Current mood:convalescing
Category: Art and Photography
Building Design Story
http://www.bdonline.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=3137254&encCode=4894911881BC062024708JTBS737226611
Rut Blees Luxemburg’s visions of decades
27 March 2009
By Catherine Croft
Photographer Rut Blees Luxemburg is diversifying from the images for which she’s best known
Commonsensual: The works of Rut Blees Luxemburg
Black Dog publishing, £24.95, 208pp, 3/5 stars
Yellow lights reflect in a dark puddle, a cracked concrete gains a luminous beauty. Simultaneously disturbing and seductive, German- born photographer Rut Blees Luxemburg’s haunting and beautiful work has infiltrated our urban visual culture steadily over the past decade.
While one of her photographs provided the cover image for The Streets’ debut album, another was used by Bloc Party for their second album, A Weekend in the City. An angled slice of glistening pavement entitled The Veins appeared on a London Transport poster, while a set of her images, Piccadilly’s Peccadilloes, formed a public art installation in the tube station at Heathrow Terminal 4.
She has collaborated on an opera, and the design team for Channel 4’s recent Red Riding trilogy also seems to have been sucked into her universe — there is no explicit acknowledgment but the influence seems undeniable.
Luxemburg has a new book out, and a small exhibition of images taken from it are at her publisher’s Black Dog Gallery; another selection is at the Union Gallery.
These show a more diverse range of subject matter and mood, with large black and white images and black and white polaroids, in addition to the saturated colour images for which she is best known. She has photographed vandalised sculpture at churches in England and France, as well matter eaten away by natural forces — a porous wall carved away by the unrelenting action of wind and sea.
Mosque shows the blotched forms of skeletal concrete minarets, designed to be overclad but with a surprisingly pleasing aesthetic. They appear roughly taped together with their own very emotive poetry. Teufelsberg is German for Devil’s Mountain, and the image was taken on the artificial hill in former West Berlin built by the allies from the rubble of the city, submerging a Nazi military technical college designed by Albert Speer.
For a while, this was topped by a small skiing centre. It then became a US National Security Agency listening station. Luxemburg has photographed inside the radar domes that still remain and which are being proposed as the location for a spy museum. A contrast in scale, the polaroids, each annotated with exposure details, are displayed unmatted as precise found objects.
Luxemburg studied at the London College of Printing (1990-93) and the University of Westminster (1994-96), and now lives in London, teaching at the Royal College of Art. She describes her work as an exploration of “the continuing significance of the modern project on the city” through which “its ambitions and its poetic and real failures are recast as potential”.
“She has expressed an interest in moments where history appears in dense yet coded layers”
She has expressed a particular interest in “revealing moments where history appears in dense yet coded layers”, and the book groups images drawn from different past series into chapters which suggest overlapping narratives. For instance, The Pattern of the Plans juxtaposes the Teufelsberg pictures with one of Rayners Lane in Harrow from the series shown at Heathrow.
Creative writer Douglas Park provides a reflective commentary with its own beauty: “ethereal gaseous liquid pavements and roads/that sometimes stir, flow and gush forwards” and “particular light, a light of golden flares and darker gleaming, reflections, puddles, shadowed corners”; while Régis Durand’s essay succinctly points to an “element of repressed lyricism” that defies sentiment and drama.
However without more literal explanatory text (for instance, there is no information about Teufelsberg for those not in the know), the stories that seem to haunt the book remain elusive.
Does this matter? At the book launch, Richard Sennett drew attention to the “publicness” of Luxemburg’s images. Despite being devoid of people and without background information, the photographs “take people outside themselves into a world that is non-representational”, Sennett says.
And they are all the more powerful for retaining their mystery and a sense of stillness that comes with the absence of narrative.
'Piccadilly’s Peccadillœs', Rut Blees Luxemburg, Transport For London public artwork, Heathrow Airport, London, 2007-2008.
In later 2006 and early 2007, aided and abetted serial collaborative partner-in-crime, Rut Blees Luxemburg during the course of their duties, photographing London Underground signage and lighting reflected in puddles near selected Piccadilly Line stations. All towards a project, especially commissioned on the occasion of the 1st centenary of London's Piccadilly Line.
At the 2007 launch (for which guests commuted to and from Heathrow Airport, all the way from Rut Blees Luxemburg's exhibition at Union Gallery Union Gallery then in South London), recited ‘Shifted Blockage Flowing Load’, text based on personal insight, involvement and experience of venture.
