found sculpture and photography from surrealism to contemporary art

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This article was downloaded by: [MacEwan University Libraries] On: 14 November 2014, At: 14:07 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Visual Studies Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rvst20 Found sculpture and photography from surrealism to contemporary art Jelena Stojkovic a a University of Westminster Published online: 07 Apr 2014. To cite this article: Jelena Stojkovic (2014) Found sculpture and photography from surrealism to contemporary art, Visual Studies, 29:2, 228-230, DOI: 10.1080/1472586X.2014.887294 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1472586X.2014.887294 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http:// www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

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Page 1: Found sculpture and photography from surrealism to contemporary art

This article was downloaded by: [MacEwan University Libraries]On: 14 November 2014, At: 14:07Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: MortimerHouse, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Visual StudiesPublication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rvst20

Found sculpture and photography from surrealism tocontemporary artJelena Stojkovica

a University of WestminsterPublished online: 07 Apr 2014.

To cite this article: Jelena Stojkovic (2014) Found sculpture and photography from surrealism to contemporary art, VisualStudies, 29:2, 228-230, DOI: 10.1080/1472586X.2014.887294

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1472586X.2014.887294

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) containedin the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make norepresentations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose ofthe Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be reliedupon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shallnot be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and otherliabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to orarising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematicreproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in anyform to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Page 2: Found sculpture and photography from surrealism to contemporary art

what they tell us about the ‘social ties’ between humansand pet animals. The authors are quite aware that theyare contributing to the body of scholarship on thehistory of sentiment and of sentimentality, both ‘sincereand staged’ (as they put it).

In order to make their study manageable, the authorslimit their sample to Real Photo Post Cards (RPPCs),popular in the decades 1905–35. Their examples, drawnfrom more than 500 they examined, are primarily fromthe United States and Western Europe. Some of theseRPPCs are amateur photographs (Kodak, through itsadvertising, encouraged people to take photographs oftheir pets) and some are in studios by professionalphotographers. The photographs only rarely revealanything about the social class and race of thepet-keepers, so the authors are quite aware of the limitson their generalisations from this sample. Nonetheless,their book is a model for using visual evidence toconfirm and even go beyond what we think we knowabout the history of pet-keeping and the history ofsentimentality in the United States.

The authors organise the book chapters by distinct wayscats were photographed, from ‘still and unstill’ portraitsto cats-as-companions to ‘cats as kin’. Because of myown writing about vernacular photography by warriors,I was especially interested in their penultimate chapter,‘Cats as Shipboard Mascots’. The authors use ErvingGoffman’s (1976) ideas and his concrete methods forreading touching and the gaze from GenderAdvertisements to interpret the RPPC images. In theirsearch for ‘sentimentality tie signs’, the authors detectmore fantasy than fact, as the photographers project intothe scenes a sort of idyllic relationship with the pets. Theauthors warn that there is some harm in the ‘weakanthropomorphism’ of pet animals, as true sentimentslips into sentimentality.

Arluke and Rolfe provide in this book a beautifulexample of using photographs for writing the history ofhuman emotions, a history revealed only partially in thewritten record. They close their summary chapterconnecting their conclusions with Norbert Elias’s workon ‘the civilising process’, a theme John Grady choosesto emphasise in his excellent foreword to the book;Grady’s contribution, indeed, is a solid sociologicalanalysis in its own right.

REFERENCES

Goffman, E. 1976. Gender Advertisements. New York: Harper& Row.

Leach, E. (1964) 2000. “Anthropological Aspects ofLanguage: Animal Categories and Verbal Abuse.” InThe Essential Edmund Leach: Anthropology and Society,edited by E. R. Leach. New Haven, CT: Yale UniversityPress.

© 2014 Jay Mechlinghttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1472586X.2014.887292

Found sculpture and photography from surrealism tocontemporary artedited by Anna Dezeuze and Julia KellyBurlington, VT, and Farnham: Ashgate, 2013, 216 pagesISBN: 978-1-4094-0000-4 (hardback) Price: £60.00Reviewed by Jelena Stojkovic, University of Westminster

Found Sculpture and Photography from Surrealism toContemporary Art is a timely collection of nine essaysthat explores the relations between photography andsculpture through a rich prism of varied case studies. Asphotography’s importance to surrealism has long sincebeen established, the volume continues to argue thatsurrealism, including photography, remains of relevanceto the study of contemporary art. It shows how it retainssuch relevance not only as a historical avant-gardemovement but also as a space of intersection andinterchange for some of the chief ideas and subjects ofconcern driving art production throughout the twentiethand twenty-first centuries.

The volume takes Involuntary Sculptures, a series ofphotographs shot by Brassaï and submitted to thesurrealist periodical Minotaure in 1933 with captionsby Salvador Dalí, as its point of departure. Brassaï’sphotographs – already the subject of a 2004symposium at the Henry Moore Institute and seenpartially on the book’s cover – presented close-uprenditions of everyday debris, defamiliarising their sizeand purpose by showing them against nondescriptbackgrounds. Involuntary Sculptures offered ascientific-like approach to chance encounters withobjects widely considered to be insignificant andmarginal. It is the ‘involuntary’ character of this series,inscribed by the surrealist celebration of automaticwriting and unexpected juxtapositions, that informsthe essays compiled in the volume, as it complicatesthe study of both sculpture and photography with thenotions of chance and agency. As the editors stress inthe introduction, they frame sculpture between what is‘made’ and ‘found’, while advancing the view ofphotography as simultaneously an artwork and adocument, or an object and an image.

