Andreas Gursky, the German artist of sixty-five years has his first major retrospective show at the Hayward Gallery. From my visit a few days before the show was coming to its end, the gallery was shown to be in healthily circulation with enough folk to prove the show a success and no doubt, keeping the Hayward’s patrons satisfied with their cultural social ornament.
The first room of the gallery proved to be expected of a German artist, portentous nature matched in its vertical and horizontal weight and from the history of the artist, a glisten of commercialization touch as one can find in how saturated the folk look in Ratingen, Swimming Pool 1987, best to mention Gursky acquired this from his father who worked as commercial photographer. This being the auxiliary to the rest of the show, naturally, the works would be of comprehensible and inviting order. However, there is something dry and too common about these photographs. Only are there glimpses of Gursky pushing into the material that would sustain him for a good decade or two – Ruhr Valley 1989,
here we can see an artist who failed at approaching the medium of painting and scurried away to the camera seeking painterly forms through the lens. The photograph is a Franz Kline if he were too lazy to pick up the brush, the vision borrowed of Wender’s, his vision that he imbued into the drifting journalist – Phillip Winter, in Alice in the Cites 1972. It is in Maloja 1989, Gursky shows early fermentation in his primary material – society. The photograph is passable and base; a scenic mountain where a flock of tourist idle sit-ass in view of a mountain making a collective decision.
Luckily for Gursky he was exploring this visual material in the late eighties and not where we are now – in the tumultuous rush of informatical orgasms of cheap five-second memes and superfluous bric-a-brac post-internet colour themes that make sense to only a digital rainbow algorithm by a bedroom artist delinquent. Who are the pioneers of photography today? Richard Prince snapping at American demi-realism and gritty sexual contorted positions from the bedroom, Mathew Barney and his queer bestial metamorphic diva-shots, Wolfgang Tillmans and his cool-chic easy going rave-culture European thumb snaps. Gursky provides a healthy balanced oeuvre to a lot of the base images being produced today. Here is an artist who managed to congenially develop naturalistic interests with a sociological observance to the isolating metropolitan and the underworld that supports its mechanisms, a passive European unsaid critique of capitalism. However, as neatly as the retrospect is presented there are many works that fall dismissible as visual exercises rather than finalized visions.
There is a short lapse of the indoors and domestic in Gursky’s work in room two, we see this in two photographs along with indoors transit based photographs - Turner Collection 1995 and Untitled (Carpet) 1993. Whether Gursky was conscious of this or not, he landed on material worth debate, not for its contentiousness, but more so its authenticity. It is the Turner Collection 1995
that we are given a placid balanced shot of three turners in strongly saturated colours that destroy the initial reading of turners for two reasons.
The first is the level of comprehension of images, of detail and colour, as it does not correlate to what is depicted here. This is a syndrome of Gursky’s commercial photographic roots, he has managed to create a deception of imagery which is a visual approach in all his works, but one I do not find acceptable for a series of Turner paintings, and why? Because it then descends the quality of work to something of ornament, to a subject caged into another artist’s vision. However this is not a new phenomenon of any kind as we have seen this cheap excuse for a creation of work by Richard prince and his Instagram print-series. The questions that immediately calls the attention of a cultural endorsed viewer is the validity of the work? We must scrutinize this no? As perfect and well composed as the image is, where is the differentiation of a regular art viewer taking a photograph of historically charged work and Gursky? To press this matter more, the act of such a thing is tourism, inarguably, which thus spawns the line of thought that, possibly, even a degenerate-breed of art where the cheap thinking process of tourism is valid. The second photograph still drags on Gursky’s sentimental loss to his refusal to take a physical approach to painting – Untitled (Carpet) 1993, a uni-student exercise of guiding the viewer to focus on the texture of everyday material, a Proustian move no doubt.
