The Carl Kruse Arts Blog in conjunction with the Ivy Circle Berlin is happy to invite all to an art exhibit of artist Jade Cassidy taking place on Wednesday, February 12, 2025 from 6-9 p.m. at the Quantum Gallery on Kurfürstendamm 210 in West Berlin.
The event will feature complimentary champagne from the Lombard champagne company, who will be represented by champagne ambassador Fanny Thiel, and a complimentary open wine bar from 6-7pm. A full cash bar goes on all night.
Originally from South Africa, Jade Cassidy is an emerging artist who resides in Berlin. Her work explores themes of renewal and resilience, and the exhibition invites viewers to reflect through her paintings and sculptures on cycles of destruction and revival, often using the South African Protea flower for inspiration.
The event is free and open to all friends of the Carl Kruse Arts Blog, and while an RSVP is not mandatory, it would be good to have a head count for the champagne and the bar.
For any questions (and to RSVP) contact Carl Kruse at info@carlkruse.net.
Cheers and to a great gathering on the 12th in Berlin! ============ The Carl Kruse Arts Blog Homepage is at https://carlkruse.net Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com The blog’s last article was in memory of David Lynch.
The Carl Kruse Arts Blog in conjunction with Ivy Circle Berlin is happy to invite all to an art exhibit of artist Jade Cassidy taking place on Wednesday, February 12, 2025 from 6-9 p.m. at the Quantum Gallery on Kurfürstendamm 210 in West Berlin.The event will feature complimentary champagne from the Lombard champagne company, represented by champagne ambassador Fanny Thiel, and a complimentary open wine bar from 6-7pm. A full cash bar goes on all night. It will be good.Originally from South Africa, Jade Cassidy is an emerging artist who resides in Berlin. Her work explores themes of renewal and resilience, and the exhibition invites viewers to reflect through her paintings and sculptures on cycles of destruction and revival, often using the South African Protea flower for inspiration.
The event is free and open to all friends of the Carl Kruse Arts Blog, and while an RSVP is not mandatory, it would be good to have a head count for the champagne and the bar.
For any questions (and to RSVP) contact Carl Kruse at info@carlkruse.net. Cheers and I look forward to a great gathering on the 12th in Berlin!
Place: Boros Foundation, Reinhardtstraße 20, 10117 Berlin
URL: boros-foundation.de
Cost: 35€
Spread over 3,000 sq m of a converted air-raid bunker, this is the fourth exhibition featuring works from the private collection of Karen and Christian Boros, showcasing international artists from 1990 to the present. The couple purchased the bunker, originally designed by Albert Speer to both house their contemporary art and to make it accessible to the public. The redesign of the bunker was awarded the Beton Architectural Prize in 2008.
During the 1.5-hr tour in English, an art mediator from the Boros team will tell us about the exhibited works, the history of the building, and its architectural background. Christian Boros has often said he only buys art that he does not understand, so the tour will be interesting to say the least.
The event is to be followed by an optional dinner at a nearby restaurant.
For any questions please reach out to me as soon as possible to info@carlkruse.net.
The Carl Kruse Arts Blog in conjunction with the Ivy Circle Berlin would like to invite all to its second Art Brunch at the studio of Helena Kauppila, on Saturday, October 5, 2024, starting at 11:45 am on the fourth floor of Ackerstrasse 81, 13355 Berlin
There will be a welcome and brief introduction by the artist at 12:15 am.
A mathematician turned painter, Helena is fascinated by complexity and emerging systems. While her colorful paintings may appear random and disjointed, there is a systems thinking behind them, often anchored in mathematics. Her work touches on the structure of DNA, mathematical theories, and the human connection to nature and the world around us..
Kauppila resides in Berlin. She holds a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Columbia University and is the recipient of the Reginald Marsh and Felicia Meyer Marsh scholarship at the Art Students League of New York.
Light brunch food and drinks will be served. Featuring “Elixir of Life” DNA Canapes and a color-changing welcome drink. RSVP helpful (but not required).
At 1 pm other ateliers in the building open as well, so there will be further opportunity to explore other art and meet other artists.
Cheers! Carl Kruse =============== The Carl Kruse Arts Blog Homepage is at https://carlkruse.net Contact: catl AT carlkruse DOT com Carl’s most recent article on Medium was a look at Viktor Frankl’s “logotherapy.”
