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КАТЕГОРИИ:






The Boundaries of Light and Shadow




 

The advent of photography changed the course of art history permanently. Throughout the ages images of noblemen, historic events and landscapes had been preserved on canvas. Photography usurped this role of recording history, just like the industrial revolution rendered manual labor in great part obsolete. Subsequently the purpose of paintings was altered and artists forced to find new and more subjective motifs. They became less restricted in the sense that now they were able to give their imagination free rein, paint their own musings and what they sensed in their surroundings on totally different premises. Impressionism came to the fore, then surrealism, and a host of other movements that kept themselves utterly beyond tangible reality or on its periphery. Photography meanwhile enjoyed great popularity as a medium for preserving the image of people and various occasions and thereby replaced the historical painting. Many considered the advent of photography to be the death of painting but at the same time the new form was perceived as a rather vulgar mode of recording, not least after the masses acquired cheap cameras to take on holiday and use to preserve memories of friends and relatives in a life-like form. Photographers were taking snapshots for newspapers on the one hand and portraits of family and the gentry on the other. But just like painting, photography has nonetheless retained its cultural significance and has in the last decades become an accepted art form.

 

The Fluxus Movement, which came into being as a certain reaction to abstract art in the sixties, took full advantage of photography. In this country, Dieter Roth was the herald of this movement and the SUM people, with Sigurður Guðmundsson in the vanguard, embraced the new techniques to express their ideas. The strong connection between photography and “high art” has not least been cemented because of its position in contemporary art, not only as a record of individual works but as an integral part of it. Photographs form the core of the works of many of today’s best-known visual artists, along with motion pictures and the growing field of computer graphics. Some of them work almost exclusively with photographs, e.g., Cindy Sherman, or use them regularly with other media and materials, Ólafur Eliasson and Roni Horn, a good friend to all things Icelandic, being a case in point What they have in common is seeing photography as one of the many media to express their vision. Rather revealingly, these artists don't title themselves photographers. Those who have completed specialized studies in photography rarely call themselves artists, but the boundaries between those two fields are pretty nebulous. Some photographers only exhibit their work in galleries and museums; perhaps to avoid being branded artisans and to make a name for themselves in the art world. Others restrict themselves mainly to magazines, e.g. Páll Stefánsson who, with his panoramas of Icelandic nature, paved the way for its resurrection as the salient symbol of the nation at the beginning of the eighties, just like Georg Guðni exalted the landscape anew a bit later as a worthy motif for painters.

 

It is not obvious when a photograph is the work of a photographer or could be a photographic work by a visual artist and what makes it a work of art in that case, other than the institutionalized or ideological context. Do the boundaries lie only on the social level, in the struggle between the different fields of the visual arts or is there a real aesthetic difference? Or is perhaps the only difference inherent in the linguistic solecism of the word “difference”? All things being equal, there is no unassailable aesthetic epicenter, it shifts back and forward, up and down, according to the Zeitgeist and is governed by how society and its various components bestow value on these things. The artistic law of gravity belongs in the irrigation systems of information technology where the powers of conviction (i.e. money and so-called human resources) mostly lie at each moment. The power of conviction attracts to itself the common faith which in turn spreads around and lays the foundation for accepted opinions. Subsequently they become part and parcel of the curriculum, our values, outlook on life and possibilities.

 

Ideas are potential objects, usually bad objects. Our understanding of the art of centuries past has everything to do with how we see things now. It is a bogus notion that time will eventually separate the wheat from the chaff, because modernity forms our interpretation of history to no lesser extent than the past governs the future. To boot, as will be a matter of common knowledge within a century, time doesn't exist. For example people were less than impressed with the Early Renaissance painter Piero della Francesca until cubism became the order of the day. And the world of music didn’t prick up its ears to J.S. Bach until the Jew Moses Mendelssohn resuscitated him with his concerts long after the master passed away. When the Canadian phenomenon of a pianist Glen Gould visited Russia in 1957 and regaled the nomenklatura mostly with partites by Bach, communism verged on ideological bankruptcy among the music world’s elite who had renounced the Bible, as Bach had indeed been one of the main sources of spiritual salvation for the clergy He is somehow so divinely mechanical almost Newtonian. What is the cream of the crop today might be rendered obsolete tomorrow and what was obsolete yesterday could become de rigueur the day after tomorrow, unless artists operate on an extrasensory cosmic plane like Bach. But this is of course a very contemporary outlook. Through the fish-eye lens of history at large most things appear out of focus, receding back to their original state of quantum fuzziness.

