MANIPULATED FORMS

This major retrospective of the work of Canadian photographer Jeff Wall brings together over fifty stunning works produced between the late 1970s and the present day, providing an overview of his entire career. Jeff Wall has exhibited his photographs internationally for the twenty-five years and is one of the most intriguing and influential artists working today. He has also played a key role in establishing photography as a contemporary art form.

Jeff Wall

Restoration 1993Transparency in lightbox 1190 x 4895 mmMuseum of art, LucerneCinematographic photograph© The artist

Restoration 1993, shows actual conservators apparently in the process of working on the restoration of a panoramic painting in Lucerne, Switzerland. The title also evokes Wall’s own complex relationship with his artistic past. Although Wall used a 360° panorama camera, he chose to capture only 180°, or half the panorama, digitally collaging overlapping exposures. This idea was important to Wall. 'The exclusion of the space behind the camera is measured in a way that no other picture I've made is so closely measured... And of course there's a woman looking into the space... into part of the picture you can't see, to make a little accent to that notion that there's a space outside.'

In the early 1990s, Wall began to use computers in the construction of his photographs. He commented: 'I've been able to experiment with a new range of subjects or types of picture that weren't really possible for me before... I have always considered my work to be a mimesis of the effects of cinema and of painting (at least traditional painting), and so the fictional, formal and poetic part of it has always been very important.' While his use of digital montage is obvious in his more implausible scenarios, Wall also regularly applies the process to his realistic pictures.

Artist Statement

A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai) 1993Transparency in lightbox 2290 x 3770 mmTate. Purchased with assistance from the Patrons of New Art through the Tate Gallery Foundation and from the National Art Collections Fund 1995Cinematographic photograph© The artist

This work is one of Wall's earliest digital montages. It refers directly to a woodblock print by Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai. Wall transposes the nineteenth-century Japanese scene to a contemporary cranberry farm near Vancouver. Amateur actors play the odd assortment of rural and city characters, surprised by the forces of nature. It required over 100 photographs, taken over the course of more than a year, to achieve a seamless montage that gives the illusion of capturing a real moment in time.

Wall is best known for his large-scale colour transparencies, mounted in wall-hung light boxes which combine the seductive glow of a cinema screen with the physical presence of sculpture. Wall's works are typified by two approaches, which he characterises as either cinematographic or documentary. For his innovative mise-en-scènes, Wall has pioneered state-of-the-art film and digital techniques to compose meticulously staged scenes. At first glance they often appear to be snapshots but, on closer inspection, the multi-layered content sometimes seems too bizarre or complex to be real. Wall draws upon a myriad of references from art history, particularly nineteenth century painting. His A Picture for Women 1979 directly references Edouard Manet's Un Bar aux Folies-Bergère whilst the iconic A Sudden Gust of Wind (After Hokusai) 1993 pays homage to Hokusai's exquisite Japanese print. Wall also draws upon cinematic techniques by using actors as protagonists, artificial lighting, staged compositions, and a narrative technique which leads you to contemplate the unseen events leading to the moment depicted. These stunning depictions of urban life tell stories about people, their habitat and the everyday yet  enigmatic way they interact.

Practice

The Destroyed Room 1978Transparency in lightbox 1590 x 2340 mmNational Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Purchased 1988Cinematographic photograph© The artist

The Death of Sardanapalus (1827) by Eugène Delacroix,

In this multi-character tableau, Wall presents a highly orchestrated fantasy that mixes black humour with pathos.Dead Troops Talk (a vision after an ambush of a Red Army patrol, near Moqor, Afghanistan, winter 1986) 1992.In Dead Troops Talk, Wall merges conventions from war and horror movies with those of the history painting of previous eras to create an elaborate, grotesque fiction. The picture presents a hallucinatory scene in which soldiers who have just been killed on the battlefield are re-animated, engaging with each other in what the artist describes as a 'dialogue of the dead'. As the title indicates, the troops are a Soviet patrol ambushed in Afghanistan during the war and occupation of the 1980s. Each figure or group seems to respond differently to the experience of death and reanimation. The three soldiers clowning with their own wounds provide a note of macabre levity. Wall has suggested that their black humour is as plausible a reaction to their circumstances as the more serious or distressed responses of their comrades. As carefully constructed as a film or epic painting, the work was shot in a large temporary studio, involving performers and costume, special effects and make-up professionals. The figures were photographed separately or in small groups and the final image was assembled as a digital montage.

