Caroline Levine

Department of English
Rutgers University-Camden
levinec@camden.rutgers.edu

 

Review of: Andreas Gursky. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. 4 March – 15 May 2001. Exhibition Website

 

Peter Galassi. Andreas Gursky. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2001.

 

The modernist avant-garde made a gesture of rejecting popular entertainment and the commodification of culture. To be sure, avant-garde artists often employed the best techniques of advertising and marketing, but they did so on the sly, careful always to boast of their isolation and disinterestedness. With Andy Warhol came something new, a suggestion that there was nothing outside of commodification, that we were always already enmeshed in the repetitions of exchange. One definition of postmodernism makes this the central, the characteristic move of our time: don’t try to escape commodity fetishism, we hear, because there’s no way out, no elsewhere, no other.

 

Jeff Koons gives us this version of postmodernism par excellence. Sneaker advertisements and basketballs, porn stars and kitsch toys, vacuum cleaners and stuffed puppies: Koons appropriates the most mass-produced objects and shines them up, making them glow with appealing prettiness at the same time that their banality appalls. Koons, astute about the marketplace, is a self-proclaimed artist of desire: he plays on the fact that his audience wants these objects, coveting the luminous glossiness of mass-marketed commodities. Shamed though we may feel, Koons seduces us into a longing for those things which appear to transcend their ordinariness, but not by any magic other than commodification itself–the bright, unmistakable sheen of the newly packaged purchase.

 

At first glance, the photographer Andreas Gursky might seem to fall into the same category as Jeff Koons, a critic-cum-devotee of the global seductions of marketing. His huge glossy photographs offer up rows of athletic shoes, a landscape of Toyota and Toys ‘R’ Us logos, digitally doctored images of hotels and corporate offices in Hong Kong, New York, and Atlanta, floors full of stock traders, and, perhaps best of all, the endless riches of a 99¢ store, where stacks of brightly colored commodities are so radiant that they cast a gorgeous pastel glow on the store ceiling.

 

But taken together, the photographs that are collected in Gursky’s mid-career retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York hint at something else, something other than the commonplace workings of desire.

 

It’s not easy to articulate what that something is. Peter Galassi’s richly illustrated catalogue works to do justice to the monumentality of Gursky’s oeuvre, and its large scale does succeed in evoking some sense of the work’s grandeur. Galassi, in a wide-ranging and scholarly introduction, strives to account for Gursky’s striking aesthetic by tracing major influences: his father the commercial photographer, his disciplined training under Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf, his references to Minimalist painting, his turn to color, to big print, and to digital techniques. Galassi also labors to differentiate Gursky from his contemporaries, arguing, for example, that although Gursky’s work can seem reminiscent of American photography, his “adherence to a ruling pictorial scheme” distinguishes him from the Americans and marks a crucial debt to the Bechers (Galassi 24). All of these contexts and conclusions are convincing, but somehow the mystery of Gursky’s work–its ability to “knock your socks off,” as Galassi puts it (9)–remains unaccounted for, elusive.

 

Take “99 Cent” (1999), for example. Here the title and the date begin by pushing us to the brink. We are just under, just short, imminent, incomplete. And yet the image itself is one of repletion, even of excess, as candy bars and bottles of juice, shampoo, and detergent line up in row after row of color, and the products appear to go on forever. Indeed, what Gursky offers us is a tempo of fullness and insufficiency, as blocks of color are punctuated by horizontal white stripes, and the store as a whole is held up by six slender white vertical columns, rhythmically spaced. The ceiling itself repeats the inside of the store, the bright colors reflected into pale versions of themselves, echoing the floor, symmetrically placed in their own ghostly rows. The few shoppers who dot the storescape seem like prowlers hiding in the shelter of the shelves, their heads barely rising above the patterns of packaging. The remarkable effect is that the arrangement of the whole takes over, as the play of whites and colors overwhelms both the single commodity and the lone consumer. The objects are not there to be bought and sold, clutched and consumed, eaten and used. They are there to add their small notes to the vast pulsing rhythm of the spectacle.

 

Awed, visitors to the show step back.

 

With Gursky, the grip of consumerist desire is gone. Gone is the impulse to grasp and to own, to finger and to taste. He invites distance–the detachment of wonder.

 

But how? How do these marvelous, luminous photographs engender a feeling of awed distance? How do they frustrate the attraction of commodification? The answer, I want to suggest, lies in their remarkable formal control–something Gursky took from his training in Düsseldorf. But even more specifically, their wonder emerges from the one formal pattern that recurs in almost all of Andreas Gursky’s work: parallel lines.

