Jan Dibbets: 2

Dutch artist Jan Dibbets made these photo collages  for the Musée Zadkine in Paris in 1994. The use of photography by Jan Dibbets, it is argued, “is abstract” or “rather non-realistic” (Fuchs and Moure, 1991 p.13). This is “because it does interrupt the visual process of perception by imposing precise forms” (Fuchs and Moure, 1991 p.13). The aim of these photoworks is “to ‘deconstruct’ the consistent appearance of visual space conventionally represented in photography”, by multiplying viewpoints, fragmenting exposure times and grading shades of light” (Fuchs and Moure, 1991 p.181).

Sources:
Fuchs and Moure, (1991) Jan Dibbets,  Interior Light: Works on Architecture 1969-1990 Barcelona: Ediciones Polâ ̧grafa .

John Stezaker

John Stezaker once said “so much emerges from what I destroy” (Buck, L., 2011 p.36).  This could have come from the mouth of Gordon Matta-Clark. Stezaker’s collages seem to come out of the surrealist imagination: they are fragmentary and dream-like and created from found images. These dream-like and unsettling narratives drew from film stills, glamorous publicity shots from the golden age of Hollywood and postcards. 

  John Stezaker Untitled (For Angus) Film Still Collage II, 2009  

Old Mask IV 2006

Mask XXXV, 2007

Carla Sorell notes that “in the Mask series old portraits are mixed with found postcards, placed precisely over the face in such a way that the void created by the landscape become somehow representative of the subjects psyche” (Sorrell, C., 2011 p.21).

Sources:

Buck, L., (2011), “So much emerges from what I destroy” Art Newspaper 20 No220 Jan 2011 p.36

Sorrel, C (2011) “The Face Beneath” Crafts no228 Ja/F p.20-21

Doug and Mike Starn

The Starn Twins’ artworks are “not appropriation photographs designed to deconstruct- or expose the context in which the original art was made” (Papadakis, 1989 p.61). The objects produced are “drained of its original significance” (Papadakis, 1989 p.61). Doug and Mike Starn’s work seem to be part of the so lat century, millennium burnout. The two have so “internalized post-modernism as to be virtually free of it, liberated, that is, to the exercise  post modern license without being over determined or terrorized by its ideological excess” (Wheeler, 1991 p.335).

Still Life 1983

The Building 1985

They do recycle art history, like postmodernism but they offer something more positive and “more humanistic” with “richer imagery that elicit feeling and fantasy” (Wheeler, 1991 p.336). Doug and Mike Starn’s work is made up of “elaborately layered collages cobbled together with Scotch Magic Tape” (Wheeler, 1991 p.336).

Rookery 1985

Double Stark Portrait in Swirl 1985-6. Toned silver print with tape, 8'3" square.

The fragmented results are fascinating like a “photographic Cubism with the geometric patterning of the individual sheets of paper, fracturing and distancing the underlying ‘picture’ in much the same way that the lambent planes of an Analystical Cubsim jostle a representational world that supposedly lies beneath” (Papadakis, 1989, p.61).

Triple Christ  toned silver print with Scotch tape, aluminium, wood, glue and glass 1986 

 Untitled (Large Christ) 1987, silver print, tape. film, glass, wood, 228.6 x 609.6 cm

Blue Lisa 1987, toned silver print 215.9x134.6cm

Sources:

Papadakis, (1989) New York New Art, Art & Design, Academy Editions London/New York:  St. Martin’s Press

Wheeler, (1991)  Art Since Mid-Century, London: Thames and Hudson

N.B. Some of the early titles seem wrong to me. I hope to research further and discover more details.

 

New Synths

 Here are some new experimental Photosynths using 250 photographs of Lincoln Cathedral.

The first looks like a great medieval city, a utopian dream.

This one looks like a Medieval replay of a cubist composition.

