DAVID GOLDBLATT

David Goldblatt, The farmer’s son with his nursemaid, on the farm Heimweeberg, near Nietverdiend in the marico Bushveld, Transvaal (North-West Province), 1964. Courtesy David Goldblatt and Goodman Gallery Johannesburg and Cape Town.

The Art of Seeing. David Goldblatt in his own words about his retrospective at Centre Pompidou. 
By Nina Strand

The photographer David Goldblatt was present for a press preview the day before his grand opening at Centre Pompidou this Spring. His voice is also very present throughout the exhibition, since in each room several films are presented, in which he explains the story behind his images. Goldblatt is a key figure on the South African photography scene and for the first time in France, the Centre Pompidou has mounted a retrospective of his work. The exhibition includes a selection of his major series, and reveals lesser-known groups of pictures, like his first photos taken in the townships of Johannesburg. As Centre Pompidou writes, all his series cast a sharp eye on the complexity of social relations under apartheid and ask big questions about our time.

David Goldblatt, On the corner of Commissioner and Eloff Streets. Boksburg, 1979. Courtesy David Goldblatt and Goodman Gallery Johannesburg and Cape Town. 

Of the current situation in South Africa today, he comments: “The country is recovering from a terrible period of corruption, bad government and disrespect for our constitution. It’s difficult to say what will happen. There is great promise in the new president, and I’m hopeful for the future, although it will take us a long time to recover.” His work, he explains, can only can touch on these issues. “I can’t deal with the grand questions.” Asked if he is looking for complexity in his work, he answers that everything is complex. “This is what reality is like; it’s never simple, there’s always complexity, and I try to take account of it in the work I do.” 

On the question of how he works, Goldblatt explained that he is not at all interested in style and doesn’t even think he has a style. He works on what intrigues him. “If I’m mystified by what I’m seeing, then I want to photograph it. Photography to me is a magical tool to show the world. Whether I convey the mysteries in my photograph, I don’t know. I follow my ideas. I get to work, see what happens, and then turn the pictures into series. The series may take several weeks, or several years. I followed one series for 15 years.”

David Goldblatt, Fifteen-year old Lawrence Matjee after his assault and detention by the Security Police, Khotso House, de Villiers Street, Soweto, Johannesburg, 1985, Courtesy David Goldblatt and Goodman Gallery Johannesburg and Cape Town.

Speaking of photography in general, he is optimistic. “I think things have changed: we’re all fully informed today – we know the world and we’ve seen the photographs. The ability of photography today is to make relevant statements, and the cleverer and more creative photographers, two of whom are here today”  – he points to the artists Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin who are present for the opening, also exhibiting at Pompidou in the Galerie Photographies – “are doing new things, finding new means of expression and ways in which photography relates to the world that we haven’t expected, that we haven’t seen.” Adam Broomberg later tells me how happy he and Chanarin are to be exhibiting together with Goldblatt: “We’re all eastern European Jews, and from South Africa, so you could say both the Holocaust and the apartheid regime runs in our veins.” Goldblatt spent many hours seeing their show: “There are the same amount of images in our exhibition as in David’s, and he took time to look though them all.”

David Goldblatt, Shop assistant, Orlando West, Soweto, Johannesburg, 1972. Courtesy David Goldblatt and Goodman Gallery Johannesburg and Cape Town.

Asked if he looks at his work as art, Goldbatt’s answer is clear: “I grew up in photography. I was privileged. But I have to be frank, I don’t look at myself as an artist. If you tell me that my work is art I don’t mind, but I have no ambitions in art. Art and photography is a very risky relationship. I think that photographers need to be cautious about being convinced that they’re artists. A friend of mine made the distinction ‘the art of work or the work of art’, and I’m leaning heavily towards the first.”

As to the question of the role of photography today, when everyone can take pictures with their mobile phones, Goldblatt replies: “The development of digital technology is a huge advantage, and should be looked at in relation to writing. We can all write, we all have pens, but that doesn’t mean that we’re all writers. Having a pen doesn’t make us all poets. If you’re looking at photography as a medium for penetrating thought, then there are different skills. France has been blessed with some extraordinary photographers from the very beginning of photography.  These are people who had the seeing eye. You can’t learn to have the seeing eye at school – you must just have it.”

David Goldblatt, Temporary » Censorship of its artworks by management of the University of CapeTown : at left a drawing by Diane Victor has been covered ; at right, woodcuts by Cecil Skotnes have been removed. University of Cape Town, 14 May 2016. Courtesy David Goldblatt and Goodman Gallery Johannesburg and Cape Town. 

David Goldblatt, Centre Pompidou, 21 February 2018 – 13 May 2018.

MARIE BOVO

View of the exhibition Стансы / Stances. © Marie Bovo, Courtesy the artist and kamel mennour Paris/London

Marseille-based artist Marie Bovo captured the depths of Russia from a train carriage in search of ordinariness. Interview by Anja Grøner Krogstad.

Anja Grøner Why did you choose the name Cтансы (Stances) for your latest series? 

Marie Bovo I thought Stances was a good way to define this work, because on the one hand it refers to a stop, and on the other it recalls the term ‘stanza’ or verse. Every train station is a pause, and at the same time, every stop makes sense on its own as a frame and a place. Every stop represents a particular landscape and a distinct time of day.

For three weeks, I travelled on the slow local trains between St Petersburg and Murmansk. The process was the same every time: the train would stop for about 20 seconds, and because I never knew whether the doors would open on the right or left, the decision about where to point the camera had to be made in seconds. I used a view camera, which isn’t exactly the lightest, handiest camera out there, but the cold made it impossible to work digitally. The hardest part was at dusk, when the indoor lighting altered the perception of space, and the challenge was to transform the hostile metallic overhead lights into something golden. 

AG Stances was first shown in the Église des Trinitaires Church in Arles, then at OSL contemporary in Oslo, and now at Kamel Mennour in Paris. What are the important factors about a space when you show your work? 

Picture from the installation of Stances by Marie Bovo at Église des Trinitaires Church in Arles. Courtesy the artist and OSL Contemporary.

MB I always consider the relationship between the photograph and the exhibition space. While the gallery and the white cube is probably the most common space in which to present art today – and as such a neutral and extremely standardised one – the church in Arles was exactly the opposite. It was constructed as a religious place of worship, and those qualities remain, although the church is now desacralised. I found that really interesting for Stances, because previously I’ve explored how our relationship with the image differs from one culture to another. In the Western tradition, one of the first places in which we’re confronted with images is the religious space. In Russia, there’s a particular devotion linked to the icon. It’s a sacred image that serves as a link between the divine and the secular. When presented in a church, icons are hung in specific places to create a pathway, to accompany the spectator step by step and tell a story. And in Orthodox churches you have the iconostasis, a wall of icons and religious paintings that separates the nave from the sanctuary. I was inspired by this idea and decided to recreate an iconostasis in Arles. The icon is an entrance, a door that separates the holy and the profane, and the work I did in Russia is all about train doors opening and the relation between two spaces. At Kamel Mennour, I recreated that arrangement to make a wall of images. 

AG You consider the Mediterranean to be your base, and your earlier series are set in Cairo, Alger and Marseille, to name a few. What was it like working with cold scenery like this? 

MB I rediscovered Malevich’s oeuvre through the Russian landscape. During days of snow, the train would cross lakes that were several kilometres long, and I had the impression of being in a white mass. Malevich’s White on White and his way of thinking took on a new meaning for me. 

AG How did you interpret him before? 

MB I think in a more conceptual way, certainly one that was less sensitive and less sensual. Still, I remember seeing his work in group shows, and a Malevich would always draw me in from afar. There’s a return to figuration in his later work, but even his most abstract paintings bear a certain resemblance to the icon painting. While passing through that white mass of snow, it was as if the landscape took on a new dimension. And that’s not conceptualism; it’s literally a physical experience. 

AG You went to art school and initially wanted to become a sculptor. You’ve often incorporated literature and other art forms into your work. So did any other artists or writers nourish this series? 

Marie Bovo, Стансы - Дивенская / Stances - Divenskaya, 2017. View of the exhibition Стансы / Stances. © Marie Bovo, Courtesy the artist and kamel mennour Paris/London

MB Literature was particularly important to get a deeper understanding of Russia. I read everything from the classics such as Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, to Mandelstam, Solzhenitsyn and contemporary authors like Andrei Gelasimov. I read a beautiful text on drawing by Gelasimov called Thirst. It tells the story of a young man who’s sent to Chechnya and comes back completely disfigured. All his former facial features are gone, and the book is about how he learns how to draw and search for new traits. It’s a profound reflection on drawing, on form, figuration and disfiguration. All these different books allowed me to plunge into Russia’s history, but each time through the perception of the author. It was very educational. 

AG And what did you learn about Russia?

MB I think European history was largely written in the margins. Take the city of Königsberg, the birthplace of Kant, as an example. Today, it’s the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, and when you look at it on a map you almost have the impression that it’s not in Europe, whereas in the eighteenth century, this was a centre for the Enlightenment movement situated right in the heart of Europe. Culture grows and matures in the margins and Russia is interesting in that regard because it constantly interrogates us on the question of being inside or outside. 

AG The human presence is always evoked in these works but never in a direct manner: we see no one, but we see a trace. Why? 

MB A human presence immediately creates anecdotes. No matter what you look at, the presence of a person always takes centre stage; it becomes the architecture or the place of someone. The absence of humans is disorienting, which is why the trace is interesting. Besides, the places I travelled through were practically deserted. In France we say that from each village church tower you can see the next village church tower. In Russia that’s simply not possible.  

AG Is it a goal to travel to as many places as possible? Is there a place you’d never set foot in? 

MB It depends, but there are places I feel more concerned with than others. I prefer Russian literature to American literature, for instance. I know the work of famous American authors, but it quickly ceases to interest me because I feel like it doesn’t concern me. There are definitely places that inspire me more than others because I already have an interior dialogue with them through literature. I recognised several familiar elements in Russian literature and painting where I didn’t expect to find them at all. Reading Mandelstam was one the first times I read poems about Odysseus, for example.

Perhaps it has to do with the fact that American culture has become so dominant, even in art history. After World War II there’s an imposition of an art history centred on the United States, which is an interpretation that should be criticised, or at least relativised. At the same time, I don’t think one should fall too deeply in love with Russia either. We need to stay aware of the negative aspects. To love the country is one thing, but to be in love with it is different.   

Marie Bovo, View of the exhibition Стансы / Stances. © Marie Bovo, Courtesy the artist and kamel mennour Paris/London

Marie Bovo was born in Spain and lives and works in Marseille, France. “Cтансы (Stances)” is on view at Kamel Mennour, 6 rue du Pont de Lodi, Paris 6e, until 3 March.  

DANIEL GUSTAV CRAMER

Algodones, 2017. All photos courtesy of Daniel Gustav Cramer. 

Berlin based artist Daniel Gustav Cramer brings together distinct space considerations, synthesising abstractions drawn from the artist’s personal experiences in his show Five Days, on now at Entrée in Bergen. Interview by Tiago Bom

Tiago Bom Your exhibition Five Days, at Entrée, relates to different instances in your life; aesthetic considerations drawn from personal experiences. To start with the title, what does it relate to? 

Daniel Gustav Cramer The title Five Days suggests a temporal space, five moments and scenes. I wanted to bring together two parts: One is the experience of the exhibition itself, being in the space. The elements in the space are abstract and somewhat restrained, certain forms are echoed throughout, the way colours, forms and proportions are used to create a dialog between objects and images. There is a particular stillness surrounding the works. 

The second part are the journeys reflected in the individual works. Each work suggests a different tale. When you think of these stories coming together, overlaying, the show begins to shift.
The works in the exhibition describe scenes in a desert in Southern California, in Australia’s Outback, at a fjord in the north of Iceland, in a forest in Norway and on a mountain top in Sweden. One of the works, an additional and almost invisible work titled XXXVI, 2017, an iron sphere placed on the floor, refers directly to the experience of being in the space. This work has a single property: It must remain in Bergen. 

TB A lot of your work, namely the photographic one, seems to stem from your personal travels. How important is this itinerant character in your work and why? 

DGC I love traveling, to be on the road, I am constantly longing for it. Do you know the experience when you travel with a train and outside your window houses pass by, windows upon windows - and you wonder: how is it possible that behind each of these windows whole life stories unfold, of happiness and sorrow, infinite routines and for a split second you pass by, look into this world, become a part of it, a window that is in an instance replaced by another one. The relation I have to my surrounding is different when I am in a place that I don’t know – I am alert, observant and open. I have problems recalling what I did on a specific day three weeks ago in my studio... but I can see with the greatest clarity what I ate that evening in Vernazza and how the sand between my toes would tickle me while waiting for the food to be served.
A memory; experiencing a memory, is entirely different to the present experience. Time is absent or deformed. I see a scene in front of me, a mood, I feel something, but the duration is distorted. This scene has no before or after. A memory is like a shape, it has an inside and an outside. 

