Moses Quiquine is an artist whose work disregards the boundaries and classifications found in fashion.

Moses Quiquine is an artist whose work disregards the boundaries and classifications found in fashion, whilst maintaining high quality craftsmanship and a strong visual narrative. During his residency at the Victoria & Albert Museum he explored the memories, histories, cultures and stories within the museum’s collections, and has woven these into a grand tapestry using hundreds of different materials and textiles.

Celebrated for his radical innovation in stained glass, Brian Clarke is a major figure in contemporary art.

A lifelong exponent of the integration of art and architecture, and celebrated for his paintings, sculpture, ceramics, mosaic, and his radical innovation in stained glass, Brian Clarke has been a major figure in contemporary art for the last four decades. Distilling the euphoria of form and color, Clarke’s oeuvre is testament to the fact that “artistic practice has the ability to change the shape of things, has the ability to transform the world.” This film charts his life and career from a modest upbringing in Oldham, through cutting-edge punk years, to producing the single largest pieces of stained glass in the world at this time. With contributions from Paul Greenhalgh, Director, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts; photographer Ralph Gibson; Dame Zaha Hadid; Sir Peter Cook; and June Osborne, DL, Bishop of Llandaff.

Fahrelnissa Zeid, Towards a Sky, 1953, oil on canvas, 593 x 201 cm (private collection; photo: Sotheby’s, 2017) © Fahrelnissa Zeid Estate

When Fahrelnissa Zeid exhibited her painting Towards a Sky in 1953, it took six handlers to install at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. The following year, 1954, one third of the canvas had to be rolled up in order to fit the work into the space of London’s Institute for Contemporary Art (Zeid was the first woman to have a solo exhibition there). She reworked and repainted sections of it as she usually did to her works, then re-exhibited it in London in 1957, in the garden of Lord’s Gallery. The painting was mounted on a special frame, punctured around the edges and strung in place like a sail, soaring three floors high.

Originally 7 meters tall, the painting now measures 5.93 by 2.01 meters (233-1/8 by 79 inches). Zeid cut off a section, but both parts reappeared publicly sixty years later and were sold separately by different auction houses. This colossal work is not her largest extant painting, however. That would be her 1949 painting Voyage of the Man Moon, measuring 6 x 1.6 meters and shown for the first time in New York in 1950. Since she began exhibiting in 1941 back in her native Istanbul, Zeid favored large formats averaging two meters, larger than a human body. And from 1949 to the mid-1960s, she produced monumental works averaging 5 meters in length.

Fahrelnissa Zeid, A Study for Towards a Sky, 1953, oil on canvas, 52 x 105 cm (private collection; photo: Bonham’s, 2017) © Fahrelnissa Zeid Estate

Looking at this painting on a screen is misleading, because it does not dominate the viewer’s field of vision as it does in real life. But the impression of its vortex of colors and shapes is as strong as when it was seen up close in that garden in London, when the critic George Butcher wrote about how before sunset, its entire glowing surface dominated the space, transforming life around it; how it seemed to grow in some organic way out of the ground, and towards the sky. Another critic, Terence Mullaly, noted that the painting’s size was irrelevant, because what mattered more was Zeid’s persuasive vision and her extraordinary ability to speak through color.

The melodic and the symphonic

This work illustrates a most accomplished period in Zeid’s fifty-year-long career as the only non-European, female, mid-20th-century modern artist to have regularly produced monumental paintings.

The painting evokes the sublime in its boundlessness, a quality we may associate with Abstract Expressionism, and the movement’s characteristic emotionally charged non-figurative imagery. But Fahrelnissa Zeid arrived at such awe-inspiring results via a distinct trajectory.

She found inspiration in Vassily Kandinsky’s spiritualist theorization of abstract art, in which she recognized her own approach and an articulation of her exalted state of mind while working. This interest may be traced to the 1951 launch of a new French translation of his 1911 book, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, at the opening of her second Paris exhibition. Zeid’s Towards a Sky, like other works she produced during that period, illustrates some of Kandinsky’s prescriptions: rhythm, seemingly antagonistic compositional subdivisions, and a concealed inner harmony.

Advocating for a purer new form of art, divorced from objective representations, Kandinsky urged painters to imitate music’s employment of rhythm and abstract construction, to repeat notes of color and set them in motion. He also argued that pure abstract compositions, lacking objective imagery, should be anchored by small compositions that may appear meaningless and antagonistic to each other, but their opposition and lack of cohesion would harmonize the whole painting. He called the subordinate compositions melodic, and the compositions consisting of various forms, symphonic. Both would be linked by transitional forms, anchored by an undetectable non-geometric harmony, arising from a seemingly unintentional selection of shapes that appeal less to the eye, and more to the soul.

Another early influence on her practice were the writings of the 19th-century color theorist Charles Blanc, which inspired figurative Post-Impressionists like Vincent van Gogh, and the Neo-Impressionist (the separation of colors into individual dots or patches that interact optically) and Pointillist (painting tiny distinct dots next to one another in order to form an image) movements. Discernible in Zeid’s mid-abstract period are Blanc’s ideas on the separation of colors into individual patches. With Zeid, they do not interact to represent a figurative scene, but aggregate in a pulsating multicolor abstract murmuration.

Fahrelnissa Zeid standing in front of her painting Vers un Ciel (Towards a Sky) exhibited at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (image courtesy of Fahrelnissa Zeid Estate; photo: Studio Yves Hervochon, 1953)

Towards a Sky exemplifies these effects in its oppositional permutations of color eddies and shards. When seen horizontally, as the work is sometimes displayed, there is no discernible center or recognizable composition across its maximalist surface, but a powerfully felt symphonic motion. Displayed vertically, an invisible but perceptible movement pulls the disparate chromoluminarist melodies upwards.

The title of the work leads the viewer to focus on the blue concentration at the top (or to the right, when the painting is displayed horizontally). The eye then wanders back and forth from there to the bottom (or left) yellow ensemble. However, Zeid did not tend to give literal titles to her works, so this painting’s upward dynamic may well evoke Kandinsky’s notion of how the spiritual life of humanity is comparable to a pyramid progressing imperceptibly towards the future, with artists leading humanity on that path.

Zeid usually outlined her paintings by drawing an almost continuous line in charcoal pencil, then sketching the interstitial honeycombs, and finally filling them up with a limited range of colors. Here the palette comprises the primary colors: red, yellow, and blue, complemented by a few secondary and tertiary colors, with whites and blacks in between.

Fahrelnissa Zeid, Towards a Sky, 1953, oil on canvas, 593 x 201 cm (private collection; photo: Sotheby’s, 2017) © Fahrelnissa Zeid Estate

Visual analysis

Although the painting is meant to be viewed vertically, we can analyze its interweaving of colors and shapes horizontally from the left, to follow the manner in which Zeid herself created the work, as she painted her larger canvases by tacking them along the walls of her studio; the left side of the painting is also where the most defined shapes are drawn.

Leaning towards the left is a sloping yellow peninsula. The edge of its roughly shaped triangle is followed by an almost imperceptible concentric vortex dominated by smaller white and green shards interspersed with maroon, pink, and blue spikes and triangles. Transitioning onto the last subdivision on the right is a vertical stack of maroon, black, and blue oblongs, delineated by a narrow white barrier of white shards. The painting ends on the right with a multiplicity of diffused floating shapes. The gap between the first triangular ensemble and the central vortex is filled by a transitional spill of mainly white, blue, and maroon trapezes and convex rectangles. When seen vertically, however, the painting reveals its irresistible dynamic: a spiraling path upwards from an ascending yellow slope, moving through a concentric greenish implosion, across a step and onto a floating azure arrangement of broken shards.

This dynamic perfectly aligns with the artist’s description of her practice as a quest for salvation and a communion with the universe. She stated that her paintings surged within her from depths “far beyond peculiarities of sex, race or religion.” When working, she would feel “as if the sap were rising from the very roots of [a] Tree of Life to one of its topmost branches, where I happen or try to be, and then surging through me to transform itself into forms and colors on my canvas. It is as if I were but a kind of medium, capturing or transmitting the vibration of all that is, or that is not, in the world.” [1]

Bridging universes

Born in 1901 into a family of intellectual and artistic Ottoman state officials, the young Fahrinnisa Şakir Kabaağaçli was in 1919 one of the first students to attend the Women’s Academy of Fine Arts, Istanbul, in modern-day Turkey. She quit after marrying, however, and travelled frequently with her writer husband İzzet Melih Devrim to visit European museums. In 1928, she joined the Académie Ranson in Paris, which led her to abandon her academic figurative style and adopt an expressionist style. Upon her return, she re-enrolled at the Istanbul art academy.

