‘Man Ray: Unconcerned, but not indifferent’ exhibition at The Hague Museum of Photography, The Netherlands

24 January 2009 – 19 April 2009

 

 

Man Ray
‘Self-portrait’
1924

 

“Man Ray (1890-1976) used his camera to turn photography into an art – no mean feat for a man who tried almost all his life to avoid being described as a ‘photographer’. He preferred to be identified with his work in other media: drawings, paintings and Dadaist ready-mades. The exhibition entitled Unconcerned, but not indifferent at the Hague Museum of Photography is a large-scale retrospective of Man Ray’s art and life. It links paintings, drawings and (of course) photographs to personal objects, images and documents drawn from his estate to paint a picture of a passionate artist and – whatever his own feelings about the description – a great photographer.

 

 

Man Ray
‘Rayograph’
1921

 

Unconcerned, but not indifferent is the first exhibition to reveal Man Ray’s complete creative process: from observations, ideas and sketches right through to the final works of art. By establishing the linkage between art and inspiration, it gives a new insight into the work of Man Ray. The three hundred plus items on display are drawn from the estate of the artist, which is managed by the Man Ray Trust. Some of them have never been exhibited since the artist’s death in 1976 while others are on show for the first time ever.

 

 

Man Ray
‘Noire et blanche’
1926

 

Man Ray’s real name was Emmanuel Radnitzky. He was born in Philadelphia (USA) in 1890. The family soon moved to New York, where his artistic talent became increasingly apparent. Photography was not yet his medium: Man Ray, as he would later call himself, concentrated on painting and became friendly with Dadaist artist Marcel Duchamp, who persuaded him to move to Paris (France). There, Man Ray moved in highly productive artistic circles full of Surrealists and Dadaists. He began taking photographs of his own (and other people’s) works of art and gradually became more interested in the photographic images than in the originals – which he regularly threw away or lost once he had photographed them.

 

 

Man Ray
‘La priere’ (Prayer)
1930

 

By this time, commercial and art photography had become his main source of income and he was displaying an unbridled curiosity about the potential of the medium. This prompted a great urge to experiment and the discovery or rediscovery of various techniques, such as the famous ‘rayographs’ (photograms made without the use of a camera). Man Ray left Paris to escape the Nazi occupation of France and moved to Los Angeles, where he abandoned commercial photography to concentrate entirely on painting and photographic experimentation. However, his next real surge of creativity occurred only after he returned to Paris with his wife Juliet in 1951. In the last twenty-five years of his life, he regularly harked back to his earlier work and was not afraid to quote himself. In that sense, Man Ray can be seen as a true conceptual artist: the idea behind the work of art always interested him more than its eventual execution. Man Ray died in Paris in 1976 and is buried in Montparnasse. His widow, Juliet, summed up the artist’s life in the epitaph inscribed on his tombstone: Unconcerned, but not indifferent.

 

 

Man Ray
‘Larmes’ (Tears)
1930

 

The exhibition examines the four separate creative phases in Man Ray’s life. Each is closely connected with the place where he was living (New York, Los Angeles or Paris), his friends at the time and the sources of inspiration around him. Using Man Ray’s artistic legacy and – perhaps more particularly – the everyday objects that were so important to him, Unconcerned, but not indifferent reveals the world as he saw it through the lens of his camera. 

The exhibition is being held in cooperation with the Man Ray Trust in Long Island, New York, and La Fábrica in Madrid.”

 

 

Man Ray
‘Solarisation’
1931

 

Text from The Hague Museum of Photography website

Exhibition: ‘TruthBeauty: Pictorialism and the Photograph as Art, 1845-1945′ at George Eastman House, New York

February 7, 2009 – May 31, 2009

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Alfred Steiglitz
‘New York Central Yard’
1910

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Alvin Langdon Coburn
‘Wapping’
1904

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“Pictorialism was simultaneously a movement, a philosophy, an aesthetic,and a style, resulting in some of the most spectacular photographs in the history of the medium. This exhibition shows the rise of Pictorialismin the late 19th century from a desire to elevate photography to an art form equal to painting, drawing,and watercolor, and extends the historical period generally associated with it by including its influential precursors, its persistent practitioners, and its seminal effect on photographic Modernism.”

