OLA RINDAL

For the manifesto A Criticism Review we invited different writers to contribute. More and more journals have closed or moved online in the past years and are commissioning fewer texts. In spite of the fact that the art scene is flourishing, many exhibitions go by almost unnoticed because of a lack of resources. However, the involuntary pause experienced by the art scene over the past eighteen months, and its reopening, have presented an opportunity to reflect on how we can make changes within the writing community, carving out new ideas about how to work and be published.

Through these texts we wish to promote all initiatives and hopefully inspire more newspaper and media to offer more room for art reviews. The image we used in the publication, and made as a risograph poster, is by Ola Rindal, used for a review of his book Night Light in Objektiv #8. The text (in Norwegian) is written by Jorunn Rike from Tronsmo bookstore:

Night, Light. Ola Rindal. Livraison Books, 2013

Utvaska snapshots av potensielt urovekkende scenarier om natta. Umiddelbarheten og overraskelsen i møtet med det ukjente. Famling i mørket, kameraets blitz som lyser opp og blender. Spenningen mellom frykten for å se og frykten for det usynlige. En fundamental uttrykksløshet som åpner for innlesning; av ensomme gatevandringer på den mørke sida eller primitive ritualer i naturen. Innholdet ligger i betrakterens blikk. Alt er printa så lyst, nesten helt hvitt, at vi myser for å se mer – og fornemmelsen er den samme som når du sperrer opp øynene og stirrer inn i mørket.

J.R

CARMEN WINANT

Carmen Winant’s made these poster for the photography festival f/stop curated by Susan Bright and Nina Strand. Winant made new posters especially for TRUST to be shown on the City Light Boards all around Leipzig, and at the entrance of the exhibition in Werkschau. 

‘There are so many ways to enter a theme like this one’, she writes in her artist portrait about the work. ‘I considered myriad approaches, from the more literal (I have a pile of images in my studio, for instance, of ‘trust fall’ exercises) to the more oblique. Ultimately, I couldn’t stop thinking about this collection of hands I’ve been holding onto for over a decade, moving them with me between cities and studios.’

What started out as a collection of pictures of Marlene Dietrich’s hands while performing (cut from a book given to Winant by an elderly neighbour) has grown to encompass thousands of other actresses’ hands, mixed together and held in place in an oversized notebook: ‘In the process, I became enamoured with how actresses use their hands as tools of their craft, as instruments of expression and manipulation. It seemed to me there was so much in these detached gestures: a channel into thinking about performance and performativity, certainly, but also about vulnerability, grip and eagerness.’ 

Depending on their orientation, the hands collectively brace for a fall or rise together in unison (in an imaginary classroom, or a court of law). Winant explains: ‘This guided my thinking about trust: it’s the thing we give to the actress, or perhaps something they demand from us, to really feel a performance. It’s something that has the capacity to shapeshift between people, contexts, orientations. And it’s something we do perpetually, together and in exchange.’

HODA AFSHAR, VIKTORIA BINSCHTOK, INGRID EGGEN, LAURE PROUVOST, PAUL MPAGI SEPUYA, CARMEN WINANT, GUANYU XU

By Susan Bright and Nina Strand, curators of f/stop 2021

This edition of f/stop 9 – Festival für Fotografie Leipzig – responds to our new future. The world is still dealing with a pandemic in various states of extremity. We don’t know what the art scene will look like after vaccinations have been completed, variants confined and lockdowns ended. But based on our current environment, we believe that trust is the currency of the twenty-first century. It is at the centre of the COVID-19 crisis, the Black Lives Matter revolution, the #metoo movement, fake news, national elections, relationships with technology, as well as our personal lives. Trust, more than ever, is crucial to the way in which we conduct ourselves on both a personal and a societal level. The timeliness, topicality and relevance of this theme are clear. In terms of scholarship, however, trust is relatively new as an area of study. While in the last fifteen years, research into this area has grown exponentially; it has been argued that trust study offers certain challenges. Most notably these are a lack of general theory on which to base research; no agreed definition of the term (a criticism also levelled at similar sociological and psychological areas such as control, confidence, risk or power) and the impossibility of measuring its success or failure. 

It is agreed, however, that due to the complex nature of trust, it is imperative to adopt an interdisciplinary agenda when considering it. Thinkers and authors within each discipline seem to find a definition that fits their field and way of thinking. The Harvard Business Review claims that trust depends on three elements: positive relationships, consistency and good judgment/expertise. Social trust is about transparency of action, continuity of values, and a belief in community. When promises go unfulfilled, a sense of betrayal seeps in to undermine social cohesion. Roughly speaking, trust deals with behaviour that revolves around respect, reliability, reciprocity and responsibility. 

It is this complexity and illusiveness of the concept, and the fact that it is both socially embedded in human behaviour and how we organise ourselves, that attracted us to the subject. Like the concept of trust, art resists reductionist assumptions and definitions. For both the digital programme and the physical exhibition, we have invited contributors who are dealing with trust in different ways, all of which invite the audience to consider the concept in regard to issues of consent, artistic agency, computational relationships, faith, the body and personal space. The artists respond to trust with varied approaches and reflect on it in ways that are both personal and societal.

A Festival as a Work in Progress

As curators, we are committed to trying new processes and experimenting with different ways of imagining and building a common space. In order to do this, we saw our role as curators for f/stop as a ‘work in progress’ in many ways. We hope we have extended the possibilities and reach of a festival. By treating the festival as an on-going discourse and mode of reflection, we reached outwards whilst also allowing the festival and ourselves to be challenged by the complex situation of our time.

The events of the past year have meant that all cultural institutions have had to rethink, reimagine and rebuild. Nobody is immune to these changes, and nor should they be. The most obvious shift we have all witnessed in terms of outward-facing events from arts institutions is the increase in online programming. As exhibiting artist Viktoria Binschtok states, 'It’s a special time, during which “business as usual” simply doesn’t work. Digital spaces are all the more important for communication. This is truly the best time to reflect on the networked exchange of images.’ 

Salma Abedin Prithi, Mundane, 2019 © Salma Abedin Prithi

Our Digital Wonderings program on the f/stop website is an idea taken from Visual Wanderings, instigated on the Objektiv site, where photographers and artists from many different countries are invited to create art that responds to our new situation.Digital Wonderings is a series of online speculations that can take any form. Invited contributors come from a wide range of disciplines and can respond and react to the theme of trust as they wish. Our desire for Digital Wonderings is in line with a progressive cultural agenda that favours collaboration and challenges assumptions. Its approach is interdisciplinary, weaving complexity and humour with seriousness, the vernacular image alongside fine art, and demonstrating a determination to challenge audiences’ expectations of what a festival showcases. At the heart of our curatorial intention lies a commitment to supporting artists, collections and intellectual discovery in order to inspire audiences and comment upon the time in which we live.

One of the contributors to Digital Wonderings is the South African artist Lebohang Kganye. Her photography offers an inventive look into her family’s history, and by implication the wider histories of South Africa from before and during Apartheid. In our interview with Kganye, she explains that, to her, trust is not the absence of doubt, but co-exists with it. ‘Photography is informed by the unconscious’, She adds. ‘Its devices reveal what we don’t normally see – the gaps, the in-between spaces, the loss.’

Another contributor to our online series also dealt with history. We approached Dannielle Bowman after seeing her work for the New York Times Magazine’s ‘one issue’ project, which was devoted to a single topic. It was titled the 1619 Project, named for the date on which the first ship bearing enslaved Africans arrived in the American colonies. For Digital Wondering she contributed with an image she took on this assignment, and her accompanying text recounts visits to Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello estate, first as a pupil in fifth grade, then as a grown up. She asks if we can trust what we remember, and if we can trust what we are told by teachers. She confronts how information is hidden from view.

Bangladeshi photographer Salma Abedin Prithi also deals with what is hidden from view and what is over-exposed in terms of photographic representation. In her series Mundane, she concentrates on the increasingly passive reaction to extreme violence through constant news cycles of hate. This work shifts our attention to the normalisation of violence in her community, where the everyday occurrence of heinous crimes makes such events start to become mundane, and something to which people no longer pay proper attention. In relation to this work, the ideas of the renowned German writer and thinker Jan Phillpp Reemtsma are pertinent. He argues in his book‘Trust and Violence (2008) that discussions of violence either mystify or pathologise it. He claims that violence cannot be comprehended without understanding the concept of trust, and the peculiar balance and relationship between the two. 

Seven Positions on Trust

Alongside the online programme, we looked closely into the local situation, and were keen to take the festival into the city centre to exist amongst the lives of the people of Leipzig. We commissioned Carmen Winant to make posters for the City Lights Boards that are located all around the city. She often describes herself as a photographer who doesn’t make her own pictures, and has always been attracted to photography that rejects photography. She moved into working in collage, installation and found images because she is distrustful of how seductive photography can be. This commission started with her collection of images of the hand gestures made by German-born American actress Marlene Dietrich while performing (cut from a book given to her by an elderly neighbour), which then grew to encompass those of thousands of other actresses. In the process, Winant became fascinated by how actresses use their hands as tools of their craft, as instruments of expression and manipulation.

