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CALIFORNIA FINE ART LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHY |
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I'm afraid we get a great deal of our exposure to art through
magazines and through slides and I think this is dreadful, this is
anti-art because art is a direct experience with something in the
world and photography is just a rumour, a kind of pornography of
art.
--CARL ANDRE, 1970
Stepping over Carl Andre's work, visitors to last year's Minimalism survey at
the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, soon came across three helpings
of art porn. First was a projection of slides taken in 1966 by Dan Graham for
his seminal Homes for America; then there was Mel Bochner's 36 Photographs and
12 Diagrams of the same year; and, finally, there were installation shots of
Robert Grosvenor's 1968 Haags Gemeentemuseum show. Graham used photography to
document minimal forms and serial arrangements in suburbia, and Bochner
employed the camera to fix any one arrangement of a constantly changing
sequence of wooden blocks. Grosvenor, by contrast, used the camera simply to
document his work. He was an old-school sculptor, building large structures
that intruded on the viewer's space. The Dutch installation shots were not
really his in the way that Graham's and Bochner's contributions were theirs.
Presumably included in the LA show because the sculptures themselves were too
big or too difficult to refabricate, the shots not surprisingly led us to wish
we could see the real thing. But if Graham's and Bochner's photographs have
suggested new directions for sculpture and photography alike, it is
Grosvenor's modest installation shots that somewhat unexpectedly strike a
chord with one strain of artistic practice today.
Consider, for example, Italian artist Giuseppe Gabellone's Untitled, 1999, a
photograph of a rough interior fitted with a grid of fluorescent lights. The
space is probably an unconverted warehouse, but we don't really examine the
architecture so much as the rollicking roller coaster of a sculpture that
fills it. A plywood ramp bends toward us and away, lurching up and tumbling
down, parallel to the floor at times, then tilting at precarious angles. Where
the wood catches the light from above full-on it is bleached to near white,
while its underside darkens at times to gray. The loops seem to defy gravity,
despite the fact that we can see the planks holding them up. And though the
material seems untreated and no effort was made to conceal the armatures, the
construction still looks as though it must have taken ages to finish. But once
it was complete, Gabellone set up his tripod, snapped the photograph, and
proceeded to take the plywood pieces apart.
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For anyone who derives pleasure from viewing sculpture this is art porn
indeed--but not a perversion so much as a tease. The sculptural imagination
speeds along the track. What would it have been like to walk around the
construction? The wood stretches to the walls so you would have had to crawl
to get under the side bends. What would you have seen from the other side of
the space? Would it have been possible to follow the loop without getting
confused? The tantalizing photograph raises these questions but keeps the
answers to itself. Staring at its dumb, flat plane, we can't even work out if
the track was continuous. Try. Pretty soon you'll get lost in the tangle.
Gabellone is one of a handful of artists today working out of the predicament
suggested by Grosvenor's 1968 photographs. If you can't ultimately have the
sculpture, could you not have just the photograph? Untitled answers this
question in the affirmative, but before thinking through its implications, we
should pause to recall earlier episodes in the ongoing relationship of
sculpture and photography. For instance, in the same year as Grosvenor's Dutch
show, Douglas Huebler moved away from his wood-and-Formica constructions,
instead using ballpoint-pen marks and fabric stickers to indicate the apexes
and edges of absent "sculptures" that he documented photographically.
Huebler's work was initially discussed in terms of dematerialization--the
image replacing the object--but it would be more compelling to understand it
in terms of a shift from conceiving space as physical bulk to thinking about
social space: Less than three years after he stopped building objects, he
embarked on a project to photograph everyone alive. In that intervening time,
meanwhile, Robert Smithson had made an insistently material sculpture, but one
most people would know only through images. His Spiral Jetty, 1970, would lead
the critic Craig Owens to draw important new conclusions about the clash
between sculpture and photography in his 1979 essay "Earthwords." For Owens,
Spiral Jetty confounded the primacy of direct experience that Carl Andre, as
quoted above, had valued above all else. The point, after all, was not that we
would actually get ourselves to Utah. Rather, it was that we wouldn't.
Photography necessarily intrudes in our encounter with sculpture but so, too,
in our encounter with everything else. As Owens concluded: "Smithson ...
accomplishes a radical dislocation of the notion of point-of-view, which is no
longer a function of physical position, but of the mode (photographic,
cinematic, textual) of confrontation with the work of art."
Whatever one thinks of the different interpretations of the relationship of
sculpture and photography in the late 1960s, current practices demand new
readings. Alongside Gabellone we find artists as diverse as Simon
Starling Star·ling (stär
l
ng), Sir Ernest
1866-1927.
