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11/12/2012

Allan Sekula / Christian Hidaka

Galerie Michel Rein, Paris

Allan Sekula
Californian sequences

Curator: Marie Muracciole

Both before leaving California for New York in 1974 and after returning the next year, I planned and photographed a number of smaller sequential projects, often involving some sort of staging, either deadpan or comic. These were never printed. The works fall between my works from the earlier 70s, such as Aerospace Folktales and projects from the late 70s, such as School Is a Factory.

I remember being especially annoyed by the position taken by the 1975 exhibition New Topographics at George Eastman House in Rochester, even though I liked the work of many of the included photographers. Even though the landscape was shown to be humanly transformed, often in absurd ways, there was no strong sense of human or social agency. By 1976, I was joking that this was the ?neutron bomb? school of photography: killing people but leaving real estate standing.

So what I was experimenting with as an alternative was a way of suggesting that social topography was inevitably the site of strife, class war, land-grabs, ethnic-cleansing, repression and empire. This is especially true in California, where the bones of the first inhabitants crunch underfoot with every step.

Allan Sekula, Translation and Completion, 2011

California Stories (1973-1979) are short narrative sequences, scripted and photographed by Allan Sekula when he began working with photography, although not developed until the summer of 2011. Previously unseen in Europe they are here shown alongside two rarely seen videos: Performance Under Working Conditions (1973) and Talk Given by Mr. Fred Lux... (1974). Each of these works employ masque, pantomime and fictional re-enactment to effect a satiric portrait of everyday social conflict, all the while raising myriad questions about the underlying conditions of documentary realism. At the time, Sekula was reacting to the concept identified by the 1975 exhibition New Topographics which was being equally promoted by conceptual art: a precise descriptive photography, demonstrating its neutrality, most often in black and white, in which the human figure is erased along with all social and political scales. An admirer of most of the photographers in the exhibition, Sekula however refers to it as « the ?Neutron bomb? school of photography ».

Born in Erie, Pennsylvania in 1951, Allan Sekula was brought up in California from the end of the 50?s and currently lives in Los Angeles. It is in South California in 1977, during the time that the United States was facing the crisis which followed its defeat in South East Asia, that Sekula began combining writing and photography to document the political and economic situation of postwar military Keynesianism. In his notes on Aerospace Folktales, 1973, Sekula characterised this linking of texts, sound recordings and images as a ?disassembled movie? and this applies to much of his photographic work to the present.

Allan Sekula found these historic works last year when, for the first time, he produced a paper version of a work which is just slightly older, Untitled Slide Sequence (1972). In a previous exhibition in Istanbul[1], I decided to show both versions of Untitled Slide Sequence: the slide show which has existed since its creation and the photographs. On one side of the wall 25 images were projected onto a single screen in the dark and on the other they covered the white cube. This allowed one to come and go, to slow down the movement of the sequence for oneself, to move from the display to the projection and vice versa. There were many ways of seeing this ordinary moment in the life of a Californian aerospace factory in the 70?s: the moment of leaving a factory which makes arms for a lost war, at the time when the problem of unemployment was becoming rife. Seeing the people leave the factory recalls the film by the Lumière brothers and more recently, an installation by Haroun Farocki2. But Untitled Slide Sequence also leads us to The Forgotten Space, the film directed by Allan Sekula and Noël Burch in 2010, in which they analyse the long term effects of the politics of the period.

There are a number of reasons to today discover theses images made in the past: for what they meant at the time, for what the present can tell us about them and finally for what they tell us about the present.

Marie Muracciole
Special thanks to Ali Akay

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Christian Hidaka
Souvenir

The derivation of the title of Christian Hidaka's exhibition at Galerie Michel Rein, Souvenir, is from the French, "to come to mind". This cognitive inference, which is inspired by a physical memento or form is in common with Hidaka's different depictions of space within the exhibition and the various notions of the competing representational values which accompany them.

Drawn from distinct sets of representational language, Hidaka's works mediate references to two periods which greatly informed the depiction of the pictorial plane. That of the 1480's, of Piero della Francesca and the influence of Euclidean geometry, with composition dependant on and within the parameters of the frame; and a second group which infer a limitless unfolding of space, which either take the form of ancient Chinese calligraphic landscapes or of a limitless unfolding of digital space, which originated in 1980's computer games.

The balance of information within these works rests not only in the nature of the subject within the frame, but also of how the subject represents an understanding of the frame itself and the space beyond, both physically and cognitively. The occurrence of smaller, more distinct movable objects within the sparse and expansive space of the architectural paintings infers a sense of phenomena.

The significance of these more declarative elements is at odds with the allusion to an unfolding of infinite space in the landscapes, an effect achieved through the repetitive sequence of form; and whilst distinctly different there is a psychological parity established with the isolating and exposing of the definite.

In both groups of works there is a sense that the message of the work doesn't reside within a single element or locus within the piece, but that through the works suggestive qualities it establishes a set of relationships in space. It is this aspiration for the space within versus the space beyond of the works, a distinction between the two forms which finds itself manifest pictorially. The Euclidean approach is to turn the composition inwards, acknowledging the objects as the message, whereas as a space of contemplation the Chinese landscape was intended to draw the viewer into that space, dissolving the division between representation and subject. This difference is as equally the difference between the Western aspiration for versus the Eastern actualization of spirituality.

In bringing these forms of spatial language together, Hidaka tests the treatment of his subject against its material, and also of the collective space sought by the works. Present amongst the differences established by the collective presence is the time of the work, both as a collection of present gestures derived from the artist's hand, as a tradition of interpretation or as the inference of meaning derived from within forms of depiction. It is this memory of belated representation, in combination with the implications sought actively by the works nature which poses the question as to whether the souvenir in question is ultimately that of past thought.

Gabor Gyory

Galerie Michel Rein
42 rue de Turenne 75020 Paris
Opening hours:
Tuesday - Saturday 11 am - 7 pm

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