TB Photography as a medium constitutes an important part of your oeuvre. Apart from its reproductive quality, what attracts you to the medium and what is its role in conjunction with the other media? 

DGC I like the idea that the engagement with my surrounding and subjects leaves no single trace, it doesn’t affect anything. When I photograph, I am not taking anything, transforming what is in front of me, but observing, the gaze through the lens is the only active tool. My interest has never been about what is visible in a photograph, but rather what is not. What hides behind the subject, what happened before this moment was captured? What changed between two photographs that look identical at first sight? There is a photograph entitled Moose, 2017 in the exhibition at Entrée. Espen Johansen and myself drove on a road in Norway. All at once, a gigantic moose came onto the street right in front of us. I grabbed my camera, focused and... it was too late. The framed image now shows an empty street. 

Moose, 2017. 

TB This exhibition features works relating to a visit to the Old Tjikko tree site in Norway but also a voyage to the desert of Algodones. Here you seem to be drawn to inhospitable areas, an Arctic forest and a sand desert in the south of the USA. What draws you to these locations and how is that reflected in the work? 

DGC I am fascinated by these kind of remote places. They inhabit a certain type of purity. I don’t mean this in a romantic or esoteric sense. They are in a positive way one- dimensional spaces. A desert is not that far off from the image one has of a desert: There is sand, a little shrub here and there, it is hot, a cloudless sky, a particular silence. A photograph taken on location turns into an image of its idea. Places far away have elements that are familiar to us. This creates a certain tension. Eight years ago I started working on a continuous instalment of exhibitions, each titled after the amount of works in the exhibition itself. The installation at Entrée is perhaps the 18th show of this series. The works are all elements of an expanding web connecting those exhibitions. They reference historical events, discoveries, scientific researches, unresolved cases as well as particularities of locations all over the world. The works might use formal structures of song writing, story telling or research as well as the language of existing works of art. 

TB If you allow me the poetic interpretation, the subjects or moments you focus on seem to often have an almost “Delphic” aura; Animals and plants seem to acquire an almost totemic quality; archetypal if you will and, particular captured experiences draw a sense of augury – as it is the case with the attempt to capture a moose crossing the road present at this exhibition. Either intentional or a formal and visual artifice, the abstractions you capture invoke in me a sense of upmost respect when dealing with personal experience. Can you tell me a bit more about the work subjects you choose and what role personal experience plays in it? 

DGC Stories are an essential part of the human spirit. Stories are passed on from generation to generation, children hear stories before they fall asleep, the news cycle produces one story after the next. A contemporary way to express oneself on social media is to create a narrative around one ́s self. Yet, there is no single “true” story, an event cannot be repeated or be retold in the exact same way it occurred. In this sense every story is an abstraction, a creation. I am using stories as tools to describe a form or shape or to hint towards something else. A very simple example: think of a man who walks from a tree to a lake and stops. His movement has created a line. As it is a story, written down, both the first and last word of this story are visible on the same page. Consequentially, the man is at the same time at every point between the first and last step of his walk. There is a line drawn into the landscape or a kind of sculptural space by his movement. 

Old Tjikko

The works, even if in part they might appear diaristic or personal to the viewer, are to my understanding abstract and deconstructed. Having said that, my motivation to make work, ultimately, is personal. With each work I am trying to understand a little bit more about the world around me, about belonging, friendship, death, how time affects everything and the necessity of form. And each work added to the existing works adds a bit more to the web of thoughts and questions between all of them. 

TB Are there any particularities of Nordic landscape and culture that you find recurrent in your work? Do you think you’ll be doing more projects in Norway in the future? 

DGC Most of the time I am intrigued by similarities I find between seemingly detached places and how the different circumstances produce difference. A sandy path on a mediterranean island seems almost identical to one in Iceland. But there are distinct variants as a consequence of the different climate, the different vehicles or animals using the path, etc. I have not seen a lot of Norway yet and feel the urge to go again in the summer, to travel the fjords and discover much more. I am really amazed, how warm and friendly the people are. During my time in Bergen, it rained almost every day, but the faces were smiling as if on a hot summer’s day. 

TB What other projects do you have planned for the future? 

DGC For several years I am working on and off on a vampire film. I shot most of the scenes last year in Transylvania. It is not an actual vampire movie. Rather a visual conversation about, a friendship and its evolution and disappearance. I have just produced a first screen print in many years, it is shown at Entrée. I would like to return to this technique. Right now I am preparing an exhibition at Sies and Höke in Düsseldorf for the end of January 2018. 

Five Days, curated by Espen Johansen, is on until until the 13th of January 2018. Daniel Gustav Cramer was born in Düsseldorf, Germany. He is based in Berlin. He studied at the Royal College of Art in London. He has exhibited in numerous places, including dOCUMENTA(13), Kassel, Kunsthaus Glarus, La Kunsthalle Mulhouse, Kunsthalle Lissabon, Kunstsaele, Berlin, CAAC Seville, etc. This year he has exhibited at grey noise in Dubai, UAE, at Verksmiõjan In Akureyri (Iceland), at Vera Cortes in Lisbon, Portugal and Sperling in Munich. 

PETE FLEMING

Pete Fleming, UI (User Interface) and Screen Grease II, 2016

To reflect on our editorial theme of the relationship between the written word and the image, we asked the same questions to various people in the field in our current issue: What makes a great image-text project? How can we bridge the space between ‘the silence of the image and the blindness of language’? Can we reshape our understanding of what a photograph is? Do you have faith in the written word? And finally, what comes after the pictorial turn? 

The concept of the flexible image is at the core of my work, which considers the relativity between words, images and objects. Words appear amongst videos, living organisms and sculptural structures, acting as anchor, axis or context for the photographic. A kind of drifting, circular poetics allows for movement across and between the boundaries of definition and clear image. I cannot separate the written from the visual, and see these two forms of readability evolving and existing in symbiosis. This is what I find exciting in image-text publications, situations that transcend a mere combination, and where 2+2=5. There has to be this extra element, a movement beyond and outward. Perhaps it’s in this affective space between image and text that the world can enter and surprise us, and fantastic artworks can open up that space. Chris Marker’s Level 5 (1996) remarkably bridges ‘the silence of the image and the blindness of language’. Watching that film for the first time in a tiny side-street cinema left me stunned.

As Harun Farocki has proved, photography is tied to developments in optical engineering. As a discipline, it’s therefore constantly evolving, along with the methods and techniques for making and displaying images, presently finding itself at the centre of the attention economy. In an effort to understand the effects of new screen technologies as inseparable from the worlds we’re creating, I’ve been producing a series of artworks grouped under the collective title of the ‘word-image-touch-object’. This is a term that’s intended to clarify the combination in a many jointed ‘thingness’, the materiality of the photograph as it moves between servers, finger tips, light emissions and feelings. The ‘word-image-touch-object’ is productive and receptive; it’s rewritten every time it’s read, and it’s entangled in its context: a discursive composite, reliant on its resonance with medium, message and consumer. The haptic and the radiant are embedded into discussions of language, both written and visual, just as technologies, images and words are incorporated into a sense of self.

There’s been a shift in power: from the twentieth-century author and publisher to the host, censor and aggregator. In his book Open Sky (1997), Paul Virilio identified a transition from a ‘world-space of geopolitics’ – local identities, vernacular language, nationstates – to an ascendant ‘world-time of chronostrategic proximity’ of images, analytics and global corporate homogeneity. If there’s conflict within words and images, it may be over time and attention: ‘Slow’ images are negated by efficient ‘fast’ images. The video for Beyoncé’s game-changing single Formation features cuts of no longer than three seconds, an editing format prevalent in social media, and one that resonates with the violence of historical and contemporary cultural editing of Black female voices. If images are the dominant cultural currency, they will resonate with us: through fear and pain, as well as strength and joy. 

Resonance relies on multiple surfaces or bodies, a synchronous vibration, an understanding. The action of language includes this movement, whereas, to quote Donna Haraway in The Promises of Monsters (1992), representational practice ‘forever authorizes the ventriloquist’. Recently I saw Susanne M. Winterling’s video Vertex (2015). The piece ends with a camera zoom into a CGI-rendered woven texture, revealing the constituent individual pixels and fragmenting the illusion of the image, reminding me of my collusion in the virtual magic. In response to the forceful strike that W.J.T. Mitchell advocates, I would argue that Winterling maintains a persistent push to reveal awareness, and it is I who is found wanting in my belief in the image. This composite articulation, whereby positions are stated and the roles of author and reader are drawn in relation to each other, is where the image as a social object finds its materiality beyond the dimensions of its pixels. Certain words and approaches to the image may fall out of use, but new forms appear, and I propose that the ‘word-image-touch-object’ is one such emergent direction. 

LINA SELANDER

 Lina Selander, Repeat After Me, 2017. Photo by Christina Leithe H.  

Description is vandalism

Lina Selander's dark video works, on show in Oslo for the first time, are characterised by a dense layering of images and text. 

Interview by Lisa Andrine Bernhoft-Sjødin

Lisa Andrine Bernhoft-Sjødin For your first solo exhibition in Oslo, Repeat After Me, you're showing the works Silphium (2014), The Offspring Resembles the Parent (2015) and The Ceremony (2016), all made together with Oscar Mangione. Your films are like poetry, a tapestry of images and text. It's not always clear what binds the images together, and they feed off each other in a very poetic manner. Do you think of your films like that?

Lina Selander Yes, I do. Furthermore, the three works showing at Oslo Kunstforening I think of as a triology, a kinship I'm very curious about. What characterises these works is that the constant layering of images isn’t always predictable. Putting these three works together in one show makes them unpredictable in relation to each other as well. The installation is fifty percent of the whole body of any given work I do.

LBS How do you mean? Does the editing process continue into the gallery?

LS Exactly. Editing is an essential part of the work. It's the montage of images that drives my films forward. Once they enter the gallery, the process of meta-montage starts. The overall choreography of Repeat After Me at Oslo Kunstforening is a zigzag form, where each film is shown on diagonal transparent screens, so the films bleed through the screen, creating both a reverse image and a further projection on the opposite wall. The three films are separated from each other in adjacent rooms with a doorway leading from one room to the next.

LBS So the structure of the installation does not only gestalt the layering within the films themselves, but also between the works. Are they synchronised?

LS No, and that's just it: they're like a glockenspiel, manifesting time and history in different relations depending on when one's watching. 

LBS Their physicality, their presence in the room marks a particular moment, a particular juxtapositioning of the images and events you're presenting.

LS Yes, the viewer's presence becomes part of my works in a way that underlines the volatility of time and history that exists in our memory. The meta-montage creates unexpected abysses and sudden bridges. Furthermore, my films reflect on and read each other, and when shown together become each other’s critics.

LBS Memory is important to your work in general, and Silpium (2014) connects memory to money by way of the goddess of memory Mnemsyne, which later translated its value and wording to that of money. The Offspring Resembles the Parent (2015) shows horror images of emergency bills from German hyperinflation of the 1920s and The Ceremony (2016) explores the fantasy of history and memory. How does memory relate to its representation through your chosen medium?

LS It's a strange time we're living in. It's as if we don't need memory any more, now that our technologies have taken over the task of remembering. We see our world through our technology, and the story the image is telling dims the more intimate interpretation. The image is the event and the negative is the unbroken connection between that event and us. But what is an image? It's purely time and light, right? Representations depend on their specific place in history, and how they're remembered is also dependent on their circumstances and their emotional ties to their specific moment. There's no way we or the camera can inject one image with every single implication of a moment. 

LBS Still we try and fail.

LS Yes we do. I think of the editing act as a political act: it reaches in and reassembles, re-reads a moment in time. 

LBS By reassembling and adding both archival and your own material you're creating an unstable relation to the stories you're telling – they become emotionally difficult to read and with that many images in one setting, are you concerned about overexposing the viewer to them? 

LS Well, that may well be, though I do think that time is key. The films are quite long, and giving the images time provokes a reaction and a counter-reaction in the viewer that questions their initial prejudice about the subject or the object in front of them.

LBS I've also noticed that there's a great deal of silence in your films, and when the audio comes on it feels fundamental to the image, regardless of whether it's the sound of a park or your voiceover. 

LS My works have become more and more silent. In many ways, I feel the image has replaced speech. Silence creates its own form of concentration, where speech would be far too leading in terms of processes of thought. Sound is very spatial, creating a now to climb into. That being said, silence is also sound and the question of sound leads us back to my editing process, because the editing, the composition of the films, has replaced sound; it's in the editing that the musical act is unveiled. 

At the same time, the voiceover is also a positioning of the artist – it's important that it presents a point of view, that it's female, that it's not an imperial accent, etc. – simply put, that it's not articulated from some official or priviledged position. Because sound creates a minute and emotional now, one becomes acutely observant of what one’s experiencing. 

LBS A momentary anchoring.

LS Forever assembled and re-assembled.

Lina Selander, Repeat After Me, 2017. Photo by Christina Leithe H.  

