Undergraduate Final Thesis
INTRODUCTION AND EXCERPT
For my undergraduate final thesis, I investigated two moments of exhibition-making: the more theoretical part, in which concepts are elaborated and a narrative is built relating the artworks, called the curatorial project, and what spatially supports this speculation, the exhibition design.
Among the various forms of artistic production, photography was chosen for the curatorial research. At the beginning of the process, I realized that videos and films should also be part of this exhibition, as both are photographic-based media. From the beginning, it was established that the theme would discuss the relationship between photography and architectural spaces in the building and urban scales. Photography is a tool that has been explored for a long time in the process of architectural production, particularly for understanding the existing context in which any intervention would be held. Another interesting point in the parallel of photography and architecture is that there is a constant passage of two-dimensional and three-dimensional spaces in both fields, which brings us to the discussion of the construction of realities based on the existing and the fact that both codes, photography, and architectural representation, are guided by visual rules.
Moreover, cities and buildings have always been photographic objects in documentaries, photojournalism, and artistic photography in general. I believe that when we discover these photographic productions, which are made beyond the field of architecture, they cause everyone to question and learn because they present views from different people who have experienced this architecture. However, it is necessary to clarify two points: this research believes that photography is a construction based on visible realities and not a faithful representation (mimesis); and this research does not intend to question architectural styles or to focus on a specific production, but to speculate how a set of works in large cities, such as São Paulo, interferes in people’s visual perceptions, how people connect visually to the cities where they live or just pass by, and what they create based on this experience.
Another frame proposed by this research is related to time. This study explores national and international production from the 1980s to 2010.
The process was an exciting challenge because studying contemporary art is not easy, as the production and understanding of the works are very close. That is why I decided to use the word speculation instead of theorizing.
In this sense, due to some difficulties faced in the first part of the research, I based my comprehension of the artistic universe on different sources, such as texts, readings, and artwork analyses, which led me to write the text "Dialogues." This indicates the curatorial subject and the connections between some artworks.
I also studied different exhibition design projects and their history, aiming to work on curatorial and design projects together. The text “About Exhibitions of Photography” treats specifically this part of the research, in which I present references and ideas. From this process, I could develop the show's concepts and guidelines, relate ideas to the space in which the exhibition would take place, and finally design the show.
Excerpt of Curatorial Project:
“Construction of Spatialities” is a curatorial project based on the critical study "Dialogues," in which concepts were explained and works analyzed. The exercise of organizing ideas on photo media (in particular photography) was crucial to clarifying the direction that the project would take, what issues would be addressed, and how this would occur.
This text does not precisely explain a theory or formulate innovative ideas for photographic studies. This would require years of study and an extension of knowledge of works I still do not possess. This text is an account of the experience of finding a subject in which I became interested and gathering objects that correspond to it, as well as the description of the exercise of this curatorial project and its working process. My path is certainly not linear; it is full of comings, goings, and freedom of organization.
The curatorial project was initially guided by a few aspirations: to exhibit works produced by photo-based media (photo, video, and film) that could explore the urban landscapes of large cities such as São Paulo, New York, and London while discussing the photographic medium itself. In addition to these points, the frame of the contemporary language of works produced between 1980 and 2011 and the lack of geographical delimitation mean that the works could be of any metropolis and the artists of any origin.
During the critical study cited earlier, some images caught my attention. Those included David Hockney’s photomontage work, in particular the “Pearblossom Highway,” with the reconstruction of a cliché scenario on a North American desert road, made from a significant number of photographs and, as a result, multiple perspectives grouped into a final image. The idea of the multiplication of cutouts that discuss the issue from a Renaissance perspective was a major reference, also seen in the “On the Road” series by Lee Friedlander. Another work that influenced the exhibition project is the “A View” installation by Cassio Vasconcelos, with its various viewpoints of an image, enabling a comprehensive view when the observer is positioned squarely in its center (another discussion on the foundations of photography). Finally, the video “The Algiers’ Sections of a Happy Moment” by David Claerbout provides the disassembly and reassembly of a three-dimensional space based on plane shots. Regarding these works and the choice of presenting them through an exhibition, Colin Westerbeck provides an interesting analysis of the work of Robert Frank: the chaining of images on books is carried out in a dense and profound way, given that his experiences in film allowed him to learn how to apply to pictures the principles of montage in film. They are placed in a logical sequence through a composition of metamorphoses.
