Memories of Play

With Christmas coming up I’m a bit prone to nostalgia, thinking back to a time before I was aware of the rampant commercialization of the holiday. The arrival of the Sears Wishbook that officially kicked off a season of acquisitiveness, the anticipation of Christmas eve, tearing open the presents on Christmas morning, a time when toys were the order of the day. I never really thought about the meaning of those toys then. How toys for boys generally centered around construction and war while girls’ toys often were about child rearing. Katsushige Nakahashi, on the other hand, has spent quite a lot of time thinking about his childhood and the things he played with.

from the University of Hawaii Zero Project, Katsushige Nakahashi

Nakahashi is a sculptor who uses photography to generate the building material for some of his projects. In 2006, at the University of Hawaii he built a full-size replica of a WWII Japanese Zero out of roughly 25,000 photographs. The photographs where taken of a 1:32 scale model, a toy. Nakahashi constructed such models as a child, so the work is partly about the memory of those times and the sense of play, but the objects represented are so loaded there are bound to be multiple readings. It seems Nakahashi has run afoul of these multiple readings and has the following to say about his work.

My memory of war was making a plastic model of a Zero fighter, and playing with it. I am not a historian, nor am I a politician. I am frequently asked to clarify my status, whether I belong to the right or the left. The fact is that answering these questions is not what I am asked to do as an artist. Judging right from wrong doesn’t make any sense to me either. On the contrary, questioning people from a lot of different dimensions through my work, bringing those questions to light, is what I am aiming at. Through the process of doing so, I sincerely believe that by looking back at the past, a spirit of forgiveness, intelligence, and respect for a better future will emerge.

In the past few weeks I spent two separate occasions taping together photographs for his upcoming show at SF Camerawork. This time Nakahashi has photographed a 1/30th scale model of a WWII suicide sub (kaiten) in minute detail. When the photos are taped together they will create a 3D replica at actual size (roughly 15 meters). Unlike past projects, where he has photographed commercially available models as a connection to his childhood, he had to have this model custom made. I don’t know that this fact changes the tone of the work because, to me, the whole project is a replication of that sense of construction as play. In this case the materials are not plastic parts and glue, but photographs and cello tape. The show opens January 3rd and runs to March 22nd with an opening reception January 15th.

For more information on the upcoming exhibition, including volunteer sign-up for the construction of the project, click here.

Combustible

What do Chris McCaw and Marco Breuer (links to work here and here) have in common (other than their work sometimes bordering on combustion)? Both artists are very interested in the photograph as an object and the process involved in creating that object. In the current climate of rapid digitization, where the process of photography becoming more removed, this is a refreshing notion.

from the Sunburns series, Chris McCaw

At Friday night’s Photo Alliance lecture McCaw talked about the long daylight exposures, large format (in some cases self built) cameras and paper negatives of his Sunburns series and how he has become more attuned to the seasons and the movement of the sun. This series of work has also made him more aware of his materials as only certain older stocks of paper will give him the results he is looking for. Beyond the aesthetic appeal of the images, the draw of McCaw’s images is the combination of two types of interaction that light has with the paper. The first being the recording of the landscape in the traditional photographic sense and the second being the burning of the paper as if with a magnifying glass.

It’s interesting that McCaw and Breuer have ended up where photography began, creating unique objects rather than multiples. In Breuer’s case a lot of his earlier work was with photograms because, for him, printing photographs in the darkroom felt like working with old ideas, ideas he that had occurred to him days or weeks earlier. His whole output since has been exploring ways to keep immediacy in his work and do away with any mediating process. This in itself is an interesting choice considering photography itself is mediation, a removal from the actual.

PAN(C-289), 2003, Marco Breuer

Breuer’s more recent work, which appears in a recently published book by Aperture, is done by working (sanding, scraping,incising) the surface of exposed color photo paper to reveal different colors. In an interesting side note, Breuer wasn’t terribly happy with the outcome of the book so he began reworking a handful of the actual books in the same way he produced the original work. He sanded, removed text, and otherwise worked the books until they had reached an acceptable level of authenticity. That is what I appreciate about Breuer, his dedication to the ideas that he has set forth for himself and his continuous exploration of those ideas.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

” A fucking masterpiece”

That’s what Sean Penn called Julian Schnabel’s new film tonight at a screening in San Francisco and I would have to agree. Without giving too much away I’ll say that the story of Jean-Dominique Bauby is amazing, the performances (particularly Max von Sydow) are heartfelt and pitch perfect, and the team of Schnabel and Janusz Kaminski create a truly beautiful film.

In a Q&A session after the screening (which was more rambling anecdotes than interview) Schnabel said that he felt film making was more about finding something out about the world than telling something that you know. His discoveries become our discoveries and they make for the palpable freshness of this film.