Since then, ‘Shifted Blockage Flowing Load’ (and also ‘Pied-a-Terre Lumiere’), appeared in, Commonsensual: The Works of Rut Blees Luxemburg monograph, Black Dog Publishing, London, 2007.
As well as sometimes being in the same exhibitions, events and publications, other works about and with Rut Blees Luxemburg include:
‘Pied-a-Terre Lumiere’, premiered at launch for 'Pied-a-Terre Lumiere', public artwork, Place de Laurieres, Bellevue, Nantes, 2002 (1st published, as artist's pages, with Rut Blees Luxemburg in 'Miser & Now' magazine number 3, 'Future as Nostalgia' issue, various editors, Keith Talent Gallery, London, 2004); afterword, ‘Trinativity’ (English / Welsh, translated by Sian Edwards), 'Ffolly', Rut Blees Luxemburg, Ffotogallery Ffotogallery Cardiff / Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea, 2003.
Have also helped "christen" works, such as 'Ffolly' and 'Orifice Grid'.
Sometimes, Rut Blees Luxemburg exhibits and publishes black, white and grisaille trial-run polaroids from site-visits, plans for usually colour, high-resolute and large scale works, often including accomplice's inscriptions.
Jokes were made that ‘Pied-a-Terre Lumiere’ and 'Trinativity' were worthy candidature fodder as arias in the 2004 opera, 'Liebeslied / My Suicides' (Alexander Garcia-Duttmann's libretto using earlier texts for Rut Blees Luxemburg, set to music by Paul Clark).
Piccadilly’s Peccadiloes, Public Art Installation by Rut Blees Luxemburg, Heathrow, London, 2007
Text written and read by Dougals Park for the inauguration of the work in Heathrow, 2007
Pied a Terre Lumiere, Public Art Work, Bellevue, Nantes by Rut Blees Luxemburg
Text by Douglas Park read at the opening of the installation in Nantes, 2002
At concentrated sources of extreme coldness,
surplus glut of stale household condensation
and fresh morning dew fall accumulate and centralise,
where they mix and gel,
freeze rock hard into ice nuggets,
frost over with fireproof snowflakes
and mature into
see-through glass, crystal, diamonds, silver and stainless steel.
Their strength, energy and force sets off fuse ignition,
sending sparks flying,
flammably burning
-but these stone power-packs themselves,
withstand all heat,
never even thaw out slightly, let alone melt away,
damage repellent immunity strain being resistant,
durable and indestructable.
Borne aloft on the sudden gust of a gentle breeze,
a flock, pack, shoal or swarm of such units comes together,
forming ballroom dance-floor solid rivers,
often abruptly halted and stuck at unbroken standstill,
as well as ethereal gaseous liquid pavements and roads
that sometimes stir, flow and gush forwards.
Moving along,
only at a dead-slow snail and tortoise pace,
both infantry processions parade ahead boldly,
glow sunshine and spread warmth,
preventatively cancelling out villainous power-cuts that would otherwise successfully plunge brightness and clarity of day
into invincibly dark night time sub-zero conditions.
Copyright, Douglas Park, 2002
Shifted Blockage Flowing Load
Vast expanses overstretch
until pulled too far
exceeding beyond maximum limits
that suddenly there’s
fast-speed contraction and shrinkage inward.
Original size and form reduce and decrease,
leaving mere fractions of their previous mass and bulk they once were.
No longer endlessly continual and unbroken masses,
but defined and locatable compact units.
Along outer-edges,
coastal-beach riverbank seashore canal-towpath cliffs
surround and picture-frame
innermost civic-centre and forest-clearing at the very heart;
nothing or little lies between moat and castle-keep.
Distantly underneath,
every solid factory-chimney divulges secrets,
yet always in encrypted code states,
so otherwise might just have been withheld.
Messages enter,
some stay,
others evaporate or implode,
many even orbit around.
Case-subjects undergo changes,
within themselves,
also enacting such processes onto anything,
body or where else met with.
All the rest spill out the other side,
rejected and escaping;
different than beforehand,
never the same again,
without turning back anymore.
Dreams extend,
burnt through armour-plated rock-face;
wounded injuries and healing bandage dressings confuse,
unresolved, interchangeable.
Countless visions projected –only to fall,
sent back down again,
drowning and buried,
inside these wishing-wells;
still more get forcibly thrown high up,
landing, stuck, lodged.
Unfilled graves flood deep,
as does each hollow column pillar capital ship-mast.
Eventual conclusion awaits discovery
or invention required for validity and activating.
Copyright, Douglas Park, 2007
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