Art and Extremism, East and West; R.I.P. Snapshots; Sugimoto's Homage to Duchamp
ART AND EXTREMISM, EAST AND WEST
Die Zeit's Jens Jessen reflects upon the explosive potential of images in the wake of the recent murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh by an Islamic extremist. "Art is not fun," writes Jessen. "At least not for everyone." Jessen links van Gogh's murder to the 1989 fatwa issued against Salman Rushdie after the publication of The Satanic Verses. "Now, as then, the Islamic extremists seeking deadly revenge did not accept the special status, the autonomy, of art." Yet the failure to respect art's autonomy cannot be attributed to religious or cultural differences. "Following from the same principle, there was last year's hysterical reaction by the citizens of Berlin to the proposed Red Army Faction exhibition [at the Berlin Kunste-Werke], which looked at the persistence of RAF symbols in popular culture," recalls Jessen. "Here, too, the exhibition's organizers were accused of minimizing terror [with art]. Under certain conditions, it seems that showing is understood as endorsing, the messenger as the author of the message." For Jessen, the problem lies in art's transformation of troubling historical and contemporary events into mere signs that are expected to offer pleasure. "As the Islamic extremists do not want to address the suppression of women, German society would not like to admit that the RAF, ritually condemned in the public realm, could, with its pictures and icons, become a general signifier of rebellion for youth culture."
R.I.P. SNAPSHOTS
Die Süddeutsche Zeitung's Harald Hordych says "goodbye to the blink of an eye." The rise of digital cameras is rapidly driving the snapshot—"the world's most beautiful product of chance"—to extinction. "This is a eulogy for analogue photography," writes Hordych. "Not for pictures by professionals or amateurs in the know . . . but for the quiet, unspectacular layman’s snapshot—that particular way of taking pictures that could only exist in analogue photography and, thank God, actually did exist as a mass phenomenon." The snapshot (the term, originally hunting lingo, was adopted by 19th-century photographers) becomes impossible with the technologies of the digital camera, Hordych asserts. "Laymen love digital cameras because they provide two possibilities that were not available in analogue photography: checking and repetition. Look and shoot—and try again. That did not work before. And that's precisely the reason why great snapshots could exist—pictures told a story that we often did not suspect as we were taking them. Only with the temporal distance between taking the picture and developing it could we recognize the small, private truths—the accidental images that captured the essence of an individual by registering a certain gesture, a certain way of placing oneself or looking at someone."
SUGIMOTO'S HOMAGE TO DUCHAMP
For his exhibition "Etant donné: le Grand Verre" at Paris's Fondation Cartier, Hiroshi Sugimoto puts a different historical spin on photography. Speaking with Libération's Brigitte Ollier, Sugimoto explains the thinking behind his homage to Marcel Duchamp, "a champion of irony" whose work could be appreciated "without knowledge or particular references." Inspired by the readymade, Sugimoto found his own in an unexpected place: at the University of Tokyo museum. There, Sugimoto fell upon a collection of scientific devices dating from the late 19th and early 20th centuries: small objects that were made for calculating mathematical formulas or measuring mechanical movements. "I wanted to photograph them as soon as I as saw them," says Sugimoto, who set up his studio in the middle of the museum and photographed the objets trouvés in a large-scale format. "I tried to work so that my prints would be in the silver gelatin and artisanal tradition of photography—simply beautiful, luminous and without tricks. If I could have had the same quality in an even larger format, I would have happily done it." Sugimoto tried to reflect Duchamp in the installation, which divides the mathematical objects from the mechanical ones. "Duchamp really changed our way of thinking about and looking at art," adds Sugimoto. "Art can arise without any a priori intention—maybe there is no better way." The exhibition continues until February 27, 2005.