THE LAST PHOTO?
The question of the end of painting haunts the history of pictorial abstraction. One of the first to have formulated it was Nikolai Tarabukin. Referring, in From Easel to Machine (1923), to Alexander Rodchenko’s Pure Red Colour, which was accompanied by two other monochromes in the exhibition 5x5=25 (1921), the Russian art historian and critic spoke of “the last painting”, “the last step on a long road”, “the last word after which the painter’s word must be silenced”. “Last painting”: the turn of phrase was at least true for Rodchenko, who then abandoned painting and devoted himself to photography in order to create the exemplary work of the New Vision that we know today. But what would Tarabukin have said in the face of Schwartz auf Schwartz, an entirely black photograph produced by Rodchenko in 1944-45? Would he have spoken of a “last photo”? Nothing is less certain. For the history of photographic abstraction, which appeared with photography, from William Henry Fox Talbot’s first attempts, seems to be devoid of any teleology. On the contrary, the movement appears even to be the opposite, since photography, when it tends towards abstraction, seems to be all about its origins.This is, at least, what the exhibition la Photographie à l’épreuve de l’abstraction [Photography to the Test of Abstraction] devoted to the current resurgence of abstract photography and presented simultaneously at the Frac Normandie Rouen, the Centre photographique d’Île-deFrance (CPIF) and the Centre d’art Micro Onde, demonstrate. These contemporary practices are sometimes grouped together under the name of New Abstraction which, paradoxically, poorly conceals what they owe to the historical foundations and developments of photography.The exhibition, its catalogue and the study day that accompanied it are, like many others, most enlightening on this point (1). In fact, explicit at the Frac, where it is given the name “archaeology”, the historical impulse of photographic abstraction runs through all three exhibitions. Probably reacting to the digital turn of the 1990s2000, it brings together, on the one hand, practices that return to the original fundamentals of the photographic process. First of all, light, more precisely that of the sun towards which, at the risk of dazzling, Zoe Leonard and Sébastien Reuzé point their camera and Ignasi Aballí her film camera. But also the light-sensitive medium, like the obsolete papers revealed by Alison Rossiter. In addition to the search for the conditions in which photography appeared, there is also an interest in the techniques and images of the past. Mustapha Azeroual explores the possibilities of gum bichromate, while with First Successful Permanent Photographs (2011), Pauline Beaudemont pays homage to the primitive icons of the medium’s history by re-photographing their appearance on the internet with Polaroid. Contemporary abstract photography is rediscovering the medium by producing new images. But it also runs the risk of redoubling the search for the past, from which it is then difficult to distance itself. This is especially true of the more formal works, for example those that exploit the arrangements of translucent planes or opaque volumes that, since Alvin Langdon Coburn’s Vortographs (1917) and the constructivist experiments of the 1920s and 1930s, have punctuated the history of photographic abstraction. The artists exhibited are not renewing formulas that have already been tried and tested—or the use of colour. Some, such as Zin Taylor and his small black-and-white prints, even look back to the aesthetics of yesterday, suggesting that the historicism of contemporary abstraction sometimes goes with harking back to the past.
STATE OF EMERGENCY
This is why the novelty of New Abstraction has to be sought elsewhere. The first track pursues the effects of digital image production technologies, the qualities and limitations of which the artists exploit. At the Frac, l’Esthétique de l’impression [Esthetics of Printing] underlines the materiality of the imperfections and accidents sought by Pierre-Olivier Arnaud and Wade Guyton, but Thomas Ruff’s Zycles
3090 (2008), inspired by representations of magnetic fields and produced by a computer programme, without a light source or tangible referent, switches to “pure abstraction”. The revivals opened up by the second avenue are broader since they lie in a rapprochement between abstraction and documentary. One may be surprised by the presence of Karim Kal, a social documentary filmmaker, at the CPIF. But one understands, particularly by listening to the historian Julie Martin during the symposium, that documentary can benefit from abstraction. In fact, the coloured flats and halos streaked with parallel or concentric lines in the series The Other Night Sky begun in 2007 by Trevor Paglen prove the existence of American reconnaissance satellites. As for the large colour fields in the series The Day Nobody Died (2008) by Broomberg and Chanarin, obtained by exposing large sheets of silver halide paper to the light and heat of Afghanistan, they were produced alongside the British army, whom the two artists as accompanied, claiming to be war photographers. No doubt we can deduce from this that between the revelation of now invisible or immaterial realities and criticism of the information factory, photographic abstraction gives documentary film the means to renew itself while forcing it to recognise the obsolescence of its conventional uses. In other words, if abstraction has an end, it would be that of the documentary in the historical sense of the term.This is, no more and no less, what the three red video screens in Hito Steyerl’s Red Alert (2007) indicate. They refer to the colour of the state of emergency in the United States, but also to Pure Red Colour, the “last painting”.
The exhibition is extended at the Frac Normandie Rouen and at the CPIF until February 21th, 2021. Bilingual French/English catalogue (Hatje Cantz, 40 euros) with contributions from the curators, Nathalie Giraudeau, Audrey Illouz, Véronique Souben, and the historians Kathrin Schönegg and Erik Verhagen. Symposium organised with ESADHaR, on October 28th, 2020, recorded and soon to be released by the magazine Radial.