Thursday, 31 March 2011
Suki Chan Interval II
Interval n. 1. a period between two events or times, or the space between two end points 2. the difference in pitch between two notes
Suki Chan’s film premiere Interval II explores our transient relationship with our built environment through symbolic periods in history. Chan juxtaposes two contrasting types of architecture that mediate our relationship with our surroundings from a cast-iron pier in Northwest England to a roundhouse in Southeast China. Chan uses time-lapse to accentuate the transitory movement of light over the structures, highlighting their physical form within the altered landscape. Shifting from micro to macro, she investigates traces of human presence within the buildings, as well as the social and cultural shifts within the respective societies.
An icon of industrialization, cast iron piers are reminiscent of the Victorian era and its grand vision for the advancement of humanity through science and technology. Boldly stretching out over the sea towards the horizon, the structure brings us closer towards the elements of nature, as well as being a site of cultural activity. During the 20th century, travel by rail was increasingly more accessible for the working class, bringing them to the seaside and the popular destination of the pier. Today, many of the piers have fallen into disrepair and a new community has taken refuge – thousands of starlings return to roost at the end of each day, marking their arrival with mesmerizing swarming formations in the sky.
The roundhouses designed and built to protect its inhabitants from the elements of nature were historically inhabited by the migrant community of Hakkas or otherwise known as “guest people”. The round fortress-like form made from rammed-earth is a result of the blending of the Hakka culture, local building materials and techniques. The form of this traditional dwelling articulates a collective spirit and an aspiration for security of the community. The round shape maximizes interior space whilst ensuring an equal split between the occupants, usually several generations of a large extended family. As China modernizes many members of the family move away from these vernacular dwellings to the city in search of new opportunities.
The built environment is organized in terms of our binary perceptions of space, inside and outside, physical and psychological, sacred and profane, culture and nature. Buildings are the remains of human endeavors to mark and change the wider environment. They remind us of our fundamental need to create refuges, as well as our desire for progress.
Suki Chan’s film premiere Interval II explores our transient relationship with our built environment through symbolic periods in history. Chan juxtaposes two contrasting types of architecture that mediate our relationship with our surroundings from a cast-iron pier in Northwest England to a roundhouse in Southeast China. Chan uses time-lapse to accentuate the transitory movement of light over the structures, highlighting their physical form within the altered landscape. Shifting from micro to macro, she investigates traces of human presence within the buildings, as well as the social and cultural shifts within the respective societies.
An icon of industrialization, cast iron piers are reminiscent of the Victorian era and its grand vision for the advancement of humanity through science and technology. Boldly stretching out over the sea towards the horizon, the structure brings us closer towards the elements of nature, as well as being a site of cultural activity. During the 20th century, travel by rail was increasingly more accessible for the working class, bringing them to the seaside and the popular destination of the pier. Today, many of the piers have fallen into disrepair and a new community has taken refuge – thousands of starlings return to roost at the end of each day, marking their arrival with mesmerizing swarming formations in the sky.
The roundhouses designed and built to protect its inhabitants from the elements of nature were historically inhabited by the migrant community of Hakkas or otherwise known as “guest people”. The round fortress-like form made from rammed-earth is a result of the blending of the Hakka culture, local building materials and techniques. The form of this traditional dwelling articulates a collective spirit and an aspiration for security of the community. The round shape maximizes interior space whilst ensuring an equal split between the occupants, usually several generations of a large extended family. As China modernizes many members of the family move away from these vernacular dwellings to the city in search of new opportunities.
The built environment is organized in terms of our binary perceptions of space, inside and outside, physical and psychological, sacred and profane, culture and nature. Buildings are the remains of human endeavors to mark and change the wider environment. They remind us of our fundamental need to create refuges, as well as our desire for progress.
Sophy Rickett
Romantic Artifice
by Mark Durden
There is a compelling simplicity to many of Sophy Rickett’s pictures. In her Untitled Landscapes, (1998) photography is pared down to a simple binary of black and white, dark and light. Only there is always more black than white, more darkness than light. As single projected beams, light appears in these pictures as lines or cuts in the image, an illumination which only partially illuminates. Against the excesses of darkness, more is concealed than revealed.
