Abstraction and Photography: 3

After World War II photographic abstraction informed by the experiments of the New Bauhaus in Chicago became quite prominent in the United States.  Many of these developments coincided with the rise of Abstract Expressionism in post war American painting.

Represented here are some later examples of photographic abstraction by James Welling. He emerged in the '70s as an artist for whom photographic norms and the representational field itself were and remain contested and problematised.

James Welling Untitled, 1980 (P4)

James Welling 2-29 I (B15), 1980, Gelatin silver contact print 3½ x 4 in.

James Welling 2-29 II (B16), 1980 Gelatin silver contact print4 ⅝ x 3 ¾ in

Abstraction and Photography: 2

European photographers began to produce work nourished by cubism, abstraction and the Bauhaus aesthetic pioneered by Moholy-Nagy and El Lissitsky.  Members of the New Vision Group began to produce innovative compositions. Within the French avant-garde, photographers such as André Kertész and Florence Henri began to treat form in new ways.  Kertész produced work like Shadow of the Eiffel Tower, 1929. Henri would seek out the abstract within the concrete in work like Abstract Composition (handrail) 1930. Henri would also use mirrors to manipulate composition on form as in her work. One interesting example is Window, 1928-29. Jaromír Funke also used mirrors in his Photographic Constructions (1923).

Other methods of producing photographic abstractions were found by photographers. For example, Christian Schad, Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray produced photograms and influenced future production of photographic abstraction via cameraless photographic methods. 

André Kertész  Shadow of the Eiffel Tower, 1929.

Florence Henri  Window, 1928-29.

Jaromír Funke Photographic Constructions  1923.

Jaromír Funke Light Abstraction, 1927

Abstraction and Photography: 1

This is a subject that I should have discussed for project one since many of my posts deal with one kind of abstraction or another.  Pictorial abstraction is conventionally defined as “a work of art with no recognizable subject”. This seems totally at odds with nature of photography which is essentially realistic and representational/ figurative.

The two approaches that have explored include the exaggeration of single characteristics like subjects form or its texture. The other approach generally includes the use of extremes close-ups, distortions and lighting effects. These effects transform the subject in such a way as to make it unidentifiable.  Although not strictly photographic, project one included lighting effects, blurring and numerous references to abstract art.  Project 2, is more photographic, but the imagery is distorted and is often unidentifiable or at times difficult to identify and abstract in nature. Certainly with the automatic-joiners that project 2 have produced, the imagery shifts from the representational to the abstract. 

“From the moment Cubism emerged in Europe, around 1907-8, its radically stylized geometric shapes prompted photographers- who were also influenced by Japonisme, Constructivism, and Wassily Kandinsky’s of abstraction (1913)- to imitate what then seemed the essence of Modernism (Mora, G 1998, p.39).  

Alvin Langdon Coburn The New York Octopus 1912

Alvin Langdon Coburn was said to be the first to intentionally abstract photographs. Evidence of this can be found in his 1912 series New York from its Pinnacles. The New York Octopus is a good example. Although many would deny Cubism is abstraction, its stylization of reality led photographers like Coburn to experiment with light and refracted mirrors in 1916. These works were called vortographs by Wyndham Lewis one of the key figures of Vorticism. 

Alvin Langdon Coburn Vortograph 1917

In 1916, Paul Strand made abstracts such as Porch Shadows. These works in turn inspired Fancis Bruguier and members of the Japanese Camera Pictorialists of America. There was an eagerness to link their photography to the avant-garde that was emerging from Europe. 

Paul Strand. Porch Shadows, 1916. 

The move towards abstraction quickly shifted towards the figurative and the stylization of the human body. This approach was associated quite strongly with the Clarence H. White School of Photography. From 1914 many of the professors and students like Laura Gilpin, Paul Outerbridge  Jr., Karl Struss, Margaret Watkins    and  Bernard S. Horne would produce photography informed by experimental abstraction.

