The Bartender Never Gets Killed

Wolfgang Zurborn has an exhibit going up at Haus der Photographie, Deichtorhallen Hamburg.

I really like the surreal way the planes in these images work.  These are done in such a way you are constantly doubting what is real and what isn’t.

Interesting use of pastel colours too.

From the artists statement:

“Drift” is representing a way of seeing the fractured modern world in its overlapping images and contexts. I am interested in finding the sublime in the ridiculous condition of modern life with a Dadaist awareness of the found object. With a surrealist sense of humour I am creating a collision montage of juxtaposed, multi-layered images combined on a single picture plane. Disconnected from the purely functional sense our every-day surrounding appears in a much more sensual way.

Reading that, seems to fit pretty well with what I’m trying to do! Which is maybe why I feel so drawn to these. I must admit to being almost overawed by the apparent effortless ease.

Also interesting how the  colour palette has changed from a previous series..

It is also well worth downloading some of the texts available on the website of discussions of his work…

he has posed a philosophical question by
means of photography: How far is it possible for a subject in the digital age to attain individual
cognition and performance in an everyday public context?
Everyday worlds and the worlds of images dialectically merge in the subject’s mind: views of
the perpetually changing Lebenswelt are unrecognizably bound to the omnipresent pictures
from the mass media.
To Zurborn, traffic terminals, concert fields, stadiums, shopping malls, business and
entertainment parks are the zones the media invade, where the relation-ship between man and
public space take on new aggregate states of individual cognition and action.

These are things that concern a lot of us, but his implementation of these concerns is unique IMO.

An earlier project from 1996, used a technique I tried a while back…

But he managed to fragment the world in ways I wasn’t doing. The vertical rather than horizontal arrangements don’t allow for the graphic complexity I was trying for,  but the resultant fragmentation serves just as well. Very nice. Certainly stuff I’d buy if I was buying art instead of selling it!

Li Lin is represented by 798 Photogallery, China’s first gallery that specialised in photography.

His landscape format photographs show an ‘inhabited emptiness’ if that makes sense. Lots of space counterbalanced by evidence of human development. A common colour theme emphasises a sense of unreality.

The framing and composition suggests alien intrusions that seem to be transforming rural China at an ever-increasing speed.

Woods Lot’s recent post concerning Heideggers view on the tool,

The peculiarity of what is proximally ready-to-hand is that, in its readiness-to-hand, it must, as it were, withdraw in order to be ready-to-hand quite authentically. That with which our everyday dealings proximally dwell is not the tools themselves. On the contrary, that with which we concern ourselves primarily is the work — that which is to be produced at the time; and this is accordingly ready-to-hand too. The work bears with it that referential totality within which the equipment is encountered.

reminded me of Adorno’s statement that for art to be ‘modern’ and relevant, the tool had also to be a part of the modern world. The exagerated  digital quality of Li Lin’s colours seem to emphasise the gap between the modern and the rural , the almost cognitive dissonance, that the people who populate Li Lin’s landscapes must feel.

This theme of ’stranger in a strange land’ when the stranger is the original resident of the landscape is an old one, but the speed of change in China, and China’s relationship to the more developed world is one that is a fertile ground  for Chinese artists.

I picked this up from browsing some of the links from the new issue of LAY FLAT, this particular photographer was featured on Shane Lavalette’s journal accessible from his website.

Herman van den Boom completed a project entitled Arcadia Redesigned .

I have a lot of time for this project.  The almost ironic surreal-ness of how we construct our piece of cultivated and ordered nature speaks volumes of our need  for something ‘other’ that we seem to loose in the same act as trying to create it.

Jamie Isaia, on the PhotoEspaña blog, makes the point that, with the economic downturn, now is a good time to work on your personal work. Jamie is a fashion photographer whose personal work I really like

Jamie’s professional portfolio can be seen here…

Firstly, something new from Mike Ryder,

someone whose constantly evolving search for exactly what photography IS to him makes him worth watching…

…and probably the most beautiful pic I’ve seen in a longtime from another favourite photographer, Ralph Ballerstadt

I’m really busy at the moment and have little time for the blog – hopefully things will quieten down soon. However, here is a ‘look at this’ post. Living in Spain, but not being Spanish, I sometimes come across wonderful work by people I’ve never heard of, one such is Alfonso Brezmes. On his site, you’ll find photographs, collages, animations

I see links to some of John Matturi’s work, but I really like the viewpoint he presents

The site is well worth spending time with, even though it is a flash site!

