contemporary monkey

Diane Arbus: how did she get them to stare like that?

Now that digital photography is ubiquitous, everyone can, and does, shoot photos. Without difficulty, we conveniently take shots of our friends, who are more than willing subjects to pose for the moment. Our insane family members, who will only open up to us because they have to, easily give up their privacy while we have them at their weakest hour. But not everyone can get the best out of an unfamiliar, and potentially unwilling, subject. Asking complete strangers to stop for a quick snap is hardly going to happen, especially if you’re asking a team of leather-clad Hell’s Angels to pose for you.

Diane Arbus, the American photographer, resolved to capture these difficult and brazen shots, and she didn’t have the advantage of a tiny, unobtrusive digital camera in her pocket. She was able to get what she wanted through sheer will and canny persuasion.  I imagine Arbus to have been the kind of friend who would have been willing to go up to anyone to start a conversation. She’d have been very useful to us boys at about the age of 16.

At the Nottingham Contemporary, a sizable collection of Arbus’ photos are on display, albeit in a very low, almost sleepy light (I suppose it’s for the sake of the now decades-old prints). The evidence is fairly clear: Arbus could penetrate any group of outsiders from the 1950’s and 60’s, and let’s face it, that’s about the time when outsiders were at their zenith. Arbus wasn’t at all an insider to any of these communities of exotics. She grew up posh, while in another world, her photographic subjects inhabited what would have been a no-go zone for her and her kind.

By instilling confidence between her and the circus freak, nudist, or any other nutter/oddball on the other side of the camera, she was able to make friends through the assurance of professionalism, and get the straight-on shot that the subject rightly deserved. Imagine if you did that now? You’d probably be dragged by heavy chains behind some hillbilly’s pickup truck, or be sucked into an awkward, experimental religion you had no idea existed until a few short minutes ago. It’s not the kind of thing most sane people do these days.

Diane Arbus’ art is more about trust than about the subjects she shot, or the photographs themselves for that matter. But these days, these contemporary days, we could probably use more trust between divisive groups of war-mongering gangs. We need a Diane Arbus for places like Isreal, Afghanistan, Fox News, Millwall Football Stadium. Well, maybe let’s start with Israel and Afghanistan and see how that goes before attempting an all-or-nothing game at Millwall.

Eberhard Havekost; every heard of him? Me neither. Knowing who he is, at this point, is unimportant as he’s unlikely to be remembered by anyone in say 10-20 years. But Eberhard Havekost deserves a look, if only to be example-boy for What’s Wrong With Contemporary Art.

Let’s get the process out of the way first. Eberhard Havekost (I just love saying the name, for no other reason than it sounds like a maker of pencils), takes a photo snapshot of something. Usually anything. The snapshot is then filtered through Photoshop. For those of us who use Photoshop quite a bit, know not to touch any of the filters because filters are simply for the technophobe, the blind, and the creatively bereft. Unless of course you’re eight years old, then it’s brilliant because it’s subversive in a childish sort of way, and it puts you well on the road to revolution. But if you’re not eight, like most of us, using filters is sentimental at best, and sad and overwrought at worst.

After the Photoshop filter dabbling, Eberhard Havekost moves onto, believe it or not, painting! Eberhard Havekost paints, using his newly Photoshopped photo, on canvas. Just like real painters. To some extent I see the irony in the process; like old media taking back the streets from new media, and hey, if you think you’ve got gestures down Mr. Photographer, you just haven’t seen an Eberhard Havekost. This seems to be a trend amongst Germans. Gerhard Richter does it, and because some folks refer to him as the 20th century’s greatest living artist, his work is probably a magnet for others to photo copy. How ironic (or does that, because I’ve found it to be ironic, make it no longer ironic - I never know with these things). Usually in these instances it’s a big pissing contest between art and photography.

Richter's "Reader"...image of an image.

Anyway, we digress; back to Eberhard Havekost. I bring up the subject, not only because, again, I like saying Eberhard Havekost, but that I’ve just popped into London’s White Cube recently in hope of all hopes to find something that captures the imagination. Instead, I found Eberhard Havekost. After about 15 minutes inside, I make haste to the handy leaflet at the front of the room. It starts off:

“The point of departure for my paintings”, Havekost commented in a recent interview, “is an emotional quality or a factuality - in other words, something I can feel.”

