YET magazine issue #8 by YET Magazine

30 May 2015

A Magazine about Photography

Issue N° 08

Emile Barret • Corey Bartle–Sanderson • Regula Bochsler • Joan Fontcuberta Aneta Grzeszykowska • Nico Krijno • Zachary Norman • Cédric Raccio Jean–Vincent Simonet • Myne Søe–Pedersen • Sheida Soleimani • Jules Spinatsch Miguel Ángel Tornero • Manon Wertenbroek

Is art the representation of truth or the making of fiction? Is it idea or invention? Is it experience or knowledge? From Photography and art. A brief history of a conflictual relationship by Arianna Catania

Colophon

YET magazine

Issue 08

PUBLISHER YET magazine, Editorial offices Lausanne, Switzerland Lugano, Switzerland T +41 (0) 78 838 25 17 info@yet-magazine.com www. yet-magazine.com YET MAGAZINE #08 Editor-in-chief Salvatore Vitale Deputy Editor Paola Paleari Art director Nicolas Polli Photo Editors Salvatore Vitale Elena Vaninetti Graphic designer Nicolas Polli Web designer Leonardo Angelucci Sales Manager Davide Morotti Team coordinator Giulia Giani Translations Zoe Casati

For sponsorship, advertising and partnership inquiries (magazine and online services) contact us at sales@yet-magazine.com

INSIDE ISSUE 08 Front Cover Sheida Soleimani Back Cover Emile Barret

AUTHORS Emile Barret Corey Bartle-Sanderson Regula Bochsler Louise Clements Joan Fontcuberta Aneta Grzeszykowska Nico Krijno Zachary Norman Cédric Raccio Thomas Seelig Jean-Vincent Simonet Myne Søe-Pedersen Sheida Soleimani Jules Spinatsch Miguel Ángel Tornero Manon Wertenbroek Lars Willumeit CONTRIBUTORS

Arianna Catania Flavia Culcasi Luisa Grigoletto Maxime Guyon Jagoda Wisniewska

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The content may not be copied, downloaded, reproduced, distributed, transmitted, displayed or published without an explicit prior written permission of YET magazine, and/or in the case of third party materials, the copyright holder of that material.

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Comment & notes

Editor’s Note Photography is definitely experiencing some sort of golden age. Images have been included predominantly ever more in several fields and in larger scale. Today, it isn’t so outrageous to talk about art when we see a photograph. This, over the years, has led to the start of new movements and experiments of the medium itself, and to the conceptual approach that laid down its foundation. Many artists nowadays are no longer purely photographers, but use various techniques to create expressive images. In such scenario there is a contamination of genres and styles, a mix of media and arts that generate new output. And photography plays very different roles in this creative process: it can be the means chosen to create, or it can also be the end of the process, without really being a part of it. Photographers, increasingly so, have created strategies and performances specifically for the camera, abandoning the idea of the documentation of reality, the here and now, and including the option of the final product as a work of art itself. Photography as a means of performance recording, primed for photography itself. Technological development and experimentation have certainly been a fertile ground for artistic creation. Elements like 3D rendering and photo manipulation have become part of the photographic universe providing new ideas and conceptual developments. All this opens up new scenarios for possible future uses of the photographic medium. At present it is difficult to delineate the boundaries between photography and other art forms – assuming their defined existence – but we can outline possible scenarios that represent possible futures. This situation leads us to question ourselves about the very nature of photography and its boundaries, investigating new ways of definition as being no longer only a record of real events.

This study will embrace not just the photographic production, but also the entire apparatus that surrounds it. Based on past analysis and a re-reading of the present, it’s possible to provide interesting ideas on the development and consequences of this mix of genres, disciplines and techniques. It is important, however, to emphasize that these trends come from attempts and experiments carried out already by photographers during the last century, when the artistry of photography was very hard to be acknowledged. The work of artists such as Bernd and Hilla Becher, Stephen Shore and Seydou Keïta – to name a few – have strongly contributed to the emergence of a photographic style that was based on the concept more than the mere representation of reality. Based on these influences, contemporary photographers have developed new approaches to photography and, today, at this historic moment, we are witnessing the inception of new trends and strands, where the boundary between photography, sculpture, painting, graphic design, 3D modelling and more becomes increasingly blurred. Thus, it is interesting to provide a wide range of examples and hypotheses to illustrate the current situation, without providing real answers to what will be, but trying to imagine possible developments. We are at the beginning of a process wherein the photographic medium is reinterpreting itself, a process that will surely lead to new discoveries and ideas from which to start plotting the future of photography as an art form.

Salvatore Vitale 3

Contents

YET magazine

In this issue

I Valensis Cédric Raccio

II Editorial pp. 08 — 19

III Exotic Matter Zachary Norman

Editorial pp. 20 — 29

IV Editorial pp. 38 — 49

V Synonym Study Nico Krijno

Gliding / Scanned Mirrors Myne Søe-Pedersen

Louise Clements Lars Willumeit

Tandem / Fusion Manon Wertenbroek

ASYNCHRONOUS I – V 2013 + Jules Spinatsch

Interview pp. 30 — 37

Nico Krijno

Editorial pp. 50 — 65

VI Editorial pp. 70 — 83

A day with Louise Clements and Lars Willumeit

Review on Nico Krijno’s Synonym Study

Book review pp. 66 — 69

Photography and Art Editorial pp. 84 — 103

Essay by Arianna Catania

Focus On pp. 104 — 113

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Contents

VII Maldoror Jean-Vincent Simonet

Editorial pp. 114 — 135

IX LLIAISONS Emile Barret

XI —

Negative Book / Selfie Aneta Grzeszykowska

Editorial pp. 136 — 149

Editorial pp. 196 — 203

The Rendering Eye Regula Bochsler

Editorial pp. 170 — 189

XII National Anthem Sheida Soleimani

Editorial pp. 204 — 215

XIII The Random Series Miguel Ángel Tornero

Thomas Seelig

Q & A with Thomas Seelig

Interview pp. 150 — 155

Being a photographer in a Post— Internet era

X Editorial pp. 156 — 169

.psd Corey Bartle-Sanderson

VIII

Editorial pp. 220 — 235

Essay by Maxime Guyon

Focus On pp. 190 — 195

A reflection on the medium Essay by Flavia Culcasi

Focus On pp. 216 — 219

Joan Fontcuberta Interview with Joan Review Fontcuberta about pp. 237— 245 the second issue of Mould

YET magazine

Biographies

Artists’ Biographies EMILE BARRET www.emilebarret.com

THOMAS SEELIG www.fotomuseum.ch

SHEIDA SOLEIMANI www.sheidasoleimani.com

Emile Barret was born in 1989 at Les Lilas (FR). In 2012 he graduated with a special mention at the ECAL (Ecole Cantonale d’Art de Lausanne), where he worked as an assistant for two years. His photography work is made by an anthropological point of view in which all the depictions give a symbolic view on the several world’s perceptions. Working mainly with analog photography and large format cameras, he gives the viewers several meaning layers, bringing into question the image reading system. In 2013 he won the 28th Festival de Mode et de Photographie à Hyères’ Prix du Public as well as the Swiss Design Award.

Thomas Seelig (born 1964 in Cologne) has played an integral role in the development of the Fotomuseum Winterthur since 2003. As curator of the collection, he has conceived and realized not only the annual series of Set exhibitions, featuring works from the collection, but also numerous additional exhibition projects, including Im Rausch der Dinge (The Ecstasy of Things) (2004, together with Urs Stahel), Forschen und Erfinden – Die Recherche mit Bildern in der zeitgenössischen Fotografie (Research and Invention, Investigations with Images in Contemporary Photography) (2007) and Status – 24 Dokumente von heute (Status – 24 Contemporary Documents) (2012). In addition, Thomas Seelig curated the current anniversary exhibition Concrete – Photography and Architecture, which is on view at the Fotomuseum Winterthur through May 20, 2013. After studying Visual Communications/Photography at the Fachhochschule Bielefeld and completing a curatorial program at the Jan van Eyck Akademie in Maastricht/NL, Seelig worked as a freelance curator before joining the museum’s staff.

Sheida Soleimani is an Iranian-American artist, currently residing in Detroit, Michigan. The daughter of two parents that are political refugees, Soleimani inserts her own critical perspectives on historical and contemporary socio-political occurrences in Iran. Her current series of works, entitled National Anthem, melds sculpture, collage and photography, to create table top still life’s that include symbolic lexicons in reference to Iranian politics throughout the past century.

JOAN FONTCUBERTA www.fontcuberta.com Joan Fontcuberta (born 24 February 1955 in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain) is a conceptual artist whose bestknown works, such as Fauna and Sputnik, examine the truthfulness of photography. In addition, he is a writer, editor, teacher, and curator. Fontcuberta received a degree in communications from the Autonomous University of Barcelona in 1977. He worked in advertising in his early career, and his family had also worked in advertising. From 1979 to 1986 he was a professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Barcelona, after which he earned a living through his art. In 1980 he co-founded the Spanish/English visual arts journal PhotoVision, and he is still Editor in Chief. Since 1993 Fontcuberta has been a professor of audiovisual communication at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. Among other teaching appointments, he was visiting lecturer in Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University in 2003. Among other awards, he was named an Officer in the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Ministry of Culture in 1994. His curatorial experience includes serving as the Artistic Director of the 1996 Rencontres d’Arles, an international photography festival. He exhibited at Les Rencontres d’Arles, France, in 2005 and 2009.

ZACHARY NORMAN www.zacharydeannorman.com Zachary Norman (b. 1985) is a visual artist currently based in Chicago, Illinois. He received a BA in Studio Art from Kalamazoo College and an MFA in Photography from Indiana University. His work has been published widely and featured in solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally. In 2013 he co-founded the art collective EIC. He is also a cofounder of the quarterly experimental photography publication DELIBERATE OPERATIONS. Norman is the recipient of a New Frontiers Grant from Indiana University for his research on computational photography. His work is primarily concerned with how our visual perception informs the ways we make and understand images and, inversely, how those image-making methods affect our perception.

COREY BARTLE SANDERSON www.coreybartlesanderson.com Corey Bartle Sanderson (b. 1992, The Wirral) lives and works in London. He received a BA (Hons) in Fine Art from Kingston University in London, 2014. Much of Corey’s work plays with the assumption that images will be manipulated, and seeks a balance between realism and surrealism, combining photography, sculpture and installation. His interests comprise digital and analogue processes equally.

MIGUEL ÁNGEL TORNERO www.miguelangeltornero.net Miguel Ángel Tornero (Baeza, 1978) Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Granada, currently lives and works in Madrid. He has completed residencies in places such as the Spanish Academy in Rome (2012/13) or Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin (2010), and has been awarded major prizes of photography as Grünenthal (2011) Purification Garcia (2007) or ABC (2003) and “Generaciones” (2009) for art projects. His solo exhibitions include Dear Unforeseen (2012) at Gallery Juan Silió of Santander, The Random Series -berliner treatment- (2010) Künstlerhaus Bethanien Berlin, or So far so good (2007) Luis Adelantado Gallery in Valencia. He has also participated in projects curated by, among others, Joan Fontcuberta, Charlotte Cotton or Virginia Torrente. Recently just published the photo book “The Random Series -berliner treatment romananzo & Madrid trip” (Editorial RM).

NICO KRIJNO www.nicokrijno.com Nico Krijno (born 1981) is a South African artist who lives and works in Cape Town. With a background in theatre and experimental video, Nico Krijno switched camps to the field of visual arts around 2008. His performance-based photographic practice is realised in a variety of media, from sculpture, participatory installation and video. Krijno’s book Synonym Study recently made the shortlist for the The Paris Photo Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards 2014. Krijno’s book is self-published, with support from the 133 Arts Fund and has been shortlisted under the First Photobook category. The book is also part of a travelling exhibition that visits New York, Tokyo and Melbourne.

MANON WERTENBROEK www.manonwertenbroek.com Starting from emotions and feelings she can’t describe with specific words, Manon Wertenbroek collects pieces and subjects to photograph them as if they were dead natures or portraits. In this process of shaping her inner, complex and instable, energy, the preparatory sculpture work is in a central position: using paper, clay and colors, these fragile shapes become focus points in her research. This process ends with photography, in which she contains the expressive space created before and the feelings behind it.

MYNE SØE-PEDERSEN www.mynesoe.net Myne Søe –Pedersen (1972) is a camera-based artist working and living in Copenhagen. She is educated from Cooper Union School of Art, New York 2000 and Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam 2001. Her works have been exhibited in both solo and group exhibitions in Europe, among others at Galerie Van Gelder, Amsterdam (2014) The National Museum of Photography, The Black Diamond, Copenhagen (2012), Peter Lav Photo Gallery, Copenhagen (2011), F/STOP Photofestival, Leipzig, Germany (2010), FotoTriennial, Museet for Fotokunst, Brandts, Odense (2009) Ystad Museum of Art, Sweden (2008). Her work is in the collection of the Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, Dennis Hopper Collection, Los Angeles, Novo Nordisk Art Foundation, a.o.Galerie van Gelder in Amsterdam represents her.

JEAN-VINCENT SIMONET www.jeanvincentsimonet.com Jean-Vincent Simonet was born in 1991, in Lyon (France). He graduated from ECAL in 2014 with high honors and just started is carrier mixing editorial, fashion and experimental photography. His personal work was exhibited at Plat(t)form in Fotomuseum Winthertur in 2015 and he will take part to the Swiss Design Award in Basel this year. He’s living in Lausanne where he juggles between commissioned photography and personal explorations.

CÉDRIC RACCIO www.dualroom.ch Cédric Raccio is an Italian-Swiss photographer who was born in 1981 and grew up in the canton of Valais. He graduated from the University Of Art & Design, Lausanne. Attracted by different forms of visual arts, his work has been exhibited at Festival Images Vevey 2014.

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Biographies

JULES SPINATSCH www.jules-spinatsch.ch

LARS WILLUMEIT www.larswillumeit.com

Jules Spinatsch (Davos, Switzerland, 1964. Lives and works in Zurich) is one of the most innovative artists to have emerged on the international photography scene in recent years. Over the last ten years he has developed a personal and idiosyncratic approach towards documentary photography that has enabled him, by means of automated cameras and other hightech equipment, to create visually impactful installations through which to explore key topics in contemporary society: the exercise of political power, controlling societies and the implications of technological progress.

Lars Willumeit (born 1974) is a German anthropologist and curator with an interest in photography, regimes of representation and visual cultures. He currently works as curator for East Wing a gallery and platform for photography in Doha, Qatar with an exhibition space in Dubai, UAE. At present he is studying for a Master of Arts degree in Art Education and Curating at the Zurich University of the Arts.

His work has been exhibited at numerous venues, including: Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; Fotomuseum, Winterthur; San Francisco MoMA; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Nederlands Fotomuseum, Rotterdam; CCC Strozzina, Florence. He has received prestigious awards, including: Swiss Art Award, UBS Cultural Foundation Art Award, DU Magazin/Greenpeace Photo Award, and International BMW Photography Prize Paris Photo. In 2005 his monograph Temporary Discomfort received the best photography book award at the Rencontres D’Arles, France.

Also working as photo consultant, he specializes in editorial development of magazines and photo books, picture research and art education. Previously he trained as a photographer and studied social anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Recently Lars provided a substantial glossary of 39 concepts for the photographic exhibition and book project Deposit by Yann Mingard, to be published with Steidl and shown as an exhibition from March 2014 at the Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland and from October 2014 at Museum Folkwang Essen, Germany and in 2015 at the FotoMuseum in Antwerp, Belgium.

LOUISE CLEMENTS ANETA GRZESZYKOWSKA www.en.rastergallery.com/tag/grzeszykowska Born in 1974, graduated from the Graphic Art Department at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. In 2014 she won Politika’s Passport Award in The Visual Arts category. She lives and works in Warsaw. The primary medium in which Aneta Grzeszykowska works is photography. However, she treats it instrumentally, as a tool for the realization of advanced, artistic and ontological exercises. The artist is interested in the role photography plays in creating and documenting a personal identity. Therefore, in her film projects or doll sculptures, the human figure acquires the shape and aura of a marionette. One of the main topics of Grzeszykowska’s works is her own identity, with which she plays on many levels: by erasing her own figure from a family collection of photographs (Album, 2005), or by impersonating Cindy Sherman in her classic cycle Untitled Film Stills (2006). Some projects by Grzeszykowska – like the cycle of illusionist portraits of non-existent people (Untitled, 2006) – take advantage of the possibilities offered by digital image manipulation, while others use photography and film in a classic way by emphasizing the performative dimension of the artist’s activities. The motifs which she obsessively returns to in her works are absence, invisibility, disappearing, and the confrontation of body and thought with nonexistence.

Louise Clements (born UK, 1975) is Artistic Director of QUAD, a centre for contemporary art, film and new technologies, since 2001. She is the Co-Founder/ Artistic Director of FORMAT International Photography Festival in Derby since 2004. As an independent curator, since 1998 she has initiated and curated many commissions, publications, mass participation, art, film and photography programmes and exhibitions. Guest Curator at Kaunas Photofestival, Lithuania Duel/Duet; Habitat Centre and Haus Khas BlowUp, in Deli, India 2012; Dong Gang international Photography Festival, South Korea, The Constructed View, 2013; Dali International Photography Festival, China, Life Is Elsewhere 2013; Noorderlicht 20/20, Groningen Netherlands 2013; PhotoQuai, Paris 2015; Les Rencontres Arles Discoveries 2015; Hamburg Phototriennale, Germany, container city 2015; La Biennale di Venezia, the Leisure Principle EM15, 2015; Slideluck, Rome 2015. Louise regularly presents and writes about contemporary art for conferences, catalogues and magazines in both print and online media. She is also co-editor of photobooks inc - Hijacked III UK/ AUS; PHOTOCINEMA; Hungry Still; and the Editor at Large for 1000 Words Mag. Advisor for WYNG Masters Photography Award Hong Kong and APT Global. She is an international juror, nominator, speaker and portfolio reviewer at awards, festivals, universities and galleries extensively throughout Europe, America and across Asia.

