The last picture show smallclasses.dma.ucla.edu/Fall18/173/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/The-la… ·...

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Anran Gong

Transcript of The last picture show smallclasses.dma.ucla.edu/Fall18/173/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/The-la… ·...

Page 1: The last picture show smallclasses.dma.ucla.edu/Fall18/173/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/The-la… · Dutch painting, exploring the conventions of that genre. Horizon 1° -10° Land

Anran Gong

Page 2: The last picture show smallclasses.dma.ucla.edu/Fall18/173/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/The-la… · Dutch painting, exploring the conventions of that genre. Horizon 1° -10° Land

In October 1960, Klein hired the photographers Harry Shunk and

Jean Kender to make a series of pictures re-creating a jump from a

second-floor window that the artist claimed to have executed earlier

in the year. This second leap was made from a rooftop in the Paris

suburb of Fontenay-aux-Roses. On the street below, a group of the

artist’s friends from held a tarpaulin to catch him as he fell. Two

negatives--one showing Klein leaping, the other the surrounding

scene (without the tarp)--were then printed together to create a

seamless "documentary" photograph. To complete the illusion that

he was capable of flight, Klein distributed a fake broadsheet at

Parisian newsstands commemorating the event. It was in this mass-

produced form that the artist's seminal gesture was communicated to

the public and also notably to the Vienna Actionists.

Yves Klein, Leap into the Void, 1960

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“To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of

a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise

organization of forms which give that even its proper expression. I

believe that, through the act of living, the discovery of the world

around us which can mold us, but which can also be affected by us. A

balance must be established between these two worlds – the one

inside us and the one outside us. As the result of a constant reciprocal

process, both these worlds come to form a single one. And it is this

world that we must communicate.”

- Henri Cartier Bresson

Henri Cartier Bresson, Behind the Gare Saint – Lazare, Paris, 1932

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The revolution of photographic art happened in 1960s and 1970s.

The collision between the traditional photographic art thoughts and modern photographic art thoughts.

Hence, people wonder: will it come - the time when no longer see photographic images as autonomous aesthetic objects?

The artists represented in the exhibition challenge us to reassess our commonly held assumptions of what constitutes a picture and help us acquire a deeper understanding of the extraordinarily diverse and widespread uses of photography in the art world today.

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Dust Breeding presents an interesting

precursor of the use of photography by artists

in the 1960s. Duchamp allowed the lower

back panel of the Large Glass to accumulate a

thick layer of dust over a period of three

months. Man Ray then photographed this

work, producing an image of an alien

landscape that was neither a documentation

of Duchamp’s sculpture” nor a formalist

photographic exercise, but rather a hybrid

object caught somewhere between the

realms of photography and sculpture,

dramatically embodying Man Ray’s

contention that “photography is not art”. The

work of Man Ray and his cohort would be the

harbinger of a host of new photographic

possibilities that began to emerge in the

1960s.Dust Breeding, Man Ray, 1920 Marcel Duchamp, The Large Glass,

1915-23

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Jan Dibbets’s understanding

of the landscape was heavily

informed by the history of

Dutch painting, exploring the

conventions of that genre.

Horizon 1° -10° Land (1973)

represent ten thin, vertical

photographs of an abstracted

horizon line of the notoriously

flat Dutch landscape.

Progressively tilting the image

to an eventual pitch of ten

degrees, Dibbets confounds

our visual expectations and, in

so doing, destabilizes our

vision and undermines the

fabricated and historically

loaded conventions of our

cultural depictions of the

landscape.

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Land - Sea Horizon (c), 2011Colour photographs

collaged onto archival board

23 7/10 × 40 1/5 in; 60.2 × 102 cm

Land-Sea Horizon 2, 2011Colour photo-collage

with pencil, mounted onto board

47 2/5 × 47 2/5 in; 120.3 × 120.3 cm

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Big Comet 3°-60° Sky-Land-Sky, 1973

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Richard Long produced photographic documents of ephemeral

sculptural and performative acts that the artist enacted in and

on the landscape. His impermanent interventions – which

included cutting an X-shaped swath through a field of daisies

and walking back and forth across a field in a straight line until

a visible path was worn in works such as A Line Made By

Walking, England (1967). His work is “pencil of nature” –

writing on the surface of the English countryside.

Richard Long

A Line Made by Walking , 1967 Photograph

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The artist taking another kind of walk through

the landscape. A long-range view of the artist

himself walking down the slopes of a volcanic

mountainside in rural Italy. Anselmo’s

photograph is at once an existentialist

statement about the isolation of the individual

and an invocation of the geological forces of

gravity and volcanism, as well as the physical

energy that is continuously present in the

natural world. “Natural forces of gravity”

Entrare nell’ opera (Entering the work) 1971

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During 1960s and 1970s, some artists began to make

investigation and intervention into the built environment.

Robert Smithson attempted in his sculptures and

photographic works to capture the movement of another

kind of energy – the transformative geological decay

associated with “entropy” or “energy drain”. Whether

turning his camera on the crumbling “monumental”

industrial structures of suburban New Jersey in Monuments

of Passaic (1967) or on the ongoing simultaneous

disintegration and reconstruction of a small Mexican hotel

in his slide lecture presentation Hotel Palenque (1969).

Smithson would record the “ghostly photographic remains”

of the slow movement of entropy in the man-made

environment.

Robert smithson: the monuments of passaic, 1967

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End of 1960s: conceptual experimental photographic art gained momentum and credence internationally

Delphi (1965), Giulio Paolini. Walker Art CenterSelf Portrait as a fountain Bruce Nauman 1966-1967/70

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Robert Smithson Hotel Palenque, 1969-1972.

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

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Staged photography – what the critic A. D. Coleman referred to in 1976 as photography’s “directional mode” – became an important tool for several artists who sought to compose their very own theaters of the absurd.

In the photographic works of Bas Jan Ader, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Ger Van Elk, and William Wegman, photography was used to construct humor laden scenarios that are at once fantastic and illogical.

Piet Mondrian, Composition in Red,

Blue and Yellow, 1930

On the Road to a New Neo-Plasticism, Weskapelle, Holland

Bas Jan Ader, 1971

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The discovery of the sardines, Placerita Canyon, Newhall, California, Van Elk, 1971