DUANE MICHALS

To reflect on our editorial theme of the relationship between the written word and the image, we asked the same questions to various people in the field in our current issue: What makes a great image-text project? How can we bridge the space between ‘the silence of the image and the blindness of language’? Can we reshape our understanding of what a photograph is? Do you have faith in the written word? And finally, what comes after the pictorial turn? 

Artist Duane Michals has made a career with his images accompanied by text or vice versa. Last year saw the premiere of his first video, Double Talk, and he is currently working on several more. Here are his answers to our questions:

A new illiteracy of images is being born, and is the result of the illiteracy of a culture with pretend language and pretend emotions. The images people are being presented with don’t demand much. Donald Trump is the reduction ad absurdum of the one-liner-insult intellectual discourse. Trump is the ultimate destination of the trivialisation of language as meaning. I’ve seen the future and it’s ‘fuck’.

I don’t really pay too much attention to photography as a field. I feel peripheral to PHOTOGRAPHY. However, because I love the field, I do get annoyed by trends that I think demean it. The first trend is the Cindy Sherman-ing of photography as an art, and by that I mean the million-dollar-and-up prints. Now that it’s become a product, students want to become photographers for the wrong reason. It’s the ‘hollywoodisation’ of photography.

I’ve always enjoyed literature and poetry, in some ways more than photography because writing conjures up an imaginary universe that you share with the writer and create with them. Photography is defined by the facts it represents. It doesn’t float in the air the way poetry does. De Chirico and Magritte are both poetic painters who play with facts, but contradict the facts with mystery.

Years ago I saw a photograph of a young man on crutches. His leg was in a cast, he had no shirt on, and he was at home leaning in a doorway. I was very touched by his vulnerability, his potential future possibilities as a man, as well as his fragility. Although I didn’t specifically copy this image, it has seeped into my work as part of how I view life. 

INGRID EGGEN

Focusing on involuntary acts, specifically those driven by affect, Ingrid Eggen examines the body’s non-verbal communication and symbolism.

A conversation between Ingrid Eggen and Nina Strand.

Nina Strand Your latest photo series, Knegang, is as if created for this issues on the flexible image. The project fuses internal and external emotional experience into one. Can you expand on that?

Ingrid Eggen I work with symbols and signs based on communication, exploring different ways to dismantle and distort body language. The gestures I use are both common ones, such as those used in formal gatherings or meetings – i.e. raising one’s hand when wanting time-out – and from more obscure contexts such as activist groups, biblical and occult imagery and fantasy. Dismantling and distorting these body signals reduces them to powerless gestures, though covertly offering resistance to and commenting on the situations within the motifs. My goal is to create a new language, through the body’s way of collecting and storing information unconsciously. The unnatural is cited as the natural so as to portray life’s absurdities.

NS What inspired this project?

IE I’m concerned with the body and its affective actions, i.e. involuntary ones, the ones we deem irrational. These actions are on a par with affect theory in that they turn us away from the rational and towards the notion that something more basic informs our actions, such as muscles, reflexes and instinct. How do we act if our senses determine our movements and utterances, e.g. in relation to our decision-making processes?

NS Our issues consider the relation between image and text and the image as action or symbol.

IE Knegang also considers signs and symbols in light of the ongoing simplification of language following the abundance of social media and new technologies. Conversely, our range of expressions of emotion and states of mind has broadened.

NS Tell us about your process so far.

IE I’ve been working on Knegang for the past year. The motifs have developed through multiple takes. To meet the demands of bodily strain that the image entails, I’ve used various models for each motif. It might be that the joints of one model are too tight or short, or there’s an impromptu shivering, which ruins the ambiguity of that particular work. By using myself as model I tentatively approach the motifs before getting models involved, yet the end result is impossible to predict. I find that exciting. My intention with this project is to put the various pieces into a conversation. I’m trying this out at Galleberg Gallery this fall. Cautiously titled Kneganger, the exhibition opened the 29th of October.

NS The group exhibition Vårsalong at TM51 Gallery this past winter featured works from your series RestrictedFlora. These images created a buzz for their performative character. I’m so happy we’re featuring works from this project in this issue. You are working on a new flower project, FloraTulips. Can you tell us about it?

IE The tulip with its simple and elegant lines, in many ways the flower of modernism and functionalism, is in its own right a visual perfection of nature. I’m interested in the tulip as a means of communication, as with the RestrictedFlora motifs. FloraTulips will consist of numerous bouquets of tulips displacing, distorting and challenging their natural form, as aesthetic object and symbol. It’s all about violating that perfection.

NS Your consistency has earned you recognition. Steffen Håndlykken’s text for your collaborated project with Admir Batlak FORHØST at Gallery 1857 last year underlined this: “On the one hand there are clothes, on the other hand there are photographs. There are bodies in the photographs and the clothes fit on the bodies, and cover up the bodies, and show off the bodies that are in the photographs. The bodies are doing all the work, unzip this, button that, hook it up and tie it down while the camera collects its fractions of moments. Clothes posit poise, while the camera postures posing, punctum, full stop.” These works underscore your expressive consistency and become acts.

IE The image is no longer a representation, but rather an action. We see so many images today, so it’s crucial that the image isn’t confined to any one reading.

NS Yes, what makes us stop and look? My feeling is that everything is so recognisable. I was scrolling through Instagram before you got here, and saw over 30 images in two minutes. That’s a lot of information, almost too much.

IE We see this kind of confinement in writing as well – shorthanding with smileys and symbols.

NS Is it that we simply don’t have the time to stop and look? Are press releases becoming obsolete? Maybe a single image would suffice.

IE At the very least, a press release should expand on and add to the current exhibition, not explain it to me.

NS I agree. I don’t want to see answers on the wall, I want question marks, something more than what I just read in the press release.

IE Images that obstruct and stir something within themselves and simultaneously within us.

NS Both D2 and Kunstkritikk recently argued that photography falls outside the scope of contemporary art, and the interest we’re seeing from the larger institutions is novel. But that’s not true, is it?

IE Is the photograph exhibited less than other media?

NS No, it’s everywhere. The latest interviews we have published online includes AURDAL / MUGAAS at Kunstnernes Hus, Weaknesses, Secrets, Lies by Mattias Härenstam at The Vigeland Museum and Beyond the Veil by Geir Moseid at Noplace. That’s three camera-based artists shown in Oslo just this last month. (March 2016.) 

IE I agree, the photographic is more visible. However, it’s important to keep in mind that the exclusively photographic exhibition spaces are crucial when studying the medium. How durable are these spaces when confronted with such extensive visibility in other venues?

NS Time will show. Fotogalleriet turns 40 next year, which might be a watershed for that space at least. In my opinion, a publicly funded gallery like Fotogalleriet should set the agenda and reflect the current photo-based art scene. In 2007, for its 30th anniversary, the gallery, with Ida Kierulf at the helm, asked Tom Sandberg, one of the initial founders, to curate the celebratory exhibition. He showed relatively unknown photographers Morten Andenæs and Ola Rindal, putting his finger on the pulse of the current scene. Lillehammer Kunstmuseum made an attempt to give an overview with their May exhibition Slow Pictures, on contemporary photography. You were in it?

IE The exhibition, curated by Janeke Meyer Utne and Christine Hansen, examined various notions of contemporary photography, with heightened attention to the digital impact on the image. By way of the photograph as object, materiality and light, the artists are underscoring the idea of the photographic. The works generate a notion of delay, creating a silence and space to reflect.

NS In a way, we’re back where we started. So why do we continue to create when surrounded by all this static? What is it that we want to convey?

IE My feeling is that we want to offer another perspective, a potential fracture or opening, and sometimes pause. What viewers ultimately gain should be largely undefinable and non-restricted. Even when art is rigid, when it’s good it leaves room for the viewer to reflect. 

This interview was first published in Objektiv #13, The Flexible Image Part I.  

MORTEN ANDENÆS

All images from the show on closing in by Morten Andenæs.  

To reflect on our editorial theme of the relationship between the written word and the image, we asked the same questions to various people in the field: What makes a great image-text project? How can we bridge the space between ‘the silence of the image and the blindness of language’? Can we reshape our understanding of what a photograph is? Do you have faith in the written word? And finally, what comes after the pictorial turn?

I’ve often wanted, perhaps naively, to be able to experience pictures without the interference of language – a seemingly simple desire to have a purely visual experience with a picture, without the seemingly unavoidable contamination brought to bear on it by the word. And yet, what, if anything, would I see?

Around the turn of the millennium, Leonard Shlain wrote a book called The Alphabet vs. The Goddess. According to Shlain’s research into neurology and anthropology, literacy itself – that is, the advent of a written language – changed the human brain in an unprecedented way. Text and written language, reading and writing, required specialised areas in the left hemisphere of the brain to be activated and enlarged, which in turn activated certain analytic ways of thinking traditionally associated with maleness. Shlain’s argument is that across the globe, one sees that cultures previously devoted to polytheistic goddess religions and oral histories where women played a central role gave way to monotheistic religions and a turn towards patriarchy. To put it simply, the word took over the image.

Steve Martin proposed that if you want to play a dirty trick on a three-year-old, teach him to talk wrong. Someone speaking complete but assertive gibberish is disturbing because it clearly reveals the gap introduced by symbols. Beneath the surface of any symbolic system is always a sort of vacuum; an emptiness with an immense potential. Lucas Blalock’s complex work, do you need a diagram (2012) brings this last point home.

Images and pictures are ubiquitous, and because of that, there seems to be this consensus that our culture is dominated by images. I have no fear that the word will die. If anything, I’m concerned about our ability to relate to images, to use pictures and representations as ways of communicating something that can’t be spoken rationally, and not have them turn into tidy packets of understandable information. I have this sense that the way we’ve come to use images now is as if they were text in disguise. We’ve come to relate to images as something to be ‘read’ rather than experienced, and by reading them rather than experiencing them, we tend to overlook that part of the image that’s resistant to being verbalised or made into language – that resists domestication and taming.

At best, photographs confront us with a void. A void that language can’t easily fill. A point where language falters. In therapy, part of the treatment can be to resist talking – to resist explaining an emotion, because to explain it, is to assuage it, to make it bearable. Images have the capacity to be nearly unbearable experiences with potentially devastating effects. As Carol Mavor points out, they have the potential to bruise us, and though we cannot impose upon them the responsibility of making us act, there are images that we cannot escape from. A truly dangerous image burns into our retina, leaving a remnant that language can’t explain away, can’t mollify in any way.

Earlier, there was a certain kind of magic at work in photography: the exposure of the silver halides of the film to light and fixing an image through complex chemical reactions. The unruly silver halides known as the grain of the film, either fine as the skin of an infant, or coarse as a farmer’s hands, are now text. Yes, light is still captured. Yes, in certain areas of the photographic process there are chemicals involved, but mostly what happens is light being translated into a series of numerical values, which in turn are written in code – a language no doubt – which then forms the basis of the image. No wonder the age of the digital photograph is also the age of the emoji. What’s exposed in an image like Blalock’s as mentioned above is the void at the heart of the image – an emptiness that we need to embrace as existential, rather than try to escape from. Can we believe in this void, in the creative chaos that follows from it? Can we treat it like a form of belief that we respond to with awe and wonder? 

SIMON BAKER

All photos are Installation views of Perfoming for the Camera, Tate Modern, 18 February - 12 June 2016. Courtesy of Tate Photography © Joe Humphrys, Tate Photography

Simon Baker in conversation with Niclas Östlind on Baker's work as Tate’s first curator of photography.  

Niclas Östlind You’ve held one of the key positions in photography since 2009. What did you do before you started working at Tate?

Simon Baker Tate is the first museum I’ve worked at, and prior to that I was associate professor of Art History at the University of Nottingham. I taught history of art and photography. During that time, I started working on exhibitions as a freelance curator. I did one at Hayward Gallery in London and one at the Fruitmarket in Edinburgh. I slowly became more interested in curating than in academic writing.

NÖ You hold a PhD; what was your thesis about?

SB It was about Surrealism and French revolutionary politics. It wasn’t really about photography, but the Surrealist publications have, as everybody knows today, incredible photography in them by famous photographers like Man Ray and Brassaï, but also found photographs and vernacular material. I was very interested in not only how photography could play a role in an avant-garde context, but also the equal level the Surrealists found between photography, painting and sculpture. For them, photography wasn’t a secondary medium. It was actually the most important medium and that was very inspiring.

NÖ What did Tate look like when you started? 

SB Obviously, it’s the UK’s national museum and in fact consists of four museums. It had done fantastic photo exhibitions, like the beautiful Robert Frank show, Jeff Wall and ‘Cruel & Tender’. Tate had a reputation for showing photography, but had never really built a collection, and it was limited to photographs that were part of Conceptual art. There was a fairly good collection of the Düsseldorf School, but mostly it was people working with photography and not necessarily photographers.  

NÖ That’s rather delayed, since many museums started collecting photography in the 1970s.