REGULA BOCHSLER www.regulabochsler.ch www.renderingeye.net Regula Bochsler graduated in history at Zurich University; from 2004 to 2011 she was editor-in-chief of the weekly cultural program “Kulturplatz” of Swiss National Television. She is most happy when she can satisfy her curiosity by doing research and tinker with words and images, by which she creates books, exhibitions, documentary films and – since the launch of Apple Maps in 2012 – her art project “The Rendering Eye”. Among other books she has published “Leaving Reality Behind: etoy vs Etoys.com & other battles to control cyberspace” (Ecco Press 2003) and “The Rendering Eye. Urban America Revisted” (Edition Patrick Frey 2014). 7

YET magazine

Valensis Photographs and text by Cédric Raccio

www.dualroom.ch

I Editorial

Cédric Raccio Pages 08 — 19

Valensis 8

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CĂŠdric Raccio

In my photographic practice, I am alternating between the topics of heritage and current lifestyle (generation Y), with our interests more and more experimental and defined, in connection with digital technologies and underground activities associated with our evolution. For this reason I like to work on my pictures in a more extreme way to represent, in addition to a simple image, an attitude or a feeling. The subjects fade gradually and something more abstract or mystic take place. Valensis is a project about myths and legends from my region, Wallis. Treated with experimental visual techniques, this collection of images offers an eclectic approach to my universe. For my MA in Photography, i mixed various themes: the mountain, death, psychedelic music, religion or else the representation of the devil

in this century. The stories I hear around me are my basic model images with bold and innovative digital processes (iPhone screenshots, overlays, collages and 3D simulations). I then try to move away from a traditional linear narrative to create a new artistic approach permeated with different stories that were narrated to me. Â 9

YET magazine

Gliding / Scanned Mirrors Photographs by Myne Søe–Pedersen Text by Inger Ellekilde Bonde

II Editorial

Pages 20 — 29

www.mynesoe.net

Myne Søe–Pedersen

Gliding / Scanned Mirrors 20

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Gliding a travel in light and colours In her recent series, Scanned Mirrors and Gliding (2014), Danish artist Myne Søe-Pedersen moves on the borders of what we normally understand as photography. The images in these series are made without any use of a camera and the motives are abstract investigations of form, colour and light. Mirrors in disguise Mirrors. A doubling and an illusion at the same time. A magical opening to other worlds and an everyday tool. Throughout cultural history, mirrors have been a source of myths and an object of investigation in fields of psychology and human perception. Since the invention of photography, mirrors have also been closely linked to the photographic image. Photographs are called mirrors that remember. A fascination with mirrors, their manifold symbolic meanings and close relationship to photography was a starting point for Scanned Mirrors. As with Søe-Pedersen’s earlier work, especially the series Transient, Untitled Covers and The Horse Book, this is also a meticulous and curious investigation of an object. Scanned Mirrors examines how mirrors and light affect each other with the use of a scanner. It seems to ask: What happens when you expose a mirror to intense light? At first view, the dark surfaces of circles and squares with shimmering light at the edges do not resemble mirrors, as we know them from our every day use. They are mirrors in disguise. The light from the scanner blocks their reflection and left visible on the surface are only dust, dirt, scratches and fingerprints, which gives the otherwise cool expression a certain tactility and sensibility. Instead of your own eyes starring back at you, the dark surfaces become landscapes of projections, hidden worlds of imagination and small glimpses of the universe.

Myne Søe–Pedersen

changing colours marking a beginning or an ending; opening or closing this gliding movement of music. The colours that emerge from the bevelled edge created when the mirror and the light meets under the lid, are born out of chance. Seen as a whole, this series seems as choreographed coincidences, where an almost scientifically working method combines itself with chance, leaving us, the viewers, floating in a strange world of rainbow colours and a sense of eternity. Colours are at the very centre of the series Gliding, which consist of digital colour drawings made entirely on a computer. Here the colours from Scanned Mirrors are explored and in a playful way this series reflects on the transitions of colours and grading, when for example yellow slowly transforms into red or blue. As our eyes glide and dive into the changing colours, these images also reflect on our perception of abstract images. We will often try to read a horizon and a sense of space into the digital colour-canvases and sense how different colours evoke different emotions. Although entirely digitally made, these images maintain a relation with the history and tradition of photography, since when printed they are transferred from the digital space to 8x10 negatives and printed on contact sheets. This lends the digitally produced another kind of materiality and spirituality, and bridges post-photographic practices with early photographic techniques. Gliding and Scanned Mirrors enter into a long trail in the history of photography of camera-less experiments with the emergence of figures and forms using only light. With these series of work, Myne Søe-Pedersen investigates our understanding of a photographic image as well as basic human perception of colours and reflections, inviting us to dive into spaces of imagination, infinity and possibility somewhere between the abstract idea of rainbows and the specific mirror-object.

Music of chance and reflections on colours As a whole, Scanned Mirrors make up a musical rhythm with its movements of increasing and fading intensity in colours and darkness. The

Inger Ellekilde Bonde 21

YET magazine

Interview

A Day With Louise Clements 30

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Louise Clements Lars Willumeit

and Text by Paola Paleari

Lars Willumeit 31

YET magazine

Interview

QUAD is that kind of place which, during the collaborative-approach-to-design classes I attended while I was studying Service Design at the university in Milan, we could have singled out as a perfect case study. Placed in the very core of Derby, UK, it is a multi-functional centre that gathers under the same roof a cinema, a very lively cafeteria, a workshop and a gallery – a place for the community run by the community, directed by a strong sense of collaboration and participation. Since 2004, every two years, it turns itself even more pyretic by organising the FORMAT International Photography Festival, today one of the UK’s leading international contemporary festivals of photography and related media. This year’s edition took its theme from the legendary body of work Evidence by Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel, a collection of found industrial, scientific, governmental and institutional photographs. This conceptual project, self-published as a book in 1977, was pioneering in demonstrating that the meaning of an image is always conditioned by the context and sequence in which it is seen. QUAD & FORMAT’s artistic director Louise Clements and guest curator Lars Willumeit took the strategies contained in this artistic approach as a starting point to built up BEYOND EVIDENCE: An incomplete narratology of photographic truths, one of FORMAT’s main exhibitions that - through a wide range of contemporary works explored the complexities implied in visual representation and perception processes, especially when they pass through the aperture of lens-based media. During the festival’s opening, I managed to steal them away for time enough to share some thoughts about curating photography. P.P.

In your professional activities as curators, you deal with a range of situations and institutions:

from public museums to private galleries, passing through festivals, as in FORMAT’s case. The festival, in particular, is gaining more and more importance in the spreading and circulation of contemporary photography. What are its specificities and its good and bad sides? L.C.

A festival is generally a place where you can take more risks and where you can be slightly more open, if compared to how photography is usually handled in a museum. It’s that kind of situation where a lot of people’s voices are coming through, and it becomes a rich melting pot. This is both is a positive and challenging aspect: for FORMAT, the time schedule was very long - more than three years of preparation - but then during the festival we make sure to programme time for spontaneity. I like to have live elements as part of the festival, which add vitality and freshness, allowing audiences to have a mix of planned and unexpected creative encounters. This is a more risky and challenging programming style that demands more courage from the curator and more trust in the artists, but I have been doing things this way for many years now and it works very well. It’s also a crucial moment for the photographers: the energy of the Festival allows them to test what they’re doing to a big audience, in real time. The phenomenon of festival proliferation - or as some authors, in contemporary art contexts, like to call it “biennialism” - is not at all limited to photography festivals only: you see the same happening also in the world of film, where the festival has become more and more relevant from both social and business perspectives. In this cultural sector, the major commercial distribution channels are often no longer fully representative of what is L.W.

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Louise Clements Lars Willumeit

being produced around the planet and most often experimental artist films or Arthouse productions can be almost exclusively in festivals or in niche streaming services. P.P.

If you allow me to make a pretty romantic equivalence, I’d like to compare the dynamics of the festival in photography today to what happened in painting 150 years ago with the Salon de Refusés: a parallel exhibition space that hosted and displayed a new kind of painting, which was not accepted by the established system. This alternative paradigm started as a minor thing and ended up in having the impact we know. Don’t you think a less top down approach should be critical to the ecology of the entire photography scene as well? Yes, what is going on in the diverse and dispersed ecosystem that is photography nowadays could possibly be compared to what happened in painting during the Impressionist period, when the ”exhibitionary complex” of the museum was much slower than the artistic practices themselves. Regarding photography, until quite recently, a large majority of photography exhibitions - with some important exceptions especially in the 1920-30’s and the 1950’s - have just consisted of same-sized and neatly framed images hanged in a classical line that we all know too well. But now some museums are actually starting to wake up to the digital challenge to their curatorial authority, but also in terms of reaction time and to notions of participation. To give an example, Fotomuseum Winterthur just employed a “digital curator” and it’s hosting a hybrid on-line and on-site exhibition format called “Situations”.

L.C.

Change takes time... we are now fourteen years after the boom of the open source! I think the personal command of the online space and the rise of voices from around the world has been one of the most significant changes in our lifetimes, and the role of photography and photographers in this is considerable. It has also allowed international networks to grow, interact and exist on and offline. I do travel and read a lot, but on a daily basis I keep in touch with, meet and discover photographers online all the time. P.P.

We are facing a fertile hybridization between photography and other disciplines, both in the artistic field as well as in the social and scientific ones. We thus need new conceptual approaches and, as a consequence, new forms of display: that’s why the presence of the curator becomes so important. At which point of this process do you think we are now? What still has to be done?

L.W.

L.C.

We must remember that curating as a practice is quite young: when I studied my Master of Arts in 2000, there were not many books about this discipline. Then it all went quite fast, and the rise of the Internet played a big influence, especially in photography: 2004 was the year of web 2.0 and social medias’ expansion and, from that moment on, people started to curate their own space online, training their communicational skills and getting involved in translating images into narrative structures. It started a new era of dynamic, fluid and more hybrid curatorial practice that blurs the definitions between the institution/public space, artist, curator, designer, producer and performer. L.W.

We are facing hybridity also in another sense: the role of the

YET magazine

Interview

artist and that of the curator are in some ways blurring. For example, there is a whole artistic movement based on the notion of artistic research, as well as aesthetic journalism, in which the artistic function is interacting or even fusing with curatorial functions that were previously separated. It’s an exciting time, where an open-minded and collaborative attitude can really take photography onto a new level in the way it is being presented and performed. It’s interesting to notice that some of these approaches already existed during the Avant-garde periods, when experimentation - not only in the artistic making, but also in display formats - reached its highest peak. We can understand and learn a lot by looking at how exhibitions were curated at that time. In this sense, it’s worthy to recall what Robert Heinecken wrote about Sultan & Mandel’s work at the time it was first presented, almost forty years ago. I quote:

01/02 - Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel, Evidence, 1977. Courtesy of FORMAT International Photography Festival

P.P.

Are these young men unconsciously extending that infamous curatorial dictum which goes roughly like this: Decide to encourage or illuminate a particular mode of pictorial expression. Locate a large number of existing semi-anonymous pictures which fall within these parameters. Edit these pictures as to create an altered context. Organize and exposit these pictures to be significant, in such a way as to prove A. An ironical, quite provocative statement about the role of the artist and of the curator, which sounds so topical today…

L.C.

It’s often a matter of definitions. Sometimes it’s the artist himself that doesn’t want to be labelled as a photographer, even if his work is mainly lens-based. The linguistic issue is definitely an ongoing concern for some, and for others it is not important to be defined. But, as we know, context is everything. L.W.

There is a present concern about the image’s entire life cycle: the crucial moment is not only image creation anymore, but also concerned with its afterlife, its distribution, appropriation and re-interpretation, for example how it is presented and also received by the viewer. We are moving our attention from pure creation to the whole production, distribution and consumption processes and relations, which have undergone a deep transformation due to the algorithmic turn. This, of course, has an influence on the distinction of roles and tasks: where does the photographer role stop and where does the curatorial or the photo editor role take over? In the huge panorama of what is photography today, which is almost overloaded, how do you, as curators, operate a selection on which kind of photographic researches should be fostered and displayed? P.P.

My work and interest is very site specific in QUAD, and involves the community in an unusual city. I operate in a similar way in the international projects I curate. I’m fascinated by so many different ways of working, as well as by participatory practices where the artist facilitates the frameworks for audiences to contribute. The relationship between a place, its audience, histories and location is very important. Curatorial practice should always be aware of and experiment with the site and its key participants, artists and audience as well as the L.C.

Eighth Issue

Louise Clements Lars Willumeit

YET magazine

Interview

Andrea Botto, KA-BOOM, Quad Center. Courtesy of FORMAT International Photography Festival

Giorgio Di Noto, The Iceberg, Quad Center. Courtesy of FORMAT International Photography Festival

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Louise Clements Lars Willumeit

overarching concept. Great curating responds to and interacts with these essential elements in a sensitive, live, provocative and thoughtful way. The exhibition Lars and I curated for FORMAT responded to all these aspects and was based on a collaborative process shared with the artists in order to find new ways of showing their works as a cohesive installation overall.

gate both the materiality of the photograph, but also of the things that are being photographed. Today, photographer’s employ and explore sculpture, installation and performance through and with photography, and we are seeing them in a new way.

L.W.

L.C.

Curiosity is definitely one of the core components - and I don’t deny that I also sometimes just follow my intuition. From my side, since I come from a social anthropology background - which is a sometimes dauntingly wide area of investigation - my interest is on visual representations as such. It’s not only photography that I’m interested in: I focus on how photographs are placed within the larger ecologies of visual representation systems. It is a trend I see in a lot of recent photography projects, a growing area of matter-based approaches that investi-

P.P.

Which recent photographic exhibition did you find interesting?

A collective exhibition called Inside that took place at the Palais de Tokyo last autumn, curated by Jean de Loisy, Daria de Beauvais and Katell Jaffrès. It offered visitors a passage to the interior of the self, for which the exhibition space served as a metaphor. L.W.

(Mis)Understanding Photography – Works und Manifestos, curated by Florian Ebner at Museum Folkwang, Essen.

Tommaso Tanini, H. said he loved us, Pearson Building. Presented by Discipula. Picture by Andrea Botto. Courtesy of FORMAT International Photography Festival

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Exotic Matter Photographs and text by Zachary Norman

www.zacharydeannorman.com

III Editorial

Zachary Norman Pages 38 — 49

Exotic Matter 38

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Zachary Norman

In physics, the term ‘exotic matter’ is typically applied to matter whose existence is hypothetical or about which little is known. In this work, I have generated my own hypothetical matter; the exoticism of which is completely dependent upon its visual representation. The phenomena and matter represented in these images do not and have never physically existed. They can be seen but not touched. p. 40

Exotic Matter 2_3 Archival Pigment Print 16” x 20”

p. 40

Exotic Matter 2_2 Archival Pigment Print 16” x 20”

p. 41

Exotic Matter 2_1 Archival Pigment Print 16” x 20”

p. 42

Exotic Matter 3_2 Archival Pigment Print 24” x 30”

p. 43

Exotic Matter 1 – Displacement Map Archival Pigment Print 36” x 45”

pp. 44–45

Exotic Matter 2 – Displacement Map Archival Pigment Print 30” x 24”

p. 47

Exotic Matter 3_1 Archival Pigment Print 20” x 24”

p. 48

Exotic Matter 1 Archival Pigment Print 36” x 45”

p. 49

Exotic Matter 1 – Cube Extracted Archival Pigment Print 20” x 24”

p. 49

Exotic Matter 1 – Sphere Extracted Archival Pigment Print 30” x 24”

This exploration is a response to a world in which a network of machines and digital interfaces dictate human perception and behaviour. Given these conditions, the contemporary image and the objects represented therein have become unbound from their physicality. They have become malleable and susceptible to multiple interpretations and intentions. Thus, images and objects can be rendered exotic, in that the matter from which they are

composed can be manipulated and represented in ways that deviate from expectations of how they should behave. These images were generated through various photographic and non-photographic techniques to exploit the vulnerability of the image-object relationship; the tenuousness of which reflects the relationships between non-existence and existence, ideation and materialisation, space and time. 39

YET magazine

Tandem / Fusion Photographs by Manon Wertenbroek Text by Julien Gremaud

IV Editorial

Pages 50 — 65

www.manonwertenbroek.com

Manon Wertenbroek

Tandem / Fusion 50

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Manon Wertenbroek

Starting from sensations and emotions she canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t associate with words only, Manon Wertenbroek literally creates her images building subjects on different levels and photographing them in the form of still life or portraits. In this need to give back materiality to an inner energy, complex and unstable, the groundwork of sculpture occupies a vital part: with the help of elements like paper, clay and pigments, these fragile forms are temporary anchor points, physical and spatial in her research; the finalization of the process is played in the second half, and the way the established space for expression is framed and emotions are confined.

These mental images can also be related to emotional relationships. Tandem gives an account of the relationship with a brother suffering from personality disorder, almost non-existent interactions, or in some cases rediscovered. The distance and the elusive tend to be resolved through a scenario composed and built with the help of her brother. They may also refer to classic subjects revisited and reviewed in a search process, plastic and instinctive, as are the bouquets of flowers in Fusion, synthesized, literally cut out of a sheet of reflective paper and mirrored on a computer screen.

