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Previously: Community Performance in Google Street View and 20.12.53 - 10.08.04.
Last week i introduced briefly Manipulating Reality, a show that ran until January 17 at CCCS in Florence. This truly enjoyable exhibition explored the way photographic images and videos represent reality as much as they can construct and betray it. The issue has taken a key importance in a society where images have gradually taken over the role of words as a vehicle of communication. Manipulating Reality presents a selection of 23 artistic approaches that work through photography and video to develop possible models of reality. Its aim is not to understand whether photographs can convey reality but how this can occur. The works exhibited represent different artistic strategies addressing the construction, reflection or distortion of reality in images. In addition to investigating the value of documentary photography today, many of the artists presented reflect in part the conditions of the tool of photography and adopt known artistic techniques such as collage, presentation in model form, abstraction and the assemblage of different elements.
To visitors in a hurry or unaware of who Demand is and what he is capable of, the exhibition opens in an offensively un-spectacular way with Thomas Demand (see his other work Haltestelle.) His Presidency series is devoted to a place we have seen countless times on tv and cinema screens: the U.S. President's Oval Office. The office, seen from different angles, is empty of any human presence. At first sight, it looks like a mere photographic reproduction of the real office until a closer examination reveals that it is the photograph of a paper model. Demand never set foot inside this symbol of supreme power. Basing his work on images encountered in newspapers and magazines, he meticulously crafted life-sized models made of paper and cardboard. Their sole purpose was to be photographed. After the shooting, they were destroyed.
Interestingly, Presidency was commissioned by the New York Times Magazine, a publication which has undoubtedly at his disposal bags of photos taken in the real office. The frontal image of the desk in the Oval Office made the cover in November 2008, immediately after the presidential elections. Demand's images does not offer any clue as to the identity of the president working there. The artist's version of the famous office addresses not only the illusion of power but also the illusory authenticity of photography in a society where communication goes hand in hand with "digital revolution".
The setting of Tatjana Hallbaum's IN-BETWEEN photos is impeccable: an emergency squad works composedly around a plane disaster, a building destroyed by an earthquake waits tranquilly to be surveyed by a rescue team. The pictures look fake and doctored. They are not. At least not completely. The catastrophes never took place, they are mere training exercises to prepare personnel of the police, fire-fighting and civil defense departments should a real disaster occur. As the title of the series suggests, the artist's interest is focused on the space 'in between', the one that separates reality and fiction. Hallbaum describes her works as follows: "The work is questioning the gap between 'true' and 'false', 'reality' and 'fiction'. It should show that photography circumvents this. The question is not what reality is, but how we can represent it."
The haunting Museum of Nature series by Ilkka Halso portrays a distressingly believable vision of a future when the only nature to enjoy will be the one that has to be preserved, just like a work of art, inside a museum.
Like the IN-BETWEEN series, Still Lovers documents a niche phenomena in which fiction is made to be confused with reality. Elena Dorfman met men and women who have made the famous RealDolls part and parcel of everyday domestic life. The dolls come with a heavy aura of porn but Dorfman's images are intimate, not sexual. They explore the emotional bonds created between ordinary-looking people and their silicon partner.
Gregory Crewdson's works brings this idea of manipulated reality to Hollywood level. Metaphorically and literally. seem to defy any attempt to define them. One moment they evoke high-definition stills from big budget movies. Next, they remind viewers of Dutch paintings. Or maybe a scene from a fantasy video game. Set in the most generic American suburbia, the puzzling scenes leave viewers wondering what has just taken place or what is going to happen. Although Crewdson works with a team of professionals one might expect to meet on a cinema production, it's only after an elaborate process of digital editing that this effect of hyper-reality and "hyper-visuality" arises in both the details and the ensemble. My images on flickr. Photo on the homepage: Cigarette, 2007 © Sarah Pickering. |
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I spent quite a bit of virtual ink on Manipulating Reality, a show that closed about a week ago at CCCS in Florence: Community Performance in Google Street View and 20.12.53 - 10.08.04. This exhibition explored the way photographic images and videos represent reality as much as they can construct and betray it. One of its section was dedicated entirely to the treatment of images in the context of war.
