Category: space

Review: ‘Sidney Nolan: Drought Photographs’ at Australian Galleries, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 3rd March – 27th March 2011

Curator: Damian Smith

 

Sidney Nolan (Australian, 1917-1992) 'Untitled (desiccated horse carcass sitting up)' 1952

 

Sidney Nolan (Australian, 1917-1992)
Untitled (desiccated horse carcass sitting up)
1952
Archival inkjet print
23 x 23cm

 

 

“In the meantime the landscape presents scenes of desolation which mark the memory of all who see it. Thousands of carcasses are strewn on the baked and cracked plains. There is a brooding air of almost Biblical intensity over millions of acres which bear no trace of surface waters. The dry astringent air extracts every drop of moisture from the grass, leaving it so brittle that it breaks under foot with the tinkling of thin glass.”


Sidney Nolan. Epic Drought in Australia 1952

 

“Peering into the pantry, which held a particular fascination for me, my eye was caught by several jars of preserved fruit that stood on the otherwise empty shelves and by a few dozen diminutive crimson apples on the sill of the window darkened by the yew tree outside. And as I looked on these apples which shone through the half-light … the quite outlandish thought crossed my mind that these things … had all outlasted me …”


W.G. Sebald. The Rings of Saturn 1988

 

 

This is a superb exhibition of 61 black and white photographs by Sidney Nolan. The photographs were shot using a medium format camera and are printed in square format from the original 1952 negatives. They were taken near the Birdsville Track in Queensland and were commissioned at the time by the Brisbane newspaper The Courier Mail. Although not intended to be studies for the later ‘Drought paintings’ they have become, were the beginning of, can be seen as, preparatory ideas pre sketching and painting.

There are two proof sets of the Drought Photographs (including the one displayed on the gallery wall) that are printed on a cool-toned Type C photographic paper (analogue to digital to analogue) at about 8″ square. These are the less successful of the prints for the “beauty is in the box.” The more impressive prints are the edition of 10 that is for sale, either as individual prints or as a whole folio, that are printed at approximately 10″ square on a slightly warm-toned Canson Infinity 310 gsm archival inkjet paper (analogue to digital). These are the knockout prints with lots of mid-toned hues – for the warm tone of the paper more closely matches the feel of the dusty Outback. They possess a very “inky” atmosphere and wonderful light. Make sure that you get the gallery staff to show you some of these prints!

The work itself is a joy to behold. The photographs hang together like a symphony, rising and falling, with shape emphasising aspects of form. The images flow from one to another. The formal composition of the mummified carcasses is exemplary, the resurrected animals (a horse, for example, propped up on a fifth leg) and emaciated corpses like contemporary sculpture. Here I am reminded of some of the work of Henry Moore.

The handling of the tenuous aspects of human existence in this uniquely Australian landscape is also a joy to behold. Through an intimate understanding of how to tension the space between objects within the frame Nolan’s seemingly simple but complex photographs of the landscape are previsualised by the artist in the mind’s eye before he even puts the camera to his face. Unfortunately I don’t have any photographs to show you of these works but for me they were one of the highlights of the exhibition, rivalling any of the work of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographers photographing in the American Dustbowl during the 1930s. Finally, some great Australian landscape photographs!!

As the curator Damian Smith notes of both strands, “Throughout the series emphasis shifts from detached observation to intimate contemplation – between the forces of the outer landscape to the darkness of the animals’ inner being.”

I would not say the landscapes are ‘detached observation’. Both forms require intimate contemplation.

 
Let us investigate the presence of these images further.

“Barthes mentions the apparently “universal” experiences of birth and death, experiences that, he points out, are in fact always mediated by historical and thus political circumstances. Echoing a famous remark by Bertolt Brecht, he contends that “the failure of photography seems to me to be flagrant in this connection: to reproduce death or birth tells us, literally, nothing.””1

“To reproduce death or birth tells us, literally, nothing.” Hence, you could argue, through an appeal to nostalgia for a mythology of the Australian bush we are held at the surface of an identity. Drought, desolation, despair, death. But these photographs go beyond the reproduction of death, go beyond mere nostalgia, by pushing the prick of consciousness, Barthes punctum, into a sense of spatial immediacy and temporal anteriority – an experience Barthes “sums up as the “having-been-there” that is the basis of every photograph’s sense of witness.”2

The new punctum becomes other than the detail – no longer of form but of intensity, of Time: conjuring past, present and future in a single image.3 We, the viewer, bring our own associations to the image, our knowledge of drought in this big land – the knowledge that this drought has happened, it did happen and it will happen again and again and again in the future, probably with more frequency than it does now. The photograph becomes an active, mental representation of the material world. It becomes the world’s ‘essence’.

The photographs stand for something else, some other state of being, much as this work can be seen as one small aspect of Nolan’s art that stands for the whole – a close examination of a small part of something that represents the whole, like a sail represents a yacht, a metonymic resonance. They tell us something through time, of life and death. As the great author W. G. Sebald eloquently observes in his quotation at the top of this posting these things outlast us – in our imagination.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

 1/ Batchen, Geoffrey. “Palinode: An Introduction to Photography Degree Zero,” in Batchen, Geoffrey (ed.,). Photography Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009, p. 6
2/ Ibid., pp. 8-9
3/ Ibid., p. 13


Many thankx to Ingrid Oosterhuis (General Manager Melbourne) for her help and to Australian Galleries for allowing me to publish the text and the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

 

 

Sidney Nolan (Australian, 1917-1992) 'Untitled (calf carcass in tree)' 1952

 

Sidney Nolan (Australian, 1917-1992)
Untitled (calf carcass in tree)
1952
Archival inkjet print
23 x 23cm

 

 

In 1952 Sidney Nolan was commissioned by the Brisbane newspaper The Courier Mail to travel through far northern Queensland to record his impressions of one of the worst droughts in Australia’s history. Throughout this journey Nolan took numerous black and white photographs using a medium format camera, resulting in a host of startling and memorable images. Focusing on both the macabre spectre of the many animal carcasses strewn across the landscape and on the singular dwellings announcing a tenuous human presence, Nolan created numerous iconic images.

Having returned to Australia after an extended period traveling in Europe, Nolan commented that the animal carcasses reminded him of the petrified bodies he had seen at Pompeii. Throughout the series emphasis shifts from detached observation to intimate contemplation – between the forces of the outer landscape to the darkness of the animals’ inner being. With their carefully composed compositions the photographs represent a dramatic shift from the artist’s earlier photographic experiments. In place of a prior spontaneity, drought-stricken animal carcases are framed in formally rigorous compositions, the moment seemingly trapped in time.

For the first time this exhibition includes the complete and unabridged series of Sidney Nolan’s Drought Photographs, including images previously unavailable for public exhibition.

Damian Smith
Archivist for the Nolan Estate 1996-1999

 

Sidney Nolan (Australian, 1917-1992) 'Untitled (camp bed)' 1952

 

Sidney Nolan (Australian, 1917-1992)
Untitled (camp bed)
1952
Archival inkjet print
23 x 23cm

 

Epic Drought in Australia

Australia has not a very long history, but it is long enough to indicate that she must expect a major drought once every decade. Even so the present drought which the north and west of the continent is enduring, is by far the worst in living memory.

Rivers which have not been dry for over a century are now beds of hot sand, and even the aborigines can find no parallel in their mythology for a drought of this magnitude.

To cattle raising areas, failure of the annual monsoonal rains spells near tragedy. Of a total of 11.4 million beef cattle 1.5million have already perished.

The position is complicated by the lack of a railway connecting the North-centre of Australia with the eastern seaboard. Had such a railway been in existence many thousands of cattle could have been shifted to agistment areas and saved. As it is, the cattle must survive journeys from 500 to 1500 miles on stock routes, and this is generally impossible owing to the weakened positions of the animals. Thus cattle men must face the prospect of watching their herds dwindle until at least the end of the year when there is the probability of early summer storms bringing relief.

In the meantime the landscape presents scenes of desolation which mark the memory of all who see it. Thousands of carcasses are strewn on the baked and cracked plains. There is a brooding air of almost Biblical intensity over millions of acres which bear no trace of surface waters. The dry astringent air extracts every drop of moisture from the grass, leaving it so brittle that it breaks under foot with the tinkling of thin glass.

Death takes on a curiously abstract patter under these arid conditions. Carcasses of animals are preserved in strange shapes which have often a kind of beauty, or even grim elegance.

Over the whole country there is a silence in which men and animals bring forth the qualities necessary for survival. Patience, endurance – and for many Australians, a bitter and salty attitude of irony.

Sidney Nolan, August 1952

Text from the Australian Galleries website [Online] Cited 18/03/2011 no longer available online

 

Sidney Nolan (Australian, 1917-1992) 'Untitled (cow in tree)' 1952

 

Sidney Nolan (Australian, 1917-1992)
Untitled (cow in tree)
1952
Archival inkjet print
23 x 23cm

 

Sidney Nolan (Australian, 1917-1992) 'Untitled (Brian the stockman mounting dead horse)' 1952

 

Sidney Nolan (Australian, 1917-1992)
Untitled (Brian the stockman mounting dead horse)
1952
Archival inkjet print
23 x 23cm

 

 

Australian Galleries is delighted to present this fascinating exhibition of selected photographs by Sidney Nolan curated by Damian Smith, Archivist for the Nolan Estate 1996-1999.

Smith states in the accompanying exhibition catalogue:

“In 1952 Sidney Nolan was commissioned by the Brisbane newspaper The Courier Mail to travel through far northern Queensland to record his impressions of one of the worst droughts in Australia’s history. Throughout this journey Nolan took numerous black and white photographs using a medium format camera, resulting in a host of startling and memorable images. Focusing on both the macabre spectre of the many animal carcasses strewn across the landscape and on the singular dwellings announcing a tenuous human presence, Nolan created numerous iconic images. This exhibition includes the complete and unabridged series of Sidney Nolan’s Drought Photographs, including images previously unavailable for public exhibition.”

In his 1952 essay Epic Drought in Australia Sidney Nolan remarked on the poignancy of the images, noting the following:

“Death takes on a curiously abstract patter under these arid conditions. Carcasses of animals are preserved in strange shapes which have often a kind of beauty, or even grim elegance.”

To coincide with the exhibition Drought Photographs, Australian Galleries will be showing a selection of Drought Drawings by Sidney Nolan that include works previously exhibited at the National Gallery of Victoria, in it’s landmark survey of Nolan’s work Desert Drought in 2003.

Sidney Nolan Drought Photographs
Curated by Damian Smith

In 2010 Damian Smith established Words For Art, a consultancy specialising in art writing and curatorial projects.

Damian has always had a strong interest in Nolan’s work, he was appointed the inaugural archivist for the estate of Sidney Nolan in 1996. Since that time he has curated numerous Nolan exhibitions including a major exhibition, Unmasked: Sidney Nolan and Ned Kelly 1950-1990 for the Heide Museum of Modern Art in 2006.

Building up to the Heide exhibition, Damian was based at Sidney Nolan’s home ‘The Rodd’ at Herefordshire, a 16th Century manor on the border of England and Wales. During that research period he developed an interest in Nolan’s life-long engagement with photography. He discovered vintage prints of Nolan’s photographs of outback Australia and the devastating drought in far northern Queensland, which were included in the landmark survey Sidney Nolan: Desert and Drought, at the National Gallery of Victoria in 2003. The exhibition included previously unseen photographic images from 1949 to 1952.