The photography in this process of creation is the ending point, the moment when, after the construction and study, the artist relates entirely to her subjects. 51

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Review

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Nico Krijno

Synonym Text by Jagoda Wisniewska

Study

Book Pictures by Nico Krijno

Review 67

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Review

I am opening the first page of Nico Krijno debut book Synonym Study, and I see a black and white double spread photograph, that instantaneously gives me an idea of what is awaiting me in the following pages. There will be constructions; there will be creative occurrences. Over 100 pages book, offering waves of visual infusions: carefully constructed still lifes (amongst which some are digitally manipulated), staged and spontaneously photographed portraits, studio and location shots or snapshot like images. In Nico Krijno’s photographs, abstract made ups, forms and patterns merge with more organic forms of the human body, fruits, and plants. His photographs are loud and full of colours, patterns and information. Backgrounds fuse with the photographed objects creating a dual relationship. Hand made DIY appearance of Krijno’s creations set up a valuable statement. The photographer constructs these sculptures, shapes them, and modifies them. As obvious as it seems the sculptures he makes are strongly ‘physical’; almost crashed and forced into whole new creatures, that flow as a stream of fresh spring water onto my eyes. As I experience the book from page to page, I am exposed to surprises: new sculptures, new figures. The stream continues. These generated sculptures – monsters as I call them – are funny and playful in their appearance. They scream to me for attention as I flip the pages of the book. Still life (alive) monsters, that I keep on my shelf, safely enclosed between the books’ hard covers. The creative process of Krijno’s work has no boundaries. It seems, as the work put into the creation of these forms is as important as the final result converted into an image. It seems that for Krijno, everything can be shaped into a new meaning; everything can be a sculpture translatable into an image. Synonym Study brings up many questions regarding the condition of contemporary

approaches in still life making. Krijno’s work touches upon the concept of an image as an object, as well as the idea of the content and its relationship with the physical surface of a print or in this case a photo book. The final results are not the fabricated sculptures, but rather the documentation of their existence in a certain time and space. Therefore, a choice the photographer made by documenting the sculptures through the medium of photography, forces the viewer to rethink the idea of tangibility of the objects themselves. Thus their lifespan is not long and their life space not available to the wider audience. However, through the photographic image, it becomes widely accessible with no expiration date. Krijno’s constructions link the flicker of realism of a photographic document with the imaginary world of fiction and illusion. I try to analyse the title. Synonym – the word brings other nouns to my mind: same, alike, identical (from thesaurus.com); equivalent, parallel, comparable. Nico Krijno explores the territory of ‘alikeness’ adding a new layer to its meaning. The said stream of images he takes, seems to have no final point, no end. However, publishing a book for many artists has a meaning of completing something, of giving a defined edge to a project. I trust that this also applies to Krijno’s practice, which seems more like a never-ending visual study or rather a never-ending observation, which has been placed within the defined form of this book. Thus Synonym Study, with its clear structure, gives to this at first chaotic mixture of visual research, a more coherent ‘whole’, settling Krijno’s images into one body of work that every photography hedonist should experience.

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Nico Krijno

YET magazine

Synonym Study Photographs by Nico Krijno

V Editorial

Image selection from Niko Krijno’ Synonym Study

www.nicokrijno.com

Nico Krijno Pages 70 — 83

Synonym Study 70

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ASYNCHRONOUS I – V 2013 + Photographs and text by Jules Spinatsch

Pages 84 — 103

www.jules-spinatsch.ch

VI Editorial

Jules Spinatsch

Asyn– chronous I –V 2013 + 84

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Jules Spinatsch

From the Cold War to the Internet Age on the basis of several episodes in the history of nuclear technology: the series of works entitled ASYNCHRONOUS I â&#x20AC;&#x201C; V deals with quintessential chapters in the history of nuclear technology, from the 2nd World War to the 21st century. Each episode is based on a specific event or nonevent that appears important with regard to understanding the historical and technical developments, and represents the political and societal situation at the respective point in time. One thing that all episodes have in common, is that irrational factors played a major role, such as the fear of communism, political errors of judgement, and incompetence. Asynchronous primarily examines the respective imagery that was used or produced in order to explain technical accomplishments and/or to propagate the corresponding ideologies. This group of works contains self-produced images and videos, as well as found material. For chapter II and III a computer-controlled camera was used. 85

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Editorial

Asynchronous I: Red Mirage III S [1958]

coats of paint, but also in a multitude of postcards depicting the individual jets. Asynchronous I comprises two images of an enlarged and processed postcard. They hang in portrait format beside each other: the Mirages usually flew in pairs. The pilot in the image is looking into the camera of the co-pilot, who is photographing him from the second jet (a twoseat Mirage RS). The overpainting of the Swiss cross, resulting in a red spot on the wings, adapts the postcard image of the Mirage to the changed reality. Among other things, it relates the fact that the aircraft have now been relieved of their national function and no longer need to represent the country. No they stand on point against the sky like a monument on their own behalf.

pp. 90–91 Mirage, or the dream of flying to Moscow with the bomb. The story of Swiss nuclear energy begins with the end of the Second World War. The Swiss military command, much like that of the USA, was convinced that the Soviet Union aspired to occupy all of Europe. In the Cold War era, through to the end of the eighties, Switzerland was dominated by a majority of liberals and Christian democrats, constituting a broad intersection with the country’s military-economic complex. Thus, in the late forties and during the fifties, efforts to establish a national nuclear industry were made in both military and industrial circles. The defence doctrine envisaged nuclear weaponry: on the one hand as a deterrent, and on the other hand, even though Switzerland saw itself as a neutral country, there was a desire to be able to fly to Moscow with high-speed aircraft in order to carry out preventative defensive nuclear strikes. One suitable transport vehicle was the Mirage III fighter jet. The French manufacturer modified the aircraft, giving it the required mechanisms to carry nuclear bombs. Despite the Mirages never being used in an emergency, their suitability remaining doubtful, the procurement ending in a major scandal, and an average of one machine per year crashing, they were nevertheless revered by the Swiss public: even after the last official flight in 2003, the little, elegant triangles in the sky are seen as an impressive representation of the Swiss fighting spirit. This is evident, not only in the aircraft’s changing 86

Asynchronous II: Depot ABC [1969]

pp. 92–95 After several delays, the Swiss test reactor in underground caverns near Lucens was put into operation in 1967. Upon the first attempt to obtain maximum output, a serious accident occurred. The explosion and subsequent core meltdown meant that the Swiss

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Jules Spinatsch

engineering industry’s dream of being able to participate in the world market with its own line of nuclear reactors was already brought to an end in 1969. After the incident, which was classed as INES level 5 out of 7, the reactor and caverns were sealed shut. Lucens signifies the end of Swiss efforts to use self-developed nuclear power, both economically and militarily. (The Mühleberg and Beznau nuclear power plants, completed in 1969 and 1971, were planned to have American reactors from the onset). The final report from the Parliamentary Investigation Committee PUK was published in 1979, meticulously examining, describing and illustrating the catastrophe’s course of events. In 1992, the Vaud government decided to convert the reactor’s operation buildings and access tunnel into a depot for cultural assets. Since 1997, these have accommodated cultural assets from almost 20 cantonal institutions. This chapter includes visual material from all three official documents that were released, as well as new images:

project), not only the course of the accident, but also the various respective functions of the images can be identified and deduced. However, the changes also indicate a shift in how the authorities deal with information and the public. In the pre-digital era, authoritarian decisions determined what reached the public, whereas today it is rather the opposite: marketing departments produce an abundance of target-group-oriented information. However, the intention remains the same: to steer public opinion and to produce suitable material for this purpose.

1. Commissioning report, 1967 (without photographs included). 2. Accident investigation report from the Parliamentary Investigation Committee PUK, 1979 (photographs of details and damaged parts from the reactor). 3. Information brochure from the opening of the cultural assets depot, 1997 (architectural and editorial style photographs). 4. Own images, January 2013. Extracts from a photographic panorama on the site in Lucens. A computer controlled camera meticulously scanned the buildings and surround ings on the Lucens site and gener ated a panoramic image from 315 individual images. The reproduced visual material from the official documents and individual images from the panoramic photographs were used to create a portraitformat silent video. The chronological sequence with intertitles resulted in a visual time travel through the story of the Lucens nuclear power plant and its photgraphic images produced between 1967 and 2013. On the basis of the change from 1967’s hermetic specialist report without images, through to 1997’s PR product (or even through to the art

Asynchronous III: Zwentendorf – The Missing 20 Minutes [1978]

p. 97 The large photographic floor installation “The Missing 20 minutes” shows a chronological sequence of 289 photographs from inside the reactor of the nuclear power plant in Zwentendorf, Austria, which was completed in 1978 but never put into operation. Back then, the Kreisky government wanted to have the public approve its policy against the opposition, so it organised a public referendum. But it was a fatal error of judgement: operating approval was rejected by 50.47 %. Since the government was sure of the referendum’s outcome the plant has been technically ready and, after commissioning, only around 20 minutes away from producing energy: this is how long it would have taken to lower the fuel rods into the reactor and to trigger nuclear fission. These missing 20 minutes were completed 35 years later by a computer-controlled camera, mounted 87

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Editorial

on the fuel rods’ lowering device – a journey to the place of the prevented nuclear fission. While moving into the reactor’s interior, the camera tilted 90° downwards and panned 45° to the left and right. While doing so, it captured an image once every four seconds, constructing a time-space panorama of the still-uncontaminated reactor – a panorama that tells about the journey and recalls the unique history of the reactor. The Zwentendorf nuclear power plant was built as a power plant and declared a democratic sculpture by the voters. Instead of generating electricity, it functions as a museum of the future. Exhibited here are idle, albeit uncontaminated, nuclear facilities, where disassembly training takes place and guided tours are offered.

Axpo refused to allow this, saying that his photographic surveillance panorama method, which uses chance and loss of control as a creative principle, was dubious – and that it contradicted the security requirements. What was actually meant, was the security of control over image production. Spinatsch found a new approach: a public visitor centre is an analogy of the functioning nuclear power plant. In Switzerland, every nuclear power plant also has a functioning visitor centre, due to public pressure for justification. It is the power plant’s justification mechanism. Laws of nature and phenomena are demonstrated there, comparisons are presented, technologies are explained, but assertions, pearls of wisdom and refreshments are also offered. Spinatsch visited the Beznau, Leibstadt and Gösgen nuclear power plants, taking photographs in the visitor centres from the perspective of a visiting citizen. There taking photographs is permitted, or even desired, so that what is learnt and experienced is passed on, because the operators are convinced that comprehension of a technology also leads to increased acceptance thereof among the public. Here, the propagandistic connotation is that explaining the functionality also naturally conveys the relevance of a technology. The “Dose of Confirmation” section examines the didactic material that the operators of Swiss nuclear power plants offer their visitors. Here, the images and installations are subjected to a didactic reinterpretation, or rather “de-interpretation”, via selection, extraction, or the elimination of environment and context.

Asynchronous IV: Normal Operation – Dose of Confirmation [2013]

Asynchronous V: Obsoleum [1984 + x]

pp. 98–101 In 2012, Jules Spinatsch unsuccessfully attempted to record a panoramic photograph in the control room of the Beznau nuclear power plant during normal daily operations. The operating company 88

pp. 102–103

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Jules Spinatsch

The current debate surrounding the disposal of radioactive material is plagued with terminological confusion. A final repository with retrievability is a contradiction in itself. Thus, Jules Spinatsch coined a term of his own: “Obsoleum”, which refers to the (communication) dilemma of Switzerlands NAGRA, The National Cooperative for the Disposal of Radioactive Waste, or of the topic in general. Obsoleum (from obsolete and museum) describes the fulfilment of the wish associated with the final repository, namely the topic vanishing into the eternal darkness underground, into oblivion. The relatively new retrievability requirement, pertaining to radioactive material that has supposedly been stored away for the last time, turns every final repository into another intermediate repository, but for a duration that is now unknown. Although radioactive waste has been produced for over 50 years, not one single final repository for highly radioactive waste is completed or functional anywhere in the world. The material is stored and cooled for 20-30 years in Castor containers, often on the sites of the nuclear power plants themselves. In Switzerland, all highly radioactive waste is brought to the Zvilag intermediate repository in Würenlingen, in a simple, well-guarded hall on the Swiss Plateau, near the Beznau and Leibstadt nuclear power plants and close to the German border. The Nuclear Energy Act stipulates that radioactive material (and thus the problem) can no longer be exported. The NAGRA, founded in 1984, is in charge of developing and implementing solutions for safe disposal of the radioactive waste produced in Switzerland, with a commitment to people and the environment. NAGRA is also obliged to inform the public about its work. Since a few years ago, retrievability of the material from a final repository must also be guaranteed, in case new technologies for processing the radioactive material become available in the distant future. The images depicting a final repository model in a visitor centre are intended to convey the current concept of a final repository with retrievability. The argumentation is based on the analogy between a fossil and radioactive waste: 600 meters below the surface of the earth, enclosed in a particular sedimentary rock, an ammonite fossil has remained unharmed for 100 million years. Therefore, this sedimentary rock (Opalinus clay) is also suitable for storing radioactive material until the radiation has abated.

The Obsoleum images adopt this NAGRA narrative primarily without comment, repeating the linear account with a hard beginning, but with an end in obsoleum. Even if the plates are rearranged, this story can hardly be varied at all: NAGRA’s one (and supposedly only) possible marketing narrative remains. Only the black panel offers interpretational resistance; as a consequence of this narrative and fulfilment of the wish associated with the final repository, it can be seen as an illustration of obsoleum. Or indeed as evidence that the retrievability requirement is in fact inadvertently causing light to penetrate the eternally dark obsoleum once again – an obvious contradiction already manifests itself within the concept.

Photography and Art

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104

Focus On

Text by Arianna Catania

A brief history of a conflictual relationship

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“THE INVENTION OF PHOTOGRAPHY HAS DEALT A MORTAL BLOW TO THE OLD MODES OF EXPRESSION, IN PAINTING AS WELL AS IN POETRY”

wrote critic André Breton in 19211. And it is true: since its inception, photography has created great turmoil. Pulled from side to side, accused of being simply a means to slavishly represent reality, or heightened as modern art, photography has struggled to fully join the field of art. Nothing new, thought, for the boundaries of art were already being quarrelled 2,500 years ago. The camera had not been invented yet at the time of Plato, but the Athenian philosopher moved the same allegations to painting: “Which is the art of painting designed to be – an imitation of things as they are, or as they appear – of appearance or of reality? Of appearance.” According to Plato, the products of art are “quickly and easily accomplished”, which consists in “turning a mirror round and round”, thus creating “the sun and the heavens, and the earth and yourself, and other animals and plants”. 2 In fact, art is for Plato a technical representation of the false. Towards the end of the Fourth century BC, reflecting on aesthetics, Aristotle started precisely from the issue of “technicality” in the sense of “know how”. Unlike objects from nature, those created by man are the result of an “intellectual process” that helps turn something into the object of knowledge, as a representation of what actually exists. Is art the representation of truth or the making of fiction? Is it idea or invention? Is it experience or knowledge? To these questions, as old as the history of art, it is even more difficult to respond if we refer to photography, the ambiguous art par excellence.

1 2 106

Andrè Breton, in the catalogue introduction for the exhibition by Max Ernst at the gallery Au Sans Pareil, Paris, May 2nd, 1921 Plato, The Republic, Book X

REALISM / MODERNISM The invention of the daguerreotype, in mid-Nineteenth century, makes these arguments even thornier. This new means, in fact, was easy, accessible to all and close to popular culture. And for many it became an easy way to make money: American ex-jewellers and pharmacists, without any artistic training, immediately understood the business potential of this new technology and began to sell cheap portraits for cheap prices. The necessary technical skills were acquired in just a few hours, making photography attainable to everyone. For many figurative art connoisseurs, in fact, this showed how photography was a mechanical act, inferior to sculpture, painting and drawing. Yet, since its inception, there were many examples of artistic use of photography that rejected these accusations. Just think of pictorial photographers like Julia Margaret Cameron and Robert Demachy [Fig 01], applying manipulations and out-of-focus technique to black and white pictures, in order to show how photography could recreate the same effect as a charcoal drawing. Or Thomas Sutton [Fig 02], who, in 1861, combined three monochrome exposures with filters of different intensities to create the first colour image, which clearly reminds abstract painting. These are examples of works that are not classically “photographic”, but it still is not enough to let photography enter into the Olympus of the arts. A major leap forward came in the early Twentieth century, thanks to Alfred Stieglitz: photography begins to get noticed, both in its pictorial and documentary characteristics, thanks to the Photo-Secession photography club in New York and the famous magazine Camera Work. The Steerage [Fig 03], a shot from 1907, perhaps marked the start of the “photographic Twentieth century”: this image contains all the impact of documentary truth, but does not remain entangled in a purely narrative perception of the present. Moreover, it is

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Photography and Art

able to give an idealized form of the great social changes of an era, in agreement with those theorists believers – from Naturalism literature – that art should describe reality out of any abstract or idealism, as realistically and objectively as possible. Among the photographers who followed this school, there are the masters August Sander, Paul Strand and Lewis Hine. Photography is here conceived as a “realist” form of art and as a purely positivist result of human intelligence and technological development of modern society. As American photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn writes at the beginning of the last century: “Photography is the most modern of the arts, its development and practical usefulness extends back only into the memory of living men; in fact, it is more suited to the art requirements of this age of scientific achievement than any other. It is, however, only by comparing it with the older art of painting that we will get the full value of our argument plainly before us; and in doing so we shall find that the essential difference is not so much a mechanical one of brushes and pigments as compared with a lens and dry plates, but rather a mental one of a slow, gradual, usual building up, as compared with an instantaneous, concentrated mental impulse, followed by a longer period of fruition. Photography, born of this age of steel, seems to have naturally adapted itself to the necessarily unusual requirements of an art that must live in skyscrapers.” 3

between reality and fiction. As theorist Michel Poivert wrote: “Photography has been able to play its role only by bringing out its originality. Originality consisted in its ability to embody what art is not. And such originality could only be visible by overcoming a major obstacle: that of a contradictory story in itself, a dual history where art photography presented in museums can be that same ‘ document’ photography. The decline of this contradiction became all the more urgent as it appeared natural, having conceptual art demonstrating that the document contained sufficient aesthetic virtues to reform the status of the work of art itself.”4 So art and document are not in contradiction. Indeed, photography is art precisely because it is the document. John Szarkowski, curator of the department of photography at MoMA, put a full stop to this topic at the end of the 60s. To him, photography is different from the other arts because its history is not linear but centrifuge, an unusual history running from a centre and spreading then fully into our consciousness: “Like an organism, photography was born whole. It is in our progressive discovery of it that its history lies.” 5 The curator of the exhibition New Documents in 1967 is, as a matter of fact, Szarkowski, who presents a new generation of photographers whose goal is not only the documentation, but especially the search for a thorough understanding of the world, to be achieved by breaking the aesthetic standards of that time, by showing what the mass culture had hidden and deleted. The young authors – unknown at that time – are Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand and Diane Arbus with her “monsters”. They inaugurate the era of “street photography”. The dichotomy art / document clarifies better in the ‘90s, when Canadian photographer Jeff Wall replaces the word “photograph” with the term “image”. Not a simple amateur photograph anymore, that has become one of the media of contemporary mass communication, but a professional image that contains within a continuous dialectic between the artistic and documentary aspects.

