The Power of Images
Posted on September 01 2017
Author Silvia Mazzucchelli
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The Power of Images is an exhibition curated by Urs Stahel, consisting of a selection of images belonging to the Bologna Mast Foundation collection (up to 24/09/2017). It might seem ambitious that a series of photographs simply coming from the job market and factory world rises to paradigm of what has now become the condition that every spectator is somehow the subject of: the power of images and their indisputable seductive power. Yet this collection illustrates this in an unmistakable way.
At first glance it is true that in front of the spectator's eyes there is an epopee of industry's vision in all its possible declinations: from the heavy, to the mechanical one, to that now fully robotized. And it is true that through this selection of images it is possible to grasp the world of work in all its complexity: the exhibition does not intend to trace the history of industry, nor to unconditionally glorify the work, nor to be constituted as a vehicle of ideological construction or nostalgic idealizations. You see very different environments, factories, machines, men, products. And here we could evoke the denotative function of photography, what an image depicts, the event that it shows, the context in which it was taken, its descriptive potential, as Urs Stahel recalls in its introduction "Matter and Idea, Machine and metaphor ".
And yet there is something else, an element that escapes from pure denotation. The element that surpasses the selection of images is that their sum produces a dense and palpable semantic nucleus: the exhibition has a body. This is his strength. And the body has a shape: that of a truck driver Billy Mudd, photographed by Richard Avedon. The perfection of his eyes, transparent and relentless, coexists with the imperfection of his limbs.
At first glance it is true that in front of the spectator's eyes there is an epopee of industry's vision in all its possible declinations: from the heavy, to the mechanical one, to that now fully robotized. And it is true that through this selection of images it is possible to grasp the world of work in all its complexity: the exhibition does not intend to trace the history of industry, nor to unconditionally glorify the work, nor to be constituted as a vehicle of ideological construction or nostalgic idealizations. You see very different environments, factories, machines, men, products. And here we could evoke the denotative function of photography, what an image depicts, the event that it shows, the context in which it was taken, its descriptive potential, as Urs Stahel recalls in its introduction "Matter and Idea, Machine and metaphor ".
And yet there is something else, an element that escapes from pure denotation. The element that surpasses the selection of images is that their sum produces a dense and palpable semantic nucleus: the exhibition has a body. This is his strength. And the body has a shape: that of a truck driver Billy Mudd, photographed by Richard Avedon. The perfection of his eyes, transparent and relentless, coexists with the imperfection of his limbs.
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Richard Avedon, Billy Mudd, Camionista, Alto, Texas, 1981
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It's magnetic. His look is a frame for all the selected images, he has a biblical power, as Erich Auerbach described it in one of his famous essays, in the sense that before his magnetism, the power of his body and his gaze, all the other images of the exhibition, neatly historical, have no title to present itself independently, as if the whole collection, along with all the history of men there, has to be placed in its visual horizon. Billy's look does not work to attract the spectator's sympathy; there is no flattery or charm. Billy's glance carries a precise idea of what the power of a photographic image means and perhaps its most ancestral and irrational force: it simply seduces and subordinates.
But that's not all. In the opposite wall, another work is exposed : "Psychomotor" by Rémy Markowitsch. The man's look understands it in its entirety: it is made up of twenty-five parts and was made for an exhibition dedicated to Volkswagen's factory and the city of Wolfsburg, which grew up as an appendage to the plant.
But that's not all. In the opposite wall, another work is exposed : "Psychomotor" by Rémy Markowitsch. The man's look understands it in its entirety: it is made up of twenty-five parts and was made for an exhibition dedicated to Volkswagen's factory and the city of Wolfsburg, which grew up as an appendage to the plant.
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Rémy Markowitsch, Psychomotor, 2016 Courtesy Galerie Eigen + Art Leipzig / Berlin
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In this work the engine of a machine is transformed into a "psychomotor" in a living body with a powerful erotic charge and at the same time evokes the spots of Rorscach while waiting to be watched and freely interpreted. And here is the idea of metaphor evoked by the curator in the title of the introduction. In this context it represents a case of "semantic anomaly": the body of the engine is a human body,the metaphor transfers the referent's sense to another referent, it deludes an expectation and creates a surprise. In addition, it allows to transfer the sense of the exhibition, from the gaze's body , or rather from the power of Billy Mudd,to the body of the image's glance, the "psychomotor", and what remains concealed behind or inside it, removed, hidden, waiting to be interpreted.
These are the two poles within which the space of a movement opens,from the Greek metaphérō "to take beyond'': from the collector's gaze, imposing its way of conceiving reality and its overall purpose to the chance to find in this vision, the possibility of a continuous research and interpretative, introspective transformations.
In the metaphorical space of the transfer, there is a link between the collection idea, its seductive power, and the spectator: the look of those who have chosen images and the affective value associated with them opens up to multiple other looks, and the The collection, which imposes its course, seems to suggest the possibility of being constantly evolving, open to the "stains" to which every spectator can attribute a different meaning, beyond pure denotation and its finitude.
