Jan Dibbets

Panorama Dutch Mountain 12 x 15° Sea II A  1971

Jan Dibbets is a conceptual artist associated with earth art or environmental art, that “broad-based movement of artists who shared two key concerns of the sixties: the rejection of commercialisation of art and the support of the emerging ecological movement” (Atkins, 1990 p.71).


Dibbets uses a “series of aligned colour photographs to depict landscape by ‘correcting’ or modifying the way humans, the camera and nature itself interact and thus “challenge the ‘reality’ of the photograph and that of seeing with the naked eye” (Stangos, N., et al, 1994 p.111). As well as dealing with the facts of the natural world”, his work engages with the conceptual aspects of perception” (Wheeler, D., 1991 p.265). This reference to perception recalls cubisms visual shuttling and depictions of fleeting events. “The world”, through the eyes of the Cubists “is set forth as a field of shifting relationships that includes the onlooker” (Hughes, 1991 p.32).


Jan Dibbets is “heir to a terrain” that is “constricted” and from a culture “rich in traditional landscape painting” (Wheeler, 1991 p.265). Like earlier Dutch artists Dibbets “deals with the natural world as well as the conceptual aspects of perception, all of which makes him a son not only of Rembrandt and Ruysdael, but also Saenredam (Holland’s 17th Century proto-abstract painter of church interiors) and the great Mondrian” (Wheeler, 1991 p. 265).


The flatness of the Dutch landscape would prove problematic to landscape painters who went on to resolve this “by filling the sky with mountainous clouds” (Wheeler, 1991 p.265). Dibbets found his solution in the camera and so “photographed the native polder serially by mounting his camera on a tripod and rotating it 30 degrees for each twelve shots, all the while progressively tilting the instrument” (Wheeler, 1991 p.265).

 

The result, “when aligned side by side the sequential color images represented the platitudinous Dutch horizon as a show wave curve or extended mound.” Thus Dibbets, “reshaped the Lowlands and created mountains, at least in the metaphorical manner possible with conceptual documentation” (Wheeler, 1991 p.265).

Sources:

Atkins, R., (1990) Artspeak: a guide to contemporary ideas, movements, and buzzwords New York: Abbeville Press Publishers

Hughes, R., (1991) Shock of the New London: Thames and Hudson

Stangos, N., (1994) The Thames and Hudson dictionary of art and artists  London: Thames and Hudson

Wheeler, D., (1991) Art since Mid Century London: Thames and Hudson

Microsft Photosynth

Watch a virtual tour of Venice using Photosynth. I'll show you Photosynths best features and how to use them. Photosynth is available to download for free from: http://labs.live.com/photosynth

Microsoft Photosynth

Photosynth takes a large collection of photos of a place or object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed 3-Dimensional space.

Luo Yongiin

Landscape is given a similar treatment to cubist landscape in the work of Luo Yongjin in work like XiGaZe from 2001 which was shown as part of the exhibition River Flows East-Landscapes of the Imagination in 2010. Yongjin’s XiGaZe is constructed in a similar manner to Kellner’s, however the fragmentation is far more subtle in its arrangements.  We also see Hockney "joiners" too.

 XiGaZe 2001

Luo Yongjin’s photographs hover between two very distinct points of     view. The artist’s landscapes and urban scenes are primarily informed     by China’s rapidly changing nature as he off sets its rich cultural     heritage with more recent urban development. In the late 1990s Luo    Yongjin began a series devoted to architecture where a single shot     taken from a single viewpoint seems substituted by a long,     superimposed series of images extending in time and space like     contemporary mosaics. These images convey the speed and hysteria     of rapid growth within the simplicity and stillness of a black and white image.
    (Dematté, 2006)

Yonglin between 1997 and 1998 began to photograph the new buildings in Beijing.  Yongjin “adopted a ‘mosaic’ style to capture the magnitude of these structures” (Artspeak China, ND). Another example of the ‘mosaic’ technique can be found in his work Oriental Plaza, 1998 – 2002

Luo Yongjin Oriental Plaza, 1998 - 2002
Photography, 36 cm x 650

 

