Aperture's Blog, page 198
March 29, 2013
On the Edge
Willie Doherty, Without Trace (Hidden), 2013. Courtesy of the artist and Peter Kilchmann, Zurich.
Willie Doherty, Without Trace (Into Thin Air), 2013. Courtesy of the artist and Peter Kilchmann, Zurich.
Willie Doherty, Without Traces. Installation view at Peter Kilchmann, Zurich. Courtesy of the artist and Peter Kilchmann, Zurich.
Willie Doherty, Without Trace (Between), 2013. Courtesy of the artist and Peter Kilchmann, Zurich.
The eleven photographs in the first room of Willie Doherty’s exhibition Without Trace seem both strangely immediate and familiar. They are all views of Zurich’s snow-covered outskirts in winter, the season that has just passed. They were taken on several visits to Zurich that Doherty undertook in recent months, an unusual move for an artist whose work has mostly focused on his native Northern Ireland. And although locals will easily recognize some locations, in particular those taken near the two rivers that run through the city, the large-format prints also look like they could have been taken anywhere in continental Europe. The peripheral places they show seem generic and anonymous—the snow-covered bank of river, concrete modernist buildings, a highway overpass in the woods, a panoramic view of the city on a grey day, dish antennas next to some modular temporary housing. The sky, save for one image, is gray, the light even and fallow. The snow eliminates details and colors, making the sites even more indeterminate. The strict composition of the photographs, often emphasizing a central perspective, underlines their severity. This seems to be a documentary series about the margins of the city where the built environment and nature intersect, often in a jarring contrast.
The wall-size video projection in the second room cunningly transforms this first impression. The video includes views similar to those in the photographs, yet the temporality of the moving images makes the sites appear more still, more forlorn. A female voice with strong foreign accent, seemingly Eastern European, tells the story of a man who had decided to spend a winter in Zurich. It’s not the photographer, as the viewer might have surmised, but instead a construction worker who has disappeared without any trace on the morning of December 12. A number of notebooks found in his apartment indicate that he felt increasingly isolated in the city. The narrator intones, “He had given up his construction job and spent his days wandering,” and he seems to have spent most of his time in places like those shown in the photographs and the video. An increasing sense of paranoia and dread had gripped him. He had sensed that the city harbored dreadful secrets, and only the rivers and the snow offered him solace. One day, he simply disappeared. The video ends with views of a frozen lake in the woods, while the woman relates that she dreamt “last night” that his corpse was lying in a frozen lake, waiting to be uncovered by the spring sun.
Willie Doherty, Without Traces, 2013. Installation view at Peter Kilchmann, Zurich. Courtesy of the artist and Peter Kilchmann, Zurich.
Doherty used a similar combination of landscape views and a voice-over narration in his video Secretion (2012), presented last summer at Documenta 13. It showed decrepit industrial landscapes near Kassel, while the voice-over told the similarly Poe-like story of a former concentration-camp warden who is killed, some years after World War II, by the seepage of human remains into the drinking water, destroying his body in the form of fungal spores. Both works examine the traces of the past harbored by industrial landscapes, and the alienation they induce. The photographs in Without Traces add yet another layer of complexity to Doherty’s dense docu-fictions. At the outset, they appear to be rather straight-on documentary images. Seeing them a second time, after encountering the video projection, they are imbued with the construction worker’s narrative. They appear to show Doherty’s retracing of the construction worker’s fatal stay in Zurich. Indeed, these might be the photographs the anonymous worker would have taken himself. Doherty’s adroit manipulation of our perception points to the inherent malleability of photographic images whose content is easily twisted by additional information. A paranoia similar to the one experienced by the story’s construction worker begins to haunt the viewer, who acutely experiences how easily she may be manipulated. The images are indeed not what they seem—just like the city that refuses to yield its dreadful secrets.
Martin Jaeggi is an independent writer and curator. He writes frequently about photography and contemporary art and teaches in the photography department of the Zurich University of the Arts.
Willie Doherty’s exhibition remains on view at Peter Kilchmann, Zurich, until April 13.
March 27, 2013
Thomas Ruff: photograms and ma.r.s. at David Zwirner
Photograms (detail) © Thomas Ruff, Courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London
Thomas Ruff is among the most important international photographers to emerge in the last twenty years, and one of the most enigmatic and prolific of Bernd and Hilla Becher’s former students, a group that includes Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, Candida Höfer, and Axel Hutte. Known for employing a range of techniques in his photographic work—spanning analog and digital exposures, computer-generated imagery, appropriation and manipulation—Ruff’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at prominent venues internationally, most recently in 2012 with a comprehensive large-scale survey presented at the Haus der Kunst in Munich.
Thomas Ruff: photograms and ma.r.s., on view March 28–April 27, 2013, at David Zwirner Gallery, will feature the world debut of Ruff’s new series, photograms, a body of work depicting abstract shapes, lines, and spirals in seemingly random formations with varying degrees of transparency and illumination. Reminiscent of 1920s-era experiments in camera-less photography, Ruff’s “photograms” derive from a virtual darkroom built by a custom-made software program. This new work will be presented alongside his ongoing series, ma.r.s., in which Ruff transforms black-and-white satellite photographs of the surface of Mars, taken by high-resolution cameras aboard NASA spacecraft, with interjections of saturated color.
Thomas Ruff: photograms and ma.r.s.
March 28–April 27, 2013
David Zwirner Gallery, New York
—
In 2009, Aperture released the first monograph dedicated exclusively to the publication of Ruff’s remarkable series JPEGS (completed in 2007), in which he explores the distribution and reception of images in the digital age.
