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After yesterday's first part of my report on Parrworld. The Collection of Martin Parr, here's a quick (and very sloppy i'm afraid) focus on his private collection of photographs. The artist's interest in social themes finds an echo in these documentary photographs. I'm going to leave aside the international part of this collection and concentrate only on the images from Great Britain.
Most of the works exhibited at the Jeu de Paume date from the 70s and 80s, an era dominated in England by the rule of Margaret Thatcher. Parr doesn't have fond memories of her reign and the photos he collects attest of the social decline and malaise the working class went through at the time. And without further ado - but also without any order nor detail, let me introduce you to:
Paul Reas's photo illustrate the arrival of retail culture in Britain, with American-style shopping malls and out-of-town stores (see in particular Portfolio 1 on his website.)
The work of Tony Ray Jones has been a great influence on Parr who first saw Ray-Jones's photographs of the British at work and leisure when he was still a student, back in 1970: "His pictures were about England. They had that contrast, that seedy eccentricity, but they showed it in a very subtle way. They have an ambiguity, a visual anarchy. They showed me what was possible." (via)
Chris Killip's black and white images captured people and places stricken by Thatcherism.
Tom Wood's Looking for Love series was taken in 1982-85 in a North England disco pub. The photos not only offer a crash course in that glam rock '80s fashion that's been back in favour on the catwalks for a couple of seasons, it's also an anthropological and o-so-crude glimpse into the insecurities and aspirations of young people.
Peter Mitchell has used early colour photography since the '70s to record the transformation of Leeds and its working-class. He immortalized chip shops, fun fairs, power stations, young bikers, Saturday afternoon and mills.
John Davies has been photographing the raw industrial wilderness and suburban sprawl of the Midlands and northern England since 1981.
All this grittiness is almost forgotten with John Hinde's photos of Butlins resorts, the affordable holiday destination for the British working classes. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Billy Butlin commissioned Hinde and his team of photographers to immortalise his holiday camps in technicolor postcards that were sold at Butlin's camps throughout the British Isles.
The series Life as a Night Porter document 10 years that Chris Shaw spent working as a night porter in London hotels.
Chris Howgate's Mecca, a series of photographs taken in bingo halls throughout the UK. You can catch Parrworld - the Collection of Martin Parr until 27 September 2009 at the Jeu de Paume in Paris. Previously: Parrworld. The Collection of Martin Parr (Part 1), Martin Parr retrospective: from fish & chips to mass tourism, Party of the day. |
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The Jeu de Paume in Paris is hosting an exhilarating show featuring the personal collection of Martin Parr along with some of his own series of photographs. Parrworld. The Collection of Martin Parr mixes the everyday absurdities the photographer sees in every aspect of our society with a wonderful taste for contemporary photography and an unusual empathy for the scenes and people he portrayed in "The Guardian Cities Project."
Parr is admired all over the world for his 'subjective documentary approach' but that doesn't mean that everyone is ready to swoon for his satire. However, the Parrworld exhibition shows a side of the photographer that might win over some of the detractors who accuse him of being heartless, superficial and cynical. For once in an exhibition dedicated to the photographer, the ludicrous side of consumer culture, mass tourism, family and British way of living that his work illustrates is taking second stage. There's a lot of farce in the knickknack he's been amassing for decades but there's also a real respect for the subjects he snaps in The Gardian's series and his collection of prints from British and international photographers can hardly be regarded as casual and inconsequential. I'll actually dedicate another post to those. But let's start with the objects, books and postcards Parr collects. Parr started to compile postcards thirty years ago. His collection includes studio portraits, tasteless vacation postcards and curiosities, such as 'boring postcards' depicting motorways, prefabricated buildings and interiors of airplanes. He is particularly keen on collecting the garish postcards made between the 1950s and 1970s by John Hinde studio.
The amazing heap of objects the curators and Parr arranged thematically in the exhibition space includes souvenirs from the Soviet 'Sputnik era', original posters and leaflets from the 1984 UK miners strike, commemorative china from Maggie Thatcher's reign, Spice Girls' biscuits and chocolates, a prayer mat featuring the Twin Towers, Saddam Hussein's clocks and watches and some new Barack Obama ephemera. They might be as weird as you get but the objects selected in this wunderkammer represent events that have shaped our collective memory because of their presence in the media.
