I started the archive 6 years ago with 11 people a day reading it. Today the archive averages between 3-4,000 people a day and has over 3,000 Likes on Facebook.
Reproduced below are a couple of postings from the archive on its very first day 13/11/2008 – just text please note, no images – and a mandala image of the Sahasrãra or Crown Chakra (for creativity) to celebrate the milestone.
Namaste
Marcus
The artist does not turn money into time
“The artist does not turn time into money, the artist turns time into energy, time into intensity, time into vision. The exchange that art offers is an exchange in kind; energy for energy, intensity for intensity, vision for vision… Can we afford to live imaginatively, contemplatively?”
Winterson, Jeanette. Art Objects. London: Vintage, 1996, p. 139.
After Light
“And on the other end of the spectrum, there is the AFTER LIGHT, a light of the past, which are echoes from past experiences so intense that they sometimes appear in front of us in the form of unexpected shadows. They hide on clear days under the roofs of houses. It is believed to be the same light seen by people we knew many years ago that survives like a message in a bottle, but always in a precarious way and often vanishes into thin air.”
Helguera, Pablo. “How to Understand the Light on a Landscape,” in Patt, Lise (ed.,). Searching for Sebald: Photography After W. G. Sebald. Los Angeles: The Institute of Cultural Inquiry, 2007, p. 119.
Sahasrãra or Crown Chakra / Thousand Petal Lotus
“That for which they seek is that which searches.”
Saint Francis of Assissi
Symbol
The Crown Chakra is known as the Thousand Petal Lotus. The number 1000, adds up and reduces to the number 1 in numerology. The number one represents strong leadership and will power, a courageous person who is goal oriented and driven. A number one person is a pioneer who is independent and individualistic and approaches issues from a unique perspective. A number one is original and sometimes unconventional. They possess tremendous potential for success in life.
Throughout history it has been depicted in paintings of Jesus the Christ, Buddha, Saints, Angels and other highly evolved beings as a golden white halo around their heads.
Colour
The Crown Chakra is associated with the colour violet. Some references link it to the colour white as well. Violet is the highest colour in the light spectrum. It represents the spiritual or higher self, wisdom, vitality, intuitive awareness, passion and dignity. White is purity and the colour of the Divine light. Red, which is the lowest colour on our physical perceptual light spectrum, and just above infrared light, rules the Root Chakra. Conversely, violet, the highest colour on our physical perceptual light spectrum, and just below ultra-violet light, rules the Crown Chakra.
Sense
Our multidimensional and extrasensory senses are ruled by the seventh chakra. Once this chakra is opened, our sense of empathy and unity expands. When we raise our consciousness, we experience another person, place or object as if we are inside of them or as if we are “being” them. It is important, then, that we remember that with this power comes responsibility. We should activate these senses only to provide help or healing – NEVER for mere curiosity or with any malicious intent.
Compassion is the main sense that develops as our Crown Chakra opens. We have two kinds of compassion: Crown Compassion, which is more about perception and communication, and Heart Compassion, which is more about emotions and empathy.
Element
The element of this Chakra is the Cosmic Energy, which is often experienced as an inner light emanating from the deepest part of our being. This Cosmic Energy, which rules the higher kingdoms and stems from the Source, feels like an ultimate intelligence and a sense of all-knowing. When our Crown Chakra opens we can also experience the complete isolation and blackness of the Great Void. This Void, which resonates just below the fifth dimension, represents the raw potential for all that can, or will be. The total darkness is representative of the centre of a seed before it opens into the light of manifestation. when we can perceive from our Crown Chakra, we can identify both extremes of all polarities.
The opening of the Crown Chakra expands our perception into the fifth dimension where there are NO polarities. Therefore, there are many paradoxes associated with this Chakra as it represents the “end of all paradox.” As we travel through the higher dimensions, it is important that we release all judgments associated with the polarities of light and dark. We must instead consult our own inner knowing and higher consciousness to navigate us through our inner worlds. Eventually, we will all be aware of our fifth dimensional selves; they know no judgment and hold no fear. For what is judgment, if not a form of fear?
Consciousness
Since our Crown Chakra represents our multidimensional consciousness, as we open this Chakra our reality will no longer be limited to the third and fourth dimension. When our Brow Chakra, the sixth Chakra, opens we begin to travel into the higher sub planes of the fourth dimension. With the opening of our seventh Chakra, and the subsequent activation of our Third Eye, our consciousness can now enter the fifth dimension. It is then that the many realities around and within us gradually become consciously apparent to us.
The process of our awakening begins with expanding the consciousness of our physical selves and working to clear our etheric bodies. Then the astral, the mental, the causal and the spiritual I AM consciousness can align themselves in preparation to ascend into the fifth dimension. Until we reach the fifth dimension we can “work” towards enlightenment, but from the fifth dimension on, we must simply “BE”. “Doing” is not important then; consciousness alone is important. And finally, in the sixth and seventh dimensions even consciousness is not important as there is only the “Isness”, the “Nowness” and the “Hereness.”
Exhibition dates: 15th March – 7th September, 2014
Curators: Eva Respini, Curator, with Drew Sawyer, Beaumont and Nancy Newhall Curatorial Fellow, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art
*PLEASE NOTE THIS POSTING CONTAINS ART PHOTOGRAPHS OF FEMALE NUDITY – IF YOU DO NOT LIKE PLEASE DO NOT LOOK, FAIR WARNING HAS BEEN GIVEN*
Robert Heinecken (American, 1931-2006) Figure Horizon #1 1971 Ten canvas panels with photographic emulsion Each 11 13/16 x 11 13/16″ (30 x 30cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Gift of Shirley C. Burden, by exchange
A bumper posting on probably the most important photo-media artist who has ever lived. This is how to successfully make conceptual photo-art.
A revolutionary artist, this para-photographer’s photo puzzles are just amazing!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thank to MoMA for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Robert Heinecken (American, 1931-2006) Le Voyeur / Robbe-Grillet #2 1972 Three canvas panels with bleached photographic emulsion and pastel chalk 14 x 40″ (35.6 x 101.6cm) George Eastman House, Rochester, New York Museum purchase with National Endowment for the Arts support
Robert Heinecken (American, 1931-2006) Child Guidance Toys 1965 Black-and-white film transparency 5 x 18 1/16″ (12.7 x 45.8cm) The Art Institute of Chicago Gift of Boardroom, Inc.
Robert Heinecken (American, 1931-2006) Lessons in Posing Subjects / Matching Facial Expressions 1981 Fifteen internal dye diffusion transfer prints (SX-70 Polaroid) and lithographic text on Rives BFK paper 15 x 20″ (38.1 x 50.8cm) Collection UCLA Grunwald Center for Graphic Art, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles Gift of Dean Valentine and Amy Adelson
Robert Heinecken (American, 1931-2006) Kodak Safety Film / Taos Church 1972 Black-and-white film transparency 40 x 56″ (101.6 x 142.2cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Committee on Photography Fund
Robert Heinecken (American, 1931-2006) As Long As Your Up 1965 Black-and-white film transparency 15 1/2 x 19 5/8″ (39.4 x 49.8cm) The Robert Heinecken Trust, Chicago Courtesy Petzel Gallery, New York
Robert Heinecken (American, 1931-2006) Periodical #5 1971 Offset lithography on found magazine 12 1/4 x 9″ (31.1 x 22.9cm) Collection Philip Aarons and Shelley Fox Aarons, New York
Robert Heinecken (American, 1931-2006) Six Figures/Mixed 1968 Layered Plexiglas and black-and-white film transparencies 5.75 x 9.75 x 1.5″ (14.61 x 24.77 x 3.81cm) Collection Darryl Curran, Los Angeles
Robert Heinecken (American, 1931-2006) Figure / Foliage #2 1969 Layered Plexiglas and black-and-white film transparencies 5 x 5 x 1 1/4″ (12.7 x 12.7 x 3.2cm) Collection Anton D. Segerstrom, Corona del Mar, California
Robert Heinecken (American, 1931-2006) Kaleidoscopic Hexagon #2 1965 Six gelatin silver prints on wood Diameter: 14″ (35.6cm) Black Dog Collection Promised gift to San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Robert Heinecken (American, 1931-2006) 24 Figure Blocks 1966 Twelve gelatin silver prints on wood blocks, and twelve additional wood blocks 14 1/16 x 14 1/16 x 13/16″ (35.7 x 35.7 x 2.1cm) Whitney Museum of American Art, New York Gift of Jeanne and Richard S. Press
Robert Heinecken (American, 1931-2006) Multiple Solution Puzzle 1965 Sixteen gelatin silver prints on wood 11 1/4 x 11 1/4 x 1″ (28.6 x 28.6 x 2.5cm) Collection Maja Hoffmann/LUMA Foundation
The Museum of Modern Art presents Robert Heinecken: Object Matter, the first retrospective of the work of Robert Heinecken since his death in 2006 and the first exhibition on the East Coast to cover four decades of the artist’s unique practice, from the early 1960s through the late 1990s, on view from March 15 to September 7, 2014. Describing himself as a “para-photographer,” because his work stood “beside” or “beyond” traditional ideas associated with photography, Heinecken worked across multiple mediums, including photography, sculpture, printmaking, and collage. Culling images from newspapers, magazines, pornography, and television, he recontextualized them through collage and assemblage, photograms, darkroom experimentation, and rephotography. His works explore themes of commercialism, Americana, kitsch, sex, the body, and gender. In doing so, the works in this exhibition expose his obsession with popular culture and its effects on society, and with the relationship between the original and the copy. Robert Heinecken: Object Matter is organised by Eva Respini, Curator, with Drew Sawyer, Beaumont and Nancy Newhall Curatorial Fellow, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition will travel to the Hammer Museum, and will be on view there from October 5, 2014 through January 17, 2015.
Heinecken dedicated his life to making art and teaching, establishing the photography program at UCLA in 1964, where he taught until 1991. He began making photographs in the early 1960s. The antithesis of the fine-print tradition exemplified by West Coast photographers Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, who photographed landscapes and objects in sharp focus and with objective clarity, Heinecken’s early work is marked by high contrast, blur, and under- or overexposure, as seen in Shadow Figure (1962) and Strip of Light (1964). In the mid-1960s he began combining and sequencing disparate pictures, as in Visual Poem/About the Sexual Education of a Young Girl (1965), which comprises seven black-and-white photographs of dolls with a portrait of his then-five-year-old daughter Karol at the centre.
