Exhibition dates: 20th November, 2015 – 23rd March, 2016
Curators: Jennifer Blessing, Senior Curator, Photography, with Susan Thompson, Assistant Curator, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
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My apologies, I am feeling very poorly at the moment, so just a small comment on this exhibition.
After the trilogy of 19th century photography, now for something completely different… two consecutive postings on contemporary photography.
In this art, the photograph becomes a conceptual “speech” act, where the artists speak with photographs, working with the context of the image – the image as concept, as talk.
It’s not just that the artists make photographic objects, they push what the medium can do. As the press release observes, “Theirs is a sort of “photo poetics,” an art that self-consciously investigates the laws of photography and the nature of photographic representation, reproduction, and the photographic object.” It is art that requires contemplation and meditation on source by Self. I have included several videos and extra text to illuminate aspects of the work in the posting.
I like the intertextuality that the artists employ when pushing the boundaries of photographic practice and representation, particularly Claudia Angelmaier’s series Works on Paper (2008-) and Lisa Oppenheim’s series The Sun is Always Setting Somewhere Else (2006).
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
99 SECONDS OF: PHOTO-POETICS: An Anthology / Guggenheim New York
The exhibition and its accompanying catalogue examine an important new development in contemporary photography, offering an opportunity to define the concerns of a younger generation of artists and contextualise their work within the history of art and visual culture. Drawing on the legacies of Conceptualism, these artists pursue a largely studio-based approach to still-life photography that centres on the representation of objects, often printed matter such as books, magazines, and record covers. The result is an image imbued with poetic and evocative personal significance – a sort of displaced self-portraiture – that resonates with larger cultural and historical meanings. Driven by a profound engagement with the medium of photography, these artists investigate the nature, traditions, and magic of photography at a moment characterised by rapid digital transformation. They attempt to rematerialise the photograph through meticulous printing, using film and other disappearing photo technologies, and creating artist’s books, installations, and photo-sculptures. While they are invested in exploring the processes, supports, and techniques of photography, they are also deeply interested in how photographic images circulate. Theirs is a sort of “photo poetics,” an art that self-consciously investigates the laws of photography and the nature of photographic representation, reproduction, and the photographic object.
Text from the exhibition web page.
Anne Collier (American, b. 1970)
Crying
2005
Chromogenic print
99.1 x 134cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Purchased with funds contributed by Mr. and Mrs. Aaron M. Tighe
© Anne Collier
Collier’s photographs offer a straightforward presentation of found images and printed ephemera, and explore themes of appropriation, iconography, and surrogacy… Though implicitly layered with feminist critiques of mass media, Collier’s images of famous women – especially those of other artists, like Cindy Sherman, for example – can also be interpreted as oblique self-portraits.
Text from the Guggenheim artist’s web page
“Ephemera and mediation are at the quiet center of Collier’s Crying, one of her works in the exhibition. Seen from across the room, “Crying” looks like a photograph overlaid upon a painted surface, or perhaps a portrait integrated within a two-dimensional space. The image, indeed a photo, is divided horizontally; the upper two-thirds are white, the bottom third is black, and on the left-hand side there is a small square close-up of a distraught woman crying. The woman is Ingrid Bergman, and this is the cover of the LP that accompanied her 1943 film For Whom the Bell Tolls. The LP is upright, facing the viewer dead-on, and up close we can see that there are a number of records behind it and that the flat spaces above and below are actually a white wall and black floor. The work is in no way overwhelming; there is nothing bombastic about it. Rather, the thrill of it comes from the reading it requires. Collier deploys her references strategically – this brings to mind abstract painting, Bas Jan Ader’s I’m Too Sad to Tell You, Bergman’s films and unconventional life, and the joy of the collector in the record store. Should that not be enough, it also awakens the empathy centers that begin firing when we see someone cry. Crying is part of a series involving records – others are of The Smiths and Sylvia Plath – but it contains the tensions within all of her work: advertising and fine art, nostalgia and distance, the camera and the eye. Collier has said she is interested in photographing objects that have “had previous lives… been handed and used,” and these rely on a kind of slow intertextuality; the gradual unfolding of meaning and feeling working towards a dizzying remove. It’s disorienting and evocative, a poetics in which the camera is not just the set-up but the punchline, and all the previous lives can be felt lurking beneath the surface.”