After getting divorced, she remarried the Iraqi diplomat Prince Zeid bin Hussein and adopted his first name for her last name, and Arabized her first name (from Fahrinnisa to Fahrelnissa). She suffered in the following few years from physical ailments and mental breakdowns, and doctors advised her to focus on her art to feel better. Zeid would later credit painting for saving her life.

Paintings from Zeid’s time in Istanbul during World War II. Left: Fahrelnissa Zeid, The Blue Tree, 1943, oil and gouache on canvas, double-sided, 54 x 45 cm (private collection; photo: Sotheby’s) © Fahrelnissa Zeid estate; right: Fahrelnissa Zeid, Self-Portrait, 1944, oil on canvas, 60 x 50 cm (Sema-Barbaros Çağa Private Collection) © Fahrelnissa Zeid estate

Fahrelnissa Zeid lived and traveled between Europe and Baghdad in the 1930s, busy with her family and social obligations, and took private painting lessons all along. She returned to Istanbul during World War II and focused on her work, painting expressionist portraits, nudes, cityscapes, symbolist scenes, and busy flat perspective interiors in saturated colors, thick impastos, black contours, and tightly controlled small motifs. She joined a local modernist art collective called D Grubu in 1941, becoming their only Turkish female member. She began exhibiting alone in 1945 to critical and commercial acclaim. She complained, however, of being dismissed as an amateur by some of her male peers, and she longed to affirm herself artistically beyond Istanbul.

Fahrelnissa Zeid in her London studio painting Le Voyage de l’Homme lune (Voyage of the Man Moon), 1949 (image courtesy of Fahrelnissa Zeid Estate)

Soon after the war ended, Zeid left for London where her husband was appointed as ambassador. She ended up living between Paris and London for three decades and exhibited in both cities regularly. She adopted abstraction in 1949 after undergoing a sensory shock on her first intercontinental flight, looking over receding fields below. In 1952, she joined a new group of painters and critics known as the Nouvelle École de Paris.

Her abstract period went through distinct phases that began with an experimental period of aerial views of geometrically abstracted agricultural fields, traversed by swirling black lines. She then transfigured her terrain abstractions into large and monumental polychromatic murmurations, like Towards a Sky.

No limits

Fahrelnissa Zeid’s fifty years practice would undergo numerous stylistic transformations, but her works are recognizable for their Fauvist color choices and exhilarating juxtapositions; expressionist brush application and intense palette knife incisions; pulsating black lines, all-over fragmentation of planes, small jarring motifs; and, often, her signature ambitious scale.

Well into her last years, she continued to paint, draw, paint on unexpected media like sea rocks and poultry bones, explore new materials such as colored resin sculptures and stained glass, and she also returned to portraiture. All this, despite undergoing the tragedy of the killing of her husband’s entire family in the 1958 Iraqi republican revolution, which drove them into exile for more than a decade and led her to suspend her practice. She passed away in 1991, in Amman, Jordan, where one of her children settled, and where she taught art for a decade to a new generation of abstract artists.

Fahrelnissa Zeid’s drive yielded an innovative and prolific output despite numerous challenges. She was able to deploy considerable energy to produce works requiring great focus, while also exploring new styles in rapid sequence. Her maximalist abstract expressionist works evoke the sublime with their teeming, unleashed power. Her sublime was a projection of the exaltation she described feeling while working, and a transposition of her shifting moods. Her loss of self in painting is mirrored in viewers’ own submersion in the shapes, colors, and movement of her works.

Describing her painting process, Fahrelnissa Zeid could well have described Towards a Sky: “painting is for me, flow, movement, speed, encounters, departures, enlargement that knows no limits.” [2]

Abelardo Morell, Camera Obscura Image of Courtyard Building, Lacock Abbey, 2003, 50.8 x 60.8 cm (Fox Talbot Museum, Wiltshire) © Abelardo Morell

Abelardo Morell is known for artworks that employ the language of photography to conjure visual surprise and wonder. In this image, we see double: the stone gothic architecture is both right-side up and the room’s view of it is upside-down. We are inside and outside at once. Morell used a camera obscura both to make this room strange and unfamiliar and to reference the origins of photography itself. But it’s not any old room: Morell made this image in Lacock Abbey, the home of one of the inventors of photography, William Henry Fox Talbot. In subject matter and technique, it is a meditation on the magic of photography.

What is a camera obscura?

The principle of the camera obscura (Latin for “dark room”) has been known since antiquity: namely, that light passing through a small aperture in a darkened chamber will project an upside-down, reversed image of the scene outside on the opposite wall. The basis for all photography, the camera obscura can be a room or a small, hand-held box—today’s camera. The simplicity of this natural phenomenon makes it no less wondrous. As Leonardo da Vinci wrote of it: “Who would believe that so small a space could contain the image of all the universe? O mighty process!” [1]

Diagram of a camera obscura in Gemma Frisius, De Radio Astronomico & Geometrico Liber… (1545; photo: HathiTrust)

Combining art, science, and a sense of magic, the camera obscura could turn the world into a picture (the image appears to viewers like an inverted movie projected in color upon the far wall). For centuries, the camera obscura was deployed as an optical toy or educational tool, but as 19th-century inventors began the chemical experiments that would become known as photography, they strove to fix—on paper, glass, or metal—its fleeting images.

Many years later, Morell employed the camera obscura to vividly demonstrate this fundamental technique for his photography students. In a cavernous classroom, he covered all the windows with black plastic and assembled his class in a semi-circle. He then poked a three-eighths-inch hole in the plastic, and the students invariably gasped in amazement to see buses running along the ceiling and pedestrians walking upside-down: the ordinary scene outside rendered extraordinary.

Turning rooms into cameras

Although Morell used the camera obscura to explain photography, it was some time before he began using it to make photographs. He first tried it at home, while on sabbatical in 1991. As with his classroom, he covered the windows of his bedroom with black plastic and poked a small hole. Morell then brought a large-format view camera on a tripod inside the room to record the strange juxtapositions that occurred when the outside world was projected onto a domestic interior. He eventually figured out that an exposure of six to eight hours was required, which eliminated all moving things (people, cars) from a scene and rendered objects that moved slightly (the leaves on a tree, for example) as a blur. In those early experiments, he said, “I felt that I had touched on something very important: that the very basics of photography could be potent and strange.” [2]

The camera obscura successes in his home launched an intensive series that would last decades and span the globe. Throughout the series, Morell found new meanings in the dialogue between architectural interiors and the world outside. Although the pictures are emptied of people (both inside and out) because of the long exposure time, a lingering human presence is invariably discernible in the interiors—Morell includes crumpled sheets and pillows or personal effects in a home, and often moves furniture or other items to break the plane on which the outside image is projected. As an eight-hour exposure compressed onto a single piece of film, the picture is part record, part abstraction. The combination of presence and absence, the normal and the strange, lends the photographs an air of the uncanny—what Sigmund Freud defined as the simultaneously familiar and foreign. [3] This disorienting effect, both uncomfortable and pleasurable, appeals to the artist, who likes the thought that an empty space may not be truly empty, that the world enters and infuses even the most isolated spaces.

William Henry Fox Talbot and Lacock Abbey

Morell was (and remains) fascinated by the early history of photography, and he made a pilgrimage to Lacock Abbey, where he produced two camera obscura works. The polymath Talbot—an expert in spheres of knowledge as varied as mathematics, chemistry, Egyptology, botany, and art history—was an ideal model. “I want my photographs to reflect a time when science, art, philosophy, and religion were closer brothers and sisters, as they were during Fox Talbot’s time,” Morell has stated. [4] Talbot’s innovations in photography were born from his own frustration with both the camera obscura and the camera lucida, a related optical device, as drawing aids, so Morell’s approach is particularly resonant as an homage to photography’s invention. (A younger generation might see a different kind of magic here; Lacock Abbey was filmed for some scenes of Hogwarts in the Harry Potter movies.)

The jumbled scene in Morell’s Camera Obscura Image of Courtyard Building may be confusing as the interior and exterior merge in opposite orientations. Soon, a logic takes hold: the elements that are upright—the door, the column, the ceiling arches—represent the interior, and those that are upside-down—gothic arches, paned windows, a shingled roof—comprise the courtyard outside. A chair and a music stand—left or placed there by the photographer—disrupt the flat plane of the wall and cast their own shadows. Brighter areas appear, one marking the sky from the scene outside, and another outlining the door in an accumulation over the hours of a small but insistent leak of light from beyond the room.

