Etna

Salvatore Arancio’s work explores beauty and sublime in nature. Fascinated with botany and geology, Arancio associates these notions with ideas of displacement and ambiguity. This set of interests and concerns translates into the series Etna, which comprises photographs of the endemic flora that grows on the lava flow of a Sicilian volcano, Mount Etna. This apparently delicate but resilient pioneer vegetation, which is normally overlooked, is the first to sprout after the devastation produced by the volcanic eruptions. The images portray nature as it starts to repossess the territory and enhance the vibrant colours of the plants against the blackened coarse volcanic earth. Through a meticulous act of close inspection, the work juxtaposes images of delicacy and grace to the notion of sublime, whilst focusing on the nature cycle of destruction and rebirth. The photographs make also subtle references to the formal composition of seventeenth-century Flemish still-life paintings. Painstakingly framed and digitally manipulated they combine the natural with the artificial to suggest a state of suspension between the real and the fictional. Marcello Grioli

The Non-simultaneity of the Same – Daily Mirror

"Photography did not become an art merely because it employed a dispositive that provided the imprint of the body with copies of the same. It became an art because it exploited twin poetics of the image by creating two things out of the images, whether simultaneously or not: obvious testimony to a history written on faces or objects, and pure blocks of visibility that resist any sort of narration or meaning."

Jacques Rancière: "Die Bestimmung der Bilder." In: Politik der Bilder. Berlin 2005, p. 19.

Talking about photography in the digital era requires a new understanding of the photographic — one that no longer defines the link between image and object as an impression upon a light-sensitive surface, but rather as the quality of being an image that can be reproduced without being forced to make any other references. This kind of photography uses a reservoir of visible phenomena, which can be enriched with visual possibilities beyond the familiar, which can expand the actual via the virtual. Natalie Czech’s photographic montages of images are based on archives of images and databanks. She sorts through their motifs and arranges them into similar groups; then on the computer, she isolates details from individual photographs and assembles them into montages. This process leads to pictorial compositions in which photographs of past events overlap each other in a state beyond time and specific sites. Lacking a dominant, perspective-oriented direction, the particles of digitized images constitute an all-over composition, eliminating in the one image all memory of what was previously stored in it, yet nonetheless maintaining the particular quality of the original images, which represents a unique reality. The fact that it is the knowledge of the original context that first allows the viewer to recognize the reference to reality is one of the productive paradoxes of this kind of photography, which nevertheless continues to make referential arguments and employs images from mass media without permitting its visual sources to be evident in the final, independent composition.

Press photos documenting war, terror, catastrophes, or accidents form the basis for the “Daily Mirror” series. These, as well as the finished montages, which eliminate context and thus suspend events, also refer to something that remains outside of them: bullet holes, sooty walls, broken plates of glass are indications of bombings, fires, crime, and death. These are traces of events already past. The images, some of them reduced to the basic minimum of recognizability, are, on the one hand, substitute narratives of these things, yet, on the other, they avoid narrative, dissolving it into a sheer pictorial presence. History is inscribed in these images, and yet they are hermetically caught in the interplay of difference and repetition, which constitutes the reason for their selection. They simultaneously show things that have taken place on different levels of time, and their montage develops a disturbing simultaneity in the images, which does not refer to any distinct experience — "a synchronicity of time expansions" between visual composition and the system of social references (Hubertus von Amelunxen).

Czech established these methods of simultaneously overlapping different shots as early as her 2002 series "Blattschnitte" (Sheet lines). Based on aerial photographs taken by government surveying offices and originally meant to help make maps, Czech layers various aerial photographs of the same places on top of each other. The digitally corrected photographs, almost precisely alike, document the traces of change in the space and urban architecture, which have been inscribed in the towns and landscapes. As a result, in Czech’s abstract montages, with their geometric, chromatic modules, there is no longer any before/after, but simply the simultaneity of a world that seems to have already disseminated internally.

