One of my personal highlights in 2018 was seeing Elle Pérez’s exhibition Diablo at MoMA PS1. The exhibition consisted of nine large-scale photographs and a collage board of images and written notes. Pérez’s way of portraying others clearly demonstrates that a respectful deal has been made with the sitter.
Read MoreI met Diane Severin Nguyen last August as she was passing through New York on her way back home to Los Angeles having finished the second of three summers on the MFA program at Bard College. Torbjørn Rødland, an enthusiastic advocate of Nguyen’s work, had suggested we meet. Nguyen’s visceral, materialist approach stayed with me. So last winter, when the 28 year-old artist was staging exhibitions of new work in both New York (at Bureau) and Los Angeles (at Bad Reputation) I was thrilled to catch up with her and talk more about her pictures, their fugitive subjects and how these two exhibitions came together.
Read MoreHow We Work. Lillian Davies and Ola Rindal.
For our latest issue, A Criticism Review, we invited a group of writers and critics to reflect on current trends and desired changes in the writing community, considering new ideas about how to work. More and more journals have closed or moved online in the past years and are commissioning fewer texts. In spite of the fact that the international art scene is flourishing, many exhibitions go by almost unnoticed in the press because of a lack of resources. However, the involuntary pause experienced by the art scene over the past two years, and its gradual reopening, have presented an opportunity to redefine and refocus the way we work.
On Tuesday the 24th of May, Objektiv presented the conversation How We Work at our temporary pop up space in the Marais, an opportunity to look closer at writers, publishers and the artists they're devoting their work to. The idea is to valorize the artist's voice, as well as the writer's. We will discuss new ideas for scholarship in contemporary art as well as the creative production of print media. A presentation from Nina Strand, followed by a discussion with contributing writer, Lillian Davies.
On Wednesday 25th of May, we invited to an apéro with artist, Ola Rindal, and a presentation of his work shown in the space. Some photographers seem to invent their very own quality of light in their imagery. Norwegian Rindal is no exception, both in his commercial work and in his own projects.
Listen to the conversation:
Thora Dolven Balke
A conversation on Balke’s show Rough Seas and her upcoming photobook. The term Rough Seas evokes a sense of instability. It is used to describe a difficult situation or time, conjuring unrest, agitation or excitement. Despite the magnitude of its symbolism, it is also used to describe an intimate reality, as is often the case in the artist’s work.
Dolven Balke depicts familiar situations in seemingly ordinary places, grown out of her own experiences. In her images there are figures relaxing by water, bones of aquatic animals, a grieving man lying on a picnic table, a woman pumping milk from her breasts or an MRI scanner with signs of recent use. Mundane scenes become condensed monuments to everyday life. Her photographs are often shown side by side with sculptures using tactile materials and recognizable objects.
The ongoing series FLOW shows original polaroids cut out from cast silicone objects. The material is skin-like, typically used in prosthetic limbs or special effects. These rectangular sliced bodies in different tones replicate water-resistant patterns such as anti-slip pads, dish drying mats, wetroom appliances and suction pumps. Listen to the conversation:
A Criticism Review
Our conversation from the release of ‘A Criticism Review’ is live.
Ashik Zaman whom together with Koshik Zaman and Azmi Kashem has founded and run the Swedish online magazine C-print. During the pandemic, Objektiv initiated a series for its online journal called Visual Wanderings. Photographers from all over the world were invited to create art that responded to our new situation: what did the lock-down mean for their work? Now, we want to hear from the writers and the critics. More and more journals have closed or moved online in the past years and are commissioning fewer texts. In spite of the fact that the art scene is flourishing, many exhibitions go by almost unnoticed because of a lack of resources. However, the involuntary pause experienced by the art scene over the past eighteen months, and its reopening, have presented an opportunity to reflect on how we can make changes within the writing community, carving out new ideas about how to work and be published.
Listen to it here:
A conversation with Ayo Akinsete and Lisa Bernhoft-Sjødin. Ayo Akinsete’s ongoing series You Must Set Forth at Dawn(2016–) is a visual meditation on Black life America; on being born and raised in something continuously brutal in its hypocrisy; on having a privileged relationship to Blackness, but not owning it. Born in Nigeria and raised in Ohio, Akinsete never truly aspired to be American. He began making the work in 2016, months before the election of Donald Trump, when living in an itinerant state between Norway and the US. The contemplations continue; the work is ongoing.
Listen to the conversation here:
Dev Dhunsi
This fall we are testing the podcast format, this conversation is with Dev Dhunsi. Currently taking his bachelor of Fine art at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, he just had a solo show at Fotografiens Hus in Oslo.
Listen to the conversation here:
Since our first edition, published in the spring of 2010, conversations on camera-based art has been the core of Objektiv. Throughout our issues we have always had one or more conversations between artists and others on the scene, conversations that aim to highlight current tendencies in this art practice. This fall we are testing the podcast format. This is our first attempt:
Cecile B. Evans, For a Future Adaptation of Giselle (Willis' battle of whatever forever), 2021. Courtesy of the artist and Kistefos Museum. Photo: Jon M. Sandbu. Liquid Life, 2021.
Work in progress
Liquid Life, this year’s exhibition at Kistefos Museum, Jevnaker, opened on Sunday 23 May and will be finalised in mid-June.
A conversation with curator Martha Kirszenbaum, by Nina Strand
Featuring work by seven international artists such as Pierre Huyghe, Sandra Mujinga and Cécile B. Evans, this exhibition is inspired by the times in which we live. Its fulcrum is the term ‘liquid modernity’ coined by Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman in his 2000 book of that name, which examines how we moved away from a 'heavy' and 'solid', more hardware-focused modernity to a 'light' and 'liquid' software-based modernity, a transition that changed the human condition. ‘It’s a very interesting text’, Kirszenbaum tells me at the exhibition opening. ‘It’s still relevant today, since our postmodern world is ruled by immediacy. We’re realising that the physical ties between people have eroded, and my question for this show is how to find connections to live together again.’
With only seven artists, the museum’s extraordinary architecture plays an important role: ‘ I’m not interested in filling the space as a curator,’ says Kirszenbaum. ‘I’m very interested in small gestures.’ Kirszenbaum and the artists – the show includes five commissions – were also inspired by the contrast between the museum and its surroundings: ‘The Twist, this hyper-modern jewel of architecture that I’m blown away by, and the mysterious Norwegian woods that surround it.’
Sandra Mujinga, Coiling, 2019. Courtesy of the artist and Kistefos Museum. Photo: Jon M. Sandbu. Liquid Life, 2021.
The show opens with Sandra Mujinga’s tent-like sculpture placed in a corner and bathed in her characteristic green light, inspired by the green screen. According to Kirszenbaum, Mujinga’s work functions as: ‘the fairy godmother of the show, floating around us while we walk.’
This light leads on to the three-channel screen film installation by Cécile B. Evans, A Future Adaptation of Giselle, made in cooperation with Ballet National de Marseille / (LA) Horde. Kirszenbaum explains: ‘It is a feminist ballet in which Giselle is trying to escape the paternalist order, helped by the Willis—a sisterhood of spirits of women jilted at the altar on their wedding day.’ A trailer was shown at the opening, juxtaposed with footage showing previous versions of the ballet, with a ten-minute film to be installed in mid-June. ’Evans selected eight students and eight dancers from the company’, Kirszenbaum tells me, ‘all dressed in their collection of costumes dating from when Roland Petit was the director, who was friends with designers Christian Lacroix and Jean Paul Gaultier.’ The work by Evans focuses on the battle, and she is currently working on an animation for the film, which will eventually turn into a feature film.
For the twist in the gallery, which bridges the Randselva River, Laure Prouvost was inspired to make a new waterway to accompany the existing one. Hers is filled with debris and materials from the surrounding woods, as a comment on our ecology, and leads up to a monitor showing a clip from her 2019 film They Parlaient Idéale, showing a brass band playing in the Palais Idéal du Facteur Cheval.
In the panorama gallery you will find a Pierre Huyghe’s installation, a hybrid object that will dissolve during the course of the exhibition. Works by Ane Graff, Oliva Erlanger and Max Hooper Schneider can also be explored, and Schneider is coming to the museum for a one-month residency to broaden the sense of this being an exhibition in progress. Kirszenbaum elaborates: ‘He’ll make a work on site, and have it evolve in the space when the museum is open, so that the audience can follow it’s development. This new installation is inspired – like many others in the show – by Norwegian folk tales, and by Norwegians’ love of dark metal music.’ The exhibition also opens and closes with a commissioned sound piece, composed and produced by Parisian-based Samson, with artists as Nils Bech among others.
‘Liquid Life also reflects how our times are impacted by COVID’, says Kirszenbaum. ‘Some of the works haven’t arrived, and almost none of the artists could be here today, except Ane Graff. Rather than hiding or lying about the fact that the show had these challenges, I made it a concept. Everyone who visits is part of the artwork itself’, Kirszenbaum concludes.
Ane Graff, The Goblets (Soil Edition), 2021. Courtesy of the artist and Kistefos Museum. Photo: Jon M. Sandbu. Liquid Life, 2021.
Ed Ruscha, Then & Now, 2005. Courtesy the artist and Peder Lund.
THEN AND NOW
Bjarne Bare interviewing Ed Ruscha.
Bjarne Bare It has been said that you brought the camera from the pedestrian level to the car, as a response to Americana and the car culture of the American West. Was this decision something you thought about in the beginning of your career, or did it happen as part of life in Los Angeles?
Ed Ruscha Taking photosnaps on the highways was my way of collecting information and bringing the news, if you could call it that, to the sparkly city of L.A.
BB At the same time, the idea of the photograph as a tool, rather than a medium was also an opposing force. For example, the book titled Thirtyfour Parking Lots in Los Angeles was published the same year as the legendary exhibition titled New Documents curated by John Szarkowski at MoMA (1967), an exhibition famous for introducing photography as an acknowledged art form in a modern art museum context. In your early books, the medium (photography) seems to be the interest, not the potential art form as such. Where did this fascination for the medium originate, and do you have this fascination still?
ER At first it was fun to see what could be done and to throw up the feathers and let them fall wherever they do. That type of action could work today and maybe does.
BB Your first book, Twentysix Gasoline Stations, was quite a remarkable statement regarding idea, format and medium. I read a statement by you in the book Ed Ruscha and Photography (Whitney, 2004) that said you would like to be the Henry Ford of book making. At that time, photographers were struggling for acceptance in the art world. One of the main outputs for fine-art photographers was the precious photo book. In Twentysix Gasoline Stations you went the opposite way, making an affordable book that was printed cheaply and made for a wide distribution. What sparked this idea?
ER It was coming from an innocent kid who thought he found water where there was none.
Ed Ruscha, The Sunset Strip (Gazzarri’s Supper Club), 1976. Courtesy the artist and Peder Lund.
BB In June 2011, founder of Self Publish Be Happy, Bruno Ceschel, mentioned in a panel discussion held at Printed Matter in NYC that Twentysix Gasoline Stations marked the beginning of the self-published photo book. The fact that you decided on the concept before the images were conceived and printing it on a high-speed offset press, kept a low selling price amongst other things. Now, fifty years later, these ideas are still provocative and new, and we have recently seen a big wave of self-published books as a response to the established publishers and probably the internet as well. What is your comment to the recent wave of self-published books in connection to the period in which you started publishing?
ER It has been long established that a publisher or editor stands between an Artist and a printed book. Why is there a need for this type of person? Why can’t an Artist create his own printed book? Also, how can you “edit” James Joyce or anything else?
BB You have said that making photo books without being a photographer was “media fucking” and that this inspired you. (Ed Ruscha and Photographs, Whitney 2004.) Still, your photographic projects stand out to me as pure photography without filters and in pursuit of a personal style. Was this one of the reasons your work was seen as conceptual rather than photographic?
ER At times, I have felt that the photos of gas stations were only an excuse to make a book and that a book in itself was king and all important in my art making.
BB How do you see the future of the medium, at what stage is photography today? Do you think it has evolved at all since the start of your career in the early sixties, besides its technical aspects?
ER There are as many kind of photographers as there are painters these days and plenty of really good ones. Photography, or the act of capturing images with some kind of device can’t logically end, as I see it, and surprising things will happen, wait and see.
BB Thirtyfour Parking Lots in Los Angeles (1967) was shot by a professional photographer from a helicopter, commissioned by you. In 2006 a German artist named Hermann Zschiegner published Thirtyfour Parking Lots on Google Earth simply by appropriating images of the same parking lots from Google Earth. Even the book cover is a low-resolution version of the cover of your book. Why do you think your early projects translate so well into new generations, and is it alright to be so directly appropriated?
ER I see the computer capture of my books as a logical exercise. My first reaction was one of amusement that someone would find the material worthy of a second look.
BB What sort of car did you drive when making 26 Gasoline Stations and what do you drive now?
ER Then: A 1950 Ford 4 – door Sedan. Today I drive a 2000 Lexus Sedan.
Ed Ruscha, Vacant Lots (1970-2003), Courtesy the artist and Peder Lund.
This conversation was published in Objektiv #6, 2012.
Sara Cwynar, Tracy (Gold Circle), 2017, © Sara Cwynar, courtesy Foxy Production, New York.
MAKING MECHANISMS CLEAR
Sara Cwynar explores the finely tuned shaping of subjectivity through the circulation and valuation of objects and images, in conversation with Brian Sholis.
Brian Sholis You have spoken in the past about trying to build a sense of “the outmoded” into your work—to appreciate that fashions and tastes change and that the reception of your work will change over time. Have you thought about this differently in recent years as opportunities have arisen to present your work in new contexts?
Sara Cwynar I sometimes think about when many people will see the work versus very few. More often, though, geographic and social contexts seem important. It’s more than art school versus commercial gallery versus art fair; it’s also Canada versus America versus Europe. For Americans, the objects I collect and then photograph are personal, they carry nostalgic resonances. In the European context, these same objects are only vaguely recognizable, somewhat familiar. For example, I have been collecting objects that are slightly phallic in their appearance: vacuum parts, weird pantyhose liners, old hot-water bottles. They’re abstract enough that you cannot pinpoint their original use, and therefore they take on symbolic meanings. And I think this happens more often when my work is exhibited in Europe, where the distance from the American-made objects I use is a little greater. There is a separate narrative that attaches itself to the photographs when they are presented in America: the depicted objects speak to the history of American manufacturing, a mid-century idealism about progress and consumer society that turns into a story about what we no longer make in this country. That happens all over the world in a global economy, but these changes are a prominent part of American social and political discourse. And, too, there is an identifiably American way of buying and discarding objects. Canada, where I’m from, seems like a middle ground for my work—the response to it contains elements of both the American and European reactions to it. I’m fascinated by the slight shifts in resonance objects have between Canada and the United States.
BS As a Canadian artist who moved to New York then attended graduate school in Connecticut, can you elaborate on that last point, or about the “Americanness” versus “Canadianness” of your work?
SC Well, I’m obsessed with the American context. A lot of stuff I’ve been finding lately comes from eBay vendors in the Midwest. The region seems to have troves of commercial objects—and a greater range of them seem accessible than in places like New York or California, where cycles of fashion revolve more quickly and consistently. I also think the objects I reference are usually American, too, and transmit an American view of the world—one filtered through pop culture and popular photography. Looking critically at not only mass-produced objects but also mass-produced modes of depiction is a kind of political project. And one that I think speaks to where American society is now, in terms of a more general awareness of how images are constructed. Canada just doesn’t feel as mixed up, for lack of a better way of putting it, and it doesn’t feel as loaded to investigate these kinds of objects there.
BS Much of your source material was originally made or printed during the late 1960s and early 1970s, a period you describe as bringing a certain mid-century idealism to its conclusion. Does the present moment also seem like a point of transition or inflection?
SC I think it does. For example, the reason I wanted to make a project about the rose-gold iPhone is that I believe it exemplifies so many of the qualities that objects from that earlier period represent. For one thing, selling something purely around a color—a color “invented” for an object—feels very much of the 1960s-’70s moment. Corporations and designers reappropriated colors for commercial uses all the time. There’s also something resonant about how the rose- gold iPhone is the same as another, more commonly available iPhone; it simply has a new veneer. That feels like a “modern” way of selling something—a very idealistic way of pitching a product. I wanted to point to the way you can look back at that time and see its crass commercialism so clearly. The distance permits a certain cynicism about the mechanisms for selling products. You can even acknowledge how those practices led us to where we are today. But despite our sophistication, the same forces are in play today—even if we believe we can see through them. I wanted to talk about the iPhone partly because it totally got me; I was seduced by it. I wanted to think through my personal relationship to these broader forces. Even though you see things clearly, even if you’re inherently skeptical, you sometimes can’t help but participate in them.
