Exhibition: ‘Gillian Wearing and Claude Cahun: Behind the mask, another mask’ at the National Portrait Gallery, London

Exhibition dates: 9th March – 29th May, 2017

Curator: Sarah Howgate, Senior Curator of Contemporary Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery, London

 

Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954) 'Autoportrait' 1929 from the exhibition 'Gillian Wearing and Claude Cahun: Behind the mask, another mask' at the National Portrait Gallery, London, March - May, 2017

 

Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954)
Self-portrait (reflected image in mirror with chequered jacket)
1927
Silver gelatin print

 

 

“… the life of spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself. It is this power, not as something positive, which closes its eyes to the negative as when we say of something that it is nothing or is false, and then having done with it, turn away and pass on to something else; on the contrary, spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being.”


George Wilhelm Frederich Hegel, 1807. Phenomenology of Spirit, Preface (trans. A. V. Miller 1977), Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 10

 

 

This is an interesting pairing for an exhibition but the connection between the artists is unconvincing. This is because Wearing and Cahun are talking to different aspects of the self.

Wearing’s self-portraits, her mask-querades, her shielded multiple personalities, talk to a “postmodern meditation on the slipperiness of the self” in which there is little evidence of the existence of any “real” person. Wearing wears her identities in a series of dress-ups, performances where only the eyes of the original protagonist are visible. These identities evidence Jung’s shadow aspect, “an unconscious aspect of the personality which the conscious ego does not identify in itself.” Rather than an assimilation of the shadow aspect into the self followed by an ascent (enantiodromia), Wearing’s images seem to be mired in a state of melancholia, a “confrontation with the shadow which produces at first a dead balance, a stand-still that hampers moral decisions and makes convictions ineffective… tenebrositas, chaos, melancholia.” This is not a confrontation that leads anywhere interesting, by looking the negative in the face and tarrying with it. These split personalities rise little above caricature, an imitation of a person in which certain striking characteristics are over emphasised, such as in Wearing’s portraits of her as Andy Warhol or Robert Mapplethorpe. To me, the photograph of Wearing as Mapplethorpe is a travesty of the pain that artist was feeling as he neared the end of his life, dying from HIV/AIDS.

Cahun’s self-portraits contain all the depth of feeling and emotion that Wearing’s can never contain. Here, identity and gender is played out through performance and masquerade in a constructive way, a deep, probing interrogation of the self in front of the camera. While Cahun engages with Surrealist ideas – wearing masks and costumes and changing her appearance, often challenging traditional notions of gender representation – she does so in a direct and powerful way. As Laura Cumming observes, “She is not trying to become someone else, not trying to escape [as Wearing is]. Cahun is always and emphatically herself. Dressed as a man, she never appears masculine, nor like a woman in drag. Dressed as a woman, she never looks feminine. She is what we refer to as non-binary* these days, though Cahun called it something else: “Neuter is the only gender that always suits me.””

*Those with nonbinary genders can feel that they: Have an androgynous (both masculine and feminine) gender identity, such as androgyne. Have an identity between male and female, such as intergender. Have a neutral or unrecognised gender identity, such as agender, neutrois, or most xenogenders.*

Cahun had a gift for the indelible image but more than that, she possesses the propensity for humility and openness in these portraits, as though she is opening her soul for interrogation, even as she explores what it is to be Cahun, what it is to be human. This is a human being in full control of the balance between the ego and the self, of dream-state and reality. The photographs, little shown in Cahun’s lifetime, are her process of coming to terms with the external world, on the one hand, and with one’s own unique psychological characteristics on the other. They are her adaption** to the world.

**“The constant flow of life again and again demands fresh adaptation. Adaptation is never achieved once and for all.” (Carl Jung. “The Transcendent Function,” CW 8, par. 143.)**


Claude Cahun is person I would have really liked to have met. Affiliated with the French Surrealist movement, living with her partner the artist and stage designer Marcel Moore, the two women left Paris for the Isles of Scilly and were then imprisoned in Nazi-occupied Jersey during the Second World War as a result of their roles in the French Resistance.

“Fervently against war, the two worked extensively in producing anti-German fliers. Many were snippets from English-to-German translations of BBC reports on the Nazis’ crimes and insolence, which were pasted together to create rhythmic poems and harsh criticism. The couple then dressed up and attended many German military events in Jersey, strategically placing them in soldier’s pockets, on their chairs, etc. Also, they inconspicuously crumpled up and threw their fliers into cars and windows. In many ways, Cahun and Malherbe’s [Marcel Moore] resistance efforts were not only political but artistic actions, using their creative talents to manipulate and undermine the authority which they despised. In many ways, Cahun’s life’s work was focused on undermining a certain authority, however her specific resistance fighting targeted a physically dangerous threat. In 1944 she was arrested and sentenced to death, but the sentence was never carried out. However, Cahun’s health never recovered from her treatment in jail, and she died in 1954.” (Wikipedia)

Undermining a certain authority … while ennobling her own identity and being. Love and respect.

Dr Marcus Bunyan


Many thankx to the National Portrait Gallery, London for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. For more information please see the blog entry by  Louise Downie. “Claude Cahun: Freedom Fighter” on the National Portrait Gallery Blog 09 May 2017.

 

 

“Under this mask, another mask. I will never finish removing all these faces.”


Claude Cahun, 1930

 

 

This exhibition brings together for the first time the work of French artist Claude Cahun and British contemporary artist Gillian Wearing. Although they were born almost seventy years apart and came from different backgrounds, remarkable parallels can be drawn between the two artists. Both of them share a fascination with the self-portrait and use the self-image, through the medium of photography, to explore themes around identity and gender, which is often played out through masquerade and performance.

 

Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954) 'Autoportrait' 1928 from the exhibition 'Gillian Wearing and Claude Cahun: Behind the mask, another mask' at the National Portrait Gallery, London, March - May, 2017

 

Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954)
Autoportrait
1928
Gelatin silver print
13.9 x 9cm
Jersey Heritage Collection
© Jersey Heritage

 

 

“Once seen, never forgotten: Cahun had a gift for the indelible image. Even when the signals are jammed, and the meaning deliberately baffled, her vision always holds strong. This is partly convenienced by the artist’s exceptional looks. Her long, thin face, with its shaved eyebrows, large eyes and linear nose, takes paint like a canvas. She converts herself into a harpy, a lunatic or a doll with equal ease. In one self-portrait, she even holds her own bare face like a mask…

Peering into these monochrome images, so delicate and small, the viewer might inevitably wonder which is the real Cahun: the woman in the aviator goggles, the pensive Buddhist, the young man in a white silk scarf? But this is not the right question. She is not trying to become someone else, not trying to escape. Cahun is always and emphatically herself.

Dressed as a man, she never appears masculine, nor like a woman in drag. Dressed as a woman, she never looks feminine. She is what we refer to as non-binary these days, though Cahun called it something else: “Neuter is the only gender that always suits me.” …

There is little evidence that she ever displayed these photographs, which were forgotten for decades after her death. It seems that her partner was generally behind the lens, but we know almost nothing about how they were made. Of her lifelong project, Cahun wrote: “Under this mask, another mask. I will never finish removing all these faces.”

Commentators have taken this to mean that she thought of herself as a series of multiple personalities, and the double exposures, shadows and reflections in her work all seem to undermine the idea of a singular self. Yet Cahun is formidably and unmistakably Cahun, her force of personality registering every time in that utterly penetrating look. Far from some postmodern meditation on the slipperiness of the self, her images are completely direct. They acknowledge the sufferings of a double life and are deepened by them every time; and yet they rejoice in that life too.”

Laura Cumming. “Gillian Wearing and Claude Cahun: Behind the Mask, Another Mask – review,” on The Observer website Sunday 12 March 2017 [Online] Cited 17/12/2021

 

 

Gillian Wearing and Claude Cahun: Behind the mask, another mask

This exhibition brings together for the first time the work of French artist Claude Cahun and British contemporary artist Gillian Wearing. Although they were born almost seventy years apart and came from different backgrounds, remarkable parallels can be drawn between the two artists. Both of them share a fascination with the self-portrait and use the self-image, through the medium of photography, to explore themes around identity and gender, which is often played out through masquerade and performance.

 

Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954) in collaboration with Marcel Moore (French, 1892-1972) 'Aveux non avenus frontispiece' 1929-1930

 

Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954) in collaboration with Marcel Moore (French, 1892-1972)
Aveux non avenus frontispiece
1929-1930
Photomontage
Silver gelatin print
Jersey Heritage Collections
© Jersey Heritage

 

“Cahun appears in enigmatic guises, playing out different personas using masks and mirrors, and featuring androgynous shaven or close-cropped hair – as can be seen in the multiple views of her in the lower left-hand side of this collage. The image also includes symbols made up by the women to represent themselves – the eye for Moore, the artist, and the mouth for Cahun, the writer and actor. Whereas the majority of Surrealists were men, in whose images women appear as eroticised objects, Cahun’s androgynous self-portraits explore female identity as constructed, multifaceted, and ultimately as having a nihilistic absence at the core.”

Ron Radford (ed), Collection highlights: National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2008

 

Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954) 'Self-portrait (as a dandy, head and shoulders)' 1921-1922

 

Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954)
Self-portrait (as a dandy, head and shoulders)
1921-1922
Silver gelatin print
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Thomas Walther Collection
Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York / Scala, Florence

 

Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954) 'Studies for a keepsake' c. 1925

 

Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954)
Studies for a keepsake
c. 1925
Silver gelatin prints
Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris
© Musée d’Art moderne / Roger-Viollet

 

Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954) 'Study for a keepsake' c. 1925

 

Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954)
Study for a keepsake
c. 1925
Silver gelatin print
Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris
© Musée d’Art moderne / Roger-Viollet

 

Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954) 'I am in training don't kiss me' c. 1927

 

Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954)
I am in training don’t kiss me
c. 1927
Silver gelatin print
117mm x 89mm (whole)
Jersey Heritage Collections
© Jersey Heritage

 

Totor (progenitor of Tintin) and Popol are two comic characters by the Belgian cartoonist Hergé. Castor and Pollux are the twin stars; Pollux and Helen were the children of Zeus and Leda, while Castor and Clytemnestra were the children of Leda and Tyndareus.

 

Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954) 'Self-portrait (kneeling, naked, with mask)' c. 1928

 

Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954)
Self-portrait (kneeling, naked, with mask)
c. 1928
Silver gelatin print
116mm x  83mm
Jersey Heritage Collections
© Jersey Heritage

 

Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954) 'Self-portrait (full length masked figure in cloak with masks)' 1928

 

Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954)
Self-portrait (full length masked figure in cloak with masks)
1928
Silver gelatin print
109 x 82mm
Jersey Heritage Collections
© Jersey Heritage

 

Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954) 'Self-portrait' 1929

 

Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954)
Self-portrait
1929
Silver gelatin print

 

Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954) 'Je tends les bras (I extend my arms)' c. 1932

 

Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954)
Je tends les bras (I extend my arms)
c. 1932
Silver gelatin print
Jersey Heritage Collections
© Jersey Heritage

 

Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954) 'Self-portrait (in cupboard)' c. 1932

 

Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954)
Self-portrait (in cupboard)
c. 1932
Silver gelatin print
Jersey Heritage Collections
© Jersey Heritage

 

 

Gillian Wearing and Claude Cahun: Behind the mask, another mask (9 March – 29 May 2017) draws together over 100 works by French artist Claude Cahun (1894-1954) and British contemporary artist Gillian Wearing (b.1963). While they were born 70 years apart, they share similar themes of gender, identity, masquerade and performance.

