Cordier in San Francisco

Cordier, 21/4/72 I  after a computer drawing of Manfred Mohr, 1972

The Haines Gallery of San Francisco has mounted a geometry-flavored show entitled "Poetics of Construction" featuring Pierre Cordier, Ai Weiwei, Andy Goldsworthy, and the amazing Monir Farmanfarmaian, among others.  The objects in this show - and most are indeed objects, with a sculptural physicality evident or implicit - have a brooding presence and seem to rest comfortably, even authoritatively, in their appointed space.  Cordier's chemigrams from 1972 fit in nicely with this concept.  Back then, he had just begun to collaborate with Manfred Mohr, the computer art pioneer, who was fresh from exhibiting his first computer-plotted drawings at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris.  For Cordier, this was to mark the beginning of a 20-year preoccupation with grids, graphs, and glyphs in some of their more austere forms, mollified perhaps by the chemigramic filter; only since the millenium has the hold of this spell on him begun to ease.  The works shown at the Haines reflect the early stages of that collaboration.

Cordier, 22/4/72 I  after a computer drawing of Manfred Mohr, 1972

The titles refer to the dates of execution and are written in Romance-language style with day, month, year in that order.  So that these two pictures were done on Friday and Saturday, the 21st and 22nd of April 1972.  Why are these dates interesting?

On that very Friday, while Cordier was bent over his darkroom trays, the Apollo 16 spaceship landed on the moon, in an unexplored region called the Descartes Highlands.  Astronauts climbed out, stumbled around in that strange gravity, collected rock samples, took snapshots of each other, saluted the earth and climbed back in.  Cordier was just finishing the first picture.  The following day - Saturday - one of the largest housing projects in America was intentionally demolished by the government because the tenants refused to live in it any longer: they had said they were treated like rats and it was intolerable.  That was Pruitt Igoe, in St Louis, and the documenting of its demolition, which was unprecedented, became one of the iconic moments in the film Koyaanisqatsi (Life Out Of Joint, in the Hopi language) by Godfrey Reggio and Philip Glass.  Cordier meanwhile was just completing the second.  In the brief space of a day, a monstrous tension between life as it is and life as it might have to be, or become.  In my mind this tension drifts over and envelopes Cordier in his studio, he unaware yet somehow understanding.  His marks are faint but made with a firm and serene hand, his voice no more than a whisper, I see his lips barely moving.  He has been given to record the allegory.  I exagerate but then I do not.

Apollo 16, Moon, near the Descartes Crater, 1972

Pruitt Igoe, St Louis, 1972

The Cordier works on display are c-prints from the chemigram original, printed in editions of 12.  The show runs until March 9, 2013.

Images from sound files: new prints from Arnold Brooks

Brooks, untitled, 2012, 30 x 30"

That the senses are interconnected is not a fresh insight.  Kandinsky was dreaming of it back in 1913, at the birth of abstraction, and Rimbaud, with his derangement of the senses, had thought of it before him: once pure sound was divorced from scales, instruments, hymnals, it could become a tool of the modern artist, like the colors of the palette.  You could hear a piece by Stravinsky and then go to your studio and paint it, if your senses allowed for that.  Yet the problem in pictures was this, that for a thousand years we had thought not about time, the matrix that sound lives in, but about space.  Yes there were correspondences: we could depict sound as color if we were so inclined, we could even convince the public of that, but to find a depiction of sound as time was another matter altogether.  Space, capacious and accommodating, was for putting things into, like kings and queens, sun-washed cities, dwarfs, groupings of fruit on a table, naked bathers.  It had a physical reality you could touch.  You could put things there and they stayed there; you could return to look at them later.  Not so with time: you put something there and it was as good as lost, because time flowed, it was never the same again.  That B-flat chord on the piano - gone.  That Verdi aria - gone.

Kandinsky, A Few Circles, 1926

Toward the end of the last century, because of technology, this began to change.  Devices had been invented which preserved time as physical marks or tracks, as successions of instants, that could be played back - first the phonograph, then cinema, then tape recorders.  Later, the development of the computer and concomitant inventions in mathematics and signal processing ushered in definitive changes for the storing of sound, namely its digitization as strings of 0s and 1s.  You could write code on a piece of paper, feed it to a machine, and a string quartet would play.  What's more, with just a few different assumptions, you could make that same string of code produce a picture.

