Opening night crowd at Colour, Time by David Thomas with from right to left Farbenfreude Series: Movement of Colour, Heart (Large) 2008; Farbenfreude Series: Amid Dark and Light (Dark Painting) 2008; and Farbenfreude Series: A Gentle Pasing (Large) 2008 on back wall Photo: Marcus Bunyan
“A photographed real space and an expanding undefinable painting space (the non-figurative form) confront each other. The result is a coexistence of various models of space, a coexistence and entanglement of inconsistent things.”
Christoph Dahlhausen. David Thomas EIKON nr 53, Vienna, Austria, 2006
A slow burn painting, photography and composites show at Nellie Castan Gallery. Minimalist grid paintings combine with squares of colour taken out of photographs (again! as at the recent Richard Grigg show at Block Projects). This supposedly imparts profundity to insubstantial and mundane photographs that aim to comment on the existential nature of our being through the presence / absence of the missing spatio-temporal slice. This exhibition just didn’t hit the spot for me. Nice to catch up with Jason Smith Director of Heide Museum of Modern Art who was in attendance.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Nellie Castan Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Opening night crowd at Colour, Time by David Thomas with the series Length of Time 2009 on table Photo: Marcus Bunyan
David Thomas (Australian born Northern Ireland, b. 1951) Length of Time Series: Blue tape on red monochrome 2009 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
David Thomas (Australian born Northern Ireland, b. 1951) End of Summer: Homage a Tati (small splash) Enamel on photograph 2009
Opening night crowd in front of David Thomas’ Black Reflection Painting: For William Barak 2009 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Exhibition dates: 20th February – 12th April, 2009
Gerhard Richter (German, b. 1932) 9.4.89 10.1 x 14.8cm Oil on colour photograph
There is something unsettling in Richter’s serendipitious interventions. Using his own prosaic 10 x 15cm colour photographs that have been commercially printed as the basis of the works, Richter overlays the surface of the photograph with skeins of paint that disturb the reflexivity of each medium. Dragging the photograph through the paint or using a palette knife to apply layers of colour, the surfaces of paint and photograph no longer exist as separate entities. The process produces punctum like clefts rent in the fabric of time and space. If the intervention is judged unsuccessful the result if immediately destroyed.
In 5.Juli.1994 (below) blood red fingers of paint strain upwards as they invade the solidity of a dour suburban home, echoing the invading trees branches at top right of picture. In 11.2.98 (below) green paint slashes across the mouth and forehead of a woman in a floral dress, her eyes seemingly bloodshot and pleading stare into the distance to the left of our view, the silent scream strangled in her throat by the vibrations of paint. These are the instantaneous responses of the artist to the photograph, a single mood expounded in irreversible gestures, the actions of the painter’s hand disturbing the indexical link of the photograph and it’s ability to be ‘read’ as a referent of the object it depicts. Richter’s interventions challenge the concept of momentary awareness and offer the possibility of a space between, where the image stands for something else – access to Other, even a contemplation of the sublime.
“The colour of paint applied corresponds or contrasts the tonalities of the underlying photograph but link the two through formal relationships of the layers … Often a tense relationship, the results run the gamut of the surreal to the beautiful to the disturbed. It is all the more surprising that each in its perceived completeness was in essence accomplished by chance and trial and error.”1
“Richter’s painterly gestures bounce off the [photographs] content in peculiar ways, sometimes interacting with it, sometimes overlaying it and sometimes threatening to eclipse it altogether. The final effect is to cause both photography and painting to seem like incredibly bizarre activities, disparate in texture but often complicit in aspiration.”2
I love the violence, the sometimes subversive, sometimes transcendental ‘equivalence’ of these images: where a Steiglitz cloud can stand for music, where a Minor White infrared photograph posits a new reality, Richter offers us an immediacy that destroys the self-reflexive nature of everyday life. His spontaneous musings, his amorphous worlds, his bleeds and blends crack open the skin of our existential life on earth. Here, certainly, are ‘the clefts in words, the words as flesh’.
Gerhard Richter (German, b. 1932) 11.4.89 10 x 15cm Oil on colour photograph
Gerhard Richter (German, b. 1932) 11.3.89 10 x 14.9cm Oil on colour photograph
Gerhard Richter (German, b. 1932) 5.Juli.1994 10.2 x 15.2cm Oil on colour photograph
Gerhard Richter (German, b. 1932) 11.2.98 10 x 14.7cm Oil on colour photograph
Gerhard Richter (German, b. 1932) 22.2.96 9.6 x 14.7cm Oil on colour photograph
Gerhard Richter (German, b. 1932) 11.Febr.05 10.1 x 14.9cm Oil on colour photograph
The exhibition presents 330 of Richter’s largely unknown overpainted photographs, a technique he has been using since 1982.
The exhibition UERBERNALTE FOTOGRAFIEN / PHOTOGRAPHIES PEINTES (OVERPAINTED PHOTOGRAPHS) at the Centre de la photographie Geneva (CPG) presented a side of the work of Gerhard Richter largely unknown up till now. Only a few collectors and gallerists close to the artist were aware of the practise that Gerhard Richter, one of the most important artists of our times, had developed systematically since 1982. It is only because of this exhibition that more than 1000 of his over-painted photographs will enter into his catalogue raisone. The CPG presents approximately 330 of them in this show.