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Edward Steichen
‘Moonlight The Pond’
1906

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Edward Steichen
‘Grand Prix at Longchamp, After the Races’
1907

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Eva Watson Schutze
‘Woman with Lilly’
1905

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“With 130 masterworks from such well-known photographers as Alvin Langdon Coburn, Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz, Robert Demachy, Frederick Evans, and F. Holland Day, this remarkable exhibition will illustrate the Pictorialism movement’s progression from its early influences to its lasting impact on photography and art.”

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Frederick Evans
‘York Minster: In Sure and Certain Hope’
1903

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F. Holland Day
‘Ebony and Ivory’
1899

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Robert Demachy
‘Une Balleteuse’
1900

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Exhibition dates: Saturday, February 7, 2009 – Sunday, May 31, 2009

Text from the George Eastman House website

Review: ‘The Water Hole’ exhibition by Gerda Steiner and Jorg Lenzlinger at ACCA (Australian Centre for Contemporary Art), Melbourne

“Warning. Watch your step while gazing at distant view.”

Sign at entrance to the exhibition. 

 

 

Gerda Steiner and Jorg Lenzlinger
Entrance to ‘The Water Hole’ exhibition at ACCA, Melbourne
2009

 

A cave like entrance presents itself to the visitor as they enter the exhibition leading to a long winding tunnel that is lined with silver insulation foil and tree branches, lit by floor mounted electric light bulbs. The foil moves with the natural movement of air causing not a rustling of leaves but of artificial surfaces.

At the end of the tunnel the viewer enters a large installation space, confronted with a effusive pop art Garden of Eden, a Magic Forest. It takes a while to work out what is going on, there are so many elements to the sculptural piece. The main elements are buckets, toilets, basins and drainage pipes, plumbing fittings that all lead to a bed with a drying dam in the centre of a satin bedspread: the ‘waterhole’ of the exhibition title. The waterhole is fed by water dripping from a medical bag suspended high in the air above the dam, a nice touch. The rest of the forest and pipes are dry. The installation comments on our water supplies and the ‘technologies of production’ (Foucault) that permit us to produce, transform or manipulate things. We might install rainwater tanks to catch water but if there is no water to catch in the first place then we are in trouble: we make our bed and have to lie in it, the empty basins like our catchment areas, dry and bleak. 

 

 

Gerda Steiner and Jorg Lenzlinger
‘The Water Hole’
2009

 

 

Gerda Steiner and Jorg Lenzlinger
‘The Water Hole’
2009

 

Other elements of the forest have an environmental theme, the installation developed by the artists in response to the extensive drought most of Australia (and it particular Melbourne) is experiencing. Here are spiders with hairy legs and mobile phones for bodies infesting the installation, plumbing fittings with natural seeds sprouting from their ends, brightly coloured crystal forms fed each day with water by gallery staff so that they grow. An upside down umbrella with Polar bear images printed on it’s material has imaginary water draining down a bamboo pipe into a bucket; empty water bottles form a large nest with broken eggs inside; artificial plants, bones, crabs, seaweed and flying stuffed owls are form some of the other elements in the installation.

 

 

 

Gerda Steiner and Jorg Lenzlinger
‘The Water Hole’
2009

 

Climbing a few steps we enter a ‘bird’ watching gallery replete with binoculars to observe the humans in the forest as much as the forest itself. A water cooler sits incongruously in this watching space, silent and somehow complicit in its ironical presence.

The viewer then moves to another room. 4 video projectors display another water themed installation on the gallery walls, the videos meeting in the middle of the walls and reflecting each other. Ambient music accompanies images of rain!, spurting water, owls and plastic pipes, plastic flowers and plastic horses as the viewer relaxes on a waterbed in the middle of the space. The effect of the music and images is quite meditative when combined with the gentle rocking of the waterbed, the projections of the video forming kaleidoscopic ‘Northern lights’ on the ceiling of the gallery. This room is an extension of the themes of the large installation.

 

 

 

Gerda Steiner and Jorg Lenzlinger
Installation view of waterbed at ‘The Water Hole’ exhibition at ACCA, Melbourne
2009

 

 

Moving forward the viewer enters another room – the meditation room. This room is most effective in encouraging contemplation of the different planes of our existence and our orientation in (environmental) space.

Three beds are present – one suspended from the ceiling by four metal rods. Climbing onto this bed the movement from side to side caused by your weight makes you feel seasick and slightly disorientated. Above the second table is a wonderful mobile made of twigs, branches, dried leaves, plastic flowers, beads, plastic bags, baby dummies and jewellery moving gently in the breeze. Lying on the table with the mobile about a foot above your head things drift in and out of view as you change the focus of your eyes – close, mid, far and then onto the moving shadows on the ceiling.