In "Daily Mirror," the relationships are even more complex. The works are not based on photographs that form an inventory of reality under the premise of having the greatest possible objectivity. Instead, they are indexical images, whose chromatic gloss proves deceptive, owing to the causal connection to terrible events. The large-format “Sea of Flowers,” for instance, features a sea of bouquets laid in public places by mourners after accidents, bombings, or the deaths of celebrities. Different perspectives overlap; things somewhat blurred encounter things clearly in focus. In "Final Cleaning" there are layers of glass shards lying on the ground, the remains of plate glass after bombings. These layers form an almost monochromatic image, in which the different resolutions within it, the occasional spot with distinct pixels, or cut edges remain visible. In this composition, homogeneity is also conveyed simply through a sense of distance. "Charcoal Drawings on a Wall" is a composition of walls turned black with soot after fires or bombings. "Riddled" shows isolated bullet holes in different colored wall structures on a white background. "Win or Lose," in turn, reveals a rush of colors made of different overlapping visual layers of confetti raining down on politicians and audiences after campaign speeches. "Airshow" collects vapor trails from fighter jets at military air shows; "Aftermath," the rubble of houses and cities after catastrophes. The event-like character suggested by these descriptions nevertheless remains unique to Czech’s photographs. Here, there is no plot, just the arrested traces of one, which lose their individuality in the mass condensation of equals.

"Daily Mirror" is therefore based on the artist’s idea of what makes an image current, how long it remains present in visual memory, and when it is replaced by another image of apparently the same kind. News reports need current images. Still, media are choreographed to work through visual events that are similar and fit into particular categories. After a bomb attack, news reports usually show an image of a police and medical blockade, then a shot of the destruction: shards of glass on the ground or a zoom-in to a pool of blood. By constantly repeating certain patterns, the focus is shifted from the event itself to the structure and the report’s telegenic or photographic representation. The external reference fades in comparison to the sequencing, which emphasizes presentation, as opposed to the formal character of the event. Since news reports are in constant production, the parameters of form and content shift, as attention is first drawn to mass media not merely because an event is fresh, but through a combination of newness and redundancy. Whatever is new first receives attention when it is shown as a variation of something with which we are already familiar, so that a difference of variety and redundancy is created or, as Niklas Luhman wrote: surprises and standardization enhance each other.

The images that Czech manipulates become, through their decontextualization, standardized per se. They do not evoke visual evidence, although their indexical form seems to allow them to take on the function of evidence. It is this circumstance that perhaps makes up the paradoxical center of her art, which recalls photography and yet is no longer photography in the classic sense. Rather, it is the result of various operations in the field of manipulated visualization. As a form of digital visualization with its own type of economy, Czech relies on the way that an all-over composition can take on those kinds of social and political contexts that determine the economy of media representation. It is precisely the accumulation of similarities that levels the event enclosed within the individual image. Each bullet hole is proof of a bullet that could hardly have been shot with peaceful intent. Each piece of rubble stands for a home that has been destroyed somewhere in the world. Nonetheless, it is perhaps the mass accumulation of these various fates, in the broadest sense of the word, which is able to awaken in the viewer a form of empathy for the event that is barely visible anymore. Wherever aesthetic exaggeration exposes media stereotypes as such, a glimpse of the presence of terror, archived for eternity, can be seen behind the surface.

On the other hand, as soon as a form of interpretation penetrates the visual composition, the works lose their universality, which is detached from time, and can be partially recontextualized, which also forces the universal terror back into the closet, up to a certain point. Czech’s small-format series, "Across the Universe," is named after the Beatles’ song, whose refrain is "Nothing’s gonna change my world." In six photographs, the series features collections of banners from demonstrations that took place between 2000 and 2005. The specific events are unknown, but the slogans make the semantic references clear. Besides the many interchangeable terms ("Go Home," "Peace"), the banners — some of which are printed, others hand-painted — refer to particular events in time and can be categorized through the names of politicians or national contexts. In 2000 for instance, dominant themes included Austrian right-wing populist politician Jörg Haider, the fall of Slobodan Milosevic, Al Gore’s controversial defeat in the American presidential election, and the fate of a young Cuban refugee, Elian. In 2001 Osama bin Laden appeared for the first time, as did criticism of gene-manipulated babies in New York, and the mad-cow disease crisis. A year later, Robert Steinhäuser, who ran amok in Erfurt, Germany, and the so-called Hartz reform of the German unemployment system were topics of German demonstrations. In other countries, there occurred the murder of Pim Fortuyn, the expansion of the G7, and the beginning of the American military attack on Iraq. Individual banners are arranged according to size, so that the writing gets smaller toward the end, forming a line of perspective that seems to go on forever. The texts can only be read close up; from a distance, the many posters turn into abstract color surfaces. And yet, the infinite — the core of all the works in the “Daily Mirror” series — shifts into focus here, for we recognize the eternal repetition of things that are the same, and the return of social sensitivities. It is precisely these, ultimately articulated in the act of public protest, which do not simply excite attention, but primarily desire one thing: to be an image.