British physiologist. With Sir William Bayliss he discovered (1902) the
hormone secretin.
, Shirley Tse, Armando Andrade Tudela Tudela (t
thā`lä), town (1990 pop. 27,063), Navarre prov., N
Spain, in Navarra, on the Ebro River. The surrounding fertile region produces
vegetables, fruit, grapes, and olives. There are sugar refineries and varied
manufactures., Damian Ortega, and the team of Adam Dade and Sonya
Hanney all using sculpture and photography together. Unlike Huebler, these
artists are not replacing the laborious activity of fabrication with a hastier
form of marking and documenting, or moving from objects and matter to social
space. Nor should a consideration of their practices imply a progressive
development from sculpture to photography: They all continue to make and show
actual objects. And unlike Owens's Smithson, they aren't exactly interested in
the way experience is mediated by photography and text per se--a condition
that is now taken for granted from the start. Instead, photography and
sculpture have entered a more complex phase of their relationship, folding
over each other, reversing positions, flipping back and forth, the one
becoming the other.
One of the ways to explore the differences between these artists' works might
be to think about the way photography's inherent characteristics open up onto
various photo-sculptural practices. The indexical nature of analog photography
has long been understood as crucial to its difference from other media, and
this property clearly inflects the work of James Casebere and Thomas Demand.
Their photographs present meticulously constructed replicas of spaces or
objects, and it is precisely the medium's indexicality that momentarily
convinces us we are looking at real things, not replicas. For the critic
George Baker, this is a "truly minor perversion," and I am certainly more
interested in those artists who are thinking less about photography in terms
of its properties as a medium and more in terms of its facilities as a tool or
device: Photography is utterly mobile, remarkably fast, and can document
things that were once present but are no longer there. All of these
characteristics seem obvious, but to varying degrees they have helped to
inspire and facilitate unexpected new tendencies in sculpture.
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Returning to Gabellone's Untitled, we can see how it exploits photography's
documentary power. The surprise of the work is that it witnesses a real
sculpture that was once present but no longer is. Simon Starling uses
photography in a related manner, but for him the object remains alongside
photographs that sometimes show the previous locations it occupied. To take
one example, for Burn Time, 2001, Starling constructed a small wooden model of
a building in Bremen, Germany, that had been converted from a prison into a
museum dedicated to the Bauhaus designer Wilhelm Wagenfeld. Starling's model
museum was exhibited at Camden Arts Centre in London next to a stove fashioned
of bricks from the front steps of the institution. At the opening, eggs were
cooked on the stove in Wagenfeld egg coddlers, fueled by wood hacked off the
model building. These eggs had been laid inside the model museum when it had
been situated on a chicken farm in Scotland. Photographs in the Camden
catalogue showed the object during its former life as a henhouse. While these
images in some ways undercut the primacy of the gallery experience by
implicating the model in a more expansive narrative than was readily
appreciable in the exhibition, they also open the work up to our imagination.
Some were taken with a wide-angle lens, and in them the model looks like a
life-size building, if somewhat out of place in the Scottish landscape, with
hens looming like monstrous giants beside it.
At other times, Starling has used photography to inscribe his sculptural
projects within a circuit of personal and global economies and ecologies. One
of the most reflexive examples of this process took place at FRAC
Languedoc Languedoc (läNgdôk`), region and former
province, S France, bounded by the foot of the Pyrenees, the upper Garonne
River, the Auvergne Mts., the Rhône, and the Mediterranean. It comprises the
departments of Aude, Gard, Hérault, Lozère, and Pyrénées Orientales.-Roussillon Roussillon (rsēyôN`), small region and former province, S France,
bordering on Spain along the Pyrenees and on the Mediterranean. It is now
roughly coextensive with Pyrénées-Orientales dept. Perpignan is the historical
capital. in Montpellier. Starling learned that the institution's
catalogues were printed in Romania, where paper, ink, and other production
costs were lower than in France. He discovered, in other words, that in their
very materiality the photographs that would record his sculptural project
would bear witness to the uneven economies of Europe. So as not to silence the
witness, the production process of the catalogue became the subject of the
project. Starling traveled to Romania and took photographs that would appear
in the cataiogue. Once printed, they were presented back in Montpellier in
uncollated stacks. The stacks of photographs thus constituted his finished
sculpture; but since he had also refashioned the gallery space to resemble the
Romanian printing works, they simultaneously had the character of unprocessed
materials on a factory floor.