One of her most spare and minimal pictures— Untitled Landscape-Part VI, 1998— shows nothing more than a sliver of projected light as it illuminates the ground, cutting a horizontal line across the photograph. The panoramic format of the picture itself appears to have been elongated in order to contain the extent of this line of light. This picture of nothing, evokes at once an empty stage and the ‘slashes’ in Luciano Fontana’s canvases or the ‘zips’ in Barnet Newman’s paintings. Only the earthbound horizontality of Rickett’s line counters any connotations of elation and transcendence that would be prompted by verticality.
In other Untitled Landscapes, (1-4, 8,10), figures are there to indicate scale, provide a measure against the blackness. The lone figures against the void have a particular iconic resonance: from Caspar David Friedrich’s painting, The Monk By the Sea to the existentialist closure of Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blow Up, with those long shots of the lone, diminutive, disappearing figure of the photographer. Untitled Landscapes (8-11) give a viewpoint looking up and from a distance at what appear to be the railings on bridges, illuminated in such a way they appear as a series of markings, as if calibrating or mapping the empty and ambiguous space. In all of these pictures, the source of light remains out of frame. Yet the panoramic format appears to contain the light, each picture shows us the total extent of its illumination.
Lit in an exaggerated manner, these landscapes draw attention to the process of illumination. But for all the romantic allusions, the metaphorical connotations of light and illumination in these pictures, they also possess a distinctive medium-specificity, a materialism which literalizes and pulls against more metaphysical responses. The banality and ordinariness of the lighting is succinctly and wittily revealed in the reflexive picture showing the lamp illuminating the generator which powers it in Untitled Composition, 1999.
A central concern of Rickett’s is to break with traditional Albertian, monocular perspective, in which the viewer is provided with a fixed and privileged viewing position that serves to draw him or her into the dynamic of the image. In many of her pictures, the foreground is obliterated, or the horizon emphasized to unfix the viewing position, so that the viewer, as Kate Bush has said, “could be anywhere and nowhere”. In more recent works, Playing Fields, London, (2001) and Untitled Landscapes, Rome, (2002), an apparently continuous landscape that stretches over four panels, turns out , on closer inspection, to incorporate viewpoints that shift from image to image. Bereft of the co-ordinates by which we map, measure and ‘enter’ photography’s illusionary space, these pictures hover between flatness and depth. Rickett has spoken of how the effect of “spatial uncertainty and lack of perspectival fixity within the pictures... leaves the viewer out.” Excluded from the images, we tend to scan the photographs, look across them not into them.
In Untitled Landscape, Part 12, 1998, a picture of a blind person's white stick, an opposition between seeing and not seeing is set up. The panoramic format, the simple formal compositional elements— a white line against a black background— underline this picture’s relationship to the rest of the Untitled Landscape series. In many senses, this final addition to the series is a literal joke about perception. Photography details an instrument which helps a non-sighted person to ‘see’. We are looking at something that is not looked at, but felt, physically used as an instrument with which someone without sight is able to physically move around in the world. The image also recalls the way in which an anti-optical notion of sight pervaded thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the idea of vision as touch. In evoking touch this photograph also highlights the limits of photography. A corporeal engagement with things in the world is of course the very experience the photograph cannot offer. I also see the work in connection with Paul Strand’s powerful portrait, Blind Woman, 1918, in which the subject wears a placard bearing the word BLIND, a documentary image which as David. P. Peeler put it, “sends the mind looping back to photography itself”.
In relation to seeing, her series of panoramic pictures, in which the base and tops of trees are cropped out, Forest 1-3, 2000, is of interest in that the pictures have the appearance not only of photographic negatives but afterimages. They thus evoke an internalised, subjective view. Bereft of light, these dark, flat pictures, also come closest to miming the condition of abstract paintings, an Op Art photography made up the rhythm of vertical grey lines over black.
For Clement Greenberg photography was defined against abstract painting. If for him the essence of modernist painting, meant any content, any narrative association is emptied out of the picture, then the essence of photography concerned narrative, its capacity to tell stories. Photography was closer to literature than painting. Rickett consciously opposes this— “I have never been concerned with making pictures that operate within the realm of ‘what happened next’.” Many of her recent works foreground photography’s non-narrative identity. In doing so they further extend the quality of occluded and incomplete vision that characterises her 1998 Untitled Landscape series. Rickett hyperbolizes the sense of photography missing an event, photography as the act of not seeing something. In these pictures light is linked with an activity taking place out of the picture: the event which lights from behind the trees in her series— Cypress Screen, Dundee (2001)— or in her images, London Studio 1 and 2, (2002) which shows light seeping though the edges of veiling curtains. Rickett has also produced succinct textual works which concern the ‘edges’ of an event, the build up of expectancy signalled in such theatrical cues as: [Music Swells.] CURTAIN or [Enter Ballet and Singers] CURTAIN, (both 1999). These stage directions are printed in the top left of otherwise blank photographs, offering a conceptual and formal variant on the oppositions between seeing and non seeing, event and non-event, narrative and non-narrative, which characterises her photography.