Rose Gold, 2017. 16 mm film transferred to video, 8 min
BS You’ve begun making videos. How does their durational nature, the possibility of their narratives changing or even corroding over time, correspond to your thinking about these decades-long changes in society?
SC I want to revisit some of the advertising strategies I critique in my photographs, but only reveal that critical stance slowly. Perhaps viewers won’t realize, at first, that what they’re seeing is not exactly what it looks like. Speaking procedurally, I wanted to make videos because I wanted to present projects featuring rapid editing. I was imagining hypothetical viewers who can only pay attention for one second before needing something else to look at. Those people exist now; rapid cuts fulfill the expectations of a certain kind of present-day viewer. Attention spans are so short; I can feel how short mine is. I thought that a rapid-fire structure made sense for showing all these objects that have themselves faded away from popular consciousness. I give each of them only a moment in the spotlight before moving on to something else. That frantic progression feels to something like today’s advertising feels, or how being in the world feels.
BS We likewise live in an era of seemingly sped up news cycles and political developments …
SC The cycles are so fast. I think about the rose-gold iPhone in the context of the soft jewelry boxes that are featured in Soft Film. Those boxes likely had a decade or two of use and relevance. The rose-gold iPhone already feels like it’s falling out of favor, or as if it’s out of date. It’s much more accessible today, and therefore less desirable, than when it was first introduced and cost something like $800.
BS Perhaps this is why your video never shows the rose-gold iPhone, except in an image you recorded off of a screen …
SC I purposely never put it in the film. I actually have a rose-gold iPhone now because I was entitled to an upgrade through my phone plan. I was using a mangy, cracked iPhone 5 for at least a year, so that’s what’s lovingly held and touched in the film. I could barely see its screen.
BS Your hands hold the phone in the film, and elsewhere a narrator describes you as owning a “collection of pictures of women demonstrating technology.” Is that one way you conceive of your work, as demonstrating or revealing technologies?
SC That’s definitely part of my work. I want to make mechanisms clear, which is perhaps even more important given how technically sophisticated art photography often is. The barrier to entry for art photography, in terms of access to technology, can be high. I have always been interested in making things that don’t require such technologies. Or perhaps deliberately misuses them, creates something filled with more mistakes than what I initially thought was “real” art photography, like Jeff Wall or Andreas Gursky.
BS Do you think that’s partly a generational divide?
SC The way I work seems more prevalent in the last five or ten years, when photographers were making more low-key work, making art within their economy of means, making photographs as photographs, not as monuments. I don’t know whether that’s a response to the moment, or to the art market, or whatever, but it feels like the most vital aspects of art photography have moved away from epic projects. What can Gursky do today to surprise us?
BS He could incorporate bodies! In the past two to three years you’ve begun making portraits. Can you discuss the relationship between the people depicted and yourself, or between the people depicted and the objects that surround them?
Sara Cwynar, Tracy (Grid 1), 2017, © Sara Cwynar, courtesy Foxy Production, New York.
SC I photograph people like I photograph objects. I’ll take a portrait and then, at least when it’s printed and placed into an arrangement with other objects in the studio, it becomes part of a still life. Everyone I photograph though is someone I am close to and know well. I photographed my ex-boyfriend a lot, and he appears in both of my recent films. Having someone in the film with whom I have a close relationship helps to temper some of the dry theory that makes up part of the narration. Just when you can’t listen to any more of this academic language, the film shifts into a more personal register. Tracy, who appears in several recent photographs, has been my friend for about ten years. She is an art director who currently works at Google. She poses with a deep knowledge of how women have been represented in pictures down the ages; she poses almost ironically. Everything she does is familiar but a little off. She’s a great collaborator with whom to think about a critique of the traditional representations of women. The photographs of her look to me like mid-century studio portraits. It was nearly always white women who featured in such commercial portraits during that time. It still feels notable to see that kind of picture featuring someone who is not white. Conversely, using people close to me also helps me to find my way into archives that I don’t know much about. I connect images I find seductive to aspects of my own life. We can work together to find new meanings for historical precedents. Many photographers who work this way, who make advertising-style images, such as Roe Ethridge, Torbjørn Rødland and Christopher Williams… their work is always perfect. I know that’s what advertising imagery is supposed to look like, but I think it’s more exciting when pictures are not perfect. I don’t know how to make a perfect picture. I bought a digital Hasseblad, which makes everything look so seductive, and I can’t find a way to use it for my own purposes.
Soft Film, 2016, 16 mm film transferred to video, 8 min
First exhibited at Statements, Art Basel (winner of the Prix Baloise)
BS In Soft Film, your body is presented alongside objects, it contorts to accommodate objects like plants. Yet your voice is one of authority. It’s a question literally raised in Rose Gold, whose overlapping male and female narrators. Can you speak about authorship and your visual and aural presences in the videos?
SC For Soft Film I cast an amazing actor, one who is way too talented to be recording voiceovers. But he wasn’t allowed to do other work while studying at Yale. I wanted a voice of authority. I was thinking of National Film Board films that lecture audiences about things in the world. I watched one last night about the Toronto police force. The level of surety in those narrators’ voices is redolent of another era. So I hired someone with a smooth voice, someone who could project that authority, but then gave him a script about which he was unsure and left in some of his hesitations and my interruptions. Some viewers may recognize the name lines drawn from feminist texts, or connect the more personal observations to other aspects of my work. But I wanted it to be quite clear, at certain points, that I am in charge. I also think using a male voice when you’re a woman lets you get away with saying more without it feeling diaristic. Well, maybe it still does a little bit. But I believe there is still a way in which viewers will simply accept a male voice reciting “facts” in a way they won’t accept from a female voice. It’s an interesting tension in a feminist film.
BS Funny, I thought you were going to say . . . lets you get away with saying more without it feeling strident or bitchy.
SC I hadn’t thought about it that way, but that feels true, too.
BS We’ve been speaking about bodies and voices. Can you tell me a bit about your recent pictures of armor, which are about a kind of bodily absence?
SC I found those pictures at the York University Library in Toronto. I wanted something to reiterate the New York exhibition’s themes of technology and the masculine-feminine dialectic—you know, Tracy versus the presidential busts and the armor. I think they’re creepy pictures. They come from an out-of-print book on armor that I’ve never seen anywhere else. It hadn’t been checked out of the library since the 1970s. And the pictures themselves are from the 1950s. They were made with an eight- by-ten-inch camera, and the staginess of the lighting somehow makes them look futuristic, almost as if they were 3D modelled. They represent a mashup of time periods and technologies even before my own interventions. I inserted more objects, ones that are often coded “domestic” or “female” to offset the seemingly stoic male figure we imagine inhabits the suit of armor.
BS Can you elaborate a little more about the female/male dialectic in your recent exhibition? It seems like the live presences in your work are female and the more absent, colder presences are male.
SC Except for Bernado, my ex-boyfriend, who appears briefly in the film. But I guess I was thinking about women—about many different groups, in fact—being affected by abstract male forces. I had already begun the work when the image was published of dozens of white men sitting around a table at the White House discussing women’s reproductive rights. Power can be so abstracted, so removed from the places and the people who feel its effects.
Sara Cwynar, Armor (Sebastian Schmid, Harnash, 1550-60. Kat. Nr. 139), 2017, © Sara Cwynar, courtesy Foxy Production, New York.
Pixy Liao, Homemade Sushi, 2010(1).
Digitally Native
While there was a focus on so called 'post-internet art’ in the early 2000s, the art of that time was predominately made to be shown and experienced within traditional gallery spaces. How does that translate to the current 'space-less’ era, when art is increasingly moving online? Can we properly experience art without spatial involvement? These are some of the questions discussed by artist and curator Bjarne Bare and director of Photoworks, Shoair Mavlian. (Editor’s note: This conversation took place on the 15th of May.)
Bjarne Bare We’ve all been going through an unprecedented time recently with the pandemic, and just like every other field, the art world has had to adapt as best it can. As an artist, I’ve found new ways to show my work over the past months, and I’m interested to hear from your side, as a curator and director, how you’ve dealt with it. I'm also interested in how photography deals with this, because I see both good and bad sides for the medium in these times.
I’ve recently been struck by a paradox regarding the recent focus of the art-world on going digital, and comparing that to the ‘post-Internet’ age of the early 2010s. I was travelling to London quite extensively around that time, and I remember that in the artist-run galleries, especially around Peckham, there was so much focus on this idea of post-internet art. Everyone was kind of laughing at it and people were confused about the term, yet a lot of young artists were working with this idea of ‘art after the internet’, and were excited about the different ways in which the internet was influencing art. But they were formatting the works in the gallery space, and it didn't really feel like much of a critique at the time. This movement kind of peaked with the exhibition Electronic Superhighway at Whitechapel Gallery in 2016. When I revisit the video promoting that exhibition now, the idea of the internet and the fascination behind it seems so dated already, and yet the show is only four years old. And all those works were taken from the virtual space into a white cube, whereas I think now we’re seeing the opposite of that, where we’re forcing the works from the exhibition spaces online. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about your experiences of how best to format works for online showing.
Shoair Mavlian When I was at university and during my studies, this kind of post-internet art moment was really at the centre of things. But by the time I entered the traditional museum world in 2008, it had almost disappeared. It's as if the promise and expectations of it didn't infiltrate into traditional museums. It's interesting that you mention artist-run spaces in parts of London like Peckham, which in the early 2000s, would have been very experimental and pre-gentrification, those kinds of spaces on the fringe. I started my career in a very traditional white cube gallery environment. I worked at Tate Modern for ten years, where the architecture and the experience of the physical gallery space were really important in relation to how we thought about curating exhibitions.
I think it's fair to say that curating for a white cube environment is something that you can learn relatively easily. You very quickly get used to curating in a traditional gallery and you learn this language of how to put physical objects in the space, even the language of transferring more temporal works like film and video into a gallery space. But there still isn't a good language for curating online. So to do that the other way around – to take things from the physical space and put them online – is still very problematic.
BB Do you see this as a platform issue? I'm thinking of Instagram as a share or die culture, where there's so much work and the feed lends itself to the idea of scrolling versus panning your eyes around the room. Putting together a series for a scrolling type of situation is inherently different. Could there be a different type of platform where digital curation would work better?
Farah Al Qasimi, Dragon Mart Light Display, 2019 Courtesy of the artist and The Third Line, Dubai.
SM I think the problem lies in taking something and translating it into a form that isn’t its native form. So when we try and put a physical exhibition online and replicate a physical experience, that doesn't work. I find platforms like Instagram less problematic, because what’s so interesting about those types of platforms that are digitally native is that their sole purpose is to show photographic images in a digital context. They're not attempting to replicate a physical experience.
BB I agree. I like the term ‘digitally native’. I think that could be a key to understanding this transition.
SM When I left Tate to become the director of Photoworks, it was a huge leap. Going from an organisation that’s primarily defined by the building that houses it – Tate Modern, which is this iconic building – and then moving to an organisation that’s never had a physical space, this was something that was completely foreign to me. It's been a very interesting process to get used to: separating the curatorial practice from a set physical environment. We constantly come across challenges related to it. I didn't train as a curator, I never went to university to study curatorial practices, but if you do, you’re still primarily taught that the end goal is to put things in a white cube. So as curators, we don't really have the tools to do anything outside this traditional remit.
BB I think as an artist as well, you’re always thinking of that physical space as some kind of an end point. Maybe I'm old-school or traditional, but for me, visiting an exhibition is a break from network technology. I can enter this space and it’s this quiet refuge in the city where I can contemplate. I've been thinking about how the internet can show art and, at the same time, function as this mental space, where I take a break from the digital sphere. But an exhibition online feels like another tab on my computer where I can’t find that focus.
The conversations that have flourished recently online, I really enjoy those because curators and people who work in institutions are often pretty distant from the artist. Recently, I’ve enjoyed your conversations where you speak personally to an artist. Here in Los Angeles, Klaus Biesenbach, who recently became the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, has been doing these at-home conversations. It's so nice to see a director of a big institution speak directly to artists in their home. It's a very different type of engagement.
I was thinking about this last week when I ‘went’ to Frieze, New York, with my friend Jennifer Piejko. It was funny – she sent me an invite link and we went together and we were texting as we were browsing through the fair. It was weird. At one point, it kind of felt nicer than an art fair, but she also mentioned that it felt like she was browsing through an online retailer for clothing. It's funny how the authors have borrowed that aesthetic for showing art online. In some way, it kind of feels like they're late to the game in doing that, because I can only imagine how collectors are enjoying browsing through a selection like this.
SM It's super interesting that you make that connection with online shopping. I guess now it's made the leap into the art world. From a curatorial perspective, as you say, it's a bit late. Curators have been using these types of visualisations, these virtual tools, to plan exhibitions for a long time. For at least five years, probably even more, there's been software available with which you can plan your exhibition before you install. I guess the difference is, when you're planning a show, you know that it's always just the preparation before you get into the space. It's never meant to be the end result, and I guess that's the key thing. These types of visualisations were never designed to replace the experience of going to an exhibition or the experience of going to an art fair.
BB Exactly.
SM They were designed as a planning tool and that's kind of where they fall down, I think. Since the Covid-19 situation has happened, we’ve adapted the tools that are available at this current moment, but they're not necessarily the right tools for the future.
BB For instance, is the Brighton Photo Biennial still happening this year? Or will you postpone it?
SM Yes, very good question. We run a biennial photo festival and it’s due to open at the end of September and we’ve decided not to postpone it. We’ve decided to go ahead, but we won’t have any physical, traditional exhibitions. Instead, we’re exploring the possibility of presenting the same idea through three different modes of delivery.
Theo Simpson, Jerwood/Photoworks Awards, 2020 supported by Jerwood Arts and Photoworks. Installation view at Jerwood Space, London. Photo: Anna Arca.
BB That's interesting.
SM So the theme is Alternative Narratives, which looks at contemporary projects that present alternative propositions to the traditional narratives found in the history of photography. Ironically, we were originally planning to challenge the model of a photography festival anyway. As you know, photography festivals are usually multi-venue and you walk across the city to ten, twenty, fifty different venues, and this year we wanted to challenge that. We’d planned to house the entire festival in one warehouse space, but that's obviously not possible anymore. Its too risky due to Covid-19 and new social-distancing precautions.
Instead, what we’re planning on doing is having these three different modes of delivery. One is an outdoor exhibition, using the urban infrastructure that's already present, primarily advertising space that’s no longer being used. That will be one mode of delivery, an outdoor festival that you can view while social distancing. Even if we go back into a situation of lockdown, you should be able to visit it on your daily walk.
The second mode of delivery is our annual magazine: the next magazine will be a deconstructed version of a photo festival that you can install in your home. The example that's most easy to reference is the practice of Dayanita Singh, who makes these exhibitions in a box that you can install in your home. She encourages you to live with it, install it in different ways, invite your friends over and have an exhibition opening. So it’s really embracing that idea that we can't have a festival where we all come and see it together, but we can send the festival to you and you can install it in your home or your classroom, or your community space and then we can talk about it together.
The third mode of delivery will be our online platform, which activates those two physical elements. So you can go to the website and go into more depth about the festival through artist videos and audio guides. The online platform will be the equivalent of our hub, where we can host those digital conversations and talk to each other while still being surrounded by the festival in our own environments.
Essentially it's the same curatorial projects being presented in three different ways, or being accessed in three different ways. We wanted to use this situation to experiment with the festival model. You don't have to access all three – you could just engage with the outdoor exhibition, or you could just engage with the festival in your home, or you could just engage with the online element. So there are different entry points that all work together or separately.
BB Exactly. I think you're right in saying that the curatorial aspect is pretty much the same. There's still a clear agenda and a theme. I think that's what the audience is seeking. And it will be easier for someone like me, who’s on the other side of the world, to visit, which I like.