“By placing paint on photographs, with all their random and involuntary expressiveness, Gerhard Richter reinforces the unique aspect of each of these mediums and opens a field of tension rich in paradoxes, as old as the couple – painting / photography – which has largely defined modern art.”
Gerhard Richter is justly famed for the photorealism of his early canvases, but it is less well known that he has also painted directly onto photographic prints. These (mostly small-format) pieces were reproduced in books as early as the first Atlas, but practically all of the works themselves are housed in private collections and rarely exhibited in public. Overpainted Photographs gathers this body of work, which unites the labor of the hand with the work of mechanical reproduction to produce a kind of art as conceptually rich as Richter’s better-known paintings, neutralizing the expressive powers of each medium to reach an indifference to their potency. In an overture to Duchamp’s “degree zero” found objects, the original photographs are frequently bland in content – an empty office, a ball, a beach scene or tourist snapshot – and Richter’s painterly gestures bounce off that content in peculiar ways, sometimes interacting with it, sometimes overlaying it and sometimes threatening to eclipse it altogether. The final effect is to cause both photography and painting to seem like incredibly bizarre activities, disparate in texture but often complicit in aspiration. This monograph offers a unique opportunity to savour what had previously been a neglected but copious aspect of Richter’s work.
“The public scenes, whether on the beach or the ski slope or children’s theatre, are beset with sudden surges of colour that tend to resemble interventions of the sky or elemental forces, more than the moods of a decorative or ornamental painter annotation. Sometimes they seem like catastrophic visions. Blood-red snowflakes dance above the white fern. The photo shows skyscrapers in the urban morning sun – and the oil paint adds to the sulpherous fire that pours over the city from the sky”
Louise Paramor (Australian, b. 1964) Show Court 3 (II) 2009
Boarding a train at Flinders Street we emerge at South Yarra station to stroll down to River Street for our third opening of the night at Nellie Castan Gallery. We are greeted by the ever gracious Nellie Castan who has just returned from an overseas trip to Europe where she was soaking up the wonders of Rome amongst other places. For the latest exhibition in the gallery Louise Paramor is presenting two bodies of work: Show Court 3 and Mood Bomb (both 2009). Lets look at Show Court 3 first as this work has older origins.
Originally exhibited in 2006 at Nellie Castan under the title Jam Session the sculptures from this exhibition and many more beside (75 in all) were then installed in 2007 on show court 3 at Melbourne & Olympic Parks, hence the title of the installation. In the smaller gallery in 2009 we have six Lambda photographic prints that are records of this installation plus a video of the installation and de-installation of the work.
While interesting as documentary evidence of the installation these photographs are thrice removed from the actual sculptures – the sculptures themselves, the installation of the sculptures on court and then the photographs of the installation of the sculptures. The photographs lose something in this process – the presence or link back to the referentiality of the object itself. There is no tactile suggestiveness here, no fresh visual connections to be made with the materials, no human interaction. The intertextual nature of the objects, the jamming together of found pieces of bright plastic to make seductive anthropomorphic creatures that ‘play’ off of each other has been lost.
What has been reinforced in the photographs is a phenomena that was observed in the actual installation.
“The sculptures created a jarring visual disruption when placed in a location normally associated with play and movement. The stadium seating surrounding the tennis court incited an expectation of entertainment; a number of viewers sat looking at the sculptures, as though waiting for them to spin and jump around. But mostly, the exhibition reversed the usual role of visitors to place where one sits and watches others move; here the objects on the tennis court were static and the spectators moved around.” (2007)1
In the photographs of these objects and in the installation itself what occurs is an inversion of perception, a concept noted by the urbanist Paul Virilio.2 Here the objects perceive us instead of us perceiving the object: they stare back with an oculocentric ‘suggestiveness’ which is advertising’s raison d’être (note the eye sculpture above). In particular this is what the photographs suggest – a high gloss surface, an advertising image that grabs our attention and forces us to look but is no longer a powerful image.
In the main gallery was the most interesting work of the whole night – experiments of abstraction in colour “inspired by the very substance of paint itself.” Made by pouring paint onto glass and then exhibiting the smooth reverse side, these paintings are not so much about the texture of the surface (as is Dale Frank’s work below) but a more ephemeral thing: the dreamscapes of the mind that they promote in the viewer, the imaginative connections that ask the viewer to make. Simpler and perhaps more refined than Frank’s work (because of the smooth surface, the lack of the physicality of the layering technique? because of the pooling of amoebic shapes produced, not the varnish that accumulates and recedes?) paint oozes, bleeds, swirls, drips upwards and blooms with a sensuality of intense love. They are dream states that allow the viewer to create their own narrative with the title of the works offering gentle guides along the way: Girl with Flowers, Lovers, Mood Bomb, Emerald God, Mama, and Animal Dreaming to name just a few. To me they also had connotations of melted plastic, almost as if the sculptures of Show Court 3 had dissolved into the glassy surface of a transparent tennis court.