This one and the four on top of the page: Carmen Winant, Posters made especially for TRUST for the 9th edition of f/stop, 2021. © Carmen Winant.

In terms of our theme, these found images of hands seen around the city, and in the main exhibition space, point to the idea of trust in performance. As Winant states, ‘Depending on their orientation, these hands collectively brace for a fall or rise together in unison (in an imaginary classroom, or a court of law). This guided my thinking about trust: it’s the thing we give to the actress, or perhaps something she demands from us, to really feel a performance. It’s something that has the capacity to shape-shift between people, contexts, orientations. And it’s something we do perpetually, together and in exchange.’

In line with recent events, especially those in America following the death of George Floyd, there has been a rise in performing sympathy and virtue signalling. These acts, such as taking the knee, function as a background to the posters. The placement of the hands can be read in many ways. When facing down they appear to be bracing for a fall, an act that Michelle Dent and MJ Thompson in Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory suggest is ‘that last desperate act of agency we are left with when faced with the terror and tragic beauty associated with loss and grief’. Hand ups is currently more readily associated with conflicts with police than with something more celebratory. Either way, they comment upon human vulnerability and agency. 

The motif of the hand can also be seen in the work of Ingrid Eggen and Laure Prouvost. Hands and their associated gestures have long signalled coded messages in art, but with the advent of COVID-19 their significance has been highlighted as touch has become so loaded. The two films by Laure Prouvost shown in TRUST, I Need To Take Care Of My Conceptual Grandad (2010) and Taking Care (Love Letter to Fellow Art Work) (2019) are both part of Prouvost ’s monitor video series, in which, without showing her face, she speaks to the viewer about the object or relic placed in front of her. She makes her hands the main character of the films. 

Laure Prouvost, Taking Care (Love Letter to Fellow Art Work), 2019. Video, 3 min 23 sec © Laure Prouvost; Courtesy Lisson Gallery.

The title I Need To Take Care Of My Conceptual Grandad refers to the conceptual relative whom Prouvost claims was a conceptual artist and a good friend of Kurt Schwitters. However, the video also points to the British artist John Latham, a catalogue of whose work she smothers with moisturiser. Latham was an influential artist for Prouvost early in her career. Taking Care (Love Letter to Fellow Art Work)’relates to the former film.  This work was originally intended for the gallery space, to be shown on a monitor placed in front of another artwork, to which the ‘love letter’ was addressed. Instead, it was screened on Prouvost’s website and that of her gallery in the spring of the first lockdown last year, offering comfort in these trying times. The camera is focused on her torso and gesturing hands, which appear to be attempting to caress the camera as she whispers soothing words. As a viewer, without the presence of the invisible artwork, it feels as if the caring attention is being lavished on you. Both pieces are acts of love; both place importance on the care of art and artists. Seeing them now, in a time when we are used to being addressed remotely and experiencing disembodied voices, the meaning of these works will perhaps be different from they might have signified before COVID, encouraging us to reconsider the experience, physicality and materiality of art. 

Ingrid Eggen, Handl #6, 2020. © Ingrid Eggen

Experiencing work in a changed environment of course alters readings, and it’s hard to imagine a time when art will not be read through the lens of the pandemic. Norwegian artist Ingrid Eggen examines the body’s non-verbal communication and symbolism, often dismantling and distorting body language in her large-scale photographs. She says of the work, ‘I strive to portray a more animalistic body, demonstrating the surreal quest to move beyond the confines of rational modernity. This includes controlled physical and psychological aspects, placed into conversation with bodily reflexes and unconscious desires.’ In a world where emoji’s have come to stand in for complex emotions and feelings, these photographs touch on our involuntary gestures, reflexes and instinct, and the unspoken messages they portray. 

It is hard to reduce these actions to simple representations like the quick thumbs-up of an emoji. Instead, they offer another perspective, a potential fracture or opening, and sometimes a pause – a million miles away from the language of social media. They show us the importance of involuntary gestures, and how much is lost in on-screen communication. It is these silent moments between people – a glance, a touch, a flinch, that build human trust and are at the core of relationships. 

American Paul Mpagi Sepuya centers reflexivity and collaboration in his practice, creating photographs that emphasize the relationship and trust built between artist, subject, camera, and image. For TRUST, we are exhibiting a small collection of the artist's early portraits and zines loaned from a friend and early supporter in Berlin. Around the time his Dark Room-series was first exhibited in 2017, Sepuya described his practice as the making of photographs, books and installations rooted in portraiture, homoerotic visual culture and the function of the studio: "Portraiture is the foundation of my practice. The subjects appearing in my work are a cast of friends, intimates and muses. They are founded in ongoing relationships mediated by the making and production of photographs." 

Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Self-Portrait Waiting II, 2006. © Paul Mpagi Sepuya.

Living in Brooklyn in 2004, Sepuya began photographing a growing community of new acquaintances against the minimal yet charged backdrop of an intimate portrait-studio-meets-bedroom set-up. In these early works, the making of the portrait itself is bound up in the un-fixed relationship between photographer and subject; the "backstage" of the site of portraiture; and the circulation of the images in Sepuya's self-published zine series SHOOT.  Across these foundational early works, Sepuya is both making the images of Queer community he wanted to see - a casual, shared intimacy radiating notions of friendship, generosity, romance and creativity - and deconstructing the making of portraiture, the moving of subjectivity and identifying how images are made, seen, and circulate.

The study of trust has roughly fallen into two areas: interpersonal/cultural trust, as we can see so acutely in the work discussed above, and ‘interfirm’ trust, which lies between organisations and the institutional. What the above concepts of the interpersonal and interfirm neglect, however, is how closely trust is tied to faith. These two concepts are so intertwined that it is often impossible to understand where one starts and the other ends. Faith is intangible, invisible and unphotographable. This was the challenge that Hoda Afshar set herself to capture when she visited the islands of the Strait of Hormuz, near the southern coast of Iran. 

Within the community that lives here, there is a belief that the winds, generally considered to be malevolent, can possess a person, causing them to experience illness or disease. The inhabitants practice a ceremony to placate these winds and exorcise the sprits from the body. Afshar spent time with the people and their customs, the winds and the landscape. The vast, alien-looking rocks, moulded by the winds over millennia, resemble organic sculptures. In his essay ‘Winds of History’, Michael Taussig refers to the rocks as ‘gods signatures’, as if shaped by the hands of giants. The stories of these often unpredictable winds, their power and their traces left on the people and landscape, are revealed in a mysterious story of faith, history and ceremony. 

Using both video and still images, Afshar subtly and intelligently questions and responds to traditional modes of documentary. Fully aware of the Neo-Marxist writings around documentary photography by authors such as Martha Rosler, Alan Sekula, Abigail Solomon Godeau and Alan Trachtenberg that focus on the inclusive documentary form as a critique to the lone photographer bearing witness to the world, Afshar questions the role of the document, the subject, the observer and the observed, and shifts the power relations so commonly associated with documentary photography. 

Hoda Afshar, from the series Speak the Wind (2015-2021). Image courtesy and © the artist and Milani Gallery.

Interfirm Trust (or distrust to be more exact) can be seen in the work of Guanyu Xu and Viktoria Binschtok. This is most acutely addressed, in terms of authority, in Xu’s ongoing series Resident Aliens, and in terms of our reluctant trust in the Tech behemoths, in the work of Binschtok. At the heart of Xu’s complex investigation of personal and political history and identity is the figure of the outsider. Resident Aliens addresses the conditions of immigrants in the US, and the lack of any kind of nuance or personalised relationship between the authorities and those labelled ‘resident alien’, ‘immigrant’ or ‘refugee’, which leads to the rise of xenophobia – especially with regard to the Asian community.  His photographs are large collages of images of his collaborators’ belongings, domestic interiors, private photographs and pictures from their travels around the world. In these works his aim is to question notions of the familiar and foreignness, belonging and alienation, and the legal status of a person. For immigrants, home is never private and secure, but a perpetually temporary state. The project examines privilege and power and the precarious nature of trust in terms of legality and civic acceptance for those without it. As he states, his practice extends from examining the production of power in photography to the question of personal freedom and its relationship to political regimes.

Xu’s work  also highlights the disparities and connections between the US where he lives, and China where he was brought up. In Temporarily Censored Home (2018–19), he made an intervention into his parent’s home in Beijing, intricately layering photographic images all over the house in order to queer the heterosexual space. His film Complex Formations juxtaposes cellphone images taken by his mother during their trips to the US and Europe with 3D animations that Xu made. The video is accompanied by his monologue and a conversation with his mother on the notion of cultural influence and the American Dream.

‘How do we trust the image, and trust the authority of an image representing someone?’, Xu asks. ‘It's really important to actively remind the viewer that these images are constructed. Identity is constructed, and identity is also constantly in flux.’ Similarly, Binschtok highlights the constructed nature of the image by commenting on current patterns of understanding around collecting, consumption, recycling and value that are reverberating in the art world and beyond. What computers can’t deliver, of course, is the material presence of objects. By turning everything into a standard-sized digital image, the variety of scale, materiality, olfactory elements and physicality is lost. Like many of her generation, Bincschtok regain, reframes and thinks of these elements anew. 