Artwork

Dead Troops Talk (A vision after an ambush of a Red Army patrol, near Moqor, Afghanistan, winter 1986) 1992Transparency in lightbox 2290 x 4170 mmMr. David PincusCinematographic photograph© The artist

Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima. Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima is a famous photograph taken on 23 February

1945, by Joe Rosenthal.

Yasumasa Morimura

Picture for Women 1979Transparency in lightbox 1425 x 2045 mmCollection of the artist. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, NewYorkCinematographic photograph© The artist

Picture for Women was inspired by Edouard Manet's masterpiece A Bar at the Folies-Bergères (1881–82). In Manet's painting, a barmaid gazes out of frame, observed by a shadowy male figure. The whole scene appears to be reflected in the mirror behind the bar, creating a complex web of viewpoints. Wall borrows the internal structure of the painting, and motifs such as the light bulbs that give it spatial depth. The figures are similarly reflected in a mirror, and the woman has the absorbed gaze and posture of Manet's barmaid, while the man is the artist himself. Though issues of the male gaze, particularly the power relationship between male artist and female model, and the viewer's role as onlooker, are implicit in Manet's painting, Wall updates the theme by positioning the camera at the centre of the work, so that it captures the act of making the image (the scene reflected in the mirror) and, at the same time, looks straight out at us.

Picture for Women 1979

Edouard Manet, A Bar at the Folies Bergere, 1881,

Daughter of Art History (Theater A) 1990color photograph mounted on canvash: 70.87 x w: 96.87 in / h: 180.01 x w: 246.05 cmCourtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York

"The Two Fridas“ by Frida Kahlo

An Inner Dialogue with Frida Kahlo (Dialogue with Myself 1) 2001, color photograph, ed of 5: 76 3/4 x 69 inches ed of 10: 52 3/4 x 47 1/4 inches, Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York

Marcel Duchamp como Rrose Selavy foto de Man Ray 1920

Widely known as the artist who transforms himself into the Mona Lisa and movie actresses, Yasumasa Morimura has won international acclaim for his unique and avant-garde expression of 'beauty'. Since 1985, his focus has been his 'self-portrait series', consisting of unique reconstructions of art masterpieces in which the subject's face is substituted with that of Morimura himself. Through careful study and analysis of the themes, artists, and historical background of these works, Morimura searches out their raison d'etre and transforms them according to his own interpretations. His ability to deconstruct, subvert and simultaneously create an homage is what enables his work to continually defy categorisation.

Rembrandt van Rijn (1606, Leiden – 1669, Amsterdam)The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp., 1632Oil on canvas, 169.5 × 216.5 cm (66.73 × 85.24 in)

Portrait (Nine Faces), 1989color photograph, h: 71 x w: 92 in / h: 180.34 x w: 233.68 cmCourtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York

Daughter of Art History (Princess A), 1990 Medium  color photograph , h: 82.75 x w: 63 in / h: 210.18 x w: 160.02 cm

Las Meninas (1656, English: The Maids of Honour )

Analyse the artist's use of materials and his intentions in art making. In your response make reference to Pieter Breugel's Parable of the Blind and Yasumasa Morimura's Blinded by the Light.

“Yasumasa Morimura's Blinded by the Light is a clear appropriation of Pieter Breugel's Parable of the Blind. In close reference to the materials, techniques and art elements employed by both artists, we are able to understand how they communicate their ideas, feelings and effects in their artworks. Painted in 1568, Parable of the Blind is a religious painting where Breugel portrays "a single moment but implies a whole sequence of events." In the Gospel of St.