SM Yes. And one of the reasons we still print a physical magazine is because its portable and can travel around the world. We really didn't want to just have a digital festival, because I think what makes the digital interesting is its relationship to the physical. So those two things kind of go hand in hand and complement each other. I think we always have to remember that.
BB I totally agree. I've been thinking about that in terms of prints versus JPEGs. I had this discussion with my friend Sara R. Yazdani recently. In the past, I’ve always refused to publish my JPEGs – I prefer to show pictures of installation views, because I like the way the photograph appears in the space, and the print is of importance to me. She said I’m just old-fashioned. I just have to get over it. She was referencing Wolfgang Tillmans, for instance, who shares JPEGs left, right and centre, but he still has such an emphasis on the physical print in his practice.
This comes back to the art-fair ‘viewing rooms’: there was an article in the New York Times this week where they asked Jeff Koons about this, and he said: ‘They feel personal, they feel intimate. I love looking at images. I can be just as happy to look at an image of a Manet painting online. It’s really about the stimulation that a work has for you.’ I'm a little bit conflicted about his idea that a Manet painting can be as good online through its digital stimulation. I was thinking about what that means for you as a curator, when you're discovering new artists, and judging their practice from a digital reproduction. I know, for instance, you recently had Nico Krijno do a takeover on Instagram. His work is also very physical to me. Do you have any final notes on this sense of loss, in terms of sensibility, in the digital sphere? How might we try to recoup it?
Roger Eberhard, 24th Parallel South, Chile, 2018.
SM This is super interesting to me, because I grew up in Australia and my entire art-historical education was done through textbooks or the internet. I hate to admit this, but I was twenty-one and had already graduated university before I had the opportunity to physically stand in front of any of the European masterpieces.
BB Well in Norway we have a similar problem.
SM In Norway you get to see Munch.
BB That's true.
SM In terms of contemporary art and how I work now, I think that we've become extremely literate in reading images. We've not only become extremely good at understanding the subject matter of an image, but we also subconsciously know how to read the physical attributes of a JPEG or of an image that we see on screen. We're becoming better and better at that. So for me, when I'm viewing work online, unless it was work that was made to be viewed online, I subconsciously know that it's only the preview of what I'm going to see in real life. When I'm researching contemporary artists, I know if I'm interested in the work, I know if I want to see more, and hopefully, after I've done the research, I get to physically see it in its physical form.
In terms of access, as long as we understand the difference between the photographic object and doing something digitally, then the digital realm obviously offers far greater access. If you don't have freedom of movement, or you don't have the financial resources to travel and see these things in real life, then the digital does offer something important. This whole Covid experience has made us remember that, as long as the digital doesn't replace the physical, then it's largely a positive thing.
BB I agree. I think the term you used earlier, ‘digitally native’, is interesting in this sense, because the digital viewing room doesn't have to replace the exhibition; it can be an additional mediating tool. We've become so fluent, like you said, in curating art into a white cube that maybe now there’s room for another arena that can play alongside the classical exhibition. And we can still look at installation views. Like I said, I was able to visit Frieze last week. I can experience this year’s Brighton Photo Biennial perhaps even more effectively than previous versions, without having to travel.
SM Exactly. Going back to something you said earlier, I’ve been thinking for a long time about artists’ expectations that they’ll exhibit in a white cube, or that the pinnacle of their career will be to exhibit in a white cube. It would be helpful if that began to shift. I think that comes down to how we’re taught in art school about exhibiting work. There are two things that I found really exciting, which pushed me to leave Tate. One was the fact that I wanted to work with artists of my generation, and the other was that I wanted to install things in experimental environments. But although that was really exciting from my perspective, it's actually very difficult to convince an artist to exhibit their work in a non-traditional gallery space, to print it on a material that's different. For instance, I did an exhibition in Spain a few years ago. It was in a dilapidated kind of manor house, which had one entire wall missing. It was basically open to the elements and you looked out onto the sea. We couldn't print any of the photographs on paper. I had to try and convince quite traditional photographers that we needed to print on fabric and other more durable materials that would withstand the elements of the building. So that was a very interesting experience and I think something that’s kind of pertinent when we talk about the digital, because again, it's a different experience for an artist to give permission to show their work in a digital context.
BB Absolutely. And I think this is valid in terms of the understanding of labour as well. I did an online exhibition last week for Fotogalleriet in Oslo, where they asked me a month prior if I’d contribute with an online exhibition for their website and Instagram. It struck me, as I was working with it, that labour-wise and time-wise, I spent nearly as much time on a project like that as I would on an ‘actual’ exhibition. I think you as a curator have a similar experience: you're probably working at least as much now during this time and you also have to be more visible. People seem to be very active these days, which I’m very pleasantly surprised by. I feel optimistic about this.
SM What you say about labour is very important, because we have to make sure that we don't devalue digital content. We don't want that, since the art world is already very bad at not paying for labour. And just because it's online or just because it's digital doesn't mean that it doesn't take the same amount of time as doing it in the physical realm.
Alberta Whittle, Celestial Mediations II, 2017
The first Photoworks Festival - Propositions for Alternative Narratives - took place 24 September to 25 October 2020.
Sandra Mujinga, Throwing Voice, 2016.
COMMUNITY COMMUNITY COMMUNITY
As we live our lives more and more within the digital, Sandra Mujinga wants to see what happens to subjectivity within this kind of structure. Interview by Lisa Bernhoft-Sjødin.
Lisa Bernhoft-Sjødin What are you working on right now?
Sandra Mujinga My main focus this year is shadows, both expressly and metaphorically.
LBS Shadows, how?
SM Shadows as the opposite of light and as the effect of not being the source of light.
LBS In your work you’ve examined what it is to be a digital subject. Is probing shadows a part of this?
SM My work has always dealt with shadows because of the use of projectors. The viewer’s shadow can distort or enhance my work; the key is to contain either approach. What prompted me to venture further was when I read Zach Blas essay Queer Darkness (2016) from the publication Fear Eats the Soul edited by Omar Kholeif and Sarah Perks. He questions the power of hypervisibility in relation to queer issues and how light is a prerequisite to being visible. Around the same time, the American painter Kerry James Marshall’s works started popping up in my feed. His works really resonated with me and had an immediate connection to my own thoughts about identity politics and representation. The subjects de- picted in the paintings all have a similar skin tone, a flat black skin tone, a way of exploring blackness in itself. Is there power in being in the shadow or not visible at all in a world lit up only by voices?
LBS It might be a whole new way of thinking about subjectivity: a darkened exterior might hide a lit interior.
SM Exactly. It’s interesting to see what can come out of obscuring what’s initially on display. How we control and own our visibility has, again, always been part of my works. Throwing Voice (2016) engages with that kind of subjectivity. The avatar is a live model, whose appearance is obscured while editing. It highlights her outer visuality, her pure physicality. The audio – YouTube tutorials on contouring by young black women – is trying to give substance to this now digital object. Even though we can’t see the women, they’re still constructing their visual selves. And reading Zach Blas has motivated me to explore with darkness what we expect to be spotlighted. The internet is a stage that I frequently take advantage of. It’s enabling us to create whatever self we desire, but it’s a vulnerable freedom. There are no “safe spaces”, because we’re constantly under surveillance. However, it’s also creating another kind of freedom. Social media is not one of my favourite things but without them, I wouldn’t have met so many fantastic people online. I’m not a fan of Facebook, but I look at it as a tool to meet and keep in touch with people I identify with. It’s simultaneously a shitty place and a magical one.
LBS So you, as a solipsist, have taken a few steps back in favour of community?
SM Yes and no. How we react to and engage with people online is getting more and more generic. It’s become somewhat scripted. You know what to post on, say, Instagram to get loads of likes and favour- able comments. Even when posting stuff that’s of a more political nature, both the poster and the viewer follow a script that’s “right”: the right references, the right article or meme or people. Call it oversaturated artivism.
LBS Artivism?
SM Art as activism.
LBS Really? Like the Pepsi commercial with Kendall Jenner joining “the movement” only to save the day by offering the riot police officer a Pepsi?
SM Hah! Oversaturated artivism.
Both images are installation view of Sandra Mujinga's work at Subjektiv, Malmö Konsthall, taken by Helene Toresdotter,
LBS I loved a lot of the memes that came in the aftermath of that. One of the good things in regards to the expansiveness of the internet is how it can function as a corrective to big hegemonic corporations and institutions such as Pepsi. Invisible outsider groups can become visible and powerful.
SM I think, though, that the corrective has always been there, but before, you could just turn a deaf ear to the weird boy in the schoolyard preaching about the evils of Coca Cola. Now, it’s all of a sudden in your feed. One viral hashtag, and everybody’s talking about it. It’s the magic of the internet.
LBS Sure. I wanted to ask you about the Whitney Biennale and the inclusion of Dana Schutz’s Open Casket (2016), which portrays Emmett Till’s open casket. It prompted an uproar from the African-American art community, and the artist Hannah Black wrote an open letter to the institution on the issue, asking them to remove the painting. Several artists had signed the letter, including you. Why was this an important stand for you to take?
SM Being a young black artist one hopes that an influential institution like the Whitney would have the sensibility to involve minorities instead of ignoring them. Signing her letter was a way to voice my frustration over this, and traverse the generic and mainstream reactions you saw online responding to the letter. What surprised me was the outcry from the other side: that this was book-burning and censorship, claiming the right to free speech. The problem with that is the presumption that Hannah Black shouldn’t be granted free speech. Free speech is so many things, and one has to accept being called out and discuss things, not hide behind ‘free speech’.
LBS Definitely. I also saw the letter as a way of choosing one’s own narrative. As young black and brown people, we’re surrounded by narratives told about us. The letter was the most public objection to this since Black Lives Matter came about.
SM There has to be a vital representation to influence change. It’s absolutely pivotal to let the Other speak for themselves. I’ve been obsessed with the black British filmmaker Cecile Emeke’s Strolling series, an internet series where she walks and talks with young POC, about their experiences of adversity and struggle. This kind of thing creates a language on diversity, on racism, that quite frankly we lack in Europe. I think we’re going to see more and more people sharing their experiences of prejudice, to show that we don’t accept the current narrative. And it’s in the internet com- munity I see that change happening. There’s a great- er sense of pride. Starting out as an artist, I needed to define my own internal dialogue as a way to form agency, to not be solely a token or the diversity act of the art community.
LBS Your work is populated entirely by POC. The women in Throwing Voice are black, both the voiceovers and the avatar, and in your installation pieces the models are of African decent. It’s such a relief for African-Norwegians like my self. But it doesn’t feel like “political art”: the theme is universal, but the subjects level our societal hierarchy.
SM Art doesn’t have to be explicitly political. My using only models of African descent is not, as you pointed out, a political charge. I’m creating what I wish to see. I’m not performing for any kind of white fragility. My work is for the future. It’s what happens before the art is created that’s interesting: people from all parts of society coming together and just talking. That’s the only way to create political change. Societal hierarchy is manifested by who is visible. The internet is making it much easier to be in the light. However, to be visible is a very vulnerable state. So is it possible to be visible but in the shadows? What kind of state is that? You can’t see the work being done, but only the outcome of the work.
LBS What you say reminds me of art historian Adrienne Edwards’ term “blackness in abstraction”, which she coined in relation to the paintings of Adam Pendleton, a young black American artist who, among other things, paints only with one colour – black – adding texture with the paint instead of lighter nuances.
SM Forcing one to look for nuances on an assumed flat surface: that’s similar to what I’m doing with shadows and darkness. One of my most recent works is elaborate textile pieces that I’m tentatively calling “wearable sculptures”, worn by the same models in all my future works throughout the year, showing them in different kinds of light and shadow, adding texture and nuances to them. I still make a point of being active outside the exhibition space, outside of the art context, engaging with other communities, doing whatever is needed of me, whether that is washing the dishes or helping out with other tasks. What I mean is, it’s so easy to think that just because we’re artists we’re exempt from prejudice. It might be that we just don’t know that our responses are scripted care. Maybe it’s because we’re afraid of saying the wrong thing. Maybe we don’t have the tools or language to discuss prejudice with nuance. Either way, it’s essential to get out of the studio and be part of the community, to gather and just talk. That’s where the magic happens.
This conversation is based on an earlier interview that took place in 2016 in relation to Mujinga’s exhibition Real Friends at Oslo Kunstforening. It can be found here.
Kenneth Josephson, Michigan, 1981. Courtesy the artist and Stephen Daiter Gallery, Chicago.
FLIP THE MEDIUM
Objektiv #18 investigated the practice of exhibiting camera-based art, both from the insti- tutional and artistic perspectives. For the the issue we’ve asked several writers, artists and curators to reflect on the memorable displays – whether in galleries, books, magazines, online or on billboards – that have remained in their minds. Artist B. Ingrid Olson talks with curator Lauren Fulton about exhibition practises.
B. Ingrid Olson I’d like to begin with the project you were working on when we first met. In fall 2015, you came to my studio in preparation for the exhibition Picture Fiction: Kenneth Josephson and Contemporary Photography at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Can you talk about your introduction to Josephson’s work and what about his approach distinguishes the work from other conceptual photographic work made around the same time?
Lauren Fulton My introduction to Josephson’s photography occurred many years ago, which I think is common for a lot of people—they just don’t realize it, or know who to credit, even people who have lived in Chicago for years. The motifs he invented for image making have become widely popular and completely infiltrate our lives. I only realized my familiarity with them when I was in graduate school and doing research on the MCA’s permanent collection. I could finally put a name to this person, the man who essentially created the selfie! And launched the entire practice of conceptual photography. One thread of the exhibition situated Josephson’s practice within the history of conceptual art rather than that of photography, a medium that was for many decades considered just a tool in service of something greater. He studied photography, but his ideas have always been what is key to his art; his images were crafted in order to convey them, often humorously. His works question the medium itself, exploring how photographs communicate meaning and presenting tensions between reality and illusion. Around 1964, Josephson began the first of his four most well-known series, called Images within Images, which employs a very witty approach and self-reflexive devices. This was at a time when the label photographer was distinct from artist and Josephson’s work was not considered fine art. There are few photo- graphers I can name, beyond Robert Cumming and Duane Michals, who were working in a similar mode at the time. The fact that these photographers identified as such, rather than as artists, could be why they are only now receiving the attention they deserve. In my opinion, Josephson’s work better aligns with conceptual artists working in a variety of media, like Gary Beydler, Ed Ruscha, and William Wegman. The similarities, both formally and conceptually, between Josephson’s Bread Book (1973) and the artist’s books made by Ruscha are wild.
BIO The Bread Book also made me think of Michael Snow's Cover to Cover. I love the idea of those books being a kind of haptic, photographic sculpture. The exhibition in Chicago featured a parallel component highlighting the work of other artists from around 1970 to now. In addition to the relatively broad time range, the type of work included is quite varied for a photography-focused exhibition: artist books, video, and sculpture alongside more traditional photographs. In your research and selection process, what points of contact did you want to highlight between Josephson and the other artists’ work?
LF There are some sculptures (photo objects), videos, and artist books, as you said. Josephson and I have talked about the individuals I mentioned— mostly West Coast guys—and in a few instances there seems to have been some overlap, geographically, and that largely has to do with where they were trained. Some of the other artists included are more directly connected to Josephson, colleagues like Robert Heinecken, or students of his from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Then there is a section of work by contemporary artists that furthers the idea that concepts Josephson invented are prevalent in art today, either through direct or indirect influence. This part of the exhibition includes your work. We selected two-dimensional photographs for the show, but there are also some really interesting links between your Plexi-photo sculptures and the ones Josephson made with fabrics, frames, and plastic tubes.
Kenneth Josephson, Sally’s Skirt, 1973.
BIO Sally’s Skirt floored me when I saw it in the exhibition. It is a perfect example of what I see as Josephson’s diversion from a purely conceptual practice. In that piece, there is the primary focal point: a printed photograph of a woman's crotch and legs— that might normally be clothed by the skirt—which is placed on top of an actual skirt. But there is an ex- tra, tangential element: the swath of unhemmed, patterned fabric draped very casually behind the framed skirt and photograph. That decision adds so much itch to the piece, in the best possible way.