On the nature of photography

Morell’s rooms are never blank screens; their architectural forms and human furnishings alter, frame, and distort the view beyond the windows. The photographer makes a number of choices in his camera obscura photographs, selecting the room, the view, and the position of the pinhole. He also often intervenes in the scene, rearranging furniture or moving smaller objects. His camera obscura works offer a metaphor for all photography: even science—here, the optical principle made apparent with the simple tools of black plastic and a small hole—is subjected to art (or artifice). These seemingly pure photographs are, in fact, highly constructed. They thus explicitly mediate—as all photographs do, if perhaps less obviously—the objective and the subjective, the natural and the cultural. This camera obscura image of Talbot’s home is a particularly potent reminder of this, using photography’s most basic and primal means to evoke photography’s magic, even as we are reminded that photographs are always interpretations.

Andy Warhol, Gold Marilyn Monroe, 1962, silkscreen on canvas, 211.4 x 144.7 cm (Museum of Modern Art, New York)

Popular culture, “popular” art

At first glance, Pop art might seem to glorify popular culture by elevating soup cans, comic strips and hamburgers to the status of fine art on the walls of museums. But, then again, a second look may suggest a critique of the mass marketing practices and consumer culture that emerged in the United States after World War II. Andy Warhol’s Gold Marilyn Monroe clearly reflects this inherent irony of Pop. The central image on a gold background evokes a religious tradition of painted icons, transforming the Hollywood starlet into a Byzantine Madonna that reflects our obsession with celebrity. Notably, Warhol’s spiritual reference was especially poignant given Monroe’s suicide a few months earlier. Like religious fanatics, the actress’s fans worshipped their idol; yet, Warhol’s sloppy silkscreening calls attention to the artifice of Marilyn’s glamorous façade and places her alongside other mass-marketed commodities like a can of soup or a box of Brillo pads.

Richard Hamilton, Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?, 1956, collage, 26 cm × 24.8 cm (Kunsthalle Tübingen, Tübingen)

Genesis of Pop

Robert Rauschenberg, Bed, 1955, oil and pencil on pillow, quilt, and sheet on wood supports, 191.1 x 80 x 20.3 cm (The Museum of Modern Art, New York)

In this light, it’s not surprising that the term “Pop art” first emerged in Great Britain, which suffered great economic hardship after the war. In the late 1940s, artists of the “Independent Group,” first began to appropriate idealized images of the American lifestyle they found in popular magazines as part of their critique of British society.  Critic Lawrence Alloway and artist Richard Hamilton are usually credited with coining the term, possibly in the context of Hamilton’s famous collage Just what is it that makes today’s home so different, so appealing?  Made to announce the Independent Group’s 1956 exhibition “This Is Tomorrow,” in London, the image prominently features a muscular semi-nude man, holding a phallically positioned Tootsie Pop.

Pop art’s origins, however, can be traced back even further.  In 1917, Marcel Duchamp asserted that any object—including his notorious example of a urinal—could be art, as long as the artist intended it as such. Artists of the 1950s built on this notion to challenge boundaries distinguishing art from real life, in disciplines of music and dance, as well as visual art. Robert Rauschenberg’s desire to “work in the gap between art and life,” for example, led him to incorporate such objects as bed pillows, tires, and even a stuffed goat in his “combine paintings” that merged features of painting and sculpture. Likewise, Claes Oldenberg created The Store, an installation in a vacant storefront where he sold crudely fashioned sculptures of brand-name consumer goods. These “Proto-pop” artists were, in part, reacting against the rigid critical structure and lofty philosophies surrounding Abstract Expressionism, the dominant art movement of the time; but their work also reflected the numerous social changes taking place around them.

Post-war consumer culture grabs hold (and never lets go)

c. 1950s advertisement for the American Gas Association

The years following World War II saw enormous growth in the American economy, which, combined with innovations in technology and the media, spawned a consumer culture with more leisure time and expendable income than ever before. The manufacturing industry that had expanded during the war now began to mass-produce everything from hairspray and washing machines to shiny new convertibles, which advertisers claimed all would bring ultimate joy to their owners. Significantly, the development of television, as well as changes in print advertising, placed new emphasis on graphic images and recognizable brand logos—something that we now take for granted in our visually saturated world.

It was in this artistic and cultural context that Pop artists developed their distinctive style of the early 1960s. Characterized by clearly rendered images of popular subject matter, it seemed to assault the standards of modern painting, which had embraced abstraction as a reflection of universal truths and individual expression.

Left: Roy Lichtenstein, Girl with a Ball, 1961, oil on canvas, 153 x 91.9 cm (Museum of Modern Art, New York); right: Detail of face showing Lichtenstein’s painted Ben-Day dots, Roy Lichtenstein, Girl with a Ball, 1961, oil on canvas, 153 x 91.9 cm (Museum of Modern Art, New York, photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Irony and iron-ons

In contrast to the dripping paint and slashing brushstrokes of Abstract Expressionism—and even of Proto-Pop art—Pop artists applied their paint to imitate the look of industrial printing techniques. This ironic approach is exemplified by Lichtenstein’s methodically painted Ben-Day dots, a mechanical process used to print pulp comics.

As the decade progressed, artists shifted away from painting towards the use of industrial techniques. Warhol began making silkscreens, before removing himself further from the process by having others do the actual printing in his studio, aptly named “The Factory.”  Similarly, Oldenburg abandoned his early installations and performances, to produce the large-scale sculptures of cake slices, lipsticks, and clothespins that he is best known for today.

Raphael Montañez Ortiz, Duncan Terrace Piano Destruction Concert: The Landesmans’ Homage to “Spring can really hang you up the most,” 1966, wood, metal, paint, felt, textile, and nails, 142 x 124.5 x 28 cm (Tate Britain, London; photo © Tate) © Raphael Montañez Ortiz

The broken wooden frame of a destroyed upright piano hangs turned 90 degrees on the wall. The interior makeup of the instrument now lays exposed, with the various wooden boards of the back snapped in jagged pieces, strings cascading down and over, forming a tangled mess. The ornate metal plate of the harp makes a straight vertical line along the right side, a prominent triangular spiral from the original manufacturing creates an aesthetic contrast with the ruins of wood and metal. In its destruction, the forms and textures of the materials that make up the piano are now visible. It is no longer a functioning piano, but a new work of art that only hints at the movements and sounds of its final performance. 

Rather than a complete finished sculpture, Duncan Terrace Piano Destruction Concert: The Landesmans’ Homage to “Spring can really hang you up the most” is the remains of a Piano Destruction Concert realized by Brooklyn-born Puerto Rican artist Raphael Montañez Ortiz in September 1966 for the Destruction in Art Symposium in London (DIAS). Throughout the month, Ortiz created a series of destruction realizations, his term for the live destruction performances. Duncan Terrace Piano Destruction Concert is one of the earliest remnants of Ortiz’s Piano Destruction Concerts, a destruction realization he repeated in some form for over fifty years with its remnants in museum collections around the world. Yet what makes a destroyed piano a work of art?  

Destruction as art 

Ortiz began destroying furniture in the early 1960s in a series titled Archaeological Finds. For the series, Ortiz gathered domestic objects from his home and studio, specifically chairs, couches, and mattresses. He then manually broke apart each object, using his hands and legs to tear at the wood, cotton, wire, and string. Ortiz linked the process of making Archaeological Finds to both an archaeological excavation and a ritual to unearth the materials of industrially produced objects like furniture. Such a process enacted a form of “deliberate encounters,” that enabled Ortiz to probe at the transformations that occur when two forces come together. [1] Ortiz references ritual as part of his own personal research into his family’s Indigenous ancestry (specifically Yaqui ancestry on his mother’s side) as well as more broadly to work through the effects of Western colonization of the Americas. In 1962, he wrote in his “Destructivism: A Manifesto,” that “as a mattress or other man-made object is released from and transcends its logically determined form through destruction, an artist….is also released from and transcends his logical self.” [2] Through destruction, Ortiz hoped to liberate himself and the object from Western conventions. Ortiz’s encounters with domestic objects were a way to destabilize how contemporary Western capitalist culture encouraged productivity for both objects and people. 

Ortiz finished an Archaeological Find by fixing the destroyed objects to a plywood base and encasing the object in resin so they could be mounted on walls as works of art like the Duncan Terrace Piano Destruction Concert. However, Ortiz often worked on the Archaeological Finds in his studio for days and weeks. In contrast, the Piano Destruction Concerts are within the field of performance art: they invite viewers to experience destruction in person in real time as a work of art.   