Starling not only makes use of photography's documentary capabilities but also
exploits its mobility. In Work Made-Ready, Les Baux de Provence (Mountain
Bike), 2000, he rode his bike from Britain to a mine in France where he
collected bauxite later used to fabricate a replica of the bike. He took along
his camera on the journey and later published his photographs of the mine. The
idea here is that photographs show the source of the natural matter used to
make the sculpture. Flip this idea around and we're back to Gabellone, who in
the series of works made after Untitled, 1999, took sculptures fabricated from
inorganic materials outdoors and used photography to record their temporary
locales. Made indoors, the Styrofoam blue flowers of Untitled, 2002, were
photographed on roadsides in southwest Italy. At first, the locations seem
utterly at odds with the objects. They are scrubby settings, where instead of
flowers there's evidence of construction work, half-finished buildings, and
makeshift, rusted iron fencing. Gabellone's flowers dominate the images,
preposterously. But look at them more, and they seem subtly in tune with their
surroundings. Though they roughly resemble lilies, no pains were taken to make
them look like real flowers, let alone fake ones, since different floral
blossoms protrude from each crude stick-stem; in one photograph they even rest
on platforms. However well carved, the Styrofoam is as insistently industrial
as the setting.
Like Gabellone, Shirley Tse has periodically taken her sculptures for a walk.
After a show in Los Angeles, she deinstalled her large, hanging work She's Got
That Air, 1997, and cut up its soft plastic cubes. She then took these pieces
to the sand dunes in Death Valley, where she let them fall like tumbleweeds
and photographed them crumpled against the soft ripples of sand. Her next
series of photographs, "Not Exactly A ...," was also made in 1998 in another
inhospitable setting, this time an icy Canadian landscape. Here the sculpture
was a pink plastic biomorphic form, its fuchsia brightness shattering the
pale, frozen ground. A year later, Tse moved from LA to Chicago and along the
way took various photographs of a set of electric-blue sculptures made of
Bubble Wrap. Some were shot up close in dramatic national parks so they seem
massive, forming terrains that rhyme with the jagged mountains behind. In
another photograph, the objects were set along a drab highway like abandoned
hitchhikers.
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If Gabellone's work might ridicule artificial attempts to prettify industrial
and urban spaces with weakly decorative flower beds, it is hard not to surmise
that Tse's images are playing with the legacy of Earthworks. Perhaps Tse's
photographs and the smallish sculptures they picture deflate the
gigantism cerebral gigantism gigantism in the absence of
increased levels of growth hormone, attributed to a cerebral defect; infants
are large, and accelerated growth continues for the first 4 or 5 years, the
rate being normal thereafter. The hands and feet are large, the head large and
dolichocephalic, the eyes have an antimongoloid slant, with hypertelorism. The
child is clumsy, and mental retardation of varying degree is usually present. of
Michael Heizer's work, while the intrusion of industrial materials into the
"natural" environment pokes fun at James Turrell's craters-and-stars
transcendentalism
transcendentalism, American literary and philosophical movement
transcendentalism (trăn'sĕndĕn`təlĭzəm) [Lat.,=overpassing],
in literature, philosophical and literary movement that flourished in New
England from about 1836 to 1860.. But something about the spirit of
these photographs makes me think that such a critical position is not entirely
the point. I'd like to imagine instead that Tse is on a strange quest to find
out where these pink and blue bodies can be at home, and, ironically, that may
be where they would seem most out of place. If in cities plastic is so
ubiquitous as to be invisible, when caught by the camera in the great outdoors
it can appear surprising once again; it can breathe.
Like Starling, Tse and Gabellone rely on the idea of photographic mobility,
and in suggesting different formulations of the relationship between sculpture
and photography, they invoke art-historical precedents somewhat less canonical
than the work of Graham, Bochner, Huebler, and Smithson mentioned above. While
the industrial materiality and floral iconography in Gabellone's photographs
recall Michelangelo Pistoletto's 1965 cardboard Rosa bruciata (Burnt Rose),
the variable locations of the photographs suggest the trip taken by Palla di
giornali (Ball of Newspapers), 1966, the huge ball of compressed newspaper
that Pistoletto rolled through the streets of Turin, a journey captured in Ugo
Nespolo's film. And in connection with Tse's work, consider Eleanor Antin's
"100 BOOTS," 1971-73, and think of it now not as a series of postcards but as
a roving sculpture that could be repositioned in different locations. After
all, the first photograph, 100 BOOTS Facing the Sea, 1971, shows an
arrangement of identical units in a line, reworking one of the most famous (anti)compositional
modes of 1960s sculpture (Andre's Lever, 1966). Antin's sculpture, rearranged
and resituated for each new photograph, could occupy the deserted outdoor
spaces of Earthworks and the vernacular urban space of the supermarket, the
amusement park and the museum.