Cahun, along with her contemporaries André Breton and Man Ray, was affiliated with the French Surrealist movement although her work was rarely exhibited during her lifetime. Together with her partner, the artist and stage designer Marcel Moore, the two women left Paris and were then imprisoned in Nazi-occupied Jersey during the Second World War as a result of their roles in the French Resistance. In her photographs she is depicted wearing masks and costumes and engaging with Surrealist ideas. She also changes her appearance by shaving her hair and wearing wigs, often challenging traditional notions of gender representation.

Gillian Wearing studied at Goldsmiths University, winning the Turner Prize in 1997. She has exhibited extensively in the United Kingdom and internationally, including solo exhibitions at the Whitechapel Gallery and Serpentine Gallery, whilst overseas, recent retrospectives include IVAM Valencia and K20 Dusseldorf. Wearing’s photographic self-portraits incorporate painstaking recreations of her as others in an intriguing and sometimes unsettling range of guises such as where she becomes her immediate family members using prosthetic masks.

Despite their different backgrounds, obvious and remarkable parallels can be drawn between the artists whose fascination with identity and gender is played out through performance and masquerade. Wearing has referenced Cahun overtly in the past: Me as Cahun holding a mask of my face is a reconstruction of Cahun’s self-portrait Don’t kiss me I’m in training of 1927, and forms the starting point of this exhibition, the title of which (Behind the mask, another mask) adapts a quotation from Claude Cahun’s Surrealist writings.

Dr Nicholas Cullinan, Director, National Portrait Gallery, London, says: ‘This inspired, timely and poignant exhibition pairs the works of Gillian Wearing and Claude Cahun. These pioneering artists, although separated by several decades, address similarly compelling themes around gender, identity, masquerade, performance and the idea of the self, issues that are ever more relevant to the present day.’

Sarah Howgate, Curator, Gillian Wearing and Claude Cahun: Behind the mask, another mask, says: ‘It seems particularly fitting that at the National Portrait Gallery on International Women’s Day we are bringing together for the first time Claude Cahun’s intriguing and complex explorations of identity with the equally challenging and provocative self-images of Gillian Wearing.’

Gillian Wearing and Claude Cahun: Behind the mask, another mask is curated by Sarah Howgate, Senior Curator of Contemporary Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery, London.

 

Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954) 'Self-portrait as a young girl' 1914

 

Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954)
Self-portrait as a young girl
1914
Silver gelatin print
Jersey Heritage Collections
© Jersey Heritage

 

Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954) 'Self-portrait as a young girl' 1914

 

Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954)
Self-portrait as a young girl
1914
Silver gelatin print
Jersey Heritage Collections
© Jersey Heritage

 

Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954) 'Self-portrait (shaved head, material draped across body)' 1920

 

Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954)
Self-portrait (shaved head, material draped across body)
1920
Silver gelatin print
115 x 89mm

 

Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954) 'Autoportrait' 1927

 

Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954)
Autoportrait
1927
Silver gelatin print

 

Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954) 'Self-Portrait' 1927

 

Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954)
Self-Portrait
1927
Silver gelatin print

 

Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954) 'Que me veux tu?' 1929

 

Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954)
Que me veux tu? (What do you want from me?)
1929
Gelatin silver print
18 x 23cm (7 1/16 x 9 1/16 ins)
Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris

 

Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954) 'Self-portrait' 1929

 

Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954)
Self-portrait
1929
Gelatin silver print

 

Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954) 'Autoportrait' 1939

 

Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954)
Autoportrait
1939
Gelatin silver print
10 x 8cm
Jersey Heritage Collection
© Jersey Heritage

 

Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954) 'Self-portrait (with Nazi badge between her teeth)' 1945

 

Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954)
Self-portrait (with Nazi badge between her teeth)
1945
Photograph – Courtesy of the artist

 

 

Ten things you need to know about this extraordinary artist

1. Her real name was Lucy Schwob.
She was born 25 October 1894 in Nantes, daughter of newspaper owner Maurice Schwob and Victorine Marie Courbebaisse; her uncle was the Symbolist writer Marcel Schwob. Subjected to anti-Semitic acts following the Dreyfus Affair, she was removed to a boarding school in Surrey, where she studied for two years.

2. Cahun’s lover was also her stepsister.
In 1909, she met her lifelong partner and collaborator Suzanne Malherbe while studying in Nantes, in what she described as a ‘thunderbolt encounter’. Eight years later, Cahun’s father married Suzanne’s widowed mother.

3. The couple adopted gender-neutral names.
Schwob first used the name Claude Cahun in the semi-biographical text ‘Les Jeux uraniens’, Cahun being a surname from her father’s side. Malherbe changed her name to Marcel Moore and the pair moved to Paris in 1914, where they began their artistic collaborations and Cahun studied literature and philosophy at the Sorbonne.

4. Cahun was one of the few female Surrealists.
In 1932 she was introduced to André Breton, who called her ‘one of the most curious spirits of our time’. Four years later, Cahun participated in the Surrealist exhibition at the Galerie Charles Ratton, Paris, and visited the International Surrealist Exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries, London. Whereas in the works of male Surrealists women often appear as eroticised objects, Cahun’s self-portraits explore female identity as constructed and multifaceted.

5. She was first and foremost a writer.
Now best known for her striking self-portraits, Cahun saw herself primarily as a writer. In 1930 she published Aveux non avenus (translated into English as Disavowals or Cancelled Confessions), an ‘anti-memoir’ including ten photomontages created in collaboration with Moore.

6. In 1937 the couple swapped Paris for Jersey.
Cahun and Moore moved to La Rocquaise, a house in St Brelade’s Bay, Jersey, where they led a secluded life. The couple reverted to their given names, Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe, and were known by the islanders as ‘les mesdames’.

7. They were actively involved in the resistance against Nazi Occupation.
When the Germans invaded Jersey in 1940 they decided to stay and produced counter-propaganda tracts. In July 1944 they were found out, arrested, stood trial, and were, briefly, sentenced to death (though these sentences were commuted). The couple were imprisoned in separate cells for almost a year before Liberation in May 1945.

8. In 1951 Cahun received the Medal of French Gratitude for her acts of resistance during the Second World War. Suffering increasingly from ill health, she died in 1954 at the age of sixty. Moore died eighteen years later, in 1972.

9. She remained forgotten for half a century
Following her move to Jersey, Cahun slipped from critical attention. After the death of Marcel Moore, much of Cahun’s work was put up for auction and acquired by collector John Wakeham, who then sold it to the Jersey Heritage Trust in 1995. The publication in 1992 of the definitive biography by Francois Leperlier, Claude Cahun: l’ecart et la metamorphose, and subsequent exhibition, Claude Cahun: Photographe, at the Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1995 encouraged a growing interest in the artist’s work. It was during this time that Gillian Wearing discovered Claude Cahun.

10. She was an artist ahead of her time
Wearing speaks of a ‘camaraderie’ between her and Cahun but she is not the only contemporary artist to have been influenced by her work. Cahun has a dedicated following among artists and art historians working from postmodern, feminist and queer theoretical perspectives; the American art critic Hal Foster described Cahun as ‘a Cindy Sherman avant la lettre’.

 

Gillian Wearing (English, b. 1963) 'Self-portrait as my brother Richard Wearing' 2003 from the exhibition 'Gillian Wearing and Claude Cahun: Behind the mask, another mask' at the National Portrait Gallery, London, March - May, 2017

 

Gillian Wearing (English, b. 1963)
Self-portrait as my brother Richard Wearing
2003
Heather Podesta Collection
Courtesy Maureen Paley, London; Regen Projects, Los Angeles; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York
© Gillian Wearing

 

Gillian Wearing (English, b. 1963) 'Me as Mapplethorpe' 2009

 

Gillian Wearing (English, b. 1963)
Me as Mapplethorpe
2009
Courtesy Maureen Paley, London, Regen Projects, Los Angeles and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York
© Gillian Wearing

 

Gillian Wearing (English, b. 1963) 'Me as Warhol in Drag with Scar' 2010

 

Gillian Wearing (English, b. 1963)
Me as Warhol in Drag with Scar
2010
Courtesy Maureen Paley, London, Regen Projects, Los Angeles and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York
© Gillian Wearing

 

Gillian Wearing (English, b. 1963) 'Me as Diane Arbus' 2008-2010

 

Gillian Wearing (English, b. 1963)
Me as Diane Arbus
2008-2010
Courtesy Maureen Paley, London, Regen Projects, Los Angeles and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York
© Gillian Wearing

 

Gillian Wearing (English, b. 1963) 'Me as Cahun holding a mask of my face' 2012

 

Gillian Wearing (English, b. 1963)
Me as Cahun holding a mask of my face
2012
Courtesy Maureen Paley, London; Regen Projects, Los Angeles; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York
© Gillian Wearing

 

Gillian Wearing (English, b. 1963) 'Self-portrait of me now in a mask' 2011

 

Gillian Wearing (English, b. 1963)
Self-portrait of me now in a mask
2011
Collection of Mario Testino
Courtesy Maureen Paley, London; Regen Projects, Los Angeles; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York
© Gillian Wearing

 

Gillian Wearing (English, b. 1963) 'Me as mask' 2013

 

Gillian Wearing (English, b. 1963)
Me as mask
2013
Private collection, courtesy Cecilia Dan Fine Art
Courtesy Maureen Paley, London; Regen Projects, Los Angeles; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York
© Gillian Wearing

 

Gillian Wearing (English, b. 1963) 'At Claude Cahun's grave' 2015

 

Gillian Wearing (English, b. 1963)
At Claude Cahun’s grave
2015
Courtesy Maureen Paley, London
© Gillian Wearing

 

 

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Exhibition: ‘The Serial Portrait: Photography and Identity in the Last One Hundred Years’ at the National Gallery of Art, Washington

Exhibition dates: 30th September 2012 – 31st December 2012

 

Emmet Gowin (American, b. 1941) 'Edith, Danville, Virginia' 1971

 

Figure 5. Emmet Gowin (American, b. 1941)
Edith, Danville, Virginia
1971
Gelatin silver print
20.2 x 25.2cm (7 15/16 x 9 15/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Patrons’ Permanent Fund
© Emmet and Edith Gowin, Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

 

 

~ Alfred Stieglitz / Georgia O’Keeffe
~ Paul Strand / Rebecca Strand
~ Emmet Gowin / Edith Gowin
~ Harry Callahan / Eleanor and Barbara Callahan
~ Robert Mapplethorpe / Patti Smith
~ Nicholas Nixon / The Brown Sisters
~ Andy Warhol / Serial Photography / Photo Booth Portraits
~ Mario Testino / Kate Moss
~ Baron Adolf de Meyer / Baroness Olga de Meyer
~ Edward Weston / Charis Weston
~ Lee Friedlander / Maria Friedlander
~ Paul Caponigro / The woods of Connecticut
~ Bernd and Hilla Becher / grids
~ Gerhard Richter / Overpainted Photographs
~ Masahisa Fukase / wife and family
~ Seiichi Furuya / Christine Furuya-Gößler
~ Sally Mann / children and husband
~ William Wegman / dogs


Australia?
Nobody that I can think of except Sue Ford.