 

This book, published in commemoration of the exhibition by the same name at the Akureyri Art Museum, conjures up history, society and the individual in a flash. Nowadays, the role of photography has mainly been to sell us products, to inculcate us with a certain point of view and to create an image, along with enabling us to chase after the ghostly remnants of personal memories beyond smell or touch; it is a technical mode of compensation for that which cannot be retrieved and smacks a bit of the line of the eaten bread crumbs which lead only to Hansel and Gretchen being almost eaten themselves in the hut of the wicked witch. The apparatus monopolizes the visual language as the chief replacement for reality and the underwriter of “truth” in spite of being caught red-handed perpetrating many frauds and deceptions. And the usurpation by the computer in most areas has merely replenished the bag of visual trickery and illusions available on demand. By the same token, photography has been used as a political and societal diagnostic measure and the source of all kinds of philosophical ruminations.

 

The photographers gathered here were professionally trained in their area and restrict themselves exclusively to this medium. Most photographers today are employed by newspapers and magazines, they often work for the advertisement monolith and commonly run their own studios. Their photography is normally part and parcel of their “day job” and their photos rarely end up in museums or galleries. One could say that they don't belong incontrovertibly to that cultural realm, but few would doubt that all these are presentable artists. The staunchest supporters of cultural Apartheid posit that “real visual arts” create “worlds of their own”, while other visual arts reflect their environment with varying success and adapt this reflection to the commercial dictates of the mainstream. In their eyes photography is a craft, not an artistic discipline, more akin to design and the compromise of a democratic decision (i.e. abstract mediocrity) than a “purer” vision.

 

Only by restricting oneself exclusively within the confines of art proper can one somewhat disdainfully employ the hackneyed expression “art photography”.

 

The curator of this exhibition and the author of this book, Einar Falur Ingólfsson, who has extended knowledge of the history of photography is dearly of a different opinion, indeed, he is extensively educated in his field and works off and on as an independent artist The boundaries between design and art no longer present a Berlin Wall of sorts and they constantly become more and more blurry. Einar decided to present the best photographers of the country from the beginning, in his personal opinion, and line them up like a national soccer team. These artists are an addition to the group of many of the world’s finest photographers who have already exhibited their work at the Akureyri Art Museum, as well as artists who work with photographs, inter al. Nan Goldin, Roman Opalka, Orlan, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Lucinda Devlin, Andres Serrano and Spencer Tunick.

 

Passing such a stiff historical sentence by nominating a sort of timeless national team of photographers serves as a reminder that art and the whole spectrum of humanity is an incessant game played out according to certain rules and an aesthetic premise.

 

Of what interest would such a primitive soccer game be if not for the showcases like the bicycle kick, the header right into the comer of the goal, a thundering goal from midfield and scoring off the post, game strategy and dazzling displays? But there the comparison ends. In this team there is neither a forward, a goalkeeper nor a team captain. These were and are a bunch of solo players. What matters is what is done and how. And it’s also a matter of where and when in all this timelessness.

 

Yet what matters most is the referee. Einar puts his objective vision forth with riveting firmness. Here is no “professional” committee at work which shields itself behind an opaque majority decision. Because of Einar’s knowledge of foreign and Icelandic photography, his views offer insight into contemporary values, but at the same time, they are a reflection of his own personal vision and what drives him on. This personal vision lends the selection a credibility which should relieve us of the burden of always having to be for or against. On the other hand there is little that dissuades us from being swept along with him and enriching ourselves in the process, expanding our horizons as our own attitudes are merged with his understanding. This is to amass solid riches.

 

Hannes Sigurðsson, Director

 

Akureyri Art Museum

 

 






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