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The generative strategy behind Gabellone's and Tse's projects (transport the
object outside, position it, and take its photo) can be twisted to bring us to
yet another section of the roller coaster linking sculpture and photography:
Take the camera out, find an object, and declare it sculpture through the
process of photography. This idea immediately calls to mind some of Gabriel
Orozco's photographs, not those for which he sets up an arrangement of objects
but those where he chances on them. The headless huddle of goats pictured in
Common Dream, 1996, must have seemed amazing as Orozco passed, a kind of found
Louise Bourgeois or Dorothea Tanning. An earlier point of origin for this
activity would be Brassai's "Sculptures Involontaires" of 1933. Brassai found
rolled ticket stubs, hand-worn slips of soap, and squeezed-out blobs of
toothpaste, placed each object on glass, and photographed them extremely
close-up with dramatic, oblique lighting. The camera obliterated the memory of
the objects' tiny size, making everyday throwaway bits and pieces loom like
strange forms from outer space.
If Brassai's photographs fashioned futuristic sculpture from the wasted
objects of the present, the opposite is now often the case: Sculptors seem to
be fascinated with photographing obsolete objects in situations recalling
old-fashioned sculptural modes far removed from their own object-making
practice. In some of the most interesting photographs in Richard Wentworth's
ongoing series "Making Do and Getting By," cast-off planks and bricks serve
new functions as makeshift steps or parking-space savers. While it's true that
all the photographs in this series, begun in 1987, show obsolete objects put
to good use, in these particular examples the arrangements oddly resemble the
modernist sculpture of Anthony Caro. In a similar vein, the young Peruvian
artist Armando Andrade Tudela has taken a series of photographs on roadsides
in his country showing the giant steel structures once used to display massive
advertisements. The structures now seem lonely on the highway, like
flesh-picked skeletons but also like the Constructivist sculpture of long ago.
The operative idea here is that a past form of sculpture--be it Surrealist,
Constructivist, or modernist--is found or "re-created" through the practice of
photography alone.
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A different understanding of photography's temporal gymnastics informs another
twist in recent photo-sculptural work, one that capitalizes on the camera's
ability to evoke not an era but an instant. Peter Fischli and David Weiss set
the bar in this regard with their series of photographs, Stiller Nachmittag,
Equilibres" (Quiet Afternoon, Equilibrium), 1984-85, which starred carefully
balanced arrangements of cutlery and produce. Half the humor of these
photographs derives from their familiarity: Who doesn't play with their food
and balance spoons on their forks? But the other half owes to our sheer
amazement that the artists managed to get their hands out of the photo before
the construction collapsed. Fischli and Weiss's photographs find a kind of
progeny in the temporary furniture constructions of Mexican Damian Ortega and
the British duo Adam Dade and Sonya Hanney. Their arrangements are never as
precarious as their predecessors', but their photographs nonetheless emphasize
the temporary, and, in the latter case, furtive character of the sculptures.
In his "Puentes y Presas (Autoconstruccion)" (Bridges and Dams
[Self-Construction]) series of 1997, Ortega reassembled all of the chairs and
cupboards in his apartment into structures based on architectural forms such
as the arch. The images recall '50s sculptural assemblages made using
discarded industrial objects, but where the earlier artists permanently
recuperated detritus into artworks, here the chairs resumed their everyday
functions after Ortega's photographs.
For the first work in Dade and Hanney's "Stacked Hotel Room" series of
1998-2002, the pair checked into a hotel in Rhodes and rearranged the entire
contents of their room (beds, fans, sheets, toilet-paper rolls) into a
compact, rectangular block. They have built nine similar constructions since.
On each occasion, they pretend to be "normal" hotel guests, and before leaving
they return their room to the state in which they found it. No one but them
knows how the rooms were used. The initial guilty pleasure of these works
derives from the secrecy and audacity of the action to which the photographs
bear witness. Looking at them, we feel a bit complicit. But the real power of
the series comes from the comparisons we make between these images and other
kinds of rearrangements, whether by a coke-crazed rock band or a lusty couple
on a dirty weekend. If these mental images resemble a kind of scatter art,
Dade and Hanney's constructions recall Minimalism. Their temporary
rearrangements are ultimately less brazen than utterly and compulsively
polite. So, too, are Ortega's constructions, which are clearly and carefully
planned and as neat as the rest of the untouched furniture behind them.
