Ernest Pignon @ Galerie Lelong, Paris 8ème

Ernest Pignon-Ernest, Ecco Homo X, 2012

I dropped by Galerie Lelong this afternoon expecting to see a Markus Lüpertz and A R Penck exhibition. Alas I was a month early. Instead I saw Ernest Pignon-Ernest’s Prisons. A curious set of photographs in which the artist made ink drawings of the prisoners who were incarcerated in Saint Paul prison in Lyon during World War II. The prison was closed in 2009, and the prisoners transferred to a new location in Corbas. In 2012, the prison was opened for les journées du patrimoine, and to mark the occasion, artists were invited to participate. Ernest Pignon-Ernest made drawings of its former prisoners, some know, others not so well known, which he then placed on the walls of the old prison, having the prisoners “reoccupy” the prison walls.

Ernest Pignon-Ernest, Linceul IV, 2012

This exhibition at Galerie Lelong shows the drawings and photographs of Pignon-Ernest’s transformation of the prison walls. The prisoners of Saint-Paul include, most famously, Klaus Barbie, but also, members of the Resistance during World War II who were guillotined under order from Vichy, the writer Marc Bloch, Pierre Kropotkine. Ernest-Pignon draws their emaciated bodies and faces, sometimes exposed at others clothed, and the dead covered with a shroud. The result are highly graphic, emotionally overwrought images that call for a lot of pathos. While there is something compelling about the concept of memorializing through reinstatement of images of the incarcerated, at least initially, it comes as a surprise. It is intriguing because this is not the traditional form for memorializing those who suffer.

Installation View

While usually memorials are created in which such walls are left to speak for themselves, with no attempt to reinstate images of those who suffer, Pignon-Ernest’s images create memories for us. The viewer of Ernest-Pignon’s images is not left to imagine anything as the artist has done our work for us, giving us highly charged images that, we are told, should solicit our pity. We are not given the space to reflect on what we see because the walls are reimagined for us. I liked the way the images of the incarcerated become a part of the walls, literally being merging with the fabric of the wall such that it is difficult to distinguish between representation and the wall itself. As I say, the idea is good: the prisoners are given back the walls that entrapped them. But wouldn’t it be better if they were set free of this nightmare? Instead of being integrated into it forever?

Ernest Pignon-Ernest, Yoyos, 2012

There is also something didactic and unimaginative about having our visualization of the nightmare of living in Saint-Paul prison done for us, especially when the same strategy was repeated again and again with little variation. I much preferred the large scale photographs of the drawings in place. as they had been pasted onto the walls. These seemed to have more tension and were aesthetically more pleasing and created more space for the viewer to see the prisoners in their environment. Rather than the drawings that elicited pathos a sense of the prisoners as submissive victims.

Pastoral, Alexander Gronsky & Genesis, Sebastiao Salgadoà la Polka Galerie , Paris 3ème

Sebastiao Salgado, Churchgate Station, Mumbai, 1995

On entering the Polka Galerie I thought I must have missed the Salgado exhibition as the space was filled with the Russian Alexander Gronsky’s photographs. But this tiny storefront gallery in the heart of the Marais opens out onto a courtyard which hides a whole world of workshops, ateliers, as well as another exhibition space in the back. A walk over cobblestones led me to the atelier and Salgado’s wonderful images.

Alexander Gronsky, Novye Mytishchi I, 2010

The pairing of these two photographers is interesting, even if it is not intended to inspire comparisons. Gronsky’s works are sparse, capturing the stasis and infinite nothingness of Soviet Russia that has never quite left the face of a country supposed to be revelling in its post-perestroika promises. Expanses of white snowy landscapes, isolated industrial estates, undeveloped land surrounding banks of apartment blocks, the same building over and over again, are the horizon line in Gronsky’s photographs. With these worlds as their backdrops Muscovites are shown to spend their leisure time in the images of Pastoral. Gronsky’s images reminded me of Mitch Epstein’s Americans who relax in the most deadly of environments, oblivious to the terror that surrounds them. Gronsky’s are like the Communist version of Epstein’s critique of industrial and post-industrial America. But as the title suggests, Gronsky’s photographs are not critical, they do not show situations that are urgent. Indeed, there is a timelessness and a bucolic ease to Gronsky’s scenes that make for an “everything is okay” vision. Thus, at the same time, they reminded me of the realist images of the post-1980s German photographers such as Andreas Gursky or Thomas Struth. They capture the same objective emptiness that marks the contemporary world.

Alexander Gronsky, Strogino I, 2009

However, Gronsky’s photographs don’t have the edge that makes Epstein’s, Gursky’s or Struth’s photographs fascinating. While they do venture into the weird and wonderful world of Russia, itself an abstraction and aberration, they do not have the aesthetic tension that would make them compelling. There is a sense in which the environment overwhelms the figures, comfortably framed by classical representations in which the horizon has simply become concrete. Ultimately, I didn’t find much of anything to keep me wondering, keep me looking again at these worlds. They were well composed, but not compelling.