ART / DOCUMENT The official acceptance of photography into the art field happens only halfway through the Twentieth century. And in grand style: in 1940, the photography department is established at MoMA in New York, a real temple for contemporary art. It is the access to museums, with the resulting benefits of the market value, to elevate photography as art, as critic Rosalind Krauss wrote in the early 90s. Many authors – including Stieglitz – donated part of their archives to the New York museum, which now contains more than 25,000 images, most of them coming from the documentary tradition. Yet the entrance to the museum does not resolve the ambiguity of the nature of photography, the seamless dialectic between art and document,

3 Alvin Langdon Coburn, Camera Work no 36, New York, 1911 4 Michel Poivert, La Photographie contem poraine, Flammarion, Paris, 2002. Translation by the author. 5 John Szarkowski, The Photographer’s Eye, Museum of Modern Art/Doubleday, New York, 1966 107

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Focus On

[Fig 01] Thomas Sutton, Tartan Ribbon, 1861. Public domain–––––[Fig 02] Robert Demachy, Struggle, 1904. Published on Camera Work, No 5, 1904. Public domain–––––[Fig 03] Alfred Stieglitz, The Steerage, 1907. Courtesy of Alfred Stieglitz Collection in Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York–––––[Fig 04] André Kertész, The Polaroids, 3 july 1979. Courtesy of Estate of André Kertész and Stephen Bulger Gallery 108

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[Fig 05] David Hockney, Nicholas Wilder Studying Picasso, Los Angeles 24th March 1982. Courtesy of David Hockney / hockneypictures.com–––––[Fig 06] László Moholy-Nagy, The Law of Series, 1925. Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn–––––[Fig 07] Maurice Tabard, Room with Eye, 1930. Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York / The Elisha Whittelsey Collection / The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1962 109

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DEMOCRACY / REVOLUTION

MODERN / POST-MODERN

And yet, in 1936, there were those who had already understood everything: Walter Benjamin. For the German philosopher it no longer makes sense to talk, as it was the case until then, about the aura of the work of art. To dismiss the superiority of literature, painting and music was the advent of photography and cinema, both means of mass communication, industrial and duplicable. The primary question that Benjamin arises is “whether the very invention of photography had not transformed the entire nature of art.” 6 But this revolution of culture has its positive aspects: the reproducibility transforms art, which can become “political” and “social”, accessible and democratic, rediscovering a pedagogical function through technology. And that is what happens with the invention of the Polaroid: quick and easy devices, democratic and revolutionary at the same time. The disproportional proliferation of instant film (in the mid ‘50s, 70 percent of American households had one) engage experiments of any kind, such as André Kertész surrealist polaroids [Fig 04], the 2,500 Walker Evans sheets and the mosaics by David Hockney [Fig 05]. One can hence say that photography has always taken advantage of the possibilities offered by technology, proving that no new invention, no new medium is a threat, but always an opportunity for experimentation, that feeds on the social dynamics of each historical period in which it is born and raised, exploiting or subverting them. However, Theodor Adorno, a distinguished member of the Frankfurt School, did not trust the ability of art to stimulate change in society: in the capitalist-industrial system there cannot be an overturn coming from the artists, because such totalising system leaves no room for manoeuvre and freedom. For the German philosopher, artists can be free only in a negative solipsistically art, the art of the non-practice. At the verge of post-modernism, Adorno perhaps had a point.

Photography, that was considered the ultimate modern art in the Twentieth century, is perfectly at ease even in the post-modern era, where all is permissible. Indeed, only from now on photography starts to be free to express and to be fully itself, by mixing all the different languages of the various historical periods. In 1973, American writer Susan Sontag writes: “Insofar as photography does peel away the dry wrappers of habitual seeing, it creates another habit of seeing: both intense and cool, solicitous and detached; charmed by the insignificant detail, addicted to incongruity. But photographic seeing has to be constantly renewed with new shocks, whether of subject matter or technique, so as to produce the impression of violating ordinary vision.” 7 The long and complex process of transformation, born from modernity crisis, has not yet run its course: the pillars that societies had built in the past begin to crumble. And in this “liquefaction” – to put it like Bauman – photography finds the perfect location, from the moment it is characterized by objectivism and materialism on one side and by conceptualism and experimentation on the other. Ambiguous but also forerunner, it is as if photography was already projected from its birth towards the post-modern and the contemporary, and its destiny was to create havoc and break the boundaries where many wanted to relegate it. Just think of the ‘30s and the fantastic photomontages by László Moholy-Nagy [Fig 06], or the surrealist visions by Maurice Tabard [Fig 07]. As Claudio Marra writes: “One can assume a kind of schizophrenia of the medium, involved on one side with the old modernity and at the same time able to participate in the new contemporary. Not a compromise, as some might assume, but an actual state of borderline, a life in half, a sort of pseudo contradiction that in the long run could prove useful to the reflection process still wide open on the transition from modernity to the contemporary.” 8 Photography as agitator of art, “anti-art”, as pointed out by Walker Evans in 1947: “Photography has nothing whatsoever to do with ‘Art’. But, it’s an art for all that.” 9 In contemporary times, after breaking the boundaries delimiting the arts, photography is finally rampant in every artistic movement. In Pop Art, with Andy Warhol’s polaroids; in Land art,

6 Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, originally published in Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, 1936 110

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where the photographic documentation becomes an important modus operandi (Robert Smithson) [Fig 08] ; in Conceptualism, where the photographic image, in all its substance, plays a key role in building the work (Joseph Kosuth); in Performance art, where the experience of the artist is central, and photography serves as a fixer of the work through time (Sophie Calle); in Appropriation, where the works made by authors of the past are borrowed (Sherrie Levine) [Fig 09].

photograph, practiced by masses of enthusiasts, is increasing, even thought the relationship is more and more complex, since often the two parts mix up and one is inspired by the other. Simply look at the use of the Internet by authors such as Sean Snyder (Untitled-Archive Iraq, 2003-2005) [Fig 11] or Erik Kessel (24hrs in Photos, 2011). The first collects amateur photographs of American soldiers in Iraq to document war “from the inside”; the second prints one million photos uploaded on Flickr in one day. More recently, Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin (War Primer 2, 2011) [Fig 12] reflect the media at the time of the “war of terror”, mixing photographs conveyed on digital media, newspaper images, text, screenshots, documents. And Alfredo Jaar (Lament of the images, 2002) [Fig 13] takes the pondering on the image on the highest level of abstraction, presenting a white screen, which can contain all or nothing. At the opposite extreme, AES+F collective [Fig 14] makes radical changes and heavy manipulation to the images, to confront issues such as violence and war. These are examples that show how today’s photography – and art in general – is nourished by any means, living between abstraction and representation, blending documentation and conceptualism, analogue and digital, social criticism or pure aesthetics. A contemporaneity that destroys all boundaries between things, between the arts. A contemporaneity that swallows everything, radically transforming the language and the outcome.

DIGITAL / CONTEMPORARY But we should not dread that an artistic surplus - the crushing of genres, styles and techniques - will lead to the extinction of art. “Our society has given rise to a general aestheticization: all forms of culture – not excluding anti-cultural ones – are promoted and all models of representation and anti-representation are taken on board”, says sociologist Jean Baudrillard in 1993. “It is often said that the West’s great undertaking is the commercialization of the whole world, the hitching of the fate of everything to the fate of the commodity. That great undertaking will turn out rather to have been the aestheticization of the whole world – its cosmopolitan spectacularization, its transformation into images, its semiological organization.”10 And if everything becomes an image, a sign, a spectacle, photography can only be part of this transformation, moving as a main character between different artistic genres, according to a horizontal and “democratic” basis. Today we are in full digital era, but the invention that radically changed contemporary society is near retirement age: it has been almost 60 years since the creation of the first digital image, obtained from a prototype scanner (Russell Kirsch in 1957 turned a portrait of his son into a binary file). [Fig 10] Meanwhile, the first digital camera is now 40 years old, created in 1975 by Steven Sasson, who took black and white pictures at a resolution of just 0.01 megapixels. Photography has had almost two centuries to find its place in art. But today, facing the invasion of images produced by billion of smartphones around the world, the debate has been rekindled. The distance between a so called “authorial” photograph, a cult object for a niche of specialists, and a “social”

7 Susan Sontag, The Heroism of Vision, in On Photography, Penguin, London, 1977 8 Claudio Marra, Fotografia e Pittura nel Novecento, Bruno Mondadori, Milano, 2000 9 Art: Puritan Explorer, Exhibition review of Walker Evens, Art Institute of Chicago, Time no 50, New York, December 15th, 1947 10 Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil, Verso, London, 1993 111

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10 11

[Fig 08] Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1970. Great Salt Lake, Utah Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water 1500 feet long and 15 feet wide. Photo: Gianfranco Gorgoni. Collection: DIA Center for the Arts, New York Courtesy of Estate of Robert Smithson / licensed by VAGA, New York–––––[Fig 09] Sherrie Levine, After Walker Evans 4, 1981. Private collection. Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery, New York–––––[Fig 10] Russell Kirsch, Son Walden, 1957. Public domain–––––[Fig 11] Sean Snyder, Untitled (Archive, Iraq), 2003-2005 Courtesy of Lisson Gallery 112

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[Fig 12] Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Plate 23 from War Primer 2, 2011. Courtesy of Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin and Collection Tom Price, London. (Aircraft, at right, is seen as it is about to fly into the World Trade Center in New York on Tuesday. The aircraft was the second to fly into the tower Tuesday morning)–––––[Fig 13] Alfredo Jaar, Lament of the Images, 2002. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, New York and Lousiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark–––––[Fig 14] AES+F, Tondo #13, from the Last Riot 2 series, 2006. Courtesy of AES+F and Triumph Gallery 113

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Maldoror Photographs and text by Jean–Vincent Simonet

www.jeanvincentsimonet.com

VII Editorial

Jean–Vincent Simonet Pages 114 — 135

Maldoror 114

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Jean–Vincent Simonet

“IN ORDER TO CONSTRUCT MECHANICALLY THE BRAIN OF A SOMNIFEROUS STORY, IT IS NOT ENOUGH TO DISSECT THE READER'S UNDERSTANDING WITH ALL KINDS OF FOLLY AND BRUTALIZE IT COMPLETELY WITH RENEWED DOSES, SO AS TO PARALYSE HIS FACULTIES FOR THE REST OF HIS LIFE, BY THE INFALLIBLE LAW OF FATIGUE; ONE MUST, APART FROM THIS, BY MEANS OF A GOOD MESMERIZING FLUID, INGENIOUSLY REDUCE HIM TO A SOMNAMBULIC STATE IN WHICH IT IS IMPOSSIBLE FOR HIM TO MOVE, FORCING HIM TO CLOSE HIS EYES AGAINST HIS INCLINATION BY THE FIXITY OF YOUR OWN.”

Extract from Songs of Maldoror (1869), Lautréamont

In 1869, aged 23, Isidore Ducasse published Les Chants de Maldoror, a cutting-edge book praising youth revolt, blasphemy and the victory of dream over reality. Ducasse died few months after publishing his only works, in mysterious circumstances. Victim of censorship, it was discovered and acclaimed by the leader of surrealistic movement André Breton 50 years later.It's now considered as a classic in french literature.

I discovered Ducasse's book last year and I was really chocked by the power of the text. It creates a lot of mental pictures to me. Then, I decided to make a rendition of the original book, divided into six booklets. This new illustrated version is a revival of this literary enigma, transforming the classic novel into a contemporary editorial object. Each of the six booklets offers a thematic approach related to the universe of Les chants de Maldoror (Romanticism, Chaos, Bestiality, Science, Intimacy and Literacy). The graphic design and different typologies of pictures, from black and white analogue to heavy digital process, give each booklet its own and strong personality. A fight between past and present, picture and text take place into the project. The literary blasphemy turns into a tribute. 115

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Negative Book / Selfie Photographs by Aneta Grzeszykowska Text by Maria Brewińska

VIII Editorial

Pages 136 — 149

www.en.rastergallery.com/ tag/grzeszykowska

Aneta Grzeszykowska

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Aneta Grzeszykowska

Negative Book Aneta Grzeszykowska’s series of black and white photographs, Negative Book, is a project which deconstructs positive photography and as such forms a continuation of the artist’s reflections on the character of the photographic medium and its various transformations. The starting point here was traditional photography registering personal situations or scenes deliberately posed for the camera. In opposition to the earlier Album (2005) – composed of classic photographs from the family collection from which the artist had deleted her own image – in Negative Book the artist is visible on each photograph, while the whole series was created using two new photographic techniques. The first is the exposition of the body totally or partially painted black, which creates a reverse effect on the negative: the body takes on a bright colour. This effect is particularly striking when the artist’s body is located on the photographs in the vicinity of other figures, whose colour of skin remains in a negative black. The second technique is the transformation of pre-existing positive photographs into negative versions. Such a manipulation (both of the medium and of the viewer) seems to undermine the trust we have in the images we receive through the means of positive photography as a convincing reflection of reality. But it is not the analysis of the medium that is the dominant question here. Negative Book connects with the artist’s previous works through a concentration on the exhibition of one’s own body and its perfomativity, meaning that what we end up with is a sort of intimate diary. It is just that the negative character of the photographs and the positive procedure used on the body make it less real, depriving us of the possibility of a visual identification and stripping it of its emotional layers, leading to a situation where individuality and identity become relative. The result is that personal situations are reborn in an ontologically cold and severe game of black and white.

Text by Maria Brewińska

The text was written for Death and the Maiden, Aneta Grzeszykowska’s solo show at Zachęta – National Gallery of Art in Warsaw (13.04 - 02.06.2013).

Selfie Selfie lies between photography and sculpture. At its heart is the analysis of the process of selfcreation – one of the most fundamental themes of art and also a basic premise for the condition of the post-medial society of today. Aneta Grzeszykowska makes a radical turn in the direction of the grotesque, creating startling sculptural charades using fragments of her own body, modeled in pigskin and exhibited on smooth leather backgrounds. Her selfie takes on an uncanny quality as she creates a self-portrait out of many parts. She treats corporeality, sensuality and autoeroticism with black humor, which transforms the aesthetic experience into a struggle with basic existential emotions. Her refined compositions resem-ble the terrifying props of a horror film set. As in the classics of this genre, death imitates life, while life – the artist’s hands visible in the photographs – is deadened as she gestures towards these imper-manent sculptural objects. The fragmentation of the body, through the surreal exercise of sculpting select organs and the use of tight photographic frames, leads to a leveling of the processes of creation and destruction. And those fragments of the female body are at the same time actual pieces of an animal’s flesh. Grzeszykowska takes apart her own image and manipulates the vision of her body in various ways, citing, for example, the themes inherent in the work of Alina Szapocznikow. She persists approaching the radical and jarring assertion that self-creation is but another, fallible means of struggling with the mortal nature of the body.

Aneta Grzeszykowska, Selfie #(8, 5, 1, 2, 11, 18, 19), 2014. Courtesy of Raster gallery, Warsaw Aneta Grzeszykowska, Negative Book #(47, 2, 18, 6, 25, 14), 2012/2013. Courtesy of Raster gallery, Warsaw 137

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Interview

Reacting to Situationsâ&#x20AC;¨ Fotomuseum Winterthur integrates in a new way the real and the virtual in relation to exhibition.

By Salvatore Vitale

Interview with Thomas Seelig 150

Beni Bischof, Untitled, from Handicapped Cars, 2014 C-print, 13 x 18 cm, Collection Fotomuseum Winterthur

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Thomas Seelig

For twenty years Fotomuseum Winterthur has made mainly monographic exhibitions. When Thomas Seelig and Duncan Forbes started their work, they felt the need to introduce new practices connected to the contemporary scene. SITUATIONS is a new curatorial project launched by Fotomuseum Winterthur on April 10th 2015, driven by the idea that photography is inside society, and not just an artistic practice anymore. The idea is to build up a platform where photography can be discussed. Starting from a statement, the main goal is to move reactions on what the perception of photography is today and what its possible development and applications can be. As an important institution in the field of photography, with SITUATIONS, Seelig and Forbes are introducing a fresh and new approach that allows the museum to react more quickly to developments within photography culture. This will define a vision of what photography is becoming and what can be done in order to offer a new experience between the integration of physical exhibition space and virtual forum. I was happy to meet Thomas Seelig, co-director of Fotomuseum Winterthur, in order to know how SITUATIONS can be a starting point for approaches within photographic curatorial projects, and how it is evolving in these new contests where time and space are getting more and more relative, and the image production and distribution is increasing exponentially. I’m very impressed by this new format launched by Fotomuseum Winterthur. SITUATIONS is going to drive changes in the perception of the common exhibition space. Tell me more about the format. Where does it come from? What are your first impressions? T.S.

