Gare de l’Ouest, 20080511, HTML, 430 x 310 pixels

Hanns Schimansky: Zonder titel, 2007, 93,0 x 121,4 cm, vouwen, Oost-Indische inkt en krijt op papier

Hanns Schimansky, La ligne qui pense, Une exposition du MAHN, du 28 mai au 17 septembre 2000

Hanns Schimansky: o.T., 2007, Tusche, 55 x 75 cm

Am Main, 20080510, HTML, 310 x 430 pixels

Signe Guttormsen: To the End of the World, 2006, acryl op hout, 28 delen in verschillende formaten, ca. 270 x 750 cm, Galerie Hein Elferink,

Signe Guttormsen: Jedes Mal ein anderes Mal, 2005, Kunsthalle Bremerhaven

Frankfurt, 20080509, HTML, 430 x 310 pixels

I’m posting these two photos of two paintings by Maureen Gallace taken by artist Mark Barry during the press preview at The Armory Show 2006 precisely because 303 Gallery claims they own “the copyright to the work and all public display of images, including web content.” See Barry Hoggard’s 303 Gallery - protecting its artists from the internet. What would 303 Gallery do if one of its artistss works wound up in a Louise Lawler?

Mark Barry: Maureen Gallace at 303 Gallery (The Armory Show 2006)

The gallery also claims, “The reason galleries don’t want these kinds of photos online is because they are horrible reproductions. We spend thousands of dollars having work professionally photographed so that we can show the work as it should be shown - well-lit, properly exposed, color corrected - both online and in print.” OK, so I did a little quick color correction in Photoshop (thanks to George Rodart), and rotated them one pixel counter-clockwise. Besides, it’s just documentation of art objects at a particular time and place, certainly not the real thing. And now the artist’s and the gallery’s name is contained in one more searchable page on the web, which is simply another point in the art world popularity context.

Mark Barry: Maureen Gallace at 303 Gallery (The Armory Show 2006), color-corrected and rotated

Detwang, 20080508, HTML, 310 x 430 pixels

Al Taylor: Endless Puddle, 1990, Plexiglas, enamel paint & wood, 96.5 x 203.2 x 32.1 cm

Al Taylor: Untitled (Pet Stain Removal Device), 1990, Pencil, gouache, ink, correction fluid & xerox machine toner fixed with solvent on paper, 54.3 cm x 88.9 cm

ob Tauber, 20080507, HTML, 430 x 310 pixels

Raoul Dufy: La Fée Electricité, 1937, at Musée d’Art moderne, Paris

Iphofen, 20080506, HTML, 310 x 430 pixels

Matt McClune: Winter 2005 Series #6, 125 x 62 cm, Pigmented acrylic on anodized aluminium

Sulzfeld, 20080505, HTML, 430 x 310 pixels

Paul Thek: UNTITLED (Bunnies on Stairs), 1984, acrylic on canvas board, 94,5 x 65 cm

The Paul Thek Project

Romantische Straße, 20080504, HTML, 310 x 430 pixels

Kim Anno: Wind, 2006,oil on aluminum, 49 x 37 inches

Barbarossaplatz, 20080503, HTML, 430 x 310 pixels

As part of a three-person show titled ALIGNMENT at Ruimte Morguen in Antwerpen, Frederick Bell, a British artist living in Brussels, showed an installation of about a dozen A4 size horizontal inkjet prints of photographs hung with pushpins, end to end, in a single line directly on and across the wall in the back room. These images, comprising a single piece, provoke thoughts about looking and where value is located; when we look at a series of images like on a wall in a room, in a gallery context, apparently unmediated, or barely mediated, we often wonder, “What is the art about?” but we ask less often, “Where is the art?”

We live in an age when visitors walk up to a painting in a museum, take a picture, and move on, having seen, they think, the painting. But what they’ve really documented is the fact that they’ve stood momentarily before the painting. Bell slows this down, and returns this current practice to the artist’s age-old practice of studying the work of his/her predecessors. The photograph becomes the equivalent of a page in the artist’s sketchpad, used to record impressions in the museum and later brought back to the studio to be looked at, worked on, thought about, and learned from. A more contemporary term we might now use is “process”; Frederick Bell processes the documentation of the museum visit, extrapolating from this first photograph a series of successive images, each of which takes us one step closer in looking, one step further towards finding art. He contemplates and ruminates, turns the documentation around and examines it, trying to see deeper into it after the fact. We are encouraged to engage in a genuine step-by-step sequence of questioning and search for levels of meaning– the onion unpeeled, the Russian matryoshka dolls nested and unnested, the boxes within boxes unstacked and restacked.

Starting with a photograph of a cluster of paintings by Giorgio Morandi hung salon-style on a wall in Bologna, Bell begins his processing through a series of images: a photograph of the paintings; a photograph of a painting that diagrams the cluster of paintings; a photograph of the painting leaning against a wall in an apartment; a flat diagram of the painting of the cluster of images; a photograph of a photograph of people in the same gallery in Bologna; photographs of outline drawings of the people; a photograph of drawings, and a photograph of a series of photographs of the drawings installed on the wall; and so on.

Bell’s installation is about looking at looking. Each image is both one step closer in analyzing the Morandi installation, and one step further back in thinking about what is being seen and how to look at it. Are we looking at the Morandi paintings, or the Morandi installation? Do we watch the artist’s looking at the Morandi paintings, or his own looking at how he looked at the Morandi paintings, or how he looked at and thought about the context of looking at the Morandi paintings? We observe the artist look at Morandi, then follow his looking at his documentation, and then at how he looks at and thinks about his own looking. In the meantime, as we do this looking, and the looking at the looking, we begin to look at ourselves, and think about our own looking. Each of these layers of looking is like a frame around another frame. It’s not a game; it heightens our own awareness of what we seeing, what we notice, where mean lies, and how we think about it.

When we say visual art, where are the boundaries of what is visual? Is the visual simply what the artist has made or chosen and presents? Does the visual include not only the individual work of art– the object on display to look at– but the complete visual experience of our looking, the context in which it is seen, the various social and cultural frames around it? It’s very curious how a few inkjet prints of little material value pinned to a wall can prompt so much reflection. The value– the thing here that has meaning in Bell’s work– may be in the series of framings that occur, the recognition of how a visual experience is also a conceptual experience, and that all art is context-dependent. Simultaneously, the art may be the visual and intellectual process that we go through in stepping through the frames, our gradual recognition of context, and the emotion that we feel in having gone through this experience of looking at and gaining this recognition.

“ALIGNMENT”, 13.03.08 - 03.05.08
Frederick Bell, Mathieu Haldermans, Marc Schepers
Ruimte Morguen, Waalse Kaai 21-22, 2000 Antwerpen, Belgium

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Above: talking with Marc Schepers (above left), on Saturday afternoon, April 19, 2008, at Ruimte Morguen in Antwerpen; I visited this exhibition with Monique, Ann, and Luc (above right).

Der Residenz, 20080502, HTML, 310 x 430 pixels

Above: Mark Barrow: Pyramid & Sarcophagus, 2007, 29 x 26 in., Acrylic on Linen

Above, left: Mark Barrow: Patchwork, 2007, 30 x 30 in., Acrylic on Linen
Above, right: Mark Barrow: Winding Weft, 2007, 22 x 20 in., Acrylic on Linen