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Finding a Visual Identity in the Digital Age | Ralph Gibson | TEDxFulbrightSantaMonica

#ralph gibson #research #art research #art photographer #photography #photography identity #youtube #ted talks #Youtube

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The Body

The human body has inspired artists throughout the ages – traditionally the body was often used to explore allegory, beauty and sexuality but in the twentieth century there was a significant shift in both how the body was perceived, and how it was used to create art. Use of the body, frequently the artist’s own body, as a medium is often associated with performance art. Performance art came to prominence in the 1960s and can be seen as a branch of conceptual art. Conceptual artists think beyond the use of traditional media and explore ideas in whatever materials or form is appropriate.

An important influence on the emergence of performance were the photographs of the abstract expressionist painter Jackson Pollock making his so-called ‘action paintings’, taken in 1950 by the photographer Hans Namuth. Pollock, with his canvas laying on his studio floor, dripped and poured household paint onto the surface. Throughout the 1950s artists such as Yves Klein continued to experiment with the application of paint, blurring the lines between painting and performance.

In his Anthropometries paintings (1960) Klein used the human body as a paint brush when naked women, smeared in paint, where pulled across large canvases creating abstract tracings of the human form. The element of performance in the creation of these works was further enhanced through an audience of spectators dressed in formal dinner-wear. While Klein, was known for developing new techniques and attitudes to art, others, such as those associated with Fluxus, had more overtly political agendas.

Joseph Beuys Coyote I

1980Joseph Beuys Coyote II

1980Bruce Nauman Changing Light Corridors with Rooms 1971

Prior to Beuys’s performance, the younger American artist Bruce Nauman was establishing himself as an early pioneer of performance art in the USA. Nauman used video and photography in works such as the Art Make-Up films (1967-8) and Self-Portrait as a Fountain (1966-7). In Self-Portrait as a Fountain, Nauman, investigates the role of the artist, making reference to Marcel Duchamp, using his body to physically replicate the sculpture Fountain 1917 (replica 1964). In Art Make-Up (1967-8) Nauman used his body to mask and erase his own identity through the application of different coloured make-up associating himself as actor taking on different guises and mutations. During the same period of the Art Make-Up films, Nauman also created his first corridor installation Performance Corridor (1968). Subsequent installations such as Changing Light Corridors with Rooms (1971) would similarly create claustrophobic and enclosed spaces. In these works Nauman transforms us into active participants who are nevertheless controlled and manipulated by his reconstruction of the gallery’s layout ehansing our own physical experience and spacial awareness.

The 'action' began as soon as the artist landed in the USA, when he was wrapped in felt in New York’s John F. Kennedy airport, and driven in an ambulance to René Block's Manhattan gallery. He spent three days in the gallery space with a coyote before being driven straight back to the airport and flown home. The coyote is significant because it is sacred to Native Americans, representing an aspect of the country's past which Beuys felt affection for. Each day of the 'action', he made two piles of the current Wall Street Journal. These would be duly torn or urinated on by the coyote – his statement on contemporary USA. Two works in the ARTIST ROOMS collection Coyote I (1980) and Coyote II (1980) reference items used in the action including a felt blanket and newspapers set in the room where the action took place. Beuys would often use felt in his actions and sculptures because of the materials insulating properties, which are integral to the meaning of the work. Beuys would also have a suit tailor made for him from felt, which he would use for the earlier performance Action the Dead Mouse / Isolation Unit (1970). Felt Suit (1970), one of Beuys’s many multiples, evokes the image of the artist almost as if a self portrait, despite the absence of the body.

While Nauman was investigating the role of the artist and various physiological states Gilbert & George were presenting themselves as sculptures at art schools and galleries in London. Dressed in suits, with their faces painted in metallic silver and gold they mimed and performed music-hall songs, making minimal robotic movements for up to eight hours. Realising that they could reach only a handful of people at a time, they began to create films and pictures that could extend the idea of living sculpture without requiring their physical presence. Performance pieces were recorded in photography, film and video, and these eventually became the primary means by which their performances reached a wider public. Like Beuys, Gilbert & George’s appearance would become an integral part of their work.

Charles Ray Plank Piece I-II 1973

Charles Ray was similarly thinking of sculpture as an activity rather than object when he created early photographic works such asPlank Piece I & II (1973) . In this photographic documentation of Ray, he is pinned against a wall with a plank of wood. Ray creates a minimal, graphic image that is at once humorous and unsettling. In Ray’s later works such as Oh Charley, Charley, Charley… (1992) he creates casts from his own body where the lifeless bodies allude to a sense of play in the artist’s absence.

The physical absence of the artist’s body is apparent in the work of Richard Long, who often creates art by walking in the landscape. The formative work A Line Made by Walking (1967) was created when Long was on his way home and he stopped in a field in Wiltshire. He then walked backwards and forwards until the flattened turf caught the sunlight and became visible as a line. Long photographed this work, recording his physical interventions within the landscape which underplay his own presence in the work.

Francesca Woodman Space 2, Providence, Rhode Island 1975

Francesca Woodman Space², Providence, Rhode Island, 1975-1978 1975

Francesca Woodman similarly created works which question the presence of the body while indicating a sense of life. A prolonged exposure technique creates a spectral blur of Woodman’s body giving her a ghostly presence in works such as Space², Providence, Rhode Island, 1975-1978 (1975-8). Woodman’s work often captured her in isolation, in dilapidated interiors, where her body is partially absent or obscured. She is both present and absent – her identity removed by the obscuring of her features.

Martin Creed Work No. 837 2007

The artist Martin Creed is not the performer in Work No. 837 (Sick Film) (2007), instead a series of young men and women walk on screen and vomit; Creed is exploring the human body and its processes. Much of Creed’s work is normally devoid of emotional content but in this case, the extremes the participants are pushed to, enhanced by the retching and choking, conjures discomfort in the spectator.  As well as Sick Film Creed also made similarly minimal films, which focused on basic human functions such as defecation and sexual intercourse – in each of these films the body is set against a stark and sterile background to focus our attention on these basic and yet highly private human functions.

Creed’s work provokes an emotive response because we are familiar with these basic functions – our memory of similar experiences can be distressing or negative. The American sound and video installation artist Bill Viola’s work is often emotional in a classical sense, recalling medieval or renaissance painting. The two works by Viola in ARTIST ROOMS: Four Hands (2001) and Catherine’s Room (2001) are from a series known as The Passions, which explores human emotions, inspired by early European devotional paintings. The bodies in these works perform rituals and gestures that accompany emotional states and relate to the cycles of nature.

Just as Viola uses fragmented body parts in works such as Four Hands concentrating the viewer on single body part or gesture the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe often zoomed in on single area once stating "I zero in on the body part that I consider the most perfect part in that particular model". In the work Derrick Cross (1983) the body’s core fills the frame. The arch of the body suggests movement while the draped fabric around the waist enhances the sense of performance and sculpture. Mapplethorpe, like Viola, also takes his inspiration from classical and renaissance art, however, emotion is overridden by the bodies’ physical perfection.

Douglas Gordon A Divided Self I and II 1996

The partial and fragmented body parts in Douglas Gordon’s A Divided Self I & II (1996) belong to the artist himself but this is not evident at first glance. The work consists of two screens; both showing two arms struggling with one another which appear to belong to two different people: one is hairy and the other, hairless. The fact that both arms belong to the artist illustrates a personal identity conflict. Gordon frequently uses his own body in his artwork often wrestling, constraining and disfiguring himself, manipulating his body making his audience aware of their own fugitive subjectivity, questioning how we give meaning to our experience of things and our relationship to ourselves.

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The Body Observed

Magnum photographers explore the body through images that examine a range of subjects from identity, intimacy, sexuality and ritual, to voyeurism and performance

Magnum Photographers

Herbert List Wrestling boys. At the Baltic Sea, Germany. 1933. © Herbert List | Magnum Photos

The exhibition The Body Observed, opening at the Sainsbury Centre of Visual Arts on 23 March, explores how the body has been looked at through the documentary lenses of 14 Magnum photographers, from the 1930s to the present day.

The exhibition is curated by the Sainsbury Centre in collaboration with Magnum Photos in response to the Sainsbury Centre’s extraordinary collection of European modern art – focused on the figurative in 20th Century modern art, as well as their significant early ethnographic collection of figurative objects from non-Western nations. Pablo Picasso, Edgar Degas, Francis Bacon, Jacob Epstein, Henry Moore, Alberto Giacometti and Amedeo Modigliani are all represented in the collection. A range of works from the Sainsbury Centre’s permanent collection will be exhibited alongside the photographic prints in the exhibition.

Werner Bischof "Zebra woman". Zurich. Switzerland. 1942. © Werner Bischof | Magnum Photos

The Body Observed considers the photographic representation of the human body, specifically in relation to the documentary photograph, and reflects upon how photographic representation both mimics and corrupts the tropes of figurative representation defined through the history of art, developing its own language through the medium’s unique position between utilitarian function and artistic application. In a multitude of ways, the camera has been used to express the body; to describe or suggest its function and form as well as metaphysical sensations; to gaze upon, objectify and categorize the body; and to view the body as a signifier for broader societal examination or reflection. Works presented in the exhibition explore thematics such as gaze, identity, intimacy, sexuality, voyeurism, ritual, and performance; drawing into focus the social and cultural structures that affect the representation of the human form.

