PERFORMANCE AND THE CAMERA AT THE TATE MODERN
PERFORMANCE
AND THE CAMERA AT THE TATE MODERN
From the time when
photography was in its infancy the tendency towards it evolution into the
seventh art was palpable. This is the
topic of the Tate Modern’s latest exhibition Performance and the Camera.
Artists sought to connect individual shots into a performance, an
enactment or re-enactment, that somehow also delved into the macabre or
esoteric origins of the art form in its vital capture of a single moment in
time. The ephemeral became unique and
indivisible, science presents photography, an art form capable of presenting a
glimpse into eternity.
The exhibition
demonstrates that photography is a mediated, conventional form rather than a
depiction of reality. Yves Klein’s (1928-1962)
work Saut dans la Vide (Leap into the
Void, 1960) which was completed along with his collaborators Harry Shunk
(1924-2006) and Janos Kender (1938-2009) shows the artist leaping from a
building into fresh air. Klein used the
work as evidence of his ability to undertake unaided lunar travel but the Tate
documents how a large tarpaulin was held by workmen under the artist. The work was a photomontage and the workmen
were erased afterwards leaving the viewer with a deception that tests his or
her credulity. Essentially the image is
asking how far credulity can go, how far trust between producer and receiver of
the image can be taken. Perhaps the work
hardly seems controversial today since so many trademark techniques of
photographic and cinematic special effects are now well known, the issues of
production and consumption of images so familiar. The image seems to speak out of an age of
innocence.
Harry Shunk was born in a
suburb of Leipzig in 1924 and formed an artistic collaboration with Hungarian
Janos (Jean) Kender. They were also partners
who became photographers to the avante
garde artists of the 1950s and 1960s.
When their relationship dissolved in 1970 Shunk lived as a recluse in
New York, living in poverty. That was
until 2006 when Shunk’s art memorabilia collection collapsed on top of him,
killing him and leaving one of the most amazing art collections ever amassed to
the council of metropolitan Manhattan.
Janos Kender died a few years after Harry Shunk also in poverty. Theirs is an intriguing postscript to the
triumphs and disasters of the art elite in the Twentieth Century.
In Aaron Siskind’s
(1903-1991) photos of divers at Lake Michigan the bathers are left eerily
suspended in mid-air. The illusion is
maintained by techniques of cropping and high contrast Siskind, a Russian Jewish émigré, had become
known for his socially engaged photographic work with the New York Photo League
which included The Harlem Document
and The Catholic Worker Movement
(1936-40). Siskind left the League
because of its gravitation towards the Communist Party, its dogmatic ideology. He then initiated abstract, symbolic work and
became identified with the abstract expressionist movement summed up the work
of Jackson Pollock (1912-1956).
In another work by Yves
Klein, Anthropometry of the Blue Period
(Galerie International d’art Contemporain, Paris 1960), Klein transforms
traditional art genres such as the female nude into an entertaining performance
art which becomes a new way of
configuring tradition and genre. Naked
women roll in paint and rub their bodies against canvases while a string
quartet plays in the background. This
sounds reactionary but the presence of women in the audience makes the event
tasteful rather than a sordid strip tease.
Works like this are beginning to question the orthodoxies of the past
through the new medium of photography, in fact the most questioning decade of
the last century, the 1960s, was about to begin. Images of sport were also important as in
Siskind’s depiction of bathers and Klein’s work Judo Demonstration (Tokyo, 1953-4).
Yayoi Kusama (1929 -)
captures the ethos of 1960s counter-culture in the U.S., creating happenings
that attack establishment politicians like Richard Nixon and often end with the
symbolic burning of the American flag (a consequence of the U.S. governments
aggressive war in Vietnam). Nudity,
exhibitionism, soft fabrics and tiny cushions are all combined in works like Happening/Fashion Show (New York 1968)
and another happening called The Anatomic
Explosion (Wall Street, New York, 1968).
The latter is an anti-war naked happening and flag burning at the
Brooklyn Bridge. Banners proclaim ‘Self-Obliteration’
while male and female naked radicals pose in front of Swiss banks and a statue
of George Washington.
Ai Weiwei (1957 -)
creates a striking performance in his Dropping
a Han Dynasty Urn (1995). Weiwei
looks disinterested and oblivious as he drops a 2,000 year old urn, an act of
provocation in a country that venerates its cultural traditions. Artists like Weiwei are countenancing a decisive
break with the past that is palpably beyond the Communist Party of China that
was eventually to hold the artist for 81 days without charge.