Anonymous text from “Woman with Camera: Anne Collier’s Feminist Image Critique,” on the Deutsche Bank ArtMag 88 website Nd [Online] Cited 13/03/2016. No longer available online
Moyra Davey (American, b. 1958)
Les Goddesses (still)
2011
HD colour video, with sound, 61 min.
Courtesy the artist and Murray Guy, New York
© Moyra Davey
In the mid-2000s, the moving image took on a renewed prominence in Davey’s work. Inspired by her deep interest in the process of reading and writing, the artist’s essayistic video practice layers personal narrative with detailed explorations of the texts and lives of authors and thinkers she admires, such as Walter Benjamin, Jean Genet, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Davey’s own writing is central to her videos. The transcript of Fifty Minutes (2006), in which the artist reflects on her years in psychoanalysis, was published as a personal essay in the artist book Long Life Cool White: Photographs and Essays by Moyra Davey (2008), and her text “The Wet and the Dry” formed the basis of the narration of Les Goddesses (2011).
Text from the Guggenheim artist’s web page
Erin Shirreff (Canadian, b. 1975)
UN 2010 (still)
2010
HD color video, silent, 17 min.
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Purchased with funds contributed by Erica Gervais
© Erin Shirreff
Erin Shirreff (Canadian, b. 1975)
UN 2010 (excerpt)
2010
HD color video, silent, 17 min.
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Purchased with funds contributed by Erica Gervais
© Erin Shirreff
Shirreff’s work in photography, video, and sculpture reflects on the distance between an object and its representation, exploring the capacities of photography in conveying a sculptural experience.
Since scale and presence were central concerns of much mid-century abstract sculpture, Shirreff often draws on images of such works as she explores the disjunction between photographs and their subjects. Sculpture Park (Tony Smith) (2006), Shirreff’s first video work, features small cardboard maquettes the artist made of five Tony Smith sculptures. Filmed against a black background, their dark forms become discernible only as “snow” (Styrofoam) slowly accumulates on their surfaces. For subsequent video works, including Ansel Adams, RCA Building, circa 1940 (2009), Roden Crater (2009), and UN 2010 (2010), Shirreff photographed printed pictures of her subjects – often landscapes or iconic modernist buildings – under varying lighting conditions in the studio, inputting the resultant images into video editing software. These videos appear at first to be long, static shots of the subjects pictured, but eventually belie their own artifice as the viewer becomes gradually aware of the texture of the image surface.
Text from the Guggenheim artist’s web page
Lisa Oppenheim (American, b. 1975)
The Sun is Always Setting Somewhere Else (detail)
2006
Slide projection of fifteen 35 mm slides, continuous loop, dimensions variable
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Purchased with funds contributed by the Photography Committee
Oppenheim’s work explores the interactions between an image, its source, and the context in which it is encountered. The Sun is Always Setting Somewhere Else (2006) originates from photographs of the setting sun taken by U.S. soldiers in Iraq, which Oppenheim found on the image-sharing website Flickr. Holding each photograph at arm’s length in such a way that it aligns with the horizon of the setting sun in the artist’s native New York, the artist reshot the images as the sun set within the frame. Presented as a 35 mm slide show, the significance of seemingly quotidian sunsets shifts with the knowledge of who captured them and where.
Text from the Guggenheim artist’s web page
Guggenheim Examines New Developments in Contemporary Photography with Photo-Poetics: An Anthology
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum presents Photo-Poetics: An Anthology, an exhibition documenting recent developments in contemporary photography and consisting of photographs, videos, and slide installations by ten international artists. With more than 70 works by Claudia Angelmaier, Erica Baum, Anne Collier, Moyra Davey, Leslie Hewitt, Elad Lassry, Lisa Oppenheim, Erin Shirreff, Kathrin Sonntag, and Sara VanDerBeek, the exhibition runs from November 20, 2015 – March 23, 2016, and presents a focused study into the nature, traditions, and magic of photography in the context of the rapid digital transformation of the medium.