The female nude is a recurring motif, featured in Refractive Hexagon (1965), one of several “photopuzzles” composed of photographs of female body parts mounted onto 24 individual “puzzle” pieces. Other three-dimensional sculptures – geometric volumes ranging in height from five to 22 inches – consist of photographs mounted onto individual blocks, which rotate independently around a central axis. In Fractured Figure Sections (1967), as in Refractive Hexagon, the female figure is never resolved as a single image – the body is always truncated, never contiguous. In contrast, a complete female figure can be reconstituted in his largest photo-object, Transitional Figure Sculpture (1965), a towering 26-layer octagon composed from photographs of a nude that have been altered using various printing techniques. At the time, viewer engagement was key to creating random configurations and relationships in the work; any number of possibilities may exist, only to be altered with the next manipulation. Today, due to the fragility of the works, these objects are displayed in Plexiglas-covered vitrines. However, the number of sculptures and puzzles gathered here offer the viewer a sense of this diversity.
Heinecken’s groundbreaking suite Are You Rea (1964-1968) is a series of 25 photograms made directly from magazine pages. Representative of a culture that was increasingly commercialised, technologically mediated, and suspicious of established truths, Are You Rea cemented Heinecken’s interest in the multiplicity of meanings inherent in existing images and situations. Culled from more than 2000 magazine pages, the work includes pictures from publications such as Life, Time, and Woman’s Day, contact-printed so that both sides are superimposed in a single image. Heinecken’s choice of pages and imagery are calculated to reveal specific relationships and meanings – ads for Coppertone juxtaposed with ads for spaghetti dinners and an article about John F. Kennedy superimposed on an ad for Wessex carpets – the portfolio’s narrative moves from relatively commonplace and alluring images of women to representations of violence and the male body.
Heinecken began altering magazines in 1969 with a series of 120 periodicals titled MANSMAG: Homage to Werkman and Cavalcade. He used the erotic men’s magazine Cavalcade as source material, making plates of every page, and randomly printing them on pages that were then reassembled into a magazine, now scrambled. In the same year, he disassembled numerous Time magazines, imprinting pornographic images taken from Cavalcade on every page, and reassembled them with the original Time covers. He circulated these reconstituted magazines by leaving them in waiting rooms or slipping them onto newsstands, allowing the work to come full circle – the source material returning to its point of origin after modification. He reprised this technique in 1989 with an altered issue of Time titled 150 Years of Photojournalism, a greatest hits of historical events seen through the lens of photography.
Robert Heinecken (American, 1931-2006) Breast / Bomb #5 1967 Gelatin silver prints, cut and reassembled 38 1/2 x 38 1/4″ (97.8 x 97.2cm) Denver Art Museum Funds From 1992 Alliance For Contemporary Art Auction
Robert Heinecken (American, 1931-2006) Then People Forget You 1965 Gelatin silver print 10 3/8 x 12 15/16″ (26.3 x 32.8cm) The Art Institute of Chicago Gift of Boardroom, Inc.
Robert Heinecken (American, 1931-2006) Cliche Vary / Autoeroticism 1974 Eleven canvas panels with photographic emulsion and pastel chalk 39 1/2 x 39 1/2 in. (100.3 x 100.3cm) Collection Susan and Peter MacGill, New York
Transparent film is also used in many of Heinecken’s works to explore different kinds of juxtapositions. In Kodak Safety Film / Christmas Mistake (1971), pornographic images are superimposed on a Christmas snapshot of Heinecken’s children with the suggestion in the title that somehow two rolls of film were mixed up at the photo lab. Kodak Safety Film / Taos Church (1972) takes photography itself as a subject, picturing an adobe church in New Mexico that was famously photographed by Ansel Adams and Paul Strand, and painted by Georgia O’Keeffe and John Marin. Presented as a negative, Heinecken’s version transforms an icon of modernism into a murky structure flanked by a pickup truck, telephone wires, and other modern-day debris.
Heinecken’s hybrid photographic paintings, created by applying photographic emulsion on canvas, are well represented in the exhibition. In Figure Horizon #1 (1971), Heinecken reprised the cut-and-reassemble techniques from his puzzles and photo-sculptures, sequencing images of sections of the nude female body, to create impossible undulating landscapes. Cliché Vary, a pun on the 19th-century cliché verre process, is comprised of three large-scale modular works, all from 1974: Autoeroticism, Fetishism, and Lesbianism. The works are comprised of separately stretched canvas panels with considerable hand-applied colour on the photographic image, invoking clichés associated with autoeroticism, fetishism, and lesbianism. Reminiscent of his cut-and-reassembled pieces, each panel features disjointed views of bodies and fetish objects that never make a whole, and increase in complexity, culminating with Lesbianism, which is made with seven or eight different negatives.
In the mid-1970s, Heinecken experimented with new materials introduced by Polaroid – specifically the SX-70 camera (which required no darkroom or technical know-how) – to produce the series He/She (1975-1980) and, later, Lessons in Posing Subjects (1981-82). Heinecken experimented with different types of instant prints, including the impressive two-panel S.S. Copyright Project: “On Photography” (1978), made the year after the publication of Susan Sontag’s collection of essays On Photography (1977). The S.S. Copyright Project consists of a magnified and doubled picture of Sontag, derived from the book’s dustcover portrait (taken by Jill Krementz). The work equates legibility with physical proximity – from afar, the portraits appear to be grainy enlargements from a negative (or, to contemporary eyes, pixilated low-resolution images), but at close range, it is apparent that the panels are composed of hundreds of small photographic scraps stapled together. The portrait on the left is composed of photographs of Sontag’s text; the right features random images taken around Heinecken’s studio by his assistant.
Heinecken’s first large-scale sculptural installation, TV/Time Environment (1970), is the earliest in a series of works that address the increasingly dominant presence of television in American culture. In the installation, a positive film transparency of a female nude is placed in front of a functioning television set in an environment that evokes a living room, complete with recliner chair, plastic plant, and rug. Continuing his work with television, Heinecken created videograms – direct captures from the television that were produced by pressing Cibachrome paper onto the screen to expose the sensitized paper. Inaugural Excerpt Videograms (1981) features a composite from the live television broadcast of Ronald Reagan’s inauguration speech and the surrounding celebrations. The work, originally in 27 parts, now in 24, includes randomly chosen excerpts of the oration and news reports of it. Surrealism on TV (1986) explores the idea of transparency and layering using found media images to produce new readings. It features a slide show comprised of more than 200 images loaded into three slide projectors and projected in random order. The images generally fit into broad categories, which include newscasters, animals, TV evangelists, aerobics, and explosions.
Text from the MoMA press release
Robert Heinecken (American, 1931-2006) Figure Cube 1965 Gelatin silver prints on Masonite 5 7/8 x 5 7/8″ (15 x 15cm) The Robert Heinecken Trust Courtesy Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Tucson
Robert Heinecken (American, 1931-2006) Figure in Six Sections 1965 Gelatin silver prints on wood blocks 8 1/2 x 3 x 3″ (21.6 x 7.6 x 7.6cm) Collection Kathe Heinecken Courtesy The Robert Heinecken Trust, Chicago
Robert Heinecken (American, 1931-2006) Fractured Figure Sections 1967 Gelatin silver prints on wood blocks 8 1/4 x 3 x 3″ (21 x 7.6 x 7.6cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York The Photography Council Fund and Committee on Photography Fund
Robert Heinecken (American, 1931-2006) The S.S. Copyright Project: “On Photography” (Part 1 of 2) 1978 Collage of black and white instant prints attached to composite board with staples 47 13/16 x 47 13/16″ (121.5 x 121.5cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Purchased as the partial gift of Celeste Bartos
Robert Heinecken (American, 1931-2006) Recto/Verso #2 1988 Silver dye bleach print 8 5/8 x 7 7/8″ (21.9 x 20cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Mr. and Mrs. Clark Winter Fund
Robert Heinecken (American, 1931-2006) Figure Parts / Hair 1967 Black-and-whtie film transparencies over magazine-page collage 16 x 12″ (40.6 x 30.5cm) Collection Karol Heinecken Mora, Los Angeles
Robert Heinecken (American, 1931-2006) V.N. Pin Up 1968 Black-and-white film transparency over magazine-page collage 12 1/2 x 10″ (31.8 x 25.4cm) Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago Gift of Daryl Gerber Stokols
Robert Heinecken (American, 1931-2006) Typographic Nude 1965 Gelatin silver print 14 1/2 x 7″ (36.8 x 17.8cm) Collection Geofrey and and Laura Wyatt, Santa Barbara, California
Robert Heinecken (American, 1931-2006) Are You Rea #1 1968 Twenty-five gelatin silver prints Various dimensions Collection Jeffrey Leifer, San Francisco
Robert Heinecken (American, 1931-2006) Are You Rea #25 1968 Twenty-five gelatin silver prints Various dimensions Collection Jeffrey Leifer, San Francisco
Robert Heinecken (American, 1931–2006) Cybill Shepherd / Phone Sex 1992 Silver dye bleach print on foamcore 63 x 17″ (160 x 43.2cm) The Robert Heinecken Trust Courtesy of Petzel Gallery, New York
Robert Heinecken (American, 1931-2006) MANSMAG: Homage to Werkman and Cavalcade 1969 Offset lithography on bound paper 8 3/4 x 6 5/8″ (22.2 x 16.8cm) The Robert Heinecken Trust, Chicago
The Museum of Modern Art 11 West 53 Street New York, NY 10019 Phone: (212) 708-9400
Curators: Stephanie Rosenthal (Chief Curator of the Hayward Gallery, London) and Sabine Breitwieser (Director, Museum der Moderne Salzburg), with Tina Teufel (Curator, Museum der Moderne Salzburg)
PLEASE NOTE: THIS POSTING CONTAINS PHOTOGRAPHS WHICH MAY BE DISTRESSING TO SOME PEOPLE
If I had half of this artists courage, I might not even have a quarter of her talent.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Museum der Moderne Salzburg for allowing me to publish the photographs and text in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“Art is a material act of culture, but its greatest value is its spiritual role, and that influences society, because it’s the greatest contribution to the intellectual and moral development of humanity that can be made”
“My art is grounded on the belief in one universal energy which runs through everything; from insect to man, from man to spectre, from spectre to plant, from plant to galaxy.”
“To me, the work has existed on different levels. It existed on the level of being in nature and eventually being eroded away. But obviously when it’s shown to someone as a photograph, that’s what it is.”