LF The tactility and familiarity that these details add is fantastic, like the corduroy skirt or his daughter Anissa’s dress from that time. I think it also emphasizes Josephson’s intervention, his presence, within the work. He often did this by including his outstretched arm or shadow in his photographs, but this construction of layered materials reinforces the “meta” thing he is so known for. How do you think that extra dimension applies to your own work? You, too, have evolved from the two-dimensional into sculpture (both Plexi-photo objects and the reliefs), an approach that supports your ideas of framing the body that were first seen in your more iconic photographs. For the group show we are working on together for the Aspen Art Museum (AAM), you are creating a series of reliefs that will be installed within one of the galleries and function as what you’ve called “punctuations” throughout the space.
BIO I’ve always been interested in the idea of two-dimensional objects defying flatness and being recognized as material things. My approaches to that question have varied, but always stem from a desire to heighten the bodily awareness of the viewer. In my recent series of Plexiglas Perimeter works, as well as the series of wall-bound relief sculptures, forms and frames demarcate the space that a body can occupy. Both types of work create negative spaces, sitting empty and implying the potential missing positive. The works suggest interaction, or imply a correlation between the viewer’s body and the artwork, and yet the works are not actually meant to be touched. They are vacated spaces, not to be entered. In these works, both photographic and sculptural, the images are still images, but they are contained, structured by a frame and installed at specific heights that correspond to their bodily referent and encourage a more proprioceptive encounter with them. This idea of designing or structuring experience and reframing the experience of images within an exhibition seems at the forefront of another show you worked on in Aspen, Wade Guyton Peter Fischli David Weiss. This installation included large architectural interventions alongside paintings, sculptures, and video. It seemed as though the discrete artworks themselves were unaltered, but their installation suggested a very particular and new way of encountering them, and maybe therefore of understanding them. Can you describe the exhibition and the decisions involved in the installation?
B. Ingrid Olson, Eye and eye, 2018. Courtesy of the artist and Simone Subal Gallery, New York.
LF That was our first building-wide exhibition at the museum. Guyton and Fischli had never collaborated before but had always wanted to, so the museum’s director, Heidi Zuckerman, offered the entire building to them. Albeit mostly subtle, there are many parallels that can be drawn between Guyton’s and Fischli and Weiss’s art. We really didn’t know what sort of ideas they were going to approach us with. It was a different way of experiencing their work—both their independent work and the collaborative sculptures made by Guyton and Fischli. We didn’t publish any description of this show on our website; it was something you had to come to Aspen to experience. The collaborative sculptures were in the form of walls: walls installed within the galleries, but also outdoors on what we call the Commons, and on the roof. I remember writing the labels and, though they looked the same in every way but scale, it was funny how each had a slightly different material make-up. The wall in front of the museum blocked visitors’ access to the entrance; they had to weave around it to get into the building. The wall in the Roof Deck Sculpture Garden was hilarious in that it blocked the view of Aspen Mountain. This is where the cafe is located; it’s packed every day with people who eat up there, watch skiers coming down, and enjoy the view. Guyton and Fischli enjoyed taking that pleasure away from the experience for a while. They commented about how people would be thrilled when their show was over. They installed one of Guyton’s paintings—unprotected!—on the Roof Deck wall. Over the course of the exhibition it was exposed to extreme sun, rain, and snow. It held up very well, but of course that wasn’t the point. They loved this idea of making walls, which we referred to as sculptures. I think there were seven in total, and they were sometimes used to hang/prop Guyton’s paintings or support the projection of a Fischli and Weiss video. I think my favorite was right outside Gallery 1, incredibly awkward and obtrusive, that created a narrow pathway from the elevator to the staircase. It had a presence but you had no idea why it was there. And then, of course, there are the Fischli and Weiss polyurethane works, which were arranged within one of the galleries to create an environment that looked like Fischli and Weiss’s studio: carpentry tools laying around, paint buckets, a level. It was a tight space to move around within. This gallery led into another that was installed with Guyton’s stack paintings. These involve him stacking numerous inkjet-printed paintings on top of one another and propping them together in the gallery. The paintings are individual works themselves but he shipped a bunch of these to the museum and created new stacks on site. Gallery 3 was full of these, thus dictating how one could interact with them. We don’t allow visitors to touch artworks, so only the painting on the front could be viewed entirely; for the others, you just had to enjoy the edges and the information they revealed. Although maybe an unlikely pairing, the installation concept shined new light on the many commonalities in their practices and their use of imagery.
Installation view Wade Guyton Peter Fischli David Weiss, Aspen Art Museum, 2017. Courtesy Aspen Art Museum. Copyright © 2018 Aspen Art Museum. All rights reserved. Photo: Tony Prikryl.
BIO You mentioned that this exhibition was something you had to go to Aspen to experience. But the show was extraordinarily well documented, even utilizing 360° technology within each gallery to give a complete record of the relationship between works in the installation. The availability of comprehensive documentation of installations, let alone 360° documentation, seems to be an anomaly within museums—many have no installation images available online, and others have only a small selection of images available on their websites. Of course, not everyone can travel to experience every exhibition, so it seems potentially beneficial to offer some degree of a virtual simulation. However, I am always frustrated with the sense of loss that comes with documenting artworks or exhibitions. Images of artworks and exhibitions always feel incomplete, distant, flat, and muted. Even the 360° vantage point doesn’t capture the physical experience of walking through a show. It seems that this ability to record an exhibition, which in the past was used as an informational record for archival purposes, is now often a placeholder for actually seeing works of art. As a curator, do you also experience this feeling of exhibition and artwork documentation being an underwhelming substitute, full of interwoven frustrations and satisfactions?
LF I try to avoid it completely if I am going to see the exhibition; otherwise, there is not much more that I have besides the catalogue, in some cases, and often installation images are not included in the catalogue. I cannot get on board with virtual walkthroughs of gallery or museum spaces as substitutes. But they are useful tools.
BIO In your curatorial pursuits, you’ve approached artists that work across a range of mediums and topics, but many of them work photographically. Is it coincidence, or is there something about photography in particular that you are drawn to?
LF. It is completely by coincidence. I actually find it to be a somewhat intimidating medium so I’m not sure how this keeps happening. Five years ago I would have said sculpture and public art was primarily my background. I was a photography major in college for some time but do nothing with it now. I do, however, remain very drawn to those practitioners who flip the medium on its head and, like your work and Josephson’s, merge it with other forms and materials to create constructions using photographs. I’m a sucker for that.
B. Ingrid Olson, Midriff Hrif, 2018. Courtesy of the artist and Simone Subal Gallery, New York.
All spreads are from Objektiv #15, ALBUM by Eline Mugaas and Elise Storsveen.
NEW NARRATIVES
For more than ten years, artists Eline Mugaas and Elise Storsveen have worked on their joint fanzine project parallel with their separate work. Containing mass-produced images taken from various prints and magazines, the photocopied fanzine is, according to the artists, a project without end. Photography book editor and eager ALBUM collector Gösta Flemming met up with Mugaas and Storsveen in Oslo in March (2017), curious to hear how it all started.
Gösta Flemming Putting together images in book form is a genre of its own. People pick up tons of amateur photographs from fleamarkets, and we’re also seeing more and more publications containing images found on the internet, often with unknown sources. Your focus is on commercial images. How did this project start, and for what reasons?
ALBUM We’ve been publishing ALBUM for about ten years, but it started long before that. We’ve known each other for about 40 years, and we created ALBUM #1 after 30 years of continuous conversation and friendship, so it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly when it started.
GF There’s a true symbiosis between you?
AL ALBUM places our dialogue outside of our private conversation to include others. We consider that dialogue to be interesting, but because it can be inaccessible to others, the ALBUM project is a way to edit and visualise what we talk about. For the past years, the art scene has focused on philosophical references, the language has got very complicated and intricate. ALBUM was a proposal to go back confidently to the visual material and through that bring forward strong statements. We decided very early on that it would be restricted to images solely, no words. The first edition set a standard that every subsequent edition would follow. It was decided that the zine would be colour printed, on folded A3 sheets limited to 200 Xeroxed issues. The layout is done with scissors, tape and paper; the size dictates how many pages can be stapled together at once. This is the core of the project, though we’ve done other ALBUM-related things, such as installations and posters. The archive materials/sources are inexhaustible.
GF Where do you get all these images?
AL Everywhere, really, though the majority of the prints come from fleamarkets. We could’ve made hundreds of ALBUM issues. The inexhaustibility of themes we find in the material is surprising to us. It’s like they create themselves, and the material is always accessible. Ten years ago, there was so much freedom in making something as quickly as the fanzine for- mat allows, so we set some very strict parameters. We borrow Xerox machines, Xeroxing at night, during which process a simplification takes place. The added restrictions became pivotal, giving us the opportunity to go in many different directions, but with precision.
GF The imagery is from the 1960s–80s, yes?
AL Mainly, though every ALBUM features new and even older images. We had a lot of material even before we started actualising the project, and we continue collecting images. Visiting the bookstands at various fleamarkets, we find very few books we don’t already own. We mostly collect publications on education like sexual education, books on dog training, cooking, travel, crafting, leisure and cultural history. Starting out, we used clippings from our own art practice, but we found that within the context of the project the less interesting or less complicated images work better in creating a new dialogue. The most spectacular and personal favorites are usually edited out during the process, though they do act as important kick-starters.
GF It got me thinking of Jan Stenmark. He’s very focused on the 60s and 70s in his works.
AL Yes, he’s very time-specific, though he works concretely, juxtaposing text and image, which is different from what we do, but there are similarities. Like him, we’ve also been working with the images we grew up with. We both study the juxtaposing of different elements. It’s exciting to show how little is needed before one image influences another, creating a new narrative. It’s like a collage really.
GF Are you familiar with Bertolt Brecht’s Kriegsfibel from 1955? It contains newspaper images with notes that he collected from the Second World War while he was in exile from Germany. He was very suspicious about photography as a truth witness, and in Kriegsfibel he combines these images with short poetry attempting to decode and understand them. Then in 2011 Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin added media images of the war on terror from the internet to Brecht’s book, resulting in the publication War Primer 2. It’s also a form of collage. How do you work? Do you cut out the images you like?
AL There are so many images packed in boxes at both our studios, plus we have a lot of books to choose from. For example, ABC for sexual education and Sex Lex. Here, every theme is treated equally: under H you’ll find Harem, Handicap, Herpes and Hormones, all at the same level. We start with lots of images spread out on white sheets on the floor, outlining the pages and the sequencing. This makes it easier to see connections and to choose which narratives we want to proceed with. Some issues have a strong visual connection that’s difficult to explain, while others have a clear thematic connection. We build the visual narrative around a well-used structure: introduction, elaboration, a sort of climax near the end before phasing out. It’s always exciting when the issue works as one readable idea despite the fragmented imagery.
GF What about copyright? Have you been approached by anyone?
AL No, not yet anyway; we don’t really worry about it, but we steer away from imagery that has been defined as art, artist’s publications or magazines or books on art. We use mass-produced images only. The best images for us are those with an accessible, simple message; those are the easiest to manipulate. By using already printed images, we make it clear where the images are from, leaving no question as to whether these are our images or not. Part of the joy of the project is to recognise the images’ original reading and at the same time to see them in a new relationship. Before the book was published [The first ten issues were collected as a book by Teknisk Forlag and Primary Information in 2014], ALBUM was a Xerox machine project. Copyright wasn’t really an issue with the book either, basically because there wouldn’t be any money if we were sued.
GF Richard Prince is doing a similar thing, appropriating images from various sources.
AL Richard Prince is exploring questions around individual desire in the encounter with commercial interests. He doesn’t take a clear position on whether this is good or bad. However, this has become a problem now that he’s no longer a small-scale artist appropriating images from Malboro campaigns, but a world-famous one appropriating at the same speed and scale from less know photographers or personal Instagram accounts. There’s the issue of privacy: are open Instagram accounts public or private? Right or wrong, there’s more to it than that. All of a sudden, he’s on the opposite side of the power relation, which is interesting when speaking of appropriation. Who you are can’t be insignificant in this regard; he’s traversed from one to the other. It should be a priority in life to protect the lesser.
GF You also have an established position after 10 years.
AL Yes, it’s a challenge placing oneself on a bigger scale, but for now, we’re a far cry from Prince. We borrow images in our own artistic oeuvre as well. Appropriation is a well-established art practice, so we don’t need to try to justify it. Even though not all is allowed, it kind of almost is.
GF When is it an artwork? When is it that the actual artistic contribution begins? Even if you use other peoples pictures, it’s in the context of your own artwork.
AL The images in ALBUM are not the actual artwork; it’s what we do with them and the narrative that follows from it.
GF This is what I meant when I said that this was an established genre: there’s a tradition you’re working with. Pioneering this field was artist Hans Peter Feldmann, who for decades collected and assembled others’ images in book form.
AL Feldmann is not as preoccupied as other artists in the West with the symbiosis between individuals and capitalism. He plays with all sorts of visual expressions. Whereas Prince is sexy and dangerous, Feldmann is communicative and playful, like a kid in a candy store. ALBUM is probably a child of both, together with Fischli and Weiss. These are artists we’ve looked to for inspiration.
GF It’s interesting to see the different characters that this kind of work can assume. Yours is joyous, Feldmann’s is that of the manic collector. Tacita Dean’s book Flow has a whole other expression: she uses amateur photography in a quieter way.
AL An argument for both Prince and Feldmann is that they voice a different perspective from the traditionally commercial one. It’s important that these voices that challenge how we handle visual information exist. It enables us to better scrutinise the information.
GF Warhol was at the forefront of recycling images in his silkscreens, where he added new features such as colours.
AL He wanted to remove the notion of a personal touch: a classic artistic stand. This notion goes even further back, to the likes of Max Ernst, who used kiosk literature and commercials for his collages. We choose our images with our artistic skills, picking out the ones through which we want to tell our narrative. It’s often hard to know whether a photo is art or not, but our work is about opening up a space where one isn’t told how or what to look for; instead, one’s invited to apply one’s own reading and voice.
GF Is ALBUM a meeting point in your practices?
AL Yes, that’s a fitting description. We started with a wish to showcase weird photos, putting them in contexts that made us laugh. Quite quickly, it became a conscious, critical reading of our culture’s visual material and so we wanted to question through them how we viewed the world. Working on ALBUM #3, for example, we became aware that a large portion of the images we chose depicted a lone man in a landscape. The focus wasn’t that he was a man, but a representation of a human being. Women are seldom represented like this.
GF She’s more of an object?
AL Yes, definitely. We found lots of images of man and nature or man and the big machine. He’s heroically alone, he looks content, he’s got purpose. in being there. We changed the narrative, proposing that he was melancholic and yearning. It’s important to point out that this theme was something that was already there in the material; we have no particular interest in lonely men, as such. By defining him as lonely and yearning for love and purpose, we wanted to return him to a state of individuality, at the same time underscoring who gets to speak on behalf of humanity: by and large, white men. Non-white people have even less of a voice than white women. There’s been a great change for the better, but it takes time, especially when it’s so little communicated in white culture. After #3 we made an issue on women, focusing on representation. All our fanzines attempt to find new readings of our own gender.
GF You’re far away from the moralising attitude in the childrens’ books that you’ve used images from. There’s a lot of humor in your work, even when it’s serious. No one is exempt.
AL That’s not contradictory. Exposing ourselves is important, as with ALBUM #4 on female representation. On one page, there’s a typical fashion image from Vogue, a totally unrealistic ideal. On the opposite page is an image from your typical softcore porn magazine, mocking a woman for being incapable of sharpening a knife. The result is that these women, in this new context, become both independent individuals and hardcore feminists. Therein lies our freedom. We know the references and give them new meaning and at the same time the original context remains accessible for many. We look for images with rare narratives, like the active or strong woman, the objectified or caregiving man, people of different ethnicity not exoticised, wanting to show each of them as modern, equal human beings.
GF Your work is very equal, no matter what the cultural origins of its subjects.
AL It’s important that everyone gets to be an individual. In the issue on women artists, we mostly poke fun at ourselves about how convenient it is to have the creative woman around. It’s amazing how many fashion spreads out there feature scenes from within the studio showing women in expensive dresses throwing paint at each other. And weirdly, there are a lot of women washing their shoulders. We’ve obviously got very dirty shoulders! It’s both extremely funny and unrealistic at the same time.
GF How was this issue received?
AL Well, in many ways it’s a very obvious project and agenda. Our standpoints are easily readable, even if it’s just images and no text.
