В связи с выставкой работ Мирослава Тихого в Centre Pompidou — ссылка от Йорга Кольберга на важную статью:
'Girls, girls, girls'
"Blurred and deliberately flawed, Miroslav Tichy's snatched photographs of women capture the frustrations of desire. At its best, his work has the delicacy and poise of a smutty Vermeer" — Geoff Dyer (I find myself increasingly torn about this photography, for reasons that I might outline later).
Girls, girls, girls
Blurred and deliberately flawed, Miroslav Tichý's snatched photographs of women capture the frustrations of desire. At its best, his work has the delicacy and poise of a smutty Vermeer, argues Geoff Dyer
Geoff Dyer
The Guardian,
Saturday August 2 2008
Van Gogh's rise to posthumous glory is unsurpassable but, in scale and strangeness, the story of Miroslav Tichý's triumph takes some beating. And, unlike Van Gogh, he is around to enjoy it - sort of. Tichý is 82 now and, if he could be persuaded to leave his lair in Kyjov, in the Czech Republic, would see his name writ large on the banners fluttering outside the Pompidou Centre, which is showing a retrospective of his work.
The first things on display are his cameras and lenses, looking as rusty and old as weapons unearthed from the battlefields of the first world war. Photographers tend to be obsessed by kit, are always trying out new lenses, films and processes. Tichý began photographing with the most basic Russian-made camera - and this was the technological high point of his career. Thereafter he became a scavenger, modifying and building his equipment with whatever came to hand: a rewind mechanism made of elastic from a pair of shorts and attached to empty spools of thread; lenses from old spectacles and Plexiglas, polished with sandpaper, toothpaste and cigarette ash. His telephotos were cobbled together from plastic drain pipes and empty food tins. He also made his own enlarger, out of cardboard and planks. Tichý's make-do-and-mend philosophy extends to his own, um, wardrobe. Recent photographs show him holding his DIY camera, wearing a filthy sweater, stitched together with what look like dead beetles. These portraits of the artist as an old castaway are reminiscent of John McCarthy's reaction on first seeing long-term hostage Brian Keenan: "Fuck me, it's Ben Gunn!"
So, what did Tichý do, once he was kitted out with his homemade arsenal? Put as simply as possible, he spent his time perving around Kyjov, photographing women…
… the limitations of the camera meant the framing was often askew - ankle. That is the least of the pictures' defects: most are under or over-exposed as well. Michael Hoppen is currently exhibiting a small selection of Tichý's at his London gallery. I asked him how many great Tichý's pictures there were in total. "In focus?" he replied, as if that were a personal preference, and not a prerequisite for photographic adequacy. "Maybe two or three hundred." In some of these, the ostensible subject is all but blanched out of existence by a blaze of intruding light.
This is, however, the most orthodox phase of Tichý's working methods. Once developed and printed, the pictures were subjected to a protracted form of editorial hazing: left out in the rain, used as beer mats or to prop up wobbly tables. Where the definition was not sharp enough, Tichý would pencil around breasts or hips like an enthusiastic but unqualified cosmetic surgeon. Sometimes he'd frame the pictures with a specially chosen mount: a garbage sack, say, or a bit of squiggled-on card. One of the works at the Pompidou has been gnawed by the rats with which the artist shares his home. It may be hard to resist the conclusion that Tichý is a few frames short of a roll — but he's shrewd with it: "If you want to be famous," he has said, "you have to be worse at something than everyone else in the world."
…Suffering from the delusion that his colleagues were part of a fascist conspiracy, he had a complete breakdown that led to his being committed to a psychiatric clinic for a year.
From that time on, his life assumed the curious combination of neglect and compulsion that was eventually transformed into the stuff of cultural legend (Nick Cave has written a song about him; Michael Nyman is contemplating an opera based on his life). He abandoned everything else and, throughout the fluctuating political climate of the 1960s and 70s, burrowed away at his new existence as "a stone-age photographer".
…Then there is EJ Bellocq, whose photographs — some of them badly damaged — of prostitutes in New Orleans from the 1910s were eventually brought back from a long-forgotten death by Lee Friedlander (who also played a key part in the posthumous revival of William Gedney, another self-sufficient recluse). The difference between Bellocq and Tichý is that the former, evidently, was on close and friendly terms with the women he photographed. Even when Tichý's wonky telephoto enables him to snuggle up deceptively close, his pictures gaze longingly on a world from which he is excluded.
…The value of "I'm Not There" is also a function of its rarity: the song exists only in this incomplete take. The production of images gathered pace throughout the 20th century and then, with the spread of digital, the idea of scarcity or any economy of production simply disappeared. Tichý's pictures — he seems not to have made multiple prints - have the quality of relics that have survived some kind of visual holocaust, when only these decrepit traces (that Berger word again) remain.
…As a species we have remained physically unchanged for millennia. This accounts for the primal pull of Tichý's images. But this biological imperative has been refined, recalibrated, mediated and - at times - challenged by the long history of art. Patched-up equipment notwithstanding, the ageing voyeur and former art student was conscious of the gestures catalogued by this tradition so that his pictures, at their best, have the delicacy and poise of a smutty Vermeer.
Or, to get to the quick of the matter, the indelicacy of a certain Courbet. In 1866, at the request of a Turkish diplomat, Courbet painted a tightly cropped close-up of a woman's stomach and genitals called The Origin of the World. The first Tichý photographs on show at the Pompidou are, in representational terms, near-failures. In some you can make out the shape - elusive and suggestive as the constellations - of what may be a woman. Others are just blurs and protoplasms of light emerging from infinite darkness. If you were able to travel back to the dawn of time, as the universe writhed into existence, this, perhaps, is what you might see.
Текст полностью:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/ ... hotography
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