Lotus Block, Beijing(Series: Chinese City Scape), 1998

Artspeak China; http://www.artspeakchina.org/mediawiki/index.php/Luo_Yongjin_%E7%BD%97%E6%B0%B8%E8%BF%9B

Dematté , M., Allsopp Contemporary & Lavinia Calza
Luo Yongjin: “Points Of View”,
http://www.allsoppcontemporary.com/pdf/LY_PR.pdf

Robert Delaunay

Effel Tower 1911

Robert Delaunay (1885-1941) is seen as a pioneer of abstract art in the early 20th century and the inventor of Orphic Cubism. He was one of the most influential artists in Paris and very interested in the emotional effects of pure colour. He fused this interest in colour with the “loose geometry that he borrowed from Analytical Cubism” (Lynton, N., 2003 p.67) and used it to represent the modern city. Norbert Lynton suggests that “the large tilting planes in his paintings oppose and compensate for each other, each suggestion of space and movement being countered by another (2003 p.67).

The Red Tower 1911-12

For Delaunay the "master-image of culture was the Eiffel Tower, which he viewed with real ecstasy as an ecumenical object, the social condenser of a new age" (Hughes, 1991 p.36).  He wanted, it was argued that Delauney "wanted  a pictorial speech that was entirely of this century", the twentieth century, "based on rapid interconnection, changing viewpoints aand an adoration of 'good technology' and the Tower was the supreme practical example of this in the daily life of Paris" (Hughes, 1991 p.38).

Delaunay's "friend and collaborator, the poet Blaise Cendrars, remarked in 1924 that:

No formula of art known up to now can pretend to give plastic resolution to the Eiffel Tower. Realism shrank it; the old laws of Italian perspective diminished it. The Tower rose over Paris, slender as a hatpin. When we retreated from it, it dominated Paris, stark and perpendicular. When we came close to it, it tilted and leaned over us. Seen from the first platform it corkscrewed around its axis, and seen from the top it collapsed into itself, doing the splits, its neck pulled in...

(Hughes, 1991 p.38).

In works like The Red Tower 1911-12, "Delaunay could realize the sensations of vertigo and visual shuttling that Cendrars described. The Tower is seen almost literally, as a prophet of the future" (Hughes, 1991 p.38). For Deaunay the Tower "became his fundamental image of modernity: light seen through structure" (Hughes, 1991 p.38).

                                  

Dealuney's work has had a great impact on modern art and on the general vision of modernity. Here we have can see his studies of the Eiffel Tower and how they  would go on to inform the work of Thomas Kellner. 

Sources:

Hughes, (1991) The Shock of the New London: Thames and Hudson

Lynton, (2003) The story of Modern Art London: Phaidon

Thomas Kellner

 

Eiffel Tower 1997 

The photographer Thomas Kellner produces work that represents his subjects in fragments like the cubists.  Kellner discusses his approach to panoramas in an article for Art in America (1999). He began his panoramas in 1997: “I had been thinking about doing a panorama of the country's entire border for many years, but couldn't figure out how to do it. Finally I came up with a solution: split it up into single situations. I fabricated special cameras that would photograph with eleven pinholes on one negative” (Kellner, 2003 p. 32). 

He later visited Paris and “decided to photograph the Eiffel tower”, that emblem of modernity. It was quite an appropriate choice of subject since he admired and had studied the work of Delaunay. Although at time when Kellner wrote his article in 2003, he was not using digital technologies, there is something in his process that corresponds to the nature of project 3. In fact his prints are not large prints at all, but contact prints. He makes the observation that “the bigger the image gets (that is the more film I use), the more the building itself disappears; the more you begin to see the picture itself rather than a image of something” (2003).

 Washington D.C. The White House (2004)

 

Houston Texas, Oil Refinery 2006 

He ends his article with this: I have gone on to photograph other icons of our culture that we all know well. A year after New York's World Trade Center was attacked; I am still thinking about the parallels that my pictures have with that tragedy.  These buildings, like the Twin Towers, have become metaphors for a culture in fragments (Kellner, 2003). The “culture in fragments” is the essence of the visual material that is to be produced for project 3. 