These are wonderfully evocative paintings. I really enjoyed spending time with them.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ O’Neill, Jane. Louise Paramor: Show Court 3. Melbourne: Nellie Castan Gallery, 2009
2/ Virilio, Paul. The Vision Machine. (trans. Julie Rose). Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994, pp. 62-63
Many thankx to Nellie Castan Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Louise Paramor (Australian, b. 1964) Show Court 3 (VI) 2009
Louise Paramor (Australian, b. 1964) Show Court 3 (detail) 2009
Louise Paramor (Australian, b. 1964) Show Court 3 (detail) 2009
Louise Paramor (Australian, b. 1964) Opening night crowd in front of Sky Pilot (left) and Mama (right) 2009 Paint on glass
Louise Paramor (Australian, b. 1964) Opening night crowd in front of Green Eyed Monster (right) and Sky Pilot (right) 2009 Paint on glass
Louise Paramor (Australian, b. 1964) Opening night crowd in front of Pineapple Express 2009 Paint on glass
Louise Paramor (Australian, b. 1964) A Dog and His Master (detail) 2009 Paint on glass
Louise Paramor (Australian, b. 1964) Lovers 2009 Paint on glass
Dale Frank (Australian, b. 1959) 2. One conversation gambit you hear these days: ‘Do you rotate?’ An interesting change of tack? No suck luck. ‘Do you rotate?’ simply fishes for information about the extent of your collection. Do you have enough paintings to hang a different one in your dining room every month? 2005
Louise Paramor (Australian, b. 1964) Mood Bomb 2009 Paint on glass
Louise Paramor (Australian, b. 1964) Slippery Slope (detail) 2009 Paint on glass
Louise Paramor (Australian, b. 1964) Green Eyed Monster (detail) 2009 Paint on glass
Many thankx to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962) Untitled from the series Beneath the Roses 2006 Digital pigment print
Famed photographer Gregory Crewdson will present the inaugural discussion in a series sponsored by the Photography Society of The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City…
Crewdson’s work has been widely exhibited and reviewed. He makes large-scale photographs of elaborate and meticulously staged tableaux, which have been described as “micro-epics” that probe the dark corners of the psyche. Working in the manner of a film director, he leads a production crew, which includes a director of photography, special effects and lighting teams, casting director and actors. He typically makes several exposures that he later digitally combines to produce the final image.
“Crewdson is one of the most daring and inventive contemporary artists using photography,” said Keith F. Davis, Curator of Photography at the Nelson-Atkins. “His meticulously crafted works are immensely rich in both narrative and psychological terms. They prod us to rethink our ‘usual’ relationship to photographs as physical objects and as records of worldly fact. Crewdson is a genuinely important figure in today’s art world. He has an international reputation and has influenced an entire generation of younger photographic artists.”
Attendance to the program is free.
Text from ArtDaily.org website
Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962) Untitled from the series Beneath the Roses 2005 Digital pigment print
Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962) Untitled from the series Beneath the Roses 2005 Digital pigment print
Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962) Untitled (Sunday Roast) from the series Beneath the Roses 2005 Digital pigment print
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art 4525 Oak Street Kansas City, MO 64111
Photographs are available from this series for purchase. As a guide, a digital colour 16″ x 20″ costs $1000 plus tracked and insured shipping. For more information please see my Store web page.
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled from the series Momentum 2009 Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled from the series Momentum 2009 Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled from the series Momentum 2009 Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled from the series Momentum 2009 Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled from the series Momentum 2009 Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled from the series Momentum 2009 Digital colour photograph
Edward Burtynsky (Canadian, b. 1955) Silver Lake Operations #1, Lake Lefroy, Western Australia 2007 2007
One of the great photographers of the world.
Enjoy some of his images and for more photographs please visit his website.
Many thankx to The Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Edward Burtynsky (Canadian, b. 1955) Tanggu Port, Tianjin, China 2005 2005
Nature transformed through industry is a predominant theme in my work. I set course to intersect with a contemporary view of the great ages of man; from stone, to minerals, oil, transportation, silicon, and so on. To make these ideas visible I search for subjects that are rich in detail and scale yet open in their meaning. Recycling yards, mine tailings, quarries and refineries are all places that are outside of our normal experience, yet we partake of their output on a daily basis.
These images are meant as metaphors to the dilemma of our modern existence; they search for a dialogue between attraction and repulsion, seduction and fear. We are drawn by desire – a chance at good living, yet we are consciously or unconsciously aware that the world is suffering for our success. Our dependence on nature to provide the materials for our consumption and our concern for the health of our planet sets us into an uneasy contradiction. For me, these images function as reflecting pools of our times.
Edward Burtynsky quoted on The Whyte Museum website
Edward Burtynsky (Canadian, b. 1955) Oxford Tire Pile #8, Westley, California 1999 1999
Edward Burtynsky (Canadian, b. 1955) Nickel Tailings #30, Sudbury, Ontario, 1996 1996
Edward Burtynsky (Canadian, b. 1955) Nickel Tailings #31, Sudbury, Ontario 1996 1996
Edward Burtynsky (Canadian, b. 1955) Feng Jie #4, Three Gorges Dam Project, Yangtze River, 2002 2002
These images are meant as metaphors to the dilemma of our modern existence; they search for a dialogue between attraction and repulsion, seduction and fear,” said Edward Burtynsky, photographer. “We are drawn by desire – a chance at good living, yet we are consciously or unconsciously aware that the world is suffering for our success. Our dependence on nature to provide the materials for our consumption and our concern for the health of our planet sets us into an uneasy contradiction. For me, these images function as reflecting pools of our times.