This is where Arnold Brooks, printmaker, sound artist, filmmaker, enters the scene.  When Arnold, quite by accident, first opened up a sound file in photoshop, the computer imaging editor, he was dumbstruck: here was an image that resembled a seascape or a desert, or the lovely meandering grain that you see in wood - but it was a representation of sound.  What relation was there?  Were certain shapes selected by the computer code?  What forces were at work to render these forms?  He pursued his investigations, terming the images of sound files 'transpositions'.  He found he could reverse the process; he could edit the sound to make other transpositions, or edit the transposition to make other sounds.  His original feelings of deep wonder never ceased.  As he says, "The static image and the time-based piece are literally the same file; in their native environment the files are one.  The transposed file can be manifested simultaneously in two different states while in the computer and is still the exact same file."  And what should we call this manifestation?  Well, if we listen to it it's sound and if we look at it it's a picture - nothing's changed there.  But incredibly, the two are made distinct by a process external to the event: a few mere symbols, more or less, in the computer code, or by running the same code through different codecs or software or ASCII editors.

Arnold is not happy with his transpositions.  He finds them "moribund" because their soul - sound - has been torn out of them.  They are lifeless, he says, they don't ring.  It was with great reluctance then that he showed several at Manhattan Graphics recently as sort of a research in progress, including the image above.  He wasn't ready for the overwhelming enthusiastic reaction he got from fellow artists, which must have surprised and caught him off guard: his transpositions were being compared to some of the outstanding works in the minimalist canon.  Still, if you ask him what really matters he'll say that's pretty hard, because that's asking how shapes are made. 


Arnold Brooks' email is isthmus.pictures.sounds@gmail.com

The great tangent of Nino Migliori

(Franco Marinai, the New York-based photographer and printmaker, has written a guest post.  We are happy to make the space available to him.)

Migliori, oxidization, 1948

It's 1948 - a momentous year - and the world is reeling from the disasters of WWII.  The future is uncertain but in the relative obscurity of a darkroom in central Italy, a young photographer boldly sets off in two seemingly different directions: realism and experimentation.

As a neorealist photographer he would document Italy's transition from an agricultural to an industrial society with B&W essays that gained him considerable notoriety.

As an experimenter he would turn out to be a dedicated and steadfast destroyer of photographic conventions.  Over the years he oxidized, cut, wrecked, scratched, burnt, and otherwise abused film, photographic paper, polaroids, and cliché-verres alike.  This landed him squarely in the Italian pantheon of the photographic avant-garde (informal wing).

Migliori, oxidization, 1954

That the two practices could live together shouldn't be a surprise.  It's certainly not a case of split personality.  They are rather two aspects of the desire to get to the bottom of things, to get concrete, in other words to visualize reality, whether it has to do with some kids in the streets of Naples or with some unorthodox chemical reaction on photographic paper.

Nino Migliori started off his informal journey producing "oxidizations" - abstract images obtained off-camera by plying photographic paper with fixer and developer.  They have an uncanny kinship with what later - in 1956 - would be called a "chemigram" by Pierre Cordier, its legitimate father.

The interplanetary alignment ends there.

Migliori, oxidization, 1954

Nino Migliori kept on a tangent - so to speak - to produce "pyrograms", "watergrams", "celluloid-grams", "photograms", "cliché-verres" and much more.  It's a large and varied body of work that speaks loud for Migliori's unrelenting enthusiasm and voracious curiosity.  In fact, the gist of his experimental work seems more about unrestricted dabbling than anything else.  And this may be its strength.  But given the volume and the nature of the images housed in innumerable museums and private collections in Europe and the US, one wonders whether he had any rejects.  Did he discard any?  And this may be another of Nino Migliori's strengths.

                                                                                                 -  Franco Marinai

Where you can look at chemigrams this winter

Turnbull, numerical structure 2, 2012

The Hosmer Gallery is located at the Forbes Library in Northampton, Massachusetts, about a 2-hour drive west from Boston.  Very soon you'll be able to see some of Richard Turnbull's work from 2010-2012 there, in a much anticipated show running February 1 to February 28, 2013.  Am I giving it all away by saying that my favorite is the surprising, apocalyptic 'glyph studies 1'?

Turnbull, glyph studies 1, 2012

Meanwhile, down in Pennsylvania Norm Sarachek is having a show at Santa Bannon Fine Art in Bethlehem from December 7 to December 30, 2012, featuring his new 'Steel Works' series.

