Signs of a Struggle: Photography in the Wake of Postmodernism | V&A | London

Text by Matt Swain

This display, which is a forerunner for the V&A's forthcoming exhibition Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990, explores photographs that make reference to themselves as well as other media, demonstrating the longevity and pervading influence of Postmodernist photography over a 30 year period starting in the 1970s. You can read a preview of the upcoming show in the current issue of Aesthetica which is available here.

The images, which can initially seem superficial, link eras and media ensuring that there is a translation beyond surface depth. They all carry a strong sense of individual style with the duality of connection, this being the crucial link to their place in time as well as the here and now. Scenarios are built or staged and then quite wilfully destroyed, existing only for the purposes of that photograph. The works here, almost 40 photographs, are loosely arranged by theme and are by some of the most influential Postmodernist artists, demonstrating a wide variety of styles and techniques.

David Hockney's Photography is Dead, Long Live Painting (1995) successfully sets the tone, showing a Get Well Soon card containing a photograph of sunflowers next to Hockney's painting of them, effectively posing the question as to whether a painting of something can ever be more beautiful than a photograph. Richard Prince, who has been taking sections of advertising images from posters and magazines since the 1970s and making "re-photographs", is represented here with the Marlboro man in Untitled (Cowboys) (1986), questioning consumerism and the environment in which such advertisements are seen.

Cindy Sherman's renowned conceptual self-portraiture is exemplified in Untitled (1979) featuring Sherman as a Marilyn-style Hollywood star, captured on camera by the paparazzi. It is a defining moment in what it seeks to be, representing femininity in popular culture and displaying a typically classic sense of modernity. One Flesh (1985) by Helen Chadwick also addresses femininity albeit it from a different perspective, showing mother and baby with a golden placenta floating above, a Renaissance-style collage on cheaply produced photocopies in red, gold and blue, confronting conventional ideas about the human body, the sacred and the feminine.

Throughout, styles clash and mingle. The component parts are familiar but we see them reassembled in new ways, giving them new meaning or multiple meanings and forcing reappraisal, igniting our imagination and suspicion. Peter Kennard's Haywain with Cruise Missiles (1980) invades Constable's idyllic vision with a missile launcher on top of the horse-drawn cart. Tess Hurrell's Chaology no 1 (2006) effectively shows a flimsy, handmade model from cotton wool and talcum powder imitating a nuclear explosion. Ann Hardy took months to create her post-party scene for Untitled IV (2005), and then subsequently destroyed it. The interpretation of the creation remains on the surface, discarded urban objects contrasting with balloons, an unsettling, unfinished and recently vacated chaos.

Arguably the most effective work here is Claire Strand's Signs of a Struggle (2003), from which the display takes its title. This series of images fascinatingly builds scenes in living rooms, streets and gardens, an allegory of potentially paranormal activity and faked police crime scenes, staged yet utterly convincing. It is this authenticity that makes this real but fun. You are the outsider looking in with the clear knowledge that it is staged.

The later images possess a certain subtlety and humour not always apparent in some of the earlier works but it all somehow feels contemporary, raising questions about how photography is represented and about the meanings within the various layers. Almost without noticing, we are all becoming more accustomed to the idea of looking at two or more irreconcilable ideas as one and making sense of them. Despite some recent debate to the contrary, Postmodernism is alive and well. Who knew that obvious artifice, beautiful fakery and pastiche could be so enticing?

Signs of a Struggle: Photography in the Wake of Postmodernism continues at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London until 27 November 2011

vam.ac.uk

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Images:
Untitled IV (balloons) Ann Hardy (2005) Courtesy Anne Hardy, courtesy Maureen Paley, London and ArtSway

Last Week | Haegue Yang & Felix Gonzalez-Torres | The Sea Wall | Arnolfini | Bristol

Text by Regina Papachlimitzou

Setting the haunting installations of Berlin-based Korean artist Haegue Yang against the shimmering undulations of the work of late Cuban artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres, The Sea Wall presents an intriguing conversation between the two artists’ distinctive practices. Employing domestic materials stripped of their everyday use is a common thread running through the works of both Yang and Gonzalez-Torres, unexpectedly obliterating the demarcation between the artistic and private realms.