Raphael Montañez Ortiz, Duncan Terrace Piano Destruction Concert: The Landesmans’ Homage to “Spring can really hang you up the most,” 1966, wood, metal, paint, felt, textile, and nails, 142 x 124.5 x 28 cm (Tate Britain, London; photo © Tate) © Raphael Montañez Ortiz

The 1966 Destruction in Art Symposium

DIAS was a series of events organized by German-born Jewish artist Gustav Metzger and British poet John Sharkey that brought together artists, writers, sociologists, and psychologists from around the world to discuss the relationship between the uses of destruction in art. The press release announced: “The cataclysmic increase in world destructive potential since 1945 is inextricably linked with the most disturbing tendencies in modern art, and the proliferation of programmes of research into aggression and destruction in society.” [3] The symposium highlighted how artists creatively embraced destruction following WWII, specifically the Holocaust and the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Metzger himself was a refugee of the Holocaust whose family members were murdered by the Nazis. 

While Metzger referenced the devastating effects of 1945, he and many other artists throughout the world were also contending with the Vietnam War, which was televised and reported on around the world. Beginning in 1965, the United States expanded its involvement in Vietnam, shifting from offering financial and military aid for France and South Vietnam to providing American ground troops and initiating immense bombing campaigns against North Vietnam. While many of the artists participating at DIAS, like Ortiz, had been working with destruction before the conflict’s escalation, their art took on greater moral implications as the spectacle of war filled televisions, magazines, and newspapers. Destruction in art gave artists opposed to the war an aesthetic outlet to confront its impacts on human life.

Destroyed piano (detail), Raphael Montañez Ortiz, Duncan Terrace Piano Destruction Concert: The Landesmans’ Homage to “Spring can really hang you up the most,” 1966, wood, metal, paint, felt, textile, and nails, 142 x 124.5 x 28 cm (Tate Britain, London; photo © Tate) © Raphael Montañez Ortiz

The sounds of destruction 

How does one piece together an experience of a work realized over fifty years ago? In addition to the broken piano frame described above, Ortiz’s memories, photographs taken at the time and an audio recording help construct what this early Piano Destruction Concert looked and sounded like. 

Ortiz realized this Piano Destruction Concert at the home of composer Fran Landesman and writer Jay Landesman. At their invitation, Ortiz destroyed the Landesmans’ own upright piano with an ax, a piano Fran often used to compose lyrics and songs, such as “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most,” as referenced in the work’s title. Before the performance, Ortiz had the piano properly tuned to be ready for a performance. Then, with the assistance of Jay and other attendees, Ortiz carefully began lowering the piano into the basement where the performance was to take place. However, a third of the way down the piano became stuck on its side, its feet facing Ortiz and the door. While it was not his intention to perform in the stairwell, Ortiz embraced how the stairwell helped amplify the sounds. 

Listening to the audio recording, we can hear the rhythmic banging and knocking as Ortiz swings the ax into the wood, combined with the occasional low creak as the wood is separated and pulled. As the banging continues, it is interrupted by the reverberating sounds of the piano as the ax hits the strings, their deep notes echoing out behind the continued pounding. Ortiz alternates between the steady slam of the ax against the wood, the groaning creaks of the wood splitting, and the startling booms of the strings being struck. 

Destroyed piano (detail), Raphael Montañez Ortiz, Duncan Terrace Piano Destruction Concert: The Landesmans’ Homage to “Spring can really hang you up the most,” 1966, wood, metal, paint, felt, textile, and nails, 142 x 124.5 x 28 cm (Tate Britain, London; photo © Tate) © Raphael Montañez Ortiz

The percussive sounds in Ortiz’s performance contrast starkly with the melodic sounds typically associated with pianos. Upright pianos, like the one owned by the Landesmans, were symbols of middle and upper-middle class status within Euro-American homes. Ortiz drew from non-European music and sound to distort the practice of the home recital, where guests gathered around the family piano for informal concerts. The Piano Destruction Concerts instead revealed an alternative visual and sonic life for the piano, and by extension, Ortiz hoped to reveal alternatives from Western culture for himself and those in attendance. He has noted that “sound is an important part of Indigenous ritual, and the drumming sounds of the pianos that resonates when I chopped them apart were an expansion of their voice…” [4] The Piano Destruction Concert brought attendees into the ritual performance so that they could hear the piano anew and witness the transformation of the object from an instrument of European gentility to an object with Indigenous possibilities. 

At DIAS-London, Ortiz hoped that witnessing the object transformation in real time would reveal how destruction was neither inherently good nor bad, but instead a powerful part of existence that required the same level of investigation as creation. Ortiz’s destruction realizations joined those by Metzger and other participating artists such as Yoko Ono and Hermann Nitsch, who offered symposium attendees the opportunity to experience the social and spiritual dynamics of destruction, when it is liberatory and when it is catastrophic.

Since 1966, Ortiz has continued to perform Piano Destruction Concerts in museums, galleries, and even in the mountains of the Italian Alps. While the work gets repeated, Ortiz has also altered the performance, sometimes adding a sacred circle of offerings such as salt, chicken feathers, and eggs and inviting others to destroy with him. Such alterations reinforce that while the core destructive act remains the same, each Piano Destruction Concert is its own unique work adapting to the environment and moment in time when it was created, just as Ortiz did with Spring Will Really Hang You Up The Most in 1966. 

This essay is part of Smarthistory’s Latinx Futures project and was made possible thanks to support from the Terra Foundation for American Art.

Christian Boltanski, Personnes, 2010, Grand Palais, Paris, Monumenta 3 (photo: Jean-Pierre Dalbéra, CC BY 2.0) © estate of the artist

It is January 2010. As I enter the Grand Palais in Paris, the historic building’s interior is hidden from view by a high wall constructed of rusted biscuit tins, each with a four-digit number displayed on its front. Once I walk around the wall, a curious scene unfolds in the massive hall beyond.

Christian Boltanski, Personnes, 2010, Grand Palais, Paris, Monumenta 3 (photo: Jean-Pierre Dalbéra, CC BY 2.0) © estate of the artist

Rows of rectangular spaces are neatly arranged in a grid with aisles in between. Marked by four poles at the corners and lit by a suspended light above, each space is piled with clothes—garments of various designs and colors. A mound of clothes more than thirty feet tall looms at the far end of the grid.

Christian Boltanski, Personnes, 2010, Grand Palais, Paris, Monumenta 3 (photo: Giovanni Sighele, CC BY 2.0) © estate of the artist

The mechanical claw of an enormous crane hovering above periodically picks up a few items from the mound, only to drop them back after raising the catch high in the air. Without any heat, the hall is cold and dreary. A strange, muffled boom, the sound of a beating heart, adds to the visitor’s discomfort, its repetitive rhythm overlapping the occasional metallic noise of the grasping crane. In an adjacent room, visitors are offered an opportunity to have their heartbeats recorded and transferred onto a compact disc. This is the French artist Christian Boltanski’s ambitious installation, Personnes, at the third edition of the exhibition, Monumenta.

Grand Palais, Paris, France (photo: Ștefan Jurcă, CC BY 2.0)

Coming of age after the Second World War

Christian Boltanski who died in 2021 remains one of the leading figures in conceptual art. His consistent pursuit of disturbing yet profound existential questions presented in a variety of installations has captivated his audience for more than five decades. Fascinated by the universality of death and the fragility of human existence, Boltanski was preoccupied throughout his career with notions of memory, loss, identity, and biography. Though he usually identified as a painter, he worked with a wide range of objects, materials, and modes of representation. The subjects and ideas fundamental to his projects—including Personnes—have their roots in his family and his coming of age in the years following the Second World War.

Boltanski was born in 1944 to a Corsican-Catholic mother and a Ukrainian-Jewish father a few days after the liberation of Paris from Nazi occupation. His father, a doctor, had to hide under the floorboards of their house for a year-and-a-half to avoid detection by the Nazi authorities. The family remained traumatized for years after the war, affecting Boltanski’s childhood. The Jewish Holocaust was a recurring theme in family discussions and his parents’ fears about losing their children put severe restrictions on him and his siblings.