Artist Practice & Post-modern frame Analysis Example

Continued…

Matthew, Jesus tells a parable "If the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch." Breugel has linked the characters in a composition that's leads symbolically to disaster. The characters in the painting cross the diagonal ... ” “... fast, loose, immediate, and sometimes untraceable, but it gives a helping hand to artistic ideas like Morimura's. Morimura may be initially playing with Western assumptions of artistic importance, but he's also sometimes using technology that is further enabling the questioning of veracity. He creates a 3D tableaux to replicate the settings of the painting, then dresses and styles himself to resemble the figures in the painting; enters the scene and photographs himself as part of the scene. Morimura applies digital computer-scanning techniques that enables him to merge 6 images of himself in the same picture; image cloning. He also shows that fixed identity is an obsolete concept in our contemporary, by cross-dressing as females. Furthermore, we can ”

Pieter Bruegel 1525 – 1569The Parabel of the Blind.

Blinded by the Light 1991 Yasumasa Morimura self-portrait Type C photograph. This is a reconstruction of a 1568 painting by Pieter Brueghel - Parable for the Blind

Angels Descending a Staircase, 1991color photograph mounted on canvash: 102.5 x w: 89 in / h: 260.35 x w: 226.06 cmEdition/Set of 3Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York

Marcel Duchamp, 1912Nude Descending a Staircase (No.2)

Marcel Duchamp Descending Stairs, 1915 by Man Ray.

Andreas GurskyArtwork FrameVisually, Gursky is drawn to large, anonymous, man-made spaces—high-rise facades at night, office lobbies, stock exchanges, the interiors of big box retailers (See his print 99 Cent II Diptychon). In a 2001 retrospective, New York's Museum of Modern Art called the artist's work, "a sophisticated art of unembellished observation.

It is thanks to the artfulness of Gursky's fictions that we recognize his world as our own.“ Gursky’s style is enigmatic and deadpan. There is little to no explanation or manipulation on the works. His photography is straightforward.

Commercial ValueAs of early 2007, Gursky holds the record for highest price paid at auction for a single photographic image. His print 99 Cent II, Diptych, sold for GBP 1.7 million (USD $3.3 million) at Sotheby's, London.[7]

World / Audience / Frame

Andreas Gursky, Chicago Board of Trade II, 1999, C-print mounted to plexiglass in artist's frame 73 x 95 inches

He was born in Leipzig in 1955, but he grew up in Düsseldorf, the son of a commercial photographer. In the early 1980s, at Germany's State Art Academy, the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Gursky received strong training and influence from his teachers Hilla and Bernd Becher,[1] a photographic team known for their distinctive, dispassionate method of systematically cataloging industrial machinery and architecture.[2] A similar approach may be found in Gursky's methodical approach to his own, larger-scale photography. Other notable influences are the British landscape photographer John Davies, whose highly detailed high vantage point images had a strong effect on the street level photographs Gursky was then making, and to a lesser degree the American photographer Joel Sternfeld.

Artist Frame / Education

Workers 2006

Before the 1990s, Gursky did not digitally manipulate his images. In the years since, Gursky has been frank about his reliance on computers to edit and enhance his pictures, creating an art of spaces larger than the subjects photographed.[citation needed]

Writing in The New Yorker magazine, the critic Peter Schjeldahl called these pictures "vast," "splashy," "entertaining," and "literally unbelievable.“ In the same publication, critic Calvin Tomkins described Gursky as one of the "two masters" of the "Düsseldorf" school. In 2001, Tomkins described the experience of confronting one of Gursky's large works.

