ARTISTS WITHOUT BORDERS

In all the terrible news coming out of Ukraine a small article about Mariupol caught my eye recently.  It mentioned that one of the buildings damaged by shelling was the Kuindzhi Art Museum and reported that some art works had been looted by Russian troops.

My mind immediately raced back to an exhibition of Russian landscape art at the National Gallery in 2004 in which I first came across the work of Arkhip Ivanovich Kuindzhi (1842-1910).  I was really taken by it and did my best to find out about him in my frequent subsequent trips to Russia.  I’d also been reading up on the Russian mystic/philosopher/artist (and, some say, spy) Nikolai Roerich.  On a visit to the Roerich Museum in Moscow as I peered closely at an old photo of Roerich’s art class I realised with a bit of a shock that his tutor was….yes, Arkhip Kuindzhi.  All of this clearly required more investigation and I spent some time finding out about the two of them.  This was all twenty-odd years ago and I have had several reproductions of Kuindzhi’s work and one of Roerich’s hanging in our house ever since.  My researches didn’t lead very far though. There is quite a bit on Roerich in English but Kuindzhi hardly gets a look in even though he was a very popular artist in his day and his work is still of some standing. Browsing the net, I noticed in a recent Sotheby’s sale that one of his paintings sold for around $3million.

Kuindzhi was an absolute master of illumination – both by sun and moon. 

Moonlight on the Dnepr. 1880.

Ukraine Evening. 1878-1901. Russian State Museum, St. Petersburg.

Morning on the Dnepr. 1881. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

What attracts me most is not his technique though but the suggestion of emptiness and presence at the same time – that spaciousness which borders on the spiritual. ‘Morning on the Dnepr’ is a painting almost of nothing.

I’ve always been particularly struck by this one below, too. It is one of several he painted which carry the title “Birch Grove”.  Am I the only one to see a very definite suggestion of a split down the centre of the painting – almost a rent in reality?  It is a little exaggerated by the colour tone in this reproduction but I have seen the original and it is definitely there, believe me.

Birch Grove. 1879. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

There is very little written about Arkhip Ivanovich Kuindzhi in English – that I have ever found anyway.  He is not even mentioned in Honour and Fleming’s World History of Art.  In other sources  he is simply referred to as a Russian artist.  I’d have to be honest and say that until recently I wouldn’t have quibbled with that.  Despite my interest I had never even heard of the Kuindzhi Art Museum.  Now it is brought to my attention in the worst of circumstances. And it dawns on me why it is in Mariupol. It is in Mariupol because, as I now remember, that is where Kuindzhi was born.  He was Ukrainian.* At the time the Crimea was part of the Russian Empire so perhaps there was some justification for calling him Russian.   The distinction might have passed most of us by once upon a time, but not any more.  

Here’s my homage to to Arkhip Ivanovich – my own little birch grove a short walk from our house. (Taken coincidentally with a Russian Zorki 4K.)

* Kuindzhi is not on his own either. Vasily Grossman, author of Life and Fate and often referred to as Russian was also born in Ukraine - as was Mikhail Bulgakov, author of The Master and Margherita. I wonder how many others there are?

MANCHESTER

Part of the fun of living in the city is thinking about the city.

In Manchester for some years now there has been a series of 4 x 4 evenings in which 4 speakers are given 15 minutes each to opine on a set urban topic.  The latest one this week was “Sin City: The Morality Of Urban Growth” in which the star turn was  The Guardian’s Architecture Correspondent, Oliver Wainwright who had done some flame fanning by writing a rude article in that paper about the belt of skyscrapers currently being built around the city centre.

Usually each of the speakers gets the same time as all the others.  In this case,  OW was given forty minutes or so to set out his case. This was that the skyscrapers are ugly, out of place and will do nothing for Manchester’s economy; are mostly investment vehicles for rich foreigners; that of 15000 residential units none are affordable homes (ie let at less than 80% of market value); and that the council should be ashamed of itself for granting them planning permission.  He had even managed to get hold of an advertising promotion for the city from one of the investment fairs held in the hot places where rich people tend to congregate.  The strapline?  “Turn Your Determination Into Envy”.  Great stuff.