John Harper: 2

John Harper: From Light, section 4, 'Gordale 4 days', 1997
600cm x 250cm resin based black and white photo paper, board, acrylic sheeting

Section of From Light series produced as commission for Photo 98 from location work in North Yorkshire. Large scale photo constructed works. From larger body of work called 'Collected Light'. Slide 'Four days at Gordale Scar'. From Light, Mappin Gallery solo show Photo 98 programme.

John Harper

A quick thank you to Barry Wenden: when Barry Wenden, an external examiner from Northampton for the University of Lincoln, caught a glimpse of my work on this blog, he mentioned the photography of his colleague John Harper. He then went on to show several web pages featuring Harper’s work. John Harper produces photographic joiners, which are very interesting and suggest an array of ideas close to my interests.  

Featured here are a number of photographic joiners that are part of a series called “River”.  John Harper’s work is concerned with landscape: “Geomorphology had always interested me, not from any scientific basis but more in terms of its essential relationship to the activities of the artist. It seemed to me that there were many associations between the practices of the artist and the making of the land, and such thoughts had played their part in previous work. In the mid seventies when I was working more directly with the landscape I produced a series of works which I termed 'Catchment'. I felt that the artist’s activities related to this concept in that we gather material from a catchment area around us to condense and reform it, much in the same way as a river does. This information is then carried along through time by forces that are out of the artists hands. We work with time, no matter what our subject matter is and are always conscious of our own temporality and transience” (Harper, J., n.d.). 

Although nature is not the subject of or referred to directly in the final project, the work does concern itself with landscape and to “temporality and transience”.  This is Harper's description of his relationship to landscape:

“I began to think of the river in allegorical terms and to realise the close temporal and physical relationships that exist between the nature of the river and the nature of film. Both are translucent ribbons that carry memory along in their flow, that have complex and overlapping time structures, and each in their own way transport light and reflection with complex plays on the nature of picture plane and space” (Harper, J., n.d.). 

The above work is part of 'Broken and Breaking Ground' a Book project with John Harper featuring recent work from Fermynwoods. Working closely with John Harper, the book was produced over a 3 month period between 2007 and 2008. It's launch coincided with the associated exhibition of John Harper’s work at Fermynwoods.

John Harper is a member of the creative practice-led research network LAND2 (“land squared”) - formally LAN2D) – which was started in 2002 by Iain Biggs (UWE Bristol) and Judith Tucker (Leeds) as a national network of artist / lecturers and research students with an interest in landscape / place-oriented art practice.



Sources:

Harper, J., (n.d.) "The River" Land 2, Membership, Statement and Work:

http://www.land2.uwe.ac.uk/harper.htm

Project Three Presentation and Proposal

Themes and Technologies:

The third project:

–engages with the relationship between the representation of real spaces and places and their virtual equivalent

–Using software like Microsoft Silverlight and Photosynth amplifies photographic possibilities in such a way that it problematises representation

–Explores the architectural idea of deconstructivism associated with hyper architecture

–It is characterized by ideas of fragmentation, and an interest in manipulating structures.

•The final project concerns itself with the technologies that make it possible to construct photographic panoramas and auto stitch pictures to essentially create what has come to be described as auto joiners (Zelnik-Manor & Perona, 2008).

•The following images are achieved via the use of Microsoft’s Photosynth technology:

Photosynth Architectural Mutations:

Photosynthed architecture: algorithmic architecture (2011)

 

Key influences

•The visual artefacts
–corresponds to the mosaic of visual experiences contained within collage, and especially cubist collage and painting.
–a response to the expanding field of photography a response to Berger and Vertov’s description of a technological way of seeing:

-“the invention of the camera changed the way” we “saw…. The visible no longer presented itself” in “order to be seen.  On the contrary, the visible, in continual flux, became fugitive” (1972, p.18)

-Cubism “creates these fractured, multiple images which are like shifting kaleidoscopes” (Levy, M, 1969, p.322).
-Fred Ritchin in his book After Photography, states that photography is becoming “cubist” (2010, p. 123). 