Speaking of his “Quarries” series, Burtynsky has said, “The concept of the landscape as architecture has become, for me, an act of imagination. I remember looking at buildings made of stone, and thinking, there has to be an interesting landscape somewhere out there, because these stones had to have been taken out of the quarry one block at a time. I had never seen a dimensional quarry, but I envisioned an inverted cubed architecture on the side of a hill. I went in search of it, and when I had it on my ground glass I knew that I had arrived.”
Text from The Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies
Edward Burtynsky (Canadian, b. 1955) Shipbreaking #1, Chittagong, Bangladesh, 2000 2000
Edward Burtynsky (Canadian, b. 1955) Bao Steel #2, Shanghai, China, 2005 2005
Edward Burtynsky (Canadian, b. 1955) Iberia Quarries #3, Bencatel, Portugal, 2006 2006
Edward Burtynsky (Canadian, b. 1955) China Quarries #8, Xiamen, Fujian Province, 2004 2004
Edward Burtynsky (Canadian, b. 1955) Dam #6, Three Gorges Dam Project, Yangtze River, 2005 2005
Trailer for the film Manufactured Landscapes in which Jennifer Baichwal documents Edward Burtynsky doing what artists do – making art, in this case photographing Bangladesh and China as he observes the “manufacturer to the world”.
Edward Burtynsky Manufactured Landscapes
The Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies 111 Bear Street, Banff, Alberta T1L 1A3 Canada Phone: 1 403 762 2291
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) On Port Phillip Bay 2009
Port Phillip Bay in the morning from the 48th floor of a tower in Southbank, Melbourne
Melbourne’s hottest day ever 46.4 degrees. Firestorms to the north of the city, Port Phillip Bay completely obscured, very strange light seen from 48th floor. The day, 7th February 2009, is now known as the Black Saturday bushfires.
180 people died and 414 were injured as a result of the fires.
It was a very scary day. I cannot imagine what it would have been like to have been there, up close. My condolences to all those that lost loved ones.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) On Port Phillip Bay 2009
Port Phillip Bay during firestorm, in the afternoon from the 48th floor of a tower in Southbank, Melbourne
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Looking towards the docks, Melbourne 2009
Looking towards the docks, Melbourne, during the firestorm
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Looking across the city 2009
Looking across the city with the Melbourne Star Observation Wheel (at the time called the Southern Star) in the foreground
Black Saturday bushfires
The Black Saturday bushfires were a series of bushfires that ignited or were burning across the Australian state of Victoria on and around Saturday, 7 February 2009 and were Australia’s all-time worst bushfire disasters. The fires occurred during extreme bushfire-weather conditions and resulted in Australia’s highest ever loss of life from a bushfire; there were 180 fatalities, and 414 were injured as a result of the fires.
As many as 400 individual fires were recorded on 7 February. Following the events of 7 February 2009 and its aftermath, that day has become widely referred to in Australia as Black Saturday.
Background
A week before the fires, a significant heatwave affected southeastern Australia. From 28-30 January, Melbourne broke temperature records by experiencing three consecutive days above 43°C (109 °F), with the temperature peaking at 45.1°C (113.2°F) on 30 January, the third hottest day in the city’s history.
The wave of heat was caused by a slow moving high-pressure system that settled over the Tasman Sea, with a combination of an intense tropical low located off the North West Australian coast and a monsoon trough over northern Australia, which produced ideal conditions for hot tropical air to be directed down over southeastern Australia.
The February fires commenced on a day when several localities across the state, including Melbourne, recorded their highest temperatures since records began in 1859. On 6 February 2009 – the day before the fires started – the Premier of Victoria John Brumby issued a warning about the extreme weather conditions expected on 7 February: “It’s just as bad a day as you can imagine and on top of that the state is just tinder-dry. People need to exercise real common sense tomorrow”. The Premier went on to state that it was expected to be the “worst day [of fires conditions] in the history of the state”.
Events of 7 February 2009
A total of 358 firefighting personnel, mainly from the Country Fire Authority (CFA) and Department of Sustainability and Environment (DSE), were deployed across the state on Friday evening (6 February) in anticipation of the extreme conditions the following day. By mid-morning Saturday, hot northwesterly winds in excess of 100 kilometres per hour (62 mph) hit the state, accompanied by extremely high temperatures and extremely low humidity; a total fire ban was declared for the entire state of Victoria.
As the day progressed, all-time record temperatures were being reached. Melbourne hit 46.4°C (115.5°F), the hottest temperature ever recorded for the city and humidity levels dropped to as low as two percent. The McArthur Forest Fire Danger Index reached unprecedented levels, ranging from 160 to over 200. This was higher than the fire weather conditions experienced on Black Friday in 1939 and Ash Wednesday in 1983.
