“Nature transformed through industry is a predominant theme in my work. I set a course to intersect with the great ages of man; from stone, to minerals, oil, transportation, silicon, and so on. To make these ideas visible I search for subjects that are rich in detail and scale yet open in their meaning. Recycling yards, mine tailings, quarries, refineries and shipbreaking yards are all places that are outside of our normal experience, yet we all partake of their output on a daily basis.”
-Edward Burtynsky
Edward Burtynsky Photographic Works
01/29/2004
01/28/2004
Paul Virilio - Museum of accidents
"Contemporary civilization differs in one particularly distinctive feature from those which preceded it: speed. The change has come about within a generation," noted the historian Marc Bloch, writing in the nineteen-thirties. This situation brings in its wake a second feature: the accident. The progressive spread of catastrophic events do not just affect current reality, but produce anxiety and anguish for coming generations. Daily life is becoming akaleidoscope of incidents and accidents, catastrophes and cataclysms, in which we are endlessly running up against the unexpected, which occurs out of the blue, so to speak. In a shattered mirror, we must then learn to discern what is impending more and more often-but above all more and more quickly, those events coming upon us inopportunely, if not indeed simultaneously. Faced with an accelerated temporality which affects mores and Art as much as it does international politics, there is one particularly urgent necessity: to expose and to exhibit the Time accident.
Fondation Cartier - Paul Virilio
LUC TUYMANS
Room, 1999
oil on canvas /177.0 X 126.0 cm
Body, 1990
oil on canvas / 49.0 X 35.0 cm
The Rabbit, 1994
oil on canvas / 59.3 X 71.5 cm
Mayhem, 2003
Oil on canvas
Born Mortsel, Belgium 1958 Lives and works in Antwerp, Belgium
'Pictures, if they are to have effect, must have tremendous intensity of silence, a filled silence or void', the Flemish artist Luc Tuymans has said. 'The observer should become motionless before the picture [and] freeze [in] a kind of picture-terror. I show pictures with a direct intention. The effect they should have on the viewer resembles an assault that lie or she does not experience directly, but from a distance, initially. When he or she comes closer, this assault should loom again, but on a different level. Something quite unmistakable then triggers certain emotions, makes certain demands. This can only come about in a certain silence, [like] the silence before a storm. It is not about developing feelings of melancholy, but about a certain form of deja vu.
Before turning to painting, Tuymans was a filmmaker;
perhaps his decision to change media was for the sake of silencing his images. The silence of Tuymans' paintings is extreme, like that of a corpse. Indeed, his works seem more dead than alive, resurrecting the ghosts of past histories that are themselves shrouded in silence, such as Nazism or Belgium's colonial past. Elsewhere Tuymans revives the cloudy, forgotten details of personal memory, for example in the patterns of a kitchen towel, the illustrations of a medical handbook, or the recollections of a play that Tuymans attended with his parents in the 1970s. His pictures are
discomforting, as if diseased, and yet their delicacy and connection with the past call to mind gentle memories of childhood, of partial glimpses into an adult world of hushed secrets.
'Painting is utterly soundproof', Tuymans has said. 'It does not make noise, or remind one of music.' His work does not stray into simulating other media but remains very deliberately confined to what painting does best: it is utterly mute, still and flat. It functions through genres: landscape, portrait and still-life. The colours are faded, like a whisper, while his choice of images borders on the indecipherable; his is neither a random nor fully understandable choice of subject matter. 'Everything could be painting', says Tuymans, 'Or, in fact, everything just is painting.'
No discussion of contemporary painting is complete without referring to Tuymans' work. Throughout the 1990s up to the present he has, perhaps more than am oilier recent painter, kept alive the possibility of painting as a viable art form whilst admitting to its position on the 'peripheral outskirts of the art world'. 'Painting should mute its image, deny its real proportions and colour, and be difficult in terms of being memorized', he has said. His silent pictures cannot be memorized, yet remain unforgettable.
(Hamza Walker)
FELIX GONZALEZ-TORRES
Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), 1991
multicoloured candies individually wrapped in cellophane, endless supply
ideal weight: 175 lb, overall dimension variable
Untitled (Death by Gun)
Begun 1990. Nine-inch stack of photolithographs,
sheet: 44 15/16 x 32 15/16"
http://momawas.moma.org/collection/depts/prints_books/blowups/prints_books_022.html
Born Guaimaro, Cuba, 1957 Died Miami, USA, 1996
When the Guggenheim Museum organized a survey exhibition of Felix Gonzalez-Torres' work in 1995, he spoke passionately about the artists who most influenced him, as if paying back a debt for the examples they provided. Citing the appropriationist strategies of Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince and Cindy Sherman, he aligned himself with their postmodernist (and in some cases feminist) critiques of representation. He too expropriated existing aesthetic styles, infusing allegedly neutral Minimalist sculpture and Conceptual text-based work with both political and autobiographical content, and not distinguishing between the two. His was an art of infiltration and subversion, seducing with great formal beauty to introduce commentary on critical cultural issues such as equal rights and the efficacy of democracy. The catalogue accompanying the Guggenheim retrospective positioned Gonzalez-Torres' work as an extension of 1980s postmodernist art. While this genealogy remains true today, in retrospect his unique practice functions as much, if not more, as a bridge to the art of the 1990s that directly engages its audiences.
Best known for his infinitely replenishable sculptural slacks of imprinted paper and endlessly refillable mounds of edible sweets, Gonzalez-Torres created works that exploit systems of mechanical reproduction and distribution. They also explore the ever-eroding distinctions between privacy and publicity, while speaking metaphorically of the socially disenfranchised. An openly gay man, Gonzalez-Torres also infused his art with poetic references to both homosexuality and the tragedy of loss endured by a generation scarred by the AIDS epidemic. His premature death at the age of
thirty-nine ended what promised to be a brilliant artistic career, although the impressive body of work he completed during his brief life has proved profoundly important to a generation of younger artists investigating methods of distribution, audience participation and process-oriented aesthetic strategies.
Singularly generous, Gonzalez-Torres literally gave his art away. The sheets of coloured paper or photographs from his stacks flow like a virus outward from the gallery or museum into the community at large to spread intimate messages of love and loss, or heated missives against the National Rifle Association, inadequate healthcare and the like. This munificence parallels the open invitation Gonzalez-Torres offered his viewers to interpret the work as they wished, in recognition that meaning is always contingent on the context in which it is encountered.
Clues to Gonzalez-Torres' own references are often embedded in the parenthetical subtitles he assigned to each 'untitled' work. For example, a coiled pair of identical, illuminated light strings subtitled Lovers - Paris (1993) subtly suggests a same-sex couple. Diagonal lines on sheets of graph paper subtitled Bloodwork (1989) become ciphers for one's mortality. And a festive, 175-pound, corner spill of brightly wrapped candy subtitled Portrait of Ross in L.A. (1991) transmutes into a depiction of the artist's boyfriend before he succumbed to AIDS. Through such allusions, Gonzalez-Torres reintroduced what was sublimated in much postmodernist art - erotic desire, visual pleasure, vulnerability with a potent but quiet poignancy. (Nancy Spector)
01/27/2004
photography + identity
Umberto Boccioni: Io Noi Boccioni, Photomontage (ca.1907/1910)
Marcel Duchamp
Henri-Pierre Roche
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