Consultant Shelagh McNerney was given about five minutes to reply.  This broke with the 4x 15 minutes format and was unfair given the time allotted to the main speaker. 

In her position I would have started by  introducing myself as the representative of The Devil.  Very courageously however she set to with a basic proposition that “economic growth has delivered every single improvement to humanity”.  There was no great conspiracy against Manchester and any successful city was constantly reconfiguring itself; Manchester was never that pretty anyway;  urban growth is not the cause of the city’s homelessness and other problems; and that low growth is not the answer.  Given the handicap she had I thought she made a pretty good stab at a defence.

The other two speakers didn’t add that much and at the end the chair asked each of the participants for one phrase to sum up what was needed to improve matters.  “More power to the public sector” said OW.  “More cash” said Shelagh.  There was simply no common ground between them and as so often these days you were implicitly invited to take sides – which will get us nowhere.

Oddly enough, the comment which seemed to cause most offence was that Manchester is not a pretty city.  I’d have thought it’s self-evident. I like the place very much and think it’s a great city but ‘pretty’ – such a demeaning word - is not an adjective I would apply to it. 

Visually, there are some very interesting buildings but it’s not really an architectural wonder either.  For me the real knockout visuals are the city’s engineered structures.  I never fail to feel a jolt  coming in on the tram as it whizzes past and under and over the bridges and viaducts which span the city: the bracing and girdling, the bulk and curve – the sheer mass of them.  You can almost see stovepipe-hatted Victorian engineers sucking on their clay pipes and stabbing at creased plans with muddy forefingers.

Here’s a shot I took this summer of the Castlefield Basin - which is where the Bridgewater Canal meets the River Medlock. Three 19th century railway viaducts frame the late 20th century Merchants’ Bridge. The modern one says “Look at me!” but the Victorian ones just say “Get outta my way!”. You can see a couple of those controversial tower blocks going up mid-left.

Here is the MSJ and AR again with a double bounce first over the Rochdale canal and then over the adjacent roadway. It’s a 21st century tramway that it carries now rather than the original 19th century railway.

Even the footbridges look built for a race of giants.

It didn’t stop with the Victorians, either. Here is a massive concrete column holding up steel girders to get the tram system across the Mersey to the airport. Pretty? Not really - but pretty impressive, certainly.

Apparently there are another 21 tower blocks planned for the bottom end of the city. Maybe one day they will have the same aura as the bridges but I doubt it. Bridges are infrastructure. They are for everyone.

WRESTLING WITH FOG (2)

 (WRESTLING WITH FOG (1) appears in July’s blog posts below)

I suppose that going on retreat would be an activity viewed with suspicion by many because there is that element of the religious or metaphysical which is so out of tune with our secular and rational times.  I’ve found it helpful over the years though, having done a kind of tour d’horizon of spiritual traditions: TM, Tibetan Buddhist, Western Buddhist, Quaker, Sufi, Zen Buddhist, Theravadan and so on. My head has had a good airing, I’ve taken what I wanted and left what I didn’t want – and I’ve met some delightfully whacky people, too.

The tradition that I have followed for a few years now is known as Chan which is a Chinese form of Zen.  Chan retreats follow a set pattern of silence and meditation but the one I attended in Cornwall last month was a bit different because it involved an activity element - which was Japanese brushwork.  It was kind of tripartite: there was the usual sitting meditation; then work on what is known as a huatou (see below); and finally two sessions a day on brushwork. It was this brushwork that particularly interested me because of the longstanding connection between Zen and creativity.* What might it tell me about the processes of photography?

A huatou is the historical record of a short but significant exchange, often between Zen teacher and pupil.  In this retreat’s huatou, from around the 9th century, the pupil asks the teacher how to follow the path of Zen.  The teacher says the more you pursue it the farther it will get away: thinking, he says, is delusion; and not thinking is blankness. 