Around midday, as wind speeds were reaching their peak, an incorrectly-rigged SWER line was ripped down at Kilmore East. This sparked a bushfire that would become the deadliest and most intense firestorm ever experienced in Australia’s post-1788 history. The overwhelming majority of fire activity occurred between the afternoon of 7 February and 7:00 pm, when wind speed and temperature were at their highest, and humidity at its lowest.
Casualties
A total of 180 people were confirmed to have died as a result of the fires. The figure was originally estimated at 14 on the night of 7 February, and steadily increased over the following two weeks to 210. It was feared that it could rise as high as 240-280, but these figures were later revised down to 173 after further forensic examinations of remains, and after several people previously believed to be missing were located. This figure was later increased to 180 after several people succumbed to their injuries. …
Among the dead in the Kinglake West area were former Seven Network and Nine Network television personality Brian Naylor, and his wife Moiree. Actor Reg Evans and his partner, artist Angela Brunton, residing on a small farm in the St Andrews area, also died in the Kinglake area fire. Ornithologist Richard Zann perished in the Kinglake fire, together with his wife Eileen and daughter Eva.
Fatalities
General statistics
~ 164 people died in the fires themselves, 12 died later in hospital, and 4 died from other causes including car crashes
~ Out of the 180 deaths, 100 were male, 73 were female, and 7 were unidentified
~ There were 164 Australians, 9 foreign nationals, and 7 people of unidentified nationalities killed in the bushfires. The foreign nationals comprised citizens of:
~ Greece (2) ~ Indonesia (2) ~ Philippines (2) ~ Chile (1) ~ New Zealand (1) ~ United Kingdom (1)
~ 7 of the deaths occurred in bunkers of both fire-specific and non-fire-specific design
~ 1 firefighter, David Balfour, 47, from Gilmore, ACT, was killed near Cambarville on the night of 17 February, when a burnt-out tree fell on him as he attached a hose to a fire tanker
Location of deaths
~ Inside houses (113) ~ Outside houses (27) ~ In vehicles (11) ~ In garages (6) ~ Near vehicles (5) ~ On roadways (5) ~ Attributed to or associated with the fire but not within fire location (4) ~ On reserves (1) ~ In sheds (1) ~ Unknown locations (7)
Eduardo Sourrouille (Spanish, b. 1970) Salon para Gaydjteam 2008
Artium, Basque Centre-Museum of Contemporary Art, presents the exhibition Villa Edur. Eduardo Sourrouille (North Gallery, from January 17 to April 19), an intimate self-portrait of this Basque artist based on more than 170 photographs taken in recent years. Sourrouille (Basauri, Bizkaia, 1970) proposes a metaphorical visit to the private rooms of his life, from the most superficial to the most intimate, to explore all aspects of the relationship with others and with oneself. Based on three different series of technically exquisite photographs, the author displays a world in which affection and the need to love and to feel loved predominates, in which there are ever-present allusions to questions such as sexual identity, the demands of friendship and recognition of links with others.
Villa Edur, the title of the first major one-man show of the work of Eduardo Sourrouille in a Museum, is taken from the maternal home of Eduardo Sourrouille, “the first legacy I received from her, the most valuable of all her bequests: besides being a home, it is an ongoing project, a driving force in my life and a reflection of my artistic career.” As in a home, the exhibition allows the visitors to explore a number of different rooms, each more intimate than the previous one, in which the artist receives visitors, who are converted into a host and guests.
Thus, in the exhibition, as in his house, “the host receives his guests at the entrance, where newcomers have access to proof of all the visitors that preceded them.” And in this way, the visitor sees two different series of portraits in the first room, Of the folder, people who visited my house and Of the folder, people who visited my house: room for… In the first Gallery, the artist presents different portraits of couples, consisting of himself with the different people with whom he has had some kind of relationship, be this emotional, family, friendship or any other kind. In this case, the photographs come very close to studio portraits, with carefully prepared, static poses, with hardly any atrezzo.
Each of these photographs is matched in the exhibition with another belonging to the second gallery of images, in which Sourrouille repeats the figures but in this case with a more accentuated theatricality, with a set design that may make the spectator imagine anecdotes or stories that occur in the encounter. The room, dominated by a more than one hundred photographs, reveals an entire “network of relationships, in which friendship, affection, love, fascination, desire, etc. (sometimes mixed up), have a place. The number of people including his father and other relatives, a large number of friends, artists such as Miguel Ángel Gaüeca, Manu Arregui and Ignacio Goitia, have been present here and have left their mark, and as the entire exhibition is imbued with games and humour, fictional figures such as Doña Rogelia are also included.
From this broad entrance, densely inhabited by figures “whose ghost lives on”, the artist invites first to step into his sitting room, the place in his house that “offers a precise image of what its owner is and would like to be.” In this space, Eduardo Sourrouille presents thirty self-portraits that “show of the people who have coexisted in me” and who “embody in the symbolic manner the different aspects of love and friendship, that can be found in me, as in any other individual.” With this aim in mind, Sourrouille presents in this exhibition space the Selfportrait with a friend series, thirty images in which the artist photographs himself with different animals, ironic portraits in which the human being appears to adopt certain characteristics of the animal.