Werner Bischof Nude. "Breast with grid." Zurich, Switzerland. 1941 © Werner Bischof | Magnum Photos

Werner Bischof "Nude back". Zurich, Switzerland. 1941. © Werner Bischof | Magnum Photos

Early studio works by Werner Bischof are an aesthetic ordering of form, as light and shadow falls on anonymous female torsos accentuating and hiding curves and features. After completing his artistic education in Switzerland under prominent members of the avant-garde, Bischof engaged in a search for beauty in pure form, as well as in nature. An interest in abstraction is present throughout Bischof’s early work, and here the body is photographed by display and omission, treated for its formal values as aesthetic object.

Custodians of a Desire: Herbert List’s Couples at the Beach

Herbert List

Herbert List Michelangelo's Slave, damaged plaster cast. Academy of Arts, Munich, Germany. Winter 1945 / 1946. © Herbert List | Magnum Photos

Herbert List "Amor II". Hammamet, Tunisia. 1934. © Herbert List | Magnum Photos

Photographs by Herbert List, made across Europe and the Mediterranean between 1933-1958, highlight his fascination with both photograph and sculpture, as well as with the interstitial space between the two. In the selection of works shown, the ancient world, is depicted through Classical sculpture in Greece and Germany, which appears to be animated by the myth of the sculptor Pygmalion, wherein he makes a statue so beautiful that he falls in love with it. After begging the goddess Aphrodite to bring him a wife as captivating as his statue, she instead, brings Pygmalion’s sculpture to life. Reading List’s images through this narrative, and taking into account the time in which they were made, as war raged across Europe, photographs reference the fragility of human form through its mortality. A melancholy runs through the work as we contrast the weathered and ancient sculptures, still standing, against the glistening and rippled torsos of young men, human flesh whilst gazed on in desire, is permeated by impermanence.

Herbert List Young man with laurel over the eyes. Athens. Greece. Circa 1936. © Herbert List | Magnum Photos

This idea of the fragility of form appears again in the late Tim Hetherington’s intimate portraits of soldiers asleep on tour in Afghanistan (‘Sleeping Soldiers’). The single figures in slumber, curled up on camp beds, bare of uniform, show the men depicted as individuals lost in repose; vulnerable, fallible, essentially human. While the figures are stripped of any exterior roles within a war zone, the war renders the calm bodies all the more exposed in this tender examination of masculinity.

Tim Hetherington Sergeant Elliot Alcantara sleeping. Korengal Valley, Kunar Province, Afghanistan. July 2008. © Tim Hetherington | Magnum Photos

In Philippe Halsman’s ‘Jumpology’ series, the body appears to be both subject, and obstacle to be coaxed. His photographs of male and female celebrities often incorporated elements of humor, play and performance. In the early 1950s, Halsman began to ask his subjects to jump for his camera at the conclusion of each sitting. In these uniquely witty and energetic images, the formal pose of the sitter falls away, and the subject loses a degree of control of their image. In each jump, Halsman’s subjects are photographed actively inhabiting their body, in all its energy, awkwardness, and imperfection.

Philippe Halsman | Jump Book. French actor and film director Jacques Tati. 1954. © Philippe Halsman | Magnum Photos

Philippe Halsman Actress Audrey Herburn. 1955. © Philippe Halsman | Magnum Photos

With a reputation for creating sensitive depictions of public figures, most notably Marilyn Monroe, in 1959, Eve Arnold was invited to photograph Joan Crawford, one of the few silent film stars who had weathered the advent of ‘talkies’ to become one of cinemas most lauded stars. A range of vintage prints in the exhibition from this series explore the female body in relation to aging and the cult of celebrity, whereby the female icon is measured by beauty and youth. Arnold focuses on the beauty rituals at Crawford’s home that preluded her public appearances, and here we see the work involved in the construction of this body image. Whilst the camera freezes the moment, the body continues to change with time and age.

A Public Image: Joan Crawford

Eve Arnold

Eve Arnold Joan Crawford, actress (USA), trying to remember her lines during a rehearsal at home. Behind her is Joan as she was in Mildred Pierce. California. 1959. © Eve Arnold | Magnum Photos

Eve Arnold Actress Joan Crawford. Los Angeles, California, USA. 1959. © Eve Arnold | Magnum Photos

Eve Arnold Actress Joan Crawford. Los Angeles, California. USA. 1959. © Eve Arnold | Magnum Photos

Further referencing the cult of the body, Bruce Gilden’s dynamic black and white images from Fashion Magazine each portray a performance for the camera. Gilden’s confronting style and punchy flash here record a fictional narrative. Models role-play hard-men and gangster’s mol’s at a Mafia funeral. Gilden frames his figures, and moves around his subjects, close-cropping to focus in on details – a shapely leg, a swinging hip, the female body fetishized and aestheticized bringing to life and adding allure to the clothing. There is also humour in his juxtapositions, a gazelle-like model towering above over an older woman on a sidewalk serves to emphasise the absurd, otherworldly nature of this particular kind of female beauty when encountered amongst the grit and grime of a New York sidewalk.

Bruce Gilden New York City, USA. 2005. © Bruce Gilden | Magnum Photos

Through the work of Susan Meiselas, Bieke Depoorter, Olivia Arthur, and Alessandra Sanguinetti, themes of gender, sexuality, gaze, and identity are explored. Olivia Arthur’s ‘In Private’ shows the body as a site for exploring gender and sexuality in India against the socio-political constraints imposed upon individuals. Arthur initially worked in Mumbai with sitters who identify themselves as being part of the LGBTQI+ community, a community that represents contemporary diversity in relation to sexuality and gender. From this starting point, the photographer expanded the range of subjects to engage with the wider topic of sexuality in all its forms. Capturing intimate exchanges between a couple lost in embrace against lone individuals looking in and out of the frame, gaze is ever present in this work. Denial of privacy and the implications of being seen inhabit the photographs that are installed hanging together in a tight cluster. As a viewer, one peers in from vantage points on these intimate moments, as Arthur questions privacy in a political context whereby one’s most intimate moments are under the scrutiny of law.

Olivia Arthur Indian fashion designer James Ferriera at his home in Kotachiwadi. Mumbai. India. 2016. © Olivia Arthur | Magnum Photos

Olivia Arthur Urmi Jadav, a transgender activist. Mumbai. India. 2016. © Olivia Arthur | Magnum Photos

Susan Meiselas’ ‘Carnival Strippers’ is considered an important work both within the history of photography and feminism. In the early 1970s, Meiselas spent her summers photographing and interviewing women who performed striptease as part of small town carnivals in the United States. Meiselas records the dynamics of performance, on stage and off, photographing both the subjects’ public performance and their private lives. In Meiselas’ portraits, the girls formally present themselves to her camera, posing, confronting. Throughout the work, there is an ever-present question about control; are the subjects (the girls) or the onlookers (the ‘customers’, the carnival barkers) in control? The female body here is neither simply the posed, silent nude or the exposed, naked self. The images of sexualized display are countered by the images made ‘behind the curtain’; the girls relaxing, climbing past one another, tidying. The body that is in one moment objectified, is in the next, domestic, ordinary. Work is the dominant theme. In the exhibition, the photographs are accompanied by an audio piece whereby the pomp of the carnival callers and racket of audience excitement is contrasted with the girls matter-of-fact talk about the realities of the job.

Susan Meiselas Shortie. Presque Isle, Maine, USA. 1973. © Susan Meiselas | Magnum Photos

Opening up the dynamic between photographer and subject, and between voyeur and object, is Bieke Depoorter’s ongoing work ‘Agata’. Agata, a young woman who Depoorter met in a strip bar one night during a moment of disillusion with photography, employs her body as a tool in performance. The two became friends and are recording the ongoing development of their relationship. As Depoorter follows her subject, she who was once a stranger is quickly transformed into a collaborator. Agata tentatively reveals her body to the camera, retreats into the night, lets her body fall softly onto furniture, the poise of performance removed. Integral to the display are Agata’s own handwritten reflections on the photographs: “I was creating myself anew for your camera. The everyday Agata behind the scenes. Not the one dancing in a strip club or performing violent acts during the techno parties.”

Night Walks with Agata

Bieke Depoorter

Bieke Depoorter Agata. Beirut, Lebanon. August 3, 2018. © Bieke Depoorter | Magnum Photos

The two women create a fascinating reflection on the complexities of representation of both people and bodies, dually exploring how Agata perceives and presents herself, and how we as viewers read her through Depoorter’s images. Questioning the promise of the photograph, as a mode of delivering both truths and deceptions, Depoorter and Agata seem to ask: as they become closer does this record become truer? Do they portray the ‘real Agata’, or merely another version of Agata?

Bieke Depoorter Agata. November 4, 2017. Paris. France © Bieke Depoorter | Magnum Photos

Bieke Depoorter Agata. Paris, France. November 4, 2017. © Bieke Depoorter | Magnum Photos

Alessandra Sanguinetti’s The Adventures of ‘Guille and Belinda’ is a study of two girls as they transition from childhood to adulthood. Sanguinetti sought to portray the psychological and physical transformations of these girls as they matured into adults. Referencing an array of images from the Madonna icon to John Everett Millais’ classic ‘Ophelia’, and drawing on a tradition of magical realism, Sanguinetti casts the girls in their own imagined scenarios, capturing them coming to grips with their gender, sexuality and body identity.

Alessandra Sanguinetti Ophelias. Buenos Aires. Argentina. 2001. © Alessandra Sanguinetti | Magnum Photos

Cristina Garcia Rodero has long been documenting the rituals, festivals, and traditions of Spain and Mediterranean Europe. Her monograph, Espana Occulta (Hidden Spain), examines the religious festivals and pilgrimages of the country: individuals and crowds engaging in religious display and offering. The body here is both symbol and sanctuary, it is the physical properties of flesh and blood that house the non-physical entity of spirit. Garcia Rodero documents (amongst others) the Fiestas de Santa Marta de Ribarteme (or the Near Death Festival), in which those who have cheated death in the past year are carried in coffins in procession, making for surreal images of the living masquerading as the dead. In other images, masked figures pause by roadsides, appearing as strange icons or omens. Garcia Rodero’s haunting body of work reflects on ceremonial transformation, the sacrificial body, mortality, and belief.

