Essay, Artistic Reflexion as a Cycle of Conferences, About Matter in a Photographic Production, APE, 2021
1.
Sybren Vanoverberghe’s photographic production involves intense research; the rational results thereof hide in images that seek out areas of the vague. If the photographer is an archaeologist of his or her time, Vanoverberghe succeeds in pushing time aside, making it redundant or even sidelining it. Photography celebrates the absence of time, because time cannot be inferred from a photograph. The photographer evokes the powerlessness of photography through that which remains outside the photograph’s frame. The photograph always involves a state of ‘being over’ forever: images that never return because the photographic image is a unique crossroads between time and space, between light and dark.
The photographer halts his or her gaze, petrifies as it were the gaze with a single click that definitely belongs to ‘the past’. Photography literally means to shoot the time: firing a well-aimed shot at a target, the trophy being a lasting image that is a fragment of the inside and outside of the folds of time. Fairground attractions often come with photography: who hits the bullseye is immortalized in this brief moment of heroism. Vanoverberghe’s early photographs are often characterized by a special grey, chemical-material blurring, causing the motifs as it were to fade in peripherally neutral shades of colour, without therefore evoking extra content.
2.
Conference of the Birds (2019) is a radical series of photographs, very precisely framed, shot in a desolate region of Iran. These are alarming images that do away with the concept of aesthetics. Here, the palm trees are the negation of the heavenly idée fixe they usually evoke: they have turned into paltry shadows of their lost beauty. The photographs visualize the impotence of photography to make statements about ‘the general’, ‘the exemplary’.
The palm trees have turned into neglected graphic signs in and between a foreground and background, where the sharp, glaring light makes us rub our eyes. This is a nature morte in a deviant-political sense. The visible tragedy of the palm tree is emphasized by its perfect setting in a dehumanized, desolate site/environment, sometimes surrounded by ruins that may or may not evoke war or an archaeological site. These are ‘open images’: photographs that register without judging.
Photography is a flexible, democratic and delicious instant medium that still allows to manipulate the ‘shot’ images in the lab and turn them into an alienating abstraction (possibly with faded colours) of the subject and/or object that the photographer so purposefully and accurately captured through the lens.
Conference of the Birds is the record of a loss, without additional information, without referring to cause or place. An exotic archaeology that upsets our expectations and at the same time cultivates our distrust of the desert as a life-threatening place. It’s striking that Vanoverberghe mainly pays attention to the other, abject side of reality, that he casts his eye on the unpolished side of the medal.
The entire series Conference of the Birds is almost monochrome. As a result, it’s the everyday motif of the destroyed or weathered palm tree that pushes itself to the foreground and demands our attention. The white background is like a plinth for the main motif, and whoever is mentally open to it, can see in it hot topics such as climate change, war, migration, etc.
The impressive series should be considered a conceptual master mould; its underlying programme relates to a specific looking at reality that is linked to an artistic consequence.
Excursus
Franz Wilhelm Kaiser, art theoretician and curator, studied the legitimacy of photography as art. He asked this question: ‘How can we still distinguish in the flow of images between art and (consumer) photography. (...) Is it the quality of the image? That is improbable, for professional (consumer) photographs are indeed professional and have to be able to create good, efficient images in order to survive.’
It has of course to do with the conflict between early photography and the age-old art of painting. Painters such as Edgar Degas (1834-1917) in first instance still used photography as an ‘objective source of inspiration’, but the unassailable privilege of painting with regard to ‘the depiction of reality’ evaporated before long, which would give rise to abstract art.
Kaiser continues his sober, logical argument by referring to the existence of conceptual photography: ‘Something that bears the hallmark of the bad, poorly crafted, imperfect print, so that there can be no doubt that it’s all about the intellectual content.’ Kaiser refers to the now familiar theoretical concepts of Walter Benjamin (auratic perception) and Theodor Adorno (deartification of art), but also to the photographer and Bauhaus adept Werner Graeff, who in his book Es kommt der Neue Fotograf (There Comes the New Photographer) (1929) declared ‘flaws in the image’ to be a creative principle. Exactly this allowing flaws to sneak into the image generates the unique authorship and cashes in on the difference and added value of a work.