The most effective bed has a small meteorite suspended in a net bag above it. The viewer slides underneath the ‘rock’ placing the meteorite about a foot or so above your face. The meteorite is brown, dark and heavy, swinging slightly above your ‘third eye’. You feel its weight pressing down on your energy, on your life force and you feel how old this object is, how far it has traveled, how fragile and mortal you are. It is a sobering and enlightening experience but what an experience it is! 

Entering the final room small colour photos of people being hugged from behind and lifted into the air, laughing, line the gallery walls. These are the weakest elements of the exhibition and seem to bear no relation to all that has passed before.

Running off of this gallery is an alcove that is a dead end, a full stop to the exhibition with an installation ‘Desalination plant for tears’. 

 

 

Gerda Steiner and Jorg Lenzlinger
Installation view of ‘Desalination plant for tears’ from ‘The Water Hole’ exhibition at ACCA, Melbourne
2009

 

A cheap Formica desk sits at the end of the space. Perched above the desk is a tv showing live black and white images of the earlier bird watching gallery – the watcher now the watched. On the desk itself is a microscope (with slide of human tears), pencil, a candle for heat under a glass flask of water (looking like a spider  from the large installation!) and various glass test tubes and vials. A diagram explains the working of a ‘Desalination plant for tears’ an analogous reference to the desalination plant earmarked for Wonthaggi, south-east of Melbourne.

Irony is again present in the ‘2 leaves grown at Singapore Airport by desalinated water (2008)’, two framed, brown dead leaves, and in the ‘Tear system’ diagram where glands have turned into forests and the eye into a lake (see below).

 

 

Gerda Steiner and Jorg Lenzlinger
Diagram from ‘Desalination plant for tears’ from the exhibition ‘The Water Hole’ at ACCA, Melbourne
2009

 

This is a magical and poignant exhibition that is a joy for children and adults alike. Children love it running around exploring the environments. Adults love it for it’s magical, witty and intelligent response to the problems facing our planet and our lives. Go and enjoy this interplanetary collision. Highly recommended!

 

 

Exhibition dates: 23 December 2008 – 1 March 2009 

More information on the ACCA website

Gerda Steiner and Jorg Lenzlinger website 

Review: ‘Framing Conflict – Iraq and Afghanistan’ exhibition by Lyndell Brown and Charles Green at The Ian Potter Museum of Art, The University of Melbourne

Official war artists 

 

Despite one brilliant photograph and some interesting small painted canvases this exhibition is a disappointment. No use beating around the figurative bush in the landscape so to speak, talking plainly will suffice.

Firstly, let’s examine the photographs. Thirteen large format colour photographs are presented in the exhibition out of an archive of “thousands of photographs Brown and Green created on tour”1 from which the paintings are derived. 

 

 

Lyndell Brown and Charles Green
‘Afghan traders with soldiers, market, Tarin Kowt base, Uruzgan province, Afghanistan’
digital colour inkjet photograph
2007 – 08

 

 

Lyndell Brown and Charles Green
‘Afghan National Army perimeter post with chair, Tarin Kowt base, Uruzgan province, Afghanistan’
digital colour inkjet photograph
2007 – 08

 

Most of the photographs are inconsequential and need not have been taken. Relying on the usual trope of painters who take photographs they are shot at night, dusk or dawn when the shadows are long, the colours lush supposedly adding ‘mystique’ to the scene being portrayed. In some cases they are more like paintings than the paintings themselves. Perhaps this was the artist’s plan, the reverse marriage of photography and painting where one becomes the other, but this does little to advance photography as art. There is nothing new or interesting here: sure, some of the photographs are beautiful in the formal representation of a vast and fractured landscape but the pre-visualisation is weak: bland responses to the machines, industry, people and places of the conflict. Go look at the Andreas Gursky photographs at the National Gallery of Victoria to see world-class photography taking reality to the limit, head on.

Too often in these thirteen images the same image is repeated with variants – three images of the an aircraft having it’s propeller changed show a lack of ideas or artefacts to photograph – presented out of the thousands taken seems incongruous. The fact that only one photograph is reproduced in the catalogue is also instructive. 

