REALITY CHECK:
TRUTH AND ILLUSION IN CONTEMPORARY PHOTOGRAPHY
Metropolitan Museum of Art
New York City
Reviewed by Julie “Jigsaw” Ashcraft
Stumbling upon this exhibit after wandering through galleries of crusty mummies is a bit of a shock. The extremely glossy surface on Attempt, 2005–a Chromogenic Print by Thomas Demand, is comparable to the coated surface of high grade European fetish porn. Overcoming initial desire provoked by form allows the aftershock of the content to settle in. Attempt, 2005 depicts stacks of explosives with long fuses on the desk of an artist’s studio. An artist’s studio was targeted in the 1970’s by the German terrorist Baader-Meinhof Gang, who placed the explosives there in an effort to blow up the state prosecutor next door.
I remember one evening in Berlin, in 1981, sitting on a bed covered with a Soviet flag, Punk Rockers and artists–hearing that police raided the home of a friend of theirs the night before. Police took him in for questioning upon discovering a copy of Chairman Mao’s little red book, and a wanted poster of Baader-Meinhof/Red Army Faction members–which their friend had stolen from the Post Office and hung over his bed. Radical chic was so prevalent amongst fashionable young West Germans at the time, that it was hard to discern who was really dangerous, and who was posing.
Back to the present. The gallery card reveals that Thomas Demand, the artist who created Attempt, 2005, makes life-size 3-D models, from colored paper and cardboard, based upon existing images. After photographing his models, he destroys them. There is no information given as to HOW he destroys them–and whether anyone gets hurt!
Lower on the Richter Scale, but higher on the Humanist, empathetic emotional scale, is a photograph by another model-builder, James Casebere. His plaintive B/W Silver Dye bleach print, Hospital 1997, gently draws the viewer into a darkened roomful of empty hospital beds. Where did everybody go? Are they all healthy, or did they all die? Is the light dappling into the room from above moonlight–or searchlights? An aura of charming mystery is preserved by the cleanliness of the snow-white beds, and the fact that if you look close enough you know they aren’t real. Casebere makes the models he photographs from plaster, styrofoam and cardboard. There is no mention on the gallery card of him destroying the models. If anything, one gets the feeling he might cherish and preserve them.
Exceptionally well conserved–and well guarded–‘models’ are captured in Polar Bear, 1976 ,a Gelatin Silver print by Hiroshi Sugimato. Arriving in New York City in 1974, he frequented the American Museum of Natural History taxidermed animal dioramas. The gallery card quotes him as saying, “I made a curious discovery. The stuffed animals positioned before painted backdrops looked utterly fake, yet by taking a quick peek with one eye closed, all perspective vanished, and suddenly they looked very real. I’d found a way to see the world as a camera does. However fake the subject, once it’s photographed, it’s as good as real.”
These, and other challenges to the common perception that photographs document reality, await you in the Contemporary Photography gallery, on the second floor of the Met, through March 22, 2009.
copyright (c) 2008 Julie Ashcraft
all right reserved
Contact Julie at: [email protected]