┐ The blind man and his visual clarity └

Posted on January 19, 2013 by N

Terence Koh, God, 2007. View of the performance at de Pury & Luxembourg, Zurich. Courtesy Peres Projects, Berlin.

Installation view of Terence Koh (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, January 19–May 27, 2007). Photograph by Sheldan C. Collins

“I wish to suggest that we are like philosopher-artists installed in these works, engaged in inscribing and contemplating the line between the real and representation, the trait, which continually both “draws a boundary and with draws from it.” To be this blind man means, for Derrida, to see with one’s hands, and indeed when one interacts with these installations one finds oneself touching – walls, elevator doors, a door jamb or stair railing – whatever is near to hand that will steady one’s balance. The blind man of necessity must also rely on memory, both the memory of objects and spaces (the configuration of the room, one’s location relative to furniture) and, more important, the memory of sight itself. Deceived by shadows, blinded by sunlight, we are like Plato’s cave dwellers, for, like them, the viewer of contemporary art “suffers from sight.” Accustomed to a world of simulation, a world where image is reality, we are full time skeptics for whom light and darkness, truth and falsehood, reality and representation hold equal dangers. We are left to draw blindly, again and again, the line between them.
(…)
Not quite performance and not quite sculpture, Nauman’s corridor pieces provoke a series of questions: What is the role of the, for lack of a better word, “viewer’s” body and the effect of the constraints placed on that body? What is the place of vision in works in which there is nothing in particular to see (the blank walls), or in which seeing is frustrated (the image of the back of one’s head), or in which one is blinded (the bright lights) ? And what is the function of representation in works in which nothing much seems to be represented? While it seems clear that Nauman’s works are performative?they involve a setting, an actor, a simple narrative arc, a temporal framework, and what Joseph Roach has called sur rogation (the viewer stands in for the artist)?they also resist the category of performance.2^ They are, at the same time, involved with seemingly more conventional artistic concerns such as vision (we are forced to contemplate our own seeing), subject-object relations (the corridor is both sculpture and stage), and representation (the viewer represents the artist). Performance and sculpture, the real and representation, vision and blindness? the corridor is an apt figure through which to contemplate the passage between conceptual categories. It functions both as a long line (Derrida’s trait) that divides, and as a liminal space that connects?here and there, now and then.”

excerpt of Blink: The Viewer as Blind Man in Installation Art, by Jane Blocker, in Art Journal, Vol. 66, No. 4, 2007

┐ Eric Rondepierre └

Posted on December 22, 2012 by N

“That impossible photogram, as Roland Barthes said. An object which is not (even) an object, but at the same time is actually two objects. It doesn’t (really) belong to the cinema or (simply) to photography ; it is more than a photograph yet less than a film. It is, therefore, a sort of axis or fold, the precise crossing point (punctum) between cinema and photography. Eminently paradoxical, the photogram is the touchstone of Eric Rondepierre’s work which is acutely conscious of the delicate balance on the razor’s edge where cinema meets photography in their most intimate specificity.

Eric Rondepierre’s work always starts with a film, or more precisely with the image-matter of a film. Rondepierre is not interested in cinema as the reflection-projection of a film on a screen, in a consumer relation to what is watchable, with its imposed length and speed, uninterrupted flow, impression of movement, perceptive fiction, transitory illusion – in other words the magic of the large cinema-body on the screen. What interests him is the film as actual film strip, a material sequence of fixed images intimately and appropriatively related to its object. Film images that you can not only see but also touch, hold, manipulate and collect.

In other words, Rondepierre aims at what is most authentically photographic at the very heart of cinema. This is of course profoundly contradictory. The photogram is an impossible object : it is both film’s condition of existence and its total negation. Obviously a film consists only of photograms, yet seeing a photogram for what it is (the frozen image of a film) necessarily means not seeing the film, which can only exist fully as movement. Seeing a film flow past automatically implies not seeing photograms, nevertheless the very essence of a film since they disappear, absorbed into the projection process. Photograms are the only real images and the only invisible images in a film. This is the ontological paradox which makes photograms into cinema’s blind «spots».
(…)

What strikes me most in all this is the principle of texture-filters which seems to me to operate in Rondepierre’s artistic strategy like Freud’s memory screen. It is a question of masks and shifts, in which the accumulated density of textures only reflects downstream the work that the spot principle has already performed upstream : burying and excavating part of what is invisible (part of the unconscious). Just as the concept of photograms revealed by freezeframes can be interpreted as a figure of the revelation of film’s unconscious. Photography and cinema are merely spots and textures. Don’t believe too much in what you can see. Learn to not see what is displayed (and therefore which hides). Learn to see beyond, beside, across and beneath. Look for the spot in the image, texture in the surface, negatives in positives and latent images in the negative ground. Follow once more the route mapped out by the psychicphotographic apparatus, shifting from eye to memory, from appearance to unrepresentable. Dig down through the layers and levels like an archeologist. Photographs are only surfaces, they have no depth, only a fantastic density. Behind it, beneath it or around it, one photo always hides (at least) another photograph, or a film. It is a question of screens, and here you enter in a singular universe, the one of an individual by the name of Eric Rondepierre.