Artwork / Career and style

Andreas Gursky (January 15, 1955) is a German visual artist known for his enormous architecture and landscape color photographs, often employing a high point of view. He is represented by the Matthew Marks Gallery in New York and by Sprüth Magers Berlin London in Europe.The German über-photographer Andreas Gursky was the perfect pre-9/11 artist. He excelled at portraying the border-to-border, edgeless hum and busy obliviousness of modern life, what Francis Fukuyama ridiculously declared “the end of history,” George W.S. Trow called “The Context of No Context,” and Rem Koolhaas dubbed “Junkspace.” Not only did Gursky seem to be critical of all this, but his handsome images of trading floors, hotel lobbies, raves, and landscapes were charged with a visual force and intellectual rigor that let you imagine that you were gleaning the grand schemes and invisible rhythms of commerce and consumption. Gursky’s new pictures are filled with visual amphetamine, but now they’re laced with psychic chloroform. He’s such a serious artist that this amphetamine is singular enough to sometimes offset the deadening effects so that his pictures occasionally impart a poetics of numbness and stupefaction.

Artist Frame

Andreas Gursky, Pyongyang  I & V, 2007.

Gursky is exhibiting eleven large pictures at Matthew Marks’s West 22nd Street space and four more giants at the gallery’s 24th Street address. All these pictures were made in Thailand, Europe, Japan, North Korea, and the Middle East. The photos of racing crews are as big as boats and are like billboard versions of Caravaggio and David paintings. Other images update Kurosawa’s pageantry and Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 film of the Nuremberg rallies. All are highly structured pictorial engines that inundate with spectacle and detail, then hollow out. Gursky still gives you a lot to ogle. In his series on North Korea’s annual Arirang Festival, where 80,000 gymnasts perform choreographed routines, you gape at this sea of humanity in a gigantic stadium, then notice shoelaces and smiles. In three lush pictures of Thailand’s so-called James Bond Islands, you scan hundreds of square miles of ocean but also spot teeny tourists on the sand. In a photo of a German asparagus farm, you gaze on numberless rows of crops yet can almost count individual stalks. On the annoying, overclever side, there’s May Day V, an image of a tall building wherein you can see hundreds of people through the windows, including, on the sixth floor, amid a gaggle of mugging guys, a grinning figure that turns out to be Gursky himself.

Artwork / Audience

Gursky's May Day V (2006), at Matthew Marks.

F1 Boxenstopp III. 2008

F1 Arial 2008

Camera position is the co-star of these pictures. Usually Gursky places his lens high above, far away, on cranes, or even on helicopters. His pictures often entail multiple views of the same subject, different subjects seamlessly spliced together, and digital manipulation. Gursky loves ordered spaces and repeating grids. As he puts it, “My preference for clear structures is the result of my desire—perhaps illusory—to keep track of things and maintain my grip on the world.” He’s especially maniacal when he portrays people. “I am never interested in the individual,” he coolly says, “but in the human species and its environment.” There is no one person in a Gursky; everyone is part of a multitude. The biggest picture at 22nd Street is F1 Boxenstopp III, which portrays two Formula 1 pit crews at work. This twenty-footer is one of a series of four photographs, and they come in an edition of six, not counting artists’ proofs. They’re reportedly priced at $750,000 per image (the gallery won’t confirm that figure). Maybe it doesn’t matter, but that’s $18 million altogether. Once you stop gasping at that number, you may notice that F1’s panoramic composition is so stilted and melodramatic that it resembles a nineteenth-century tableau vivant or a neoclassic history painting. The figures and lighting owe much to photographers like Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Gregory Crewdson, and Jeff Wall. Gursky has digitally pieced together numerous shots from various locations, including his studio, making F1 less a photograph than an invention, and what’s tedious about it is how coyly self-referential it is. Directly above the pit crews are onlookers in a glassed-in observation deck. Many of these folks take photos; a few have their hands against the clear surface of the skybox.