JPEGS
$250.00
JPEGS
$85.00
The Dusseldorf School of Photography
$95.00
Luigi Ghirri: Kodachrome
When he published Kodachromes, Ghirri wrote a short exposé on his sources of inspiration, the notion of “deleted space,” and the things he is not interested in. That essay is reproduced below. It was included in Aperture’s 2008 volume It’s Beautiful Here, Isn’t It.
—Paula Kupfer
Luigi Ghirri, Bologna, 1973. © Estate of Luigi Ghirri, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery
Kodachrome: Introduction
I
In 1969 the newspapers published the photograph taken from the spaceship traveling to the moon. This was the first photograph of the entire Earth.
The image that man had pursued for centuries was presented for our view; it held within it all previous, incomplete images, all books that had been written, all signs, those that had been deciphered and those that had not. It was not only the image of the entire world, but the only image that contained all other images of the world: graffiti, frescoes, paintings, writings, photographs, books, films. It was at once the representation of the world and all representations of the world.
And yet this total vision, this re-description of everything, obviated the possibility of translating the total hieroglyph. The power of containing everything was annulled in the face of the impossibility of seeing everything all at once. The event and its representation, seeing and being contained, were presented—once again—to humanity as an insufficient response to the same old questions.
This possibility of total duplication, however, enabled us to glimpse the potential for deciphering the hieroglyph; we had the two poles of doubt and secular mystery: the image of the atom and the image of the world, finally looking at each other face to face. The space between the infinitely small and the infinitely large was filled by the infinitely complex: man and his life, nature.
The need for information or for knowledge emerges from these two extremes—fluctuating between the microscope and the telescope—to be able to translate and interpret reality or hieroglyph.
Luigi Ghirri, Paris, 1972. © Estate of Luigi Ghirri, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery
II
My work emerges from the desire and the need to interpret and translate the sense of this sum of hieroglyphs—not only the easily identifiable reality of the reality that has highly symbolic content, but also thoughts, memories, imagination, and fantastical or alienated content.
For my purposes, photography is extraordinarily important, because of its specific characteristics. In photography, the deletion of the space that surrounds the framed portion is as important for me as what is represented: it is thanks to this deletion that the image takes on meaning, becoming measurable. The image continues, of course, in the visible realm of the deleted space, inviting us to see the rest of reality that is not represented.
This double aspect of representing and deleting not only evokes the absence of limits, excluding every idea of completeness of finitude, but shows us something that cannot be delimited: reality itself.
The possibility of seeing and penetrating the universe of reality instead passes through all representations and cultural models that are known and given to us as defined and decisive. Our relationship with reality and life is that same relationship that exists between the satellite image and the actual earth.
Thus photography, with its indeterminacy, becomes a privileged subject it allows us to move away from the symbolic nature of defined representations, and we can attribute to it a value of truth. The possibility of analysis in time and space of the signs that form reality (the entirety of which has always been elusive) thus allows photography, with its fragmentary nature, to be closer to what also cannot be delimited: physical existence.
So I am not interested in images and “decisive moments,” the analysis of language in and of itself, aesthetics, the concept of all-consuming idea, the emotion of the poet, the culled quotation, the search for a new aesthetic creed, the use of a style.
My duty is to see with clarity, and this is why I am interested in all possible functions—without separating any of them out, but taking them on as a whole, in order to be able, from time to time, to see the hieroglyphs I have encountered and make them recognizable.
Luigi Ghirri, Chartres, 1977. © Estate of Luigi Ghirri, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery
III
The daily encounter with reality, the fictions, the surrogates, the ambiguous, poetic, or alienating aspects, all seem to preclude any way out of the labyrinth, the walls of which are ever more illusory… to the point at which we might merge with them.
The meaning that I am trying to render through my work is a verification of how it is still possible to desire and face a path of knowledge, to be able finally to distinguish the precise identity of man, things, life, from the image of man, things, and life.
—1978
Text © Estate of Luigi Ghirri; images © Estate of Luigi Ghirri and courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York.
It's Beautiful Here, Isn't It...$55.00
Luigi Ghirri – Kodachrome
When he published Kodachromes, Ghirri wrote a short exposé on his sources of inspiration, the notion of “deleted space,” and the things he is not interested in. That essay is reproduced below. It was included in Aperture’s 2008 volume It’s Beautiful Here, Isn’t It.
—Paula Kupfer
Luigi Ghirri, Bologna, 1973. © Estate of Luigi Ghirri, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery
Kodachrome: Introduction
I
In 1969 the newspapers published the photograph taken from the spaceship traveling to the moon. This was the first photograph of the entire Earth.
The image that man had pursued for centuries was presented for our view; it held within it all previous, incomplete images, all books that had been written, all signs, those that had been deciphered and those that had not. It was not only the image of the entire world, but the only image that contained all other images of the world: graffiti, frescoes, paintings, writings, photographs, books, films. It was at once the representation of the world and all representations of the world.
And yet this total vision, this re-description of everything, obviated the possibility of translating the total hieroglyph. The power of containing everything was annulled in the face of the impossibility of seeing everything all at once. The event and its representation, seeing and being contained, were presented—once again—to humanity as an insufficient response to the same old questions.
This possibility of total duplication, however, enabled us to glimpse the potential for deciphering the hieroglyph; we had the two poles of doubt and secular mystery: the image of the atom and the image of the world, finally looking at each other face to face. The space between the infinitely small and the infinitely large was filled by the infinitely complex: man and his life, nature.
The need for information or for knowledge emerges from these two extremes—fluctuating between the microscope and the telescope—to be able to translate and interpret reality or hieroglyph.