GF One of the images recalls Jeanne d’Arc; we carry all these references with us.
AL Exactly, all of us carry with us different histories that shape us whether it’s newspaper history, film history, women’s history. We’ve seen millions of images, and a lot of these we can read without an attached explanation. Our colleagues understood our project straightaway, while everyone else was looking for a text, a title or an introduction. But with more issues, they stopped asking.
GF Sure, it’s so dense, the connections become clear. How many issues will there be?
AL We haven’t got any restrictions; we’re hoping it will be a life-long project. Not only is the material inexhaustible, but so is the format. We’ve found our storytelling method, where we can come up with new themes and photos, and we hope it will go on for many years to come. ALBUM is our fuel for our separate practices. But it’s essential that it continues to feel relevant and fun to create.
Marina Pinsky, Pine Tree Flag 2, 2017
WHAT, PHOTOGRAPHERS WORRY?
TRAVIS DIEHL IN CONVERSATION WITH MARINA PINSKY AND CARTER MULL
I have this idea that photography makes artists anxious – that the recent so-called ‘sculptural turn’ in photography stems partly from the nagging worry that the photograph isn’t enough in our accelerating age. Why else take an essentially two-dimensional, lens-based image and extrude it into three dimensions, if not to distance the image from the boring old wall? Why else would you manifest your image via commercial processes (UV printing, posters/billboards, 3D printing/rendering, VR/AR, etc.), if not to put circulation above content? At the same time, now that taking photos is free, there remains a version of the ‘classical’ effort of the photograph to argue for its own value, uniqueness and preciousness. My feeling is that rather than evolving as artists from ‘straight’ photography to more sculptural presentations – a movement towards – anxious photographers have undertaken a movement away from straight photography. Perhaps it’s the anxiety that photography itself just isn’t art, an anxiety about the simplicity or purity of the form, and a desire to negate or scramble formal purity in general. Of course, this anxiety could be my own, and perhaps the artists themselves are less concerned by such distinctions. And so, in the below conversations, I sound out two artists – Carter Mull and Marina Pinsky – who have both been called photographers, who have made and exhibited excellent photographs, but who wouldn’t claim the name themselves. Indeed, as Mull says, my question is already circumscribed by what are essentially the parameters of conservators and climate control – in other words, by institutions.
MARINA PINSKY
Travis Diehl Your latest show, at 303 Gallery in New York, seemed to comprise several distinct bodies of work: low, grey, frame-like sculptures; combinations of carved foam and carved stone; and a series of black and white photographic prints. How did you arrive at this format, or in other words, what did you mean to put into play by maintaining such stark contrasts between different media?
Marina Pinsky All of the material sensibilities in that show were intuitive. The foam and stone being forced together in the three Trigger Trace works, 2018, is probably the most palpable tactile contrast within one sculpture. I lived in New York when I was younger, and going back to the city over the years, sensations that I’d got used to before suddenly came to the surface, newly grating on me. The general ambient noise of the city, especially in the subway, the sound of metal scraping against metal all the time, and the bodies in the trains, pushing against each other and getting distorted against the metal poles and irregular plastic seat shapes. I think a lot of those uncomfortable impressions made their way into the sculptures when I could reflect on them back in my quiet studio, half a world away from all that intensity.
TD I see a transition from wall-based photographic work to more sculptural, dimensional photographs?
MP The first such work I made came about through a few chance events. First, I’d been thinking about the word ‘author’ in relation to an authority (i.e. expert) and an authority figure (i.e. law enforcement officer). I remember having conversations with friends and with my brother about these ideas. A friend had an artwork in her studio that was a ‘manager’, which would sort of put pressure on her to keep focus, and that was a very inspiring idea. It was a free and strange time for me then, working in the studio without anyone looking over my shoulder (which I’d got used to when studying in art school for six years). It seemed useful to build myself some inanimate object that could be an authority figure, but not in a menacing way – more a role model who could help me meet certain expectations of myself. So I came up with a very simple structure of bent sheet metal that could support itself and be freestanding. At the same time, I was working on the montage of the image that I wanted to print on the surface. I shot the photograph at The Grove, an outdoor shopping mall in LA, where people seem to come to be noticed by other people, and everyone is constantly taking photos. I lived close by, and would go there sometimes to take photos of people. This particular man had a natural confidence and grace that fit my ideals for the first Role Model sculpture.
Marina Pinsky, Cage, 2016
TD When is the ‘straight’ – ie. traditional, Szarkowskian – photograph enough?
MP There are some situations that fit into the regular photo frame so perfectly that to add anything would destroy the viewer’s concentration on that event/image. For example, I made a series of photos called Woman and Child of a Belgian female police officer performing a fingerprinting demonstration on a child. The images are close-ups following the movements of both sets of hands as each finger is inked and printed by the gloved officer. The photos are, for the most part, ‘straight’, and the viewer follows this process (though not necessarily in order) unfolding in time as they walk around the room and see the individual photos, which are slices of this event that has now been extended in space and inside of their individual temporal imagination.
TD So you do still occasionally make a body of work that’s just photographs? Part of the difficulty with, say, maintaining that convention of a photographic frame as a window is that photography is more vernacular even than written language; it seems hard to say where the photo begins and ends.
Marina Pinsky. Installation view: Dyed Channel. Kunsthalle Basel, 2016. Photo: Philipp Hänger
MP Nowadays, I would pair photographs and sculptures in the same room. And I think this ‘window’ feature of photographs is something you can mess around with. For example, when I had a show at the Kunsthalle Basel, in the centre of one room I installed a boat, floating in a low tank of water. The boat was constructed based on photos I’d taken of a duck-hunting boat at the Havre de Grace Decoy Museum on the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland. Going around the room was a line of small photographs on the wall, hung relatively close together, which had a much more local subject matter. They were underwater photos of the Rhine River, where it passes through Basel, which I’d taken over the course of a week with a snorkel and underwater camera. So they were like little ‘windows’ onto the underwater seam of the city. Printed on the glass in their frames were bits of images of local fish specimens from the nearby natural history museum. These were the fish that, ideally, live in the surrounding Swiss waterways. But the banks of the Rhine have been home to chemical factories (now pharmaceutical companies) for centuries, and the river has been a dumping ground for all that industry. So this is expressed through the optical effect of the printing on the glass, where the fish hover on the edge of disappearing from sight, depending on the angle of view. At the same time, this fish-image also makes you acutely aware of the glass as material and as a distance-creating layer, which echoes back to the hunting boat sitting in the glass tank half full of water in the centre of the room.
TD This distinction between photography and not-photography may no longer be a discursive flashpoint, but it seems to me that the reason why Woman and Child needs to be a more traditionally photographic work is that in terms of subject matter you’re dealing with a kind of cataloguing and sorting and surveillance and control that’s essentially photographic.
MP Yes, making these photos I was thinking about the mechanisms of photography that we face most of the time in our daily lives, that create our identity and draw the limits of our mobility. But also, in this case, these functions are being parroted and are playacted in order to indoctrinate parents and children into this surveillance apparatus, treating it as a normal and fun ‘activity’. Of course, this is my own view of the situation I was photographing, and the images themselves have had so many different interpretations.
TD In terms of medium specificity, what would you call yourself? An artist? A sculptor? A photographer? Has this changed over time?
MP I would call myself an artist (at least that’s what I list as my profession on my tax form). I studied photography at two schools, both of which were interdisciplinary art schools. But then I still called myself a photographer (even though I was always making a lot of other things), and any sculptures I made were in the service of photography – they only existed inside a photographic frame. But after I finished my studies, I started making sculptures that I felt could stand on their own. More and more now, I’m trying to think sculpturally.
CARTER MULL
From Carter Mull’s website.
Travis Diehl You often use photographs, but the work isn’t strictly photographic – it’s sometimes a digital collage.
Carter Mull What I do is deal with the circulation of artwork – whether art objects or digital images or both – in a relatively defined space of distribution. This is a different approach from saying, for example, ‘I’m a painter who makes paintings.’ A more accurate way to describe what I do is ‘montage’. This act of montage happens from work to work. It also happens in the play of artist roles and also in how various segments of culture are at times delineated and at other times conjoined.
TD Do you think of what I want to call the ‘veil sculptures’ as montages?
CM In the case of the veil sculptures, I made these dye sublimation prints on layered tulle, which were then draped over large bouquets of flowers. The two-dimensional digital source files are brutal and saturated, but when printed, the images become delicate, topological, three- or even four-dimensional objects. This idea of montage becomes an argument about sculpture and about para-cinema. At the time I made those works, I’d spent time with members of the party scene centred on the warehouses near my studio – people in their early twenties whose identities were in great flux. I saw the bouquets of flowers as akin to people transforming. I saw them more as bodies.
TD Maybe there’s something about your photographs of the club kids that couldn’t do what the veil sculptures do?
Carter Mull, Theoretical Children, fused space, San Francisco, US. November 12, 2015 – January 17, 2016. Images copyright and courtesy of the artist, fused space and Jessica Silverman.
CM Totally. With the veil sculptures there’s a poetics, a kind of ephemerality of the image. The images in the veils were made in a very simple way. I made patterns and graphics from the logos of the world’s largest media companies and those who invested in them. For me, there’s a kind of topological relationship between how capital is indexed in sub-pop, advanced pop culture and the various loci of capital itself. We could look, for example, at the flows of capital at Viacom as having a degree of reciprocity with the performers who grow out of Heav3n. It’s also important to understand that I ended up here through the questions of my own aesthetic project. For years, my work had performed its own commercialisation, a strategy adopted from the Neo-Geo artists like John Armleder. Along the lines of some sort of protective skin between my work and its distribution, I’ve also done things that were decidedly meant to not circulate in the world or circulate very rarely. When I began to make images of the friends I’ve made downtown, the larger project at hand was to create an alternative to the art world that could be used to look back onto the art world and model it. It’s decidedly a work of culture, but not something to be defined by the system of art. I made some video work that dealt with these kinds of questions very directly in Hearts of Gold, 2013. I got more interested in a kind of autonomous practice, or a practice that isn’t necessarily tied to the system of art, but maybe situated on the edge of the system of art and that can function in another space of distribution as well. In many ways, the image is impossible to quarantine.
TD Do you think of yourself as a photographer?
CM I never have, although I do like performing the role of the photographer. I actually really love shooting straight pictures of people, but that came out of other ideas. In the summer of 2012, I noticed this relationship between my work and a very real lifestyle trend in which various historic subcultures such as LA punk or local drag were mashed together to form a kind of pop skin. I wanted to create a relationship between my work and this world. That’s how I started shooting portraits. But I studied painting in college.
TD You can play the role of a photographer without being one?
CM Totally. I don’t think photography is art. I understand on a structural level how photography became constituted as art. When we talk about these categories – painter, sculptor, et al. – we’re talking about how institutions, whether market or museum, define artists. But for me, it’s never art. Photography is an independent segment of culture that’s been central to the culture industry for decades, whereas art has often remained autonomous from the world while working to articulate a relationship to something outside itself. Photography in an art context often does the exact opposite – it strives to insulate itself from the forces of culture.
TD What’s the last series you did that wasn’t lens-based at all?
CM I’ve used the lens in everything. I use a camera pretty much every day. I also use printers and computers and pencils and paint. For me, it’s very much a use of the image. There’s definitely a history to working that way, but it’s always been kind of hard to place.
TD You don’t seem anxious or conflicted about it.
CM The conflict for me comes within institutional environments and the way that my work is formatted within a market situation. You want to have a proper understanding of your work out there so people kind of know what they’re dealing with. It’s complex in the sense that sculpture has had a true expanded field, whereas two-dimensional work hasn’t, although one could argue that the turn towards looking to circulation is analogous to the expanded field of sculpture. My work, or that of many of my colleagues, functions more like a communicative signal. And the communication is distributed in various ways, within the relay stations of museums and galleries, or through other means. To answer your question directly about the anxiety, I do have a kind of honest anxiety about the identification of what I do. The anxiety comes from the misalignment of context and work. The flip side is that the right context for the work can be profoundly satisfying.
TD Why do you think people think of you as a photographer, or in that category?
CM I did make C-prints for many years. Then I shifted the processes and I shifted the substrate, so it was a lot of works with aluminum and cotton and organza. Photography departments can’t collect it because of the way the cold storage works, so those types of substrates have to go into the contemporary art department. In a way, the museum has to classify them as contemporary art. For me, that’s important because it does set up the most reductive version of the discourse.
TD What was the last C-print you made?
CM I made a C-print at the end of 2012, Autopoetics and Wire. It’s images from the movie poster for Pollock, with Ed Harris, mixed with some images of the Alexander Liberman spread in Vogue, March 1951. The models against the Pollocks.
TD A print of a photo of a photo of a painting.
CM Exactly.
Carter Mull, Theoretical Children, fused space, San Francisco, US. November 12, 2015 – January 17, 2016. Images copyright and courtesy of the artist, fused space and Jessica Silverman.
Picture taken from Image Text Ithaca’s website.
MAKING BRIDGES
A conversation with Catherine Taylor and Nicholas Muellner on The Image Text Ithaca initiative.
Nina Strand As you know, we’re working on a double issue named The Flexible Image this year (2016). The Ithaca College Image Text MFA is a unique degree program focused on the intersection of writing and photography. Our board member Lucas Blalock told me about your programme, a programme that feels like something that’s been missing for so long. Could you tell us about how this began?
Nicholas Muellner It began as a casual conversation between the two of us. Coming from photography as I do, but also using language a lot in my work, I’ve felt a bit displaced by the space between writing/literature and photography/visual art; how they share so much and yet speak at cross purposes, or don’t speak to each other at all. Catherine and I – she coming from writing but with a history and interest in the image – started a conversation about the crossover between our disciplines. The more we talked to each other, and with others, the more we saw the great interest in bridging these two areas. We ran workshops for the past two summers. When we did the second we knew we were making a MFA, but the first was more an experiment to see if it was a good idea. And the response was great.
Catherine Taylor The idea for Image Text Ithaca came out of an encounter with each other’s work. Once we’d seen each other’s books, we thought that the way our work spoke to each other (about the tenderness and the terror at the seam between private and public, about the tension between materiality and analysis, about the monumentalizing of history, about the haunting resonance of art in daily struggles) deserved more time and attention. And then we encountered this issue of a mismatched vocabulary between the disciplines, which is interesting and provocative but also frustrating. When we started inviting people to the first workshop, they were all extremely eager to participate. Both the writers and the visual artists were happy to spend time together in this exploratory and friendly environment. They were missing this creative and professional dialogue.
NM The people who came to the workshops were established artists and writers whom we invited. And we also did an open call and the response we got was huge – 130 applicants in two weeks. This was an opportunity they’d been looking for and that they just didn’t think existed. Some of them come from traditional photography and writing backgrounds (undergrad degrees from art schools, or writing programmes). Several have already worked on independent or collaborative publishing ventures, including John O’Toole and his Oranbeg Press. A few come from more idiosyncratic backgrounds, which is exciting to me. One was trained as an architectural historian, though she’s also worked with photography and writing. Another was a social worker and community organiser before joining our programme to focus on the writing and image-making that had been taking place in his bedroom. We’re not looking for any particular pedigree – only for open, talented, experimentally ambitious artists.
CT So many of the people said the same thing: ‘I’ve been waiting for this.’
NM One of our graduate students heard about the programme and it made her very emotional because she thought she was all alone in working like this. She just got in her car and drove to Ithaca the next day. I’ve noticed this in photography: so many visual artists have been trying to work with language, especially in books, but they’re missing the discipline and structure to work rigorously with language. And I think many writers are having the same experience with image-making.
NS You’re also integrating The ITI press as part of the MFA. The Press is, as you write, modelled on contemporary photographic and literary small presses, and will publish online and on paper innovative text and image works by national and international writers and artists. Could you tell me more about this?
CT The press is an initiative where the students can learn more about publishing, not just how to be published, but to also how to be editors and curators.
NS Which is something I think we see many younger artists doing today – having all these different hats on, and being able to work in all these fields. This is something also reflected in your own bios.
CT Yes, and we also started the press because we saw a need for this specific kind of press, one that can work with both text and images. I know of a number of photo-presses who do image and text work, but they don’t really have connections with, or reach out to, the community of writers, and vice versa. A myriad of independent presses for literature exist, but they don’t work much with images, or consider the communications between the two genres. There are so few presses that work well with both.
