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- Art<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
29 January, 2018<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"\/standpoint\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/03\/files_u28_art_gursky.jpg\" "\\"Feature")
<\/p>\nIn November 2011 Andreas Gursky\u2019s Rhein II<\/em> (1999) became the most expensive photograph ever sold at auction. The image, a huge six feet by 12 feet, fetched $4,338,500 and is of the utmost banality. It shows horizontal bands of flat, grass-covered riverbank, a tarmac cycle path, a grey stripe of river, and a flat, cloudy and near-colourless sky. It is a slice of nothingness containing no people and no buildings. Nor is it quite nature: the landscape has been shaped and emptied by man \u2014 straightened and denuded of trees. The photograph displays little interest in colour and none in traditional concepts of beauty and nor is it even a real scene \u2014 Gursky digitally removed a factory on the far bank in order to create what he called \u201cthe most contemporary possible view\u201d of the Rhine. <\/p>\n
Gursky is, in auction terms, by some way the most successful of all photographers: nine of his pictures have sold for more than \u00a31 million and his works occupy eight places in the list of the 25 most expensive photographs ever sold. His work is distinguished by its epic scale (some up to five metres in length), its hallucinogenic detail, its demonstration of the patterns in nature and the built environment, and Gursky\u2019s determined anti-individualism: \u201cI have never been interested in people,\u201d he says, \u201cbut instead exclusively in the human species and its environment.\u201d <\/p>\n
Henri Cartier-Bresson famously defined photography as being concerned with capturing \u201cthe decisive moment\u201d \u2014 the quintessential instant in which people (and it was always people with him) are most truly themselves, regardless of whether they are alone or interacting with others. For Gursky though the decisive moment \u201csometimes stretches on for days or months and appears to be reproducible at any given moment, appears to stop time or, one might say, to stretch it into infinity\u201d. His pictures of stock exchanges, warehouse interiors, superstores, airports, rubbish tips, hillsides and container ports contain no obvious narrative and have no specific rooting in time or place.<\/p>\n
There are links in his work to art history, both to 20th-century minimalists such as Donald Judd and Barnett Newman, and to the Romantic-era painters such as Caspar David Friedrich and the 19th-century American Hudson River school. Gursky too works with the sublime, although his is a post-modern version in which awe in front of nature and its numinousness has been replaced by its opposite \u2014 numbness. <\/p>\n
Gursky is the subject of a major retrospective at the Hayward Gallery, until April 22, the first exhibition to be held there since its two-year refurbishment. Some 60 of his photographs are on display, tracing the development of his work from his training at the Academy of Art in D\u00fcsseldorf under Bernd and Hilla Becher \u2014 whose photographs of industrial buildings presaged a new way of looking at unlovely architecture \u2014 through the more human-scale pictures of the early 1990s to the dwarfing photographs of his maturity.<\/p>\n
Gursky\u2019s photographs are a disquieting but valid way of looking at the modern world. It is often claimed that his work offers a critique of capitalism and the gigantism of the modern global world \u2014 vast, faceless spaces for production or consumption, the industrial scale soullessness of modern farming and mass tourism \u2014 but his photographs can equally be seen as non-judgmental. \u201cI only pursue one goal: the encyclopedia of life,\u201d he has said, but whether the entries in that encyclopedia are good or bad is not his concern. <\/p>\n
A photograph such as Paris, Montparnasse <\/em>(1993) is four metres long and shows the city\u2019s largest post-war housing block \u2014 a front-on cliff of apartment windows, innumerable identical spaces each differentiated by their curtains or blinds. The building resembles one of those ant farms of childhood though with hardly an inhabitant to be seen. Here is a structure that perfectly exemplifies Le Corbusier\u2019s \u201cmachine for living\u201d, a vast Mondrian grid into which human lives \u2014 absent and present \u2014 have been inserted.<\/p>\n
Gursky\u2019s interest though is also formal and technical. The viewpoint is impossible: he could not get far enough back to photograph the endless horizontal swathe in one go so he took multiple images from two different points and digitally combined them. The magnification he achieved turns the real into a near abstract, a panorama with a rhythm of its own, and does away with the idea that, at heart, photography is all about single-point perspective. His aim, he says, is to merge foreground and background into a single entity: \u201cI call this the democratic view.\u201d Without a clear focal point, every inch of the image is as important \u2014 or unimportant \u2014 as every other, \u201cwhich completely dispenses with hierarchy\u201d. This is not a subject in a setting but the setting as the subject. <\/p>\n
What is perhaps most potent about Gursky\u2019s photographs is that they fight the eye\u2019s natural instinct to home in: he homes out. Nor does the knowledge that he has digitally altered images put the photographs into the realm of invention: his post-production additions, subtractions and flattenings are designed to increase each image\u2019s sense of instinctive reality, not to give them artificiality.<\/p>\n
His are not comfortable images: they show that we design buildings intended to function rather than enhance, that we are largely blind to the patterns that are intrinsic to both the natural and man-made world, and that even en masse \u2014 lining the side of a mountain road up which the Tour de France cyclists will climb or pulsating in our thousands at a May Day rave in Dortmund \u2014 we are just flecks. In this image-saturated world Gursky gives a fresh twist to the old saw: in the age of the photograph, where we perceive everything through pixels, man is just another pixel too.<\/p>\n
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<\/h3>\n
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Brandt and Moore: The gentleman and the miner<\/a>
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A maestro of detail long before Leonardo<\/a>
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A breath of fresh paint<\/a><\/p>\nWhat to read next<\/h6>\n
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\nBrandt and Moore: The gentleman and the miner<\/a>
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\nA maestro of detail long before Leonardo<\/a>
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\nA breath of fresh paint<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Andreas Gursky\u2019s disquieting yet sublime photographs form the first show at the refurbished Hayward<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6800,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-510","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/510","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=510"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/510\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6800"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=510"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=510"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=510"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}