Luigi Ghirri, Paris, 1972. © Estate of Luigi Ghirri, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery
II
My work emerges from the desire and the need to interpret and translate the sense of this sum of hieroglyphs—not only the easily identifiable reality of the reality that has highly symbolic content, but also thoughts, memories, imagination, and fantastical or alienated content.
For my purposes, photography is extraordinarily important, because of its specific characteristics. In photography, the deletion of the space that surrounds the framed portion is as important for me as what is represented: it is thanks to this deletion that the image takes on meaning, becoming measurable. The image continues, of course, in the visible realm of the deleted space, inviting us to see the rest of reality that is not represented.
This double aspect of representing and deleting not only evokes the absence of limits, excluding every idea of completeness of finitude, but shows us something that cannot be delimited: reality itself.
The possibility of seeing and penetrating the universe of reality instead passes through all representations and cultural models that are known and given to us as defined and decisive. Our relationship with reality and life is that same relationship that exists between the satellite image and the actual earth.
Thus photography, with its indeterminacy, becomes a privileged subject it allows us to move away from the symbolic nature of defined representations, and we can attribute to it a value of truth. The possibility of analysis in time and space of the signs that form reality (the entirety of which has always been elusive) thus allows photography, with its fragmentary nature, to be closer to what also cannot be delimited: physical existence.
So I am not interested in images and “decisive moments,” the analysis of language in and of itself, aesthetics, the concept of all-consuming idea, the emotion of the poet, the culled quotation, the search for a new aesthetic creed, the use of a style.
My duty is to see with clarity, and this is why I am interested in all possible functions—without separating any of them out, but taking them on as a whole, in order to be able, from time to time, to see the hieroglyphs I have encountered and make them recognizable.
Luigi Ghirri, Chartres, 1977. © Estate of Luigi Ghirri, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery
III
The daily encounter with reality, the fictions, the surrogates, the ambiguous, poetic, or alienating aspects, all seem to preclude any way out of the labyrinth, the walls of which are ever more illusory… to the point at which we might merge with them.
The meaning that I am trying to render through my work is a verification of how it is still possible to desire and face a path of knowledge, to be able finally to distinguish the precise identity of man, things, life, from the image of man, things, and life.
—1978
Text © Estate of Luigi Ghirri; images © Estate of Luigi Ghirri and courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York.
It's Beautiful Here, Isn't It...$55.00
March 22, 2013
See, Memory
Chirodeep Chaudhuri’s exhibition A Village in Bengal is on view at Project 88, Mumbai, until March 25.
Chirodeep Chaudhuri, Untitled–11, 2012, from the series A Village in Bengal. Courtesy of the artist and Project 88, Mumbai.
Chirodeep Chaudhuri, Untitled–13, 2012, from the series A Village in Bengal. Courtesy of the artist and Project 88, Mumbai.
Chirodeep Chaudhuri, Untitled–03, 2012, from the series A Village in Bengal. Courtesy of the artist and Project 88, Mumbai.
Chirodeep Chaudhuri, Untitled–12, 2012, from the series A Village in Bengal. Courtesy of the artist and Project 88, Mumbai.
Chirodeep Chaudhuri, Untitled–20, 2012, from the series A Village in Bengal. Courtesy of the artist and Project 88, Mumbai.
Chirodeep Chaudhuri, Untitled–14, 2012, from the series A Village in Bengal. Courtesy of the artist and Project 88, Mumbai.
This exhibition of twenty-two black-and-white photographs samples the images included in Chirodeep Chaudhuri’s recent book A Village in Bengal, which records life in Amadpur, his parents’ ancestral village in the northeast Indian state of West Bengal, where he spent holidays as a child. Travelling to Amadpur annually over twelve years, Chaudhuri has captured the town’s life thoroughly and unsentimentally. His intense gaze takes in many inhabitants, animals, and architectural details: there is a decrepit terra-cotta temple; ducks crossing an unpaved road, single file, like the Beatles on the cover of Abbey Road; a bull at rest, his expressive shadow merging with that of the shade he’s sought; and a throng of women standing before an elegant landowner’s villa. This range of imagery could very well describe rural settings elsewhere in India. Yet Chaudhuri’s ability to capture gestures, architecture, and landscape distils these scenes of a symbolic home into a coherent, singular narrative which treats the photographer’s stated intention—“to see, store, and air again the unutterably fragile experience of home.” A Village in Bengal is a serious exploration of memory and uncertain recollection, filtered through the vivid panorama of the annual festival of Durga Pujo.
Durga Pujo is an autumnal fête celebrating a principal female Hindu deity of destruction. To adherents and outsiders alike, Pujo, as the festival is sometimes called, is emblematic of Hindu Bengali identity. Many view this vibrant five-day event as the religious counterpart to the Bengali discursiveness that suffuses daily life, from fiery polemical discussions and a passion for the arts to political zeal and culinary profligacy. To his credit, Chaudhuri’s record of the kaleidoscopic activities around Durga Pujo stays this expectation. The show does not replicate the flamboyance traditionally associated with Durga Pujo by mechanically archiving exemplary moments. Rather, he has created a narrative complicated by silent passages about Amadpur that relate only metonymically to the festival. The resulting photo-essay is forcefully ordinary yet persuasively structured by combining precise details and necessary distance. It is here one begins to understand how a personal album can also function, as the photographer suggests, as a historical chronicle of “traces of a lifestyle that once existed.”
Chirodeep Chaudhuri, Untitled–18, 2012, from the series A Village in Bengal. Courtesy of the artist and Project 88, Mumbai.