And in this lies one of the possible dimensions of his work – it operates precisely like a psychic apparatus, maybe like Freud’s famous little Wunderblock the « magic notepad » which in 1925 Freud used as the ideal metaphor for the workings of the first topic of the unconscious : a question of levels, of transparent surface area upon which one writes, and a background layer on which the inscriptions are preserved in absentia even when the have been erased from the surface. Photography is the top surface, cinema the background dephts and writing the displaced entity. The « Wunderblock » shifts from one to the other, a link, like the photogram which relates photography to cinema. The deep spot (the invisible, the inconscious, the buried object, the lost text) and the texture which brings it to the surface, visible and conscious (the layered pathway to visibility). Coming and going. Directly or mediated. And starting again from the beginning.”

excerpt of Eric Rondepierre or working with photograms (between spot and texture) by Philippe Dubois in “Eric Rondepierre”, ed. Espace Jules Verne/ Galerie Michèle Chomette, Paris, 1993, pp. 28-35. FULL TEXT here

more of Eric’s work here

┐ Christian Boltanski – death from within └

Posted on December 15, 2012 by N

“Since the late 1960s, Christian Boltanski (b. 1944, Paris) has worked with photographs collected from ordinary and often ephemeral sources, endowing the commonplace with significance. Rather than taking original photographs to use in his installations, he often finds and rephotographs everyday documents—passport photographs, school portraits, newspaper pictures, and family albums—to memorialize everyday people. Boltanski seeks to create an art that is indistinguishable from life and has said, The fascinating moment for me is when the spectator hasn’t registered the art connection, and the longer I can delay this association the better. By appropriating mementos of other people’s lives and placing them in an art context, Boltanski explores the power of photography to transcend individual identity and to function instead as a witness to collective rituals and shared cultural memories.”

“While the particular images in this installation represent children and the family dog at play, there is a brooding sadness and sense of threat which suggests that fear of loss which accompanies all our joys. The black-and-white photos are taken from, or simulate, old family snaps and sometimes news-paper images. This style is deliberate: the black-and-white prints feel like a literal trace in a way that colour plates and digital images do not. We seem to be able to sense the process embedded in the materiality of the print that is created when light falls onto silver nitrate and changes its chemical structure. In this way the light that ‘touches’ the object also touches the print. Because of this intimate process, the photo of a loved one is more than a likeness; it is a relic of their having once been there in front of the camera. This process is further enhanced by the dim reading lamp which is attached to a frame and by the old biscuit tin below each photo which suggests the collections of memorabilia that most of us have in some cupboard or shed.2 The boxes in this installation contain snapshots of the families represented in the larger photographs. The effect also suggests the use of photos in ‘ex votos’ and memorials to the departed. (…) Boltanski plays upon the ambiguity of photography and memory by presenting these found photo-graphs from family albums or archives. In re-photographing them he further degrades the likeness and enhances the feeling of distance in time from the event. He exploits our predisposition to accept the authenticity of old black-and-white images as actual records of events yet presents them with deliberate theatrical effect. The atmosphere he creates is like that of a shrine in a cathedral or mausoleum, but it does not feel like mock religiosity – it is more personal than that and at the same time has broader cultural associations.”

click image to see a documentary about Christian’s life and work, in UBUWEB

┐ Ian van Coller └

Posted on November 2, 2012 by N

“This series combines several influences that have personally been relevant to my art-making process. The work grew out of my experimentation with the use of quilting techniques based on traditions from Africa and Gees Bend, Alabama as a way to tell stories and record oral histories. The manner in which individuals in these portrait collages are presented, was heavily influenced by posters from the period of resistance against apartheid in South Africa. The union posters are now iconic examples of the strong printmaking tradition that grew out of resistance and artistic movements that began in the townships, and which often created “heroic” figures out of ordinary people. The individuals portrayed in the portrait collage series are primarily female domestic and farm workers.

The collages themselves consist of a multi-layered, two-dimensional piece. I print images on Mitsumata fiber paper, which is then soaked in shellac to provide a transparency that allows me to rework both the front and back of the image. The transparency of the paper allows me to layer images on top of one another so that the final piece is essentially multidimensional.”

