Big Sheep, Amelie and me

I do wonder though, how the mode of efficiency affects a mode that’s more about relating and love. I believe in the second more than I believe in the first – and I don’t mean to suggest that motherhood and work divide solely along those lines. The mode of relating and love is a mode related to spirit, and I believe, is what Jesus modelled throughout his life as not only possible, but somehow truer. This can and should reflect across all dimensions of living, creating a fuller picture than our compartmentalising does. I’m so far from that fuller picture, but next week, when Lent starts, I’m going to try and pay attention (as Aldous Huxley kept saying in ‘Island’) to where that truth can be found in my work life.

I’ll dive into the Bible, looking at the elements of earth, fire, wind and water for my next project. I’ll play and listen to music LOUDLY. I’ll get outside more. You can keep tabs on me if you like…

These 4 prints are a celebration of what the Dictionary of Biblical Imagery calls ‘the four coordinates of hope’: faith, joy, perseverance and endurance. Hope is more than just a vaguely positive feeling about the future – it is an attitude towards the present that transforms character and releases us to live without fear. It is a strong mindset, an ‘anchor for the soul, firm and secure’ (Hebrews 6:19).

This sense of secure hope is referred to in the Bible by analogy to the protective and healing power of wings: ‘Those who hope in the Lord… will soar on wings like eagles,’ ‘He will cover you with his feathers, and under his wings you will find refuge,’ ‘for you who revere my name, the sun of righteousness will rise with healing in its wings’ (Isaiah 40:31, Psalm 91:4, Malachi 4:2). It is the wings in these images that are all in some way being transformed.

While the wings themselves are described with line, the use of colour and layers of other photographic detail suggests a growing vitality that has the power to take us beyond the one-dimensionality of the everyday. There is a sense of freedom in flight that is emotionally uplifting and which, for the Christian, reflects the joy of the Holy Spirit.

Beate Gütschow’s exploration as an artist directly probes questions of pictorial representations of reality. As a student in Hamburg and Oslo, she explored verisimilitude initially as a painter and installation artist and eventually became attracted to photography for its apparent, though qualified, ability to more faithfully and accurately represent reality. Her final constructions at first glace appear as if captured from reality but upon closer inspection they are revealed as fiction.

The exhibition (2008) surveys two of Gütschow’s photographic series: LS and S. LS is an abbreviation of Landschaft, or landscape, and S is for Stadt, or city. Both series posit questions of idealization—one of nature and the other of urbanity. Drawing from her enormous archive of collected images, mostly taken with analog film, of trees, buildings, clouds, hills and people, Gütschow’s pictures are montages consisting of up to hundred different images assembled together digitally. Her final constructions at first glace appear as if captured from reality but upon closer inspection they are revealed as fiction.

Influenced by artists such as Claude Lorrain, John Constable, and Nicolas Poussin, the LS series follows the rules of romantic landscape painting of the 17th century. Traditional landscape paintings are organized with three distinct spaces: the foreground serves as the viewer’s entrance into the picture, usually framed by trees like a stages set; the middle ground contains a river or path and people looking outward; and the background vanishes in the far distance. The frame suggests an expansive terrain. Using these rules, Gütschow creates an idyllic landscape by mixing elements of pictures taken from parks, construction sites, pristine nature, and people engaged in leisure activities. The deliberate inclusion of familiar 21st century elements like garbage, trees cut by chainsaws, and people in T-shirts endows an otherwise romantic landscape with implausibility and suspicion.

Lenses and their use pre-Reformation was often considered heretical, whether in camera obscura ‘shows’ (Arnold of Villanova in 1300), Roger Bacon’s ideas, Della Porta on painters’ secret tools. How do you trust something that so distorts plain sight? Hockney says this was actually about power, as wielded by the church. The power over lens-based media reasserted itself in more secular terms with the early 20th-century wars, where Hitler, Stalin and even Mao elevated photo-realism and were suspicious of abstraction.

The revolution in the making and transmission of imagery in recent times is as big as the revolution wrought by printing in conjunction with Renaissance naturalism. Is this good or bad? It has the potential to be both, to huge degrees. Everything from paedophilia to personal understanding, from surveillance and intrusion to the power of the individual over the collective. My fear is that we are not getting a proper cultural grip on all this – that we are stumbling blindly into a blinding glare of ill-understood images, flickering past too rapidly for our critical scrutiny. It’s a big job for the cultural historian. It’s a big job for the artist. We should be in the same base camp, with the same mountain range in sight.

Martin Kemp writing to Hockney, 28/11/99, p.281 in ‘Secret Knowledge’ by Hockney.

The science of photography wasn’t new at the invention of photography (1839), the aesthetics were (attr. Heinrich Schwarz, p.284). = romanticism?

To use a lens-based system involves more than a combination of technical means and an aspiration to naturalism. It involves a conceptual definition of artistic representation as literal imitation, together with a sense that an optical device which creates an image through the geometry of light delivers a more objective picture than the fallible human apparatus. Once this faint in the artificially made image became widespread, it could provide a model for objective naturalism even when not actually used to make a particular work. In this way, it is possible to see the ‘age of the objective image’ as extending from the Renaissance to the present day, with the domain of such images defined as Fine Art until the mid-nineteenth century, when their sovereignty passes to photography and later the cinema and TV.

Martin Kemp to Hockney, 19/01/00, p.284.

The aspiration of optical imitation in Western art is very exceptional. Its apparent ‘normality’ is because of the triumph of this way of representing in our century, above all as the result of the universal spread of photography, film, TV etc.

Martin Kemp to Hockney, 03/03/00, p.286.

Better to have the human hand at work, at least it’s connected to an eye and therefore a body. We are a part of nature, in it, not a mathematical point.

Hockney to Dr Susan Foister, 05/04/00, p.303.