Jo Higgins

July 5, 2010

Review

REVIEW: EXPOSED: Voyeurism, Surveillance & the Camera, Tate Modern, London

Jo Higgins

July 5, 2010

Review

28 May – 3 October 2010.

Philip Lorca diCorcia, Head series, 2002. — Philip Lorca diCorcia, *Head* series, 2002.

Let’s get something clear. EXPOSED is not an easy exhibition. Challenging, confronting, at times horrifically violent and voyeuristic, at others compelling and strangely beautiful. It is all these things. It messes with your head, your sense of propriety and your definitions, however tenuous, of what makes one photo art and another just perverse. Both visually and intellectually, this makes for a compelling, if occasionally uncomfortable, encounter.

There is a certain timeliness to this exhibition and its study of voyeurism, surveillance and the camera. We’re in an age unlike any before where technology rules the day – and wiretaps, live streaming, camera phones and paparazzi chases are the resigned norm. Examining photography as an invasive act immediately confronts the complacency with which we accept these invasions, encourage them even in our curiosity, and though it falters in parts and overwhelms in others (this is a huge exhibition), EXPOSED successfully addresses a number of the social, cultural and psychologically motivating factors behind these kinds of images – why we take them and why we look at them. Critical to this engagement is the wall text at the beginning, which states that most of the hundreds of photographs on display were taken without the subject’s knowledge. It is a distinctly creepy start.

Lee Friedlander, New York City, 1966. — Lee Friedlander, *New York City,* 1966.

Philip-Lorcia diCorcia’s Head series perhaps best embodies this conundrum. Visually they are not terribly shocking or even necessarily interesting. Theatrical lighting catches the head of someone in a crowd and the effect is of a staged encounter. In fact, these people, denominated variously as Head #23 or Head #4, were photographed without their knowledge by a series of hidden cameras, the flash triggering as they walked by. Famously, one of diCorcia’s unwitting targets tried to take legal action against him but the landmark ruling defended the artist and his right to self-expression over any right the subject might have over their own image. It is difficult to know which is worse – to be censored or to be spied upon.

DiCorcia’s contemporary street photography is contextualised by a wide range of historical precedents with work by Walker Evans, Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander also on show. Friendlander’s New York City, 1966 in particular illustrates the hunt and shoot mentality of the street photographer, the photograph capturing a menacing shadow imprinted on the back of an unaware woman as she walks down the street.

RIchard Avedon, Andy Warhol, 1969. — RIchard Avedon, *Andy Warhol,* 1969.

The leap from documentary or street photography to paparazzi’s chasing celebrities is not a huge one but thankfully the exhibition does not dwell much beyond Alison Jackson’s parodic pap shots of celebrity lookalikes. Princess Diana, perhaps the most famous victim of the long lens is accorded only a glass case with newspaper clippings trumpeting blame for her death at the hands of the paparazzi. Nick Ut’s photograph of Paris Hilton being returned to Prison in 2007 is neatly contextualised by Giuseppe Primoli’s equally tasteless photograph of Impressionist painter Edgar Degas exiting a pissoir in Paris in the early 1880s.

The ugliness of this celebrity fascination is deftly illustrated by Richard Avedon’s famous photograph of Andy Warhol, or rather, of Warhol’s horrific scars – the result of his near fatal shooting at the hands of Valerie Solanas in 1968. Framing the image in such a way, not capturing the pop artist’s face with his iconic shock of hair and glasses, but photographing him simply with his jumper pulled high has a number of effects. It humanises the very unreal ‘character’ of Warhol, it focuses the attention on the violence inflicted on him and intellectually, as a shooting of a shooting, it crystallises this idea of photography as a form of violation.

