Joel Peter Witkin, Heaven or Hell, Bibliothèque Nationale

Joel Peter Witkin, Woman Once a Bird, 1990

Every one of Joel Peter Witkin’s images in Heaven or Hell is violent. These photographs are violent, disturbing, and I can see why they have a history of controversy in the United States. That said, however, they are also very clearly  critiquing, or at the very least, drawing attention to violent images of a different kind: all those media images that massacre and maim the body in the interests of political oppression and financial gain. Similarly, the way they are exhibited at the Bibliothèque Nationale together with other drawings from their collection, I wonder if the photographs were a commentary on the history of art that Witkin clearly draws on? While Rembrandt's women's bodies are voluptuous and rich, Witkins will be obese or painfully thin to the point where they are skeletal. What does this say about the representation of the body in Western art? 

Joel Peter Witkin, Melvin Burkhart: Human Oddity (1985)

As a man hits a nail through his nostril or a figure sits with his or her wings broken off, we are reminded of the history of art that is referenced by the images, but simultaneously, as we look at these and other images of violated and distorted bodies, it’s impossible not to recall the wars, both real and represented that care little for the integrity of the human body.  And surely, though Witkin’s images may be more explicit, they are no more violent than the barrage of mass media images that verge on pornography as they penetrate our homes and our lives on a daily basis. Indeed, this reminder makes the photographs even more disturbing and confronting than they are already. Because for all their confrontation, the real crime is being committed elsewhere: if Witkin’s photographs are about death, destruction, war and the loss of humanity, the performative and ironic twist to these circus creatures ensures their morality is left intact, while the same might not be said of their mass media counterparts.

Joel Peter Witkin, Woman Breastfeeding an Ael, 1979

What I loved most about the freaks and geeks in Witkin’s photographs was that even when they were minus an arm, massacred, violated, scarred by torture, or had an instrument of torture attached to their genitals, they were proud, they were human, and they had a strange beauty. Always, they were made up for the camera, and happily parading on a stage. This gives them a status somewhere between genetic hiccups, circus freaks and fantastical creatures of the perverted unconscious. Because the photographs are stripped, scratched, bleached and chemically disfigured, the medium itself gives the images a resemblance to early daguerrotypes, and with that resemblance, all of the implications of staging and posing. Similarly, the photographs reminded me of Méliès films, mainly due to their element of the magical, but also of course, because of Méliès’ wont to disfigure, decapitate and disappear the body. Once again, the staged element is exaggerated by the reference to Méliès’ films. Like the early silent films, the magic in Witkin's photos is both created in the mise-en-scène and in the manipulation of the medium. Or, put another way, the “performance” is created for and before the camera. In addition, like Méliès’ films the violated and decapitated body is returned to the body of the photograph, here with the scratching and distressing of the image.

Also made overt in a very unique way is the  discourse on sexuality and gender. In all of the photographs gender is mutable or complex — women with penises, women without breasts, men with breasts and a whole pageant of figures who are neither and both men and women — but it’s rare to find any interactions between whole people in Witkin’s work. Nearly all of the figures are solitary, explorations of the isolation and desolation of the individual in this imagined world. 

Joel Peter Witkin, Studio of the Painter Courbet, 1990

The title, Heaven or Hell points up another set of complex ambiguities that confused my response to the photographs. All of them hover between representations of unconscious fears and desires, and playful satires on the history of art. Are they tragic or ironic? Fiction or fact? It’s difficult to tell. And by extension, I found myself not being quite sure of whether or not to be repulsed or amused, horrified or in empathy with the distorted, degenerate bodies. And even then, I watched my response incase it was not what the photographs were wanting of me. So as they wandered between S & M, pornography, the history of art, Greek mythological figures and even contemporary politics, and as I moved through the exhibition, I became increasingly at home with the otherwise deeply disturbing and confrontational images. 

copyright of all images, Joel Peter Witkin

Gerhard Richter, Dessins et Aquarelles 1957-2008, au Louvre

Gerhard Richter, 7.1991. Ink on paper, 1991
c. ADAGP Kunstmuseum Winterthur

Even though a number of contemporary artists have exhibited in the Louvre, I still think that entering into the hallowed halls of the great museum brings a certain kudos to contemporary artists. And Gerhard Richter confirms his place in the upper echelons of French culture as his retrospective not only occupies the Centre Pompidou, but two rooms just off the main hallway of the Louvre have been given over to his drawings and water colors. The achievement is even more impressive when we remember that Richter is a German artist who has no obvious connection to France. The very exhibition of these works in the Louvre is honor indeed.

Gerhard Richter, 27.4.1999 (1), 1999
Private Collection, Cologne

The drawings are sensuous, intimate, even more intimate than the paintings which, as I repeatedly insist, give us opportunity to sense and to see the great artist in the pulling and dragging of paint across a canvas. In the drawings and watercolors we see his hand move, at times, uncontrollably, across paper. The works are physical as well, in a wholly different way from the paintings. They are physical because their creation is so vulnerably present to the point where, at times, they appear as not fully conscious reveries.  

