Robert Smithson, Mirror Stratum, 1967
Thursday, April 5, 2012
Filling the Gap
Smithson's elaborate and ambitious project for the Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York, (1969) art exhibit involved a number of Nonsite sculptures - Mirror Displacements - which he created in one of the galleries of the museum, each comprising mirrors and rock salt amassed from the nearby Cayuga Salt Mine. He also made a Subsite-Sub-Nonsite piece that related a work installed "underground," that is, in a stone closet in the museum's basement, with a Subsite above ground at the Cayuga Salt Works' quarry. Connecting the Subsite to the gallery was third element, a Mirror Trail, which mapped the placement of eight mirrors along a path that Smithson had laid out to link the art in the institution in Ithaca with the outdoor locations beyond the city. Modest photographs of the mirrors in situ accompanied this map.
On one wall of the gallery, he exhibited the Ithaca Mirror Trail piece together with small photographs of mirrors in the mine shaft.
On the floor, Smithson installed a group of sculptures variously composed from mirrors and salt crystals.
Photography was relegated from the status of crucial indexical (shift from context to context) witness to that of documentary supplement, while mirror reflection now assumed a vital place. Henceforth, when he employed photography in his art, Smithson would question the image's capacity to convey anything beyond a sense of temporal absence or loss: it had become, in short, equivalent to the mirror reflection , a lacuna in perception's modalities.
*Robert Smithson: Spiral Jetty, George Baker et al., University of California Press, 2005
On one wall of the gallery, he exhibited the Ithaca Mirror Trail piece together with small photographs of mirrors in the mine shaft.
On the floor, Smithson installed a group of sculptures variously composed from mirrors and salt crystals.
Photography was relegated from the status of crucial indexical (shift from context to context) witness to that of documentary supplement, while mirror reflection now assumed a vital place. Henceforth, when he employed photography in his art, Smithson would question the image's capacity to convey anything beyond a sense of temporal absence or loss: it had become, in short, equivalent to the mirror reflection , a lacuna in perception's modalities.
*Robert Smithson: Spiral Jetty, George Baker et al., University of California Press, 2005
Reflections
Excerpts from Robert Smithson's Incidents of Mirror-travel in the Yucatan, 1969
"The mirror itself is not subject to duration, because it is an ongoing abstraction that is always available and timeless. The reflections, on the other hand, are fleeting instances that evade measure. Space is the remains, or corpse, of time, it has dimensions."
~THE THIRD MIRROR DISPLACEMENT
"Reflections fall onto the mirrors without logic, and in so doing invalidate every rational assertion. Inexpressible limits are on the other side of the incidents, and they will never be grasped."
~THE FOURTH MIRROR DISPLACEMENT
"There was a friction between the mirrors and the tree; now there is a friction between language and memory. A memory of reflections becomes an absence of absences."
~THE SEVENTH MIRROR DISPLACEMENT
"The mirror itself is not subject to duration, because it is an ongoing abstraction that is always available and timeless. The reflections, on the other hand, are fleeting instances that evade measure. Space is the remains, or corpse, of time, it has dimensions."
~THE THIRD MIRROR DISPLACEMENT
"Reflections fall onto the mirrors without logic, and in so doing invalidate every rational assertion. Inexpressible limits are on the other side of the incidents, and they will never be grasped."
~THE FOURTH MIRROR DISPLACEMENT
"There was a friction between the mirrors and the tree; now there is a friction between language and memory. A memory of reflections becomes an absence of absences."
~THE SEVENTH MIRROR DISPLACEMENT
Wednesday, April 4, 2012
The Contemplative Camera
Take a closer look at a rain-streaked windowpane, the drain of a kitchen sink, or the gravel underfoot. At first glance, these ordinary objects may seem to hold little aesthetic or spiritual merit. But for students of contemplative photography, or Miksang, these small slivers of perception represent a marriage between eye, mind, and heart.
Miksang, which means "good-eye" in Tibetan, is a process that captures arresting moments of everyday life-and deepens our awareness of them-by using the simplest mechanics of a camera. Inspired by the dharma art and Tibetan Buddhist teachings of Chögyam Trungpa Rinphoche, Miksang doesn't take much heed of formal photography techniques or professional standbys like complicated lighting setups. Without manipulation and distortion, the eye and the lens are free to simply see. As famed French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson once wrote, "People think far too much about techniques and not enough about seeing."
Contemplative photography's roots go back to 1954, when 15-year-old Chögyam Trungpa took his first photograph. The next few decades would see him flee Tibet to India in the footsteps of the Dalai Lama, study comparative religioin at Oxford University, bring Tibetan Buddhism to the West, and found Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. Through it all, he continued to shoot rolls of film.
In 1979, a commercial photographer named Michael Wood took notice. Wood wouldn't immediately praise the photography: "I had mixed reactions," he says. "From one point of view I thought he really didn't have his techniques together. But I hadn't seen anything like it; it stopped me in my tracks." Wood began studying Trungpa's dharma art teachings and imitating his work. Eventually, he combined the philosophy with his own professional photography experience to create the methodical exercises at the heart of Miksang.
The art form has flourished over the past 25 years through trainings around the world and at the Miksang Institute for Contemplative Photography in Boulder. "We teach anywhere that is available," says Julie DuBose, the Institute's cofounder.