The German Friends of the London School of Economics (LSE) invite members of the Carl Kruse Arts Blog to a visit to the exhibition of “Gerhard Richter. Hidden Gems. Works from Rhenish Private Collections” at the Museum Kuntspalast in Düsseldorf on Sunday, 15 September 2025 at 2:15pm. The major autumn exhibition at Museum Kunstpalast brings together more than 130 artworks from all of Gerhard Richter’s works. Many of the exhibits are hidden treasures from private collections that have rarely – if ever – been shown in public before. As part of the most comprehensive Gerhard Richter exhibition in Germany for over ten years, these works provide an insight into the entire spectrum of his art – from his beginnings in the early 1960s to more recent times. Thr tour will take place in English.
We will meet at the Foyer of the Museum Kunstpalast, Ehrenhof 4-5, 40479 Düsseldorf at 2:15pm ahead of the tour to allow time for cloakroom and distribution of entrance tickets, so that we can start the tour on time.
Please register by Thursday, 12 September, by completing the online registration form: https://www.vereinonline.org/LSEAlumni/?veranstaltung=104198 We encourage you to sign-up early, as we allocate places on a first-come, first-served basis.
The guided tour is free of charge for members of the German Friends of LSE while the participation fee for non-members, including those of the Carl Kruse `Arts Blog, is €10. Please pay either by Paypal or provide a SEPA direct debit mandate.
Please reach out if you have any questions and I look forward to seeing you at the event.
I was speaking with a friend of mine a few days ago about innovations in art, or the lack thereof. He was of the opinion that nothing new was being made, that we, as a collective, were stagnating in our incessant recycling of the old, and in our opulent media wealth. At our fingertips, we have it all, from the birth of recorded music in Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville’s phonautographic capturing of Au Clair de la Lune to the newest Taylor Swift album, The Tortured Poet’s Department. Type, and you will get. That is how it is now. We are used to it.
I did not disagree with my friend. I feel it too, sometimes. When I am writing a film, when I am playing music, when I am writing my articles…am I simply recycling what came before? Am I, as we all seem to be, caught in the web of ceaseless creation, forever destined to be one step behind. It’s that feeling when you watch a film and you wished that you’d made it, or when you listen to a song that you wished you’d written. It’s the feeling of a seeming inability to see the world in a way that has not been done before, and it appears insurmountable.
It is boring, too, sometimes. There is so much that it is hard to look at, hard to see a thing amidst the digital trees. A smog of screens clouds my own creation and makes me leave projects hanging half complete.
However – I did not agree with my friend either.
I have been frequenting many music venues lately. Small places, with small dancefloors and dimmed lights. The music, here, is small too. Names I’ve never heard, people I’ve never seen. And some of it, sure, is as I mentioned; a desperate harkening to the bygone days of 60s rock, a tepid hippy revolution a la 70s with all its tassles and flowing paisley dresses, or a retelling of the pop idols of the late 2000s. But some of it is new, brilliantly new, wonderfully new – voices I’ve never heard before, melodies that stick around in my mind when I return home to my house beside other houses. Bishopskin, The Wheel 2!, Drive Your Plow – these are bands that have found the means to somehow squeeze themselves into the holes that remain in our musical landscape, and there they are building deep foundations that, they hope, will endure in the years to come.
But, sometimes, when I watch some of these bands writhing about on the stage, shouting about politics and love, throwing themselves off the stage into the audience, it is as though, at times, I can already see their end. Because it’s true, what Noel Galagher says. Streaming has killed music, particularly rock music. It pays artists a pittance of what they would have been paid before through record sales. In other ways, it enables smaller bands to be discoverable more easily, through such platforms as Spotify, giving them a reach that would have been neigh impossible before the advent of streaming. But nonetheless; we are out here, us artists, working tirelessly for ‘nish’. And that is enough for many artists to eventually break and throw in the towel.
But there is hope in it. Some of this music is indeed new, indescribable and incomparable to what I’ve heard before. There have been times where I have been so shocked at the skill and innovation of a band that I’ve found myself standing motionless, mouth agape, in awe of what I am seeing, because what I am seeing feels like a birth of something that, one day, will no longer frequent these small dingy venues. It feels like I am dancing in purgatory with performers that will soon find themselves up in the sky, untouchable at last.