This collection of quirky, tacky and curious objects intimately ties Parr up with those sublimely ridiculous people he portrays in his photo series. Parr was already a world-famous artist. Now he is also an eccentric Englishman who collects the kitschiest objects he can get his hands on.
Parr's unique collection of national and international books on photography covers the history of photography books, from icons in book art to publications by obscure publishing houses. Featured in Parr and Garry Badger's publication of their two volumes of 'The Photobook - A History', these books have become collector's items. But Parrworld is also showcasing some of Parr's own work. Several rooms are filled with prints from 'Luxury'. This brand new series depicts wealth in the western world, or rather the way the affluent proudly show off their new-found fortune. The photographer has selected locations where the international jet-set is comfortable splashing out its wealth: the Millionaires' Fair in Moscow, the Basel Art Fair in Miami, the Dubai Art Fair, Munich's Oktoberfest, the Chantilly racetracks and the Motor Show in Beijing. This focus on the international upper class completes Parr's earlier projects on the working and middle classes. The photographer wrote: Traditionally the portrayal of poverty has been the domain of the "concerned photographer", but I photograph wealth in the same spirit. When the new emerging middle classes demand and receive the luxury goods that so many of us take for granted, it will put considerable pressure on the world's resources. We are seeing the first manifestations of this: soaring oil prices brought on in part by exceptional demand from China and India; food prices escalating as crops are diverted into biofuels.
My favourite part of the show was Parr's photographs of 10 UK cities, commissioned by the newspaper for The Guardian Cities Project. The photographs, published in special pull-out sections of the newspaper, reveal a real tenderness and an empathy with their subjects which one isn't used to witness in Parr's other projects.
Parrworld - the Collection of Martin Parr runs until 27 September 2009 at the Jeu de Paume in Paris. Previously: Martin Parr retrospective: from fish & chips to mass tourism, Party of the day and All-Inclusive. A Tourist World. |
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The Maison Européenne de la Photographiein Paris is currently hosting the 10th edition of the Festival @rt Outsiders. (Un)Inhabitable? - Art of Extreme Environments explores the meaning of living in extreme environments. These environments are either those that were, until recently, uninhabited by human beings and that contemporary science and technology is turning into "inhabitable" places (Antarctica, underwater world, outer space, deserts); or they are those that the consequences of man's actions have ruined and made "uninhabitable" for himself but also for other species.
It seems that every single European city is coming up with its own global warming-infused exhibition. @rt Outsiders was smart enough to narrow the focus of its show and to present a couple of artworks that stand out for their complexity, beauty and sense of involvement with the subject.
One of them is Sounds from Dangerous Places, Chernobyl, by sound artist Peter Cusack. Since the nuclear catastrophe of April 26, 1986 nature at Chernobyl seems to be thriving. As humans were evacuated from the exclusion zone around the nuclear power station over 20 years ago, animals moved in. Existing populations multiplied and species not seen for decades began to return (although not every scientist agrees with the statement that the benefits for wildlife from the lack of human activity outweigh the risks of low-level radiation.)
Sounds from Dangerous Places, Chernobyl is part of a broader project by Cusack to collect sounds from sites which have sustained major environmental damage. Impressed by the natural sounds of springtime in the Ukrainian city --dawn chorus, nighttime concert as well as frogs and nightingales-- the artist coupled photographs taken at and around Chernobyl with sound recordings. The sound of birds singing, the view of lovely old houses and wild flowers contrast with the sinister image we have of dilapidated buildings and the invisible radioactivity crackling through Geiger counters. This is one of the most striking works in the show as it's one of the rare artworks that explores Chernobyl without stopping at its potential for spectacularity and drama. As Cusack writes: There is, often, an extreme dichotomy between an aesthetic response and knowledge of the 'danger', whether it is pollution, social injustice, military or geopolitical. The project asks, "What can we learn by listening to the sounds of dangerous places?"