Miksang, which means "good-eye" in Tibetan, is a process that captures arresting moments of everyday life-and deepens our awareness of them-by using the simplest mechanics of a camera. Inspired by the dharma art and Tibetan Buddhist teachings of Chögyam Trungpa Rinphoche, Miksang doesn't take much heed of formal photography techniques or professional standbys like complicated lighting setups. Without manipulation and distortion, the eye and the lens are free to simply see. As famed French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson once wrote, "People think far too much about techniques and not enough about seeing."
Credit - Julie Dubose
Contemplative photography's roots go back to 1954, when 15-year-old Chögyam Trungpa took his first photograph. The next few decades would see him flee Tibet to India in the footsteps of the Dalai Lama, study comparative religioin at Oxford University, bring Tibetan Buddhism to the West, and found Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. Through it all, he continued to shoot rolls of film.
Credit - Katherine Adams
In 1979, a commercial photographer named Michael Wood took notice. Wood wouldn't immediately praise the photography: "I had mixed reactions," he says. "From one point of view I thought he really didn't have his techniques together. But I hadn't seen anything like it; it stopped me in my tracks." Wood began studying Trungpa's dharma art teachings and imitating his work. Eventually, he combined the philosophy with his own professional photography experience to create the methodical exercises at the heart of Miksang.
The art form has flourished over the past 25 years through trainings around the world and at the Miksang Institute for Contemplative Photography in Boulder. "We teach anywhere that is available," says Julie DuBose, the Institute's cofounder.
"Miksang is about being present and available."
~Brian Sano, yoga & Miksang instructor
*Dakota Sexton, Yoga International, Winter 2011-12
Candida Hӧfer ~ Found Spaces
"I photograph rooms as they are."
"What interests me about spaces is the mixture of different epochs, how different periods represent themselves," stated Hӧfer in 1998, indicating a key theme of her work: the superimiposition of various time levels that becomes evident in the stylistic discontinuities between architecture and interior decoration. Since 1979, Hӧfer has been photgraphing public and semi-public interiors - waiting rooms, hotel lobbies, spa facilities, banks, churches, theatres, univeristy auditoriums, libraries, archives, museums and, since 1990, zoos. With a sure sense of the coexistence of the anachronistic, her images capture bizarre and occasionally paradoxical things when the history of a place and its current functions and uses collide.
Hӧfer's photographed interiors are places of transition, but also for the accumulation, storage and organization of knowledge - locations of the cultural memory, designed for collective use.
Robert Smithson
Robert Smithson is surely best known for Spiral Jetty (1970), and Earthwork on nature's grandest scale at Rozel Point on Utah's Great Salt Lake. Made with a bulldozer, the sculpture comprises the materials of its location: mud, salt crystals, rocks, water. Smithson died in a plane crash in 1973 while he was working on another large Earthwork, Amarillo Ramp. As works like there show, he focused in his forward-looking and influential career on a reconsideration of the nature of sculpture-or rather, of sculpture in relation to "nature," as nature is constituted in our time.
The natural material used to create his art, previously foreign to art in the exhibition space, serve to idetify the origin of a work's materials-far from the art-supply store.
"Instead of putting a work of art on some land, some land is put into the work of art."
The use of mirrors emphasizes the important role played by reflection in Smithson's redefinition of sculpture. As the mirror reflects the work's setting in a museum or gallery space, it also relieves sculpture of its static nature by capturing the movements of visitors and opening up the work for multifaceted viewing.
Spiral Jetty, 1970
The natural material used to create his art, previously foreign to art in the exhibition space, serve to idetify the origin of a work's materials-far from the art-supply store.
"Instead of putting a work of art on some land, some land is put into the work of art."
The use of mirrors emphasizes the important role played by reflection in Smithson's redefinition of sculpture. As the mirror reflects the work's setting in a museum or gallery space, it also relieves sculpture of its static nature by capturing the movements of visitors and opening up the work for multifaceted viewing.
Sixth Mirror Displacement, 1969
*Dia:Beacon, Lynne Cooke and Michael Govan, Dia Art Foundation, 2003
Hanne Darboven
Hanne Darboven was born in Munich in 1941. Following a brief episode as a pianist, she studied painting at the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Hamburg. Between 1966 and 1969 she lived intermittently in New York City, then returned to her family home in Hamburg, where she continues to live and work. Her first one-person show was at the Galerie Konrad Fischer, Düsseldorf, in 1967. Darboven has particitpated in many international exhibitions, and has also had numerous one-person shows in Europe and North America.
Her work has been informed by Conceptual art practices, based in forms of numerical writing and systematic work in the realm of abstraction and universality. Later in her career in 1978, whe introduced visual documentation alongside her works of looping texts and numbers, primarily in the form of found and rephotographed images, which allowed her to address specific historical issues for the first time.
Weaving together cultural, social, and historical references with autobiographical documents, it synthesizes collective memorey with personal history, the social with the private.
*Dia:Beacon, Lynne Cooke and Michael Govan, Dia Art Foundation, 2003
Her work has been informed by Conceptual art practices, based in forms of numerical writing and systematic work in the realm of abstraction and universality. Later in her career in 1978, whe introduced visual documentation alongside her works of looping texts and numbers, primarily in the form of found and rephotographed images, which allowed her to address specific historical issues for the first time.
Weaving together cultural, social, and historical references with autobiographical documents, it synthesizes collective memorey with personal history, the social with the private.
*Dia:Beacon, Lynne Cooke and Michael Govan, Dia Art Foundation, 2003
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