NS Nicholas, you mentioned a poet in the past workshop who collaborated with a visual artist, and they inspired each other?
Matvei Yankelevich, Some Worlds for Dr. Vogt
NM As for collaboration and integrated image-text work, we deliberately have no set expectations, rules or templates. Sometimes collaboration produces a hybrid work; other times, one project or genre simply influences the other. Sometimes a project demands both images and writing; other times, the solution lies in only one medium, even if the insights of the other are important influences. Our past workshops have led to numerous collaborations between a writer and a photographer that have taken several tangible forms. For example, photographer Hannah Whitaker sent images to poet Matvei Yankelevich (both 2014 fellows) who in turn wrote a poem provoked by the photographs. The result was published as an image-text pamphlet as part of the Self Publish Be Happy Pamphlet series. And one of Hannah’s photographs subsequently appeared as the cover for Matvei’s newest book of verse (a fantastic image foreshadowing a truly amazing cycle of poems). All three of our first ITI Press publications came out of collaborations and shared insight during the workshops. What am I leaving out or getting wrong, Catherine? If the coming summer session is a giant bud on the mysterious plant of the previous workshops, what do you hope the hidden flower will look like? Or what will be its fruit?
CT Did you know that cross-pollination often produces plants that are more fertile than their parents? I wish this for our programme: increased fertility, a wildly productive site for future growth, maybe monstrous and beautiful, maybe nourishing, but always vital. Already, the publications from our first year are spreading in interesting ways. For instance, Andre Bradley’s Dark Archives has gotten a lot of attention (short-listed for the Rencontres d’Arles Photo-Text Award) and he continues to produce a series of stunning image-text works, including his latest, Soprano. Claudia Rankine, author of the breakout book Citizen, was an ITI fellow both of the past workshops and included work by another ITI fellow, Michael David Murphy, in her book. Artists and writers Earl Gravy (Emma Kemp and Daniel Wroe), Bobby Schiedemann, Analicia Sotelo and Thomas Whittle collaboratively produced another ITI Book, Tessex, through a process of remote correspondence, curatorial outreach, and an epic road trip. Nicholas collaborated with poet John Keene to produce our most recent book, Grind. And this fall we are publishing a new screenprint portfolio, The Black Banal, by video artist Tony Cokes. I’m in Toronto this week, teaching a writing workshop; half of the manuscripts include photography and everyone’s interested in pursuing work at this intersection. Pretty exciting.
Grind, John Keene and Nicholas Muellner, 2016.
NS I’m intrigued by Claudia Rankine’s Citizen – as I see that many are. These short texts seem to function as images. Grind, as well, seems very funny and important. The cover reminds me of Vibeke Tandberg’s paintings Oblivion, Absence, Disaster, Assumption and Delirium, in which the titles are painted letter on letter, making the words they refer to impossible to read, but lovely text images. I’m not sure, as our synopsis for this issue suggests, about the image as a readable sign. We were inspired by Aperture’s issue Lit. and we want to investigate whether the image has taken over from the word, and if gestures are taking over from images. But I do believe our visual competence is getting better and smarter and that we’re used to and can understand image and text and symbols quicker, which makes it easier to expand our creativity to include different genres. What do you think: will the image take over from words?
CT Nicholas recently pointed me to an essay titled The Caption by Nancy Newhall, which was published in the very first issue of Aperture in 1952. Even then, Newhall wrote, ‘Perhaps the old literacy of words is dying and a new literacy of images is being born.’ She said that ‘photograph-writing’ might become ‘the form through which we shall speak to each other, in many succeeding phases of photography for a thousand years or more.’ But she conceded the continuing role of the textual, saying ‘The association of words and photographs has grown to a medium with immense influence on what we think, and, in the new photograph-writing, the most significant development so far is in the “caption”.’ I think one could argue that there has been a kind of continuing transformation – some might say reduction – of much writing into the function of the caption given the omniscience of the image. So, rather than tackle the unanswerable crystal-ball question of whether images will take over words, it might be interesting to think about whether we agree that language has become subsidiary to image in a caption-like way, or not. And, if it has, are there modes or uses or examples where language as caption might be re- imagined, re-enchanted, complicated or exploded? I’m thinking of the ‘condensary’ (to borrow a word from poet Lorinne Niedecker) of Jason Fulford’s Hotel Oracle, or, at the other end of the spectrum, Nicholas’ expansive captioning in The Amnesia Pavillions. Or maybe Roni Horn’s Still Water (the River Thames for Example), or some of Moyra Davey’s work. Nick, can you think of other examples? Although, I think we do also have to admit that the moving image is the real tsunami, and if we look at words in that context we’d need to talk about the screenplay and the soundtrack and maybe even concede that the photo-text world we’re exploring might be merely a quaint, but still deeply moving, anachronism.
NM I just googled Tandberg’s paintings and the likeness to the Grind cover, by our fantastic designer (and ITI summer fellow) Elana Schlenker, is incredible. The photos in the book are appropriated profile pictures from gay meeting sites, in which the subjects have made formal, usually abstract interventions to hide their faces while showing the rest of themselves – extravagant anonymity, you could say. And Elana, with the cover, went one step further, extracting the shape of obfuscation into a graphic presence all its own. The source, then, has a strong kinship to Tandberg’s spelling of a word that becomes invisible but makes an image all the same. This reminds me why I get so excited about putting writers and photographers in a room to learn from one another. Both fields (as distinct from, say, painting and sculpture) operate with a language that’s everywhere, all the time, and put to the basest and most sublime uses constantly. As I type, thousands of people are texting heartbreaking, syntactically experimental phrases to those who don’t text them back. And just as many are launching tragic and vulnerable images across the ether. But they’re also sending a picture of their rash to their mom, or channelling their high school English training into a well-crafted Yelp review of a Starbucks. My emoji keyboard has five different crying smiley-faces, plus two with Xs for eyes. Words and photographs are constantly put to the most banal and transcendent of uses on such a scale in our lives that we can’t help but question the value of ‘art’ and ‘literature’ as categories of specialised training and expression. But I choose to believe that this surplus or onslaught of image-text production in the world creates a new urgency for the artist – to make of it something other than what’s sweeping us all away like a landslide. The Media Studies scholar Mikko Villi, writing way back in 2008 – just as the first smart phones were hitting the market – had already noted that cell-phone photographs were enacting a fundamental shift in the function of images: to communicate across space, rather than across time. This shifting of the pressure of production to the absolute present is true for language as well. These days, I’m exhausted by this pressure, in which the funny, the tragic and the functional stream by so indiscriminately, but don’t seem to gather downstream in anything that feels like a past. And when would I have time to revisit that anyway? Like the Tandberg paintings Nina described, each expression seems to cross out the last. And it’s the role of the artist to make a complex and enduring form out of that relentlessness. Image and text used together, purposefully, can force us to stop and remember that the world is still unknowable. The oscillation of the mind between an ambiguously linked caption and photograph can do this. As much as images and words flow indiscriminately through the streams of our lives, we still process them differently: one doesn’t show, the other doesn’t tell. Daily life, and the ‘tsunami’ (as Catherine called it) of the moving image both tend to elide that fact in the rush of simultaneity. And that’s where the quaint, anachronistic slowness of still images and written language, given the proper graphic space, can put on the brakes – can force reflection and pause and make a re-humanising allowance for the slowness and uncertainty of knowing. Another route it can take is to theatrically reconstruct the landslide of words and pictures so that it draws and enhances the contours of the crisis of mental and temporal collapse that we’re in. For that, the onslaught of moving image makes powerful sense. I’m thinking of video works like Camille Henrot’s Grosse Fatigue and Hito Steyerl’s Factory of the Sun.
Tomas Espedal, Mitt privatliv, Gyldendal Forlag.
NS How lovely that you should bring up Henrot, Nicholas: her work Grosse Fatigue is featured in our Part 1 of The Flexible Image issues. Tandberg is a good example because she also writes novels, something many other fellow Norwegian artists have done, like Matias Faldbakken, Morten Andenæs and Signe Marie Andersen. The latter has just published her first book with ‘analogue texts’ as she calls them – texts written over many years about images she couldn’t take, or thoughts around how an image could be. She’s just this week having a discussion on her work and on working with image and text together with the writer Tomas Espedal at the opening of Slow Pictures at Lillehammer Art Museum. Espedal himself published his first photobook, My Private Life, last year and has been a fan of photography for a long time, always photographing everything around him. One of the most telling images from his book is an image of his bed and nightstand, with novels and notebooks and drinks and cigarettes all around it. The text accompanying this image says: ‘If one could photograph lovesickness, then this photograph is an attempt: I was about to fall asleep for good, but my writing kept me awake.’ Espedal is one of my favourite writers, and the fact that he uses images makes my belief in the subject of this coming issue even stronger: that texts are becoming images and vice versa, as Nancy Newhall was telling us a long time ago in the essay you mention Catherine, as well as her idea of the caption, which to me is why I like Instagram: it’s a place where you can play with giving the image further meaning through a caption. This weekend I thought some more about poets and images while reading a biography on Louise Bourgeois where she’s trying to understand the process by which a painter like Picasso came to the work he was doing at that time. Looking at the group he exchanged views and ideas with, like Max Jacob and Guillame Apollinaire, she wrote: ‘The poet owns the field of images as well as the field of words. As a creator of images, the poet is close to us, which is why I read Joyce, Jarry, James and Gertrude Stein.’ This might be what my idea of what the outcome of your programme is: owning both fields. To conclude, what are your thoughts on the exhibition mentioned in our issue, SEEABLE/ SAYABLE (Kunstnernes Hus, 2016). Here, the idea of the ekphrasis creates a fruitful approach to the exhibition.
NM I love the idea of ekphrastic texts resonating as spoken language through the exhibition. It really gets to the space between the mental image and the visual image: a seemingly small chasm with no bridge across. It’s a common interest for both me and Catherine. There are many great moments in her writing – in Apart, and her forthcoming book – where language conjures an image that we’re acutely aware we can’t see.
CT My new book’s working title is Inanimate Subjects; it considers military drones, the figure of the puppet, and ideas about autonomy and powerlessness. Because of the nature of drone technology, the question of images we can’t see, image-making that’s largely invisible, and, in fact, world-shaping that happens on an invisible plane both literally and figuratively is very much central to Inanimate Subjects. While I hadn’t really articulated this for myself in the process of writing the book, Nick’s comments about the power of language to conjure absent images is central to that text, and, as he says, to so much writing. My book does include a series of photographs, but I decided not to use military drone views of battle zones or civilian landscapes since those images seemed to overwrite what I was exploring in language. They dominated and reduced. Instead, the photos are of a single puppet in a series of different poses that I hope are evocative of different affects and feelings that course through the writing. In this work, because of the intensity of the subject matter, I hope the photos provide a break, a punctuation, a pause, and maybe a kind of breaking or punching through the page to glimpse something inarticulate the lies underneath it all: that silence that nonetheless speaks.
NM That gap becomes a metaphor for larger (emotional, historical, political) conditions, as much as a way of telling. As the exhibition’s title suggests, hearing a picture is as powerful as seeing one, but certainly not the same. To me, the ekphrastic in literature is just a subset of what great language frequently does: it conjures a powerful image to enact the narrative of projected desire. We produce what’s absent. Sometimes I think the secret that animates language is the invisibility of the image, and the secret of the artwork is its unalterable silence. I’m always thrilled by the two secrets passing each other in the park at night. The encounter is full of mystery, suggestion and insatiable desire.
Nina Perlman, Architects, Pigeons, shortlisted for this year’s MACK First Book Awards. Perlman graduated in 2019.
Since our first edition, published in the spring of 2010, conversations on camera-based art has been the core of Objektiv. Throughout our 20 issues we have always had one or more conversations between artists and others on the scene, conversations that aim to highlight current tendencies in this art practice. We wanted the first book from our Objektiv Press-series to consist of twelve conversations from previous issues and to be launched during this year’s Les Rencontres d’Arles. Due to the current situation we will focus instead on our two upcoming essay publications and share (and republish) the dialogues online. This conversation is from our 16th issue.
Marianna Simnett’s The Bird Game (film still), 2019. Courtesy the artist, FVU, the Rothschild Foundation and the Frans Hals Museum.
WEARING MANY MASKS
An interview with Marianna Simnett, with an introduction by Camille Henrot.
For Objektiv #19, we asked artists who have featured in our first eighteen issues to ‘pay it forward’, so to speak, and identify a younger artist working with photography or film whom they feel deserves a larger platform. Camille Henrot wanted to showcase Marianna Simnett, and we were fortunate to use Henrot’s words for this introduction, and her notes as questions for the conversation: In an interview with director of Nottingham Contemporary, Sam Thorne, Marianna Simnett explained how, when going to a doctor, she was subjecting herself to a sort of active passivity – actively going through a process where something was inflicted upon her. I found this very interesting, and it reminded me of the works of Orlan, an artist who used her own body as her canvas and also filmed her operations during the 1990s – something I felt was very significant and forward thinking at that time. Marianna’s perspective is dreamlike, sometimes with the element of psychoanalysis, and sometimes connected to fiction. I like the fact that political gestures are indirect in her works. She is unapologetic, and it is she who sets the rules, with a true loyalty and commitment to her own world of imaginary desires. I also like the fact that in Marianna's work, truth is ambivalent. She plays with confusing us, with what is true and what is not, what is her and what is not her. This toying with authenticity is bold today, at a time when we’re obsessed with transparency and truth. The category of judgment is also obsolete in her work – what is right and wrong is non-existent. In this way, Marianna activates a political and societal critique that has a certain degree of humour, a laid-back attitude. The act of modifying her voice is not only about modifying the voice. Yes, it is a reflection on gender, authority and how women are perceived in general, but it’s also an attack on the fetishism of the authentic, and the idea that you should be ashamed of any sort of moderation of your identity. Marianna‘s self-inflicted alteration of identity is something active and positive, a transformative cultural critique.
When talking about altering her voice, Simnett has mentioned Margaret Thatcher, and the prejudices people have about women. Female artists are particularly vulnerable to such prejudices, when they use themselves in their films: “Everyone gets excited when I stick needles in my neck. Especially men. I think they get turned on by it. They get all pumped up and it makes me want to vomit. I love playing dress-up. Most of my female characters have half their face hanging off, or worms crawling out of their mouths. I use the archetypal figure of the fair-haired heroine. I twist and distort the blondeness of fairytale beauty until it becomes horrific. My face is all over my work, so it’s a bit late to turn back. A great artist and friend of mine, Julia Phillips, inspired me to think more critically about handing over your identity when all you really should be known for is your work. She really protects that. It’s powerful and no doubt hard work to be the one saying no all the time.”
Marianna Simnett, Blood In My Milk (video still), 2018.
Simnett’s relationship with self-fiction, and the idea of sincerity and exposure of the self is very present in her practice: “You know yourself when you’re being real. But sincerity doesn’t have to be singular. I wear many masks. At her exhibition at MoMA, New York, I made a pledge to Adrian Piper that I’d never say anything I didn’t mean. And that was a promise — I felt able to sign that document. Everyone was saying, ‘What if you lie?’ And I said, ‘You can still lie and really mean it!’ All my work is semi-autobiographical. It’s not about factual events happening in my life, but I’m undeniably present. It’s weirdly more real than fact. It’s an anxious state I’m trying to convey, a frequency, a persistent nagging, something that other people can engage with as well. I’m frivolous with the idea of sincerity. I like to be wild and play different characters. But you have to stick your feet in the ground and do your thing, and not accept it when people tell you it’s wrong. That core belief in yourself has to be a hundred percent there. Otherwise, you end up in deep trouble.”
Simnett doesn’t just use herself in her works, however, but includes the people she happens to meet: “Surgeons, scientists, children … A girl I met on a farm became my surrogate, my mouthpiece – poor thing. She had to cut off her nose and sing about mastitis. Then she had to crawl up her own nostril and get chased around by an Albanian virgin. I don’t usually work with the same people twice, but she’s the exception – other than myself, of course. I perform when I know it’s going to hurt. I can do things to my own body (change my voice, induce unconsciousness) with a casualness that I couldn’t ask of anyone else – I’d probably be put in prison.”