Auschwitz warehouse of shoes and clothing confiscated from prisoners and deportees gassed upon their arrival, still photo #15330 from Soviet film of the liberation of Auschwitz, First Ukrainian Front, shot after January 1945 (photographic print held by Comite d’histoire de la dieuxieme guerre mondiale, Paris, reproduced by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington)

Existential questions

Growing up, Boltanski was influenced by the dominant philosophy of the time. Following the devastating destruction of World War II, the Holocaust, and atomic bombs, Existentialism became highly influential among European intellectuals. The writings of French thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir and others harshly critiqued the ideals of the Enlightenment, which had thus far been considered the bedrock principles of European and American modernity. In the post-war period, the Enlightenment values of the essential nobility of the human body and mind, rationality, progress, redemption, and the crucial role of posterity in enhancing human legacies were challenged in favor of the primacy of individual free will. For the Existentialists, the dark reality of the war, the bombs, and the Holocaust shattered the traditional belief in destiny, replacing it with the unsettling notion of chance and the dismantling of the inevitability of progress. This worldview made a permanent impact on Boltanski’s creative work.

The repeated references to the Holocaust during his formative years were responsible for Boltanski’s sustained interest in human mortality, which characterizes much of his work. Unlike most other genocides, the Final Solution designed by the Nazis employed a highly organized archival system to both dehumanize its victims and generate meticulous historical records of the atrocities. Tattooing each prisoner with a number, classifying them into groups by skill set while eliminating those it deemed useless, and accumulating their confiscated possessions—clothing, baggage, shoes, eye-glasses—in separate groups with plans for future use were some of the strategies that made the attempted extermination a remarkably efficient bureaucratic project.

Christian Boltanski, Personnes, 2010, Grand Palais, Paris, Monumenta 3 (photo: tangi bertin, CC BY-SA 2.0) © estate of the artist

Personal archive

Without any formal schooling in art, Boltanski, too, made the archival principle central to his art. For him, artifacts left behind had the potential to be a personal archive; such objects, he claimed, evoked the absent subject. He therefore regarded albums of family photographs, clothing or any such possessions as components of a biography waiting to be reconstructed. Underscoring the loss of biography by focusing on archival remains that were disassociated from their origins was important to Boltanski and an expression of his interest in the fragility of memory. It was his way of restoring the erased humanity of victims of collective traumas. His attraction to the archive, along with his exploration of the complex relationship between individual identity and the human multitude, and his interest in the role of chance in life and death converge into Personnes, his largest installation.

Personnes, however, has a precedent in an installation series from 1988. In one version called Reserve Canada, Boltanski hung used garments on the walls of a chamber from floor to ceiling. The title “Canada” has a dark origin. In the Nazi camps, selected Jewish prisoners, known as the Sonderkommandos, were forced to cremate the bodies of those who were murdered in the gas chambers or bury them in mass graves and store their possessions. It is believed that these forced laborers invented the name “Canada” (or Kanada”)—possibly a tragically ironic euphemism for an imagined land of plenty—to refer to the warehouses containing the belongings of the deceased. Thus, while the scene initially appears to be a second-hand clothing store, knowledge of the title’s background promptly changes that perception. Because Boltanski believed every individual is unique with possibilities, he was intrigued by the anonymity of individual identities within a collective trauma. A dress, like a photograph, is both a reminder of the absence of its owner and an intimate object linked to the wearer’s body. Though each clothing item in Canada represents a person, that specificity is subsumed by the power of the multitude. This tension between individual and collective identities works much more powerfully in Personnes.

A contradiction

In French, “personnes” has two contrary meanings; depending on context, it can either mean “people” or “nobodies”. This opposing duality pervades the project. Unlike Reserve Canada, this installation with around fifty tons of clothes has an ominous ambience that affects many visitors. The crane repeatedly picking up garments from the mound and dropping them becomes a disturbing reference to the film footage shot by the Allied forces at the liberated concentration camps in 1945 of massive piles of corpses being loaded on trucks and bulldozed into mass graves. In fact, the separated rectangular spaces on the floor of the Grand Palais immediately recall such graves where bodies are commingled and individual existence is forever erased; a genocidal arena where one becomes “nobody.” What is more, Boltanski deliberately left the exhibition venue unheated because he wanted to exacerbate the unease of visitors in a Paris winter, aiming for a heightened psychological impact.

Rusted biscuit tins and human heartbeats draw attention to traces of individuality overwhelmed by their multiplicity. For Boltanski, the popular European practice of using empty biscuit containers to store memorabilia, money or other intimate possessions made them personal reliquaries with no public value. Thus, with each tin assigned a number, the wall of containers at the entrance of the gallery becomes a collective structure where individual biographies and memories become anonymous. Similarly, the sound of recorded heartbeats, the ultimate sign of a person’s life, is disconnected, anonymous, and impossible to distinguish from a myriad of other beating hearts.

Christian Boltanski, Personnes, 2010, Grand Palais, Paris, Monumenta 3 (photo: Giovanni Sighele, CC BY 2.0) © estate of the artist

Collective trauma

Belief in chance is perhaps Boltanski’s strongest link to Existentialism. Existentialists unequivocally rejected the view that the victims, including children, of the Holocaust or any other genocide were destined to die. Destiny was to them, a cruel, and more importantly, irrational position. Instead, chance became a dominant theme in their effort to understand collective traumas. Boltanski deeply reflected on the role of chance in life, including survivor’s guilt, where a survivor of a tragedy painfully wonders why they, and not the others, escaped death. The dominant component in Personnes that underscores chance is the action of the crane. While the mechanism resembles the robotic claw used to pick up stuffed dolls from a glass case at an arcade, its enormity in the installation makes it a dystopian giant toying with human remains—”the hand of God,” as Boltanski observed. Watching the crane’s repetitive action of randomly grabbing clothes and callously releasing them from its clutch, one becomes acutely aware of the active role of chance in the process, especially since the machine picks up a different quantity of clothes each time. Furthermore, while some of the stacked biscuit tins contain personal artifacts, a visitor never knows which ones do, as all of them are impersonally marked with a number.

Bearing traces of individual biographies, the tins and the clothes lend themselves to classification and documentation that is central to the fictive archival process that the artist asks us to imagine. The heartbeats, however, have already achieved archival status. Beginning in 2005, Boltanski recorded many thousands of heartbeats, meticulously organizing and cataloging the recordings with donor information. Around fifteen thousand of those recordings were used in Personnes. The collection eventually grew into the Heart Archives Project. Three copies were made of each recording, one of which was sent to a sponsored sanctuary on Teshima Island in Japan’s Inland Sea. Since 2010, the entire collection has been stored in a one-story building on the island especially made for it. This archive is the most powerful evidence of the artist’s meditations on absence, memory, and both the reality and abstraction of death.

After its display in Paris, adjusted versions of Personnes have since been reconstructed at several international venues, one of which was No Man’s Land, exhibited at the Park Avenue Armory in New York in the summer of 2010. A spectacle engaged in the act of remembrance, Personnes referentially evokes the Holocaust, but also explores broader questions around mortality. Through his lifelong curiosity about mortality and his creative attempts to reconcile the fragility of individual existence with the certainty of death, Boltanski never surrendered to morbidity and pessimism. Once one experiences the harshly dystopian character of Personnes, one realizes that by dissecting the uneasy question of death, the artist, in fact, celebrates Humanity and every individual’s place in it. He was always ready to let things go, including his art. Boltanski required his projects to be dismantled at the end of the show because he wanted his narratives and ideas to outlive the objects.

In the 1960s, Polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz began making large-scale woven sculptures that defied all categorisation. They seemed like coats or cocoons that tempted you to crawl inside, or hairy living creatures suspended from the gallery ceiling. The critics did not know what to make of them and called them ‘Abakans’ – perhaps the only example of an art form named after their artist. In this film, curator Ann Coxon leads us through a ‘forest’ of these towering Abakans, exploring how Abakanowicz pioneered a whole new form of installation art.

The museum’s architectural design brings the personal tragic stories of the wars of the 20th century to visitors.

Imperial War Museum North, designed by Daniel Libeskind, 2001, Trafford Park, Manchester, UK

In the third part of a mini-series about the Black Atlantic, culture writer and curator Ekow Eshun explores monuments and hidden histories through the work of Donald Locke and Hew Locke. In 1993, Paul Gilroy published a ground-breaking book, The Black Atlantic: Modernity & Double Consciousness, which has forever left its mark on historical and cultural studies. The idea that there exists a culture which is African, American, Caribbean, and British, all at once, has generated the rich and boundless space that is Black Atlantic thinking. This series explores Tate’s collection and the impact of the Atlantic slave trade through the lens of the Black Atlantic. It gives an accessible introduction to the Black Atlantic, how it can help us to understand British identity and how we can acknowledge and learn from history to look towards the future.