Marcel Duchamp was also attracted to the
concept of performance as in his depiction of female alter ego, Rrose
Selavy. His performance was captured by
the photographer of 1920s Paris, Man Ray (1890-1976). F.Holland Day (1864-1933) took his
performance for the camera to an extreme by taking on the persona of Jesus
after watching the Oberammergau Passion Play.
Day even starved himself for his role in The Seven Words (meaning the seven things that Jesus says on the
cross) in order to look suitably emaciated but the work was criticised and
considered blasphemous.
Later self-portraits
include Tomoko Sawada (1977 -). Sawada’s
self-portraits were taken in a Kobe subway station’s photo booth. She alters her appearance hundreds of times
to underline her belief that even though the subject’s appearance can be
altered, the personality remains the same.
In Hans Eijkelboom’s (1949 -) work With
My Family (1973), Eijkelboom poses as a father of four different families
in his hometown in Holland, having asked permission to do so while the children’s
father was at work. His subversion of
the ‘typical family’ photo journal provides another instance of an image slyly
disconcerting and macabre. Photo artists
began to create alternate personas, investigating alternate histories and
putting together fictional diaries and experiences to explore the nature of
performance, to question the veracity of the image and the relationship of the
viewer to the spectacle.
Self-portraits and
performances enable photo artists to describe experience at the limits, to explore
issues of control and voyeurism. In her
work Strip (1999-2000) Jemima Stehli
(1961 -) performs a striptease in front of different male observers who happen
to be art critics, dealers and curators.
The observer controls the shutter release, deciding at what stage of the
strip the photo is taken. This leads on
to the current vogue for selfies, where software products like Facebook,
Instagram, Iphone and Youtube make production of photo performances possible to
everyone.
The exhibition presents
some of the earliest self-portraits by pioneering photo artists such as those
by Hippolyte Bayard (1801-1887) and feminist and gender pioneer Claude Cahun
(1894-1954). The photo artist Linder (1954
-) creates a series of self-portraits where she is wrapped in cellophane or
tears a selfie from her face as if to intimate that the true self exists deeply
within the image after various onion layers are peeled away.
Attempts at self-promotion
through compelling self-portraits and publicity shots that undermine the traditional
idea of the artist are also examined.
For instance, the German artist Joseph Beuys (1921-1986) presents a
carefully considered image, wearing a felt trilby, fishing jacket and holding a
walking stick. Beuys declared that ‘everyone
is an artist’ and in consequence the artist becomes the art work and no longer
needs to make any kind of art. Andy
Warhol (1928-1987) creates a consummate self-image that becomes iconic even
though it consists of an ill-fitting white wig, pale, even emaciated skin and
an attitude of passivity and nonchalance.
The posters presenting this image are so consistent that they could be
used to market almost anything, department stores, computers, films. Jeff Koons’ (1955 -) creates art magazine
adverts (1988-9), the perfectly stylised image-making associated with the music
industry or Hollywood, taken by Greg German, a photographer known for his
portraits of celebrities. Yet the images
mock the idea of celebrity, the artist poses with garlanded seals, live pigs
and a braying donkey flanked by two statuesque female models. He preaches Marxism to infants.
The last part of the
exhibition brings us up to date with the selfie era. In Romain Mader’s (1988 -) work Ekaterina (2012) the photo artist
depicts a series of attempts to acquire a Russian mail order bride and bring
her to Switzerland, Mader’s homeland.
These images are stunningly subversive, both photo artist and bride seem
plausible yet also creepy and disconcerting.
Finally, the work of Amalia Ullman (1989 -) Excellences and Perfections (Instagram Update; 8th July
2014, 1st Sept 2014) depicts a young girl lost in New York,
descending into a sordid lifestyle of drug-taking and then becoming self-confident
and purposefully commanding her urban environment. This kind of storytelling seems even to refer to
the well-defined moral planes of early cinema and appears to point away from
everyday life to an alternate sphere of being which includes predictable conflicts
and enjoyable yet foreseen plots with comfortingly simplistic morality. But banality is also a subject of these
images where the everyday is somehow undermined pointing towards a deeper sense
of unpredictability and a darker, perturbed vision.
Paul Murphy, Tate Modern,
April 2016
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