SB I know and there’s a reason for that. It was a famous scandal in the British Photography world. Keith Arnatt – who we now have a great collection of – wrote an amazing essay called ‘Sausages and Food’ in 1982, describing the problems with Tate’s collecting policy. The director of Tate at the time, Alan Bowness, said that Tate collected photography by artists, and not art by photographers. It was a distinction they made between an artist using a camera, and photographers trying to be artists. They defended the policy by saying that the V&A had the national collection of photography, and that photography historically had been an applied art. They didn’t think it necessary to have traditional forms of photography in Tate’s collection, since other institutions already collected these. What Arnatt also wrote was that when he was a Conceptual artist, Tate collected his work, but when he started doing landscape photographs they stopped. His question was how they could make that strange distinction. What he wanted to point out was that artistic practice had gone beyond that distinction. We often refer to that essay to show what’s changed at Tate since then.

NÖ What were you asked to do when you started as curator?

SB To collect photography in the broadest way possible, not only focusing on a few Conceptual artists using cameras. The second thing was to show that photography has always been inside the history of art, and that the histories should never have become separated. My suggestion when I started, which was accepted by everybody, was that Tate should try to reintegrate photography: not build a separate gallery, not try to make a revisionist alternative history, but simply put photography back into the collection where it arguably always should have been. It was about finding the moments where photography was central to the arts, but also opening up the galleries and, for example, showing a whole room with Bruce Davidson next to a room with Andy Warhol, in order to make connections between two people who worked in New York at the same time. We try very hard not to exceptionalise photography, but to make it a natural part of the collection. I personally strongly believe in this strategy. In London, you can see photography on its own at the V&A, which has a permanent room describing the history of the medium through its collection, and you can go to the Photographer’s Gallery if you want to see a photography exhibition. Tate is the only place where you can see photography alongside painting, sculpture, installations, film and video. That’s our unique role.

NÖ What are the most important changes you’ve been able to make?

SB In objective terms, we’ve acquired a great number of photographs that weren’t in the collection before. It’s a question of the photography team persuading the rest of our colleagues that major photographic works are important. In terms of financial resources, we have a patrons committee to support the acquisition of photography, but the other acquisition committees, like the Asian-Pacific, the Russian-Eastern Europe, the African, and the Tate Americas Foundation have also bought photography. We’ve been successful in convincing all of them that photography is important. The biggest difference now is that it’s not only myself and my immediate colleagues, but also many other people suggesting rooms of photography for our displays. Now you see photography everywhere in the museum, and photography isn’t an exception anymore – that’s a massive change in an organisation like Tate.

NÖ It seems that you’ve truly broadened the geographical perspectives. 

SB Tate’s programme in general has expanded not only in terms of media, but also in terms of geography, to take on the whole world rather than only Europe and North America. It also includes many more women artist than before. That’s the agenda for the new building, and during the last ten years the curators have been learning about different regions, trying to disturb the centre–periphery logic that’s been present in so many museums up until now.

NÖ When you started at Tate, you were the first photography curator the institution had ever had. What does the photography department look like today?   

 SB It doesn’t look massively different. I’m lucky to be working with a brilliant and very knowledgeable assistant curator, Shoair Mavlian. She started in in 2010, I think, and we work together all the time. In the last couple of years, she too has been allocated an assistant. To put that in context, we’re working with all the four Tate museums, so it’s still a rather small team. But Tate actually doesn’t believe in departments and we work with all the other curators and are part of the general team. There’s no photography, or other media-specific, department.

NÖ In a way, you weren’t a classical photography expert when you got the position at Tate. What have you learnt working there?

SB When I started, I was vaguely knowledgeable about the 1920s and 30s. It was the period I’d mostly worked on. I had to quickly become a generalist to be able to deal with photography up to the present day. But at that time, it was still possible to read all the general photo history books in a couple of weeks. You couldn’t do that if it was painting. As a result, my personal interest is very broad. At Tate we decided on certain things we’d concentrate on, particularly post-war Japan. That was a decision made on the basis of what was in other collections in Britain and Europe. We looked for areas that had been the least collected and would be best for us to focus on in relation to both their affordability and accessibility. There was no point in us trying to build a huge collection of modernist photography when Centre Pompidou probably has the greatest collection in the world, with tens of thousands of prints from that period. We found photography in the post-war era that was overlooked. It’s a very strategic choice and not based on personal taste. We have a very good relation with other museums, like V&A, and they lend us works that we might want for an exhibition – and we of course do the same for them – so why repeat what they already have? Another important aspect is that we’re trying to collect in proportion to what we want to show. We wouldn’t acquire 4,000 prints by one photographer and show ten. We’d buy fifty and show fifty.  

NÖ How would you describe the exhibition programme?

SB It’s been important to show photography as a very diverse, open and expanding medium. The first exhibition I worked on was the William Klein and Daido Moriyama show, and in that show you had films, screen prints, photobooks, paintings, slideshows and installations. It was a way for me, and for Tate, of saying that this is what we believe photography to be – a varied and creative medium. We were really not interested in doing a show with 600 small black and white prints evenly spaced. All of the shows we’ve done since then have followed this logic. For us, photography is a diverse medium and it has all kind of modes of delivery to the world, from the small vintage print to the printed page to giant installations. It’s also a way of getting out of the rather small and protective ‘photo ghetto’.

NÖ What do you mean by that? 

SB  In the 1970s and 80s, there were a number of really good photo exhibitions in Britain, but they never generated an increase in the general popularity of photography. Photography wasn’t shown or collected that much in national museums either. The situation created a frustration among a generation of photographers who feel they were let down. Their careers took off, but then not much happened. In Paris, for example, there are both huge national museums with massive photography collections, and several smaller institutions showing photography. So if you were a photographer in Paris you could have a number of shows in various places. Here in Britain it was very different. The culture here hasn’t served photography well. The result was that photographers felt overlooked and they had their own survival strategies. One was publishing, and we have an amazing tradition of printed matter and photobooks in Britain. It can almost be seen as a reflection of the lack of opportunities for exhibiting, even if that is getting much better. Tate should play an important part in that development and it can do so by offering large-scale photo exhibitions.

NÖ Considering the changes in contemporary photography – technological and how it’s used and distributed – what are the biggest challenges for an institution like Tate, and how are you dealing with them?

SB Our first big challenge is that we did start very late. Therefore, we are to a certain extent forced to look backwards to make up for what hasn’t been done. We find ourselves constantly raising money to buy works by eminent photographers, because we have to do it now – before it’s too late. Another challenge is also to engage meaningfully with contemporary practice. In the thematic group shows we’re including younger artists and we also host Off Print in the Turbine Hall. It’s a self-publishing or independent publishing book fair, but we also offer tables for individual artists and students. The photobook is a very dynamic field and it’s been a major way of both monitoring and engaging with younger artist’s works. Hosting Off Print is a way for us to be part of the emerging scene, and we’re very enthusiastic about it. The second major challenge, which we haven’t really managed yet, is the digital, online and less object-based practices. Museums need objects, but we’re also increasingly engaging in other modes of delivery. That’s the challenge for the future, not only for Tate, but also for many large institutions.

NÖ What do you think are the most interesting things in the younger scene today?

SB There are many different strands of practice and not just one dominant trend. In the last few years there’s been a strong interaction between photography and sculpture, and bringing photography in relation to three-dimensional spaces in new ways. In Japan, there’s a very interesting group of younger women artists making extremely sophisticated works on gender and identity that we’re following up. What the photobook world tells us is that there’s incredibly pluralistic activity and that these photographers have created their own networks and spaces of display and circulation. That’s where I’m looking: to what’s being published more than what’s exhibited.

NÖ How would you describe the theoretical landscape today, and what are the most relevant questions from your perspective?

SB Honestly, I have very little engagement with the theory of photography. Having been an academic I understand the concept of it and the necessity of engaging in theory, but it’s not something that takes up much of my time. And it almost can’t. Curators are no longer able to be researchers in the way they used to be in the past. We’re dealing with an enormous variety of different activities. We’re dealing with a global context of photography and we need to be generalists. What we’re asked to do by the museums is to summarise what’s going on and explain that to our audience in an interesting and accessible way.

WALTER BENN MICHAELS

Phil Chang | Cache, Active, 2012 | LA><ART | Los Angeles

The Beauty of a Social Problem 

Interview with Walter Benn Michaels by Thomas Roach

Thomas Roach I’ll lift questions from WJT Mitchell to begin: Who are you? What do you do? What crucial facts in your background would you mention if you were introducing yourself to a stranger on an airplane?

Walter Benn Michaels So I pretty much keep to myself on airplanes but I guess the relevant facts about me are that I teach in the English Department at UIC and that, in addition to writing about literature and literary theory, I write about politics and art. And in politics, I’m an orthodox Reedian (Adolph); in aesthetics, an orthodox Friedian (Michael).

TR You wrote recently: “If what you want is a vision of the structures that produce both the policies we’ve got and the desire for alternatives to them, art is almost the only place you can find it.”  Why do contemporary practices in photography interest you specifically? Or, why is photography the exemplar?

WBM The main thing that’s drawn me to photography has just been that for most of my looking-at-art lifetime, much of the most ambitious and exciting work has been made by photographers or artists with a strong connection to photography. Of course, there’s been lots of meretricious and boring work too (that’s inevitable) but, starting with Jim Welling’s work in the early 80s, so many of the things that have just blown me away have been photographs. And one reason for that, I think, has been photography’s centrality as a site for thinking about a particular set of theoretical questions that have turned out also be important political questions: the role of the artist in determining the work’s meaning, the role of the reader or beholder, the relation of the work to the world 

Of course these questions matter for every art. But it’s not hard to see their particular salience for photography. The fact, for instance, that you can make a picture just by pressing a button on the camera can easily be understood to raise questions about the relative demands of skill and concept, or about how tight the relation between the artist’s intentions and the picture’s meaning can be, or even (something I’m writing about right now) about what exactly an intention or an intentional act is.

And, precisely because the photographer’s contribution to the meaning of the work can come to seem attenuated, the beholder’s can come to be accentuated. The most vivid early example was obviously Barthes’s punctum – the insistence on what the beholder felt regardless of or despite whatever the photographer might have meant. And, of course, that distinctive appeal to the viewer is linked to the photograph’s distinctive relation to what it’s a photo of.  Just to choose an artist I haven’t written about but whose work I’m interested in, if you look at LaToya Ruby Frazier’s photographs of Braddock PA, there’s a kind of non-identity between how we respond to the subjects of those photographs and how we respond to the photographs as art.  One depends on how we feel about de-industrialization, racialized poverty, etc.; it’s about us. The other depends on how we understand what Frazier is trying to do with these pictures; it’s about art. So the indexical relation of the photograph to its subject generates a certain appeal of the photograph to its beholder’s subjectivity. But the photographs’ claim to be art demands a response that, while it is routed through the indexical – routed through our response to the plight of the people the photos depict-- is fundamentally different from it.

LaToya Ruby Frazier, Grandma Ruby and U.P.M.C Braddock Hospital on Braddock Avenue, 2007. Gelatin silver photograph, 20 x 25 in. Courtesy of the artist  © LaToya Ruby Frazier.

TR What you’re describing here are mainly aesthetic issues but you write about them as if they were also political issues. Is it overly simplistic to describe your interests as “Aesthetic Autonomy vs. Political Autonomy”?

WBM Well, you’re dead on about autonomy. What I was just describing about the photo’s relation to the world and to the beholder suggests the ways in which the (straight) photograph or the photogram – with its causal dependence on what it’s a photo of and hence its openness to the different responses different viewers will have to the sight of (say) deindustrializing Braddock -- is maybe the least autonomous art object imaginable. But what I’ve been interested in is photographers who both acknowledge and seek to overcome this structural openness, who seek to establish the autonomy of the work. What they’re producing is works that insist on a meaning that’s independent of and even indifferent to the response of the viewer.  And while that’s obviously an aesthetic project, I argue that it’s also a political project, and, today, a very particular kind of political project -- not liberal but left, organized around neither individuality nor identity but the concept of class. 

TR Are the artists you describe in The Beauty of a Social Problem (2015) – Evans, Wall, Binschtok, Chang, Deschenes, Ou – protesting a set of aesthetic structures analogous to class? 

WBM I don’t think they’re protesting anything but I do think they have a class aesthetic, whether or not they have a class politics (which some do and some don’t). Today, the core of liberal (or neoliberal, not much difference) politics is the effort to make capitalism fairer, to minimize the role played by racism, sexism, etc. in depriving people of the ability to succeed in the market. And what that effort requires is precisely a kind of attention to and appreciation of both identity and individuality -- who people are, how we see each other and treat each other. A kind of ethics. But the work of artists like Binschtok and Chang and Ou (as least as I understand them) is not interested in and in fact refuses those kinds of relations. It’s interested instead in its own structure, its own logic (that’s part of what’s meant by autonomy).  So what we see in their work is a world that does not depend on how we see or feel about it. And it’s that world that provides us an image of our own, of a society structured by the logic of labor and capital, not by how capitalists feel about workers. By exploitation, not by unfairness or a failure of compassion. In this way, what amounts to an aesthetics of indifference finds its use also as a politics of indifference. It’s an aesthetics and a politics instead of an ethics.