We tried to see what was happening outside and react to it. Nowadays the medium is very fluid and this

fluidity is something which is not new in a way. If we look for example at Postcards or Life magazine; they were distributed widely, so the medium has always had the kind of drive and possibility of reaching a lot of people, perhaps through a narrow historical context. Now we have the possibility to broaden and correct that, in a way that we can open up again through analyzing the difference between museological attitude and social implication, and how we can combine this to create something that is moving forward. When an institution like Fotomuseum Winterthur takes this kind of stand, it really can have effects on all the photography chapters in a way, tell us a little bit about that. I think we are testing it now, we don’t neglect the regular exhibition programme. The blog is something to evaluate the plus or the minus, where do we succeed or where do we fail, but I think that’s part of the possibility of becoming smaller in the unit and also to be able to form everything to its needs. For many years we had two very big exhibition volumes to play with, and that made it very slow in terms of programming and reacting of what was going on. So to make it smaller means we can curate on site; you see something and you want to translate it into a format you can react on time and not two years after, for instance. T.S.

How does this interaction process work exactly? T.S.

First of all, we realized we’ve always created a lot of content, and if you evaluate how this content reach people, like catalogs, it was always a limited amount of readers. Through the blog however, we found out we have many readers that aren’t physically present. But if you translate that into a global audience, you realize people

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are following us, even if they are not associated with the Fotomuseum Winterthur and its space. That stimulated us to bring more content, accessible not at the exhibition, but through the internet, and people have to raise awareness of where do they get what kind of content, and sometimes the content might be bigger on the internet site and less important in the exhibition moment, or it might not even be in the exhibition. That’s the kind of play we want to stimulate. At the beginning it might irritate a little bit, but it’s also a kind of training system to say museums can act between physical space and virtual space. This kind of online curatorial projects are increasing with time, there’s a need to find new ways to show photography and being aware of the large amount of possible audience that can be reached. What do you think about online exhibitions’ format? I think it all depends on the form. If the form within the internet is the best to carry the content, I would always go for the internet. For economical reasons, for instance, maybe one should do it using online spaces, in order to push the content to the public. I think it’s also a way to make it possible where sometimes there’s restriction.

nical sense, how images were distributed, or limited or widened in its audience. So it always had this kind of movement, there was never a constant “treatment”, there was always a change. Channeling change is part of photography – and that’s joyful – and I think now, after photography has reached that kind of status within the museum world – not only in photography museums but also in art museums – there’s the risk to be stuck to one single definition, and everybody following that definition. And if you connect that now to the outside world, the distribution of images, the moving and the still image – like two pictures in one apparatus – you see that there are a lot of parameters floating. It’s not only the image that is floating, but also the circumstance of how we define this photographic nature. Basically it’s to avoid the notion that there is only one solution. I see a lot of work based more on the form than the content, do you think that today it’s more about the medium itself than the concept behind the photographic work or series?

T.S.

You said in SITUATIONS’ statement that today we are talking more about the photographic than photography, what do you mean by that? T.S.

For many decades, photography has always been a self-referential discourse – where are we, what are we, how are we treated, what is photography, what is art – having a lot of internal definition moments. On the other hand, in a tech-

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T.S.

Normally I would say that people should have learned better through conceptual photography in the 70s, it’s surprising to still have these kind of conversations about photography. But then again, I think it also backlashes. When we had this opportunity with digital photography, everybody was making documentary photography. For me it was a backlash moment in photographic history. And now we have the same, where you have all these approaches to very formalistic ideas. I would say it’s much more interesting to think about the use of photography and its distributive nature. How the work of a curator is changing in this digital era?

David Horvitz, from Mood Disorder, 2012– Digital print, 45 x 32 cm Collection Fotomuseum Winterthur

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T.S.

First of all I would state that the museum, or our museum, is not the only content producer in the world, we are one voice between many others. Also, we can share, follow, highlight, comment, we have all the kind of possibilities which are embedded in communication culture. If you compare, for example, the attitude to see how people are communicating in social media, and apply that to a museum curator, it’s the same thing: producing something, writing something, stimulating exchange. You can quote, you can like other things, you can bring them in, you can share. If you treat also editorial work in that sense, it might be liberating bringing this external discourse into a museum.

ware, and ended up in 57 different contexts. So now, in the collection, we have these 57 contexts that are actually growing, and every year we receive updates where these images are stored. This could be a model of the nature of the floating image touching different contexts.

I think we are living in a very interesting period of time in terms of exploring new possibilities, something is happening to photography that is very similar to what happened to figurative art at the beginning of the past century. What do you expect from photography in the next five to ten years? It’s always relative, in the last years the panorama has become wider; it’s not a question of the medium, but about perception of the medium, and we will have to anticipate the changing nature. And the changing nature has happened, we are living in a different time, images have taken a different road, but it hasn’t reached the discourse in terms of museum world. So basically I think that this will be much more a part of the Fotomuseum world. Therefore we will have to break down few rules, and we will probably have to work on this kind of education. For example, last year we bought works by David Horvitz, he made a project where he was implementing an image, an open source image, giving only two words with this image. There were three shareT.S.

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Cédric Eisenring / Thomas Julier Time Machine, TJ#1 Edit, 2009–2014 Installation, HD videos, 93 print on demand booklets Collection Fotomuseum Winterthur Jiří Thýn, Untitled, from Basic Studies / Nonnarrative Photography, 2011 C-print, 27.5 x 22.2 cm Collection Fotomuseum Winterthur, gift Eugen Haltiner Willem Popelier, from Showroom Girls, 2011, Inkjet print, 128 x 90.5 cm Collection Fotomuseum Winterthur

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LLIAISONS Photographs and text by Emile Barret

www.emilebarret.com

CREDITS Collaborations with PhilippeAlbert Lefebvre & Ana Varela, Nadine Capdevielle & Bruno Barret, Maya Rochat, Florian Luthy, Florence Jung & Nicolas Leuba, Fabrice Schneider, Romain Mader, (Music for) Eggplant, Julien Grémaud, K3.14COUZ, Paul Barret & Raphaël Faure, Ali-Eddine Abdelkhalek & Félix Salasca, Baptiste Gratzmuller, Karolina Kula.

IX Editorial

Emile Barret Pages 156 — 169

Lliaisons 156

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Emile Barret

LLIAISONS is the result of a series of intense collaborations undertaken during a six month residency in London, where a number of artists working in fields such as photography, computer graphics and video games, installation, film, performance and sculpture have worked together refining the concept of continuos development of the work.

Together, Philippe-Albert Lefebvre & Ana Varela, Nadine Capdevielle & Bruno Barret, Maya Rochat, Florian Luthy, Florence Jung & Nicolas Leuba, Fabrice Schneider, Romain Mader, (Music for) Eggplant, Julien Grémaud, K3.14COUZ, Paul Barret & Raphaël Faure, Ali-eddine Abdelkhalek & Félix Salasca, Baptiste Gratzmuller et Karolina Kula have developed a video game that offers an experience in which, through the gameplay, one can enjoy the work.

“Yesterday, my life was headed in one direction. Today, it is headed in another. Yesterday, I believe I would never have done what I did today. These forces that often remake time and space, they can shape and alter who we imagine ourselves to be, begin long before we are born, and continue after we perish. Our lives and our choices, like quantum trajectories, are understood moment to moment, at each point of intersection, each encounter, suggest a new potential direction.”

– Cloud Atlas, – Lana Wachowskii

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The Rendering Eye Photographs by Regula Bochsler Text co-written with Philipp Sarasin, The Rendering Eye: Urban America Revisited www.renderingeye.it

X Editorial

Pages 170 — 189

www.regulabochsler.ch

Regula Bochsler

The Rendering Eye 170

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Regula Bochsler

Expeditions into the 3D World of Apple Maps Within its mapping service, Apple offers an application called Flyover. This app allows the user to “fly” over and around the places that are rendered in 3D. In September 2012, at the time of the launch of Apple Maps, the application’s renderings of buildings and streets have provoked a lot of criticism and mockery, since the maps and the corresponding images are not without errors. It’s these peculiar and strange “errors” that first aroused my curiosity, but they merely provided the starting point for my later expeditions into this new world. Soon I realized I had never seen similar images of cities and nature alike before, and decided to explore the world of Apple Maps more deeply. This was the beginning of my art project called The Rendering Eye (www.renderingeye.net). The 3D Flyover feature is based on vector graphics that continually generate new images according to positions selected by the user. These renderings undoubtedly constitute the most technologically advanced and contemporary way of viewing urban spaces, based as they are on an incredible stream of photographic data generated by Apple’s new cartography division, which the employees ironically nicknamed “Sputnik division.” I was impressed by the technical prowess of the project, but I was even more fascinated with the visual quality of this brand new digital world. Even though this world is machine-generated, it is “picturesque” in ways I had never seen before. The screenshots I started collecting from all the places I visited possess an occasionally exuberant and sometimes even poetically soft chromatic complexion. The shapes and colours of architecture and nature testify to algorithms that are overwhelmed by the complexity of “reality.” They show streets without any traffic and human beings, industrial installations looking like colourful toys, ships transformed into ephemeral shadows and trees pupated into bizarre sculptures. Thanks to their “flaws,” their blurred lines, distortions, and

mirror effects, the images look as if they had been created manually. The more I got immersed into this strange world, the more it reminded me of well known paintings, of video games and even film classics. I found reverberations of the dystopian metropolises of Blade Runner, the expressionistic cityscape of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the futuristic structures of SimCity and the light drenched boulevards of French painter Camille Pissarro. Other images recall the Water Lilies of Claude Monet, an island outside of Berlin looks like a modern version of the Isle of the Dead of Swiss painter Arnold Böcklin, while several landscapes remind me of the Ocean Park series of the American painter Richard Diebenkorn as well as the Onement I-VI series of Barnett Newman. To my great amazement I came to realize that I was not the only one having these associations. Numerous people, friends and unknowns, started talking about the same artists and even the same paintings while they were watching the images of the Rendering Eye project. The fact that Apple is currently working on improving the database of its renderings already heralds the end of the special quality of these images: soon the streams of data will have expanded many times over again; the algorithms will have been refined and the visualizations of reality so perfected that these cartographic images will turn into simulated immediacy, and thereby become artlessly mimetic. At that point the 3D renderings will no longer produce a picture, but rather a flat image that will be indistinguishable from a photograph – a photograph which, for its part, will no longer be distinguishable from a rendered image. In light of this anticipated development, the screen shots presented by the Rendering Eye project are already a memory of a future past, when computer-generated cityscapes were still “picturesque.” 171

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Focus On

Being a photographer in a Post窶的nternet era

Text by Maxime Guyon

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Maxime Guyon

What is the role of a contemporary photographer nowadays in an overwhelming rise of digital mass media? This is a question that a young photographer like me asks himself constantly. In a digital generation blossoming into online social medias, sharing and digesting any possible general web contents, photography sees a total change of its environment. Photographers to be, future curators and soon to be art directors engage their main social advancement tactics on Facebook, posting and re-blogging artwork on tumblr, building their own showcase of inspiration, daily snapshots or even cropped and filtered photographs on Instagram, and creating their virtual exhibition spaces thanks to well designed websites. Here is an extract of a wide panel of display possibilities for visual communicants but also for a whole hyper connected society that has adopted — but especially adapted themselves to — this new virtual “communal space”1 and its aesthetics. The so called Postinternet movement introduced by Marisa Olson, Gene McHugh and Artie Vierkant 2 had known a warm success from the art market and curators, allowing them to label emergent artworks. Firstly, this movement particularly describes art that has been inspired by the impact internet has on our culture. Internet is known for being a place where everyone is free to analyse and interpret every accessible informations online, loads of opinions without limits on every possible sort of topic. This inexhaustible access to informations, visual or textual, has completely disseminated our vision and representations on original sources. “While mass media brings its viewer the world, the world is also held at bay while the viewer commits h/er gaze to the screen, forever separated from others and from communal space”3 This leads us onto questioning the current substance of contemporary photography. That’s why, as you can see, I particularly chose to start this essay by mentioning “The Image Object Post-Internet” by Artie Vierkant, 1–3 2

From The image Object Post-Internet, Artie Vierkant, Source Critical Art Ensemble (CAE), “On Electronic Civil Disobedience” Wikipedia, “Postinternet” (www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postinternet)

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as he brought light to a new way of working with art in this new social environment. However Vierkant’s essay didn’t help me to finally answer my own questions concerning the photographic medium during my thesis research. So this is why I’m here writing these words. A group of artists has played with the ready-made content available online, this is what Artie Vierkant calls “surfing as art”. Like Jon Rafman with his project “The Nine Eyes of Google Street Views”4 and Constant Dullaart with “Jennifer in Paradise”5, artists practicing “surfing as art” use the internet itself in order to indexing and curating this ready-made web content with the intention to delimit the viewers context of interpretation. But these photographs taken by Google Street View, or this photograph of Jon Knoll’s wife, are now no longer photographs anymore, we can only call them “images”, after being composed automatically by a software as to make a 360° view, or after being downloaded and compressed several times, these photographs had been so much altered that we are not able to assimilate them as photographs. These artists, notably Constant Dullaart — with whom I had a video conversation — affirm that the medium of photography is dead these days. Naturally, it is his own point of view, as a new media artist, he is not using photography to create his oeuvres but rather using the general web content itself. Therefore, does photography has a role in this world wide web? Or even a link with these new technologies? Some photographers have even turned to stock images as material to make their artworks, like Kate Steciw in an interview on an art social platform called Artsy — known also for its capacity to connect potential online art buyers with galleries — where she is explaining her earliest difficulties to find her own purpose in contemporary photography. “It was a weird time to study photography, there was Philip-Lorca DiCorcia, Jeff Wall, Cindy Sherman, all very good photographers with high production value.

4 5 6

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http://9-eyes.com A letter to Jennifer Knoll, http://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/sep/5/letterjennifer-knoll/ Up and Coming: Kate Steciw Playfully Redefines the Medium of Photography Artsy.net, https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-up-and-coming-katesteciw-playfully-redefines-the

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Maxime Guyon

How do you even make a picture that looks that good? It’s like we were waiting for the internet, and for digital to arrive.”6 She is certainly one of the most eminent artist in photography of the near future, but this brings us to this embarrassing question, do we need to take photographs to still affirm that we make photography? We have the proof that not in every case, in my opinion, photography is an invariably ever evolving process, as it lays perpetually on technological evolution likewise on its environment contingencies. Today, this environment is softwares, internet and its culture, it’s obvious that it has a direct and indirect aesthetic impact on contemporary photography. We can take naïve examples like “memes” 7, which is a perfect example of social intervention on surrounding images on the web, but we can also observe new indirect alterations on images caused by the internet ubiquity, the act of “re-blogging” alone, for instance, changes simultaneously the interpretation of a picture. The technological evolution is a subject that I’m quite interested in my practice. We can see that technological evolution is strongly and intimately linked to the photographic medium. It is frenetically evolving, and therefore modifying the medium’s nature, like high frequency trading would modify the stock market, changes an umpteenth time the way we see economy, with the risk of messing it up. The major influence of these technologies in photography has been emphasized in a conversation between Sandra Plummer, Harriet Riches and Duncan Wooldridge on “Either/And”. “We were interested in how that impacts on understandings of photographs themselves as objects, that within theory have slipped from view, […] engendered by digital technologies.” […] “(the) photographic object (is) increasingly immaterial, […] the difficulty is to perceive the photograph as image and object simultaneously.”8 7 8

Wikipedia, “Internet Meme” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_meme) Photography’s New Materiality: An Introduction, From Either/And website by Charlotte Cotton, http://eitherand.org/photographys-new-materiality/ photographys-new-materiality/

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This dematerialisation makes us forget about the physicality of what a picture is. We could assume this evolution as degenerative for the medium, however it reminds us of a movement in the 60’s, which is Conceptual Art. Conceptual Art is a movement where the idea or the concept is the most important aspect of the work according to Sol LeWitt9, we loose therefore in a way the condition of the photographic object but on the other hand we gain in “virtualisation”. “Virtualisation” is a notion expressed by Timur Si Qin in his “Meta-Materialism” essay, a term that stands for textual, or simulacra — which represents ultimately the idea of an artwork, its representation — this way we don’t see virtual as a meaning of digital or immaterial, but something with consistency and reality. Timur Si Qin even writes: “(The metastructure, the composition of the actual and the virtual is) An explicit reflection of this network within the artwork therefore becomes an attempt at discerning the true environment surrounding the work.”10 We observe then that a photo documentation or a photograph on a screen doesn’t have the same impact than in printed form, but gives the same metastructure. This concept opens up a new way of producing artwork, even for photographers, or I would rather say especially for photographers, because it deliberately frees photographers from literal representation thanks to these new technologies. Fred Ritchin with his book In our Own Image re-issued in 1999, was one of the first to evoke this emancipation, “Art Photography as well will no longer draw much of its strength and context from a perception that it is inherently a comment on visible, verifiable realities, but will come more easily to be seen, like painting,

9 10 11

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Wikipedia “Conceptual Art”, Source “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” Sol LeWitt Metamaterialism by Timur Si Qin, http://timursiqin.com/2011/metamaterialism.html In Our Own Image, Fred Ritchin, Aperture 2010 twentieth-anniversary edition

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Maxime Guyon

as synthetic, the outcome of an act from the artist’s imagination.”11 Post-production softwares like photoshop, brought then the studio, but also the darkroom, in “a virtual realm”12, using, for some, the technology against oneself – the well known Lucas Blalock’s stamp brush for example – or using this technology to open new discourses, like the poetic series “In Time’s Breeze” from Michael Bussel. Moreover, this lack of physicality in photography due to archiving and retouching digital file, has echoed a rise of awareness on the importance of photobooks, but also of photography as sculpture like Rachel De Joode did with her photography objects “Color Of Me” in 2013. To me photography isn’t crossbreeding other disciplines but rather explore its environment and its interpretation. Digital native photographers now feel the need to work physically with their artwork, and keep on experimenting the digital environment as a totally different communal space. Photography has been and will still be a witness of cultural evolution.