 

 

Lyndell Brown and Charles Green
Installation view of photographs from the exhibition ‘Framing Conflict’ at The Ian Potter Museum of Art, The University of Melbourne
2009

 

 

Lyndell Brown and Charles Green
‘Dusk, ship’s bridge with two sailors, northern Gulf’
digital colour inkjet photograph
2007-08

 

Some images are just unsuccessful. For example the photograph ‘Dusk, ship’s bridge with two sailors, northern Gulf’ is of a formulaic geometry that neither holds the viewers attention nor gives a deeper insight into their lives aboard ship and begs the question why was the photograph taken in the first place? The dark space has little physical or metaphysical illumination and seems purely to be an exercise in formalism. The photograph ‘Dusk, ships’ bridge with sailor, northern Gulf’ is more successful in the use of light and shade as they play across the form of a sailor, his head resting pensively in his hand, red life vests adding a splash of colour to the bottom right of the photograph. 

 

 

Lyndell Brown and Charles Green
‘View from Chinook, Helmand province, Afghanistan’
digital colour inkjet photograph
2007-08

 

The brilliant photograph of the group is ‘View from Chinook, Helmand province, Afghanistan’. This really is a monstrous photograph. With the large black mass of the helicopter in the foreground of the image containing little detail, the eye is drawn upwards to the windscreen through which a mountain range rises, with spines like the back of a Stegosaurus. To the right a road, guarded by a desolate looking pillbox and yellow barrier, meanders into the distance. Dead flies on the windscreen look like small bullet holes until you realise what they are. This is the image that finally evidences a disquieting beauty present in the vast and ancient landscape. 

 

 

Lyndell Brown and Charles Green
‘Late afternoon, flight line, military installation, Middle East’
oil on linen
2007

 

Turning to the paintings we can say that some of the small 31cm x 31cm paintings work well. From an ‘original’ photograph the artist selects and crops a final image that they work up into a highly detailed oil painting. Distilled (as the artist’s like to put it) from the ‘original’ photographs, the paintings become a “merging of a contemporary sense of composition – borrowed from photography, film and video – with the textures and processes of traditional oil painting.”2

“These works were developed by the artists to be something akin to “Hitchcockian clues” which create the sense of looking out at a scene but being distanced from the action. To some degree the entire suite of small pictures participate in developing this intrigue, by showing an array of ambiguous scenes in which direct action is never present, or is obscured by limited perspectives … The artists noted that the war zones they witnessed were low in action but high in tension” 3

 

 

Lyndell Brown and Charles Green
‘Market, Camp Holland, Tarin Kowt, Uruzgan province, Afghanistan’
oil on linen
2007

 

To an extent this tension builds in some of the small paintings: the small size lends an intimate, intense quality and forces the viewer to engage with highly detailed renditions of textures of clothing, material, skin and hair and the distorted scale of the ships and aeroplanes portrayed. In these intense visions the painting seems less like a photograph and more like a new way of seeing. However, this occurs only occasionally within the group of small paintings.

If we think of a photograph in the traditional sense as a portrayal of reality, then a distillation of that photograph (the removal of impurities from, an increase in the concentration of) must mean that these paintings are a double truth, a concentrated essence of the ‘original’ photograph that changes that essence into something new. Unfortunately most of these small canvases show limited viewpoints of distilled landscapes that do not lead to ambiguous enigmas, but to the screen of the camera overlaid by a skein of paint, a patina of posing.

 

 

Lyndell Brown and Charles Green
‘View from Chinook, Helmand province, Afghanistan’
oil on linen
2007

 

 

Lyndell Brown and Charles Green
‘History painting: market, Tarin Kowt, Uruzgan province, Afghanistan’
oil on linen
2007

 

This feeling is only amplified in the three large ‘History’ paintings. The three paintings seem static, lifeless, over fussy and lacking insight into the condition of the ‘machine’ that they are attempting to portray. It’s a bit like the ‘Emperors New Clothes’, the lack of substance in the paintings overlaid with the semantics of History painting (“a traditional genre that focused on mythological, biblical, historical and military subjects”) used to confirm their existence and supposed insight into the doubled, framed reality. As Robert Nelson noted in his review of 2008 art in Melbourne in The Age newspaper it would seem that painting is sliding into terminal decline. These paintings only seem to confirm that view.