The album-like quality of this series has an obvious derivation: the subjects include the photographer’s distant relatives in their palatial ancestral home in Amadpur. Untitled-18 depicts a group of women headed by one man assembled at a dining table topped with plates of food, possibly the ingredients of festival cuisine, and a boy of about two or three years old. The scene has all the traits of a conference at an impasse or at its end. Several of the figures cover their mouths with their hands; speech is absent; body language is static, detached. The torpor of the situation is strongly conveyed by the proximity of the camera. Ironically, this intimate stock-taking effectively lends the image the character of a political event, as though it were documented by an official recorder granted security clearance. Seen another way, however, the image also conveys the boredom of a certain kind of gaze, that of a child uninterested in a group of adults engaged in boring adult things—here literalized by the child’s listless body near the center of the composition, possibly a proxy for the photographer in his early years.
Likewise, Untitled-22, perhaps the best image in the show, is also a visual argument about the fickle nature of photographic meaning. In this case an archetypal episode drawn from the Pujo rituals offers a window onto people’s changing relationships to religious customs. The photograph features the multi-armed Durga at the moment of her immersion, the definitive endpoint of the festival. The camera is positioned above a body of water to show a group of boys who are thrusting a large, Ferris wheel–shaped contraption into its depths. The wheel-shaped contraption is the rear frame of a three-part Durga idol structure. Durga and the flanking idols are naked, as if disrobed in preparation for their watery commute. Surprisingly, they are missing their heads. The image is charged with movement and a romantic excess of luminosity. This arguably timeless scene of play and happiness might also represent what Pujo means to a band of frolicking boys at any moment in Bengali history. But key aspects of the scene caution against facile judgement, beginning with the headless, naked idols, whose schematic bodies, minus the ritual clothing, are less sexual than campy.In contrast, the half-naked boys are emphatically sensual. Caught between the sterile idols and our living gaze, they signal a palpably cinematic sensibility of compressed time: psychologically anachronistic frames joined into a one-shot face-off. It is as if Chaudhuri’s childhood self can recall not how fun looked but felt, which his adult photographer’s eye has stolen of innocence.
Chirodeep Chaudhuri, Untitled–22, 2012, from the series A Village in Bengal. Courtesy of the artist and Project 88, Mumbai.
Two other images explore the show’s central theme: how perception shifts in recollection. Untitled–11 (2012) is a twelve-by-eighteen-inch image of a man floating, belly-up, in a pond. His face is clear while the rest of his body is obscured by cloudy water. The play between clarity and ambiguity is obvious, as is the perceptual uncertainty of apprehending a physical body in an inherently murky medium; here the pond could easily stand in for the dark well of the past. In Untitled–14 (2012), a wiry set of hands are depicting quilting a bedspread. The hands’ shadows mask the needle and throw in doubt whether the act of sewing is taking place. After all, the bedspread is only minimally worked. At left in the foreground is a safety razor, and to the right a pair of glasses, which emphasize yet again the mental processes of editing and refraction that impact how memories form.
Prajna Desai is a writer of fiction and nonfiction, and an academic editor. She teaches architectural history in Mumbai, which is currently her home.
March 18, 2013
Art Directors Club 92nd Annual Awards
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The Art Directors Club (ADC), the first global creative collective of its kind, will host its ADC 92nd Annual Awards + Festival of Art and Craft in Advertising and Design next month. The three-day festival will be based at the W South Beach Hotel in Miami Beach, and will take place from April 2–4.
Unlike any other industry event, the ADC 92nd Annual Awards + Festival inspires international advertising, design, and visual communications professionals to reconnect and recommit to the art and craft of their industries by inspiring their inner artist. The festival will feature interactive, hands-on workshops led by key industry visionaries throughout each day, the ADC Design Night Celebration, the ADC 92nd Annual Awards Gala, parties and social gatherings throughout the week, and, of course, the beauty and culture that is South Beach.
For more information and details about the ADC 92nd Annual Awards + Festival of Art and Craft in Advertising and Design please visit the Art Director’s Club Award and Festival site.
ADC 92nd Annual Awards + Festival of Art and Craft in Advertising and Design
April 2–4, 2013
Miami Beach
Interview with Bill Armstrong
For more than fifteen years, the New York–based photographer Bill Armstrong has been working on his Infinity series, which entails photographing handmade collages of printed source material with his camera’s focus ring set to infinity. His latest exhibition, Film Noir, is on view at ClampArt in New York through April 6. In addition, Armstrong appears tonight at Aperture Gallery in conversation with W. M. Hunt on the subject of “Thinking in Color.” —The Editors
Bill Armstrong, Untitled (Film Noir #1433), 2012. Courtesy of the artist and ClampArt, New York.
Bill Armstrong, Untitled (Film Noir #1414), 2011. Courtesy of the artist and ClampArt, New York.
Bill Armstrong, Untitled (Film Noir #1435), 2012. Courtesy of the artist and ClampArt, New York.
Bill Armstrong, Apparition #909, 2005. Courtesy of the artist and ClampArt, New York.
Bill Armstrong, Apparition #906, 2005. Courtesy of the artist and ClampArt, New York.
Bill Armstrong, Figure #30, 2000. Courtesy of the artist and ClampArt, New York.
Aperture: This is your fourth exhibition at ClampArt. Were a viewer to try and trace the arc of these shows’ development, he or she might suggest that your source material and themes have become decidedly more contemporary. Earlier exhibitions involved images of Roman sculpture or Renaissance-era master drawings. This show, while referencing the classic films of the 1940s and ‘50s, seems to use contemporary source material. (Is that Michelle Obama we see in one image?) How do you aim to balance universal, timeless concerns with references to things—films noir, today’s advertising and stock imagery—that might be in the living memory of some viewers?
