Michel Frizot, art and photography historian, and Hélène Pinet, in charge of the Rodin Museum’s photography collection, are studying the historic conjunction during the 1960s between sculpture and photography through a selection of eight major artists. Rodin had been a precursor in this field, as shown by the photographic works of Jean Limet, whose pictorialist inspiration (graphic arts gallery) was appreciated by the sculptor.
Photography fits in as an action medium before being an artistic medium in order to set an intermediate or temporary stage. In the context of the beginnings of land art and conceptual art, the path was open by Richard Long and Gordon Matta-Clark.
For Richard Long, it’s all part of the walking experience of which he defines an ephemeral trace with materials found on-site (branches, rocks, water) and documents through the intervention of photography. It is the viewer who establishes the process through his imagination. He also creates assemblages in exhibition spaces questioning natural and artificial connections by using materials in their raw state or recut.
Gordon Matta-Clark searched for the negative in sculpture and in photography through these spectacular “cuttings” which he carried out on abandoned buildings or buildings to be demolished. He pierced the walls, ceilings and facades and removed material to better reveal the skeleton of the architectural envelope, bringing about a principle of deconstruction. Systematically documenting the steps of this feat and the result of this cutting with photography, he also cut his negatives to create a flow in its gaps.
For Giuseppe Penone, it’s a question of equivalencies between photography and traces of the body through traps set for the viewer and through his gaze with “To Turn One’s Eyes Inside Out”. From the analogy that he uses between vegetal nature and human nature until a possible metamorphosis of one into the other takes place, he uses his own body, the vehicle of the action captured in a photograph, a cast, an enlargement or a negative (“The Geometry in the Hands”).
John Chamberlain, self-taught in the flamboyant baroque aesthetic, uses car body sheet metal that he cuts and welds together as Black Mountain College professor Robert Creeley would do, working with fragments of reality, perceptions and exchanges. Next, he uses a Widelux panoramic camera with a turning lens leaving a lot up to chance, using his arms instead of the viewfinder. Resulting are distortions and stretched forms that intersect genres.
Mac Adams, who gave the exhibition its title, constructs puzzles from images inspired by crime novels and cinema. His photographic diptychs are scattered with clues like sculptures leaving the viewer with the task of reconstructing the before and after. It is a middle-ground art where light plays a big role (“shadow sculpture”) by making forms appear, bypassing our expectations and perceptions.
Dieter Appelt has also placed himself on the fluctuating border between mediums. In line with Viennese actionists, his performances go from ancient myths to the origin of man. Nude, the body smeared with clay, he explores the notion of surface and layers with photography being the only trace of such rituals. A fervent admirer of Erza Pound, he goes to the places where the poet lived, giving them a ghostly aspect through the negative view.
Markus Raetz cultivates equivalences and paradoxes around decoys of visual perception that he designs based off of photography. With a subtle mirror trick, his volumes give rise to metamorphoses which always imply movement of the viewer. His most well-known work, the man in a hat becoming his legendary hare (a nod to Beuys), is accompanied by the “Circle of Polaroids” around of a man walking and by a new piece specially released from his studio.
Cy Twombly, not as well-known for his sculptures, these combinations of primitive shapes evoking relics or symbolic objects, had continuously practiced photography ever since his beginnings at Black Mountain College. We discover his taste for the color polaroid’s square format and his strident, blurred tulips whose luxurious and fragile beauty escapes from the lens like a vanishing haiku.
Again organized by a museum whose specialty is not photography, this exhibition offers fascinating, fruitful links woven between mediums, elective affinities tied together with photography which crystallize the creative drive and clarify a thought in the making.
EXHIBITION
Between Sculpture and Photography
From April 12th to July 17th, 2016
Musée Rodin
77, rue de Varenne
75007 Paris
France
http://www.musee-rodin.fr
