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Symbol key: Silver Monas Hieroglyphica To Sublime Gold To Mix Water Earth Fire Air Blood A Retort Copper
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Some Reflections on Metal Introduction by Hugh Aldersey- Williams
Document and Metaphor Shannon Ebner, Falk Messerschmidt, and Khanh Xiu Tran Words by Jeremy Haik 4
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The Visible and the Veiled Photographs by Richard Learoyd Words by Dominica Paige
Tales from the City of Gold Photographs by Jason Larkin Words by Liz Sales 22
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& Group Show: In Pursuit of Perfection (Fiction as It Is) Benjamin Swanson, Aspen Mays, Aaron Hegert, Zachary Norman, Sarah Palmer, Andrew Williams, Justin James Reed, Curtis Hamilton Words by Dominica Paige Center
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Wind, Earth, Fire, Air Matthew Brandt, Sam Falls, Klea McKenna, and Chris McCaw Words by Christina Wiles
Ouroboros Liz Sales in conversation with photographer Marina Berio and chemist Ed Chen 41
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Terrestrial Astronomy Lisa Oppenheim, Xavier Barral, and Trevor Paglen Words by Christina Labey
Electroshock Reverie Photographs by David Goldes Words by Dominica Paige 58
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Divine Potential of Ordinary Detritus Photographs by Moyra Davey Words by Liz Sales
Notes on Type Elana Schlenker interviews Johannes Breyer and Fabian Harb of Dinamo 72
Contents
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Some Reflections on Metal
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W O R D S B Y H U G H A LD E R S E Y - W I LLI A M S
Introduction
When most of us think of chemical change, it is something sudden and visible we expect to see: a disappearance in a puff of smoke, an appearance of bright crystals, perhaps, a magical color shift, a sludge becoming transparent, or even the emergence of luster out of dross, which was the venal dream of the alchemists. Alchemy is the Arabic word from which we get “chemistry.” Before that, it came from Greek, perhaps related to a word used to describe mixing or mingling, although the etymology itself is scrambled. Alchemy is used more loosely today to refer to any remarkable transformation that demands mysterious skill— a chemical change, yes, but also one in which an impressive aesthetic result is achieved from basic ingredients. Chefs are alchemists now. And photographers, but we’ll come to that. In one sense, the alchemical period was a success; it lasted far longer than chemistry has thus far. From classical antiquity, philosophers believed that there were just four elements— earth, air, fire, and water—and that everything was composed of them in different degrees. So persistent—and some might argue, so scientifically robust—was this foursome that it remained a favorite subject for artists long after alchemical pursuits were discredited, and it continues to be explored by a few even now.
Two substances we recognize as modern chemical elements—mercury and sulfur—were central to alchemical study. Mercury, according to Aristotle, was heavy and liquid and combined the elements earth and water. Flammable sulfur clearly contained fire. Thus, together, it was thought they might form gold, that most perfect metal. All other metals were simply imperfect; even silver, the only other precious metal in antiquity, was inferior. Inferior for a particular chemical reason: it tarnishes. The word “tarnish” refers specifically to the corrosion of this one precious metal. Iron rusts, and other metals may corrode in one way or another, but only silver tarnishes. However, unlike rusting iron, which makes a subtle tonal shift from grey to red, silver, the most light-reflective of all metals, makes the most dramatic transformation possible, from bright white to deep matte black. These polar opposites give silver a unique symbolism. It is regarded as complementary to gold in many cultures—as the photographic pioneer William Henry Fox Talbot noted in his English Etymologies—and the two are widely paired with the moon and the sun. Monthly, we see the moon eclipsed by the earth, turning from a white disc to black. Gold is eternal and represents the male. Silver is feminine, pure, virginal— but also subject to corruption. One suspects that this is a cosmography devised by men. The alchemy that photography employs is its manipulation of this intrinsic contrariety in a new way. For photographic darkroom paper, of course, contains silver, and it is when this silver is chemically transformed by light and chemicals that its stark contrast is revealed. Yet the traditional symbolism that silver carries with it, cemented over centuries of hammering and twisting by smiths and craftsmen, is all but ignored by photographers. Black and white photography erupted into the world as a protean force, a new-made thing, a technological marvel.
This seems to me to be missing a trick. For the origins of photography are steeped in the materials and methods of alchemy, its precious metals, acids, and salts, its mercury vapors. In 1614, Angelo Sala, a physician from Vicenza, recorded the natural darkening of nitrate of silver when exposed to sunlight. A century later, silver salts were being used to dye feathers and furs black, and in 1727 Johann Heinrich Schulze from Magdeburg made photographic images of words by placing paper stencils over the surface of a bottle containing a mixture of chalk and aqua regia with silver. Despite this demonstration, and despite landscape painters’ widespread use of the camera obscura at the same time, it seems nobody thought to bring these processes together for another hundred years. Photography could have been invented far sooner than it was. In the 1820s, the Frenchman Joseph Nicéphore Niépce was the first to create archival pictures using an optical apparatus that we would come to recognize as a camera and a silver chloride medium. Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre continued Niépce’s work using silvered plates sensitized with iodine vapor to produce a film of silver iodide which was then exposed to the scene to be recorded. The iodide was converted back to silver where the light struck it to create a negative image. Deposited directly on the silver mirror surface, however, this negative could be made to appear as a positive image by altering one’s angle of view. The two timeless properties of silver— its high reflectivity and its propensity to tarnish— are embodied in this new technology. Yet, today, these old meanings are ignored. The critical literature of photography passes over the symbolic importance of silver. How does the use of silver, the elemental embodiment of purity, virtue, and the feminine, contribute to the photograph? How do its values relate to the values of the camera’s eye, its truthfulness and all-seeingness? Does the photograph, like the silvered mirror that Shakespeare’s Richard II calls for so that he might see himself “bankrupt of his majesty,” bring a salutary message of disillusion? Or does the silver medium provide a lustration that purifies the sitter? The great commentators on photography, most notably Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, are silent on the matter. Yet what sport they might have had with the chemical semiotics of the photographic process and its reflections and reversals between black and white.