Notice how all the artists are men except two: Sally Mann and Hilla Becher.

Dr Marcus Bunyan


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

 

 

Introduction

Alfred Stieglitz, one of the most influential photographers of the twentieth century, argued that “to demand the [single] portrait… be a complete portrait of any person is as futile as to demand that a motion picture be condensed into a single still.” Stieglitz’s conviction that a person’s character could not be adequately conveyed in one image is consistent with a modern understanding of identity as constantly changing. For Stieglitz, who frequently made numerous portraits of the same sitters – including
striking photographs of his wife, the painter Georgia O’Keeffe – using the camera in a serial manner allowed him to transcend the limits of a single image.

Drawn primarily from the National Gallery of Art’s collection, the
Serial Portrait exhibition features twenty artists who photographed the same subjects – primarily friends, family, or themselves – multiple times over the course of days, months, or years. This brochure presents a selection of works by seven of these artists. Like Stieglitz’s extended portrait of O’Keeffe, Emmet Gowin’s ongoing photographic study of his wife, Edith, explores her character and reveals the bonds of love and affection between the couple. Milton Rogovin’s photographs of working-class residents of Buffalo, New York, record shifts in the appearance and situation of individuals in the context of their community over several decades.

A number of photographers in the exhibition have made serial self-portraits that investigate the malleability of personal identity. Photographing themselves as shadows, blurs, or partial reflections, Lee Friedlander and Francesca Woodman have made disorienting images that hint at the instability of self-representation. Ann Hamilton has employed unusual props and materials to transform herself into a series of hybrid objects. Finally, work by Nikki S. Lee takes the idea of mutable identity to its logical conclusion as the artist photographs herself masquerading as members of different social and ethnic groups.

Text from the NGA website

 

Emmet Gowin (American, b. 1941) 'Edith, Danville, Virginia' 1963

 

Figure 4. Emmet Gowin (American, b. 1941)
Edith, Danville, Virginia
1963
Gelatin silver print, printed 1980s
19.7 x 12.7cm (7 3/4 x 5 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Charina Endowment Fund
© Emmet and Edith Gowin, Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

 

Emmet Gowin

Emmet Gowin (born 1941) met Edith Morris in 1961 in their hometown of Danville, Virginia, just as he had decided to abandon business school to study art. Several years later at the Rhode Island School of Design, his teacher Harry Callahan, who made numerous photographs of his wife, Eleanor, encouraged Gowin to photograph the subject he knew most intimately – his family and in particular Edith, whom he married in 1964.

The Gowins’ artistic and marital collaboration has endured for half a century, yielding an extraordinary series of quiet, attentive portraits. In some photographs, such as Edith, Danville, Virginia, 1963 (fig. 4, above), Edith appears contemplative, even reserved. The somber beauty of this work stems in part from Gowin’s use of a tripod-mounted, large-format camera, which requires a lengthy exposure but produces photographs with exquisite details, such as the delicate shadow of a twig that falls across Edith’s face. To make the dramatic circular shadow that surrounds her in Edith, Danville, Virginia, 1971 (fig. 5, above), Gowin attached a lens meant for a 4 × 5 camera to a large 8 × 10 camera. This focus draws our attention to her figure, but the screen door simultaneously frames and obscures her form, resulting in a play between presence and elusiveness. While Gowin’s photographs are born of a deep intimacy, they refuse to lay bare his wife’s soul or expose the couple’s private passions.

The same delicate balance between revelation and reserve marks a group of portraits made during the couple’s travels in Central and South America. Edith and Moth Flight, 2002 (fig. 6, below), made at night using a ten-second exposure, combines Gowin’s enchantment with natural beauty and his interest in the nuances of his wife’s gestures and moods. Placing a pulsing ultraviolet light behind Edith’s head, Gowin recorded the luminous traces left by moths as they danced around her blurred face, transforming her into a ghostly and even otherworldly presence, visible yet just out of our reach.

Text from the NGA website

 

Emmet Gowin (American, b. 1941) 'Edith and Moth Flight' 2002

 

Figure 6. Emmet Gowin (American, b. 1941)
Edith and Moth Flight
2002
Digital ink jet print
19 x 19cm (7 1/2 x 7 1/2 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Charina Endowment Fund
© Emmet and Edith Gowin, Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

 

Francesca Woodman (American, 1958-1981) 'House #3, Providence, Rhode Island' 1976

 

Francesca Woodman (American, 1958-1981)
House #3, Providence, Rhode Island
1976
Gelatin silver print
16.1 x 16.3cm (6 5/16 x 6 7/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Gift of the Heather and Tony Podesta Collection

 

Francesca Woodman

Francesca Woodman (1958-1981) began making photographs at age thirteen, and by the time she entered the Rhode Island School of Design in 1975, she was already a skilled photographer. Using herself as the subject of nearly all her work, Woodman put her body in the service of exploring such themes as feminine identity, sexuality, mythology, and the relationship of the body to its surroundings. Conjuring visions of a complex inner world, Woodman’s photographs are powerful for their ability to suggest psychic turmoil within images of serene, ethereal beauty.

Woodman’s interest in the emotional affect of space can be seen in House #3, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976 (fig. 14, above). Using an abandoned house as a makeshift studio, Woodman often photographed herself merging with her surroundings, including doors, walls, and windows, dissolving physical or psychic boundaries. She also frequently moved during long exposures or allowed the camera to record only part of her body in order to obscure her figure. By invoking a ghostly presence, Woodman’s photographs often present her as someone who refuses to commit to a solid image of herself.

Woodman’s lush and intimate photographs thus offer a tantalising glimpse of a mysterious, private world. Yet they are more than romantic expressions of a young woman’s subjective experience. Notes in Woodman’s diary suggest, for instance, that Untitled, Providence, Rhode Island, 1975-1978 (fig. 15, below), alludes to the Greek mythological story of Leda, who was seduced by the god Zeus in the form of a swan.

Toward the end of her brief but prolific career (Woodman committed suicide when she was twenty-two) the artist began working on a much larger scale, using her body more as a structural element. Caryatid, New York, 1980 (fig. 16, below), made as part of a monumental photo-installation called Temple Project, draws both its title and inspiration from the columns carved in the shape of women that were used in ancient Greek and Roman architecture. Although Woodman displays her figure in a more expansive and direct manner than in her earlier work, the gesture that obscures her face and leaves her partial and unknowable is typical for the artist, who always preferred suggestion over declaration.

Text from the NGA website

 

Francesca Woodman (American, 1958-1981) 'Untitled, Providence, Rhode Island' 1975-1978

 

Francesca Woodman (American, 1958-1981)
Untitled, Providence, Rhode Island
1975-1978
Gelatin silver print
10.5 x 10.5cm (4 1/8 x 4 1/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Gift of the Collectors
Committee and R. K. Mellon Family Foundation

 

Francesca Woodman (American, 1958-1981) 'Caryatid, New York' 1980

 

Francesca Woodman (American, 1958-1981)
Caryatid, New York
1980
National Gallery of Art, Washington
William and Sarah Walton Fund and Gift of the Collectors Committee

 

Ann Hamilton (American, b. 1956) 'body object series #13, toothpick suit/chair' 1984

 

Figure 17. Ann Hamilton (American, b. 1956)
body object series #13, toothpick suit/chair
1984
Gelatin silver print, printed 1993
11 x 11cm (4 5/16 x 4 5/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Gift of Heather and Tony Podesta Collection

 

Ann Hamilton

An artist known for multimedia environments, performances, and videos, Ann Hamilton (born 1956) made the first photographs in the body object series in 1984 with objects left over from an installation she had presented as an MFA student at Yale. Later images from the series were based on subsequent performances and installations, documenting both the objects used and the actions performed with them. Hamilton appears in each photograph with objects attached to or touching her body, her face only rarely visible. The results are striking, unsettling, and often witty.

Despite emerging from Hamilton’s installation and performance practice, the photographs in the series stand on their own as works of art. Paying close attention to the material qualities of familiar objects, Hamilton models creative new uses for them, changing their function and meaning. In body object series #13, toothpick suit/chair, 1984 (fig. 17, above), for example, thousands of toothpicks transform Hamilton’s clothes into a porcupine-like hide while a chair becomes a burdensome instrument of torture. The image elicits visceral emotions – alienation, hostility, fear – though it does so with a dose of absurdist humour.

As self-representations, the photographs in the body object series depart radically from any traditional notion of portraiture. Instead of insisting on Hamilton’s uniqueness as an individual, these images present her body almost as an object on a par with other objects. Some of the photographs are linked directly to her biography: Hamilton had studied textile design before getting her MFA, and the toothpick suit refers to her love of fabrics. In other photographs she makes abstract concepts more graspable through the senses. Sound is given tactile and visual form as tissue paper in body object series #14, megaphone, 1986 (fig. 18, below), while in body object series #15, honey hat, 1989 (fig. 19, below), Hamilton wrings her hands in honey to suggest the idea of washing one’s hands of guilt. Based on an installation in which the artist embedded money – 750,000 pennies – in a layer of honey, this image also gives new meaning to the phrase “sticky fingers” and highlights the connections between language, images, and objects that Hamilton explores in both her photographs and installations.

Text from the NGA website

 

Ann Hamilton (American, b. 1956) 'body object series #14, megaphone' 1986

 

Figure 18. Ann Hamilton (American, b. 1956)
body object series #14, megaphone
1986
Gelatin silver print, printed 1993
11 x 11cm (4 5/16 x 4 5/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Gift of Heather and Tony Podesta Collection

 

Ann Hamilton (American, b. 1956) 'body object series #15, honey hat' 1989

 

Figure 19. Ann Hamilton (American, b. 1956)
body object series #15, honey hat
1989
Gelatin silver print, printed 1993
11 x 11cm (4 5/16 x 4 5/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Gift of Heather and Tony Podesta Collection

 

 

The National Gallery of Art explores how the practice of making multiple portraits of the same subjects produced some of the most revealing and provocative photographs of our time in The Serial Portrait: Photography and Identity in the Last One Hundred Years, on view in the West Building’s Ground Floor photography galleries from September 30 through December 31, 2012. Arranged both chronologically and thematically, the exhibition features 153 works by 20 artists who photographed the same subjects – friends, family, and themselves – numerous times over days, months, or years to create compelling portrait studies that investigate the many facets of personal and social identity.