The project also provides us with a further opportunity to reflect on some governments and industry suggestion that nuclear power is one of the greenest fuels available right now and that it would allow us to cut carbon dioxide emissions and keep climate change at a tolerable level. Audios of Chernobyl Dawn and Chernobyl Frogs.
Howard Boland & Laura Cinti presented a new version of The Martian Rose, an experiment about life on Mars. A series of roses were exposed to Martian conditions using a planetary simulation chamber specifically built for Mars. The fragile floweres were placed inside a biochamber that simulates most of the extreme conditions found on Mars. The low pressure, the hard penetrating UV-light and the chilling temperature. The roses emerged, dark red, frozen, their shape intact. The project reminds us that no matter how many spaceships we build and launch into outerspace, no matter how much we want to adapt and explore new planets, space is still a pretty unhospitable place for men.
EPO4 Dewey's Forest, by Shiro Matsui, was inspired by Silent Running, a sci-fi movie that depicts a future in which all plant life on Earth has been made extinct, except for a few specimens preserved in a fleet of space-borne freight ships. The artist designed a garden for weightlessness. An experiment of the garden should be sent to the International Space Station during the Autumn 2009, in collaboration with JAXA, the Japanese Space Agency. The garden looked fit and healthy when i visited the show. I'd be curious to see what the plants look like in a month or two. Plants are locked in a rotating machine, behind a porthole and thus unreachable, allowing the vegetation to grow in all directions, like in weightlessness. A camera is filming the garden from inside, capturing the audience looking at it. Visitors cannot enter the garden anymore that astronauts can go outside.
If a garden can thrive in space? How about art?
In 2003, while he was an artist in residence at the Australian Antarctic Base of Davis, Stephen Eastaugh created a sculpture garden between the meteorology building, a usually-frozen sea and a public mostly made of penguins. The sculptures look like small totems. Inspired by a wooden head planted in a pile of rocks years ago by an unknown explorer, they compete with the antennas, flagpoles and windsocks distributed around the station. My pictures, c-lab has more images as well as a review of the exhibition. The 10th edition of the Festival @rt Outsiders, curated by Annick Bureaud and Jean-Luc Soret, runs until October 11, 2009 at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris. If you're in Paris on Wednesday don't miss the conference and debate that will focus on the economic and political challenges in the Arctic territories, an area coveted for its reserves of oil, gas and other materials buried deep under the Related: Lucy + Jorge Orta's Antarctica expedition, Interview with Laura Cinti and Howard Boland (c-lab). |
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I've just seen the Parrworld exhibition at the Jeu de Paume in Paris. It put me in the best possible mood. Not my first Martin Parr exhibition but this one gets full marks for the amazing display of objects that the artist collects and for the rooms dedicated to the British and international photographers that have influenced Parr's work. Details about the exhibition will follow with the usual absence of alacrity that has come to characterize my blog. Here's an appetizer. This one is from The Port Glasgow Book Project by Mark Neville.
Previously: Martin Parr retrospective: from fish & chips to mass tourism. |
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The Palais de Tokyo's ongoing exhibition, Spy Numbers, takes as its starting point the mysterious and vaguely distressing Numbers Stations. These shortwave radio stations have been broadcasting for several decades, yet their precise function and origin are an enigma. Artificially generated voices are reading streams of numbers, words, letters, tunes or Morse code. Are they sending messages to secret agents? To governments? To weapon or drug traffickers?
Spy Numbers echoes GAKONA, the previous exhibit inspired by the work of Nikola Tesla, in its exploration of the electromagnetic spectrum and its margins. Extending beyond the phenomenon of number stations, the exhibition explores the themes of intrigue and conspiracy. It's a small exhibition. Just a dozen pieces. Some if them very good.
Pascal Broccolichi used a program to capture the electromagnetic activity taking place inside and around the Palais de Tokyo. Sonotubes, an apparatus one would expect to see on the set of 2001: A Space Odyssey, broadcasts the reverberations of these flows of buried waves. Installed at the entrance of the exhibition, Sonotubes sets the tone of the exhibition. We are in for an unsettling and mystifying ride.