Ana Mendieta
The few women working with the body at that time were in instant affinity with each other… The struggle for all of us was to keep the sensuousness of the body and to de-eroticize it in terms of cultural expectations. It was gratifying and exciting to discover her work. Those of us who had already been situating the body as central to our visual aesthetic could also anticipate the resistance that would be around her.
I see her death as part of some larger denial of the feminine. Like a huge metaphor saying, we don’t want this depth of feminine eroticism, nature, absorption, integration to happen. It’s too organic. It’s too sacral. In a way, her death also has a symbolic trajectory. More than Ana dies, when she dies.”
Carolee Schneeman quoted in Camhi, Leslie. “ART; Her Body, Herself,” on the New York Times website published June 20, 2004 [Online] Cited 20/06/2014. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
“You do feel the sadness that she’s not with us and you wonder where she would have gone with her work.”
Raquelin Mendieta
Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985) Untitled (Facial Cosmetic Variations) (detail) 1972 Suite of eight colour photographs (estate prints, 1997) Each 50.8 x 406cm The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection; courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York and Paris
Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985) Rape 1973 Colour photograph (lifetime print) 20.4 x 25.4cm The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection; courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York and Paris
Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985) Rape Scene 1973 Colour photograph (lifetime print) 39.8 x 31 x 3.2cm (framed) Tate Presented by the American Patrons of Tate, courtesy of the Latin American Acquisitions Committee 2010
Rape Scene (1973) was part of series of works devised in response to the rape and murder of a fellow student on the Iowa University campus, where Mendieta completed her BA, MA (painting) and an MFA (inter-media). She invited friends and fellow students to her apartment. The viewer entered through a slightly ajar door into a dark apartment into a room where the artist appeared under a single source of light revealing Mendieta stripped from the waist down. The artist stood slouched and bound over a table, nude from the waist down with her body smeared in blood. Around her was an assemblage of broken plates and blood on the floor. Her direct identification with a specific victim meant that she could not be seen as an anonymous object in a theatrical tableau.
Ana Mendieta(Cuban-American, 1948-1985) Untitled (Self-Portrait with Blood)(detail) 1973 Suite of six colour photographs (estate prints 1997) Each 50.8 x 40.6cm Private collection, London; Courtesy Alison Jacques Gallery, London
Ana Mendieta: Traces is the first comprehensive survey of this influential artist’s work to be presented in Great Britain or the German-speaking world. It persuasively demonstrates that her art, while very much rooted in the concerns of her day, maintains a powerful connection to our present moment. Born in Cuba in 1948, Mendieta was forced to immigrate to the United States as a child due to her father’s political situation, and much of her work is obliquely haunted by the exile’s sense of displacement, while also reflecting her position as a double minority in North America’s largely white, male art world of the 1970s and 1980s. From the beginning, motifs of transience, absence, violence, belonging, and an identity in flux animated her multidisciplinary art, which ranged nomadically across practices associated with body art, land art, performance, sculpture, photography and film. At its core lay her recurring use of her own body – its physical and photographic traces – and her interest in marginal outdoor sites and elemental materials.
Spanning her brief, yet remarkably productive, career, this exhibition explores the many distinct facets of her practice. It captures her powerfully visceral evocation of ritual and sacrifice, as well as cycles of life and decay, while also highlighting her pioneering role as a conceptual border-crosser. Including photographs, drawings, sculptures, Super-8 films and a substantial selection of photographic slides, most of which have not been exhibited until now, Ana Mendieta: Traces reveals an artist whose underlying concerns led her to bravely re-work and re-combine genres, to draw on different cultures, both archaic and contemporary, while challenging the limits of the art discourse of her time. Her work continues to profoundly challenge, disturb, influence and inspire.
The Museum der Moderne Salzburg will open an extensive retrospective of the work of Ana Mendieta, one of our era’s most important and influential artists. Mendieta was born to a politically active family in Havana, Cuba in 1948. In the wake of the Cuban revolution, when she was only twelve years old, her parents sent her together with her sister to the United States. In 1985, at just thirty-six years old, she died under tragic circumstance in New York. During her short yet prolific career, she developed a unique visual language that is mesmerising in its intimacy, and equally challenging. Her pioneering work has been acknowledged by large retrospectives in the United States and Europe, and is represented in the collections of major museums.
According to Sabine Breitwieser, director at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg, who has arranged the exhibition, “a comprehensive exhibition in the German-speaking area, especially in Austria, and the German monograph on Ana Mendieta are long overdue. The artist’s distinctive work, in which she stages her body within the landscape, seems to be ideally exhibited at this site, where nature and the theatrical take on such a major role. Due to the fragility of the work, this could possibly be one of the last extensive Mendieta exhibitions.”
Among the central themes in Mendieta’s artistic work are exile and cultural displacement. In her search for identity and finding her place in the world, she attempted to create a dialogue between the landscape and the female body. Her work reveals numerous points of contingency with the emerging art movements of the 1960s and 1970s – Conceptual art, land art, and performance art. Nonetheless, it refuses any kind of categorisation and instead addresses missing links or gaps between different media and art forms. “Through my art I want to express the immediacy of life and the eternity of nature,” wrote Mendieta in 1981. Using her own body and elementary materials, such as blood, fire, earth, and water, she created transitory pieces that combine rituals with metaphors for life, death, rebirth, and spiritual transformation. Her disembodied “earth body” sculptures were private, meditative ceremonies in nature documented in the form of slides and films. From them, Mendieta developed the so-called Siluetas (silhouettes), which form the core of her work. In the 1980s, Mendieta’s body disappeared from her artworks and she started to generate indoor works for galleries. Her engagement with nature continued in her sculptures and drawings, which she created as lasting works.
The exhibition presents roughly 150 works, which are organised throughout twelve spaces; two of these spaces are reconstructions of the original exhibitions by the artist. The works shown are in a multitude of media ranging from photography, film, and sculpture through to drawing. A further section will present the artist’s archive. Slides and photographs, notebooks and postcards offer insight into Mendieta’s working methods. The concern of Stephanie Rosenthal, chief curator of the Hayward Gallery London, is “to show Ana Mendieta’s outstanding work in all of its facets, and to place her artistic process at the center.”
While the artistic media that Mendieta utilises in her works could not be any more diverse, the pictures that she produces are characterised by an unmistakable, overwhelming and mystical poetry. This exhibition makes clear that almost thirty years after the artist’s premature death, her work has lost none of its singularity and uniqueness.
Text from the Museum der Moderne Salzburg website
Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985) Untitled (Silueta Series) 1978 Gelatin silver print 20.3 x 25.4cm Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985) Alma, Silueta en Fuego (Soul, Silhouette on Fire) (still) 1975 Super-8 colour, silent film transferred to DVD 3:07 minutes The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection; Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York and Paris, and Alison Jacques Gallery, London
Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985) Anima, Silueta de Cohetes (Firework Piece) (still) 1976 (Soul, Silhouette of Fireworks) Super-8 colour, silent film transferred to DVD 2:22 minutes The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection; courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York and Paris
Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985) Untitled (Cuilapán Niche) 1973 Black and white photograph (lifetime print) 25.4 x 20.4cm Private collection, London; Courtesy Gallery Lelong, New York and Paris, and Alison Jacques Gallery London
Ana Mendieta died at just 36 years old, but the imprint of her life digs deeper than most. Mendieta’s work occupies the indeterminate space between land, body and performance art, refusing to be confined to any one genre while working to expand the horizons of them all. With the immediacy of a fresh wound and the weightlessness of a half-remembered song, Mendieta’s artwork remains as haunting and relevant today as ever.
Her haunting imagery explores the relationship between earth and spirit while tackling the eternally plaguing questions of love, death and rebirth. Like an ancient cave drawing, Mendieta’s art gets as close as possible to her subject matter allowing no excess, using primal and visceral means to navigate her themes. Decades after her death, the Museum der Moderne Salzburg will show a retrospective of the late feminist artist’s work, simply titled “Ana Mendieta: Traces.”
Mendieta, who was born in Havana, Cuba in 1948, moved to the U.S. at 12 years old to escape Castro’s regime. There she hopped between refugee camps and foster homes, planting inside her an obsession with ideas of loss, belonging and the impermanence of place. As an artist in the 1970s, Mendieta embarked upon her iconic series “Silhouettes,” in which she merged body and earthly material, making nature both canvas and medium. In her initial “Silhouette,” Mendieta lay shrouded in an ancient Zapotec grave, letting natural forms eat up her diminutive form.
Her “earth-body” sculptures, as they came to be known, feature blood, feathers, flowers and dirt smothered and stuck on Mendieta’s flesh in various combinations. In “Imagen de Yagul,” speckled feverishly in tiny white flowers, she appears as ethereal and disembodied as Ophelia, while in “Untitled Blood and Feathers” Mendieta looks simultaneously the helpless victim and the guilty culprit. “She always had a direction – that feeling that everything is connected,” Ana’s sister Raquelin said of her work.
An uncertain mythology runs throughout Mendieta’s oeuvre, a feeling at once primal, pagan and feminine. Admirers have cited the Afro-Cuban religion of Santeria as an influence, as well as the ancient rituals of Mexico, where Mendieta made much of her work. Yet many of Mendieta’s pieces removed themselves from the spiritual realm to address present day events, for example “Rape Scene,” a 1973 performance based off the rape and murder of a close friend. For the piece Mendieta remained tied to a table for two hours, motionless, her naked body smeared with cow’s blood. In another work, Mendieta smushes her face and body against glass panes, like a child eager to peek into an off-limits locale, or a bug that’s crashed into a windshield. Against the glass, her scrambled facial features almost resemble a Cubist artwork.
Mendieta died tragically young in 1985, falling from her New York City apartment window onto a delicatessen below. She was living with her husband of eight months, minimalist sculptor Carl Andre at the time. Andre was convicted of murder following the horrific incident and later acquitted. Though the art world remains captivated by the mysterious nature of Mendieta’s passing, her sister emphasised the importance of removing Ana’s work from her life story. “I don’t want it to get in the way of the work,” she said. “Her death has really nothing to do with her work. Her work was about life and power and energy and not about death.”
Fellow feminist performance artist Carolee Schneeman disagrees, however, telling The New York Times in 2004: “I see her death as part of some larger denial of the feminine. Like a huge metaphor saying, we don’t want this depth of feminine eroticism, nature, absorption, integration to happen. It’s too organic. It’s too sacral. In a way, her death also has a symbolic trajectory.”
