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8/4/2019 The Mediterranean Theater, War Landscape Photographs by Bart Michiels
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BART MICHIELSTHE COURSE OF HISTORY: THE MEDITERRANEAN THEATRE
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8/4/2019 The Mediterranean Theater, War Landscape Photographs by Bart Michiels
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He knew that the essence of w ar i s v io lence, and that m od erat ion in w ar i s im beci l i ty . T H O M A S B A B I N G T O N M A C U A L Y, “ E S S A Y O N L O R D N U G E N T ’ S M E M O R I A L S O F H A M P D E N ” , 1 8 3 1
8/4/2019 The Mediterranean Theater, War Landscape Photographs by Bart Michiels
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In the Cherry Tree’s Branches a crunching of iron shoes.
Summer foams up for you out of helmets. The blackish cuckoo
With diamond spurs draws his image on to the gates of the sky.
THE CHERRY TREE’SBRANCHESBY PAUL CELAN
In this poem Paul Celan, the German-Jewish poet and survivor of Auschwitz, joins the
violence of war with the radiance of the natural landscape. Bart Michiels, in his series
The Course of History, makes use of the same conundrum by photographing the stark
natural beauty now found in former war-torn landscapes. The sites that he photographs
were the worst killing elds in Europe. His photographs of the Garigliano River, Monte
Lungo and Monte Cassino, Hill 593 are locations of the six-month struggle in 1943-44
to break the Gustav Line in the mountains of central Italy. Four battles were waged before
the Allies were able to advance to Rome, leaving more than 350,000 men dead or
wounded. Only the bloodbaths of Verdun, The Somme and the worst ghting on the
Eastern Front compared with Monte Cassino.
“The Mediterranean Theatre,” the latest installment of The Course of History, surveys
the rivers, seas and mountains of the Mediterranean, the sites in Greece, Italy, Spain
and Turkey that witnessed the most decisive battles for domination of the western world.
Michiels concentrates on climatic and topographical conditions in order to draw references
to the former devastating events. Related to his approach, the military term ‘ friction’ refers
to unexpected interference with military plans that includes bad weather and rough
terrain, but also the general uncertainty created by war. The photograph Monte Lungo
1943, Mattina contains the story of the ‘fog of war,’ through an actual fog that enveloped
a strategic mountaintop that is said to have demobilized Italian soldiers who lost their way
during an attack. The seascape photograph Lepanto 1571, Mare Sanguinoso bears the
news in gleaming blood-red lines of a sea battle that lasted only four hours yet spent the
lives of 30,000 men and caused the destruction of the entire Turkish eet. Lepanto
BART MICHIELS:
THE MEDITERRANEAN
THEATRE
B y S a r a h S t a n l ey
8/4/2019 The Mediterranean Theater, War Landscape Photographs by Bart Michiels
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was a critical battle between Islam and Christianity that announced the end
of Turkish domination in the Mediterranean.
A native of Belgium living in New York City for the past decade, Michiels’
European identity has been shaped by landscapes of war, the remnants and
ruins that still mark the countryside where he grew up. It is the photographer
himself who is the primary interlocutor, researching through his photographs
how the European wars have shaped the histories of the west. Hardly ever
is war pictured in actual places distinguished by its own unique topography,
the features which often prove decisive in the outcome of victory or defeat.
Traveling to Salamis, Marathon and Thermopylae, Michiels visited the
battleelds of the Persian Wars as an impetus for The Mediterranean
Theatre, following in the long tradition of the rst historian Herodotus who
visited temples, battleelds, monuments and cities to inform his writing about
the Greco-Persian Wars, 490 and 480-479 BC. The Course of History
is urging a reconsideration of the history of war as it continues to unfold in
present times. The images beckon us to question the inevitability of war
and where it is leading us. The human costs of war and the associated
amnesia resemble Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, propelled forward
by the future and unable to turn back and examine the carnage as it piles
up behind him.
Roger Fenton was the rst professional photographer sent to document
the outcome of armed conict during the Crimean War, 1855. Although
most of his photographs were concerned with preserving the dignity of
battle, one of his photos relates directly to the visual territory of Michiels’
Course of History. Entitled The Valley of the Shadow of Death, the photo
of a battle site where six hundred soldiers were ambushed is a portrayal of
death without the dead, for all it shows is the wide rutted road studded with
rocks and cannonballs curving across the horizon. In a similar framework,
Michiels’ photograph Cannae 216BC, The Death of Paulus is a desolate
eld of scattered white rock that serve as markers for the fallen dead, cor-
poral allusions to 50,000 Roman soldiers who were lost there in a single
day. These spectral references to the ground are also found in the images
of Troy and Thermopylae (The Death of Leonidas), the epic battle of the
Spartans against Xerxes the Great.