Kellner, T. “All to Pieces: Fragmented Monuments” Aperture no. 170 (Spring 2003) p. 32-7

Man Ray: The Return to Reason

Man Ray’s ironically Le Retour à la raison (‘Return to Reason’) is one of a few films made by a Dadaist. The other film-makers associated with the movement include Hans Richter and Rene Clair. Man Ray’s film was shown as part of the ‘Soiree du couer de à barbe’ which marked the demise of the movement in Paris in 1923.

Man Ray applied his rayogram to cinematography. I did not place Man Ray with the other abstract filmmakers featured in the blog because the quality is not related to painterly forms (Ruttmen, Richter, Fishinger) but a direct physical action on to the film and a process that relates to material nature of film. The abstract quality relates to the films “mechanics, materials, chemistry and techniques of cinematography” (Le Grice, 1977, p.34). The emphasis therefore is upon the physicality of the medium.

Sources:

Le Grice, M., Abstract Film and Beyond, Cambridge, Mass, London, UK: MIT Press

Berlin Symphony of a City

I have already included one entry for Ruttman that shows one of his abstract films Lightplay Opus I. Ruttman would collaborate with the animator Lotte Reininger. Ruttman’s reputation as a film maker however, is based on the above documentary Berlin: Symphony of a Great City. It is such an innovative example of cinema that it “remains a model for subsequent urban portraits throughout the world” (Kostelanetz, 2001 p.534). The rhythmic nature of the film puts me in mind Koyaanisqatsi: Life out of Balance from 1982 and other earlier films by Man Ray.  

Ruttman is not without his critics: “within twenty years” argues David Thomson, "Ruttman had moved from being a proponent of absolute cinema to a leading propagandist" (Thomson, D., 1975 p. 501). Ruttman's pure cinema "was always sterile and formalistic" and was "waiting to be exploited by a totalitarian message" (Thomson, D., 1975 p. 501). Indeed, Berlin does feature rhythm and motifs, "the large scale integration of single effects" that is similar to the hypnotic ornament of Celtic design, tattoos or a military parade. Is Ruttman, as John Grierson has argued "meretricious and dangerous"? (Thomas, D., 1975, p.501).

Sources:

Kostelanetz, R., (2001) Dictionary of Avant-gardes 2nd Edition, New York and London: Routledge. 

Thomas, D (1975) A Biographical Dictionary of the Cinema, London: Secker and Warburg

Robert Longo 3: New Order "Bizarre Love Triangle" (1986)

In this video for New Order's "Bizarre Love Triangle" Longo uses elaborate layering of imagery and "toys with the small screen by splitting it in highly inventive ways" (Diekmann, 1990 p.136)

The "screen divides vertically into four panels, each with a different moving picture struggling for attention against its neighbor" (Diekmann, K, 1990 p.136). He does this through the imagery being "shredded" in which "a random, time-based pattern, generated through a computer", making the "images of the performers appear striated and 'torn'" (Diekmann, 1990 p.136). Other elements of the video are "relegated to a small, horizontal strip at the bottom of the screen" (Diekmann, 1990 p.136)

Sources:
Diekmann, K, (1990) "Small-Screen Stimulus: The Film and Video Work" in Fox, H., Robert Longo New York: Rizzoli pp.129-141.

Robert Longo 2: The Golden Palominos - Boy (Go)

The Golden Palominos - Boy (Go), Featuring Michael Stipe. Video directed by Robert Longo.

Longo music video combine live and found footage "mixtures of black-and-white and color and, particular in the case of 'Boy (Go)' .... (a) sophisticated image construction that adheres to and riffs away from musical rhythmns" (Diekmann, K., 1990 p.130).

The experimental nature is informed by his knowledge of the cinematic avant-garde: "Longo was greatly influenced by experimental filmmaking, and his first music video, "Boy (Go)" is in some ways an homage to that visionary tradition, with its emphasis on the evocative power of the single shot. Exercising the 'Kino-Eye'that Dziga Vertov developed in Man with a Movie Camera (1928), Longo creates an oppositional montage by blending found and live imagery to present a diffuse (and occasionally nostalgic) picture of natural and machine life- a horse galloping, a jet plane ascending, a ferris wheel spinning, a tree slowly falling, junkyards, and verdant fields, all caught in a swirl of circular movement" (Diekmann, K., 1990 p.130). These swirling motifs bring to mind Berlin: Symphony of a city (1928) by Walter Ruttman or Man Ray's Return to Reason (1923)

Diekmann, K, (1990) "Small-Screen Stimulus: The Film and Video Work" in Fox, H., Robert Longo New York: Rizzoli pp.129-141.