Similarly, in film, when we search a little deeper, we find a clamouring, the clunking resonance of thick-bodied old cameras, and the quiet poise of a director with an eye unlike any other. In film, I find the new over and over again
A little while ago, I discovered the work of Hlynur Pálmason, an Icelandic director, whose heart of ice and snow and shingle and waterfalls bewitched me instantly. The first work I saw of his was Nest (2022), a film created over the course of 18 months which follows three siblings as they build a treehouse. The children building the treehouse are Pálmason’s children, and the film is permeated with the endlessly changing landscape of Iceland. The cold, the wind, the whiteness of the sun, then the orange of the sun and the green of the fine grassland. The film is plotless, in a sense, and yet, as we watch the months pass, and the treehouse being built, we feel the passage of time as something so present, so palpable, that it makes us see it in our own lives, in the passing of our days, our weeks, our months, our years. Nest reminds me of long summer days spent whiling away the hours doing nothing, or of winter mornings, wrapped in sheets while the kettle boils and the fire burns away.
Later, I watched Pálmason’s Godland (Volaða land (Icelandic); Vanskabte Land, (Danish – ‘Malformed Land’) (2023), a film whose terrible, stark beauty and impossibly crisp images stayed with me long after its last frame. Godland is imbued with the insidiousness of colonialism without a word being said about it. It is also a film filled with simple pleasure; the pleasure of sun and warmth after days trudging frozen tundras, the pleasure of an accordion bellowing out over the water as people dance, the pleasure of a hot soup swallowed under a wooden roof.
Pálmason is new. His films are new, his eyes are new. Away from the endless mechanical pumping of the Hollywood machine, we find many like Pálmason. Not like him in vision, but like him in sentiment. Making only art that he feels must be made, not the art that is asked of him, not the art that is made only for money.
Mark Jenkin is another director who has caught me in his grip with his eye and his fishing line. I watched Enys Men (Cornish for ‘Stone Island’) (2022) recently, which follows an ecologist as she goes out to check on some strange flowers growing on a cliff on the Cornish coast. Every day, she goes out, checks the temperature of the soil, drops a rock into a well, then returns home and switches on the generator, pens down her findings, and makes tea. In the evening, she reads by candlelight, because she has turned off the generator. This is a slow film, despite its short running time (1h 30m), and all the better for it. Time is not an anxiety, time merely serves as a tool with which to dwell on the rolling waves, the verdant fields, the darkness of the night in rural Cornwall. The protagonist’s house is away from everything, and so she is alone. And despite the implications of her solitude, I found myself yearning for the simplicity of her existence. London is tiring, at times. It is perhaps because I am here that I am often anxious that I can never create something new, something that touches people as the musicians and directors I have mentioned have touched me, something that excites people and makes them see this strange life a little differently, with wider eyes, like those of a child. I live and breathe in the saturation of a city groaning under the weight of millions of dreams and lives, and it is difficult, at times, to see the light, to see the possibilities that shine through the cracks in the grey paving stones of the streets where I live.
After the terrorist attack by Hamas on October 7th in Israel and the Gaza war, life changed for artist Yury Kharchenko.
And now,, the Hällisch-Fränkisches Museum is showing works by the artist in a solo exhibition from June 29th to October 20th, 2024.
The Berlin-based artist was born in Moscow in 1986. He came to Germany in the late 1990s as a Jewish refugee. From 2004 to 2008, he studied painting at the Düsseldorf Art Academy and then philosophy and literature at the University of Potsdam. The up-and-coming young artist has recently exhibited in well-known institutions, including the Museum Kunstpalast Düsseldorf, the Felix-Nussbaum-Haus in Osnabrück, the Kunstmuseum Walter, the Kunstmuseum Bochum and the Hamburger Kunsthalle.
Influenced by his experiences as a Jew in Germany, he takes up themes in his current paintings that deal with the war in Israel and Gaza, the Ukraine war, the problematic culture of remembrance in Germany, anti-Semitism and the relativization of the Holocaust. For example, he presents an Auschwitz gate with an Israeli and Palestinian flag hanging above it, and a ptyrodactyl flying out of it. What German responsibility does the Holocaust have for the current Middle East situation? Or the founding father of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, the T-Rex from the blockbuster “Jurassic Park” by filmmaker Steven Spielberg under an entrance gate whose shape is reminiscent of that of Auschwitz. The lettering, however, reads “Welcome to the Jewish Museum.” He depicts Beavis and Butt-Head, who embody woke culture from the US cartoon series, in front of the Auschwitz Gate. One of the images shows Jean Amery and an inscription on the Auschwitz Gate reads “From the River to the Sea”. Is it a call for a new genocide of the Jews and the annihilation of Israel? It is images like these that Kharchenko uses to demand more ethics from a society that is facing the decline of historical knowledge. In his works he focuses on the present, which contains a past that can never be overcome, and references to reactionary identity politics and post-colonial anti-Semitism meet totalitarianism and the utopia of consumer society. The synagogue paneling by Elieser Sussmann on display in Schwäbisch Hall is one of the most important Judaica in Europe. This alone is one reason why the Hällisch-Fränkisches Museum regularly makes reference to Jewish topics.