Bill Armstrong: I see what you are saying about an apparent arc from the past to the contemporary in the source material of my shows at ClampArt, but over entire the course of the Infinity series, the path is more wayward; in fact, the first portfolio, Early Figures, is made the same way as Film Noir. I felt it had been so long since I started the series that it made sense to circle back.
The idea of the Film Noir project is to revisit in color the themes of the classic black-and-white films of the 1940s and ’50s. The solitary figures contemplating the unknown reference the ethical and philosophical dilemmas laid out in those stories. However, the dark, mysterious images remain unresolved to hint at the increased uncertainties of the contemporary viewpoint.
I think of the film-noir subjects of loneliness, alienation, and the existentialist dilemma as universal themes that fit right into the overall trajectory of my work. I’m always trying to bite into the big themes: death, love, redemption, freedom, spirituality. I don’t have the exact quote, but Jack Pierson once said something like, “If it’s not about lonely, it’s not art.” Even though that’s apocryphal, I think the fact that we are alone is a major theme today, as much as faith and hope were in the Renaissance, or mortality was to the Romans. In a way I see all these themes as asking the same question. What is the meaning of it all? Does it matter what we do?
And by the way, I’m happy that many people read the image on the exhibition invitation as Michelle Obama—all the better—but it’s not her. It’s actually a figure from a Garry Winogrand photograph! An important aspect of blurring is that, by erasing individual features, I push the viewer to supply his/her own interpretation. I’m interested in this increased subjectivity: that the psychology and imagination of the viewer comes in to play. In many ways my work is about perception, how we try to resolve images but can’t, and how in that moment of confusion, when we are unsure of what we are seeing, the rational mind is derailed and we are freed to respond on a more subconscious level. I can’t be sure what it all means exactly, but I think a lot of people are very comfortable with the idea of Michelle Obama, and putting her into the picture may represent a desire for safety, for the known in an uncertain world. But perhaps you’d have a different explanation …
Aperture: Perhaps the fact that many people see Michelle Obama in the photograph included in this show is indicative of a “desire for the known,” as you aptly put it. Now that you’ve been at work on the Infinity series for a decade and a half, have you found viewers generally able to balance this desire for stability and familiarity with your own interest in pushing the meaning of the images out into more abstract, universal “big themes”? A related question: Given the methdological constraint of always setting the focus ring to infinity, what techniques have you developed over the years for varying the meaning conveyed by your pictures? I imagine it has something to do with color theory …
BA: For an artist like myself, who has a singular style, the challenge is always to keep a thread of familiarity connecting the bodies of work while at the same time spinning an expanding web in which each new portfolio is fresh enough to grab attention.
There are constraints to my blurred process—the images can’t be sharp, of course—but the range of subjects I can work with is broad. My overall goal of creating an ephemeral, spirit double for the real world is in some ways an endless quest, and each step along the way intersects with reality somewhat differently. The subject matter establishes the wide parameters of the meanings, but, yes, I use hues and values of color to fine-tune the emotional range of the individual images. My process is quite gestural: I mix and match colors, foregrounds, and backgrounds quickly and shoot rapidly. Sometimes it’s almost trancelike and depends on chance, but at the same time I’m fully aware of the principles of the contrast and harmony of colors.
Bill Armstrong, Untitled (Film Noir #1431), 2011. Courtesy of the artist and ClampArt, New York.
Aperture: I wouldn’t have expected your process to be described as “gestural,” given the precision of the effects achieved by your individual prints. It must require rigorous editing. Your work is featured on the cover of the recent Aperture book The Edge of Vision. That book is about abstraction in photography, a topic that has been very prominent in recent conversations about the medium. Are these conversations—around the work of such photographers as Walead Beshty, Liz Deschenes, Mariah Robertson, Michele Abeles, and others who manipulate their materials—of interest to you?
BA: I mention the “gestural” aspect of my work because I often find that if I work with a palette of colors one day, the next day those colors won’t interest me. There’s a subconscious aspect driving the process—the work is expressing some sensitivity or mood that I’m not aware of—and that seems important.
Of course, the printing requires care and precision. I’m still making my own prints in the color darkroom, and I do think the prints in the ClampArt show jump off the wall, if I say so myself. Brian Clamp is a wizard with lighting, and that makes a big difference. I know some people think working in the darkroom is a bit pathetic these days, but I’m proud of those prints!
I’m thrilled that there’s a new interest in abstract photography. I’ve always thought of the lens as a paintbrush for making creative images. Over the years, I’ve often felt out of step with my peers: in the beginning people even told me color was for commercial work and black and white was for art! Luckily I didn’t listen.
I love smart, original, and visually compelling work: Mariah Robertson and Walead Beshty’s virtuoso photograms blow me away. How about Ellen Carey’s crumpled series; do you know those? They make me want to work without a camera—it’s so pure and direct. I show the mixed-media artists, Sarah Anne Johnson and Sam Falls, in my class, as well the rest of the Higher Pictures crew: Artie Vierkant, Jessica Eaton, Letha Wilson. I’m also interested in the idea of the printer being the medium. Wade Guyton, Gerhard Richter, and John Baldessari all had big shows last year, making inkjet prints without using a camera. I bet we’ll see more of that.
I’ve been making some abstract videos myself. I had an exhibition of them in 2011 at the Cornell Museum of Art. I’d love to make more, I’ve got lots of ideas, but it’s hard to find the time. Lately, I’ve been making some abstract images in the subway with a camera phone. Maybe they will see the light of day sometime—I’m not sure yet.
Aperture: Unlike some iterations of your Infinity series, the subjects in Film Noir are all human, are all seen full-length, and are often in outdoor locations. Can you speak about the decisions that led to these being the works’ defining characteristics?