Artwork & Audience / Frame

Continued…

Thus, the frontality of the image and the idea of multiple views of one subject is stressed. Standing between the crews is a sexy blonde in lace-up leather stilettos, hot pants, and a skull on her low-slung belt buckle, which is conveniently positioned almost at the center of the picture. Is Gursky implying that men are drones and women are merely saints, sluts, sirens, or fodder for fashion photography, cheesecake, and pornography? Or maybe he’s admitting that he’s out of ideas. Better, because it looks like an abstract painting, is Bahrain I, a beige-and-black depiction of a racetrack in the desert. More fantasy like is Kamiokande, an underground observatory in Japan where we see a tank containing 50,000 tons of water, surrounded by thousands of golden orbs—sensitive light detectors—that are evidently watching for supernovas. It’s like a cave with 100,000 golden eyes. Two tiny boatmen in the foreground make you think about crossing into the afterlife. Speaking of, there’s Cheops, in which Gursky gives us a vertical slice of the Great Pyramid. This picture escapes Gursky’s gravitas because it is a photo not of a pyramid but of labor, organization, slavery, and hubris. It contains a glimmer of Gursky’s old critical bite. Otherwise, as sensational and buzzy as some of these pictures are, Gursky is in too much control and not adding anything new or daring to his work. Many of his recent photos light up, then empty out.

Dubai World III, 2008Andreas GurskyC-Print Photograph, h: 237 x w: 342.5 x d: 6.2 cm

"The first time I saw photographs by Andreas Gursky...I had the disorienting sensation that something was happening—happening to me, I suppose, although it felt more generalized than that. Gursky's huge, panoramic color prints—some of them up to six feet high by ten feet long—had the presence, the formal power, and in several cases the majestic aura of nineteenth-century landscape paintings, without losing any of their meticulously detailed immediacy as photographs. Their subject matter was the contemporary world, seen dispassionately and from a distance."

Audience Frame / Critic

Andreas Gursky, 99 Cent II Diptychon, 2001, C-print mounted to acrylic glass, 2x 207 x 307 centimeter

Andreas Gursky, Shanghai, 2000, C-print mounted to plexiglass, 119 x 81 inches

Patricia Piccinini

Issues / themes / art practice

Patricia Piccinini is an artist who works across a range of media including drawing, photography, sculpture and video. Her work tests the boundary between humans, other animals and biologically engineered species; between the real, the imagined and the scientifically possible. Piccinini is well known for her sculptural work The Young Family 2002‐3 featured in the Australian Pavilion of the 2003 Venice Biennale.

Piccinini’s video work is a central part of her art practice. The moving image is often regarded as having a powerful impact in terms of communicating truth. As an audience we are accustomed to viewing film and video that appears life‐like. Piccinini manipulates the truth status of the moving image in The Gathering 2007. She uses familiar subjects to coax us into a false sense of security. The video begins with a middle class suburban home. However, its empty illuminated rooms suggest that all is not as it seems. In a series of vignettes Piccinini focuses on everyday details within the house such as the staircase, the curtains and the light fittings. These stills generate suspense and a feeling of unease. We are unsure of what to expect next. A young girl is asleep on the carpeted floor in one of the rooms. Gradually seven small marsupials emerge from behind curtains and under beds to surround her. These extraordinarily life‐like creatures press alarmingly close to the child who remains oblivious in her slumber. They seem to be at once menacing and protective. One of the creatures displays its young, squirmy pink embryos that emerge momentarily from a pouch. The video finishes with a final vignette that focuses on an Indian wall decoration. This idyllic scene of a man and woman appears unrelated to the dream‐like strangeness of the preceding events, leaving us to question the relationship between the unfolding drama and this final scene.

Practice

Piccinini combines two important influences in The Gathering – popular culture and art history. The opening vignettes and the unusual soundtrack are reminiscent of the techniques used in suspense and thriller movies. Like most suspense films made in the past fifty years, the setting for The Gathering is far removed from the Gothic mansions of earlier traditions. The sense of suspense is heightened when the strange and unexpected threatens the everyday or commonplace. The Gathering also references Surrealist painting traditions. The dramatic focus on everyday details within the house renders the familiar, strange. This tendency to make the home unfamiliar or ‘uncanny’ is found in the work of many Surrealist artists including Dorothea Tanning and Pierre Roy who also stage unexpected encounters within the home environment in their paintings.