In the NGV exhibition, numerous small-scale contact prints showing Nolan’s ‘Drought animals’ were featured, as were larger black and white prints from the same series. Additional small-scale prints were sourced as well through Nolan’s step-daughter Jinx Nolan. Of note was Nolan’s now famous Untitled (Brian the stockman mounting a dead horse at Wave Hill Station), 1952, a startling image that first featured in the 1961 Thames & Hudson monograph Sidney Nolan, where it appeared titled Desert.

Having researched and written about these images, Damian recognised that Nolan had spent many hours studying the images, notating them and ultimately using them in the development of his now famous Drought paintings. Nolan offered the photographs to Life Magazine, New York in a bid to bring this extraordinary series to public attention. This bid was unsuccessful.

After all of the years since these photographs were taken, Damian made the decision to resurrect Nolan’s photographs working closely with Sidney Nolan’s widow Mary Nolan, nee Boyd. The result being this exhibition at Australian Galleries, Melbourne in 2011.

Keen to preserve the artist’s vision, the photographs have been produced to a scale consistent with the vintage prints and all are printed from the original negatives which were discovered at ‘The Rodd’.

Text from Australian Galleries Melbourne

 

Sidney Nolan (Australian, 1917-1992) 'Untitled (cow carcass and cow skull)' 1952

 

Sidney Nolan (Australian, 1917-1992)
Untitled (cow carcass and cow skull)
1952
Archival inkjet print
23 x 23cm

 

Sidney Nolan (Australian, 1917-1992) 'Untitled (cow and calf carcass covered in dirt I)' 1952

 

Sidney Nolan (Australian, 1917-1992)
Untitled (cow and calf carcass covered in dirt I)
1952
Archival inkjet print
23 x 23cm

 

 

Australian Galleries
35 Derby Street [PO Box 1183]
Collingwood 3066
Phone: +61 3 9417 4303

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Australian Galleries website

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Exhibition: ‘Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography’ at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York

Exhibition dates: 7th May, 2010 – 4th April 2011

 

Ilse Bing (American born Germany, 1899-1998) 'Self-Portrait in Mirrors' 1931


 

Ilse Bing (American born Germany, 1899-1998)
Self-Portrait in Mirrors
1931
Gelatin silver print
10 1/2 x 12″ (26.8 x 30.8cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Joseph G. Mayer Fund
© 2010 The Ilse Bing Estate / Courtesy Edwynn Houk Gallery

 

 

How I wish I could have been in New York to see this exhibition!

Marcus


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

 

 

Frances Benjamin Johnston (American, 1864-1952) 'Physiology. Class in emergency work' 1899-1900

 

Frances Benjamin Johnston (American, 1864-1952)
Physiology. Class in emergency work
1899-1900
Platinum print
7 9/16 × 9 1/2″ (19.2 × 24.2cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Gift of Lincoln Kirstein

 

“It is wrong to regard photography as purely mechanical. Mechanical it is, up to a certain point, but beyond that there is great scope for individual and artistic expression.” ~ Frances Benjamin Johnston

 

After setting up her own photography studio in 1894, in Washington, D.C., Frances Benjamin Johnston was described by The Washington Times as “the only lady in the business of photography in the city.”1 Considered to be one of the first female press photographers in the United States, she took pictures of news events and architecture and made portraits of political and social leaders for over five decades. From early on, she was conscious of her role as a pioneer for women in photography, telling a reporter in 1893, “It is another pet theory with me that there are great possibilities in photography as a profitable and pleasant occupation for women, and I feel that my success helps to demonstrate this, and it is for this reason that I am glad to have other women know of my work.”2

In 1899, the principal of the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Virginia commissioned Johnston to take photographs at the school for the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris. The Hampton Institute was a preparatory and trade school dedicated to preparing African American and Native American students for professional careers. Johnston took more than 150 photographs and exhibited them in the Exposition Nègres d’Amerique (American Negro Exhibit) pavilion, which was meant to showcase improving race relations in America. The series won the grand prize and was lauded by both the public and the press.

Years later, writer and philanthropist Lincoln Kirstein discovered a leather-bound album of Johnston’s Hampton Institute photographs. He gave the album to The Museum of Modern Art, which reproduced 44 of its original 159 photographs in a book called The Hampton Album, published in 1966. In its preface, Kirstein acknowledged the conflict inherent in Johnston’s images, describing them as conveying the Institute’s goal of assimilating its students into Anglo-American mainstream society according to “the white Victorian ideal as criterion towards which all darker tribes and nations must perforce aspire.”3 The Hampton Institute’s most famous graduate, educator, leader, and presidential advisor Booker T. Washington, advocated for black education and accommodation of segregation policies instead of political pressure against institutionalized racism, a position criticized by anti-segregation activists such as author W. E. B. Du Bois.

Johnston’s pictures neither wholly celebrate nor condemn the Institute’s goals, but rather they reveal the complexities of the school’s value system. This is especially clear in her photographs contrasting pre- and post-Hampton ways of living, including The Old Well and The Improved Well (Three Hampton Grandchildren). In both images, black men pump water for their female family members. The old well system is represented by an aged man, a leaning fence, and a wooden pump that tilts against a desolate sky, while the new well is handled by an energetic young boy in a yard with a neat fence, a thriving tree, and two young girls dressed in starched pinafores. Johnston’s photographs have prompted the attention of artists like Carrie Mae Weems, who has incorporated the Hampton Institute photographs into her own work to explore what Weems described as “the problematic nature of assimilation, identity, and the role of education.”4

Kristen Gaylord, Beaumont and Nancy Newhall Curatorial Fellow, Department of Photography, 2016

1/ “Washington Women with Brains and Business,” The Washington Times, April 21, 1895, 9
2/ Clarence Bloomfield Moore, “Women Experts in Photography,” The Cosmopolitan XIV.5 (March 1893), 586
3/ Lincoln Kirstein, “Introduction,” in The Hampton Album: 44 photographs by Frances B. Johnston from an album of Hampton Institute (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1966), 10
4/ Quoted in Denise Ramzy and Katherine Fogg, “Interview: Carrie Mae Weems,” Carrie Mae Weems: The Hampton Project (New York: Aperture, 2000), 78

 

Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954) 'Untitled #92' 1981

 

Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954)
Untitled #92
1981
Chromogenic colour print
24 x 47 15/16″ (61 x 121.9cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
The Fellows of Photography Fund
© 2010 Cindy Sherman

 

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953) 'Nan One Month After Being Battered' 1984

 

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Nan One Month After Being Battered
1984
Silver dye bleach print (printed 2008)
15 1/2 x 23 1/8″ (39.4 x 58.7cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Purchase
© 2010 Nan Goldin

 

JoAnn Verburg (American, b. 1950) 'Still Life with Serial Killers' 1991

 

JoAnn Verburg (American, b. 1950)
Still Life with Serial Killers
1991
Chromogenic print
19 9/16 × 27 11/16″ (49.7 × 70.4cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Horace W. Goldsmith Fund through Robert B. Menschel
© 2025 JoAnn Verburg

 

One day I went to the market in Spoleto, Italy, where my husband and I spent every summer and my flowers were wrapped up in a newspaper that I brought home and realised had a photograph of the serial killers, Charlie Manson and Jeffrey Dahmer, and an article in Italian that asked why these things happen in America. I knew immediately that I wanted to incorporate it into a photograph. And in our bedroom, I had leaned some jumbo postcards from the Courtauld Museum in London on the dresser.

Although the photograph could have a lot of traditional still life elements in it, you know, the bottle or the fruit, or the flowers, I like the fact that an aspect of the still life work that I’m able to bring in is the news that’s going on in another part of the world.

In my still lives, bringing in the newspaper allows me to connect these things that might seem very disparate, a fragment of a painting by a French painter from another century, put together with a news article about murder. But in fact, the nature of our contemporary lives is that we’re flipping the channels all the time. We’re experiencing so many things at once, and we’re not able to selectively engage only one thing at a time.

Text from the The Museum of Modern Art website

 

 

The Museum of Modern Art draws from its rich collection of photography to present the history of the medium from the dawn of the modern period to the present with the exhibition Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography, from May 7 to August 30, 2010. Filling the entire third-floor Edward Steichen Photography Galleries with photographs made exclusively by women artists, this installation comprises more than 200 works by approximately 120 artists, including a selection of exceptional recent acquisitions and works on view for the first time by such artists as Anna Atkins, Claude Cahun, Rineke Dijkstra, VALIE EXPORT, Nan Goldin, Helen Levitt, and Judith Joy Ross. The exhibition also includes masterworks by such luminaries as Berenice Abbott, Diane Arbus, Gertrude Käsebier, Dorothea Lange, Lisette Model, Tina Modotti, Cindy Sherman, and Carrie Mae Weems, as well as pictures, collages, video, and photography-based installations drawn from other curatorial departments by artists such as Hannah Höch, Barbara Kruger, Annette Messager, Yoko Ono, Lorna Simpson, Kiki Smith, and Hannah Wilke. The exhibition is organised by Roxana Marcoci, Curator; Sarah Meister, Curator; and Eva Respini, Associate Curator, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art.

The Edward Steichen Photography Galleries comprise a circuit of six rooms devoted to a rotating selection of photographs from the Museum’s collection. The galleries featuring works from 1850 to the 1980s open on May 7, 2010, and remain on view through March 21, 2011. The most contemporary works in the exhibition are currently on view in The Robert and Joyce Menschel Gallery, and they remain on view through August 30, 2010.

For much of photography’s 170-year history, women have contributed to its development as both an art form and a means of communication, expanding its parameters by experimenting with every aspect of the medium. Self-portraits and representations of women by a variety of women practitioners are a recurring motif, as seen in works by artists ranging from Julia Margaret Cameron to Lucia Moholy, and from Germaine Krull to Katy Grannan. Significant groups of works by individual photographers are highlighted within this chronological survey, including in-depth presentations of the work of Frances Benjamin Johnston, Käsebier, Modotti, Lange, Levitt, Arbus, Goldin, and Ross.

Marking the entrance to The Edward Steichen Photography Galleries is a large-scale photographic wallpaper, Fluxus Wallpaper, realised by Yoko Ono and George Maciunas in the early 1970s. This work depicts the serial repetition of a set of buttocks, an image originating from a provocative Fluxus film made by Ono in 1966.

Pictures by Women opens with a gallery of nineteenth and early twentieth-century work, representing the variety of photography’s applications. The earliest photograph in the installation was made in the 1850s by British photographer Anna Atkins, who used the cyanotype process to record her many plant specimens. Presented side by side are in-depth groupings of work by American photographers Frances Benjamin Johnston and Gertrude Käsebier. In 1899 the Hampton Institute commissioned Johnston to take photographs at the school that were featured in an exhibition about contemporary African American life at the Paris Exposition of 1900. On view is a selection of pictures taken from a larger album of 156, which exemplify Johnston’s talent for balancing pictorial delicacy and classical composition with the demands of working on assignment. Käsebier – another woman who produced photographic works of art while operating a successful commercial studio – is best known for her portraits and symbolic, soft-focus pictures of the mother-and-child theme.