As ever, you are being driven into a corner and you are challenged to find your way out.  How do you neither think nor not think, for heaven’s sake?  The teacher offers a clue: ordinary mind, he says, is the way.  So now you have to consider what is ordinary mind.

Enter the brushwork.  This is large scale.  You have a brush the size of a decorating paintbrush and paper several feet long - something like below.

Fukushima Keido doing calligraphy: Spencer Museum, University of Kansas, 1989

Each day we practised a different Japanese character on newspaper.  The instant it is done you throw it away.  After a day or two you start putting these characters together in sequence on pristine rice paper.  You aren’t familiar with the characters of course; you aren’t familiar with a brush this size; you aren’t used to putting your whole body into calligraphic action; and everyone else is watching you.  When the rice paper moment comes therefore there is tension.  You soak the brush with the ink and you raise it in the air.  Now!  At this point what is going on…………?  Exactly!  You are either thinking about what you are doing, analysing, commentating, judging, worrying; or you are not thinking at all because your mind has gone blank.  This is where the elusive ordinary mind may help.

This example happens to be about brushwork.  It’s just the same with a camera, though.  What is going through your mind as you stroll along, camera in hand?  What makes you stop and click?  The idea that it will be a good picture maybe; that it’s a beautiful scene; that it’s not a beautiful scene; that this is the kind of thing  you photograph; that your friends will like it; and so on and so on, the endless commentary.  But pointing the camera aimlessly will get you nowhere either.

At the end of these Chan retreats there is traditionally a session where each participant has a minute or two to speak about their experience during the week.  I went first on this one and of course there is that paintbrush-poised moment just before you open your mouth.  There is silence.  Everyone waits.  What will you say?  Will you think, or not think; or simply speak?

It’s not hard to see plenty of other moments in day to day life when such a situation appears and not all are aesthetic choices by any means: quattro stagioni or margherita; left or right at the lights; reading the bedtime story; many a conversation; or that moment when the knife point dents the pear’s skin.   All approached in a soup of thought and blankness so we don’t recognise them.

To the right is my work from the final day with all the characters.  What does it say?  It says: “Ordinary Mind Is The Way” – of course!

• Way too broad a topic to cover here but if you type ‘zen and creativity’ or even ‘zen and photography’ into your search engine you will disappear under an avalanche of book titles. I think I’ve mentioned it before somewhere but I’ve found Seeing Fresh: The Practice Of Contemplative Photography by Andy Karr and Michael Wood to be helpful.

MANDY BARKER

Talking Rubbish

Great talk by Mandy Barker at Redeye this week. She is now well known for her photographic work documenting the extent of plastic waste in the world’s oceans.  The resulting images achieve that elusive photographic goal of taking a large real-world issue and condensing it – without diminishing it – into a single photograph.

PENALTY - The World © Mandy Barker

  The talk  was a bit of a master class in process: in how to take an idea and turn it into a photographic project.  She explained how she took the initial concern and started to work on it several years ago with a series called Indefinite.  This developed as it went along.  Several series, more ambitious and wider in scope both photographically and logistically, followed: Soup; Shoal; and Penalty (see image right). The most recent is Beyond Drifting which uses a 19th century botany manual as a model for images of plastic detritus shot to look like plankton.  In all of this work the ugliness of decaying plastic is transformed into graphic images that draw the eye and intrigue the mind without ever minimising that ugliness.  Its construction of shape from detail is almost pointilliste.

Mandy shared research methods, photographic techniques, workbooks and happy accidents in what I felt was an act of great generosity.  I couldn’t make my mind up whether she is an environmentalist with a camera or a photographer with environmental concerns but either way you couldn’t help but be inspired.