Practice / Artwork

The Gathering, 2006, Video

According to Patricia Piccinini: I think my creatures are actually more mythological than scientific. They are chimeras that I construct in order to tell stories that explain the world that I live in but cannot totally understand or control. Like most myths they are often cautionary tales, but they are also often celebrations of these extraordinary beasts. Patricia Piccinini in conversation with Laura Fernandez Orgaz from The Naturally Artificial World, (tender) creatures, exhibition catalogue Artium2007 Available online: www.patriciapiccinini.net/

Quote

I think if people are disturbed by my work it is because it asks questions about fundamental aspects of ourexistence — about our artificiality, about our animalness, about our responsibilities towards our creations, our children and our environment — and these questions should be easy to answer but they are not. What I love is when people argue over what the work is trying to say, when they begin the process of examining the issues from a number of perspectives. I love watching a person move from an initial sense of revulsion against the strangeness of my creations towards a sense of understanding or sympathy. I love it when people realise that all this stuff is actually about our lives today. Patricia Piccinini in conversation with Laura Fernandez Orgaz from The Naturally Artificial World, (tender) creatures, exhibition catalogue Artium2007 Available online: www.patriciapiccinini.net/

Patricia Piccinini

Patricia Piccinini – Critical reviews/ quotes

Realised in media ranging from the digital to the sculptural, the highly finished surfaces of her (Piccinini’s) artworks are important to the success of her project. Her strange machines are seamless and beautifully detailed; her creatures show every follicle and freckle. Piccinini’s process relies on the expertise of many collaborators: scientists and upholsterers, embroiderers and custom detailers. Her role is often a directorial one — her drawings and storyboards guide the dialogic process between artist and maker. Stella Brennan ‘Border Patrol’ exhibition catalogue In Another Life 2006 Wellington City Gallery, New Zealand Available online: www.patriciapiccinini.net/

Despite their constant reinstatement of disbelief, the scale, sound and motion of Piccinini’s installation works absorb us. Instead of an ersatz experience of an inaccessible natural world, the artist has created a place where it is the experience that is real, and the natural world that is synthetic. It is not the real world but still it is a real experience; life but not as we know it. Indeed, for Piccinini, it is precisely their synthetic composition that makes these environments real. Peter Hennessey ‘Patricia Piccinini – Installations: What is installation?’ 2001 Available online: www.patriciapiccinini.net/

Liter, 2010

David Rosetzky works predominantly in video and photographic formats, creating scenarios in which human behaviour, interactions, individuality and identity come under intimate observation. Technically and aesthetically precise, his slick portraits resemble the idealized images found in high end advertising screen culture.

Rosetzky has been making portraits since the early 1990s. His stylized, moody and strikingly beautiful videos, photographs, animations, sculptures and drawings are presented in complex installations that explore the central themes of identity, subjectivity, contemporary culture and community. Rosetzky is primarily interested in the ways in which relationships with others shape a sense of self and group belonging. Artifice, illusion, deceit and anxiety are subtle themes that extend across his practice.

Fashion, with its emphasis on surface and materiality, provides an interesting counterpoint to Rosetzky's interest in layering and portraiture and the relationship between interiority and exteriority, reality and fantasy, authenticity and artificiality.

David Rosetzky

Artworks

Nothing Like This 2007video still from 16mm film transfer to DVD, colour, sound, 24 mins38 secs, looped

Without You, 2003/2004, single channel digital video, duration: 10:40

I made Without You at the end of 2003 beginning of 2004. It was a work commissioned by the National Gallery of Victoria to be part of an exhibition in Japan. As we had to have subtitles made for another video work of mine in the show – which was very costly – I needed to come up with something that didn’t rely on dialogue or voice-over, which much of my previous work had done. I wanted to consider in this new work how others inform and almost become part of our selves – whether through memory or interpersonal relationships.

I made still images from digital video footage which were then cut by hand with a scalpel. The collaged elements were then re-shot at two frames per second to form an old – school style animated morphing. Without You questions the boundaries where our selves begin and end – an idea that is communicated using a purely visual language.

Without You 2003-04