The rise of photographic modernism in the 1920s and 1930s is traced in the second gallery primarily with the work of European women artists. A wall of portraits of women showing the range of artistic expression and experimentation during this period includes Claude Cahun’s radical gender-bending self-portrait in drag (1921); Lucia Moholy’s striking portrait of fellow Bauhaus student Florence Henri (1927); and Hannah Höch’s Indian Dancer: From an Ethnographic Museum (1930), a collage evoking the modern woman. Included here is also a photocollage by the little known Japanese artist Toshiko Okanoue, titled In Love (1953). Cannibalising images from U.S. magazines such as Life and Vogue, this surreal collage represents a young Japanese woman’s perception of the Western way of life. A group of pictures taken in Mexico in the late 1920s by Italian photographer Tina Modotti possess an aesthetic clarity and beauty that reflect her increasing political involvement within her adopted country. Also included is Ilse Bing’s Self-Portrait in Mirrors (1931), a picture staging a complex mise-en-scène between two reflections – one in the mirror and the other in the camera’s eye – as well as similarly powerful works by Imogen Cunningham, Florence Henri, Germaine Krull, and Lee Miller, who experimented with mobile perspectives of the handheld camera and graphic compositions.

The third gallery features photographers who devoted themselves to the complex challenge of exploring the social world in the interwar and postwar periods. Largely comprising work by American women, this gallery includes comprehensive presentations of two of America’s leading photographers, Dorothea Lange and Helen Levitt. The breadth of Lange’s accomplishments is represented through a selection of approximately 20 photographs, all of women, including her iconic Depression-era picture Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California (1936); the memorable One Nation, Indivisible, San Francisco (1942); and pictures capturing the bustle of postwar life in America, such as Mother and Child, San Francisco (1952). Opposite these works is a wall of colour photographs taken by Levitt in the 1970s on the streets of New York City. These lively, spontaneous pictures are full of humour and drama, and continue the rich tradition of the American documentary genre that Levitt helped establish in the 1940s with her black-and-white photographs. The rest of the gallery includes a variety of work made during the period, including Berenice Abbott’s documents of the changing architecture and character of New York City in the 1930s, and Barbara Morgan’s elegant 1940 photograph of dancer Martha Graham performing her dramatic piece “Letter to the World,” based on the love life of American poet Emily Dickinson.

Photography’s documentary tradition in the postwar period continues in the fourth gallery, most notably with a selection of Diane Arbus’s portraits of women, such as A Widow in Her Bedroom, New York City (1963); Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey (1966); and Girl in Her Circus Costume, Maryland (1967). This gallery also includes work by artists of the 1960s and 1970s who embraced photography not just as a way of describing experience, but as a conceptual tool for appropriating and manipulating existing photographs. Examples include Martha Rosler’s collage Cleaning the Drapes (1969-1972), which juxtaposes images of domestic bliss taken from women’s magazines with news pictures of the war in Vietnam. The gallery also introduces several notable examples of acts performed for the camera, including Adrian Piper’s self-portrait series Food for the Spirit (1971), a meditation on transcendental being through an analysis of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason; and VALIE EXPORT’s provocative Action Pants: Genital Panic (1969). Presented as a set of posters, this work memorialised a performance in which the Austrian artist marched into an experimental art-film house in Munich wearing crotchless trousers, challenging mostly male viewers to “look at the real thing” instead of passively enjoying images of women on the screen.

The emergence of colour photography as a major force in the 1970s is seen in the fifth gallery, with large photographs, including Tina Barney’s Sunday New York Times (1982) and a picture from Cindy Sherman’s celebrated Centerfolds (1981) series. This gallery also includes the work of postmodern artists associated with The Pictures Generation, such as Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, and Laurie Simmons, who played with photography’s potential to comment on the increasingly image-saturated world of the late twentieth century. Representing the other end of the photographic spectrum is the diaristic aesthetic of Nan Goldin. A group of Goldin photographs dating from 1978 to 1985 capture the shared experience of an artistic downtown New York community – a generation ravaged by drug abuse and AIDS. These pictures of the artist’s friends, lovers, and Goldin herself explore the highs and the lows of amorous relationships. These are presented opposite work by Gay Block, Sally Mann, and Sheron Rupp, who use the probing vision of straightforward photography to explore the world around us.

Concluding the installation in The Robert and Joyce Menschel Gallery are major groups of works that suggest the diversity of artistic strategies and forms in contemporary photography. A group of Judith Joy Ross portraits of very different women – a graduation guest (1993), a soldier (1990), a congresswoman (1987), and a visitor to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1984) – invite us to reflect upon the relationship between social roles and the unique identities of the individuals who fulfil them. Presented on the same wall is Rineke Dijkstra’s ongoing series Almerisa, comprising 11 photographs made over a period of 14 years. Dijkstra first photographed Almerisa – a six-year-old Bosnian girl whose family had relocated from their war-torn native country to Amsterdam – as part of a project documenting children of refugees. Dijkstra continued to photograph her at one- or two-year intervals, chronicling not only her development from childhood through adolescence and into adulthood but also her cultural assimilation from Eastern to Western Europe. A selection from Carrie Mae Weems’s series From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995) superimpose sand-blasted text over found photographs to dissect photography’s historical role in imposing stereotypes upon African Americans. Rounding out this gallery is a wall dedicated to portraits of women, including work by Valérie Belin, Tanyth Berkeley, Katy Grannan, and Cindy Sherman, suggesting the plasticity of photography and, indeed, of female identity itself.

Press release from the MoMA website

 

Julia Margaret Cameron (British born India, 1815-1879) 'Untitled' c. 1867

 

Julia Margaret Cameron (British, 1815-1879)
Untitled
c. 1867
Albumen silver print
13 3/16 x 11″ (33.5 x 27.9cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Gift of Shirley C. Burden

 

Gertrude Käsebier (American, 1852-1934) 'The Manger' 1899

 

Gertrude Käsebier (American, 1852-1934)
The Manger
1899
Platinum print
12 13/16 x 9 5/8″ (32.5 x 24.4cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Gift of Mrs. Hermine M. Turner

 

Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942) 'Campesinos (Workers' Parade)' 1926

 

Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942)
Workers Parade
1926
Gelatin silver print
8 7/16 x 7 5/16″ (21.5 x 18.6cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Given anonymously

 

Lucia Moholy (British, 1894-1989) 'Untitled (Florence Henri)' 1927

 

Lucia Moholy (British, 1894-1989)
Untitled (Florence Henri)
1927
Gelatin silver print
14 5/8 x 11″ (37.1 x 28cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther
© 2010 Lucia Moholy Estate/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

 

Hannah Höch (German, 1889-1978) 'Indian Dancer: From an Ethnographic Museum' 1930

 

Hannah Höch (German, 1889-1978)
Indian Dancer: From an Ethnographic Museum (Indische Tänzerin: Aus einem ethnographischen Museum)
1930
Cut-and-pasted printed paper and metallic foil on paper
10 1/8 x 8 7/8″ (25.7 x 22.4cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Frances Keech Fund
© 2019 Hannah Höch / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Germany

 

Through the cut-and-pasted elements of Indian Dancer, Höch assembled references to film, Central African sculpture, and the domestic sphere. Her collaged model is the actress Renée (Maria) Falconetti (also known simply as “Falconetti”), appearing in a publicity still for Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 film The Passion of Joan of Arc. Half of Falconetti’s face is replaced with the ear, eye, and mouth of a wooden dance mask from Cameroon. Atop her head rests a crown of cutlery: cutout shapes of spoons and knives, set against glinting metallic foil.

This work belongs to a series of photomontages called From an Ethnographic Museum (1924-1934), in which Höch juxtaposed images of women with reproductions of tribal art cut from magazines. The artist cited a visit to the ethnographic museum in Leiden, in the Netherlands, as an influence in the conception of this series; however, she used material from other cultures mostly as a point of departure for commentary on the status of women in contemporary German society. Invoking an androgynous fifteenth-century French martyr as embodied by a glamorous movie star, capping her with the finery of a domestic goddess, and aligning her with a cultural Other, this composite representation examines the complex facets of modern femininity.

Publication excerpt from MoMA Highlights: 375 Works from The Museum of Modern Art, New York (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2019)

 

Grete Stern (Argentine born Germany, 1904-1999) 'Photomontage for Madí, Ramos Mejía, Argentina' 1946-1947

 

Grete Stern (Argentine born Germany, 1904-1999)
Photomontage for Madí, Ramos Mejía, Argentina
1946-1947
Gelatin silver print
23 9/16 × 19 7/16″ (59.8 × 49.4cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Latin American and Caribbean Fund and partial gift of Mauro Herlitzka
© 2025 Galería Jorge Mara-La Ruche

 

Toshiko Okanoue (Japan, b. 1928) 'In Love' 1953

 

Toshiko Okanoue (Japan, b. 1928)
In Love
1953
Cut-and-pasted printed papers on printed paper
14 x 9 5/8″ (35.6 x 24.4cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Committee on Photography Fund and Committee on Drawings Funds
© 2019 Toshiko Okanoue

 

Martha Rosler (American, b. 1943) 'Cleaning the Drapes' from the series 'House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home' c. 1967-1972

 

Martha Rosler (American, b. 1943)
Cleaning the Drapes from the series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home
c. 1967-1972
Pigmented inkjet print (photomontage), printed 2011
17 5/16 x 23 3/4″ (44 x 60.3cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Committee on Photography and The Modern Women’s Fund
© Martha Rosler

 

Rosler conceived Bringing the War Home during a time of increased intervention in Vietnam by the United States military. Splicing together pictures of Vietnamese citizens maimed in the war, published in Life magazine, with images of the homes of affluent Americans culled from the pages of House Beautiful, Rosler made literal the description of the conflict as the “living-room war,” so called in the USA because the news of ongoing carnage in Southeast Asia filtered into tranquil American homes through television reports. By urging viewers to reconsider the “here” and “there” of the world picture, these activist photomontages reveal the extent to which a collective experience of war is shaped by media images.

Gallery label from The Shaping of New Visions: Photography, Film, Photobook, April 16, 2012 – April 29, 2013

 

Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) 'New York' 1977

 

Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
New York
1977
Chromogenic print, printed c. 2005
17 15/16 × 11 15/16″ (45.6 × 30.4cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Gift of Marvin Hoshino
© 2025 Film Documents LLC

 

 

The Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53 Street
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Review: ‘Navigating Widely’ by Vanila Netto at Arc One Gallery, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 1st March – 26th March 2011

 

Vanila Netto (Brazil, b. 1963) 'Pole Relief' 2011

 

Vanila Netto (Brazil, b. 1963)
Pole Relief
2011
50 x 50cm
Archival pigment ink on cotton rag paper

 

 

“There’s an odd diaristic quality to Vanila Netto’s photographic, still life, video and neon works. What at first might seem like a hotchpotch of gestures, assemblages and moments reveals a lateral narrative – still points on a fluid map.”


Dan Rule in The Age newspaper

 

 

Netto’s work moves from one place to another, Navigating Widely. Some elements are more successful than others. The grainy colour field photographs of extruded objects (foam packing, the detritus of cardboard) fail to impress lacking the fidelity that the subject matter requires and the ability to integrate successfully into the lateral narrative. The Super 8 film transferred to digital video It is time to bridge (2011) is excellent, evoking as it does the utopian ideals of industrialisation, planes and rockets becoming “permanent and sedentary residents” of an abandoned dream park. The diptych neon installation Elation, Deflation (Inner Tubes) (2011) is also effective in evoking the interface between human and machine.