Among other things, Yury Kharchenko also makes reference to the museum’s collection, such as the synagogue paneling, the Nazi era and the Holocaust, and vice versa, to the questioning of what terror is today and how or whether one can still live as a Jew in Germany today.
What do the German Holocaust, Hamas and Russian terror have in common and how does an artist experience the current world situation in his pictures?
The Carl Kruse Arts Blog invites all to another exhibition and social gathering in Berlin as part of its Art series with German artist Michael Dyne Mieth.
Join us Thursday, May 23, 2024 from 6:30pm – 9:30pm at Dorotheenstr 83, 10117 Berlin.
Dyne will exhibit a collection of his works spanning his more than three decades as a painter. We will also have on hand staff from Margarethenhof Vineyards who have graciously offered to showcase some of their wines for the event. Jasmin Catering will serve unique Levantine-inspired finger foods. It will be good.
Dyne is a painter, sculptor and multimedia artist living in Berlin, whose art is exhibited internationally and always attracts attention due to his visionary motives. Some of his work includes his massive “G18” in which he revisits and reimagines Picasso’s Guernica, which has forever inscribed itself in art history as an appeal for peace. G18 was exhibited along with Pablo Picasso’s original Guernica at the Imperial Hofburg Museum in Innsbruck during the anti-war exhibition GUERNICA – “Icon of Peace.”
Dyne was also selected by Cisco Systems to envision a work on sustainability for their innovation center openBerlin. He created a sculpture in the shape of a robot called “Recycle” from packaging material that is normally hazardous waste. Sensors in a bodysuit that Dyne wore saved the data of his movement as the work was created and later published as “the data of creativity” allowing viewers to immerse themselves in the artist’s world and understand what he did and how he did it.
We look forward to seeing you on May 23 for what will be a beautiful evening.
It is dawn, and the city is not awake, because in France, cities sleep when the night rolls through them. Maybe a light shines out from the backroom of a bakery, where a few bakers with sleep in their eyes pound and shape dough beside a firing stone oven so the breads will be baked in time for the morning traffic when it streams in through the bakery doors. Perhaps a waitress is walking dozily beside the flowing grey of the Rhône with the keys to her café jangling between her front two fingers. And somewhere, perhaps, there is a shadowy figure retreating unseen from a wide crack in the pavement, which he has filled with tiny shards of ceramics that glitter like stars as the sun glares up, up and above the towering white of the Cathédrale Saint-Jean-Baptiste. The day has begun, and there is a new artwork by Ememem in the streets of Lyon.
Ememem is an anonymous artist, described by Ian Phillips of The Guardian as ‘France’s answer to Banksy’, and has produced over 350 artworks throughout the streets of Lyon; from potholes to pavements, from gaps beside wide gnarled tree roots to broking paving stones, Ememem’s ‘flacking’ (his name for the mosaic method he uses) shines through the gaps in the cityscape.
Ememem’s work seems, to me, a sort of variation on Kintsugi, the Japanese art of traditional ceramic repair, a way to visualise the mending process of broken ornaments which treats breakages as essential in the history and future of an object, rather than as something to be seamlessly hidden. The imperfections of these objects are highlighted and cherished using Kintsugi, as the cracks in the concrete of Lyon are highlighted and made colourful by Ememem.
The word ‘flacking’, which Ememem uses to describe their technique, is a neologism originating from the French word ‘flaque’, meaning puddle. I think this to be a most poetic way to describe Ememem’s artwork. As puddles of colour, with patterns pooling out from their centres and dribbling into the surrounding splits, just as water would. As natural as rain, Ememem’s works blend into the metropolis.