Since many of Mendieta’s artworks were bodily performances, the ephemera that remain are but traces of her original endeavours. For an artist whose career was built on imprints, ghosts and impressions, this seems aptly fitting. Visceral yet distant, bodily yet spiritual, Mendieta’s images speak a language very distant from the insular artistic themes that so often populate gallery and museum walls. Mendieta’s works present the female body turned out, at once vulnerable and all-powerful, frail and supernatural. As her retrospective makes obvious, her artistic traces are still oozing lifeblood.
Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985) Untitled 1976 “Silueta Series, Mexico” Colour photograph (lifetime print) 39.8 x 31 x 3.2cm (framed) Tate Presented by the American Patrons of Tate, courtesy of the Latin American Acquisitions Committee 2010
Mendieta formed a silueta on the beach at La Ventosa, Mexico, filling it with red tempera that was ultimately washed away by the ocean waves. The artist documented the obliteration of the figure by the tide in a sequence of 35 mm slides.
Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985) Untitled 1978 “Silueta Series, Iowa” Colour photograph (lifetime print) 25.4 x 20.3cm The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection; courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York and Paris
Applications open: 3rd February 2014
Applications close: 25th April 2014
About the Prix Elysée
At the Musée de l’Elysée, we think that supporting photographers in the evolution of their career is as important as preserving their art for future generations. It is in a shared commitment to foster creativity and support the production of new work that the Musée de l’Elysée enters into a partnership with Parmigiani Fleurier to launch the Prix Elysée.
Who can apply
The prize is open to promising photographers or artists using photography, of all nationalities, who have already enjoyed their first exhibitions and publications. There is no imposed theme or preference for any particular photographic genre or technique. Applications are open from February 3 to April 25, 2014.
What can you win?
The winner and nominees of the Prix Elysée will all benefit from important exposure and the Museum’s expert guidance. The winner is invited to produce an original and new project as well as its related book. Both the project and book will be presented at one of the Musée de l’Elysée’s most important events, the Nuit des images.
How to apply
Photographers must be recommended by a reputed professional in the fields of photography, cinema, fashion, journalism, publishing or contemporary art. The Musée de l’Elysée will select eight nominees based upon their entry portfolios. Each will receive a contribution of CHF 5’000 towards the initial presentation of their project in a dedicated edition of the Prix Elysée magazine. This magazine will accompany the nominees’ complete portfolios in the final consideration before the jury of experts. The winner will receive CHF 80’000 to be divided between the completion of the proposed project and the publication of the accompanying book within one year. A curator from the Musée de l’Elysée will advise the winner throughout this process.
The call for applications will take place biennially. The first edition of the Prix Elysée is launched in February 2014 and concludes in June 2016.
Applicants may download the official rules for le Prix Elysée at www.prixelysee.ch.
The von Gloeden is stunning and some of the paintings are glorious: the muscularity / blood red colour in Falguière by Lutteurs d’Alexandre (1875, below); the beauty of Ángel Zárraga’s Votive Offering (Saint Sebastian) (1912, below); the sheer nakedness and earthiness of the Freud; and the colour, form and (homo)eroticism of The Bath by Paul Cadmus (1951, below), with their pert buttocks and hands washing suggestively.
But there is nothing too outrageous here. Heaven forbid!
After all, this is the male nude as curatorial commodity.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Musée d’Orsay for allowing me to publish the art work in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“The high brow peep show is divided thematically into depictions of religion, mythology, athleticism, homosexuality, and shifting notions of manliness. Wandering the Musee’s grand halls you will see rippling Greco-Roman Apollonian gods, Egon Schiele’s finely rendered, debauched self portraits and David LaChapelle’s 90s macho-kitsch celebs. Edward Munch’s hazy, pastel bathers mingle with Lucian Freud’s grossly erotic fleshy animals and reverent depictions of Christ and Saint Sebastian, showing the many ways to interpret a body sans outerwear.”
Priscilla Frank. “‘Masculine/Masculine’ Explores Male Nude Throughout Art History And We Couldn’t Be Happier (NSFW),” on the Huffpost Arts and Culture website, 26/09/2013 updated 07/12/2017 [Online] Cited 02/01/2021
In the late 19th century, Belgium was one of the great centres of European symbolism. Jean Delville’s paintings and writings expressed the most esoteric side of the movement. In the mid-1880s, Delville’s discovery of the symbolist milieu in Paris and the friendships he made there led him to break with the naturalism inherited from his academic training. Thus his friendship with the Sâr Péladan and his regular attendance at the Salon of the Rose+Croix, testified to his belief in an intellectual art which focused on evocation more than description.
School of Plato, a decoration intended for the Sorbonne but never installed there, is a striking work in many respects. Its monumental size and its ambitious message – an interpretation of classical philosophy seen through the prism of the symbolist ideal – set it apart. The manifesto makes no secret of its references, from Raphael to Puvis de Chavannes, but envelops them in the strange charm of a deliberately unreal colour range. The ambiguity emanating from this fin de siècle Mannerism knowingly blurs the borderline between purity and sensuality.
In this work the arrangement of the bathers is brilliantly orchestrated – a complex grouping of foregrounded figures is contrapuntally arranged against another group occupying the middle ground. There is a strong classical echo to the triangular, pedimental architecture of these four foregrounded figures, anchoring the work compositionally. The effect is to create an architecturally interlocking circle of figures surrounding a group of bathers in the water or sitting on the banks. The corporeal presence of the foregrounded figures and the luminosity of their skin tones are echoed in the volumetric forms of the cumulus clouds that loom in the background. We see Cézanne’s technical confidence in the way the terrain has been flattened and the treescape simplified. He uses trees here not for their anecdotal fidelity, but to anchor the composition at key points.
There is an undeniable sense of ritual in this work. Some commentators interpret the scene as baptismal – Cézanne became a devout catholic in 1890 – with the figure at left pouring water over the head of a partially submerged bather to his right. But it is also clear here that Cézanne mixes the sacred with the profane. There is a celebratory, Arcadian purity which finds its mirror in the compositional structure as a whole, whether it be the way in which light reflects off the facets of the bodies or in which it is refracted off the looming cloud masses. A paganistic, sensual exuberance informs the way in which the figures circle the bathers in the water, which Henri Matisse’s famous The dance 1910 will later recall. (Matisse was a great admirer of Cézanne’s work and owned a number of his paintings.) And it is probably no coincidence that the ‘attendant’ holds a luminous, vulva-shaped towel at the very centre of the composition. Grammatically, the title Baigneurs does not preclude the possibility that some of the participants may be female – the seated figure who is, significantly, adjacent to the towel, appears to be clearly female, for example. Bathers, then, is redolent with meaning. This is a powerfully multivalent work, and along with the later The large bathers paintings of 1894-1905 and 1900-1905, is considered to be one of Cézanne’s great masterpieces.
Mark Henshaw
Text from the National Gallery of Canberra website [Online] Cited 02/01/2021
This red/pink monochrome that characterises The Adolescents first appeared after Picasso’s visit to Gosol with his partner Fernande. The earth in this village in the Catalan Pyrenees was done in an unusual ochre colour that Picasso included in his “Rose Period” (1904-1906). Two nude figures, outlined and modelled on a monochrome background, give the image a sculptural and classical character. The poses are hieratic: the young man crosses his arms above his head, while the young woman, or androgynous adolescent, balances a pitcher on her head in a timeless pose. Jean Cassou highlighted the Mediterranean character of this brief phase in Picasso’s art, and its relationship with the art of Maillol (1861-1944). Undulating lines can be made out below the legs of the two figures. This in fact is the sketch from another composition intended to be in horizontal format, but which the artist chose to erase. Paul Guillaume bought this beautiful painting in 1930. It came from the art dealer Ambroise Vollard (1866-1939). The “pink classicism” of this painting seems to anticipate the period after 1906 of the “return to order”, which characterised Picasso’s work in the 1920s, and which corresponds with other paintings in the Orangerie like the large Bathers of the 1920s.
Provenance: Ambroise Vollard, Paris; Paul Guillaume (1930); Domenica Walter
Text from the Musée de l’Orangerie website [Online] Cited 08/01/2021
Auguste Rodin (French, 1840-1917) The Age of Bronze
1875-1876
Bronze
H. 180.5cm ; W. 68.5cm ; D. 54.5cm
Made in Brussels, this figure, one of Rodin’s most famous works, attests to the sculptor’s masterly skill and his attention to living nature that informs the pose and the modelling.A young Belgian soldier, Auguste Ney,was the model for this statue devoid of any element that would shed light on the subject’s identity. The untitled work was exhibited at the Cercle Artistique, Brussels, in 1877, then, entitled The Age of Bronze, at the Salon in Paris, where it caused a scandal.
Also known as The Awakening Man or The Vanquished One, the statue recalls one of the early ages of mankind. There was originally a spear in the left hand, as is shown in a photograph by Gaudenzio Marconi, but Rodin decided to suppress the weapon so as to free the arm of any attribute and infuse the gesture with a new liberality.
Accused of having used a life cast of his sitter, when the statue was shown in Paris, Rodin had to prove that the quality of his sculpture’s modelling came from a thorough study of profiles, not from a life cast. His critics eventually recognised that the sculptor was innocent of any trickery. The scandal, however, did draw attention to Rodin and earned him the commission for The Gates of Hellin 1880.
Text from the Musée Rodin website [Online] Cited 08/01/2020
While it has been quite natural for the female nude to be regularly exhibited, the male nude has not been accorded the same treatment. It is highly significant that until the show at the Leopold Museum in Vienna in the autumn of 2012, no exhibition had opted to take a fresh approach, over a long historical perspective, to the representation of the male nude. However, male nudity was for a long time, from the 17th to 19th centuries, the basis of traditional Academic art training and a key element in Western creative art. Therefore when presenting the exhibition Masculine / Masculine, the Musée d’Orsay, drawing on the wealth of its own collections (with several hitherto unknown sculptures) and on other French public collections, aims to take an interpretive, playful, sociological and philosophical approach to exploring all aspects and meanings of the male nude in art. Given that the 19th century took its inspiration from 18th century classical art, and that this influence still resonates today, the Musée d’Orsay is extending its traditional historical range in order to draw a continuous arc of creation through two centuries down to the present day. The exhibition will include the whole range of techniques: painting, sculpture, graphic arts and, of course, photography, which will have an equal place in the exhibition.