Hugh Aldersey-Williams is a writer and curator with interests ranging from science to architecture and design. He is the author of Periodic Tales, a cultural history of the chemical elements, and is currently curating an exhibition of artworks that make significant use of the elements at Compton Verney, Warwickshire, in 2015. His forthcoming book is The Adventures of Sir Thomas Browne in the 21st Century.
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There are contemporary artists who are attuned to the idea that the modern chemical elements do in fact have the kind of symbolism once ascribed to the ancient four elements. Cornelia Parker, for example, has played on silver’s tendency to tarnish in a series of works entitled Stolen Thunder, which are comprised solely of the tarnish, rubbed off onto handkerchiefs, from a number of iconic silver objects ranging from Davy Crockett’s fork to Guy Fawkes’ lantern. The fact that Parker shows us only the black residue from these shiny objects invites us to reconsider the nature of their one-time owners’ celebrity. For what else tarnishes besides silver if not reputations? Although, as I have said, few photographers have dwelt on the symbolism of the elements in their art, a notable exception must be made for the work of Simon Starling. One Ton II is a set of five identical platinum photographic prints. As in many of Starling’s works, the material we finally see in the gallery has been subjected to transformations so that it is in effect made to tell its own story. Starling’s platinum prints illustrate the laborious extraction of the very metal required to make them—platinum in popular culture having been adopted as the element signifying even greater value than gold. The contrast between the beautiful tissue of the photographic images and the chaotic panorama of the South African opencast mine where the platinum ore was extracted is striking. It is impossible not to reflect on the cost of obtaining the metal, the “one ton” of the title referring to the quantity of ore that was required to extract the amount of platinum needed for the five photographs. Before we make the cultural decision that a metal such as silver or gold or platinum is “precious,” we first find that it is expensive to obtain, both in human and in environmental terms. The meanings of our materials are always intrinsically linked to the processes of winning and working them. As we drift further and further from the physical materials of traditional photography with the spread of digital photography, this is something we would do well to remember. !
Conveyor, No.6
Simon Starling, One Ton, II, 2005
Some Reflections on Metal
DOCUMENT " & METAPHOR 8
WORDS BY JEREMY HAIK
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The practice of alchemy sits at the crossroads of many disciplines, some of which may appear, to the contemporary mind, to be at odds. Chemistry is the central figure, but the fields of literature, religion, mythology, and philosophy are also significant. Alchemy’s history is a dense tangle of conflicting accounts, and its texts are equally labyrinthine. These works combine meticulous laboratory procedures with metaphorical language and imagery, and this unlikely pairing leaves the practice somewhere between science and art. Similarly, artists who work with photography often succeed in reconciling indexical reality and strict laboratory procedures—whether darkroom chemistry or digital color management—with metaphor and symbolism. In curatorial statements and exhibition catalogs, photography is often compared to alchemy via direct analogy: both rely on transformation through chemistry and process. More significantly, the deeply interdisciplinary qualities of both practices produce works that fuse analytical observation, empiricism, and precise documentation with symbolism, poetics, and metaphor.
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Jeremy Haik is an artist, writer, and educator. His work deals with the relationship between written and visual forms of language in the context of digital information systems and historical narrative.
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In his comprehensive study of alchemy, Lawrence Principe notes, “arriving at a solid, satisfactory conclusion about alchemy can seem as difficult as finding the Philosopher’s Stone itself. Alchemy’s primary sources present a forbidding tangle of intentional secrecy, bizarre language, obscure ideas, and strange imagery.” 1 To further complicate matters, many alchemical texts have been lost to the tides of history. Of the thousands of documents that have survived, most are nearly impossible to understand thanks to their elaborately encrypted and symbolic language. The authors of these texts were determined to keep the revelations that appeared to them tightly guarded, and so they kept the precise details of their experiments illegible to the casual observer. 1 Lawrence Principe, The Secrets of Alchemy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 2. 2 Zoltan Kovecses, Metaphor: A Practical Introduction, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 264.
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Document & Metaphor
Alchemists had legitimate reasons for this secrecy. Imagine that you have the knowledge and skill to turn lead into gold, or to produce an elixir of immortality. Would you share your discoveries with the world, or keep them to yourself? If there were other individuals who could help you in this process, how would you communicate with them without being discovered? Would you be a target for desperate individuals and institutions? These concerns led alchemists to encrypt their writings with intricately constructed allegory, drawing from a deep well of mythological knowledge. By borrowing from the fluid narratives of myth, these laboratory procedures were transformed into strange variations on familiar stories in which mysticism, science, and religion were collapsed into one. The material that survived is simultaneously poetic and analytical, descriptive and cryptic, weaving together ancient stories and the bleeding edges of scientific practice. This poetic language that defines alchemical texts is uncommon in most contemporary scientific literature. Metaphor is crucial in helping to conceptualize and therefore understand the world; Zoltán Kövecses, a linguist and author of several books on the study of metaphor, goes so far as to say, “No scientific discipline is imaginable without recourse to metaphor.” 2 But metaphor is also by nature imprecise and flexible in meaning, allowing room for multiple interpretations. As science grew more specialized and collaborative, clarity and effective communication became more critical. Robert Boyle’s 1661 text The Sceptical Chymist strongly advocated for the use of rigorous, practical evidence and reproducible results, written in plain and unambiguous language. The subsequent rejection of alchemy’s flowery and confusing language and the emphasis on clarity and empirical rigor were the beginnings of the fault line that would ultimately separate alchemy from modern science. Our personal experience of the world, outside the controlled environment of the laboratory, is often one of ambiguity, uncertainty, and misleading information. Experiences and phenomena that refuse clear and unambiguous description are what compel both science and art forward. Photography is uniquely positioned to offer insights to both laboratory scientists who rely on rigor and clarity and to artists who rely on metaphor and ambiguity. In their respective practices, Shannon Ebner, Falk Messerschmidt, and Khanh Xiu Tran take advantage of photography’s ambidexterity to examine the relationship between language and images.
