Category Archives: Book Review

Tina Schula

October 26, 2011 – 11:38 am

Tina Schula
Radical Camp
9.5. x 9 in.
Perfect Bound
Soft Cover
26 Pages
Edition of 40
Self-Published
Publication Date: 2011

I’m reminded of a photograph. It appears innocent enough at first glance; a grouping of bunk beds, all occupied. The figures, each obscured by blankets could be sleeping. They’re not. Documenting the 1997 mass suicide of thirty-nine individuals, each members of the American religious group Heaven’s Gate, the photograph simplifies a more complex narrative, distilling the moment into a tender, albeit naïve, sentiment.

There are moments of such tenderness in Tina Schula’s quietly haunting Radical Camp. Figures recline casually on the floor in a dialogue with each other; they embrace, smiling in the warmth of the sun. These moments will not last. Explosives are built. A hostage is taken. And so, over the course of twenty-six constructed tableaux, Schula weaves a complex narrative centered on an invisible target, an unknown goal.

Focused on a small but disparate group of men and women, Radical Camp basks in mystery. The militia, if one is to get into the business of classification, is lead by an enigmatic man introduced only as Duke. An uncomfortable figure, Duke commands the attention of both his cohorts and Schula’s camera. Opening to his determined gaze, Duke establishes himself not as a towering presence, but someone with towering aspirations. His worried eyes concealed behind gold-framed sunglasses, the greasy haired leader most closely resembles the guitar playing Branch Davidian, David Koresh.

The book’s preface, a quote from Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer gives philosophical form to the ambiguously defined group. Hoffer writes, “a rising mass movement attracts and holds a following not by its doctrine and promises but by the refuge it offers from the anxieties, barrenness and meaninglessness of an individual existence.” In this light, the additional cast of characters in Schula’s work, Junior, Cyndi, David, Lynn, Josh, and Dwayne appear as members of a familial body. They accept their leader with little reluctance. Duke watches over his family with the bewildered temperament of a reluctant father thrust head first into a world of great responsibility.

If Radical Camp appears as a cipher it is precisely because as viewers we are positioned as outsiders, privileged enough to glean some information, but foreign enough to only catch a glimpse. We develop theories. We are left wondering.

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Tereza Zelenkova: Supreme Vice

October 14, 2011 – 11:02 am

In Tereza Zelenkova’s artist statement accompanying the body of work Supreme Vice (2011), the Czech-born visual artist explains that this body of work evolved from ideas surrounding the occult revival in the 19th century. This renewed interest in the occult posits a counter-narrative to prominent Western ideologies regarding perception, reality, and the human experience. As many have noted, photography was born from a collective desire to accurately render the visual world. There is the simplified story of Louis Daguerre and Fox Talbot simultaneously arriving at the creation of commercially viable photographic technology, but the idea of photography was inherited. The increasing dependence of Western ideology and thought on vision, the preferred sense from which to perceive and understand the surrounding world, accounts for the photographic impulse that entertained the use of the camera obscura, diorama, physionotrace, and other interpretations of the photographic. The pervasiveness of positivism, rationality and the scientific method justified what could be seen and quantified as the only valid form of experience and truth. The photographic embodies this reliance on sight and reality. It is important to account for Zelenkova’s use of photographic technology to unravel the façade of rationality we attribute to our history and society. Her use of compositionally direct black and white photographs, a medium associated with truth, to give credence and visuality to “our susceptibility to irrational beliefs” emphasizes this duality as an integral part of human experience.*

The seeming opposition of the irrational and rational, of vision and blindness, is acutely illustrated in Supreme Vice. Zelenkova’s sophisticated rhythm and imagery implicates us into an uncomfortable state in which fear, superstition, and death are the norm. The last image in the booklet presents us with the culmination of esoteric symbolism, a robed and hooded figure placed in front of a stark white background. We are not afforded the resolution of identifying with the figure’s humanity as the face is completely hidden, leaving us involved. She continuously deprives our desire to define the subjects who are photographed. There are no faces, no geographical landmarks, no references for us to grasp to, and this ambiguity reinforces her stark postmodern vision. The second spread presents us with a disconcerting pair: the left image is of varying bones artfully and decisively placed in a triangular pattern, the right image is of a dressed skeleton in which only the skull is visible. Not only does the skeleton obviously remind us of the nature of our existence but also the bone symbol implies a talismanic quality invoking ever-present death. This preoccupation with irrationality, spiritualism, and death not only questions our seeming rationality; it also reminds us that photographs create mediated experiences and contingent truths. This tension is most wonderfully illustrated in what appears to be an otherworldly aerial landscape. It is at once an optical illusion and a fictitious truth; under scrutiny the landscape is inconsistent and impossible until the realization that it is water over sand. Although its illusion and untruth has been revealed, there is still the stubborn impulse to regard it as a landscape. It is symptomatic of the human experience to be able to fully invest in two contradictory truths, into rationality and irrationality, science and mysticism, blindness and vision. The occult revival was a backlash against overbearing concepts of reality, which threatened to reduce the multiplicity of experiences and perspectives enjoyed by humanity into one meta-narrative of truth.