When Rickett uses colour photography, her pictures tend to highlight the synthetic aspect of its colour. Here, as in some of her landscape panoramas, she plays with romantic motifs, for example, the skeletal and cruciform lone saplings of Poplar Plantation, Dundee, 1 and 2,(2001). While the motif might link such pictures with romantic iconography, the lurid light tends to divest them of any transcendence. Yellow sodium light on the saplings gives them a fake and phoney aura. In contrast to the austerity of Poplar Plantation, Dundee, her recent series of pictures, taken on the edges of sportfields in Rome, are much more pictorial. In these nocturnal landscapes, the night sky, formerly reduced to a black void in her pictures, is now an animate and integral element of the image. Some of them appear to have adopted the tradition
al spatial compositions of landscape pictures— the tripartite structure of foreground, middleground and background. Rickett even deploys the repoussoir object of framing trees. But these are pictures in negative in the sense of the generically familiar landscape paintings they might evoke. The lack of daylight makes them the obverse of paintings from nature. These are mock classical landscapes, in which the chemical aspect of night lighting— the ‘pollution’ of the night sky by sodium street lights and the tungsten lights illuminating some unseen sports event, always out of frame, off screen— is set in tension with the landscape motif. Natural landscape views are made unnatural, tainted, stained by light.
Such pictures in their visual plenitude and fullness signal a shift from the starkness of earlier works. They also seem to look more towards the classical landscape tradition and ideal. But in many respects it would be too constraining to see her simply as a landscape photographer. Photography is as much her subject as the landscapes and views she offers us. Rickett’s is an oeuvre in which the integral elements of photography are highlighted and accented. Her landscapes are studies in lighting, scale and perspective. Her most recent series, Untitled Landscapes, (Rome), 2002, are studies in colour photography, the distinctive effect of colour film’s responses to differing types of light.
If one was to look for a key precedent for her work one finds it in certain conceptual photographic practices of the late 1960s and the 1970s. There are affinities here, for example, with John Hilliard’s revelation of the material elements of photography. Hilliard moved from photographs about photography— cameras, darkroom clocks etc.— to landscape, which for him became a means to raise questions about the nature and limits of photographic representation. In a series of diptychs, Over Mount Caburn, 1978, for example, Hilliard presents two different images from the same landscape view, with each picture exposed alternatively for land and sky. Hilliard then went on to explore narrative scenarios, staging events which were often drawn up in terms of antagonist relationships between male and female protagonists. While Rickett has no interest in the narrative possibility and potential of the medium, in many respects she continues Hilliard’s work with landscape, using landscape as a means to accent and highlight photography’s non-narrative and formal possibilities. Her views of nature are mediated and filtered by the processes of photographic representation. Landscape is a motif to play with and against, a romantic and romanticised counterpoint to photography’s artifice.
Thomas Struth. Paradise
At this point, "Paradise" consists of twenty-five photographs I'm just beginning to understand. intuition is an old word, but many things sprout from inner processes and needs and then take on a form. My approach to the jungle pictures might be said to be new, in that my initial impulses were pictorial and emotional, rather than theoretical. They are "unconscious places" and thus seem to follow my early city pictures. The photographs taken in the jungles of Australia, Japan, and China, as well as in the California woods, contain a wealth of delicately branched information, which makes it almost impossible, especially in large formats, to isolate single forms. One can spend a lot of time in front of these pictures and remain helpless in terms of knowing how to deal with them. There is no sociocultural context to be read or discovered, unlike in the photographs of people in front of paintings in museums. Standing in front of the facade of the cathedral in Milan, one experiences oneself as a human being defined by specific social and historical conditions. The jungle pictures, on the other hand, emphasize the self. Because of their consistent "allover" nature, "Paradise" numbers 9 and 4 could be understood as membranes for meditation. They present a kind of empty space: emptied to elicit a moment of stillness and internal dialogue. You have to be able to enjoy this silence in order to communicate with yourself--and eventually with others.