Cristina Garcia Rodero The sleeping soul. Pilgrimage of Nuestra Senora de los Milagros de Saavedra. Galicia, Spain. 1981. © Cristina Garcia Rodero | Magnum Photos

Cristina Garcia Rodero Heads of wax. Pilgrimage of Santo Cristo de la Agonia de Xende. Galicia, Spain. 1977. © Cristina Garcia Rodero | Magnum Photos

Cristina Garcia Rodero The mystery of the wood. San Pedro de Lincora. Galicia, Spain. 1993. © Cristina Garcia Rodero | Magnum Photos

Alec Soth is a chronicler of people and place, through poetic reflection. Niagara, featured here, explores the famed honeymoon destination on the US-Canadian border. Against the grandeur of the falls themselves, Soth’s subjects are lost in their dreams and aspirations; their ideas of how their romantic couplings will grow and transform into interwoven lives. Nudes, bodies honestly depicted with all their imperfections, markings, and various sizes and forms are the signs of the realities of lives lived and lives paired, just as much as the faded motels and the unraveled love letters. We look at the bodies shown to us and examine their physicalities, as if their physical appearance can help us understand their compatibility, their chance at making romance last.

Revisiting Alec Soth’s Niagara

Alec Soth

Alec Soth Happiness Inn. Canada. 2005. © Alec Soth | Magnum Photos

Alec Soth Jennifer and Terrell. Canada. 2005. © Alec Soth | Magnum Photos

Expression of the living body; of flesh, bodily fluids, sensation is present in the works of both Miguel Rio Branco and Antoine d’Agata, who close the exhibition. Rio Branco’s Silent Book, depicts scenes of bodies and spaces at night, exploring contemporary Latin American identity. Physique is emphasized in anonymous bodies, highlighted by artificial light and sweat, the physical exertion of visceral and sensual lone figures are viewed under the provocative veil of the night. Antoine d’Agata’s art is one of sensation, an exploration of the living flesh, not static before his lens but moving, convulsing, experiencing, living. Here, d’Agata is in dialogue with Francis Bacon, the six works by the French photographer shown with Francis Bacon’s ‘Two Figures In A Room’.

Miguel Rio Branco Havana, Cuba. 1994. © Miguel Rio Branco | Magnum Photos

Miguel Rio Branco Training at the "Academia Santa Rosa Boxing Club". © Miguel Rio Branco | Magnum Photos

On Bacon’s work, Gilles Deleuze wrote: “The painting is composed like a circus ring, a kind of amphitheater as ‘place’. It is a simple technique that consists in isolating the Figure (.…) The important point is they do not consign the Figure an immobility but (….) an exploration of the Figure within the place, or upon itself.”

The same could perhaps be said of d’Agata’s oeuvre. The works are fluid, with one foot in vice and one in pleasure, the image less a record of performance but a mark made by flesh, sensation, abjection.

Antoine d’Agata Phnom Penh. Cambodia. 2008. © Antoine d’Agata | Magnum Photos

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#research #art research #photography #nature #environmental portrait #articles

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Alex Majoli on Artists and the Rewards of Environmental Portraiture

The photographer discusses environmental portraiture, responding to and reflecting a subject's mood and work, and the rewards of meeting artists in their own studios

Alex Majoli Wall in the studio of artist Ellsworth Kelly.(Photo by Alex Majoli and Daria Birang.) Spencertown, NY. USA. 2012. © Alex Majoli | Magnum Photos

At 15, Alex Majoli joined the F45 bottega in Ravenna, Italy, working as an apprentice under Daniele Casadio. “I grew up in the studio, which specialized in art reproduction,” Majoli recalls. “Many times my master asked me to go to the studios of the artists while they were working to complete the catalogues. I learned that the place where one should take a picture of an artist is in their studio.”

The wisdom that an artist might best be understood situated within the environs in which they create has served Majoli extraordinarily well over the years. Although not primarily a portrait photographer, Majoli’s sensitivity to the complex interplay between his subjects’ inner worlds and outer lives has made him a gifted portraitist of leading contemporary artists.

In the new book Magnum Artists: Great Photographers Meet Great Artists, the title’s author and editor Simon Bainbridge brings together portraits by Magnum members of more than 100 of the most innovative artists of the past century. From Edward Steichen, Man Ray, and Marcel Duchamp to William Eggleston, Nan Goldin, and Naim June Paik, Magnum Artists offers an intimate look at a diverse array of men and women who have transformed the course of Western art.

Alex Majoli Floor of the studio of Ron Gorchov.(Photo by Alex Majoli and Daria Birang.) Brooklyn, NY. USA. 2012. © Alex Majoli | Magnum Photos

Majoli’s environmental portraits reveal the collaborative nature of his approach and the importance of developing a space for mutual engagement between artist and sitter in the creative process. Whether photographing with Marina Abramović, Yayoi Kusama, Shirin Neshat, Ron Gorchov, James Rosenquist, Sophia Calle, Carrie Mae Weems, or Ellsworth Kelly, Majoli possesses the ability to distill the essence of each artist to reveal the space where mind, spirit, and body become one.

Majoli approaches each of his subjects from a place of discovery. He follows no template or technique, preferring to allow his subjects and the environment to inform the shape the portrait will take. “If you go to an established photographer, the sitter knows they are going to look fantastic and great, and the result has already been written before they take a picture,” Majoli says. “The artists saw my photography, and some of my conceptual work. They were excited because maybe they didn’t know what I would come up with. Sometimes they would be skeptical, but they were also intrigued and interested in being more experimental.”

Alex Majoli Sophie Calle in her house. Paris. France. May 2011. © Alex Majoli | Magnum Photos

For Majoli, dialogue is a critical part of the portrait process, be it through a conversation or shared activities. “Even when I have my camera in front of a person, the person can collaborate with me by suggesting a set-up they would like to try,” he says. “We go from there to another place — that is the best part: just to be free to express ourselves. It has to be a picture of two people, not only one. Then the cross-over of two personalities materializes in the work.”

The results are a series of portraits that stand at the intersection of two creative minds, allowing each portrait to stand apart from one another by offering a unique, often-unexpected insight into the spirit of the subject. Majoli’s portraits of Sophie Calle made for La Repubblica in 2011 depict extraordinary scenes of the French writer, photographer, installation and conceptual artist in her home and studio, a space as eccentric as the woman herself. Located in Malakoff, a suburb south of Paris where Calle has lived and worked since 1979, the studio has transformed from a warehouse-like space into what she describes as a “zoo of taxidermy,” featureing a tiger, giraffe, peacock, monkey, foxes, and two large bull’s heads, which appear in one of Majoli’s portraits. “Sophie Calle’s a collector. Her work is all about collection investigations that are less pictorial and all about thinking,” Majoli observes. “You can fall in love with any man or woman, any artist you photograph, because they are so brilliant of mind.”

Alex Majoli Sophie Calle in her house. Paris. France. May 2011. © Alex Majoli | Magnum Photos

"It has to be a picture of two people, not only one. Then the cross-over of two personalities materializes in the work."

- Alex Majoli

Alex Majoli Shirin Neshat, an Iranian visual artist, she is known primarily for her work in film, video and photography. In her house in NYC. NYC. USA. 2009. © Alex Majoli | Magnum Photos

Alex Majoli Shirin Neshat, an Iranian visual artist, she is known primarily for her work in film, video and photography. In her house in NYC. NYC. USA. 2009. © Alex Majoli | Magnum Photos

Similarly, Majoli’s 2009 portraits of the Iranian visual artist Shirin Neshat evoke her visual language: renowned for investigating the dialects of binary thinking that inform our notions of East and West, feminine and masculine, public and private, and present and past. “Shirin Neshat is so beautiful, fragile, and silent. She was dressed in black with painted eyes that reminded me of a cat,” Majoli recalls. “Her home was a minimal place in Soho [in New York] with beautiful light. I tried to [create some] symbiosis and translate what I saw. I entered her place: it was white, she was dressed in black, and the work is black and white. It came naturally to do what I did there.”

Alex Majoli Shirin Neshat, an Iranian visual artist, she is known primarily for her work in film, video and photography. In her house in NYC. NYC. USA. 2009. © Alex Majoli | Magnum Photos

Alex Majoli Performance artist Marina Abramovic. Rome. Italy. 2005. © Alex Majoli | Magnum Photos

It was a very different encounter compared to Majoli’s experience photographing Marina Abramović for American Vogue when the “grandmother of performance art” was living in Rome in 2005. “That was a more glamorous shoot. There was a stylist on the set who came with some cutting-edge clothes. We spent a day together and had fun. She is a performer and this was evident on the shoot. I was thinking more about the glamour side than the artist side when I took those pictures. We walked through Rome and she was ringing bells at her friends’ homes asking, ‘Can we take a picture here?’ She also wanted kitsch: an image of her on a Vespa in front of the Colosseum, which was all her idea. I am not really into that,” Majoli says with a laugh. “The others were much more of a collaboration.”