TR Re-enactment interests you. You describe the points at which blankness and generalization are necessary for convincing reenactment – you use Tom McCarthy’s hockey mask wearing actors in Remainder (2005) as an example. I’m reminded of an anecdote of Charles Ray’s related to Unpainted Sculpture (1997) – his meticulous casting of a Pontiac Grand Am death-wreck in fiberglass. He describes the frustrating failure of the project until he began filling and smoothing between the cast parts with Bondo. He describes Bondo as a cinematic fade between scenes, interstitial filler between the perfectly reproduced component parts without which the copy, somehow, failed. It was a baffling problem for him… that he would need Bondo, that an indexical process like casting would fail to convincingly copy a thing without the addition of a material not present in the original.

WBM There’s a lot in that question! In Ray, of course, what’s partly at stake in making the copy is transforming the object (made by nature, like Hinoki or by chance – literally accident – like Unpainted Sculpture) into the bearer of the artist’s intentions. In Remainder, intentionality is approached a little more obliquely.  What re-enactment does is instantaneously produce normativity – you’re not just walking down a hallway, you’re walking down a hallway that either does or doesn’t look like it’s supposed to. So the whole point of McCarthy’s re-enactor is that he’s obsessed with getting it right and that when he does get it right he feels the “tingling” of what he calls “significance.” Which is to say, meaning. Just as Ray produces meaning by making chance into intention, McCarthy’s re-enactor produces meaning by making a hallway into the representation of a hallway. And what’s crucial about the blank is not so much that it makes the representation more convincing but that, like the space demarcated by a frame, it functions to mark the conceptual difference between material that means and material that doesn’t.

TR So that’s what you’re getting at when you write “it’s only abstraction – the blankness that turns something (a hockey mask, paper, cement) into a representation of nothing – that makes the very idea of remainder possible”? And, to paraphrase, that with this renouncement of thingness, with this use of a concrete material as ‘a nothing’ we somehow rehabilitate the material itself for use. How do Phil Chang’s unfixed Cache, Active works rehabilitate or affirm representation by virtue of their slide into monochromes? 

WBM Because the Cache, Active works are pictures that, once you expose them to the light immediately begin to turn into monochromes, they might be thought to do exactly the opposite of what I’m talking about; they seem to start as representations and collapse or, I like your word, slide into the sheerly material. But since there are important ways in which photographs aren’t exactly representations in the first place (that’s the point of all the indexicality stuff), there’s an equally important way in which the slide into materiality functions to assert that fact – to insist on a materiality that was always already there.  And in that sense – the sense in which these works are not only material but are about their materiality – the slide is their way of refusing to slide, of making what looks like the disappearance of representation into a representation. 

TR Do artists like Chang make it possible for other artists to assume less fraught or even uncaring relationships with the thingness of photographs?

WBM That’s a good question. Insofar as there’s an internal logic at work here, the answer might almost be that work like his, properly understood, might make it not only possible but almost necessary.   To be in the room with one of the Cache, Actives while it’s fading is a powerful experience. It’s like being shown the work as an epitaph for the process that made it. So maybe after that experience, a certain kind of interest in the ontology of the photograph begins to get replaced. If you look at Chang’s more recent work (like on the cover of my book), you can see a slightly different direction, a different sense of what makes a photograph a photograph. Actually, you can see this tendency also in what Owen Kydd calls his durational photographs. And in Binschtok’s Clusters and, of course, Demand’s Pacific Sun.

TR You compare Walker Evans’ FSA pictures to Liz Deschenes’ mirrored photograms. I understand the economic conditions surrounding both bodies of work are important to your analysis, but why Evans? Why not a comparison between Deschenes and say, Steiglitz’s Equivalents? Some of these were made in the same period of extraordinary inequality. Or Moholy-Nagy’s photograms? (He was in Chicago then.)

WBM No doubt there are things you could say about Deschenes in relation to Steiglitz’s Equivalents or Moholy-Nagy but I was drawn to the Evans because I think both his work and hers address the question of the beholder in differently revelatory ways. In the book, I try to show how Evans’s ambition to make art functions to foreground the difference between the photographer and his subjects, how his effort to make art out of people who (in his and Agee’s view) have no conception of art, makes the photographs address the inequality between their subjects (who don’t see them as art) and their viewers (who do). So what interested me in Deschenes was that in the mirrored photograms, what we see – not sharecroppers but ourselves – eliminates that inequality, while the beauty of the works themselves – which I understand in part as producing a desire not to see our own reflections – functions to complicate that effect of identity.

More generally, I would say that while you are of course right that the economic conditions in which a work is produced seem to me important, they’re not dispositive. It’s the work’s formal ambitions that I think function as the structure of address to those conditions. And, of course, Evans tended to be very vehement about the fact that his photographs had no politics. I don’t know if Deschenes feels the same way and I don’t know anything about what her politics are. So putting them together was maybe a way also of making a slightly larger point about how politics work in art.

JONAS MEKAS

Detail from In an Instant it All Came Back to Me, Jonas Mekas, 2015

Cinema was invented to celebrate life

Jonas Mekas exhibits new work in The Internet Saga during this years biennale in Venice.

Interview by Nina Strand

- We tend to forget this, what cinema can do, we don't pay attention to it and that's why a show like this might be important, the artist Jonas Mekas tells Objektiv outside Zuecca Project Space’s Venice gallery Spazio Ridotto. The gallery is dedicated to digital artistic projects in order to create a connection between the physical exhibition space and the digital world. In all the opening frenzy during the 56th Venice Biennale this small space offers a welcomed break from the overcrowded Arsenale and Giardini. And especially welcome is the opportunity to have a short conversation with the legendary Mekas whom independent film artists have everything to thank. In 1962 he founded the Film-Makers' Cooperative, and in 1964 the Film-Makers' Cinematheque, which eventually grew into Anthology Film Archives, one of the world's largest and most important repositories of avant-garde cinema. During all this time he continued writing poetry, teaching and making films, many giving him credits for being the one who developed the diaristic forms of cinema. Since 2006 the web site www.jonasmekasfilms.com functions like a great multimedia diary where real life becomes cinema.

Jonas Mekas outside Spazio Ridotto, Venice. Photo: Nina Strand

 In Venice, Mekas exhibits at two different places, one part of The Internet Saga features the work Birth of a Nation (1997) shown in the gallery. A piece composed of four simultaneous projections, displaying 170 portraits, appearances and glimpses of directors and friends who, along with the artist himself, have formed the history of independent cinema in the US. This because, according to the short manifest accompaning the list of participants: "The independents of cinema IS a nation in itself. We are surrounded by a commercial cinema Nation same way as the indigenous people of United States or any other country are surrounded by the ruling powers. We are the invisible, but essential nation of cinema. We are Cinema."

- These are friends of delicate taste and experiences, and every film is important, Mekas explains. - This is a collage where you do the editing yourself, you do your own selection. I have seen them many times, I know what's on every one, but different spaces give different reading.

As part of the show Mekas will perform a poetic decleration named To the Internet written especially for the occation. 

- I believe this work will be important even in twenty years time as things change as documents.

Detail from In an Instant it All Came Back to Me, Jonas Mekas, 2015

Another part of the exhibition takes place at the Palazzo Foscari Contarini on the Grand Canal, now housing the only Burger King in Venice. For the next seven months the audience can experience previously unpublished work by Mekas.  In an Instant it All Came Back to Me (2015) features monomeric vinyl on 32 windows facing the courtyard of the restaurant. The close to 800 frames are picked from Mekas' films with the intention to registrer the rythm of past times.

- I wanted to show art in an every day setting, and also look at what the film does to the space here in this well known eating place. We don't always pay attention to what's around us.

At Burger King the audience can also enjoy different videoes from Mekas' Online Diary (2006-2015) and in the courtyard they can enjoy their lunch with a back drop from the sound diary To Petrarca (2003).

-  My films are made from daily life with my friends, they were not invented in darkness, they intend to celebrate the positive aspects of life.

The curator duo behind The Internet Saga, Francesco Urbano Ragazzi, have high ambitions for this project and have stated: "This is not a normal pavillion of the Biennal and it is not an event. We are at the beginning of a grand narrative which is taking place in the real time of the internet." Their project is dedicated to Mekas, calling him an eternal experimenter, and they were extremely pleased when he accepted to take part of it.

- They came up with the idea and I came along for it. I liked the idea of doing something like this in these terrible times. Everybody is running from something, be it of politcal or religious reasons, people are set against each other, fighting and killing, it is a very demanding century we have embarked on, Mekas says, back in Venice after having exhibited here in 2003 and also in 2005 representing the Lithuania National Pavillion.

Detail from In an Instant it All Came Back to Me, Jonas Mekas, 2015

- It seems like everybody are pushed to the corner, and we are witnessing a destruction of the planet. Nobody really understands where we are at, and I think we forget that the disaster is close. We are running out of water, and I am sure that while we are doing this interview five species are dying.

Therefore, Mekas says, we must be awoken and this can be done with art.

Saying this, he shares the opinion with many others on this years biennale exhibition titled All the world's futures, curated by Okuwi Enwezor.

- There's no future to be seen in this years show. It is merely leftovers from the past. We must look further back in history for the groundbreaking shows where something happened, where something could be changed.

The Internet Saga might lead to something more as it also can be seen for those outside of Venice. Everyone can go online and see it wherever they are.

- We are in the beginning of a strong digital culture, and it is important to point out beauty, celebrate the little bits of paradise we have in order to maybe change things.

- One must never give up, Mekas says.

 - It is our duty not to, we must not be destroyed.

TOM SANDBERG

Untitled, 2008, Tom Sandberg

The curator of the show Tom Sandberg: Photographs 1989-2006, Bob Nickas on his collaboration with Tom Sandberg.

Nina Strand After your first visit at Ekely in Tom's studio, set up by Marta Kuzma and OCA as a last-minute meeting, having encountered his big, haunting prints, you knew immediately that you wanted to make a show with him. What was it in his work that intrigued you?

Bob Nickas Some of them were, as you say, haunting. The images stayed with me after I had left, and of course I thought of his pictures of planes and clouds and the sky on the flight back to New York. It was clear that this was an artist who saw the world in a way that emphasized its fragility and ours. One image in particular hit me very strongly, as I'm sure it does for most viewers—the enormous egg-like baby's head on the beach. That's a photo of his daughter when she was very young. You only need to see that photo once and you don't forget it, and that first time you feel as if you already knew it from before. Not many artists can create images with an instant recognition, and that linger for a long time. It could be a scene from a movie, where everything is still and then suddenly there's a slight movement, a little paw-like hand in the sand, and then the child attempts to lift its heavy head and can't. So there is also this filmic quality to Tom's work—all these stills from the movie that is life—and his downbeat film-noir sensibility is very evocative. For one thing, only black-and-white prints. Tom, like others who capture that halting stillness and its poetics, worked exclusively in black-and-white. I would suggest as well that in a quietly expressive way he was able to amplify silence. John Cage did that most famously, and it's worth noting that among Tom's portraits of artists is a very fine picture of Cage from 1985. Here, Tom seems to regard a person no differently than he would the face of a mountainside.

NS In your catalogue text you make comparisons between Tom's pictures and Peter Hujar's, and wrote: "Tom Sandberg’s is a world where life is always in the balance; we are in it, but only in passing. We can experience an intense connection to it, and share it with one another, and at the same time be awed by how insignificant we are in relation to its vastness." The show at PS1 was so well put together. How was it to collaborate on it with him? You organized several exhibitions with photographers. How did you see Tom's work in comparison? And how was the show received?

BN In my text I also refer to Edward Weston, Weegee, Robert Frank, William Klein, and Brassaï. That's very good company in which to be included, but also for them to be in his company. While the art of the past helps us to understand the art of the present, so too can the art of the present inform what came before. Time is never really moving in one linear direction, and histories overlap. In Tom's case, this may have something to do with the timeless quality of his pictures, the sense that their position is not so easily fixed. What year is it? And is it night or day? In the end, this doesn't really matter. Like the ghostly image of the plane that seems to float above the runway, the pictures hover in time. Tom and I occasionally met in Paris, and on one occasion I was celebrating my birthday, for which Tom gave me Henri Cartier-Bresson's Scrapbook. Maybe if we had been in Oslo or in New York it wouldn't have registered in the same way, but because there was such a strong connection between the pictures and the place, I felt as if the activity represented in the book, that pursuit of the world in passing, its sadness and its mystery, what was known and unknown, was also Tom's activity.
The other photographers I had previously done shows with at PS1 were William Gedney and Peter Hujar, who were no longer alive, which meant that I was dealing with pictures and not the person who made them. There was an exhibition with Stephen Shore, we showed an entire series and hung the pictures almost exactly as they came out of the crates—a very democratic process. With Wolfgang Tillmans, although his plan was based on my invitation and our initial conversations, he is in many ways his own best curator. He had very definite ideas for what he wanted to do, and an overall vision for the show. Around that time I proposed to bring a survey of Louise Lawler's work to the museum, but she decided against a big New York show in that moment. So the exhibition with Tom turned out to be my last at PS1. It was easy to work with him. We respected one another and he trusted me—in part because he was somewhat nervous and I was totally confident. I knew it would be good from the beginning. There were a lot of great pictures to choose from and we had plenty of space. The show was given the largest galleries in the museum. I think he was curious to see how someone else responded to his work in the choosing and installation of a show. As the works were placed and hung, everything was discussed between the two of us, and we were both happy with the results. Many who came, including otherwise well-informed critics and curators, couldn't help wondering how it was they were unaware of Tom's work, and it was clear that his pictures had made a very strong impression. Despite the fact that he had been working for some time, his art was very much a discovery in New York.