Gonzalez-Torres’s work Untitled (Water) (1995) proliferates throughout the galleries of Arnolfini. Upon entering the ground floor gallery, the visitor is confronted with possibly the largest of the work’s manifestations in the exhibition: a towering curtain of iridescent beads powerfully evocative of the sea, serves as a permeable boundary which the viewer is invited to appreciate on a visual, tactile, and auditory level. Dividing the gallery space about a third of the way in, the work half invites-half commands the viewer to experience it by walking through it, by running his or her fingers along it and listening to its constituent beads softly murmuring as they rub against each other. In the process, the personal becomes the social and eventually the political, when the work is considered through the filter of its position inside the Arnolfini, the Arnolfini’s strategic location in Bristol’s Floating Harbour, and the socio-historic connection between Bristol and sea-trade.

In contrast to Gonzalez-Torres’s invitingly sensual work, Yang’s 186.16m3/372.32m3 sharing the same gallery is forbidding in its near-intangible frailty. Consisting of equally-spaced threads so thin they almost disappear into the background work, this seemingly vulnerable installation nonetheless commands the gallery space by restricting access to it; and even though the threads could easily be torn apart by a careless visitor, the work nonetheless exudes an air of latent violence, reminiscent as it is of barbed wire enclosing space, forcibly keeping people out or in.

Several of Yang’s works showcased as part of The Sea Wall share this quality of quietly dividing, enclosing, and predicating space. To a significantly higher extent than other artists exhibiting at the Arnolfini, Yang very much inhabits the gallery spaces with her works –works in which the previously empty space they are situated in is as critically a part of the work as the material it consists of. The main gallery of the first floor is entirely taken up by Yang’s VIP’s Union, 2001-2011, a piece for which she personally contacted a number of VIPs belonging to the Bristol artistic and cultural sectors (including Nick Park of Aardman Animations, Arnolfini’s own Nav Haq, and even the Mayor of Bristol), to request for a temporary donation of a piece of their own furniture. This ragtag assortment of tables and chairs, arranged in small groups, thus transforms the gallery space into a silently heaving congregation: the furniture used is both pointedly empty and strangely animated, the close proximity of the chairs implying intimate conversation which is nonetheless countered by the obvious absence that inheres in the work as a whole.

In the smaller gallery to the left, Mirror Series plays with a similar, though inverted, use of space. The series comprises a number of mirror works that stubbornly reject passive reflection in favour of active response, while offering unanticipated alternatives in place of reflected image. Works such as Eyes Off, 2007, Back, 2006, and Ulterior Thought, 2007, each in its own way, defy the space they are situated in by either presenting their own, entirely unrelated image, or by refusing to reflect any image whatsoever. Consequently, the viewer expecting to see their own reflection is thus confronted with an abandoned room dotted with origami flowers, or with a mirror that seemingly prefers to reflect the wall. None of the mirrors in the series quite does what a mirror is expected to do, thus creating an unsettling feeling of doubt in the viewer, an impression of his or her presence being somehow called into question – the very validity of the viewer’s presence in the gallery challenged.

The Sea Wall brings together two artists who, through works of varying interactivity, invite the viewer to explore the role liminal spaces play in the subjective construction of identity. The space occupied by absence or defined by transience thus becomes as much a function of the viewer as a creation of the artist.

The Sea Wall: Haegue Yang with an inclusion by Felix Gonzalez-Torres continues until 4 September.

arnolfini.org.uk

Aesthetica Magazine
We hope you enjoy reading the Aesthetica Blog, if you want to explore more of the best in contemporary arts and culture you should read us in print too. You can buy it today by calling +44(0)1904 479 168. Even better, subscribe to Aesthetica and save 20%. Go on, enjoy!

Image:

Felix Gonzalez-Torres “Untitled” (Water) (1995)
Blue, clear and silver plastic beads, metal hanging rod.
Rue Saint-BenoÎt, 2008
Installation of eight sculptures
Installation shot, Arnolfini 2011
Photo: Jamie Woodley

Ryan Gander: Locked Room Scenario | Londonnewcastle Depot | London

Text by Charles Danby

There were momentary points of sensory poetic and visual intrigue within Ryan Gander’s Locked Room Scenario, the optical slightness of a darkened corridor that led to an unwitting approach of ones own shadow in a space indeterminate in scale, direction and makeup. Here there was an overwhelming sense that the ceiling was narrowing like an all too familiar cinematic illusion. Odd shafts of light, such as the thrown-back light of a slide projector, were all that illuminated the environment. The scenario was entirely compelling.

