On one wall, photographs of industrial cooling towers are arranged in a grid, drawn in very detailed black and white.
The other offers 30 different views of the blast furnace in Western Europe and US factories. You can just make each bolt of their twisted plumbing.
The entire gallery is investigating the vast Concordia coal-fired power plant in Oberhausen, Germany. The teaming photo shows a gas storage tank, a “lean gas generator”, a “quenching tower” and a “coke pusher”.
These and other things like 450 images will fill up “Bernto & Hilla Becher” A fascinating, frank and gorgeous show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Jeff Rosenheim, a photography curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, held a thorough retrospective exhibition for the German couple Betchers, who produced some of the most influential art photographs of the last half century. Bernd (1931-2007) and Hillah (1934-2015) led a generation of great students in Düsseldorf. DusseldorfIts graduates include major photographers such as Andreas Gursky and Candida Höfer.
But for all the heavy industry burdens seen at the Met show, it’s easy to imagine the stinks, smoke and rackets imposed on the Bechers when they were working. You take away the overall impression of lightness, fun order. Sometimes even a gentle comedy.
Like the orderly, light-filled abstractions of Agnes Martin and Sol LeWitt, the gray grid walls are one after another calming the eyes and calming the soul. The fact of collecting 16 different water towers on the walls of one museum from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean is to domesticate them, remove industrial anxiety and original function, and turn them into something like antiques and collectibles. Useful. The catalog essay refers to Bechers’s “rigorous documentation of thousands of industrial structures.” This is correct, but it’s the rigor of the train spotter, not the engineer. Despite their concrete grandeur, the various water towers come off slightly ridiculously. Whether to collect cookie jars, vintage wine, or water tower shots is to collect and organize our human instincts as much as they really are. You collect.
think 32 Campbell Soup (1962) Andy Warhol started his pop career. This is an important precedent for Betcher’s ordered continuity. Soups can be read as a critical portrayal of American consumerism, but canned soup catalogs also read as a quiet joke, at least when presented for art rather than shopping. I think I was presented with Bechers’ famous industrial building “types” without any sort of industrial goal.
Indeed, one of the things you can’t get from the Becher show is real knowledge of mechanical engineering, coal processing, or steelmaking. When I was a student in the old days, I cut out a wall-filled image from a glorious book of Beaker’s blast furnace photography and framed it. (Their art has always been in their books as much as the exhibition.) After living with my kamado for about 10 years, I can’t say I was able to pass the quiz from Smelting 101. ..
In early press, Betcher was called a “photographer-archaeologist,” and the Mets catalog describes how he revealed “functional features of the industrial structure.” Certainly between the ultra-natural clarity of their images and the unmediated “objectivity” of the previous purely technical and scientific photography intended to teach about the structure and process of industry. Have similarities. Bechers praised such photographs. But even if their own projects looked systematic, their goal was art. In other words, it was always obligatory to let the function and meaning emerge freely.
I think it’s best to imagine that they are skeptical of their previous desire for a scientific and technical order. After all, Bechers made his artistic progress in the 1960s and early 70s, the moment an aspiring intellectual was reading. Thomas Kuhn’s “Structure of Scientific Revolution” This shows how science sociology (who is in power in the lab and who is not) is shaping what science conveys to us. The French philosopher Roland Barthes murdered the Almighty writer, making the rest of us the true creators, even if it remained unstable.European society was confused when they faced fear Red brigades And Bader-Minehoff gang, very well captured Gerhard Richter stripes and smears, Another German giant of postwar art. Bechers worked in a world of volatile and volatile ideas. By parroting the grammar of technical images without actually achieving the technical goals, their photographs appear to loosen the mooring of the technique. By collecting water towers in the same way that someone else collects cookie jars, they have shrunk the industry to size.
Bechers aren’t the only ones making that seam. Conceptualists of their time also played games with science and industry.When John Baldessari took a picture himself Throw three balls in the air So they form a straight line, so he was simulating the experiment without aiming for the actual experimental results. The point was repeated throwing and its failure, and it was not a straight line that could never be formed. When Bechers’ friend Robert Smithson poured a sea of glue on the hillside and sprayed the hut with a bulldozer until the roof broke, he did not aim to build anything, but a heroic construction. I was imitating the movement.
What sets Bechers apart from others is that they imitate from the inside out. They lived in the world of technophilia portrayed using the language of advanced photographic technology. Their pictures are structured much like any other “lean gas generator” they might draw. The objectivity of justice in their images is achieved only by the ingenuity of serious photography.
Take a picture of the four squares of Bechers’ four square worker’s house. Some homes are taken so close that you can’t see the entire façade at a glance when standing in front of you, as in the Bechers image. A wide-angle lens is required to enable that trick, but only if the bellows is attached to a technical view camera that slides the lens and film in opposite directions. In this way, Betcher can look at the top step of leaning forward while catching the gable of the house in the sky (we are looking at it head-on).
Mysterious levels of detail and its brilliant gray and black range require human hand-sized negatives, sapling-sized tripods, lens filters, and advanced darkroom techniques. And the couple, such labor-intensive, just at the moment most of their photography buddies and millions of average people moved to cameras and films that could shoot on-the-fly with lab-processed colors. It depended on various technologies. With Bechers, the “decisive moment” of a 35mm photo is in a gray-on-gray stasis that feels like it can last forever, as if it couldn’t move like the steel girder it draws. It will be replaced.
But in reality, these steel girders were more time-limited than Betcher’s photo. “Our time appeared in technical equipment and buildings, just as medieval ideas appeared in Gothic cathedrals,” Bechers once declared, but the times they revealed are actually them. It wasn’t the time when I was working. Plants and mines were about to close — some were already abandoned — when the Bechers shot them as the western economy switched to services, design and computing. The obsolete Bechers technique is in line with their subject. Both represent the last moments of the “Industrial” revolution. That’s why this show is almost inspirational.
But one of its most obvious moments is related to cinema, not photography, not by a couple of powers. Bechers’ little son, Since then, Max, who has become a prominent artist himself, When they set out to record a Midwestern silo, they once captured his parents in moving colors. Max filmed Bernd and Hira unloading rugged equipment from a classic Volkswagen camper van in the 1960s, similar to the Victorian era. It was a ridiculously underpowered machine, but who could resist its colorful paint work and its modline and styling?
To get the full black-and-white meaning and influence of Bechers’ Machine Age, you really need to see it through the window of an orange van in the Information Age.
Bernd & Hilla Becher
Until November 6, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan, (212) 535-7710; metmuseum.org.