When renowned American photographer Garry Winogard says, “Putting four edges around the collection of information or facts transforms it. A photograph is not what was photographed, it’s something else... a new world is created,” he highlights an emblematic and much-discussed feature of photography: its ability to create new worlds. It is not a mirror of reality but has traces of it because the visible (and the non-visible, as some contend that shadows are made of light) is its raw material.
The multiplicity of plans and perspectives contained in the same image was the initial principle that guided the choice of works. However, during the project development, other processes related to it were added. They include reverberations from Cubism and collage in contemporary photography - such as a number of series by April Gertler -, the influence of the video on photography - ordering images in a logical sequence -, as well as elements from extra-frame exploration discussed by Arlindo Machado in “Specular Illusions,” through the removal of the four corners of the image - taking parts out of the visible and leaving room for the speculation.
By listing these points, I work with images that defy the common and heedless view of the world around us. That is to say, they are strange and conflicting images, and, as Eisenstein pointed out, conflict on the plane is the basis for a good montage.
In addition, the urban visual conflicts are generated inside the problems of architecture and urbanism through the design of cities, the distribution of their buildings, the buildings at different scales and various styles, the contexts of each part of these cities, the materials that make up these universes, and their colors.
Chaos and disorder exist in the contemporary urban landscape anywhere in the world, even in the most traditional societies, which maintain historical styles. There is a constant overlapping of concepts and designs, visual aspects, and spatial conceptions. I, therefore, sought artists who did not opt for organizing the chaos, as did Henri Cartier-Bresson in his “decisive moment” phase, but decided to take on and explore the conflicts of these metropolitan landscapes.
In this manner, the combination of visual strangeness and the subversion of the foundations of photography leads to a different (not common) way of understanding the urban spaces in which we live. The production highlighted for this exhibition helps us understand the spatial conformation of these places and the relationship between them and their inhabitants. Multiple views are cast on them.
Throughout the research, I came across hundreds of works and realized that some operations made my conceptual sketches more evident. The first of them is nothing new: having been explored since the 1920s/1930s by photographers such as Lisette Model and Henri Cartirer-Bresson, the well-built game of reflections and refractions is a sure way to discuss the overlapping of planes. Other artists took up the camera obscura technique and worked with it in different ways, creating an overlap of spaces and times. Another approach is related to the unusual angle of view that creates new relationships between full and empty spaces and scales of urban elements. There is also image post-production, its editing, like cutting and pasting.
As regards the selection process of the work, there was no analysis of the collection of an institution, which, in a way, proved to be a challenge. The research was free, based on references from classes, books, magazines, newspapers, exhibition catalogs, visited exhibitions, blogs, museum collections, galleries, artist (and art collective) websites, websites of photography festivals around the world, photography contests websites, lectures, roundtables, work and references from friends, videos, films, and different media.
First, I highlighted the works individually but pointed out possible relationships. One of the approximation parameters was their production processes, which were not apparent at first sight and required research. Another decisive factor for the establishment of relationships between the works was the kind of visual experience the viewer would have. Hence, the effects created based on operations were crucial for creating cores. Thus, these two parameters led me to decide what would be next, not only for the curatorial project but also for the presentation space of the work.
Therefore, poetics and ambiguity were the keys to discovering the artistic process within the entire work.
In practical terms, after establishing the curatorial guidelines and selecting the works, the organizational model consisted of dividing the group into small groups. In addition, there would be a strong core in which concepts are more evident, with other cores connected to it by several points (central group and surrounding groups).
Finally, four groups were established, which later became two, due to the demands of the exhibition.
The first group contains the works of Harry Callahan, Serge Clément, Michael Wesely, Corinne Vionnet, April Gertler, Abelardo Morell, and Mood Collection. The second group includes works by Lee Friedlander, Gordon Matta-Clark, Pierre Huyghe, Bob Wolfenson, Marcelo Silveira, David Claerbout, Urbanscreen, and Rafael LozanoHemmer.
As for the visual effects and the aforementioned production process, the images in the first group address continual streams of planes that are united, superposed, and condensed. The images are based on concomitances and interlaces. There is a space conflict, which is more evident in the works of Harry Callahan, Serge Clément, April Gertler, and Abelardo Morell, and in some cases, conflicts of temporality, as happens in the images of Michael Wesely and Corinne Vionnet. The photographs of Harry Callahan and Serge Clément and the video by Mood Collection are part of what I referred to as the vital core.