24 Pages
19 X 27 cm
Edition 250
£12.00
ISBN 978-1-907071-24-9
Published in London by Mörel Books
morelbooks.com

Images: Supreme Vice, 2011 © Tereza Zelenkova & Mörel Books

*Quoted from Tereza Zelenkova’s statement, which can be accessed at terezazelenkova.com

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Ofer Wolberger

October 3, 2011 – 7:14 am

Held together by nothing more than a modest fold and measuring a bit taller than a standard sheet of letter paper, Ofer Wolberger’s Visitor shifts clumsily in the hands of the beholder. Deceptively simple, Visitor joins together several portraits, exclusively female, in a dense field of halftone. Flirting with abstraction, figures emerge as partial renderings; Seurat with a printer.

There is no pagination. Excluding the timestamps which complement each photograph, text is seldom found. Over the course of 48 pages viewers are asked to consider several ambiguous portraits prefaced only by the book’s title, hastily written and underlined across an otherwise barren white cover.

Despite no explicit instructions to do so, Wolberger’s book practically demands to be rearranged. Quietly recalling the cut up methods of Brion Gysin, Visitor merges portraits almost seamlessly; cursory glances would doubtful trigger any suspicion to the incongruities that exist just below the surface. Yet it is the inclusion of a blurred red line – a zip as Barnett Newman preferred saying – as if born from the soft flow of a spray can, that draws attention towards the book’s unbound gutter, at once uniting and dividing each portrait.

Parallels, tenuous as they are, may be found between Visitor and Life with Maggie, Wolberger’s extended photographic project which began in 2007. Like Life with Maggie, a series at once recalling Cindy Sherman and Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Visitor addresses the complexities of identity with elegance. Both works, separated stylistically, address identity is a construction existing in flux, a pastiche adaptive to the environment it occupies. A set of masks.

The 2008 recipient of the Humble Arts Foundation New Photography Grant, Wolberger has, since 2010, gradually chipped away at his unfortunately titled Photographic Book Project with Visitor marking the eighth release in a series of twelve self-published books. The plan for the Photographic Book Project was ambitious: one book for each month of the year. Wolberger has fallen behind schedule but few appear to be complaining. Like the Photographic Book Project as a whole, Visitor is an exercise in dexterity. Created under severe time constraints with little preconception, Wolberger’s vast and varied output alone, a seemingly fearless display of raw ideas is worth noting. A welcome departure from the artist’s more long-term endeavors, Visitor provides viewers a glimpse into the mind of the artist at work; unbound, open to change.

Visitor
8.5 x 12.5 in.
Unbound
Soft Cover
48 pages
Edition of 100
Horses Think Press
Publication Date: April 2011

ofer wolberger

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Book Review: Eric Bessel’s Archives

August 26, 2011 – 8:18 am
Archive {2005–2010}, 2011

Archive {2005–2010}, 2011

The first image of Eric Bessel’s Archive {2005-2010} – which includes 52 photographs, two essays, and an artist statement – pictures a strange work of taxidermy. The title, A taxidermied lemur, Cleveland, 2009, only seems to confuse rather than clarify. It is clear that this “arrangement of skin”* does not accurately represent a lemur. As the first essay explains, the skin of the lemur is in fact stretched and formed onto a model of a fox creating a hybrid creature: a lemur displaying white canines. The inaccurate representation of a lemur is not so different from the inconsistencies in Bessel’s publication. The title Archive does not accurately represent this body of work, the majority of the images are portraits but they are by no means objective, systematic, or encyclopedic the way an archive should be. Fifty-two edited images over a span of five years is not exhaustive, furthermore he often depicts his sitters in a theatrical manner evidencing their subjective nature. Neither Bessel’s statement nor the descriptive titles included with each image distinguish between those he knows intimately and average strangers. It is only through the second essay that we are privy to the nature of his relationship to the sitters, most are of his immediate family and some are of strangers. Bessel creates an opposing set of signifiers, the objective and subjective, simultaneously obscuring his relationship to the subjects (even naming a self-portrait Young man with cardigan, 2010) whilst including Lauren Applebaum’s** essay which makes light of his false distance. Archive {2005-2010} is a reiteration of the hybrid creature, the lemur-fox, as it attempts to stretch a diverse and subjective body of images onto the armature of the standardized and objective archive.