“The Gallery’s photography collection essentially began with the donation of Alfred Stieglitz’s ‘key set,’ so it is fitting that this exhibition opens with portraits by Stieglitz, who understood that a person’s character was best captured through a series of photographs taken over time,” said Earl A. Powell III, director, National Gallery of Art. “Although the exhibition is drawn largely from the Gallery’s significant collection of photographs, we are grateful to the lenders who have allowed us to present more fully the serial form of portraiture that Stieglitz championed.”

Since the introduction of photography in 1839, portraiture has been one of the most widely practiced forms of the medium. Starting in the early 20th century, however, some photographers began to question whether one image alone could adequately capture the complexity of an individual. As Alfred Stieglitz, the era’s leading champion of American fine art photography, argued: “to demand the [single] portrait that will be a complete portrait of any person is as futile as to demand that a motion picture will be condensed into a single still.”

Along with Stieglitz, some of the 20th century’s most prominent photographers – Paul Strand, Harry Callahan, and Emmet Gowin – used the camera serially to transcend the limits of a single image. Each of these photographers made numerous studies of their lovers that sought to redefine the expressive possibilities of portraiture while probing the affective bonds of love and desire. By employing the camera’s capacity to record fluctuating states of being and mark the passage of time, other photographers such as Nicholas Nixon and Milton Rogovin have documented individuals – in families or communities – over four decades. Capturing subtle and dramatic shifts in appearance, demeanour, and situation, these series are poignant and elegiac memorials that remind us of our own mortality.

Other photographers have made serial self-portraits that explore the malleability of personal identity and the possibility of reinvention afforded by the camera. By photographing themselves as shadows, blurs, or partial reflections, Ilse Bing, Lee Friedlander, and Francesca Woodman have created inventive but elusive images that hint at the instability of self-representation. Conceptual artists of the 1970s and 1980s such as Vito Acconci, Blythe Bohnen, and Ann Hamilton have explicitly combined performance and self-portraiture to stage continual self-transformations. The exhibition concludes with work from the last 15 years by artists such as Nikki S. Lee and Gillian Wearing, who take the performance of self to its limits by adopting masquerades to delve into the ways identity is inferred from external appearance.

Press release from the National Gallery of Art website

 

Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934) 'Westport, Connecticut' 1968

 

Figure 11. Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934)
Westport, Connecticut
1968
Gelatin silver print
19.8 x 12.3cm (7 13/16 x 4 13/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Trellis Fund
© Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery

 

Lee Friedlander

In the 1960s Lee Friedlander (born 1934) sought, by his own account, to create images of “the American social landscape and its conditions.” Other photographers in his New York circle, including Diane Arbus and Garry Winogrand, also explored the chaotic beauty and contradictions of modern life. Friedlander, however, was the only member of this group to turn repeatedly to self-portraiture in order to understand the world around him. He stalked city streets with camera in hand, recording not only the haphazard incidents of daily life but also his own presence, often as a shadow or a reflection.

In the shop window of Westport, Connecticut, 1968 (fig. 11, above), for example, a reflection of Friedlander’s legs appears to merge with the shapely limbs of a woman in a bathing suit who points a camera at the viewer. The woman is an illusion, a cutout advertisement – but she is also a stand-in for the camera-wielding Friedlander, whose torso and head also appear faintly, as a shadow cast against her legs.

By letting the reflection in a window obscure what is inside, or allowing his shadow to intrude into the frame, Friedlander violates many of the rules of “good” photography. Works such as New York City, 1966 (fig. 12, below) testify to Friedlander’s ability to transform such “mistakes” into witty, ironic juxtapositions. In this case, the startling intrusion of Friedlander’s shadow onto the back of a fellow pedestrian is visually confusing, simultaneously threatening and humorous, as Friedlander’s spiky hair merges with the woman’s fur collar. A sly commentary on the predatory nature of such street photography, the looming shadow that engulfs the subject is also an effect of Friedlander’s equipment, a 35mm Leica with a wide-angle lens. In order to fill the picture frame with his chosen subject, Friedlander had to make the picture at close range, resulting in the inclusion of his own shadow.

Even in self-portraits in which Friedlander makes himself fully visible to the camera, the artist often makes humorously self-deprecating deadpan images, appearing, for example, as a disheveled driver on a manic mission in Haverstraw, New York, 1966 (fig. 13, below). Edgy but unpretentious, brimming with pictorial detail, Friedlander’s self-portraits are visual puzzles that explore the place of the self in the chaos of contemporary urban life.

Text from the NGA website

 

Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934) 'New York City' 1966

 

Figure 12. Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934)
New York City
1966
Gelatin silver print
21.7 x 32.7cm (8 9/16 x 12 7/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Trellis Fund
© Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery

 

Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934) 'Haverstraw, New York' 1966

 

Figure 13. Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934)
Haverstraw, New York
1966
Gelatin silver print
21.7 x 32.7cm (8 9/16 x 12 7/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Trellis Fund
© Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery

 

Ilse Bing (German, 1899-1998) 'Self-Portrait with Leica' 1931

 

Ilse Bing (German, 1899-1998)
Self-Portrait with Leica
1931
Gelatin silver print, printed c. 1988
26.7 x 29.7cm (10 1/2 x 11 11/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Gift of Ilse Bing Wolff

 

Gillian Wearing (English, b. 1963) 'Me as Mapplethorpe' 2009

 

Gillian Wearing (English, b. 1963)
Me as Mapplethorpe
2009
Gelatin silver print (based upon Robert Mapplethorpe work: Self Portrait, 1988. © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation)
149.86 x 121.92cm (59 x 48 in.)
Private Collection
Courtesy the artist; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York; Maureen Paley, London, Regen Projects, Los Angeles

 

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) 'Rebecca' 1922

 

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Rebecca
1922
Platinum print
24.4 x 19.4cm (9 5/8 x 7 5/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Southwestern Bell Corporation Paul Strand Collection
© Aperture Foundation Inc., Paul Strand Archive

 

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) 'Rebecca, New Mexico' 1932

 

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Rebecca, New Mexico
1932
Platinum print
14.9 x 11.8cm (5 7/8 x 4 5/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Southwestern Bell Corporation Paul Strand Collection
© Aperture Foundation Inc., Paul Strand Archive

 

Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) 'Georgia O'Keeffe' probably 1918

 

Figure 1. Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946)
Georgia O’Keeffe
probably 1918
Platinum print
18.4 x 23.1cm (7 1/4 x 9 1/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Alfred Stieglitz Collection

 

Alfred Stieglitz

Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) was already an accomplished photographer, publisher, and champion of modern art when he the first encountered the work of Georgia O’Keeffe in 1916. He made his first photographs of her in 1917 and sent them to her with the note, “I think I could do thousands
of things of you – a life work to express you.” Over the next two decades Stieglitz made more than three hundred photographs of O’Keeffe, whom he married in 1924, creating what he called a “composite portrait.” This extraordinary body of work charts the couple’s relationship and
expresses Stieglitz’s conviction that portraiture should function as a kind of “photographic diary.”

Many of the photographs Stieglitz made of O’Keeffe in the early years of their relationship, including Georgia O’Keeffe, c. 1918 (fig. 1, above), are palpably erotic, reflecting the intense passion they shared. Revealing herself to the lens with a bewitching vulnerability, O’Keeffe exudes a tenderness and seductiveness that belie the strain of holding the pose during the long exposures required by Stieglitz’s large-format camera. Often, his photographs express both his desire and admiration for O’Keeffe, at times verging on idealisation of the person he called “Nature’s child – a Woman.” Yet his portraits also look beyond her face to find eloquence in all
parts of her body, as in the print Georgia O’Keeffe – Hands and Thimble (fig. 2, below), where her hands display an almost tactile physicality. Here, Stieglitz used a printing technique that resulted in tonal reversal, causing deep shadows to print as bronze tones and creating the dark outlines that dramatise O’Keeffe’s graceful fingers and emphasise the metallic gleam of the thimble.

After Stieglitz exhibited more than forty portraits of O’Keeffe, including some provocative nudes, in 1921, the painter was dismayed to find that her own art began to be interpreted in a sexualised way, and she rarely posed unclothed after 1923. O’Keeffe’s desire to control her image, along with the increasingly attenuated nature of their relationship after 1929, when
she began spending several months a year working in New Mexico while he stayed in New York, further strained their partnership. In Georgia O’Keeffe, 1930 (fig. 3, below), the artist stands before one of the paintings she had made in New Mexico. Gazing steadily at the camera, she appears as a monumental force at one with her art, confident yet untouchable.

Text from the NGA website

 

Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) 'Georgia O'Keeffe - Hands and Thimble' 1919

 

Figure 2. Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946)
Georgia O’Keeffe – Hands and Thimble
1919
Palladium print
24 x 19.4cm (9 7/16 x 7 5/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Alfred Stieglitz Collection

 

Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) 'Georgia O'Keeffe' 1930

 

Figure 3. Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946)
Georgia O’Keeffe
1930
Gelatin silver print
23.9 x 19.1cm (9 7/16 x 7 1/2 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Alfred Stieglitz Collection

 

Nicholas Nixon (American, b. 1947) 'The Brown Sisters' 1975

 

Nicholas Nixon (American, b. 1947)
The Brown Sisters
1975
Gelatin silver print
20.2 x 25.2cm (7 15/16 x 9 15/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Patrons’ Permanent Fund
© Nicholas Nixon, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco and Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

 

Nicholas Nixon (American, b. 1947) 'The Brown Sisters' 1978

 

Nicholas Nixon (American, b. 1947)
The Brown Sisters
1978
Gelatin silver print
Promised gift of James and Margie Krebs
© Nicholas Nixon, courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

 

For more images from this series please see my posting Nicholas Nixon: Family Album

 

Milton Rogovin (American, 1909-2011) 'Samuel P. "Pee Wee" West (Lower West Side series)' 1974

 

Figure 7. Milton Rogovin (American, 1909-2011)
Samuel P. “Pee Wee” West (Lower West Side series)
1974
Gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Gift of Dr. J. Patrick and Patricia A. Kennedy

 

Milton Rogovin

Milton Rogovin (1909-2011) belongs to a rich photographic tradition of documenting the social and personal histories of people who would otherwise be forgotten. He did so serially, returning over many years to encapsulate not just single moments but entire lifetimes. Rogovin started his career as an optometrist in Buffalo, New York. In 1957, after he refused to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities about his association with the Communist Party, the local paper labeled him the “Top Red in Buffalo.” His optometry practice folded as a result, leaving his family of five to survive on the salary of his wife, Anne. With free time suddenly available, Rogovin turned to photography with a strong sense of purpose. “My voice was essentially silenced,” he recalled, “so I decided to speak out through photographs.”