The best work in the exhibition is the series of small square format, analogue colour photographs that have been printed digitally (see photographs below). There is a lovely spatial resistance in these photographs – hints of colour, slices, markings on walls, the collision of opposites – that elevates them above the rest of the exhibition. In these photographs, the punctum pricks our consciousness but is it enough? Although these are interesting photographs, are they photographs that you would remember in a week, a month or a year? More was needed to hang your hat on, perhaps an ambiguous sense of Time that stretched the frame of reference.

Overall, the hotchpotch of gestures, assemblages and moments needed a more substantial grounding and, for me, became points on a confused map: a collection of complexities, both global and personal, that needed a focusing of rationale and conceptualisation. Less is more! Drawing what are some good ideas and threads together in a simplified form would add to the strength of the work for there is talent here. Perhaps concentrating on one idea and exploring it more fully would be a step along the path. I look forward to the next literation.

Dr Marcus Bunyan


Many thanxk to Angela Connor for her help and to Arc One Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photograph for a larger version of the image.

 

 

Vanila Netto (Brazil, b. 1963) 'Colossus' 2011

 

Vanila Netto (Brazil, b. 1963)
Colossus
2011
100 x 100cm
Archival pigment ink on cotton rag paper

 

Vanila Netto (Brazil, b. 1963) 'Mir' 2011

 

Vanila Netto (Brazil, b. 1963)
Mir
2011
50 x 50cm
Archival pigment ink on cotton rag paper

 

Vanila Netto (Brazil, b. 1963) 'Wheeling Consorts' 2011

 

Vanila Netto (Brazil, b. 1963)
Wheeling Consorts
2011
50 x 50cm
Archival pigment ink on cotton rag paper

 

Vanila Netto (Brazil, b. 1963) 'Solaris' 2011

 

Vanila Netto (Brazil, b. 1963)
Solaris
2011
50 x 50cm
Archival pigment ink on cotton rag paper

 

Vanila Netto (Brazil, b. 1963) 'Air Buzzing' 2011

 

Vanila Netto (Brazil, b. 1963)
Air Buzzing
2011
50 x 50cm
Archival pigment ink on cotton rag paper

 

 

Arc One Gallery
45 Flinders Lane
Melbourne, 3000
Phone: (03) 9650 0589

Opening hours:
Wed – Sat 11am – 5pm

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Exhibition: ‘TRACEY MOFFATT: narratives’ at Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide

Exhibition dates: 26th February – 20th March 2011

 Curators: Maria Zagala, Associate Curator of Prints, Drawings and Photographs, Art Gallery of South Australia and Stephen Zagala, Curator at Monash Gallery of Art

 

Tracey Moffatt (Australia, b. 1960) 'Something More (no. 3)' 
from the series of 9 photographs ‘Something More’ 1989

 

Tracey Moffatt (Australia, b. 1960)
Something More (no. 3)
From the series of 9 photographs Something More
1989
Direct positive colour photograph
98 × 127cm
Courtesy the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

 

 

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

 

Tracey Moffatt: Narratives is the first major exhibition of this leading contemporary Australian artist to be held in Adelaide. The exhibition is a collaboration between the Monash Gallery of Art in Melbourne and the Art Gallery of South Australia and explores Moffatt’s interest in the history of cinema and the formal language of film and video in her construction of ‘photo-narratives’. It features seven of Moffatt’s multi-part photographic series, including Something More (1989), Scarred for Life I (1994) and II (1999), Up in the Sky (1997), Laudanum (1999), Invocations (2000), and The Adventure Series (2004).

In these series Moffatt uses photographic stills to build non-linear and open-ended stories. The narrative aspect of these series allows her to develop dream-like sequences, in which the real and the imaginary can unfold alongside each other. In this way, Moffatt invests the social reality of issues like race relations and domestic violence with uncertainty and subconscious dimensions. She presents disturbing subject matter in highly staged photographs which use the seductive language of film and popular culture to directly engage her audience.

The exhibition also includes Moffatt’s ground breaking films Nice Coloured Girls (1987), Night Cries (1990), Heaven (1997) and BeDevil (1993), and the critically acclaimed video montages produced with Gary Hillberg, Artist (2000), Revolution (2008) and Other (2009).

Text from the AGSA website

 

 

Tracey Moffatt (Australia, b. 1960) 'Something More (no. 5)' from the series of 9 photographs 'Something More' 1989

 

Tracey Moffatt (Australia, b. 1960)
Something More (no. 5)
From the series of 9 photographs Something More
1989
Direct positive colour photograph
98 × 127cm
Courtesy the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

 

Tracey Moffatt (Australian, b. 1960) 'Something More (no. 1)' 1997

 

Tracey Moffatt (Australian, b. 1960)
Something More (no. 1)
1997
From the series of 9 photographs Something More
1989
Direct positive colour photograph
98 × 127cm
Courtesy the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

 

Tracey Moffatt (Australia, b. 1960) 'Job hunt, 1976' 1994

 

Tracey Moffatt (Australia, b. 1960)
Job hunt, 1976
From the series of 10 prints Scarred for life I
1994
Colour photolithograph on paper
80 x 60cm
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection
Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

 

Tracey Moffatt (Australia, b. 1960) 'Useless, 1974' 1994

 

Tracey Moffatt (Australia, b. 1960)
Useless, 1974
From the series of 10 prints Scarred for life I
1994
Colour photolithograph on paper
80 x 60cm
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection
Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

 

Tracey Moffatt (Australia, b. 1960) 'Up in the sky (no. 1)' 1997

 

Tracey Moffatt (Australia, b. 1960)
Up in the sky (no. 1)
From the series of 25 prints Up in the sky
1997
colour photolithograph on paper
61 x 76cm
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection
Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

 

Tracey Moffatt (Australia, b. 1960) 'Up in the sky' 1997

 

Tracey Moffatt (Australia, b. 1960)
Up in the sky
From the series of 25 prints Up in the sky
1997
colour photolithograph on paper
61 x 76cm
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection
Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

 

Tracey Moffatt (Australia, b. 1960) 'Laudanum (no. 1)' 1998

 

Tracey Moffatt (Australia, b. 1960)
Laudanum (no. 1)
From the series of 19 prints Laudanum
1998
Photogravure on paper
76 × 57cm
Courtesy the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

 

Tracey Moffatt (Australia, b. 1960) 'Invocations (no. 2)' 2000

 

Tracey Moffatt (Australia, b. 1960)
Invocations (no. 2)
From the series of 13 prints Invocations
2000
Colour silkscreen on paper
146 x 122cm
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash
Collection 
Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

 

Tracey Moffatt (Australia, b. 1960) 'Invocations (no. 5)' 2000

 

Tracey Moffatt (Australia, b. 1960)
Invocations (no. 5)
From the series of 13 prints Invocations
2000
Colour silkscreen on paper
146 x 122cm
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash
Collection 
Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

 

Tracey Moffatt (Australia, b. 1960) 'Invocations (no. 7)' 2000

 

Tracey Moffatt (Australia, b. 1960)
Invocations (no. 7)
From the series of 13 prints Invocations
2000
Colour silkscreen on paper
146 x 122cm
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash
Collection 
Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

 

Tracey Moffatt (Australia, b. 1960) 'Adventure Series (no. 1)' 2004

 

Tracey Moffatt (Australia, b. 1960)
Adventure Series (no. 1)
from the series of 10 prints Adventure Series
2004
Inkjet print on paper
132 × 114cm
Courtesy the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

 

Tracey Moffatt (Australia, b. 1960) 'Adventure Series (no. 2)' 2004

 

Tracey Moffatt (Australia, b. 1960)
Adventure Series (no. 2)
From the series of 10 prints Adventure Series
2004
Inkjet print on paper
132 × 114cm
Courtesy the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

 

 

Art Gallery of South Australia
North Terrace Adelaide
Public information: 08 8207 7000

Opening hours:
Daily 10am – 5pm (last admissions 4.30pm)

Art Gallery of New South Wales website

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Galleries this week and ‘The Lost Diggers’

March 2011

 

It has been a busy week!

On Tuesday I visited Australian Galleries in Smith Street to view the Drought Photographs by Sidney Nolan. A wonderful experience. Thursday night was the opening of Manstyle at NGV Australia, Federation Square, the new exhibition that “explores the extremes of masculine style and some of the most influential ideas that have pervaded menswear over the past three centuries.” A lively opening with lots of milliners, designers and fashionistas but only a modicum of style from many of the men in attendance.

Friday saw a trip up Flinders Lane to visit Arc One Gallery (review of Navigating Widely by Vanila Netto), Craft Victoria and drop in and say hello to Mary Lou Jelbart, director of fortyfivedownstairs and view the extensive renovations to the office and storage areas. Always good to catch up with Mary Lou. Then onward, battling terrible traffic, to the opening of New11 at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) where the work was a bit ‘thin’ with a couple of notable exceptions.

Saturday saw a drive to Albert Street, Richmond to catch up with the galleries there – mostly stable exhibitions. Wade Marynowsky’s The Hosts: A Masquerade Of Improvising Automatons at John Buckley Gallery were interesting for 10 minutes or so reminding me of evil, corseted, twirling, marionette Daleks. I then had a chat with the delightful Edwin at Sophie Gannon Gallery and saw the first stages of installation of the upcoming Daniela Federici exhibition that is part of L’Oréal Melbourne Fashion Festival. Looks to be an interesting show.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

 

Antoinette or Louis Thuillier. 'No title (unknown Australian soldier wearing sheepskin jerkin)' c. 1916/17

 

Antoinette or Louis Thuillier
No title (unknown Australian soldier wearing sheepskin jerkin)
c. 1916/17
Glass negative
France

This image is published under fair dealing for the purposes of criticism or review (Commonwealth of Australia Consolidated Acts: Copyright Act 1968 – Sect 41)

 

 

This is a truly amazing story – finding these large format glass slides of First World War soldiers in an attic!

The original farmhouse has so much atmosphere. The photographs themselves are funny, poignant, informal, beautifully shot (the photographer, either Antoinette or Louis Thuillier, had a generous eye) and exhibit wonderful camaraderie

To actually find the original backdrop and be standing in the very place where these photographs were taken sends goose bumps up the spine just looking at the video. Imagine actually being there.

Look at the details – the hands, wedding rings, muddied boots, the children clasped by diggers with smokes in their hands, the props (chairs, motorbikes, guns, plant stands), sheepskin jerkins and the signs – We will soon, be, home, All that is left of them, France, 1916-1918.

They were so young, stoic, handsome. They stare out at you across time.

As Barthes and Sontag would say, these photographs haunt you.

 

View the video of the remarkable story from the link The Lost Diggers.

Look at hundreds of wonderful photographs from the links below:

    The Lost Diggers Facebook page
    Australian and international soldiers – Part 1
    Australian and international soldiers – Part 2
    Australian and international soldiers – Part 3

     

    Antoinette or Louis Thuillier. 'No title (unknown Australian soldier smoking a pipe)' c. 1916/17

     

    Antoinette or Louis Thuillier
    No title (unknown Australian soldier smoking a pipe)
    c. 1916/17
    Glass negative
    France

     

     

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    Review: ‘Rosemary Laing: leak’ at Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne

    Exhibition dates: 26th February – 19th March 2011

     

    Rosemary Laing (Australian, b. 1959) 'Jim' 2010

     

    Rosemary Laing (Australian, b. 1959)
    Jim
    2010
    From the series Leak
    C Type photograph
    Large image size 110 x 238cm
    Framed size 127 x 255cm
    Edition of 8

     

     

    You have just got to love these!