 

Bernard S. Horne Design - Princeton

1917 (ca) Gelatin silver print

11 7/8 x 9 15/16

Margaret Watkins The Clarence H. White School of Photography: Design for Marble Floor, "Blythswood," Glasgow 1919

The work of the staff and students =were often reproduced in the magazine Photo=Graphic Art.

Sources:

Mora, G., (1998) Photospeak,  New York: Abbeville 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

Digital montage: problemitised sight, illusion, art and sculpture.

Greenberg's comments about collage are relevant to the reading of my digital montages. I use similar materials like wallpaper. There is the same optical play on depth and surface, foreground and background. There are other ways of seeing that seem as relevant and connected. The digital montage in its transitions shifts the wallpapers and the flowers from being intaglio to relief and back again. This shifting view recalls Helen Chadwick’s Piss Flowers which seem to be moulds and then transform into the very objects that come out of moulds.

Chadwick, Helen Piss Flowers, 1991-2
Bronze, cellulose lacquer

Still from The Irritated Gaze, Part II Intimations 2010. Digital image, wallpaper and light.

When Seeing Is Not Believing - Dana Foundation

When Seeing Is Not Believing - Dana Foundation

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Sound

Hi all,

I have found a recording of Marcel Duchamp's La mariée mise a nu par ses celibataires...meme (The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelor's Even) a "musical erratum" to the sculpture of the same name. It accompanies an interview of Tristran Tzara by Olivier Todd from 1959.

Tristan Tzara with Olivier Todd. Sound: Marcel Duchamp(ND)/performed and recorded by Mats Persson and Kristine Scholz 1980: Dada into Surrealism from, if I am not mistaken, the recording Futurism and Dada Reviewed, LMT Publishing 1988/2000. I have no translation I am afraid.




La mariée mise a nu par ses celibataires...meme according to the above recording notes by James Neiss and Paul Hammond can be described as "a possible system of musical composition." Duchamp's sound works require elements of chance: " the requisites are a funnel, a toy train with open trucks and balls to be placed in the funnel. The balls are numbered and represent separate notes- a piano, for example. Chance decides the tonal sequence of the composition, which is thus made variable" (Neiss, J and Hammond, P, 1988/2000).


The above version uses "ordinary pianos" which "replaced the ordinary action with a small electric motor with a rotary disc which moves against the strings to produce various overtones" (Neiss, J and Hammond, P, 1988/2000).

The sound that Duchamp achieves is similar to the sounds I wish to create for my moving images, some of which are featured somewhere in this blog (see the entry New Developments: Deepest Autumn and a Big Thank You).

MIchel Chion

Rob Coley introduced me to the writings of the French composer Michel Chion. He specialises in "electro-acoustic music" and produces works that often that "often incorporate elements from traditional forms- sonatas, requiems, masses, waltzes, mambos- but these are transform in the context of his sound based art which is ultimately associational in structure. His primary concerns has been the association between sound, image and memory (Kostelanetz, 2001, p. 116).





Michel Chion, Requiem - Excerpts, Part One

On the new pics: previous post.

Thanks Mike for your comments on the previous post. You saucy thing! How Withnail and I! I will never see these innocent, yes they were innocent, flowers in the same way again!

I should have added more comments with the pictures. To be honest I was too tired, it was getting late and I clicked "PUBLISH POST" instead of "SAVE NOW".

I had forgotten about Mapplethorpe, thank you for reminding me.. As for the method: these are scanned flowers. I love their smudginess. The smears on the scanner are shocking, but they make a wonderful texture. I must photograph the flowers too.

Ernst, Snow Flowers 1929

Georgia O'Keffe: title and date unknown

Mapplethorpe Orchids, 1989

Picasso's Collages

Pablo Picasso Guitar, Sheet Music, and Wine Glass 1912

As I work on my digital collages I am reminded of Clement Greenberg's essay on collage: "The Pasted-Paper Revolution" (or as it is known "On Collage"). Greenberg's article is still amazing. In it he discusses a number of cubist works by Braque and Picasso.

In the Autumn of 1912 Pablo Picasso began a series of works using a range of materials such as wallpaper, imitation wood grain, newspaper, a charcoal drawing and sheet music. This is one (above) of the earliest collages and perhaps even the first.

