Photographing the Light in Places That May Soon Be Lost - 5 April 2007
The New York Times
By KATHRYN SHATTUCK
Published: April 5, 2007
But for the occasional modern accouterment — a microwave in Belgium, a row of 2005 calendars in Spain — Bert Teunissen’s photographs of Europeans at home could have been captured in the remote corners of the continent a century or two ago. Weathered faces gaze out from surroundings patinaed through generations of use. Fireplaces the size of caves radiate heat across stone-slab floors. Hams and sausages age on hooks dangling from massive wooden beams. A dog wiles away a lazy lifetime at its owner’s feet.
Of the more than 350 structures he has photographed, he estimated that 90 percent no longer exist. More Photos »
And then there is the light, dissipated by homespun lace or entering windows unobstructed, that slices through the haze of years like a freshly sharpened knife.
“At first I thought it was quite obvious to compare the work of a Dutch photographer to a Dutch painter,” Mr. Teunissen said of his initial dismay at reviews that likened his portraits to the still lifes painted by Vermeer and de Hoogh. But once he more closely examined the Dutch masterpieces painted some 300 years earlier and their particular radiance, he too was struck by a certain similarity.
“It was only then that I understood that the kind of light I used in those pictures is the same kind of light as painters used in those paintings,” he said in a telephone interview from his home in Huizen, about 15 miles east of Amsterdam. “It’s old and antique light, the kind you rarely see anymore.”
Thirty of Mr. Teunissen’s portraits are on view at the Aperture Gallery in Chelsea through May 10, when a companion book, “Domestic Landscapes,” will be published in the United States by Aperture. His Web site, bertteunissen.com, has several hundred more, including images from a 2003 project in Japan. Spanning 10 countries and 10 years and counting, his collection serves to archive a way of life that is, he said, “fated to disappear as a consequence not only of architectural standardization but also of social displacement and shifts in public opinion about life and how it should be lived.”
“Domestic Landscapes” began as a quest for the special light and atmospheres that were familiar to Mr. Teunissen, now 47, as a boy, and that he longed for after his childhood dwelling in the rural Netherlands was razed when he was 8 and replaced by a modern house that never quite felt like home.
It metamorphosed into an effort to preserve memories of a lifestyle fast becoming obsolete. Of the more than 350 structures Mr. Teunissen has photographed, he estimated that about 90 percent no longer exist.
A commercial photographer whose work for companies like G Star Jeans veers toward the cool and kinetic, Mr. Teunissen came upon his first interior in “Domestic Landscapes” by accident, as he cycled through the hamlet of Castelnau in southwestern France.
There he found his way to the home of a white-haired woman who sat at a wooden table, its top painted in brown and white checks. Behind her a deer head was mounted above a stone fireplace adorned with a short toile curtain. Shelves of bottles and painted dishware hung beneath a heavy beamed ceiling.
“I was immediately bewitched by the atmosphere,” he said. “The light that fell through the windows seemed extremely familiar to me.”
Almost a year later, on an assignment to capture what he called a “Sunday afternoon feeling” for a gin advertisement, he took a similar image some 700 miles away in his birthplace of Ruurlo.
“It started occurring to me that there had been an atmospheric similarity,” he said. “The places in my photographs had something in common that had to do with some kind of architectural consistency.”
“But it was not just about nice old places that gave me a nostalgic feeling and reminded me of my old family home,” he continued. “It also became clear that this had to do with a way of living, a way of building, a way of using the house, that I understood was disappearing.”
He began to investigate remote regions of Europe where actual daylight had been an important aspect in the way people lived and used a house in the years before electricity.
Through mayors, fire stations and tour guides, he asked for introductions into people’s homes, after which he set up his camera, using only natural light to illuminate his subjects in the rooms they used most.
Many of the dwellings in “Domestic Landscapes” have been lived in by the same families across centuries, their occupants some of the last purveyors of ancient culinary and agricultural traditions.