There remain two more rooms in this house, the most private of all, where “intimate secret processes” take place. Sourrouille once again portrays himself with his father in the environment where the legacy is transmitted by means of simple rites, before going on to “the most secret room of all (…) in which the intimate world of each person is developed, in other words, what one does not necessarily confess but what one, nevertheless, has decided to experience.” Here, the spectator confronts a video entitled If you could see him through my eyes, in which the sheets are lowered slowly to discover the artist accompanied by two wild boar.
Press release from Basque Centre-Museum of Contemporary Art
The house that I show in Villa Edur is my house, as it was (is) my mother’s. It is the first legacy I received from her, the most valuable of all: in addition to a home, it is a perpetual project, a vital engine and a reflection of my career.
Eduardo Sourrouille (Spanish, b. 1970) Self-portrait with impetuous friend 2008
“The house I depict in Villa Edur is my home, as it was (is) my mother’s home. It is the first legacy I received from her, the most valuable of all her bequests: besides being a home, it is an ongoing project, the driving force in my life and a reflection of my artistic career.
1
In my house, the host receives his guests at the entrance, where newcomers find proof of all the visitors that preceded them. Everything takes place in this zealously staged space, and so each decorative element is selected with the very same care. Objects, costumes and scenery make up, both individually and jointly, a system of symbols alluding to the nature of its own contents.
One by one, the portrait of the person in question confronts his situation within the context that was created for him and which, at the same time, he himself contributed to defining, and whose ghost still lives on. Each portrait determines both a singular identity and the kind of relationship in which at least two individuals interact and this, in turn, is the reflection of a specific experience. Each relationship leaves a visible and definitive mark on the other, like the dent in an aluminium vessel, which reasserts the experience and provides solace (provisionally) as it is the proof of our materiality. The inescapable need to make these marks involves the creation of an entire network of relationships in which friendship, affection, love, fascination, desire, etc. (sometimes mixed up), have a place.
Next to the door, raised on her solid, light shelf, my mother observes us and invites us in.
2
A door leads to the sitting room, a multifunctional and ultimately magical space, an environment in which everything that can be shown to visitors (plus part of what cannot be shown) is put on display. Definitively, the sitting room always offers a precise image of who its owner is and would like to be, of what he deliberately reveals to others and what he cannot prevent from being perceived through the cracks in his subconscious.
For this reason, the sitting room offers visitors a gallery of thirty self-portraits that show them the different people who coexist in me, what they can expect and the extent of the range of choices permitted. From a conceptual viewpoint and in a symbolic manner, these portraits embody different aspects of love and friendship that can be found in me, as in any other individual.
3
Beyond the sitting room lie the private rooms in which intimate, secret processes take place, ceremonies that create individuals and subsequently shape them, mould them and endorse them for the world. In one of these, I share the space with my father because this room is where his offspring receive their legacy through atavistic and recurrent rites – so simple that they scarcely cause pain. In another room, I (at last) dare to make the call I have learnt, the one that I use to invoke the Other, even though in some ways the person I seek is myself. There is anguish and confusion in that call, but also the desire to establish constructive communication, as I also offer myself to the Other so that he might leave his mark on me.
4
The intimate world of each person, in other words, what one does not necessarily confess but what one, nevertheless, has decided to experience, is developed in the most secret room of all. It is also the space reserved for the beauty that one finds by one’s own means – as it has not been revealed by any of one’s elders – and which therefore will be treasured as the exclusive property of its discoverer.
I live in Villa Edur because all the relationships that crystallise around me also reside there. Every individual harbours a space that he uses as a scenario to display his relationships, his family, lovers, friends, and for life, everything that is deposited with the passing of time, following the structure of his stage machinery. That is the space that is often called home.”
Ianko López Ortiz de Artiñano for Eduardo Sourrouille
Text from the Artium, Basque Centre-Museum of Contemporary Art website
Eduardo Sourrouille (Spanish, b. 1970) Panolis 2008
Eduardo Sourrouille (Spanish, b. 1970) Double self-portrait 2008
Eduardo Sourrouille (Spanish, b. 1970) Self-portrait with a proud friend 2008
Eduardo Sourrouille (Spanish, b. 1970) Self-portrait with a gorgeous friend 2008
Artium, Basque Centre-Museum of Contemporary Art 24 Francia Street. Vitoria-Gasteiz, 01002 Araba Phone: 945 20 90 00
Opening hours: Tuesdays to Fridays: 11am to 2.00pm and 5.00pm to 8.00pm Saturdays and Sundays: 11.00am to 8.00pm Mondays closed
Another fantastic group of Americurbana from this wonderful photographer!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Gagosian Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“Henri Cartier-Bresson famously said, “The world is going to pieces and people like Adams and Weston are photographing rocks.” But I don’t think the world would have been a better place if these photographers had headed off to a war zone. The question is whether you can be a political photographer while you photograph rocks. My pictures don’t have a specific social commentary but I think they have social and political meaning.”