Too often war photographs are driven by the action of combat, which does
not provide any breathing room to think about the connection between
the past and current conicts. As objects of contemplation, Michiels
landscapes aim to deepen a sense of reality, a step outside of the barrage
of daily news coverage of war. His images are only lled with tall spreading
grasses, shimmering of a cascading river and ancient stone enshrouded in
mist. These landscapes appear too peaceful, emptied of all references to
battle, horrors that have since vacated Europe and migrated to other loca-
tions. What remains is history, hovering in a tremulous state of waiting that
gently pulls at the cords of memory. In this sense, each photograph serves
as a memory device that distills the secrets of the past for our eyes now.
These battleelds have returned to natural rhythms to produce a tension
between an idealized state and the violence once committed there. From
ancient times to the present age, it is still the soldier’s body that mediates
biological forces through the technology of warfare.
He sleeps through the battle and summer, it is for him that the cherry bleeds…
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02/01/2006 05:ART8: Photography
Page ttp://dsc.gc.cuny.edu/part/part8/reviews/stanle.html
Roland Fischer superimposes the interior with the exterior of thebuilding to create an entirely new image
Untitled (Strasbourg), 1997C-print, AP 1/1
36-1/4” x 120” (92 x 305 cm)Digital Image Courtesy Von Lintel and Nusser Gallery, New York City
Roland Fischer’s large-scalefaçade images resemble abstr
paintingUntitled
(Chicago) 2001C-print, edition of 5
71 x 49 inches(180 x 125 cm)
Digital Image Courtesy Von Liand Nusser Gallery, New York
From Gothic to Modern: the Faces/Facades of Roland Fischer
Androgyny and the Mirror: Photographs of Florence Henri,1927-38by Melody Davis Betwixt and Between: Female Portraiture in theWork of Nadarby Jennifer E. Farrell
Mathieu Paints a Pictureby Fred Gross Ben Shahn's Two Portraits of Walker Evans: ACritique Paintedby Jin Han Taking Inventory: William Henry Fox Talbotby Lisa Jaye Young
Big Impactby Katherine Bussard New York September 11 by MagnumPhotographersby Tina Gregory The Beauty of Evil? review of on europeanground by Alan Cohenby Allison Moore
"La Divine Comtesse": Photographs of theCountess de Castiglioneby Caterina Pierre Letizia Battaglia: Passion Justice Freedom -Photographs of Sicily by Marguerite Shore From Gothic to Modern: the Faces/Facades of Roland Fischerby Sarah Stanley Luke Smalley, "Gymnasium"by Rich Turnbull
Exhibition Design as Installation Pieceby Vanessa Rocco
by Sarah Stanley PRINT ARTICLE “ … we are not entirely matter, nor are we entirely idea … through images, and in images, we can compreheopposites, grasp complex relationships, and ultimately fathom both the interior and the exterior in theirentirety. “ Roland Fischer, Kunstbunker, September 24, 1995
Roland Fischer, a key figure incontemporary German photography, his second solo exhibition in the UniteStates at Von Lintel & Nusser Galleryfrom September 6 to October 6. Wellknown for his monochrome exploratioof portraiture, this show of ten large-scale photographs included the facadegothic cathedrals and corporate highrises, buildings of archetypal recognitFischer’s presentation of the gothic wthe modern is hardly spurious. Thesoaring, light-filled skeletal volumes othe gothic cathedral were sources of inspiration for early skyscraper design
by Berlin architects in the 1920s and in particular Mies van der Rohe’sexpressionist glass skyscrapers. Thisformal continuity is revealed throughFischer’s superimposition of the interithe gothic cathedral with exterior viewIn Fischer’s combination, the stonefaçade weaves into the erupting formthe interior space. The stone exteriordissolves into an array of geometricforms, reenacting the greattransformations in architectural form
precipitated by the construction of the Crystal Palace of 1851, a building now seen as the earliest precursorthe glass architecture of the modern office building. The diamond-shaped verticals of the pointed arches appto peel open from the dark shell of the interior, introducing an organic quality of movement into the staticiconography of the cathedral. As the image itself is crucial for Fischer, the superimposition of interior/exterioopens up new visual territory. In line with Fischer’s disruption of the stone façade, Monet declared, regardinhis Cathedral series, that “everything changes, even stone,” to express his intentions to capture the shifting
conditions of light and vapor that surrounded the façade of the Cathedral of Rouen.