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Toponymy is the study of the names people have given to places (from the Greek topos meaning place and onoma meaning name). The city currently known as St. Petersburg offers an interesting study in the fluidity of toponyms: the city—then known as Petrograd— was the site of the October Revolution of 1917 led by Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks, and on January 26, 1924, five days after Lenin’s death, Petrograd was renamed Leningrad. The Siege of Leningrad proved one of the longest, most destructive, and most lethal sieges of a major city in modern history, and the name of the city itself is laid on an equally shaky foundation, shifting between no less than eight iterations, official and unofficial, over the last three hundred years, including Petersburg, St. Petersburg, Petri, Petropolis, Piterpol, Petrograd, Red Petrograd, and Leningrad. 4 Kazimir Malevich, The Non-Objective World (Chicago: P. Theobald, 1959), 67.
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Document & Metaphor
Russian Night consists of found slides depicting various landmarks in what was formerly Leningrad (present-day St. Petersburg, Russia’s second-largest city). The slides were scanned without a backlight— the component that illuminates transparent film. Each scan depicts the slide’s cardboard frame, captions in Russian and English, and a dusty, black void where the image should be. These empty frames call to mind Allan McCollum’s Plaster Surrogates, or Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square paintings (the first of which was, coincidentally, exhibited in St. Petersburg in 1915). While Russian Night shares a flat, graphic quality with these works, it is an inherently photographic project. Rather than using photography to render an image of the visible world, Messerschmidt subverts the mechanics of photography to render St. Petersburg invisible. In The Non-Objective World, Malevich writes, “the visual phenomena of the objective world are, in themselves, meaningless; the significant thing is feeling, as such, quite apart from the environment in which it is called forth.” 4 Messerschmidt’s black squares function as metaphoric, as-yet-unfilled screens for the projections of the imagination. Framed and directed by the minimally descriptive language of the captions, he presents us with a photographic profile of St. Petersburg that relies as much on his own actions as it does upon the active participation of the observer. Some of the locations and monuments no longer exist, and in some ways the version of St. Petersburg that the original slides were meant to depict does not either. The emptiness in these images could suggest nothingness and absence or unresolved potential and opportunity in equal measure. In this project, language explains and clarifies but also primes and suggests, leveling the weight of future possibilities with that of historical fact. Messerschmidt’s project She took it with a pinch of salt is a series of images charting the quasi-fictional biography of two German immigrants. The project consists of a grid of appropriated historical images and documents, with a corresponding guide that functions as a map of the piece. The guide assigns a number to each image and corresponding passages of text— similar to a museum exhibition guide—and most of the entries cross-reference other entries. To fully engage this work requires jumping along a zigzag path, bouncing from image to text, text to text, and back to image. Messerschmidt has made it intentionally
5 Khanh Xiu Tran, “Geode: A Technical Guide” (master’s thesis, School of Visual Arts, 2014), 3. 6 Philippe-Alain Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion (New York: Zone Books, 2004), 278.
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Both the enhancement and the reverse-image searches rely on a mathematically derived set of equations and analysis algorithms. The logic of mathematical precision and the fuzzy ambiguity of her source images turn out to be surprisingly fluent partners. Their complementary relationship marks the impressive power of these search engines to map a Mnemosyne-like network of connections between seemingly unrelated images and subject matter; images of bombers, car windows, NASA explorations, and geological surveys appear as relevant results in her searches. The sheer breadth of the project leaves some question as to whether these efforts reflect a genuine investigation or whether they are subtly masked indictments of truth and meaning within the scientific process and within photography itself.
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Ebner, The Crooked Sign, 2006
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Ebner, EKSIZ, 2011
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Ebner, XSYST, 2011
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Ebner, XIS, 2011
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Messerschmidt, She took it with a pinch of salt, installation view, 2012
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Messerschmidt, Untitled, 2011
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Messerschmidt, Russian Night 06, 2009
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Messerschmidt, Russian Night 24, 2009
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Tran, 5 Tones, 2014
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Tran, Looking through a bulged side window of an S2 Tracker, 2014
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Tran, Search Results (Group A), 2014
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Tran, Area of Study, 2014
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Tran, Isolation by False Coloring, 2014
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Tran, Ground Truth Segmentation I, 2014
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Tran, Multiangle Imaging Spectroradiometer (MISR) mystery image, 2014
Document & Metaphor
Strictly speaking, none of these artists are practitioners of alchemy. The consensus among historians of alchemy is that the word itself is often applied too casually. Lawrence Principe cites several unusual examples of this trend in book titles such as The Alchemy of Finance and American Alchemy: The History of Solid Waste Management in the United States. What these artists do share with the alchemists is the use of language and images as flexible, malleable containers for meaning. Alchemical thinking was as literary as it was scientific, relying on experimentation but also employing myth, metaphor, and allegory to explain its results. In broad terms, the purpose of language itself is to capture meaning, package it into a clean and universally understood box, and send it on its way in the form of speech or writing. A perfect language would offer absolute certainty and clarity. As these artists show us, however, such a language does not exist, and the systems that do exist are laced with doubt and ambiguity. As the practice of alchemy began to wane before newer innovations and discoveries, the richness of symbol and metaphor that defined its writings started to dissolve within the emerging scientific discourses. Systematized language and units of measurement like the metric system —first introduced in 1799—positioned laboratory science as a herald of observational truths based on rational empiricism. Photography’s early years, thanks in part to its precise mechanical vision, seemed to offer the same promise of truth and clarity. And even in spite of our increasingly sophisticated uses of photographic images, this false promise persists in certain pockets, such as surveillance. By bringing text and image together, the artists in these pages refuse to collapse the meaning of either one into tidy packages. In their work, text and image are suspect; they remain elusive and rife with dead-ends and encrypted meaning. These artists recognize in the photographic image the same uncertainty, doubt, confusion, and intentional secrecy that the practitioners of alchemy recognized in their own work. Photography can be a metaphor for alchemy, not only in its reliance on transformation and chemical processes, but, more importantly, because it recognizes the flexibility of the alleged reality it depicts, and because, rather than attempting to capture—and caption—that reality, it revels in its ineffectiveness in the face of false certainty. !