NS  For this issue we have invited a number of artists to have conversations with each other on the state of photography after Tom. One predicted that Tom's pictures will stand out even a hundred years from now as the work of Munch does. Two artists are also looking at current trends, and are very pessimistic, stating: "All we see are repetitions of previous work. Different varieties of something old, out-dated and worn out." We are curious on your thoughts on both Tom's legacy and the work seen today?

John Cage, 1985, Tom Sandberg

BN Who can say whether Tom's work will stand a hundred years from now? Anyway, none of us will be around. And yet if you look at what contemporary picture-making concerns itself with today, it's doubtful that it will somehow captivate people in the future. It's not so fascinating to us now. The sort of calculated realism/surrealism you see nowadays, with oddly combined objects photographed against various color backgrounds, or manipulated with cheap effects, they may look strange or surprising on first view, but tend to flatten and appear more normal every time after. A hundred years from now, maybe two years from now, they may be mistaken for advertising or design.

As for Tom's legacy, I suspect that people will come back to it over and again. It will continue to be discovered and re-discovered, for at least as long as people remain interested in art, and in how we attempt to make sense of passing through this life.     

TOM SANDBERG

MoMA PS1 founder Alanna Heiss comments on the exhibition Tom Sandberg: Photographs 1989-2006, curated by Bob Nickas and presented at MoMA PS1 in 2007.

Interview by Lisa Bernhoft-Sjødin

The exhibition was Sandberg´s first solo show in the US, following Torbjørn Rødland in 2006 and followed by Børre Sætre in 2008. Over thirty works were shown in the exhibition, spanning from 1989 to 2007, in the Second Floor Main Gallery. It was an important show for the Norwegian photographer, and coincided with MoMA PS1’s mission to act as springboard to international and emerging artists in the American art world.

The show’s curator, Bob Nickas, described Sandberg’s photography as a world where life is always in the balance. We are in it, but only in passing. We can experience an intense connection to it, and share it with one another, and at the same time be awed by how insignificant we are in relation to its vastness. We all understand how, in an instant, the camera automatically fixes a person in time, and yet in affirming our very being, photography also evidences our mortality, the fleeting nature of life.

"Sandberg’s photography can be quite ominous, I think” says Alanna Heiss, sitting down with me at Clocktower HQ in Manhattan. "And for me the common denominator is mystery. Nothing in his work is communicated as a simple statement. Take the one with the infant and the sea as a backdrop (Untitled, 2004). One sees this big round disk, and as you get closer, you realize it´s a baby´s head. Closer inspection reveals that the child is laying in the sun, in complete ecstasy. The image, which begins as an ominous one, transfers into an essay on joy."

With the millenium growing closer, Alanna Heiss encountered chronic problems that faced P.S 1 as a contemporary art space. One problem was P.S 1’s survival as a vibrant and powerful venue for contemporary art. She eventually chose a course of action that seemed at the time the most radical thing imaginable: a merger with MoMA. To do this, meant that the artist-driven, non-collecting “anti-museum” of almost thirty years was to shed its guerilla tactics, and explore aligning its building and programs to the leading Museum of Modern Art. But it had to be an equal trade-off: MoMAPS1 was to still have the edge of Heiss´s P.S 1, which had largely drawn its structure from her pioneering work in the alternative space movement of the seventies. She hoped P.S 1 could garner strength from the prestige of its new heavy weight partner, while at the same time retain its worldwide reputation for being at the forefront of new art activity. During this process, a greater commitment to photography emerged.

“We were looking for ways to interact department by department, and one crossover was photography. P.S 1 had been showing photographers since 1976, however, as part of a general art committee, rather than as a separate discipline. I am not a photography curator, but I have always been fascinated by photographers. And so, when Nickas introduced me to Tom Sandberg´s work, I was enormously enthusiastic!”

There were several reasons for this. One of them being that his work felt very familiar to her.

“He was a quiet gentleman, who reminded me of my family. You know, I´m Norwegian three generations removed. One of the things I love about Norway, is that you can see far and wide. You have a very keen sense of where you´re positioned in the world…And I also saw in his work a traveller, which I felt very akin to my own way of life. I remember we had a little bit of common understanding about the importance of nothing, the lack of everything, talking in very cliché ways about landscape.”

“As a photographer, Sandberg was a true craftsman: very old-fashioned by nature, and what he captured was quieter and more personal at key points than, say, his documentarian counterparts."

It was a big decision to show him in the Second Floor Main Gallery.

 “We were showing Sandberg in our most glamorous space. It was a huge commitment from us to Sandberg. Photography is absolutely wall art, so when installing a show you look for walls with a defined beginning and an end. When looking at them, you don´t stand far off, you go up to them. Our first consideration was that the gallery had so much space, we weren’t sure it was going to work. But it looked beautiful in the space, no doubt about it. He belonged there.”

 “I think an interesting discussion today is: What is the value of photographs at all? I mean, a photograph is so ephemeral, and has the ability to disappear in a sea of other photos. In many ways they´re easily reprinted, and if a photograph gets damaged by sunlight for example, it can be reproduced. In that way, photographs are unique in the art world as authentic pieces, attainable to a general public. They are accessible in a manner that paintings or sculptures could never be: housed in museums or galleries or artist’s studios as unique art objects. But then again, I think Sandberg evaded that pitfall of photography with the gigantic scale of his prints. They create a massive experience that you´re robbed of if you see it on a screen or in a diminutive copy. "

 All images are taken from MoMA PS1 site from the exhibition Tom Sandberg: Photographs 1989–2006

PETER GALASSI

An-My Lê, Manning the Rail, USS 'Tortuga', Java Sea, 2010

Peter Galassi, the former chief curator of photography at MOMA, came to Gothenburg for an artist’s talk on the occasion of An-My Lê’s first Nordic exhibition last Saturday. Objektiv invited six people from the photo scene to ask him one question each.
 

Kjersti Solbakken, director of Fotogalleriet, Oslo As the director of a lens-based gallery, I’m curious to know more about your view of the contemporary art scene. What, in your opinion, is the critical concern of photographic practice today? 

Peter Galassi  For thirty years I tried very hard to keep up with new work in photography. I enjoyed that a lot, but of course, it was also part of my job. Since I left MoMA nearly four years ago, I’ve felt a great sense of freedom from the responsibility of trying to keep up. And I no longer feel a need to formulate a comprehensive overview of the field, so I’m afraid I’m not very useful to you on this point.

But I will take stab at outlining one concern that’s on my mind regarding the contemporary scene. I think it’s very positive that photography has finally got over its inferiority complex and can now play with the big boys and girls in the grown-up art world. Today, you can make anything you want, and lens-based works (to use your term) are not by definition inferior to other kinds of art.

On the other hand, when I see a show of lens-based art these days, I sometimes have the impulse to say to the artist: ‘OK, it’s art. I get it. Great! But what about the world out there?’ Lens-based images have an extraordinary capacity to describe and engage that world, and I have a sense that the enthusiasm for making lens-based art has tended to neglect that capacity.

One example: I’m trying to learn to speak Swedish, and one chapter in one of my study books is about Kiruna in the very north of Sweden, the mining town that produces something like 90% of Europe’s iron—enough every day to make six Eiffel Towers—and which is now being forced to move because the mine is disturbing the bedrock of the town. It’s a fascinating place, which has the further complication of darkness in winter and continuous daylight in summer. Is anyone trying seriously to photograph in Kiruna? 

Bjarne Bare, artist and founder of MELK, Oslo In Anywhere or not at all, Peter Osborne questions the use of the term ‘medium’ to categorise photography, since it serves so many purposes and is found in so many places. Osborne also asks where the photograph is, given that it’s hard to say whether it’s found in the negative, in the print, on the screen etc., pointing towards a more open ontological idea of the status and being of the photograph. I find photography rather schizophrenic as a medium, and have been even more puzzled since reading Osborne’s statement because he seems to me to be on to something that’s rarely discussed in today’s discourse on photography and how it’s evolving. Where do you believe the photograph is today, compared to a few decades ago, and will it move to different places in the future? Will something be lost on the way?

Galassi  In my view, it’s never made sense to talk about the photograph, because, as you point out, photography has so many functions in the world. If you define photography as registering traces of energy to create a visual image, then its uses go all the way from the amazing methods that scientists keep developing to see what’s going on inside our bodies to the most boring photograph in an art gallery. Photography doesn’t have an essence, ontological or otherwise; it’s something that humans invented and what matters is how they use it, as with language or guns. You can use language for a bureaucratic memo or for Shakespeare’s sonnets. You can use a gun to defend yourself against an evil attacker or to kill the innocent. You can use photography to record faces for drivers’ licences or to make Sune Jonsson’s incredible scenes of the frozen coast near Umeå (one of my favorite recent discoveries). As usual, the most interesting—thrilling, unpredictable, outrageous—aspect is the human element.

The rest of your question overlaps with the next one, from Espen Gleditsh, so I’ll try to answer them together.

Espen Gleditsch, artist and teacher at Oslo Fotokunstskole During the seminar Real Photo History at the National Library of Norway in 2014, you gave the lecture ‘Photography 1839–1918: Process, Object, Audience, Image’. You addressed the intimate relationship between the invention of different photographic processes and the spreading of photographic images: how technical developments regarding reproduction changed not only the distribution of photographic images, but also the criteria for what the camera lens was pointed at; the selection of subject matter and how it was photographed. What are your thoughts on how these issues are relevant to photographers today?

CONSTANTIN BRANCUSI, View of the studio: Plato, Mademoiselle Pogany II, and Golden Bird, c. 1920, gelatin silver print, 11 3/4 x 9 1/2 inches (29.8 x 24.1 cm). Private collection © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. From the exhibition IN THE STUDIO: PHOTOGRAPHS, curated by Peter Galassi, at Gagosian Gallery, FEBRUARY 17 - APRIL 18, 2015

Galassi Making, replicating, manipulating and transmitting photographs has never been easier, quicker or cheaper. This unarguable fact is beaten into our soggy heads with relentless frequency, often accompanied by glib assumptions about what the consequences have been and will be. In fact, every single aspect of our lives is being transformed by digital technology, just as they were by the steam engine, electricity and so forth—though perhaps even more radically. What we don’t know is where we stand on the curve of that transformation. I have the feeling that the only people who are certain to be wrong about the future are the people who are certain that they’re right.

And not everything is changing. For the moment, for example, each human being is still confined to one body that lives 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

For me, the most extraordinary thing about photography—plain, ordinary photography—is that it has proved capable of expressing an individual’s unique relationship to and understanding of the world, with all the subtlety, surprise, depth and power that language can. Digital technology hasn’t done anything to change that.

Thomas H Johnsson, artist and curator for Landskrona Photofestival Peter, what comes to your mind first – your idea, or your choice of artist? 

Galassi. As Marcel Duchamp—and Ulf Linde, and Lee Friedlander—have said: I don’t believe in ideas, I believe in facts. Works of art—photographs—are facts. That’s where I start; that’s where the fun begins. I get interested in pictures, and then I follow my nose. I’ve noticed, though, that the people who create the most compelling pictures tend to be more intelligent than the rest of us, with more original minds – Mr Friedlander, for example

Ann-Christin Bertrand, curator at C/O Berlin What, in your eyes, would be the most appropriate way for a photographic institution to react to the profound transition that the medium of photography is going through, in order to give more space to questions related to its future, and to find new formats more adapted to what photography is becoming?

Galassi  If you mean photographic institutions that aim to serve the art of photography as it is being practised right now, then my answer is simple and old-fashioned: you pay attention, you try to educate yourself about what’s happening and consider it sympathetically, and then you try to bring what you think is the best of it to your audience. If the work that you judge to be the best is best experienced hanging on the wall in a gallery, that’s one thing. If it’s best experienced in some other way, then you try to adapt to that need. The art leads, the institution follows.

Of course, all of that is much easier said than done. The art world today is truly global, which means that keeping up is harder than ever—impossible, really—and it’s a huge challenge to try to get a working sense of the very different cultures from which different work emerges. And in terms of medium, size, format and so forth, not all of the work is leading in the same direction. In some respects, the easiest of all may be the work that leads right out of the building into the cloud—until you discover that maintaining an institutional presence on the web can be just as costly and complicated as running a bricks-and-mortar building.