“This body of work deals with the colonial legacies that have become the social and economic realities of a modern South Africa. Each piece is an exploration of how Euro-centered attitudes have affected my personal history, as well as how they helped construct notions of Africa as the “dark continent.” In an attempt to resolve these dramatically different influences on my life, and to come to terms with my place in the world, I have made very specific choices about the images, materials, and the frames. This body of work originated with the idea of Zambian “memory boards” as a way to trace personal memory/history, as well as the social memory/ history of South Africa. The frames themselves are transformed into objects that carry content in and of themselves, rather than merely encasing a photograph. Old family snapshots or culturally significant images and texts are also inserted in the frame, expressing the tension between the African and European influences on my identity.”

more of Ian’s great body of work here

┐ Traer Scott └

Posted on November 2, 2012 by N

Natural History is a series of completely candid, in-camera single exposure images which bring together both the living and the dead, creating allegorical narratives of our troubled co-existence with nature. Ghost-like reflections of modern visitors viewing wildlife diorama against the preserved subjects themselves, housed behind the thick glass with their faces molded into permanent expressions of fear, aggression or passivity.

“There are many tastes, smells and visual vignettes that I recall from my solitary summers spent in the Natural History museum: the Moonpies and Mountain Dew that I often ate as a mid-day snack, procured from a distinctly southern 1930’s lunch counter on the ground floor; the slightly fetid smell of the animals’ cages- mostly a mix of cedar and musk; wearing a Corn snake around my waist, coiled deliberately through my belt loops in meticulously planned casualness to impress visiting children; proudly and proficiently operating the temperamental levers of the manual service elevator that would often became stuck between floors; the hissing cockroaches from Madigascar who would emit a puff of air when you pressed on their armored backs… and of course the dioramas which I sometimes watched the staff construct or alter, but mostly just gawked at while lurking in the spot lit halls. Oddly enough though, one of the things that stands out the most about my long, shadowy summer days in the museum is National Geographic.

Either because they liked me or because no one really had the time to care, I had full run of the place including keys and punch codes. Behind the education rooms where my mother gave live animal demonstrations to groups of visitors was one of the museum’s informal archives rooms. At the front of the cluttered, windowless room was a tall bookcase filled with every issue of National Geographic since the 1890’s. At the time, I wanted to be an archaeologist (no doubt influenced heavily by Raiders of the Lost Ark) and so for years I had associated all things “old” with mystery and treasure. I was immediately drawn to the magazines’ obvious age and antiquity: the crackled, yellowing covers, thick fibrous paper and fascinating photos. I don’t recall reading the articles at all and don’t even know that I was interested in who or what the subjects were, I really just craved the photographs. I hungrily analyzed the clothing and the environment in the images and was possessed by the notion of staring into the eyes of long dead people. I still do this. As an adult I began collecting Victorian photographs and still feel the same uneasy fascination with holding the subject’s gaze. It is the same sort of disquiet I experience when looking at dioramas.

When I rediscovered dioramas through the Natural History series, I felt a sense of satisfaction and completion, like perhaps a few of the loose ends from my youth had been neatly tied up and even finally made themselves useful. An argument could be made that this series is a celebration or remembrance of a time of quiet discovery for an introverted child. Alternatively, it could also be a way of mourning a very difficult time in my life when my family was falling apart and I learned to seek solace alone, valuing things that other children had no time for.

The rest of my childhood is not nearly as clear as those summers at the museum, I remember very little from the next several years. People, school and home life are vague at best but I do remember that the sense of solitude never really left me.”

More of Traer‘s work here

┐ roots & fruits #12 – Gonçalo Figueiredo └

Posted on October 25, 2012 by N

These portraits are part of a series made back in the Winter of 2009 and it depicts a group of students from the Photography Department to which Gonçalo also was part, both as a technitian and as a student. In December, confronted with the lack of conditions and materials the course lacked to offer, they decided to camp at school and endure a silent and peaceful protest until they were heard.

“Let us now consider the time exposure, of which the photo-portrait is a concrete instance. Whether of a live or dead person, the portrait is funerary in nature, a monument. Acting as a reminder of times that have died away, it sets up landmarks of the past. This means it reverses the paradox of the snapshot, series to series. Whereas the snapshot refers to the fluency of time without conveying it, the time exposure petrifies the time of the referent and denotes it as departed. Reciprocally, whereas the former freezes the superficial time of the image, the latter releases it. It liberates an autonomous and recurrent temporality, which is the time of remembrance. While the portrait as Denkmal, monument, points to a state in a life that is gone forever, it also offers itself as the possibility of staging that life again and again in memory.