In the second part of a mini-series on the Black Atlantic, culture writer and curator Ekow Eshun considers identity and nationhood through the work of Ellen Gallagher, Lubaina Himid, John Akomfrah, Chris Ofili and Fred Wilson. In 1993, Paul Gilroy published a ground-breaking book, The Black Atlantic: Modernity & Double Consciousness, which has forever left its mark on historical and cultural studies. The idea that there exists a culture which is African, American, Caribbean, and British, all at once, has generated the rich and boundless space that is Black Atlantic thinking. This series explores Tate’s collection and the impact of the Atlantic slave trade through the lens of the Black Atlantic. It gives an accessible introduction to the Black Atlantic, how it can help us to understand British identity and how we can acknowledge and learn from history to look towards the future.

In the final part of our mini-series on the Black Atlantic, culture writer and curator Ekow Eshun looks at the afterlives of slavery in contemporary artistic practice through the work of Kara Walker, Alberta Whittle and Hew Locke. In 1993, Paul Gilroy published a ground-breaking book, The Black Atlantic: Modernity & Double Consciousness, which has forever left its mark on historical and cultural studies. The idea that there exists a culture which is African, American, Caribbean, and British, all at once, has generated the rich and boundless space that is Black Atlantic thinking. This series explores Tate’s collection and the impact of the Atlantic slave trade through the lens of the Black Atlantic. It gives an accessible introduction to the Black Atlantic, how it can help us to understand British identity and how we can acknowledge and learn from history to look towards the future.

In episode one of a four-part mini-series, culture writer and curator Ekow Eshun searches for a definition of the Black Atlantic, drawing on the works of JMW Turner, Ingrid Pollard, Isaac Julien and Yinka Shonibare. In 1993, Paul Gilroy published a ground-breaking book, The Black Atlantic: Modernity & Double Consciousness, which has forever left its mark on historical and cultural studies. The idea that there exists a culture which is African, American, Caribbean, and British, all at once, has generated the rich and boundless space that is Black Atlantic thinking. This series explores Tate’s collection and the impact of the Atlantic slave trade through the lens of the Black Atlantic. It gives an accessible introduction to the Black Atlantic, how it can help us to understand British identity and how we can acknowledge and learn from history to look towards the future.

Art historian Gregory Salter considers Freud’s paintings of queer and marginalized bodies in the age of Section 28, the early years of HIV/AIDS, and preoccupations about class and gender.

Bernd Becher, Hilla Becher, Water Towers, 1988, grid of nine gelatin silver prints, 172 × 140 cm (The Museum of Modern Art, © Estate of Bernd Becher & Hilla Becher)

In the late 1950s, photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher began documenting industrial architecture. Initially beginning in the Ruhr region of what was then West Germany and areas in the vicinity of their home and studio in Düsseldorf, they would go on to pursue their practice across Western Europe, the United Kingdom, and in the Rust Belt regions of the United States. Focused on infrastructure of the Industrial Age, the married couple and collaborators captured structures that were overlooked, declining, and would be dismantled after the onset of the Information Age in the late twentieth century. The Bechers’ systematic documentation of industrial infrastructure resulted not in singular images of historically important examples, however, but in gridded typologies: a series of images that, when presented together, emphasized the formal similarities of buildings constructed for the same function.

Bernd Becher and Hilla Becher, Anonymous Sculpture (cooling towers), 1970, grid with 30 gelatin silver prints plus diagram, 207.3 × 188.4 cm (The Museum of Modern Art, © Estate of Bernd Becher and Hilla Becher)

Typologizing noble, modest, industrial structures

Water Towers is typical of the Bechers’ approach to typological studies. Die Wassertürme, in their native German, were not the only buildings the Bechers would photograph as typological studies throughout their career as collaborators. Their subjects ranged from structures used in the coal and steel industries (mine tipples, blast furnaces) to farming (silos, framework houses, grain elevators) and modern energy infrastructure (oil refineries, gas holders, and cooling towers as seen above).

Bernd and Hilla Becher, Water Tower, Verviers, Belgium, 1983, printed 1989, gelatin silver print, 60.6 x 50.4 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, © The Estate of Bernd and Hilla Becher)

They captured these places with stunning austerity and incredible consistency. The black-and-white photographs in any given typology may have been taken over the course of several years (note the date range in their Winding Towers, dated 1966–97). Despite such historical breadth, each photograph captures its subject with uniform lighting, accentuating the structure with such clarity as to convey both a common shape across the group, while highlighting individual idiosyncrasies.

Consisting of nine photographs of concrete water towers, the grid of photographs that make up Water Towers (each in a separate frame, though exhibited together as a single unit) draws attention to a common form. Form relates to function (at least in these structures), and a water tower’s function is quite simple: it holds water from an elevated structure so the weight of the water’s downward gravitational force will push the water throughout the system. As individual specimens isolated within their respective landscapes, the water towers may be unremarkable. However here, photographed vertically with a large-format, 8-inch-by-10-inch view camera, the images read as portraits, and present the viewer with an opportunity to relish the peculiarities of each patched, stained, graffiti-adorned, defiantly enduring, well-worn remnant of the Industrial Age.

August Sander, Pastry Cook (Konditor), 1928, gelatin silver print, 30.32 × 22.54 cm (Carnegie Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute)

Antlitz der Zeit (The Face of Our Time)

The Bechers’ distinct approach to their subject matter belies the historical works that inspired their photographic pursuits. Particularly important is the work of August Sander, whose 1929 book Antlitz der Zeit (The Face of Our Time) reproduced sixty photographic portraits of a myriad of contemporary Germans. Sander’s photographs of German society were organized as a spectrum of social castes, and his camera treated everyone as equals—whether they were Black, white, Jewish, a baker, a lawyer, a politician, or housing insecure. Likewise, Sander’s subjects were nearly always identified by vocation, rather than name, and were centered in the frame as they made eye contact with the camera. Like the Bechers’ work, Sander’s project was formally and technically rigorous as its multiple images drew attention to differences and similarities across his subjects. For some, such an equitable treatment of individuals across races and classes was seen as threatening, and Sander’s bookplates were confiscated and destroyed in 1933 as the Nazi Party rose to power. While the Bechers’ approach can appear, in contrast to Sander, austere and desolate, their project was likewise marked by the social and economic conditions of their time.

Bernd Becher, Hilla Becher, Water Towers, 1971–2009, grid of nine gelatin silver prints, 172 × 142 cm (Tate, © Estate of Bernd Becher & Hilla Becher)

Picturing Western Economic Unification

While the Bechers’ “portraits” of industrial buildings may appear less politically motivated than Sander’s Antlitz der Zeit, installations such as Water Towers are perhaps more politically engaged than one might at first suspect. When displayed as gridded typologies, the photographs are notably devoid of particular historical indicators or even individual senses of place. These typologies present a uniform whole, and the focus is on form and format rather than geographic and political differences. In a manner, their work is about the transnational homogeneity of industrial architecture, communicating Western industrialization as a broad social and economic force. Of note, the Bechers’ careers coincided with the creation of the European Economic Community (E.E.C.), an alliance of liberal democratic states in Western Europe that began in 1957 (the same year Bernd Becher made his first photographs of industrial buildings). The E.E.C. was the economic and political predecessor to the European Union. The Bechers’ typologies visualize capitalism and industrialization as a transnational expression.

Minimalism and “Prime Objects”

In 1972, the Bechers’ work was shown at the Sonnabend Gallery in New York. The exhibition was seen by many artists associated with Minimalism, a movement that emphasizes geometric simplicity, and industrial manufacture, thus calling attention to an object’s form and spatial context within the exhibition space. The Bechers’ rigorous, gridded, typologies were systematic, series-based works, like the work of many Minimalists. Importantly, many artists associated with Minimalism, including Robert Smithson, Mel Bochner, Carl Andre, and others, shared an affinity for the art historian George Kubler. His 1962 book The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things made the claim that all forms of art shared common denominators, or “Prime Objects.” [1] These prototypical forms of art, according to Kubler, were a means of classifying all art objects, regardless of their original cultural context. A work such as the Bechers’ Water Towers appears to express this same idea—between all of the formal differences in the nine water towers, we can perceive common attributes, a primary form.

While the Bechers’ never confirmed if they were aware of Kubler’s theories, they did make clear the importance of Ernst Haeckl’s Kunsformen der Natur (1904), a visual work that, like Kubler’s writings, used visual forms as a means for understanding the natural world. [2] Alongside their peers in the late-1960s (Smithson interpreted Kubler’s theory of the prime object as, in short, “a shape that evades shape”), we can understand the Bechers’ organizational conceit—the typology—as indicative of a shift toward ways of seeing that drew on influences from outside the canon of Western fine art practice. [3] The Bechers’ unique approach allowed for an appreciation style and beauty in forms of architecture that might be overlooked for their sheer functional and standardized appearance.