Alex Majoli Artist James Rosenquist in his studio. (Photo by Alex Majoli and Daria Birang.) Spring Hill, FA. USA. 2012. © Alex Majoli | Magnum Photos

Majoli is adept in dealing with strong personalities, recognizing that within their expression something deeper reveals itself, as is the case in his 2012 portrait of American artist James Rosenquist. Majoli met the early proponent of Pop Art in his Florida studio half a century after his first solo exhibition and inclusion in the landmark ‘New Realists’ show at Sidney Janis Gallery where his work appeared alongside Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Claes Oldenburg’s.

“You don’t do so much with Rosenquist — he is a volcano of energy,” says Majoli. In an explanation of the intent, demanding look on Rosenquist’s face, he remembers, “He was cracking jokes from the first moment of the day, and even making jokes about how his studio burned down years before all his work caught on fire. He was so immersed in what he was doing, I had to ask, ‘Can you stop for a second? Really. I need to take a picture.’ He said, ‘Yeah come on take the picture. I have to paint.’”

“I asked him what he thought about [another artist’s] work that seemed to copy his in a certain way,” Majoli continues, “and he said, ‘You know Alex, everybody has a mother. My mother oversaw me when I was young to wake up early in the morning and work hard. His mother says, ‘Wake up the morning and copy James Rosenquist.’” Majoli laughs, delighted at the memory of Rosenquist’s unquenchable pith. “I’m so glad I met these people. What a privilege!”

Alex Majoli Wall in the studio of artist Ellsworth Kelly.(Photo by Alex Majoli and Daria Birang.) Spencertown, NY. USA. 2012. © Alex Majoli | Magnum Photos

A striking counterpoint to that rollicking meeting was the time Majoli spent with American painter, sculptor, and printmaker Ellsworth Kelly in the artist’s 20,000-square-foot Spencertown studio in upstate New York in 2012. By this time, Kelly — best known for his hard-edge, minimalist works made in the Color Field style during the mid 20thcentury — was in his late 80s. There, Majoli’s approach to portraiture was just as pared back as the works of the artist himself, encapsulating Kelly’s simple color palette that underscores the geometry of forms.

“Ellsworth Kelly is shy, completely gentle, and really calm. He uses crutches and usually needs to be seated, but was walking around the studio with his oxygen tank, which he had taken off for the photograph. He gave me a lot,” Majoli says. “I love that picture. It’s not really the standard image someone would take or publish. It was dark and he was backlit, but I saw something, and I asked, ‘Can you stop, please?’ He gave me all the time and was super sweet.”

Alex Majoli Wall in the studio of artist Ellsworth Kelly. (Photo by Alex Majoli and Daria Birang.) Spencertown, NY. USA. 2012. © Alex Majoli | Magnum Photos

Alex Majoli Sketch in the studio of artist Ellsworth Kelly. (Photo by Alex Majoli and Daria Birang.) Spencertown, NY. USA. 2012. © Alex Majoli | Magnum Photos

Despite the differences of subject, style, medium, and approach among the many artists Majoli met and photographed, he discovered they all shared the same passion to create. “It was a lesson that made me realize the market side is a completely different world,” he says. “Yayoi Kusama, I think she doesn’t even know what they are doing with the paintings, she just does them. As an artist… you wake up in the morning and do what you feel. They keep the flame of creativity focused on the art, rather than how much money they could make with it. I feel like even if they got $1 a day, they would have the same passion and dedication. I am sure — I saw that.”

Alex Majoli Artist and writer Yayoi Kusama's Shinjuku studio. Throughout her career she has worked in a wide variety of media, including painting, collage, scat sculpture, performance art, and environmental in (...) 

Alex Majoli Artist and writer Yayoi Kusama's Shinjuku studio. Throughout her career she has worked in a wide variety of media, including painting, collage, scat sculpture, performance art, and environmental in (...) 

Alex Majoli Artist and writer Yayoi Kusama in her Shinjuku studio. Throughout her career she has worked in a wide variety of media, including painting, collage, scat sculpture, performance art, and environment (...)

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Arnold Newman’s ‘environmental portraits’ were revolutionary. Pushing the boundaries of traditional portrait photography during the middle of the 20th century, Newman believed that to create a truly insightful portrait, every aspect of the image had to be considered. Uninspired by plain studio backdrops, the artist sought to articulate the sitter’s life and work through the environment in which he photographed them.

Newman’s career began in 1938, when he started experimenting with his own documentary photography, while working in various portrait studios across Philadelphia, Baltimore and West Palm Beach. By the end of 1941, Newman’s name had infiltrated the New York art scene. Quickly gaining recognition for his portraits of famous sitters, particularly artists, he soon began working for publications such as Fortune, LIFE and Harper’s Bazaar.

Noted for his ‘environmental portraits’, Newman photographed his subjects in settings which reflected their profession and captured them in situ – from Jackson Pollock in his studio, to Arthur Miller pictured backstage at the theatre. One of the artist’s most known photographs pictures the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky sitting at a grand piano. In this portrait, the object of the sitter’s profession takes centre stage, nearly filling the image, while Stravinsky himself takes a seat in the corner.

Newman’s choice of a white background, along with his use of black and white film and angle, all work together to subtly nod towards the sitter’s character and profession. He stages the image in a way which causes the lid of the piano loses its depth, taking the form of an abstract shape which closely resembles a music note. The music note dramatically looms over the composer, embodying Stravinsky’s life’s work.

Newman said of his sitters, “it is what they are, not who they are, that fascinates me”. In this portrait, the sitter and his profession merge. Through his ‘environmental portrait’, Newman creates an image which visualises the scale of Stravinsky’s talent and fame.

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Opinion Art and Nature

JOHN-PAUL STONARD

Art can only ever express the distance between humans and the natural world

Fan Kuan, Travellers among Mountains and Streams c.1000, ink on silk hanging scroll, 206.3 x 103.3 cm

The Collection of National Palace Museum, Taipei

Picasso was right. No matter how naturalistic a work of art, it is always more about art than nature. Works of art show our sense of being apart from the natural world, our stubborn sense of difference from other animals and the the universe in which we find ourselves.

Landscape paintings made in China around the 900s are among the first great poetic statements of this sense of apartness. Fan Kuan’s hanging- scroll painting Travellers among Mountains and Streams, the most famous of this school, shows the ‘unendurable contrast’, as the poet and translator Arthur Waley put it, between the human and natural worlds. Vast cliffs swamp the human world, tiny figures lost in the ink-drawn landscape.

It was an idea taken up in European art many centuries later – a sense that nature was beyond human control. I love James Ward’s great, glowering painting Gordale Scar 1812–14, in Tate’s collection, but it does nothing to rid you of your deep sense of fear when actually approaching the towering cliffs in the Yorkshire Dales, or to calm your racing heart when scrambling up the dangerous limestone cleft, an ascent both terrifying and impossible to resist. Only at the top, lying exhausted out on the quiet, windswept plateau, is it possible to think of Ward’s painting once again.

Art is constantly driven by the attempt to bridge the apartness of humans and the world. It always fails. In the 20th century, this pursuit became a matter of finding an equivalent not for the appearance, but for the invisible forces of nature. How might you show processes of growth, decay or gravity in art? These are just as much ‘nature’ as a tree in the field. ‘Art imitates nature in her manner of operation’, in the words of the art historian Ananda Coomaraswamy in his 1934 book The Transformation of Nature in Art. This tradition of thought was brilliantly summarised by Clement Greenberg in his essay from 1961 ‘On the Role of Nature in Modern Painting’. He describes how impressionist artists tried to resolve all conflict between art and nature by bringing painting to the verge of abstraction, but it was for the cubists to realise what this meant: ‘When Braque and Picasso stopped trying to imitate the normal appearance of a wineglass and tried instead to approximate, by analogy, the way nature opposed verticals in general to horizontals in general – at this point art caught up with a new conception and feeling of reality that was already emerging in general sensibility as well as in science’. Perhaps this was when Picasso first conceived his ‘not nature’ definition of art.

Ward’s Gordale Scar now seems prophetic of how this feeling of reality has become, in our own times, so dark and dangerous. John Ruskin was among the first to realise that man had ‘desacrilised’ nature, as he put it, viewing it as a source of raw materials to be exploited, emptying it of its mystery. It is no longer simply a feeling of apartness, but also a sense that we own and control nature. But art shows us that we do not. We have laboratories where we recreate the birth of stars. Art is a record of our changing encounter with nature, and reveals the truth that our sense of separation is mere illusion — we are a tiny part of a greater whole. Art ‘cannot stand in competition with nature’, Hegel once wrote, ‘and if it tries it looks like a worm trying to crawl after an elephant’.

John-Paul Stonard is a writer and art historian. He is currently writing a book telling the story of art, from Palaeolithic to the present day, for Bloomsbury.

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People use art to help their well-being but also to draw attention to societal changes and issues. The combination of art and nature allows people to explore the natural world, create more profound meaning for themselves, and connect people through understanding and viewing their artwork. This article will discuss the importance of integrating art and nature and how various artists used nature to inspire them.

Throughout time, artists have used nature as a muse or motivation for creating different forms of art. Nature can provide endless forms of inspiration, and it can be a critical theme in many forms of artwork. Henry Matisse said, “An artist must possess nature. He must identify himself with her rhythm, by efforts that will prepare the mastery which will later enable him to express himself in his own language.” Artists use nature to express themselves but also to understand their work and themselves on a deeper level. To do this, artists may even use nature within their creations, such as wood, clay, water, and graphite, which are all-natural mediums.

There has also been some research done on the importance of art and nature to the well-being of others. Thomson et al. (2020) found that creative green prescription programs, which combine arts- and nature-based activities, can significantly impact the psychosocial well-being of adult mental health service clients. They recommended that museums with parks and gardens blend programs to incorporate nature, art, and well-being. Kang et al. (2021) found that nature-cased group art therapy positively affects siblings of children with disabilities. This type of art therapy increased their resistance to disease and their self-esteem while alleviating stress.

