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TITLE : Catherine Grout, "Presences", 2008
DATE : 08/23/2011 00:37

PRESENCES

 

Breidamerkurjokull. Cold. Sensation of great distance. Kangia.

And the incessant movement of life and material brought together. Arctic sea. Water in all its forms and transformations, ice and ice chunks washed up, ice floes and cliffs that nudge each other, waves and clouds, snowflakes in flight with a lightness that covers everything, directed by the wind. Greenland. Iceland. Without forgetting air and earth, their mixing and touching, and vegetation in various stages of blossom.


Movements and Moments

Untitled #3369 (Breidamerkursandur, Iceland), 2007. It swirls, and one swirl mixes with another: the sky is in the ice that melts and penetrates earth as it blends with the salt water of the incoming wave. Black sands flow around ice chunks and rocks; the sea pulls back toward the horizon, and snow remains, not yet carried outward by a wave. Upon contemplating the image for a time, its silence becomes sonorous: drips, shocks, murmurs and groans. We feel the force of earthly gravity, the weight of the mass of melting ice, and its metamorphosis, all at once, as well as the sea drawing back past the horizon in the ebb and flow of currents and cosmic attraction, the groundings or movements, ice bobbing in the waves with all the currents of water and air that circulate, run, bury themselves and pass by. Everything is linked together. And us? If we feel all this so powerfully in our bodies, we are not simply spectators in front of a two-dimensional image hung on a wall or reproduced in a book. But, then, where are we? Untitled #12368 (Oraefijokull, Iceland), 2008. In between. We encounter a split rock, earth-coloured, a bare island surrounded by snow, situated half-way (but not centred) between earth and sky, between cloud and snow, between the place where we stand and the mountain profiled behind. Are we located at one end? Are we, too, between two elements? The clouds above us, moving toward the mountains, mark us in our verticality between twin poles of earth and sky. Like the rock, we are in-between, at the crossing of two axes, vertical and horizontal. Insofar as we receive this cracked rock not as form rising from a ground but as singular and full presence surrounded by air, as material and volume pressing on soil, the rock interrogates our presence, opening us to an amplitude that urges us to exceed the front-and-centre position of the mere spectator. In short, our experience of these photographic images is kinesthetic; our visual experience is not simply one of recognizing or reading signs, or of distinguishing specifics that we can then name. It is, rather, an ensemble of interrelationships with no central vanishing point. All our modes of vision are solicited, from that of the fovea (which gives us sharpness of detail), to the macula (which provides the high acuity vision we use to read), to peripheral vision (which has a field of view from 30° to 180° and detects movement)1. To put it simply, the artist encountered something – a moment of light, a rock, a vast plain, a bank of clouds low over the sea, a snowstorm on a beach, a floating iceberg – and did not try to appropriate it, and in so doing, he lets us experience the intensity of the moment of encounter. “When I’m in the field, the image itself decides what moment I am waiting for. The waiting is part of the encounter. Some might think that it’s just by luck that all the elements come together to reveal the object to be photographed. But the image is really the culminating moment of my complex experience of my relationships with the world before me. I’m always amazed that it is possible to obtain an image in the fleeting second of an encounter between several physical and mental worlds. The moment when the shutter at last opens is chosen, and is the conclusion of a situation.” 2 Thus the “moment” has a heft or depth, a resonance that resides in the “tripartite relationship between the I-photographer, the object to be photographed and the photographic image.” The image conveys this depth through the sensation of temporality that stems from movement and displacement. After a time, that differs depending on individuals, on the work, on luminosity, we come to feel these movements (and not to “perceive” them as the image itself is fixed) as something inhabiting the material. In parallel fashion, the act of taking the photograph occurs as a co-existence, for Boomoon is held by the moment, open to what is and to what is taking place, in an attitude of active passiveness. The actual taking of the photograph is “a way of recollecting my existence within an object or situation.” It is thus more a question of being than of having: of encountering, contemplating, and being part of a world-moment that will not happen again. The encounter with the pine tree near Sokcho on a March day in 2008 (Sorak, #355) resounds in us and makes us feel, through and with it, a dialogue with the snow that falls continuously over several hours and with the walker who proceeds across the immensity of the field. In Korean, the creation of a photograph is not considered a “taking” or “shooting”; the term that is used “designates a trace of physical contact,” that of light rays which simultaneously touch both the light-sensitive surface and the photographer. It is important to insist on this aspect, for only too often the photographic act in the West is one in which the photographer assumes a position of detached retreat that in fact accompanies a process of appropriation. It can been described as a cultural practice that desires to know and categorize, as a will to power, even as a kind of imperialism.