Clement Greenberg in his "The Pasted-Paper Revolution" of 1958 argued that pictorial allusion gave way to what he called an optical illusion. In his sophisticated formalist reading of the work he argued that the various elements, the lettering, the charcoal lines and the coloured papers "begin to change places in depth with one another, and a process is set up in which every part of the picture takes its turn at occupying every plane, whether real or imagined, in it."


Art News 1958

Source:

Frascina, Francis and Harrison, Charles (1987) Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology New York: Harpers and Row pp.105-108.

William Latham Interview

This is an interview from a documentary series called Secret Passions, from Channel 4 in the early nineties.

William Latham

Hopefully in the course of writing this blog I have shown the relevance of abstraction to my own practice. Michael Rush in his book New Media in art shows us that "abstraction is still very much alive in computer art" (2005, p. 209). William Latham's Evolution of Form is a "computer sculpture" that draws its inspiration from complex natural forms like seashells and the work of "Surrealist painters Salvador Dali and Yves Tanguy in his quest for forms that can be manipulated, reshaped (or 'carved', in virtual sculpture within the computer (2005, p. 211).

Rush claims that "Latham was amongst the first to create genetically alive forms that resemble living organisms, though there mutations only occur inside the computer (2005, p. 210)

Clip from The Evolution of Form, by William Latham and Stephen Todd, from 1989; work done at IBM UK Research Labs. Details of sotware can be found in the book: Evolutionary Art and Computers, Academic Press, 1992.

Latham and Todd have now joined Frederic Fol Leymarie (since 2006) at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and created the Mutators Research Group: http://www.mrg-gold.com

Was presented at SIGGRAPH'94 and Imagina'93 (funded by the British Arts Council and Channel 4). The sound track is from Michel Redolfi (www.audionaute.com) famous for his underwater music.

Biogenesis shows the evolution of artificial life forms in a synthetic universe where 'survival of the fittest' is replaced by 'survival of the most aesthetic'. We see cellular evolution and the replication of mutations forming chain-like structures resembling coral. The artist is like a gardener, breeding, selecting, marrying and steering the course of evolution for creative ends. The film is a record of this evolutionary process. It can be viewed as a psychedelic experience or a more subtle parody of a man's relationship with the natural world through modern technology.

This line of work is being pursued by the MRG group at Goldsmiths College in London, led by Latham, Todd, Fol Leymarie et al. (www.mrg-gold.com).

Char Davies: Ephemere

Char Davies: Osmose

"The medium of 'immersive virtual space', or virtual reality- as it is generally known- has intriguing potential as an arena for constructing metaphors about our existential being-in-the-world and for exploring consciousness as it is experienced subjectively, as it is felt."

Charlotte Davis "Changing Space: Virtual Reality as an Arena of the Embodied Being" (1997).

Charlotte Davies, artist, painter and film maker achieved international recognition for her artworks that employ the technologies of virtual reality. Her transition from traditional materials: paint and film began around 1985 when Davies began to explore 3-d computer imaging techniques. In 1987 she became a founding director of Softimage, a 3-D software company that created special effects for Hollywoods films , most notably for Spielberg's Jurassic Park.


Davies adopted the Softimaging programme for her own artistic purposes culminating the immersive multimedia work Osmose.



Osmose (1995):

Aaron Siskind

In my own work I try to seek out odd juxtapositions of objects and strange meetings of things and the images of things. I try to seek out artists and writers that attempt to explore similar issues. I really discovered Aaron Siskind after reading David Anfam’s Abstract Expressionism (1994).


Aaron Siskind (1903-1991) was a member of the New York Photo League in the 1930s. His early work was in the social documentary tradition producing projects such as Dead End: The Bowery, and The Harlem Document. In the 1940s he started to connect with members of the New York School, whose dominant aesthetic was abstraction, transforming his work and shaping his interests. His black and white images of this period were of found objects, graffiti, peeling posters and an urban landscape familiar and a source of inspiration to Kurt Schwitters and Robert Rauschenberg.

