During a recent trip I had the pleasure of touring the KunstHausVien (Art House Vienna), home of the Museum Hundertwasser and host at the time of a remarkable exhibition titled Visions of Nature. The KunstHausVien is itself an artwork. Designed by Friedensreich Regentag Dunkelbunt Hundertwasser (translation: Peacerealm Rainyday Dark-colorful Hundredwater), ne Friedrich Stowasser, it has trees growing out of it. There is a permanent memorial exhibition of Hundertwasser's work, introduced by a picture of him in his late middle age, and a "picture of him" today. That latter is a photo of a tree; under which he was buried. Let's get our nature worship on.
***
I have always been attracted to the idea that art must be evaluated, at least in part, on the arguments it makes. Painting a thing cannot be separated from the artist's decision that the thing should be painted. Painting the thing just so, rather than some other way, reflects something. And I always ask myself: do I agree?
On the other hand I am always leery of artists' own descriptions of the meaning and purpose of their work, particularly after art became intellectualized in the early 20th century. Because I think most of those statements are bullshit. Or, to clarify, because I think that artists often arrive at the works that emerge from their techniques, and that artists choose their techniques - at best - because they do things that look cool, not because they produce specific meaning. But if you have made a statue of a duck because the clay wanted to be a duck that day, do you say that? Or do you say it is because you were thinking about poverty and the duck represents oppression? Artists have patrons; patrons love bullshit; so artists produce bullshit. And also art.
This makes gleaning artistic purpose from any work basically a guessing game. And so, judging art from its apparent purpose a fool's errand. Right?
Here is a description of process that resulted in the image, from the link above:
South Korean photographer Myoung Ho Lee does something rather simple—and rather similar to the working process of the late legend Richard Avedon. He separates his subjects from their environments by way of a simple yet formal backdrop. Difference here, of course, is that Lee's subjects are full-blown, fullgrown trees, and his 60-by-45-foot canvases form merely part of the photographs rather than filling up the frames. (The backdrops are erected with cranes, ropes, and bars by a production crew—Lee edits out the extraneous supports with digital retouching, creating a floating canvas at the center of each image.) The result is a rather surprising redefinition of the nature of a portrait, the nature of a landscape, and the nature of, well, nature itself.And here is a description of meaning, from the exhibition guidebook:
Stylization and Approximation
Myoung Ho Lee combines concept and landscape photography to create an entirely new genre. Lee has been photographing trees in his home country since 2006, but he rejects traditional landscape photography by not staging the trees as part of a nature that is whole.
Rather, each tree is isolated from its surrounding by a white screen. By staging the trees in the tradition of portrait photography and simultaneously transferring them into the typical subject of landscape photography, Lee creates a barely tangible image that irritates our perception as it fluctuates between the veracity of nature and the emphasis of its staged depiction according to culturally and aesthetically coded modes of representation.
When I first asked myself, what argument is this making, I found nothing. It was pure music to me: harmonious colors and shapes. Visually pleasing. But its argument? Buzzing on the line.Now, yeah yeah, I know your Landscape and Power, we can get all critical geography if you want. We can engage in arguments about what the argument is. But that is imposing our intellectual creativity on this other person's artistic creativity. Ooh lala, the life experiences of the photographer, which we somehow claim access to and the right of interpreting, have led him to choose this subject for this or that political purpose. Rubbish. And no, I don't mean that visual art cannot be used for political purposes - rather that I am suspicious of all attribution of political motive that doesn't come from the artist, and of political motive that does come from the artist.
What is left? The subject is a landscape with a centered, solitary tree, behind which a large white canvas has been spread; and the scaffolding holding up the sculpture digitally erased, i.e., replaced with the landscape background to create the illusion that the canvas is floating. It's a fine view without the tree. It's a cliché view of a single tree in a landscape setting. It's...
No, what it actually is, is a picture of a tree on a white background, framed in a landscape. The frame is quite thick, and there is a cool trick where the thick frame matches the portrait where the trunk meets the grass. But it's a frame. It's literally a picture of a tree in a lovely frame of the landscape itself. Cool.