The Jan Van Eyck Academy in the Netherlands has opened a lab for artists to do their own nature research. They created a facility to support woodworking, printmaking, photography, video, and metalwork while allowing artists to explore their work and relationship with nature. This lab gives the artists a chance to consider nature in various ways, including its relation to ecological and landscape development issues to begin to bridge a gap between humankind, nature, and art. There needs to be more scientific research on the importance of nature and art; however, we see that artists are already beginning to research how nature affects their work and overall mindset.

How have artists used nature in their work?

Renowned artist Vincent van Gogh, was able to bring aspects of nature to life in his paintings. His work has allowed people to understand nature in different forms and bring people together. A recent exhibit of his work brought people together for a visual and thrilling experience.

Photos taken at the Immersive Van Gogh Exhibit Chicago from Sam Iwinski 2021

Nature also inspires modern artists, such as Mary Iverson, who draws inspiration from the natural beauty around her. Her paintings offer a contemporary spin on traditional landscape art, and she uses monuments, national parks, and societal issues (like climate change) as inspiration. She began addressing climate change in her art because she wanted to combine her environmental activism and painting interests.

Another modern artist, Miranda Lloyd, creates contemporary abstract nature art, such as trees, birds, and other naturalistic nature scenes. She uses inspiration from her own backyard and paints many scenes that are inspired by the sea. Miranda is an excellent example of how you can be inspired by nature within and outside of your home. 

Additionally, items from nature can be used to create new forms of art. Renowned artist Daniel Poppercreates larger-than-life sculptures, and many of them are designed with forms of nature. He currently has an outdoor exhibit at the Morton Arboretum in Lisle, IL, called “Human+Nature.” This exhibit connects people and trees through sculptures and other forms of art. As stated on the Morton Arboretum’s website, “People rely on trees for clean air to breathe, shade to cool, and beauty that can bring joy and relaxation, among many other benefits. In turn, trees need people to care for them to thrive and share their benefits, especially in a changing climate.” Individuals can begin to reimagine their relationships with trees as they explore these large-scale artworks. Below are a few pictures from his exhibit!

Photos taken at the Morton Arboretum from Sam Iwinski 2021

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There seems to be a close relationship between nature and art. Nature has become a central theme in many famous artists’ artworks. Nature has proven to be one of the most treasured muses known to man. It provides endless inspiration to artists, where they can bring life to nature in their paintings. Many famous artists like Van Gogh and Monet celebrated nature in their artworks. Nature in art is glorified for its sublime and picturesque manifestation on canvas. It is cherished for its intricacy and beauty. 

Some philosophers including Aristotle lauded that art can mimic nature. It embodies as a true reflection of the artist’s inner soul. Aristotle even once wrote that “Art not only imitates nature but also completes its deficiencies”. This can be interpreted as art not only recreating the natural world but also creating new ways in which to see it in another light. In other words, art is the missing voice of what nature lacks to speak. Here’s a look at some beautiful artwork that can mesmerize one’s soul and convey a sense of deeper thoughts and perspective.

BUDDHA BY PARTHA MONDAL

The idea offered by nature is endless. It is seen as a way to appreciate nature and bring out the complex human connection to nature. From time immemorial artists and poets have connected nature to human characteristics and mood. Earlier artists used art as a medium to bring out the spirituality in nature. They portrayed every landscape, flower, and insect with a touch of divinity, which was largely attained by the use o light and shade. Art was also a way to explore the world of nature. It brought out the beauty and importance of nature. Many artists portray nature as realistically as possible, which led to the emergence of many movements surrounding art. 

Photorealism to abstraction, nature is depicted in every art style. Art movements like Tonalism, naturalism, Plein air, Danube school, and Ecological art were based solely on nature and the natural world.

 FOREST STREAM BY SUJATA JOSHI

Landscape Paintings depict natural scenery in art, which is why it is also referred to as nature paintings. Artists have been enamoured by the beauty of nature and have tried to capture nature in all her glory through beautiful landscape paintings. Traditionally, landscape art depicts the surface of the Earth, but there are other sorts of landscapes that are also depicted extensively in art, such as moonscapes, skyscapes, seascapes among others.

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Inside the White Cube - The Ideology of the Gallery Space - Brian O'Doherty - Introduction by Thomas McEvilley - The Lapis Press Santa Monica San Francisco

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The White Cube

“The ideal form of the gallery as a white cube is inseparable from the artworks exhibited inside it.” (O’Doherty, 1986)

The white cube is a content analysis proposal that involves ideological implications that address the issue of the spectator’s place in new spaces of the spatial exhibition, an aesthetic that came to define the idea of ​​space in an art gallery. The proposal focuses on the intense relationship between space and visitors.

The white cube display model should have even walls and discreet artificial lighting with a modern design, a space undisturbed by time.

The author Grespan (2015) explains that the interior must be completely white and aimed to abolish any perceptual connection or reality, creating an almost religious atmosphere in which time and space are excluded. This neutrality focused on concentrating the viewer on individual masterpieces, without anything interfering with the experience. The museum visitor in an aseptic space, with little human presence (a space where the reception and bathroom are so hidden), theoretically should free the public from the sensation of being observed, promoting a personal connection with the works of art. With this lack of “real life” connections, the viewer would be drawn into a reflective mode.

One of the most significant moments in the history of the exhibition, in the opinion of McDemott (2015), was the expansion of the white cube method, a term as already mentioned conceived by the art critic and artist Brian O’Derthy, who, in the 1970s, was claiming due to the growing movements of “institutional criticism”. Institutional critique began in the late 1960s when artists began to create art in response to institutions that purchased and exhibited their work. In the 1960s, the art institution was often branded as a place of “cultural confinement” and therefore something to attack.

The white cube is to be experienced in a neutral space without any distractions so that it could affect its task of self-assessment. The spectator himself was passive and alienated in the sacredness of the gallery space.

In his influential essay Inside the White Cube Brian O’Dherty (1986) provides an extensive and provocative analysis of the history and operation of the white cube. Using rich, often sarcastic language, unfolding the white gallery’s layers of time, interests, and intentions. The author carefully dismantles the myth of the neutrality of the gallery space. His narrative goes through the space that is considered neutral to the context, to their proliferation, at times, it seems that he considers the white cube as a long farewell to modernism.

Elements of criticism became more common according to Gelburd (2015) in the 1980s, during the period of “deconstruction” that was part of postmodernism. This critique concluded that many aspects of Western culture made the white cube an almost unconscious element, an unexamined assumption, thought to convey and reflect certain values ​​of the art displayed there.

Art, largely abstract, was often thought to transcend the specifics of any culture, to engage a universal audience through universal forms. The post-war world and American hegemony seem to lend credibility to this “universal” approach in many areas, including art and its exhibition. In the 1970s, the white cube was no longer apprehended as a context; it was just the way the art was shown (Bright, 2015).

Brian O’Dherty explains that gallery space is not a neutral concept, but a historic building. Furthermore, it is an aesthetic object in itself. The ideal shape of the white cube that modernism developed for the gallery space is inseparable from the works displayed inside. The white cube not only conditions but also subdues the artworks themselves. The white cube is conceived as a context-free place, where time and social space are considered excluded from the experience of artworks. It is only through the apparent neutrality of appearing outside everyday life and politics that the works inside the white cube can seem self-sufficient — only by being freed from historical time can they achieve their aura of timelessness (Sheikh, 2009).

O’Dherty and others like Brightt (2015) reminded us that no space is neutral, that all situations and environments affect art and, conversely, how spaces are experienced. It could be argued that the white cube space is now the “traditional” space for viewing art. It is certainly the most common art produced in the last century.

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INSIDE THE WHITE CUBE: NOTES ON THE GALLERY SPACE, PART I

A RECURRENT SCENE IN SCI-FI movies shows the earth withdrawing from the spacecraft until it becomes a horizon, a beachball, a grapefruit, a golf ball, a star. With the changes in scale, responses slide from the particular to the general. The individual is replaced by the race and we are a pushover for the race—a mortal biped, or a tangle of them spread out below like a rug. From a certain height people are generally good. Vertical distance encourages this generosity. Horizontality doesn’t seem to have the same moral virtue. Far away figures may be approaching and we anticipate the insecurities of encounter. Life is horizontal, just one thing after another, a conveyer belt shuffling us toward the horizon. But history, the view from the departing spacecraft, is different. As the scale changes, layers of time are superimposed and through them we project perspectives with which to recover and correct the past. No wonder art gets bollixed up in this process; its history, perceived through time, is confounded by the picture in front of your eyes, a witness ready to change testimony at the slightest perceptual provocation. History and the eye have a profound wrangle at the center of this “constant” we call tradition.

All of us are now sure that the glut of history, rumor and evidence we call the modernist tradition is being circumscribed by a horizon. Looking down, we see more clearly its “laws” of progress, its armature hammered out of idealist philosophy, its military metaphors of advance and conquest. What a sight it is—or was! Deployed ideologies, transcendent rockets, romantic slums where degradation and idealism obsessively couple, all those troops running back and forth in conventional wars. The campaign reports that end up pressed between boards on coffee-tables give us little idea of the actual heroics. Those paradoxical achievements huddle down there, awaiting the revisions that will add the avant-garde era to tradition or, as we sometimes fear, end it. Indeed tradition itself, as the spacecraft withdraws, looks like another piece of bric-a-brac on the coffee-table—no more than a kinetic assemblage glued together with reproductions, powered by little mythic motors and sporting tiny models of museums. And in its midst, one notices an evenly lighted “cell” that appears crucial to making the thing work: the gallery space.