Whenever art people say things like, “point of departure” it means they’re the type of person who searches for an explanation to every part of their lives and woe betide the unlucky person standing next to them. Here’s my own example: “The point of departure for my breakfast this morning was a strange and vacant sort of empty feeling I witnessed in the pit of my stomach.” While most of us are getting on with life, and finding art in the everyday magnificence of life itself, others have nothing better to do than to seek out meaning in the minutia.

To get right to the art, here’s a glimpse of Eberhard Havekost at The White Cube:

Eberhard Havekost: they all look like this

There are nine of these trees, and they all look the same. It’s almost not worth the bother to put a nail in the wall for any of it, really. The point for Eberhard Havekost is to photograph a tree in winter, from different angles, at night, and then apply a Photoshop filter. He then uses theses abstract images, and effectively paints a realist image of the blurred image. Let’s pause to hear from the White Cube’s web site: ”

“… increasingly Havekost uses the photograph as a starting point or base structure.”

[For anyone before Andy Warhol, we would have called that either copying, or just being lazy. Here it's euphemistically called a starting point.]

“…a material quality distinct from the photographic original.”

[Um, yes, that's why we call it painting, and not alt-photo.]

“The resulting atmosphere is spooky and surreal: the trees sway and droop, the greens hang like thick ooze from the pendulous branches.”

[Spooky and surreal? Really? My first thoughts were: monochrome, grey-green, dull, multiplicity for no real reason. I'm not sure this is even art school material.]

“The tree is, of course, one of the oldest motifs in Western art: with ‘Gast’, the artist has created a proliferating forest that seems to haunt this rich history, a gang of spectres that persist in provoking awe and wonder.”

[Oh right, that's where the spooky and surreal come from. Now I'm with you. Still, it isn't spooky, and it isn't haunting. It's really just navel gazing, and dull. If you want to navel gaze, Mr. Eberhard Havekost, find something of higher value to society, like the CERN particle accelerator, or unravelling cryptic Mayan symbols, or, what makes Jaffa Cakes so good.]

“Havekost enacts a process of de-materialisation and re-materialisation, from thought to object. And when confronted anew, the process is reversed again: the painting now provokes a range of interpretations and associations in the mind of the viewer.”

[I don't know if you know this, but that's what "us viewers" do with all art.  Reinterpreting your work isn't a mind-boggling, just-stumbled-upon theme that you've opened our eyes to.  We ALWAYS do that.]

Generally I see what Mr. Eberhard Havekost is doing, but the result is fairly vapid in intellect, and aesthetically mute.  Focusing on subject matter, and “filtering” is the point of being an artist, and rendering an interpretation is the enjoyment of the viewer. Welcome to life as we know it Mr. Eberhard Havekost, how does it work on your planet?

like Amiga, but with paint

In October of 2009, the internet turned 40 years old.  Not the web, or as some would call it, the Google machine; I mean the internet, developed by ARPANET for the US military to withstand a Soviet nuclear missile attack.  Images on the internet arrived later, around 1990, when the CERN Institute developed the world wide web. I bring these dates up because they seem so long ago; the wow factor hasn’t been palpable since the late 20th century.  Or so I thought.

Digital art, while not widely accepted by the art buying public (i.e., merchant bankers), is widely followed by a global audience.  Its gallery, however, is mostly online so you’d have to know where to look to find it.  Even with limited appeal, however, there it is; raging wildly and completely toward the Next Big Thing.  Digital styles vary from futuristic, technology-pushing 3D imagery coded to audio, fireworks, and probably even orgasm, to something completely not that - sentimental remembrances of 8 bit digital: the old space invader imaging.  If you missed the digital art revolution, you were probably buried under a rock, or possibly banished to whatever the equivalent of the art gulag would be.  Crawford, Texas maybe.

Semyon Faibisovich isn’t from anywhere near Texas, at least not topographically.  He’s from Moscow.  But the digital distance between he and Crawford’s most popular citizen isn’t that far.  Faibisovich at one time painted in the realism style, but traded canvas for film in the past two decades.  During this time, the former Soviet Union was crumbling beneath the merciless weight of its arch enemy: Conceptual Art.  While Faibisovich was off conceptualizing, digital photography was busy happening.