As James der Derian notes in his essay for the exhibition catalog: No State or state of mind can exercise full authority in the contemporary infosphere - which of course does not stop many from trying. Images and politics are of course intimately intertwined. A clamorous example is offered by the German and Italian fascist movements in the 1930s. Inspired by the techniques of agitprop of the Russian Revolution, both governments used the relatively new media that were photography, radio and film to bolster their power through visual messages where propaganda and reality appeared to be one and only. The issue was brought to the public attention more recently when the Pentagon imposed a strict blackout on media coverage of US soldiers' coffins returning from Iraq (a censorship which seemed to extend to art portraits of living but reclining soldiers.) The ban, in force since the Persian Gulf war, was eased last year. Artists Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin followed the British army in Afghanistan as embedded photo reporters in June 2008. Embedded reporters are expected to 'document' the conflict while complying with the rigid directives of military command. Only the images that make it through their censorship process are published.
Instead of running after bullets and casualties, Broomberg and Chanarin exposed a roll of 76.2 cm wide and 6 m long photographic paper to the sun for twenty seconds every day. The result, titled The Brother's Suicide, is a series of abstract, mostly white images, with colourful marks where the light and the heat triggered a chemical reaction on the paper. The next step of their work in Afghanistan is The Day Nobody Died, a video that traces the return of the cardboard box containing the roll of photographic paper. The artists followed the soldiers and filmed them as they had to load and unloading the roll of photographic paper from one military base to another. The same gestures are repeated as the soldiers and the box step inside on Chinooks, planes, buses, tanks and jeeps. The object bore no meaning nor probably any sense for the soldiers who become the involuntary protagonists of an absurd performance encapsulating the repetitive nature of military life outside the battleground. A touching and quirky moment in the video sees the soldiers watching the reality show Big Brother under a military tent, with the big cardboard box 'sitting' among them.
The choice of communicating their experience on the war front through abstract and formalistic representation might seem almost irrational. When it is impossible and even forbidden to faithfully communicate the pain and horror of the personal tragedy of soldiers waiting for the moment to fight or die, The Brother's Suicide and The Day Nobody Died force us to reflect and imagine what we do not see and what we are not told. What Broomberg and Chanarin seek to demonstrate with this paradoxical work of "anti-documentation" is that their images are equivalent in terms of truth content to the photographs of embedded reporters approved by military censorship. Their abstract painting of light bears witness to the reality of the conflict in the same almost paradoxical way as the work of the war photographers, which in any case does not present the truth. |
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Previously: Community Performance in Google Street View. Last week i introduced briefly Manipulating Reality, a show that ran until January 17 at CCCS in Florence. This truly enjoyable exhibition explored the theme of the manipulation and reconstruction of reality through photographic images and videos.
One of the artists whose work i discovered while visiting Manipulating Reality is Moira Ricci, a photographer and video artist who gained fame and critical respect for a series of photos she never shot. 20.12.53 - 10.08.04, which appears to have been born out of the artist's desire to investigate her personal past and memory, embodies the views put forward by Roland Barthes in his celebrated Camera Lucida: photography endows the past with a certainty so solid as to be equivalent to the present, thus blurring the boundary between reality (what was) and truth.
A series of amateur photographs from a family album are lined-up on the walls of the gallery. They star the same people whose fashion style evolve as the photographs turn from b&w to coloured by hand to slightly yellowed colour. As your eyes go from one image to another, you realize that two women keep appearing. An elegant woman with black hair who parties, goes to Milan with her fiancé, makes babies and gets older and a slim young woman with a long sad face alla Modigliani, upon whom time seems to leave no trace. The young woman is Moira Rossi. In the images she stands slightly aloof and stares intently in the direction of the other woman, as if she'd hope that the lady would turn and acknowledge her presence. That other woman is her mother who died in 2004. On 10.08.04 to be precise. Hence the title of the series.
Digital processing of the old photographs of her mother's life enabled the artist to appear beside and observe her mother in the moments that, at the time, were thought worthy to be 'immortalized.' Ricci carefully chose her clothes so that they would match the fashion of the time, she adjusted the lighting to fit unobtrusively in the portraits and cast herself as a shy figure at the edge of the photo. The reconstructed images manipulates both the present and the past, building a bridge that enable her to try and reach out to her mother virtually in various moments of her life. To be continued... |
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The worst way to kick off a new year for an art blogger is to see an exhibition so good you're left wondering if the rest of the year won't be a 12-month letdown. Manipulating Reality, a show running until January 17 at CCCS in Florence, is brilliant. The exhibition explores the theme of the manipulation and reconstruction of reality through photographic images and videos. Because my blogging slowness is becoming legendary and the exhibition closes real soon, i thought i would be best to post a quick entry about one of the artworks i discovered in the exhibition before coming back with a much wordier report.