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Judging from the works I have discussed, we can infer that the artists in
question share some skepticism toward the trend of gigantic sculpture by the
likes of Olafur Eliasson, Anish Kapoor, and Richard Serra, which James Meyer
recently lamented has replaced the issue of scale with sheer size. Some of the
artists under consideration here retrieve scale through photography--Tse's
photographs, for instance, endow small sculptural objects with great scale
through cropping and framing. Some deflate size--in Tudela's photos, massive
steel structures appear smallish. By exchanging or accompanying real sculpture
with an image, all of these artists to some extent question the very validity
of the physical encounter, raising the question as to why it should still be
critical. But they do not refuse the physical encounter tout court, as other
sculptors working more directly with social and institutional space have done.
Rather, in their photographs, the traditional kinaesthetic experience of
sculptural viewing is simultaneously celebrated and withheld.
That said, it is also fascinating to consider how these artists' encounters
with photography inform the continued production of their objects. Gabellone,
for instance, has gone from making images of objects to objects of images: In
the 2003 Venice Biennale, he exhibited low reliefs made of polyurethane foam.
These were three-dimensional renditions of Japanese prints, famously important
in the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century art for their flatness.
Since making photographs of temporary constructions, Ortega has used
photography as a kind of sketchbook. In the future, he plans to ship a Beetle
from his home in Mexico back to Germany and bury it upside down outside
Volkswagen headquarters in Wolfsburg. To see what this might look like he has
already produced a photographic mock-up in which wheels protrude from the
ground. Tse continues to show groupings of plastic sculptural works, but when
installed, many seem to offer photographic viewpoints. Polymathicstyrene,
1999-2000, for instance, is a wall-mounted, hip-high shelf sculpture with
various diagonal extrusions routed into its horizontal top plane; when one
looks down at this surface from a standing position, these patterns recall
aerial photography (and, it could even be said, bring to mind another early
rendezvous between sculpture and photography, Man Ray's image of Duchamp's
Large Glass, titled Dust Breeding, 1920, but sometimes referred to as view
from an aeroplane).
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Tse meanwhile has questioned the very basis of the distinction between images
and objects, noting that her Ilfochromes are printed on polyester backing and
are polymer coated. This allows her to stress that since her medium is
consistently plastic, her work transcends more traditional categories like
photography and sculpture altogether. And so we get to the last twist--or
rather flip--in the tale, whereby the artist conceives of the photograph not
as an image of sculpture but as sculpture itself. Though not exactly new
(think of Bochner's Surface Dis/Tension, 1968, or Gordon Matta-Clark's
Photo-Fry of the following year), this idea is particularly compelling now,
when digitalization has changed the way we think about photographic
materiality--having wrested the image from its basis in matter. Those artists
who have most famously exploited digital procedures have produced images as
inflated as the large-scale installations that frustrate Meyer. For many other
critics, the "Struffsky" phenomenon is part and parcel of the spectacular
drift of recent art (see, for instance, Alexander Alberro's account of Gursky
in these pages). By contrast, the photographs by the artists discussed here,
though by no means snapshots, certainly do not approach the grand scale of
nineteenth-century history paintings. But the point, in fact, is not so much
their actual size as their materiality, and for these artists, the engagement
with sculpture has fostered a keen sensitivity to the material character of
their photographs. Starling's work once again is exemplary here. For a recent
show in Barcelona, he produced photographs with an outmoded platinum-based
process used mainly from its invention in 1873 until 1920. Yet this was no
romantic return to an obsolete technology, pace Chuck Close's daguerreotypes.
Pursuing a rigorous conceptual "circuit," Starling lit his photographs with
bulbs (themselves the "sculptures" in the show) that were powered by a
generator also using platinum. So the photographs were connected to the
sculptures through an emphasis on a constant and shared materiality. In his
next show, held in Basel, he rephotographed a 1910 image of a lead mine in
Scotland and printed it, again using the platinum procedure. The platinum he
used this time was mined in South Africa, and the other objects in the show
were reflections on the fact that it took one ton of ore and huge amounts of
labor to produce enough platinum for the prints. Sculpture and photography
emerge now not as foes--the one criticizing and supplanting the other--but as
partners, both refusing transcendence, both rooted in matter, which is to say,
rooted in the economic and geographic reality of our world.
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Mark Godfrey teaches at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College
London,
