Picturing a history of many faces
The Age
Friday July 17, 2009
PRESENTATION/REPRESENTATION: PHOTOGRAPHY FROM GERMANY Monash Gallery of Art, cnr Jells and Ferntree Gully roads, Wheelers Hill, until August 30, mga.org.au THERE'S nothing ordinary about German photography.The large exhibition at the Monash Gallery of Art curated by Thomas Weski is full of technically beautiful images that describe a world of change and counterpoint. With monumental formats, the images harbour a story that you want to probe, as if the background history has a gravity to match the visual richness.A beautiful bridge by Matthias Koch seems like a superb tourist shot made with a large camera: impeccably composed from afar and gorgeously lit, with a warm glow toasting the deciduous trees and picking out the old mineral textures of the town. Yet freakishly, this innocent Glienicker Bridge, seen in such luminous rhapsody, was identified as a spy interchange during the 1980s.Collectively labelled as "places of German history", Koch's images remind you that there are no neutral or bland spots on that continent, and many places are stamped with horrific memories.A disused airstrip - a ruin, with its concrete blocks lifting at the seams - is seen in cool but fading light as the fog rolls in. It was a runway at the Heinkel plant, which supplied the Luftwaffe during the Nazi period with massive volumes of devastating aircraft. After the war, the company contracted greatly, producing motor scooters and the like, so the runway recedes into the cold mist of the northern landscape.Koch doesn't always take advantage of rich atmosphere. Another image shows a submarine at Kiel from 1944 in flat light. Many of the artists are similarly matter-of-fact, and without expressive emphasis. But even the drab deserted interiors of Laurenz Berges have a story behind them. They're abandoned lodgings around defunct coalmines.The exhibition covers many genres, as with the portraits of Albrecht Fuchs, showing international artists in relatively dead-pan ways. The stars are all engaging, in spite of themselves. And so too with the apparently boring locations selected by Karin Geiger, the border zone between town and country, inhabited by boys at a loose end.Germany doesn't really have outskirts the way we do. There's usually a more sudden transition between dense urban environments and the country. On this small margin, the youth make tracks in dirt with their bikes, or use the bridges or jumps put there by the council.Germany does, however, have several hoons. Unlike our bogans, they possibly need a slightly official excuse to justify their rampage, as with Carnevale among Italians. But the downside of these organised ritualistic events is that things can get out of hand on a large scale.Uschi Huber has produced a marvellous series of street scenes where all downstairs doors and windows are barricaded with plywood for Festival Monday, the Rosenmontag, of the Cologne Fasteleer. The shopping strips and residences are deserted, with an eerie sense of the calm before the storm. But lest the fortifications confess unseemly paranoia in the face of a society going berserk, the plywood is beautifully measured and cut, an aesthetically curious Christo-like cladding, and paradoxically a fine statement of civic pride.If we're going to have a drunken riot, we may as well do it perfectly and the rough behaviour will go to plan, with all the necessary provisions in place. The legendary German discipline emerges even in portraying erratic violence.German photographers respond to the visual richness of other cultures as well.Nicola Meitzner has assembled multiple pictures showing the thrilling density of Tokyo, where each scene supplements something in the last. At the same time as witnessing the visual chaos of life at so many levels of overhead movement, you also sense intimacy among the pockets of tranquillity and concentration.It's not unusual for the artists to work in series, rather than rely on the impact of a single magnificent image. Some, like Wiebke Loeper and Heidi Specker, produce narratives, either literal or by implication. In the course of these patchwork concepts, you sometimes see beautiful flat light, which is unfamiliar here, even during our winter.But then maybe things ordinary in Europe strike us as pretty extraordinary over here in our suburban land of bluster and glare.robert.nelson@artdes.monash.edu.au
© 2009 The Age