Archive

Miscellaneous images that formed part of Assignment 2 but were not selected for examination purposes.

Miscellaneous images from Assignment 1 that I liked.

Assignment Two

My aim in this project was to explore visually the tension between construction and destruction, and in particular how this tension can be observed in construction sites. Until the very end phases of completion, they have a hurt, damaged, sad, abandoned feeling about them. My argument is that we hurt ourselves and others to build what we want. Once sites and buildings have been settled and colonised and given validity through human purpose, they take on a temporary gloss and veneer, and lose all traces of that hurt until they sink back into decay. It struck me that we are somehow always destroying what we have made, whether in the act of construction, or through the inevitable neglect.

There are numerous construction sites around Pietermaritzburg right now, but I found that access to them is fairly restricted, mostly for safety reasons. I explored the construction site at Medi-Clinic in Payne Street, a residential site, the old polo pavilion, and the cluster of houses near Liberty Midlands Mall from which people have been moved (under controversial circumstances) and that now stand abandoned and gutted, waiting to be destroyed to make space for the mall precinct to expand. For examination purposes I have chosen four pictures from this last site, in order for the selection to have a unifying thread running through it.

The site is a bit of a conundrum, as it is essentially public space (one can drive through the area) but is also protected by security guards who had been told to prohibit pedestrians from having access or taking photographs.




A very private place. (Note the StayEasy lodge peeping through the trees.)

Remnant left behind on a bedroom wall.

 

Nature was already starting to reclaim the site.

 



Assignment One

For this assignment for Wayne, we had to work with layers of images that we had taken around campus and home, and experiment with changing the opacity of these layers to see what emerged. After some initial frustrations with finding combinations that "worked", I found some interesting, spectral combinations.



Bell, roof, steps.



Tree stump, clock, mirror shard.

Chess board, leaves, louvre.

 

Case study

Sabine Hornig

The Destroyed Room (2006)

"The recorded image inverts our relation to the world, as if the hallucinatory alphabet of sensations materialised and anticipated its formation. That is exactly how this continual exchange between individuals, bodies, and things happens, through shifts into other dimensions (like language, physics, cinema, architecture, the work's space of perception, even the one where the viewer stands)" (CPIF 2007).

Confronting the complex interplay of surface and depth, reflected and concrete forms, and impossible perspectives and configurations of objects and spaces in the work of German artist Sabine Hornig (1964–), requires a similar process of conceptual layering and stacking. Visually and conceptually, the viewer of these works is always standing at an unstable intersection between the exterior and interior; the concrete and the ephemeral; the public and the private; construction and destruction; past, present and future; and the flat surfaces and the multi-dimensional, multi-perspectival depths framed within them.

Sabine Hornig, The Destroyed Room, 2006, 100 x 159 cm (plexi), © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2011. (Accessed: http://mobile.arttattler.com/archivesabinehornig.html)

The particular work by Hornig that I have chosen to focus on is The Destroyed Room, a multi-layered, complex photographic image in which the gutted interior of a shop front is framed through a large floor-to-ceiling glass window, upon and through which multiple layers of reflected images and interior perspectives compete for the viewer’s attention, and are further obscured in places by layers of dust and/or condensation or frost. Visually and conceptually, The Destroyed Room is a very dense image, but there are two aspects in particular that strike me about it. The first aspect that interests me about this work is primarily visual, and relates to Hornig’s technical skill in capturing unusual and destabilizing optical effects. The second aspect relates more to Hornig’s thematic concerns, and the possible questions she may be raising about social, cultural, economic and political issues in contemporary, post-unification Germany, and the everyday objects that construct, deconstruct and reflect (sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively) on these concerns.

The Destroyed Room is part of the “Windows” series that Hornig began in 2001 and that consists of 50 photographs enlarged to scale in which she “re-examines the subtle relationship between picture and space, image and reality, in the context of vacated shopfront windows in the Mitte district of Berlin” (Art Tattler International 2011). In this series Hornig presents windows as pictures, as framing devices that combine and unite multiple perspectives on a two-dimensional surface. In The Destroyed Room, the viewer is presented with the view into the gutted interior of the shop, the reflection of the scene outside on the glass window (a city street empty of cars and a strip of urban parkland covered in snow and populated by leafless, wintry trees but devoid of people, despite the backdrop of buildings), and the glass window itself, with its murky layers of dust and/or condensation. “In a precise, exacting visual language, Hornig unites this multi-layered fabric composed of surface views, deeper views and reflections, of before and after, and uses the example of the urban sphere and how we perceive it to generate new ideas relating to tensions between pictorial and real space that challenge the viewer’s prying gaze” (Art Tattler International 2011).