Candida Höfer, British Library I, London, 1994, 38.1 × 57.8 cm (Israel Museum, Jerusalem, © Candida Höfer)

The Düsseldorf School of Photography

With their formal and conceptual rigor, it is not surprising to know that Bernd and Hilla Becher were respected and influential teachers. From the mid-1970s through the mid-1990s, they taught together at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf—which, prior to their arrival, had not viewed photography on equal grounds with other “fine arts.” That would change as they established a rigorous and uniform aesthetic that would be known as “The Düsseldorf School of Photography,” or the “Becher School.”

The couple’s propensity for using large-format cameras resulting in precise images that would be presented in a formally austere manner, influenced many of their students’ works. An early generation of their students, including Candida Höfer, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff, and Thomas Struth, became some of the most influential photographers of the 1980s and 1990s, a moment when digital photography brought into question the salience of analog photographic processes. These students’ tendency for capturing the contemporary landscape, using color photography, printing their work in a large scale, pushed the technical limits of the medium, and reflected their teachers’ contribution to the history of photography. In both their capacity as professors, and in their published and exhibited work, the Bechers’ photography showed the conceptual and formal possibilities of the medium, and the ability for landscape photography to make incisive comments on contemporary society.

Richard Hamilton, Just What is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, so Appealing?, 1956, collage, 26 cm × 24.8 cm (Kunsthalle Tübingen, Tübingen)

Consumer products and mass media

Richard Hamilton, Just What is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, so Appealing?, 1956, collage, 26 cm × 24.8 cm (Kunsthalle Tübingen, Tübingen)

In this iconic collage by the British artist Richard Hamilton, created in 1956, a midcentury living room is filled to the brim with logos and cut-out images of consumer products. At center, a lampshade is emblazoned with the emblem for the auto manufacturer, Ford. The cover of a comic book hangs as “wall-art” and a can of tinned ham sits on the coffee table, like a decorative vase. Found images and mass media artifacts are everywhere we look in this image—on the television, out the window, up the stairs, and on the floor. 

In fact, even the couple who occupy the room appear to us as commodities. The wife, a nude model, is perched seductively on the couch, while the husband, a Herculean body builder, shows off his covetable physique, wielding a suggestive Tootsie pop by his waist. Often interpreted as a kind of idealized, modern-day “Adam and Eve,” the couple are also products on display, no different from the branded and packaged goods that adorn their home.

The title of this art work takes the form of a question—Just What is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, so Appealing?—phrasing that echoes the titles of articles in popular magazines and which can be answered somewhere in the dizzying array of consumer imagery strewn across its the work’s surface. The domestic space, Hamilton asserts, has become prime real estate for the advertising industry, and is an arena in which middle class aspirations are on full display in the form of futurist vacuum cleaners and television sets.

Following the victory of Allied forces in World War Two, the United States in particular experienced a period of economic bounty; factories that had been mobilized to create airplanes, artillery, and other military necessities were repurposed towards the manufacturing of popular culture, luxury items, and household products that were then exported worldwide. Produced amidst the arrival of American goods in the United Kingdom, Hamilton’s collage is one of the first works of what would be later known as the Pop Art movement: a genre which both celebrated and critiqued subjects such as consumerism, celebrities, and the cheapening of modern culture amidst the turn towards mass-production.

Pop Art’s British origins

While many of the most recognizable names in Pop Art are American artists like Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Claes Oldenberg, who created paintings and sculptures inspired by comic books and advertisements throughout the 1960s, the movement actually originated in postwar London. In fact, a half decade before Warhol exhibited his famous Campbell’s Soup paintings, it was Hamilton who gave the movement its first official definition. Describing his ideas to his friends, the architects Peter and Alison Smithson, Hamilton wrote that:

Pop Art is: Popular (designed for a mass audience), Transient (short-term solution), Expendable (easily forgotten), Low cost, Mass produced, Young (aimed at youth), Witty, Sexy, Gimmicky, Glamorous, Big business Richard Hamilton, Letter to Peter and Alison Smithson, 16 January 1957

Hannah Höch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany, 1919–20, collage, mixed media

The terms above were rarely used in relation to fine art, which is normally ascribed a sense of timelessness, seriousness of purpose, and significant material value. Pop artists sought to challenge the elitism of the academic tradition, much like the artists of the Dada movement of the World War I era, who challenged the way in which art is often used as a symbol of socio-economic status. Pop artists were interested in critiquing the status of art as a commodity object, and often depicted or made use of artifacts of popular culture, advertisements, and mass media.

In Britain, Pop Art developed alongside a similar turn in intellectual history. For instance, the New Left writer Raymond Williams wrote an important essay called “Culture is Ordinary” in 1958, which proposed that we should not think of “culture” as a term that applies only to pursuits of the leisured class. He wanted scholars to examine a broader definition of culture as a “whole way of life” whose expression is evident in popular films, novels, advertisements, and other mass-produced media. Art critic Lawrence Alloway, who coined the term “mass popular art” in 1955, likewise argued for the importance of art that engaged with mass communications and contemporary visual culture. [1] Similarly, Pop artists like Richard Hamilton were interested in drawing our attention to the desires, culture, homes, and interests of regular, everyday people—not just the financial elite.

The Independent Group and “This is Tomorrow”

While Just What is It… is considered to be among the most foundational works of Pop Art, this small collage was initially not created as a work of art. At just 12 inches square, it was produced as the cover design for the catalogue of an exhibition called This is Tomorrow, an immersive, collaboratively produced installation of art and design that was conceived by a collective called The Independent Group, of which Hamilton was part.

An advertisement for the Whitechapel Art Gallery’s futuristic exhibition ‘This is Tomorrow’. 1956

The Independent Group was a cohort of young artists, designers, architects, and writers affiliated with the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. At the time, the museum typically exhibited Modernist paintings and sculpture, but by the late 1950s this kind of art felt out-of-step with the contemporary moment. In the early 1950s, members of the Independent Group met to discuss topics in visual culture that lay outside the traditional arena of fine art.

Eduardo Paolozzi, I was a Rich Man’s Plaything, 1947, printed paper on card, collage in Bunk!, 35.9 × 23.8 cm (Tate)

In 1952, Eduardo Paolozzi, for instance, gave a lecture entitled ‘Bunk!’ that was illustrated by projections of collages made from comic book clippings, magazine advertisements, film stills, and photographs of celebrities. [2]

Cardboard cutout of Robby the Robot in the This is Tomorrow exhibition, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 1956

In 1956, the Independent Group produced one of their most important exhibitions. Entitled This is Tomorrow, the show was held at London’s Whitechapel Gallery. It was divided into eleven immersive sections, each curated by a group of artists, architects, and other collaborators, who treated their contribution as a manifesto for contemporary, and future, visual culture. They each designed a poster and were given six pages in the exhibition catalogue.

Hamilton was a member of Group Two, along with architect John Voelcker, and fellow artists such as John McHale. Theirs was among the most memorable displays in This is Tomorrow; it featured dizzying Op Art panels and a life-size collage of cinema posters and cardboard cut-outs. For instance, that famous press photograph of Marilyn Monroe—flirtatiously posing above a breezy subway grate in The Seven Year Itch—was juxtaposed with Robby the Robot, an iconic character in the 1956 science-fiction film, Forbidden Planet.

Pop Culture in the Space Age 

Advertisement for Armstrong Royal Floors in Ladies’ Home
Journal (June 1955)

Art historians have traced many of the original contexts for the images that Hamilton collages in Just What is It…? For instance, the artist began the collage with a backdrop drawn from an advertisement for Armstrong Royal Floors, which was included in the June 1955 issue of the American magazine Ladies’ Home Journal.

This domestic interior scene provides the basic setting into which Hamilton pasted new images, such as the Hoover Constellations vacuum cleaner, Stromberg-Carlson television, and Armour Star Ham, among other products. 

However, not every collage element comes from the marketing world.

Richard Hamilton, Just What is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, so Appealing?, 1956, collage, 26 cm × 24.8 cm (Kunsthalle Tübingen, Tübingen)

For instance, Hamilton topped his domestic space with a planetary “ceiling”—a view of Earth, which had been photographed using an aerial camera at a height of about 100 miles. (This came from the personal archive of fellow artist McHale, who used collage elements to form images of futuristic, robotic creatures). Its inclusion complicates the sense of scale in Hamilton’s collage, as we move from the intimate space of a residential interior to the expansive realm of the cosmos.