The Visible and the Veiled
Richard 01–02
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W O RD S B Y D O MINIC A PA IGE
Learoyd
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Richard Learoyd’s photographs have an uncanny presence that exists somewhere outside of time, even as he is tracking it. His process speaks to the past: Learoyd photographs using an enormous camera obscura, an apparatus with a long history of diverse uses. Its optical principles were understood by ancient Chinese and Greek philosophers, and artists since Leonardo have been utilizing them in their work. In his practice, Learoyd employs a camera obscura of his own construction to create direct positive prints. The light falling on his subjects is focused onto the photographic paper, which is directly exposed. There is no intercessor— no negative or digital file—so each photograph is completely one-of-a-kind. And because they are made without a negative, each is a true, unmediated record of light reflecting from the subject to the paper. This unique aspect renders each image closer to a solitary, fleeting moment and does so more precisely than an image with an intercessor because, although the moment has been captured, it cannot be reproduced beyond the original print; it is absolute in its singularity. Learoyd is reverent in his observations of the natural world. His portraits and still lifes are acclaimed for the magnitude they imbue in their subjects and the pristine detail that calls to mind still life paintings of the Dutch Golden Age masters. And the acclaim is welldeserved; his images are ethereal, like visual hymns. The lighting is such that illumination seems to emanate from within his subjects, while likewise enveloping them; the color is full of rich vitality and nuance. The leaden and cloudy backgrounds ripen into tender golden flesh tones. The simplicity of the images is hypnotic, particularly in our overly saturated visual culture. Having unrestricted, immediate, and constant access to technology has made us a restless bunch. Our unsettled nature pushes us to photograph incessantly in order to satiate our appetite for furnishing evidence of our own lives, an effort to render moments and storylines permanent. Our photographs go beyond communicating the simple fact of our existence to include personal narratives and symbols, and to weave together overlapping stories. With Learoyd’s portraits, the removal of everything but the subject and the intense amplification of physical detail eschews common chronological narrative and replaces it with timelessness. The dichotomy between clarity and restraint furthers the sense of immortality in the sitter—their presence contends with their existence in a manner that is ineffable.
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Agnes At Table I, c. 2007, courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
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Sixteen Mirrors, 2013, courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
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Hare II, 2012, courtesy of McKee Gallery, New York
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Fish Heart, 2009, Private Collection, courtesy of McKee Gallery, New York
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Agnes Nude, 2007, Private Collection, courtesy of McKee Gallery, New York
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Empty Oval, 2008, courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
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Flamingo I, 2012, courtesy of McKee Gallery, New York
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Agnes, July 2013 (2), 2013, courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
Conveyor, No.6
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The Visible and the Veiled
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The effect of heightening detail while masking specifics provides Learoyd’s work with the uncommon ability to create images that are hyper-present yet otherworldly. In his portraits, the atmosphere is both serene and substantial as the eye moves from exquisite detail to hushed forms, searching for evidence of narrative or hints at the sitter’s psyche or personality. The photos are captivating in that they overflow with visual information while cleverly withholding particulars, hovering between the ideal and the apparent. Part of the magic of Learoyd’s work is that it is a catalogue of paradoxes: the sitters are imbued with the strange mixture of delicacy and power, of ambiguity and precision. Lucidity blends into the obscurity of legend. In his decade-long portrait study of a woman named Agnes, we watch as she develops from youth to mature adult, the photographs marking notches on the timeline via the creases of her skin. Of all of the visual arts, only photography can tell us the truth of aging, of time passing, of our own mortality. In his essay “Photography and Fetish,” French film theorist and critic Christian Metz writes, “Photography is the mirror, more faithful than any actual mirror, in which we witness at every age, our own aging. The actual mirror accompanies us through time, thoughtfully and treacherously; it changes with us, so that we appear not to change.” The paradox here is that while photography brings us face-to-face with mortality, it also serves to immortalize us. Learoyd calls these studies extended portraits, and in them, we see an unfurling of suspended time; Agnes’ existence is both frozen and prolonged. And by creating a series whose purpose is to trace time via one human subject, the portraits act as a contemporary momento mori. What reaches further beyond the contemplation of time, lineage, and mortality, however, is the gracefulness of the portraits, which, even when awkward, are still lyrical to the point of poetry.
The overwhelming presence evident in Learoyd’s portraits is negated by his photographs of blank mirrors—or of what at first may appear to be blank mirrors. In fact, these mirrors show something far vaster than an individual’s reflection: they cast the cosmos in great phosphorescent splashes. These darkened mirrors are also reminiscent of occultist Dr. John Dee’s mirror, made of highly polished obsidian and used for scrying the dark recesses of the past and the future. While we may not see beyond the mortal realm in Learoyd’s mirrors, we do see the boundless possibility of the untamed universe. The expansive is rendered concise as the vastness of space is contained within a mirror, the laws of light and astronomical motion frozen. The cosmos gazes back at us, and in this context, the unknown becomes knowable and the distant close at hand. The lull, inimitable color, and fragility of Learoyd’s portraits and mirrors is again evident in his photographs of deceased animals. The animals are so palpable and splendid that, despite their deflated posture, they transcend their being as scientific specimens and appear on the verge of revival. They function as a sort of two-dimensional taxidermy, preserved and transfigured in a manner that is enigmatic, unnerving, and provocative. That these animals are dead is an afterthought— one rendered with great aesthetic appeal, as each creature’s former liveliness is captured in stillness by the photograph. Even sagging and exhausted, they are agile, accentuating nature’s beauty. And this is perhaps what Learoyd’s photographs do best—effortlessly straddle the fine fissure between the immediate and the eternal; the visible and the veiled; the cryptic and the convincing. "
Dominica Paige is an artist, writer, and a professor of art history and photography. She is a faculty member at Pratt Institute.