-The “contradictory ‘double’ image” created by Photosynth “is cubist; reality has no single truth” (Ritchin, .F., 2010 p. 147).
-The imagery for project 3 attempts to describe in visual terms “the flickering ungovernable mobility of the gaze” (Bryson, 1983 p.121).

-Uricchio in “The Algorithmic turn: photosynth, augmented reality and changing implications of the Image” (2011):
Notes the temporal slippage contained within a photosynth. Something similar to “the ‘transient, the contingent’ that Baudelaire ascribes to the modern” (Uricchio, W., 2011, p.29)

-Uricchio argues that the photosynth recalls the imagery of the early-nineteenth-century, where long time exposure  often resulted in ghost figures (Uricchio, W., 2011, p.29)
-This project concerns itself with Photosynth’s “radical disjunctures” and the “unstable nature of the composite” (Uricchio, W., 2011, p.30).

Visual Influences

The photosynth is also referred to as the auto joiner (“joiner” is coined by Hockney). This term is associated with Jan Dibbetts, David Hockney, John Stezaker, Thomas Kellner and Gordon Matta-Clark .

George Braque Soda 1911

Pablo Picasso Still Life with Chair Caning 1912

Jan Dibbets Panorama Dutch Mountain 12 x 15° Sea II A  1971

Jan Dibbets, Musée Zadkine photo collages 1994

 John Stezaker Untitled (For Angus) Film Still Collage II, 2009 

 Gordon Matta- Clark Splitting, 1974
Chromogenic prints mounted on board

David Hockney Mother, Los Angeles, Dec. ‘82 1982

Thomas Kellner Houston Texas, Oil Refinery 2006

Tim Head’s Displacement installation also with similar themes. 

Tim Head Displacements (installation view) 1975

Visualization

•The imagery is digitally projected
•Visually it is a mosaic of different perspectives of architecture
•The original idea draws from Tim Head’s installation: the building projected on to is the same building as the one represented within the projection. 

Sources:


Baudelaire, C., (2008) The Painter of Modern Life, London:  Phaidon

Berger, J., (1972) Ways of Seeing London: BBC, Penguin Books

Bryson, n., (1983) Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze, New Haven: Yale University Press

Levy, M., (1969) A History of Western Art London: Thames and Hudson

Ritchin, F., After Photography London: Norton

Uricchio, W., (2011) “The Algorithmic Turn: Photosynth, Augmented Reality and the Changing Implications of the Image” Visual Studies vol 26 Issue 1pp. 25- 35

Zelnik-Manor (2007) “Mult-View Image Compositions”
http://authors.library.caltech.edu/7695/1/paper.pdf
[Last Accessed 10 May, 2011]

Zelnik-Manor & Perona (2008) ”Automating Joiners”
http://webee.technion.ac.il/~lihi/Publications/ZelnikPerona.AutoJoiners.pdf
[Last Accessed 10 May, 2011]

David Hockney

 Don and Christopher, Los Angeles, 6th March 1982

David Hockney’s work shows an infatuation with the Polaroid, which led him to “re-explore the riches of the space-time equation investigated by Braque and Picasso in Analytical Cubism” (Wheeler, 1991 p. 159).

     Photographing Annie Leibovitz While She Is Photographing Me, 1982
photographic collage, 25 7/8 x 61 3/4 in.

In a conversation between David Hockney and Paul Joyce they explore the way in which technology influences the way we see:

Paul Joyce: So called reality accords with a programmed way of looking which goes back to what you were saying earlier, that the photograph has influenced the way we look. If we are presented with a photograph we say: well, that’s life. But it may not only be still photog4raphers that are responsible for that. Movies have influenced our way of seeing as well, but they are not life at all. They show a world confected, glamorized, changed.

Still Life Blue Guitar, 1982  composite polaroid, 24 1/2 x30 in.