In some of the photographs, the picture stands like a screen in front of another, invisible image, dissolving the vanishing point that photography usually puts into focus. I made several attempts to take pictures in the old German woods close to the Czech border, but pine forests always look like Christmas. I didn't want to portray a specific place, that specific forest. Rather I was trying to feel within its primeval branchings the moment of beginning that once was the world. I also avoided pictures that would evoke exotic fantasies or look like botanical gardens. Actually, I don't even see the images as depictions of nature. The theme may play a major part, but the undertone makes the music. It's about the experience of time as well as a certain humility in dealing with things. It's a metaphor for life and death.
My trips to China made me aware of Brice Marden's "Cold Mountain" paintings. You can feel the time invested in those canvases. Marden engages in Asian calligraphy but frees the characters of their semantic aspect. He respects these signs as a sort of homage to an alien cultural phenomenon. He's not Chinese, so he has to find his own language following the Chinese script. It's very important to me to relate my own cultural work to the achievements of other cultures. I try to constantly be in between spaces and to feel life's breath--the rhythm of inhaling and exhaling, as in tai chi. Every day, I could think of thirty pictures that would have a spectacular effect, but it's not about big ideas. Instead I'm trying to effectively unite the conscious and the unconscious of life and the time I live in and thereby create authentic pictures. Even in the portraits, I've always sought the moment in which the portrayed's presence is especially strong.
I don't understand why so many people equate the notion of paradise with escapism. Paradise was never a place one could enter--though, in this global moment, escapism is no longer an issue either. The disappearance of the social debate about utopia, which the title "Paradise" alludes to, is an impoverishment and banalization. I focus exclusively on the experience of proximity. Nowadays the human being is reduced to a consumer and therefore to an instrument of a global economic mechanism. I, on the other hand, am interested in peculiarity, the individual ways of people and what goes on inside them when their historical bearings are disoriented. Certain aspects of cities now strike me as being straight out of science fiction, such as a particular intersection in Tokyo's Shibuya district, where everything revolves around the increase and intensification of information. Then I notice a growing confinement, not only in a physical sense but also in terms of vital energy. We must look elsewhere if we want to expand the individual's space. Understanding and communication have increasingly become inner processes originating in silence. As sources of air and space, the jungle pictures offer me an even deeper purchase on another of my ongoing subjects--the city.
Translated from German by Philip Glahn.
Taken from http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_9_40/ai_86647178/
Oxbow Archive info
On a summer morning in 1833, Thomas Cole, a British-born, American landscape painter climbed to the top of Mount Holyoke in central Massachusetts and made a sketch of the Connecticut River where it bends and resembles an ox yoke. Three years later the sketch he made that morning became View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm (The Oxbow).
The four by six foot painting, now a key work of American art has been described as Cole’s attempt to create a moving time/space panorama within a single frame – the passage of time is represented by the ongoing fury of the storm on the mountain as sunshine returns to the meadow below. Cole was skeptical about progress and the painting may represent a warning about the clearing of wilderness to make open land for farms and factories. Nearly two hundred years after Cole painted The Oxbow, the American photographic artist, Joel Sternfeld, walked into the mile square field depicted in the lower right quadrant of Cole’s painting. Sternfeld had first photographed this field in 1978 while traveling on American Prospects. By the time he returned in 2006, the Oxbow in the river was crossed by an interstate highway and the destructive effects of progress that Cole had feared were making themselves apparent globally as climate change.
Sternfeld spent the next year and a half walking that field, commuting to it on an almost daily basis from his home in southern Vermont. His archive is a record of classic New England seasonality, a nature study unlike any other as it is made with the foreknowledge that because of global warming it will never be the same again. His choice of subject matter, a flat unremarkable corn and potato field (archetypal new world crops), signals a conceptual stance away from previous nature depictions: his field is neither Beautiful, nor Sublime, nor Picturesque. The flatness of the field, an unusual stretch of visual freedom in the New England highlands offers an eloquent emptiness and a vessel for the true subject his work: iconic seasonal effect as manifestation of the orbiting Earth.
Sternfeld’s time landscape is also a companion piece to his recently published Sweet Earth: Experimental Utopias in America and to When It Changed (pictures at the Montreal Climate Change Conference) and needs to be understood in terms of the political and cultural resonances of those works. Joel Sternfeld is a much published and exhibited artist. Amongst his previous books with Steidl are American Prospects and Walking the High Line.
Taken from http://www.steidlville.com/books/782-Oxbow-Archive.html
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