The Visible and the Veiled
TALES FROM THE CITY
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W O RD S B Y L I Z S A L E S
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GOLD Article name or author
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Liz Sales is an artist, writer, and educator with an interest in the relationship between technology and perception. She is a faculty and staff member at the International Center of Photography.
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Gold is the most noble of the noble metals. Its properties are unaffected by air, water, or time. Thus, its alchemical associations with perfection and immortality persist today. Its celestial associations are rooted in materiality as well, as virtually all gold on the planet arrived here by meteorite. Two billion years ago, an asteroid collision created the largest accessible gold deposit on Earth, the Witwatersrand Basin. The most gold ever mined has been extracted from the south ridge of this astronomical depression, now called Johannesburg, South Africa. Here, the noble metal is liquefied by heavy metals for ease of extraction, making mining a type of reverse transmutation, an anti-alchemy, turning land from gold to mercury. 1
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1 Jason Kirk, Joaquin Ruiz, John Chesley, and Spencer Titley, “The Origin of Gold in South Africa,” American Scientist 91 (2003): 34-36. 2 Nick Norman and Gavin Whitfield, Geological Journeys: A Traveller’s Guide to South Africa’s Rocks and Landforms (Johannesburg: Struick Publishers, 2006), 40.
Tales From the City of Gold
In June 2010, when social documentarian Jason Larkin first arrived in Johannesburg on vacation, the city of gold was alight with celebration, hosting the 19th World Cup. Amidst the excitement, Larkin noticed the alien mounds of crushed yellow rock that comprise the city’s backdrop, distinct from the natural red-brown soil. He learned that this integral part of the city’s topography is the man-made waste product of mining—gold ore dumps— and that, despite their toxicity, these “tailings” are home to millions of people. Back home in London, Larkin’s fascination continued to grow. “Three weeks before we left Johannesburg, I decided to start exploring the mines with my camera. Once I was home, I kept returning to the photographs I’d taken,” Larkin told Conveyor. “Finally, I convinced my girlfriend to move to Johannesburg with me so I could do my research locally and document the mines.” After relocating to South Africa in 2011, Larkin began investigating the largely lawless artificial topographies and their history in a project that spanned the next two-and-a-half years of his life. The resulting work pictures Johannesburg’s physical fractures as well as the ruptures that gold mining has left in its environmental and in its social landscapes. This is Larkin’s second major, long-term social documentary project. It follows Cairo Divided, an equally surreal body of work investigating the satellite-cities project that has terraformed the hostile desert surroundings of Cairo. With so much of the photographic universe speeding up, Larkin feels that it is important to take a slower approach to his practice. He expands, “I was frustrated with the way twenty-four hour, competitive media pushes photographers to take less and less time to tell a story, posting pictures online before they even have captions. For this project, I wanted the benefit of living in Johannesburg and the luxury of doing unhurried work. By living in [there], I was able to set up meetings with local experts and government officials. Although, just having the opportunity to speak to local residents was helpful, as well. It’s a big subject to tackle, six billion tons of mining waste.” Throughout his exhaustive research, Larkin also collected information, archival images, and idiosyncratic phrases from a two-way Fanagalo dictionary, a lingua franca based on the Zulu, English, and Afrikaans languages. The name “Fanagalo” means “do it like this” in Nguni, signaling the language’s use as a tool of authority.3 Larkin explains: “Fanagalo was created by English colonialists in
the nineteenth century so that white mine bosses could command workers who spoke a number of different languages. Fanagalo is still spoken today, which I think says a lot about the legacy of the mining industry.” Incorporating this level of inquiry into his process allowed Larkin’s photographic work to palpably engage with the complex history of his subject matter. His images show remnants of the past in the present day and put the everyday here and now in a historical context. Larkin says, “I typically shoot with one camera body, one lens, and a few rolls of film. I had ten frames per roll so I carefully considered each shot. I can have a relationship with my subject, uninhibited by screens.” Larkin tells the story of life on the tailings, which pose a serious health threat to “Joburgers” in a city still trying to recover from an already toxic history. Today’s white South Africans and the nearby suburbs of Johannesburg they occupy are conspicuously absent from Larkin’s edit, which sticks strictly to the topography of the city’s tailings and the communities living alongside them. Johannesburg is built on one of the world’s largest deposits of gold, discovered under farmland in Witwatersrand, a long, north-facing scarp in the Gauteng Province of South Africa, 130 years ago. At that time, numerous gold rushes all over the globe caused large migrations of miners, including an enormous influx of Africans, to the Witwatersrand area. Well before apartheid, black African workers were kept in quarters close to the mines and the growing dumpsites around them in order to segregate the workers from the colonialists. Larkin maintains, “The system of apartheid helped keep mining costs cheap. That legacy is unavoidable here. In Johannesburg, the people living in poor, informal communities are black. I wanted to highlight this social dynamic by photographing life on the dumps.” The astronomical amount of gold mined over the past century allowed South Africa to become the world’s largest producer. When gold prices plummeted, the larger mining companies began to abandon their operations and environmental obligations.4 Larkin states, “Johannesburg exists today solely because of mining. While most towns built around intense mining go bust when the mining stops, Johannesburg became powerful and rich as a financial center with the mechanics of a proper economy. However, one still cannot take gold mining out of the labor issues and land rights issues of today; the historic legacy of mining in South Africa is massive.” This overpowering history is articulated in
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3 J. D. Bold, Dictionary, Grammar and Phrase-Book of Fanagalo (Kitchen Kafir): The Lingua Francaof Southern Africa as Spoken in the Union of South Africa, the Rhodesias, Portuguese East Africa, Nyasaland, Belgian Congo, etc. (South Africa: Central News Agency, 1958). 4 Charles H. Feinstein, An Economic History of South Africa: Conquest, Discrimination, and Development (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 210-211.