Onwards to the third room and here we see an artist with more spontaneous gait and risk in his subject matter. The main talking point and anecdotal spilling - Salerno I 1980, it is here that Gursky moves out of the naturalistic vertical dominated shots and more into a snake drift tromp l’oeil shot of industry, economy, labour, commodity but he manages to depict these revolving themes without committing to typical the socialist commentary. He pushes his investigation to the commodity of things, the backbone of how they are systemised and liquidated, how the capitalistic order of things imported and exported are butchered jig-time in rowdy flesh uniformed howling numbers and sporting paper.
This is not only a sight Gursky shows in Tokyo, Stock 1990, but also in Chicago Mercantile Exchange 1997, here the progression of execution differentiates by Gursky’s decision to set a stage and dramatize the archetypes of traders and brokers in a hysterically blown Wolf of Wall Street shot. The Chicago photograph itself is a glossy hoo-hah inbred of The Great Gatsby (film) and The Wolf of Wall Street. But what is Gursky saying in this photograph but creating visual sensation. There is no sense of critique, statement but rather a coy average meagre satire on the world of commerce.
Upstairs of the show, level six, one finds Gursky’s approach develops from the painterly to the more cinematic and theatrical. The room sets the tone cathartically and poised with F1 Pit Stop 2007, where there is a strong matted black found in the palette of Caravaggio. The dark matted black soaks all of the light in the room and generates a centre gravity to the drama at heart – the mechanical teams changing the tyres of formula one car. Evident, it is an intelligent subversion of subject material as one can only associate the intense velocity of these machines. Here here we see Gursky switch the approach of capturing an object and people in transit to one in idle form, or at least one readying for transit. Certain values make this photograph a success and lording it over the rest of his oeuvre. The composition draws to antiquity and modernistic values; balance, clarity, skill, virtuosity, symbolism, narrative and then what ships this into its time is the matter itself, machine, speed, progression, sport, competition; the collective working for the company, it is at this point of comprehending the photograph the viewer finds himself in a stagnation of indifference. I would like to say one is moved, rather, one is left more in awe by the capabilities to how Gursky can stage a composition of second elegance and clarity, giving him a hair of artistic merit from his departure from naïve exercises of capturing images with movement for swift abstract expressionist mimetic movements.
Though it is on the same floor that we see a lapse in the artist’s consistency for capturing the poignant. SHI T 2013, a dabble in the digital editing process of photography where Gursky collages the figure of Ironman and one of his muses on the forefront of a hazy pink, paradise background – the work of a millennial playing around with his meme footage in a lecture. I remain dubious to this photograph having any artistic merit but more as more coy capitalistic critique. At this mature stage in Gursky’s career, he is too old to be falling in transgressive post-modernist thought. It is like tearfully viewing Gilbert and George’s hideous banner series.
The retrospect ends with one of Gursky’s latest works Rückblick (Review) 2015, a photograph again revisiting his homage to painting and the abstract expressionists, depicted, four Chancellors of the Federal Republic of Germany in front of a deep red hued Newman. We see him once again making light political commentary on the backbones of society, at least here, more on his homeland, Germany. The photograph is one of idleness and leisure, one man sits smoking lax, white smoke whispers, drifting to the ceilings as the four powerful folk sit-ass deciding on governing manoeuvres leisurely eyeing a Newman. What is Gursky commenting on? The ill decisions of Germany’s government or is he again, as listlessly done in his oeuvre, staging simple scenic sensational imagery? It is an impasse; the message of the medium is arthritic, weak, meagre, shy, base and superficial. Bravo to the man who can whip up a scenic composition, but after a repetitious time, it becomes nothing but passive pleasurable gazing. He looses his power of direction of photography, of art, as a means to depict truth vis-à-vis reality.
The Gursky retrospective in its final consumption proves to be nothing but glossy distraction rather than mobile engagement to the actuality of life. Safe visual commercialism is what is on offer here, faster than a buy one get one free. Bravo for an easily eluded audience.
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