Paths

In his book written in the 1980s, Arctic Dreams, American writer and essayist Barry Lopez notes that we who come from temperate-zone cultures have long been ill at ease with huge expanses of arctic ice, desert or tundra. He writes: “Difficulty in evaluating, or even discerning, a particular landscape is related to the distance a culture has traveled from its own ancestral landscape.”3 Boomoon, like Barry Lopez, was born in a country situated in the temperate zones of the planet’s northern hemisphere. Nonetheless, his photographic research and life choices testify to his increasing attraction for expanses of desert or ice where human presence is not evident. It is truly a question, as Lopez says, of a path taken, and in a double sense: the path taken physically, and the path of his voluntary distancing from society to feel, if not free (for perhaps we can never feel truly free), then at least freed from what he feels is superfluous, either to his artistic production or to his way of being in the world and relating to other people and to things, and to the place where he lives. His Northscape series includes several series of works made in different places, at different times. He began the work during a trip to Siberia at the turn of the century, at the shores of Lake Baïkal and the extremes of the North. “I had dreamed since I was young of that ‘icy land where words lose all meaning’ described by Solzhenitsyn. With the glacial winds of Lake Baïkal penetrating me to the bone, I hoped to put an end to everything that repelled me, even my unhappiness with myself.” It was only early in 2008 that the artist realized that these various series were related and distinct from other images. He saw his first long flight of 1985 as the starting point, the moment when he first “marvelled at the sight of high altitudes that belonged neither to men nor birds,” which led to his starting work on the series On the Clouds in 1993. “It was the cloud that served to situate me in space. The fact that the horizon drawn by high-altitude clouds is an illusion intrigued me even more than the clouds. Inflight, the movement of the airplane governs my breathing; at the same time, the idea of point of view becomes confused.” Here lies one of the characteristics of the North series: the indeterminacy of any point of view and the alteration of reference points. The path evoked by Barry Lopez corresponds to a change in the cultural values that accompany a way of seeing and watching the world and of thinking our own relationship with it, values that are, for Lopez, those of the Western subject whose mental structure is still largely Cartesian and built upon dualisms of subject/object and nature/culture. The change in values can, in fact, alter perception, alter what we discern of the world, what makes sense and what allows us as subjects to orient ourselves in a space we have analyzed and evaluated in terms of distance, depth and solidity. The alteration of reference points, of light (rays, passage, diffusion, refraction, etc.), of the experience of the horizon, of the relationship of land and sky, has a profoundly destabilizing effect, and can provide the Western subject a chance to rethink his or her place in the world. It allows this subject to adapt modes of perception so as to base understanding of the milieu not on fixed points of reference (associated with the use of perspective) but on the relationship between elements as well as on movement and direction (of wind, currents) and thus move from an attitude associated with a foveal gaze to an attentiveness linked to peripheral vision, and movement. In Boomoon’s photographs, there is nothing to discern but an ensemble of simultaneous interrelationships whose meaning is perhaps divulged only to those who think of themselves not as central but as one element among many others.


Rhythms

The discovery, in several works from the series To the Stones, of the presence of large rocks isolated in an expanse with no human trace offers a scansion whose modulation is played out in the dynamic of the self. The rocks act not as geographical reference points but as presences; they interrogate at the same time as they provide a centre of gravity and alter all sense of direction in these Northern or desert expanses. If, in viewing the ensemble that constitutes a series and in discovering different series, we see single images in isolation from others, we nonetheless realize that Boomoon is interested not in the single image or the single viewpoint, but in exchanges within a temporal co-presence. The series exists because the photographer is continually solicited by the world (Merleau-Ponty) and because the visible incessantly renews itself. With the works in the series created in Kangia, Greenland in September 2007, our gaze traverses the image, from one zone to another to see what lies beside, in front, behind. No detail finally detaches itself from the whole. After the first moments of our encounter, each image is perceived as an ensemble in movement, in translation, in reversal, drift and overlap. The images are released from the immobility that is due to the process of representation and come to life, as I’ve already indicated, in our active vision. We might recall the stones of certain dry gardens that emerge from a sea-like expanse in the rhythm of a cosmic breathing. Close and far-away meld, and the blue or darker tonalities modulate an ensemble made up of an infinity of whites.As in On the Clouds, the hanging of an suite of images creates a singular space-time, without lead-in, without anchor. The ground is hidden to us and yet matter weighs, moves and turns. And though I’ve evoked the movements in what is present, evoked things and elements, at the same time the artist himself is not still. “It’s very exciting to find points of view before a phenomenon that evolves constantly. I move too, and after taking several shots, I enter a rhythm, a breathing in tune with the moment. For example, the sea and the movement of successive waves absorb me and offer me a longer respiratory cadence. The cold and wind are also part of the characteristics of place.” The landscape invokes a relationship that goes deeper than just sight. It is what takes place between him and the world, just as much as it is what surrounds him. Boomoon’s open attitude is that of a subject who does not separate himself from landscape, and it recalls the interpretation of the Japanese philosopher Kobayashi Yasuo: “In landscape, we exist only as one of the many elements that constitute the landscape; light, vegetation, water, air, stone…. yes, we breathe; we are there as breathing beings and only that, beings circulating and fluid just as water is, and light, and air….” 5