From here, the material in EXPOSED only gets darker as rooms dedicated to voyeurism and desire and witnessing violence complicate the viewing experience. The tenuousness of looking at these images under the guise of ‘art’ becomes slippery, particularly in the face of Susan Meiselas’s photographs of 1970s strippers and of Nicaraguan victims of genocide. Koshei Yoshiyuki’s 1979 series of nocturnal voyeurs preying on young couples in Japanese parks at night are particularly confronting. And not in a ‘goodness this is interesting’ sort of way. This idea of looking – and of discerning the voyeur from the witness remains far from resolved and our moral qualifications of historical import (think Abraham Zapruder’s film of JFK’s assassination, now oddly held in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) versus pop cultural curiosity is complicated by the realisation that the Pulitzer Prize-winning image of the young Vietnamese girl burned by napalm in 1972 was taken by the same Nick Ut who photographed Paris Hilton 35 years later.

Nick Ut’s photograph of Paris Hilton being taken to prison, 2007.

With the exception of Sophie Calle’s fabulously creepy 1981 work The Hotel, where the artist worked as a chamber maid in Venice and systematically documented the comings, goings and belongings of the hotel guests, the exhibition falters towards the end, as the focus turns specifically to ideas of surveillance. Perhaps it is simply that after 13 rooms and hundreds of works focus is difficult to maintain, or perhaps it is that after 13 rooms of confronting, voyeuristic images, these large scale works – aerial images of person-less landscapes and buildings et al – feel alternatively dry or oblique. It is an unfortunate end to what is otherwise an overwhelmingly strong exhibition and having thus been implicated, under the guise of art, in a mass act of complicit voyeurism, the lasting sense of EXPOSED is that as individuals and members of our contemporary image-saturated society, we have a responsibility to look critically, ethically and sensitively – and perhaps also to learn when to look away.

REVIEW: Sean Scully New Work, Timothy Taylor Gallery, London

Jo Higgins

June 21, 2010

Review

28 May – 3 July 2010

There’s an enormous sense of integrity to Sean’s Scully’s work. Certainly his unwavering, at times unfashionable, commitment to abstraction, particularly in the face of the ‘shock and awe’ styles of contemporary art we have become accustomed to contributes to this sense but there is also a visual integrity – in his palette and his painterly application – and the resulting encounter is overwhelmingly contemplative, beautiful and satisfying. Which is no small feat for a series of canvases ostensibly covered in large rectangles of colour.

There are only thirteen works on display in this exhibition of new work at Timothy Taylor Gallery but such is their scale, and their depth, that the experience is far from short-changing. The works are mostly new additions to Scully’s Wall of Light series and the earthy, luminous colours that were inspired by the artist’s visit to Mexico in the early 1980s are infused with a warm sense of energy that makes standing in front of them a meditative experience. The beauty of Scully’s technique – applying paint, scraping it back, re-applying it and layering in different colours means that these blocks of colour are never exactly executed and their gestural, unpolished edges allow subtle peeks of colour to seep through – a navy is offset by a blush pink, a grey blue reveals a sunflower yellow. The aesthetic effect is of a visual depth and complexity within the work but beyond that, there is also the suggestion of a conscientious artistic practice.

Scully’s work resonates with a subtle but gently invigorating energy that stems in large part from a scrutiny of the canvas. There is both effort and restraint in Scully’s work – a methodology of application and image construction that is evident in the gestural brushstrokes and yet, despite this very human presence on the canvas, there is also a spiritual, emotional quality akin to the best of Mark Rothko’s own canvases of rectangular colour blocks, where the paintings seems to breathe and perhaps threaten to evanesce. Scully’s works feel more grounded than Rothko’s in this sense, defined by its textural quality and scale, but that spiritual sense of encounter is very much alive here. In fact, viewing Scully’s work might best be understood as a sort of religious experience – not in the sense of great revelation or a chorus of hallelujah – rather, in that sense of dedication, passion and faith, and an understanding of religion as a search for beauty and grace. It is surprisingly affective and the large airy space of Timothy Taylor Gallery lends itself well to the scale and emotion of Scully’s work. Overwhelmingly this viewing experience is an edifying one, both visually and emotionally and it is well worth encountering.

