-1959)
The San Francisco Call Building Project
1913
Preliminary perspective
Pencil, coloured pencil, and cut-and-pasted tracing paper on paper
47 3/4 x 23 7/8″ (121.3 x 60.6cm)
The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York)

Frank Lloyd Wright (American, 1867-1959)
The Mile High Illinois, Chicago Project
1956
Perspective with Wright’s Golden Beacon Apartment Building project (1956-1957)
Pencil, coloured pencil, ink, and gold ink on tracing paper
105 x 30″ (266.7 x 76.2cm)
The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York)

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

Opening hours:
10.30 am – 5.30 pm
Open seven days a week

MoMA website

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Video: ‘klimt02 in conversation with Mari Funaki’

May 2014

A wonderful energy, a wonderful artist, a wonderful human being – sadly missed!

Marcus

Published on April 23, 2014

Interview filmed on the occasion of the solo exhibition Space and Gravity by Mari Funaki at Klimt02 Gallery in Barcelona in February 2008. The artist talks about her work, the process of work: drawing, breaking predictability, her gallery and steel and black concept.

Gallery Funaki website

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Exhibition: ‘From the Village to Vogue: The Modernist Jewelry of Art Smith’ at the Cincinnati Art Museum

Exhibition dates: 22nd February – 18th May, 2014

Curator: Chief Curator Cynthia Amnéus

Art Smith (American, 1917-1982)
“Modern Cuff” Bracelet
Designed c. 1948
Silver
1 5/8 x 2 1/2 x 4 in. (4.1 x 6.4 x 10.2cm)
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Charles L. Russell

Very much of their time, these beautiful, understated pieces of anamorphic jewellery are exquisitely designed and crafted objets d’art.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Art Smith (American, 1917-1982)
“Lava” Bracelet
Designed c. 1946
Silver
2 1/2 x 2 5/8 x 5 3/4 in. (6.4 x 6.7 x 14.6cm)
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Charles L. Russell

Art Smith (American, 1917-1982)
Autumn Leaves Brooch
1974
Gold, jade
1/2 x 3 x 1 3/4 in. (1.3 x 7.6 x 4.4cm)
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Charles L. Russell

Art Smith (American, 1917-1982)
Untitled
1948-1979
Wood, paint, copper
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Charles L. Russell

It will be a feast for the eyes of those who appreciate jewellery this Spring in the Queen City. The spirit of craft and its revival will shine through in large scale, highly sculpted pieces of jewellery created by Art Smith and his contemporaries in From the Village to Vogue: The Modernist Jewelry of Art Smith, February 22, 2014 through May 18, 2014.

This exhibition features twenty-four pieces of silver and gold jewellery created by African American artist Art Smith, as well as more than forty pieces by his contemporaries, including Sam Kramer, Margaret De Patta, and Harry Bertoia. Three pieces of jewellery by Alexander Calder, who influenced many of these artists/jewellers, will also be featured in this exhibition. This exhibition was organised by the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the Cincinnati Art Museum is the first to host this exhibition. It will then continue to the Dallas Museum of Art and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia.

Inspired by surrealism, biomorphism and primitivism, Art Smith (1917-1982) was one of the leading modernist jewellers of the mid-twentieth century. Early in his career, Smith met Talley Beatty, a young black dancer and choreographer, who introduced him to the world of dance, in particular the salon of Frank and Dorcas Neal. It was there that he met several prominent black artists, including writer James Baldwin, musician and composer Billy Strayhorn, singers Lena Horne and Harry Belafonte, actor Brock Peters, and painter Charles Sebree. Smith began to create pieces for dance companies, who in turn, encouraged him to design on a grander scale. This experience is evident in the scale of his mature work.

In 1946, Smith opened his own studio in Greenwich Village and started selling his jewellery. He soon caught the attention of buyers in Boston, San Francisco, and Chicago. In the early 1950s, Smith received pictorial coverage in both Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue and was mentioned in The New Yorker shoppers guide, “On the Avenue”. Smith soon established business relationships with Bloomingdales, Milton Heffling in Manhattan, James Boutique in Houston, L’Unique in Minneapolis and Black Tulip in Dallas. While his earlier work was executed primarily in copper and brass, because it was less expensive, growing recognition increased sales and special commissions for custom designs. This allowed him to begin producing more work in silver. He received a prestigious commission from the Peekskill, New York chapter of the NAACP, for example, to design a brooch for Eleanor Roosevelt. He was even commissioned to design a pair of cufflinks for Duke Ellington, whose music he often listened to while working.

Included in the exhibition are major works by Smith including his famous Patina Necklace (c. 1959). Worked in silver, it is an example both of the large scale of his jewellery and of his use of asymmetry. Alexander Calder’s influence is also clear in this piece. From the curved structure that wraps the neck, two pierced ellipses dangle over the breastbone, giving the necklace a kinetic energy that enlivens the piece. With a sculptor’s sensitivity, Smith emphasised negative space in his designs and viewed the human body as an armature for his creations. He considered his jewellery incomplete until it rested on the human structure.

According to Cincinnati Art Museum interim Chief Curator Cynthia Amnéus, “Working in the heart of Greenwich Village, Smith was influenced by jazz musicians like Charlie Parker, visual artists like Robert Motherwell, and the poetry readings of Beat Generation writers like Alan Ginsberg. Smith’s work, like that of his contemporaries, appealed to an artistic and intellectual clientele. These artisans were not concerned with making pretty jewellery. They created works of art that were meant to be worn on the body.”

Press release from the Cincinnati Art Museum website

Art Smith (American, 1917-1982)
Linked Oval Necklace
Designed by 1974
Silver, amethyst quartz
11 x 10 1/2 x 1/2 in. (27.9 x 26.7 x 1.3cm)
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Charles L. Russell

Art Smith (American, 1917-1982)
Triangle Necklace
c. 1969
Silver, turquoise, lapis lazuli, rhodochrosite
16 1/8 x 5 1/8 x 1/2 in. (41.0 x 13.0 x 1.3cm)
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Charles L. Russell

Art Smith (American, 1917-1982)
Ellington Necklace
c. 1962
Silver, turquoise, amethyst, prase, rhodonite
16 7/8 x 9 7/8 x 3/4 in. (42.9 x 25.1 x 1.9cm)
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Charles L. Russell

Art Smith (American, 1917-1982)
New Orleans Necklace
c. 1962
Silver, three semiprecious stones: Labradorite (?)
8 5/8 x 5 7/8 x 3/4 in. (21.9 x 14.9 x 1.9cm)
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Charles L. Russell

Art Smith (American, 1917-1982)
“Bauble” Necklace
c. 1953
Silver, colourless quartz
9 1/8 x 4 7/8 x 1/2 in. (23.2 x 12.4 x 1.3cm)
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Charles L. Russell

Peter Basch (American, 1921-2004)
Model Wearing Art Smith’s “Modern Cuff” Bracelet
c. 1948
Black-and-white photograph
13 3/4 x 103/4 in. (34.9 x 27.3cm)
Courtesy of Brooklyn Museum

Cincinnati Art Museum 
953 Eden Park Drive
Cincinnati, OH 45202
Phone: 513-639-2872

Opening hours:
Tuesday through Sunday, 11am – 5pm
The Art Museum is closed on Mondays

Cincinnati Art Museum  website

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