Review of: Andreas Gursky. The Museum of Modern Art,
New York.
4 March - 15 May 2001. Exhibition
Website
Peter Galassi. Andreas Gursky. New York: The Museum of Modern
Art, 2001.
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The modernist avant-garde made a gesture of rejecting popular
entertainment and the commodification of culture. To be sure,
avant-garde artists often employed the best techniques of
advertising and marketing, but they did so on the sly,
careful always to boast of their isolation and
disinterestedness. With Andy Warhol came something new, a
suggestion that there was nothing outside of
commodification, that we were always already enmeshed in the
repetitions of exchange. One definition of postmodernism
makes this the central, the characteristic move of our time:
don't try to escape commodity fetishism, we hear, because
there's no way out, no elsewhere, no other.
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Jeff Koons gives us this version of postmodernism par excellence. Sneaker
advertisements and basketballs, porn stars and kitsch toys, vacuum
cleaners and stuffed puppies: Koons appropriates the most mass-produced
objects and shines them up, making them glow with appealing prettiness at
the same time that their banality appalls. Koons, astute about the
marketplace, is a self-proclaimed artist of desire: he plays on the fact
that his audience wants these objects, coveting the luminous glossiness
of mass-marketed commodities. Shamed though we may feel, Koons seduces us
into a longing for those things which appear to transcend their
ordinariness, but not by any magic other than commodification itself--the
bright, unmistakable sheen of the newly packaged purchase.
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At first glance, the photographer Andreas Gursky might seem to fall into
the same category as Jeff Koons, a critic-cum-devotee of the
global seductions of marketing. His huge glossy photographs
offer up rows of athletic shoes, a landscape of Toyota and
Toys 'R' Us logos, digitally doctored images of hotels and
corporate offices in Hong Kong, New York, and Atlanta,
floors full of stock traders, and, perhaps best of all, the
endless riches of a 99¢ store, where stacks of brightly
colored commodities are so radiant that they cast a gorgeous
pastel glow on the store ceiling.
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But taken together, the photographs that are collected in Gursky's
mid-career retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York hint at
something else, something other than the commonplace workings of desire.
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It's not easy to articulate what that something is. Peter Galassi's
richly illustrated catalogue works to do justice to the monumentality of
Gursky's oeuvre, and its large scale does succeed in evoking some sense
of the work's grandeur. Galassi, in a wide-ranging and scholarly
introduction, strives to account for Gursky's striking aesthetic by
tracing major influences: his father the commercial photographer, his
disciplined training under Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Kunstakademie in
Düsseldorf, his references to Minimalist painting, his turn to
color, to big print, and to digital techniques. Galassi also labors to
differentiate Gursky from his contemporaries, arguing, for example, that
although Gursky's work can seem reminiscent of American photography, his
"adherence to a ruling pictorial scheme" distinguishes him from the
Americans and marks a crucial debt to the Bechers (Galassi 24). All of
these contexts and conclusions are convincing, but somehow the mystery of
Gursky's work--its ability to "knock your socks off," as Galassi puts it
(9)--remains unaccounted for, elusive.
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Take "99
Cent" (1999), for example. Here the title and the date begin by
pushing us to the brink. We are just under, just short, imminent,
incomplete. And yet the image itself is one of repletion, even of excess,
as candy bars and bottles of juice, shampoo, and detergent line up in row
after row of color, and the products appear to go on forever. Indeed,
what Gursky offers us is a tempo of fullness and insufficiency, as blocks
of color are punctuated by horizontal white stripes, and the store as a
whole is held up by six slender white vertical columns, rhythmically
spaced. The ceiling itself repeats the inside of the store, the bright
colors reflected into pale versions of themselves, echoing the floor,
symmetrically placed in their own ghostly rows. The few shoppers who dot
the storescape seem like prowlers hiding in the shelter of the shelves,
their heads barely rising above the patterns of packaging. The remarkable
effect is that the arrangement of the whole takes over, as the play of
whites and colors overwhelms both the single commodity and the lone
consumer. The objects are not there to be bought and sold, clutched and
consumed, eaten and used. They are there to add their small notes to the
vast pulsing rhythm of the spectacle.
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Awed, visitors to the show step back.
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With Gursky, the grip of consumerist desire is gone. Gone is the impulse
to grasp and to own, to finger and to taste. He invites
distance--the detachment of wonder.
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But how? How do these marvelous, luminous photographs engender a feeling
of awed distance? How do they frustrate the attraction of
commodification? The answer, I want to suggest, lies in
their remarkable formal control--something Gursky took from
his training in Düsseldorf. But even more specifically,
their wonder emerges from the one formal pattern that recurs in
almost all of Andreas Gursky's work: parallel lines.
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Sometimes Gursky's parallel lines come from familiar scenes of
contemporary life, like store shelves and divided highways.