An asymmetrical reciprocity joins the snapshot to the time exposure: whereas the snapshot stole a life it could not return, the time exposure expresses a life that it never received. The time exposure doesn’t refer to life as process, evolution, diachrony, as does the snapshot. It deals with an imaginary life that is autonomous, discontinuous, and reversible, because this life has no location other than the surface of the photograph. By the same token it doesn’t frame that kind of surface-death characteristic of the snapshot, which is the shock of time splitting into not anymore and not yet. It refers to death as the state of what has been: the fixity and defection of time, its absolute zero.

(…)

Time exposure implies the antithesis of trauma. Far from blocking speech, it welcomes it openly. Only in time exposure (portrait, landscape, still life, etc.) may photography appear with the continuity of nature. The portrait, for example, may look awkward, but not artificial, as would be the case of a snapshot of an athlete caught in the midst of a jump. When continuity and nature are perceived, speech is apt to body forth that perception in the form of a narrative that meshes the imaginary with the symbolic and organizes our mediation with reality.

The word now, used to describe the kind of temporality involved in time exposures, doesn’t refer to actual time, since it is abstracted from its natural link with here: hic et nunc. It is to be understood as a pause in time, charged with a potential actualization, which will eventually be carried out by speech (or memory as interior speech), and is most probably rooted in the time-consuming act of looking.” excerpt from the article Time Exposure and Snapshot: The Photograph as Paradox, by Thierry de Duve, published in October, Vol. 5, Photography (Summer, 1978), pp. 113-125

More of Gonçalo’s work here

┐ Hallgerður Hallgrímsdóttir └

Posted on September 5, 2012 by N

More of her work here

┐ Martin Seeds └

Posted on September 5, 2012 by N

“I never set out to document anything. It was more of a search, an investigation. I wanted to understand more of myself. To find others like me. I needed to be sure that I wasn’t the only one.

In 1986 I left Northern Ireland for London and for work. I brought me a diploma in computer studies, a strong accent and £50 that I think my father gave me at the ferry terminal. When questioned about my origins in London I rarely had much more than a terse answer. I didn’t have a strong sense of what culturally defined me as being from the North of Ireland. If I did venture into that definition a violent history emerged. And it was difficult to reject that violent element of my heritage without rejecting much of the culture and history. Over the years I returned ‘home’ to Northern Ireland many times and felt with each return increasingly alienated, to the point where I now view my home country as a detached outsider.

But there must be others. I’m sure we, the ones from over there, all get asked the same questions; of origin and of history. And therefore some of those others, like me, must also doubt their answers. Of belonging? There are those, the numbers of whom are unknown to me, although I suspect there are many, that do not answer or give a faux “…it doesn’t matter…”. So much is buried in such a dismiss. For many don’t want to embark down the tiresome road of “…going into that nonsense…”.

I reached the seminal point of detachment in 2010, when I returned to Belfast for a family Christmas. Arriving in the morning and tired from my journey, I slept until mid afternoon. During my sleep there was a heavy snowfall and on waking I stared at this new white landscape from the bedroom window. It felt, for a moment, that a troubled history had been wiped clean but I realised that the snow, although deep and heavy, lay lightly on the surface and was like myself without roots. At that point I knew I did not belong here and because I didn’t feel I belonged elsewhere I needed to understand my sense of displacement.

I am convinced however that there exists within us all a deep sense of origin. It is stronger in some cultures, less deeply buried perhaps. To be clear I’m not talking about nationalism, no, that is something else. That’s wrapped up in political ideals and tied to legal boundary posts. What I’m referring to is more a primeval notion of origin. An unconscious apolitical reference point, which influences much of our choices.

On my recent trips to Northern Ireland I visited familiar places. I was trying to find some resonance of myself engrained in the substance of these known locales. I looked in museums, the repositories of local history and culture, hoping to find some clarity as to my origins. I visited the border country between the north and south of Ireland. Thinking that by looking across that troublesome boundary line to another supposedly different place it might jolt a notion of longing through knowing I didn’t belong there; but in fact it was hard to see where one country ended and the other began. I journeyed to Stormont the seat of political power and once there, I walked the peaceful woods surrounding that contested white building. Throughout all of this, I explored the faces of my fellow countrymen. These faces would surely harbour some common trait, characteristic or expression that I could recognise as my own.