It would be another fifteen years before the publication of the first photograph of Earth in its entirety—the so-called “Blue Marble” captured by the Apollo 17 crew in 1972—but both the Cold War and Space Age were on the horizon, and public fascination with planetary vision was already palpable in popular culture. As Hamilton himself later wrote: 

We seemed to be taking a course towards a rosy future and our changing, Hi-Tech, world was embraced with a starry-eyed confidence; a surge of optimism which took us into the 1960s. Though clearly an ‘interior’ there are complications that cause us to doubt the categorisation. The ceiling of the room is a space-age view of Earth. The carpet is a distant view of people on a beach. It is an allegory rather than a representation of a room.[3]

As an allegory of the future—one marked by its fixation on “tomorrow”—Hamilton’s collage is one of the major works of the postwar age to truly represent what it means to be “contemporary.”

Michelangelo Pistoletto recreates a seminal 1966 performance in which he rolled a ball of newspapers through the streets of Turin.

A key artist of the arte povera movement, Michelangelo Pistoletto came to London in May to recreate a seminal 1966 performance in which he rolled a ball of newspapers through the streets of Turin. At Tate Modern he pasted together newspapers to make a two-metre sphere, and accompanied by his wife Maria and a huge crowd, took it out into the city. We follow Pistoletto as he travels over the Millennium Bridge, through the streets, then back to Tate Modern on a boat. The artist also explains the political and personal significance of staging such an action today.

Mario Merz, Igloo di Giap (Giap’s Igloo), 1968, metal structure, wire mesh, bags of clay soil, neon, batteries, accumulators, 120 x 200 cm (Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, photo: Yannick, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

North Vietnamese General Võ Nguyên Giáp said, “If the enemy masses his forces, he loses ground; if he scatters, he loses strength” to describe the perils one faces in battle. Regardless of the benefits gained from a military strategy, it could lead to other disadvantages. So why did the contemporary Italian artist Mario Merz include this statement on Igloo di Giap? What was he trying to say to the viewer of his work?

At first glance, Merz’s Igloo di Giap (translated as Giap’s Igloo) might confuse the viewer with its unusual appearance. It is a four-foot-tall igloo made from a metal frame covered with wire mesh on top of which are clear bags filled with clay soil. Across the surface of the igloo in white neon tubing is written the statement made by General Giáp translated into Italian: “Se il nemico si concentra perde terreno se si disperde perde forza.”

Arte Povera

To understand the meaning behind Merz’s Giap’s Igloo, we need to go back to 1968 when the work was made. At the time, Merz was associated with a group of artists known as Arte Povera. The term Arte Povera [poor art] was coined by the Italian art critic and curator Germano Celant to refer to artists who often exhibited together in the late 1960s though each worked in different styles, with diverse materials, and with varying concepts. One commonality they shared was that they each sought to bring life and art together. They encouraged viewers to actively engage with the artwork and experience underlying forces that we all respond to such as fire, gravity, electricity, or social and political tensions that existed in the present moment. Though these artists often utilized common, everyday “poor” materials such as glass, metal, stone, beeswax, and dirt in their work, this was not the basis for the term “Arte Povera.” Instead, Celant envisioned Arte Povera artists as stripping away—impoverishing—the codified ideas, words, and ideologies attached to traditional western culture to allow the viewer to have a more direct experience of art and life.

Merz and the other Arte Povera artists were responding to changes occurring globally. Many of these artists came of age after World War II, when the socio-economic landscape of Italy was rapidly transforming as it recovered from the devastation of the war. This was also a period of intense social upheaval. Students and workers united to protest unfair labor and education conditions. U.S. monetary aid sent to rebuild Europe’s economy helped to improve the production of material goods and repair infrastructure. At the same time, a new influx of American capitalist and consumer values was transforming Italian culture, which led many Italians to oppose U.S. influence, a reaction that was expressed through works of art. The U.S. military presence in Vietnam in the 1950s and 60s led to heightened hostility among Europeans who grew increasingly critical of the violence occurring abroad.

Arte Povera artists rarely created politically overt work; instead, they sought to create art that would provoke viewers to question the social and political systems and structures of the world around them. Within this context, it becomes clearer why Merz incorporated General Giáp’s statement onto his igloo. The phrase asks viewers to consider the actions being taken by Giáp and other Vietnamese during the Vietnam War, which had been ongoing for more than a decade when Merz created his sculpture. At the same time, Giap’s Igloo encourages viewers to contemplate their actions in the moment by encouraging them to physically engage with the object. As they walk around the work, they might consider how the words implicate them within larger cultural systems.

Mario Merz, Igloos, Pirelli Hangar Bicocca, Milano, 2018 (photo: CiaoMilano, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Why an igloo?

Giap’s Igloo was the first igloo created by Merz. During his career, he made over 30 igloos in various sizes and with a variety of organic and industrial materials. An igloo is a basic architectural structure that provides shelter and warmth and dates back to ancient nomadic cultures. The igloo form raises many different associations. It is a space that can be built by children to play in, and its shape can be seen in a dome atop a cathedral. Merz would typically collect many of the materials for his igloos from the local area and rebuild them differently each time they were installed. In this way, the artist was similar to a nomad, always on the move and constructing his shelters in response to each new environment he encountered.

Mario Merz, Luoghi senza strada, 1994, slate, neon, wire (photo: Giovanni Sighele, CC BY 2.0)

At first glance, General Giáp’s quote might not seem relevant to an igloo made of wire and clay, but the clay-filled bags are reminiscent of sandbags used in bunkers during war and have a defensive appearance. Art historian Elizabeth Mangini has proposed that the bags of clay are suggestive of General Giáp’s statement—the clay might provide strength in its structure, but it covers much less ground than it would if the clay was spread out.

Mario Merz, Igloo di Giap (Giap’s Igloo), 1968, metal structure, wire mesh, bags of clay soil, neon, batteries, accumulators, 120 x 200 cm (Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris)

Viewers engage with Giáp’s Igloo as they walk multiple times around it to read the neon text. Art historian Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev has suggested that the viewer’s involvement with the work mirrors Giáp’s words. When reading the first half of the quote that begins at the top of the igloo, viewers must walk slowly for a short distance around the igloo to read the phrase and so cover little ground. The second half of the quote is spread out across the lower half of the igloo and causes the viewer to walk much more quickly to read all the text and therefore scatters and loses strength.

Mario Merz, Spirale di cera, 1970–81 (photo: Giovanni Sighele, CC BY 2.0)

The Fibonacci sequence

Requiring the viewer to expend energy to understand Giap’s Igloo is closely tied to Merz’s interest in conveying the presence of underlying invisible energies present in life. [1] The igloo’s shape is, for Merz, a metaphor for this energy. Merz was drawn to the igloo because he saw within its design, a spiraling line that begins at the structure’s apex and slowly spreads outward to its base. Merz’s fascination with the spiral motif as an expression of the expansion of energy into space is closely tied to the artist’s interest in the Fibonacci sequence, which he incorporated in different ways throughout his artmaking.

Named after the 13th-century Italian mathematician, Leonardo of Pisa (later known as Fibonacci), this famous mathematical series consists of a sequence of numbers in which each is the sum of the two proceeding numerals: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, etc. and produced, for example, by 0+1=1, 1+1=2, 1+2=3, 2+3=5 and so on. This increasing mathematical sequence can be found in biological growth patterns, such as how certain flowers produce petals or the family tree of honeybees. When the Fibonacci sequence is drawn out in a diagram, it represents an ever-expanding spiral. For Merz, the Fibonacci series illustrates how everything, from nature to society, is in a transformative state of progression and change.

The Fibonacci sequence is implicit within Giap’s Igloo. The artwork turns out to be not just a simple structure made of humble materials, but a multifaceted dialogue with the past, present, and future. Its shape harkens back to the past, the written statement speaks to the contemporary actions of humanity, and the essential form contains within it the mathematical expression of how the future will continue to develop and transform. When encountering Giap’s Igloo, Merz invites you to consider your actions, and how those actions will contribute to our larger existence.

This film features some of the most important living Postmodern practitioners, Charles Jencks, Robert A M Stern and Sir Terry Farrell among them, and asks them how and why Postmodernism came about, and what it means to be Postmodern. This film was originally made for the V&A exhibition ‘Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970 – 1990’

Tate Curator, Linsey Young, explores the work of Rachel Whiteread, one of Britain’s leading contemporary artists and the first woman to win the Turner Prize in 1993. Using industrial materials such as plaster, concrete, resin, rubber and metal to cast everyday objects and architectural space, her evocative sculptures range from the intimate to the monumental.