The history of modernism is intimately framed by that space. Or rather the history of modern art can be correlated with changes in that space and in the way we see it. We have now reached a point where we see not the art but the space first. (A cliché of the age is to ejaculate over the space on entering a gallery.) An image comes to mind of a white, ideal space that, more than any single picture, may be the archetypal image of 20th-century art. And it clarifies itself through a process of historical inevitability usually attached to the art it contains.

The ideal gallery subtracts from the artwork all cues that interfere with the fact that it is “art.” The work is isolated from everything that would detract from its own evaluation of itself. This gives the space a presence possessed by other spaces where conventions are preserved through the repetition of a closed system of values. Some of the sanctity of the church, the formality of the courtroom, the mystique of the experimental laboratory joins with chic design to produce a unique chamber of esthetics. So powerful are the perceptual fields of force within this chamber that, once outside it, art can lapse into secular status—and conversely. Things become art in a space where powerful ideas about art focus on them. Indeed the object frequently becomes the medium through which these ideas are manifested and proffered for discussion—a popular form of late modernist academicism (“ideas are more interesting than art”). The sacramental nature of the space becomes clear, and so does one of the great projective laws of modernism: as modernism gets older, context becomes content. In a peculiar reversal, the object introduced into the gallery “frames” the gallery and its laws.

A gallery is constructed along laws as rigorous as those for building a medieval church. The outside world must not come in, so windows are usually sealed off. Walls are painted white. The ceiling becomes the source of light. The wooden floor is polished so that you click along clinically or carpeted so that you pad soundlessly, resting the feet while the eyes have at the wall. The art is free, as the saying used to go, “to take on its own life.” The discreet desk may be the only piece of furniture. In this context a standing ashtray becomes almost a sacred object, just as the firehose in a modern museum looks not like a firehose but an esthetic conundrum. Modernism’s transposition of perception from life to formal values is complete. This, of course, is one of modernism’s fatal diseases.

Unshadowed, white, clean, artificial, the space is devoted to the technology of esthetics. Works of art are mounted, hung, scattered for study. Their ungrubby surfaces are untouched by time and its vicissitudes. Art exists in a kind of eternity of display, and though there is lots of “period” (late modern), there is no time. This eternity gives the gallery a limbolike status; one has to have died already to be there. Indeed the presence of that odd piece of furniture, your own body, seems superfluous, an intrusion. The space offers the thought that while eyes and minds are welcome, space-occupying bodies are not—or are tolerated only as kinesthetic mannequins for further study. This Descartian paradox is reinforced by one of the icons of our visual culture: the installation shot, sans figures. Here at last the spectator, oneself, is eliminated. You are there without being there, one of the major services provided for art by its old antagonist, photography. The installation shot is a metaphor for the gallery space. In it, an ideal is fulfilled as strongly as in a Salon painting of the 1830s.

Indeed, the Salon itself implicitly defines what a gallery is, a definition appropriate for the esthetics of the period. A gallery is a place with a wall, which is covered with a wall of pictures. The wall itself has no intrinsic esthetic; it is simply a necessity for an upright animal. Samuel F. B. Morse’s Exhibition Gallery at the Louvre (1833) is upsetting to the modern eye: masterpieces as wallpaper, each one not yet separated out and isolated in space like a throne. Disregarding the (to us) horrid concatenation of periods and styles, the demands made on the spectator by the hanging pass our understanding. Are you to hire stilts to rise to the ceiling or to get on hands and knees to sniff anything below the dado? Both high and low are underprivileged areas. You overheard a lot of complaints from artists about being “skied” but nothing about being “floored.” Near the floor, pictures were at least accessible and could accommodate the connoisseur’s “near” look before he withdrew to a more judicious distance. One can see the 19th-century audience strolling, peering up, sticking their faces in pictures and falling into interrogative groups a proper distance away, pointing with a cane, perambulating again, clocking off the exhibition picture by picture. Larger paintings rise to the top (easier to see from a distance), and are sometimes tilted out from the wall to maintain the viewer’s plane; the “best” pictures stay in the middle zone; small pictures drop to the bottom. The perfect hanging job is an ingenious mosaic of frames without a patch of wasted wall showing.

What perceptual law could justify such (to our eyes) a barbarity? One and one only. That each picture was seen as a self-contained entity, totally isolated from its slum-close neighbor by a heavy frame around and a complete perspective system within. Space was discontinuous and categorizable, just as the houses in which these pictures hung had different rooms for different functions. The 19th-century mind was taxonomic, and the 19th-century eye recognized hierarchies of genre and the authority of the frame.

How did the easel picture become such a neatly wrapped parcel of space? The discovery of perspective coincides with the rise of the easel picture, and the easel picture, in turn, confirmed the promise of illusionism inherent in painting. There is a peculiar relation between a mural—painted directly on the wall—and a picture that hangs on a wall; a painted wall is replaced by a piece of portable wall. Limits are established and framed; miniaturization becomes a powerful convention that assists rather than contradicts illusion. The space in murals tends to be shallow; even when illusion is an intrinsic part of the idea, the integrity of the wall is as often reinforced by struts of painted architecture as denied. The wall itself is always recognized as limiting depth (you don’t walk through it), just as corners and roof (often in a variety of inventive ways) limit size. Close up, murals tend to be frank about their means—illusionism breaks down in a babble of method. You feel you are looking at the underpainting and often can’t quite find your “place.” Indeed murals project ambiguous and wandering vectors with which the spectator attempts to align himself. The easel picture on the wall quickly indicates to him exactly where he stands.

For the easel picture is like a portable window that, once set on the wall, penetrates it with deep space. This theme is endlessly repeated in northern art, where a window within the picture in turn frames not only a further distance but confirms the windowlike limits of the frame. The magical, boxlike status of some smaller easel pictures is due to the immense distances they contain and the perfect details they sustain on close examination. The frame of the easel picture is as much a psychological container for the artist as the room in which he stands is for the viewer. The perspective positions everything within the picture along a cone of space, against which the frame acts like a grid, echoing those cuts of foreground, middle ground and distance within. One “steps” firmly into such a picture, or glides in effortlessly, depending on its tonality and color. The greater the illusion, the greater the invitation to the spectator’s eye; the eye is abstracted from an anchored body and projected as a miniature proxy into the picture to inhabit and test the articulations of its space.

For this process, the stability of the frame is as necessary as an oxygen tank to a diver. Its limiting security completely defines the experience within. The border as absolute limit is confirmed in easel art up to the 19th century. When it curtails or elides subject matter, it does so in a way that strengthens the edge. The classic package of perspective enclosed by the Beaux-Arts frame makes it possible for pictures to hang like sardines. There is no suggestion that the space within the picture is continuous with the space outside it.

This suggestion is made only sporadically through the 18th and 19th centuries as atmosphere and color eat away at the perspective. Landscape is the progenitor of a translucent mist that puts perspective and tone/color in opposition, because both contain, among other things, opposite interpretations of the wall they hang on. Pictures begin to appear that put pressure on the frame. The archetypal composition here is the edge-to-edge horizon, separating zones of sky and sea occasionally underlined by beach with maybe a figure facing, as everyone does, the sea. Formal composition is gone, the frames within the frame (coulisses, repoussoirs, the braille of perspective depth) have slid away. What is left is an ambiguous surface partly framed from the inside, by the horizon. Such pictures (by Courbet, Caspar David Friedrich, Whistler and hosts of little masters) are poised between infinite depth and flatness and tend to read as pattern. The powerful convention of the horizon zips easily enough through the limits of the frame.

These and certain pictures focusing on an indeterminate patch of landscape that often looks like the “wrong” subject introduce the idea of noticing something, of an eye scanning. This temporal quickening makes the frame an equivocal and not an absolute zone. Once you know that a patch of landscape represents a decision to exclude everything around it, you are faintly aware of the space outside the picture. The frame becomes a parenthesis. The separation of paintings along a wall, through a kind of magnetic repulsion, becomes inevitable. And it is accentuated and largely initiated by the new science—or art—devoted to the excision of a subject from its context: photography.

In a photograph, the location of the edge is a primary decision, since it composes—or decomposes—what it surrounds. Eventually framing, editing, cropping—establishing limits—become major acts of composition. But not so much in the beginning. There was the usual holdover of pictorial conventions to do some of the work of framing—internal buttresses made up of convenient trees and knolls. But the best early photographs reinterpret the edge without the assistance of pictorial conventions. They lower the tension on the edge by allowing the subject matter to compose itself, rather than consciously aligning it with the edge. Perhaps this is typical of the 19th century. The 19th century looked at a subject—not at its edges. Various fields were studied within their declared limits. Studying not the field but its limits, and defining these limits for the purpose of extending them, is a 20th-century habit. We have the illusion that we add to a field by extending it laterally, not by going, as the 19th century might say in proper perspective style, deeper into it. Even scholarship in both centuries has a recognizably different sense of edge and depth, of limits and definition. Photography quickly learned to move away from heavy frames and to mount a print on a sheet of board. A frame was allowed to surround the board after a neutral interval. Early photography recognized the edge but removed its rhetoric, softened its absolutism and turned it into a zone rather than the strut it later became. But one way or another, the edge as a firm convention locking in the subject had become fragile.

Much of this applied to Impressionism, where a major theme is the edge as umpire of what’s in and what’s out. But this is combined with a far more important force, the beginning of the decisive thrust that eventually altered the idea of the picture, the way it was hung, and ultimately the gallery space: the myth of flatness, which became the powerful logician in painting’s argument for self-definition. The development of a shallow literal space (containing invented forms, as distinct from the old illusory space containing “real” forms) put further pressures on the edge. The great inventor here is, of course, Monet.