BA: I mentioned before that Film Noir represents circling back to my first portfolio in the Infinity series which was in the style of horizontal “environmental portraits.” I always think in terms of portfolios, so once I’ve got an idea the variations tend to stay within a fairly close range.
I’m not sure how I started this series, but there’s a back story which brings in the subconscious again—that seems to be my theme right now. I was in a show at Robischon Gallery in Denver with Halim Al-Karim a few years ago. He’s an Iraqi refugee and dissident who also uses blur. His work is political and a powerful metaphor for his experience. On the airplane back from the opening, I wondered how I might create work that would reflect personal experience, the way he did. I recalled how I was halfway through my Apparition series before I realized I was making photographs of ghosts of old men and that my father had just died. I consider Apparition my most powerful work and believe that fact that the motivation was subconscious is a key to its power, its truth. I thought about how it might be worthwhile to make work about my mother’s death, but I never came up with any ideas and when I got home I soon forgot about it.
A short while later I began shooting figures in the landscape, in the style of my early work. As I went along the images kept getting darker and more mysterious, and I gradually developed the idea of having the portfolio relate to the Film Noir themes. As well as the films the writers Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett were very important to me as I came of age, and so, too, were Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre—I lump them together in my mind.
As with Apparition, it wasn’t until I was well into the project that it dawned on me that this was it—this was the work about my mother’s death that I had imagined on the airplane. My mother committed suicide when I was fourteen, and as one can imagine it turned my life upside down. I realized these dark images of solitary figures were self-portraits in a way, and represented the ideas and feelings I carried through adolescence into adulthood—the period when I was interested in film noir and existentialism. For many years I felt that I was alone, that my universe was darker and less defined than my peers, and that it existed somewhat in parallel to conventional reality—that truth and meaning were obscured, perhaps unattainable.
Bill Armstrong, Figure #70, 2003. Courtesy of the artist and ClampArt, New York.
Some people believe that the power behind art is communicated through the work if the work is true, that the viewer feels that power and internalizes it according to his or her own needs and consciousness. If that’s the case, then there’s no point in artists explaining themselves too much. In some ways I agree with this idea; at the same time, however, I often find that if I like art, I like it even better when I learn more about it. It’s a fine line. I doubt I’d write about this in my artist’s statement, but in an interview I feel it’s a bit different, more personal and informal. And of course it is important to me and doesn’t feel it should be a secret—it was well over forty years ago that my mother took her own life, yet the power of that event still exists within me. If I can transform any of that power into imagery that others can relate to, well, that seems like a good thing.
Aperture: Given your interest in spirituality and universality, do you have any religious beliefs or belief in God?
BA: Spirit was the title of my first show at ClampArt, and it referred to a whole range of ideas about spirits: nineteenth-century ghost photography, evil spirits of African masks, Bhuddism, Kandinsky. A philosophy professor I met at the opening suggested that my work was not really about spirituality but about spiritism. That was his word for the idea that I investigate a lot of different aspects of “spirit.” I think he was right.
I had an interesting experience the other day. Bill Hunt and I were talking about the spiritual aspects of blue. He asked me if I believed in God and when I hesitated, he said, “You believe in the subconscious.” It occurred to me that belief in the subconscious might be another way of saying God is within you. I had never thought of that before. I guess I’m still learning.
March 15, 2013
Rinko Kawauchi On Press – Ametsuchi
The presses were rolling in China earlier this month for Rinko Kawauchi’s forthcoming monograph Ametsuchi (Aperture, 2013), an eighty-page clothbound volume of the Japanese photographer’s latest work designed by Hans Gremmen.
Rinko Kawauchi has gained international recognition for her nuanced, lushly colored images that offer closely observed fragments of everyday life (see, for example, Illuminance, her 2011 Aperture monograph). In her latest work, Kawauchi shifts her attention from the micro to the macro—images of distant constellations and tiny figures lost within landscapes, as well as photographs of a traditional style of controlled-burn farming (yakihata) in which the cycles of cultivation and recovery span decades and generations.
Ametsuchi: Photographs by Rinko Kawauchi is coming soon.
Ametsuchi
$80.00
Untitled, from Illuminance
$2,500.00
Illuminance Limited-Edition Box Set
$1,800.00
Illuminance
$60.00
March 14, 2013
A Great Improvisation
Don Cherry and Manfred Eicher at Tonstudio Bauer in Ludwigsburg, Germany. Photograph by Roberto Masotti. © Robert Masotti, courtesy Haus der Kunst, Munich.
Installation view of ECM—A Cultural Archeology. Photogrph by Wilfied Petzi, courtesy of the Haus der Kunst, Munich.
Spread from ECM—A Cultural Archeology.
Keith Jarrett. Photograph by Roberto Masotti. © Roberto Masotti, courtesy of the Haus der Kunst, Munich.
Don Cherry. Photograph by Gérard Amsellem. © Gérard Amsellem, courtesy of the Haus der Kunst, Munich.
Spread from ECM—A Cultural Archeology.
ECM—A Cultural Anthology is the name of a multidisciplinary exhibition organized last year by Okwui Enwezor and Markus Müller for Münich’s Haus der Kunst as well as an engrossing new catalog documenting over four decades of history issuing from, inspired by, and surrounding the Münich-based Edition of Contemporary Music. Founded in 1969 by musician and producer Manfred Eicher, ECM’s name was different from the start. Not a “label” tagged onto a varied set of recordings but something much closer to a small literary press or publisher of artists’ books, like the ones the nearby Edition Hansjörg Mayer had been publishing in Stuttgart with artists like Dieter Roth, Emmett Williams, and Robert Filliou since 1963. Frequently these books captured the uncapturable—poems that couldn’t be read, performances and happenings that left only graphic traces or elliptical photographic documentation. Eicher’s ECM attempted the same with its live recordings and studio sessions. And, like Mayer’s books, ECM’s editioned events were meticulously produced, artistically challenging, often unfamiliar, and as far as possible from what catalog contributor Wolfgang Sandner describes as “cultural fast food.”