To convey the specifically masculine nature of the body, the exhibition, in preference to a dull chronological presentation, takes the visitor on a journey through a succession of thematic focuses, including the aesthetic canons inherited from Antiquity, their reinterpretation in the Neo-Classical, Symbolist and contemporary eras where the hero is increasingly glorified, the Realist fascination for truthful representation of the body, nudity as the body’s natural state, the suffering of the body and the expression of pain, and finally its eroticisation. The aim is to establish a genuine dialogue between different eras in order to reveal how certain artists have been prompted to reinterpret earlier works. In the mid 18th century, Winckelmann examined the legacy of the divine proporzioni of the body inherited from Antiquity, which, in spite of radical challenges, still apply today having mysteriously come down through the history of art as the accepted definition of beauty. From Jacques-Louis David to George Platt-Lynes, LaChapelle and Pierre et Gilles, and including Gustave Moreau, a whole series of connections is revealed, based around issues of power, censorship, modesty, the boundaries of public expectation and changes in social mores.
Winckelmann’s glorification of Greek beauty reveals an implicit carnal desire, relating to men as well as women, which certainly comes down through two centuries from the “Barbus” group and from David’s studio, to David Hockney and the film director James Bidgood. This sensibility also permeates the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries as it questions its own identity, as we see in the extraordinary painting École de Platon [School of Plato], inexplicably purchased by the French state in 1912 from the Belgian artist Delville. Similarly, the exhibition will reveal other visual and intellectual relationships through the works of artists as renowned as Georges de La Tour, Pierre Puget, Abilgaard, Paul Flandrin, Bouguereau, Hodler, Schiele, Munch, Picasso, Bacon, Mapplethorpe, Freud and Mueck, while lining up some surprises like the Mexican Angel Zarraga’s Saint Sébastien (Saint Sebastian), De Chirico’s Les Bains mystérieux (Mysterious Baths) and the erotica of Americans Charles Demuth and Paul Cadmus.
This autumn therefore, the Musée d’Orsay will invite the visitor to an exhibition that challenges the continuity of a theme that has always interested artists, through unexpected yet productive confrontations between the various revivals of the nude man in art.”
Why had there never been an exhibition dedicated to the male nude until Nackte Männer at the Leopold Museum in Vienna last year? In order to answer this question, the exhibition sets out to compare works of different eras and techniques, around great themes that have shaped the image of the male body for over two centuries.
We must distinguish above all between nudity and the nude: a body simply without clothes, that causes embarrassment with its lack of modesty, is different from the radiant vision of a body restructured and idealised by the artist. Although this distinction can be qualified, it highlights the positive, uninhibited approach to the nude in western art since the Classical Period.
Today, the nude essentially brings to mind a female body, the legacy of a 19th century that established it as an absolute and as the accepted object of male desire. Prior to this, however, the female body was regarded less favourably than its more structured, more muscular male counterpart. Since the Renaissance, the male nude had been accorded more importance: the man as a universal being became a synonym for Mankind, and his body was established as the ideal human form, as was already the case in Greco-Roman art. Examples of this interpretation abound in the Judeo-Christian cultural heritage: Adam existed before Eve, who was no more than his copy and the origin of sin. Most artists being male, they found an “ideal me” in the male nude, a magnified, narcissistic reflection of themselves. And yet, until the middle of the 20th century, the sexual organ was the source of a certain embarrassment, whether shrunken or well hidden beneath strategically placed drapery, thong or scabbard.
From the 17th century, training of the highest standard was organised for the most privileged artists. In sculpture and in history painting, the ultimate aim of this teaching was to master the representation of the male nude: this was central to the creative process, as the preparatory studies had to capture the articulation of the body as closely as possible, whether clothed or not, in the finished composition.
In France, pupils studied at the Académie Royale then at the Académie des Beaux-Arts, working from drawings, engravings, sculptures “in the round” and life models. Right up until the late 20th century, these models were exclusively male, for reasons of social morality, but also because the man was considered to have the archetypal human form. In order to be noble and worthy of artistic representation, and to appeal to all, this could not be the body of an ordinary man: the distinctive features of the model had to be tempered in order to elevate the subject.
Above all, the artists of Antiquity and of the Renaissance were considered to have established an ideal synthesis of the human body without being distracted by individual characteristics. For Winckelmann, the German 18th century aesthete, the ideal beauty of Greek statues could only be embodied by the male nude. But although it inspired numerous artists, the “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur” of Winckelmann’s gods was undermined by other interpretations of Classical art: the torment of Laocoon, a work from late Antiquity, can be seen in the work of the Danish painter Abildgaard, while David advocated a much more Roman masculinity. Even when challenged, reinterpreted and renewed by the 20th century avant-garde, the Classical male nude and its rich legacy remains an object of fascination right up to the inter-war years and up to the present day.
The concept and the word “hero” itself come from ancient Greece: whether a demigod or simply a mortal transcending his human condition to become an exemplum virtutis, he embodies an ideal. The admiration for Classical art and culture explains the ubiquity of the hero in Academic painting, particularly in subjects given to candidates of the Prix de Rome: great history painting thrived on the exploits of supermen in the most perfect bodies.
This connection between anatomy and heroic virtue, conveying noble and universal values, goes back to the Neo-Platonic concept linking beauty and goodness. The hero’s nudity has been so self-evident that the “heroic nude” has become the subject of a recurrent debate about the representation of great men, past or present, no matter how incongruous the result may appear.
Heroism is not a state, rather a means by which the strength of character of an exceptional being man is revealed: although Hercules’ strength is inseparable from his exploits, it was David’s cunning that overcame the powerful Goliath. In both cases they are endowed with a warrior’s strength, which was particularly valued by a 19th century thirsting for virility and patriotic assertion: more than ever, this was the ideal to be attained. We had to wait for the 20th century crisis of masculinity before we could see the renewal of the status of the increasingly contemporary hero, and the diversification of his physical characteristics. However, whether a star or a designer like Yves Saint-Laurent, or even the young men on the streets of Harlem painted by the American Kehinde Wiley, the evocative power of nudity remains.
The 20th century witnessed the start of a new way of looking at the human body where the focus was on medical aspects and hygiene, and this had a considerable impact on the concept of the artistic nude. Numerous physical education movements and gymnasia appeared. People were captivated by the figure of the “sportsman” and, as in the work of the painter Eugene Jansson, came to admire and covet the virile power of his body in action. This concept is realised in culturalism, the narcissistic admiration of a body that has become an object to be fashioned like an artwork in its own right. Modern man with his athletic morphology has become a new potential ideal: he embodies a beauty that invites comparison with Greco-Roman art.
Linked with the affirmation of national identity, the athlete has come to personify the brute force of the nation and an ability to defend the country in times of war. During the 1930s in the United States, the image of the athlete evolved in a distinctive way, highlighting the ordinary man as a mixture of physical strength and bravery. Totalitarian regimes, however, perverted the cult of the athlete in order to promote their own ideology: Germany linked it in a demiurgic way with the made-up concept of the “Aryan” race, while Mussolini’s government erected marble idols on the Stadio dei Marmi.
As he moves outside the established order, the mythological hero risks the anger of the gods and the jealousy of men. Although his passions, his moral shortcomings and occasionally his frailties stem from his human condition, he is happy to possess the perfect form of the gods: thus the artist and the spectator find expression of a perfect self. The great dramatic destinies thus give character to the compositions, and enable them to interpret a whole range of emotions from determination to despair, from hostility to eternal rest.
Although it is a platitude to say that feelings are expressed most accurately in the face – from the theorised and institutional drawings of Charles Le Brun to the “tête d’expression” competition at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts – one must not underestimate the key role of the body and the anatomy as vehicles for expressing emotion: certain formal choices even led to generally accepted conventions.
Mythology and the Homeric epic abound with stories of the ill-fated destinies and destructive passions of heroes, whose nudity is justified by its origins in ancient Greece: Joseph-Désiré Court displays the broken body of the ill-fated Hippolytus, a premonition of the transposition in the ancient world of Mort pour la patrie [Dying for The Fatherland] of Lecomte du Nouÿ.
Nude Veritas
The Realist aesthetic, which came to the fore in western art during the 19th century, had a dramatic effect on the representation of male nudity. The human body, represented as nature intended, was no longer seen from the decorous distance that characterised the idealised image of the nude, a goal to be achieved through Academic drawing exercises. In this context, where revealing the body was an affront to modesty – in the male-dominated society of the 19th century, the unclothed male appeared even more obscene and shocking than the unclothed female – the male nude gradually became less common as female figures proliferated.
This reversal did not mean, however, that naked men disappeared altogether: scientific study of the male nude, aided by new techniques such as the decomposition of movement through a series of photographs taken in rapid succession – chronophotography – brought advances in the study of anatomy and transformed the teaching of art students. From then on, it was less a case, for the most avant-garde artists, of striving to reproduce a canon of beauty inherited from the past, than of representing a body that retained the harmony of the model’s true characteristics.
The evocative power of the nude inspired artists like the Austrian Schiele to produce nude self portraits that revealed the existential torments of the artist. Invested at times with a Christ-like dimension, these depictions, moving beyond realism into introspection, continued to be produced right up to the 21st century, especially in photography.
The fascination for reality established in artistic circles in the mid 19th century prompted a thorough renewal of religious painting. Although resorting to the classical idealisation of the body seemed to be consistent with religious dogma, artists like Bonnat breathed fresh life into the genre by depicting the harsh truth of the physical condition of biblical figures.
This principle was already at work in Egalité devant la mort (Equality before Death), by Bouguereau, who, in his early work, in the final days of Romanticism, exploited the power of the image of an ordinary corpse. Rodin, far from enhancing the appearance of the novelist that he was invited to celebrate, sought to render Balzac’s corpulent physique with implacable accuracy, without diminishing his grandeur in any way.
The question is thus raised of art’s relationship to reality, a question Ron Mueck tackles in his work. And the strange effect brought about by a change of scale gives an intensity to the dead body of his father that echoes the dead figure in Bouguereau’s painting.
Including the naked body in a landscape was not a new challenge for 19th century artists. In many aspects, this was recurrent in large-scale history painting, and a demanding artistic exercise by which a painter’s technical mastery was judged. It was about making the relationship between the naked body and its setting as accurate as possible in terms of proportion, depth and light. Although Bazille’s Pêcheur à l’épervier [Fisherman with a Net] is one of the most successful attempts – in a contemporary context – at depicting a naked man in an atmospheric light that the Impressionists later took for their own, he nevertheless observed the principles of academic construction.