There are many roadworks occurring in my city at the moment. Holes in the road being filled with steaming concrete. Paving stones being unearthed from their soft cement beds and replaced by other such stones. Small potholes being haphazardly filled in – when they dry up, they make little molehills in the road. And all around these works is commotion. Trucks, huge machinery buzzing and whirring and crackling, men in neon waving this way and that, or bent over, tugging at rocks and earth, or stood observing as a mechanical arm picks up grey detritus before them. It is not that these works are not essential, of course not. But perhaps there are some instances where an Ememem-type figure could perform their quiet work, and calm the noise somewhat; maybe they might venture out from the woodwork in the dead of night, and fill in the deep crevasse that has emerged on the pavement over by that café, fill it with red circles and blue squares and orange crescents and green rectangles, fill it with colour and brightness and precision and beauty. It would be good, I think, if we were to fill in the holes of this city with more colour.
I like to imagine how Ememem might create one of their artworks. How patiently they must place the little pieces of ceramic, how very meticulously they must plan out the pattern in order to fit it exactly into the strange shape that has been gouged out of the street, or road, or wall. How quickly they must work so as not to be seen by a soul.
Not a lot is known about Ememem, but there have been musings about the reason behind their name; their agent of 15+ years, Guillaume Abou, asserts it may be a reference to the first letters from Lou Reed’s ‘worst’ album – Metal Machine Music (from The Guardian article entitled ‘France’s answer to Banksy: the anonymous street artist filling potholes with colourful mosaics’ – September 2022). Ememem have purportedly said that their name refers to the sound made by their moped when they go out at night to create their pieces (I challenge you not to make that noise in your head). I’m not sure which idea I prefer – Lou Reed or the rumbling of a moped grumbling reluctantly awake at midnight. We know that Ememem is French, though speaks with a bit of an accent (perhaps Italian, suggests Ian Phillips of The Guardian), and that they are untrained, artistically speaking, though their father was a house tiler. Might that make Ememem a street tiler? I’ve always thought it to be a wonderful thing to follow in one’s parent’s footsteps, to learn a craft from them and continue it on for generations. It is a lost thing, I think. These days, we find our own way, and reject the old ways of our parents in favour of paving a path towards the new. Always pushing forwards, quicker, faster. Never taking a moment to admire the path from whence we came, or taking the time to fill in the cracks in that path with our own mosaics. Rather, we move to different streets, different roads, and leave the old to whither in our wake.
It is refreshing to have an artist without a face. Anonymous authorship is not a particularly easy feat in the modern day, and, save for the aforementioned Banksy, I can’t think of any other known artists who have managed to successfully make themselves opaque to the public’s ever prying eyes. We live in a visual age, an age where parasocial relationships have become the norm. We believe that we KNOW our favourite celebrities, or ‘artists’ – we know what they eat, we know the music they like, we know who they’re married to or dating, what clothes they wear, where they live, where they grew up, what school they went to, who their friends are…and, perhaps, we might feel that they know us, in some way, or that they might be our friends, should we meet them in real life. So, to have an artist who rejects all that, who is known only for the patterns they’ve made in the cracks in a city, is quite magnificent. Ememem ‘fixes’ the city, makes it beautiful, and they do not even want us to know their name. This, to me, implies a humility and compassion that I do not think I possess as an artist, nor ever will. ==============
We are very aware these days of our submersion in the image; that much of our cultural meaning and awareness originates in the consumption of, production of, and of our being represented by images. The burning questions and controversies around the latest development in A.I.-related productions, or re-productions, or pastiches and parodies of the “real”, seem to take this image-world for granted, or at least it has forced a recognition of the limitations that we consider apt for it. Not too long ago, the invention of photography is now coming up to its second centennial, there were fusses on what actually photography was meant to be: does it function as an art? Is it the technical extension of perception? If it is not an art, what are we being gifted by this capability to fix an image? It is accepted now that photography can function as an art (museum space, exhibitions, online), and that the photograph can exhibit powerful displays of humanity; photography also displays much else besides and aids across contemporary industries. Photography is also an activity, a way of seeing and reacting to space and time, and has had a decisive effect on altering our perception and informing modern consciousness.
In an anthology of “classical” essays on photography (which ranges from the pioneers, Daguerre, Niepce, and Fox Talbot, to cultural critics of images, such as John Berger reminding us that an image is not just an objective fix of reality), the editor says ‘a common lament among photographers … is that the medium lacks a critical tradition’, as opposed to the critical traditions we find in painting and Literature where these medium’s cultural use and evolution are discussed and debated. One of the reasons why this is so is because photography has had a confused history with its relation to painting, not just whether it should be understood as an artistic practice or not, but whether it should be taking cues from painting as it did during the latter half of the nineteenth century: those strange portraits where serious faces look back at you from an artificial room decorated in Grecian amphoras and columns, or how it later tried to resemble Impressionism. It is not entirely obvious how to compose a photo, at least in the beginning, without the aid of referring to painting, that other visually composed experience. It is further confused because it is also not entirely obvious what social and existential effects the ability to reproduce reality by fixing its image will have, or mean, whether it is used for artistic, political, or scientific purposes.