Although the reproduced image is fixed (according to Hornig’s view and perspective on taking the photograph), it is clear to the viewer that at the time the scene afforded her multiple layered perspectives to choose from (in Hornig’s installation works, the viewer is able to experience such multiple possibilities). In addition, even with the fixed reproduced image, Hornig allows for the viewer to participate and add an element of improvisation by mounting the photograph behind plexiglass, thus reflecting and incorporating the immediate surroundings of the gallery space and the viewer’s reflection. In the reproduced image, there are hints and suggestions of ephemeral human faces hovering in the murky layers of the image, possibly the faces of bystanders who are not otherwise apparent, or possibly Hornig’s own face, but equally possibly figments of the viewer’s imagination. As Dominic Eichler comments, Hornig’s work makes use of “visual puns that rely on double-takes: moments when you sense that everything is not in the place you might expect it to be” (Eichler 2001). Hornig transgresses optical boundaries, and in doing so challenges conceptual boundaries, mediating these physical and intellectual spaces through doors and windows, which are essentially fluid boundaries between public and private spaces. Eichler (2001) continues: “The complementary yet antagonistic relationship between image and space is central to Hornig’s work. She likes role reversal: creating spaces that flatten out and images that protrude into space. To make matters more perplexing, her pieces also involve image and space in flexible analogies with other abstract pairs: exterior and interior, public and private”.

The title of this particular image, The Destroyed Room, foregrounds the tension between destruction and rebuilding. The room has been gutted in preparation for renovations, it seems, and objects related to building and construction (a ladder, beams, light fittings, wiring, piping) are arranged quite neatly near a pile of rubble and sand. The interior has been stripped and destroyed in preparation for rebuilding, but the scene is eerily still and deserted, and it is a sense of destruction and annihilation that is captured and framed by the floor-to-ceiling glass window, rather than construction. This aesthetic of destruction and reconstruction is central to Germany’s 20^th-century national narrative, and can be traced from the First World War, to the annihilation of their largest cities during the Allied bombing raids of the Second World War, and through to the systemic decay of East Germany under Soviet rule. Although there is a promise of reconstruction, and the attendant hope and freshness that goes with it, what Hornig has captured here is stasis, and a sense of arrested decay and desolation. This feeling is reinforced, perhaps, by the barren urban winter landscape reflected on the glass, a scene that features leafless wintry trees in the snow and that is devoid of people despite the built-up urban backdrop. In the context of such barrenness, the ephemeral, possibly spectral, elements of the image that I have alluded to could suggest an afterlife of some sort, the nature of which is still indeterminate: the ghostings and afterlives of the images as captured in the reflections and distortions and obscured elements; or the ghostings and echoes of certain ideas and attitudes and orientations, some (rebuilding, possibly) nurtured by and some (destruction, possibly) suppressed by Germany's cultural and political history.

Hornig's literal and figurative foregrounding of a moment of stasis and destruction, rather than movement and construction, could be construed as a challenge to entrenched ideas about urban progress and development, and about processing a difficult and often traumatic history (a process that Germans have referred to in the past as Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or "mastering the past"). Hornig herself alludes to the process of uniting the concrete elements of a place or space with the more personal signifiers that the artist or viewer relates to: 

“I reduce the form of the architectural elements, with the result that these no longer directly relate to a specific location. Instead they attach themselves to memories: the recollections of commonly encountered places and particular situations, such as standing in front of a wall or a closed door and being able to vaguely make out something through it”.

It is Hornig's creation of literal and figurative doors and windows into multiple interpretive possibilities that I find fascinating.

Art Tattler International. 2011. “Photographs of Vacant Shopfronts, Enlarged to Scale.” Available online at http://mobile.arttattler.com/archivesabinehornig.html Accessed: 13 August 2012.