Sarachek, Steel Works 1, 2012

Sarachek, Steel Works 2, 2012

He follows that up with another show at the Perkins Center for the Arts in southern New Jersey which runs from February 9 to March 23, 2013, because you'll need to see more of this fine artist.

The inventor of the so-called chromoskedasic variation in chemigrams, Dominic Man-Kit Lam, recently concluded a huge show with over 100 works at the Shanghai Art Museum (China) this past October 2012 entitled 'Vision of Harmony'.  He also spoke at the event, and an inspirational video of it has been posted on YouTube.

Man-Kit Lam, from Vision of Harmony, 2012

Man-Kit Lam, from Vision of Harmony, 2012

Man-Kit Lam, installation view, Vision of Harmony, 2012

Back in New York, Eva Nikolova is exhibiting chemigrams from her new series 'Ordinary Disappearances', which offer imaginary but quite emotional Balkan landscapes from and about memory, triggered by a trip to her homeland after many years' absence.  The show is at the Grady Alexis Gallery in El Taller Latinoamericano in upper Manhattan and runs from November 26, 2012 to January 9, 2013.

Nikolova, untitled IV, 2012

Nikolova, untitled VI, 2012

A blog regular, Nolan Preece, is presenting both chemigrams and glassprints at the PUB Gallery, Wildflower Village, Reno, Nevada from November 29, 2012 to January 15, 2013.

Chemigramist Douglas Collins exhibited in the recent Alternative Processes Competition at Soho Photo in lower Manhattan from November 7 to December 1, 2012.  He will also be in the annual group show at the Center for Photographic Art in Carmel, California, from January 12 to March 1, 2013.

The classic reach of some recent chemigrams

Preece, Ag Conglomerate, 2012

Nolan Preece is a chemigramist, which is to say he makes pictures on photographic paper using, basically, the simplest of means, developer and fixer.  No camera, no darkroom, no enlarger.  Since he has spoken with us often about his artistic methods, I thought I’d leave him alone in the Nevada desert for a while with his projects, no need to bother him.  That is, until one day recently when he sent in a picture of his latest work, Ag Conglomerate, shown above.

The scale and aspiration of Ag Conglomerate shot an immediate rush of recognition through me.  Where had I seen this device before?  

I remember now: that heap of pictorial elements rising toward an apex in a kind of emotional crescendo somehow caused me to think of Tintoretto’s Ascent to Calvary (1567) or Rubens’ altarpiece for the abbey of Afflighem, Christ Carrying the Cross (1637), the best version of which may be an oil sketch completed a few years earlier and now hanging in a museum in Berkeley, California.  The size certainly helps too.

Rubens, Christ Carrying the Cross, U. of California Berkeley, 1632

But there is also the basic structural gambit, that pyramid of multitudes of interchangeable parts that grow into a great, rankless disturbance, each part in the act of rising, tossing, or falling.  The hierarchy in each artist’s imagery is fluid and impermanent; there’s an uncanny resemblance in the way each is organized, even though one was created on commission from a powerful, wealthy institutional client many centuries ago and the other essentially on a notion and a shoestring just yesterday.  The two pictures are conjoined in my mind like blood relatives.

Preece, Ag Conglomerate, detail, 2012

I had to ask him how he did it, not the conception but the details.  Here’s what he tells me.  He starts his chemigram by applying an acrylic resist to a standard piece of 8x10” photo paper.  Before the resist dries, he impresses substances into it, the way one uses a soft ground in etching.  He then proceeds to the chemigramic fix-develop-fix routine, and once that’s done to his satisfaction he washes and dries the print.  Next, he then takes it over to his Epson 4990 scanner and scans it, using Silverfast as the scanning software.  He sets the output to the largest he thinks he’ll need, 48x72” at 300 ppi.  From there the image is pulled into Photoshop Camera RAW to work over the color balance, density and contrast of the image plus give pre-sharpening.  The laborious part is coming up: using the clone-stamp tool in Photoshop to rid the scan of dust spots, a process that can take hours, switching magnifications back and forth depending on the size of the desired print.  He calls this ‘dust farming’ the image.  Nolan has a nice little short-cut here – he sets the Photoshop noise filter to ‘dust and scratches’, radius 2, threshold 20, which cleans up most of the small stuff.  When he’s finally done, he does a ‘crop test’, cropping a small representative area of the print as a sample to print out and get an idea of what the whole print will look like.