Guanyu Xu, Space of Mutation, 2018. © Guanyu Xu

The term ‘Networked Image’ was first coined in 2008 by Katrina Sluis and Daniel Rubinstein in their essay ‘A Life more Photographic’. This was one of the first academic works to consider photography online in terms of politics and aesthetics in algorithmic culture and its social circulation and cultural value. As a student of the early 2000s, Binschtok worked at the intersection of digital and analogue and the ideas expressed in that influential essay will have been second nature to her as a practising artist. Having grown up with the Internet, she is well aware of how devices and platforms have remade the world and our understanding of ourselves within it. Her relationship with the digital world is no different from that of the ‘real’ world and there is no ‘digital dualism’ in the way she considers and uses images.

Entering a search term on a computer results in more images than older generations could have expected to see in a lifetime. In this world of digital connectivity, images can be linked in an infinite variety of ways. Working with image-search algorithms Binschtok selects pictures to be matched with others visually. She then materialises these floating images in clusters, demonstrating the random associations that are made between private and public image production online. The individual image becomes irrelevant, while associations and visual similarities come to the fore. Removing any linear narrative, Binschtok points to the seemingly random computational decisions presented, where with every ‘refresh’ there is a new arrangement of information available. The images presented to the artist change daily depending on her location, past searches or spending patterns, illustrating how we are all passively reliant on the institution of Google for information. The visual decisions regarding the final presentation and the selection of the individual images in relation to one another of course lies with the artist. There is poetry in the algorithm’s decisions, but it is Binschtok who makes the intersections, who formalises them and creates new relationships often with comical or melancholy effect.  

Viktoria Binschtok, Cherry Blossom / Rostock, 2020. © Viktoria Binschtok & KLEMM'S Berlin.

Curatorial Wonderings 

Despite all the technological advances being made, challenges, risks and trust will become increasingly critical for human and technological interaction as the century develops. Trust is the basis around which all of our human relationships revolve and when trust is high, our interactions flow with sensitivity and ease. We consider curating an art that has trust at its core and that involves sharing and exchanging knowledge by placing value in dialogue. As a joint project, our curatorial process comes from conversations, a critical reflection on professional relationships and friendship, a contemplation of the last year and a consideration of positions of interests that overlap and diverge. We consider the curatorial space, both online for the past year, and in Werkschau for the ten days of the festival, a site of collective learning, for the artists, ourselves and the audience, based on relations of partnership, solidarity, sharing, and of course, trust. 

Notes:

1 The fast-growing community devoted to researching trust across disciplines and countries includes the First International Network on Trust or FINT, the Centre for Trust Research at SOAS in London, and the Center for Trust Studies at the University of Arizona.

 2 See https://hbr.org/2019/02/the-3-elements-of-trust (accessed 23 March 2021). 

3  For an overview of the challenges to trust scholarship see, Ping P. Li (2011) ‘The rigour–relevance balance for engaged scholarship: New frame and new agenda for trust research and beyond’, Journal of Trust Research 1 (1): 1–21.

4 From an artist’s statement, May 2021.

5 Visual Wanderings at Objektiv

6 The full Digital Wonderings programme includes: Susanne Ø. Sæther, Onora O’Neill, Nigel Warburton, Lebohang Kganye, Salma Abedin Prithi, Dannielle Bowman, Clara Hausmann, Anthony Luvera, Fred Hüning, Delpire & Co, Whitney Hubbs, Katrina Sluis and Jonas Lund, Carmen Winant, Hoda Afshar, Viktoria Binschtok, Ingrid Eggen, Laure Prouvost, Paul Mpagi Sepuya and Guangu Xu.

7 From an artist’s statement, May 2021.

8 Michelle Dent and M.J. Thompson, ‘Women and Performance’: A Journal of Feminist Theory (2004), Volume 14, issue 1: 6. 

9 The use of touch in video art was examined in our third Digital Wondering with the essay ‘Touch/Space: The Haptic in 21st-Century Video Art’ by Dr Susanne Ø.Sæther. She focuses on issues of the haptic in recent video art and the striking motif of the hand touching the screen and forming a distinctly layered spatiality for the viewer. This often creates a mise-en-abyme, especially when viewing on a hand-held device. The examples she uses enfold the viewer, inviting us into the compututational space. 

10  From an artist’s statement, May 2021.

11 From the interview ‘On finding your Form’  (accessed 24 May 2021)

12 S. Rowlinson (2009), ‘Interpersonal trust and inter-firm trust in construction projects’, Construction Management and Economics, 27 (6): 539–54.

13 M. Taussig, ‘Winds of History’ (2021) in H. Afshar, Speak the Wind, MACK, London, 2021.

14 In her interview for our second Digital Wondering, British philosopher Onora O’Neill talks about how we think about the term ‘trust’ and how much it has shifted in her field of Bio-Ethics over the last fifteen years. This chimes with the rise in trust studies and the shift in the relationship between doctor and patient. While trust used to be thought of in terms of implicit consent on the part of the patient, a more formalised consent is now considered necessary. Trust has become focused on third-party attitudes and generic attitudes with no discrimination or judgment.

15 From an artist’s statement, May 2021.

16 Daniel Rubinstein and Katrina Sluis (2008), ‘A Life more Photographic’, Photographies,1: 1,9–28. Katrina Sluis was a contributor to Digital Wondering 13, where, in conversation with artist Jonas Lund, she discusses breaking up with photography, the politics of ambiguity, automation and adtech, decentralistion, NFTS/Programming and trust.

17 The term ‘digital dualism’ was coined by Nathan Jurgenson. For an excellent overview of networked images and social photography see: N. Jurgenson, The Social Photo: On Photography and Social Media, Verso, London and New York, 2019.

ARE BLYTT

FIVE BOOKS FROM MY STUDIO TABLE

Lennart Nilsson. A Child is Born.

Sylvie Eyberg / Valerie Mannaerts. La Biennale Di Venezia 2003.

Masahisa Fukase. Ravens.

Mark McKnight. Heaven is a Prison.

Ed Atkins. Get Life/Love’s Work.

On the question on my interest in photography from a previous interview:

Photography is a beautiful way of capturing life and moments in time. I admire photographers that concentrate, observe and wait for the moment. I am not a big fan of the digital-post-production-and-photoshop-school or the possibility of doing hundreds of photos in a minute. I like the photo to work when taken in a single shot, or not to work and then be trashed. Maybe like a canvas? I very seldom crop or anything like that. Either it works or not. To deal with life through observation is a space that feels to me as an important counterweight to academic thinking.

Photography, both found material and my own, has been a part of my paintings for some time, as paper collages, printed with silk screen or painted on the canvas. I was accepted to art school with painting and photography, both mediums were a mix between abstract and ‘life’, but there was no encouragement to continue photography, so for many years this has been something I did for myself and my personal archive. 2019 was the first time I showed framed photographs together with paintings at Galerie Alber in Cologne. I feel that within contemporary photography there are still unlocked doors to enter or new areas to explore, maybe even more so than in contemporary painting...

From The benefits of bankruptcy, Weinspach, 2020, Interview by Tom Lingnau.

Photos by Are Blytt

PHIL CHANG & TRAVIS DIEHL

Carter Seddon, Souvenir, January 11 – February 22, 2020. Jenny’s.

PROTOCOLS OF DISPLAY

In a conversation for our current issue of Objektiv, the young art scene was discussed, artists that goes beyond the gallery, doing shows in their living rooms, in their backyards, on the side of their studio, in storefronts.... Perhaps we are not looking to established institutions to resolve critical issues? Maybe the artist-run spaces might be challenging larger institutions?  The precedent for this development goes back to the garage galleries of the 1950s and 1960s, a formative time when spaces and co-operatives dedicated to photography were founded in major cities in the West. Previously, there wasn’t a visible infrastructure, there were simply spaces where people tried to do things together. There is a parallel with what we’re living through now. Amongst the missions of Objektiv is an investigation of the ways in which camera-based art is exhibited, both from institutional and artistic perspectives. During this year’s PhotoLA in January I held a panel questioning the protocols of display, inviting artist Phil Chang, writer Travis Diehl, and the inaugural Director of Photography at the V&A, Duncan Forbes. We discussed if artistic practices actually produce spaces for display, and not the other way around? The panel talk was not recorded, but I have asked Chang and Diehl to share their statements on the LA scene here. 

Phil Chang, The Suburban, July 27 – September 10, 2019, Milwaukee, WI.

Phil Chang I believe that photography excels at capturing and describing the world in images. However, I also believe that something else other than photography excels at capturing and describing the world; this would be in the way that we produce, circulate, and consume photographic images. I believe that these actions more accurately describes the world than actual photographic images of the world.

In July 2019, I staged an exhibition at The Suburban in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Started in 1999, The Suburban has allowed artists and curators to self-direct and organize an exhibition with the intention of moving the site of production – whether that be the artist studio, the institution, the museum or any site considered for production – into their space. 

My exhibition included works where I manually applied inkjet printer ink onto inkjet printer canvas. Each work was installed by pushpins, blue painters tape, aerosol spray adhesive, and a single, stretched inkjet canvas held up by screws. This varied approach to presentation and installation methods was crucial to knowing that I would be showing work in an independent, artist-run space.  