But while most of his subjects were elderly, he occasionally stumbled across younger people who honored the more self-sufficient ways of their ancestors. An image taken in the Spanish village of Monterroso shows a tub of fresh meat on the floor before an old couple and their middle-aged son, who abandoned a successful career in Switzerland to return home and revive traditional methods of raising and slaughtering livestock.
“Ironically, the Europeans portrayed by Teunissen are members of a generation whose work on the foundations of the European Union has ushered in the demise of their own way of life,” Saskia Asser, a curator at the Huis Marseille Museum for Photography in Amsterdam, wrote in an essay for the exhibition. “Age-old trades and crafts are disappearing as farming and agriculture are industrialized. Moreover, strict European Union regulations passed down from Brussels make life for the small farmer or food producer untenable.”
Mr. Teunissen witnessed the effects of these regulations in northern Portugal, where assorted pubs and taverns had been shuttered because they did not meet the latest European Union standards, which he said required them to have two built-in toilets and stainless steel worktops.
“Since the provincial government was dependent on European subsidies to finance the construction of a much-needed new road, the mostly elderly innkeepers were forced to either comply, which they simply could not afford to do, or close down,” he wrote in an essay.
Mr. Teunissen will soon begin photographing in Eastern Europe and Russia, and hopes someday to venture to the United States, he said.
But always there is the pressure of time.
“Those people belong there,” he said. “That’s what you feel when you look at the pictures. They kind of made each other, the people and the places, they became a single unit together.
“All you can do now is cross the country and hope that you still find places that have been left alone, and left in peace.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/05/arts/design/05dome.ht
America in all its extremes - 1 October 2007
Most people will remember Andres Serrano from the exhibition he presented in the Groninger Museum eleven years ago at the invitation of museum director Frans Haks. The urolagnia posters on display all over the city at that time caused quite an uproar; but then visitors came to the museum in throngs. It was typical of Frans Haks: provocation with a keen eye for PR. And it was typical of Andres Serrano: super-stylized work with a bite to it.
Then again it wasn’t.
Of course, sex and sensuality are always present in the work of this New York artist with his orthodox Catholic upbringing. But he had never before been as explicit as in A History of Sex (1996), nor would he be again. Moreover, this was the only time that the photographer entered into direct confrontation with the art of painting. He depicted his SM couples, transsexuals and piercing fetishists in a way that was very reminiscent of the old masters. The extremely Dutch skies in the background could have been taken straight from a Ruysdael.
A History of Sex was actually a detour for Serrano: an excursion to a different visual language, a different time and even – quite literally – to a different country. Because in fact the rest of Serrano’s oeuvre is about only one thing: America. Just like Oliver Stone with his films about the assassination of Kennedy or the Vietnam War, and Ken Burns with his documentaries about baseball and jazz, Serrano is a self-appointed visual historian, who tries to capture the history of his young country while it is still being made. Just like Stone and Burns, Serrano focuses on stereotypes. But unlike the film-makers, Serrano has to make do with stationary, single images. And he even refuses to show individuals or objects in their entirety (another difference between the rest of his work and A History of Sex, in which he did use complete shots). It is as though the photographer is so close to his subject that he cannot take enough distance to view the whole picture.
It makes his photographs intimate and direct – and often controversial in an explosive way. For Piss Christ (1987) Serrano immersed a crucifix in a container of urine; in doing so he incurred the fury of conservative senators. The Klan (1990) also provoked heated responses. Serrano – himself of Honduran-Cuban descent – depicted the racists with their pointed hats in a way that was almost glorious.
Several of Serrano’s photo series are now on display at Witzenhausen Gallery. The images presented here of the madness and extremes of America are slick – almost like advertisement photos. The pistols, for instance, have wooden handles which gleam like well-polished antiques.
Much more moving is the triptych from the Morgue series (1992). To the left is a frontal shot of a pale face with an empty gaze, half concealed beneath a sheet; to the right a corpse in profile, with a blue cloth over its eyes; and in the middle a broken but still glittering watch on the charred arm of a burns victim. Serrano’s idea of a memento mori is not exactly subtle, but it is not devoid of emotion.