 

 

Lyndell Brown and Charles Green
Installation view of paintings from the exhibition ‘Framing Conflict’ at The Ian Potter Museum of Art, The University of Melbourne
2009

 

Here was a golden opportunity to try something fresh in terms of war as conflict – both in photography and painting – to frame the discourse in an eloquent, innovative manner. Most of this work is not interesting because it does not seem to be showing, or being discursive about anything beyond a personal whim. Because an artist can talk about some things, doesn’t mean that he can make comments about other things that have any value. Although the artist was looking to portray landscapes of globalisation and entropy, there are more interesting ways of doing this, rather than the nature of the transcription used here.

As Degas noted about his art practice,

“It is very good to copy what one sees: it is much better to draw what you can’t see any more but in your memory. It is a transformation in which imagination and memory work together. You only reproduce what struck you, that is to say, the necessary. That way your memory and your fantasy are freed from the tyranny of nature.”4

 

No thinking but the putting away of intellect and the reliance on memory and imagination, memory and fantasy to ‘distil’ the essence. This is what needed to happen both in the photographs and paintings  - leaving posturing aside (perhaps an ‘unofficial war artist’ would have had more success!) to uncover the transformation of landscape that the theatre of this environment richly deserves.

M Bunyan

 

 

Exhibition dates: 05 Nov 2008 to 01 Feb 2009 

The Ian Potter Museum of Art website

 

References

1. Heywood, Warwick. Framing Conflict: Iraq and Afghanistan exhibition catalogue. Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 2008, p.6.
2. Heywood, Warwick. Framing Conflict: Iraq and Afghanistan exhibition catalogue. Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 2008, p.6.
3. Heywood, Warwick. Framing Conflict: Iraq and Afghanistan exhibition catalogue. Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 2008, p.11.
4.  Degas, Edgar quoted in Halligan, Marion. “Between the brushstrokes,” in A2 section, The Saturday Age newspaper, January 17th 2008, p.18.

 

‘Entropa’ sculpture by David Cerny on view at the European Council building in Brussels, Belgium

 

David Cerny
‘Entropa’
2009

 

“Czech artist David Cerný promised the following: a collaboration between 27 artists from the European Community who would put forth their vision from their own countries. France was portrayed as a labor strike, Spain as a slab of concrete and Italy into a soccer field … Belgium appears as a chocolate box, Denmark constructed with Lego and the map of Sweden below a box that looks like the ones Ikea uses.

The only problem is that behind this work of art, which has caused great controversy reducing Greece to a huge fire, Romania into a Dracula castle, there is only one creative mind, that of David Cerný. Cerny, who also invented 26 false names of European artists that had supposedly collaborated with him, recognizes that he knew the truth would come out and says that economic restrictions and lack of time motivated him to do the whole work by himself.”

from the ArtDaily, org website

 

“The installation consists of a giant jigsaw map – or a kind of plastic frame which keeps the elements of a miniature model in place – with a “cliché and stereotype” of each one of the EU’s 27 member states. Each country was announced to be sculptured by a different national artist.

You you can see Polish priests lifting the flag of the gay movement, a clear reference to the iconic image of the American soldiers planting the Stars and Stripes on Iwo Jima. France is pointedly represented by a map of France covered with the inscription “Strike!” The Netherlands have sunk beneath the sea with only minarets of mosques appearing above the surface…

When the EU officials saw the work and felt offended, Czech Deputy Prime Minister Vonda firstly defended the project as a way of confronting prejudice and “a space for the free expression of artists from 27 countries.” At least, this was his reaction before they found out it is all one big hoax of Czech art David Czerny, who made the sculpture entirely on his own.”

from the Servaas in Shanghai blog

 

 

David Cerny
‘Entropa’ (detail)
2009

 

“The original intention was indeed to ask 27 European artists for participation. But it became apparent that this plan cannot be realised, due to time, production, and financial constraints. The team therefore, without the knowledge of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, decided to create fictitious artists who would represent various European national and artistic stereotypes. We apologise to Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek, Deputy Prime Minister Alexandr Vondra, Minister Karel Schwarzenberg and their departments that we did not inform them of the true state of affairs and thus misguided them. We did not want them to bear the responsibility for this kind of politically incorrect satire. We knew the truth would come out. But before that we wanted to find out if Europe is able to laugh at itself.

At the beginning stood the question:  What do we really know about Europe? We have information about some states, we only know various tourist clichés about others. We know basically nothing about several of them. The art works, by artificially constructed artists from the 27 EU countries, show how difficult and fragmented Europe as a whole can seem from the perspective of the Czech Republic. We do not want to insult anybody, just point at the difficulty of communication without having the ability of being ironic.