The second group has more analytical characteristics. While the works of the first group contained multiple perspectives that were confused and often organized as layers, in the second group, it is common that these layers are presented side by side or one after the other (sequentially). The works operate with the fragmentation of space, as in the montages by Gordon Matta-Clark and Lee Friedlander, and the reassembly and reconstruction in the final image, as in the works of Marcelo Silveira and in Spacing, or even later in the viewer’s brain, as in videos of David Claerbout.
Harry Callahan's photographs were taken in 1984 in the cities of Atlanta and Providence. According to the photographer, his style was naïve, considered his best feature. The trait of this naïveté, which, I would say, has aroused an intense curiosity, led to the creation of thought-provoking images. Even if we consider their format (36.7 x 24.4 cm), Callahan was quite astute, as they take the viewer to their proximity, inserting them, on the scale of the look, in the universe of those spaces that, to be perceived, require that one not be oblivious to them. In addition, there is a strong sense of composition and meticulous adjustments to his photographs.
Serge Clément, from Canada, clarifies many images in the “N à Y,” “Sutures Berlin,” and “Fragrant Light/Parfum de Lumière” series that photography to him is not a way to answer questions, but instead to make them. As in Callahan's case, his images address the complexity of visible reality through the direct gaze of the camera, without double exposures or negative montages. The referent is visible, and the possibilities are given.
"Reflection New York" is a video that shows scenes of the homonymous city from the end of a day to the beginning of the next. It is a photographic inquiry that seeks to see the city in an unusual manner. It explores reflections on various scales, lighting settings, and the revival of planes and reversal of the pedestrian standpoint.
In the two series of Michael Wesely (New York and Berlin), the photographer explores the passage of time and the permanence of space and its immobility. The most famous of the two, Berlin, shows the reconstruction of Potsdamer Platz. Wesely installed cameras obscuras in five points around the construction site of this German milestone and recorded, over two years, the changes that occurred in this landscape that resulted in what is known today. It is a concurrency of times condensed in the same image, filled with compiled and overlapping details. The city/image relationship is crucial in Wesely's work, particularly concerning the transformation of the image. As the photographer has stated, there was no conceptual intention regarding the reconstruction of such a representative space following German reunification.
His photographs, however, tell us much about this process and enlighten us about the project and its spatial relationships (in terms of architecture and urbanism). Moreover, there is a reversal of the logic of photography with respect to capturing the instant. There are many “todays” together, with elongated seconds and expanded time.
Corinne Vionnet works based on a logic that is parallel to that of Wesely. Her images in the “Photo Opportunities” series appear to be the result of a camera moving at a certain time. In this case, the camera moves, not the referent. However, we observe that her work goes beyond; it is not the result of her gaze on those landscapes but the meeting of hundreds of looks from nearby points of view. To be more clear, Corinne uses images of different people (residents, tourists, passers-by) available on the Internet and overlaps them, literally. It is as if the image of those places that are so significant to their cities was the meeting of many views of them. The photos are not unique but multiple. The layers of views not only discuss the relationship between the image of a place and its position in the collective memory but also raise questions about visual representation.
April Gertler provides quite exciting notes to the highlighted set so far. The artist works mainly with collages from photographs and drawings, showing a clear influence of this process in her photographs from the “Still” series. In a conversation by email, April reveals that she had been traveling constantly during the period in which she made it, and this movement caused some of her senses, particularly her vision, to lose clarity about where she was. Many elements were repeated in cities such as Berlin, New York, and San Francisco. The smells, however, certainly did not remain; they were the ones that made her geographical location clear. Thus, the series mixes city elements, transposition of situations, and repetition of events and images. It is a collage of situations experienced in an indeterminate space, and the image chosen here enhances this issue. The collage of planes and elements of different natures marks the scene's composition.
Another artist who explores the principles of the camera obscura, Abelardo Morell, from Cuba, transforms entire environments into black boxes. He covers all openings with black plastic, leaving only a tiny hole through which light enters the space, bringing images of the outside world. These reach the walls upside-down, and the image formed in those environments is recorded by a large format camera. However, in principle, to achieve what we see, it used to take up to 10 hours. In recent years, with new digital technologies, the photographer confesses that this process has become faster. In addition, Morell began to use color film and insert lenses into the hole to better control the image obtained, as well as reversing them using a prism. Conceptually, a crucial issue in his work is the restoration of the medium used to match the values of the images from the outside world and the interior space.