Sebastiao Salgado, Greater Burhan Oil Field, Kuwait, 1991

In stark contrast, Salgado’s photographs are so intense and so complicated that there is not a moment to breath and not even a trace of emptiness. Even when in Gronsky’s photographs there are groups of people engaging in activities that might create noise, they are silent. Salgados images, however, are noisy, cacophonous and filled with an intense sensuality. The train station in Mumbai is heaving – there is not a slither of space between one person and the next. We feel the heat of the burning oil wells in Greater Burhan Oil Field, KuwaitI, 1991. And we feel the discomfort of the dirt that covers the humans as they fight the man made nightmare. Unlike suburban Moscow the far off worlds that Salgado photographs are fiery, alive, not cold and isolated. One could argue that they also depict alienation in urban spaces, it’s just of a different kind.

Sebastiao Salgado, Serra Pelada, State of Para, Brazil, 1986

Salgado’s photographs exhibited at Polka depict nightmares that we know from futuristic films, such as Elysium, 2013. In a photograph such as  Serra Peladail State of Para Brazil, 1986, there’s no difference between the Hollywood fantasy and the reality of a world in which people are human slaves suffering the dystopia of a capitalism gone awry. Salgado depicts other worlds that we have never been to, or if we have, we are still surprised that this world exists because we don’t know it in this way. He shows an “otherness” that is often created in the techniques of his photography.  Works of wonder, whether it’s animals, an elephant running through a forest or the human subjection necessary to the apocalyptic Brazil, we are watching wonder take place. It is just that it is a wonder drenched with sadness and anger because it’s not just poverty at stake, it’s the exploitation to the point of devastation, manufactured by us, in the West.




All images copyright Polka Galerie

Tacita Dean, JG, @ Marian Goodman Galerie

Tacita Dean, JG, 2013 

Even though Tacita Dean has retained a certain consistency to her work over the past fifteen years, my enthusiasm for some pieces has always been greater than it has for others. Her latest installation at Marian Goodman in the Marais is complicated and dense, making it tempting to sit watching the looped film of JG for hours. For me, it’s perhaps one of the more challenging and interesting works in her oeuvre.

 

Tacita Dean, JG, 2013
Film Still

Before going downstairs to the film, in the main gallery, a series of photographs “around” the film is exhibited. A salt encrusted book in one photograph is both aesthetically mesmerizing, and frightening. Salt is one of those substances that is everywhere, and it is deadly. Salt not only clogs the arteries, but it creates thirst and negates the effects of the water it salinates. It is like an evil disease that has entrapped the book. But salt, for Dean, in this photograph, is also delicate, gentle, and it is all about time. The evidence of a book that was once in the salt lakes tells of a book found in water that has apparently dried up long ago. Salt goes nowhere in the aging process, salt simply cakes all that falls into it. And yet, it preserves the book, keeping it safe for generations, safe from the ruinous effects of water.

Tacita Dean, JG, 2013
Film Still

The JG in the installation’s title refers to J G Ballard, the science-fiction writer who influenced Dean’s meditations on time, preservation, water, salt and sun. Dean and Ballard shared a passion for Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, built in Utah’s Great Salt Lake in 1970. Apparently Dean and Ballard exchanged a series of letters that discussed the resonances and resemblances between Ballard’s The Voices of Time and Smithson’s spiral jetty. Unlike other of Dean’s films, JG has a voiceover, Jim Broadbent reading what I assume to be these letters.

Tacita Dean, JG, 2013
Film Still

The press release describes Dean’s film thus: “JG is an astonishing kaleidoscopic experimental film, which could never have been made using a digital format, its beauty is unique to the abilities of analogue film.” And it’s not only the aesthetic, but I was struck how all of Dean’s concerns are laced into the form and ontology of light sensitive analogic film. The passing of time, the preservation of memories (in saline), a spiral jetty as a way to engage with nature and its processes all become transformed into an endless loop of film. She says of The Spiral Jetty and Ballard’s story that they resonate, "not just because they were made or written when spooling and reeling were the means to record and transmit images and sound, but because their spiraling is analogous to time itself." As indeed is her 35mm anamorphic film. At some point in the film we see workers handling heavy industry, and somehow, this is appropriate to the medium of film in a way that it is not to the digital. Work, production, industrialization, all are the territory of a type of filmmaking unknown to the 21^st century. We see the passing of time, the freezing of time, the endless motion, the arcane and the archaic in the very images that capture it.

 

Tacita Dean, JG, 2013
Installation View

In one of the most fascinating aspects of JG, Dean has developed a new technical process that further reinforces the richness and uniqueness, as well as the indispensability of 35mm film. Dean’s process, called aperture gate masking, is analogous to a form of stenciling. Apparently, it “allows her to use different shaped masks to expose and re-expose the negative within a single film frame. This requires running the unexposed film through the camera multiple times, giving each frame the capacity to traverse time and location in ways that parallel the effects of Ballard’s fiction and Smithson’s earthwork and film.” It could only be done with film.