A taxidermied lemur, Cleveland, 2009

A taxidermied lemur, Cleveland, 2009

Man with breathing apparatus, 2009

Man with breathing apparatus, 2009

Woman with silver hair in wind, 2010

Woman with silver hair in wind, 2010

Ad respondent with colorful blouse, 2009

Ad respondent with colorful blouse, 2009

Bessel’s approach dichotomizes the familiar with the unknown. The family member recurs and evolves while the stranger is cursory, awkward and unfamiliar. The interactions between photographer and subject emphasize this divide. Some of the sitters command their own representation while others are subjected to Bessel’s gaze. The level of intimacy Bessel shares with the sitter can be gauged by the amount of times a subject is included in the publication. For example, “Woman with silver hair,” (Bessel’s mother as Applebaum clarifies) is an artist who commands her space and seemingly orchestrates the many portraits she is portrayed in. The position of power by Bessel when photographing an unknown delivery boy or stiff ad respondent is not evident in the portraits of his family and friends. The photographs of his family are a mutual exchange as evinced by the way his mother’s outstretched hand in Woman with silver hair in wind, 2010 seems to be engaging with Bessel as if in mid-conversation. Whereas the blonde woman pictured as Ad respondent with colorful blouse, 2010, who only appears in Archive once, has her hands stiffly and self-consciously placed on the bench. This contrasting tension of the familiar and unknown is evidence of the impossibility of creating an objective collection of artefacts, an archive, when equipped with the all-too human realization that the social terrain in which one belongs is fraught with emotions, anxieties, comfort, and awkwardness. Archives {2005-2010} is a lemur-fox; it is the subjective masquerading as objective.

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*Kenneth White, “Consider the Lemur: Eric Bessel’s Arrangement of Skin,” in Eric Bessel, Archive {2005-2010} (New York: Conveyor, 2011), 7-9.

**Lauren Applebaum, “Surrogates of the Self,” in Eric Bessel, Archive {2005-2010} (New York: Conveyor, 2011), 12- 5.

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Sjoerd Knibbeler: Ertussenuit

August 19, 2011 – 8:22 am

Sjoerd Knibbeler

Ertussenuit
Sjoerd Knibbeler
40 pages, soft cover, full color
Edition of 300
Text: Herman Koch (in Dutch)
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The word Ertussenuit has no direct English translation. It is a phrase that roughly means: “a day out.” And so we go, out for the day, with Sjoerd Knibbeler as our guide on a tour of contemporary Dutch places of leisure. This is not a stroll through a wooded national park but, rather, one through the zoos, spas and paintball parks of the Netherlands. The blue skies are murals and the trees have buttons.

Etrussenuit met Sjoerd Knibbeler is a collection of photographs from the parks, museums, and recreational arenas of the Netherlands. The book gives us backstage access into the production of contemporary Dutch amusement.

Sjoerd Knibbeler

The venues of recreation and leisure are specific to the needs of the community at the time and place they are built. Think about the early World Fairs and Expos compared to the advent of the U.S. National Parks system or Prohibition-era traveling circus trains. Places of recreation are made to fit a community’s preferred mode of escapism. The images in Knibbeler’s book are detailed looks at the props and staging that goes into creating the illusion of such places. What is interesting is that in each circumstance we find ourselves inside elaborate, albeit clumsy, re-creations of nature. One image depicts the white tiled edge of a swimming pool underneath a lush rainforest canopy and a sparkling night sky. It is all undeniably synthetic, the ferns are nothing more than painted silk and plastic. In another image a woman is framed between two legs of a Wooly Mammoth. The woman’s hair, long, blonde and draped over her shoulder, camouflages her face and blends in with the hairy mass of the animal’s body. She sits, head bowed, using her fingertip to touch up the painted surface of a rock in the Mammoth’s habitat. This image is also an example of how Knibbeler often uses small clips of human figures in the frame to contextualize the strange spaces that fill the photograph.

The images, taken with a medium format camera, are super sharp and evenly lit. They compress space in a way that distorts scale. It is difficult to discern if the objects are miniature or larger than life. Are these little desktop aquariums or rooms the size of sports arenas? One image shows a representation of the human musculoskeletal system, which appears to be life-size, until one notices the escalator railing dwarfed in the bottom right hand corner of the frame. What is seemingly a close-up image of a model is actually a one-story tall human knee. The formal quality of the images serves the theme of the series, which is to examine the illusion that the patrons of these spaces so eagerly want to believe.

Sjoerd Knibbeler

I cannot help but find the pictures both humorous and disturbing. It is a feeling not unlike the one I get every time I go to a shopping mall and see a mother with her child on a leash. The feeling is similar to witnessing something that is both entertaining and unnatural, like a seal with a circus ball, or better yet, like a seal nosing a window squeegee. It is the absurdity of the situation that is amusing, but the reality of it that is unsettling.

These images are layered and the concept engaging. Knibbeler is able to produce visually interesting photographs that, as a group, discuss a number of abstract ideas. Ertussenuit explores the complicity of attempting to recreate nature and amusement at our failure to do so. The book is about escapism as well as the cultivation of nature. Its pictures are smart, illuminating the absurdity of the task at hand, humans building completely synthetic imitations of the natural world. Through these images, we learn how natural it is to make these places and then seek them out as venues for fun and relaxation. Moreover, these photographs illustrate how far humans have come from knowing and lacking a desire for the real thing.

Sjoerd Knibbeler

While some of the images fall just short of their standout counterparts, Ertussenuit is well-conceived and smartly executed. Knibbeler’s concepts are poignant, and he leaves plenty of space in his pictures for the viewer to wander around inside and come out with a unique interpretation.

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