Alec Soth on the Gagosian Gallery website 2009
Alec Soth (American, b. 1969) Dynell, Bemidji, MN (Girl in store) 2007
Alec Soth (American, b. 1969) Josh, Joelton, Tennessee 2004
Gagosian Gallery is pleased to present The Last Days of W., colour photographs taken by Alec Soth between 2000 and 2008.
Although originally conceived without explicit political intent, in retrospect Soth considers this selected body of work, which spans both terms of George W. Bush’s presidency, to represent “a panoramic look at a country exhausted by its catastrophic leadership.” Soth’s earlier series such as Sleeping by the Mississippi, Niagara, and Dog Days, Bogotá – all subjective narratives containing disenfranchised figures and decaying landscapes – laid the conceptual groundwork for The Last Days of W. It provides a wry commentary on the adverse effects of the national administration, perhaps best exemplified by an unwittingly ironic remark that Bush made in 2000: “I think we can agree, the past is over.”
Following in the humanist tradition established by the great chroniclers of the American experience such as Walker Evans, Robert Frank, and Stephen Shore, Soth captures diverse images of a country disillusioned with, and deceived by, its own identity, from mothers of marines serving in Iraq to teenage mothers in the Louisiana Bayou; from religious propaganda in the American workplace to the mortgage crisis in Stockton, CA. His incisive depiction of contemporary American reality confronts the ideals romanticised in the American Dream with the hastening decline of the American Empire.
Text from the Gagosian Gallery website 2009
The Last Days of W installation view at Gagosian Gallery
Alec Soth (American, b. 1969) Home Environment, Billings, MT 2008
Alec Soth (American, b. 1969) Republican National Convention, Saint Paul, MN 2008
Gagosian Gallery 980 Madison Avenue New York, NY 10075 Phone: 212.744.2313
Lyndell Brown (Australian, b. 1961) and Charles Green (Australian, b. 1953) Afghan traders with soldiers, market, Tarin Kowt base, Uruzgan province, Afghanistan 2007-2008 From The approaching storm series 2007-2009 Digital colour inkjet photograph 155 × 107.5cm
Despite one brilliant photograph and some interesting small painted canvases this exhibition is a disappointment. No use beating around the figurative bush in the landscape so to speak, talking plainly will suffice. Firstly, let’s examine the photographs. Thirteen large format colour photographs are presented in the exhibition out of an archive of “thousands of photographs Brown and Green created on tour”1 from which the paintings are derived.
Most of the photographs are inconsequential and need not have been taken. Relying on the usual trope of painters who take photographs they are shot at night, dusk or dawn when the shadows are long, the colours lush supposedly adding ‘mystique’ to the scene being portrayed. In some cases they are more like paintings than the paintings themselves. Perhaps this was the artist’s plan, the reverse marriage of photography and painting where one becomes the other, but this does little to advance photography as art. There is nothing new or interesting here: sure, some of the photographs are beautiful in the formal representation of a vast and fractured landscape but the pre-visualisation is weak: bland responses to the machines, industry, people and places of the conflict. Go look at the Andreas Gursky photographs at the National Gallery of Victoria to see world-class photography taking reality to the limit, head on.
Too often in these thirteen images the same image is repeated with variants – three images of the an aircraft having it’s propeller changed show a lack of ideas or artefacts to photograph – presented out of the thousands taken seems incongruous. The fact that only one photograph is reproduced in the catalogue is also instructive.
Some images are just unsuccessful. For example the photograph Dusk, ship’s bridge with two sailors, northern Gulf is of a formulaic geometry that neither holds the viewers attention nor gives a deeper insight into their lives aboard ship and begs the question why was the photograph taken in the first place? The dark space has little physical or metaphysical illumination and seems purely to be an exercise in formalism. The photograph Dusk, ships’ bridge with sailor, northern Gulf is more successful in the use of light and shade as they play across the form of a sailor, his head resting pensively in his hand, red life vests adding a splash of colour to the bottom right of the photograph.
The brilliant photograph of the group is View from Chinook, Helmand province, Afghanistan. This really is a monstrous photograph. With the large black mass of the helicopter in the foreground of the image containing little detail, the eye is drawn upwards to the windscreen through which a mountain range rises, with spines like the back of a Stegosaurus. To the right a road, guarded by a desolate looking pillbox and yellow barrier, meanders into the distance. Dead flies on the windscreen look like small bullet holes until you realise what they are. This is the image that finally evidences a disquieting beauty present in the vast and ancient landscape.
Turning to the paintings we can say that some of the small 31cm x 31cm paintings work well. From an ‘original’ photograph the artist selects and crops a final image that they work up into a highly detailed oil painting. Distilled (as the artist’s like to put it) from the ‘original’ photographs, the paintings become a “merging of a contemporary sense of composition – borrowed from photography, film and video – with the textures and processes of traditional oil painting.”2
“These works were developed by the artists to be something akin to “Hitchcockian clues” which create the sense of looking out at a scene but being distanced from the action. To some degree the entire suite of small pictures participate in developing this intrigue, by showing an array of ambiguous scenes in which direct action is never present, or is obscured by limited perspectives … The artists noted that the war zones they witnessed were low in action but high in tension”3
To an extent this tension builds in some of the small paintings: the small size lends an intimate, intense quality and forces the viewer to engage with highly detailed renditions of textures of clothing, material, skin and hair and the distorted scale of the ships and aeroplanes portrayed. In these intense visions the painting seems less like a photograph and more like a new way of seeing. However, this occurs only occasionally within the group of small paintings.