By extension, the casual use of photography can be considered from the point of view of major artists, such as John Baldessari or Richard Long. Their inconspicuous, ordinary photographs tend to depict a progressing thought process, and to (quite) a lesser extent they register moments in time and space that are linked to for example ephemeral actions and performances in museums and galleries. In this sense, photography is the material and visible prosthesis of an unstoppable process of creative thinking, linked to the issue of the representation of the socially and culturally continuously changing world. At the same time, these photographs allow a unique glimpse into some or other ordinary human activity/condition everyone is familiar with, thus highlighting and exposing its banality and marvel.
Indeed, precisely the imperfections—introduced intentionally or otherwise—focus the perception and catch the attention of the public... and succeed in holding the attention and focussing perception.
3.
The disconcerting series of photographs with the disturbing, poetical title Conference of the Birds seems to resonate quite well with Kaiser’s analytical ideas. The photographs all seem overexposed, which emphasizes the tarnished motif of the palm tree, which itself constitutes the leitmotif of the series and the accompanying publication. (The title Conference of the Birds refers to a Persian poem in which birds embark on a quest for their leader through seven valleys; at the end of their ‘flight’, the few surviving birds realize that the essence of their quest coincides with the search for the route.)
The white, neutral light deluges the series of photographs, not unlike natural processes and cycles irreversibly ‘annihilate’ flora, fauna and palm trees. (Yet) these images stick in our memory and dwell there with a dose of worldly recognizability. And all the same, the final conceptual purpose gets stuck ‘privately’ with the author and creator of the photographic images.
Paul Valéry claimed: ‘That which doesn’t resemble anything, doesn’t exist.’ That is also the case in abstract art, as the German painter Gerhard Richter, one of the most influential postwar artists, perfectly explains: ‘I think that so-called abstract paintings are always viewed as representations, that’s to say, they always depict something even if we can’t see what it is. We automatically look for similarities with real visible phenomena, and in that indirect way the painting communicates a mood, a statement.’ Throughout his career, Richter has explored the narrow zones between photography and painting, but he has also invested everything in the image: ‘The most important thing is what is created, not how it is produced.’
The image is a photograph, a painting or a lithograph... The image and its impact are what count, and in this the artist’s mechanical skill/expertise are helpful in order to raise ‘this’ image from the stream of mass images and turn it into ‘something’ that counts.
4.
In his work, Vanoverberghe explores the surface and the relief of things and surroundings. He searches for that which eludes our gaze, without their registering being accompanied by a loud fanfare or unnecessary showiness. Reality is controlled by his alert eye and is left alone: it is neither beautified nor manipulated. In the judicious capture of the detail and its exact framing, the attention shifts towards ‘the special’.
The special turns into a state of abstraction: images that engage in a sort of microscopic relationship with their original context. It is remarkable that zooming in on the world’s matter results in an amazing parallel world: a world in which there is hardly any or no coherence or blissful rest amidst the continuous noise and turmoil around us.
5.
Sandcastles and Rubbish is the title of this new publication, which is in fact an artist’s book. The publication isn’t a catalogue, but a well-planned, printed exhibition in the shape of a book. The book as mobile space: a book that eludes supporting walls and offers a potential public the chance to introduce art into the home without having to move to some other place.
This book should be considered a distant relative of the ephemeral exhibitions Seth Siegelaub made at the end of the 1960s. The legendary New York art dealer found a way out of the then prevailing dematerialization process of art, which during the revolutionary 1960s ensued from the general, harsh and fundamental criticism of the work of art as a commodity on the free market.
The title Sandcastles and Rubbish is a direct reference to the place where these images were created/came to a standstill: on derelict industrial sites where the archaeological remains continue to disintegrate due to indifference, decay and strategic considerations of estate agents. Paradoxically, in this decline of industrial buildings, there’s beauty and poetry—which has nothing to do with nostalgia or lending an ear to jubilant cries about a distant socioeconomic past.
These remains of industrial archaeology are transformed by Vanoverberghe into an aestheticizing visual language, which set in black and white is not the subject of nostalgia, but refers to a concrete reality. Time and again, the reality of time produces innovation, generates industrial and human outsourcing, and here and there it presents in a cultural-tourist setting traces of ‘conserved decay’ that have been turned into ‘museum items’.
Vanoverberghe contributes to a specific approach of the concept ‘archive’. He shows ‘what’ remains intact and visualizes it as a fluid collection of ‘that’ which before long won’t be there any longer. Dust, sand and other matter cover the industrial production that has ground to a halt.