Masculine nudity in nature took another meaning as society was transformed through technical advances and urbanisation. Man was now seeking a communion with nature, that could reconcile him with the excesses and the sense of dislocation created by the modern world, while still conforming to the theories of good health advocating physical exercise and fresh air.
In pain
In allowing themselves to deviate from the classical norms, artists opened up new possibilities for a more expressive representation of a body in the throes of torment or pain. The decline of the Academic nude and of classical restraint explains this predilection for ordeals: Ixion’s for example, condemned by Zeus to be bound to an eternally spinning wheel of fire.
The writhing body can also express torment of a more psychological nature. The pain experienced by the male body naturally relates to the issues of power between men and women in contemporary society: the naked body can be demeaning and, in certain circumstances, likely to call into question virility and male domination. In this respect, Louise Bourgeois’ choice of a male figure for her Arch of Hysteria was not a random one.
The martyr can, nevertheless, inspire compositions other than the tortured body: the death of Abel, killed by his brother Cain in the Book of Genesis, seems, on the contrary, to have inspired the pose of a totally relaxed body at the point of death. This abandon, however, conveyed a certain ambivalence that artists were determined to exploit: the body, often magnified and in state of morbid ecstasy, was in fact there for the spectator to relish. In these cases, suffering was merely a device to justify fetishising the body once again. In contrast with this seductive treatment, photographers engaged in experiments to divide the body into individual parts, in an aesthetic or even playful approach.
Judeo-Christian culture has undeniably influenced the representation of the naked man since the beginning of modern art. However, the Catholic concept of the body has been at variance with nudity since Paleochristian times: the body is merely the corporeal envelope from which the soul is freed on death. Influenced by theologians advocating the union of the sensory and the spiritual, nudity gradually became accepted for important figures such as Christ and Saint Sebastian. Their martyred bodies, transcended by suffering endured through faith, paradoxically allowed the human soul to come close to God.
For the Catholic church, the vulnerability of Christ’s body, subjected to suffering and bearing the stigmata, is evidence of his humanity, while his divinity is revealed in his inspired expression and his idealised body, a legacy of the underlying classical models. The figure of Saint Sebastian is especially complex: this popular saint, the epitome of the martyr who survives his first ordeal, embodies the victory of life over death. This life force is no doubt related to his youthful beauty and his naked body, both of which made their appearance in the 17th century. This being the case, his representation gradually moves away from Catholic dogma, and acquires an unprecedented freedom and life of its own: his sensuality is more and more obvious, whereas his suffering is at times impossible to detect. In this quest for sensual pleasure, and until the 20th century, the only taboo was to reveal the penis.
Boris Ignatovitch (Russian, 1899-1976) Douche (Shower)
1932
Silver gelatin photograph
In Shower, a group of young athletes enjoys a therapeutic water massage; in the foreground is the back of a young man, whose stately figure takes up almost the entire frame. The masterful light and airiness of the image have a stunning aesthetic effect, illuminating the drops of water that are sprinkled across the spine and muscles of his tanned back. Aleksandr Deineka (1899-1969) was so captivated by the powerful composition of Shower that he recreated the scene in his painting After the Battle (1937-1942, below).
Text from the Nailya Alexander Gallery website [Online] Cited 10/01/2021
Aleksandr Deyneka (Russian, 1899-1969) After the Battle
1937-1942
Oil on canvas
Kursk State Art Gallery
This painting was inspired by a photograph by legendary Soviet photographer Boris Ignatovich that he had presented to Deyneka (above). The artist thought the composition with an athlete in the foreground was perfection itself. However, he had difficulty transferring it to the canvas, and the painting took five years to complete. Deyneka finished it at the height of World War II, which is why the athletes in the title had turned into soldiers.
Anonymous text from the Russia Beyond website December 2019 [Online] Cited 10/01/2021
“This male homoeroticism maintains close ties with the revolutionary project to destroy the family and traditional marriage and the construction of new types of social relations based on collective values above all, with the idea that the bonds of friendship and camaraderie between men (homosociality, “male bonding”) are equally or more important than heterosexual bonding. It is mainly in the period from the Revolution to the 1930s the values of friendship and camaraderie seem particularly highlighted the detriment of the bonds of love, very devalued as “petty-bourgeois”, but even more later, with the Stalinist project of “restoration” of the family, it can be assumed that the emotional and romantic in the heterosexual couple have never been a pervasive and rewarding cultural representation of magnitude of that which may be known in the West. [11] The researcher Lilya Kaganovsky, analysing the Soviet visual culture (especially cult films of the 1930s and 1940s), speaks of “heterosexual panic” in response to the concept of “homosexual panic” coined by Eve K. Segdwick: according Kaganovsky, Soviet cultural works largely reflects the idea that the relations of friendship, especially homosocial, particularly between men, is a moral value than heterosexual relationships. [12] In such a cosmology, heterosexual relationships could be perceived from within oneself and risk jeopardising the homosocial relationships of camaraderie and friendship, and the same social and national cohesion, thought to be based on collective values that conflicts with the value of exclusivity in the couple, “cozy comforts of home” [13].”
Mona. “Représenter le corps socialiste : l’exemple du peintre A. Deïneka (1899-1969),” on the Genre, politique et sexualités website, 16th April 2012 (translation by Google translate). No longer available online
The Temptation of the male
An acknowledged desire for the male body, and the liberalisation of social conventions gave rise to some daring works from the mid 20th century onwards. In the United States, in spite of its puritan outlook since the Second World War, Paul Cadmus did not balk at depicting a pick up scene between men in a most unlikely Finistère. While the physical attraction of the body remained confined for a long time to the secrecy of private interiors, it was increasingly evident in public, in exclusively masculine social situations like communal showers or in the guise of a reconstructed Platonic Antiquity.
Eroticism is even presented quite crudely by Cocteau, whose influence on the young Warhol is undeniable. Beauty and seduction part company when the ideal transmitted by references to the past takes root in idiosyncratic practices and contemporary culture, as Hockney has expressed so accurately in his painting.
For many years, the male body in art had been the subject of “objectification”. The unrestrained admiration for the perfection of the Greco-Roman nudes, a purely intellectual reconstruction of a body that had become the canon of beauty, meant that no interpretation of the nude was considered improper, even Winckelmann’s, with its powerful erotic charge.
Although Academic circles naturally encouraged the nude in great history paintings, certain subjects retained elements of sensuality and ambiguity. At the turn of the 19th century, discussion of the characteristics of the two sexes and their respective boundaries aroused interest in the bisexual amours of Jupiter and Apollo, while the formula of the young hero dying in the arms of his male lover was met with particular interest.
Girodet’s Endymion is depicted as an ephebe, his body caressed sensuously by the rays of the moon goddess, inspiring numerous homoerotic interpretations. With the Symbolists, as with Gustave Moreau, the difference between the sexes results in the downfall of a vulnerable man overcome by an inexorable and destructive force that is seen as feminine. However, at the other extreme, and in a less dramatic way, Hodler depicts the awakening of adolescent love between a self-obsessed young man and a girl who is captivated by his charm.
The sensuality and acknowledged eroticisation considered to be appropriate to the female body during the 19th century struck a serious blow against the traditional virility of the male nude: this blow was not fatal however, as the male nude was still very visible in the 20th century. Sexual liberation expressed, loud and clear, a feeling of voluptuousness and, often with few reservations, endowed the male body with a sexual charge. The model was usually identified, an assertive sign as a statement of the individuality: with Pierre and Gilles, where mythology and the contemporary portrait become one.
From the 1870s, Alexandre Falguière worked simultaneously as a painter and sculptor. Wrestlers, which was his first large painting, caught the critics’ eye and won him a second-class medal at the Salon in 1875. The theme of modern wrestling, fashionable in the Romantic period, had enjoyed a revival in the 1850s. After the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, the figure of the wrestler took on another meaning: his courage was held up as an example to develop the young citizens’ fighting spirit.
Critics were divided between those who scorned “the painting of a sculptor” and the larger group of those who recognised that Falguière had the talent of a true painter. The discussion also focused on the painting’s realism. Some commentators, who preferred the antique, slated the triviality of the theme, seeing nothing more than banal fairground wrestlers. Defenders of realism, on the other hand, enthused over the modernity of the subject and the lack of idealisation.
From 1876, Falguière nonetheless forsook modern subjects in his painting and turned to historical, mythological, literary or religious themes. If Castagnary is to be believed, the painting “was no more than a response to a dare by a painter faintly infatuated with himself and his talent.” Falguière perhaps produced The Wrestlers to prove that he was also a painter.
Text from the Musée d’Orsay website [Online] Cited 06/01/2021
Lucian Freud (British, 1922-2011) Naked Man on Bed
1989
Oil on canvas
Lucian Freud (British, 1922-2011) David and Eli
2004
Oil on canvas
Masculin / Masculin – La video on YouTube
Musée d’Orsay 62, rue de Lille
75343 Paris Cedex 07
France
Gregor Arax (Krikor Djololian) (European born Turkey, 1897-1975) Pierre Laurent 1948
Nice, France
A photograph that I have been scanning for Nick Henderson, the negative of which he bought at auction. A great negative, well exposed, with an unusual background for a physique photograph. American? English? French would you believe. And the only way I know that is my enlarging discarded newspaper at bottom left. It’s fascinates me the information that can be found in old photographs by enlarging details!
More information
Nick says the information on the auction was this:
“Original vintage photographic negative by the renowned French physique photographer Gregor Arax of Pierre Laurent taken in Nice 1948.”
Gregor Arax was France’s greatest physique photographer.
“Gregor Arax of Arax Studio… was a Greek national [this is incorrect, he was born in Turkey], who photographed male nudes in Paris from the 1930’s to 1960’s. He photographed many of the elite bodybuilders of his time, including Steve Reeves.” (text from Vintage Male Physique blog)
Finally some more information below on Gregor Arax only published in 2021! He is not Greek as stated above but was born in Turkey.
I wish I knew who the author was, I would like to thank them for the information.
Greatest of all bodybuilding photographers
“Krikor Djololian, as Gregor Arax was officially called, was born on 27 February 1897 in Adapazar (Turkey) in the bosom of a very humble and poor family…
In 1922, Krikor and his mother, Mariam, emigrated to Paris, where he resumed his activities as a photographer. He opens a studio at 9 Rue Papillon which he calls Studio Arax. At the beginning of the 1930s it moved to number 31 Boulevard Raspail. During this stage he devoted himself to studio portraits, ballroom dance championships and working as a photojournalist, collaborating with numerous Armenian and Parisian publications portraying the social life of the Parisian Armenian community. At this stage of his working life, an interest in photographing the French capital during the war, the liberation of Paris and the postwar period will also resurface.