I saw the exhibition almost a month ago and the image that haunts my memory is the one of an invisible man. For the series Erased Lynching, Ken Gonzales-Day erased all traces of lynching from postcards and old photos. The lifeless bodies, the ropes have disappeared, leaving only the setting, the onlookers, the executioners. The images deliberately ignore the victims to highlight the true mechanisms of lynching: the crowd gathered to watch the show, the photographer who immortalizes these executions. Invisible, the victims are more omnipresent than ever. As the artists writes: The Erased Lynching series sought to reveal that racially motivated lynching and vigilantism was a more widespread practice in the American West than was believed, and that in California, the majority of Lynchings were perpetrated against Latinos, Native Americans, and Asian Americans; and that more Latinos were lynched in California than were persons of any other race or ethnicity.
La Terrella by Dove Allouche & Evariste Richer follows the steps of Kristian Birkeland. Around 1895, the Norwegian scientist tried to simulate and understand the phenomenon of aurora borealis with a Terrella, a sphere in a vacuum tank to which he directed beams of cathode rays. Birkeland found they were transformed into rings of light at the magnetic poles of a sphere, Birkeland deduced that this was the origin of the aurora borealis.
Allouche and Richer produced a replica of the Terrella, which had since been abandoned, with the help of laboratories and scientists, the two artists embarked on producing a replica. For the Paris exhibition the artists made it operate in accordance with the calendar of the aurora borealis in the year when Birkeland presented his invention to the public.
The piece that alludes most directly to the numbers station is a 5 meter high Numbers Station Beacon / Community Broadcast Tower that broadcasts in the exhibition space recordings of enigmatic voices reading out numbers. The mystery surrounding the meaning of the information relayed engenders anxiety. Besides, the form of the sculpture evokes other towers: powerful lighting devices, big sound broadcasting systems, transmitting antennas, or indeed watch towers. Spy Numbers opens until August 30th, 2009 at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. Previously: Transmediale exhibition: Conspire!, A suspicious radio/printer for Mike Corley, GAKONA at the Palais de Tokyo. |
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I never thought i'd mention good old Tarzan on wmmna but there you go.
The museum is dedicated to traditional art from Africa, Oceania, Americas and Asia, and ever since its opening, it had to face accusations of reinforcing colonial stereotypes. A temporary exhibition about the famous Ape-Man, created by an author who had never set foot in Africa, was unlikely to tame detractors. But the curators are smart. Their perspective is to help visitors understand how Westerners' misconceptions of Africa, its noble savages, lush jungles and scantily clad women, came about. "The idea is to tackle the imagery through which we westerners see our friends from Africa," explained curator Roger Boulay to The Guardian. "It's about exploding stereotypes and looking at how this big western Tarzan myth was created through an intellectual mish-mash of ideas. It's also about explaining the big ideas at the turn of the century from Darwinism to the enfant sauvage, the concept of nature and the King Kong myth of the giant ape kidnapping the white woman."
Now that was a long introduction for an exhibition i did not really care about until i saw a display about Tarzan and the Leopard Men, a novel in which the hero come into conflict with the murderous secret society of the Leopard Men. Behind a glass display was a statue i found so exquisitely frightening it deserved a post:
The doll represent a member of the West African animalistic society called Aniotas/Aniyoto or leopard men. Until the mid-1900s, the Anioto would dress in leopard skins complete with a tail dangling at the back, assailing people with sharp claw-like weapons in the form of leopards' claws and teeth. They murdered their victims and left fake animal traces around them so it would look like an animal's assault. The victims' flesh would be cut and distributed to members of the society who would eat it and thus gain "special power." According to the information i could find about them, Anioto were hired as killers to establish or maintain local power relations, administer secret justice and, later, dodge colonial government control. Here's another statue:
Images of the exhibition on designboom, The Independent, L'Express and in my flickr room. BBC has a video reportage. Image on the homepage is a still from the movie Tarzan and the Leopard Woman. Tarzan is at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris until 27th September. P.s. The Leopard Men existed in crocodile version. |