Fischer’s treatment of architectural form is related to the formal language of portraiture that he developed in his Los Angeles portrait series, 1989-91.The faces of these women float within the blue or black frame of thecustomary suburban swimming pool, a monochrome color plane with almostmathematical characteristics. Freed from any personalized identificationsuch as fashion, jewelry or social context, the women’s individuality recedeswhile more universal qualities show forth from their unadorned flesh-tonedfaces. In similar ways, Fischer engages the facade of the building --frontally, sometimes framed against the stark blue sky and often completelyisolated from the local context of surrounding buildings. He rarely identifiesthe building by name, preferring to leave the photo untitled with only thename of the city as an index of place. What interests Fischer least is thedocumentary aspect of photography. Instead, he captures the flat planarquality of the modern office building as a purely visual effect associatedwith the glass curtain wall, its imposing height and reflective surfaces. Theplanarity of the façade also refers to the flatness of the photographic image.In certain photos, Fischer goes further by cropping to the boundaries of the
building’s façade so that only the vertical and horizontal lines of the windowsand structure remains framed. The overall visual effect of this rectilineartreatment recalls the linear enclosures of Mondrian, an artist who was bothinspired by and responsive to the architecture of the city. Fischer’sphotographs of the modern office building come close to releasing thephotographic subject through the color and line of pure abstraction. He uses the digital imaging process totransform the photographic image into a starkly abstract image, in order to “correct’ the waviness that resufrom the steep viewing angles required to photograph tall buildings. The monotone colors and bold lines of Fischer’s digitally-edited photographs share certain visual elements of abstract or color field painting, yet thdistinctive surfaces of photography always remains a prominent aspect of the work.
Photography’s move towards abstraction derives from a conceptual narrative related to the social and culturcontext of global capitalism and the qualities inherent in digital production. New German photography exhibstrong fascination with surface, with rectilinear geometry, with primary colors and shapes, with smoothness
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02/01/2006 05:ART8: Photography
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View of Roland Fischer’s large- scale photo images of Gothiccathedrals shown in the Von Lintel and Nusser Gallery
Digital Image Courtesy of Von Lintel and Nusser Gallery, New YorkCity
evenness that were the central preoccupations of modernist painting a century earlier. Fischer’s architecturphotos are monumental in size, most measuring between 5 and 8 feet in length, the size constraint related the print limitations of the C-Print created from a digitally-produced negative. The trend in contemporaryGerman photography towards larger formats is yet another direct engagement with abstract painting. Certathe lingering drive to legitimize photography as a fine art has also certainly contributed to the oversized forof the last decade. An abstracted image invites a larger format, as it can be viewed close up or far away andstill make visual sense. It also heightens the visual impact of color and line. Photographers first made the leinto oversized formats during the heady art market of the 1980s, a period during which Roland Fischer as eaas 1980 and later Thomas Ruff in 1986 first used oversized formats to show their portrait series. The effect the larger scale on content and image created a sensation, and became the norm thereafter for other Germaphotographers such as Thomas Struth, Axel Hutte and Andreas Gursky. Fischer handles the large format in tsame way used as the Dusseldorf group, placing white margins around the entire image and laminating the of the print to Plexiglas. The glossiness of the photographs self-consciously presents the branding features o
corporate capitalism, a brash, superficial style that Fischer closely associates with Americanism.
Architecture has long been the subjecphotography, originally due to therequirement of long exposure times, later, when picturesque views of cityscapes and the American skyscrapbecame the norm. The skyscraper’ssoaring vertical lines, glittering steelframe and reflective glass façade appetailored to be pictured in a photograpThe contemporary office tower and threctilinear facades of corporatearchitecture also provide ideal subjecfor photography, a medium that isnothing but an exact recorder of distivolumes in space. In terms of Germaphotography, Bernd and Hilla Bechers
documentation of industrial architecture through a typological model provided the basis for new encounters the city’s built form for the fresh wave of photographers emerging from the Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf.Clearly Fischer draws upon the same imagery and architecture of corporate capitalism that has fascinated bopainters and photographers associated with “Corporate Realism.” What differentiates his approach is hiswillingness to bridge the stylistic distances, in this show for instance, between the Gothic and the Modern, labare the roots of architectural abstraction through the contemporary logic of the digital image. In Fischer’shands, the smoothness and precision of the digital image ultimately call attention to the reproducibility of architectural style through the manipulation of images and surfaces of the modern city.
Author's Bio>> © 2002 P ART and Sarah Stanley. All Rights Reserved.