CPIF. (Centre Photographique d’Ile-de-France). 2007. “L’Île de Morel.” Available online at http://www.cpif.net/index.php?rub=6&ssRub=1&docId=101607 Accessed 13 August 2012.

Eichler, Dominic. 2001. “Space Invader.” Frieze 62 (October 2001) Available online at http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/space_invader/ Accessed: 13 August 2012.08.14





Precis

The title of chapter four of Charlotte Cotton’s The Photograph as Contemporary Art, “Something and Nothing”, points to the oblique subject matter of a certain thematic grouping in contemporary art photography. The non-human things that are the focus of this grouping are ordinary, everyday objects, “objects and spaces that we may ordinarily ignore or pass by” (9). Cotton lists some examples of the iconography for this type of photography as follows: “objects balanced and stacked”, such as Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s Quiet Afternoon series (1984-85), in which sculptural forms are created by assemblages of mundane household items that are often stacked and fixed together, for example a grater, a carrot and a courgette stacked and impossibly balanced; “the edges or corners of things”, such as Gabriel Orozco’s Breath on Piano (1993), in which the ephemeral traces of condensed breath are juxtaposed with and layered onto the solid, shiny corners of the piano; “abandoned spaces, rubbish and decay”, such as Wim Wenders’ Wall in Paris, Texas (2001) and Anthony Hernandez’s Aliso Village #3 (2000), that focus on neglected and abandoned spaces; and “fugitive or ephemeral forms, such as snow, condensation and light”, examples of which are Tracey Baran’s Dewy (2000), and Manfred Willman’s Das Land series that focuses on the passing of the seasons (115).

In the sense that these objects and spaces have not traditionally been seen as credible visual subjects, and that they often do not merit much attention in people’s everyday lives, they could be considered “nothing”. Yet their very concrete presence, their “thing-ness”, and the way in which they are transformed from ordinary objects and spaces and made “extraordinary” by being photographed from “a sensitized and subjective point of view” (9), and thus altered conceptually, makes them “something”. Through this treatment, argues Cotton, “everything in the real world is a potential subject” (9), as “through photography, quotidian matter is given a visual charge and imaginative possibility beyond its everyday function” (115). She cautions against seeing the subject matter of this type of contemporary art photography as “unphotographed or unphotographable” (115-16), emphasising that the significance of any subject is determined jointly by the viewer and the artist, that the photographer designates something as significant by photographing it, piquing the visual curiosity of the viewer and encouraging an intersubjective engagement.

Cotton identifies one of the precursors of this particular strand of contemporary art photography practice in Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, and locates contemporary practices within subsequent “attempts to make art from the matter of daily life, by breaking down the boundaries between the artist’s studio, the gallery and the world” (115). Because the specific technical skill of the artist is not immediately apparent or foregrounded, the objects or spaces become the focus of the viewer’s curiosity and attention, and the conceptual weight of their presence and configurations intensifies. In this sense, Cotton refers to “the pictorial charge that can be found in a place [or object], perhaps any place [or object], if one looks” (127, my addition in parentheses). Ways of seeing are crucial; physical, spatial and conceptual relationships are crucial; and an engagement with the concrete “thing-ness” of the objects or spaces, and with their location within their cultural and spatial environments, is crucial.

(What drew me to this particular chapter was an interest that I have had for a long time in the writing of W.G. Sebald, who includes photographs of various objects and scenes in his work. These photographs suggest a deeply phenomenological approach to the subject matter that has been difficult to account for within text-based literary studies. Many of the images Sebald uses lend a documentary feel to the work, and blur the boundaries between fiction and reality; but many of his images relate to architectural and spatial forms, and Cotton’s statement, in her discussion of Wenders and Hernandez that “architecture, in the context of this chapter, tends to be photographed at the point at which buildings have deteriorated or outlived their original purpose, abandoned by their inhabitants to leave only traces of previous human activity” (125), resonates strongly with many of Sebald’s preoccupations with the object in the context of its historical and cultural environment. I am hoping that looking a bit more deeply into this particular strand of contemporary art photography will help me to build a conceptual visual language and shed light on visual aspects of Sebald’s work that I have struggled to account for adequately.)