BLACKARTPROJECTS & JOHN R NEESON PRESENT
THE URBAN BODEGÓN B L A C K
THE URBAN BODEGĂ“N 38 Glasshouse Road Collingwood, Melbourne, Australia 11 - 21 March, 2015
THE URBAN BODEGÓN John R Neeson My practice is bi-partite and characterised by venue specific, referential installations that operate outside the conventions of the hermetic ‘white box’, and works that interrogate the Still Life1. The Urban Bodegón project is a conflation of these two aspects of my practice. Initially I removed replicas of iconic still life subject matter from the studio and re-located them onto ledges in the streets of the inner Melbourne suburbs of Fitzroy and Collingwood. In this increasingly gentrified neighbourhood some property owners commission street artists to work on the walls of buildings in order to avoid illegal painting, tagging or stencilling. Consequently the subject matter of these still life interventions was in complete contrast to the pervading street art aesthetic of each location. Daily immersion in this environment prompted me to consider the egalitarian (somewhat Marxists) motivation of street
artists and the location and public accessibility to artist’s work in general. As a result I ceased interventions altogether and in an attitude related to dérive and the flȃneur, began to photograph on android phone the anonymous random arrangements of objects, left in streets and laneways. I gave myself the rule of not intervening in any way with these casual compositions, identifying them as ‘ready-made’ Still Life. These images are classified as Urban Bodegóns because the objects photographed occupy relatively shallow pictorial space as does the subject matter in the 17th century Spanish Still Life paintings (Bodegón). However, there is also an affinity between my recording these chance anonymous arrangements of objects (evidence of a consumer driven society) and Nouveau Réalisme. The practices of the artists associated with this movement involved selecting and removing
objects and materials from a vernacular context and relocating them as a work of art in a conventional gallery which immediately aestheticized the found material. Pierre Restany the spokesperson for the group referred to this as the “poetic recycling of urban, industrial and advertising reality”2. Similarly, photographing the ‘ready-made’ Still Life begins the process of aesthetisisation. Susan Sontag, who considered the photographer a contemporary flȃneur, wrote ‘…photographs are evidence not only of what’s there but of what an individual sees, not just a record but an evaluation of the world’3. In this case selecting an Urban Bodegón involves evaluating which abandoned signifiers of consumption to record in their original location for future re-location. Immediately the potential readymade Urban Bodegón is seen in the rectangle of the view-finder aesthetic choices are made. These
include how much of the street location and the ledge supporting the objects to include in the image as well as an evaluation of the depth of pictorial space, an essential convention of the classification. I introduced the ready-made Urban Bodegón images into the canon of the Still Life through an exhibition at AC Institute, New York in October 20144. This was not a one-person show in the usual sense but an installation of images from an on-going collection that straddles my practices of artist and curator. The installation was also one of a number of curatorial projects premised on Still Life that began with a Museum exhibition in 19935 and includes a previous project at AC Institute6. The conventions of the single line gallery hang (and the Spanish Bodegón) would have the eye line of the observer coincide with the height of the shelf supporting objects. However, in this case
in order to include an aspect of their original location into the installation, the images were hung according to the eye level of the photographer. This takes the notion of representation out of illusion and into the experiential, which is not usual for presentations in a ‘White Box’. This arrangement also references the implication of the observer’s location in actual space into the illusion of architectural perspective, which can be traced back to the painted walls of rooms in Roman villas7. The inclusion of the observer’s physical location in relation to illusion, is also the modus operanti around which my venue specific and referential installations function. In January 2015 a second Urban Bodegón project took place in Berlin at the Institut für Alles Mögliche8. This is a shop front studio/exhibition venue that the Institut stipulates is used by the artist-in-residence for the
exploration of practices that are outside established parameters. This site was an opportunity to duplicate the physical circumstances and context of the original location at a second and equally egalitarian ‘re-location’. Over two weeks a succession of the Fitzroy/Collingwood Bodegón images was attached directly onto the store window facing the busy commercial thoroughfare. In this case the eye level of the shelf in the images coincided with the average height of pedestrians passing the window. In the Nuekölln project images collected from the streets of one urban location were returned to the streets of a second into which they seamlessly blended. As a result this project has become the prototype for future re-located presentations of the Urban Bodegón project. There are now additions to the Fitzroy/Collingwood image archive collected from locations in
Berlin/Neukölln and Williamsburg/ Brooklyn. Analysis of these supports my hypothesis that Urban Bodegóns are ‘readymade’ miscellany of consumption abandoned at specific locations that can be read as socio/ political documentations.
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http://www.johnrneeson.com
2 http://mediation.centrepompidou.fr/ education/ressources/ENS-newrea-EN/ ENS-newrea-EN.htm (60/90. Trente ans de Nouveau Réalisme, La Différence, 1990, pg 76) 3 Sontag, Susan. On Photography, 1977, Penguin Classics, London, 2008, ISBN: 9780-141-03578-9, pg 88. 4 http://acinstitute.org/the-urbanbodegonjohn-r-neesonoctober-16november-8-2014/ 5 Neeson, John R. Arrangement - Australian Still life 1973 – 1993, Museum of Modern Art, Heide, Melbourne 1993, Catalogue ISBN: 0 947 104 216. 6 Neeson, John R. Imaging the Apple, AC Institute, New York, 2010, www. imagingtheapple.com
7 Fresco wall painting from the Villa of P. Fannius Synistor at Boscoreale, ca. 4030 B.C. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 8
http://www.i-a-m.tk/
Collingwood Bodeg贸n #1 digital print, edition of 3 + 1AP 68 x 90 cm
Fitzroy/Collingwood Bodeg贸n #1 digital print, edition of 3 + 1AP 109 x 178 cm
Fitzroy Bodeg贸n #1 digital print, edition of 3 + 1AP 68.6 x 96 cm
Fitzroy Bodeg贸n #2 digital print, edition of 3 + 1AP 98.5 x 69 cm
Fitzroy Bodeg贸n #3 digital print, edition of 3 + 1AP 93 x 68 cm
Fitzroy Bodeg贸n #4 digital print, edition of 3 + 1AP 68 x 93 cm
Rome Bodeg贸n #1 digital print, edition of 3 + 1AP 83 x 118 cm
Collingwood/Berlin Bodeg贸n #1 digital print, edition of 3 + 1AP 111 x 178 cm
Berlin Bodeg贸n #1 digital print, edition of 3 + 1AP 83.5 x 106 cm
Williamsburg Bodeg贸n #1 digital print, edition of 3 + 1AP 83.5 x 106 cm
Willamsburg Bodeg贸n #2 digital print, edition of 3 + 1AP 58 x 74 cm
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