Manipulating Reality
Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina, Florence, Italy
Olivo Barbieri, site specific_LAS VEGAS 05 (2005)
Set within the restored cellar spaces below the Palazzo Strozzi’s courtyard and known as ‘La Strozzina’, the Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina (CCCS) is the only public institution in Florence dedicated to contemporary art. Opened in late 2007 under the directorship of Franziska Nori, the CCCS programmes exhibitions that are usually in some kind of dialogue with the larger, historical surveys presented in the first-floor galleries of the Strozzi. To coincide with ‘Art and Illusions’ – a survey of trompe l’oeil from antiquity to the present day – the CCCS is presenting ‘Manipulating Reality: How Images Redefine the World’, a survey of 23 contemporary artists using (usually digital) photography and video.
Thomas Demand, from the ‘Presidency’ series (2008)
Is equating large-scale photographic work with trompe l’oeil problematic? While much of the painting that employs trompe l’oeil could be said to have a shared aim (that is, to deceive the viewer by way of painterly virtuosity), the stagings and digital manipulations of contemporary photography do not. To take two examples from ‘Manipulating Reality’, in Olivo Barbieri’s film site specific_LAS VEGAS 05 (2005), Las Vegas is shot from the air using tilt-shift technology, giving the effect that the city is a model; in the photographs of Thomas Demand, real-life models of photographs of places the artist has never visited are made from paper and photographed so as to seem almost real (Demand is represented here by the five-part ‘Presidency’ series, 2008). These two things are by no means the same: Barbieri’s rendering of a real city as a miniature replica of itself is a rather obvious nod to its being frequently cited – by, among many others, Robert Venturi, Jean Baudrillard and Dave Hickey – as simulacra; Demand has something rather more to say about photography as evidence.
That aside, ‘Manipulating Reality’ is an admirably broad survey of recent work in which the traditional idea of a photograph bearing an indexical relationship to its object is re-imagined. John Berger once claimed that photography was ‘weak with intentionality’, a medium characterized by generosity, capturing every unplanned detail – but not here. In almost all of this work there is no simply causal relationship between the photo’s (apparent) subject and the photo (or film) itself. The best of the work included in ‘Manipulating Reality’ is concerned with considerably more than deception; the worst is involved with little else. But when you can guarantee that what you are seeing is not what it seems to be, the trick fails.
Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin (detail)
Jeff Wall, who was missing here, has often said that his own work can all be characterized as either documentary or cinematographic, and these are certainly the two dominant modes at the CCCS. Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin’s project was produced in June 2008 while the artists were working as embedded reporters in Afghanistan. Such photographs are often strictly censored by the military, so the pair took a more abstract route, exposing a six-metre roll of photographic paper to the sun for 20 seconds every day. One strip is shown here (The Brother’s Suicide, 2008), its seductive flares and bleached areas suggestive of a desert paradise. Shown alongside is the video The Day Nobody Died (2008), in which soldiers are shown loading and unloading a box containing the photographic paper (which is itself never seen). This was a way around army censorship, a pointed suggestion that abstraction (as well as figuration) can provide testimony. Another interesting take on documentary conventions was Aernout Mik’s Raw Footage (2006), which comprises television footage shot during the Yugoslavian civil war but which was unused by TV networks at the time. While this is clearly the inverse of Mik’s usual technique of staging real-life episodes, somehow these previously unseen footage, unmoored from the networks’ official account of events, feels somehow artificial. In these cases, when the ‘real’ is encountered it’s either too much to deal with (as with Mik) or almost imperceptible (as with Broomberg and Chanarin).
Sarah Pickering, from ‘Fire Scenes’ (2007)
Others take a cinematographic approach, with a staged or prepared angle on documentary photography: Tatjana Hallbaum’s photographs of the stage-like sets used by police and fire departments for training purposes (‘In Between’ series, 2005–6), for example, or Sarah Pickering’s 2007 ‘Fire Scenes’, taken at the UK Fire College Training centre, both provide glimpses of institutional representations of the real world.
Andreas Gursky, Bahrain II (2007)
Also included recent work from several big-hitters whose large-scale early work sketched out much of the terrain covered by the younger generation here: for example, Gregory Crewdson’s filmic games (untitled c-type prints from 1998 and 2001); Cindy Sherman’s recent ‘rich spinster’ photographs; and Andreas Gursky’s well-known Bahrain I and II (2005 and 2007) – whose aerial perspective no doubt influenced a number of the younger artists included.
Andreas Gefeller, from the ‘Supervision’ series (2004)
Elsewhere, technology sometimes commands more attention than the works themselves, as with Andreas Gefeller’s 2004 ‘Supervision’ series, for which he has collaged together aerial photographs of uninhabited interiors of East European housing projects from numerous pictures he has taken with a ceiling-height camera suspended above his head. In Osang Gwon’s Fuse (from the ‘Deodorant Type’ series, 2007–8), a life-size sculpture of a motorcyclist in leathers lies prone, the surface comprising hundreds of collaged photographs, while, in the ‘groundspeed’ series (2001), Australian Rosemary Laing presents digital composite photos of lavishly carpeted forest scenes.
Osang Gwon, Fuse (2007–8)
For a small survey show, ‘Manipulating Reality’ illustrates the diverse methods of lens-based technology currently being used relatively comprehensively, though without ever going so far as to convincingly identify an emerging tendency in contemporary photography.
Sam Thorne
Responses
There are no responses yet for this article.
