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.

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

~ Typology ~ Assignment 4

I have finally found my inspiration for a typology to carryout for the rest of the school term as part of our fourth assignment.  In these pieces I am pulling influence from Robert Smithson's Mirror Displacements and Earthworks.

A Little Late

But interesting to view nonetheless...

The Image-World

"Photography does not simply reproduce the real, it recycles it -  a key procedure of a modern society.  IN the form of photographic images, things and events are put to new uses, assigned new meanings, which go beyond the distinctions between the beautiful and the ugly, the true and the false, the useful and the useless, good taste and bad.  Photography is one of the chief means for producing that quality ascribed to things and situations which erases these distinctions: "the interesting."

-From The Image-World, by Susan Sontag

Karl Blossfeldt ~ Original Forms of Art

Karl Blossfeldt (1865-1932) was a German instructor of sculpture who used his remarkable photographs of plant studies to educate his students about design elements in nature. Self-taught in photography, he devoted himself to the study of nature, photographing nothing but flowers, buds and seed capsules for thirty-five years. He once said,"The plant never lapses into mere arid functionalism; it fashions and shapes according to logic and suitability, and with its primeval force compels everything to attain the highest artistic form."
Blossfeldt's photographs were made with a homemade camera that could magnify the subject up to thirty times its actual size. By doing so he revealed extraordinary details within the natural structure of the plants. In the process he created some of the most innovative photographic work of his time. The simple yet expressive forms captured on film affirmed his boundless artistic and intellectual ability.

Published in 1928 when Blossfeldt was sixty-three and a professor of applied art at the Berliner Kunsthochschule, Urformen der Kunst (Original Forms of Art) quickly became an international bestseller and in turn made Blossfeldt famous almost overnight. His contemporaries were enchanted by the abstract shapes and structures in nature that he revealed to the world. In 2001 Urformen der Kunst was included in "The Book of 101 Books" as one of the seminal photographic books of the Twentieth Century.

These rarely seen, subtly toned black and white photogravure images are now recognized as vital contributions to the history of photography and they remain as intriguing today as they are beautiful.