The series about sport, the ‘most important side issue’ in American society, is purely aesthetic. Each picture shows us a hand with a sports attribute – a basketball, a rugby ball, a baseball bat, a section of climbing wall. The background is a neutral green, orange or yellow or a vague blend of these colours. As a whole the series looks like a rhythmical exercise in sign language.
Although Serrano has settled down in his visual language and no radical changes can be expected from this photographer – who is now 57 years old – he continues to explore new territory. This can be seen clearly in his last work, Cycads (2006), which has been given a place of honour at Witzenhausen Gallery. The subject is cycads – tropical plants which look like a cross between ferns, palms and succulents. They are very ancient plants; they have existed for 38 million years, which means they are some of the oldest forms of plant life on earth. Thorns and poison are the weapons of this evolutionary survivor. But now it is precisely these properties which have caused the plants to end up on the list of endangered species. The pharmaceutical industry is interested in the chemical substances found in cycads; and wealthy collectors will do anything to get hold of a specimen.
Serrano’s picture of the endangered plant is typical of his work: sensual and very sharp. Like Morgue, this is both a still-life and a memento mori. But the danger and potency emanating from the images is huge. The intense green and the flaming red-orange grate against each other. The conical, almost phallic flowers thrust into the sky. Everything about this plant shouts: danger! And then there is the realization that modern-day America is about to put an end to its millions of years of existence.
EDO DIJKSTERHUIS
Andres Serrano: Cycads
Until 12 October in Witzenhausen Gallery, Amsterdam
Information: +31 (0)20 644 98 98 or www.witzenhausengallery.com
RARE ESSENCE - 1 October 2007
Using clever digital tricks, Ryuta Amae creates what he describes as “virtual memories”. His sources of inspiration are myriad: vast imaginary landscapes which he draws in black lead, and banal images drawn from everyday life, which he modifies in extraordinary ways. The first work in a new series, maternity, which he is presenting here, is based on a real photo which he interprets in order to produce a scene with religious connotations. As always with Amae, there is a gap between the identifiable subject (here, an archetypal Virgin and Child) and the elements disturbing the interpretation of it (nudity and a dark setting). Apart from his technical prowess, his photographs, which resemble daydreams, question sharply the relationship between the recorded image and the memory: is digital manipulation akin to altering memories?
The huge panoramic views by Nicholas Kahn & Richard Selesnick bring the viewer straight into the world of the imagination: each photograph can be looked at individually or in relation to the other images making up the series. An essential role is played in these photographic tales by the written word, the narrative. The sources are very varied: from the exoticism of City of Salt to a homage to the science-fiction prose of the beginning of the 20th century with Apollo Prophecies. Mixing genres is also a great speciality of Cédric Tanguy: his photographic fresco in which he appears as the grand admiral of a frenzied polar expedition is (actually) inspired very freely by the painting Vue de l'océan glacial, pêche au morse par des Grœnlandais by Frenchman François-Auguste Biard (1798-1882), produced following his visits to Lapland and the Spitzberg. There is no need to point out that the painter’s concern for accuracy is quite alien to Cédric Tanguy, who prefers to allow his fertile imagination to roam free…
However, mystery can emanate from something other than baroque, while dreams often distort reality only slightly: the images by Inez van Lamsweerde go even further because they introduce into an already fictional universe – fashion – visual discrepancies that are both simple and spectacular. In the same way, Sam Taylor Wood uses Bram Stoker’s Chairs to engage in several levels of interpretation: his allusion to the author of Dracula is a reminder of one characteristic of vampires – they do not have shadows, just like the chair on which the artist is perched. The improbable position of the body is emphasised by that of the phantom chair. Jean-François Fourtou has no need of a complex strategy: the presence of one of his very realistic camels alongside Mr and Mrs Messmer confers a touch of welcome humour to the bourgeois drawing-room. As for Hendrik Kerstens, the bizarre is at the heart of his project which he has been conducting for over ten years, using his daughter, Paula, as his sole model. Possessed by the spirit of the Dutch 17th century painters, her portraits bear the marks of a doubly ambiguous relationship: she is the only subject of her own father. Ambiguity is also at the heart of the work of Shadi Ghadirian, which focuses on the female condition in contemporary Iranian society. Without once falling into the cliché of denunciation, the photographer plays subtly with the taboos on representing the body. Ctrl, Alt, Delete, her new series, evokes like the previous ones the gap between tradition and modernity. Concealed by the black background, the female character is simultaneously revealed by the computer software icons she holds. As for Carlos Aires, the hilarious faces in his gallery of portraits contrast with the severity of the black baroque frames in which they have been placed. But it is all in plastic – just for a laugh, so to speak.