Yinka Shonibare MBE, “Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle”, Fourth Plinth, Trafalgar Square

Jo Higgins

June 14, 2010

Musings, Writings

One has to feel a bit sorry for Sir Keith Park, the Battle of Britain hero whose memorial sculpture proved an unfortunate placeholder on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square recently.

Replacing Antony Gormley’s living, breathing Fourth Plinth-Commissioned One and Other, only to make way for Yinka Shonibare’s recently unveiled Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle, this non-project sculpture of Park, while a faithful addition to the playground of historical monuments that is Trafalgar Square, was nevertheless most memorable for what it demonstrated in absentia. That is, the success of the Fourth Plinth Commission in generating interest in – and debate about – contemporary public sculpture and its ability to re-animate public spaces. Sir Keith Park might have more luck in his new home in Waterloo Place but, with the return to project-commissioned works, the success of Shonibare’s work must now be considered, and successful it arguably is.

All manner of work has appeared on the plinth since the first commission in 1999 including a marble sculpture of the disabled artist Alison Lapper by Marc Quinn, Gormley’s literally human portrait and Rachel Whiteread’s inverted invisible plinth. Perhaps surprisingly, Shonibare’s is the first work to engage specifically with the historical significance of Trafalgar Square. Indeed, Shonibare’s large-scale 3.25 x 5m ship in a bottle is a faithful replica of Horatio Nelson’s HMS Victory, which he sailed during the Battle of Trafalgar and on which he died in October 1805. The only historical aberration, Shonibare has replaced the cream canvas sails with his trademark African fabrics.

Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian

This brightly patterned material has formed the visual basis of almost all of Shonibare’s work for nearly the last 20 years and its cheerful colours belie a fascinating, complex and not entirely happy history. The wax cloth fabric, in fact an Indonesian batik, was imported by the Dutch during the 1800s and then sold cheaply to the colonies of West Africa, where they were popularly claimed as a form of African dress and identity. That the fabric was later printed in Manchester, and can now be purchased from Brixton market in South London only amplifies the complex post-colonial, multicultural narrative that is central to Shonibare’s practice and ongoing line of enquiry.

None of this is noted anywhere near the plinth but this richness of suggestive meanings is not altogether lost and there is much to take away from Shonibare’s work even without an appreciation of the fabric’s history.

Certainly the connection between Nelson and the birth of the British Empire is obvious enough and with it, the beginnings of multicultural London, which is Shonibare’s point here, but there is also a delightful series of ironic visual ideas that make this viewing experience wonderfully engaging.

Taking in the first instance the very art of ship bottle building. The necessary need for process, patience and exactitude is arguably also necessary for the building of empires and in much the same manner that collectors build and collect ships in bottles, so too did the British Empire build and collect countries to sit on the mantelpiece of Britain. The visual suggestion of empire building as casual hobby is breathtakingly cheeky.

Then there is Shonibare’s red wax seal, in which he has embossed the letters “YSMBE” – Yinka Shonibare MBE, Member of the British Empire. Shonibare was awarded the title in 2005 and has since insisted on its use at every turn, an honour and a gentle parody, for clearly the empire no longer exists and the award was given in recognition of a career made from questioning and re-framing the historical narratives that were built on the back of the Empire and its political, social and cultural post-colonial ramifications.

All of this can still be lost of viewers and the charm of Shonibare’s work remains. Because above all else it is visually arresting, fun and a witty riposte to the historical gravitas of Nelson’s Column and his colleagues on the other three plinths.

REVIEW: EXPOSED: Voyeurism, Surveillance & the Camera, Tate Modern, London

OTHER POSTS

REVIEW: Sean Scully New Work, Timothy Taylor Gallery, London

OTHER POSTS

Yinka Shonibare MBE, “Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle”, Fourth Plinth, Trafalgar Square

OTHER POSTS