Before and After
Before and After, Winter 2001, pp. 56-57
This was to have been a tale of two cities, Düsseldorf and Vancouver, and a connection between them made through two schools of photography and two artists: a German, Andreas Gursky, and a Canadian, Jeff Wall. It seems impossible to write that story now without acknowledging New York, too, on the clear, sunny, fall workday when terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and levelled its twin towers to the ground. On that day the world changed in a series of swift, destabilizing strokes.
New York would have come into the story in any event, as the site of "Andreas Gursky," the first major exhibition in this international art capital and in the United States of the 46-year-old artist’s work. Organized by Peter Galassi for the Museum of Modern Art and shown there last spring, the exhibition is travelling to the Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Galassi, as Vancouver photographer Roy Arden noted in these pages a year ago, made his MoMA debut in 1981 with "Before Photography: Painting and the Invention of Photography," a revision of the history that located the medium’s origin in science. In this era of digital technology, which Gursky and Wall both embrace alongside the history of art, Arden’s article was entitled "After Photography."
Now, however, September 11, 2001 has become a new, salient marker of before and after. Before, Gursky appeared not only as the hottest star on the international scene, but also as the artist best positioned to show us the state of photography in the information age. His mature body of work, which begins in 1984 and is known for its formal references to painting and sculpture, covers it all: straight photography, digitally processed photography and virtual imagery created in the computer. Now, after, Gursky’s vision of globalization—in scenes of industrialized landscapes, airports, seaports, factories, sports events, rock concerts and raves, high-rise office towers, hotel lobbies, financial exchanges, seats of government, stores, consumer goods, and panoramas of vast crowds—seems the truest for its subliminal registrations of alienation, diffused anxiety and profound unease. It is the content of his work and its invisible undercurrents that count most now, that reveal how acutely his sensibilities are attuned to his time. In Gursky's world, as we now must understand ours to be, every place is connected.
It was viscerally startling, after the massacre in New York, to thumb through the catalogue of Gursky’s 1998 show at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf past Happy Valley II (1995), a green, city cemetery with a large cloud of white smoke billowing up from an unseen source, and Hong Kong Island (1994), a deep, machine-dotted cavity surrounded by tall buildings that echoes ground zero at the World Trade Center. In the context of the flood of media images that began on September 11, these photographs, neither on show in New York, appear oddly prescient.
Most often, however, the palpable unease, conceptual contradictions and perceptually constructed anomalies that infuse Gursky’s work cannot be experienced from reproductions in a book, but only from the work itself. Gursky’s photographs defy reproduction, as painting does. The vertigo and spatial disorientation that suddenly come upon a viewer standing in front of them arise from their huge scale (the largest is approximately 16 feet wide); the elevated and ungrounded point of view; the flattened perspective; irrational shifts in internal scale; precipitously tilted ground planes; the constant address to peripheral vision; and the way certain images, like the semi-circular hotel interior in Shanghai (2000), or the massive glacier in Aletsch Glacier (1993), suddenly become perceptually fluid and warp in space as one walks by them. Gursky’s pictures mirror the instabilities of a world that can change in the blink of an eye.
Speed, mobility, time, distance, work, recreation, production and reproduction, unit and system, individual and mass are among the themes of Gursky's recurrent image types. Creating an accurate portrayal of what society is like now is his project. It is also Jeff Wall’s and, like Wall, Gursky constructs his truths using fictional means. Gursky cites the older, internationally known artist as an important influence on his work. Wall, of course, is the progenitor, along with Ian Wallace, of what has become known as the Vancouver school, encompassing such artists as Roy Arden, Rodney Graham, Stan Douglas and Ken Lum. As a former student of Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie, Gursky is a member of the Düsseldorf school, which includes Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff, Candida Höfer and Axel Hütte. It in turn has affected the Vancouver artists.
Wall was a visiting artist at the Kunstakademie when Gursky was a student there, in the years 1981 to 1987. He was impressed that Wall’s photographs looked like paintings, and that he mounted them on advertising lightboxes. Gursky himself tried to invent and construct images in a similar way, but he never showed the results. His work is inspired by his visual experience. It could be, however, that Wall’s dialogue with painting and film, and his position that the human, social and economic aspects of a subject are inseparable, combined with the Bechers’ tutelage to point Gursky towards his mature work: an encyclopedic description of globalized society. The large scale of Wall's luminescent pictures undoubtedly set another example, as might Wall’s use of the diptych, double or mirror images and long pictorial formats with the aspect ratio of panoramic film.
Before and After, Winter 2001, pp. 58-59
Anglers, Mülheim (1989), with its two riverbank vignettes of fishermen, suggests that Gursky was still contemplating Wall’s work in 1989. Gursky’s Paris, Montparnasse (1993) and Times Square (1997), a modernist apartment building and a John Portman hotel lobby, are among the many double images he has processed digitally and invisibly joined in the computer. In such light-filled works as these, it might be said that Gursky found "the perfect synthetic technology" that Wall discovered in a transparency mounted in a lightbox. "It was not photography, it was not cinema, it was not painting, it was not propaganda, but it has strong associations with them all," Wall has said. "It was something extremely open."
However, Wall employs his synthetic technology, which also includes the computer, to maintain a seamless Western pictorial tradition. Gursky uses his to stretch and warp its fabric and to confound expectations based not only on sensory experience of the world but also on other art. His work refers to many painters, contemporary and otherwise, but he likens his point of view to that of "an extraterrestrial." This is the view taken from a distance and from above: it grows strange as we look at it. Gursky subverts the classic attributes of the photographic. He suppresses sharp focus and controls detail, often turning it into a graphic element. He eliminates the camera’s one-point, Renaissance perspective. He compresses depth of field; redraws contours; composes with realistic elements as if he were an abstractionist; ruptures the sense of continuous space; and he erases his tracks. His address is to the body, not just the eyes, of onlookers—who don’t quite know where they are physically, except that they are left outside, locked into the role of the spectator.
Gursky is "a painter of modern life" who is not a painter. He is a photographer chronicling his times who is not just a photographer. He is unusual in that he has absorbed the gamut of visual culture and is fluent in its idioms. His photographs have the sweep of film, the texture of television, the subject matter of photojournalism and advertising, the composition of painting, the creative intelligence of high art. Much of what occurs within them lies beneath the seismographic surfaces.
Taking globalization and its implications as his subject, Gursky has relocated the Northern Romantic notion of the sublime. The older, existential landscape, in which the individual alone in nature contemplates the void, seeking an intuition of the unknowable, had already shifted into the terrain of the technological sublime in the 19th century. Gursky charts its passage into the vast and complex realm of digital, technologically driven, global socio-economics and geopolitics, in which the individual is alone in the crowd, speed is paramount and space has become immaterial, yet seemingly more vast.
What more terrible evidence of the truth in his perceptions could there be than the media images from New York that have filled us with terror and awe since September 11? It is television, which became the history painting of our age with the Kennedy assassination, that has delivered the devastating impact of this imagery from a distance, from above. Still photography coped best at street level, on peripheral damage, yet has managed only to aestheticize or sentimentalize the World Trade Center’s smoking ruin. The vastness of the landscape of destruction dumbfounds and sickens. At ground zero, which tomorrow could be anywhere, we need artists of Gursky’s acuity, perhaps Gursky himself, to cross the threshold of this new world of ours and show us what to make of it.
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