    A wonderful suite of five panoramic photographs, framed in white, inhabit the beautiful space of Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne. The photographs, different angles of the same bleached bone inverted skeleton of a house that was constructed by five builders in the Australian landscape around Cooma, New South Wales (no Photoshop tricks here!) have a subdued colour palette of misty greys and greens – all except one that has a vibrant blue sky with clouds, a man with his sheep dogs and a flock of sheep. Two of the photographs are framed upside down, one photograph a closer study from the same angle.

    The house on the hill is surrounded by wondrous light gently highlighting the wooden bones of the building embedded into the landscape in a context that is soon to become another suburban housing estate. The skeleton rises up (and falls into the sky) like a foundering ship amongst mysterious gum trees, surrounded by broken stumps and littered branches. The best photograph (top, below) has the effect of the bones being lit up like a giant puzzle.

    Examining ‘the encroachment of suburban development and the socio-economic and environmental pressures on the Australian landscape’ these photographs, named after the characters from Patrick White’s novel The Twyborn Affair, are ecologically aware and politically astute, as well as being fine photographs. The title of the exhibition, leak, perfectly sums up the osmotic nature of the encroachment of human habitation upon the ‘natural’ environment, which is already a mediated landscape due to European farming techniques and clearance of the landscape. But this is not a one way discourse; what do we call the ‘new’ Australian bush? What if the humpy invaded suburbia and pushed back the tide?

    I would love to see different types of houses in different contexts. I want to see more these are so good!

    Dr Marcus Bunyan


    Many thankx to Jan Minchin (Director) and Tolarno Galleries for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. Both images courtesy of the artist and Tolarno Galleries © Rosemary Laing.

     

     

    Rosemary Laing (Australian, b. 1959) 'Prowse' 2010

     

    Rosemary Laing (Australian, b. 1959)
    Prowse
    2010
    From the series Leak
    C Type photograph
    Large image size 110 x 247cm
    Framed size 127 x 264cm
    Edition of 8

     

    Rosemary Laing (Australian, b. 1959) 'Aristide' 2010

     

    Rosemary Laing (Australian, b. 1959)
    Aristide
    2010
    From the series Leak
    C Type photograph
    60 x 122cm
    Edition of 8

     

    Rosemary Laing (Australian, b. 1959) 'Eddie' 2010

     

    Rosemary Laing (Australian, b. 1959)
    Eddie
    2010
    From the series Leak
    Type C photograph
    Framed 127.0 x 274.6cm
    Edition of 8

     

     

    Tolarno Galleries
    Level 4
    104 Exhibition Street
    Melbourne VIC 3000
    Australia
    Phone: 61 3 9654 6000

    Opening hours:
    Tue – Fri 10am – 5pm
    Sat 1pm – 4pm

    Tolarno Galleries website

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    Exhibition: ‘Alberto Giacometti. The Origin of Space: Retrospective of the mature work’ at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg

    Exhibition dates: 20th November 2010 – 6th March 2011

     

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

     

    Alberto Giacometti (Swiss, 1901-1966) 'La Cage/The Cage' 1950

     

    Alberto Giacometti (Swiss, 1901-1966)
    La Cage/The Cage
    1950
    Bronze
    175.6 x 37 x 39.6cm
    Collection Fondation Giacometti, Paris (Inv. Nr. : 1994-0177)
    Photo: Jean-Pierre Lagiewski
    © ADAGP / Fondation Giacometti, Paris / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2010

     

    Alberto Giacometti (Swiss, 1901-1966) 'Walking Man I' 1960

     

    Alberto Giacometti (Swiss, 1901-1966)
    Homme qui marche I/Walking Man I
    1960
    Bronze
    180.5 x 27 x 97cm
    Collection Fondation Giacometti, Paris (Inv. Nr.: 1994-0186)
    Photo: Jean-Pierre Lagiewski
    © ADAGP / Fondation Giacometti, Paris / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2010

     

    Alberto Giacometti (Swiss, 1901-1966) 'Falling Man' 1950

     

    Alberto Giacometti (Swiss, 1901-1966)
    Homme qui chavire/Falling Man
    1950
    Bronze, 60 x 22 x 36cm
    Avignon, Musée Calvet (Depot Musée d’Orsay); Gift of Philippe Meyer, 2000 (Inv. Nr.: RF 4655)
    Photo: © bpk/RMN/Aix-en-Provence, Musée Granet/Michèle Bellot
    © ADAGP / Succession Giacometti / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2010

     

     

    “Space does not exist, it has to be created… Every sculpture based on the assumption that space exists is wrong; there is only the illusion of space.”


    Alberto Giacometti, Notes, circa 1949

     

     

    For the first time in 12 years, the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg is presenting a comprehensive overview of Alberto Giacometti’s mature work in Germany. Around 60 sculptures will be displayed alongside more than 30 paintings and several drawings in the circa 2000 square meter exhibition space. The exhibition offers unique insights into the fascinating oeuvre of one of the most important artists of the twentieth century.

    Giacometti’s vision of situating his figures within their own space and temporality will be realised for the first time in Wolfsburg as the exhibition architecture has been specially designed and constructed around the sculptures on display. Each of the carefully chosen works is provided with the space it requires to unfurl its true strengths. The exhibition clearly demonstrates the continued relevance of the work of Giacometti, who died in 1966, and its lasting influence on subsequent generations of artists. With his completely new conception of the human figure in relation to space and time, Giacometti can literally be considered – and this is one of the exhibition’s key theses – the inventor of virtual space.

    Organised in cooperation with the Museum der Moderne Salzburg, the exhibition juxtaposes major works from Giacometti’s oeuvre with selected pieces from private collections and the artist’s estate. The works on show in Wolfsburg are drawn in large part from the estate holdings of the Alberto and Annette Giacometti Foundation in Paris; this is the first time they have been presented on this scale in Germany. The display also includes important loans from the Alberto Giacometti Foundation in Zurich, as well as works from leading museums and private collections in Europe and the United States.

    Press release from the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg website

     

    Alberto Giacometti (Swiss, 1901-1966) 'Figure in a Box between Two Boxes which are Houses' 1950

     

    Alberto Giacometti (Swiss, 1901-1966)
    Figurine dans une boîte entre deux boîtes qui sont des maisons/Figure in a Box between Two Boxes which are Houses
    1950
    Bronze, glass, figurine painted white, 29.5 x 53.5 x 9.4cm
    Private collection (Inv. Nr.: GS 45)
    © ADAGP / Succession Giacometti / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2010

     

    Alberto Giacometti (Swiss, 1901-1966) 'Man walking in the Rain' 1948

     

    Alberto Giacometti (Swiss, 1901-1966)
    Homme qui marche sous la pluie/Man walking in the Rain
    1948
    Bronze
    46.5 x 77 x 15cm
    Kunsthaus Zürich, Alberto Giacometti-Stiftung (Inv. Nr.: GS 35)
    © ADAGP / Succession Giacometti / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2010

     

    Alberto Giacometti (Swiss, 1901-1966) 'Small Man on a Base' 1940-41

     

    Alberto Giacometti (Swiss, 1901-1966)
    Petit homme sur socle/Small Man on a Base
    1940-1941
    Bronze, 8/8
    Height: 8.4cm
    Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Dänemark
    Photo: Brøndum & Co. Poul Buchart/Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Dänemark
    © ADAGP / Succession Giacometti / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2010

     

    Alberto Giacometti (Swiss, 1901-1966) 'Large Narrow Head' 1954

     

    Alberto Giacometti (Swiss, 1901-1966)
    Grande tête mince/Large Narrow Head
    1954
    Bronze, 4/6
    64.5 x 38.1 x 24.4cm
    Collection Fondation Giacometti, Paris (Inv. Nr.: 1994-0175)
    Photo: Marc Domage
    © ADAGP / Fondation Giacometti, Paris / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2010

     

    Alberto Giacometti (Swiss, 1901-1966) 'Three Men Walking' 1948
    Screenshot

     

    Alberto Giacometti (Swiss, 1901-1966)
    Three Men Walking
    1948
    Bronze
    28 3/10 × 12 9/10 × 13 2/5 in | 72 × 32.7 × 34.1cm

     

     

    Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg
    Abteilung Kommunikation
    Hollerplatz 1
    38440 Wolfsburg
    Phone: +49 (0)5361 2669 69

    Opening hours:
    Tuesday – Sunday 11am – 6pm
    Monday closed

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    Exhibition: ‘Duane Hanson/Gregory Crewdson: Uncanny realities’ at Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden

    Exhibition dates: 27th November 2010 – 6th March 2011

    Curators: Götz Adriani and Patricia Kamp

     

    Installation photograph of the exhibition 'Duane Hanson/Gregory Crewdson: Uncanny realities' at Museum Frieder Burda

     

    Installation photograph of the exhibition Duane Hanson/Gregory Crewdson: Uncanny realities at Museum Frieder Burda

     

     

    A great double act!

    An inspired curatorial choice brings the work of these two artist’s together – life-like sculptures of everyday Americans mixing with theatrical, deadpan staged images. The mis en scène created in the exhibition space, the tension between sculpture, photograph, frame and space – is delicious.

    Crewdson is at his best when he resists the obvious narrative (for example, all the traffic lights stuck on yellow in the photograph Untitled (Brief Encounter) (2006, see below). Personally I prefer his staged photographs with pairs or groups of people within the image, rather than a single figure. The storyline is more ambiguous and the photographs of people walking along railway tracks always remind me of the Stephen King story filmed as Stand by Me (1986) with a young River Phoenix. Either way they are intoxicating, the viewer drawn into these wonderful, dark psychological dramas.

    Dr Marcus Bunyan


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

     

     

    Installation photograph of the exhibition 'Duane Hanson/Gregory Crewdson: Uncanny realities' at Museum Frieder Burda with Duane Hanson 'Old Couple on a Bench' (1994) in the foreground and Gregory Crewdson 'Untitled (Worthington Street)' (2006) in the background

     

    Installation photograph of the exhibition Duane Hanson/Gregory Crewdson: Uncanny realities at Museum Frieder Burda with Duane Hanson Old Couple on a Bench (1994) in the foreground and Gregory Crewdson Untitled (Worthington Street) (2006) in the background

     

     

    The works by the two American artists Duane Hanson (1925-1996) and Gregory Crewdson (born in 1962) confuse and touch the observer.

    Both artists present people in their everyday lives, with hopes, yearnings and broken dreams. People we usually do not notice, aged and marked by reality, by life itself. While Hanson shapes his life-sized figures with a great deal of sympathy, Crewdson rather spreads a gloomy and depressing atmosphere in his pictures of lonely people in their houses, gardens and in streets.

    With his realistic sculptures, the American artist Duane Hanson has become a synonym for contemporary realism in contemporary art. Typical motives are average people like  housewives, waitresses, car dealers, janitors. Posture and expression of these figures are very close to reality. The photographer Gregory Crewdson arranges his large format pictures with cineastic arrangements and lets the abyss behind every-day life scenes become visible.

    The exhibition at the Frieder Burda Museum presents about 30 figures by Duane Hanson, mainly from the artist’s estate, in dialogue with 20 large format works from the series Beneath the Roses by the photographer Gregory Crewdson. The photographies are mainly owned by the artist himself.