Nowhere was ECM’s dedication to creative nourishment more clear than when it released a ten-record box set of Keith Jarrett’s Sun Bear Concerts in 1978. The edition documented an entire cycle of improvised solo piano performances across five Japanese cities—a testament to sustained, meditative concentration. And while it was easy to see this achievement as heroic, I remember being particularly touched as I lingered over the liner booklet with photographs by Klaus Knaup and Akira Aimi, stopping at a double-page spread of a street sweeper shot from above. So much of ECM and Jarrett was in these images: the broom a kind of instrument and the sweeper its player, improvising a path through the graphic markings of the street unaware but subconsciously guided by the azimuth of telephone wiring above. Each image marks a beat in time, but, taken together, they became a micro-cinema, a flicker that preserved this fleeting, solitary, humble moment in the booklet’s pages. Sun Bear was my first ECM record. It was not my last.
View of ECM archive, as seen in the exhibition ECM—A Cultural Archeology. Photograph by Wilfied Petzi. Courtesy Haus der Kunst, Munich.
ECM’s first record was the Mal Waldron Trio’s Free at Last, and Enwezor devotes much of his essay to unpacking its complex network of influences, both historic and political. Historically, thirty years before ECM’s founding there was Blue Note, triggered by a migration of Europeans like founder Alfred Lion and label photographer Francis Wolff from Berlin to New York. These two, along with recording engineer Rudy van Gelder and graphic designer Reid Miles, established the label’s distinctive modern look, which drew on expressive wordplay and urban typographic vernacular with Miles’s covers; tightly-framed, often black-and-white portraits of musicians in Wolff’s photos; and van Gelder’s warm, up-close sound. ECM had a different perspective for a new generation of musicians. The migration was reversed, with American musicians traveling to Europe and Scandinavia to record. It was founded by Eicher, a musician and engineer with an artistic eye, who quickly hired the artist and designer Barbara Wojirsch, and, later, designers Dieter Rehm, Sascha Kleis, and Mayo Bucher to craft its look, which frequently pairs spare, International-style typography or Cy Twombly–like glyphs, runes, and expressive handwriting with images of what Eicher describes as “the inner landscape”: photographs of vast expanses like the sea or severe, distressed landscapes frequently absent of people. The aesthetic is strongly graphic, textural, cinematic, or sequential—these covers encourage listening and contemplation. Aurally, the landscape manifests itself with clear, pristine recordings that are variously described as luminous, transparent, open, and austere—Eicher’s signature sound. They act as one: the recording makes a room, the photograph a state of mind, the typography a human sense of organization or expression, the music a transformation, a transcendence, a freedom.
This last political value is the one most provocatively and persuasively explored by Enwezor and Müller’s exhibition, which staged ECM’s cultural history against the backdrop of other forms of artistic and formal dislocation and deconstruction in the 1960s. Enwezor reads Waldron’s title, Free at Last, through several lenses: freer forms of musical practice and production; free jazz itself, with its emphasis on the group and its explicit resistance to co-option by more mainstream musical culture; and finally, “the emancipatory processes set in motion by the Civil Rights Movement in the United States and the postcolonial and decolonization processes of the 1960s.” As Enwezor points out, Waldron’s title makes reference to Martin Luther King’s pivotal 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech, whose refrain is itself drawn from the music of African-American spirituals and set in motion through the metaphorical instrument of a pealing bell as freedom rings “from every city village and every hamlet, from every state and every city” until everyone can join hands and sing “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!” As King departed from his prepared remarks that day, this refrain, along with the speech’s titular image, were entirely improvised. When asked if free jazz had any political meaning to him in the 1960s, Eicher responds with another musical metaphor: “I felt at home in this music because it was in tune with my thinking—the way I thought about society and life.”
Installation view of ECM—A Cultural Archeology. Photograph by Wilfied Petzi. Courtesy Haus der Kunst, Munich.
Waldron’s liner notes give Enwezor’s essay its title, “Great Big Ears,” and suggest that listening, like looking at photographs, is a deeply empathic process, a response to the turmoil of the time and a method for remaining open-minded in the future. Music-making is a deeply social endeavor, about playing and listening, interaction and translation, call and response. And ECM’s orbit constitutes a sustained effort at not just music- but world-making over its forty-three years. Eicher encourages us to “think of our ears as eyes,” and the book begins with a visual overture of sorts, echoes of ECM’s many collaborators and participants. The book’s dozens of photographs begin with a young, wide-eyed Eicher at his desk. Flipping through them, we eavesdrop on pre-concert prep, studio hangouts, laughing musicians, the breeze in the trees, the idling hum of a bus, the fizzled fry of an old boombox, the pop of flashbulbs, and, finally, a double-page spread of a ping-pong match between pianist Keith Jarrett and Manfred Eicher—the genius solo improviser on one side, and the bootstrapping entrepreneur on the other. Smiling broadly, the two friends don’t seem so much in competition as perfectly in sync. Back and forth over decades, the photos testify silently to the music that remains.
Rob Giampietro is a writer and a principal at Project Projects, a design studio in New York. He teaches in the MFA graphic design program at the Rhode Island School of Design.