One thing is certain, though: the institutions don’t decide where photography is going. The best artists do. Which are the best artists? That’s the fun part.

Nina Strand, artist and editor of Objektiv In an interview with Aperture, Quentin Bajac spoke about MoMA’s history, calling it the ‘judgment seat of photography’. He added that: Today, MoMA is only one of the judgment seats. Now there are other major institutions involved in photography. I think MoMA still has a kind of specificity because of its long and deep commitment to photography. We’re writing one history of photography at MoMA, while other people or institutions are writing simultaneous histories. I’m curious to hear your thoughts concerning the different photo institutions, departments or magazines today. Do we need these special arenas and what should be their mission? 

Galassi  First of all, I want to say how lucky I feel that Quentin Bajac took my place at MoMA. I worked very hard for the department of photography, for its programmes and collection, and it’s great to know that they’re in such good hands.

And I agree with Quentin that there are many more institutional voices in photography than there used to be—and that this is a good thing. Different points of view—dialogue, debate, even competition—contribute to the vitality of culture. Just one example: Tate, in London, didn’t deal with photography in the past, didn’t have a curator. Now they do: Simon Baker, who recently organised an exhibition about war photography that, if I understand correctly, was about photography that was made after the event. (Conflict, Time, Photography, 26 November 2014 – 15 March 2015). It’s a very simple idea, but as far as I know, no one had ever done it before, and it’s brilliant. I wish I’d been able to see the exhibition, and I’m looking forward very much to studying the catalogue. If Tate still had no photography programme, if Simon wasn’t there, this fascinating project never would have happened.

As for MoMA, I think that Quentin and his colleagues should do what they believe in—and I’m sure they agree. I do hope that the collection will continue to play a significant role in the programme; after all, that’s what makes a museum a museum. And MoMA has great collections—plural. One of the greatest strengths of the photography collection is that it’s surrounded by other great collections. For decades there’s been talk about finding new ways of integrating the display of those collections. I don’t mean a tiny photograph next to a giant painting; they can be in separate galleries adjacent to each other—and the next gallery can be full of design objects. I was eager to try this and other experiments a quarter of a century ago, and I hope I can believe the rumours that these experiments will be tried in earnest soon. Then the curators can see what works and what doesn’t, and then change things. And change them again. And again.

Stuart Klipper, Cuerno Corcovada, Golfo de Corcovada, Chile, 1987. ©Stuart D Klipper From the exhibition  LAND MEETS WATER - EUROPEAN AND AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHY FROM 1860 TO THE PRESENT, curated by Peter Galassi for Artipelag, Sweden, opening in May 2015. 

JEFF WALL

All images by Jeff Wall, Boxing, 2011, © Jeff Wall 

Jeff Wall is finally back in Scandinavia with his exhibition Tableaux Pictures Photographs. Objektiv asked six artists to ask him one question each.

Dag Erik Elgin: I’d like to bring up the concept of matiére in relation to your work. To my knowledge, matiére addresses the tactile, haptic totality of organising a painting’s pictorial space in a way that exceeds formal composition. It seems that your work is informed by this approach, and I’d appreciate your thoughts on matiére in photography.

Jeff Wall: Well, if you’re thinking about the textural aspect of painting, the photograph can’t have that. The surface of a photograph can’t ever be touched; it can’t have anything tactile about it. I call it radically invisible – it’s invisible to the point where you see its invisibility – you’re very aware of it. So the only recourse is in the world that you’re depicting, the physical nature of things. Part of composition is to work with the same thing a painter would work with: colour, tone, etc. It’s always interesting what people are wearing, what’s near them, what the sky is like; all of these physical plastic matters are really part of the process of composition. Part of moving the camera to another place is bringing together an ensemble of textures, shapes, elements that do something besides just reporting on that subject. To me, a picture is not only a subject, but also the colour ensemble, the textural nature of things, the patina or lack of patina. All these things are themselves beautiful, regardless of what the thing is about. What it’s about is just another layer, what I’d call its dynamics, its life. We need to be very clear: we’re not painters, we’re not trying to accomplish or imitate painting in photography. I’ve been accused of returning photography to the imitation of painting, which is an old-fashioned way of looking at it. Painting and photography speak to each other; they’re both arts of depiction, they’re both trying to create a depiction with their means. A painting means a painting, but that doesn’t mean that aspects of what we’ve learned from painting can’t help. I learned a lot from the scale of painting when trying to rework photography, not to be like painting, but to please a group of people standing in front of a wall in a way that’s related to what people like in a painting. That’s not imitating painting; that’s being in dialogue with some of its achievements, and this has helped me as a photographer. Many cinematographers who work in films talk about how much they’ve learned from studying paintings. They’re not imitating painting either, but they have learned something from it, as painters probably learned a lot from cinema or photography. We have to work with the medium as it is. I’m very modernist in the sense that I’m working with photography as a medium. It has a capacity to capture special qualities like a marble table, a floor that's worn, in a way that painting only does with great difficulty. The recording of actual nuances of material is something very specific to photography. Even cinema doesn’t capture as much, since it’s always moving. So that in a way is the parallel to the notion of say the haptic or the textural of the painting. Only photography can show us that.

Emil Salto: Can you talk about the way you court chance in your work?

Wall: All the starting points for my pictures are accidental. Things happen that you haven’t planned on happening, as they do for everyone. In Cyclist (1996), for example – that wasn’t planned. I saw a cyclist resting and thought, ‘That’s a starting point.’ So it is chance to begin with, in this framework we call everyday life; it’s an accident. And in the making of the work there are also many many accidents. People have written about my work, very inaccurately, that everything is perfectly planned, and then everything is perfectly executed too. Even if I could plan everything perfectly, I’d have to execute it perfectly as well, and the chances of that are very low. Things change during the making of my pictures; they don’t necessarily end up as planned. That’s why I allow myself time to work on my pictures. I don’t hurry. I allow things to happen in my images that will likely be much more interesting than they would have been if I’d hurried. I try to give myself the opportunity to let the subject go through some transformations. It may only be the way the person is, or where they are, but often something will happen. The picture called Dawn (2001), which is an empty scene – that began as a picture of something happening, but as I worked on it, I didn’t need the people anymore. I let them go. In all the pictures, something changes. If you photograph someone doing the same thing, let’s say mopping the floor, it’s not the same day to day or shot to shot; every time something moves it changes. I like to think what I captured is the decisive moment, even if I had 50 shots at it, or 500. What I’m doing is not that different from others. Photography has a way of being, a way of capturing motion, capturing activity, and it always does that.

Gallery view of Jeff Wall's Stereo

Verena Winkelmann: My favourite work is Stereo (1980), the picture of a naked man lying on an orange sofa wearing a headset. In the exhibition, it’s shown as a diptych together with an image; the text ‘STEREO’. I think there is something between these images, a third picture. Most photobooks present photographs in series, where each image can function as part of a story. How do you see the photobook? Is it important to you as an object?

Wall: I like Stereo as it is. A lot of people go from wall to book; I’ve just never been motivated. I think there are two or three great photobooks that define what the photobook is so perfectly that I wonder whether anyone can take it anywhere else. To me, the great photobooks are American Photographs by Walker Evans and The Americans by Robert Frank. The two are related: Frank was deeply influenced by Evans when he made his book. Those two guys created something that has never really been matched: it’s remarkable how their work fits with the design and fits perfectly in the book form, so much so that no matter how much you’d like to see an Evans hanging in a frame on the wall, his pictures tend to look more intense when they’re in that book, because the book is in itself such an achievement. A book of photographs is a form that has its own integrity. Unfortunately for other photographers, those two guys did such a good job. Luckily, I never wanted to do a photobook; I wanted my pictures to act more in a physical form. I also like the idea that they’re more public, that more than one person can see them at the same time. I like that open interchange with people standing in a room.

Geir Moseid: I wrote my dissertation on your picture Eviction Struggle of 1988. You revised the work in 2004, calling the new version        An Eviction. Could you elaborate on why you felt the need to make a second version? There’s a change in the casting, the number of spectators, their body language, as well as the video installation that accompanied the piece. Was there a societal change or shift in public perception that you felt needed updating in the work? 

Wall: In 1988, when I was making that picture, it was still in pre-digital times, and that meant that a photograph was something that was captured once, and whatever was on that negative became the picture. That was a very complicated space to photograph. I never felt totally satisfied with the first version. I thought it was good enough to exhibit, but I was never truly happy with it. It was never one of my favourites, and that was very disappointing. I would never have exhibited it if I’d felt it was inadequate. I thought it was pretty good, but I knew that I had a lot of material on other negatives that I unfortunately couldn’t use: different people in the background and foreground who were really good but were unavailable. And then when I started working on the computer, I realised that I could release those people from their captivity on another negative and remake the picture. It took some time, but finally, in 2004, I scanned everything and managed to make a montage out of pieces that I liked better, and I think I changed the picture much for the better. The old one no longer really exists, although reproductions of it exist, but that’s not the picture anymore. I did it because I could; it satisfied something I’d wanted to do for a long time. It was only possible because there were enough things on the other negatives that allowed it to happen. If there hadn’t been, I’d never have done it. Because I knew it was there, my thinking changed once I got a computer.

An Eviction, 1988 /2004, © Jeff Wall 

Christian Tunge: In the documentary How to Make a Book With Steidl you mention that you have something like 10,000 sheets of colour negative film in a freezer. What happens when you run out? Is that ’The End’? What are your thoughts on ‘The End’?

Wall: No, no, no, they’re still making film! I just bought a lot of film. Suddenly, Kodak threatened to stop making films, something they’ve done so many times now. I don’t think it’s going to happen, but I have enough film to go on for a while. And I will probably buy some more. I use a lot, so I have some holes in my freezer now to fill up. I  keep close watch on it because we’re in a very difficult time with the photo industry. Things are ending quickly; people are deciding to stop producing all of a sudden, for reasons that are obvious enough: the economy of imaging is changing. People aren’t being very thoughtful about it. Film producers aren’t thinking of ways to tone down their production so that they can continue. It’s dangerous times to be a photographer; a lot of things you take for granted may not be around for long. So I have a lot of film. I’m like one of those people who are ready for the Holocaust: if bad times comes, I’ll have food, water and ammunition, and I can keep going. I have my stuff.

Vilde Salhus Røed: When I studied photography at The Art Academy in Bergen in the early 2000s, there was a general distrust of photography among the students. I remember we told each other that it was impossible to take good images anymore. Many of us stopped working with photography, or tried to find alternative ways of working with the medium, methods that were not about taking good images. When I look at your work today, I’m as fascinated as when I was a photography student. I feel a physical and intellectual attraction to your method – to reconstruct an image that already exists as an image or as a memory – maybe because it turns many photographic ideals inside out, and to believe or have faith in a photograph produces a different meaning. I believe in your photographs, and it gives me faith in the fact that it’s still possible to take good photographs. With this in mind, I’d like to ask you to describe your faith in photography, in creating images.

Wall: I don’t have any faith in it because I don’t think it is an object of faith. People do say things like: ‘It’s impossible to make images today because everything has been done’, but it hasn’t been done by them. There’s always a new person who’ll come and do it again, and therefore that thought is one that can come to you at a certain point in your life when you feel that you haven’t accomplished anything of yourself yet and those who have, have sort of closed the door on you. I remember when I was beginning I felt that Robert Frank had closed a door on me, because I really couldn’t imagine making a photobook like that, as I said before, but another door opened at the same time. Circumstances are always like that. Things are constantly evolving and in art there are no rules, because art can be anything. There are no rules, and not everything has been done. Every new generation will encounter the problems of the previous generations from a different place and they won’t be able to replicate what that generation has done. For example, my view of the photobook is probably now completely obsolete; my attitude won’t take a young person anywhere comparable to where it took me in the 1970s. I don't believe there are any worn-out art forms; there isn’t any art medium that isn’t available. But I do think that for individuals certain things will be blocked in your youth, and that blocked space is usually something you desperately identify with and admire, and so it becomes an obstacle and that's the great crisis that everyone faces: that the thing they want to do has already happened. So therefore they’re forced to become themselves again in another way. Many are defeated by that crisis – they can’t find their own thing. You have to face that obstacle; it’s unavoidable. It’s an illusion that all has been done – things are still happening. All you can do is to find your own relation to that obstacle.  

Volunteer, 1996, © Jeff Wall 

CHRISTINA LEITHE H.

All images by Christina Leithe H., Landscape.Albums., 2014. Detail.

This November Akershus Kunstsenter are showing three artists whose work is based on different camera-based expressions. Objektiv asked artist Christina Leithe H. to tell us about her exhibition Landscape.Albums., an installation consisting of several large folders containing photographs that both individually and collectively convey a little story or moment. Interview by Nina Strand

Nina Strand In the exhibition it is up to the viewer to look at the different works, to open the different folders and look through them. Please tell us more about your process towards this installation?