From 1934 to 1975, with a short hiatus caused by the Second World War, he began to collaborate with the British magazine Health and Strength. During this time, he traveled the roads of France in his curious and unique car (a Fiat 500 that was better known by the alias of baby mouse), to photograph and immortalize the winners of the bodybuilding competitions of the federations of ‘physical culture’ in France, and occasionally in Belgium, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. …
A few years after the end of the Second World War, photography related to the cult of the body grew steadily, thus emerging the true Golden Age for physical culture magazines. Obviously, the editors realized the commercial vein of this new photographic product, acquired mostly by an elite public, with great purchasing power, who did not skimp on expenses and who, always or almost always, received them clandestinely under the title of artistic magazines. This product led magazines to publish increasingly sensual and erotic images, but always without showing genitalia, however, those who wanted to get full nude photos (which included erections and rarely explicit sexual acts) could get them by asking for them custom made.
Curiously, in a country as puritanical as the United States was then, it is where the greatest demand arises, which causes photographic studios to proliferate. Arax is quickly claimed by North American publications attracted by his talent and his already consolidated reputation, and without thinking much he joins the bandwagon by expanding his business with a new portfolio of more artistic than sporty physical models, and with a style of posing that he produced. images that used to show frontal nudes with total naturalness, dedicating a large part of their production to these images. In order to carry out the sale by mail of this type of images but to expose the genitals, Arax devised the system of covering with a thin layer of gouache in the shape of a false fig leaf the virile attributes of the model, which disappeared easily with a little water once in the hands of the buyer. …
But if all these years were very prosperous for Arax, they were also quite tumultuous when a group of photographers like him brought to life that phenomenon called photo. beefcake. This word immediately conjures up the image of a young man flaunting his physique, but has actually been used as a blanket term for a genre of photography that is as American as jazz music and yet was actively repressed by the Bureau itself. United States Post Office and censored by law enforcement officials, who believed that the nude male form was inherently pornographic. In the early 1970s, ARAX was so fed up with these persecutions that he went so far as to say: “Comparing my photography to pornography is like comparing classical music to rock and roll.”
Another fascinating exhibition and a bumper posting to boot (pardon the pun!)
A panoply of famous photographers along with a few I had never heard of before (such as Georges Hugnet) are represented in this posting. As the press blurb states, through “key photographic projects, experimental films, and photobooks, The Shaping of New Visions offers a critical reassessment of photography’s role in the avant-garde and neo-avant-garde movements, and in the development of contemporary artistic practices.”
The large exhibition seems to have a finger in every pie, wandering from the birth of the 20th-century modern metropolis, through “New Vision” photography in the 1920s, experimental film, Surrealism, Constructivism and New Objectivity, Dada, Rayographs, photographic avant-gardism, photocollages, photomontages, street photography of the 1960s, colour slide projection performance, through New Topographics, self-published books, and conceptual photography, featuring works that reevaluate the material and contextual definitions of photography. “The final gallery showcases major installations by a younger generation of artists whose works address photography’s role in the construction of contemporary history.”
Without actually going to New York to see the exhibition (I wish!!) – from a distance it does seem a lot of ground to cover within 5 galleries even if there are 250 works. You could say this is a “meta” exhibition, drawing together themes and experiments from different areas of photography with rather a long bow. Have a look at the The Shaping of New Visions exhibition checklist to see the full listing of what’s on show and you be the judge. There are some rare and beautiful images that’s for sure. From the photographs in this posting I would have to say the distorted “eyes” have it…
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to MoMA for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
In 1920 Paul Strand and artist Charles Sheeler collaborated on Manhatta, a short silent film that presents a day in the life of lower Manhattan. Inspired by Walt Whitman’s book Leaves of Grass, the film includes multiple segments that express the character of New York. The sequences display a similar approach to the still photography of both artists. Attracted by the cityscape and its visual design, Strand and Sheeler favoured extreme camera angles to capture New York’s dynamic qualities. Although influenced by Romanticism in its view of the urban environment, Manhatta is considered the first American avant-garde film.
Aleksandr Rodchenko (Russian, 1891-1956) Sovetskoe foto (Soviet Photo) No. 10
October 1927
Letterpress
10 3/8 x 7 1/4″ (26.3 x 18.4cm) Publisher: Ogonek, Moscow
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the Judith Rothschild Foundation
Dziga Vertov (Russian, 1896-1954) Chelovek s kinoapparatom (Man with a Movie Camera) (still) 1929
35mm film
65 min ( black and white, silent)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Department of Film
Dziga Vertov (Russian, 1896-1954) Chelovek s kinoapparatom (Man with a Movie Camera)
1929
Film
1 hr 6 mins 49 secs
Excerpt from a camera operators diary
ATTENTION VIEWERS:
This film is an experiment in cinematic communication of real events
Without the help of Intertitles
Without the help of a story
Without the help of theatre
This experimental work aims at creating a truly international language of cinema based on its absolute separation from the language of theatre and literature
Man with a Movie Camera (Russian: Человек с киноаппаратом (Chelovek s kinoapparatom) is an experimental 1929 silent documentary film, with no story and no actors by Soviet-Russian director Dziga Vertov, edited by his wife Elizaveta Svilova.
Vertov’s feature film, produced by the film studio VUFKU, presents urban life in the Soviet cities of Kiev, Kharkov, Moscow and Odessa. From dawn to dusk Soviet citizens are shown at work and at play, and interacting with the machinery of modern life. To the extent that it can be said to have “characters,” they are the cameramen of the title, the film editor, and the modern Soviet Union they discover and present in the film.
This film is famous for the range of cinematic techniques Vertov invents, deploys or develops, such as double exposure, fast motion, slow motion, freeze frames, jump cuts, split screens, Dutch angles, extreme close-ups, tracking shots, footage played backwards, stop motion animations and self-reflexive visuals (at one point it features a split-screen tracking shot; the sides have opposite Dutch angles).
In the British Film Institute’s 2012 Sight & Sound poll, film critics voted Man with a Movie Camera the 8th best film ever made. In 2014 Sight & Sound also named it the best documentary of all time.
Text from the YouTube website
László Moholy-Nagy (Hungarian, 1895-1946) Ein Lichtspiel: schwarz weiss grau (A Lightplay: Black White Gray) (excerpt)
1930
This short film made by László Moholy-Nagy is based on the shadow patterns created by his Light-Space Modulator, an early kinetic sculpture consisting of a variety of curved objects in a carefully choreographed cycle of movements. Created in 1930, the film was originally planned as the sixth and final part of a much longer work depicting the new space-time.
Georges Hugnet (French, 1906-1974) Untitled [Surrealist beach collage]
c. 1935
Collage of photogravure, lithograph, chromolithograph and gelatin silver prints on gelatin silver print
11 7/8 x 9 7/16″ (30.2 x 24cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Gift of Timothy Baum in memory of Harry H. Lunn, Jr.
William Klein (American, 1928-2022) Gun, Gun, Gun, New York
1955
Gelatin silver print
10 1/4 x 13 5/8″ (26 x 34.6cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Gift of Arthur and Marilyn Penn
Martha Rosler (American, b. 1943) Red Stripe Kitchen
1967-1972
From the series Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful
Pigmented inkjet print, printed 2011
23 3/4 x 18 1/8″ (60.3 x 46cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Purchase and The Modern Women’s Fund
The Museum of Modern Art draws from its collection to present the exhibition The Shaping of New Visions: Photography, Film, Photobook on view from April 18, 2012, to April 29, 2013. Filling the third-floor Edward Steichen Photography Galleries, this installation presents more than 250 works by approximately 90 artists, with a focus on new acquisitions and groundbreaking projects by Man Ray, László Moholy-Nagy, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Germaine Krull, Dziga Vertov, Gerhard Rühm, Helen Levitt, Robert Frank, Daido Moriyama, Robert Heinecken, Edward Ruscha, Martha Rosler, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Paul Graham, and The Atlas Group / Walid Raad. The exhibition is organised by Roxana Marcoci, Curator, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art.
Punctuated by key photographic projects, experimental films, and photobooks, The Shaping of New Visions offers a critical reassessment of photography’s role in the avant-garde and neo-avant-garde movements, and in the development of contemporary artistic practices. The shaping of what came to be known as “new vision” photography in the 1920s bore the obvious influence of “lens-based” and “time-based” works. The first gallery begins with photographs capturing the birth of the 20th-century modern metropolis by Berenice Abbott, Edward Steichen, and Alfred Stieglitz, presented next to the avant-garde film Manhatta (1921), a collaboration between Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler.
The 1920s were a period of landmark constructions and scientific discoveries all related to light – from Thomas Edison’s development of incandescent light to Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity and light speed. Man Ray began experimenting with photograms (pictures made by exposing objects placed on photosensitive paper to light) – which he renamed “rayographs” after himself – in which light was both the subject and medium of his work. This exhibition presents Man Ray’s most exquisite rayographs, alongside his first short experimental film, Le Retour à la raison (Return to Reason, 1923), in which he extended the technique to moving images.
In 1925, two years after he joined the faculty of the Bauhaus school in Weimar Germany, László Moholy-Nagy published his influential book Malerei, Fotografie, Film (Painting, Photography, Film) – part of a series that he coedited with Bauhaus director Walter Gropius – in which he asserted that photography and cinema are heralding a “culture of light” that has overtaken the most innovative aspects of painting. Moholy-Nagy extolled photography and, by extension, film as the quintessential medium of the future. Moholy-Nagy’s interest in the movement of objects and light through space led him to construct Light-Space Modulator, the subject of his only abstract film, Ein Lichtspiel: schwarz weiss grau (A Lightplay: Black White Gray, 1930), which is presented in the exhibition next to his own photographs and those of Florence Henri.