ECM—A Cultural Archeology was on view at the Haus der Kunst, Munich, from November 23, 2012, to February 10, 2013. The catalog of the exhibition is published by Prestel.
Cover of ECM—A Cultural Archeology.
March 12, 2013
Album Art
Paula Roush, Found Photo Foundation / FPF, 2007–2012. Courtesy of the artist and Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Siegen, Germany.
Manfred Pernice, 18 Nov, 2012. Courtesy of the artist and Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Siegen, Germany.
Batia Suter, Surface Series (Table Selection), 2010. Courtesy of the artist and Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Siegen, Germany.
Lia Perjovschi, Timeline on General Culture (detail), 1997–2006. Courtesy of the artist and Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Siegen, Germany.
Marianna Christofides, L'histoire d'histoire d'une histoire, 2012. Courtesy of the artist and Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Siegen, Germany.
Thea Djordjadze, Archäologie Politik Politik Archäologie Archäologie Politik Politik Archäologie Archäologie Politik Politik Archäologie, 2008. Courtesy of the artist and Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Siegen, Germany.
Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the German art historian and theoretician of Neoclassicism, believed that it was the concern of art to give expression to beauty. To express this concern he developed the concepts of “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur.” He applied these concepts to, of all things, the antique statue of Laocoön, a work of art that is neither noble nor quiet, but seems to absolutely explode with struggle, aggression, and despair. Aby Warburg noticed this discrepancy and it awakened in him a passion that lasted a lifetime. Warburg asked himself to what extent the things that we perceived in an image were merely the projection of our particular culturally determined convictions. For example, in Warburg’s view, Winckelmann projected his own ideals of beauty regarding classical antiquity onto the statue of Laocoön. Yet perhaps there might be universal pictorial structures, of physical and psychic origin, stored in our memories as “pre-concepts” or forms. The Greeks called such images mnemosyne [remembrances/memories]. Warburg began to search for such pictorial “pre-concepts,” which he termed “pathos formulas.”
Warburg began his search for these “pathos formulas” at exactly the right moment. Photography had become established and offered previously unimagined opportunities for comparing images. “Thanks to the resource of photography, the comparison of images can be further developed,” Warburg stated. As a means of refuting Winckelmann’s ideal of beauty, in the 1920s Warburg collected plates with photographs not only of works of art, but also of stamps, coins, and newspaper pictures. Warburg believed that art served as a means of overcoming traumatic experiences.
Cécile Hummel, Zurück-Blicken, 2012. Courtesy of the artist and Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Siegen, Germany.
Warburg’s plates, which he called the Bildatlas Mnemosyne [Mnemosyne Album], were groundbreaking in their treatment of images. They proved provocative both for art theory and for art itself, and are still stimulating today. The intensity with which young artists in particular attempt to emulate Warburg is amazing, and was vividly displayed in this exhibition, which explicitly references the famous scholar and researcher of images. The exhibition also demonstrates, however, that these twenty-three young artists often do not share Warburg’s view of photography as simply an auxiliary resource for pursuing concrete interests. For them, photography has value in and of itself and can stand alone. This can be dangerous: believing every picture has inherent meaning can easily lead to randomness and nostalgia. One only needs to conjure a gentle appearance of old age and the job is done.
What are these artists doing with their images? If you are Manfred Pernice, you construct a pedestal out of used crates to house a photograph of the first demonstration that took place in East Berlin on November 4, 1989. The artist originally bought it for eighteen Euros as a framed souvenir. Katalin Deér installs photographs in plaster and builds large blocks of them; Tobias Buche makes photos transparent by affixing them to walls of Plexiglas. These artists spatially extend their photographs, as does Alexandra Leykauf, who transfers a photograph of a Turkish tent into the third dimension and, in the process, creates a photographic tent. Images found in the archives of the Ullstein Publishing Company are confronted with texts written by Ulrike Kuschel. She writes Lenin Gives a Speech next to one photograph. But does it really depict Lenin? Sometimes the description corresponds to the photograph; sometimes they seem to contradict each other; sometimes one discovers absolutely no correlation between them, as in the case of Lenin. Confusion reigns.
These artists also use photographs as material for creating works of art. Thea Djordjadze unrolls a carpet on the floor. In an allusion to André Malraux’s Musée imaginaire, she spreads out upon it erotic photographs from India. A tableau, a picture, an installation is created. Other artists tell stories. Marianna Christofides projects two images side by side—flower sellers, a beach, palm branches, maps on a wall—while a female voice hovers “off-screen.” The photographs are mismatched, not associated with each other, and the narration is completely unrelated to anything else. This leaves space for our imagination to solve the puzzle.
Ulrike Kuschel, Bildbeschreibungen I and II, 2005/2006. Courtesy of the artist and Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Siegen, Germany.
Two works in the exhibition refer to Warburg directly. In their film, Ines Schaber and Stefan Pente attempt to grasp Warburg’s photos of the Pueblo Indian Snake Ritual from New Mexico, in part by taking pictures of themselves in front of his photographs. Elke Marhöfer’s silent film documents a trip to London, where she filmed the glass plates of Warburg’s Mnemosyne Album (the original plates have been lost). One thing becomes clear in this exhibition: in contrast to many works by younger artists, which often slip into arbitrariness or randomness, Warburg was concerned with essentials. Another fact emerges with great clarity: the search for the “pathos formula” is nowhere near complete.
Noemi Smolik is a critic living in Bonn, Germany, and Prague.
Translated from German by Alan Paddle.
The exhibition Dear Aby Warburg, What Can Be Done with Images? Dealing with Photographic Material was on view at the Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen, in Siegen, Germany, from December 2, 2012, to March 3, 2013. It is accompanied by a catalog published by Kehrer Verlag.
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