Dust is the patina of time under which the standstill transforms into a ‘sublime’ deviant of a monument. The Dutch artist Jan Dibbets acquainted me with the photography of Albert Renger-Patzsch (1897-1966), who with his extreme close-ups of for example industrial landscapes is considered a pioneer of the Neue Sachlichkeit. From a historical perspective, Vanoverberghe is indebted to Renger-Patzsch, which finally brings us to a joint work by Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp, Élevage de poussière (1920).
Man Ray photographed Duchamp’s Large Glass after it was covered with dust. Made using a long exposure time, the photograph conveys the effect of an aerial view of a desertscape. The photograph was published in a Dada journal in 1922, with a remarkable caption by Duchamp: View taken from an aeroplane by Man Ray.
6.
Vanoverberghe’s work cannot be related to ideological criticism. Though the core of his photographic production contains a large portion of ‘not-to-be-forgotten’, the images refer clearly to another content that remains diffuse and indefinite.
Vanoverberghe is a labourer: he delves into the ‘rubbish’, looking for fragments of a larger whole that fold onto and into themselves. He labours on images like a steelworker works with hot, molten steel, pouring it into a mould where it sets right away. Thus his images also evolve towards abstraction.
In this book, images appear next to each other. It’s as if the artist takes delight in manipulating his recent oeuvre a second time in an inspiring, non-narrative context, with the aid of an (imaginary) crane, based on a sophisticated selection process and a perfect sense of what to select. He activates images that are draped/programmed next to each other, in such a way that they end up even more in the glow of uncertainty. The grabs of the crane are like tentacles of an octopus. Art spies on the spectator with a many-headed allure... As he or she looks, the spectator grabs/fails to grab non-comprehension. Art vanquishes the urge to decode.
As such, turning a derelict production unit into the subject of photography means linking up with the forgotten past. With his work, the photographer/artist generates an indefinable hyphen that links the various stages of the involvement with/experience of time. Le temps ne compte pas...
7.
Landscapes materialize from thin air in images of restrained grandeur. The entropy of the landscapes suggested in Vanoverberghe’s photographs make us think of land art, and in the context of the recent history of art also of Robert Smithson’s ideas about entropy. In his essay Art through the Camera’s Eye, Smithson calls the photographer’s camera a force ‘to invent many worlds’; a little further, he continues with these winged words: ‘Let’s face it, the human eye is clumsy, sloppy, and unintelligible when compared to the camera’s eye. It appears that abstraction and nature are merging in art, and that the synthesizer is the camera.’
The almost geological layeredness of Vanoverberghe’s photographs move forward the visual necessities of time, which themselves are spared. The abject remains of what once was the ‘industrial pedestal’ of and for an accelerating prosperity and distribution, turn into image machines that completely muddle up the urge for uniform interpretations.
Porches, flaking objects that were covered by a sediment of dirt and dust, stains like meteorites and/or astronomical constellations—all pass in review. Details—accumulative or otherwise—of industrial decline transform in Vanoverberghe’s works into cosmic landscapes, which like Rorschach tests compete with the spectator’s imagination.
8.
Vanoverberghe’s art palpates reality as if he spies the rear of things through keyholes. Via those keyholes, the images continue at the most as fragments of which the surrounding context has to be imagined by the spectator or has to be restored visually in some other way.
In this work, the art of surveying looking turns into a contemplative looking. From a series of concrete abstractions, Vanoverberghe’s photographic production succeeds in tempting us into/leading us towards a visual-mental leap into the unknown upon seeing... eroded concreteness.
Time gnaws away reality. Photography preserves memories of that which was once good and innovative. Photography freezes the past. By contrast, the art of photography reassesses that which once was in images that without a historicizing anamnesis mobilize in the spectator his or her imagination as a relevant link between the past and the now.
In this immense, alarming and problematic observation, Sybren Vanoverberghe’s recent oeuvre not only stands its ground, but also gives a new impetus to today’s photography.
‘The enemy of photography is convention, the rigid rules of “how things should be done”. Photography’s salvation lies in experimentation.’
—Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
Luk Lambrecht
September/October 2021
Sources consulted:
— All publications about Sybren Vanoverberghe previously published
— Roxane Marcoci, The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2010
— Frans-W. Kaiser, ‘Fotografie: kunst of middel om kunst te maken’ (‘Photography: Art or Means to Make Art’, in Anton Corbijn – Hollands Deep, Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, 2015
– Gerhard Richter/ Dieter Schwarz, An Interview, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden/ Verlag der Buchhandlung Walter König, Cologne, 2019