Rogovin’s candid, powerfully direct pictures gave voice to those who traditionally had none: immigrants, minorities, and working-class people. Even though he traveled around the world making photographs of workers, his best-known work was made closer to home. In 1972 he began photographing residents of Buffalo’s Lower West Side, the city’s poorest
and most ethnically diverse neighbourhood. With his bulky twin-lens Rolleiflex camera, the photographer was sometimes suspected of working for the police or the FBI. Over time, however, Rogovin gained the trust of his sitters by visiting regularly and by giving them prints of their portraits. Dignified and occasionally tender, these photographs depict the circumstances of each subject with sober honesty.

Several times over the next three decades, Rogovin sought out and re-photographed many of his original subjects, capturing the changes wrought by time and circumstance. The series Samuel P. “Pee Wee” West (figs. 7-10) registers changes in the sitter’s situation over the course of twenty-eight years, from 1974 to 2002. In 2003 the oral historian Dave Isay, working
alongside Rogovin, interviewed West, who related the story of his decades of heavy drinking. Reflecting on a photograph Rogovin had made of him in 1985 (fig. 8), West said, “That… picture actually changed my life”; it prompted him to stop drinking for six months before relapsing. A later brush with death led to permanent recovery and the founding of a program to help local youth reject drugs and alcohol. In this and other serial portraits, Rogovin honoured the everyday lives of his subjects, offering a powerful visual legacy of a community he respected and loved.

Text from the NGA website

 

Milton Rogovin (American, 1909-2011) 'Samuel P. "Pee Wee" West (Lower West Side series)' 1985

 

Figure 8. Milton Rogovin (American, 1909-2011)
Samuel P. “Pee Wee” West (Lower West Side series)
1985
Gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Gft of Dr. J. Patrick and Patricia A. Kennedy

 

Milton Rogovin (American, 1909-2011) 'Samuel P. "Pee Wee" West (Lower West Side series)' 1992

 

Figure 9. Milton Rogovin (American, 1909-2011)
Samuel P. “Pee Wee” West (Lower West Side series)
1992
Gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Gft of Dr. J. Patrick and Patricia A. Kennedy

 

Milton Rogovin (American, 1909-2011) 'Samuel P. "Pee Wee" West (Lower West Side series)' 2002

 

Figure 10. Milton Rogovin (American, 1909-2011)
Samuel P. “Pee Wee” West (Lower West Side series)
2002
Gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Gift of Dr. J. Patrick and Patricia A. Kennedy

 

 

National Gallery of Art
National Mall between 3rd and 7th Streets
Constitution Avenue NW, Washington

Opening hours:
Daily 11.00am – 4.00pm

National Gallery of Art website

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Exhibition: ‘Gillian Wearing’ at Whitechapel Gallery, London

Exhibition dates: 28th March – 17th June 2012

Galleries 1, 8 and Victor Petitgas Gallery

 

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

 

Gillian Wearing (English, b. 1963) 'Dancing in Peckham' 1994

 

Gillian Wearing (English, b. 1963)
Dancing in Peckham
1994
Colour video with sound
25 minutes
© the artist
Courtesy Maureen Paley, London

 

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

 

Gillian Wearing (English, b. 1963)
Self Portrait at 17 Years Old
2003
Framed C-type print
115.5 x 92 cm
© the artist
Courtesy Maureen Paley, London

 

 

The films and photographs of British artist Gillian Wearing (b. Birmingham, 1963) explore our public personas and private lives. This Turner Prize winner’s remarkable works draw on fly-on-the-wall documentaries, reality TV and the techniques of theatre, to explore how we present ourselves to the world.

Wearing’s portraits and mini-dramas reveal a paradox, given the chance to dress up, put on a mask or act out a role, the liberation of anonymity allows us to be more truly ourselves.

The exhibition begins with the artist herself, dancing in a shopping mall, blissfully unaware of her bemused audience. The idea of performance continues with works including Wearing’s 1997 masterpiece, 10–16. Adults lip synch the voices and act out the physical tics of seven children in a captivating film which moves from the breathless excitement of a ten year old to the existential angst of an adolescent.

Other highlights include Wearing’s iconic 1992 series, Signs that say what you want them to say, and not Signs that say what someone else wants you to say where strangers are offered paper and pen to communicate their message. In the upper galleries we enter the inner world of subjectivity. An advert – Confess All On Video. Don’t Worry, You Will Be In Disguise. Intrigued? Call Gillian… (1994) attracted a series of disturbing disclosures. Wearing jettisons her own identity to adopt the guise of family members or artists such as Diane Arbus or Andy Warhol, so revealing her own background and influence.

This comprehensive survey, which also premieres new films and sculptures, shows how Wearing is both political – often focusing on the dispossessed or the traumatised – and poetic, finding the extraordinary in us all.

Text from the Whitechapel Gallery website

 

 

Curator Introduction to Gillian Wearing

Curator Daniel Hermann introduces the Gillian Wearing exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery from 28 March – 17 June 2012.

 

Installation view of the exhibition 'Gillian Wearing' at Whitechapel Gallery, London showing work from her series 'Signs that say what you want them to say and not Signs that say what someone else wants you to say'

 

Installation view of the exhibition Gillian Wearing at Whitechapel Gallery, London showing work from her series Signs that say what you want them to say and not Signs that say what someone else wants you to say

 

Gillian Wearing (English, b. 1963) 'HELP' 1992-1993

 

Gillian Wearing (English, b. 1963)
HELP
1992-1993
From the series Signs that say what you want them to say and not Signs that say what someone else wants you to say
C-type print mounted on aluminium
Dimensions variable
© the artist
Courtesy Maureen Paley, London

 

Gillian Wearing (English, b. 1963) 'I'M DESPERATE' 1992-1993

 

Gillian Wearing (English, b. 1963)
I’M DESPERATE 
1992-3
From the series Signs that say what you want them to say and not Signs that say what someone else wants you to say
C-type print mounted on aluminium
Dimensions variable
© the artist
Courtesy Maureen Paley, London

 

Gillian Wearing (English, b. 1963) 'WILL BRITAIN GET THROUGH THIS RECESSION?' 1992-1993

 

Gillian Wearing (English, b. 1963)
WILL BRITAIN GET THROUGH THIS RECESSION?
1992-3
From the series Signs that say what you want them to say and not Signs that say what someone else wants you to say
C-type print mounted on aluminium
Dimensions variable
© the artist
Courtesy Maureen Paley, London

 

 

The Whitechapel Gallery presents the first major international survey of Turner Prize-winning British artist Gillian Wearing’s photographs and films which explore the public and private lives of ordinary people. Fascinated by how people present themselves in front of the camera in fly-on-the-wall documentaries and reality TV, Gillian Wearing explores ideas of personal identity through often masking her subjects and using theatre’s staging techniques.

This major exhibition surveys Wearing’s work from the early photographs Signs that Say What You Want Them to Say and Not Signs that Say What Someone Else Wants You to Say (1992-3) to her latest video Bully (2010) and also includes several new photographs made specially for the Whitechapel Gallery exhibition.

Visitors to the exhibition enter a film set-style installation showcasing photographs and films in ‘front and back stage’ areas. Highlights include a striking photograph of the artist posing as her younger self, Self-Portrait at 17 Years Old (2003), Dancing in Peckham (1994), a film which blurs the boundaries between public space and private expression as Wearing dances in the middle of a shopping mall, and the UK premiere of recent film Bully (2010). New photographic works shown for the first time include two portraits of Wearing as artists August Sander and Claude Cahun as part of her ongoing series of iconic photographers, as well as still lives of flowers, looking back to the rich symbolism of the great age of 17th century Dutch painting.

A gallery is dedicated to Wearing’s well-known photographs giving people the chance to write what they were thinking at that moment, titled Signs that Say What You Want Them to Say and Not Signs that Say What Someone Else Wants You to Say (1992-3). The series includes a city worker holding a sign saying, ‘I’m Desperate’, a policeman holding ‘Help!’ and another person’s sign ‘Will Britain ever get through this recession’.

The exhibition also includes a series of private viewing booths for three confessional videos shown together for the first time and in which Gillian Wearing asked people to describe intensely personal experiences. These include Trauma (2000) where sitters describe childhood traumas while wearing a mask. As well as the powerful videos Secrets and Lies (2000) and Confess All On Video. Don’t Worry, You Will Be In Disguise. Intrigued? Call Gillian… (1994). Alongside these works the video 2 into 1 (1997) sees a mother lip synching the voices of her twin sons and vice versa as they describe their relationship.

Press release from Whitechapel Gallery website

 

 

Gillian Wearing: Self Made, 2010 Trailer

Gillian Wearing’s debut feature film introduces a cast of untrained actors to a Method acting teacher. Drawing upon their own experiences, each participant creates and stars in their own mini-film.

 

Gillian Wearing (English, b. 1963) 'Bully' 2010

 

Gillian Wearing (English, b. 1963)
Bully
2010
Colour video for projection with sound
7 minutes 55 seconds
© the artist
Courtesy Maureen Paley, London

 

Installation view of the exhibition 'Gillian Wearing' at Whitechapel Gallery, London showing at left a still from the video '2 into 1' (1997)

 

Installation view of the exhibition Gillian Wearing at Whitechapel Gallery, London showing at left a still from the video 2 into 1 (1997, below)

 

Gillian Wearing (English, b. 1963) '2 into 1' 1997

 

Gillian Wearing (English, b. 1963)
2 into 1
1997
Colour video for monitor with sound
4 minutes 30 seconds
© the artist
Courtesy Maureen Paley, London

 

Gillian Wearing (English, b. 1963) 'Trauma' 2000

 

Gillian Wearing (English, b. 1963)
Trauma
2000
Colour video for monitor with sound
30 minutes
© the artist
Courtesy Maureen Paley, London

 

Gillian Wearing (English, b. 1963) 'Me as Cahun Holding a Mask of My Face' 2012

 

Gillian Wearing (English, b. 1963)
Me as Cahun Holding a Mask of My Face
2012
Framed bromide print
149 x 120.5 cm
© the artist
Courtesy Maureen Paley, London

 

Installation view of the exhibition 'Gillian Wearing' at Whitechapel Gallery, London showing work from a series of iconic photographers

 

Installation view of the exhibition Gillian Wearing at Whitechapel Gallery, London showing work from a series of iconic photographers

 

Gillian Wearing (English, b. 1963) 'Me as Sander' 2012

 

Gillian Wearing (English, b. 1963)
Me as Sander
2012
Framed bromide print
149 x 98.8cm
© the artist
Courtesy Maureen Paley, London

 

 

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77 – 82 Whitechapel High Street
London E1 7QX
Phone: + 44 (0) 20 7522 7888

Opening hours:
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Thursdays and Fridays 11am  9pm
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Exhibition: ‘Behind the Curtain – The Aesthetics of the Photobooth’ at the Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne

Exhibition dates: February – 20th May 2012

Artists:
 Jean-Michel Alberola, Louis Aragon, Marie-Berthe Aurenche, Richard Avedon, Alain Baczynsky, Jared Bark, Marc Bellini, Jacques-André Boiffard, André Breton, Hansjürg Buchmeier, Anita Cruz-Eberhard, Sabine Delafon, Anne Deleporte, Paul Eluard, Max Ernst, Michael Fent, Michel Folco, Valentine Fournier, Lee Friedlander, Näkki Goranin, Jeff Grostern, Susan Hiller, Dick Jewell , Svetlana Khachaturova, Jürgen Klauke, Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Naomi Leibowitz, Leon Levinstein, Annette Messager, Willy Michel, Daniel Minnick, Suzanne Muzard, Raynal Pellicer, Mathieu Pernot, Steven Pippin, Jacques Prévert, Raymond Queneau, Arnulf Rainer, Timm Rautert, Bruno Richard, Gerhard Richter, Thomas Ruff, Michel Salsmann, Tomoko Sawada, Joachim Schmid, Cindy Sherman, Lorna Simpson, Dimitri Soulas, Yves Tanguy, Amanda Tetrault, Roland Topor, Franco Vaccari, Andy Warhol, Gillian Wearing, Jan Wenzel, David Wojnarowicz and the group Fluxus.