These are the two poles within which the space of a movement opens,from the Greek metaphérō "to take beyond'': from the collector's gaze, imposing its way of conceiving reality and its overall purpose to the chance to find in this vision, the possibility of a continuous research and interpretative, introspective transformations.
In the metaphorical space of the transfer, there is a link between the collection idea, its seductive power, and the spectator: the look of those who have chosen images and the affective value associated with them opens up to multiple other looks, and the The collection, which imposes its course, seems to suggest the possibility of being constantly evolving, open to the "stains" to which every spectator can attribute a different meaning, beyond pure denotation and its finitude.
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Walter Niedermayr, Room Sequences 244, 2007/2015 Courtesy the artist and Galerie Nordenhake Berlin/Stockholm
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Left Yutaka Takanashi, Shinjuku Station, 1965 │Right Shomei Tomatsu, Impianto Petrolchimico. Yokkaichi, Mie, 1960
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So Pietro Donzelli's bituminous puddles are not just the indisputable indices of an abandoned industrial landscape, but they are also images of a part of us, which has to do with what we usually consider inguardable, unacceptable, something which attracts and rejects us at the same time, such as a wound, fear of darkness, a decomposing body, or a ghost escaping our understanding.
These images are thresholds, which push into other worlds, different for each spectator. The immense metal epopee filmed by Germaine Krull is the exaltation of technical knowledge that goes beyond the bounds of man, but also constitutes an endless sequence of images that denotes the power of a gaze capable of segmenting, smashing 'Indestructible metal appearance, to reduce it in abstract and tangible fragments, to own it piece by piece to recompose it into its corporeity:' les fers vivaient ', writes the photographer in his typography "Click entre deux guerres".
And yet the smoky city of Eugene Smith, the industrial plants of Masahisa Fukase and Shomei Tomatsu, images of the 1952 thermonuclear bomb tests or those of the "atomic dawn" on Nevada in the 1950s, followed by the image of the Dhaka's bunker in Bangladesh by Jim Goldberg and Hiroko Komatsu's photographs depicting all kinds of building materials, a "bio-health reserve" (the title of his work), "melancholic message board of the senescence" and "reliquary of objects in decline", are the dark side of progress, the discomfort of civilization and how it is sublimated at a visual level, a kind of "The Torture Garden" by Octave Mirbeau in an industrial version, to which we are subjected maybe to have the illusion of being able to liberate us from it.
These images are thresholds, which push into other worlds, different for each spectator. The immense metal epopee filmed by Germaine Krull is the exaltation of technical knowledge that goes beyond the bounds of man, but also constitutes an endless sequence of images that denotes the power of a gaze capable of segmenting, smashing 'Indestructible metal appearance, to reduce it in abstract and tangible fragments, to own it piece by piece to recompose it into its corporeity:' les fers vivaient ', writes the photographer in his typography "Click entre deux guerres".
And yet the smoky city of Eugene Smith, the industrial plants of Masahisa Fukase and Shomei Tomatsu, images of the 1952 thermonuclear bomb tests or those of the "atomic dawn" on Nevada in the 1950s, followed by the image of the Dhaka's bunker in Bangladesh by Jim Goldberg and Hiroko Komatsu's photographs depicting all kinds of building materials, a "bio-health reserve" (the title of his work), "melancholic message board of the senescence" and "reliquary of objects in decline", are the dark side of progress, the discomfort of civilization and how it is sublimated at a visual level, a kind of "The Torture Garden" by Octave Mirbeau in an industrial version, to which we are subjected maybe to have the illusion of being able to liberate us from it.
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Thomas Struth, Hot Rolling Mill, Thyssenkrupp Steel, Duisburg 2010
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Winston Link, Hotshot Eastbound, laeger, West Virginia, 1956
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However, the power of these images is truly liberating, in the sense that it seduces and at the same time allows the viewer to feel free, to let himself be seduce, returns to who looks at this a part of himself, induces one to look for a path as that traced by Who choose the pictures and built a collection in the collection. to see is to think, suggested Giuseppe Di Napoli in an article published right in this magazine. "The etymology ἒidos [eidos] (shape figure), from which the idea term is derived, has the same root of ἐιδέiν, [eidein] to see and, for the Greeks, the perfect to see "oìda", it means" I know "(because I have seen)".
This is the force that comes from the images. What I have just suggested is only one of the many visual paths, one of the many possible thoughts.
This is the force that comes from the images. What I have just suggested is only one of the many visual paths, one of the many possible thoughts.
The Power of Images, at the Mast in Bologna, from 3 May to 24 September 2017
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MAST Gallery, Bologna, 2017 - Courtesy MAST Bologna
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MAST Gallery, Bologna, 2017 - Courtesy MAST Bologna
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MAST Gallery, Bologna, 2017 - Courtesy MAST Bologna
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MAST Gallery, Bologna, 2017 - Courtesy MAST Bologna
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Author Silvia Mazzucchelli
Translated by LoosenArt
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