 

Sometimes Gursky’s parallel lines come from familiar scenes of contemporary life, like store shelves and divided highways. Sometimes they are uncanny, as in “Engadine” (1995), where a trail of tiny skiers runs parallel to a vast mountain range, each echoing the other as they stretch from one frame of the photo to the other. Sometimes the lines are constructed and intentional, as in “EM, Arena, Amsterdam I” (2000), which offers up a painted soccer field, or “Untitled XII” (1999), which gives us a vastly magnified image of a leaf from a printed book, where the lines of words trace perfect parallels across the page. But at other times Gursky’s parallels seem eerily found or given, as in “Rhein II” (1999), which shows us a slice of the river running in a single straight path and flanked by green lawns in such perfectly straight lines that nature itself defies belief. Or the brilliant “Salerno” (1990), where a view of a harbor becomes mysteriously ordered and arranged in juxtaposed planes: first rows of colored cars, then rows of packing crates, then rows of houses, and finally rows of mountains and the sky. Nature and industry, sports and government, sneakers and mountain ranges, mundane and transcendent–all resolve into the twinned tracks of the parallel in Gursky’s glossy universe.

 

For mathematicians, the parallel is defined by lines extending to infinity without intersecting. Gursky invites us to imagine that his lines not only go on forever, but that they are everywhere, underlying not only the disciplined orderings of culture but the unconscious life of nature. His parallels suggest a forever beyond the photograph, a forever of lines extending beyond the frames of each image and, more frighteningly, entirely beyond reason, representation, and calculation. Despite the formal harmonies of these photographs, then, Gursky’s infinitely extending lines evoke the sublime. Thus with their beauty comes a kind of terror.

 

Of course, postmodernity has encountered and embraced the sublime before, as theorized in what are now its most classic articulations. Jean-François Lyotard famously pits the postmodern sublime against the eclecticism of “anything goes.” A genuine postmodernism, refusing to value art according to its profits, launches an enthusiastic defiance of conventional forms and expectations, the desire to “put forward… the unpresentable in presentation itself” (Lyotard 81). If for Lyotard this sublime can happen in Montaigne as well as in Mille Plateaux, Fredric Jameson argues for a sublime particular to the emergence of the vast, decentered complexity of multinational capitalism. Jameson’s sublime, like Lyotard’s, reveals the limits of figuration, but it results specifically from the attempt to grasp the “impossible totality of the contemporary world system” (38).

 

While Lyotard’s sublime is evoked by unprofitable novelty and Jameson’s sublime emerges from the endless surfaces of a world overtaken by commodification, Gursky’s parallels seem to offer something older, something more metaphysical. In their extension from frame to frame the lines imply a constant, a depth beneath the surface, an underlying pattern or structure. As if Gursky was a faithful reader of Kant, his work appears to present something like an enactment of the Critique of Judgment: his lines offer a formal harmony and also, in their infinite extension, they rupture that harmony; they frame the world and they also break that frame. Thus unlike Jameson’s bewildering postmodern architecture, which dislocates and disorients, Gursky’s photographs embrace an order that is disordered only by the fact that the same forms eerily spread from one photograph to the next. In his allegiance to a venerable formalism, Gursky also seems to invoke an older philosophical paradigm. Indeed, his loving references to Romantic painters reinforce the notion of a sublime that belongs to the late eighteenth century. We see echoes of Caspar David Friedrich in “Seilbahn, Dolomiten” (1987), and we find J. M. W. Turner’s mysterious and illegible landscapes neatly framed by parallel lines in “Turner Collection” (1995).¹

 

If it is possible to see Gursky as the representative of a tradition that is now centuries old, it is worth remembering that both Lyotard and Jameson also locate their definitions of the sublime in Kant. And we can begin to bring Gursky together with these two theorists of postmodernism by recognizing that all three offer us the Kantian sublime in relation to global capitalism. For Lyotard, the sublime is that which unsettles the easy flow of the market by presenting something so unexpected that it does not lend itself to being bought and sold. For Jameson, the sublime is that which exposes our inability to grasp a world entirely overtaken by the endless surfaces of commodification. And for Gursky, the sublime transforms the banality of commodities into the grandeur of the infinite. For all three, the sublime is that which blocks desire and replaces the covetousness of a rampant materialism with a confounding awe.

 

Notes

 

Access to other on-line exhibitions of Andreas Gursky’s work may be gained via artcyclopedia. com.

 

1. Galassi writes that “Turner Collection” is disappointing, “because the trick of reducing masterpieces of painting to generic objects of reverence has become all too familiar” (35). But surely Gursky’s photograph deserves a richer reading than that: by framing Turner’s wild romanticism inside the neatness of parallel lines–not only the frames of Turner’s own work, but the pristine wood floors and moldings that echo the lines of the frames–Gursky contains one kind of sublime inside another. Turner’s sublime of an overwhelming nature is bordered and enclosed by Gursky’s infinitely extending lines, what Kant called the mathematical sublime.

 

Works Cited

 

• Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.
• Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984.