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Tales From the City of Gold
which is then syphoned off and piped into the processing plant. Millions of tons of material is being dissolved throughout Johannesburg.” The money to be made in this endeavor presents new concerns for the already fragile landscape and its people, making Larkin’s work all the more timely. In an attempt to reach diverse populations, iterations of this work have included a bilingual newsprint publication, a monograph entitled Tales from the City of Gold, and photographic exhibitions. In his previous major project Cairo Divided, Larkin made a newspaper in Arabic available for free in Cairo. In an effort to make this level of engagement a staple in his practice, Larkin made a version of his work in South Africa in both English and Zulu called After the Mines. Larkin states, “The monograph, which I published in Europe, was a space for me to fully realize my ideas, in a different way than I have in exhibiting this work in galleries. But, at forty euros, the publication would be too expensive for South Africans. I like the immediacy and accessibility of After the Mines and of newsprint in general.” In all of its incarnations, Larkin’s work is ultimately an indictment against the environmental and social impacts of greed, as well as a portrait of the current state of Johannesburg’s tailings in all their complexity. Gold is a perfect and everlasting metal but, despite our alchemical hopes, it lends none of its immortality out. On the contrary, as is apparent in Larkin’s portrait of South Africa, gold taps into our most destructive instincts. Mining is an obscene transmogrify, turning Johannesburg against its poorest citizens for over a century. #
5 Jason Larkin, Julian Rodriguez, and Mara Kardas-Nelson, Tales from the City of Gold (London: Kehrer, 2013), 29; 50.
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Pressurized Water, Krugersdorp, Johannesburg, 2013
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A Break During Panning, Roodepoort, Johannesburg, 2012
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Footsteps, Randfontein, Johannesburg, 2010
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Polluted Water Channel, Driefontein, Johannesburg, 2012
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Breaking Down the Dump, Krugersdorp, Johannesburg, 2013
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‘Top Star’, Boysens, Johannesburg, 2010
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Daniel and the Hunting Dogs, Selby, Johannesburg, 2010
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Panning for Gold, Krugersdorp, Johannesburg, 2010
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Neutralised AMD, Randfontein, Johannesburg, 2012
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RDP Housing, Riverlea, Johannesburg, 2010 All images courtesy of Flowers Gallery, London
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In Pursuit of Perfection (Fiction as It Is)
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Diligently looke thou, and to thy figure attend, Which doth in it containe these secrets great & small. —George Ripley, Recapitulation of the Twelve Gates
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The roots of alchemy trace back to a time when the Earth was still flat. It is a discipline of dissection and divination, a unique practice where science, mysticism, and intellectual rigor hold equal weight. Flush with ciphers and rituals, those who become enamored with this science of relative mystery often tend to perpetuate— indeed, at times orchestrate—its conundrums, developing secret languages and personal codes in order to cloak their findings so they may remain out of reach to other practitioners. We’re left with archives of camouflaged notes and laboratories inhabited by both logic and dreams. Endless cycles of experimentation and revision gallop towards the perfect union of the scientific and the esoteric. Alchemy has an enduring relationship with art, and photography is a conspicuous bedfellow. The photographic image has enormous transformative power: it has the ability not only to mask and expose, but also to completely alter the world. The photographer assumes the role of alchemist, and initiates the conversion of stark substances and surroundings into images that extend beyond the material realm. Photographs have the infinite ability to oscillate gracefully between the actual, the artificial, and the transcendental. Artistic studios and scientific laboratories are close affiliates, spaces consigned to investigation, analysis, and creation in which many practitioners see the midnight hours fade into the dawn. Sarah Palmer’s studio-based practice provides an impression of a poetic world that exists beyond the everyday as she combines the ubiquitous with the ideal. There is a fine balance and a duality evident in her images, important tenets in alchemical practice: as above, so below. Drawing inspiration from physics, Zachary Norman takes on the lofty challenge of creating his own hypothetical matter, fashioning things that can be seen but not touched. Meanwhile, Aaron Hegert transfigures utilitarian spaces, generating spatial and perceptual displacement in his images. Norman and Hegert also work in collaboration with one another, and they take as their focus the metamorphosis of quotidian objects and locations. Together, they conspire to cleverly transmute mundane objects into grand tableaux, drawing references to prima materia, or first matter, the starting material required for the alchemical magnum opus. Andrew Williams’ documentation of droughts in the American West captures the dramatic and rapid transformation of the landscape, and his images harness the natural elements of fire, wind, water, and air—all the
I N T R O D U C T I O N B Y D O M I N I C A PA I G E
necessary components to create the Philosopher’s Stone. Also called “the Stone of the Wise,” some practitioners have, more abstractly, likened it to a transformation of the spiritual self, characterizing individual enlightenment. Justin James Reed’s somewhat disheveled portrait of a man speaks to this searching for greater understanding and personal wisdom. The science of alchemy has a rich visual language of allegorical symbols, circles being among the most prominent. We see circles and spheres lacing throughout the work here, eternal forms of physical and aesthetic perfection. They reference the consummate erudition sought by alchemists, as well as the ambition to extend life indefinitely. The combination of human and divine aspirations is necessary to achieve material perfection, and in Aspen Mays’ work, contact sheets intermingle the abstraction and the inexhaustibility of the cosmos with small moments of the everyday. Like alchemy itself, this tangling of the indefinite and the exact serves to both expand and collapse our queries about what is possible. The cumulative effect over the course of these pages is one that speaks to the splendid figments of a venerable dream, one yet unrealized at the writing of this essay. Through the fusion of multilayered theories— ancient and modern—we see this dream of attaining perfection flare and recede, a beacon burning through countless nights in the minds of many. Leaping through the ages, the questions here are ones that seemingly only time can answer. But, if the alchemists ultimately have their way, we may all have plenty of that. !
