And I'd have to agree with Schama that this is what modern art should be about (btw, I think that last paragraph also actually delineates quite clearly for me the shortcomings of the Burtynsky work).Trouble in paradise
"How do you like your contemporary art? A quick hit of juicy mischief, a larky take on mortality, binful of bluebottles, pocketful of glitter, everything you never wanted to know and more about the artist's entrails? Right then, give Anselm Kiefer a very wide berth - because, as the show about to open at White Cube, London, will confirm, he doesn't do droll, he does the big embarrassing stuff, the stuff that matters: the epic slaughters of the world, the incineration of the planet, apocalypse then, apocalypse often; the fragile endurance of the sacred amid the cauterised ruins of the earth......Much of Kiefer's art represents a resistance to this inhuman virtualisation of memory; its lazy democracy of significance, its translation into weightless impressions. The opposing pole from that alt/delete disposability is to make history obstinately material, laid down in dense, sedimentary deposits that demand patient, rugged excavation. Kiefer's work burrows away at time, and what it exposes also makes visible the painful toil of the dig, skinned knuckles, barked shins and all....
For visual drama that (I guarantee) will haunt your dreams, there's no one alive to beat Anselm Kiefer. This is because, along with being a philosopher-poet, he also happens to be a craftsman of phenomenal power and versatility.
Dazzling, nostalgically psychedelic shots of colour. Beneath the verse from Isaiah that speaks of heavenly mercy, "Rorate coeli desuper et nubes pluant" (Drop down ye dew and let the clouds rain upon the just), Kiefer has planted a field of blazing, flamingo-tinted poppies. But the mercy is not unqualified; the flowers are marshalled along perspectival lines all the way to a horizon that is built from raised skeins of greenish-black paint, the corrupted hues of chemical pollution. (Evidently we're not in Monet's picnic country of Les Coquelicots.) Kiefer's poppies with their black faces can be read interchangeably as columns of warriors or the floral memorials of their fiery entombment. And the petals of the middle distance suggest the flares of combat as much as a field of flowers....
This is as good, I think, as art ever gets: mystery and matter delivered in a rush of poetic illumination. That Kiefer's work happens to engage with almost everything that weighs upon us in our tortured age - the fate of the earth, the closeness of calamity, the desperate possibility of regeneration amid the charred and blasted ruins - and that it does so without the hobnailed tread of pedestrian polemics, is just one of the many marvels for which we have to thank, yet again, this most indefatigable of modern magi."
“You should probably look at the ensuing errr... "discussion" yourself (and if you want to comment, do it over there); for me, it was interesting (and sad atthe same time) to see how many people would either write "fantastic" or something like "just predictable liberal dogma". Are there any nuanced opinions left?”was at best rather premature
…I agree with everyone who finds work that's purely agitprop to be uninteresting. If the only thing going on in this work was a condemnation of industry, or capitalism, or humans, it would be a big yawn for me. Whether or not i agreed. But I see more going on. For one thing, the work is pretty. The graphic forms, the almost fractal looking repetition, the interplay of detail and textures at different scales, are all mesmerizing. There's a kind of terrible beauty. It's much like the experience of looking at New York City from an airplane or a high window. The scale of it is at the same time breathtaking and horrifying. It stands simultaneously as a monument to dozens of things that are admirable and regretable about our species.It doesn't offer the viewer any obvious explanations or answers. If it was Chris's intention to create simple propaganda, then I think he failed beautifully…
…I think art, if done well, can reach into a deeper and more moving place than the usual arguments can (numbers, statistics, profit margins, doom and gloom reports, etc.). I'm not saying my work has that kind of power by itself, but maybe it might contribute something along with all the other voices that are calling for a paradigm shift. I consider myself as being like an alcoholic in a family of alcoholics, and my photographs are saying "look at the huge pile of bottles in the corner, guys, those are ours." Whatever solution there is to it all, I'm sure not smart enough or educated enough to know what it should be. But I do feel an urge to stand up and at least say "we need to have a talk."…
..The mechanical reproduction in Evans' work magnified into the mega-reproduction in for example Gursky, also in your own pictures of waste, is now rendered so big, you can't see it for what it is as individual units, only as the idea expressed in the image. It's an interesting comment on the relation of an idea to its sublime reality, one which does not let itself be empiricially grasped but for your formation of it into a unified concept. Who, for example, can "see" the national debt in terms of what all those dollar bills look like? Can we see the "tragedy of the commons" in one of us buying a Hummer and how that contributes to an overall picture of waste and environmental catastrophe? These pictures conceptualize that in a very interesting way, and make for a very powerful statement….