Extract from a conversion between Darren Campion and Lucas Blalock, on Paper-Journal.com, www.paper-journal.com/interview-lucas-blalock/

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.psd Photographs and text by Corey Bartle–Sanderson

Pages 196 — 203

www.coreybartlesanderson.com

Adobe Photoshop™ software lets you create artwork that previously could be produced only on expensive high-end workstations. This pixel-based image editing program combines a full range of painting and editing tools, sophisticated selection tools, and methods for adjusting gray levels and color in continuous-tone images. Whether you’re a graphic artist, illustrator, photographer, video paintbox artist, retoucher, or prepress professional working in a service bureau, you’ll benefit from the power and versatility of this software. As an electronic darkroom, Adobe Photoshop lets you transform scanned photographs, slides, and original artwork in many ways, for example, by cropping, rotating, and resizing an image, and by creating special effects using filters that range in effect from blurring to mosaics. As a post-production tool, Adobe Photoshop lets you edit images and produce high-quality camera-ready artwork and film.

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Comment & Notes

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National Anthem Photographs and text by Sheida Soleimani

www.sheidasoleimani.com

XII Editorial

Sheida Soleimani Pages 204 — 215

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Sheida Soleimani

By focusing on media trends and the dissemination of societal occurrences through the news, I chose to source imagery from popular media, as well as social media leaks, and adapt them to exist within alternate scenarios. Recognizing the cultural dualities in my upbringing, my work explores identity formed by personal memories and stories my parents expressed to me as a child. In the 1979 Iranian Revolution, my father was a political activist against the Ayatollah’s totalitarian regime, and was suppressed for his pro-democratic beliefs. In return, my mother was imprisoned and tortured while the government tried to learn about my father’s whereabouts. Their revolutionary stories regarding a time of societal upheaval in Iran were initiatives for me to create collisions in regards to my own critical perspectives on past historical issues, as well as their relevance today.

Through the changing of dictators within the past 35 years of Iranian political history, the national anthem of the country has been changed 3 times: each time suiting the more oppressive regime that has come into power. In my photographic scenarios, cultural symbols and signifiers are appropriated to create mash-ups in regards to my position as an Iranian-American viewing the Middle East from an outside lens. By focusing on media trends and the dissemination of societal occurrences through the news, I chose to source imagery from popular media, as well as social media leaks, and adapt them to exist within alternate scenarios. The usage of specific colours and political figures form a symbolic lexicon that runs throughout the series, while party supplies hint at the doctrines of ‘political parties’. I first sculpt and install tabletop tableaus, which are then photographed as a still life: the final photograph functions as reference to the history of propaganda posters, as well as Dada collage. Each of the photographs addresses a specific event and time in Middle Eastern history, while alluding to how both the East and West have responded to societal occurrences. Through incorporating multiple layers, the lexicon can be read and refashioned by the viewers’ ideologies, creating images that remain coeval, while acknowledging former origins.

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Rosalind E. Krauss and a reflection on the medium. The relationship between conceptual art and photography.

Text by Flavia Culcasi

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Victor Burgin in Thinking Photography, edited by Victor Burgin, MacMillan Press, 1982, p. 2

In 1968 artist Richard Serra made his piece titled Splashing by throwing molten lead in the corner where the floor meets the wall in the warehouse of the art dealer Leo Castelli. This work was part of the exhibition 9 at Castelli in 1968. In a later version, called Casting, Serra used a greater amount of lead - so the forms created by subsequent executions of this activity could be removed from the wall and placed in a row on the floor. Casting was exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art in the exhibition Anti-Illusion: Processes and Materials in 1969.

Among various issues concerning the field of photography, the expression “photographic theory” is still surrounded by many doubts, being far from restricting the issue to a set of technical factors, and at the same time unable to leave them aside. Between the curious, the amateurs and the professionals, theoretical reflections are often replaced by technical or aesthetic arguments, threatening to reduce the debate on photography only to its way of use, forgetting the meaning. Photography acquires theoretical value only when it is understood as “a practice of signification”, where “‘practice’ here is meant work on specific materials, within a specific social and historical context, and for specific purposes,” while “‘signification’ derivates from the repute of the primary feature of photography considered as an omnipresence in everyday social life, is its contribution to the production and dissemination of meaning”.1 The desire to establish a “photographic theory” underlies the purpose of making this young discipline a field of independent study, that shouldn’t overlap with neither history, nor with criticism, nor with technique, though is able to dialogue with them. Several attempts have been made by many authors where many aspects were explored, with the today’s result of having a very wide bibliography. The breadth of contributions has not solved the problem yet, and we still are not able to determine the boundaries of photography as a “practice of signification”. The problem in every theory is to be able to identify systematic regularities observable in its subject of investigation in order to advance and support general opinions about it. But the approaches of history and art critique that have dominated the analysis of photography have focused more on specific

The Relationship between conceptual art and photography

issues related to the medium and the history of techniques, while other disciplines have dealt with issues related to the genesis and to the use of the photographic image. Today, the theoretical object photography is divided between various approaches but no single definition, and has different meanings depending on the field of research (art, journalism, advertising), discipline (sociology, semiotics or historical-art studies) and the historical period (first or second half of the Twentieth century, until today). Here we present a contribution from a historic and critic of American art, that started in the Seventies a process of reinterpretation of photography with the aim of putting this discipline finally at the centre of a specific theoretical research, that can affect the whole art scene. Her long career has had to date a great influence both in America and Europe for the originality and strength of the content covered. We can define Rosalind Krauss’s approach a polyphonic one, born in the heart of art criticism but that is contaminated with many areas of knowledge such as sociology, semiotics, philosophy, literature, psychoanalysis and more. Formed in America in the Sixties, she began her career at the height of Modernism and with the influence that critic Clement Greenberg was having on this movement. He professed the myth of self-reference of beauty, of self-sufficiency as the only way to reach true art, bypassing the content to raise the form. Rosalind Krauss, along with her colleagues, takes a different position from the beginning, proving very critical of the modernist theoretical rigidity. This will be an extremely important underlying theme in all her work, which, starting from Greenberg’s line of thought, will follow contemporary art from the Sixties to the present day, tapping photography several times along the way. Modernism in art was based explicitly on the idea of autonomy and specificity of artistic means; these were to be used in their

–Richard Serra, Splashing, 1968 © Richard Serra –Richard Serra, Casting, 1969 © Richard –Serra and Whitney Museum of American Art

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absolute specificity to ensure the so-called self-referential art. This idea had had the effect of emptying the concept of aesthetic medium, identifying it only with its material support in relation to specific rules: a two-dimensional form for painting and a three-dimensional one for sculpture. To challenge this attitude, free the medium and its use, and thus part from Modernism, one has to enter, according to Krauss, the post-medial condition. Krauss and her colleagues work on the definition of theories that are able to “liberate” the art from the theoretical framework that had been set, and the word medium itself becomes a starting point to this anti-modernist movement. Rosalind Krauss, in particular, connects this word to a Stanley Cavell’s concept (Cavell was an American philosopher who was involved a lot with cinema), that used the term automatism “to attack the double problem of addressing film as a (relatively) new medium and of bringing into focus what seemed to him unexplained about modernist painting”. 2 To consider the notion of automatism (close to Surrealism’s “psychic automatism”) along with the word medium, allows you to see the linguistic substance of the artistic medium, used not just from its internal structure point of view, allegedly objective and related to its material characteristics, but rather the way they are used and the shape they are given, leaving room to the idea of improvisation. Medium and support shouldn’t be confused with one another, but rather when the medium is taken as support, it shows a generative power, going from object to subject and acquiring “specific” characteristics. In her book The Crisis of the Easel Picture (in response to the homonymous 1948 Greenberg’s text), Rosalind Krauss explains this shift from support to medium, bringing

as example the work by Richard Serra titled Casting. Heir to Jackson Pollock’s gestural painting, Serra began to use the matter as a witness of action, as the residue from an event. Taking advantage of the gravitational field, he throws molten lead into a room hitting the corner where the floor meets the wall. With this act, Serra refuses the option of the frame, ensuring that the work is exclusively dependent by the horizontality of its action and the traces of the element. Serra’s work, however, is not based on gesture, that alone would not be enough to make this form of expression a medium, but the reason of the event is based on the logic of the series. Repetition creates an internal structure, a formal syntax. The lack of frame opens up and creates a variation of possibilities. This example can be extended to the general practice of colour field painting or process art, cases where “the medium through which artists become aware of their work, become a phenomenological dimension, an axis in a field rather than the physical limit of the field itself ”. 3 Echoing the thoughts of Cavell, rules are essential to the definition of the medium, but in order to avoid the medium specificity as intended by Modernism, these rules should only be defined after the artist’s action, and therefore not be a limitation. Consequently, the artist will have to invent a medium, a language with a set of rules. Joseph Kosuth, particularly in his 1969 book Art After Philosophy, was among the first to advance the notion that an art, to regain value, has to be built as language, talk and proposition. If modernist artists’ work was to define the essence of art, Kosuth suggests to ignore special techniques like painting, sculpture and drawing and stick instead to the idea

2&5

Rosalind Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (Walter Neurath Memorial Lecture), Thames & Hudson, 2000

Rosalind Krauss, The Crisis of the Easel Picture, ed. Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel, Jackson Pollock, New Approaches, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1999, pp. 155-179. Translation from Italian by the author.

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of enlarged art or art in general, inheriting this line of thinking directly from his predecessor Marcel Duchamp, who had already seen, in the readymade strategy, the ability to overcome “the problem of the medium with the single bound that takes it directly into the central question of aesthetics, by bypassing the ‘trivial’ issue of specific artistic practice”.4 Kosuth reclaims the strategy of the readymade: one example is his most famous work One and three chairs (1965), which provides three different forms of chair, a real one, a slightly smaller photographic reproduction of the original and a photocopy magnification of the dictionary definition of the term chair. Kosuth’s thesis was that any work that the definition of art had produced could not take another form other than declaratory, and therefore “rarefy the physical object into the conceptual condition of language”. 5 Kosuth’s “self-reflective” art no longer investigates its specific nature (or rather its specific object) but rather its generality; yet Conceptual Art was unable to get out of the range of visual, and therefore has always remained in a specificity form. Photography, as Rosalind Krauss observes, was seen as the less specific means in the visual field and was often used by conceptual artists in an amateur way. From the Eighties, video and digital image will replace analogue photography as a mass social practice: “it has, then, suddenly become one of those industrial discards, a newly established curio, like the jukebox or the trolley car”.6 But it is from this point that Krauss’s critic moves to blow up the notion of aesthetic medium and carry photography into the post-medial condition. This vision comes directly from the interpretation that Benjamin gave in his

4 6–7–8

Rosalind Krauss, Specific objects in Res - Anthropology and Aesthetics, n. 46, autumn 2004, Polemical Objects, pp. 221-224 Rosalind Krauss, Reinventing the medium, in Critical Inquiry, vol. 25, n. 2, Angelus Novus: Perspectives on Walter Benjamin. Winter, 1999, The University of Chicago Press, pp. 289-305

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essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction in which the philosopher comes to a radically deconstructionist conclusion that “photography is not just claiming the specificity of its own (technologically inflected) medium but, in denying the values of the aesthetic itself, will cashier the very idea of the independent medium”.7 Benjamin’s legacy was picked up by Conceptual Art, which has had a very important role in giving centrality to photography, and making it an instrument of practice able to attack the idea of autonomy or specificity of Modernism. As Rosalind Krauss says, overcoming the specificity of the medium, photography is approaching the theoretical object, thus making irrelevant the distinction between art and photography. To seek another form of “medium specificity” – that no longer depends on the rules of the physical support, but on the rules the artist imposes from time to time in his/her work – becomes the goal to this theoretical object. Photography must become an instrument of re-invention of the medium, but reinvention does not involve restoring one of those support forms that the “age of mechanical reproduction” made no longer functional, “rather, it concerns the idea of a medium as such, a medium as a set of conventions derived from (but not identical with) the material conditions of a given technical support, conventions out of which to develop a form of expressiveness that can be both projective and mnemonic”.8 If, therefore, photography must have a role in this time of post-medial production, post-conceptual, it must start from the notion of a medium to reinvent a personal language capable of respecting the photographic specificity, but without being dependent. Rosalind Krauss and her reflection on the medium has given a great contribution to the theoretical field of photography and is today a priority area for the study and the theorisation of the photographique.

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The Random Series Photographs By Miguel Ángel Tornero Text by Carlos Fernández–Pello

XIII Editorial

Pages 220 — 235

www.miguelangeltornero.net www.therandomseries.tumblr.com

Miguel Ángel Tornero

The Random Series 220

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Miguel Ángel Tornero

A little, a rhythm, a fantasy world Text by Carlos Fernández–Pello

Text taken from the book “The Random Series –berliner trato, romananzo &madrileño trip–” (Editorial RM) Translated by Google Translate

Some artists try to capture the invisible traps; as a poet, it would not be a shortcut to reveal some of its secrets. They hope to leave a mark on her work, a flash, his silence. In my opinion it is no coincidence that these artists and poets, both as commonly called slide images. In the field of language and painting, only images – a complex manner to meet the intangible ambition - which is an expression of fiction and metaphor. This particular type of image is amazing, straddling called him on other occasions, as in the heart of the images and the endless images are disabled. The images are images that the refusal of meaning are incompatible by nature infinite. Images, however, some texts translated into symbols, term by term disables the corresponding dictionary can be rebuilt into an equivalent discourse; These images are so mysteriously closed by accident, or because they have forgotten their password, or because it has become indifferent.1

have preached 100 years - but only recently pushed recently by the crisis of democracy, Jell this conceptual precursor ends a step in the art of the sixties. I do not know, they are not works of art, can also be notable aesthetic productions, but the number of exceptions - is not the only one who appreciates – and introduces us to the heart of the site that have suffered as a system for five centuries: that art is exceptional and, by extension, something of inestimable value. As an artist it is hard to realize that we are a club, hyenas and fun lost growth retardation defend the privileged fed four cats; We know we have closed in fraud to family and friends for the defense is officially our new shopping experience. In this sense, it is not out of the MBA said its investment in the opposition or the experience was different. The perpetuation of the social stigma that is creating a prior knowledge of the person.2

Speaking of art, art, Hans Belting has recently stated that a step in the history of images began in the Renaissance, which are likely to end. I should add that the fall of the regime of Renaissance aesthetics also influenced the knowledge and most importantly, how their progress Performa called for transparency –. “Age of Discovery”, not in vain decline since in both cases, art or knowledge, there is no doubt that much of the value of aesthetic production moved to other places in time - some

These and other questions have had a pleasant conversation with Miguel Ángel Tornero on a terrace of Tirso de Molina. There seems to be a growing market for photo books created some hope for the photographer, which is not cheap - we know that something always full – but if a deal honesty amateur passion in the interest of fairness, if prices and buy ultrices eu ligula Lorem ipsum quam Eget just woke Arcu Fringilla intheger. Donec Fusce ipsum Curabitur facilisis Comfortable Massa feugiat felis

1 This clause only my translation of “fruitful ambiguity” is applied at the edge of surrealism. A Roger Caillois Reader (2003), pp.322-25, translated into English from the original “I fertilité de l’Ambigu” in aventureuses correlations: esthétique widespread; Au coeur du fantastique; the dissymétrie (1976 Paris, Gallimard) by Claudine Frank and Camille Naish.