If we think of a photograph in the traditional sense as a portrayal of reality, then a distillation of that photograph (the removal of impurities from, an increase in the concentration of) must mean that these paintings are a double truth, a concentrated essence of the ‘original’ photograph that changes that essence into something new. Unfortunately most of these small canvases show limited viewpoints of distilled landscapes that do not lead to ambiguous enigmas, but to the screen of the camera overlaid by a skein of paint, a patina of posing.
This feeling is only amplified in the three large ‘History’ paintings. The three paintings seem static, lifeless, over fussy and lacking insight into the condition of the ‘machine’ that they are attempting to portray. It’s a bit like the ‘Emperors New Clothes’, the lack of substance in the paintings overlaid with the semantics of History painting (“a traditional genre that focused on mythological, biblical, historical and military subjects”) used to confirm their existence and supposed insight into the doubled, framed reality. As Robert Nelson noted in his review of 2008 art in Melbourne in The Age newspaper it would seem that painting is sliding into terminal decline. These paintings only seem to confirm that view.
Here was a golden opportunity to try something fresh in terms of war as conflict – both in photography and painting – to frame the discourse in an eloquent, innovative manner. Most of this work is not interesting because it does not seem to be showing, or being discursive about anything beyond a personal whim. Because an artist can talk about some things, doesn’t mean that he can make comments about other things that have any value. Although the artist was looking to portray landscapes of globalisation and entropy, there are more interesting ways of doing this, rather than the nature of the transcription used here.
“It is very good to copy what one sees: it is much better to draw what you can’t see any more but in your memory. It is a transformation in which imagination and memory work together. You only reproduce what struck you, that is to say, the necessary. That way your memory and your fantasy are freed from the tyranny of nature.”4
No thinking but the putting away of intellect and the reliance on memory and imagination, memory and fantasy to ‘distil’ the essence. This is what needed to happen both in the photographs and paintings – leaving posturing aside (perhaps an ‘unofficial war artist’ would have had more success!) to uncover the transformation of landscape that the theatre of this environment richly deserves.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Footnotes
1/ Heywood, Warwick. Framing Conflict: Iraq and Afghanistan exhibition catalogue. Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 2008, p. 6 2/ Heywood, Warwick. Framing Conflict: Iraq and Afghanistan exhibition catalogue. Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 2008, p. 6 3/ Heywood, Warwick. Framing Conflict: Iraq and Afghanistan exhibition catalogue. Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 2008, p. 11 4/ Degas, Edgar quoted in Halligan, Marion. “Between the brushstrokes,” in A2 section, The Saturday Age newspaper, January 17th 2008, p. 18
Many thankx to The Ian Potter Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Lyndell Brown (Australian, b. 1961) and Charles Green (Australian, b. 1953) Afghan National Army perimeter post with chair, Tarin Kowt base, Uruzgan province, Afghanistan 2007-2008 From The approaching storm series 2007-2009 Digital colour inkjet photograph 111.5 × 151.5cm
Lyndell Brown (Australian, b. 1961) and Charles Green (Australian, b. 1953) Dusk, ship’s bridge with two sailors, northern Gulf 2007-2008 Digital colour inkjet photograph
Lyndell Brown (Australian, b. 1961) and Charles Green (Australian, b. 1953) Late afternoon, flight line, military installation, Middle East 2007 Oil on linen
Lyndell Brown (Australian, b. 1961) and Charles Green (Australian, b. 1953) Market, Camp Holland, Tarin Kowt, Uruzgan province, Afghanistan 2007 Oil on linen
Lyndell Brown (Australian, b. 1961) and Charles Green (Australian, b. 1953) View from Chinook, Helmand province, Afghanistan 2007-2008 From The approaching storm series 2007-2009 Digital colour inkjet photograph 111.5 × 151.5cm
Lyndell Brown (Australian, b. 1961) and Charles Green (Australian, b. 1953) View from Chinook, Helmand province, Afghanistan 2007 Oil on linen
Lyndell Brown (Australian, b. 1961) and Charles Green (Australian, b. 1953) Trolley, propeller change, on flightline at night, military installation, Gulf 2007-2008 From The approaching storm series 2007-2009 Digital colour inkjet photograph 87.0 × 87.4cm
Lyndell Brown (Australian, b. 1961) and Charles Green (Australian, b. 1953) History painting: market, Tarin Kowt, Uruzgan province, Afghanistan 2007 Oil on linen
Lyndell Brown and Charles Green Installation view of photographs from the exhibition Framing Conflict at The Ian Potter Museum of Art, The University of Melbourne 2009
Lyndell Brown (Australian, b. 1961) and Charles Green (Australian, b. 1953) Installation view of paintings from the exhibition Framing Conflict at The Ian Potter Museum of Art, The University of Melbourne 2009
The Ian Potter Museum of Art The University of Melbourne, Corner Swanston Street and Masson Road Parkville, Victoria 3010
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