Mother, Bradford Yorkshire 1982, composite polaroid, 56x23 1/2

David Hockney: I do think it’s true that all depictions must be stylized, what we call stylized. There is no way they can’t be. After all, they are not really reality. They are put on a flat surface as stylizations of some kind.

Listen to this [quotes from Leo Steinberg*]

Surveying Picasso’s lifelong commitment to women as solid reality - a commitment relaxed only during the cubist episode – one arrives at a disturbing conclusion. That Picasso, the great flattener of the Twentieth Century painting has had to cope within himself with the most uncompromising three dimensional; imagination that ever possessed a great painter. And that he flattened the language of painting in the years just before World War I because the traditional means of 3D rendering inherited from the past were for him too one-sided , too lamely content with the exclusive aspect in other words- not 3-D enough.

Amazing, isn’t it! Picasso shows you both front and back, and this must be about memory because…

 

PJ: You must retain one when you are looking at the other. Of course, when we walk around in an object, such as a jacket that’s on a peg, we are also dealing with what we expect it to be like. We have seen a jacket before and our imagination and our memory are stimulated by something already seen and known.

 

*Other Criteria by Leo Sternberg (Oxford University Press, 1975).

Sources:

Joyce, P., (1988) Hockney on Photography London: Jonathan Cape

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

Gordon Matta-Clark

Gordon Matta-Clark
Bronx Floors: Threshole 1972
2 black and white photographs
Each 356 x 508 mm

Gordon Matta-Clark was a key member of the New York avant-garde from the late sixties to his death in 1978. Matta-Clark’s work was formed “outside of the parameters of gallery presentation” (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2011). Matta-Clark’s work does not concern itself with form (Fineberg, J., 1995, p.382). Instead “his work involved a sense of place” not with “constructing a site”, but with the attack on “the structural integrity existing buildings, cutting gapping holes through the walls, ceilings, and floors” (Fineberg, J., 1995, p.382).  Matta-Clark’s “subversive activities were rooted in a critique of bourgeois American culture” (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2011). How is his work subversive and how is it an attack on “bourgeois American culture”? For many the work either symbolized a “violation of domesticity” in its attack on the family home, while others saw the work as “a commentary on the depredations of real estate development and urban renewal” (Joselit, 2003 p.147). 

Gordon Matta-Clark
Bronx Floors: Threshole 1972
2 black and white photographs
Each 356 x 508 mm

It is interesting to note that Matta-Clark trained as an architect. As an architect he was “well aware of what he called the “containerization of usable space” as both an economic and social form of regulation” (Joselit, 2003 p.147). Works like Splitting 1974 allude “to these urban realities through the use of procedures of inscription and displacement” (Joselit, 2003 p.147) and of course the process of dislocation.

 Splitting, 1974
Chromogenic prints mounted on board

 Splitting, 1974 Colour Photograph 680 x 990 mm

Matta-Clark was compelled to focus his attention on modernism anti-humanism. Matta-Clark attacked standardization and the rationalized structures of modernist architecture. This practice of splitting and incision is called “anarchitecture”- a play on words, fusing anarchy and architecture” (Fineberg, 1995 p.383).This was a deliberate form of political expression. “By undoing a building”, he said “there are many   aspects of social conditions against which I am gesturing”  (Simon, 1976 p.13). Matta-Clark “saw the housing of the New York Ghettos as akin to prison cellblocks and the isolation of the suburban ‘box’ as scarcely better” (Fineberg, 1995 p. 386). Matta-Clark’s “anarchitecture” was meant to “destroy the barriers between people, literally and figuratively” (Fineberg, 1995 p.386).

Window Blowout 1976 Photography Mounted on board 406 x 559 mm

Sources:

Fineberg, (1995) Art Since 1940: Strategies of Being London: Lawrence King

Joselit, (2003) American Art Since 1945 London: Thames and Hudson

 

 

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, (2011 ) Splitting, 1974 http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/1992.5067

 

Simon, (1976)"Gordon Matta-Clark 1943-1978" Art in America (November/December 1978).