Martha's Vineyard (seaweed) 2 1943

Abstract expressionists like Gottlieb and Pollock explored calligraphy in an attempt to discover new visual languages. Siskind’s Martha’s Vineyard (Seaweed) looks gestural: a tracing in the sand, a biomorphic form, a letter (A for Aaron?) a figure or a sexual symbol.

Gloucester 16A, 1944

Biomorphism as an art form draws its inspiration from nature and biological forms. We see its visual representation in Art Nouveau and its more curvilinear forms (one thinks of the Paris metro or the dominant architecture of Barcelona, specifically the work of Gaudi ) and of course Surrealism (Arp, Masson, Miro, Tanguy and Dali). The biomorphism of surrealism fed into what became abstract expressionism. The above photograph recalls the totemic art of Masson, Miro, Newman and Rothko. The above image is one that returns our gaze. Do we not see a single blank eye, a hard profile; abstract yet physiochemical like forms or “ovoids” that Motherwell presents to us in his Pancho Villa Dead or Alive 1943, the Elegy for the Spanish Republic series or At Five in the Afternoon 1949.

New York I, 1947

Chicago (Auto-Graveyard) 3, 1948

The surfaces that Siskind presents are rough, fragmentary, divided in much the same way as a de Kooning, a Motherwell, a cubist space or even a Pollock. We see the gestures of the graffiti artists, stains, drips, rust, decay, lettering and urban sign-age.

Chicago 1947-48

Siskind focused more and more on the minute. The charred surfaces that caught his eye reveal “paint smeared- walls whose facades, dense with graphic traces apparently make darkness visible”(Anfam, 1994 p. 153).

Chicago 224, 1953

This last picture again celebrates urban decay, the fragmentary with addition of the glass pain that adds a new layer and perhaps depth to this picture. The torn elements of poster remains recall not only Schwitters and the neo-dada, but the nouveau realism (Hains and Rotello) and the Situationist detournement (Debord and Jorn) that emerged in sixties Europe. This is the language of pop and low culture. What about the writing? Well, it does recall de Kooning’s dust jacket design for Harold Rosenberg’s Tradition of the New (1959) (see Hillier, Beavis The Style of the Century, 2ND Edition, 1999 p. 151).

Simon Morley’s book Writing on the Wall: Word and Image in Modern Art (2003) although does not explore Siskind’s work. However across a number of chapter we see various post-WWII gestures (forgive the pun) that involve calligraphy or writing that move towards abstraction and action painting.

Bibliography:
Abrams, D (1994) Abstract Expressionism London: Thames and Hudson Hillier, B (1999) The Style of the Century, 2nd Edition, London: Herbert Press Morley, S (2003) Writing on the Wall: Word and Image in Modern Art, London: Thames and Hudson.

Current Viewing

Apart from CSI, NCIS, Law and Order, Numbers, Criminal Minds, The Mentalist and TheEleventh Hour, I have been watching a lot of examples of avant garde film.

I was recently given a set of DVDs, one of which was a Dadaist film selection which included a number of Hans Richter abstract and semi representational film: Rythmus 21(1921-24), Filmstudie (1926) and Ghosts Before Breakfast (1927). The later two seem very surreal in nature. His one time collaborator Viking Eggeling also features on the DVD. His work Symphonia Diagonale (1921-24) is a purely abstract composition.

I also have a DVD of the work of Len Lye from 1935 to 1960/80. This is a really nice addition to my collection of animated films.

I need to prepare myself to watch Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera (1929). This is the film which served as a guide for Lev Manovich in his book The Language of New Media (2001).

László Moholy-Nagy

"The Theatre of Totality with its multifarious complexities of light, space, plane, form, motion, sound, man – and with all the possibilities for varying and combining these elements – must be an ORGANISM."

"Theatre, Circus, Variety, " Theatre of the Bauhaus (1924)

Max Ernst: 4

"Max Ernst and the Surrealist Revolution", Part 3.

Max Ernst: 3

"Max Ernst and the Surrealist Revolution",  Part 2.

Max Ernst: 2

"Max Ernst and the Surrealist Revolution", Part 1.