I chose to highlight this exhibition at The Suburban since it was best suited as a response to a question that appeared in the description of the panel discussion: “What are the external structural forces that govern the protocols of a given exhibition?”

Several criteria informed these structural forces for me as I conceived of my exhibition. They were all contingent upon one another and enabled the subsequent development of more criteria as each one was met. These included the nature of the exhibition space that I would show in (i.e. commercial, non-profit, or independent/artist-run), the degree of experimentation that the space would permit, the presence of an artist community around the space, the function of generosity if that community was present, and the degree to which both the space and the community was open to migrating the site of production to the site of the exhibition. 

Travis Diehl I second the premise that Los Angeles supports a unique ecosystem of artist-run and alternative spaces—in storefronts, studios, cars, trucks, elevators, desks, and so on (sometimes to the point of parody). I’m not sure how this relates to photographic work in particular. My feeling is that the same conditions that allow for these flexible, fly-by-night spaces to thrive also counteract the ability of artists to display photographs in any traditional sense. There’s a barrier to entry, for example, in terms of the production costs required to make, print, frame a photograph that doesn’t apply to the small, quick paintings and ceramics you often see in these spaces. Photography doesn’t lend itself to this kind of social curating. Put another way, photography is inherently institutional—these conventions of display, prints and frames and so on, are an institutional format, and so they don’t make sense in a more fluent, worldly context. 

On the other hand, you see photographs everywhere, all day long, every day, and they’re essentially free to produce and distribute—a function of your “phone” and a part of everyday communication—so here again the idea of putting a photograph in a gallery is somewhat counterintuitive and overly formal. This also has something to do with what I’ve described as the direction of anxiety over photography as a medium: artists are anxious to move away from photography, and end up working in 3D media as a result of that anxiety (as opposed to being drawn towards 3D media). 

Two exhibitions come to mind that bear out these ideas. The first is a two-person show at As It Stands by Haena Yoo and Erin Calla Watson. Both artists incorporated photography in their work, in the form of magazine/newspaper clippings and reproductions of ID documents in the former, and images found online in the latter. Watson in particular uses a kind of novel, middle-class technique of having her found images “printed” in laser etched crystals of the kind you usually see in corporate awards and sentimental portraits of your grandparents. There’s a photographic fluency there that doesn’t result in traditional photographs. 

The other exhibition is proof by exception. Carter Seddon’s last two shows at Jenny’s have consisted of silver gelatin photos framed with white mats in a modernist style. His sensibility veers between the snapshot of some close, simple still life of an apple or a flower, and a dry sort of street photography—and, in all, Seddon’s shows are animated by this profound frisson between anachronistic technique and contemporary banality. That, to me, is the present condition of photographic display.

Erin Calla Watson, Bella Descending, 2018.

Sincere thanks to all three panel participants, and to Carter Mull and Claudia James Bartlett for the invitation to PhotoLA. Thank you also to Charlotte Cotton for the conversation in Objektiv #20.

OLA RINDAL

By Nina Strand

Some photographers seem to invent their very own quality of light in their imagery. Norwegian Ola Rindal is no exception, both in his commercial work and in his own projects. In his latest book Thujord, light – or the lack of it – plays a key role. Rindal has lived in Paris for the past two decades, but every year visits his family farm in Gudbrandsdalen, in the heart of Norway, which has been in the family for over 300 years. When his older sister took it over, Rindal moved to Sweden, and then to France. Still, something always brought him home. As he writes: ‘Thujord (pronounced Tuyor) means two fields, and it is the name of the farm where I grew up. I go there every Christmas with my family, and even though I have not lived there for a long time, it is still home.’

Rindal’s camera shows him what he’s been missing. His niece. The old house. The silent trees. The desolate roads. The lonely, indispensable power lines. The one hour of daylight that is brilliant, with a pink sky. The snow. His kids’ immense fascination with the snow. The snowman. The dog. The cows in the field. The darkness. There is nothing on earth as dark as the Nordic winter.

Rindal’s work echoes a project by another Scandinavian, Lars Tunbjörk’s Vinter, which started as an open assignment from a Swedish newspaper to depict wintertime. Having always hated the darkness, Tunbjörk photographed everything he saw, and said that the work became therapeutic for him. Perhaps Thujord was the same for Rindal, who fixed his lens on his old home to remind him of where he is from.

In some ways, Thujord reminds me of Rindal’s previous book Paris, whose pictures were taken over a period of 14 years, from when he first came to the city on 11 September 2001, until the terrorist attack there in 2015. When he walked the streets of Paris, he was surprised by the gap between what he saw and the romantic city presented in photobooks. He started making visual notes, and over the years a darker side of Paris was revealed.

Rindal will continue to travel – to Norway, to Japan (the country of his wife Madoka) and to Paris – always with his analogue camera over his shoulder, showing us another side of the places we think we know.

PAUL MPAGI SEPUYA

The first thing that comes to mind when looking back on my work is recursiveness – subjects, places and strategies repeating over time and across and within images. It began, I suppose, by photographing friends and myself, and documenting my working material in the colour darkroom. It has continued in surprising ways: the ongoing collaborations and inspiration to which these friendships have led, and in repeated re-photographing of materials in my current studio space.

Over the last ten years, the interest in deconstructing the making of images, and the moving of subjectivity and identity (gendered, racialised, politicised) to the centre of how those images are made and seen has been the most resonant and, I think, impactful development. Photography is a technology that grew out of a desire to affix fleeting images, impressions, shadows, and projections. At its core it’s about longing, and a desire to hold or produce a thing of emotional use value, for gratification, for contemplation

    For the recent Whitney Biennale my work was collaborative. The invitation for friends to bring their cameras and make photographs with and alongside me in the studio went back to the summer of 2017, with the Dark Room portraits of Giancarlo and James. They continued for the next year, and are still ongoing (in a different form). It was about introducing a second point perspective into consideration after my camera and my own position had become the repeating formal and conceptual structure of most of the pictures since 2015. I decided to propose for the Whitney showing the photographs made by those friends alongside me or collaboratively, rather than my own photographs, rather than my own (one image solely of my own making was included, a large environmental Ground of the studio curtain) but it was important to show the pictures that people had not considered when they saw the second cameras being operated by friends appearing in the works I exhibited. After James and Giancarlo were described as modeling or posing, and as being assistants to my cameras when clearly they were engaged in photographing with their own cameras, I was frustrated but curious at how an image taken by me depicting my reflection alongside a separate person also aiming their camera (two depicted) could be collapsed into one photographer and one camera. So, the Whitney presentation was thought of in response to the shows at Team Bungalow in Fall 2017 and Document in spring 2018 where those portraits of James and Giancarlo were exhibited. I’m not sure how successfully legible the project, and the fact that the majority of the images are not authored by me and are tethered to *other* photographs, by me, that we do not see but have to presume exist, was revealed to the viewer.

For the current twentieth issue of Objektiv, in the tenth year of the magazine, we’ve invited twenty artists to contribute. Some have been given carte blanche to create unique portfolios or collage-like mind maps about the kind of photography that inspires their practices—and perhaps, through this, share something about their future paths. Short statements accompany each artist’s contribution.

KETUTA ALEXI-MESKHISHVILI

What made me love photography was its boundary problems: how the ambiguous power of decisions such as composition, editing, framing, circulation and presentation of an image tends to determine the meaning more than that which is being depicted. Or, for example, the opaqueness of boundaries between the depicted and depicter that are easily blurred by the dynamics of power. These tendencies allow photography a vast, mysterious area for an artist to investigate and play in. What has surprised me most lately, in my inquiry into this phenomenon, is how closely the experience of motherhood has paralleled it and in turn, has fed my images post-partum. 

    My last exhibition at Galerie Frank Elbaz in Paris, was titled mother, feelings, cognac, which was an attempt to communicate a sense of lost boundaries, between bodies, images, definitions: a certain amnesia, personal and general, if you will. Recently, I sense myself moving away from that as well, but whatever is brewing is very new and I can't yet verbalize it. 

    When we could still afford to have a stable world view, an image could shift our perception of the world. In this sense, it’s the billion collective images that I’ve consumed in the past ten years that have resonated with me the most. Slowly, over time, the power of a single exhibition or image to change one’s perception has been put to question. In a time of relentless and almost involuntary consumption of images, the rise of mass-market digital retouching and live rendering software, can a single image hold power?

     Artists have been foreshadowing our ‘post truth’ moment for a long time. I think whether directly or indirectly, all work is affected by the broader realities of its time. Generally, I don’t set out to comment on things through my work. Following the last US presidential election, however, I was invited to participate in a group show called Produktion: Made in Germany Drei, at the Sprengel Museum in Hannover. For this exhibition I worked on a concise project, titled MID, where I photographed – off the computer screen – found images of window locks produced in Germany. I also added a crumpled ribbon of a different colour to each image, in order to keep things open to interpretation. But the images still turned out to be too resolved for me. After that experience, I turned in again, hoping that the personal, with its call to empathy, can also be political.

    What comes after the pictorial turn? Instagram has eaten Facebook, fashion is having pop culture for breakfast, emojis are feasting on the written word, and most of human communication is taking place on a screen. Maybe the pictorial turn is the last turn we make before the end.