    The curators Götz Adriani and Patricia Kamp are not aiming at a direct confrontation. They are rather presenting two artists who work with different materials, but deal with very similar topics. Both artists, Hanson and Crewdson, are grand when it comes to arranging their art. Crewdson always puts very much effort into the arrangements of the scenes in his pictures, and Hanson always keeps an eye on his close surroundings.

    The works of both artists impressively reflect the complexity of the human existence. …

     

    Duane Hanson (American, 1925-1996) 'Children Playing Game' 1979

     

    Duane Hanson (American, 1925-1996)
    Children Playing Game
    1979
    Polyvinyl chloride, coloured with oil, mixed technique and accessories
    Collection Hanson, Davie, Florida
    © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2010

     

    Duane Hanson (American, 1925-1996) 'Tourists II' 1988

     

    Duane Hanson (American, 1925-1996)
    Tourists II
    1988
    polyvinyl chloride, coloured with oil, mixed technique, accessories
    Collection Hanson, Davie, Florida
    © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2010

     

    Duane Hanson (American, 1925-1996) 'Self-Portrait with Model' 1979

     

    Duane Hanson (American, 1925-1996)
    Self-Portrait with Model
    1979
    Polyvinyl chloride, coloured with oil, mixed technique and accessories
    Collection Hanson, Davie, Florida
    © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2010

     

    Duane Hanson (American, 1925-1996) 'Housepainter I' 1984/1988

     

    Duane Hanson (American, 1925-1996)
    Housepainter I
    1984/1988
    Epoxy resin, coloured with oil, mixed technique, accessories
    Collection Hanson, Davie, Florida
    © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2010

     

    Duane Hanson (American, 1925-1996) 'Queenie II' 1988

     

    Duane Hanson (American, 1925-1996)
    Queenie II
    1988
    Epoxy resin, coloured with oil, mixed technique, accessories
    Collection Hanson, Davie, Florida
    © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2010

     

    Duane Hanson

    Duane Hanson (1925-1996) is one of the most influential American sculptors of the 20th century committed to Realism.

    The proximity to reality of his lifelike, detailed human figures make for perfect irritation. Despite all the seriousness hidden behind the socio-critical issue, which prompted Hanson to create his protagonists, the figures have a great deal of entertainment value, above all – and it is precisely this that makes them so appealing – due to their occasional gravitational bearing. Featuring twenty-five works, the exhibition presents a representative cross-section of the American’s extensive oeuvre, which comprises a total of only 114 works. The figures enter a dialogue with the large-format photographs by the American photo artist Gregory Crewdson, who has a flair for relating human abysses in a different and very subtle way.

    In the early 1950s, after completing his study of sculpture at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, Hanson was initially guided by the abstract style of art that prevailed during this period. However, this would not lead to a satisfactory result. In 1953, he turned his back on his homeland and spent nearly ten years of his life earning a living as an art teacher at American schools in Germany. It was during this period that he discovered the materials polyester resin and fibreglass, which would become crucial for his future creative work. After returning to the United States, Hanson spent the ensuing years perfecting his artistic skills in the treatment of these materials in such a way that the boundaries between reality and artificial figure seem to blur – where Hanson was never concerned with the mere illusionistic reproduction of reality, but chose this veristic manner of representation as a medium for communicating his concern in terms of content, i.e., shedding light on the tragedy of human lives that hauntingly consolidates in his characters.

    In the human figures produced in the early work phase in the late 1960s, Hanson responded to the sociopolitical tension and protest movements of the day. He created sculptures and ensembles that very directly take issue with social hardship, violence, or racism, and he took a stand for the victims of this system, for the people who never had a chance to successfully face the demands made by life.

    Influenced by Pop Art, Hanson turned to thematising everyday American life, frequently switching his observations to a critically satirical attitude that was, however, always guided by compassion. Housewives, construction workers, car salesmen, or janitors – the models for his figures are people in the American middle and working classes in whose biographies the disappointment in the American dream has become entrenched. He often puts his people and all of their small insufficiencies into perspective with ironic kindness, such as, for example, the Tourists, in whom are combined all of the clichés associated with the typical Florida tourist.

    Hanson’s participation in documenta 5 in Kassel in 1972 gave rise to his international breakthrough. His figures became more lifelike; they more and more naturally blended into their surroundings. Their gestures, facial expressions, and postures related the emotional and physical burdens of life. The artist concentrated on older people in whose physiognomies one can read the traces of existence, the impact of loneliness, the problems that accompany being old, and their alienation. Hanson was struck by the isolation of this generation by society, a circumstance that has not lost any of its relevance.

    Hanson’s interest in rendering the figures as lifelike as possible is surely not rooted in a desire to want to convince the viewer of their “authenticity”; rather, their lifelikeness was meant to move the viewer to experience empathy and concern, thus manifesting Hanson’s humanism. Human values and destinies comprise the focus of his art; he transforms the reality of life into the realism of art and in doing so sharpens our outlook and our view of the world, our fellow human beings, and our own life as well.

     

    Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962) 'Untitled (Birth)' from the series 'Beneath the Roses' 2007

     

    Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962)
    Untitled (Birth)
    From the series Beneath the Roses
    2007
    Digital carbon print
    144.8 x 223.5cm
    Gregory Crewdson, Courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York
    © Gregory Crewdson, 2010

     

    Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962) 'Untitled (Blue Period)' from the series 'Beneath the Roses' 2005

     

    Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962)
    Untitled (Blue Period)
    From the series Beneath the Roses
    2005
    Digital carbon print
    144.8 x 223.5cm
    Gregory Crewdson, Courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York
    © Gregory Crewdson, 2010

     

    Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962) 'Untitled (Brief Encounter)' from the series 'Beneath the Roses' 2006

     

    Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962)
    Untitled (Brief Encounter)
    From the series Beneath the Roses
    2006
    Digital carbon print
    144.8 x 223.5cm
    Gregory Crewdson, Courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York
    © Gregory Crewdson, 2010

     

    Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962) 'Untitled (Debutante)' from the series 'Beneath the Roses' 2006

     

    Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962)
    Untitled (Debutante)
    From the series Beneath the Roses
    2006
    Digital carbon print
    144.8 x 223.5cm
    Gregory Crewdson, Courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York
    © Gregory Crewdson, 2010

     

    Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962) 'Untitled (Forest Clearing)' from the series 'Beneath the Roses' 2006

     

    Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962)
    Untitled (Forest Clearing)
    From the series Beneath the Roses
    2006
    Digital carbon print
    144.8 x 223.5cm
    Gregory Crewdson, Courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York
    © Gregory Crewdson, 2010

     

    Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962) 'Untitled (House Fire)' from the series 'Beneath the Roses' 2004

     

    Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962)
    Untitled (House Fire)
    From the series Beneath the Roses
    2004
    Digital carbon print
    144.8 x 223.5cm
    Gregory Crewdson, Courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York
    © Gregory Crewdson, 2010

     

    Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962) 'Untitled (Kent Street)' from the series 'Beneath the Roses' 2007

     

    Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962)
    Untitled (Kent Street)
    From the series Beneath the Roses
    2007
    Digital carbon print
    144.8 x 223.5cm
    Gregory Crewdson, Courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York
    © Gregory Crewdson, 2010

     

    Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962) 'Untitled (Maple Street)' from the series 'Beneath the Roses' 2004

     

    Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962)
    Untitled (Maple Street)
    From the series Beneath the Roses
    Digital carbon print
    144.8 x 223.5cm
    Gregory Crewdson, Courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York
    © Gregory Crewdson, 2010

     

    Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962) 'Untitled (Merchants Row)' from the series 'Beneath the Roses' 2003

     

    Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962)
    Untitled (Merchants Row)
    From the series Beneath the Roses
    Digital carbon print
    144.8 x 223.5cm
    Gregory Crewdson, Courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York
    © Gregory Crewdson, 2010

     

    Gregory Crewdson

    Born in 1962 in Brooklyn, New York, Gregory Crewdson is one of the best-known contemporary photographers internationally. In his most important series to date Beneath the Roses, which he created between 2003 and 2008, Crewdson explores the American psyche and the disturbing realities at play within quotidian environments. In his dramatically detailed and realistic photographs situated in America’s morbid, small-town milieu, the artist succeeds to stimulate the viewer’s subconscious on various levels. Twenty outstanding works from the series are being placed in a dialogue with sculptures by Duane Hanson. Gregory Crewdson does not spare either effort or expenses for the production of his visual inventions, which are reminiscent of film productions. The stagings are planned and arranged in advance down to the smallest detail and then elaborately implemented in a major logistical and human effort. The final photograph is the result of what is frequently work lasting several weeks, a circumstance that is substantiated by its depths in terms of content and its technical perfection.

    Gregory Crewdson works in two distinct ways to create his photographs. On one hand, he works on location in real neighborhoods and townships. On the other hand, the artist works on the soundstage inventing his world from scratch. Before the photographic location productions start, Crewdson drives around upstate Massachusetts looking for interesting settings, which he then has prepared in an elaborate process. In most cases, local residents of the ramshackle towns also play the characters in his work. Crewdson works closely with the art department of the museum MASSMoCA, when shooting his pictures done on the soundstage. The results are much like stills from a movie and reflect his affinity with cinema. Filmmakers such as Alfred Hitchcock, David Lynch, or Steven Spielberg are the inspiration for Crewdson’s uncanny stories, which he seems to freeze in a single snapshot in time.

    The construction of this narrative instant demonstrates the artist’s extraordinary talent. Like sophisticated literature does the reader, his works pose a challenge to viewers, as they have to mount the decisive share of the creative effort themselves. A brief, fleeting glance is not enough. Viewers become immersed in the staged scenes full of details and accessories to experience a moment that is intensely real. Fantasy and the powers of imagination and association fashion the visual event in the mind to become a subjective, alternative reality – an uncanny reality.

    In his photographs, Crewdson deliberately works with emotions and fears that extend through his oeuvre in recurring, in part very different scenarios. They mirror alienation, absence, shame, sexuality, and loss – human states of emotion that deeply touch the viewer. That the artist focuses on the mind in his works may be due to the fact that, as the son of a psychoanalyst, he experienced insight into the profundity of the human soul very early on. His works can be regarded as metaphors for fears and desires, for the things that take place below the surface, the palpable, as if Crewdson wanted to make visible a new or different level of reality situated somewhere between the conscious and subconscious.

    At the same time, the Beneath the Roses series can be seen as a psychological study of the American province. The settings show social realities and document the economic decline of a society behind the backdrop of the American way of life. Unsentimental and direct, they reflect working-class life – which allows us to strike an arc to the work by Duane Hanson, whose oeuvre also revolves around the concept of humanity, the facets of which he lends expression to in his silent, introverted figures.

    The evolution of Beneath the Roses was documented in a series of production stills, original drawings by the artist, and detailed lighting plans. About sixty works from this reservoir are presented in a studio exhibition at the museum in order to illustrate the complex technical process of producing the photographs. Gregory Crewdson completed his study of Street Photography at the Yale School of Art in New Haven in 1988. He returned to Yale in 1993 and has occupied the Chair of Photography since.