In 1839, Astronomer and Physicist, Francois Arago, appealed to the French Commission of the Chamber of Deputies to grant Daguerre and the son of Niepce an annual and life pension for their invention of the process which fixes images obtained in the camera obscura (the commission complied). Arago speaks about the ‘extraordinary advantage … derived from so exact and rapid a means of reproduction … to copy, for example, the millions of hieroglyphs which cover even the exterior of the great monuments … would require decades of time and legions of draughtsmen. By daguerreotype, one person would suffice’; he praises the ‘unimaginable precision of detail’ which can be used in service of the artist, and reminds the audience that it does not require any knowledge of drawing or any special dexterity ‘when, step by step, a few simple prescribed rules are followed’. This process will bring reality closer with unheard-of speed of execution, will optimise our storage of knowledge, and anyone can utilize it. From Arago’s address onwards, the daguerreotype flourished and captivated the curious middle classes of Europe and America; photographic societies were formed, professionalism began, the portraiture business was no longer exclusive to the moneyed (portraiture being one of photography’s lasting performances); Edgar Allan Poe exalted the daguerreotype, seeing in it the magical potentiality of modernity, and doctor Oliver Holmes delighted in the fact that, finally, humanity has been able to separate the form from the object, form from matter.
The poet Baudelaire voiced a different opinion, imitating a generalised spokesman for a “realistic” art, he writes: ‘I believe that art is, and can only be, the exact reproduction of nature. Thus, if an industrial process could give us a result identical to nature, that would be absolute art’. He goes on: ‘but if once it [photography] be allowed to impinge on the sphere of the intangible and the imaginary, on anything that has value solely because man adds something to it from his soul, then woe betide us!’. “Realism”, Baudelaire is reminding us, is not only about fixing an exact reproduction of time and space; it is a flux of time, emotion, and uncertainty. It must have been a strange experience for the budding photographers of the nineteenth century, being used to visual representation only through painting which the finest painters made their own. It is no wonder that the confusion began on how to take a “proper” photograph, and of what subject – how to compose nature, or reality, in spite of “style”. Since the camera seemingly offered an unlimited scope in terms of angle, light, and scene, it is no wonder the “professionals” were quick to ally themselves with the then vogue of the “realistic”, finding they had the device which would do exactly that, and, in fact, even “better” than an artist could – by allying with painting standards, an “artistic” photograph could be judged. Amateur photographers and those curious about the new medium, i.e. unconcerned with whether photography was an art or whether it should follow rules of composition, allowed photography to expand on its own right, as a medium of interest in itself – something similar to the above enthusiasm of Holmes: “taking the form from matter”.
It is with Baudelaire that we begin to detect what photography will mean to humanity under modernity. Baudelaire was concerned with the direction of art: ‘can it legitimately be supposed that a people whose eyes get used to accepting the results of a material science as products of the beautiful will not … diminish its capacity for judging those things that are most ethereal and immaterial?’ We should, moving away from the question of art, ask: what about our capacity for judging reality away from the image of reality? Why do some moments, now, stand out as “fit for a picture”, what does the ability to “collect” fragments of the world mean? With the camera, the world now very easily appears as a fragmentary experience. Humanity now faces a reality that can be broken up and composed at will, a sort of triumph over its flow – or at least an image of a triumph, which has the quality of “objectivity”. The camera, then, is the characteristic appendage of a fragmentary modernity. It details desire and traces of events, but never a unity, and in the end, justifies the travelling; it miniaturises the world. The inhuman metropolis is transformed into the photographer’s playground, full of fit subjects. The photographer, and I have in mind someone like the great French Photographer Cartier-Bresson, will say something like: “I prowled the streets, feeling very strung-up and ready to pounce, determine to trap life – to preserve life in the act of living’.