Lee Friedlander is one of the greatest American photographers of cities of the 20th century. Even though the “On the Road” series has few images dedicated to urban areas and focuses on the space connecting them–mainly in roadways–the photographs that catch the viewer’s attention the most are the two chosen for this project. That is because they contain a greater amount of information, which the photographer had to deal with in their composition. The cacophony of both is staggering and clarifies a hallmark of Friedlander’s work: his ability to create visual puzzles that challenge the fleeting glance of an observer. He builds these images, as in the above paragraphs, by exploring elements and architectural materials of urban spaces. He has a very analytical approach to them and creates spatiality as a whole. In addition to the abovementioned photographs, another image of New York is presented. Postcards of monuments and remarkable city places are placed in the foreground before one of the buildings, the milestone of the city’s landscape. It creates a set of scales and visual angles that lead the viewer to reflect on the relationship between those frames within the photograph.
The architect Gordon Matta-Clark became known in the 1970s for his work called “Anarchitecture.” His temporary interventions gained 1:1 scale in several buildings, most of them before their demolishment. He used them to deal directly with the critique of architecture and urbanism, such as the process of gentrification and the building of monuments. His interventions were recorded by photographs and films, so he also used these instruments to discuss his issues of representation, thus creating visual and spatial relationships between architecture and photography.
Pierre Huyghe reflects on the limits of representation and documentation in his tribute to the work “Conical Intersect” by Gordon Matta-Clark. The artist overlaps the film of the excavation process of the buildings that would give place to the construction of the much-debated Centre Georges Pompidou with Steve McCall’s film, which portrays the same place. Pierre Hyughe’s photograph shows the exact moment when the light invades the cavity projected on the wall where the existing architecture is dissolved by light.
Bob Wolfenson’s Anti-façade series impresses not only by the monumental scale of the images, which lead viewers to immerse themselves in those architectures but also by the choice of unusual angles that render a two-dimensional view of emblematic buildings of São Paulo, mainly in the central region. We lose track of the spatial relationship of different buildings, even if they are not a single one. In some images, the scale of the buildings is so disproportionate compared to that of humans that one might say it is merely a project or instead that the image is not a photograph of an objective referent. Also, the photographer uses empty spaces to enlarge the viewing area of façades and building details in a high-density urban area.
Marcelo Silveira, from Pernambuco, Northeastern Brazil, produces collage works in the "Landscapes" series based on images taken from magazines. The reassembly of façades and details of buildings of distinct styles clearly highlights the influence of high-density Brazilian cities. Similar to Bob Wolfenson's work, Marcelo uses overlaps and the absence of gaps to question our visual perception of this architectural sea.
As stated earlier, an important video for the entire work was “The Algiers’ Section of a Happy Moment”. First, the video follows an inverse logic regarding its own nature, not showing moving images but a succession of static frames. The movement he intends to achieve is quite slow and does not occur, in this “narrative,” in minimal fractions of time but in seconds. The strangeness is fundamental to the unveiling of David 42
Claerbout’s poetic construction process. The event space – composed of people feeding seagulls on the roof of an Algerian building – is unraveled and cut into several takes in a nonlinear, space-based sequence, which deconstructs the unity of the moment of its presence. Despite being a specific event, the extension of time and the absence of a temporal progression lead to ambiguity in reconstructing that space. In the end, viewers have elements for different mental constructions of the scene in three dimensions. It is an experience of time and space that once again questions our senses.
The video "Spacing" by the Urbanscreen Collective relates dance and conceptual spaces. The choreography is performed by dancers in a virtual place, in a three-dimensional design. There is a spatial interpretation of the movements related to the conformation of this place, which is a stage. The dancers are responsible for the reference clipping and the consequent construction of the mutant space. The three-dimensional graphics of the scenery projected on the actual façade of the office building Stubengasse in the German city of Münster also question the spectators’ perception of the scenery. Just as the architectural foundation of the building, the video provides the ambiguity of a space that is simultaneously contemporary and traditional. Its virtuality and its design clarify this point.
“1,000 Platitudes” is a large-scale photographic projection by artist Rafael Lozano Hemmer. It is a set of photomontages and a video with 1,000 words common to the vocabulary of the promotion of globalized cities, such as “open,” “cosmopolitan,” and “modern.” For the project, he assembled a mobile platform that ran through Linz, Austria, with a projector of 110,000 ANSI lumens (reproducing images with more than 70 x 70 m in size). Also, an alphabet letter was projected on each building among a selection of various types, and the set was later photographed before the arrival of the local authorities.
The idea of creating new visual worlds is fully linked to the redesign and reorganization of relationships between existing spaces through the possibilities of photographic mechanisms. These are attitudes that define constructions of new spatialities.