Indeed the magnitude of the revolution he initiated is such there is some doubt his achievement matches it, for he is an artist of decided limitations, or one who decided on his limitations and stayed within them. Monet’s landscapes often seem to have been noticed on his way to or from the real subject. There is an impression that he is settling for a provisional solution; the very featurelessness relaxes your eye to look elsewhere. The informal subject matter of Impressionism is always pointed out, but not that the subject is seen through a casual glance, one not too interested in what it’s looking at. What is interesting in Monet is “looking at” this look—the integument of light, the often preposterous formularization of a perception through a punctate code of color and touch which remains (until near the end) impersonal. The edge eclipsing the subject seems a somewhat haphazard decision that could just as well have been made a few feet to left or right. A signature of Impressionism is the way the casually chosen subject softens the edge’s structural role at a time when the edge is under pressure from the increasing shallowness of the space. This doubled and somewhat opposing stress on the edge is the prelude to the definition of a painting as a self-sufficient object—a container of illusory fact now become the primary fact itself, which sets us on the high road to some stirring esthetic climaxes.

Flatness and objecthood usually find their first official text in Maurice Denis’ famous statement in 1890 that before a picture is subject matter it is first of all a surface covered with lines and colors. This is one of those literalisms that sounds brilliant or rather dumb depending on the zeitgeist. Right now, when we’ve seen the end-point to which nonmetaphor, nonstructure, nonillusion and noncontent can take you, the zeitgeist makes it sound a little obtuse. The picture plane, the ever-thinning integument of modernist integrity, sometimes seems ready for Woody Allen, and has indeed attracted its share of ironists and wits. But this ignores that the powerful myth of the picture plane received its impetus from the centuries during which it sealed in unalterable systems of illusion. Conceiving it differently, in the modern era, was an heroic adjustment that signified a totally different world view, which was trivialized into esthetics, into the technology of flatness.

The literalization of the picture plane is a great subject. As the vessel of content becomes shallower and shallower, composition and subject matter and metaphysics all overflow across the edge until, as Gertrude Stein said about Picasso, the emptying out is complete. But all the jettisoned apparatus—hierarchies of painting, illusion, locatable space, mythologies beyond number—bounced back in disguise and attached themselves, via new mythologies, to the literal surface which had apparently left them no purchase. The transformation of literary myths into literal myths—objecthood, the integrity of the picture plane, the equalization of space, the self-sufficiency of the work, the purity of form—is unexplored territory. Without this change art would have been obsolete. Indeed its changes often seem one step ahead of obsolesence, and to that degree its progress mimics the laws of fashion.

The cultivation of the picture plane resulted in an entity with length and breadth but no thickness, a membrane which, in a metaphor usually organic, could generate its own self-sufficient laws. The primary law, of course, was that this surface, pressed between huge historical forces, could not be violated. A narrow space forced to represent without representing, to symbolize without benefit of received conventions generated a plethora of new conventions without a consensus—color codes, signatures of paint, private signs, intellectually formulated ideas of structure. Cubism’s concepts of structure conserved the easel painting status quo; Cubist paintings are centripetal, gathered toward the center, fading out toward the edge. (Is this why Cubist paintings tend to be small?) Seurat understood much better how to define the limits of a classic formulation at a time when edges had become equivocal. Frequently, painted borders made up of a glomeration of colored dots are deployed inward to separate out and describe the subject. The border absorbs the slow movements of the structure within. To muffle the abruptness of the edge, he sometimes pattered all over the frame so that the eye could move out of the picture—and back into it—without a bump.

Matisse understood the dilemma of the picture plane and its tropism toward outward extension better than anyone. His pictures grew bigger as if, in a topological paradox, depth were being translated into a flat analog. On this, place was signified by up and down and left and right, by color, by drawing that rarely closed a contour without calling on the surface to contradict it, and by paint applied with a kind of cheerful impartiality to every part of that surface. In Matisse’s large paintings we are hardly ever conscious of the frame. He solved the problem of lateral extension and containment with perfect tact. He doesn’t emphasize the center at the expense of the edge, or vice versa. His pictures don’t make arrogant claims to stretches of bare wall. They look good almost anywhere. Their tough, informal structure is combined with a decorative prudence that makes them remarkably self-sufficient. They are easy to hang.

Hanging, indeed, is what we need to know more about. From Courbet on, conventions of hanging are an unrecovered history. The way pictures are hung make assumptions about what is offered. Hanging editorializes on matters of interpretation and value, and is unconsciously influenced by taste and fashion. Subliminal cues indicate to the audience its deportment. It should be possible to correlate the internal history of paintings with the external history of how they were hung. We might begin our search not with a mode of display communally sanctioned (like the Salon), but with the vagaries of private insight—with those pictures of 17th-and 18th-century collectors elegantly sprawled in the midst of their inventory. The first modern occasion, I suppose, in which a radical artist set up his own space and hung his pictures in it, was Courbet’s one-man Salon des Refusés outside the Exposition of 1855. How were the pictures hung? How did Courbet construe their sequence, their relationship to each other, the spaces between? I suspect he did nothing startling. Yet it was the first time a modern artist (who happened to be the first modern artist) had to construct the context of his work and therefore editorialize about its values.

Though pictures may be radical, their early framing and hanging usually is not. The interpretation of what a picture implies about its context is always, we may assume, delayed. In their first exhibition in 1874, the Impressionists stuck their pictures cheek by jowl, just as they would have hung in the Salon. Impressionist pictures which assert their flatness and their doubts about the limiting edge are still sealed off in Beaux-Arts frames that do little more than announce Old Master—and monetary—status. When William C. Seitz took off the frames for his great Monet show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1960, the undressed canvases looked a bit like reproductions until you saw how they began to hold the wall. Though the hanging had its eccentric moments, it read the pictures’ relation to the wall correctly and, in a rare act of curatorial daring, followed up the implications. Seitz also set some of the Monets flush with the wall. Continuous with the wall, the pictures took on some of the rigidity of tiny murals. The surfaces turned hard as the picture plane was “overliteralized.” The difference between the easel picture and the mural was clarified.

The relation between the picture plane and the underlying wall is very pertinent to the esthetics of surface. The inch of the stretcher’s width amounts to a formal abyss. The easel painting is not transferable to the wall, and one wants to know why. What is lost in the transfer? Edges, surface, the grain and bite of the canvas, the separation from the wall. Nor can we forget that the whole thing is suspended or supported—transferable, mobile currency. After centuries of illusionism, it seems reasonable to suggest that these parameters, no matter how flat the surface, are the loci of the last traces of illusionism. Mainstream painting right up to color field is easel painting, and its literalism is practiced against these desiderata of illusionism. Indeed these traces make literalism interesting; they are the hidden component of the dialectical engine that gave the late modernist easel picture its energy. If you copied a late modernist easel picture onto the wall and then hung the easel picture beside it, you could estimate the degree of illusionism that turned up in the faultless literal pedigree of the easel picture. At the same time the rigid mural would underline the importance of surface and edges to the easel picture, now beginning to hover close to an objecthood defined by the “literal” remnants of illusion—an unstable area.

The attacks on painting in the ’60s failed to specify that it wasn’t painting but the easel picture that was in trouble. Color field painting was thus conservative in an interesting way, but not to those who recognized that the easel picture couldn’t rid itself of illusion, and who rejected the premise of something lying quietly on the wall and behaving itself. I’ve always been surprised that color field—or late modernist painting in general—didn’t try to get onto the wall, didn’t attempt a rapprochement between the mural and the easel picture. But then color field painting conformed to the social context in a somewhat disturbing way. It remained Salon painting; it needed big walls and big collectors and couldn’t avoid looking like the ultimate in capitalist art. Minimal art recognized the illusions inherent in the easel picture and didn’t have any illusions about society. It didn’t ally itself with wealth and power, and its abortive attempt to redefine the relation of the artist to various establishments remains largely unexplored.

Apart from color field, late modernist painting postulated some ingenious hypotheses on how to squeeze a little extra out of that recalcitrant picture plane, now so dumbly literal it could drive you crazy. The strategy here was simile (pretending), not metaphor (believing): saying the picture plane is “like a –––––.” The blank was filled in by flat things that lie obligingly on the literal surface and fuse with it, e.g. Johns’s Flags, Cy Twombly’s blackboard paintings, Alex Hay’s huge painted “sheets” of lined paper, Arakawa’s “notebooks.” Then there is the “like a window shade,” “like a wall,” “like a sky” area. There’s a good comedy of manners piece to be written about the “like a –––––” solution to the picture plane. There are numerous related areas, including the perspective schema resolutely flattened into two dimensions to quote the picture plane’s dilemma. And before leaving this area of rather desperate wit, one should note the solutions that cut through the picture plane (Fontana’s answer to the Gordian surface) until the picture is taken away and the wall’s plaster attacked directly.

Also related is the solution that lifts surface and edges off that Procrustian stretcher, and pins, sticks or drapes paper, fiberglass, or cloth directly against the wall to literalize even further. Here a lot of Los Angeles painting falls neatly—for the first time!—into the historical mainstream; it’s a little odd to see this obsession with surface, disguised as it may be with vernacular macho, dismissed because of geographical misplacement as provincial impudence.