Added to this there were plenty of locked doors, a number of which flanked a (or the) locked room. The locked room was circumvented by a network of constructed and altered corridors that disclosed varying views of the entombed artworks (or further props within an artwork), the vistas becoming more explicit as further routes were navigated. But such disclosure led to little, the glimpsed ‘supposed artworks’ when seen most clearly echoed with little more than the familiar. A large obtusely figurative amorphous (Yves Kline blue) fabric clad sculpture, a heavily designed wooden lectern with formal propped image arrangements. These were regular Gander artworks pretending through conceit not to be, and through a transparency of that conceit to be again - but as something else (perhaps). Ultimately that something else was not so much elusive as not necessarily that interesting, and perhaps it was that lack that ultimately appeared underwhelming.

Gander’s works are connective, in spatial proximity and across time, works are connected to other works through undisclosed and occasionally ungraspable logics. Single strands (and one line jokes) multiplied, cross-fed and interwoven, parts easily unpicked, parts easily missed. It is this methodology that was here transformed to the physical world, to be played out through the wandering of the viewer, their situation of experience also being the work. The work was an arena to be explored, with each encountered door as readily leading somewhere as nowhere. Within this the disparity between the constructed elements and the manipulations of existing aspects of the building created fault lines that perhaps highlight and reflect where the translation between the methodologies that Gander ordinarily utilises to link detached autonomous artworks failed to match with those that, in this case, propose to link stage with environment as artwork.

Gander’s works propose (through the vehicle of narrative) that there are certain logics to be ‘got’, in someway understood (even if the dislodging of this notion is what Gander might ultimately be interested in). In ‘getting’, which in itself may be no more than witnessing or experiencing, Gander solicits a sense of missing. For Gander the emperor’s clothes are both new and worn through. In the case of the Locked Room Scenario the tropes and artworld plays are apparent, all too predictable, all too internalised. A disused warehouse in a slightly (but not too much) out of the way location. A pile of mixed sized post and packages sent to the address (addressed to the fictional artists of the exhibition at the fictional gallery of its running – perhaps but not necessarily connecting to the St Martin’s art school project that the title appears to assume). A printed timeline contextualising the conceit of the fictional artists, their interaction with artworld events and artists. Within this timeline photographs of the artists appear in customary documentary monochrome, Gander exposing the mythologies of documentation within art historical heritage. Unravelling ideas through multiple fractures is an active part of Gander’s strategy. On a postcard stand, the ‘artworks’ seen only in glimpses were revealed as printed postcard images, set to standard museum fare. The amorphous blue structure (in the postcard) is seen with a cardboard sign that reads, ‘If I was monochrome I would be better appreciated’.

Characters, amateur or otherwise actors were also present, mixing, obstructing and discretely disclosing narratives. Polite graffiti on a side and back wall, and a skip filled with the waste material, a prominence of blue felt fabric, were further staged vignettes within the expansive tableau, but their transparency seemed only to add to an overstretched signposting of a constructed conceit rather than offer further dimension to it.

The St Martin’s Locked Room (1969) was about an empty space, a space not for the problematic clutter of rhetoric or expectation but a space for extracting underlying issues through time, activity and community. While such sentiment has permeated art schools and subsequent studio practices its flipside arguably lies in a counter point of circular return, a leaning on the past, a construction of fiction from a point of empty vacuum in lieu of a concrete present.

Where Gander’s strength is best deployed in the Locked Room Scenario is in the small (non narrative) material details of composition, choreography and construction rather than in its overall logic or outcome. In many ways the overall is a distraction from the parts and fragments. The moments of intrigue are those that articulate and celebrate materials and ideas rather than those that over-expose them or unwittingly enforce their separation.

Ryan Gander Locked Room Scenario, Londonnewcastle Depot, London
30 August - 23 October

artangel.org.uk

Aesthetica Magazine
We hope you enjoy reading the Aesthetica Blog, if you want to explore more of the best in contemporary arts and culture you should read us in print too. You can buy it today by calling +44(0)1904 479 168. Even better, subscribe to Aesthetica and save 20%. Go on, enjoy!

Image:
Locked Room Scenario – Ryan Gander
Photographer Julian Abrams
Commissioned and produced by Artangel with the support of Londonewcastle and the Lisson Gallery