Sometimes they are uncanny, as in "Engadine" (1995), where a
trail of tiny skiers runs parallel to a vast mountain range,
each echoing the other as they stretch from one frame of the
photo to the other. Sometimes the lines are constructed and
intentional, as in "EM, Arena, Amsterdam I" (2000), which
offers up a painted soccer field, or "Untitled XII" (1999),
which gives us a vastly magnified image of a leaf from a
printed book, where the lines of words trace perfect
parallels across the page. But at other times Gursky's
parallels seem eerily found or given, as in "Rhein II"
(1999), which shows us a slice of the river running in a
single straight path and flanked by green lawns in such
perfectly straight lines that nature itself defies belief. Or
the brilliant "Salerno" (1990), where a view of a harbor
becomes mysteriously ordered and arranged in juxtaposed
planes: first rows of colored cars, then rows of packing
crates, then rows of houses, and finally rows of mountains
and the sky. Nature and industry, sports and government,
sneakers and mountain ranges, mundane and transcendent--all
resolve into the twinned tracks of the parallel in Gursky's
glossy universe.
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For mathematicians, the parallel is defined by lines extending to
infinity without intersecting. Gursky invites us to imagine
that his lines not only go on forever, but that they are
everywhere, underlying not only the disciplined orderings of
culture but the unconscious life of nature. His parallels
suggest a forever beyond the photograph, a forever of lines
extending beyond the frames of each image and, more
frighteningly, entirely beyond reason, representation, and
calculation. Despite the formal harmonies of these
photographs, then, Gursky's infinitely extending lines evoke
the sublime. Thus with their beauty comes a kind of terror.
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Of course, postmodernity has encountered and embraced the sublime before,
as theorized in what are now its most classic articulations.
Jean-François Lyotard famously pits the postmodern
sublime against the eclecticism of "anything goes." A
genuine postmodernism, refusing to value art according to
its profits, launches an enthusiastic defiance of
conventional forms and expectations, the desire to "put
forward... the unpresentable in presentation itself" (Lyotard
81). If for Lyotard this sublime can happen in Montaigne as
well as in Mille Plateaux, Fredric Jameson
argues for a sublime particular to the emergence of the
vast, decentered complexity of multinational capitalism.
Jameson's sublime, like Lyotard's, reveals the limits of
figuration, but it results specifically from the attempt to
grasp the "impossible totality of the contemporary world
system" (38).
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While Lyotard's sublime is evoked by unprofitable novelty and Jameson's
sublime emerges from the endless surfaces of a world overtaken by
commodification, Gursky's parallels seem to offer something older,
something more metaphysical. In their extension from frame to frame the
lines imply a constant, a depth beneath the surface, an underlying
pattern or structure. As if Gursky was a faithful reader of Kant, his
work appears to present something like an enactment of the Critique
of Judgment: his lines offer a formal harmony and also, in their
infinite extension, they rupture that harmony; they frame the world and
they also break that frame. Thus unlike Jameson's bewildering postmodern
architecture, which dislocates and disorients, Gursky's photographs
embrace an order that is disordered only by the fact that the same forms
eerily spread from one photograph to the next. In his allegiance to a
venerable formalism, Gursky also seems to invoke an older philosophical
paradigm. Indeed, his loving references to Romantic painters reinforce
the notion of a sublime that belongs to the late eighteenth century. We
see echoes of Caspar David Friedrich in "Seilbahn, Dolomiten" (1987), and
we find J. M. W. Turner's mysterious and illegible landscapes neatly
framed by parallel lines in "Turner Collection" (1995).[1]
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If it is possible to see Gursky as the representative of a tradition that
is now centuries old, it is worth remembering that both Lyotard and
Jameson also locate their definitions of the sublime in Kant. And we can
begin to bring Gursky together with these two theorists of postmodernism
by recognizing that all three offer us the Kantian sublime in relation to
global capitalism. For Lyotard, the sublime is that which unsettles the
easy flow of the market by presenting something so unexpected that it
does not lend itself to being bought and sold. For Jameson, the sublime
is that which exposes our inability to grasp a world entirely overtaken
by the endless surfaces of commodification. And for Gursky, the sublime
transforms the banality of commodities into the grandeur of the infinite.
For all three, the sublime is that which blocks desire and replaces the
covetousness of a rampant materialism with a confounding awe.
Department of English
Rutgers University-Camden
levinec@camden.rutgers.edu
COPYRIGHT (c) 2002 BY Caroline Levine.
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Notes
Access to other on-line exhibitions of Andreas
Gursky's work may be gained via artcyclopedia.com.
1. Galassi writes that "Turner
Collection" is disappointing, "because the trick of reducing masterpieces
of painting to generic objects of reverence has become all too familiar"
(35). But surely Gursky's photograph deserves a richer reading than that:
by framing Turner's wild romanticism inside the neatness of parallel
lines--not only the frames of Turner's own work, but the pristine wood
floors and moldings that echo the lines of the frames--Gursky contains
one kind of sublime inside another. Turner's sublime of an overwhelming
nature is bordered and enclosed by Gursky's infinitely extending lines,
what Kant called the mathematical sublime.
Works Cited
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.
Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report
on Knowledge. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984.
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