    Press release from the Museum Frieder Burda website

     

    Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962) 'Untitled (Natural Bridge)' from the series 'Beneath the Roses' 2007

     

    Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962)
    Untitled (Natural Bridge)
    From the series Beneath the Roses
    Digital carbon print
    144.8 x 223.5cm
    Gregory Crewdson, Courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York
    © Gregory Crewdson, 2010

     

    Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962) 'Untitled (Railway Children)' from the series 'Beneath the Roses' 2003

     

    Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962)
    Untitled (Railway Children)
    From the series Beneath the Roses
    2003
    Digital carbon print
    144.8 x 223.5cm
    Gregory Crewdson, Courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York
    © Gregory Crewdson, 2010

     

    Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962) 'Untitled (RBS Automotive)' from the series 'Beneath the Roses' 2007

     

    Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962)
    Untitled (RBS Automotive)
    From the series Beneath the Roses
    2007
    Digital carbon print
    144.8 x 223.5cm
    Gregory Crewdson, Courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York
    © Gregory Crewdson, 2010

     

    Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962) 'Untitled (Shane)' from the series 'Beneath the Roses' 2006

     

    Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962)
    Untitled (Shane)
    From the series Beneath the Roses
    2006
    Digital carbon print
    144.8 x 223.5cm
    Gregory Crewdson, Courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York
    © Gregory Crewdson, 2010

     

    Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962) 'Untitled (Sunday Roast)' from the series 'Beneath the Roses' 2005

     

    Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962)
    Untitled (Sunday Roast)
    From the series Beneath the Roses
    2005
    Digital carbon print
    144.8 x 223.5cm
    Gregory Crewdson, Courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York
    © Gregory Crewdson, 2010

     

    Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962) 'Untitled (Temple Street)' from the series 'Beneath the Roses' 2006

     

    Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962)
    Untitled (Temple Street)
    From the series Beneath the Roses
    2006
    Digital carbon print
    144.8 x 223.5cm
    Gregory Crewdson, Courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York
    © Gregory Crewdson, 2010

     

    Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962) 'Untitled (The Father)' from the series 'Beneath the Roses' 2007

     

    Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962)
    Untitled (The Father)
    From the series Beneath the Roses
    Digital carbon print
    144.8 x 223.5cm
    Gregory Crewdson, Courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York
    © Gregory Crewdson, 2010

     

    Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962) 'Untitled (Trailer Park)' from the series 'Beneath the Roses' 200

     

    Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962)
    Untitled (Trailer Park)
    From the series Beneath the Roses
    2007
    Digital carbon print
    144.8 x 223.5cm
    Gregory Crewdson, Courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York
    © Gregory Crewdson, 2010

     

    Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962) 'Untitled (Worthington Street)' from the series 'Beneath the Roses' 2006

     

    Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962)
    Untitled (Worthington Street)
    From the series Beneath the Roses
    2006
    144.8 x 223.5cm
    Gregory Crewdson, Courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York
    © Gregory Crewdson, 2010

     

     

    Museum Frieder Burda
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    Review: ‘Stormy Weather: Contemporary Landscape Photography’ at NGV Australia, Melbourne

    Exhibition dates: 24th September 2010 – 20th March 2011

     

    Nici Cumpston (Australian / Barkindji, b. 1963) 'Nookamka - Lake Bonney' 2007

     

    Nici Cumpston (Australian / Barkindji, b. 1963)
    Nookamka – Lake Bonney
    2007
    watercolour and coloured pencils on ink on canvas
    74.2 x 203cm
    National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
    Purchased, Victorian Foundation for Living Australian Artists, 2008
    © Nici Cumpston

     

     

    “It is this irreversibly modified world, from the polar caps to the equatorial forests, that is all the nature we have.”


    Simon Schama. Landscape and Memory 1

     

    “The term “landscape” can be ambiguous and is often used to describe a creative interpretation of the land by an artist and the terrain itself. But there is a clear distinction: the land is shaped by natural forces while the artist’s act of framing a piece of external reality involves exerting creative control. The terms of this ‘control’ have be theorised since the Renaissance and, while representations of nature have changed over the centuries, a landscape is essentially a mediated view of nature.”


    Dr Isobel Crombie 2

     

    “And, finally, what of the vexed, interrelated matter of non-Aboriginal Australians’ sense of belonging? While the Australian historian Manning Clark speculated that European settlers were eternal outsiders who could never know ‘heart’s ease in a foreign land, because … there live foreign ancestral spirits’, it now seems plausible that non-Aboriginal Australians are developing their own form of attachment, not to land as such, but to place. Indeed, it has recently been argued that for contemporary non-Aboriginal Australians, belonging may have no connection with land at all. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why art photographs of the natural landscape have lost their currency and are now far outnumbered by photographs of urban and suburban environments – after all, it is ‘here’ that most Australians live and ‘there’ that the tourist industry beckons them to escape.”


    Helen Ennis. Photography and Australia 3

     

     

    This review took a lot of research, reading, thinking and writing, all good stuff – I hope you enjoy it!

     

    Heavy Weather: Photography and the Australian Land(e)scape

    There is nothing fresh about the work in this exhibition. If feels like all the oxygen has been sucked out of the term ‘landscape’, the land itself gasping for air, for life. What the exhibition does evince is an “undercurrent of disruption and contradiction that suggests that all is not as it may appear” (wall text) – and on this evidence the process of photographing the Australian landscape seems to have become an escape from the land, a fragmented and dislocated scoping, mapping and photographing of mental aspects of the land that have little to do with the landscape itself. Landscape as a site of psychological performance. In this sense, the title Stormy Weather should perhaps have been Heavy Weather for contemporary photographic artists seem to make heavy going of photographing our sense of belonging to land, to place.

    Is it the artists or the curators that seek to name this work ‘landscape photography’ for it is about everything but the landscape – an escape from the land, perhaps even a denial of it’s very existence. I believe it is the framing of landscape and its imaging in terms of another subject matter. While I am not going to critique individual works in the exhibition, what I am interested in is this framing of the work as ‘landscape photography’.


    Since colonial settlement there has been a rich history of photographing the Australian landscape. In the early colonial period the emphasis was on documenting the building of new cities and communities through realist photography and later more picturesque and panoramic vistas of the Australian land as settlers sought comfort in familiar surroundings and a sense of ‘belonging’ to the land (for example day trippers and photographers travelling to the Blue Mountains). Photographers rarely accompanied expeditions into the interior, unlike the exploration and mapping of the land from the East Coast to the West Coast in the United States. Unlike America there has been little tradition of photographing sublime places in Australia because they are not of the same scale as in the USA. It is very difficult to photograph the vast horizon line of the Australian outback and make it sublime. Photographing the landscape then ventured through Pictorialism in the interwar years, Modernism after WWII through to the emergence of art photography in the 1970s (for example see my posting on Dr John Cato), wilderness and tourist photography. An excellent book to begin to understand the history of photography in Australia is Photography and Australia by Helen Ennis (London: Reaktion Books, 2007) that contains the chapter “Land and Landscape.” As Ennis comments in this chapter, “… landscape photography has been the practice of settler Australians and the expression of a settler-colonial culture … The viewpoint in landscape photography has therefore been almost exclusively European”4 although this culture has been changing in recent years with the emergence of Indigenous photographers.

    Ennis observes that contemporary landscape photographers embrace internationalist styles, showing a distaste for totalising nationalist narratives and a rejection of essentialist or absolutist viewpoints, noting that an overarching framework like multiculturalism has lost its currency in favour of transnationalism (which is a social movement grown out of the heightened interconnectivity between people and the loosening of boundaries between countries) that does not disavow colonial inequalities and asymmetrical relations between countries and continents.5 Photographers have developed a “photographic language that allows for the expression of the contradictions inherent in contemporary settler Australians’ relations with the land,”6 whilst offering visual artists a “non-linear, non-didactic way of dealing with the complexities of Australia history and experience, and the relationship between past and present.”7

    This much then is a given. Let us now look at the framing of the work in the exhibition as ‘landscape photography’.


    Simon Schama in his erudite book Landscape and Memory (New York: Vintage, 1996) believes that there can never be a natural or neutral landscape (even the brilliant meadow-floor [at Yosemite] which suggested to its first eulogists a pristine Eden was in fact the result of regular fire-clearances by its Ahwahneechee Indian occupants) and that it is our shaping perception that makes the difference between raw matter and landscape. There was also a recognition that ‘nature’ was neither neutral nor beyond ideology during the 1970s-1980s. Hence there is a double mediation – by both nature and the artist.

    Despite the rejection of essentialist or absolutist viewpoints by contemporary photographers and an acknowledgment of the mediated view by/of nature one can say that there is not a single photograph in this exhibition that is just a ‘landscape’. Even the most sublime photographs in the exhibition, David Stephenson’s (Self-portrait), Reflected moon, Tasmania (1985) is cut up into a grid, or Murray Fredericks Salt photographs (2005, see below) where the photographer has waited agonisingly for weeks for just the right weather conditions to take his photographs which the general public, when visiting Lake Eyre, would have no chance of ever seeing. Through this mediation there seems to have emerged an abrogation or denial of landscape by the artists and curators conceptualisation of it, as though they are performing a particular condition, a style; working out a plan of what to do and say. Is it just a denial or is it an artistic strategy?

    I believe that these are strategies that limit artists, not strategies that enable them. The curators are equally implicated in these strategies by their naming of these works ‘landscapes’. What purpose does this naming serve, in terms of the development of a sense of place, not nation, that people living in Australia seek to have? We can ask the question: Where do you stand in relationship to the landscape both philosophically and geographically?

    After Butler, we can also ask: What forms of cultural myth making are “embedded” in the framing of landscape by the curators, the naming of such work as ‘landscape photography’?


    Rarely is the framing recognised for what it is, when it is the viewer interpreting the interpretation that has been imposed upon us, that limits the visual discourse, producing a view of Australian landscape as fragmented norms enacted through visual narrative frames – that in this case efface the representation of land and place. This conceptual framing of what the work is about limits the grounds for discourse for a frame excludes as much as it corrals. The curators form an interpretative matrix of what is seen (or not seen, or withheld), reinforcing notions of landscape photography, the ‘landscape photography’ “that requires a certain kind of subject that actually institutes that conceptual requirement as part of its description and diagnosis.”8 In other words the description ‘landscape photography’ established by the curators becomes a limiting, self-fulfilling prophecy.

    Personally, I think the problem with a landscape exhibition is that this is virtually an inane topic. Somehow “documentary” works as a topic because it is about a mental discipline. But “landscape” is no longer really a topic – it used to be a topic when landscape painters wanted to show the landscape (!) but does anyone really want to show this today? Even when the landscape painters wanted to show the sublime, the landscape was always treated with deference. No-one thinks of Minor White as a landscape photographer for he was a metaphysical photographer. And that’s what this exhibition needs – another word to give sense to a photographers efforts.

    This is difficult subject matter. While artists may reject essentialist or absolutist viewpoints what has been substituted in their place is a framing, a definition that is post-nature, that undermines any sense of belonging to land, to place. The dissolutive pendulum has swung too far the other way; we look to theory to be inclusive and sometimes stand on our heads to achieve this to our detriment.

    As of this moment we are not at the point where we can look back with some certainty and see that we have reached the beginning of the path of understanding. What I would propose to any artist is a photography that is broadly based, cumulative, offering a layered body of work that builds and refers back to an original body of work, much like the photographs of Robert Adams – photographs that do not make claims but ask questions and hint at a more responsive engagement with the landscape.

    My hope is that a more broadly based view of place and our sense of belonging to the land emerges, one that challenges our contemporary understanding of the landscape, a viewpoint and line of sight that calm our troubled sense of reality. Robert Adams has written eloquently about photography and the art of seeing. Here is a quote from his seminal book Why People Photograph (Aperture Foundation, 1994) that aptly concludes this review.

