CAPTURING THE MOMENT at the TATE MODERN on the 12th, June 2023

 

CAPTURING THE MOMENT at the TATE MODERN on the 12th, June 2023

 

Bust de Femme by Pablo Picasso 1938, Yageo Foundation, Taiwan

Capturing the Moment is a deliberation on the inter-relationship between painting and photography over the last 100 years or so.  Of course, photography was invented in the 19th century and the camera had already been utilised by the Impressionists among others.  They incorporated photographic techniques too such as cropping, framing and, later, experimentalists developed techniques like photomontage.  The exhibition mentions one of the pioneers of photography, Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904) who also influenced the British artist Francis Bacon (1909-1992), one of the artists represented here.  Muybridge was born in London but lived in the US.  He was a pioneer of stop motion photography and was the first person to prove that a galloping horse lifts its legs off the ground when it gallops.  He also photographed athletes and boxers to divide and dissect each movement and to observe via the photographic process, the unobservable. The tiny movements the eye fails to register, the captive moment.

Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California 1936 


Capturing the Moment begins, for the sake of convenience, with Picasso’s Cubist experiments completed in the 1930s such as Weeping Woman (1937), a subject that also came to summarise the Spanish Civil War.  Although it is not stated explicitly, what is at stake here is not the subject but the observer.  The movement away from the notion of a stable, omnipotent observer informed the art movements that were to dominate Europe in the inter-war years.  This is the starting point of Capturing the Moment, and it moves onto examine the work of artists like Gerhard Richter (1932- ) and Andy Warhol (1928-1987) who questioned the dominant assumption regarding the veracity of photography.

Francis Bacon, Study for a Pope VI, 1961, Yageo Foundation Collection Taiwan

The exhibition charts the triumph of abstraction over realist painting as a necessary prelude to the dominance of photography.  Up until the appearance of the camera, realism was the point of art.  However, the development of the camera made realism a redundant aesthetic.   The point now was to push the horizon line above the edge of the canvas and depict abstraction.

Andreas Gursky, May Day IV 2000.  Yageo Foundation Taiwan

The Capturing the Moment exhibition is very like other Tate Modern exhibitions, for instance, Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography and Abstract Art from 2018.  However, Capturing the Moment is less cohesive, less integrated in terms of the ideas it presents and the examples it offers.  There is a definite decline in the level of intellectual awareness, range of examples and depth of scholarship.  Nevertheless, this exhibition offers a useful starting point for anyone interested in the connection between abstract art and photography.

Cecily Brown, Trouble in Paradise, 1999, (c) Cecily Brown

The usual themes of the environment, Gay whatever and the digital age are all discussed.  The reliability and unreliability of memory and, by association, the veracity of the photographic image, are discussed in relation to artists like Gerhard Richter and Marlene Dumas (1953-).  Dumas depicts feminist icons like Lucy (2004) and Stern (2004) which is an artwork based on the famous photograph in Stern magazine of Ulrike Meinhof, a journalist and member of the Red Army Faction or Baader-Meinhof Group (which was a media construction, Ulrike Meinhof was a journalist interested in the RAF who became a member by way of some supposed Stockholm syndrome.  She was gaoled and died in gaol.  The political establishment claimed that she committed suicide but many believed that she was murdered.).  Much more contextualisation was required to understand the connection between the original image and its re-shaping by the artist.  The viewer was left wondering why these paintings and photographs were being placed together except that they are rather attractive paintings and photographs and then there is the necessity to engage with something.

Gerhard Richter, Two Candles, 1982

Although rather short of the usual Tate Modern expectations, Capturing the Moment is still informative, engaged and is certainly a great introduction to some of the issues concerning painting and photography.

Paul Murphy, Tate Modern, 12th June 2023

https://www.thebelfastengine.co.uk/

Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Predecessors, (c) Njideka Akunyili Crosby


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