Vanessa Joan Müller

Natalie Czech - Sea of Flowers

copyright Natalie Czech / VG Bild-Kunst and courtesy Galerie Jette Rudolph, Berlin

Sarah Jones - Rose Garden

NIGHT FLOWERS by Simon Pooley

It’s Springtime and it’s dark and the city sleeps. Flowers emerge in strange places and he notices the flowers and then he photographs the flowers. Medium format. Tripod. Extended exposures, no flash. Tungsten-balanced film and available street lighting. And the camera sees the flowers quite differently from the eye. It offers up a glimpse into the optical unconscious. It shows us things that we never expected to find. Things that we never expected to see.

For McConnell the sublime and the monumental and the oh-so-fucking-sad-and-beautiful always reside in the people and the places and the things where you’d least expect to find them. In the Sectarian mural. In the Undertakers. In the Crackhouse. In the violated body. In the maligned and the marginalized. In the half-way-home. The oh-so-fucking-sad-and-beautiful. In people and places and things where you’d least expect to find it.

The Night Flowers are no different. They are a series of minor photographic revelations. Revelations in the sense that they reveal what the eye cannot see and what the night will not give up and what the city’s chaos and filth and concrete foreverness largely denies. They reveal a chance encounter with fragility, stillness and beauty. In the middle of a traffic island. In the shadow of a Corporate HQ. On a street in the ghetto. They offer transcendence, escapism and redemption. They reveal it where you’d least expect to find it. Colour in the dead of night.

Sophy Rickett - Various

All images courtesy of Sophy Rickett and Emily Tsingou Gallery

Flowers - Text

‘the flower is betrayed by the fragility of its corolla: thus, far from answering the demands of human ideas, it is the sign of their failure. In fact after a very short period of glory the marvelous corolla rots indecently in the sun, thus becoming, for the plant, a garish withering. Risen from the stench of the manure pile–even though it seemed for a moment to have escaped it in a flight of angelic and lyrical purity — the flower seems to relapse abruptly into its original squalor: the most ideal is rapidly reduced to a wisp of aerial manure. For flowers do not age honestly like leaves, which lose nothing of their beauty even after they have died; flowers wither like old and overly made-up dowagers, and they die ridiculously on stems that seemed to carry them to the clouds.’ Georges Bataille, ‘The Language of Flowers’ Visions of Excess

The language of flowers was a Victorian-era means of communication in which various flowers and floral arrangements were used to send secret messages, allowing individuals to express feelings which otherwise could not be spoken. Although there are numerous meanings and symbolism in the language of flowers from botanical, mythological, religious, personal and historical, which, obviously differ slightly from country to country one element that is universally given is their appearance, that of natural beauty. Batailles’ succinct counter argument to this ideal ‘natural beauty’ of the flower, is the duality of appearance and theoretical meaning. At once symbolic of renewal and death, blossoming and rotting, holy and the profane.

So symbolic of renewal is the flower yet at the moment of being irresistibly plucked from its origin becomes a symbol of decay and death. Perhaps then this begins my point of interest and link to the photographic rather than being plucked Jones, Rickett and McConnell and Arancio choose to ‘take’ their chosen bouquets photographically rather than physically, late at night or at least when no-one is around to witness. Ambient lighting in both Rickett and McConnells’ cases apply, long exposures add what we could say is Bataille “putrid’ vision of these temporal existences.

While Jones theatrically ‘freezes’ her Roses with the camera as if a scientific device not at the height of their bloom but just after the extreme point of their descent. Withered and worn by the elements this gesture is tenfold. All of these artists 'take' photographic images of their flowers whilst artist Natalie Czech also takes her images from an already existing archive of images 'the internet'. Collating a new image together from disparate sources that have been plucked from their original origins. Thus pointedly questioning the idea of social and political memory, of flower as memorial and overlapping key themes that belong to the photographic image, those of materiality, remembrance, loss and memorial. The fragments therefore in this case from the ‘archives of digitalized social photographs’ become themselves like momento-mori quite literally this duality of love gift and offering becoming symbolic of the death they mourn, a fragment, trace or remain. Exemplified here, as Bataille says 'love smells like death’.

By Annabelle Dalby

Soulwire Illustration Flash Website Design

Explore other issues of critical dictionary issue 1 - Elianeissue 2 - Untitledissue 3 - Faceissue 4 - Navigationissue 5 - Monumentissue 6 - Family Albumissue 7 - Skirtissue 8 - Email from Belfastissue 9 - Why Dont we Walk Along the River?issue 10 - Empireissue 11 - Pirate Jennyissue 12 - Treeissue 14 - Drawissue 15 - Email from Oslo