In the church images of Andres Serrano, the minute execution of the photography is inversely proportional to the apparent banality of the subject – architectural details which thereby acquire a strange aura. However, in Paul Glazier’s work, everything is stage-managed to create a universe hovering between the celestial and the terrestrial, peopled with humanoid ectoplasm. In his video Yellow Brick Road Works, revisiting the central theme of the Wizard of Oz, sound occupies a key place and emerges as an extension of the strange world of the photographs.
While the neon blue and white of Tracey Emin evokes a cry of love and a fusion relationship (You Forgot To Kiss My Soul), the sequin embroidery of Frances Goodman, precious objects used as supports for various maxims, are geared more to introspection. I Am The Happiest Person Alive, Deadly Serious…: drawn from conversations with des body-builders, etc. these phrases refer to collective emotions, but emotions which each person feels in a profoundly individual way. The artist compares her work to the pop music of a radio station: whatever her mood, she always ends up hearing a song she likes…
The sculptures of John Isaacs and those of Olivier Blanckart are deeply anchored in the real world, where they introduce all kinds of distortions: with Let the Golden Age begin, the former transforms a memorable drinking session into a fairy-like vision, while his portable tombstone (A Perfect Soul) plays at defying the laws of physics. With his giant portrait of Catherine Millet as an Asian goddess, her body covered with vulvae, Blanckart points out that reality is rarely unequivocal – and that the founder of Art Press could very well become reincarnated as the heretical author of an autobiographical account of her sexual life. Things are much less complicated for Cheri Samba since, in any case, all chicks are the same (Toutes les nanas sont pareilles), a conclusion she reached at the age of forty. David Nicholson, on the contrary, ensures the extreme individualism of his models: his tiny paintings each bear the name of the woman in the portrait (Christine, Gabriela, …), and are charged with an erotic tension that is at times suggested, and at times displayed. A human skull, vanitas, completes the set in a very natural way…
While the media submerge us daily with bloody images that make up a considerable proportion of the international news, the Disasters of War engravings by Goya dating from the start of the 19th century have lost nothing of their persuasive force in denouncing the atrocities of the Napoleonic occupation. Or have they? When they acquired a full set of these eighty plates, the intention of Jake & Dinos Chapman was to “correct” them, “like in The Shining when the butler encourages Jack Nicholson to kill his family to correct the situation”, explains Jake… Victims and murderers are thus endowed with coloured clown’s heads and puppies to produce a new, tragic-comic and updated interpretation of the Disasters engraved by Goya. In a more humorous tone, Annie Sprinkle “corrects” the feminine body of art in her own way in the series 15 Sluts and Goddesses Inside Linda Montano, using a number of accoutrements.
The exhibition also pays homage to the very great talent of a young artist who died recently in a tragic way, the video-producer Jeremy Blake (1971-2007). 'Sodium Fox' (2005), produced in collaboration with poet and musician David Berman cultivates the sense of mystery inherent to all of Blakes’ productions. Based originally on the painting by Eugène Delacroix, “Freedom guiding the People”, the film presents a young striptease dancer from Los Angeles: in the eyes of the artists, she embodies the same allegorical values of confidence and liberty as those which Delacroix accords to his model. The visual complexity and variety of the décor permit many levels of interpretation.