Grotesque hyperbole and mystification belongs among the trademarks of Czech culture and creating false identities is one of the strategies of contemporary art.  The images of individual parts of Entropa use artistic techniques often characterised by provocation. The piece thus also lampoons the socially activist art that balances on  the verge between would-be controversial attacks on national character and undisturbing decoration of an official space. We believe that the environment of Brussels is capable of  ironic self-reflection, we believe in the sense of humour of European nations and their representatives.”

from the David Cerny website

Masterpieces of the Prado Museum in Google Earth

 

“Viewing a Velasquez or a Rembrandt in a place like Spain’s Prado museum is a unique experience. Now you can use Google Earth technology to navigate reproductions of the Prado’s masterpieces, delving even deeper into the Prado’s collection. In Google Earth, you can get close enough to examine a painter’s brushstrokes or the craquelure on the varnish of a painting. The images of these works are about 14,000 million pixels, 1,400 times more detailled than the image a 10 megapixel digital camera would take. In addition, you’ll be able to see a spectacular 3D reproduction of the museum.

Experience art in a new way. Open Google Earth, check the 3D buildings layer on the bottom left panel, go to the Prado and access the masterpieces.”

from the Prado in Google Earth website

Lecture/Performance by Hans Aarsman at The Photographers Gallery, London

 

 

Hans Aarsman
’1236 sheets of negatives from the 1980s, thrown away on 19 August 2004′

 

“Hans Aarsman presents From Ugly to Pretty and Back Again. The Mysterious Ways of Beauty in Photography.

In this lecture Hans Aarsman examines the miriad of questions involved in taking photographs for purposes as varied as advertising, documentation and personal momentos. How does our understanding of the beauty in these images differ depending their final resting place, be it ebay, family album, specialist magazines or museums collections. Through his own experiences Aarsman asks if, and how, artistic ambitions, aesthetics and useful photography can coincide. 

Hans Aarsman (b.1951, NL) worked as a photojournalist until 1994. He currently works as a writer, in particular on photography, and is co-founder of the magazine Useful Photography. Aarsman displayed, and invited contributions to, his project Photography Against Consumerism here at The Photographers’ Gallery last July. He is based in Amsterdam.

£5.00/ £3.50 concessions”

 

Date: 21 January 2009 19:00

More information from The Photographers Gallery website

Review: Bettina Speckner jewellery at Gallery Funaki, Melbourne

Opening: Tuesday 13th January 2009

 

 

“I never work with the intention to decorate things or to make them look prettier. I try to discover the soul of an object or the essence of a photograph – I want to shape something new which appeals to me and to other people far beyond the optical appearance.”

Bettina Speckner

 

Bettina Speckner opening crowd at Gallery Funaki, Melbourne

 

A very social crowd was in attendance for the opening of an exhibition by German jeweller Bettina Speckner at Gallery Funaki in Melbourne. The jewellery was certainly ravishingly made: refined, beautiful and with an elegance to most of the pieces. Interspersed between the jewellery were colour photographs of about A4 size that featured empty chairs, red benches, huts in the landscape and plants. These photographs seemed to have a very loose association to the form and imagery of the jewellery and were very minor photographs. I was not sure of their actual relevance to the pieces themselves.

 

 

Speckner uses a lot of imagery in her jewellery – tintype portraits from the Victorian era, grey etched images of gardens and vases studded with jewels and crystalline forms that have an almost solarized graphite feel to them and flowers, statues, pillars and cows etched into enamel. In these sites of intervention she seeks to make new worlds – inner/outer worlds that e-merge out of the material / worlds that are present and have ‘presence’.

The best work combines enamel, intaglio, jewels and photographic processes together. The art transcends the materials of each and coalesces in objects that transport the viewer  - forming other associations, new insights into the condition of the object.

 

 

As the artist sees, this is not so much about the memories, cultural significance and semiotics embedded in the photograph but about making something new. For me this is where the problems lies.

Is it inevitable that there is a history and association present with these images or is the viewer culturally able to see them as new objects – in a postmodern sense?

It is almost as though Speckner does want these associations present between the jewellery and the images, why else put the colour photographs between the jewellery – or is this another example of her dissociative technique coming into play. Speckner seems to have purchased the memory of the object (which it still holds) but then wants to completely overwrite it – is this possible?