Christina Leithe For the past years I have been interested in the collector. My first work where I used folders or albums was collection in black n white (2012), where all the photographs I had taken for a period of one year were presented in three albums. In this work I wanted to reveal and investigate a depressive and melancholy state of mind, a state of mind I was in at the time I took the photographs. One of the methods in this process was to gather and organize the photographic material which led to working with albums and folders. By presenting my photographs in folders the photographs keep their intimacy, and at the same time they open up for a more private and direct communication with the viewer. In Landscape.Albums, I present the folders on tables, thus inviting people to open them, like a generous gesture. At the same time, the folders are dark so maybe some won’t find them inviting at all.

NS You work with both still and moving images, using the documentary tradition as a starting point for a fictional narrative?

CL I often use personal relations as a starting point for a thematic interest. I photograph a lot, gathering material, looking at what works, and then I narrow it down throughout the process until I reach the situations and motifs that represents what I want to talk about. My videos often evolve from my photographic work, used as a comment to my own working process. 

Installation shot from the exhibition at Akershus Kunstsenter. 

NS You work mainly with analogue photography; can you tell us about your relationship with this medium?

CL Working with an analogue process in the darkroom is a way to make really unique prints. My way of working towards the perfect print has nothing to do with seeking the right grey-scale; it has more to do with finding the visual strength and purpose in the motif. I often treat my photos as documentaries which, when combined with the fiction they contain, result in a working process that inspires me to investigate the medium further.

NS In the photographs, you show us the world in black and white. This is also the case in your book Notes that was launched last year. How was the process working with the book, compared to this show?

CL These photographs presented in Notes are a selection from my work collection in black n white. Making a book, presenting only 29 out of 257 photographs, gave me an opportunity to use the archive as a working method, and thus making room for a slightly more narrative story with a personal storyteller.

The process with Landscape.Albums was very different, and I have lately been discussing with colleagues whether one folder could be turned into a book. I’m not sure it is possible, because one of the strength of the work in the exhibition is how the viewer physically move between different places and time when moving from folder to folder. 

From the 2013 book Notes. by Christina Leithe H.

ED TEMPLETON

Judging from your Instagram account it seems like you’ve had a great time installing and talking with the people involved, what is your impression of the Photobookmuseum? Their ambition is to pay tribute to the central form of expression within photograhy: the photobook. Do you agree with this? 

Templeton: Yes! I think it’s a crazy, ambitious, marvelous thing that Markus Schaden is doing. He is attempting to bring the photo book to life, to dig inside it and find out how it is  created and what the process is for making it.

And the timing, we have longed for a museum for the photo book, we interviewed Sam Stourdzé who has big plans for Les Recontres d’Arles next year and also wants to give the book a bigger space and include it in the main festival, what’s your thoughts on this? 

Templeton: I think it’s a good idea. Photography itself is amazing and fun to see in person, but most people interact with photography via books , so it makes sense to include the photo book in any festival of photography. Collectors already fetishize the books so much, perhaps the general public should have a chance to understand what makes a photo book tick.

You have stated your love for books in previous interviews, and told us that you have a big collection of them. What is your relation to the book versus the exhibition space?

Templeton: I think they are both very important, but like I said before, many more people will interact with your photography through a book than in a physical exhibition. So for me, I feel very lucky when I'm traveling and get to see an exhibition of a photographer I love, but the reason I love them in the first place was because of a book most likely! I'm fortunate to be able to add my own books to this worldwide trade/conversation via photo books. I do collect, and my library is threatening to spill over into other rooms of my house. I love flipping through photo books, it helps me refine my own photography.

Could you tell us more about your new book, Wayward Cognitions, it is a book that was 20 years in the making, according to the press release? Is this a more personal book?

Templeton: When they say 20 years in the making they mean that I pulled from my 20 years old archive of images for the book. It's not a themed book, or a specific project, the photos are selected from any time period, and do not fit into any series that I'm working on. I wanted to tell a story through street photography about the human condition, and in that way it’s a fairly traditional type of photo book, no bells and whistles, just straight photos. It's about looking at the photos and how they relate to each other and the sequence they are in. I have weaved a story in my own head while making the book that I hope the viewer also sees and feels.

And could you tell us about other upcoming projects?

Templeton: I have lots of upcoming stuff! A painting show early next year, and I am starting to work on my biggest photo book and exhibition yet dealing with the skateboard subculture. But I also have another photo book I'm working on about Catalina Island off the coast of southern California, and probably some zines with the Deadbeat Club.

DANIEL GUSTAV CRAMER & HARIS EPAMINONDA

At Documenta 13, the exhibition The End of Summer by Daniel Gustav Cramer and Haris Epaminonda extended vertically along two floors and the attic of a former office building behind Kassel’s train station. The carefully orchestrated progression of works included an array of books, photographs, found images, statuettes, 8mm films, among other ‘surgically’ displayed imagery. It was like entering a space where time had stood still and contemplation reigned. Within this ethereal juxtaposition of images, accessibility had to be constantly negotiated through spatial constraints and other artifices of placement. In a similar way, the artists’ ongoing archival project, The Infinite Library (started in 2007), tries to make a very particular sense of the heritage of images and texts belonging to the history of printed matter.

Tiago Bom Your Documenta exhibition was one of those rare presentations that I recall vividly long after experiencing it. I was not only mentally immersed in the work, which made me lose track of my geographical situation, but there was a very natural synergy between both of your interventions. At times, I thought I was experiencing work by the same person. When and how did you start collaborating?

Daniel Gustav Cramer and Haris Epaminonda We met in 2001 at the Royal College of Art in London, on the first day of our studies. We gradually became best friends and later, around 2006, we worked on our first collaboration, an online project titled The Beehive. In the beginning, we were living in different places and talked about our thoughts and troubles for hours on the phone. Later, when we started living in the same city, we continued to do this, and still do today. This has probably made us very sensitive to each other’s work. The situation in Kassel was very particular, since we don't usually collaborate in this way. Actually, that exhibition was one of three such shows, the other two at Kunsthalle Lissabon in 2012 and Samsa, Berlin, in 2010. Perhaps our closeness has helped us to find the right balance in pushing and pulling the individual works to attain this unity in the space; in a way, we’ve created a third language.

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TB The notion of archive and found/collected material seems to be a recurrent idea in your works, especially in the Infinite Library. How has this process affected your general practice and this project in particular?

CE We both, in different ways, look at what’s there in the world around us. Both of us enjoy browsing through books – this is where The Infinite Library began. Haris loves to collect  – vases, images and objects of all kinds of cultures and eras – and Daniel loves collections themselves, their particularities, especially when they’re incomplete or attempting the impossible.

TB The choice of books and images seems to focus mainly on a specific set of decades. Is there a particular reason for this selection?

CE For us, there are two main reasons why we focus more on books from certain periods. Firstly, it’s the quality of the paper, the printing, the original sources (Kodachrome, etc). Nowadays every printer tells you the same thing: ‘The quality of the paper is decreasing year by year.’  The other reason is the level of abstraction. A contemporary photograph is very close to today. A photograph from the 1980s is somehow connected to our childhoods. Older pictures have this feeling of coming from another time – although depicting what we can relate to, they remain quite abstract.

TB It seems that the title and the nature of the project alludes to Jorge Luis Borges’ work. Did you draw inspiration from his writings? 

CE One of Borges’ short stories, The Garden of Forking Paths, describes a vast library filled with books with all the letters, punctuation and spacing organised randomly and without meaning. This library is made up of hexagonal rooms. Each room has walls full of shelves, mirrors and doors to the next rooms. Every day, people walk into the library to search for one specific room, somewhere deep inside the library, which is filled with books that give all possible answers – a room that’s never found. In a sense, one could say that The Infinite Library inverts this narrative. For us, it’s a liberating moment to open a book, written by an individual mind, and connect it with another, constructed by someone else. When these two poles come together, you establish an open conversation of fragments where a certain level of authorship still remains, but it acts within another structure: that of the newly created book. Each book is rebound and numbered.

TB Also, when considering your infinite library, I can't help but think of André Malraux's ideas, in particular the book trilogy Le Musée imaginaire de la sculpture mondiale. There, within the layout, images are at times freed from a conventional historical association based on time and geography. Do you have any specific method or historical/chronological concerns when assembling the images and texts?

CE We have an extensive library of picture books that we collect. At times we sit down and look at them. We disassemble them, place them on the floor and test the individual pages. We rearrange pages, take out a few, add others from another book, and in the end come to a point where certain decisions form a new book. There’s no method; the only concern is to make the new book work as a book, visually, conceptually. It’s an intuitive process. On one occasion, we took all the pages from a book with the exception of one, and just showed this singular picture, framed on a wall. Another time, the content of the book led us to an installation consisting of a film, a slide projection and several images from other books in the space. 

TB Is the idea of a virtual museum in the form of a book something you can relate to within this project? And what are your thoughts on the use of photographs (in this case found material) at a time when sight has never been so essential to our way of life but at the same time is so over-stimulated? 

CE Perhaps a book is more like a space in which something can happen, comparable to an exhibition space. A museum has its own history and motives that we wouldn’t necessarily connect to a book. A book and a space have an outside and an inside. You’re right, there are so many images that there’s total over-stimulation. On the other hand, there are always stories to tell – with words, sounds and images. The fact that there’s an overload of information doesn’t influence the experience of a moment or a story.

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TB Does the book format allow you to bypass some social and spatial constraints that you face, for example, in your exhibitions? What challenges does it offer when composing image associations?

CE The project, at its heart, is a way for us to communicate with each other in a playful way. We sit together and try things out. The exhibitions of the books always confront us with the difficulties of showing a unique book to an audience.

TB You often refer to subjects such as history, monumentality, architecture and anthropology in your work, but it seems that it’s never with the intention of treating information in a chronological way. Instead, you create new meanings and new relations based on your aesthetic considerations. Therefore, I wonder what role monumentality plays in this work and in your general practice?

CE We select the books by their quality – a purely subjective measure. We like certain papers, colours, ideas about the placement of images and text. We allow almost all topics into the work and collect books from all genres. The collection becomes more specific when we reassemble the books. There’s no rule to it, but we feel that some books of different origin work together beautifully and others simply don’t. A book works when it tells you something more than its content. This can only really be explained when sitting in front of it and looking at it page by page. Somehow, there’s always a moment when two things find each other and immediately connect; there’s almost a chemical reaction in the air – it just makes sense. That’s a monumental moment, when it feels as if these elements were waiting for that moment to be reactivated and given a new life.

TB There’s a certain degree of violence in the act of tearing books apart, in separating or excluding parts of its original content. By shuffling the content, you generate hybrids, a new meaning, in an implicit and potentially infinite motion, like an illustration of an unfinished, always mutating world.

CE That’s a nice way to put it. We agree, there is a certain violence in the act of tearing books apart, but in most cases we have a second copy of the same book. It doesn’t justify the act, but it calms our minds to know that we’re not destroying a unique object, but dismantling one copy in a larger edition. We treat the books with care and respect and give them a new life. Still, there is a certain violence, its true.

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TB The subversiveness and the meta character of this archive challenges established hierarchies in the dissemination of information. I remember having the same impression at your exhibition in Kassel. Even though the works fascinated me, one particular aspect that seized my gaze was the general installation of the pieces and the relation between images – as if they were acquiring a personified character and could sometimes shyly hide behind each other. It’s obvious that the arrangement and set-up of the shows play a crucial role within your practice, but how does the question of hierarchy manifest itself in the content and layout of The Infinite Library?

CE You’re right about the importance of placement in the show in Kassel. There, we wanted to create narratives, even just through the way things were installed in the space, since the show was meant to be felt as an experience in its totality – not just what, but how and where things were placed, which rooms were accessible or not. We needed to build up focal points, vanishing points, moments of dispersal and a sense of disorientation, losing and finding oneself again through markings and remembrance. We thought of the space as one that had no beginning or end, seemingly with many repetitive aspects and connecting threads. One entered, turned one’s head, decided to go this way or that. The entrance and the exit door were one and the same, so that when you assumed you’d come to the end, you had to go back to where it all started. The thread of connections and tensions was built up by the relation of the elements within the space as much as by the viewer, depending on which work or room one encountered first, the length of time one spent in a room or in front of a work etc. As for the books, the rules are somewhat different. As we stated before, in The Infinite Library each book is a new beginning with a new set of rules.

TB Do you have any plans for the preservation and storing of the library once it reaches an overwhelming volume?

CE At the moment, we’ve reached about eighty books in total. The library, if we placed one book next to the other, would extend over perhaps 120 cm. Those books are kept in a shelf in our storage room. The original books have stayed on shelves since they were first published. We maintain them in the same condition, and protect them from too much natural light, although much of the ageing is unavoidable and natural.

TB What are you working on now?

CE A book about The Infinite Library that will show each individual page of the first fifty books, to be published by New Documents. Also a book published by Kunsthalle Lissabon and Mousse Publishing about the three collaborative projects we’ve done together, as mentioned above. And as always, we’re working on our own individual projects.

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