IF THE BUDDHA HAD HAD A CAMERA

Looking Closely And Seeing Clearly

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I went to a talk given by a Buddhist monk recently on the general subject of Buddhism and creativity.  He spoke in the characteristic Buddhist extemporaneous style which follows the injunctions of the subconscious rather than any pre-planned pattern but, if I heard him correctly, he did suggest that generally Buddhism does not have a great deal to say about the arts other than through traditional iconography.  I was surprised to hear that since the connection between Zen and several fields of artistic endeavour is pretty well established and in the field of photography there has been quite a close connection since the second world war at least. 

The figure to whom most investigation of the subject leads is Minor White who was active as both photographer and teacher from the late thirties up to the early seventies.  He was heavily influenced by various eastern philosophies and for me his photography falls squarely within the Transcendental tradition.  Amongst his colleagues and pupils were Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, Paul Caponigro, Walter Chappell and John Daido Loori (who later became abbot of Zen Mountain Monastery in New York State).  His work, it might be said, was part of the spirit of the times and his influence may perhaps be said to have made its way over the Atlantic to places like Trent Polytechnic and Derby College in the work of photographers such as Thomas Joshua Cooper and John Blakemore. 

As hippies turned to punks it seemed that in photography at least the eastern influence was dying away but Buddhism is more resilient than that.  On Minor White’s bookshelves there was at least one work by the controversial Tibetan Buddhist figure, Chogyam Trungpa, whose teachings on Buddhism and the arts were collected in True Perception: The Path Of Dharma Art in the 1990s.  He was himself an accomplished photographer.  His (and more general Buddhist teachings) on artistic practice including photography form the basis of the courses at the University of Naropa which he founded in Boulder, Colorado in 1974.  Those teachings are also promoted through the Miksang school and the principles of Contemplative Photography.  I myself went on a short course several years ago given by Helen Vink (a teacher in the contemplative tradition) which changed my practice very significantly.   

If we put aside the current omnipresence of mindfulness on the shelves of bookshops there are still good books to help photographers on their way in this particular method.  Two that I have found useful are John Daido Loori’s Zen And The Art Of Creativity (there are many similar titles but I think he is the one with both the Buddhist and photographic pedigree); and The Practice Of Contemplative Photography by Michael Wood and Andy Karr (whose website http://seeingfresh.com/ is also helpfully illustrative).  I notice, too, that the recent new edition of Richard Zakia and John Suler’s Perception and Imaging: Photography as a Way of Seeing (5th Edition) contains numerous references to Buddhist practices.

What is particularly striking – and should be of interest to any Thinking Photographer – is the way in which photography yet again shows itself to be such a chameleon practice.   Buddhist ways of thought have for centuries been seen in the west as religious.  Yet when they encounter a secular society such as western Europe they change character and hitch a ride onto our cultural highways through the vehicle of photography.  It is not only through photography, of course, but for those of us interested in the subject it is yet another fascinating way of looking at it.

(All three of the photos are my own and are examples of quotidian images which I almost certainly would not have taken if I had not absorbed some influence of contemplative photography)

DOUGIE WALLACE

Dougie Wallace featured in one episode of the occasional TV series “What Does The Artist Do All Day” recently.  It was mostly about his latest work snapping the rich shoppers around Harrods.  The idea is to publicise the stranglehold that the rich now have on London but I wonder if many of his subjects might not be flattered by the attention.  He has a strong nerve:  his method is to get right up close then use a double flash unit with the camera a couple of feet or less from the subject.  This creates a photo where none might have been.  First there is often a recoil with a shocked expression and second the close-up flash often creates the Ugly Effect, like Martin Parr or Bruce Gilden.  Several times in the programme DW is reassured by acquaintances that this is the truth, he is simply photographing what is there; but like all photography it is a constructed truth.  He used much the same technique when photographing stag and hen parties round Blackpool with much the same result.  Yet, curiously, his photos of Indian taxi-drivers have a more benign look and the subjects seem more dignified.  This is photography used very purposefully.  The simple, cartoon-like quality of these images has great impact, but very little respect.  You wouldn’t describe them as nuanced but I don’t think they are meant to be.