Faibisovich is being shown at the IKON Gallery in Birmingham, where he’s uploaded (OK, hung) large format images on the IKON’s walls (or as I call them, old-style screens).  He’s back painting large formats using very small source material, and he’s done most of it within the past few years.  Walking around the Moscow district of Razgulyai, he’s captured what passes for life by way of a mobile phone camera.  As most of us know, camera phones today are terrible at reproduction, but handy when you need it.  Like when your friends are throwing shots of high octane alcohol down their necks at a Spanish bar and the moment Must Be Recorded.  Nobody pretends the quality is going to be any good, with the results eventually getting sucked down the drain of the digital dark underworld of forgotten photos.  Or maybe that’s just me hopin’ and wishin’.

Faibisovich seems to have just now discovered the technological fault of the ubiquitous comrade of the proletariat.  Starting with highly-pixellated mobile photographs, he then distorts the image further through either Photoshop filters, or his own paintbrush.  The result is the digital equivalent of Monet or Renoir.

just prior to the introduction of digital photography

Pixellation isn’t new to art. Digital artists have used old fashioned computer images to achieve a kind of distressed or atavistic effect.  Faibisovich is simply doing what the impressionists and post impressionists did, but with some help from a mobile camera phone.  It’s like he’s just discovered the 20th century world of pixels through photography and manipulation.  This doesn’t seem contemporary to me.  Faibisovich is just someone who’s playing catch-up with the rest of the world, and thinks he’s on to something. He’s like the Brendan Fraser Neanderthal character in Encino Man (California Man to British People).  The content is only interesting from one point of view, and it isn’t ours.

What I found more curious was the amount of manipulation that varied among the works.  Some sections of the pieces Faibisovich has left alone, where the final enlargement is magnified relentlessly from the original source.  Other bits were recorded over with oil, which to me would suggest that he must have had a reason for supplementing some bits and not others.  What were those reasons?  As I’ve said before, knowing why an artist does something can be more interesting than the way he does it.

In fact, let’s make a rule: art can only be called contemporary if it feeds the creative spirit of our time…events within the last 10 years.  If it’s just catch-up art, then maybe the work is best suited for the museums.  Or the nostalgia bin.

I don’t quite understand the idea of trompe l’oeil, the french phrase for fooling the eye.  Other than the obvious: to prove you can make something so good it fools others into thinking art is reality, it seems to be more science than art.  To be accomplished at it is to be technically skilled, and enormously patient at your special ability.  But that also describes people who make Ferraris.  You’re proving your own virtuosity. Although you could be having a laugh at fooling other people.  Like the roadrunner and coyote in Warner Brothers animation, where the coyote paints a tunnel on a solid face, only for the roadrunner to make the trick a reality.

This week I made my way to see this sort of thing firsthand in Sheffield.  I’ve never been to Sheffield before, itself a trompe l’oeil of English pastures from the Victorian era.  The show was called “Out of the Ordinary” at Sheffield’s Millennium Gallery, and focused on craft usage in contemporary times.  Among the handful of artist was a Japanese person called Yoshihiro Suda.  The short biography of him is, “He creates hyper-realistic flowers and weeds from wood.”  I get the irony, but isn’t that like carving the perfect pebble from a rock.  Or to use the Ferrari analogy, making a car out of a new refrigerator.  His flower “sculpture” was protected by walls and a security rope where you couldn’t get any closer than about 12 feet.  I was beginning to doubt the quality.  How good can it be if I’m standing across the room to look at it?

Yoshihiro Suda

Trompe l’oeil comes up in the Autumn issue of Tate Etc. magazine as well, where a section of the magazine is devoted to the history of fooling the eye, back to the early 15th century.  Back then the point was to make it as realistic as possible because until then, I guess, nobody did it.  The article continues to 20th century artists like Rene Magritte, Duane Hanson, Andy Warhol.  I remember seeing my first Duane Hanson “statue” of an overweight tourist.  It was more creepy than sublime, but nonetheless it made me flinch, which is what good quality art is supposed to do.  Let’s add that to the list of results from trompe l’oeil: in addition to be impressive by way of its craft quality, it can creep you out too.