Organised by Jennifer Blessing, Senior Curator, Photography, with Susan Thompson, Assistant Curator, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Photo-Poetics: An Anthology offers an opportunity to define the concerns of a new generation of photographic artists and contextualise their work within the history of art and visual culture. These artists mainly pursue a studio-based approach to still-life photography that centres on the representation of objects, often printed matter such as books, magazines, and record covers. The result is often an image imbued with poetic and evocative personal significance that resonates with larger cultural and historical meanings.
The artists in the exhibition attempt to rematerialise the photograph through meticulous printing, using film and other disappearing photo technologies. Drawing on the legacies of Conceptualism and invested in exploring the processes and techniques of photography, they are also deeply interested in how photographic images circulate. Theirs is a sort of “photo poetics,” an art that self-consciously investigates the laws of photography and the nature of photographic representation, reproduction, and the photographic object. The works in the exhibition, rich with detail, reward close and prolonged regard; they ask for a mode of looking that is closer to reading than the cursory scanning fostered by the clicking and swiping functionalities of smartphones and social media. Both the exhibition and its accompanying catalogue are conceived as anthologies, as independent vehicles to introduce each artist’s important and unique practice. #photopoetics
Press release from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Sara VanDerBeek (American, b. 1976)
From the Means of Reproduction
2007
Chromogenic print
101.6 x 76.2cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Purchased with funds contributed by the Photography Committee
© Sara VanDerBeek
VanDerBeek’s photographs utilise a variety of formal strategies and references yet remain consistently engaged with issues of memory and the experience of time and space.
VanDerBeek first became known in the mid-2000s for photographs featuring her own makeshift sculptural configurations in which appropriated photos were combined into collages that resounded with personal and political meaning. Constructed in the studio out of found images and pieces of wood, metal, and string, these works, such as From the Means of Reproduction (2007) and Calder and Julia (2006), were created solely for the camera and were disassembled after being photographed.
Text from the Guggenheim artist’s web page
Kathrin Sonntag (German, b. 1981)
Mittnacht (detail)
2008
Slide projection of eighty one 35 mm slides, continuous loop, dimensions variable
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Purchased with funds contributed by the Photography Committee and Manuel de Santaren
© Kathrin Sonntag
Kathrin Sonntag (German, b. 1981)
Mittnacht (detail)
2008
Slide projection of eighty one 35 mm slides, continuous loop, dimensions variable
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Purchased with funds contributed by the Photography Committee and Manuel de Santaren
© Kathrin Sonntag
Encompassing sculpture, photography, film, and drawing, Sonntag’s work offers a complex analysis of the nature of objects and the division between fiction and reality. Using stools, tripods, tables, and mirrors to create unusual perspectives, her installations strip meaning from readily identifiable objects via photographic experiments within the confines of her studio. Mittnacht (2008) comprises eighty-one slides of found images of paranormal phenomena photographed among the artist’s studio tools and furniture. The supernatural elements are enhanced by their disorienting placement within the studio, which both creates illusions and allows errors and smudges in processing to cast an eerie shadow on certain images in the series.
Text from the Guggenheim artist’s web page
Claudia Angelmaier (German, b. 1972)
Betty
2008
Chromogenic print, face-mounted to acrylic
130 x 100cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Purchased with funds contributed by the Photography Committee with additional funds contributed by Mr. and Mrs. Aaron M. Tighe, and Rona and Jeffrey Citrin
© Claudia Angelmaier
Taking art historical masterpieces – and, by extension, art history itself – as her referents, Angelmaier traces the photographic representation of artworks across the pages of textbooks, classroom slides, coffee table monographs, and postcards. Cognisant that major artworks are most often encountered via reproduction rather than in person, she highlights the analogue media that have facilitated the circulation of such images for many decades…
The larger scope of Angelmaier’s concerns is particularly evident in the series Works on Paper (2008- ). Here, the artist photographs the backlit versos of postcards from museum gift shops. The artwork pictured on a card’s front appears muted yet faintly discernible, while the caption information and museum insignia on the back remain fully legible. By foregrounding the text, logos, and barcodes, Angelmaier not only examines the material realities of the postcard, but the social and economic systems both the souvenir and the work it depicts inhabit.