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Involuntary Sculptures is brought forward as animportant example of surrealist object research. Assuch, it is elaborated in detail in Steven Harris’sopening essay and discussed as a background for thedevelopment of Hans Arp’s biomorphic sculptures.This essay also offers an insight into previously little-acknowledged conjunctions between surrealism andabstraction. Julia Kelly’s contextualisation of AlbertoGiacometti’s and Paule Vézelay’s works is equallysituated within the historical avant-garde, elucidatingthe importance of nineteenth century collectingpractices for the relevance it assigned to found objects.The focus then shifts to Man Ray’s 1923 Le Retour àla Raison in Samantha Lackey’s interpretation of thecinematic close-up through the modernist modes ofspectatorship. The first part of the volume thus revealsthe multilayered and complex nature of surrealistresearch in objects. It demonstrates how the surrealistobject not only materialised chance encounters butalso facilitated ‘objectification of thought’, or theprocesses of artistic intervention mediated in two-dimensional images as well as three-dimensionalobjects. It also demonstrates how the surrealist objectwas of relevance for renegotiation of the establishedcategories of art.

Involuntary Sculptures is thereon reassessed from theperspective of the importance it holds for later,conceptual art practices. Martha Buskirk analysesAllan Kaprow’s 1961 environment Yard, aninstallation piece that encouraged its audience tointeract with a large number of automobile tyres, withregard to the issue of record and the role thatphotography played in its later enactments. AnnaDezeuze continues with an examination of RichardWentworth’s photographs, produced as a part of hissculptural experiments since the 1970s, highlightingtheir close relationship with theories and practices ofeveryday life as a mode of agency. Carrie Lambert-Beatty engages with Terry Fox’s The Children’s Tapes(1974), a series of video recordings of small-scalemobile sculptural constructions produced fromeveryday objects, to show the impact of television onthe conceptualisation and comprehension of art. Theproblems surrounding the visual rendering of plasticproperties of sculpture through lens-based media, aswell as the ephemerality of sculptural installations, arethus recontextualised in the post-war period as aquestion concerning the status of art objects. Thisquestion is placed within the processes of change ofthe conditions determining how an artwork is

exhibited and experienced, characteristic of thedebates of the 1960s and 1970s.

Finally, Involuntary Sculptures is also seen as relevantto the understanding of contemporary art. John C.Welchman uses it to reframe Mike Kelley’smanipulation of photographic archives for theconstruction of fictive performative situations. SimonBaker shows how American sculptor Melissa McGillcommunicates a similar tension between found objectand photographic representation in work that involvesprojections of photographs as well as installations offound porcelain figurines in gallery spaces. MargaretIversen concludes the volume by underlining theimportance of the surrealist experiments to theunderstanding of photography as intrinsicallyindexical in nature, as a means of challenging thepredominant perception of reality. She exemplifies herargument with works by Christian Boltanski andGabriel Orozco. The discussion thus comes full circle,having traversed a range of intermedial angles on itssubject matter, encompassing film, video andtelevision, but also installation, performance andconceptual art.

As Baker notes at the beginning of his essay, thevolume is resonant with previous attempts that linksurrealism to contemporary art, which haveestablished this as a research method of substantialsignificance. For instance, this approach was taken inthe exhibition Subversive Spaces: Surrealism andContemporary Art, held at the Whitworth Gallery inManchester in 2009, and it can also be observed in thedisplay of the even more closely related Le Surréalismeet l’objet, on view in 2013–2014 at the CentrePompidou in Paris. In terms of photography, thisapproach was also deployed in the book MinorPhotography: Connecting Deleuze and Guattari toPhotography Theory (Bleyen 2012), wherewell-established surrealist photographers, such as PaulNougé, were positioned vis-à-vis contemporarypractitioners, including Paul McCarthy, RodneyGraham and Tacita Dean. Found Sculpture andPhotography is thus embedded in wider scholarshipbut advances in particular the relevance ofphotographic surrealism for the investigation of issuesof continuing relevance to the study of art, includingmateriality and media specificity. In the volume’sattempt to map out an ‘alternative trajectory’ for thehistory of sculpture, what emerges as an importantproposition is the refusal to frame and view any form

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of art practice as singularly defined. By pursuing theso-called ‘generative’ tensions between photographyand sculpture, it challenges the established parametersof both through the lens of dematerialisation and byemphasising the importance of contingency andmemory for producing, experiencing andunderstanding art.

Given its subject area, this volume will be of specificinterest to a specialist readership well versed in arthistory, surrealism, sculpture or photography, as well asto students wishing to know more about any of theseareas. However, in spanning diverse media, artists,

periods and approaches, Found Sculptureand Photography from Surrealism to Contemporary Artalso offers a range of informative essays to a readerinterested in visual culture in more general terms.

REFERENCE

Bleyen, M., ed. 2012. Minor Photography: Connecting Deleuzeand Guattari to Photography Theory. Leuven: Universityof Leuven Press.

© 2014 Jelena Stojkovichttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1472586X.2014.887294

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