This young girl was included in one of the pieces in the exhibition Blood In My Milk shown at the New Museum this year: “Isabel arrived as if she were a visitation. She chose me. Her presence reminded me of my own childhood, of being chastised for playing outside, of being bound up and taught to be afraid of men. She was nine at the time and I wrote the film through her eyes – or rather, her nose. She looked like a little Lolita — her strangely distinct features had a dreamy and eerie expression — but she was no starlet. No, Isabel had none of the precociousness you’d expect of a young girl in a movie. She almost didn’t seem to care, but then she’d burst out with these extraordinary performances, complete with red lipstick and ardent tongue. She tapped into the fears we project onto others and the lengths we go to in order to protect ourselves from imagined disease and corruption.”
Marianna Simnett, The Bird Game.
Simnett also has a strong relationship to animals, both in real life and in her films: “Like Joan Jonas, with her dogs and fish, I regard the animals in my work as helpers. I’ve worked with cows, worms, cockroaches and dogs. My next film, The Bird Game, will feature songbirds and a talking crow. And I can’t talk about animals without mentioning Donna Haraway and her extraordinary kinship tales of multi-species. Animals are part of me. I had two pigeons — Winona and Scissors — but sadly, one flew away and the other got lice and died. I adored them. Jon Day, author of Homing: On Pigeons, Dwellings and Why We Return, was breeding them and I got attached. Filipa Ramos, editor of Animals, is the queen of animal-thinking. She can spot beavers’ anal sacs in red lipstick, and taught me that platy- puses sweat milk from their skin. Her work inspires me to re-examine our physical existence alongside the millions of creatures living on this planet.”
The Bird Game will be Simnett’s first cinematic film: “I spend about nine months on average on each film. They’re like babies, pretty much. The Bird Game involves a wicked crow who seduces a group of innocent children into playing her game. It’s a dark tale of transgression, and stems from my research into bird brain activity during sleep. Birds have a miraculous ability to retain high levels of cognition during wakefulness even after little to no sleep. Right now, I’m also making a sculpture for a show called My Head is a Haunted House, curated by the incredible Charlie Fox at Sadie Coles, London.”
When watching Simnett’s works, the films of Dario Argento such as Suspiria, or Claire Denis’s Trouble Every Day could come to mind: “I love Argento and Denis. The original Suspiria is one of my favourite films in the world. The remake is disgusting, except for the fun contortionist bits, and Tilda Swinton, who I adore. I love to binge. I’ll eat up everything by Walerian Borowczyk, then move on to the beasts — The Company of Wolves, Cat People, An American Werewolf in London — then settle into a Bresson dessert. I wasn’t allowed to watch anything when I was young. When I discovered movies, I was already in my teens. Since then, I’ve never lost my craving to be transported into another world by cinema.”
With a strong musical background, trained in piano and flute, music is very important. in Simnett’s work: “I write the lyrics and build a skeleton track, and then I work on it with a musician – so far, almost exclusively with Lucinda Chua. We talk about feelings and colours and moods more than notation. We want a feeling of paralysis, drowsiness, of something strangely medical happening to your body. She has a very unique talent for converting a mood into a sound. It’s like alchemy. We started working in a very light way, over about a decade. As we’ve grown as artists, the music has got more weird! Because we trust each other, we dare to go further. And now I’m collaborating with other musicians too. It’s really exciting and a crucial element of the work. Hopefully, I can release a spooky medical EP one day, full of singing bones and animated organs. I’d love that!”
Marianna Simnett, Blood in My Milk, 2018. Still 5-channel HD video installation. Courtesy of the artist and Jerwood/FVU Awards.
For the coming two weeks: A rare online screening of The Bird Game (2019) by Marianna Simnett, in light of the COVID-19 outbreak. 10th April 2020 - 24th April 2020. See the film here.
We wanted the first book from our Objektiv Press-series to consist of twelve conversations from previous issues and to be launched during this year’s Les Rencontres d’Arles. Due to the current situation we will focus instead on our two upcoming essay publications and share (and republish) the dialogues online. This conversation is from Objektiv #19.
B. Ingrid Olson, axiomatic, fingered and bent, 2014. All images are from the show double-ended arrow by B. Ingrid Olson at Simone Subal, 2015.
A conversation between B. Ingrid Olson and Lucas Blalock
Lucas Blalock In the photographic works in your show double-ended arrow at Simone Subal in New York, ‘the body’, in this case your body, played a central role. Can you talk about the relationships you’re drawing between the body, the camera and the photograph?
B. Ingrid Olson The body and the photograph are both means to address the dynamic of ‘subject’ and ‘object’, specifically the jump between an interior, direct experience and an exterior, pictured existence. Because I hold the camera pressed up to my face, the perspective within the images is primarily subjective, as seen through my eyes. As I’m taking the photographs, I simultaneously insert various parts of my body in front of the lens (my hand, my legs, my torso, my feet), which reinforces the camera’s location as a stand-in for my vision. Alternately, there are instances when the viewpoint shifts to capture my body’s reflection in a mirror, making me also the subject, the figure, or focal point of the images. In addition to my body’s placement within the images, the ideas of subject and object are related to the way in which the physical photographic prints are layered into and onto one another. The collaged superimposition of multi- ple printed photographs hinders the composition’s ability to become a single, continuous image. When your eye hits the edge of one image to find the edge of another image, there’s a kind of push-back, creating an awareness of looking rather than seeing. This very denial of immersion in the image, by way of the actual objectification of the photograph (the highlighting of the photographic print as a physical, material thing), repositions the images, which depict my body and my perspective, within the realm of the object and the ‘exterior’ for the viewer, even though the individual images may picture the opposite. In this situation, the viewer is invited to share my eyes, even to enter into my body to see what I see, but then the photographic constructions – as reflexive objects – don’t allow this, denying entry, even forcibly kicking the viewer out.
B. Ingrid Olson, the fountain containing itself, virtual fold, 2014.
LB I really like this tension you’re speaking of between the embodied object, the body proper, and the photograph. I’m curious to know whether you started with photography and its limits to arrive at this place, or whether you came to it another way.
BIO I have a background in drawing, which continues to influence the way I think about making images. However, the particularities of the photographic process have been the primary force in shaping my recent work. A kind of warmth, touch, imagination and revision are implicated in the act of drawing, to which photography has provided a degree of distance, a quickened speed and a static sensibility to fight against.
LB I’m really interested in photography as a static sensibility that can be approached as a problem in its own right. It reminds me of something Deleuze wrote about painting: that it’s a misnomer that the painter starts with a blank canvas and that in actuality the starting point is already crowded in by all of the previous gestures and clichés that make up painting’s history. There’s a way in which this can be applied very straightforwardly to photography’s history as well, but I think turning it into a question of how we understand photographic pictures to ‘act’ is more exciting.
B. Ingrid Olson, sand the walls, rip the floors, 2014.
BIO A precedent can be overcome by invention or even a slight modification. Gerhard Richter wrote this in an introduction to a book that I’m reading right now: ‘The classic photograph invents in that it records an already existing presence while at the same time causing this other or this otherness to be there in the object world as a form of production, performance, and manipulation.’ Do you think the ability of the photographic image to ‘act’ is an extension of this kind of invention or otherness?
LB Yes, I think I do. Kaja Silverman talks about this through analogy – a photograph being of a specific type of analogy that cannot be separated from the thing analogised or pictured. I do wonder what Richter means by ‘classic’! I want to try and do a better job of answering your question though. I like the sense in Richter’s quote that the photograph is adding a term and a thing to the world; a thing with relationships to other things, but also a thing that can’t be reduced to a representation of something else. I think it’s Craig Owens who talks about how the relationships in a photograph are actually invented by and only exist within the photograph. What I was really trying to get at when I brought up this idea of ‘acting’ was the sense that photograph is highly legible and at the same time very plastic. The viewer brings a lot to it and for me this has set up a situation where play becomes very available. What kind of activity is out of bounds in this contract with the viewer? And why? What isn’t but seems like it should be? I feel as if your work is taking up this play. Is it a fair way to talk about it?
BIO I don’t think of anything as being necessarily out of bounds to the viewer, as I don’t see their viewership as a fixed contract. My biggest concern in regards to the viewer is deciding what information to make available and what to purposefully occlude. The meaning of an artwork, like a sentence, can change entirely by adding one thing and subtracting another. Though I avoid the term ‘narrative’, there are obviously elements that take the work beyond pure information and beyond process. The photographs are specified by each plastic decision made, but in the end, my primary focus – in relationship to communication – is leaving room for inference and interpretation. Mis-reading, crude understandings, tangents and inconclusive ideas are all part of a seed or spark for new thought. I hope that some elements in my work will allow for this energy in the viewers. I don’t consider my work inconclusive or totally open, but I am hoping the works can evoke something like an ellipsis, or a statement that almost turns into a question.
LB I like this distinction you made earlier between ‘looking’ and ‘seeing’, which could be said to be the point at which a photograph’s pictorial qualities begin to overwhelm its informational ones. These works continue this pictorial activity through a number of extra-photographic framing mechanisms – the mat boards, inlays, etc. Can you talk about how the logic of the pictures is continued through these devices? I’m really curious whether, for you, the weight of them is located more within the (albeit accentuated) photographic space or if the work is the manufacture of an object that’s part photograph.
BIO Rather than giving emphasis to the photograph over the constructed object or vice versa, for me, it’s a matter of how both come together to create a hybrid space. I think a lot about the ‘aside’ in writing, moments in which an author breaks the fourth wall, addressing the reader directly, or when a footnote is used to expand on a facet of an idea, as a visibly separate explication or a tangent alongside the primary text. These stylistic and formal structures are related to the material aberrations in my work: the inset, mounted and stacked photographs. They exist as an ancillary pull away from the centre, a secondary element that expands the context and the content of the work.
LB I want to change stream a little, because as much as I can see all the concerns you’re describing in the works, when I think back to walking into the show, my own entry point was less formal. I immediately started thinking about feminist practice of a generation or two back, about the body and its relationship to technology/ies, and about the usefulness of the body as a stake with which to interrogate those relationships. It’s an awkwardly forward question, but are you thinking about these things? Is there a set of personal or political impulses that you start from?
B. Ingrid Olson, errection of a plate of glass between, 2014.
BIO I’m interested in qualities of femaleness versus maleness, often symbolically, like stereotypes of material or elemental and energetic associations – a straight line versus a curve, hard metal versus soft fabric, or even a brash personality versus an apologetic one. And I understand the potential of my gender to code or shape how the bodily aspects of my work are received and interpreted. I can appear platonic in one situation and invitingly sexualised in another. When my body is doing one thing, it’s at the same time not doing another thing. Images of my body bear traces of choice: clothed or naked, closed or open, vertical or flat. Of course, in some cases, I’m consciously thinking about the potential for gendered readings, while at other times, when the work is more process-oriented, structural or personally associative, the fact of my being a woman can be more automatic or default, not highlighted or underscored. I’m still coming to terms with the potential power, and also the pitfalls, of imaging my own body as a female body taking a stance.
LB All these binaries make me think of Jeff Wall’s ‘Photography and Liquid Intelligence’ essay. In a lot of recent photographic practice, process itself has been the flow crystallised in the photograph. But I feel really strongly that these works of yours aren’t functioning in the weightless combinatorial economy of images. Instead, they’re grounded in the body and that they draw a lot of power from that insistence.
Do you feel as if your pictures relate to ‘selfie culture’ or a ‘culture of images’ more generally? Or more to drawings and paintings? Or scrapbooks? I have the sense that the compilation of decisions in these later formats are categorically different from the former, but I also have the suspicion that someone like the artist Helen Marten might disagree with me.
BIO I agree with you that the work is grounded in the body – not only my body in the images but, I hope, in the viewers’ bodies as well. I want viewers to consider the work and their relationship to it as they approach it, as they stand in front of it, and again as they leave it. This seems more related to painting or sculpture – moving in the space around an artwork, considering it from far away and up close, inspecting its sides and its surface – than to the endless scroll of selfie culture. I’d say my work relates to selfie culture about as much as anything that incorporates self-portraiture does. But, I don’t think that’s very interesting.
If I were to think through Wall’s essay, then perhaps, in my own work, the body can be a kind of substitute for this ‘liquid intelligence’. A representation of a person can hold similar symbolic weight to a flow of liquid as something irreducible, erratic and changeable that exists in a kind of opposition to – but is also complemented by – the rigid mechanism of the camera. However, I don’t consider any subject or process in my work to be crystallised or finished through photography, regardless of the specificity of the pictorial or manufactured elements.
B. Ingrid Olson, three rectangles by three rectangles, infinite sheet, 2014.
We wanted the first book from our Objektiv Press-series to consist of twelve conversations from previous issues and to be launched during this year’s Les Rencontres d’Arles. Due to the current situation we will focus instead on our two upcoming essay publications and share (and republish) the dialogues online. This conversation is from Objektiv #12.
Shimpei Takeda, Trace #7, Nihonmatsu Castle, from Trace series, 2012.
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS
A conversation between Geoffrey Batchen and Are Flågan.
Are Flågan This issue of Objektiv posits a new role for, and understanding of, images. The motivation for opening up questions around this theme seems to be twofold: the increased primacy of the visual in our device- and app-driven social interactions, and the deeply encoded nature of digital images. When the platform Blogger was built in 1999, it was, at least by design, dedicated, serious and verbose. But since then, every popular milestone in the evolving social media scene has truncated texts and made room for images. Today, users on Facebook alone upload on average 136,000 images per minute. Twitter limited chatter to a maximum 140 characters in 2006, and Tumblr introduced microblogging in 2007. From 2010 onwards, Instagram filtered out words in favour of networked photographs. A year later, Snapchat offered to share a snapshot with the option of an emoji instead of a caption. You’ve recently been writing about this exponentially growing imagescape of pictogram and selfie communications. Do you see a space for reformed literacy in these fleeting, technological exchanges, or do we experience both an impoverishment of words and an inflationary devaluation of photographs?
Geoffrey Batchen The figures you cite seem overwhelming – so overwhelming that one feels helpless in the face of them, stripped of the ability to respond. Joan Fontcuberta has described the contemporary situation as “photography’s revenge”. Certainly, it seems at first glance as if it will be impossible to write a history for this imagescape or to engage it in a measured and critical way. But in fact photography’s numbers have always been overwhelming. Billions of digital images are no more debilitating to one’s critical faculties than the millions of analogue photographs that used to be churned out each year during the second half of the twentieth century, or, for that matter, than the forty daguerreotypes per day produced by Richard Beard’s London studio in 1841. In each case, an individual observer only encounters a tiny fraction of these photographs, usually just enough to recognise that both personal and commercial photography have always been driven by an economy of repetition and sameness – if you’ve seen a handful, you’ve seen them all, more or less. This allows the possibility of some critical purchase on particular genres of photograph. After all, Roland Barthes attempted to deduce the essence of photography from his examination of just one (unreproduced) personal photograph in Camera Lucida. A number of artists have produced interesting work that allows a similar reflection on our contemporary imagescape, including Fontcuberta, Joachim Schmid, Erik Kessels and Penelope Umbrico. They give me hope that critical thinking is still possible within and about this image environment. What the phenomenon you describe does demand is an analysis of the global media economy that drives it, from the manufacture of cell-phone cameras to the corporate exploitation of social-media sites of all kinds. This is the kind of analysis that now needs to be undertaken by professional scholars. However, your question seems to bear more on the experience of individual users of social-media sites. Some have worried that people once had some measure of “social literacy” in relation to their family snapshots, but no longer do. I’m not convinced that this is the case. In my experience, many users of Facebook, to take but one example, have a quite sophisticated grasp of its potential, as a means of social exchange and even as a creative medium. They recognise that personal photographs are indeed mere nodal points for social exchange, rather than pensive moments or immortal documents. Were snapshots ever treated as such documents? Perhaps sometimes, but I suspect usually not. They’ve always been rather ephemeral objects, faithfully (if selectively) stored but seldom consulted. Of course, social-media sites are not good storage depositories. They claim ownership of whatever images are uploaded onto the site. More importantly, these sites will no doubt at some point become obsolescent; when they go, so do the personal image archives of their users. Where will historians look to study the snapshots of the early twenty-first century? Getting back to your question, I wonder if the fears of impoverishment and devaluation that some have expressed are driven by a nostalgia for a time of self-awareness and literacy that in fact never really existed. Perhaps what we should be asking instead is “what new kinds of literacy are being generated and encouraged by social media?” and “how are both photography and its users being reshaped by this new kind of literacy?” Having said all that, I wouldn’t want to pretend that nothing has changed. My parents used to write long letters (by hand) to their parents every week. I write only emails, and my handwriting has atrophied, but I can now exchange messages with a global audience (including with you), transforming my place in the wider world. My children may, as you suggest, substitute a prepackaged icon for a written message. Nevertheless, they’re voracious readers as well as frequent users of new media (they make little movies and send them to Grandma). In other words, they’re able to do things that I could never do, and their skill sets are different from the ones I was taught to have. So my inclination is to assess any changes in terms of difference rather than just as signs of loss and impoverishment.