All this desperate fuss makes you realize over again what a conservative movement Cubism was. It extended the viability of the easel picture and postponed its breakdown. Cubism was reducible to system, and systems, being easier to understand than art, dominate academic history. Systems are a kind of P.R. which, among other things, push the rather odious idea of progress. Progress can be defined as what happens when you eliminate the opposition. However, the tough opposition voice in modernism is that of Matissé and it speaks in its unemphatic, rational way about color, which in the beginning scared Cubism gray. Clement Greenberg’s Art and Culture reports on how the New York artists sweated out Cubism while casting shrewd eyes on Matisse and Miró. Abstract-Expressionist paintings followed the route of lateral expansion, dropped off the frame, and gradually began to conceive the edge as a structural unit through which the painting entered into a dialogue with the wall beyond it. At this point the dealer and curator enter from the wings. How they—in collaboration with the artist—presented these works contributed, in the late ’40s and ’50s, to the definition of the new painting.

Through the ’50s and ’60s, we notice the codification of a new theme as it evolves into consciousness: How much space should a work of art have (as the phrase went) to “breathe?” If paintings implicitly declare their own terms of occupancy, the somewhat aggrieved muttering between them becomes harder to ignore. What goes together, what doesn’t? The esthetics of hanging evolves according to its own habits, which become conventions, which become laws. We enter the era where works of art conceive the wall as a no-man’s land on which to project their concept of the territorial imperative. And we are not far from the kind of border warfare that often Balkanizes museum group shows. There is a peculiar uneasiness in watching artworks attempting to establish territory but not place in the context of the placeless modern gallery.

All this traffic across the wall made it a far from neutral zone. Now a participant in, rather than a passive support for the art, the wall became the locus of contending ideologies and every new development had to come equipped with an attitude toward it. (Gene Davis’s exhibition of micro-pictures surrounded by oodles of space is a good joke about this). Once the wall became an esthetic force, it modified anything shown on it. The wall, the context of the art, had become rich in a content it subtly donated to the art. It is now impossible to paint up an exhibition without surveying the space like a health inspector, taking into account the esthetics of the wall which will inevitably “artify” the work in a way that frequently diffuses its intentions. Most of us now “read” the hanging as we would chew gum—unconsciously and from habit. The walls’ esthetic potency received a final impetus from a realization that, in retrospect, has all the authority of historical inevitability: the easel picture didn’t have to be rectangular.

Stella’s early shaped canvases bent or cut the edge according to the demands of the internal logic that generated them. (Here Michael Fried’s distinction between inductive and deductive structure remains of one of the few practical hand tools added to the critic’s black bag). The result powerfully activated the wall; the eye frequently went searching tangentially for the wall’s limits. Stella’s show of striped U-, T- and L-shaped canvases at Castelli in 1960 “developed” every bit of the wall, floor to ceiling, corner to corner. Flatness, edge, format and wall had an unprecedented dialogue in that small uptown Castelli space. As they were presented, the works hovered between an ensemble effect and independence. The hanging here was as revolutionary as the paintings; since the hanging was part of the esthetic, it evolved simultaneously with the pictures. The breaking of the rectangle formally confirmed the wall’s autonomy, altering for good the concept of the gallery space. Some of the mystique of the shallow picture plane (one of the three major forces that altered the gallery space) had been transferred to the context of art.

This result brings us back again to that archetypal installation shot—the suave extensions of the space, the pristine clarity, the pictures laid out in a row like expensive bungalows. Color field painting, which inevitably comes to mind here, is the most imperial of modes in its demand for lebensraum. The pictures recur as reassuringly as the columns in a classic temple. Each demands enough space so that its effect is over before its neighbor’s picks up. Otherwise the pictures would be a single perceptual field, frank ensemble painting, detracting from the uniqueness claimed by each canvas. The color field installation shot should be recognized as one of the teleological end-points of the modern tradition. There is something splendidly luxurious about the way the pictures and the gallery reside in a context that is fully sanctioned socially. We are aware we are witnessing a triumph of high seriousness and hand-tooled production, like a Rolls-Royce in a showroom that began as a Cubist jalopy in an outhouse.

What comment can you make on this? A comment has been made already, in an exhibition by William Anastasi at Dwan in New York in 1965. He photographed the empty gallery at Dwan, noticed the parameters of the wall, top and bottom, right and left, the placement of each electrical outlet, the ocean of space in the middle. He then silkscreened all this data on a canvas slightly smaller than the wall and put it on the wall. Covering the wall with an image of that wall delivers a work of art right into the zone where surface, mural and wall have engaged in dialogues central to modernism. In fact, this history was the theme of these paintings, a theme stated with a wit and cogency usually absent from our written clarifications. For me, at least, the show had a peculiar after-effect; when the paintings came down, the wall became a kind of ready-made mural and so changed every show in that space thereafter.

Brian O’Doherty shows at the Betty Parsons Gallery under the name of Patrick Ireland.

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Isabelle Wenzel

Isabelle Wenzel (b. 1982, Germany) studied to be a photographer/artist, but is also a trained acrobat. Usually, she sets her own body before the camera. Within the seconds that the self-timer allows her, she assumes an impossible position and continues to hold it until the camera has clicked.

The central focus of the photographs of Isabelle Wenzel is the body as a physical form, rather than people themselves. By making a photograph, she freezes a pose in time as it were, and in doing so draws attention to the sculptural qualities of the body. In order to achieve a certain image, the manoeuvres need to be carried out repeatedly. In this way, Wenzel does her own little experimental performance in front of the camera, which captures it for us in ‘frozen’ form as a photograph.

Artist statement:

I stretched forward. Felt sensations of heaviness. Was overwhelmed by choice. Got lost. Stumbled. Failed. Started again. I’m a space in the landscape. A geological formation. A botanical shape. An island of isolation.  A thinking body. Look at me in slow motion. Look at me frozen in time.

Isabelle Wenzel

Curriculum Vitae

 

Born 1982 in Wuppertal, Deutschland

Lives and works in Wuppertal

 

Education

2008-2010 Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam, (NL)

2005-2008 Fachhochschule, Bielefeld, (DE)

 

Residencies / Nominations / Grants

2021 Arbeitsstipendium Stiftung Kunstfonds Bonn, DE

2016 Individuelle Projektförderung, Kunststiftung NRW, DE

2013 Jahresstipendium, Mondriaan Stiftung, Niederlande, NL

2011 Startstipendium, Fonds voor Beeldende Kunsten, Vormgeving, Bouwkunst, Amsterdam NL

2011 European Photo Exhibition Award - Körber-Stiftung, Hamburg DE

2010 Virtual Zoom, Fotografie Stipendium, Virtual Museum Zuidas, Amsterdam NL

2007 Des Prix-Leica, Fachhochschule Bielefeld, DE

Collections

Albert Heijn Kunststichting, NL

ENECO Kunstcollectie, NL

SBK Kunstuitleen & Galerie, Amsterdam, NL

Kunstcollectie Ymere, Amsterdam, NL

FOAM/ Photographie Museum/ Amsterdam/ NL

VU MC Sammlung/ Amsterdam/ NL

 

Solo Exhibitions

2022 Automatia, Galerie Bart, Amsterdam, NL

2021 Isabelle Wenzel, Video installations, Expo Bart, Nijmegen NL

2020 Counting till 10 – Solo – Galerie Bart, Amsterdam, NL

2017 ‘Unernstes unterfangen’, Galerie Bart, Amsterdam, NL

2016 London Art Fair, Solo, Galerie Bart, London, UK

2015 Scotiabank CONTACT Fotografie Festival, Isabelle Wenzel, Metro Hall Toronto, CA

2013 Isabelle Wenzel, what the body knows, 44 Gallery, Brugge, BE

2013 10 Seconds, Isabelle Wenzel, Rene Hauser Gallery, Zürich, CH

2013 I'D Like To Double Your Entendre, Warte für Kunst, Kassel, DE

2012 Solo, Isabelle Wenzel, Ku Gallery, Taipei, Taiwan, CN

2010 Building Images, Kunst Kapel, Amsterdam, Virtueel Museum Zuidas, Amsterdam NL

 

Selected group exhibitions

2022 Numero Berlin – All Collection Vol. II Jonathan Vincent Baron and Isabelle Wenzel, Berlin DE

2022 Approche - Galerie Bart, Paris, FR

2022 Von draußen nach drinnen, Sparkasse Wuppertal, DE

2021 Unseen Amsterdam Galerie Bart, NL

2021 B/U/ILD, Neuer Kunstverein Wuppertal, De

2020 Out and about, public exhibition during Covid19, Wuppertal, DE

2019 Emergent, Platform for contemporary art, Veurne, BE

2019 Pick Me – We Like Art at Collectie DE.GROEN, Arnhem, NL

2019 – Naak Of Bloot, Museum Jan Cunen, Oos, NL

2018 – Loch – Galerie – Let’s Pretent You Don’t Know Me, Anne Huijnen, Michel und Isabelle Wenzel, Wuppertal, DE

2018 – A Balancing Act – Kunsthal Amersfoort, NL

2018 – Paradise – performance at Schauspielhaus Wuppertal, DE

Selected Works

Automatia

Book

Interviews with Isabelle

https://www.lampoonmagazine.com/article/2022/03/31/isabelle-wenzel/

Youtube Section

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Mayan Toledano

Mayan Toledano is a director / photographer based in New York. Mayan's work encompasses themes like gender identity, gay culture, the female body, intimacy and relationships and characterized by senses of humanity and empathy. Mayan worked with clients like Kenzo, Nike, Chanel, Gucci, Coach, Pat McGrath, MadeMe and American Eagle. Her work has been in editorial outlets including i-D, Vogue, W magazine, Teen Vogue, Sneeze, Them and New York times.

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#research #art research #photography #art photography #art photographer #artist research #female gaze #woman photographer #artist from girl on girl book #articles #women artists #Mayan Toledano