2 The extract corresponds to a post on Facebook July 29, 2014 Aitor Lajarín wall during a lecture by Alain Badiou has. And improved and modified. 3 Mention the literal text of Roger Caillois on the edge of surrealism. A Roger Caillois Reader, pp.322-25. 221

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eros Cursus proinflammatory congue ID posuere Powerful Arcu conubia facilisis consequat inceptos bitur curandom Donec quam pulvinar turpis pregnant. Random Posts scelerisque euismod nisi enim cubilia Interdum, neque quis dolor sit amet aliquam congue Eget hate my iaculis Tortor tacit ac NISL, accumsan of conseriesctetur ID NIBH, listen series Quis Bibendum diameter diam. Often starting in this context, in an organized manner, to bring out detail and less arbitrary elements, otherwise, if some coherent, as if hiding. These scattered signals infinite images, remote displays a message put: these images have decided to call it analog or digital. This is because its value (if any), or at least its effectiveness lies in a network of games and exclusions of different correlation conditions between the height and the other, and that our kingdom allegory will replace the cold light of analytical knowledge.3

thing. But even then, he never stopped completely translate or apply consistently sure to have a couple of steps in the weeds, if such a statement is. And what better way to build the excitement our flexibility and responsiveness to meet our mind, when you pass a secret, which is prohibited. What can we expect from art, but this type of enrichment?5

I do not think the turner Miguel Angel4 emphasis on thinking about their images. That means she is content in an attempt to clear, and transparent to hide. But it is even less likely that he composed his sonnets photographed truly random, and tries to make sense of avoiding, to avert the evil that they understand they fall. For coverage of support for video, a private foundation for next year to make a documentary, the way of working is to produce – I myself have played a couple of days, with the function of “Panorama” salary Photoshop - and the way it feels, the algorithm is not able to run Adobe temptation, so he knows he can not avoid by force; feel the machine reads the number of bits and ghosting, to push the baby. I suspect that, in the case of Michael, what happened was not clear what he wanted to convey: that was used in an allegorical labyrinth, convincingly, that viewers see what readers want to know more, and I was in the left side of the consistency of the subway network of enigmatic images. It remains to be seen whether these random consistency trick seduces us really relevant to any-

4 This challenge has been taken from the original texts of the author included in his catalog of the random number. Treatment Berliner (2010) has published published by the residence at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin GmbH and him. 5 Again, just one point I Caillois truffles in this case the details and references to the work of Miguel Ángel Tornero. Changed the name of the poet Gerard de Nerval and small cracks begin to appear in relation to other unforeseen events. 222

You will be surprised if this rhetorical question with Caillois can expect a response. An analogy zero or infinity or even prevented. Team photo Turner has the photo has been submitted, or is not useful - no, as I said, a lot of images – or encrypt a message – in pictures – they are fiction. The secret is not in the subjects photographed, but as confusion leads to a logical connection. I’m not going to draw, such as a network diagram or a photo as Gurdjieff connection holes Daumal men; When a man with “Dungeons and Dragons” Parcheesi; Designer Netscape with the creator of “He-Man”; Max Ernst with the “Double Negative” by Michael Heizer. And I have no scandal; We cooked a visual mash whose flavor is consistent, stupid, annoying, but understandable. This is the secret. Play the instrument, as I have tried to gather a lot of cave paintings of gravity painted by Ernst: E ‘known that the performance of these landscapes decal,6 German, usually go in for the top of a variety of surplus medium and a pumice stone just wonderfully surreal grotesque jet. It is true that the Office of the Turner likes nothing serious rock: white spot on the details or do not insist, but is the car that you have chosen for him. So the comparison of the results of the two processes does not seem fair: Hear what the feeling of the team: Know the limits and boundaries related things: to know what it.7

6 The adhesive (French: stickers) is a painting technique that provides for the application of images, for example black gouache on paper, which is located above the other sheet, wherein a slight pressure is applied and then dried before starting. 7 Second paragraph of this unpublished text. You want the reader to know - if you have not guessed - similar to the photographic process random Tornero, this text consists of quotations from other works and authors you read the back, I was trufando personal thoughts and corrections, with many details and anecdotes that give texture complicated starting point. 8 In chaos theory, the butterfly effect in large differences cause the sensitive dependence on initial conditions, where a small change at one place in a nonlinear system can be in a later stage. The name coined by Edward Lorenz effect is derived from the theoretical example relating to the formation of a cyclone with beating wings of butterfly last week.

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Miguel Ángel Tornero

The Butterfly Effect by Edward N. Lorenz Frigyes Karinthy8 six degrees of separation, the idea that there may be unforeseen connections between all things in the cosmos is not new. It is not the subject of this book. Even reading the Greek symploké Gustavo good things9 fighting each other and intertwine only if they share some characteristics, which are part of the same category. Miguel Ángel Tornero argues that the meaning of things from a void, an abyss in the fall with language and image, and their common denominator is always the experience, save or distorts the bond issue. But it is also a pictorial device categories within categories of knowledge, paradoxically, plug it in, and show us the strange Breakout games apart. In this sense, the selected photos are arranged similarly confusing and distinguish different to compress and stretch a pictorial tradition that is not connected to the illusion of space, if you do not, because the words are too big. The parataxis is a figure of speech that promotes the coordinated use of short sentences; and a third title of an exhibition curated Miguel work in 2012 published a lifeguard is a contraction of the fleet in the immensity of the sea. Donut O skin hide behind some of the pages of this book.10

His are the Spanish translations of songs from all the legends of the “Dragon Ball”. Moreover, to make (in collaboration with Carmen Carreter in some cases), known or not, the band plays Castilian “Alfred J. Kwak” behind the adaptation of “Saint Seiya” he (played by Bernard Minet, sing the same French version) “Isidor”, “Dennis the Menace”, “Lucky Luke”, “small”, “snorkel”, “Dungeons and Dragons” (played by sweet and misattributed Parcheesi group) “Sherlock Holmes” (Ninja played) and “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles”, just to name a few.12 At the end of a chain of flowers can be used to decorate the Great Hall, a Masonic lodge for the anniversary. It is also the title of a book, impossible to find, it relates to all that the California Museum of Jurassic Technology, Culver City published documents. It can be an essential part of the memory of traditional Hawaiian or Polynesian. Or is the title of a song by The Cure. The magician and occultist Eliphas Levi winds axiom of the free will of man, says that an iron chain is less difficult to break than a chain of flowers.13–14

Another big unknown, but it has its mark on countless musical compositions, which allowed Amado Jaén.11 Besides being the bassist for Los Diablos also compose one of his biggest hits, “A ray of sunshine” Amado Jaén sang together, but everything has been adapted many tunes Castilian animated drawings.

9 symploké: interlacing of the things that a situation (temporary or permanent) to form a system, as a whole or more sets as tensions not only at the time of the connection (which is always a time of conflict) with each other, but the time separation or partial independence between concepts, ropes, etc. I symploké contained in [63]. The interpretation of certain texts of Plato (Sophist 251E-253E) as if it is a formulation of a universal principle symploké (oppose both the holistic monism - “everything is connected to everything” like the rest of pluralism - “nothing is linked, at least internally, with nothing “-) is what pushes us to consider Plato as the philosophical founder of critical method (in contrast to the method of holistic and pluralistic metaphysics of ” academic philosophy “). {1440-1441 TCC / TCC 559-573} [Updated May 2012] http://www.filosofia.org/filomat/df054.htm 10 I find it difficult to add more. With the exception of the last sentence of paragraph text belongs to the exhibition catalog Flores; abyss; parataxis; (2012) in Lit-house. I have only the artist exposure. 11 Miguel tells me that the text editor is Jaen and Amado and unconsciously.

Olivier Magny Locus Solus said each “machine” Roussel is an objective of the analysis are not overwhelming similarities: meticulous, these machines descriptions delirium automates complex, random, random, are usually caused by a demonstration of how they work together causes, an explanation of its origin, its park and several overtones that make the historical past or legendary, as layers. We have brought the promise of a fantasy world; full of strange creatures; the Dungeon Master; gave all his strength; Y ‘barbarian; He is the guardian; Acrobats, magicians; and the Lord; Dungeons & Dragons; an infernal world; Hidden in the shadows; the power of evil; (Bis).15 We also believe that it is obviously important as we approach eliminated. We hope that travelers amid a maze of conjecture prisoners were locked up in the heart of a troubled world.16 I mean, great. 12 Literal excerpt from “The creators of the songs from the cartoon series” in las.html http:// freak4tube.blogspot.com. es/2009/04/los-creator-ofthe-steps-of-tuning 13 Eliphas Levi, Transcendental Magic, Weiser Books, York Beach, Maine 2001 (pag.208) 14 Last paragraph of text curatorial Flores; abyss; parataxis; (2012) in the Lit House 15 Part Text Song introductory Dungeons and Dragons Series. 16 Paragraph one of Olivier de Magny Preface Locus Solus (1963), Raymond Roussel, Editions Rencontre, Lausanne. Far from Caillois in his “fertilité de l’Ambigu” mentioned (see footnote 1). My translation. 223

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Ein wenig, ein Rhythmus, ein Fantasy-Welt Text Carlos Fernández–Pello

Einige Künstler versuchen, die unsichtbaren Fallen einzufangen; als Dichter, wäre es nicht eine Abkürzung, um einige seiner Geheimnisse offenbaren. Sie hoffen, ein Zeichen auf ihre Arbeit, ein Blitz sein Schweigen zu verlassen. Meiner Meinung nach ist es kein Zufall, dass diese Künstler und Dichter, die beide als gemeinhin als Dia-Bilder. Im Bereich der Sprache und Malerei, nur die Bilder - die ein Ausdruck von Fiktion und Metapher ist - eine komplexe Art und Weise, den immateriellen Ehrgeiz zu erfüllen. Diese besondere Art von Bild ist erstaunlich, gebietsübergreifenden nannte ihn bei anderen Gelegenheiten, als im Herzen der Bilder und die endlosen Bilder sind deaktiviert. Die Bilder sind Bilder, die die Ablehnung der Bedeutung von Natur unendlich unvereinbar sind. Bilder jedoch einige Texte in Symbole übersetzt, gliedweise deaktiviert die entsprechende Wörterbuch kann in eine äquivalente Diskurs wieder aufgebaut werden; Diese Bilder sind so geheimnisvoll durch Unfall geschlossen, oder weil sie ihr Passwort vergessen haben, oder weil es gleichgültig geworden.1 Apropos Kunst, Kunst, Hans Belting hat vor kurzem erklärt, dass ein Schritt in der Geschichte der Bil-

1 Diese Klausel nur meine Übersetzung von „fruchtbaren Zweideutigkeit“ liegt am Rande des Surrealismus angewendet. Ein Roger Caillois Reader (2003), pp.322-25, ins Englische übersetzt von der ursprünglichen „Ich fertilité de l‘Ambigu“ in aventureuses Korrelationen: esthétique weit verbreitet; Au coeur du fantastique; die dissymétrie (1976 Paris, Gallimard) von Claudine Frank und Camille Naish. 224

der begann in der Renaissance, die wahrscheinlich am Ende sind. Ich sollte hinzufügen, dass der Sturz des Regimes von Renaissance Ästhetik das Wissen und vor allem, wie ihre Fortschritte Performa forderte Transparenz beeinflusst auch -. „Age of Discovery“, nicht umsonst Rückgang da in beiden Fällen, Kunst oder Wissen, gibt es keinen Zweifel daran, dass viel von dem Wert der ästhetischen Produktion bewegt, um an anderen Orten in der Zeit - einige haben 100 Jahre gepredigt - aber erst vor kurzem vor kurzem von der Krise der Demokratie geschoben, Jell Diese konzeptionelle Vorläufer endet einen Schritt in die Kunst der sechziger Jahre. Ich weiß es nicht, sie sind nicht Kunstwerke, können auch bemerkenswerte ästhetische Produktionen sein, aber die Zahl der Ausnahmen - ist nicht der einzige, der zu schätzen weiß - und führt uns in das Herz der Website, die als System für fünf Jahrhunderte gelitten haben: dass die Kunst ist außergewöhnlich und durch die Erweiterung, etwas von unschätzbarem Wert. Als Künstler ist es schwer zu erkennen, dass wir sind ein Verein, Hyänen und Spaß verloren Wachstumsverzögerung verteidigen die Privilegierten gefüttert vier Katzen; Wir wissen, wir haben in Betrug, Familie und Freunde für die Verteidigung geschlossen ist offiziell unser neues Einkaufserlebnis. In diesem Sinne ist es nicht aus

2 Der Extrakt entspricht einem Beitrag auf Facebook 29. Juli 2014 Aitor Lajarín Wand während einem Vortrag von Alain Badiou hat. Und verbessert und modifiziert

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Miguel Ángel Tornero

der MBA, sagte der Investition in die Opposition oder die Erfahrung war anders. Die Beibehaltung des sozialen Stigmas, dass die Schaffung eines vorherige Kenntnis der Person.2 Diese und andere Fragen haben ein angenehmes Gespräch mit Miguel Ángel Tornero auf einer Terrasse von Tirso de Molina hatte. Es scheint ein wachsender Markt für Foto-Bücher erstellt etwas Hoffnung für den Fotografen, das ist nicht billig sein - wir wissen, dass etwas immer voll - aber wenn ein Geschäft Ehrlichkeit Amateur Leidenschaft im Interesse der Fairness, wenn die Preise und kaufen ultrices eu ligula Lorem ipsum quam Eget gerade aufgewacht Arcu Fringilla intheger. Donec Fusce ipsum Curabitur facilisis Komfortable Massa feugiat felis Eros Cursus proinflammatorischen congue ID posuere Leistungsstarke Arcu conubia facilisis consequat inceptos bitur curandom Donec quam pulvinar schwanger turpis. Random Posts scelerisque euismod nisi enim cubilia Interdum, neque quis dolor sit amet aliquam congue Eget hasse meine iaculis tortor stillschweigende ac Nisl, accumsan von conseriesctetur ID NIBH, hören Serie Quis Bibendum Durchmesser diam..

Zur Deckung der Unterstützung für Video, eine private Stiftung für das nächste Jahr einen Dokumentarfilm zu machen, ist die Arbeitsweise zu produzieren – ich selbst habe ein paar Tage gespielt, mit der Funktion des „Panorama“ Gehalt Photoshop - und die Art, wie es sich anfühlt, ist der Algorithmus nicht in der Lage, Adobe Versuchung führen, so dass er weiß, er kann nicht durch Gewalt zu vermeiden; fühlen die Maschine liest die Anzahl der Bits und Geisterbilder, um das Baby zu schieben. Ich vermute, dass im Fall von Michael, was passiert ist, war nicht klar, was er vermitteln wollte: Das war in einer allegorischen Labyrinth verwendet wird, überzeugend, dass die Zuschauer sehen, was die Leser wollen mehr wissen, und ich wurde in das linken Seite der Konsistenz des UBahn-Netz der rätselhafte Bilder. Es bleibt abzuwarten, ob diese Zufalls Konsistenz Trick verführt uns wirklich relevant zu nichts. Aber selbst dann, hat er nie aufgehört komplett übersetzen oder gelten durchweg sicher, dass Sie ein paar Schritte in das Unkraut zu haben, wenn eine solche Erklärung. Und welchen besseren Weg, um die Aufregung zu bauen unsere Flexibilität und Reaktionsfähigkeit, unseren Geist zu erfüllen, wenn du ein Geheimnis, die verboten ist vorbei. Was können wir von der Kunst erwarten, aber diese Art der Bereicherung?5

Oft beginnen in diesem Zusammenhang, in einer organisierten Art und Weise, um aus sonst bringen Detail und weniger beliebige Elemente, wenn einige zusammenhängende, als ob Versteck. Diese gestreuten Signale unendliche Bilder, Fern eine Meldung gebracht: Diese Bilder haben beschlossen, nennen es analog oder digital. Das ist, weil sein Wert (falls vorhanden), oder zumindest seine Wirksamkeit liegt in einem Netz von Spielen und Ausschlüsse von verschiedenen Bedingungen Korrelation zwischen der Höhe und der andere, und dass unser Königreich Allegorie das kalte Licht der analytischen Wissen ersetzen. 3 Ich habe nicht die Turner Miguel Angel4 Schwerpunkt auf Gedanken über ihre Bilder zu denken. Das bedeutet, dass sie Inhalte in einem Versuch, zu löschen und transparent zu verstecken ist. Aber es ist noch weniger wahrscheinlich, dass er komponierte seine Sonette wirklich zufällig fotografiert und versucht Sinne der Vermeidung zu machen, um das Böse, das sie verstehen, sie fallen zu verhindern.

3 Erwähnen die wörtliche Text von Roger Caillois am Rande des Surrealismus. Ein Roger Caillois Reader, pp.322-25.

Sie werden überrascht sein, wenn diese rhetorische Frage mit Caillois können eine Antwort erwarten. Eine Analogie Null oder unendlich oder sogar verhindert werden. Mannschaftsfoto Turner hat das Foto vorgelegt worden ist, oder nicht sinnvoll ist - nein, wie gesagt, eine Menge von Bildern - oder Verschlüsseln einer Nachricht - in Bildern - sie Fiktion sind. Das Geheimnis ist nicht in den Fächern fotografiert, sondern als Verwirrung führt zu einer

4 Diese Herausforderung wurde von den ursprünglichen Texte des Autors in seinem Katalog der Zufallszahl enthalten übernommen. Behandlung Berliner (2010) wurde von der Residenz im Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin GmbH und ihn veröffentlicht. 5 Wieder nur ein Punkt, den ich Caillois Trüffel in diesem Fall die Details und Hinweise auf die Arbeit von Miguel Ángel Tornero. Änderte den Namen des Dichters Gerard de Nerval und kleine Risse beginnen, in Bezug auf andere unvorhergesehene Ereignisse auftreten. 6 Der Klebstoff (Französisch: Aufkleber) ist ein Gemälde Technik, die für die Anwendung der Bilder bietet, zum Beispiel Schwarz Gouache auf Papier, das über dem anderen Blatt befindet, wobei ein leichter Druck ausgeübt wird, und dann getrocknet vor dem Start. 225

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logischen Verbindung. Ich werde nicht zu zeichnen, wie beispielsweise ein Netzwerkdiagramm oder ein Foto als Gurdjieff Anschlussbohrungen Daumal Männer; Wenn ein Mann mit „Dungeons and Dragons“ Mensch ärgere Dich nicht; Designer Netscape mit dem Schöpfer von „He-Man“; Max Ernst mit dem „Double Negative“ von Michael Heizer. Und ich habe keine Skandal; Wir kochten eine visuelle Maische, deren Geschmack ist konsistent, dumm, ärgerlich, aber verständlich. Das ist das Geheimnis. Spielen Sie das Instrument, als ich versucht habe, eine Menge von Höhlenmalereien der Schwerkraft von Ernst gemalt sammeln: E „bekannt, dass die Leistung dieser Landschaften Abziehbild6, Deutsch, gehen in der Regel in der Anfang einer Vielzahl von Überschuss Medium und ein Bimsstein nur wunderbar surreale groteske Strahl. Es ist wahr, dass das Amt des Turner mag nichts Ernstes Rock: weißer Fleck auf die Details oder bestehen nicht darauf, sondern ist das Auto, das Sie für ihn gewählt haben. Also der Vergleich der Ergebnisse der beiden Verfahren scheint nicht fair: Hören Sie, was das Gefühl der Mannschaft: Kennen Sie die Grenzen und Grenzen bezogene Dinge: zu wissen, was es.7

