Photography and Scuplture: The Object, and Beyond

Today the relationship between photography and sculpture is polarized by the photographic object. But each in their own way, the exhibitions of Thierry Fontaine at the Centre Photographique d’Île-de-France in Pontault-Combault (until 23 December, curated by Dominique Abensour and Nathalie Giraudeau) and of Elad Lassry at Le Plateau in Paris (until 9 December, curated by Xavier Franceschi) open up new horizons. In recent years the photographic object, impressive in its volume and materiality, has become ubiquitous. From Mohamed Bourouissa’s prints on car bodies, to Anouk Kruithof’s latex prints, Letha Wilson’s photographs cast in concrete, and the large freeform printsTaisuke Koyama unfurls in space, it has been extensively presented in these pages, giving an idea of its international and polymorphic character. In the most recent edition of La Photogra

phie contemporaine,( 1) Michel Poivert brings these hybrid practices together under the name ‘amplified photography’: photography shuns the two-dimensionality that has seemingly characterized it, spatializing itself, becoming ‘the evidence of a presence where the image definitively gives way to the materiology of the photograph’. Amplification is one element of contemporary photography that responds to digital dematerialization by the rematerialization of the image. It is, in the historian’s words, ‘the dramatic aspect of a new materialism’. The photographic object is thus the most recent stage and most visible form of the relationship between photography and sculpture, whose history—a wealth of instruction— goes back to the origins of photography, where a primitive such as Hippolyte Bayard found his subject of choice in statuary. On the one hand, it reminds us that even if they are not apparent, and even if photography and its two-dimensions seem to be, a priori,

extracted only with difficulty from the role of documenting and disseminating sculpture, they are much more productive than the links between photography and painting, which are too deeply founded in the interplay of influences and rivalries. On the other hand, it suggests that these questions have arisen in similar terms to those of today and, above all, much more broadly.(2) CRYSTALLIZATION The late 1960s and early 1970s seem to have been a time of crystallization in this respect. In 1970 the exhibition Photography into

Sculpture, ‘the first comprehensive survey of photographically formed images used in a sculptural or fully dimensional manner’,(3) was held at MoMA in NewYork. Organized by Peter C. Bunnell, it was in stark contrast to the modernist orthodoxy defended by John Szarkowski, chief curator for photography, who rather than intermingling, was determined to assert the medium’s specificity. Bringing together some twenty young North American artists, many from the West Coast, it was dominated by Robert Heinecken, with his Plexiglas illusionist environments ( Venus

Mirrored, 1968) and configurable objects ( Fractured Figure Sections, 1967). The curator’s words still resonate: ‘[the artists] have enthusiastically endorsed the notion that photography is a material medium.’ Though previously little known, in the current context

Photography into Sculpture seems to assume its historical value: recently two exhibitions organized by American galleries paid it tribute and a book was dedicated to it.(4) In reality, less linked to a specific exhibition than to a profound redefinition of art, another aspect of the relationship between photography and sculpture became more visible, that of sculpture by photography—‘sculpture into photography’, we could say. These years saw an expanding of the field of sculpture, which extended to interventions in nature or architecture, integrating the artist’s body and actions, privileging the process and the transitory, sometimes the immaterial, in which photography played a decisive role. This role extended so much that, in a way, sculpture moved from the object to its representation and that although two-dimensional, a photograph became a sculpture. This is evidenced by, among other works, Alina Szapocznikow’s

Photosculptures (1971); photos of chewed gum placed in various situations. This is the framework, to an extent defined as the relationship between photography and sculpture—irreducible to the photographic object—within which we can understand the current exhibitions of Thierry Fontaine and Elad Lassry, two artists who both practice the two mediums, proffering specific, even renewed, conjunctions. ONTOLOGICAL EQUIVALENCE Thierry Fontaine presents only photographs, never objects, whether or not they are photographic. He makes sculpture by photography when he fixes the flames of an improbable light bulb ( Lumières, 2012), and, more simply, photographs of sculptures, such as his Col-

Page de droite, de haut en bas / page right from top:

Elad Lassry. «Untitled (Boots, Blue Cord) ». 2018. Tirage argentique, corde, acier, cadre en noyer. 48,3 x 40,6 x7,6 cm. (© Elad Lassry, Court. 303 Gallery, New York). Gelatin silver print, cord, steel, walnut frame Exposition au Plateau, Paris. 2018. (Ph. Martin Argyroglo). Installation view Ci-dessous / below: Elad Lassry. « Sensory Spaces 3 ». Exposition au Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. 2014. (Ph. Hans Wilschut).