Text from the Guggenheim artist’s web page
Erica Baum (American, b. 1961)
Jaws (from the series Naked Eye)
2008
Inkjet print
47 x 41.6cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Purchased with funds contributed by Mr. and Mrs. Aaron M. Tighe
© Erica Baum
Baum takes the printed page as her primary subject, photographing fragments of found language at close range. Commingling image and text, her works often operate simultaneously as both photograph and poem… For the Naked Eye series (2008- ), Baum directs her camera into the partially opened pages of stipple-edged paperbacks from the 1960s and ’70s, capturing slivers of image and text separated by the vertical striations of adjacent pages’ brightly dyed edges. Although the compositions are each the result of a single, unaltered photograph, they operate visually as collages and veer toward abstraction.
Text from the Guggenheim artist’s web page
Elad Lassry (Israeli-American, b. 1977)
Bengal
2011
Chromogenic print in painted frame
36.8 x 29.2 x 3.8cm
A.P. 1/2, edition of 5
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Purchased with funds contributed by the Photography Committee
© Elad Lassry. Photo: Kristopher McKay © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation
Elad Lassry (Israeli-American, b. 1977)
Untitled (Woman, Blond)
2013
Chromogenic print in walnut frame with four-ply silk
36.8 x 29.2 x 3.8cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Purchased with funds contributed by the Photography Committee
© Elad Lassry
Lassry positions his photographic works as “pictures,” entities that operate simultaneously as both objects and images. In doing so, he shifts their relationship to the viewer, inviting a broader examination of how photographs are seen and understood.
Lassry regularly presents his photographs in lacquered frames that match the colours of his bright, saturated images, or in warm walnut frames in the case of his work in black and white. The artist used this approach as early as 2008, in works such as Wolf (Blue) (2008). The continuity between frame and photo, heightened by the absence of matting, highlights the physicality of the picture without disrupting the illusion of depth in the photographic image. Lassry’s pictures derive from his own studio-based photographs as well as appropriated imagery. In both cases, the images reference the language of advertising and stock photography – and the attendant notions of desire therein. However, the would-be product is either obscured or excluded, removing the sense of purpose that drives such imagery. The artist sometimes employs techniques such as double exposure, blurring, superimposition, or collage that create an unsettling instability within his pictures. In more recent works, Lassry has incorporated sculptural elements, most often silk valances that cover significant sections of the image, as in Untitled (Woman, Blond) (2013), or looping coloured wires that penetrate it, as in Untitled (Dolphins, Two) (2014).
Text from the Guggenheim artist’s web page
Leslie Hewitt (American, b. 1977)
Riffs on Real Time (3 of 10)
2006-09
Chromogenic print
76.2 x 61cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Purchased with funds contributed by the Photography Committee
Commingling photography and sculpture, Hewitt’s works often present arrangements of personally and politically charged materials – including historically significant books and magazines from the 1960s and ’70s as well as family photos (not necessarily her own) – that conjure associative meaning through juxtaposition.
In Hewitt’s series Riffs on Real Time (2006-2009), snapshots lay atop appropriated printed matter shot against a wood floor or carpet so that the contrasting textures of these layered materials build up and outward toward the viewer. In Hewitt’s various photo-sculptural series, the photographs begin to pointedly inhabit the space of the viewer. Positioned on the floor, their frames lean against the gallery walls, asserting their own materiality and calling attention to the space of the gallery.
Text from the Guggenheim artist’s web page
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