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26 Apr 2013
Reviews

Bath Abbey’s Odyssey into art

Patrick Haines, 'Perennial', 2009

Patrick Haines, ‘Perennial’, 2009


On until 6th May, Bath Abbey is hosting 7 works by contemporary artists under the heading ‘Odyssey: A Long Journey in Which Many Things Happen’. 7 pieces, on paper, doesn’t quite seem to add up to an odyssey, but surprisingly, such is their thoughtful placement in and interconnection with the abbey’s spaces that it feels expansive in the flesh: an opportunity to soak up the resonances of carved or pictured forms in the multi-level languages of ancient and modern.

In fact, such close attention is paid to the siting of the works, that the dialogue between church and art becomes quite a lively one – which is unusual when the context for contemporary work is more often than not a white cube, resistant or even hostile to any community, let alone one with gargoyles and rood screens. So David Mach’s Jacob’s Ladder, 2010, has a conversation with the stained glass window above it showing the ranked descendants of Jesse (as well as the famous sculpted ladders outside at the west entrance), and Damien Hirst’s Saint Bartholomew Exquisite Pain, 2006, is in a chapel dedicated to the martyr St Alphege. If the text alongside the work were overlooked in raising such connections, visitors may well find conversation is literally generated by the vergers or other staff present, whose engagement is a delight.

What seems most rewarding of all, however, is the chance to quietly discover one’s own relation to the works and in this case, for me, the three pieces by Patrick Haines steal the show. Steal the soul might be a more apt phrase. Perennial, 2009 (above), is a 12-foot disconcertingly spindly sculpture of a giant hogweed. With its roots bracing against the bare floor, resisting earth-bound anchorage, it has all the menace of a triffid-like presence (warranted, in fact, by hogweed’s extreme toxicity in real life), until you notice the goldfinch curled and encrusted at its ground-level root ball. It has the red marking, as well as a thorn in its gold beak, a relic of and sacrifice with Christ’s death on the cross. It is so mute, so poignant, that on kneeling at the altar rail to get a closer look, one can’t help being drawn into its story, its passing. Similar smallness is felt in both Grounded, 2013 and Chapel Flight, 2013, where a dragonfly on a service book and a miniature skeletal chapel frame evoke something like an interior fragility. The poise of organic and creaturely life is given poetic and spiritual celebration in all these pieces.

The two remaining works by Koji Shiraya (After the Dream, 2013) and Tessa Farmer (Voyager, 2013) are physically more demonstrative. The former fills the Gethsemane Chapel with dented porcelain spheres, which tumble across steps and altar and the latter has installed a swan in flight in the Birde Chantry whose wing-tips fan out nearly edge-to-edge with the walls. Both have a rapidity and a flow, a sense of life briefly halted, though channelled by the space: Voyager in particular seethes with parasitic ants and other animals. Like Haines’ goldfinch however, the swan and the delicate butterfly wings impressed on its beak, stand out regardless of scale as stubborn symbols of loyalty and love – all the more so in their sacred settings.

Sheona Beaumont | One comment | Tags: , , ,
01 Mar 2013
Reviews

Rineke Dijkstra at the MMK, Frankfurt

Almerisa series (1994 - ongoing)

Almerisa series (1994 – ongoing)


Back from a trip to Germany, having made the Gernsheim exhibition at the REM in Mannheim the primary stopping point, I found myself popping in to the MMK in Frankfurt before flying home. Here, Rineke Dijkstra has been given free rein of the entire jumpy triangulated space and its contents, to produce a solo show suspended among other works, as chosen by the photographer herself. The Krazy House, until 26th May 2013 is an exhibition named after one of her video works, a four-screen production of young dancers at the Liverpool nightclub of the same name.

Known for her focus on deceptively simple portrait photography, Dijkstra’s work seen in the flesh is mesmerising. With little technical artifice, the place for masks and theatrical gesturing or posturing is found in the subjects themselves. Particularly with teenagers, the thin gauze of defiance and assertion repeatedly wavers in glances or movements of self-consciousness – and even though the real time of film offers this tangible, visible flip between moments of self-awareness (like the lenticular postcard which advertises the exhibition), the still photographs too, express the undecided and uncertain aspects of a young person’s experience in front of the lens.