…Consumption is a multifaceted problem, which has at its heart the belief in personal right over wider responsability. You are basically asking people to question a belief system. It isn't as if people don't know the problem exists. This interpretation and personal questioning of a personal paradigm is exactly what great art can do - it forces the viewer inwards and outwards at the same time, it can make connections between elements that the viewer has not thought of, it can be 'universal' - in the same way that the Guernica has become a universal image that people STILL are affected by when they see it. By allowing viewers to 'play' with the elements of an image and its meaning, you permit the opportunity for wider connections to be made than you originally thought of - the scope of the work becomes greater with each viewing, if you like….
"The beautiful hills of Tuscany, the marvelous historical treasures of Florence-the stuff of travel dreams. Gabriele Basilico shows us another aspect of Italy-the suburban sprawl and its highways, single-family homes, store houses, shopping malls, office buildings, sheds, and workshops. His crisp, analytical photographs delve into the fragmented, cluttered structures relentlessly expanding across much of his native country. As a whole, they coalesce into a portrait of Italy today and the conflicts that have shaped it: traditional agricultural society clashing with modern industrial culture, the transformation of social and urban structures by ever increasing and accelerating mass transit, the emergence of new ways of living and building amidst the indifference of political and architectural elites. "If we look carefully at the genealogy of constructions that Basilico has captured, the new urban territories of Italy seem to be the end product of thousands of little, confused tremors in space.""-Stefano Boeri
Marco Polo and the aging Kublai Khan. Polo weaves fantastical tales of all the cities he has visited in his travels for the ailing emperor: cities and desire, cities and memory, cities and signs, hidden cities, cities and eyes - travelling back and forth through history as well as through different cities - though it eventually becomes clear that all the tales are really about one city and every city."Your gaze scans the streets as if they were written pages: the city says everything you must think, makes you repeat her discourse, and while you believe you're visiting Tamara you are only recording the names with which she defines herself and all her parts. However the city may really be, beneath this thick coating of signs, whatever it may contain or conceal, you leave Tamara without having discovered it. Outside, the land stretches, empty, to the horizon; the sky opens, with speeding clouds."
Cities & Signs 1
"If on arriving at Trude I had not read the city's name written in big letters, I would have thought I was landing at the same airport from which I had taken off. The suburbs they drove me through were no different from the others, with the same little greenish and yellowish houses. Following the same signs we swung around the same flower beds in the same squares. The downtown streets displayed goods, packages, signs that had not changed at all. This was the first time I had come to Trude, but I already knew the hotel where I happened to be lodged; I had already heard and spoken my dialogues with the buyers and sellers of hardware; I had ended other days identically, looking through the same goblets at the same swaying navels. Why come to Trude? I asked myself. And I already wanted to leave. "You can resume your flight whenever you like," they said to me, "but you will arrive at another Trude, absolutely the same, detail by detail. The world is covered by a sole Trude which does not begin and does not end. Only the name of the airport changes.""
Continuous Cities 2
"Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased. "Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it. Or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little" "
From the publishers blurb on Stems: "In 1994, suffering from aching knees and painfully concerned about it, Lee Friedlander decided to prepare himself for a sedentary life. He began to pursue the still life as a possibility and maybe a way of photographic life—a dramatic shift for a man who has spent his life photographing on the street, …anywhere but sitting down. He tried a variety of subjects with a few good results, but nothing stood out until he began to look at the fresh flowers that his wife Maria placed around their home in cut–glass vases. But nevermind the flowers. True to Friedlander's style, he very quickly found himself most interested in the stems. During the months of February, May, June and December of 1994, he focused his lens on wild arrays of stems and the optical splendor produced by light refracting through the glass vases that contained them."
(1900's photograph of the Tempio di Vesta in Rome)
(I like this sort of proto-urban topographics night shot from the 40's)
As I went through the auctions I realised there were certain things that interested me. First, this wasn't all just what you might call vernacular photography - family snapshots and the like. There was also plenty of work from professionals of one sort or another across the decades. As well, despite what the foretellers of doom predict about the overwhelming flood of digital photography, it was a little reassuring to see that there seemed to be as much bad photography produced in the 19th and 20th century as there is today. This despite the fact that for much of this time photography was a rather cumbersome pursuit, often utilizing toxic chemicals, and also comparatively expensive, yet there seems to have been no shortage of really really awful photography.
(My all time favourite purchase so far the "10 Famous Marshals of the People's Liberation Army" accordion style book - what a great example of Communist kitsch meets Becher-like typologies)
...Eerie, and yet you are drawn to just such places. How do you explain this attraction?
I have an approach/avoidance reaction to them. Sometimes I find them seductive, sometimes repulsive, but mostly I have mixed feelings. Perhaps it would be best to say I‘m drawn to visual and ideological contradictions and deceptions. I‘m fascinated by boundaries that are more conceptual than real, by ambiguous messages, by things that don‘t make sense, by bad logic. It is strange how frequently things aren‘t quite what they‘re cracked up to be ? how often pictures of exotic places are unconvincing, how often luxury resorts resemble psychiatric hospitals and how often psychiatric hospitals look like health spas. The picture of a blackboard with a diagram of arrows going in two directions (opposite) sums it up for me. Is it a sketch for a bizarre philosophy of life?...