Street With A View addresses the tension between surveillance concerns and the triviality of the images captured by Google Street View. As most of you know, this online service is based on photo material gathered by a panoramic camera attached to the roof of a vehicle driven at slow speeds through city streets all over the world. The mapping system has given rise to debates about privacy and the right to publish and use for commercial purposes the images of individuals and of entire neighbourhoods.
With the complicity of both the inhabitants of Sampsonia Way in Pittsburgh and Google Street View, artists Ben Kinsley and Robin Hewlett staged collective performances and actions that took place just as the Google Car was driving through the neighbourhood: a 17th-century sword fight, a lady escaping through the window using bed linen, a gigantic chicken, a parade with a brass band and majorettes, the lab of the inventor of a laser that makes people fall in love, etc. The images that document the events have become an integral part of the Google image archive.
The Street With A View is an ironic comment on the idea of access to reality through mass-media images. Users of Google Maps can have the impression that they have seen (and therefore know) the streets of Paris, New York or Pittsburgh without ever having set foot there. With their series of collective performances and actions, Kinsley and Hewlett create an analogy between their carefully planned and coordinated artistic events and the equally fictitious reality presented by Google. As images cannot replace direct, physical experience, they always constitute a reconstruction, if not indeed manipulation, of the real world, but one that we are led to regard as real in today's media-driven society. According to Paul Virilio, the representation of reality in an image then becomes a reality in turn, but of lower degree. The image has replaced the word, thus creating a visual truth that has become the contemporary language most used and of most importance in the globalized world.
Manipulating Reality is open until January 17 at CCCS-Strozzina in Florence. |
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I've spent the past few days highlighting some of the works exhibited but i still had to write a proper review of Green Platform. The exhibition, dedicated to art, ecology and sustainability, closes on July 19 at Strozzina (aka CCCS) in Florence.
It is a good show. Definitely less spectacular but gutsier than Radical Nature which i had visited a few days before. It's also much darker. Although there are projects that lead the way to sustainable and achievable strategies, many others leave you with a guilty (but better informed) "What have we done to this planet?" feeling. About two third of the pieces exhibited have been produced by the Strozzina. A few of them by the usual suspects but there's also a fair amount of talented Italian artists i had never heard of. As curator Valentina Gensini explains in the essay she wrote for the catalogue: Traditional indicators of human well-being (life expectancy, literacy, access to sanitation, grain yield, spread of information technology, etc.) do not take escalating environmental and humanitarian catastrophes into account, nor do they include important data regarding both the reduction of biodiversity - viewed also in cultural terms - and damage to the environment, some of which stems from technological innovations and scientific experimentation whose long-term effects are still unknown. GDP (gross domestic product) does not describe the general quality of life in any way, nor does it indicate the environmental sustainability of the paths that have been undertaken.
Accordingly, the exhibition attempts to address ecological issues not only in environmental terms but also with respect to its philosophical, psychological, economic and social implications. As you can guess, Green Platform provides visitors with an intense experience. One which comes with much more questions to ponder on once you've left the gallery than answers.
The work i found most subtle and powerful was Julian Rosefeldt 's magnificent Requiem, a four screen video installation arranged in a square. Visitors find themselves surrounded by 4 films shot in the Brazilian rainforest, home of one third of the primary forests in the world. Precious and fragile as it is, the area is nevertheless relentlessly threatened by logging multinationals. In the beginning of the video, visitors can revel in the contemplation of lush vegetation, bright colours, the hum of insects, birdsong and the sound of raindrops falling from the trees. After a few minutes, the peacefulness is interrupted by a disturbing sound which signals that a tree is falling nearby. The crashing of the tree is quickly echoes by another one. Then another one. Although, no human figure appears on the screen, it is impossible not to feel guilty and ashamed at man's lack of consideration and long-term intelligence regarding the health of this unique ecosystem. The fact that the sound of the chainsaw is absent, makes the crash of falling trees all the more resonant and distressing.