    “At our best and most fortunate we make pictures because of what stands in front of the camera, to honor what is greater and more interesting than we are. We never accomplish this perfectly, though in return we are given something perfect – a sense of inclusion. Our subject thus redefines us, and is part of the biography by which we want to be known.”9

    Dr Marcus Bunyan


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

    Addendum

    Further to my argument above there is a session ‘Australian Identity: Australian Bio-diversity and the Landscape of the Imagination’ at the Festival of Ideas, Friday June 17th 2011 at the University of Melbourne where, in the details of the upcoming session, Ian Burn has been quoted about the loss of the landscape:

    Details of the session: ‘The connection between landscape and national identity figures prominently in discussions of Australian experience. Recently the pairing of the two has taken a melancholic turn; artist Ian Burn has remarked that ‘A commitment to representing the landscape has come to be about the “loss” of the landscape’. Has the landscape that once supported the Australian legend disappeared? The landscape is represented not only in art but also through science, law and commerce. Are new landscapes and new identities now being imagined and discovered?’

    Quotation: “The idea of landscape does not just invoke rival institutional discourses, but today attracts wider and more urgent reflections. A commitment to representing the landscape has become about the ‘loss’ of landscape in the twentieth century … that is about its necessity and impossibility at the same time. Seeing a landscape means focusing on a picture, implicating language in our seeing of the landscape.”

    Burn, Ian quoted in Stephen, Ann (ed.,). Artists think: the late works of Ian Burn. Sydney: Power Publications in association with Monash University Gallery, Melbourne, 1996, p. 8.

    Footnotes

    1/ Schama, Simon. Landscape and Memory. New York: Vintage, 1996, p. 7

    2/ Crombie, Isobel. Stormy Weather. Contemporary Landscape Photography (exhibition catalogue). Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2010, p. 15

    3/ Clark, Manning quoted by Peter Read in “A Haunted Land No Longer? Changing Relationships to a Spiritualised Australia,” in Australian Book Review CCLXV (October 2004) pp. 28-33 in Ennis, Helen. “Land and Landscape,” in Photography and Australia. London: Reaktion Books, 2007, pp. 71-72

    4/ Ennis, Helen. “Land and Landscape,” in Photography and Australia. London: Reaktion Books, 2007, pp. 51-52

    5/ Ennis, Helen. “Land and Landscape,” in Photography and Australia. London: Reaktion Books, 2007, p. 123, p. 133

    6/ Ibid., “Land and Landscape,” pp. 71-72

    7/ Ibid., “Localism and Internationalism,” p. 128

    8/ Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? London: Verso, 2010, p. 161

    9/ Adams, Robert. Why People Photograph. New York: Aperture Foundation, 1994, p. 179

     

     

    Nici Cumpston (Australian / Barkindji, b. 1963) 'Flooded Gum, Katarapko Creek, Murray River National Park' 2007

     

    Nici Cumpston (Australian / Barkindji, b. 1963)
    Flooded Gum, Katarapko Creek, Murray River National Park
    2007
    Watercolour and pencil on inkjet print on canvas
    74.5 x 202.5cm
    National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
    Purchased, Victorian Foundation for Living Australian Artists, 2008
    © Nici Cumpston

     

    Stephanie Valentin (Australian, b. 1962) 'Earthbound' 2009

     

    Stephanie Valentin (Australian, b. 1962)
    Earthbound
    2009
    from the Earthbound series
    inkjet photograph
    70 x 90cm
    National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
    Purchased with funds donated by Phillip Ross and Sophia Pavlovski-Ross, 2009
    © Stephanie Valentin

     

    Harry Nankin (Australian, b. 1953) 'Of Great Western tears / Duet 2' 2006

     

    Harry Nankin (Australian, b. 1953)
    Of Great Western tears / Duet 2
    2006
    From The rain series 2006-2007
    Gelatin silver photographs
    (a-b) 107.1 x 214.3cm (overall)
    National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
    Purchased NGV Foundation, 2007
    © Harry Nankin

     

    Stephanie Valentin (Australia, b. 1962) 'Rainbook' 2009

     

    Stephanie Valentin (Australia, b. 1962)
    Rainbook
    2009
    From the earthbound series 2009
    Colour inkjet print
    69.9 x 86.9cm
    National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
    Purchased with funds donated by Philip Ross and Sophia Pavlovski-Ross, 2009
    © Stephanie Valentin

     

    Murray Fredericks (Australia, b. 1970) 'Salt 154' 2005

     

    Murray Fredericks (Australia, b. 1970)
    Salt 154
    2005
    From the Salt series 2003-
    Colour inkjet print
    119.3 x 149.3cm
    National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
    Purchased, Victorian Foundation for Living Australian Artists, 2009
    © Murray Fredericks

     

    Siri Hayes (Australia, b. 1977) 'Plein air explorers' 2008

     

    Siri Hayes (Australia, b. 1977)
    Plein air explorers
    2008
    Type C photograph
    104.3 x 134.8cm
    National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
    Purchased, Victorian Foundation for Living Australian Artists, 2009
    © Siri Hayes

     

     

    The work of the contemporary Australian photographers highlighted in this exhibition comes from a profound engagement with the lived landscape around them. The quiet intensity of their work comes from their close and sustained relationship to particular environments. These photographers may use that lived observation to reveal the layers of history in a landscape; to provoke ecological concerns; as the place for site specific performances; or to use the specific poetics of light to reveal the beauty of a place.  However for all of them, the real world is the starting point for images of particularity.

    Photographers’ interest in the landscape has increased in the last few years. Perhaps as a result of heightened environmental awareness, or an evolution in our engagement with Australian history, practitioners are again turning to the natural world as a site for critical practice and inspiration.

    Drawn from the permanent collection the National Gallery of Victoria, the selected photographers in this exhibition have a particular focus that comes from their active relationship to various environments. The artists displayed here reveal history in a landscape; provoke ecological concerns; use the landscape as a site of performance; or reveal the distinctive beauty of a place.

    Frequently underpinning these works of quiet intensity and considerable beauty is an undercurrent of disruption and contradiction that suggests all is not as it may first appear.

    Text from the National Gallery of Victoria website [Online] Cited 26/02/2011 no longer available online

     

    Rosemary Laing (Australia, b. 1959) 'weather #9' 2006

     

    Rosemary Laing (Australia, b. 1959)
    weather #9
    2006
    From the weather series 2006
    Type C photograph
    109.9 x 184.6cm
    National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
    Purchased, Victorian Foundation for Living Australian Artists, 2007
    © Rosemary Laing and Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne

     

    Jill Orr (Australia , b. 1952, lived in the Netherlands 1980-1984) 'Southern Cross to bear and behold - Burning' 2007)

     

    Jill Orr (Australia , b. 1952, lived in the Netherlands 1980-1984)
    Southern Cross to bear and behold – Burning
    2007
    Colour inkjet print
    65.5 x 134.9cm
    National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
    Purchased, Victorian Foundation for Living Australian Artists, 2010
    Photographer: Naomi Herzog for Jill Orr
    © Jill Orr

     

     

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

    Opening hours:
    Open daily 10am – 5pm

    National Gallery of Victoria website

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    Exhibition: ‘Painting on paper – Josef Albers in America’ at Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich

    Exhibition dates: 16th December 2010 – 6th March 2011

     

    Josef Albers (German, 1888-1976) 'Study for a Adobe' c. 1947

     

    Josef Albers (German, 1888-1976)
    Study for a Adobe
    c. 1947
    Oil and graphite on blotting paper
    24.1 × 30.5cm
    The Josef Albers Museum Quadrat Bottrop
    © 2010 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/VG Bildkunst, Bonn/Artists Rights Society, New York

     

     

    I really like the work of Josef Albers and these paintings on paper, studies for later work, give insight into that rare quality of Albers – his ability to mould, no that’s not the right word – his ability to accrete colours and spaces together, to build tectonic plates of colour that collide and burst against each other forming an “osmosis of plane and space.” These harmonic oscillations of vibrant colour form a pleasing equilibrium in the mind, freeing the viewer from conceptual thought and allowing us to enter a different state of being. It is fascinating to me that he painted these studies on blotting paper as the paper seems to soak up the colours, intensifying their existence.

    Dr Marcus Bunyan


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

     

     

    Josef Albers (German, 1888-1976) 'Color Study for a Variant / Adobe' Nd

     

    Josef Albers (German, 1888-1976)
    Color Study for a Variant / Adobe
    Nd
    Oil on blotting paper
    48.2 × 60.9cm
    The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation
    © 2010 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/VG Bildkunst, Bonn/Artists Rights Society, New York

     

    Josef Albers (German, 1888-1976) 'Study for a Variant / Adobe (I)' c. 1947

     

    Josef Albers (German, 1888-1976)
    Study for a Variant / Adobe (I)
    c. 1947
    Oil on blotting paper with pencil
    24.1 × 30.6cm
    The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation
    © 2010 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/VG Bildkunst, Bonn/Artists Rights Society, New York

     

     

    The exhibition is the first to show such a concentration of paintings on paper by Josef Albers, some of which will be completely unknown to the general public. Works in oil on paper, painted by the artist since the 1940s in preparation for the Adobe and Variant series in particular, are presented together with a large group related to his principal work “Homage to the Square” from the artist’s late period, that he focused on from 1950 until his death in 1976.

    Josef Albers was only able to fully develop into an important artist and influential teacher after emigrating to the USA. From around 1940 onwards, Albers was inspired by Mexico’s pre-Columbian architecture, sculpture and textile art that boosted his sense for the aesthetic and led to idiosyncratic, radiant colour compositions, the likes of which had never been seen at that time in European modern art. Around 1950, Albers discovered what was for him the ideal formal shape of colour – the square.

    The works exhibited surprise the viewer with their spontaneity, their search for immediacy and the extraordinary delicacy of their colours. Albers studied the interaction of colours like virtually no other. Through his works on paper in particular it can be seen in detail how the artist achieved such a thorough osmosis of plane and space through increasing the density of the colours used.

    Text from the Pinakothek der Moderne website

     

    Josef Albers (German, 1888-1976) 'Color Study for Homage to the Square' Nd

     

    Josef Albers (German, 1888-1976)
    Color Study for Homage to the Square
    Nd
    Oil and graphite on blotting paper with varnish
    30.5 × 30.5cm
    The Josef Albers Museum Quadrat Bottrop
    © 2010 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/VG Bildkunst, Bonn/Artists Rights Society, New York

     

    Josef Albers (German, 1888-1976) 'Color Study for Homage to the Square' Nd

     

    Josef Albers (German, 1888-1976)
    Color Study for Homage to the Square
    Nd
    Oil on blotting paper
    33.2 × 30.9cm
    The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation
    © 2010 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/VG Bildkunst, Bonn/Artists Rights Society, New York

     

    Josef Albers (German, 1888-1976) 'Color Study for Homage to the Square' Nd

     

    Josef Albers (German, 1888-1976)
    Color Study for Homage to the Square
    Nd
    Oil on blotting paper with varnish
    33.6 × 30.4cm
    The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation
    © 2010 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/VG Bildkunst, Bonn/Artists Rights Society, New York

     

     

    Pinakothek Der Moderne
    Barer Strasse 40
    Munich

    Gallery hours:
    Daily except Monday 10am – 6pm
    Thursday 10am – 8pm

    Pinakothek der Moderne website

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