 

 

Personally I don’t think this is fully possible. While no ‘grand narrative’ is present in some of these images (some images seem to be so removed from their context that we will never be able to place them again) in other pieces the images overpower the art. The ‘trace’ of memory and identity, an entity for a split second before a camera, their unique state in this singular tintype, their actual presence and life not so easily destroyed!

When an artist seeks to justify work without fully understanding the cultural implications of the use of such images, even saying she seeks to find the soul of an object when the soul may already exist in another form, then in my eyes the work is unresolved, the vision uneven. Despite the beauty of the art, its refinement and great craftmanship there is something lacking at the heart of these works – perhaps a deeper understanding that the soul can reside in optical appearance, that less may be more and that transcendence is more than skin deep.

 

 

Exhibition dates: January 13  to  February 7, 2009

Gallery Funaki
4 Crossley St.,
Melbourne 3000
03 9662 9446

Opening hours: Tues – Friday, 11 – 5pm, Sat 11 – 4pm

Gallery Funaki website

‘Edward Steichen In High Fashion: The Conde Nast Years, 1923 – 1937′ at the International Centre of Photography, New York

 

Edward Steichen
‘Gloria Swanson’
nd

 

“As part of the International Center of Photography’s 2009 Year of Fashion, the museum will host a retrospective of Edward Steichen’s fashion and celebrity portraiture. Edward Steichen: In High Fashion, The Condé Nast Years, 1923-1937, will be on view at ICP (1133 Avenue of the Americas at 43rd Street) from January 16 through May 3, 2009. It will feature 175 vintage photographs, drawn mainly from the extensive archive of original prints at Condé Nast, along with a selection of important prints from the collection of the George Eastman House Museum. This will be the first exhibition in which the full range of his fashion photography and celebrity portraiture will be shown, including many images that have never been exhibited before. Having previously traveled throughout Europe, the exhibition will be presented on its North American tour in this version only at ICP. ”

 

 

Edward Steichen
Conde Nast photograph
1928

 

“Edward Steichen (1879-1973) was already a famed Pictorialist photographer and painter in the United States and abroad when he was offered the position of chief photographer for Vogue and Vanity Fair by Condé Nast. Upon assuming the job, the forty-four year old artist began one of the most lucrative and controversial careers in photography. To Alfred Stieglitz and his followers, Steichen was seen as damaging the cause of photography as a fine art by agreeing to do commercial editorial work. Nevertheless, Steichen’s years at Condé Nast magazines were extraordinarily prolific and inspired. He began by applying the soft focus style he had helped create to the photography of fashion. But soon he revolutionized the field, banishing the gauzy light of the Pictorialist era and replacing it with the clean, crisp lines of Modernism. In the process he changed the presentation of the fashionable woman from that of a distant, romantic creature to that of a much more direct, appealing, independent figure. At the same time he created lasting portraits of hundreds of leading personalities in movies, theatre, literature, politics, music, and sports, including Gloria Swanson, Gary Cooper, Marlene Dietrich, Joan Crawford, Colette, Winston Churchill, Amelia Earhart, Jack Dempsey, Noel Coward, Greta Garbo, Dorothy Parker, and Cecil B. De Mille.”

from the ArtDaily.org website

 

 

Edward Steichen
‘Gary Cooper’
1930

 

“An exhibition of 175 works by Edward Steichen drawn largely from the Condé Nast archives, this is the first presentation to give serious consideration to the full range of Steichen’s fashion images. Organized by the Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne, and the Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography, Minneapolis, in conjunction with the International Center of Photography, the exhibition will open at ICP after an extensive tour in Europe. Steichen’s approach to fashion photography was formative and over the course of his career he changed public perceptions of the American woman. An architect of American Modernism and a Pictorialist, Steichen exhibited his fashion images alongside his art photographs. Steichen’s crisp, detailed, high-key style revolutionized fashion photography, and his influence is felt in the field to this day—Richard Avedon, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Bruce Weber are among his stylistic successors.”

from the International Centre of Photography website

 

 

Edward Steichen
‘Katherine Hepburn wearing a coat by Clare Potter’
1933

 

Exhibition dates: January 16th – May 3rd 2009

International Centre of Photography website

marcus bunyan. ‘the shape of dreams’ 2009

 

Marcus Bunyan
“Untitled” from the series ‘The Shape of Dreams’
2009

 

 

Marcus Bunyan
“Untitled” from the series ‘The Shape of Dreams’
2009