Landscapes

Untitles #718 (Sorak, Korea), 2008. Silence here, in the cold and apparent absence of wind. The atmosphere is that of snowy weather, from cloud-covered sky to snow-clouded earth, and reveals the elegant writing of vegetation partially covered by snow. The scene is reminiscent of certain ancient representations of winter landscape brushed in ink,6 although there is no moving stream, and no mountain, pavilion, hermitage or traveller. Untitled #10037 (Disco Bay, Greenland), 2007, does beckon us back to the traditional structure and themes of mountain and water paintings. Yet here the waterfall is evoked by shadow and light, and by fractures that let a crystalline blue show through. Human presence is replaced, with gentle humour, by a wild bird floating in the water at the foot of the cliff of ice. Nonetheless, this particular play of cultural references does not rule the image. The references to Chinese and Korean painting point even more profoundly to a relativization of point of view, a construction of space associated with a mode of perception and placement of the subject that differs from the operation of Western notions of perspective, especially in terms of central vanishing point. It is thus important to note that, although such a notion of perspective has presided over photographic technique, Boomoon uses it here without bowing to its induced mental structures. In fact, Boomoon uses the camera in a way that is “almost automatic” so as not to lose “his immersion in what he sees.” He recognized in 1982 that this attitude while taking photographs was crucial, when he found he no longer wanted to demonstrate things as he had done over the previous decade. The realization came to him in the days after the burial of his father when, turning around after having meditated at his father’s grave, he saw the mountain appear in the setting sun as in a graphite drawing, and he simply took a photograph. When he printed the negative, he knew that he could continue with photography, because it could also exist alongside phenomena and not depend solely on a system of signs.7 In other words, before it is a representation, photography is a relationship with the world, a way of being, and this translates into landscapes. In looking at the newly printed image of the mountain for the first time, Boomoon recalled other images he had made in the 1970s as if “in passing,”8 without really watching something or someone precise, and that for this reason did not have the distancing effect of photographs shot in other ways.For example, there were three images he had made in 1973 while seated in a Korean bus. Understanding deeply that this mental and sensory receptiveness came from serenity and letting go, he slowly moved away from his former attitude and disengaged from the objectifying structure of his previous series. Wanting to immerse himself as much as possible, he finally departed for the North in 1999. His interpretation of landscape is thus not a recognition (of signs and objects) but a phenomenon. The landscape “can’t be possessed for it has no physical existence.” His preference for photographing without humans or elements that recall human presence (houses, cultivated fields, roads, etc.) comes from his rejection of property as a value, and not from a fascination with unblemished pure nature.” 10  The landscape “is like a cloud in the wind. It takes form in accordance with the receptiveness of my spirit and my capacity for interpenetration.” Fluid, it fluctuates; it is a process of exchange between person and the visible (world or image).