 

Franco Vaccari. '(Exhibition in real time: leave a photographic sign of your passage on these walls)' 1972 (detail)

 

Franco Vaccari (Italian, b. 1936)
Esposizione in tempo reale num. 4: Lascia su queste pareti una traccia fotografica del tuo passaggio (Exhibition in real time: leave a photographic sign of your passage on these walls) (detail)
1972
Collage of photobooths mounted on cardboard, gelatin silver prints
45.5 x 58.5cm
© Franco Vaccari, property of the Artist

 

 

This is one exhibition I wish I could really see in person. Such a fascinating subject!

The images are timeless, contextless and quite beguiling. The exhibition questions the aesthetics of the photobooth through six major themes: The Booth, Automatism, The Strip, Who Am I?, Who Are You?, Who Are We?. In Melbourne there are still two black and white photobooths outside the Elizabeth Street exit of Flinders Street railway station, standing there like silent sentinels of a bygone age. I remember when I was younger queueing to have my photograph taken, for student cards and for my first passport. You needed two nearly identical black and white shoulder up portraits, no smiling, no glasses on. Now you just go to the chemist for your colour renditions. The magic and the fun has gone.

The whole performance has the illusion of the cinematic. You queue to get in, drawing back the curtain and closing it behind you, as they close the doors of the cinema. The privacy of the booth, not in darkness but behind a curtain that shields your face from prying eyes but leaves the lower half of your body exposed. Behind where you will be sitting another curtain – drawn or open? What background do you want? You adjust the seat up and down so that your face is at the correct level with the mark on the screen, enter your money and wait. The red light comes on, you (com)pose yourself and a couple of seconds later: flash! Your eyes try to recover in time for the next red light: flash!

Time seems to slow down and almost stop between the flashes of light. The experience of your performance before the screen possesses such a visceral, tense, gut feel but also a disembodied feeling. I never know how I am going to look on the cinematic film strip, not at 24 frames a second, but at 4 frames per minute. What happens to the time in between? Standing outside the booth waiting for a strip of paper with your impression on it, not knowing what the images are going to be like, whether the development of the image in such a short space of time has worked correctly – and the smell of the chemicals on the paper as you handle the still wet strip. Magic…

Dr Marcus Bunyan


Many thankx to the Musée de l’Elysée for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

 

 

Mathieu Pernot (French, b. 1970) 'Jonathan, Mickael, Priscilla, Photobooth' 1996

 

Mathieu Pernot (French, b. 1970)
Jonathan, Mickael, Priscilla, cabine du photomaton (Jonathan, Mickael, Priscilla, Photobooth)
1996
Three gelatin silver prints
540 x 195cm
© Mathieu Pernot / collection Musée de l’Élysée, Lausanne

 

Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954) 'Untitled' 1975

 

Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954)
Untitled
1975
Gelatin silver print
30.5 x 20.4cm
© Courtesy of the Artist, Metro Pictures, collection Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne

 

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

 

Gillian Wearing (English, b. 1963)
Self Portrait at 17 Years Old
2003
Framed C-type print
115.5 x 92cm
Collection of Contemporary Art Fundació ‘La Caixa’, Barcelone
© Gillian Wearing, courtesy Maureen Paley, London

 

Anne Deleporte (French, b. 1960) 'I.D. Stack #6' 1992

 

Anne Deleporte (French, b. 1960)
I.D. Stack #6
1992
Stack of photobooth portraits, gelatin silver and chromogenic prints
6 x 5 x 3cm
© Anne Deleporte

 

 

When the first photobooths were set up in Paris in 1928, the Surrealists used them heavily and compulsively. In a few minutes, and for a small price, the machine offered them, through a portrait, an experience similar to automatic writing. Since then, generations of artists have been fascinated by the concept of the photobooth. From Andy Warhol to Arnulf Rainer, Thomas Ruff, Cindy Sherman and Gillian Wearing, many used it to play with their identity, tell stories, or simply create worlds.

Behind the Curtain – the Aesthetics of the Photobooth, an exhibition created by the Musée de l’Elysée, is the first to focus on the aesthetics of the photobooth. It is divided into six major themes: the booth, the automated process, the strip, who am I ?, who are you?, who are we? Provider of standardised legal portraits, it is the ideal tool for introspection and reflection on others, whether individually or in groups. By bringing together over 600 pieces made on different media (photographs, paintings, lithographs and videos ) from sixty international artists, the exhibition reveals the influence of the photobooth within the artistic community, from its inception to the present day.

The exhibition questions the aesthetics of the photobooth through six major themes.

The Booth

An isolated space, closed in as if it were some sort of modern confessional, the photobooth is an invitation to the most intimate revelations. Generally located in public spaces-subway station, department store or train station-it also offers an extraordinary observation point onto the urban hustle and bustle. It is a world in between the intimate and the public, the inside and the outside, the debarred and the open.

Automatism

From the Surrealists to the most contemporary artists, all have been fascinated by the automatism of the photobooth. The machine does the work. The author vanishes behind the almighty technology. Malfunction can occur at times. The result is a form of poetry of the automatism made visible in its faults, failures or blunders.

The Strip

As a series of juxtaposed images, the strip recreates spatial or temporal continuities. It reconstructs improbable spaces: a closer look shows that, in fact, the adjacent image is the following image. Through this succession of images, the photobooth holds, as if folded into it, the principle of the cinema. Putting images side by side is already telling a story.

Who am I?

Identity is embodied within the space of the photobooth. It is a space for self-staging, where social, ethnic, sexual, community or any other identity can be strengthened or undone. One can pretend to ascertain one’s naked identity through the mirror of the photobooth, or on the contrary, by pulling faces or in disguise, to establish metamorphoses of the self. The photobooth is the ideal introspective tool.

Who are you?

The photobooth is not only a place suitable for self-reflection, it is also a place in which the other can be questioned, in particular through the legal identification system that delivers what is commonly referred to as ‘ID’. In devoting oneself to the compulsive and bulimic collecting of photobooth strips, one can also get lost in the faces of others.

Who are we?

While it allows us to reflect upon our own identity, or other people’s, the photobooth is also an opportunity to ponder about the nature of the couple, or the group. Inside the booth, some build their image through the mirror of the other, or of others; they pose in pairs or more, thus asserting their affiliation to a social entity. The photobooth reinforces our gregarious instinct; it embodies collective identity.

With works by Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Willy Michel, Lorna Simpson, Amanda Tetrault and the collection of albums of purikuras (see photograph below: in Japan, the name purikuras refers to a photo sticker booth or the product of such a photo booth. The name is a shortened form of the registered trademark Purinto Kurabu (プリント倶楽部). The term derives from the English print club. Jointly developed by Atlus and Sega, the first purikura machines were sold in July 1995).

Press release from the Musée de l’Elysée website

 

Anonymous. 'Collection of albums of purikuras' 1995-2010

 

Anonymous
Collection of albums of purikuras
1995-2010
Collection of digital images printed on stickers mounted in booklets
Various sizes from 9 x 12.8cm to 11.9 x 14.5cm
© Kenji Hirasawa (art collector)

 

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987) 'Frances Lewis' 1966

 

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Frances Lewis
1966
Acrylic and silkscreen on linen, 12 panels
162.5 x 167.6cm
© Collection The Sydney and Frances Lewis Foundation / 2011
The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Artists Rights Society ( ARS ), New York

 

Jan Wenzel (German, b. 1972) 'Vohang (Curtain)' 2009

 

Jan Wenzel (German, b. 1972)
Vohang (Curtain)
2009
From the series Instant History
Montage of four photobooth prints, chromogenic prints
41.7 x 31.7cm
© Jan Wenzel / Kleinschmidt Fine Photographs

 

Yves Tanguy (French, 1900-1955) 'Selfportrait in a Photobooth' c. 1929

 

Yves Tanguy (French, 1900-1955)
Selfportrait in a Photobooth
c. 1929
Gelatin silver print
20.5 x 3.8cm
© Collection Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne / 2011, ProLitteris, Zurich

 

Anonymous. 'Walter and I at the BIG SLIDE' c. 1970

 

Anonymous
Walter and I at the BIG SLIDE
c. 1970
Gelatin silver print
c. 20.5 x 3.8cm
© Collection Näkki Goranin

 

Arnulf Rainer (Austrian, b. 1929) 'No title (Automatenportraits)' August 1969

Arnulf Rainer (Austrian, b. 1929) 'No title (Automatenportraits)' August 1969

Arnulf Rainer (Austrian, b. 1929) 'No title (Automatenportraits)' August 1969

 

Arnulf Rainer (Austrian, b. 1929)
No title (Automatenportraits)
August 1969
Courtesy Galerie m Bochum
© Arnulf Rainer

 

Alain Baczynsky (Belgian, b. 1953) 'Regardez, il va peut-être se passer quelque chose …' 1979-1981

 

Alain Baczynsky (Belgian, b. 1953)
Regardez, il va peut-être se passer quelque chose… (Look, maybe it will be something going on…)
1979-1981
© Collection Centre Pompidou, dist. RMN

 

Susan Hiller (American-born artist who lived in London, 1940-2019) 'Midnight, Euston' 1983

 

Susan Hiller (American-born artist who lived in London, 1940-2019)
Midnight, Euston
1983
© Susann Hiller; Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London

 

Jan Wenzel (German, b. 1972) 'Bastler II' 2000

 

Jan Wenzel (German, b. 1972)
Bastler II
2000
© Jan Wenzel & Kleinschmidt Fine Photographs

 

 

Musée de l’Elysée
18, avenue de l’Elysée CH
1014 Lausanne
Phone: + 41 21 316 99 11

Opening hours
Wednesday – Monday 10am – 6pm
Closed Tuesdays

Musée de l’Elysée website

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

Exhibition dates: 8th October – 28th November 2010

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

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


Dan Rule in The Age

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dr Marcus Bunyan

 

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

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


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

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

Extract from Juliana Engberg About Mortality catalogue

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

Extract from Juliana Engberg About Mortality catalogue

 

 

Faces

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

Text from the Youtube website

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

Extract from Juliana Engberg About Mortality catalogue

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

Exhibiting artists include:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Highlights of the exhibition include:

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

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

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

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

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

Text from the ACCA website

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

Extract from Juliana Engberg About Mortality catalogue

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

Extract from Juliana Engberg About Mortality catalogue

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

Extract from Juliana Engberg About Mortality catalogue

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA)
111 Sturt Street
Southbank, Victoria 3006
Australia

Opening hours:
Tue – Fri 10am – 5pm
Sat – Sun 11am – 5pm
Mon Closed
Open all public holidays except Christmas Day and Good Friday

Australian Centre for Contemporary Art website

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

Exhibition dates: 1st August – 1st November 2010

 

A huge posting of wonderful photographs!