This text is from our current issue, Objektiv #20. In the tenth year of the magazine, we’ve invited twenty artists to contribute. Some have been given carte blanche to create unique portfolios or collage-like mind maps about the kind of photography that inspires their practices—and perhaps, through this, share something about their future paths. Short statements accompany each artist’s contribution.

EM ROONEY

Alfred Stieglitz, photo of Georgia O’Keefe, source unknown.

For this twentieth issue, in the tenth year of the magazine, we’ve invited twenty artists to contribute. Some have been given carte blanche to create unique portfolios or collage-like mind maps about the kind of photography that inspires their practices—and perhaps, through this, share something about their future paths. All the artists to whom we gave carte blanche to make work for this issue, were given five inspirational questions on which to reflect. Short statements accompany each artist’s contribution. Em Rooney is showing the work of other artists, in this case work by Alfred Stieglitz. The photographs appear to have been shoved into the pages of a book and this is closely related to Rooney's own way of working.
Looking back on your work to date, what patterns or consistent inquiries can you see that you couldn’t predict when you started?   In college I was having the explosive experiences of first love and of learning about my body. And, of course, these things were totally incongruous with religion and family – and there a triangle was formed that occupied me conceptually throughout my college years. I would say that I couldn’t have predicted that I would still be interested in Catholic structures and narratives, or even the architecture of the church, but that would be to say that I knew I ever had been, or that when I started making work seriously that I could have predicted that I would have been an artist, or that I knew what being an artist was. Bewildered, sometimes I can’t believe I am actually an artist, and maybe that’s the thing that would have been the hardest to predict.  

The way that I’ve often thought about photographs as private, personal, and small (and this is something I’ve already spoken a lot about especially in relationship to the pieces at MoMA) I think might have its roots in  the way photographs were often stored at my house when I was growing up. They weren’t typically on display. They were in hidden in boxes in the attic, or shoved in the pages of books– old family photos, or pictures of my mother in High School might drop out of the OED or the Joy of Sex when you pulled them off the shelf. So that relationship between the page, and image (and its one that Sontag, Barthes, Berger, Davey, bell hooks and many others have often spoken about) was there for me when I was a child, and has reoccurred formally, on and off, throughout the past ten years. 

Alfred Stieglitz, photo of Georgia O’Keefe, source unknown.

This time has  been stuffed to the gills with non-stop reading about, teaching about and seeing shows; talking about work (with my long-time love, artist and collaborator Chris Domenick) first thing in the morning, last before bed at night; getting into serious fights with friends about work they like/don’t like and why; writing about work I love and curating shows, and pouring myself into it. This question, of what has resonated with me, would be incomplete unless it were to include the work of all my friends and everything I learned from Chris and his practice, and every show I’ve seen and then verbally dissected (not to mention the work of so many gifted students I’ve taught since 2010) – the number is probably in the thousands. Below are five. Not the best, not the most important, probably the lowest-hanging fruit, they’re  first five that come to mind which might actually say a lot. 

The first show I remember seeing in a Chelsea Gallery with Chris was a Richard Artschwagger show. It was these TV-fuzz looking ‘paintings’ and Formica sculptures that didn’t really mean anything to me at the time, but I always remembered them, and in the years that followed I’m sure I saw every show Artschwagger had in New York. I specifically remember a show of his I saw in 2012 at David Noland called The Desert. It was these beautiful, small pastel drawings on coloured paper, of landscapes. And there’s certainly a way that these drawings influenced my first solo show at Bodega, four years later.  

There was also Leidy Churchman’s 2015 show at Murray Guy, The Meal of the Lion, which impacted my thinking about the way a group of disparate images could be held together with an artist’s touch and intentionality. 

Arthur Jafa’s film Love is the Message the Message is Death at the Met Breuer reminded me that there’s a directness, something like rhetoric, that images have, that’s extremely powerful. And that withholding is learned and not not a default modus operandi. 

Inversely, Trisha Donnelly’s 2010 show at Casey Caplan was charged with mystery, and taught me that sculptures can function like images in that they hold inescapable material realities.

Catherine Opie’s show earlier this year at Lehmann Maupin, comes to mind.  It featured the  artist Pig Pen as protagonist in a fictional, doomsday narrative laid out in a series of photographs and a film. Pen Pen (aka Stosh Fila) is a person I love looking at who Opie has been photographing for years. The magic of the photograph can be very simple, just like that; I like looking at you. And this is a watered down version of punctum I guess. But I love thinking about who or what a photographer photographs over time. What subject does she return to? As a student I was obsessed with Steiglitz’s photographs of Georgia O'Keeffe, how we could watch her age (becoming more handsome with every year).  We saw what  Steiglitz saw (although O’Keefe lived much longer after he died). What privilege the photographer grants the viewer, a stranger to the world of her intimacy. Opie’s show felt particularly impactful as I realized her subject, had become someone I’d grown up with as well. 

Alfred Stieglitz, photo of Georgia O’Keefe, source unknown.

Because of my closeness to dancers and choreographers (Strauss Bourque-LaFrance, Lydia Adler-Okrent, Marianna Valencia) I’ve thought a lot about dance. My first ‘real’ show was a two-person exhibition with Strauss Bourque-LeFrance at Bodega’s first gallery space in Philadelphia in 2010. There was this whole element of dance that Strauss brought to the show through a slide projector that clicked through stills from a performance he’d made. But there was also the idea that the work could be activated by movement, that everything was somehow a prop with latent or expired use. We were talking then about ‘queer formalism’, which I think nine years later sounds passé but the point is that we were sure our queerness was clear in our invitation to the viewer.

I think the pictorial turn might be the last turn, especially if we think of it in relationship to Foucault’s ideas about surveillance. I’ve seen corporate tools and machines that render quality/detail/data more quickly and easily, tools that are more often, historically and presently, used for military and capital gain; drones and advanced data processing systems, and facial recognition software, used well by responsible artists. But, I worry that the merging of scientific/corporate invention and genuine creativity will continue to alienate us from our physical world, biochemical feelings, observations and instincts and this will hasten the destruction of the planet.

This is the full statement from Em Rooney from our current issue. The launch of Objektiv #20 is at Polycopies 07/11/19 from 12 to 8 pm. Bateau Concorde-Atlantique /Berges de Seine - Port de Solferino / 75007 Paris / Métro: Concorde or Assemblée Nationale.

WOLFGANG TILLMANS

Both images from Wolfgang Tillmans, Maureen Paley, London, 5 June - 21 July 2019.

Self-Sufficient Images: Art, Media and Ecologies in the Works of Wolfgang Tillmans

Abstract by Sara R. Yazdani.

In a conversation between the German artist Wolfgang Tillmans and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist which took place in the artist’s London studio in 2007, Obrist points out that Tillmans tends toput an “equal emphasis” on the single picture, as well as on the “complex groupings and installations” of images. Tillmans agrees, emphasizing that he treats his images as “self-sufficient entities.” Assisted by various media technologies, the artist has compiled an archive of images that today consists of more than 4,000 works. When organizing these works in books and galleries and museum spaces, Tillmans performs what the present study sees as a unique way to put images into constellations. If Tillmans’ images are, as he claims, “self-sufficiententities,” how is this self-sufficiency negotiated in his works? What is the relation between his larger constellations of images and the concept of the self-sufficient image? These are the crucial questions investigated in this dissertation.

The dissertation investigates what I see as three significant stages in the artistic work of Tillmans: First, his use of the digital photocopier in the 1980s work Approaches and the 1994 exhibition Sonne München, second, his turn to abstraction and the paradigmatic exhibition if one thing matters, everything matters at Tate Britain in 2003, third, his move to the digital camera with the project Neue Welt in 2009. Through a close reading of the materiality as well as the motifs of his images, I suggest that his works should be interpreted not as mere representations but as types of beings. Through the optics of the process ontologies of Gilbert Simondon and Gilles Deleuze, and the media archaeology of Wolfgang Ernst, I discuss howTillmans’ mode of constellating images reveals a relational conceptualization of photography as the medium enters the digital—a conceptualization attuned to what this study defines as an image ecological practice. Historically contextualizing Tillmans’ practice with reference to artworks from the 1920s and 1960s which have explored visual art in comparable relational terms, the dissertation discusses how Tillmans’ practice creates relationships between bodies, technologies, nature and things. I argue that this practice brings forth questions of sexuality, bodies, homoeroticism, nature, the HIV crisis and xenophobia in ways that challenge identity politics, subject-object dualism and the anthropocentric world-view. This dissertation suggests that to trace the “self-sufficiency” of Tillmans’ photographic art involves a rethinking of the materiality of photography.

BRIAN SHOLIS

Roni Horn, Some Thames, 2000. Courtesy Dia Art Foundation, New York.

This year’s issues investigate the practice of exhibiting camera-based art, both from the institutional and artistic perspectives. For the autumn issue we’ve asked several writers, artists and curators to reflect on the memorable displays – whether in galleries, books, magazines, online or on billboards – that have remained in their minds. Here is a text by Brian Sholis.

Roni Horn, Untitled (Yes) - 1, 2001. Courtesy Dia Art Foundation, New York.