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Benjamin Swanson, Melt, 2014
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Benjamin Swanson, Experiments and Failures, 2014
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Curtis Hamilton, A Slow, Hard Boil, 2014
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Justin James Reed, Untitled, 2012
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Curtis Hamilton, Gravel & Gold, 2011
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Aaron Hegert, Untitled (Obliterative Shading #1), 2014
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Andrew Williams, Quartz Mountain— Lone Wolf, Oklahoma, 2013
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Aspen Mays, Newspaper Rock (study for a photogram), 2013
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Justin James Reed, Untitled, 2012
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Justin James Reed, Untitled, 2012
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Aspen Mays, Dodge 5, 2012
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Aspen Mays, Dodge 66, 2012
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Curtis Hamilton, Blue Monster, 2011
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Sarah Palmer, Study in Primaries (Prussia, Naples, Cadmium), 2012
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Aspen Mays, Dodge 7, 2012
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EIC, Untitled EiAE Archive Image (Stack Variation #1), 2013
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Curtis Hamilton, Down Cellar Stairs, 2011
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Aaron Hegert, Untitled (Bricks), 2014
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Aspen Mays, Face of God (Stargazer II), 2013
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Benjamin Swanson, Frame, 2014
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Andrew Williams, Lake Altus—Altus, Oklahoma, 2013 — Lugert—Altus,
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Zachary Norman, Untitled (EiAE), 2013
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Zachary Norman, Exotic Matter 2_3, 2014
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Zachary Norman, Exotic Matter 2_1, 2014
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Zachary Norman, Exotic Matter 2_2, 2014
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Sarah Palmer, Mirror Dance, 2014
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Sarah Palmer, Whiteness IV (Hunt), 2013
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Andrew Williams, Pre-harvest —Marion, Kansas, 2013 — burning—Marion,
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Aspen Mays, Cerro Calán, 2010
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Sarah Palmer, Wove out of the dark, 2012
Benjamin Swanson Aspen Mays Aaron Hegert Zachary Norman Sarah Palmer Andrew Williams Justin James Reed Curtis Hamilton
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WATER EARTH FIRE AIR 01
WORDS BY CHRISTINA WILES
Earth
Alchemists believed that the four elements corresponded to materials in the natural world. Earth was represented by hard objects such as rocks and trees, which share the quality of solidness.
Similar to Brandt, Los Angeles-based artist Sam Falls relies on the chance effects of natural decay to create a series of photographic prints. Instead of water, though, Falls makes work with materials from the earth. In 2011, the artist gathered rocks and other matter from the New Mexico desert and then placed the objects on fabric treated with natural dyes he made from local plants to create a series of large-scale photograms. Falls allowed the harsh Southwestern sun to bleach the negative space around the objects, leaving behind abstract blocks of color. Falls deconstructs the photographic process, distilling it down to its most basic elements: light and lightsensitive materials. He integrates natural elements into his practice—plants to make natural dye and rocks for his photograms—and sources materials from the environment he records. It seems appropriate that a curiosity in physical processes and natural materials has emerged at a time when mass culture is increasingly produced and consumed in dematerialized digital spaces.
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! Water Earth Fire Air
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Air
In ancient Greek philosophy, the element air was associated with the mediation between Heaven and Earth.
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For her Paper Airplanes series, San Francisco-based artist Klea McKenna folded sheets of light-sensitive paper into airplanes, exposing each to the sky above a World War II anti-aircraft lookout bunker. The portion of land along the California coast where McKenna made the work is dotted with crumbling cement lookout stations. During World War II, the stations housed soldiers whose task it was to watch the sky. Charged with guarding against enemy aircraft, their work required that they spend their days observing the changing conditions of the sky. McKenna flew her light-sensitive paper airplanes over a period of one day, from dawn until dusk. Like the guardsmen, McKenna observed and recorded the changing coastal light throughout the day. The resulting prints are visual traces of the air and sun in which they were created, each one saturated in warm reds, yellows, and oranges, with areas of black where the paper was fully exposed. The creases in the prints remind the viewer of the physical process involved in making them and blur the line between sculptural object and photographic print. The artists discussed in this essay investigate materiality— they make work of and about physical materials. Brandt, Falls, McCaw, and McKenna activate an alchemical inclination to manipulate natural elements, using the transmuting power of water, earth, fire, and air to produce photographic prints. By allowing elements of chance to enter into their processes, each artist activates an experimental impulse that has been inherent to the medium of photography since its inception. "!#$
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Water Earth Fire Air
Christina Wiles lives in Oakland, California and is a curatorial assistant in photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Ouroboros
Marina
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I N T ER V I E W B Y L I Z S A L E S
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Berio
Central issues in contemporary art can be examined within a broader cultural context by engaging with experts in a range of fields. Consequently, interdisciplinary dialogue is a means to understanding larger themes in an artist’s work. Marina Berio is an artist who combines her own blood with photosensitive materials to create images of her family, harnessing the magical potential of raw materials to communicate through art making. Edward Chen is an environmental engineer and chemist who uses chlorophyll to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and transforms it into useful organic compounds. For this issue, Conveyor editor Liz Sales spoke with Berio and Chen about state changes in matter, the natural overlap between home life and creative practice, and what Greek alchemists called “one is the all,” the interconnectedness of all things. Liz Sales It seems to me that there is a great deal of overlap in both your themes of interest and methodologies. To begin with, Ed’s scientific practice is highly creative, while your creative practice—which maintains a strong relationship between materials and concepts— calls for an understanding of process well beyond a working knowledge of the darkroom. For example, Family Matter is a series of gum bichromate prints made with blood. What does that mean? How is this work actually made? Marina Berio Gum bichromate is a nineteenthcentury process in which watercolors or dry pigments are used in combination with gum arabic and a photosensitive compound to obtain color images. The photosensitive chemistry solidifies gum arabic when exposed to light, and the gum holds whatever colorant has been mixed in with it. I’ve used blood as the pigment in the emulsion instead of conventional artists’ pigments; everything else about the process is the same. Ed Chen What kind of physical reactions have you noticed using blood instead of the pigment dyes usually used in coloring gum prints? MB Well, the iron in the blood itself is unstable, causing the print to shift slowly but noticeably from a fresher, reddish brown to a more neutral brown over the course of several months as it oxidizes with exposure to light, humidity, air, and time. EC So, basically, the prints are rusting. Blood contains— MB Hemoglobin?