Installation view

lection (2017–2018), photographs of African masks crying candle wax—whose syncretism is founded on ideas of the displacement, encounter and exchange at the centre of his work. ‘I am the photographer of my own work’ he likes to repeat, while pointing out that he came to photography through necessity. Born in 1969 on Réunion island, where he returned after studying with Sarkis at the École Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs de Strasbourg, and before living, as he does today, in metropolitan France, in the mid-1990s he found photography to be the most economical way to show his sculptural work. Since then this work has been determined by the prescience of the final image. This conjunction is even more natural for him as it is based on an ontological equivalence between these two media that share, at least in how he practices them, the same vocabulary and the same process—from the imprint to the proof including the act of printing—and the same possibilities, such as replication. At the CPIF, while his first series brings together photographs of men—the artist or another—their heads entirely covered with sculpture’s fundamental materials, clay and plaster, and while later works show the development of the object ( Souvenir [2010] shows a man creating an Eiffel Tower from shells), his Études (2016) explicitly spotlight this equivalence: these male and female nudes reduced to genitalia affirm their nature as prints, in this case based on matrices moulded by the artist. Taken outdoors but giving little context, thanks to tight framing, sometimes on white or black backgrounds, Thierry Fontaine’s images often evoke photographs of sculptures intended for catalogues. Frontal, they recall the recommendations of art historian Heinrich Wölfflin in How One Should Photograph

Sculpture, which states that sculpture, at least classical statuary, should be photographed from a direct point of view, ‘corresponding to the artist’s own conception’, excluding any attempt at sophisticated or ‘picturesque’ angles, even though they better capture volume.The invoking of Wölfflin’s writings is even more justified as Fontaine sometimes draws on a classical repertoire. The Études are taken from an archaeological fragment and Esprits (2014) cites Michelangelo’s Pieta (1498–1499). Wölfflin does not use this example, but we can be sure that he would have prescribed such strict formality as Fontaine adopts.Thus, beyond the subject of images and the context of their realization, it is also the photographic form and its historical and conventional echoes that for Thierry Fontaine make the sculpture. So much so that we can undoubtedly assert that it is in the very space of his images that the

Elad Lassry. « Untitled (Assignment 96-9) ». 2018. Tirage jet d’encre, cadre en laiton. 51,8 x 41,4 cm. (© Elad Lassry, Court. 303 Gallery, New York).

Archival pigment print, brass frame relationship between photography and sculpture unfolds. Elad Lassry’s exhibition suggests, on the contrary, that photography and sculpture do not share, a priori, any common space other than the fortuitous one of Le Plateau’s galleries. Of course, the artist, born in Tel Aviv in 1977 and based in Los Angeles, who also practices drawing, film and performance, is known for his work on the nature of photography as object. These latter, systematically printed in a small format that makes them potentially easy to manipulate, are often presented in frames that emphasize their presence by their bright colour, taken from the image, their reflective surfaces, the materials covering them, or as in the case for one of the series shown at Le Plateau, the objects that pierce them. Lassry’s exhibitions though can also bring together photographs and self-contained sculptures. At Le Plateau, where a film is also shown, they apparently have no connection between them: in the main gallery, eight photographs subtitled Assignment (2018) feature three models in what is, only at first glance, a fashion shoot for a magazine from the past, surrounded by six sculptures, also produced for the exhibition, composed of rusty compressors cut in half and filled with brightly coloured cushions, the meeting of chic and vintage glamour with formless and prosaic contemporaneity. In this respect it seems that Lassry has radicalized his position. When he previously brought sculptures and photographs together he often played with formal connections (the finish of the sculptures evoking those of his frames) or made sculpture an element of his reflection on the perception of images. At David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles in 2012, a sculpture in the form of a half-height wall, topped with pieces of coloured wood shaped like waves, stood in front of a row of photographs. In 2014, at the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam, the sculptures were seen as ‘viewing stations’ that could, again, despite their name, disturb the gaze. In these exhibitions, between expansion and compression, photography becomes an object and sculpture becomes an image, both of them joining in the notion of ‘picture’. At Le Plateau the conjunction is not based on any comparison. Lassry investigates the differences between the image and the object. He emphasizes shock. This is served by the sense of space and the finesse of the artist who, after having a wall of Le Plateau moved to obtain a perfect parallelism, established a system that could be called integrated. Founded on the intersecting of two grids drawn by the arrangement of images and objects, he stretches the space between photography and sculpture. The emptiness that separates them and that is nothing less the space of the sensible body of the spectator becomes the very site of their relationship. Thus beyond the materialism of the photographic object, the ontological approaches of Thierry Fontaine and the phenomenological approach of Elad Lassry give new insights into the current relationship between photography and sculpture.

Translation: Bronwyn Mahoney (1) Michel Poivert, La Photographie contemporaine (Flammarion, 264 pg., 29.90 euros). See my column in this issue. (2) For the most recent publications, see Michel Frizot and Hélène Pinet (eds), Entre sculpture et photographie, huit artistes chez Rodin (Musée Rodin/5 Continents, 2016) and Roxana Marcoci (ed.), The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 toToday (MoMA, 2010). (3) Exhibition press release. Online. (4) Exhibitions at Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles, 2011, and Hauser & Wirth, NewYork, 2014; Mary Statzer (ed.), The Photographic Object, 1970 (University of California Press, 2016). (5) Comment photographier les sculptures (L’Harmattan, 2008) brings together three articles from 1896, 1897 and 1915.