Robert Longo 1

Robert Longo, Untitled (Men in the Cities), 1979/2009, set of three black and white photo, 20 x 16 inches (paper), 50.8 x 40.6 cm.

Robert Longo (1953- ) bridged any gap that was left between art and popular culture. He made sculpture, paintings and music videos. Before Julian Schnabel became a film director Longo was making feature films. He made was has come to be known as the proto-Matrix film Johnny Mnemonic (1995) based on the short story by William Gibson.


Longo was associated with a group who arrived in New York from Buffalo in 1997. Among them were Charlie Clough, Nancy Dwyer, Cindy Sherman and Michael Zwack (Stangos, N., 1994, p.221).


Longo has created works in several media on contemporary situations. 






MEN IN THE CITIES, 1979

Installation View - "The Pictures Generation"

2009

 The Great Hall

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

New York, NY

Installation View - "The Pictures Generation"

 Men in the Cities - Men Trapped in Ice

1980

 The writer Richard Price suggested that Men in the Cities "reads like a warning. The dancers  dressed in dropdeadchicless chic, are literally in danger of dropping dead" (Price, 19 p.87)

 Installation View - Men in the Cities

1981


This  is Richard Price's description of this series of work: "The vacuum sealed  cityscapes now look like post neutron (real estate) bomb vistas. Dancing, dying, dancing- the figures remind me of hipped-up Brueghellian revellers in face of the plague; of Pompeiian lava casts of blasted silhouettes on Hiroshima walls  as we all increasingly dance to the ticking of the nuclear clock" (Price, 1986 p.87). Longo's work is full of violence. 

 Men in the Cities: Final Life

1982

"Longo pulls his images from magazines, newspapers, movie stills-  images we see so often we fail to see them any more. He exploits the image, monumentalizes it ties a D.O.A ticket to the big  toe and offers us a potential vision of the near future" (1986, p.87)

Men in the Cities - Untitled

1982-84

The dancing figures emerge from the same cultural space that Longo occupied. The New Wave/No Wave scene and punk informed his work. He felt, in the late seventies part of same cultural fabric as bands like Talking Heads and "seeing bands like The Contortions fronted by James Chance  . When he's on stage in new ways, moving hot and fast... It seems like the gestures in Men in the Cities are very much about the time we live in" (Price, 1986 p.88). The imagery of performances connects us to Allan Kraprow and Harold Rosenberg's reading of Jackson Pollock, the action painter. 

From An American Soldier

The work grew directly from a film still from a Fassbinder film called An American Soldier taken at the end of the film where two gangsters are shot : "In its image is embedded a high impact kind of bang; at the same time it has this incredibly fluid grace, the speed of grace" (Price, 1986, p.88).

Installation View - Men in the Cities

1981

Men in the Cities - Untitled

1980

Longo's figures seem to suffer a kind of disruption or pain. 

 Men in the Cities - Untitled

1980

It all sounds close to my memory of Ballard's writing.



There is something aggressive, apocalyptic and sometimes biblical and close to something that is now. It seems like some terrible prophecy.

Men in the Cities: Final Life (detail)

1981-82

Untitled

1981

Untitled

1982

"Men in the Cities were white people, no ethnic groupings just doomed souls. They're people who built the building that would eventually fall on them" (Price, 1986 p. 91).

Untitled (White Riot)

1982

When first confronted by Longo's drawings, I did not see people but saw something closer to a Franz Kline. Abstract rather than representational. A black abstract shape in a white space.

Longo was also a fan of Joy Division. In one of these drawings do we not see Ian Curtis?




Sources:

Longo, R., Robert Longo: http://www.robertlongo.com/


Price, R., & Longo, R.,(1986) Men in the Cities 1979-1982 New York: Narry N. Abrams

Stangos, N & Read, H., (1994) The Thames and Hudson Dictionary of Art and Artists  London: Thames and Hudson