He currently has an exhibition in Madrid at camara oscura galeria de arte

One interesting thing I like is that the work is often presented as limited edition books – a great alternative to art on the wall

I notice that Photoeye has an auction for Nancy Rexroth’s ‘Iowa’

I’ve always liked her work. She was one of the first to use the Holga-type (in her case the Diana) camera before it’s fuzzyness was ‘instant art’ or anyone had a use for it. She is also one of the few who make it work IMO – and speaking as someone who tried for a long time to do something new with it and failing miserably.

Her prints are diminutive, many just 4×4 inches.

Stephen Wirtz has the Iowa work on his web site

I recently came across the work of Patrick Lee

From his artist statement…

‘It happened suddenly and I experienced as a fact for the first time in my flesh and bones that “all is without permanence”, over what I had regretted for a long time that “all life is suffering”. I was seized by an overwhelming fear and a paralysing doubt. And just as suddenly, I arrived at yet another understanding, that to be alive and live my life “in truth” meant being present, moment by moment, in touch with reality without denial or escapism, a reality where there was present the One I sought and the One I loved.’

Now there is much to be admired in this statement as it says… absolutely NOTHING about the work! Fantastic! My hero! The work, however I really like. As someone noted in an email yesterday, I’m currently on the search for simplicity, which is true, but simplicity with content – which is damn hard to do. Clear statement, everything fully explained, but without gimmick.

Of course, one person’s gimmick is another’s medium! But I am particularly attracted to the almost ’sidewise glance’ aesthetic that Lee uses.

Ok, no montage today. I came across Andreas whilst looking for something else, saw the graphic shapes in the thumbnails and pulled up a bigger version. These are amazing POVs that seem only to be visible in the camera

The Soma project, certainly hits some areas I’ve been working in too

Especially this…

I’m currently going through the process of looking at a lot of work – I tend to do this periodically, look up over the parapet and then see what other people are up to. Peter Hutchinson is someone I’ve been looking at recently

“My involvement with the natural order and impermanent intervention in that system has taken many forms. From land art works reaching from the heights of a volcano to the sea floor, I observed what was happening and what it signified to me. Lately, in collage landscapes, I have made environments that, though they don’t exist in nature, are idealised views. They range from the snow mountains of France, Switzerland and the Rockies to my own garden. In these I see patterns concerned with stretching time and place and which at the same time emulate my own experiences. Sometimes these ideas leap out of the visual into the verbal.

I feel also an almost desperate urge to recreate and record environments which are threatened and are disappearing.”

The idea of constructing idealised views I have a lot of sympathy for and find the techniques he uses intriguing. There certainly seems something about the art ‘object’ which is similar to what I’ve been trying for recently in my physically constructed (as opposed to digitally constructed) landscapes.

He currently has a book out ‘Thrown Rope’

Although Peter Hutchinson has been working with land art since the 1960s, he has yet to receive his proper due. A refreshingly modest artist, his delicate, fleeting work is extraordinarily beautiful, remarkable intelligent, and endlessly charming. Working in the vein of Andy Goldsworthy and Robert Smithson, Hutchinson’s works are ephemeral and subject to the whims of nature. Much of it is the product of his ‘thrown rope’ method – literally throwing ropes over an expanse of land, then placing lime or planting flowers along the lines determined by the ropes. The result is a snakelike garden or swerving lines of bleached land. Hutchinson has even thrown ropes underwater, planting flowers at the bottom of a lake or stringing oranges or onions beneath the water’s surface. The photographs in Thrown Rope document Hutchinson’s career, and are reproduced along with the artist’s own hand-written notes.

Here is a pdf catalogue of his ‘Progonosis Earth’ Landscape series. Note these are all unique works, no editions going on here.