When the English word “rare” does not mean “bloody”, it often means “strange”: the epitome of a “faux ami” which cannot therefore be relied on too much – just like art, which teaches us to beware of this strange thing called reality.
P-Y Desaive
http://www.aeroplastics.net/RARE_ESSENCE/index.html
James Aldridge - 4 September 2007
Launch of the new Tate Modern Level 7 restaurant commission by James Aldridge - Cold Mouth Prayer supported by Dasha and William Shenkman in memory of their mother Belle Shenkman.
Identity MAF by Mevis & van Deursen - 1 April 2007
Mevis and Van Deursen, Graphic Designers
Armand Mevis (1963) and Linda van Deursen (1961) together form the designer duo Mevis and Van Deursen.
Dry, precise and decisively playful is perhaps the best way to describe the style of Mevis and Van Deursen. Their designs are effective, simple and striking at the same time.
In the 1980s, Mevis and van Deursen met at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, where they were both studying. Their first sources of inspiration include the book designs by Jan Vermeulen for the author Jan Wolkers, consisting of typographical letters in striking colours. The LP covers designed by Andy Warhol for the Rolling Stones' albums Sticky Fingers and Love your Life were also early muses. The pop-art style of these designs appealed to the two designers, as well as the use of repetition to convey a visual concept.
The duo has an experimental attitude and constantly studies how form can become 'content' within the design.
Mevis and van Deursen are two of the most important graphic designers in the Netherlands. They have worked for institutions such as the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Rotterdam Cultural Capital, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Metropolis M and the fashion designers Viktor & Rolf. They have also designed a large number of books for artists, including Rineke Dijkstra and Gabriel Orozco.
Both also teach courses at art schools. Linda van Deursen is head instructor at the graphic design department of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and Armand Mevis is associated with the Werkplaats Typografie in Arnhem.
The designers' work can be seen in many international museums and education institutions.
http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mevis_&_Van_Deursen
Tracey Emin represents Britain at the 52nd Venice Biennale - 7 June 2007
Tracey Emin is representing Britain at the 52nd Venice Biennale, 2007. The artist has produced new work especially for the British Pavilion, using a wide variety of media - from needlework, photography and video to drawing, painting, sculpture and neon. The Venice Biennale will provide an opportunity to see new work by Emin. Tracey will be the second female artist ever to represent the UK at the Venice Biennale the first was Rachel Whiteread in 1997.
Andrea Rose Director of Visual Arts, The British Council and Commissioner for the British Pavilion said ‘Tracey’s work goes from strength to strength. She’s a storyteller with an extraordinary ability to scratch away the surfaces to what lies below. This is a great moment to see her work in the context of the Venice Biennale, where her work will be shown in an international context and at a distance from the YBA generation with which she came to prominence’
http://www.whitecube.com/news/54/
Sam Taylor-Wood at Venice Biennale - 7 June 2007
Sam Taylor-Wood is presenting 3 new films in the Ukrainian Pavilion at 52nd Venice Biennale from 7 June until 21 November 2007. The Ukrainian exhibition ‘Poem of an Inland Sea’ has been organsied by the PinchukArtCentre, the largest contemporary art centre in the Eastern Europe and has been curated by Peter Doroshenko, from the BALTIC in Gateshead.
The exhibition will be housed in one of the most beautiful Venetian palaces - Palazzo Papadopoli. Other international artists involved in the project are: Serhiy Bratkov (Ukraine), Alexander Hnilitsky and Lesia Zaiats (Ukraine), Boris Mikhailov (Ukraine), Juergen Teller (United Kingdom), Mark Titchner (United Kingdom) and Dzine (Carlos Rolon; United States of America).
http://www.whitecube.com/news/53/
Vernissage Andres Serrano - Cycads - 8 September 2007
The exhibition is at Witzenhausen Gallery, Amsterdam. And is from september 9 untill october 6 2007.