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Press release from the Museum of Modern Art website

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

Selected wall text from the exhibition

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

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

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

Sculpture in the Age of Photography

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

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

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

Eugène Atget
The Marvelous in the Everyday

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

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

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

Auguste Rodin
The Sculptor and the Photographic Enterprise

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

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

Constantin Brancusi
The Studio as Groupe Mobile

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

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

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

Cultural and Political Icons

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

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

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

The Studio without Walls
Sculpture in the Expanded Field

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

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

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

Daguerre’s Soup
What Is Sculpture?

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

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

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

The Pygmalion Complex
Animate and Inanimate Figures

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

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

The Performing Body as Sculptural Object

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

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Exhibition: ‘Haunted: Contemporary Photography / Video / Performance’ at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

Exhibition dates: 26th March – 6th September, 2010

 

Looks like a great exhibition – wish I was there to see it!


Many thankx to Claire Laporte and 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.

 

Adam Helms (American, b. 1974) 'Untitled Portrait (Santa Fe Trail)' 2007 from the exhibition 'Haunted: Contemporary Photography / Video / Performance' Guggenheim Museum, March - Sept, 2010

 

Adam Helms (American, b. 1974)
Untitled Portrait (Santa Fe Trail)
2007
Double-sided screenprint on paper vellum edition 2/2
101.3 x 65.7cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Purchased with funds contributed by the Photography Committee 2007.131

 

Idris Khan (British, b. 1978) 'Homage to Bernd Becher' 2007 from the exhibition 'Haunted: Contemporary Photography / Video / Performance' Guggenheim Museum, March - Sept, 2010

 

Idris Khan (British, b. 1978)
Homage to Bernd Becher
2007
Bromide print edition 1/6
49.8 x 39.7cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Purchased with funds contributed by the Photography Committee

 

Bernd Becher (German, 1931-2007) and Hilla Becher (German, 1934-2015) 'Water Towers' 1980 from the exhibition 'Haunted: Contemporary Photography / Video / Performance' Guggenheim Museum, March - Sept, 2010

 

Bernd Becher (German, 1931-2007) and Hilla Becher (German, 1934-2015)
Water Towers
1980
Nine gelatin silver prints
155.6 x 125.1cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Purchased with funds contributed by Mr. and Mrs. Donald Jonas

 

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987) 'Orange Disaster #5' 1963

 

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Orange Disaster #5
1963
Acrylic and silkscreen enamel on canvas
269.2 x 207cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Gift, Harry N. Abrams Family Collection 74.2118

 

Joan Jonas (American, b. 1936) 'Mirror Piece I' 1969

 

Joan Jonas (American, b. 1936)
Mirror Piece I
1969
Chromogenic print
101 x 55.6cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Purchased with funds contributed by the Photography Committee

 

Zhang Huan (Chinese, b. 1965) '12 Square Meters' 1994

 

Zhang Huan (Chinese, b. 1965)
12 Square Meters
1994
Chromogenic print A.P. 3/5, edition of 15
149.9 x 99.7cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Purchased with funds contributed by Manuel de Santaren and Jennifer and David Stockman

 

 

Much of contemporary photography and video seems haunted by the past, by the history of art, by apparitions that are reanimated in reproductive mediums, live performance, and the virtual world. By using dated, passé, or quasi-extinct stylistic devices, subject matter, and technologies, such art embodies a longing for an otherwise unrecuperable past.

From March 26 to September 6, 2010, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum presents Haunted: Contemporary Photography / Video / Performance, an exhibition that documents this obsession, examining myriad ways photographic imagery is incorporated into recent practice. Drawn largely from the Guggenheim’s extensive photography and video collections, Haunted features some 100 works by nearly 60 artists, including many recent acquisitions that will be on view at the museum for the first time. The exhibition is installed throughout the rotunda and its spiralling ramps, with two additional galleries on view from June 4 to September 1, featuring works by two pairs of artists to complete Haunted’s presentation.

The works in Haunted: Contemporary Photography / Video / Performance range from individual photographs and photographic series to sculptures and paintings that incorporate photographic elements; projected videos; films; performances; and site-specific installations, including a new sound work created by Susan Philips for the museum’s rotunda. While the show traces the extensive incorporation of photography into contemporary art since the 1960s, a significant part of the exhibition will be dedicated to work created since 2001 by younger artists.

Haunted is organised around a series of formal and conceptual threads that weave themselves through the artworks on view:

Appropriation and the Archive

In the early 1960s, Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol began to incorporate photographic images into their paintings, establishing a new mode of visual production that relied not on the then-dominant tradition of gestural abstraction but rather on mechanical processes such as screenprinting. In so doing, they challenged the notion of art as the expression of a singular, heroic author, recasting their works as repositories for autobiographical, cultural, and historical information. This archival impulse revolutionised art production over the ensuing decades, paving the way for a conceptually driven use of photography as a means of absorbing the world at large into a new aesthetic realm. Since then, a number of artists, including Bernd and Hilla Becher, Sarah Charlesworth, Douglas Gordon, Luis Jacob, Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, and Sara VanDerBeek, have pursued this archival impulse, amassing fragments of reality either by creating new photographs or by appropriating existing ones.

 

Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954)
'Untitled Film Still #58' 1980

 

Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954)
Untitled Film Still #58
1980
Gelatin silver print
20.3 x 25.4cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Gift, Ginny Williams

 

“I’ve always played with make-up to transform myself, but everything, including the lighting, was self taught. I just learned things as I needed to use them. I absorbed my ideas for the women in these photos from every cultural source that I’ve ever had access to, including film, TV, advertisements, magazines, as well as any adult role models from my youth.”1

Cindy Sherman (b. 1954, Glen Ridge, N.J.) emerged onto the New York art scene in the early 1980s as part of a new generation of artists concerned with the codes of representation in a media-saturated era. Along with many artists working in the 1980s, Sherman explored photography as a way to reveal and examine the cultural constructions we designate as truth. Confronting the belief that photographs are truthful documents, Sherman’s fictional narratives suggested that photographs, like all forms of representation, are ideologically motivated. She is aware that the camera is not a neutral device but rather a tool that frames a particular viewpoint.

Sherman’s reputation was established early on with her Untitled Film Stills, a series of 69 black-and-white photographs that she began making in 1977, when she was twenty-three. In this series, the artist depicted herself dressed in the various melodramatic guises of clichéd B-movie heroines presented in 8 x 10 publicity stills from the 1950s and 1960s. In photograph after photograph, Sherman both acts in and documents her own productions. Although Sherman is both model and photographer, these images are not autobiographical. Rather, they memorialise absence and leave us searching for a narrative and clues to what may exist beyond the frame of the camera.

By the time Sherman made the Untitled Film Stills, black-and-white photography was already recognised as belonging to the past, and the styles she replicated were taken not from her own generation but from that of her mother’s. Sherman used wigs and makeup as well as vintage clothing to create a range of female characters. She sets her photos in a variety of locations, including rural landscapes, cities, and her own apartment. Although many of the pictures are taken by Sherman herself using an extended shutter release, for others she required help, sometimes enlisting friends and family. The characters she created include an ingénue finding her way in the big city, a party girl, a housewife, a woman in distress, a dancer, and an actress. In 1980 she completed the series and has said that she stopped when she ran out of clichés to depict. Unlike the media images they refer to, Sherman’s stills have a deliberate artifice that is heightened by the often-visible camera cord, slightly eccentric props, unusual camera angles, and by the fact that each image includes the artist rather than a recognisable actress or model. Sherman remains an important figure, with works in major collections around the globe, and continues to create striking, imaginative art.

Text from the Teacher’s Guide to the exhibition

1/ Cindy Sherman, quoted in Monique Beudert and Sean Rainbird, eds., Contemporary Art: The Janet Wolfson de Botton Gift, p. 99.

 

Landscape, Architecture, and the Passage of Time

Historically, one of photography’s primary functions has been to document sites where significant, often traumatic events have taken place. During the Civil War, which erupted not long after the medium was invented, a new generation of reporters sought to photograph battles, but due to the long exposure times required by early cameras, they could only capture the aftermath of the conflicts. These landscapes, strewn with the dead, now seem doubly arresting, for they capture past spaces where something has already occurred. Their state of anteriority, witnessed at such an early stage in the medium’s development, speaks to the very nature of a photograph, which possesses physical and chemical bonds to a past that disappears as soon as it is taken. As viewers, we are left with only traces from which we hope to reconstruct the absent occurrences in the fields, forests, homes, and offices depicted in the works in the exhibition. With this condition in mind, many artists, among them James Casebere, Spencer Finch, Ori Gersht, Roni Horn, Luisa Lambri, An-My Lê, Sally Mann, and Hiroshi Sugimoto, have turned to empty spaces in landscape and architecture, creating poetic reflections on time’s inexorable passing and insisting on the importance of remembrance and memorialisation.

 

Christian Boltanski (French, 1944-2021) 'Autel de Lycée Chases' 1986-1987

 

Christian Boltanski (French, 1944-2021)
Autel de Lycée Chases
1986-1987
Six photographs, six desk lamps, and twenty-two tin boxes
170.2 x 214.6 x 24.1cm
Rubell Family Collection, Miami
© 2010 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris

 

“A good work of art can never be read in one way. My work is full of contradictions. An artwork is open – it is the spectators looking at the work who make the piece, using their own background. A lamp in my work might make you think of a police interrogation, but it’s also religious, like a candle. At the same time it alludes to a precious painting, with a single light shining on it. There are many way of looking at the work. It has to be ‘unfocused’ somehow so that everyone can recognize something of their own self when viewing it.”1

The power of photography to recall the past has inspired many contemporary artists to use photographs to revisit the experience of historical events. In so doing, artists reconsider the photograph itself as an object imbued with history. They became aware that using the medium of photography would lend the elements of specificity and truth to their work.