Der Schmetterlingseffekt von Edward N. Lorenz Frigyes Karinthy 8 sechs Grade der Trennung, die Idee, dass es möglicherweise unvorhersehbare Verbindungen zwischen allen Dingen im Kosmos sein, ist nicht neu. Es ist nicht das Thema dieses Buches. Auch das Lesen der griechischen symploké 9 Gustavo guten Dinge gegeneinander kämpfen und verflechten sich nur, wenn sie einige Eigenschaften, die Teil der gleichen Kategorie sind zu teilen. Miguel Ángel Tornero argumentiert, dass die Bedeutung der Dinge aus dem Nichts, ist ein Abgrund im Herbst mit Sprache und Bild, und ihre gemeinsame Nenner immer die Erfahrung, speichern oder die Anleihe verzerrt. Aber es ist auch eine bildhafte Gerätekategorien innerhalb der Kategorien von Wissen, paradoxerweise, einstecken, und zeigen uns die seltsame Breakout-Spiele auseinander. In diesem Sinne werden die ausgewählten Bilder angeordnet sind, ähnlich verwirrend und unterscheiden verschiedene zu komprimieren und zu dehnen eine Bildtradition, die nicht der Illusion von Raum verbunden ist, wenn Sie nicht zu tun, denn die Worte sind zu groß. Die Parataxe ist eine Redensart, die den koordinierten Einsatz von kurzen Sätzen fördert; und eine dritte Titel einer Ausstellung, kuratiert Miguel arbeiten im Jahr 2012 veröffentlicht ein Rettungsschwimmer ist eine Kontraktion der Flotte in der Unendlichkeit des Meeres. Donut O Haut verstecken sich hinter einigen der Seiten dieses Buches.10

7 Zweiten Absatz dieses unveröffentlichten Text. Sie wollen, dass die Leser wissen - wenn Sie nicht schon erraten haben - ähnlich wie bei der fotografischen Prozess Zufalls Tornero, dieser Text besteht aus Zitaten aus anderen Werken und Autoren lesen Sie die zurück, ich war trufando persönlichen Gedanken und Korrekturen, mit vielen Details und Anekdoten, die Textur komplizierte Ausgangspunkt zu geben. 8 In der Chaostheorie, der Schmetterlingseffekt in großen Abweichungen führen die empfindliche Abhängigkeit von den Anfangsbedingungen, bei denen eine kleine Änderung an einer Stelle in einem nichtlinearen System kann in einem späteren Stadium zu sein. Der Name von Edward Lorenz Effekt geprägt ist von der theoretischen Beispiel im Zusammenhang mit der Bildung eines Zyklons mit Flügelschlag des Schmetterlings in der vergangenen Woche ab. 9 symploké: Verflechten der Dinge, dass eine Situation (temporär oder permanent), ein System zu bilden, als Ganzes oder mehr Sätze als Spannungen nicht nur zum Zeitpunkt der Verbindung miteinander (die Zeit der Konflikt immer), aber die zeitliche Trennung oder teilweise Unabhängigkeit zwischen Konzepten, Seile usw. Ich symploké in [63] enthalten. Die Interpretation bestimmter Texte von Platon (Sophist 251E-253E), als ob es sich um eine Formulierung einer universellen Prinzip symploké (wider sowohl den ganzheitlichen Monismus - „Alles ist mit allem verbunden“ - wie der Rest des Pluralismus „nichts verknüpft ist, zumindest intern, mit nichts „-) ist, was treibt uns an Plato als Begründer der philosophischen kritische Methode (im Gegensatz zu der Methode der ganzheitlichen und pluralistischen Metaphysik betrachten“ akademische Philosophie „). {1440-1441 TCC / TCC 559-573} [Stand Mai 2012] http://www.filosofia.org/filomat/df054.htm 226

Eine weitere große Unbekannte, aber es hat seine Spuren auf unzähligen musikalischen Kompositionen, die Amado Jaén11 erlaubt. Abgesehen davon, dass der Bassist Los Diablos auch komponieren einen seiner größten Hits, „Ein Sonnenstrahl“ Amado Jaén sang zusammen, aber alles wurde angepasst, viele Melodien kastilischen animierte Zeichnungen. Sein sind die spanischen Übersetzungen von Songs aus allen Legenden der „Dragon Ball“. Darüber hinaus, um (in Zusammenarbeit mit Carmen Carreter in einigen Fällen) zu machen, bekannt ist oder nicht, spielt die Band Kastilisch „Alfred J. Kwak“ hinter

10 Ich finde es schwierig, weitere hinzuzufügen. Mit Ausnahme des letzten Satzes von Absatz Text gehört zum Ausstellungskatalog Flores; Abgrund; Parataxe; (2012) in Lit-Haus. Ich habe nur die Künstler Exposition. 11 M iguel sagt mir, dass der Text-Editor ist Jaen und Amado und unbewusst.

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Miguel Ángel Tornero

der Adaption von „Saint Seiya“ er (von Bernard Minet gespielt, singen die gleichen Französisch) „Isidor“, „Dennis the Menace“, „Lucky Luke“, „klein“, „Schnorchel“ „Dungeons and Dragons“ (von sü. gespielt und misattributed Parcheesi Gruppe) „Sherlock Holmes“ (Ninja gespielt) und „Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles“, um nur einige zu nennen.12 Am Ende einer Kette von Blumen können verwendet werden, um die Große Halle, eine Freimaurerloge zum Jubiläum zu dekorieren. Es ist auch der Titel eines Buches, unmöglich zu finden, es bezieht sich auf alles, was der California Museum of Jurassic Technology veröffentlichten Dokumente Culver City. Es kann ein wesentlicher Teil des Speichers der traditionelle hawaiianische oder polynesische sein. Oder ist der Titel eines Songs von The Cure. Der Magier und Okkultisten Eliphas Levi windet Axiom der freie Wille des Menschen, sagt, dass eine Eisenkette ist weniger schwierig zu brechen als eine Kette von Blumen.13–14 Olivier Magny Locus Solus wobei jeder „Maschine“ Roussel ist ein Ziel der Analyse sind nicht überw. ltigend Ähnlichkeiten: akribisch, automatisiert diese Maschinen Beschreibungen Delirium komplexer, zufällig, zufällig, sind in der Regel durch eine Demonstration, wie sie zusammenarbeiten verursacht verursacht, eine Erklärung seiner Herkunft, seinem Park und mehreren Obertönen, die die historische Vergangenheit oder legendäre machen, als Schichten. Wir haben das Versprechen einer Fantasy-Welt gebracht; voll von seltsamen Kreaturen; der KerkerMeister; gab seine ganze Kraft; Y ‚Barbaren; Er ist der Hüter; Akrobaten, Zauberer; und der Herr; Dungeons & Dragons; ein höllischer Welt; Versteckt in den Schatten; die Macht des Bösen; (Bis).15 Wir glauben auch, dass es natürlich wichtig, wie wir beseitigt zu nähern. Wir hoffen, dass Reisende inmitten eines Labyrinths von Vermutungen Gefangenen wurden in das Herz einer unruhigen Welt gesperrt.16 Ich meine, groß.

12 Wörtlichen Auszug aus „Die Schöpfer der Lieder aus der Cartoon-Serie“ in las.html http:// freak4tube.blogspot.com.es/2009/04/los-creator-ofthe-Schritte-of-Tuning 13 Eliphas Levi, Transzendentale Magie, Weiser Bücher, York Beach, USA 2001 (pag.208) 14 Letzten Absatz des Textes kuratorische Flores; Abgrund; Parataxe; (2012) in der Lit Haus 15 Text Die Song-Einführungs Dungeons and Dragons-Serie

16 Absatz eine von Olivier de Magny Vorwort Locus Solus (1963), Raymond Roussel, Editions Rencontre, Lausanne. Weit von Caillois in seinem „fertilité de l‘Ambigu“ erwähnt (siehe Fußnote 1). Meine Übersetzung. 227

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A conversation with Joan Fontcuberta about Mould

(Photo) Writing Degree Zero

#2 â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Curated by Joan Fontcuberta

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â&#x20AC;&#x153;photosaursâ&#x20AC;?

alchemy and disobedience 238

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A conversation with Joan Fontcuberta about Mould

A conversation with Joan Fontcuberta about Mould.

www.mouldpress.org

Text by Luisa Grigoletto

The phrase “print is dead” has taken on a near axiomatic truth. But a recent boom in independent publishing puts that assertion to the test. Within the photography world alone, new publications seem to appear with evermore frequency. One such example is Mould, a hybrid book-magazine that defies traditional editorial boundaries. Each semi-annual issue is assigned to an international guest editor, given carte blanche to select and develop a concept through a sequence of photographic projects and writings. That honour for the second volume has gone to Spanish photographer Joan Fontcuberta, who uses the opportunity to concentrate on photography’s “degree zero”, i.e. its most fundamental parts. Despite racing between photography conferences in Canada and Italy, Fontcuberta was kind enough to have a chat with YET Magazine.

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What were the criteria that formed your selection? I realized that one answer to post-photography consists of withdrawing and reflecting on the origins and essence of the medium. Many artists, faced with uncertainty, take refuge in what seems most elemental and genuine. It is curious that this happens now, and that it’s happening with such intensity. When you raise the notion of a “degree zero” or “ground zero”, this can be applied to various perspectives. My proposal has favoured the materiality of the image, as if trying to answer the questions: “What are photographs made of?” and “ What would be its minimum components?” The truth is that it’s not clear to me how useful these questions are, but I’m curious.

J.F.

Mould has a hybrid and very flexible nature: did you approach it as a magazine or as a photobook? J.F.

Definitely as a book. But as a speculative book, which chronicles the present, and which does not intend to provide dogmas but spark reflections starting from provisional truths. In respect to photography, how do you think of your role as guest editor, compared to that of photographer, professor or curator? Do you perceive them as part of the same system?

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J.F.

We’re witnessing a phenomenon of hybridization or permeability between these roles in the art scene: artists, critics, conservators, curators, collectors, commissioners, professors, promoters, etc. Although we prioritize some aspects, today we tend to do a bit of everything in a one-man-band mode. In my case, this diversification is not recent, but dates back to the attempt of filling in the gaps in cultural facilities during late Francoism. Currently, there are two kinds of photography: one is decorative, and one makes you think. I have nothing against decorative photography, but I know little about it and do not consider myself competent to talk about it. I’m more interested in thought-provoking photography, and in this area, the roles of artist, curator or editor tend to materialize in the same task: making decisions and choices. The text that you wrote as an introduction to the issue states that “The history of thought is also the history of images. That is why philosophers deal with the urging need to decode what an image is.[...] However, [...] it’s up to artists to tell us what they consist of.” In your opinion, what does a photographic image consist of? Like in one of Ugo Mulas’ Verifications (The Enlargement, The Sky for Nini), your work Blow Up Blow Up seems to focus on the material aspects to expose the limits of repre-

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sentation and photography’s readability. In Mould we analyse one form of photography’s materiality. It’s one possible path. But generally, photography belongs to those concepts of which we can say: I know what it is if you don’t ask me, but if you ask me, I don’t know it anymore. That is, many particulars and shades emerge, so that photography’s protein nature becomes impossible to include in one single definition. So, we need to act by approximation and focal points. Photography is many things at once. Above all, I am interested in what we can consider the “room” of photography, that is the place where it lives: it can live in a family album, in the pages of a newspaper, in file cabinets, on a billboard, on the walls of a museum, in a book or on the screen of a smartphone, among many other sites. Each of those contexts enables a distinct nature of photography, in the extent that it applies to specific functions. Aesthetics is the shape that the “room” takes, a set of qualities that has a support, intended as a container. This form enables the function of the image, and it allows for the content to take a “body”. Aesthetics is subjected to the concept, it becomes the strategy that allows one to convey the concept. Therefore, in this sense, it seems to me contingent and accidental because it depends on how we manage the images.

tational) and the technical mode of production. So, are camera-less photograms, abstract accidents of light, monochromatic surfaces, etc. where you believe photography’s real nature resides?

J.F.

Many of the projects you selected present us with experimentations that challenge iconicity (the represen-

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To answer this, we first need to agree on what we mean by photography. Years ago, in an essay entitled “Crisis of history”, I argued that photography’s identity crisis derived from the crisis of those historiographical models that had been used to narrate its evolution. The different ways of explaining the past demand that we critically examine information, and this presumes the existence of criteria for a “mise-en-histoire” that establishes canons. In analysing the history of photography, one notices that the bargain of what’s left is realism: the iconic literalness. Photography was born as a technology at the service of truth or, as I like to say, as an orthopaedic support of an empirical visuality. That’s why, I repeat, the realistic model was privileged, but that does not mean that other models are not possible. Photography’s potential is tremendously rich and in fact from here it also allows us to pursue anti-realistic models, such as abstraction or the surreal. J.F.

In the 1990s the advent of digital technology was seen as a revolution. It even led some people to passionately defend the supremacy of one technology over the other: analogue vs. digital. What’s your stance?

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A conversation with Joan Fontcuberta about Mould

J.F.

You can set the following analogy: analog is like horseback riding; digital is like using a car. I love horsemanship, but if I have to commute or take a trip, sure I’ll drive a car. Horseback riding, therefore, does not disappear, but we relegate it to the realm of sports and the pleasure of the equestrian activity itself, the stalls, experiencing nature, etc. The same happens in photography. There will always be photographers who are reluctant to give up the photochemical systems, because they guarantee a determined “mystique” in the processes they use. They are the “photosaurs”, and they have every right to survive in their reserves.

stages, or if you deliberately contaminate the baths, or if they act only on some areas of the emulsion and for very limited periods...These experiments reveal photography’s chemical unconscious and assume the freedom of disobedience, which is the rejection of rules.

While some people are not interested in how a piece is made, some believe it to be fundamental to understanding its message. I find Chemigrams, the work by Pierre Cordier and Gundi Falk, particularly intriguing, for its combination of photography and painting. Could you tell us a bit more about it?

Internet, social networks, mobile telephony, etc. have radically transformed photography. I have experienced this process with fascination, for its potential. But I’ve also been evaluating it critically. As with any change in life, I recognize there are losses and gains. We move towards a more democratic paradigm. It is certain that photography has become secular and social, but at the cost of giving up some of its founding values like truth, durability or memory. Another example, in another order of things: in digital photography, chance is reduced under the weight of calculation and rationality. The accident, which meant so much for the Surrealists, is now entering its decline.

It’s pure alchemy! It’s a joke. Pierre has been disrupting the orthodoxy of the photochemical process for many years, to obtain unexpected results. Basically, the chemical reactions he provokes are a consequence of his altering established routines. For example, think of what can happen if, in the darkroom, as you’re developing a print, you invert the developing and fixing J.F.

All of these projects exist as real, physical and tangible objects. However, many people experience them only virtually, on-line. The Internet has changed the way we perceive and consume photographs. Is that a good or bad thing? J.F.

Many in the photography world are concerned about the future of photography magazines. However, many

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A conversation with Joan Fontcuberta about Mould

new, experimental projects, like Mould, keep popping up. What are your thought on this?

with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.”

Nicholas Negroponte, the director of MIT’s MediaLab and promoter of Wired magazine said that the days of print publications are numbered. But he said it in a book made of paper! Obviously print publishing will decline, but I do not think that the printed image will disappear. For instance, today we are witnessing a very interesting phenomenon, which is the effervescence of photobooks, I.e. books designed as a work of art, and therefore holding a talent that balances object value and content value. Each time, the photobook is getting closer to an artist book. In regards to the future of the publishing industry and the specialized cultural press, the problem is more complex because it involves matters of market and profitability. But I am convinced that a quality product which is capable of taking risks, will always come out ahead. And I think Mould is proving it.

And lastly, in your opinion, what makes a good picture and what makes a bad picture? And what’s your favourite bad picture?

J.F.

We can’t establish a quality scale with categories as simple as “good” or “bad” photos. There are no good or bad pictures, there are good or bad uses of the photos. The quality does not depend on independent values of the image itself but on how its formal characteristics adapt to certain uses. The same image can be inappropriate in a context, whereas in another it can greatly help provoke a reflection or shake the spirit of the observer. For these reasons I cannot have a favourite bad photo because there are no bad photos. J.F.

What is the role of photography nowadays? Let’s say that on a philosophical level, photography is a tool to negotiate our model of reality. In practice, the photograph serves those who have “something interesting to say”. And in that sense the photographer must have accumulated life experiences and have learned to translate them into her/ his work. Just remember Ansel Adam’s view: “You don’t make a photograph just J.F.

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Allison Rossiterm, From the series: Fours. Dupont Defend- er Varigam, expired December 1954, processed 2015, (#3), (quadriptych), 61 x 50,8 cm each element, unique silver gelatin prints.

Nino Migliori, Pirogramma, 1948

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COMMITTED TO PHOTOGRAPHY

ROMA, IT

1 1

www.ars-imago.com

ZUG, CH

2 2

www.ars-imago.ch

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Art Photography as well will no longer draw much of its strength and context from a perception that it is inherently a comment on visible, verifiable realities, but will come more easily to be seen, like painting, as synthetic, the outcome of an act from the artistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s imagination.

From In Our Own Image, Fred Ritchin, Aperture 2010 twentieth-anniversary edition 247

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Issue 08

YET magazine is a triannual photography publication which showcases editorials and photographic series from artists worldwide. Our aim is to feature several different styles of photography, without any restriction in genre, medium, or theme. We showcase both emerging and well-known international photographers – our work is basically characterized by the quality of the submitted project, from its concept to the shoot, up to the final editing. Since it has been produced and managed by people operating in the photographic sector, YET wants to show “the image” from other perspectives, starting from the photography itself. The whole working process in YET magazine is based on the firm conviction that a photographer’s work must be shown as it is: for this reason, all the photographic projects are published without any graphic or text insertions, not cut down and free from any form of further editing. Each selection is curated in collaboration with the guest artist. Along with the photographic series, we also publish reviews, in-depth articles and interviews with the key players of the sector, with the aim of giving an updated look on the international contemporary photographic field.

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ISSN: 2296–407X

ISSUE 08