Much more than just awkwardness, Dijkstra’s work is more broadly about transitions, and the marked effect of life situations on people’s lives. She has produced series of same-subject photographs, including an ongoing portrait of Almerisa (since 1994, when Almerisa was a 6-year-old Bosnian refugee in the Netherlands), and Olivier (2000-2003, a young soldier in the French Foreign Legion). She has photographed the ‘after’ of women who have just given birth, or of matadors who have just left the ring. She has said that she doesn’t always see the differences when working alongside people in this way, but that the photographs themselves tell of subtle change, and of the things ‘given away’ by the body. Photography, in her hands, reveals the invisible.

Sheona Beaumont | No comments | Tags: , ,
11 Jan 2013
Reviews

‘Seduced by Art’ at the National Gallery

Thomas Struth, 'National Gallery I, London 1989', 1989

Thomas Struth, ‘National Gallery I, London 1989′, 1989


On to the National Gallery’s Seduced by Art: Photography Past and Present, where the language of borrowed symbolism from art, or classical and biblical literature opens the door on a style which might be called iconic relating. Here, the influence of the fine art tradition is presented as the “engine for early photographic innovation, and both these precedents inspire present-day photography.”

One of the largest rooms in the genre-divided exhibition is entitled ‘Tableaux’, and features a selection of work identified by their reference to allegorical or narrative themes. Dominant on one wall is Thomas Struth’s National Gallery 1, London, 1989 (1989), which shows gallery goers scrutinizing an early 16th-century altarpiece: a painting of doubting Thomas by Cima da Conegliano, found upstairs in the gallery’s main collection. The zoned spaces of this picture-within-a-picture reveal how, as watching human figures, we invest belief in the physical inhabiting of our environment. The gallery visitors regard the scene with their backs facing us the viewers, and lean in towards it, echoing the figures of the disciples and Thomas himself. In addition, the plane of focus, seen more obviously in the print itself, is horizontal, and at the level of Jesus’ head. In a beautifully realized way, what might be a single trans-spatial line of unbroken, faith-filled sight becomes an embodied searching for the tangible body.

Such tangible bodies are found in Helen Chadwick’s work, particularly her One Flesh (1985), showing a red-cloaked visceral Madonna and Child with a collage of photocopied textures and skin. Seen in proximity to a similar subject represented by Julia Margaret Cameron (Light and Love, 1865), the capacity of photography to reflect the changing place of biblical and Christian iconography in art is apparent: on the one hand the endlessly reflexive mode of a self-conscious postmodernism borrows sign and symbol to cornucopian effect, while on the other, a Victorian sensibility claims an authoritative, if occasionally sentimental, shoring up of moral ideals. Cameron appears elsewhere in the exhibition, in the rooms dedicated to both ‘Portrait’ and ‘Figure’, yet the impact of her more conventional reference to human figure is slight in comparison – here pose and sensibility seem to be the trading cards with art of the past and photography of today (for example with G. F. Watts, and Craigie Horsfield).

Occasionally this linking and labelling of early and contemporary photography with art seems convoluted and tenuous: Jeff Wall is surely under-represented on inclusion of The Destroyed Room (1978, alongside a small copy of Delacroix’s The Death of Sardanapalus) instead of the Tate’s A Sudden Gust of Wind (After Hokusai) (1993). What does succeed overall, perhaps contrary to the lineage-thesis suggested by the curator, is an interdisciplinary examination of subject-treatment. One may well compare, for example, the digitally-constructed Arcadia of Beate Gütschow’s clean landscape LS#13 (2001), with Roger Fenton’s Paradise (1859), a view of an idyllic river scene in Lancashire. Visually, it is a subtle change that distinguishes the “stubborn lyricism” of the former, despite the inclusion of incidental printers’ marks at the edges of the image, from the “spiritual intent” of the latter. Fenton, master of multiple genres in his time (including the stereoscopic still life also seen in this exhibition), embraced a pictorial emphasis in such landscapes that reflected the ideal of the Romantic picturesque. This utopian dream cannot quite be expelled from Gütschow’s image, even as it is riddled with artificiality.