And when they are displayed on walls they have very minimal wooden frames around that. It surely looks cool. It not so surely is a "staged depiction according to culturally and aesthetically coded modes of representation," except of course that those words encompass any landscape photograph at all.
Its argument is: you should look at this rad tree.
And you should.
***
It is notable that a great deal of the work on display was photographic. And a camera, for all its wonders, puts the viewer at an enormous disadvantage. I see photographic art as a struggle to work within these limitations and capture just some small part of what is available to the in-person view. The Lee series found a novel and visually very appealing solution to this problem. How did others fare?
It is first useful to consider what is missing from a photograph of nature. Specifically, what is the difference between a photograph of nature and the perceptual melange that an individual human being experiences when looking out upon "it"? First, obviously, are the non-visual senses. The sound. The feeling and smell of the air. The ground beneath one's feet. And even some less tangible but nonetheless universally present perceptions such as the the feeling of large space, of high altitude, or vastness. And, while photography is a visual medium, even visually of course there are limitations - the precise colors in the photograph are never the same as what we see, and the subtle motions are all gone. As I wrote elsewhere, online tools today provide an easily accessible solution to these problems by offering a way to intensify photographic color and contrast to perhaps allow the viewer of the image to come closer to the feeling of awe and experiential vastness that one can have by simply walking up something tall and opening one's eyes - and then try to capture, unsuccessfully, on a camera.
So, for example, a series of photographs all very similar to this one:
Höpfner, selection from Movements 2012/2017
What distinguishes this as art? As far as I can tell, it is the written offerings - exterior to the photograph - that allow us to imbue the image above with meaning, preferably very artistic meaning. Consider whether the following description alters your perception of the above image. As described in the museum guide, Höpfner travels on foot to remote and desolate landscapes in Tibet, Korea, China, Iceland, Libya, and so forth:
He is interested in walking and being alone in nature in a meditative state. This requires solitude, and also calm. Visual stimuli, social contact, and cultural amenities are drastically reduced, which, at the same time - and this is what Höpfner banks on - heightens a person's sensibilities for the structures and delicate nuances of the exterior surroundings as well as the interior, mental and emotional, world.
The photographs the artist takes on his journeys speak a subtle, reduced language. These are quiet images and testament to an existential experience. Nothing on these photographs is too much. The grayscale of the analog black-and-white are incredibly tender and capture a wide spectrum of gray. People are not featured, and only rarely does one spot human-made objects in these wide landscapes in which one wants to lose oneself.
Three rather unusual photographs were chosen. . . They show tents that the artist put up as shelter during the night. Not only do Höpfner's photographs show how small the individual person is in the vast expanse of nature, they also indicate in a gentle, calm way how short human history has been in comparison with Earth's history.Now go look at that picture again, assuming all of the above is true. Did the reading render the photograph more meaningful? It did for me, and I suppose that is exactly its purpose. People love it when art is meaningful; there is a whole industry built around suggesting meaning in visual form. There is probably already a whole philosophy of rejecting such suggestions and finding your own meaning in the same image (meaning you're defining yourself in the negative to something somebody has already suggested, which, frankly, is pretty close to the same thing).
As is my wont, I don't trust the description. However, in this case I don't distrust it totally. I only distrust its attribution of intention. I do not accept as probable that Michael Hopfner walked into the Tibetan wilderness in order to take center-framed pictures of his tent. No doubt, he walked into the wilderness with an intention of conveying some feeling of doing so. But his experiences are his own. He could have written them down. Instead he used a camera, and the tools of subject selection and color manipulation. At some point, having walked some distance from his tent, he turned around and centered the tent in the frame. Later, he grayscaled the result. If he was feeling human aloneness and smallness in the expanse of desolate natural physical space at the moment he took the picture, or in other moments on his journey, his photograph may be a way to try to convey that. But what was done was tent in the middle plus sepia-toned grayscale. Plus a lovely written description and the viewer's own imagination. Nothing wrong here, just interesting.
And again and again, I saw the photographer's struggle to find something interesting to frame, and the museum's struggle to say something about the framing . So:
(my photo didn't turn out - this is a better one from online)
. . . large-format photographs of reflections in bodies of water. [Hutte] is part of the so-called Dusseldorf School, whose members clearly distinguish themselves from the documentary practices of other German photographers with their conceptual language of forms.