The conceit here is that the photograph is impersonal and so has a way of revelation, hence it taking over the ideological and journalistic fronts. Of course, the photographer must have the kind of eye to see where this ‘life in the act of living’ is taking place. The annoying response is: everywhere life abounds: you could not make it down your street without using up the roll, getting tired by all this life as it flits by so wantonly. Life in the act of living is really an aesthetic selection on the part of the photographer. It is with the camera that, despite the early fusses over whether you should “touch up” your images afterward and whether you understand the processes in the darkroom, modernity learned to look and think photographically – the vogue of the modernist photographers was that you should already have the image in your head before you take the photo; you just have to have the right eye to see it and the lens to capture it, and then there will appear an honest expression of life. This appears to be one of the main conclusions of the camera and the “photographic” mind: now the act of seeing can be one that can capture life honestly, instead of being tossed here and there with the inexplicable experience of the flow of time, you can cut off a little, freeze a moment and look at it time and time again. It is no wonder that the Surrealists ingratiated themselves with the medium. The photograph has something of the innocent about it: it appears that it cannot but tell the truth of a perception, of a moment. It acts to transcend the flow of time and leave a trace. It was, for the Surrealists, another form of automatism wherein a picture taken creates a past and reveals something hidden. This kind of fun is also a kind of distrust of reality (reality is not showing you everything); reality, for the photographer, now, is a web of hidden secrets and beauties, and potentially significant sights revealing and reflecting the self. The Surrealist camera-man had his antecedents in the nineteenth-century Flaneur, who flowed through the city relishing the continuous experience, it is only now with the camera that the Flaneur has become prey to discontinuous visions which the camera makes explicit. Most people who take photos, perhaps daily as the ease of picture-taking is obvious to all, although not participating in any kind of surrealist method, understand reality can be fragmented and meaningful and fun in those fragments.
And now we come back down to everyday living. We speak about our image-life and the images we see and then we speak about our life as lived experience, two very separate things – perhaps they are more intertwined, sometimes more in tune than not. Susan Sontag in one of her essays about photography (perhaps one of the first to begin a kind of “criticism” of photography) remarks that the great nineteenth century French writer Balzac had a terror of having his portrait taken, as he felt something akin to it stealing one of his “layers” of existence. Formally, or informally, a side of life becomes a series of portraits, whether asked for or not; Balzac’s horror holds some weight: there are times when an unexpected photo is existential theft. There is not much to be done, if you feel like Balzac, about the forced portraiture of our age – the formal ones feel very formal: the effect of formal portraiture is quite explicit when you look at your old yearbooks from school: some children love it, others shy away as if threatened, others accept their lot; it is the orders of the camera operator: Show those teeth, junior! – some of these reactions follow one through life. With the camera it is possible to bring out features of someone that they themselves could never see otherwise, that feel unreal to the person photographed, flattering or not. The amateur photographer begins by “training” themselves to see features in people that they find of interest, of worth, revealing – to say that the portrait discloses, discontinues, a feature of someone that is, in a way, in constant flux, shows that it reveals less than the truth of that person at that time, but rather an aestheticised version that no one can deny, that we have to, reluctantly or not, claim as ourselves.
Could there be some masking of the melancholic with this idea of fun? In the home, amongst the photo-albums that still abound despite the internet, or too with social media which reminds you to look at yourself from a year ago, you get the concentration of a life-lived. Not only of those now passed away, but the effect of time on oneself. This fateful progression speaks through those stamps of time no longer existent but contained in the frame. And these photos are imbued with something else that if one were to cut up, distort, montage-ify, it would seem a great act of disrespect and lunacy. In the portrait we see who a person thinks they are (how they would like to be observed), and who the photographer thinks they are; a cross between documentation and aesthetics. Through the photograph, the images we create, we survey ourselves constantly, document our phases, select and choose from time what we think we are, holding onto these moments despite knowing time will take it all away, and that, perhaps, we are not truly anywhere to be seen.
2.
There is an exceedingly beautiful close-up of a cabbage leaf taken in 1931 by the photographer Edward Weston. I happened to see a very similar image on the side of a Co-op food shop. At first glance, Weston’s photo could be other than what it is, like a model mountain ridge, or even a lavish gown thrown over a table – luckily, we have the caption. Of course, it isn’t as ambiguous on the Co-op, but they do wish to highlight an aesthetic, a beauty of form in the cabbage leaf. Painting has done much to expand our perception of what is beautiful, or what is complex and interesting, but it is with the realism of the camera that this expansion of perception flowered. The quickness of the camera to capture a slice of time, even from the beginning, meant a new surfeit of images, a new exploration in the realm of seeing. Once photography loosened its strange relationship with painting and struck out a new way into image creation, all kinds of perception became available: bird’s eye, close-ups, telescopic, microscopic etc. – humanity began to see, in the realism of a photograph what the world supposedly really is, but, perhaps unbeknownst to photographers and searchers of the beautiful and interesting, it has drawbacks.