It’s difficult to look at the drawings without thinking of the paintings, and often they are connected, somehow belonging to the seriality of the paintings. Sometimes the drawings are conceived in advance of the paintings, or as reflections on them. In the multiple renditions of Halifax, the drawings are like extensions or versions of the 128 Photos of a Picture (Halifax 1978) in which Richter photographed the original painting in extreme close up in black and white to create a new abstract vision, or series of visions, discrete unto themselves. In the drawings of the same title on display in the Louvre exhibition, it is as though he is exploring the physical texture of the painted surface in lead pencil on paper. What light achieved in the photographs, Richter here reaches through movement of the pencil. Except of course, the drawings come twenty years before the photographs.

Gerhard Richter, Halifax, 1978
CR: 78/15-6 

There are also conceptual and thematic continuities between the drawings, watercolors and paintings. Throughout we see a continued importance of time and place: November, the Elbe, even Halifax Times and places are always ambiguous in Richter’s work because it’s never clear whether or how the title is important. Are the series of watercolors painted daily in November 2008 remembering or documenting the importance of this month? Or do they merely reveal the weather in the winter months? In another consistency with Richter’s paintings, he draws and explores inks and watercolors always in series. And the series is always a search for something that he never finds, or something that is always on the cusp of appearing. We see windows, figures who are never realized, sometimes because they are unfinished, at others because they are always in a state of appearing and disappearing across the paper support. And then there is the characteristic Richter erasure, the palimpsestic over drawing erasing and re-inscribing.

Gerhard Richter, 128 Photos of a Picture (Halifax 1978)
1998, CR: 99

I must say, some of the drawings are so hastily and sketchily done that I wonder if they had not been done by Gerhard Richther would we bother to stop and look at them? Moreover, the drawings and watercolors do not come together in a body of work over which various issues are repeated and worked out year after year after year. Similarly,  not all of these images are equally captivating. This skepticism, coming from me who otherwise struggles to see Richter's work as anything short of a masterpiece, is quite a statement. However, I will say that my issue may perhaps be the museum's reverence for the works more than it is with Richter's drawings and watercolors themselves.

Gerhard Richter, November, 2008
Ink on Paper, Private Collection Cologne

 Because for all that I say, the most gorgeous images are the series of ink on paper works, November a title given to them apparently because they were painted daily throughout the month of November in 2008. I wondered how they were made, perhaps they are blown or put under glass and smudged as the areas of different colored inks are bloom and bleed, floating across the page. With Richter it is always a question of how they are made, but then when we know how he does it, the mystery remains. How has the ink become pink? And are the inks on oiled paper making the medium pull away from the surface of the support? Do they have some reference to the wintery world outside Richter’s window, or is the title about no more than the month they were made? In some the ink is absorbed, and on others it looks as though the paper may have been folded in half and the “figure” on one side repeated on the other. 

Andreas Gursky, Bahrain I, 2005

Andreas Gursky, Bahrain I, 2005

It was unclear to me why Andreas Gursky’s photograph of the Formula One racetrack in Bahrain I, 2005 was included in one of the chapters of the Patrick Keiller curated exhibition in the main hall of the Tate Britain. It may have been there simply because the photograph is owned by the Tate, but it looked out of place among otherwise de-aestheticized or minor works by other leading artists of the past three or four centuries. Similarly, Gursky being German and his subject matter being the Middle East, Bahrain I didn’t have any obvious connection to The Robinson Institute’s polemic on the sorry state of Britain as it is written across the nation’s landscape. Irrespective of its curious inclusion, I was excited to see the photograph in the flesh for the first time. And even though I know the impoverishment of photographic reproductions, I was still surprised to see how powerful Gursky’s photograph is in the flesh.

The first thing that struck me was the impossibility of the perspective on the landscape seen by Bahrain I. Gursky places us, at one and the same time, looking down from on high at the racetrack as it winds through the sand dunes of Bahrain, as well as perpendicular to a diminishing perspective. The built environment in the background, or at the top of the image, depending on how we look at it, recedes towards a horizon marked at its precipice with a sky erased of all detail. The simultaneous horizontality and verticality of Bahrain I, suspending the viewer in a contradictory indecision about how to look, is typical of Gursky’s tendency to push representation right to the edges of abstraction. In a compositional frame that is familiar from Gursky’s other landscapes in particular, the racetrack is simultaneously in the world and reduced to a two dimensional surface made representation by what could be plastic tape. Until, of course, the eye reaches the back of the image and the traces of human life have either been left, or await us, in the form of a man made environment. And then, in that moment of recognition of the city, the racetrack starts to appear to fall down the side of a vertical cliff.

Andreas Gursky, Bahrain I, 2005 (detail)

I have always been skeptical of the argument that the digitalization of Gursky’s photographs effectively erases their relationship to place, culture and politics. Bahrain I surely provides a sturdy example of how such photographs might be read differently. The dominance of this Kingdom in the desert, not only as it is symbolized by the Grand Prix circuit as home to one of the earliest Formula One races in the season, but also by its role in world business, are surely written in the sand by Gursky’s photograph. And in another prophetic script, what is perhaps most disturbing about the image is the thin, but shocking red advertising slogans on the side of the race track, larger than life. Thus, vodaphone also gets its chance to stake a claim on the desert landscape as well as that of the photograph. These realities, like Formula One racing make Gursky’s image more than complicated aesthetic propositions.