Sometimes it seems as though you are more interested in small details than in the big picture.
I‘m intrigued by architectural details and hardware. It‘s strange, but I‘ve never seen an electrical outlet that is level. There are people travelling around in spaceships but no one can properly install an outlet. Some people might find this consoling but I find it disturbing. Also I‘m acutely aware of things like surveillance cameras, ‘No Exit’ signs, fire alarms and grimy stains around light switches. Sometimes objects look pathological, sometimes not. It often seems as if someone could be shouting at me from the other side of the air vent. And why do heating units so often seem to be keeping an eye on things? They have peculiar human attributes ? they seem to want to join in rather than just sit there. Things like that amuse me: outlets, exhaust grates and office paraphernalia that look like minimalist sculpture. Sometimes the hardware speaks for itself; but sometimes it functions as a metaphor for something else. Every room is a conceptual piece, an installation in real time.
Prefix Photo is along similar lines - more words (though plenty of photos) - almost as good as Blindspot, but it only seems to come out a couple of times a year. The essays are often quite interesting and sometimes head off at unexpected tangents.
Parc de Sceaux, mars, 7 h. matin 1925 Tavern, the Lapin Agile, rue des Saules 1926Atget, pointing
As a way of beginning, one might compare the art of photography to the act of pointing. All of us, even the best-mannered of us, occasionally point, and it must be true that some of us point to more interesting facts, events, circumstances, and configurations than others. It is not difficult to imagine a person-a mute Virgil of the corporeal world-who might elevate the act of pointing to a creative plane, a person who would lead us through the fields and streets and indicate a sequence of phenomena and aspects that would be beautiful, humorous, morally instructive, cleverly ordered, mysterious, or astonishing, once brought to our attention, but that had been unseen before, or seen dumbly, without comprehension. This talented practitioner of the new discipline (the discipline a cross, perhaps, between theater and criticism) would perform with a special grace, sense of timing, narrative sweep, and wit, thus endowing the act not merely with intelligence, but with that quality of formal rigor that identifies a work of art, so that we would be uncertain, when remembering the adventure of the tour, how much of our pleasure and sense of enlargement had come from the things pointed to and how much from the pattern created by the pointer...
To note the similarity between photography and pointing seems to me useful. Surely the best of photographers have been first of all pointers-men and women whose work says: I call your attention to this pyramid, face, battlefield, pattern of nature, ephemeral juxtaposition...
In his early work, Atget, like most intelligent beginners, tried many things. Many of his early pictures attempt a direct reportage of ephemeral contemporary life: groups of people at workor play, the bustle of the street, events of topical interest, etc. Most of these pictures seem merely circumstantial, and insufficiently formed, but a few succeed very well. These successes, to a photographer of appropriate temperament, would have been adequate encouragement; this line of exploration could only have been profitably pursued, preferably with one of the splendid new hand cameras rather than the ponderous and refractory stand camera that Atget used. There was, however, an opposing strain in Atget's early work which-we must assume-pleased him more. These pictures are still, simple and poised, and concern themselves not with reportage but with history. Very early in his career Atget stopped trying to catch the world unaware....
...The intensity of Atget's attention might be measured by the frequency with which he returned to certain families of subject matter. He loved dooryards, with their climbing vines, window boxes, caged canaries, and worn stone doorsteps; and courts with neighborhood wells in them, immemorial centers of sociability, news, and contention. Atget's pictures describe such places with a sharp but tactful scrutiny. They define a meeting ground between domestic and civil life, the innermost plane of the private person's public face.
There is also a useful bio with a list of his books here"We are two photographers on the same days, in the same places taking different things in very different ways... There is a crystalline clarity in Terri's color, the particularity of her focus, her embrace of the beautiful. Far from random stuff. I, though, am the collector of clues, with a prejudice toward paths and borders, a lookout for the stones that have already been turned..."
From a short article: "The most impressive images by far are Esser's cityscapes, many of which depict small French riverside towns. In Macon, a strip of modest buildings along a riverbank is reflected upside down in the greenish water, as it might be in a 17th-century landscape painting or an early tourist photograph. In Gien, an ancient stone bridge arches toward a stand of houses; behind them, a turreted castle looms. These antique-looking scenes are especially beautiful: the sky glows with a golden, pinkish light, and the old stone buildings practically pulse with harmonious tones of gold, rose and white. Yet Esser also makes them anthropologically fascinating: the resolution is so clear and exact that it's possible to discern cars, read signs and even peer into windows--making for a delicious confusion between the town's multilayered, modern-day presence and the photograph's old-fashioned look".