His friend Dave Staley operates a digital photo lab nearby in Reno called Outdoor Plus.  Nolan takes him the file and they consult on any further adjustments needed.  Once they’re ready, the file is routed to Dave's Light Jet, a continuous-tone, digital C type printer, and the final print is made on Fuji Crystal Archive, a silver-based photo paper that Nolan loves for its rich color saturation.  Now he’s ready to go for mounting and framing and that’s it.  Ag Conglomerate will be the first of a new series.  Keep an eye on his website for more.

 

Remembering Lotte Jacobi

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Jacobi c. 1946

She got off the ship in New York harbor in 1935 with her Leica and a few names, not many.  Her circle in Berlin had started to fragment, the artists, dancers and actors she so loved to photograph that had been her life, and it was time to leave.  She also left behind some 10,000 negatives, now lost, and a business that had been in her family for four generations: her great-grandfather Samuel had learned the art directly from Louis Daguerre in Paris in 1840.

Her sister Ruth, also a photographer, had preceded her to NY by a few years, spending time documenting Manhattan’s Lower East Side and doing portraits while Lotte was off photographing Jewish graves in Soviet Uzbekistan.  Reunited they set up a photo studio around 1938, perhaps near Times Square, perhaps not, and did portraits to pay the rent.  Lotte though was an uncompromising photographer and not every client liked her work.  Too close-up, too informal they said.  She was ahead of her time.  Years later this would become the style but not now.

Jacobi c. 1946

Jacobi c. 1946

Jacobi c. 1946

The close-knit émigré community became sustenance for Lotte.  She photographed Kurt Weill, Albert Einstein, Marc Chagall.  She began hanging out with artists; she met Leo Katz who would become her mentor, she met Berenice Abbott who persuaded her to take courses at the New School for Social Research, a bastion of intellectual refugees from Europe.  There she learned printmaking with Stanley Hayter who had founded Atelier 17 and had printed with Picasso and Kandinsky.  She shared studio space with other student artists under Hayter’s eye, names like Pollock, Motherwell, Rothko, Miró. (Her etchings from 1947-48, like theirs, appear occasionally at auction).

Encouraged by Katz, she went back to the darkroom and began playing with light and shadows.  She could make them move and shift.  It reminded her of dancing as a young girl.  She tried candles and flashlights, and sometimes covered them with fabric.  For ten years she did this, very quietly, while the abstract expressionist movement in a big noisy way was exploding around her.  She saved the results to photo paper, eventually amassing a considerable body of work.  Katz gave them the name ‘photogenics’ and understood just what part these peaceful, amazing pictures could play in the evolution of photography as an art form, besides being really beautiful in themselves. 

Jacobi c. 1946

When I walk today through the corridors at AIPAD, the huge congress for dealers in photographic art held annually at the Park Avenue Armory, there are thousands of great photographs.  I move on, I’ve seen them.  Then, in the corner of someone’s booth, I’ll spot a small lovely thing mounted on soiled cardboard, projecting authority like nothing else around.  I stop in my tracks: a Jacobi.  I know this is why I’ve come and why I do what I do. 

Jacobi c. 1946

After 1951 she never made any more of them, although she lived another forty years.

The stars stop moving, but the earth still turns

Marinai, 2012

Franco Marinai continues his epic program of deconstructing our ideas of time and its portrayal that he first showed us in March of this year with his groundbreaking work in color chrono-photography.  He is closing in on his goal of isolating the fixed point of time, its fulcrum.  By scaling back to a black-and-white representation, his current strategy, he is able to abstract motion and therefore time yet further, reducing it to what amounts to a spare, defining beauty of pure marks and markers.  It doesn’t help to know that underlying these are trivial or prosaic acts like walking, climbing steps, eating, biking.  Forget that he uses a medium format camera modified with the addition of a variable speed motor.  Forget even that he uses a camera at all.  These marks are gestures for both the unraveling of time, and for its concentration.  They are black holes, and like all black holes they command our acute attention.   

Marinai, 2012

Marinai, 2012

Marinai, 2012

Marinai, 2012

Franco is in the process of collecting these images, numbering almost 100, into a limited-edition book of photogravures for which he will undertake the monumental task of printing himself from copper plates in his Manhattan studio. It will be entitled The Motion of the Wheel and Other Spins.  Those interested may contact him directly at www.marinai.com for further details.