Since the late 1960s, Christian Boltanski (b. 1944, Paris) has worked with photographs collected from ordinary and often ephemeral sources, endowing the commonplace with significance. Rather than taking original photographs to use in his installations, he often finds and rephotographs everyday documents – passport photographs, school portraits, newspaper pictures, and family albums – to memorialise everyday people. Boltanski seeks to create an art that is indistinguishable from life and has said, “The fascinating moment for me is when the spectator hasn’t registered the art connection, and the longer I can delay this association the better.”2 By appropriating mementos of other people’s lives and placing them in an art context, Boltanski explores the power of photography to transcend individual identity and to function instead as a witness to collective rituals and shared cultural memories.

In Boltanski’s 1986-1987 work Autel de Lycée Chases (which means “Altar to the Chases High School”) enlarged photographs of children are hung over a platform constructed from stacked tin biscuit boxes, which are rusted as if they have been ravaged by time. The black-and-white photographs look like artefacts from another era. An electric light illuminates each face while at the same time obscuring it. The arrangement gives no way to identify or connect the unnamed individuals.

The photos used in Autel de Lycée Chases were taken from a real-world source, the school photograph of the graduating class of 1931 from a Viennese high school for Jewish students. These students were coming of age in a world dominated by war and persecution, and it is likely that many perished over the next decade.

At once personal and universal in reference, Boltanski’s work serves as a monument to the dead, hinting at the Holocaust without naming it. Within this haunting environment, Boltanski intermingles emotion and history, sentimentality and profundity.

Text from the Teacher’s Guide to the exhibition

1/ Christian Boltanski, “Tamar Garb in conversation with Christian Boltanski,” in Christian Boltanski (London: Phaidon Press, 1997), p. 24.
2/ “Christian Boltanski: Lessons of Darkness”

 

Documentation and Reiteration

Since at least the early 1970s, photographic documentation, including film and video, has served as an important complement to the art of live performance, often setting the conditions by which performances are staged and sometimes obviating the need for a live audience altogether. Through an ironic reversal, artworks that revolved around singular moments in time have often come to rely on the permanence of images to transmit their meaning and sometimes even the very fact of their existence. For many artists, these documents take on the function of relics-objects whose meaning is deeply bound to an experience that is always already lost in the past. Works by artists such as Marina Abramović, Christian Boltanski, Sophie Calle, Tacita Dean, Joan Jonas, Christian Marclay, Robert Mapplethorpe, Ana Mendieta, and Gina Pane examine various aesthetic approaches inspired by the reiterative power of the photograph. Using photography not only to restage their own (and others’) performances but to revisit the bodily experience of past events, these artists have reconsidered the document itself as an object embedded in time, closely attending to its material specificity in their works.

 

James Casebere (American, b. 1953) 'Garage' 2003

 

James Casebere (American, b. 1953)
Garage
2003
Chromogenic print, face-mounted to acrylic
181.6 x 223.5cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Anonymous gift

 

“Black and white had more to do with memory and the past. Color was too much about the present, I associated it with color TV, which was not a part of my past. I wanted the images to be related to a sense of history, let’s say, whether personal or social. And I think black and white adds a certain level of abstraction.”1

Since the mid-1970s James Casebere (b. 1953, Lansing, Michigan) has been carefully constructing architectural models and photographing them, yielding images somewhere between realism and obvious fabrication. His photographs are stripped of color and detail to evoke a sense of emotional place rather than the physicality of a place’s forms. Casebere is interested in the memories and feelings that are brought to mind by the architectural spaces he represents. The resulting works are dramatic, surreal, and remarkably true to life, embracing qualities of photography, architecture, and sculpture.

His tabletop models imitate the appearance of architectural institutions (home, school, library, prison) or common sites (tunnel, corridor, archway), representing the structures that occupy our everyday world. These models, made from such featureless materials as Foamcore, museum board, plaster, and Styrofoam, remain empty of detail and human figures. It is only when Casebere casts light on their bland surfaces and spartan interiors that the models are transformed. By eliminating the details, and taking advantage of dramatic lighting effects and the camera’s ability to flatten space, Casebere is able to transform familiar domestic spaces to find the extraordinary in the everyday. He asks viewers to rely on their memory to fill in the gaps and to create a context in which to understand his images.

Casebere stages his photographs to construct realities inspired by contemporary American visual culture that blur the line between fiction and fact. In this way, his images suggest psychologically charged spaces and have an otherworldly quality. The notion that these may be actual places seems plausible, but the lack of human presence leads us to wonder what has happened here. The viewer may imagine a human story within the abandoned spaces. Without people or colour, the photographs are about our own associations with these spaces and what they may represent.

Text from the Teacher’s Guide to the exhibition

1/ Roberto Juarez, “James Casebere,” Bomb 77 (Fall 2001)

 

Trauma and the Uncanny

When Andy Warhol created his silkscreen paintings of Marilyn Monroe in the wake of her death, he touched on the darker side of a burgeoning media culture that, during the Vietnam War, became an integral part of everyday life. Today, with vastly expanded channels for the propagation of images, events as varied as the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the deaths of celebrities such as Princess Diana and Michael Jackson have the ability to become traumatic on a global scale. Many artists, including Adam Helms, Nate Lowman, Adam McEwen, Cady Noland, and Anri Sala, have reexamined the strategy of image appropriation Warhol pioneered, attending closely to the ways political conflict can take on global significance. At the same time, photography has altered, or as some theorists argue, completely reconfigured our sense of personal memory. From birth to death, all aspects of our lives are reconstituted as images alongside our own experience of them. This repetition, which is mirrored in the very technology of the photographic medium, effectively produces an alternate reality in representation that, especially when coping with traumatic events, can take on the force of the uncanny. Artists such as Stan Douglas, Anthony Goicolea, Sarah Anne Johnson, Jeff Wall, and Gillian Wearing exploit this effect, constructing fictional scenarios in which the pains and pleasures of personal experience return with eerie and foreboding qualities.

Press release from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum website [Online] Cited 22/08/2010 no longer available online

 

Gillian Wearing (British, b. 1963) 'Self-Portrait at Three Years Old' 2004

 

Gillian Wearing (British, b. 1963)
Self-Portrait at Three Years Old
2004
Chromogenic print
182 x 122cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Purchased with funds contributed by the International Directors Council and Executive Committee Members: Ruth Baum, Edythe Broad, Elaine Terner Cooper, Dimitris Daskalopoulos, Harry David, Gail May Engelberg, Shirley Fiterman, Nicki Harris, Dakis Joannou, Rachel Lehmann, Linda Macklowe, Peter Norton, Tonino Perna, Elizabeth Richebourg Rea, Mortim

 

“I taught myself to use a camera – it’s not very difficult to use a camera, but I never bothered looking at any textbooks on how to make a picture. I had a much more casual relation to it. For me at the time it was much more about the process rather than the results.”1

Photography has not only profoundly impacted our understanding of historical events, it has also changed the way we remember our personal histories. Beginning at birth, all aspects of our lives are recorded as images alongside our own experiences of them. These parallel recording devices, the camera and personal memory, produce alternate realities that may sometimes be synchronised but at other times are askew.

Gillian Wearing (b. 1963, Birmingham, England) uses masks as a central theme in her videos and photographs. The masks, which range from literal disguises to voice dubbing, conceal the identities of her subjects and free them to reveal intimate secrets. For her 2003 series of photographs Album, Wearing used this strategy to create an autobiographical work. Donning silicon prosthetics, she carefully reconstructed old family snapshots, transforming herself into her mother, father, uncle, and brother as young adults or adolescents. In one of the works, Wearing recreated her own self-portrait as a teenager – and in fact the artist considers all the photographs in this series as self-portraits. She explains: “I was interested in the idea of being genetically connected to someone but being very different. There is something of me, literally, in all those people – we are connected, but we are each very different.”2

To make the Album series, Wearing collaborated with a talented team (some of whom have worked for Madame Tussaud’s wax works) who sculpted, cast, painted, and applied hair to create the masks, wigs, and body suits used in these photographs. The elaborate disguises the artist wears, when combined with the snapshot “realism” of the original images on which they are based, create an eerie fascination that serves to reveal aspects of her identity rather than conceal it.

Self-Portrait at Three Years Old (2004) carries this role-playing further back in time. Confronting the viewer with her adult gaze through the eyeholes of the toddler’s mask, Wearing plays on the rift between interior and exterior and raises a multitude of provocative questions about identity, memory, and the truthfulness of the photographic medium. Wearing says, “What I love about photographs is that they give you a lot and also they withhold a lot.”3

Text from the Teacher’s Guide to the exhibition

1/ “Gillian Wearing,” interview by Leo Edelstein, Journal of Contemporary Art
2/ Quoted in Jennifer Bayles, “Acquisitions: Gillian Wearing,” Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY (accessed January 25, 2010)
3/ Sebastian Smee, “Gillian Wearing: The art of the matter,” The Independent (London), October 18, 2003

 

Sophie Calle (French, b. 1953) 'Father Mother (The Graves, #17)' 1990

 

Sophie Calle (French, b. 1953)
Father Mother (The Graves, #17)
1990
Two gelatin silver prints in artist’s frames edition 2/2
181.0 x 111.1cm each
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Gift, The Bohen Foundation

 

Ana Mendieta (Cuban American, 1948-1985) 'Untitled (Silueta Series)' 1978

 

Ana Mendieta (Cuban American, 1948-1985)
Untitled (Silueta series)
1978
Gelatin silver print
20.3 x 25.4cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Purchased with funds contributed by the Photography Committee

 

Anne Collier (American, b. 1970) 'Crying' 2005

 

Anne Collier (American, b. 1970)
Crying
2005
Chromogenic print edition 1/5
99.1 x 134 x 0.6cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Purchased with funds contributed by Mr. and Mrs. Aaron M. Tighe

 

Miranda Lichtenstein (American, b. 1969) 'Floater' 2004

 

Miranda Lichtenstein (American, b. 1969)
Floater
2004
Chromogenic print edition 5/5
104.1 x 127cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Purchased with funds contributed by the Photography Committee

 

Sarah Anne Johnson (Canadian, b. 1976) 'Morning Meeting (from Tree Planting)' 2003

 

Sarah Anne Johnson (Canadian, b. 1976)
Morning Meeting (from Tree Planting)
2003
Chromogenic print edition
73.7 x 79.7cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Purchased with funds contributed by Pamela and Arthur Sanders; the Harriett Ames
Charitable Trust; Henry Buhl; the Heather and Tony Podesta Collection; Ann and Mel Schaffer; Shelley Harrison; and the Photography Committee

 

Sally Mann (American, b. 1951) 'Virginia' from the 'Mother Land' series 1992

 

Sally Mann (American, b. 1951)
Virginia from the Mother Land series
1992
Gelatin silver print
76.2 x 96.5cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Gift, The Bohen Foundation

 

 

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 5th Avenue (at 89th Street)
New York

Opening hours:
Sunday – Monday, 11am – 6pm
Closed Tuesday
Wednesday – Friday 11am – 6pm
Saturday 11am – 8pm

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