I moved to New York in August 2001. My first season of art began in early September, one week before the terrible historical events visited upon that city. The memory of those sad and confusing mid-September days overshadows most of my encounters with art from that autumn and winter. Yet two quiet installations remain with me. The first, at the Dia Art Foundation, was of Roni Horn’s photographs and sculptures. After hiking too-steep stairs, one emerged, slightly breathless, into serene rooms bathed in winter light. My memory centers on an experience of transparency and reflectiveness. The show’s second room, at the time I visited, featured a line of pictures from Horn’s series Some Thames. She pointed her camera down toward the river's murky surface, catching it in many shades of blue and gray and in many moods, from serene to cantankerous. It was sometimes all surface; at others it intimated great depths. No two rivers were the same, and yet every river was the same; to encounter them was to face one's own mutable identity. So, too, was it with two large sculptures given their own rooms. These heavy glass blocks, one black and one clear, featured milky, textured sides and transparent, seemingly liquified tops. The low rectangles, the size of coffee tables, were the same dimensions, but placed in rooms of different scales and with different orientations toward the windows. It was impossible to keep the memory of one clear in my mind while looking at the other. They canceled each other out but, in doing so, continuously renewed my sense of both.

Another installation marks that somber season. It, too, was placed in a museum room that let in plenty of winter light. Janet Cardiff’s Forty Part Motet was presented in a large, second-floor gallery at MOMA PS1 that features a long line of windows along two of its sides. Forty small speakers, each on its own stand, were arranged in a loosely drawn oval. There was space to walk around and between them, as well as two benches on which to sit. The gentle curve of the speakers’ placement is connected, in my mind, to the curves of the room’s barrel-vaulted brick ceiling. The artwork, like Horn’s two installations, is in part about how one’s experience fluctuates. Forty separately recorded voices are played back through the forty speakers. I remember pacing around the room, settling in for a few minutes with a man’s rich baritone or a woman’s resonant soprano. Then I would sit on a bench and let the sound braid itself together. On several of my visits, snow drifted outside the windows; with or without this atmospheric accompaniment, no two visits to Forty Part Motet were the same.

Janet Cardiff. The Forty Part Motet. 2001. Reworking of "Spem in Alium Nunquam habui"(1575), by Thomas Tallis; 40-track sound recording (14:00 minutes), 40 speakers. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder in memory of Rolf Hoffmann, 2002

The writer Susan Orlean, describing recently her childhood love of libraries, characterizes experiences that resonate with me in this context: ‘It wasn’t that time stopped in the library. It was as if it were captured here, collected here, and in all libraries—and not only my time, my life, but all human time as well. In the library, time is dammed up.... The library is a gathering pool of narratives and of the people who come to find them.’

Since those early encounters in New York, I’ve visited thousands of exhibitions; written about hundreds; worked on scores; and curated about two dozen. When I pause to reflect upon what remains with me from that welter of experience, I return repeatedly to the inti mate or the modest. Ambitious extravaganzas make their impressions, but don’t accompany me months or years later. What sticks are exhibitions as essays, in the traditional French sense of essayer—to try, to attempt. They give evidence of particular occurrences and of the feelings those arouse; they create atmospheres as much or more than they put forth bold arguments. The more humble of them might seem provisional or slight, but that tentativeness leaves space for me to surround them, over time, with my own experiences, to weave them into my life.

This type of art encounter can be hard to find. Institutional prerogatives, namely that of popular appeal and its attendant audience numbers, militate against it. The desire to ensure that exhibition images will be legible online—and therefore will circulate widely— also has warping effects: shows today are often arranged for the pictures of them, rather than for the in-person experience. And, especially with photographic prints or video projections, the decreasing cost of technology has encouraged a spectacle that is often unrelated to the subject of the artwork. None of these things must foreclose the type of intimacy and modesty I treasure. The examples of Horn and Cardiff given above, efforts that were not modest by any means, are evidence of that. But the conditions of exhibition-making today are not often conducive to intimacy.

Vilja Celmins, Web #1, 1998. Picture from SFMoMA.

Another version of this memorableness comes from substituting the particular for the general. Some of the most expansive exhibitions I’ve enjoyed remain with me thanks to an indelible detail. Late in 2002 I visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art and wandered in to a survey of Vija Celmins’s prints. Her quiet skies, dusty desert floors, and captivating spider webs were enchanting, but have combined, over the years, into a grayscale blur. One object retains its particularity: a wood block that had cracked in two. It rested in a freestanding case in the first room of the exhibition, which was to the left of the title wall. The accompanying label noted that this crack occurred after Celmins had put dozens of hours of work into its surface; distraught, she worked with the printer to devise a clamp that would squeeze together the broken pieces and allow her to continue her efforts at image-making. The heartache of that moment, when something she had worked on tirelessly came almost to disaster, serves as a mnemonic device for the broader difficulty of making art, and therefore of the time and energy Celmins has invested over the course of her career.

I can sense the concern rising within you that I want apolitical art experiences at a moment when right-thinking people should be working hard to counter nativist and nationalist forces. The kinds of experiences I’m recounting, and advocating for, need not be to the exclusion of argumentative or demonstrative projects. But it is during moments like this that the intimate and the modest is most readily jettisoned.

Separately, my desire for the intimate and the modest follows Elaine Scarry’s thinking on the ethical value of beauty. As she wrote in On Beauty and Being Just, ‘what is beautiful prompts the mind to move chronologically back into the search for precedents and parallels, to move forward into new acts of creation ... to bring things into relation.’ This being-in-relation is what I value. Scarry continues: ‘It is not that we cease to stand at the center of the world, for we never stood there. It is that we cease to stand even at the center of our own world. We willingly cede the ground to the thing that stands before us.’

It was a crisp day in autumn 2007 and I was running around central London on the hunt for art. I duck into an unexceptional building and climb a narrow flight of stairs into Thomas Dane’s premises. There, in a small darkened room, a 16mm film projector rests on a narrow plinth. It is projecting a nearly motionless image of a horse lying on its side with a somewhat distended belly, its glassy, lifeless black eye pointed directly at the camera lens. It is an image of such transfixing stillness that only the point at which the film loops, returning to the scene the sunlight that has imperceptibly faded over the course of ten minutes, reminds me that time has not paused on the animal’s behalf. I watch again until the light returns, then again.

As all these examples suggest, my aesthetic predilection is for a soft melancholy; for artworks that reveal time passing; for the camera as a “silent” witness to quotidian experience. Yours is likely different. Nonetheless, my modest request is for more modest efforts. I yearn for simple exhibitions to counter overwrought ones; for undirected, intimate encounters with artworks; for trust that artworks will find their right audiences. The encounters I’ve described worked their way into my mind like a drop of dye filling a glass of water. Their impact was brief and localized, but as time progressed they spread, coloring my other experiences—and being subsumed within them in turn.

STEVE MCQUEEN, Running Thunder, 2007. Courtesy Thomas Dane Gallery, London and Marian Goodman, New York, Paris.

TIAGO BOM

Rui Toscano, The Right Stuff, 2008-2009. Photo © DMF, Lisboa.

This year’s issues investigate, from both institutional and artistic perspectives, the practice of exhibiting camera-based art. For the autumn issue we’ve asked several writers, artists and curators to reflect on the memorable displays – whether in galleries, books, magazines, online or on billboards – that have remained in their minds. Here is Tiago Bom’s contribution:

Action, with all its uncertainties, is like an ever-present reminder that men, though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to begin something new. Hannah Arendt in Labour, Work, Action.

What does it mean to ask if an art exhibition worked or not?  Even though it may seem like an irrelevant exercise, it may prove to be profound. The clue to this profundity might lay within language itself, in particular the word work. Work as a concept is implicitly related to the act of transferring energy from one place to another, from a form to another. This act of transferal can be both mental and physical and is in itself an act of transformation. In turn, these acts of transformation play a ubiquitous role in our individual existences as by-products of our social circumstances. This exchange is often translated as effort for money, money for time, time for effort – transformation through effort; creation, if you will.  Taking work to mean transformation and creation is a convenient way to start analysing any art experience including an exhibition. In her essay Labour, Work, Action, Hannah Arendt touches upon the philosophical and political ramifications of a myriad of pro-social actions and their entropic degrees. Arendt identifies all types of work as acts of creation in their own right, where the labour applied transforms them from being thought-things into a reality. She goes on by attributing them different levels of entropy, in relation to their utilitarian character or lack of it. Within this idea of work, “in the sphere of fabrication itself, there is only one kind of object to which the unending chain of means and ends does not apply, and this is the work of art, the most useless and, at the same time, the most durable thing human hands can produce. (...) Just as the purpose of a chair is actualised when it is sat upon, the inherent purpose of a work of art – whether the artist knows it or not, whether the purpose is achieved or not – is to attain permanence throughout the ages”. 