The rise of photographic avant-gardism from the 1920s to the 1940s is traced in the second gallery primarily through the work of European artists. A section on Constructivism and New Objectivity features works by Paul Citroën, Raoul Hausmann, Florence Henri, Germaine Krull, El Lissitzky, Albert Renger-Patzsch, and August Sander. A special focus on Aleksandr Rodchenko underscores his engagement with the illustrated press through collaborations with Vladimir Mayakovsky and Sergei Tretyakov on the covers and layouts of Novyi LEF, the Soviet avant-garde journal of the “Left Front of the Arts,” which popularised the idea of “factography,” or the manufacture of innovative aesthetic facts through photomechanical processes. Alongside Rodchenko, film director Dziga Vertov redefined the medium of still and motion-picture photography with the concept of kino-glaz (cine-eye), according to which the perfectible lens of the camera led to the creation of a novel perception of the world. The exhibition features the final clip of Vertov’s 1929 experimental film Chelovek s kinoapparatom (Man with a Movie Camera), in which the eye is superimposed on the camera lens to form an indivisible apparatus fit to view, process, and convey reality, all at once. This gallery also features a selection of Dada and Surrealist works, including rarely seen photographs, photocollages, and photomontages by Hans Bellmer, Claude Cahun, George Hugnet, André Kertész, Jan Lukas, and Grete Stern, alongside such avant-garde publications as Documents and Littérature.
The third gallery features artists exploring the social world of the postwar period. On view for the first time is a group of erotic and political typo-collages by Gerhard Rühm, a founder of the Wiener Gruppe (1959-1960), an informal group of Vienna-based writers and artists who engaged in radical visual dialogues between pictures and texts. The rebels of street photography – Robert Frank, William Klein, Daido Moriyama, and Garry Winogrand – are represented with a selection of works that refute the then prevailing rules of photography, offering instead elliptical, off-kilter styles that are as personal and controversial as are their unsparing views of postwar society. A highlight of this section is the pioneering slide show Projects: Helen Levitt in Color (1971-1974). Capturing the lively beat, humour, and drama of New York’s street theatre, Levitt’s slide projection is shown for the first time at MoMA since its original presentation at the Museum in 1974.
Photography’s tradition in the postwar period continues in the fourth gallery, which is divided into two sections. One section features “new topographic” works by Robert Adams, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Stephen Shore, and Joel Sternfeld, along with a selection of Edward Ruscha’s self-published books, in which the use of photography as mapmaking signals a conceptual thrust. This section introduces notable works from the 1970s by artists who embraced photography not just as a way of describing experience, but as a conceptual tool. Examples include Eleanor Antin’s 100 Boots (1971-1973), Mel Bochner’s Misunderstandings (A theory of photography) (1970), VALIE EXPORT’s Einkreisung (Encirclement) (1976), On Kawara’s I Got Up… (1977), and Gordon Matta-Clark’s Splitting (1974), all works that reevaluate the material and contextual definitions of photography. The other section features two major and highly experimental recent acquisitions: Martha Rosler’s political magnum opus Bringing the War Home (1967-1972), developed in the context of her anti-war and feminist activism, for which the artist spliced together images of domestic bliss clipped from the pages of House Beautiful with grim pictures of the war in Vietnam taken from Life magazine; and Sigmar Polke’s early 1970s experiments with multiple exposures, reversed tonal values, and under-and-over exposures, which underscore the artist’s idea that “a negative is never finished.” The unmistakably cinematic turn that photography takes in the 1980s and early 1990s is represented with a selection of innovative works ranging from Robert Heinecken’s Recto/Verso (1988) to Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s breakthrough Hustler series (1990-1992).
The final gallery showcases major installations by a younger generation of artists whose works address photography’s role in the construction of contemporary history. Tapping into forms of archival reconstitution, The Atlas Group / Walid Raad is represented with My Neck Is Thinner Than a Hair: Engines (1996-2004), an installation of 100 pictures of car-bomb blasts in Beirut during the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990) that provokes questions about the factual nature of existing records, the traces of war, and the symptoms of trauma. A selection from Harrell Fletcher’s The American War (2005) brings together bootlegged photojournalistic pictures of the U.S. military involvement in Southeast Asia, throwing into sharp focus photography’s role as a documentary and propagandistic medium in the shaping of historical memory. Jules Spinatsch’s Panorama: World Economic Forum, Davos (2003), made of thousands of still images and three surveillance video works, chronicles the preparations for the 2003 World Economic Forum, when the entire Davos valley was temporarily transformed into a high security zone. A selection of Paul Graham’s photographs from his major photobook project a shimmer of possibility (2007), consisting of filmic haikus about everyday life in today’s America, concludes the exhibition.
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) Projects: Helen Levitt in Color (detail)
1971-1974
40 colour slides shown in continuous projection
Originally presented at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, September 26-October 20, 1974
On Kawara (Japanese, 1932-2014) I Got Up At…
1974-1975
(Ninety postcards with printed rubber stamps)
The semi autobiographical I Got Up At… by On Kawara is a series of postcards sent to John Baldessari. Each card was sent from his location that morning detailing the time he got up. The time marked on each card varies drastically from day to day, the time stamped on each card is the time he left his bed as opposed to actually waking up. Kawara’s work often acts to document his existence in time, giving a material form to which is formally immaterial. The series has been repeated frequently sending the cards to a variety of friends and colleagues.
Atlas Group, Walid Raad My Neck is Thinner Than a Hair: Engines (detail)
1996-2004
100 pigmented inkjet prints
9 7/16 x 13 3/8″ (24 x 34cm) each
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Fund for the Twenty-First Century
The Museum of Modern Art 11 West 53 Street
New York, NY 10019 Phone: (212) 708-9400
Opening hours:
10.30am – 5.30pm
Open seven days a week
~ 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.
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.
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
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
National Gallery of Art, Washington
William and Sarah Walton Fund and Gift of the Collectors Committee
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Two faces
1991
Gelatin silver print
I am scanning my negatives made during the years 1991-1997 to preserve them in the form of an online archive as a process of active memory, so that the images are not lost forever. These photographs were images of my life and imagination at the time of their making, the ideas I was thinking about and the people and things that surrounded me.
Photographs are available from this series for purchase. As a guide, a vintage 8″ x 10″ silver gelatin print costs $700 plus tracked and insured shipping. For more information please see my Store web page.
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Fred and Andrew smoking a joint in Paris
1992
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Unknown landscape
1991-1992
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Base
1991
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Shower room, Punt Road, South Yarra
1991
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Keep Clear, Virgin Girl
1992
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Two torsos
1991
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Standing stove, plant and broom
1991
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Suspended kitchen
1991
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Bring me the head of John the Baptist / Man with Big Ears
1992
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) The Windmills of Don Q
1992
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Where the stars are (after Manuel Alvarez Bravo)
1991
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Fred and Andrew, Sherbrooke Forest
1992
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Jeff standing on his Chrysler, Studley Park, Melbourne, Victoria, 1992
1991-1992
Gelatin silver print
Exhibition dates: 12th October – 12th November 2011
Martin Smith (Australian, b. 1971) My Father Doesn’t Relate Well With Other Men
2011
Martin Smith is one of my favourite photo artists working in Australia at the moment. Smith produces consistently intriguing, stimulating art. Having had a particularly fractious relationship with my own father I appreciate the pathos and humour that Smith achieves in his work. Fantastic!
Marcus
Many thankx to Ryan Renshaw gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Martin Smith (Australian, b. 1971) My Father is a Deeply Flawed Human Being
2011
Martin Smith’s artwork focuses on those small moments that glance into a life. Tending to gather photographs as opposed to taking them, his works offer wry observations rather than grand statements. The loss or absence inherent in photographic images, which are suggestive of another time and place, is echoed in the physical loss of the words cut into the surface of the works. One story is inscribed on another; just like one memory is laid upon another or one version of a story embellishes another. The resulting works are replete with the same ambiguity, melancholy and richness as one’s memory.
‘The storytelling came from when I started looking at my old family photos and thinking about what goes with them,’ Smith explains. ‘You know when you’re looking at family photos, there are particular stories that go with them – that’s that person, that’s the time when your uncle turned up for Christmas, and so on.’
Smith’s stories that are painstakingly hand-cut into the photographic image give a whimsical and highly personal account of his life, like his ill-fated attempt to become an actor with the Sandgate Amateur Theatre Group or the time he worked in the cutlery crew at Australian Airlines, combining the text of these stories with photographs. The scarring of the photographic image with Smith’s scalpel blade ensures a unique artwork, a notion at odds with the reproducible aspects of photography.
Martin’s exhibition stems from his reflection of his experiences as an actor in Roger Fagan’s play A Perfect Price For Donny and questions the legacy of what we ‘leave behind’ for others to read.
‘Tanya was from the past of my amateur theatre days when I was 17 years old and possessed with deluded dreams of being an actor. We were both new members of the Sacred Heart Players and we both landed the leads in the production of A Perfect Price for Donny written by Roger Fagan. Roger was an elderly member of the group and had joined years earlier to gain practical experience so he could finish his play. The Perfect Price for Donny was his first and only play. Roger had worked at the Railways for 32 years and had been writing A Perfect Price for Donny on and off over the 32 years. He had not started another play, he hadn’t written any short stories, prose or even a Haiku. Since he had retired two years ago he was finally able to realise his dream of finishing A Perfect Price for Donny at the age of 68′.
‘The memories are left behind and then reconstituted and turned into other things, it’s a language constantly getting churned up. Memories are things that inform taking the photo,’ Smith says ‘and I’m bringing some of the intrinsic aspects of the photograph with me. Photography captures the classic moments of life, like your first day at school,’ he continues, ‘but it doesn’t capture the other parts of your life that are sometimes way more significant.’
People spend a lot of time in a Martin Smith exhibition reading the works and then laughing or sighing in recognition. The photographs are all of fairly impersonal exteriors, almost crime scenes, not postcards, not picturesque snaps but odd disregarded corners of the world. In some way they are reminiscent of album covers or slightly lame posters but are brought into the present by Smith’s honest and often very funny tales of modern living.
Press release from the Ryan Renshaw Gallery website
Martin Smith (Australian, b. 1971) My Father’s Talents Will Never Make Me Wealthy
2011
Martin Smith (Australian, b. 1971) My Father Fails
2011
Martin Smith (Australian, b. 1971) Revelation #2
2011
![Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985) 'Itiba Cahubaba (Esculturas Rupestres)' [Old Mother Blood (Rupestrian Sculptures)] 1982](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/ana-mendieta_itiba-cuhababa-web.jpg "Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985) 'Itiba Cahubaba (Esculturas Rupestres)' [Old Mother Blood (Rupestrian Sculptures)] 1982")
![Georges Hugnet (French, 1906-1974) 'Untitled [Surrealist beach collage]' c. 1935](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/georges-hugnet-untitled-surrealist-beach-collage.jpg "Georges Hugnet (French, 1906-1974) 'Untitled [Surrealist beach collage]' c. 1935")
Art Blart _ art and cultural memory archive 
You must be logged in to post a comment.