In the same article is a reference to a work at the Venice Biennale: a mural by Thomas Demand called “Clearing”.  It’s a very large photograph of the very thing it’s supposed to hide: the forest behind it.  This one goes one loop further though; it’s a photograph, of a sculptural stage, of a photograph of trees.  A long way to go, right?  The sculpture is made from 280,000 separate pieces of coloured paper, constructed by 30 people working for three months.  That IS a long way to go.  Apparently not only do you need the technical mastery to do these things, you have to have a lot of friends, or a lot of money.

Thomas Demand: Clearing

Discoveries this week are this: trompe l’oeil requires loads of patience, technical ability, friends, money and a sense of humour.  All this work to prove one thing: you can do something better than anyone else.  Just like making a Ferrari.

Penone: "Breath of Leaves"

It’s only a pile of dried, grey brown leaves, swept into a mound, placed in the middle of Birmingham’s Ikon Gallery.  They’re not particularly impressive looking leaves either; small and perfect shape, lacking in personality.  They’re from the box tree, offers the Ikon employee sitting near the sculpture.  He goes on to say that the artist wanted to use box leaves for their size and light weight, and allegedly, wherever the sculpture goes, so go the same leaves.  That day it occurred to me the gallery employees might be a worthwhile source of un-tapped knowledge of contemporary art.

The Ikon Gallery was showing an exhibition of sculptures by Giuseppe Penone in June.  Left on my own, which is what many galleries do to wanderers from the outside, I would not have been able to even make a guess why the artist did what he did.  At the pile of leaves, however, I made the decision that it was the gallery’s job to help me understand why last Autumn’s tree trimmings are called art.  Turning around, I glanced by a few of the other equally baffling sculptures, and returned downstairs to the manned front desk. The willing person there pointed me in the direction of the show’s programme, in addition to retrieving a more specific Penone exhibition guide.   He also provided me a brief one or two lines to think about while traveling through the show.  After sifting through the Hammurabi-like code of marketing copy for the gallery,  Penone’s point became more straight-forward.  In it’s most basic form, Penone’s discovered that the boundaries between people and nature are a fluid border, sometimes not obviously visible.  I returned to my first position: the dead pile of leaves, which was adjacent to two, similarly looking boulders.  (I learned later that one of the rocks is a man-made replica of a river boulder, which, itself was carved by nature over thousands of years.  The replica was made in a few months, but Penone’s point was, even if you could do it, why would you?  My question exactly.  I like Penone.)

I enlist my new-found friend, still perched on the chair near the heap of leaves, for more banter about leaves, rocks, branches, anything that seems to make sense at the moment.  To my surprise, the guy is happy to thrash out some meaning with me.  Together we sort through theories, insights, even wild guesses, for about five of the pieces that are within eyesight.  He seems to have been well-prepared for the artist (”he” doesn’t have a name tag by the way, so I have no idea what to call him).

Together, we reckon that the leaf mound is Penone’s canvas, and his body, the brush.  His is the form imprinted onto the pile of leaves, just as a kid would do after a father has raked a large pile from under an Autumn tree.  It looks more like good fun than serious art, but Penone adds to the shape by blowing sideways while he lies chest-down in the stack.  A half-conical valley is the only imprint left from his effort, and indeed the work is called, “Breath of Leaves”.  Nearby are photographs of Penone’s warm breath in an Italian winter forest.  Each breath develops its own shape, and the still photographs capture only one instant of each puff of warm wind.

Birmingham's Ikon Gallery

My guide and I went on for twenty minutes more, and during our discussion, I realized that he must have been waiting in a sort of limbo for a curious person like me who isn’t intimidated to ask questions.  Later he tells me that the learning centre upstairs is showing a video that Penone himself made where he explains why he does what he does.  Interviews by the artist aren’t common enough in my opinion, so after having left my guide to chat with another curious mind, I dashed up to the video room.

Penone describes using his breath as an invisible sculpture. By capturing his warm  exhalation in a chilly forest, he suggests that plant life is not much different: branches and roots instead of arms and legs, expiring oxygen through leaves rather than carbon dioxide via the mouth.

I was inside the Ikon gallery for nearly two hours - about four times the length that most shows can be consumed inside this smallish gallery.  Enabling all the resources of the Ikon, however, I was able to enjoy myself much more, and learn a great deal about the exhibit than I would had I only read the exhibition guide.  I don’t know why galleries or museum don’t encourage their people to come forward to discuss the current programmes.  If the folks are there only for security, the gallery should employ people to circulate while engaging the public.  The repeat business would certainly increase.