For we as humans have need of a reference point – a beginning? We require that ‘A’ to start from and ‘B’ to arrive at. You see I think we like straight lines, they are easy to negotiate and are convincing in their simplicity. History has, for example, a habit of being drawn as a straight line for that very reason. Well, I read the history; several versions of it. And yes, each drew its own straight line. And I got sick of the sight of it to be honest. It wasn’t telling me anything I wanted to know. It told me someone else’s story. So I went back there. I went back to find my own ‘A’.”

Martin’s statement

More of his work can be seen here

┐ Sunil Shah └

Posted on August 11, 2012 by N

“This project is both a subjective journey to recollect the past and an interrogation of documentary photography in its use to reassemble fragments of history. In 1972 the Ugandan military dictator, Idi Amin expelled 80,000 Asians from the country. I was 3 years old when my family was forced to leave their lives and possessions behind and move to the UK. This research of my family’s origins included analysis of photographs, objects and interview transcripts based on separate dialogues with my father, Ramnik Shah, and two of his brothers; Pran and Mukund. What emerged and can be seen in this fragmented photo-text sequence are objects from dusty storage and extracts from long forgotten anecdotes: there were slowly fading stories and isolated images of diminishing memories. As time advances these stories and images move out of the personal and collective consciousness and move into the public realm of ethnographic colonial histories.”

Sunil’s statement

More of his work here

┐ Brendan George Ko #2 └

Posted on June 6, 2012 by N

@ Brendan George Ko, I used to love you, from Reminiscence, 2008-10

@ Brendan George Ko, We have a history, from Reminiscence, 2008-10

“And now I see what the glass door is. It is the door of a coffin-mine. Not a coffin, a sarcophagus. I am in an enormous vault, dead, and they are paying their last respects.” (Pirsig, Zen)

We are observers to our past, and through time the memory of our history changes as we change. When Robert M. Pirsig set out on his motorcycle journey across America with his son, Chris, and a couple, John and Sylvia, he wasn’t interested in the destination, but in the discovery along the road. He was investigating the history of someone who he once was; someone he had forgotten and was no longer, Phaedrus; his severed personality. Seeing everything around him; revisiting his past, Pirsig found his memory of who he once was. And as he investigated deeper and deeper he learned of who Phaedrus was to the people he once knew, and of his words that matched each terrain, recalling him of Phaedrus’ studies and later, of his insanity.

I am searching for shades of myself, investigating my past, and finding captions that speak for each moment I had forgotten. Instead of a motorcycle, I use my feet for this journey; searching the terrain that surrounds me for my past self that has so rapidly changed over the course of half decade. And like the glass chamber that filled the dream of Phaedrus, I am only an observer to my history; completely powerless to influence change. But it is our history that makes who we are today, and it is who we are today that makes who we are tomorrow. Through my own investigation, I am reading old journal entries, and biographical fiction I wrote in different times of my life. My words will find themselves on windows of places that hold a certain memory, and after they are documented they will remain as mementos to remind me of this act as well as to engage to others who pass by. The sceneries behind these windows will be out of focus like the memory of the captions have faded through time, becoming less clear and less real. I was searching for my history, and I was learning who I was through my past, but I discovered my future in the process as I started a history with someone that was right in front of me this whole time.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig, 1974, excerpts from Chapter 23

Brendan’s work here

┐ Jananne Al-Ani └

Posted on May 2, 2012 by N

The Aesthetics of Disappearance: A Land Without People

@ Sharjah Art Foundation, 2010

┐ Carla Cabanas └

Posted on March 13, 2012 by N

“What remains of what once was – Cabanas Álbum), the artist invokes memory imprecision through erasing, scratching, and fading away of images belonging to her closest surrounding: family. The photographic processing torn off – accumulating in the bottom of the frame – erases information on spaces, context and characters. Just like we all unwillingly discard our personal history, until what remains is but ashes from times gone by.”

by Valter Ventura

More of Carla’s work here

┐ Anne Leighton Massoni └

Posted on September 2, 2011 by N

“I’m interested in combining photographs i’ve made of empty spaces (spaces once inhabited or currently inhabited, but with no one present) with found photographs of times that no longer exist (images that are empty of personal memory) and then inking a thin line (in this case white) to draw a literal point of connection from one image to the next. the titles are constructed by using two identifying words for each image used in the diptychs. the spaces in my photographs are identified by their non-present owner or descriptively; the appropriated images are titled by that which seems most relevant to me about their denotative content – in a few this may include information from the back of the image. appropriated images are stripped of their tone and cropped but nothing else is disturbed in the image (scratches, imperfections, contrast etc), where as my “space” images are adjusted in the same way i would in the darkroom.”

More of Anne’s work here

Nihilsentimentalgia

Tag Archives: Memory