The powerful all-embracing lens of the camera, as so clearly defined in Ansel Adams’ work (see earlier post), turns out to be a distinctively imaginative image-maker. It can leave the trace of cultural turn in nuance or extraneous detail, just as much as it can wield forceful artistic rhetoric in elaborate construction and scene-setting tableaux. It is to be hoped that the spiritual and theological aspects of this capacity become more widely studied in visual culture academia, as a result of the increasing institutional platform offered by such exhibitions as these, for the enrichment of the many postmodern stories of photography.

Quotes from: Hope Kingsley, ‘Seduced by Art: Photography Past and Present’ (London: National Gallery Co, 2012), p.9, 180; and Gordon Baldwin’s essay, “In Pursuit of Architecture,” in Sarah Greenough, ‘All the Mighty World: The Photographs of Roger Fenton, 1852-1860′ (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2004), p.59.

Sheona Beaumont | No comments | Tags: , , , , , ,
03 Jan 2013
Reviews

Light From the Middle East

Tal Shochat ‘Pomegranate (Rimon)’, 2010


At the V&A, Light From the Middle East: New Photography is an Art Fund sponsored exhibition bringing together over 90 works from 30 artists, broadly representative of contemporary practice in the greater Middle Eastern area (including North Africa). Photographs range from black and white documentary coverage of conflict (including work from the Iran Diary series of the well-known Magnum member Abbas), to wry commentary on the incorporation of Western materialism by Islamic culture.

Less a critical engagement with familiar political and religious topics, than a conceptual arrangement of different approaches to image-making, the exhibition presents artists who “investigate the language and techniques of photography”. ‘Recording’, ‘Reframing’ and ‘Resisting’ are the titles given to the 3 rooms of the exhibition, within which artists explore such media-interventions as digital and paper collage, scratched or burned prints, and assemblage framing. The highly successful film of Jananne Al-Ani, Shadow Sites II (2011), builds a sequence of desert aerial photographs into a semblage of stealth-like movement with slow zooms and closely-aligned fades, accompanied by a soundtrack of background noise from both ground and air.

In some instances, the imagery seems too quick to connote, rather than denote, to borrow Roland Barthes’ terms. “At once invisible and active, clear and implicit,” connotation plunges the viewer into the ready assimilation of cultural codes: so we see, and immediately grasp, the visual cliché of Shadi Ghadirian’s series Qajar (1998), featuring Iranian portrait photography with traditionally-dressed sitters holding a soft-drinks can, or sitting alongside a mountain bike. Burqa-clad women show off their Louis Vuitton accessories in Hassan Hajjaj’s Jama Fna Angels (2000), and in a reference to Manet’s Olympia (1863), Raeda Saadeh’s self-portrait Who Will Make me Real? (2003) shows the artist in a similarly reclining pose, wrapped in Palestinian newspaper.

Where the photography becomes more interesting is in playing to the slow-burning strength of denotation: “the message without a code” that underwrites any rhetorical or artistic inflexion carried by the image. So the hyperreal clarity of Tal Shocat’s series of fruit tree studies (Persimmon (Afarseman), Pomegranate (Rimon) and Grapefruit (Eshkolit), 2010-11) reflect an absurdly unnatural state of perfected ripeness. Meticulously cleaned and separated against a black background, these naturally-growing trees thwart an Edenic lushness with their knowingly artificial and contrived image. Similarly subtle, Magnetism I and II by Ahmed Mater (2012) seem to depict pilgrims circling the Ka’ba in Mecca, but in fact show the close-up view of iron filings drawn to a cube-shaped magnet. Here, the technique of scale and tilt-shift effect (whether in camera or digitally produced) present an abstraction of scene that comments on the abstracted symbol of religious festival.

Noticeably, the absence of the human figure in these two examples perhaps lends photography a hand out of short-circuited documentary imagery. Depictions of a Sufi festival by Issa Touma (1995-2005) certainly bring us into the circle of Islamic practice that otherwise discourages representation of the human form, but here, as elsewhere in the exhibition, the images of crowds and worshippers remain the documented ‘other’. A more suggestive invitation to assess the incarnational and interdependent aspect of belief and faith comes in the series Light (2006) by Waheeda Malullah, who photographs herself lying next to simple white-tiled tombs in Bahrain. She comments on the Shi’i Muslim custom of seeking blessing by touching the tombs of revered people, occasionally with light-heartedness, and also more poignantly as in the image of her cruciform body with arms stretching across tombs on either side of her.