The Presence of Colour

Certain series from On the Clouds and Greenland are astonishing in their chromatics. Intense blues in rhythmic verticality solicit our own verticality in their depths. Wrinkled masses of ice the colour of cobalt press upon and against each other, light and oppressive at once. In each case, we do not know if the colour we are seeing (which is not that which was there, for we see a representation) stems from the real or from the photographic technique (from the moment the photograph was shot right through its printing). Boomoon too must have posed the question of the real as he first saw and watched, engaged in his own moments of perception. What gives us such blues? They are events in the emergence of elementary matter, at a certain altitude, or when subject to a certain pressure, or when rays of light traverse the particular state of its particles. How can we know colour? Blue-moment colour. Phenomenologist Marc Richir explains that painters have always known that colours were not attached to things, in the sense that they do not colour things. Colours exist. Does our sense of wonder before Boomoon’s work stem from the fact that we do not recognize here what he has photographed (because we do not inhabit far lands; we do not inhabit the sky and few people are familiar with the terrain of Greenland) or because the presence of colours is more immaterial than material? 11


Expanses

Non-appropriation, the focus on a spatio-temporal indeterminacy in terms of depth and not in terms of instants in time, allows the work to be present in a here-and-now that unfolds, and not in Barthes’ “it once was.” It helps us understand clearly that Boomoon’s practice of openness in relationship to the world is that of a co-presence constituted neither by separation (self/world) nor by exclusion (of others).12  The artist’s expression “photographic breathing” refers as much to a spatial relationship (which involves the reciprocal orientation of things and self, as well as the interplay of distances) as it does to a temporal one where, to borrow the words of Japanese psychiatrist Kimura Bin, “the present is space itself, where the I “takes place” as the reality of a full expanse rich in contents.”13  It is the full expanse of co-presence. As correlative, Boomoon’s mode of presence is open and non-exclusionary. Thus, as he says, “in my work, the place of humans is not in the image but before it, where I was standing. It’s a place for all who wish to be present there.” The work includes others, and makes itself available so that, in turn, others can experience its expansiveness as a mode of full being in the present.

 

Catherine Grout (Professor at the National School of Architecture, Lille, France)

Translated from the French by Erin Moure

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1) I refer here to the work of Edward T. Hall (“…the retina (the light-sensitive part of the eye) is made up of at least three parts or areas: the fovea, the macula, and the region where peripheral vision occurs. Each area performs different visual functions, enabling man to see in three very different ways.”) in The Hidden Dimension, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966, p. 66) and to the work of Odile Rouquet concerning the relationship between body and environment, La tête aux pieds, Paris: Recherche en mouvement, Pantin, 1991.

2) The quotes in this section are taken from the artist’s own words in an exchange of letters in February 2008.

3) Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape. NY: Vintage, 2001 (originally published 1986), p. 12.

4) In his images  of the North, at times whiteness can function as darkness.

5) From “Escaping Landscape,” a talk given during the symposium Re-discovering the Landscape: A Crucial Urban Actuality, proceedings published under the direction of Catherine Grout, Tokyo: TN Probe, pp. 132-155, quoted by Catherine Grout in Pour une réalité publique de l’art, Paris: éd. L’Harmattan, 2000, p 242-243, (when I quote Korean or Japanese authors, the surname appears before the first name, following the tradition of these cultures).

6) One example is a well-known landscape by Kim Jung Hee “considered to be an expression of the lettered spirit at its highest level (1844, 23.7 x 70.2cm, private collection). The title Saehando, calligraphed on the top right, means “image of arid winter.” “Winter clearly has a double meaning, when we realize that the artist was in exile,” wrote Kim Airyung, to whom I am grateful for this reference as well as for translating the oral and written exchanges with Boomoon into French.

7) At the time, reading Merleau-Ponty, he pondered the question of meaning and non-meaning.

8) Since that time, he has made several series “in passing,” from a train (in Siberia) or an airplane (On the Clouds).

9) Almost at the same time, in the 1980s, he started to work in colour and make large prints. For a presentation of his earlier works in black and white, refer to the text by Amano Taro, “Anti-memory” in the catalogue Anti-memory, Contemporary Photography II, Yokohama: Yokohama Museum of Modern Art, 2000, p 14-29.

10) There is an essential difference here: Boomoon does not seek archetypes (as does Richard Long, for example) but new situations and moments at a remove from contemporary society, from consumption and from the forgetting of all that is at the core of human existence.

11) The question persists, even after we have felt the volume of ice and thus its materiality, in seeing water and above all by the effect of the diptych which helps us to absorb the presence of the mass floating on water.

12) As W.J.T. Mitchell demonstrates in the book he edited, Landscape and Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), the representation of landscape, considered as cultural practice, can be seen as the expression of an appropriation, or even an expropriation, in order to possess a territory. The absence of human figures can thus correspond to a desire for concrete and/or symbolic possession.

13) Bin Kimura, in Écrits de psychopathologie phénoménologique, tr. Joël Bouderlique, Paris: P.U.F., 1992, p. 61. English wording here was translated from the French edition.


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