Remember to take a packet of paracetamol when you next go to White Cube
Mason’s Yard. You may need them after looking at the latest addition to
Andreas Gursky’s oeuvre.
Gursky is the most deliberate of photographers. He never takes pictures. He
makes them over the course of months, sometimes years, planning and refining
vast, colour-saturated works that portray the multiplicity of our world and
the recurrent structures that regulate it.
His photographs are highly sought after and hang in museums and galleries all
over the world – one sold last year at auction for $2.4 million (£1.2
million) – giving us views of, for example, the teeming chaos of the Chicago
Stock Exchange, the beautifully lit shelves of a Stockholm library or a
minimalist stretch of the Rhein. Now that photography has come close to
achieving parity with paintings in museums, Gursky, who is a ruling master
of the Dösseldorf School, the crucible of contemporary art photography in
Europe, has become one of the leading artists of our time. Six years ago,
MoMA in New York devoted a major exhibition to his work, and his star has
been steadily rising since.
Recently Gursky has been visiting North Korea. This is where the headaches
start. In 2005 he talked his way into the Arirang Festival in Pyongyang, an
annual gymnastic display in honour of the late Kim Il Sung, in which 50,000
meticulously choreographed performers entertain 30,000 schoolchildren, who
are also themselves performing with flip cards to create vast, minutely
detailed pictures in the stands. To my eyes it is a nightmarish event.
Gursky uses a 5x7in large format camera. It took him 18 months to get
permission to shoot at all, and then more to negotiate to get his cumbersome
camera into the right position in the stadium. “We were always working on
the very edge of failure,” he told one reporter. “Eventually, they put us up
high in the middle of the stadium, next to a portrait of Kim Il Sung; it was
the perfect elevation for what I wanted to achieve. The extra distance
allowed the camera to manage the movement of the performers.”
The results are, frankly, terrifying. Here are several thousand tiny gymnasts
in blue leotards balancing on their heads in perfectly ordered lines,
interspersed with several thousand more gymnasts lined up in red and yellow,
their spines curled backwards into tiny “O”s. Behind them sit more seemingly
identical thousands waiting for flip-card instructions.
There are too many North Koreans to count, far more than the human eye can
take in unaided, but the camera sees them all, as well as all their tiny
straining muscles.
There are other pictures from the festival too – thousands of soldiers frozen
in diamond formations, girls in complex flower formations, and so on. The
repetitive sequences seem to go on to infinity and make one think of
colonies of very colourful, well-drilled ants. It is all slightly
hallucinogenic, a bit like a Bridget Riley painting, but made out of humans,
and the results are utterly alienating.
You want to believe it isn’t true. But although Gursky is frank about the
digital manipulation of his images (he has been known to work on some
photographs one pixel at a time), these ones didn’t need much manipulation.
“ Pyongyang III is, in reality, two photographs brought
together. You would only see the card holders when they were waiting for
whatever was about to take place on the pitch. Otherwise, I only made some
formal corrections in terms of composition in the other images, and the
events as they took place are very similar to what you see in the
photographs.”
Gursky’s subject is emblematic of a mentality. This level of human capacity
for control is surely as close to regulated sentient human life as is
possible today on this planet. This is a modern state of mind made visible
in an image.
His role in making photographs, he has said, is as an extraterrestrial being,
knowing nothing of the world, who looks at contemporary society and tries to
figure out what is going on there. With the fastidiousness of an
anthropologist, he groups his subjects under specific cultural headings.
Capitalism, consumerism and leisure feature heavily. The behaviour of humans
in defensive communist communities is a new passion.
Another new series of photographs, F1 Boxenstopp (2007), depicts the
frenetic activity that takes place in pit-stops during Formula One races.
Dozens of technicians and mechanics in colour-coded overalls and helmets
swarm around the vehicles, hurriedly refuelling and repairing, while
spectators look down from behind glass in the hospitality suites above the
track. The most powerful cars in the world, it seems to suggest, with their
massive sponsorship and advanced technology, depend fundamentally on
fallible human beings – human beings who nevertheless dress like robots.
Much is being made at White Cube of the James Bond Island series, three
aerial shots of the rocky island peaks around Khao Phing Kan in Thailand,
which was used as a location for the 1974 film The Man with the Golden
Gun. Gursky tames the islands with his camera, boxing them into his
frame as they float on a turquoise sea. But his instinct is less sure here.
The results look like a send-up of a postcard of an improbably beautiful
location, and one is left unmoved by the question of whether they really
exist or not.
Gursky was born in Leipzig in 1955 and brought up in Dös-seldorf, where he
attended the photography course at the Kunstakademie. This was run at the
time by Bernd and Hilla Becher, the leading apostles of a rigorous,
minimalist approach to photography that was intended to take the medium back
to its 19th-century roots as impersonal, quasi-scientific documentation. To
get there, Gursky had crossed over from the enemy camp. His grandfather,
Hans Gursky, had been a successful portrait photographer, and his parents,
Willy and Rose-marie, had run one of Dössel-dorf’s most successful
commercial photo studios.
You can see the influence of his family background in the technical ingenuity
of his work and sometimes in the high finish, reminiscent of commercial
advertising. But the force that drives Gursky, which perhaps comes in part
from the Bechers, is an interest in species – human or otherwise. He is not
especially interested in individuals. What he finds fascinating is the
buildings we build, the lonely natural habitats we escape to and the
modern-day temples in which we convene – the banks, shops, museums and rock
concerts – in order to practise our secular acts of worship.
His big, bold, highly structured photographs are among the hottest commodities
in the contemporary art world, often teeming with material life like a
17th-century Dutch still-life painting but with the addition of a touch of
machine-made irony. “I am never interested in the individual, but in the
human species and its environment,” he says. And in North Korea he has found
his heaven.
Andreas Gursky is at White Cube Mason’s Yard, London SW1 (020-7930 5373; www.whitecube.com
), from Friday to May 5. Andreas Gursky’s photographs will also be on
show at Monika Sprueth Philomene Magers, 7A Grafton Street, London W1 (07804
274239; www.spruethmagerslondon.com
), from Friday to May 12
