However, I must admit, that even the show Accelerated Mode was curetted by Elene Tremblay, who is a very knowledgeable and intelligent curator, I was bored there... Of course, in this new Space VOX were the images which I enjoyed, but precisely, in this expo, I especially felt plunged in a current international style already classified which I could see in many places or reviews of art.
The most obvious case being images of Matthias Hoch who worked with Andreas Gursky (without reaching the quality of its work). Just like Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth, Candida Höfer and some others, it takes part in a seemingly objective photograph, with documentary tendency, which could be very often presented in Life, National Geographic or Geo. Sometimes, these photographers - mainly Gursky, best of the group - produced good images. But more often than differently, they created vain photographs, very cold and posed where time seems stopped. Some can approve this manner of showing the world. It is not, in general, my esthetics. Fortunately for the visitor, there was an image of Nicolas Baier. The picture assembled from two images, shows a man literally cut into two. Its legs were in the workspace (the Clark workshop) whereas his chest and its head rest in a bed. Times interpenetrate there. The life seems to break up between the time of the work and that of the sleep. " Of the times, there are not almost any more time to kiss a blonde ", if quote Baier.
I believe that It is extremely significant that Montreal now has a photographic space which is worthy of a Western network of photo shows. But would not it be necessary that this place presents images illustrating the dominant tendency in photography simply, as for example a Dazibao Gallery is still doing ?
Dazibao, if present it briefly, is an artist-run center dedicated to the dissemination of contemporary photograph , which focus on photography allows us to defy the very notion of photography and explore its most unusual uses. The gallery serves both as a launching pad for young artists, and as an ideal place for more established artists to initiate and disseminate new projects. Since its inception in 1980, Dazibao has organized more than 250 events: exhibitions, performances, conferences, lectures, concerts, colloquia and discussions with artists. The center has also produced more than 30 book publications and approximately 40 booklets. Dazibao encourages intellectual and aesthetic initiatives that come directly from artists. As a result, the center acts as a link between artists, curators, theorists, authors, critics, the university community, the artistic milieu and the general public. Dazibao, in sum, defines itself as a site for exchange and research, a distributor and publisher, and an archival information center. As we visited it with the class, Lorain Williams, the Gallery Exhibition Coordinator, guided us through the present exhibit Mémoire Morte, Mémoire Vive which brings together the work of three prominent artists in an exploration of photography through the idea of memory and artefact.
In comparison with the exhibition discussed previously, I was glad to see that many artists continue to offer a critical and even revolutionist vision (more or less direct, of course) of the world to which they belong. There was the artist of Brazilian origin Viz Muniz presented by one of his first series carried out between 88 and 90 - that the Dazibao Gallery has the good idea to expose; Muniz gave to see images drawn from the famous Life review. As Lorain Williams explained, the artist sketched from memory the well known images from Life magazine - a portrait of JFK junior, the Saigon execution of a Vietcong suspect, the first man on the moon. Over a period of two years he returned to the drawings as he recalled more, adding layers, whiting-out, cutting and pasting. He then photographed his pencil drawings, printing them through a half-tone screen. Under the many layers of memory and reproduction, the photographs resemble the familiar images we know and remember, however there is also a layer of subversion, in which the artist encourages viewers to be sceptical about authenticity, memory and perception.
I also appreciated in this expo the work of Eric Cameron who was a part of the last biennial of Montreal. He continues to create false natural concretions, crossing between stones and stalagmites. Composed of objects covered with layers with plaster and acrylic resin, these almost organic forms constitute a good manners to speak about the unconscious one. In Thick Painting: Exposer/Cacher: Salima Halladj, the object is an exposed but undeveloped roll of film on which Cameron photographed the 12 orifices of a female body. A similar project entitled Thick Painting: Exposed/Concealed: Laura Baird includes 10 rolls of undeveloped film which the artist began coating between 1994 and 1996. Numbers II, III, V and VI are exhibited at Dazibao.
As for the work of Vid Ingelevics, it appears to me the least strong of the three. The photographs exhibited at Dazibao come from two related series of works with the overall title, Ice Age (1994 and 1996-98). These photographs of objects or images captive of the ice seem to me to be those which escape the least easily a simple metaphor from time and memory.
Speaking about memory, I was wondering why photographer Herbert List (1903-1975) is so little known here regardless the work he did for magazines such as Look and Life, because for me some, if not say many, images looked familiar. May be because they were more published in the soviet Russia than on this side of the Atlantic? Certainly the 228 prints in the exhibition titled Herbert List: Romantic Wanderer, finally confirmed List as an important photographer of 20th century. Perhaps List's relative obscurity is partly explained by the fact that this esthete did not desperately seek fame, as so put in the fascinating documentary video accompanying the show, "it was easy to be modern. You just had to strip."
There is a lingering sensuality to the photographs displayed near the beginning of the show, which was curated by Ulrich Pohlmann, director of the Fotomuseum im Munchner Stadtmuseum, repository of much of the List archives.
The first - and most intriguing - section of this show is titled Fotografia Metafisica, a term borrowed from the art of Giorgio de Chirico. Here, we encounter a heady, improbable brew of surrealism, Dada and Bauhaus. Most sublime of all in this section is the picture titled Optician's Display. It shows a wide-open eye in a sea of fabric. There are at least two images featuring de Chirico's most famous emblem, the seamstress's mannequin, both titled Female Slave, as if to register a certain disdain for women, who almost never appear in List's pictures.However, it is in the succeeding room, in the section titled Eros, we get the full force of List's attachment to the male form. It would be hard to find more homoerotic pictures than that titled Wrestling Youths, done in 1933, in which two men seen from close-up affectionately clasp each other while reclining in the Baltic sand. The subjects for such photos were friends, many casual. And, it should be added, these images were never sold or published by List; they remained locked in a box until a decade after the artist's death in 1975.
In another section of the show devoted to portraits, it seems that List came at one point to know and photograph everyone who was anybody in the cultural stream of Europe, including a famous painter Picasso, who seemed a kind of visual cliché even while alive, on List’s photo, his huge dark eyes staring and mad. Nevertheless, there are images which show an undeniable talent. For example, the series made up of windows of stores is exceptional. Several portraits - of Vittorio de Sica and Pier Paolo Pasolini - are fabulous. The portrait of actress Anna Magnani passes very close to the masterpiece. And that is due more to the talent of List than to the personality and the already undeniable beauty of the model. Magnani has the air of a modern Jellyfish. Its glance is intense like death. The blackness of its eyes and its hair seems like a black hole in space absorbing the surrounding light.
Do this image and several others very succeeded make for all that List - as known as the press release - one of the most significant photographers of the 20th century? Even I liked the exhibit and the List’s work in general, I am not sure.
