The world
of German photographer Andreas Gursky is nothing if not familiar, yet,
everything within it is somehow askew. The overriding sensation one gets upon
studying a Gursky photograph is that of having stumbled onto the documentation
of an unfamiliar ritual practice. In his work, large buildings hover in
carefully staggered formations, nature rears and roars in all its overwhelming
heft, and individuals gather in mysterious agglomerations. Obviously, the
real-life explanation behind a work such as “Sha Tin” (1994), could be quickly
be glommed with a careful look. The massed crowd of spectators– gathered round
an empty, grassy oval, staring at a video monitor behind which four identical
apartment blocks are punched into the landscape in front of the receding
mountains– are watching a horse race. The video monitor in the left background
tells us as much, with its image of jockeys keenly pushing their horses along,
aerodynamically positioning themselves along the horses’ flanks. Nonetheless,
Gursky’s photo has no real horses and relies solely on their filmed
representation. This absence clarifies two of Gursky’s frequently twinned
artistic interests: first, he wants to deliberately bring out the mystery of
contemporary life and make it strange; second, he wants to use photography in
the service of a political agenda.
In some
ways, it would be too simplistic to call Gursky’s work to be a report on the
late capitalist era. Yes, Gursky’s photographs return again and again to the
same visual tropes: large office towers, the infinitude of contemporary hotel
lobbies, factories, overhead views of ant-like workers on the swarm, gatherings
of individuals at leisure in which the purpose of their assembly is
deliberately left unclear. There is a clear critique at work here: the
overwhelming sameness of pictures like “Hong Kong Stock Exchange, Diptych”
(1994) and “Atlanta” (1996) sends a dagger into the heart of late capitalist
life. And yet, to stop there would be to acknowledge only half of Gursky’s
equation, for these pictures, like the rest of Gursky’s oeuvre, are beautiful.
Not an accidental or on-the-fly beauty, either; what defines Gursky as an
artist is his ability to frame the world in such a way as to make it absolutely
ravishing. In a Gursky photograph, the world looks good enough to eat. As
Fredric Jameson argues, in a work Gursky would likely be familiar with (Postmodernism:
The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism), the central conundrum of postmodernism, the koan so
difficult to entirely grasp, is that its central political ideology,
capitalism, is simultaneously the greatest and most terrible development in
human history. Gursky’s photographs, fully embracing this mystery, and
documenting the shrines of late-capitalist existence, make beautiful the very
things he critiques. More precisely, he shows his images to us, his audience,
in such a way as to bring out their innate beauty. Gursky’s bright, crisp
images, every inch of his oversized photos in sharp focus, filled with
individual detail and riotous color, are lovely enough to serve as brochure
photos for the world’s Chamber of Commerces. What supplies them with their
bite is their unflinching eye, which reveals every object to be a manifestation
of an unseen order silently at work, everywhere.
What gives
Gursky the power to endure is his unflinching humanism, which emerges in the
most unexpected of places, through the most surprising of channels. To my
thinking, the most powerful Gursky work, and the most inspired commentary on
our human condition, is one of his photographs in which the human form is
entirely absent. It is a landscape of sorts, entitled “Cable Car, Dolomites,”
and it depicts three large rocky outcroppings, each covered by a layer of mossy
grass. The top two-thirds of the picture is entirely shrouded in fog, creating
the effect of a blank canvas. Slightly left of center, and drawing the eye’s
attention immediately, despite its infinitesimal size, is a tiny orange cable
car. Because of the fog, we can spot the wire holding up the cable car at the
far right of the picture, but the car itself appears to be levitating in
mid-air, perilously risking a gravitational return to earth. The enveloping
fog which. at first glance, seemed all-encompassingly harmless, appears on
closer inspection to be consuming the hills, turning them into manifestations
of fog. The valiant nature of the cable car, risking such conditions to make
its journey, speaks loudly as a lyrical ode to the heroicism of the human being
who inches her or his way through the fog of life, ever so tiny in the scheme
of enveloping nature. “Cable Car, Dolomites” is a treasure of late modern art,
and Gursky is one of the period’s foremost chroniclers.
Saul
Austerlitz |
![Andreas Gursky: Cable Car, Dolomites (1987) [[Source: http://english.ohio-state.edu/people/garcha.2/cablecar.htm]]](https://nyartsmagazine.net/images/stories/magazine/jan_fen_2004/cablecar.jpg "Andreas Gursky: Cable Car, Dolomites (1987) [[Source: http://english.ohio-state.edu/people/garcha.2/cablecar.htm]]")