Tue Greenfort is the darling of exhibitions about ecology and sustainability. The work he created especially for Green Platform is a direct reference to the rise in temperature observed in the Mediterranean Sea. A combination of climate change, water pollution and lack of natural enemies like turtles and tuna decimated by overfishing have enabled the mauve stinger, a jellyfish with a very painful sting, to proliferate in the Mediterranean and threaten its biodiversity. Greenfort asked artisanal glassworkers on the island of Murano in Venice (an area which is more aware than most of the consequences that the rising level of the sea can have on urban life) to produce glass models of the pink jellyfish. The battle against the invasive jellyfish is absurd and tragic as the damage they are causing is the result of human foolishness. They are a part of nature but are deemed not 'natural' enough for European waters. The battle against the proliferation of the mauve stinger constitutes the umpteenth attempt by man to combat the consequences of his bad behaviour without attacking the root of the problem.
Henrik Håkansson (who also has another work in the exhibition Radical Nature in London) had a long stay in the Mexican reserve of Montes Azules, in the Selva Lacadona (Chiapas.) The area is gradually shrinking as a result of human activities, leaving animals to constantly struggle for survival against the progressive reduction of their living space. The audio works featured in Green Platform reproduces the song of the quetzal. Once venerated by the Maya and the Aztecs as Quetzacoatl, the feather-serpent, the "king" of birds is now an endangered species. Visitors can only hear the bird for a few seconds every 12 minutes, a rhythm that reflects the rareness of the bird. To hear the bird, you either have to be patient and stay there until it sings again or you must be lucky and stumble upon it. In Håkansson's work the song of the quetzal is reproduced by an amplifier, a Fender Reverb 65, which is itself considered a legend and defined, on the rock scene, as the "king" of its kind. The work thus takes the form of a sculpture/sanctuary, a tribute to the living legend of the quetzal, whose song might one day be heard and remembered only by artificial means. Dacia Manto's Inlandsis 09 layers several sheets of delicate eco-plastic, derived from maize, to reproduce the area of the South Pole, which is gradually shrinking due to global warming. It has been estimated that over 13,000 square kilometres of marine ice have been lost over the past 50 years. Internally, the huge shelf loses between 90 and 150 square kilometres of ice each year. Manto invites us to consider the geography of the South Pole as a living and fragile organism whose protection is vital for the future of our planet. It can be disturbed the softest blow and even visitors passing near the sculpture seem to cast a menacing shadow upon it.
Developed in conjunction with artists Kim Stringfellow and Tim Halbur, together with the Pond: Art, Activism, and Ideas and Greenaction for Health & Environmental Justice organisations, Amy Balkin 's Invisible-5 has a more journalistic approach. The project examines the social, economic and environmental context of the San Joaquin Valley along whose length runs Interstate 5 connecting San Francisco and Los Angeles. A strategic axis for the transport of goods and people, the corridor is also key in the development of livestock farming and intensive agriculture, waste disposal, oil and gas industries and the construction industry. Interstate 5 is one of the most toxic areas on Earth. Invisible-5 is an audio tour starring the people and local communities who fight for environmental justice. The sound archive, shared over the Internet, gathers the testimonies of the inhabitants along with typical local sounds and music. Green Platform, an exhibition curated by Lorenzo Giusti and Valentina Gensini, is on view until July 19 in Florence. All my pictures. Image on the homepage: Julian Rosefeldt, Requiem 4, 2007, Lightjet print.
P.s. The catalogue of the exhibition is to die for. Strozzina has generously uploaded the essays online and the object itself is a superb large format Moleskine. |
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Nikola Uzunovski's contribution to Green Platform - Art Ecology Sustainability, an exhibition running until Sunday at the Strozzina in Florence, is a scientific experiment and an artwork that might be less utopian than it appears.
When (or "if") fully developed, My Sunshine will reflect the sunlight and provide extra hours of lights in urban areas around the Arctic Circle, a region that receives no sunlight in Winter time due to the rotation of the Earth's axis. My Sunshine takes the form of a disc with integrated mirrors, suspended from a transparent aerostatic balloon. Climatologists, meteorologists, astrophysicists, aviation engineers, architects and designers were called by the artist to devise and agree on a theoretical groundwork that would enable these mobile reflectors to bring sunshine to Lapland at the height of winter.
Uzunovski's room at the Strozzina presents his virtual mobile workshop to the public but also engages local design students in workshops that aimed to design the revolving rings on which the reflecting mirror will be anchored.
The most important aspect of this research is the impact on the local population: an artificial sun also comes with improved social interaction and psychophysical well-being. Interview with the artist. |