There is something nostalgic about this reveling in techniques and processes that are so breathtakingly gorgeous, to represent a landscape that is likewise mesmerizing, both of which, have become obsolete. Film and the spiral of Smithson’s artwork are gone, they have not been preserved in sale. As Dean’s film oscillates between shots of nature, a tripartite film strip, and the irrigation of the land, it’s as though she captures the contradictions of these three different, extinct sites of wonder and amazement. 

All images copyright the artist and Frith Street Gallery

Harun Farocki, Parallel I-IV @ Thaddaeus Ropac

Harun Farocki, Parallel I-IV, 2012
Photo: Philippe Servent
Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Paris-Salzburg

In familiar Farocki fashion, Parallel I-IV exposes the mechanisms and the ideology that motivates computer-animated images, specifically those used in video games and war reconnaissance. And in typical Farocki style, a voiceover narration describes what we see in the image, telling us what we see, but more likely, what to look at. The merging of text, image, and voiceover is, consistent with his oeuvre since its beginnings in the 1970s, all about the control and manipulation of images, and as a result, how this leads to the control and manipulation of the way we think about reality.

Harun Farocki, Parallel I, 2012
Copyright Harun Farocki
Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Paris-Salzburg

When we walk into the downstairs gallery at Thadaeus Ropac, we enter a world in which we are surrounded by the four installations of Parallel. Each installation comprises two screens and before the coupled images, a bench. A speaker above each bench offers a narration of what we see in the image. While for the most part the narration —a familiar device in Farocki’s essay films — tells us what we are looking at, it is also a performance of the kind of manipulation that is discoursed about in the narration. As a virtual figure attempts and fails repeatedly to break through a road block, apparently an innocent attempt to escape the police, the narration explains that even though the road block is non-existent, being no more than an (invisible) surface appearance, its intransigence defies forward motion. Of course, the “explanation” is also a metaphorical warning. The focus on borders in Parallel II is perhaps the strongest of the four pieces. In addition to the animated figures attempting to break through barriers, we see a man on a horse in a recreated Western attempting to scale a cliff. In Parallel III nothing is a barrier: men walk through hedges and behind them no leaf is out of place. The borders are both invisible and virtual, and yet, they are always impenetrable.

Harun Farocki, Parallel II, 2012
Copyright Harun Farocki
Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Paris-Salzburg

The series also muses on —predictably—the disillusion of reality into an extreme illusion in the video images. In contrast to the virtual world, photographs are real, they are objects in the world and the voiceover convinces us that they are also representing something. Even if there is nothing behind the image, at least in the photograph, there is a piece of paper. Farocki reveals what we already know: that the virtual image is one step further away from reality because underneath the surface of water in the virtual world, there is a computer screen, which is itself an illusion. 

Harun Farocki, Parallel IV, 2012
Copyright Harun Farocki
Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Paris-Salzburg

Typical Farocki, there is not a lot to see on the four double screens, the image is cheap, not aestheticized. Because these are thinking images, they are images that ask us to think about what we see, rather than to be caught up in what we see. And yet, again characteristically Farocki, the content of what we see is vitally important, even though he exposes the manipulation that enables the images. The screens, especially Parallel III and Parallel IV are overwhelmed by fighting, confrontation, and devastation. Video games are one with representations of war, where the goal of both is to destroy the enemy which is usually a person.

Harun Farocki, Parallel II, 2012
Copyright Harun Farocki
Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Paris-Salzburg

I also enjoyed the history offered in Parallel I in which Farocki places the computer images in their own history from vertical and horizontal lines in the 1970s onwards to the emergence of the virtual image as it has developed from out of the filmic. In cinema there are two types of wind, the wind that blows and the wind of a wind machine – the real and the filmically manipulated. In the computer images, there is only one type of wind, and its constructed. Water in motion is made from dashes and dots, and it is simply that they are closer resemblances to reality, not that they are any more real. There is no connection beyond the visual resemblance to the original object. As the narration tells us, there is no longer any form of mystery to the image in its virtual manifestation; it, like the body that appears and disappears in the same moment, no longer exists. 

Harun Farocki, Parallel IV, 2012
Copyright Harun Farocki
Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Paris-Salzburg

This exhibition coincides with the single artist exhibition of Farocki’s oeuvre in the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, and is both predictably Farocki and unpredictably new. Perhaps most refreshing about Parallel (2012) is the audience: I sat in the blue chip Thaddaeus Ropac gallery in the Marais, surrounded by freshfaced, bright-eyed young men with backpacks, clutching skateboards. It was lovely to enjoy esoteric art with this audience, but I kept wondering about their responses to Farocki’s installation. Those who stayed longer than ten minutes, that is, to see the narrative of each part of Parellel in its entirety, seemed captivated enough, but did they anticipate an installation on video games would be this discursive? And I wondered if the exhibition showed them anything they didn’t already know, and haven’t already seen in a more sophisticated form in their own video gaming lives?