Such human presence is undoubtedly a key way in which a viewer finds in photography immediate context, if not close identification. The work of Ansel Adams (see last post), in marked contrast, is completely devoid of figures. We may well ask what type of photography may include the body, and maintain an open commentary, less attached to particular religious observance, on things felt or intuited (as well as seen), even to a spiritual degree.

Quotes from: the V&A website, accessed 21/12/12; Roland Barthes, “The Photographic Message” in Image Music Text (London: Fontana Press, 1977), p.17, 19.

Sheona Beaumont | No comments | Tags: , , ,
21 Dec 2012
Reviews

Ansel Adams at the Maritime Museum

‘Mirror Lake’, 1935


In a display of over 100 original prints, the National Maritime Museum presents Ansel Adams: Photography from the Mountains to the Sea. From muffled, vaporous clouds to sharp plumes of waterfall or geyser, water is the theme for an exhibition that celebrates the formal lyricism of Adams’ inspiring photographs. There are striking images of the curl of foam and ripple as the sea skims shores of dark sand, including a series of Surf Sequence (1940) frames on the beach at San Mateo (County Coast, California). There are expansive views of the rugged mountains and crisp snow-lined valleys of Yosemite National Park and Grand Teton National Park. There are also intricate textured details in photographs of seaweed, ice and floating grasses.

Given such a homogenising theme, it can seem unnecessary, even impossible, to move beyond the magnetism of such technically accomplished photographs: Adams undoubtedly has, and is widely celebrated for, a style with articulate and refined compositions, dramatic contrasts and an all-pervading sharpness of focus. When he formed, along with six others, Group f/64 in 1932, it was to promote photography that celebrated the camera’s clear vision, needing no other introduction. Yet, for Adams, it was also a way of seeing that suggested the immediacy of nature, along with the unhindered capacity of the mind’s eye to be a part of this immediacy.

Adams’ work presents the apparent contradiction of an isolated inhuman perspective on the world with that of complete absorption and identification with(in) it. Enlarging on his friend and colleague Alfred Stieglitz’s well-known term ‘equivalent’, Adams thought that his photographs presented not just a view, but an equivalent in terms of the emotions he felt at the time. He said that “a great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed.” As well as emotional meaning, his work has also become resonant with spiritual meaning, one concerned with our connectedness to the land and environment. In the early 1920s, Adams is known to have converted to Edward Carpenter’s monism, celebrating the wholeness of the universe, where for Adams, nature in its entirety was “the vast expression of ideas within the Cosmic mind”. Later in life, Adams’ assistant of nearly 10 years said of his work, it is “a kind of visual [John] Muir, a symbol of conscience, of reverence, of caring for the land.”

If the photographs themselves are only implicitly cosmological, rather than explicitly so, it is because Adams is always intuitively engaged with picturing what he calls ‘configurations’, not ‘integrations’. He does not seek to impose on the image, but rather to find a synthesis, an extraction from/of nature, in which he himself is implicated. There is, in the varied sizes of his prints from the 6-foot murals for The American Trust Company to the 6-inch enamel-like jewels of the Merced River, a sense of corporeal engagement with the image. Adams famously described the printing process as being like that of the performance of a piece of music, of which the score was the negative. Such an attentive position bears out his precise articulation of a holistic, embracing vision, which owes more to a spiritual conception of beauty than the aesthetic conception more readily expounded in the ‘purist’ canon of photographic history.

Quotes from: the Exhibition Guide; Anne Hammond, “Ansel Adams and Georgia O’Keeffe: On the Intangible in Art and Nature,” History of Photography, Vol. 32, No. 4, Winter 2008, p.307; Andrea G. Stillman (ed.), Ansel Adams: 400 Photographs (New York & London: Little, Brown and Company, 2007), p.9; and terms used by Adams in the exhibition’s films – two short interview excerpts from: BBC Masters: Ansel Adams, 1983 (dir. Peter Adams), and Ansel Adams: A Documentary Film, 2002 (dir. Ric Burns).

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