Art works reverberate in each viewer differently and this difference in reverberation lies in the layered qualities of the work – this is perhaps what confers it its durability – and in the symbolic capital of each viewer. One other metric could thus be layers, the more layered the work or exhibition in this case, the more transformational potential it has. We can analyze these layers case by case, by establishing inter-causal relationships between all the social variables – tracing quasi-objective traits to a specific work – its historical links, its relevance and relationship with present production and, how well it embodies these – character traits that lie within the work and the way it chooses to show it self. In a social context, to affirm that an exhibition worked, is to essentially talk about legitimacy; collective legitimacy. An art exhibition is, after all, a meeting point of confluent social, cultural, economic, and political variables (socio-historical) juxtaposed with personal agency and labour. Within this context, art should serve as an autonomous space for the debate of the fundamental questions pertaining to our Ethos and it should, in all instances, conserve a relative autonomy to all these variables. 

In sum, we have to look at the artwork as a thought-thing, another link in the chain of labour, but an exceptional one. Non-utilitarian in character and with implicit endurance to time, the art works in an exhibition should function as cohesive parts of a larger debate on our Ethos. Cohesion is only accomplished with a layered structure of content made by relating to its socio-historical variables and questions of representation, while remaining relatively autonomous to those variables.

The Great Curve in 2009, by Rui Toscano, is one of such examples. This exhibition took place at Chiado 8 in Lisbon, part of an outreach project developed by a Portuguese insurance company and, at the time in cooperation with the cultural branch of the largest state owned bank in the country (Culturgest). This cooperation, from 2006 to 2013, would end up fostering many exceptional exhibitions, always with a relative degree of autonomy, generated by a very unique set of premises. 

Overseen by Miguel Wandschneider, head of program of Culturgest, this project aimed at showcasing four annual solo exhibitions by Portuguese artists to be selected by national curators who, in turn, would have a mandate of three years. The premises that made this initiative so special within the national scene at the time, were the fact that it didn’t have the usual pressure and constraints of the commercial circuit, nor the institutional demands of museums. The underlying idea was to exhibit national artists in all stages of their careers and with varied forms of expression and interests, while making use of the production resources allocated by those two institutions. Creating, this way, an overall unique opportunity for both curators and artists to step outside their comfort zone and develop a more experimental body of work. This freedom to take risks, combined with flexible time-frames, better logistics and production support matching institutional standards, was unparalleled at the time in Lisbon, according to Bruno Marchand, the curator for this exhibition. The result was a series of honest, relevant and well produced conversations between artist, curator and space, that materialized in transformative experiences.

The Great Curve put forth Toscano’s interest in sidereal space and presented a series of works that related as much to the concrete relations between celestial bodies – a field still largely unexplored – as it did to imagination (here seen as a sensorial mechanism that organizes and categorizes all that relates to our experience of art). As Marchand writes in his introductory text, “here we enter in the realm of the cosmos, in the domain of what is infinitely large and infinitely small, and where we start from an eminently speculative experience of the Universe in order to test its possible phenomenological translation”. I see The Great Curve having the same place of origin as science fiction – the cultural space between present technologic advancements and philosophic speculation. But unlike science fiction, this exhibition did not speculate on answers or possible future scenarios, instead it set forward a series of visual synthesis’ and observations, both on questions of representation but also socio-historic phenomena – consequence of a year long layered discussion between artist and curator. 

Super Corda and Mother and Child, the center pieces, were in my opinion, the two artworks that had the most transformative power, bringing the proposal of the exhibition closer to its inception. Austere and elegantly arranged, these two works displayed an economy of means and, through their simplicity, an inherent conceptual complexity – allowing the ideas underneath to surface rather than being obfuscated by sensorial clutter. Super Corda consisted of an amplified contrabass string attached to a faux-wall. When played, this string would produce an eery bass sound amplified by a pickup, reverberating in the chamber created by one of the institution’s walls. The title of the work alluded to superstring theory in physics – the attempt to explain all natural behavior and fundamental laws, where particles are replaced by one-dimensional objects called strings that interact with each other in a vibrational state. Relating to light in a similar way, Mother and Child presented a superimposed set of two circular spotlight projections on the gallery wall. The scale and relationship between bodies were present here as a result of the difference in size of the two projections. The reflection of light, when in this pure form, forced us to establish a causal relationship between two repeated shapes and their hierarchical structure. While this question of scale in the representation of power is as old as the human pictorial production, in this case it was also a question of perception and perspective as much as representation. So is the use of light and the relationship between the spectrum of light reflected, refracted or absorbed. It is within this awareness, that we today – through the field of Spectroscopy (Astrophysics) – study the speed, temperature and material composition of astronomical bodies. 

According to Marchand, “throughout the whole exhibition, there was an implicit game between the idea of observation and its limits/protocols but most importantly, the creative opportunities that arise from those limits”. In relative proximity, these two works amplified and resonated off each other. Whatever the image showed to hide, the sound revealed without showing.

Following the same criteria I would still highlight a second experience, Oslo based artist Per Platou’s exhibition, Platou’s Cave, at artist-run gallery No Place, in 2012. Much has been written about Norway’s financial support system for the arts – unmatched, to my knowledge, anywhere else in the globe – and almost always in relation to how it fostered a vast array of independent artist-run spaces, some more proliferous than others but always free of commercial constraints. No Place is one of those galleries that has achieved some legitimacy amongst the local art crowds. Almost every artist in Oslo has exhibited there at least once since they opened. They’ve exhibited established artists, artists in mid-career, young artists and art students. Their apparent lack of criteria in the choice of media and people is both their weakness and their biggest strength and, probably the reason why they are still up and running today, when many have closed their doors. No Place has a refreshing atmosphere contrasting with a milieu obsessed with numbers and names, an important characteristic to help contextualising this experience in terms of its relative autonomy in the field and matching lack of resources and economy of means. Platou’s Cave borrowed the name from the famous cave allegory presented in the manuscript of The Republic. This jovial word game, set the scene for a far more serious and profound experience. The mise en scène was separated by curtains of thick fabric, where a carpeted floor composed of laid out persian-style carpets and cushions against the walls advertently invited people to sit or lay down. The lights were dimmed to creating a warm and private atmosphere. Platou’s Cave was drawn from the artist’s experience as a sound producer for theatre and it worked essentially as a sound chamber, where random pre-recorded and found sound-bits were assembled in a looped montage. This would then be fed with amplified sounds from the exterior of the gallery, provided by a microphone apparatus on the outside. According to the gallery “Platou’s installations override any relegation of sound to a secondary animating layer, parting with the subservience of sound to dramatic action and other hierarchical fixtures of the theatre. To the extent that he employs objects or dramatic elements other than sound in the environments he constructs, their function is that of vicarious spatial proxies, addressed to and directing the movement and visual attention of the audience. Aesthetic primacy is preserved for the auditive.” The endless combinations and the potential arrangements of sound were gripping. In this somewhat familiar and womb-like environment, being surprised by these “shadows” of sound generated a whole new dimension for imagination to wonder and thrive. 

Both examples share not only a personal transformative influence but are also by artists connected to the production of sound and music. Both do not shy away from this connection but do in fact often use it to mix and elevate their visual production. The ease with which a message travels through sound, activating a memory or a feeling, is prodigious.  These two exhibitions generated a subtle movement from Dionysian to Apollonian ideals and vice-versa. Through sound and vision we were engulfed in an all-inclusive experience while being forced to exercise some critical distance.

ERIC GYAMFI

Eric Gyamfi, “Someday, soon, I’d have to live as a straight man,” Jay laments, one Thursday afternoon after school as we walked. “I think about that every day.” Jay identifies as a gay man. From the series Just Like Us, 2016, Courtesy of the artist.

Our current issue, Subjektiv part II, invites different artists, curators and thinkers to give us their recent critical perspectives on the issues at stake and on the status of the subjective as an artistic strategy in the current political climate. Today's statement from Brendan Embser: I don’t know what it’s like to grow up as a faggot in rural France. But I know what’s like to grow up as a faggot in rural America. When I was in middle school, I was frequently taunted for my effeminate ways, called a fag, thrown up against a locker. I was ignored in gym class. Most of my friends were girls. (I preferred it that way. They were nicer.) I was lucky never to have been truly assaulted by any of my bullies, but I might have preferred a few sound beatings to the psychological stress, the verbal battering. A broken arm can be set. But words last forever. And if you’re identified as a fag before you know what a fag is, the threat of violence never really goes away. One night, when I was twenty-two, a few months after moving to New York and imagining I had escaped to the freedom of the metropolis, I was brazen enough to leave a nightclub holding hands with a young man I’d just met. As we crossed Broadway at 13th Street in the East Village, two guys called out to us You’re going to hell! 

I use the italics here in the way Édouard Louis, in his novel The End of Eddy (2017), translated from the French by Michael Lucey, indicates speech. Instead of quotations or exchanges of dialogue, Louis deploys italics, and the effect is both confessional and forensic. Italics display the wounding power of speech, as if the words themselves had been pressed into a defensive hunch, but the statements also become subject to the kind of retrospective interrogation that is the fuel of this addictive and troubling short novel. 

Just ten years old and new to his school, Eddy Bellegueule learns the blunt force of language, and its capacity to exclude, from two older boys who become his constant tormentors: 

“There in the hallway they asked me who I was, if I was Bellegueule, the one everyone was talking about. They asked me the question that I would repeat to myself endlessly for months, for years, 

You’re the faggot, right? 