Axel Hutte works with a traditional view camera, which he uses to create meticulously composed shots of fleeting moments. In doing so, he focuses less on the topographical and geological aspects of a given landscape, and primarily on its aesthetic features. The compositional and structural means of Hutte's landscape photographs, which he made in Mediterranean countries such as Portugal, Italy, France, Greece, or Spain, suggest associations with nineteenth-century German Romantic landscape paintings, but the photographs avoid the emotional excess and pathos so characteristic of German Romanticism. Rather, they may be interpreted as a kind of photographic reaction to landscape painting.
Hutte's photographs neither point to a certain narrative, nor are they overtly sentimental. They are neither analytic records of nature nor photographic descriptions of a place but rather images of a certain mood evoking loneliness and solitude. The picture's large formats, the deep horizon line, the unusual perspective, and the decentralized composition make the photographs appear strange. The impressionistic effect elicits an emotional reaction from the beholder.Well and good. But what are we looking at here that is new? How many photographs of nifty reflections on water have been taken in the history of photography? Millions? What is the trick here? The trick is that the photograph has been turned upside down. The horizon line is at the bottom of the frame. Reality is clearly depicted beneath it. And the reflection blooms from that like a magic-mushroom forest on water. It is strange that other than a glancing reference to the "unusual perspective" the museum didn't mention this. Indeed, you can find instances online of this image incorrectly displayed "right-side-up." The trick is that he turned the image upside down. I am sure he is not the first to do so, but the result is lovely enough.
And the argument is: you should look at this rad reflection.
Or, something about the Dusseldorf school, I guess.
Here are a few more of my favorites.
Simone Nieweg (don't have the title)
Nieweg's art is described as dependent on very specific lighting and weather conditions to capture moments of calm. You should look at this rad forest.
Roni Horne, from From Some Thames, Group 0 (2000)
My photographs do not do the colors of these justice. "In minimalistic style, the works of Roni Horn deal with the changeability of natural phenomena and the construction of identities in the media of illustration, book, photography, and sculpture/installation." She says she focused on the Thames because it is the river with the most suicides per year. Or: you should look at this rad water.
But my favorite is the study of square meters of land in Germany:
And if you're ever over, I will exhort you to look at this rad grass!
***
The choice to depict "nature" is in many ways an interest in celebrating the magnificence of something nobody can take any credit for. We just witness it. And so of course we have to explore the experience of witnessing it, and inhabiting it, and interacting with it, as well.
Some of this is done at the personal scale. The tent photo above is one way.
There was an interesting video of a guy standing in the Amazon jungle and screaming at the top of his lungs. There was another video where he dug a hole big enough to drop an entire tree into, chopped down a nearby tree with an axe, and dragged that tree into the hole he dug, and buried it there. He appears to have complex emotions about deforestation, but honestly this kind of performance does very little for me if the artist isn't at risk of political suppression (the topic of a later post, I hope, in the Soviet context).
By far the best of this bunch - personal-scale interactions - were a beautiful series by Vanja Bucan:
These are produced by taking a picture of something, then printing it, then marching it out to the place where it was taken and setting it up in front of the original landscape, and then playing around with it with human models in various ways, and taking pictures of that. The one in the middle is everybody's favorite, and they make a big deal out of the fact that the plant in the photo is poisonous. But I'm a big fan of the papaya too.
But my favorites were more the landscape-scale interactions, including one of a strip mine:
And a digital rendering of a protective barrier over a river:
And an electron microscope's view of atmospheric pollution:
And I think I'll leave it at that. This was one of my favorite art exhibits of all time. Although it did not give me much of a sense that artists have captured the ethos of environmentalism, they certainly are doing a great deal to describe the experience of viewing the natural world. Which, I guess, is why they called it Visions of Nature in the first place.
Some other favorites:
Kahilaniemi, Romanticism and Patriotism Studies
Whelan, Darkness Had No Need #3 (2017)
No comments:
Post a Comment