Walter Benjamin, in his essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ speaks about the ‘desire of contemporary masses to bring things ‘closer’ spatially and humanly, which is just as ardent as their bent toward overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction’. Benjamin evokes something he calls the ‘aura’ of things, the ‘distance’ of reality from us which is essential to its uniqueness, which lent a sense of unity to things. This ‘bringing things closer’, symptomatic of the increased speed of mass society, allows for greater analysis of reality – this was shown when in the late nineteenth century Eadweard Muybridge compiled photos of motion (a man walking, a horse galloping), this entirely new way of seeing such automatisms of the body seemed entirely alien to someone walking to go see these photos. It is the same with film, it can highlight the extraordinary breadth of camera angles, close-ups etc., showing such automatisms of the body, of habit, that remain unconscious to us in the everyday flow of life. On the other side of this ‘greater analysis’, and ‘bringing closer’, we also find remoteness, loneliness, and alienation. Instant access to the ‘real’ through images has a feeling of depletion and separation from reality. It has been held an obvious truth, despite all that images offer us in the way of ‘true documentation’, that all this image-consumption is not vitalising, it even appears hateful at times (the bombardment of ads and frank lies).
Image-surfeit has reached a point where things we may think would have been a grand occasion – the first photo of a sun-set for example, have now entered a new phase. This is not to say that a photo, especially if it’s for a private store of memories with their associations, becomes hackneyed, but there is a sense that if you are taking a photo to take a photo then it is probably in search of something “new”, an odd angle, or some kind of experimentation with the image. Things that are measurements of time, such as a holiday sunset can go on “reels” as a passing footnote to an experience. There is, also, the parody – the ripping out of context and placing in other orders: Dadaist photo-montage, or Terry Gilliam’s work in those Monty Python interludes, are some examples. With the accessibility of the image now instant, and the ability to manipulate in whatever order, the image can keep entertaining new contexts, and they can be re-captioned: satirical, or fake news. We are, most of the time, very adept now at understanding all these things which if explained seem quite complex, image and meaning-wise; it amounts to meeting a reality, visually, that multiplies endlessly. It is undeniable despite any reservations about “truth”, that the photograph has the potential to possess the strongest emotions, something we cannot let go, a nostalgic groping for our own lives.
The Carl Kruse Arts Blog invites all to another exhibition and social gathering as part of its Underground Art series this time with German artist Michael Dyne Mieth.
Join us Saturday, November 25 starting at 6:30pm underneath the restaurant Papá Pane di Sorrento at Ackerstrasse 23, 10115 Berlin. Dyne will exhibit a collection of his works spanning his more than three decades as a painter. The exhibition space is part of the underground cellars of the 19th century building. Wine, unique finger foods, and a surprise guest DJ will enliven the evening, where a good group of Berlin professionals and artists will convene. The event is free and open to all, though an RSVP is requested to carl@alumni.princeton.edu.
Dyne is a painter, sculptor and multimedia artist living in Berlin, whose art is exhibited internationally and always attracts attention due to his visionary motives. Some of his work includes his massive “G18” in which he revisits and reimagines Picasso’s Guernica, which has forever inscribed itself in art history as an appeal for peace. G18 was exhibited along with Pablo Picasso’s original Guernica at the Imperial Hofburg Museum in Innsbruck during the anti-war exhibition GUERNICA – “Icon of Peace.”
For his monumental work , the Berlin artist drove across the canvas in a Lincoln Continental. John F Kennedy was in such a car when he was assassinated. With his interpretation of Picasso’s Guernica, the artist explores how close war and peace are to each other. The tire imprints represent the traces of devastation that bring chaos and destruction to people’s lives.
Reinterpretation, Vis-à-vis of Pablo Picasso’s original GUERNICA Gouache, in the original dimensions of 3.50 x 7.77 m, exhibited at the Museum of the Imperial Palace in Innsbruck.
Dyne was also selected by Cisco Systems to envision a work on sustainability for their innovation center openBerlin. He created a sculpture in the shape of a robot called “Recycle” from packaging material that is normally hazardous waste. Sensors in a bodysuit that Dyne wore saved the data of his movement as the work was created and later published as “the data of creativity” allowing viewers to immerse themselves in the artist’s world and understand what he did and how he did it.
We look forward to seeing you on November 25th for what will be a beautiful evening.