By saying it they inscribed it on me permanently like stigmata, those marks that the Greeks would carve with a red-hot iron or a knife into the bodies of deviant individuals, people who posed a threat to their community.” 

The End of Eddy was published in French in 2014, when Louis, née Bellegueule—the novel is autobiographical—was twenty-two, and became a sensation, due in part to the author’s sear- ing depiction of poverty, racism, and class resentment in northern France. The direct transla- tion from the original title, En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule, is “Finishing off Eddy Bellegueule,” a gesture to Louis’s desire to dispatch his former identity and the merciless manner in which he finishes off his homophobic parents and the village of his youth, the source of his misery. 

But the English edition of The End of Eddy arrived in the United States on the heels of Donald J. Trump’s election to the American presidency, a moment of sudden liberal hand-wringing about how failure of “empathy” toward working-class Americans in the heartland brought to power an administration with its own, often cruel, inversion of the term. Liberal voters should have listened more to their fellow Americans, the argument goes, but is empathy a two-way street? If the blue states compromise on immigration reform, should the red states allow transgender individuals to use the bathroom of their choice? 

With the auspicious timing a publisher can only dream of, The End of Eddy also arrived in English during fever-pitch coverage of the French presidential election, when the specter of Marine Le Pen in the Élysée, like the “impossible” victories of Brexit and Trump, no longer seemed like a plot point in a dystopian film. Shortly before the French elections, Louis wrote an op-ed for the New York Times, explaining why people like his father—homophobic, racist, bitter—voted for Le Pen. Their poverty had been ignored to the extent that towns like the one where Louis was raised were essentially absent from the French political imagination. One publisher passed on The End of Eddy because the poverty Louis wrote about “hadn’t existed in more than a century; no one would believe the story I had to tell.” Still, Louis put the onus of responsibility on the Left, and on the media, who had got the story wrong in the first place: “Today, writers, journalists, and liberals bear the weight of responsibility for the future. To persuade my family not to vote for Marine Le Pen, it’s not enough to show that she is racist and dangerous: Everyone knows that already.” 

Into this atmosphere—Trump’s America, post-EU Britain, and the crumbling of the French political elite—arrived Barry Jenkins’s film Moonlight (2016), a lush and poetic portrait of a black gay boy in Miami, based on Tarell Alvin McCraney’s play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue. Set in Liberty City, Miami, where both Jenkins and McCraney grew up, and unfolding in three acts, Moonlight, like The End of Eddy, follows a boy whose sexual confusion and identity formation is thrown into relief by the impoverished and violent backdrop of his childhood circumstances, namely his mother’s drug abuse and his bullying at school. But where Louis’s novel is a scorched-earth cri-de-coeur, Jenkins’s film is built up through subtlety and specificity, through the exquisite accumulation of gestures and expressions, and scenes lit in hues of purple and gold. 

There’s very little dialogue in Moonlight; words, when spoken, have a gravitational force. At the end of the first act, when Chiron, a small boy given the moniker “Little,” takes refuge at the home of Juan, a father figure and a drug dealer, Chiron searchingly tries to make sense of his exclusion at school. “What’s a faggot?” he asks Juan. The silence, which shifts, in its way, from tension to genuine empathy, is breathtaking. “A ‘faggot’ is a word used to make gay people feel bad,” Juan replies, gently. “How do I know?” Chiron says, visibly trying to make sense of himself in relation to these words. Unable to answer, Juan turns to his partner, Teresa, who says with steely calm, “You’ll know when you know.” With its open-ended con- clusion, its shattering of archetypes of masculinity, and its deft evocation of race and class, Moonlight ascended to the heights of American cinema and seemingly represented, amid the capricious disregard for queer people, blacks, and immigrants by the Trump Administration, a vision of a community otherwise unknown to the culture at large. 

Moonlight, both timely and enduring, brings to mind the photographer Eric Gyamfi’s recent series Just Like Us (2016), a black-and-white documentary account of queer lives in Ghana, which debuted in the same season as Jenkins’s film and The End of Eddy. Gyamfi treats his photographic subjects as collaborators; the sense of a partnership between the photographer and his community is visible in his portraits of men and women in intimate spaces, sharing private moments. Homosexuality is still punishable by law in Ghana, but that hasn’t stopped Gyamfi’s friends from living their lives, dancing, and dressing in drag. 

In Just Like Us, Gyamfi set out to produce an archive of queer life, to show, simply, that queer people exist in Ghanaian society, and to keep their records for the future. He lived with his col- laborators and immersed himself in their lives. And he knew what a visual record would signify. Gyamfi first heard the word gay when he was twelve, around the same age as Eddy in Louis’s nov- el and Chiron in Moonlight. “Abroad, men who like other men are called gay,” a classmate told Gyamfi. “I understood what he meant, literally, and could connect to it.” But being gay is some- times seen as “un-African”—people feel it’s foreign. “So, I wanted to find out how queer people are referred to in our individual local dialects and what kinds of imagery accompany these labels.” 

The kinds of images Gyamfi made are both documents of private joy and public pain. In one cinematic portrait, a young man named Jay walks along a dusty street, his defensively hunched shoulders and checked shirt bearing uncanny resemblance to the teenage Chiron in Moonlight. “I was walking this young man home one afternoon,” Gyamfi said, “and he says to me, ‘Eric, eventually I will have to live as a straight man.’ This was a queer man who, as a result of social pressure, or familial pressure, could end up having to live as a straight man.” But Just Like Us is neither proscriptive nor celebratory, and the pictures, even the banal scenes of two men cooking or lounging, necessarily rely on the sense of fear or rejection queer people have to keep at bay. “His participants must contend with the fact that being recognized as gay means that their persons and bodies will be open to carceral punishment and social policing,” M. Neelika Jayawardane wrote of Gyamfi’s project in Aperture. “And while creating a record of the ordinary may not seem like a necessary act, given the incendiary rhetoric of the current moment, Gyamfi’s work is an act of survival.” 

There’s a scene in Moonlight in which Chiron, having reached the breaking point, charges into a classroom and, in one fluid motion, crashes a chair over the head of his high-school bully, Terrel. It’s any fag’s delirious revenge fantasy. But there’s no revenge equal to reparation. And that’s why Moonlight and Gyamfi’s photographs and The End of Eddy are essential cultural objects, even if Louis’s novel turns back on its supposed class solidarity. Louis told The Paris Review last year that he was trying, in The End of Eddy, to portray the state’s violence upon the working classes and to give those classes a voice that doesn’t exist in literature. (He called books an “assault” on the working classes, who never find themselves in books and therefore reject them.) But I find this disingenuous. Louis eviscerates the working class, and it’s almost impossible to imagine anyone from the village picking up his book, which isn’t a plea for compassion but a chair shattering over his mother’s and father’s heads. 

What drives The End of Eddy forward is the wish, ultimately fulfilled, for Eddy to escape. Would this novel have made it to print if, by some twisted dark turn, Eddy wasn’t admitted to theater school and subsequently a prestigious university? If, forced to attend the local lycée, he was delivered back into the claws of the two boys who spit in his face, and finally to some horrible job in a factory? That book might have represented working-class pain. But, having escaped, Eddy becomes Édouard; in his words, which are both his armor and his weapons, he has rejected his impoverished destiny. The plangent closing lines are a cry of relief for Eddy, and for the reader, but not for those back in the village, whose voices you never truly hear. They’ve been bullied, too. 

TORBJØRN RØDLAND

Torbjørn Rødland, I Am Linkola, 2007. Exhibition view of Torbjørn Rødland: The Touch That Made You. Photo Andrea Rossetti, Fondazione Prada Osservatorio, Milano. Courtesy Fondazione Prada

Our current issue, Subjektiv part II, invites different artists, curators and thinkers to give us their recent critical perspectives on the issues at stake and on the status of the subjective as an artistic strategy in the current political climate. Today's statement from Torbjørn Rødland who opens his show The Touch That Made You at Fondazione Prada this Thursday: 

Post-truth, you say. Operating on such a binary, do we root for a return to the hegemony of corporate journalism? When was there ever a Truth that didn’t exclude or hurt a minority?

It is unusually chaotic. There is a feeling of institutions losing dignity; of masses falling apart. But I don’t believe artists have to compete with simplified messages or imitate the crude politics of visibility in order to reconfigure this world. A more enduring fight is the one for increased complexity, which many will forgo in times of chaos.

Complexity acknowledges the limitations of known languages. It carries the burden of historical inheritance but isn’t afraid of abstraction. Complexity involves listening, observing, including voices that disagree with yours, including things that don’t have voices.

To subjectify the world is not necessarily to close off, to shatter, or to occupy. It may involve a harpoon of imagination—a poetic outreach. A poetic image can try to speak for things we have seen or felt but cannot claim to fully know—rocks, dreams, wars, our aging bodies.

We can dissect everything to fragments, mirror and peel layers off of surfaces-as-realities. But in a never-ending struggle to know what insides feel like, poetry will evade us and it will inspire us from the depths of endlessly accumulating feeds. 

Exhibition view of Torbjørn Rødland: The Touch That Made You. Photo Andrea Rossetti, Fondazione Prada Osservatorio, Milano. Courtesy Fondazione Prada