AF Indeed, but what we’re also seeing is the acceleration of production. It speaks not only of a sheer upturn in volume, but also the relentless velocity, the expected frequency, at which this photographic pulse must pound for our social accounts to be considered present and alive. Those logged in must continuously record to stay relevant and vital. Speed has thus come to dominate and relegate all that is slower to the margins. The question here is if the incredible momentum and persistence at which imaging now operates also fundamentally changes our understanding of and relationship to photography in general. Astoundingly, the total count of calotypes ever produced since their invention by Talbot is surpassed by the number of captures Snapchat and its siblings make public each and every nanosecond. Photography’s contemporary revenge, which you cite, consequently rests not only with these locust-like swarms of images devouring time and space with insatiable appetite, but with its compulsive yet tyrannical insistence on spawning and discarding new moments of passing. Photography has become more of a slight buffering of the present and omnivorous moment than an archival pointer to the human condition. Edward Tufte, author of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, is reported to purposefully delete almost every photograph he ever takes. His double acts of euthanasia deny both him and his photographs the eternal permanence they, in every sense, seek to overwhelm us with. This fatal strategy for photography is echoed by the Snapchat application, where ephemeral images (almost 9,000 flickering per second at present) live for a mere 10 seconds before disappearing forever. While privacy issues may misguidedly have attracted many users initially, this popular photographic apparatus continues to seize the zeitgeist of images by forcefully erasing the plurality of ‘that-has-been’ and with it, to stay with your favorite sources, a desire for what Roland Barthes has called, by reduction, the essence of photography. Are we currently inscribing another way of seeing and being in images that shifts the conception of photography?
Lynn Cazabon, Diluvian (detail), 2010–13, 40 silver gelatin solar photographs.
GB The being of photography has constantly been in flux, at the beginning and ever since. Nevertheless it seems that the desire to photograph has remained a constant element of the medium, motivating its inventors and their many successors to produce an infinity of photographic pictures. Already, then, I’m seeking to complicate your question a little, if only by shifting its focus from the fate of the pictures to the act of their making. If we follow your suggestion and stay with Barthes, it might be argued that we take photographs in order to ameliorate the very “catastrophe of death” that photography, by testifying to the passing of time between then and now, and thereby to our own inevitable passing at some future moment, constantly reiterates. The act of photographing is therefore a contradictory one, always flickering uncertainly between an affirmation of life and a certification of death. This helps explain why so many photographs (the vast majority in fact) are banal and ephemeral. How they are doesn’t mat- ter; all that matters is that they are, that photography happened. The ‘that-has-been’ is that something was photographed. In that sense, it also doesn’t really matter if the resulting photographs last for only ten seconds or for fifty years. As with Mr Tufte, what’s important for most people is that a photograph was taken, that a gesture was made to momentarily still both life and death. A photograph is but the ghostly remains of that futile act of suspension, of that yearning for immortality. In an otherwise secular age, taking photographs is, I am proposing, the last bastion of a theological faith in the possibility of an afterlife. This is surely the principal narrative of Barthes’s Camera Lucida, composed, of course, as an act of mourning for his deceased mother. His narrative is built around another of these oscillations, from the “essential” but absent photograph of that mother to the presence of every reader’s own missing loved one, projected into that beckoning, empty space in the text. Designed to be experienced like a photograph, the book’s central motif is a flickering back and forth between absence and presence, between zero and infinity. Published before the digital age, Camera Lucida nevertheless offers a model of how the overwhelming torrent of electronic images might be corralled and engaged. But your question is about speed rather than volume. The inference is that an increase in photography’s velocity, in the velocity of its distribution and exchange, and an associated decrease in our attention to the photographic image, might amount to an ontological shift in photography’s being, or at least in our conception of the medium (is there a difference?). But I wonder, again, if we’re talking here about matters of degree rather than of substance? Modernity (of which photography is the very embodiment) has always been associated with the acceleration of everyday life, with the “annihilation of both space and time” as nineteenth-century commentators liked to say. In any case, speed is a relative experience. Today, for example, we’re impatient if a download takes more than a second, forgetting that not so long ago it might have taken hours. I remain to be convinced that this shift makes that much of a difference to our conception of the thing being downloaded. Or that our emotional investment in the photograph has significantly changed as a result of the transition from analogue to digital technologies.
AF Your point that our investment in the photograph survives transitions, and stands the test of time, points in my mind to its core indexicality. An index, just to revisit Charles Sanders Peirce’s notion of trichotomy, is a sign linked to its object by an actual connection or real relation. This is the essential characteristic of what we’ve come to identify with photography, and how or where a photograph is made to appear is thus subordinate to an enduring recognition of what it represents. The parenthetical question you pose, about the difference between photography’s conception and ontology, is thus an inescapable one that has remained vital from your first book, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography, to your latest, Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph. The elementary experiments with light and sensitised paper common to both titles share an intertwined origin and lineage; the former conjuring an intricate conception and the latter an investigative ontology of photography. It’s certainly interesting that while we’re generally trawling the vast cybernetic networks of radiant images to spin origin stories for the medium, you’ve chosen to focus on a history of primitive prints close to its simplest and purest form. Could you describe what you see in these cameraless photographs that motivated you to highlight their shadowy existence?
GB As William Henry Fox Talbot signalled in his first comments on photography, the medium he helped invent is peculiar for handing over its representational capacity to whatever is being represented. And this generosity is especially foregrounded in cameraless photographs. The things we see in such photographs seem to have imprinted themselves on the paper before us: directly, physically, causally, without mediation, at one-to-one scale. For this reason, to make a photograph without a camera is, as you suggest, to privilege photography’s indexical capacities over all others. And this gives such photographs a powerful attraction. As Peirce suggested, indices “direct attention to their objects by blind compulsion”. In his terms, cameraless photographs establish a “real connection”, first between an image and its referent, but then between the image and its observer. Operating by contiguity, both materially and psychologically, a photograph made without a camera promises to get us closer to the presence of things, closer to presence in general. It promises, in other words, to fulfill a desire that lurks within all acts of representation: to collapse the boundary between absence and presence, between an image and what it’s of, between that image and its process of production. In skillful hands, photographs made by direct contact with the world can therefore convey things in ways other photographs cannot, because they allow that world to speak for itself as itself. As a consequence, pictures made without a camera can be grounded in the real world or let loose to create a visual experience peculiar to themselves. Since the 1960s, many contemporary artists have sought to avail themselves of, even to exploit, this dual capacity. In so doing, they necessarily inherit and reflect on photography’s own modernist heritage. Indeed, a kind of retromodernism is a common characteristic of contemporary cameraless photography, sometimes turned to ironic effect and sometimes called on as part of an effort to retrieve the critical capacities of a bygone era, when art-making still seemed to have a tenacious purchase on political and social life. And the abandonment of the camera has also allowed artists to experiment with the photographic medium itself, complicating both its identity and its creative potential. Given our contemporary context, artists making cameraless photographs today assume that the photographic medium is and has always been a politically charged field; to engage the visual and chemical grammar of the photograph is to dispute and challenge that politics at a very basic level. Apart from anything else, to make such photographs returns photography to a unique, hand-made craft and away from an automatic subservience to global capitalism and its vast economies of mass production and exploitation. Not that this kind of work isn’t capable of engaging with important aspects of those economies. On the contrary, in offering us the tactile other to the evanescent digital image, contemporary makers of cameraless photographs make art that’s all about the digital age. By slowing down the photographic act, these photographs also slow down our perception of this act; they ask us to pause a moment and think critically about the consequences of our post-industrial information economy. But throughout photography’s history the cameraless photograph has always been a subversive element, an auto-critique of everything that photography is supposed to represent. For, in rejecting the camera, such photographs also reject humanist perspective, rationalised space, three-dimensional illusion, documentary truth, temporal fixity, and so on. All these characteristics make these kinds of photographs worthy of a close study. In my case, I’ve written a history of the cameraless photograph in the book Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph, published by Prestel this April, and have curated an exhibition on the same theme, which opened at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Plymouth in New Zealand the same month.
Marco Breuer, Untitled (C-1378), 2013, Chromogenic paper, folded, burned, and scraped.
AF Although collectively billed as photographs, the cameraless works included in your book and exhibition seem to be separable into at least two categories: there are the contact prints intimately connected to the photographic tradition, but also superficially abstract images relying on contextual information to be seen and recognised, to make sense, beyond an aesthetic appreciation of them as seductive objects. These images are often made by exposing the photographic sensitivity, or an intermediary negative substrate, to other forms of radiation or weathering environments for extended periods of time. The resulting patina is arguably another type of time capsule: a recorded and condensed span rather than a singular instant caught by brief physical contact or, more conventionally, the blink of a shutter. Since these particular emanations plot every influence that led to and defined their appearance with an aggregate density, I would suggest that the prolonged exposure is a form of data-harvesting and the resulting shadows cast on sensitive paper mirror an infograph. What finally develops is the visual display of obscure, until contextually tagged, traces logged along a collapsing axis of time, the illuminating graph of a dimensional dataset. The brief for this issue of Objektiv looked for epistemic changes in our understanding of images among the latest digital trends, and singled out a broader conveyance of encoded information, part and parcel of the sharing economy, as a possible ontological leap for the myriad members of the photographic medium. While these transformative actions appear to bring a new reality to life, the recognisable features of the image itself, kept intact by the formal demands of formats, essentially remain animated by previous investments in photography. Your recent history, however, actually introduces intriguing photographs that come across as vessels of graphical information. How can we interpret their significance?
GB I’ve already tried to suggest some of the broad ways in which their significance might be assessed. But let me describe a few recent examples in more detail, each of them slightly different in approach. Consider, for example, a work made by American artist Lynn Cazabon between 2010 and 2013. Titled Diluvian, it comprises a grid of unique contact prints, with their imagery and the means of its production both being directly generated by the work’s subject matter. Embedded in a simulated waste dump, and therefore covered with discarded cell phones and computer parts as well as organic material, expired sheets of gelatin silver paper were sprayed with baking soda, vinegar and water, sandwiched under a heavy sheet of glass, and left in direct sunlight for up to six hours, four prints at a time. The chemical reactions that ensued left visual traces – initially vividly coloured and then gradually fading when fixed – of our society’s flood of toxic consumer items, produced by the decomposing after-effects of those very items. Other work has a more specific context. The potential consequences of the uncontrolled release of atomic radiation were highlighted after the earth- quake and tsunami that swept the east coast of Japan in 2011, and the subsequent meltdowns at three nuclear reactors. Seeking to make visible this otherwise invisible threat to his country’s inhabitants, Shimpei Takeda collected contaminated soil samples from twelve locations throughout Japan, each of them of historical and symbolic significance (“with a strong memory of life and death”, as the artist puts it), and then placed the samples on sheets of photo-sensitive film for a month. About half the resulting images remained almost black, but some were soon speckled with a blizzard of radioactive emissions, abstractions that nevertheless indelibly recorded the fragile state of the Japanese ecology. A distinctive feature of cameraless photography is its ability to capture a diverse range of temporal experiences, from lengthy durations to fractions of a second, in both cases allowing the representation of phenomena otherwise beyond the capacity of the human eye to see. The New Zealand photographer Joyce Campbell, for example, decided to conduct a microbial survey of Los Angeles, a city in which she lives for part of each year. Accordingly, in 2002 she swabbed the surfaces of plants and soil from twenty-seven locations chosen out of her Thomas Guide to the city. She then transferred each sample onto a sterilised Plexiglas plate of agar and allowed it to grow as a living culture. The cibachrome positive colour contact prints she subsequently made from these plates resemble abstract paintings and yet also offer a critical mapping of the relative fertility of this particular urban landscape, so dependent on the politics of water distribution. As Campbell has said, “There seemed to be a kind of poetic reversal in picturing the most botanically manicured parts of the city as oceans of bacteria and fungi, while revealing the relative sterility of the water-deprived south and east.” These examples refer inwards to their own coming into being but also outward to the material worlds they signify and beyond that to the environmental degradation of our planet. The work of German-born, US- based artist Marco Breuer inhabits a more hermetic social space. Nevertheless, it still manages to confront us with a robust physicality, both in its materiality as a series of photographic objects and by way of the various erosive treatments to which these objects have been subjected. By folding, scoring, burning, scouring, abrading, and/or striking his pieces of photographic paper, Breuer coaxes a wide range of colours, markings and textures from his chosen material. His are photographs that actively involve the body of the artist in their making. They’re about nothing but contiguity in the raw. Both touched and tactile, Breuer’s photographs have themselves become surrogate bodies, demonstrating the same fragility and subtractive relationship to violence as any other organism. And like any other body, they also bear the marks of time, not of a single instant from the past, like most photographs, but rather of a duration of actions that’s left accumulated scars. These are now witnessed, in a perpetual present, by the body of an observer suddenly made aware of its own inherent vulnerability. As I said, each of these examples is informed by its own specific contexts of production and reception. And each, as you suggest, appears at first to be composed of abstractions, requiring some sort of textual accompaniment to signify in any politically meaningful way (a charge, by the way, that could be levelled at most challenging art work, of whatever style). However, it could be equally argued that such work exhibits sufficient visual interest to induce a viewer to inquire a little further, to pause and think, or at least to enjoy a momentary immersion in a quite singular ocular experience. That experience is provided by marks and traces left by the direct action of the world on a photographic surface, making this very much an art of the real and nothing to do with abstraction at all. In an age of endless electronic mediations (including by camera-made photographs), there’s something refreshing, bracing even, about art objects that allow the world to speak for itself, as itself, with an absolute minimum of such mediation.
Joyce Campbell, Griffith Park, 2002, from the series LA Bloom.
AF This exchange has been an enlightening return to the fundamental matters of photography. Through my work in the field of imaging, I’ve grown dependent on the mathematical formulas of signal processing and the wave patterns of frequencies to comprehend the medium. This fluid digital realm operates in stark contrast to the molecular structures of particles, negative and positive, evoked by chemistry in the analogue works discussed above. Upon reflection, it seems almost unfathomable that essentially the same photograph can develop from the opto-electronic conversion function and the transformation of sil- ver halides to metallic silver. The respective wave and particle signatures of these technologies are also observable in the behavioral duality of light itself, so photography today quite appropriately surfaces both from and as all these maddening yet alluring presences of a strangely paradoxical nature. Finally, how would you, as someone who has shaped our collective interest in and understanding of the medium through your many exhibitions, books and articles, describe your continued fascination with photography?
GB This word ‘fascination’ implies an attraction to photography of a sort that only occurs under the spell of an enchantment. That’s not necessarily a false association; as I’ve already suggested, photographs suspend us between life and death, appealing to our most elemental anxieties. I’m no more immune to these anxieties than anyone else. However, I’ve also always been drawn to photography’s ubiquity. It’s everywhere. And that means the study of photography licenses me to talk about almost anything, from sex to war, and from microbes to planets. Moreover, as commentators of the calibre of Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes have already noted, this is a medium that seems to embody all the contradictions of modernity itself (including its latest, global, data-driven phase). To engage a history of the photograph is to confront the political economy of modern life itself, and that seems to lead one well beyond the precious confines of the art world. All these aspects of photography continue to hold an appeal for me, and I suspect, for many others too.
We wanted the first book from our Objektiv Press-series to consist of twelve conversations from previous issues and to be launched during this year’s Les Rencontres d’Arles. Due to the current situation we will focus instead on our two upcoming essay publications and share (and republish) the dialogues online. This conversation is from Objektiv #13, The Flexible Image.