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EC Right, hemoglobin. Each molecule of hemoglobin contains an atom of iron at its center. Red and brown are the characteristic colors of rusted iron, and therefore also produce the same colors in blood. Chemical changes in metals tend to change their colors. This is what makes traditional photography possible; silver halides, the light-sensitive silver salt compound used in conventional photographic negatives and papers, darken in proportion to their exposure to light reflected off a photographic subject. MB That reminds me of my first darkroom class from a former chemist. In the middle of that very first magical day of development, he told us that the chemistry of black and white photography is basically a chemically accelerated version of the tarnishing of your grandma’s silver, and the yellowing of paper and of apples, and that it’s a slowed down version of what happens when paper burns. He also mentioned the rusting of iron. So, photographic chemistry has always been linked in my consciousness with fire, silver, and other types of changes of state that have associative meanings. LS I associate Ed’s work with these types of changes of state as well. For example, I read that he has developed “an electro-catalytic process of converting carbon gases, directly from air, into liquid fuels.” MB Sounds like you’re trying to save the world! Thank you. Do you think the solutions exist, and all we (and by that I mean humankind) need to do is solve production problems like those of economies of scale and transport? EC Exactly. This technology enables a low-cost method of extracting carbon dioxide from the air, creating nitrogen from that captured air, and combining it with hydrogen to make ammonia, which does not create greenhouse gas upon combustion. Basically, we have the technology to make fuel from air now and run cars off of it. LS That feels alchemical to me, as if you are performing a modern form of transmutation. EC Transmutation, turning mercury to gold, can actually be accomplished scientifically. Real gold has been synthesized from mercury by neutron bombardment, but it was radioactive. Types of transmutation happen in nature as well. One element can turn into another through radioactive decay; uranium decays into radium.
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MB Chemistry has always been about cracking the code, hasn’t it? Do you see your work as revealing truths that already exist, even if the forms have not been found yet? EC Yes. However, I have my own way of cracking those codes. In addition to reading legitimate scientific articles, full of boring data and technical details, I read ancient alchemical texts, sometimes in Latin. Many of Isaac Newton’s ideas came from these texts. LS Oh, that reminds me of August Kekulé, who attributes realizing the structure of benzene to a dream he had about the ouroboros, the alchemical symbol for interconnectedness, a snake eating its own tail. EC Right. I’ve had similar experiences. For me, alchemical concepts are so general while still touching on themes I’m interested in scientifically that I find they act as a mandala, allowing me to process all the technical, left-brained details from a right-brained perspective. LS Let’s circle back to Family Matter. We spoke about how blood functions chemically in the work, and how this is analogous to the photographic process. But blood is key to understanding the content of these images as well. Family Matter depicts your husband and son play fighting and roughhousing; blood reminds me of the dichotomy between love and violence, as well as family ties. Has creating this work given you insight into your relationship with your husband and son and their relationship with each other? MB When I first chose to pair blood with this particular imagery, I was thinking of it in reference to family, and not so much to violence. Rather, I was more specifically interested in the types of bonds that are expressed through blood: those of maternity, childbirth, and labor—in both senses of the word—and how those processes bind me to the males in the image. 02–03
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Family Matter No. 7, 2013
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Family Matter No. 1, 2013
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Family Matter No. 13, 2013
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Family Matter No. 17, 2013
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Liz Sales is an artist, writer, and educator with an interest in the relationship between technology and perception. She is a faculty and staff member at the International Center of Photography.
And while the dialectic between tenderness and aggression that exists in the images has never led to overt violence, the kind that draws blood, it has led to tears. I have definitely seen more deeply into my husband and son’s relationship through the images: at first, I thought of their sparring as an expression of some timeless oedipal struggle, and of a process of maturation in my son. But after making the prints and discussing them with many people, especially men, I have come to learn that while this is partially true, the images are also very much about my husband and son as individuals. My husband’s relationship with his father is getting played out as well, as are other aspects of his personality. EC So, nothing is staged? MB It’s not staged photography. They’ll start fighting and I’ll grab the camera and get what I can get. I started when our son was about eight years old, when there was a huge imbalance of power between him and my husband. So, my son would often end up crying. The emotional frustration of fighting with someone who’s bigger than you would be too much for him. EC He doesn’t let him win at all? MB Yes, of course, if you’re a dad, you let your kid pummel you a little bit. But eventually you show who’s who, you know? EC Fair enough. MB Now that they’re more evenly matched in strength, he doesn’t burst out in tears. He’s a teenager. And there’s also more tenderness and a sort of humor in the recent images; they’re more likely to be smiling. LS I see a significant overlap between your home life and practice too, Ed. For example, you and your partner, Tara, are both working heavily with chlorophyll. EC Well, Tara is an artist and she gets me to use materials and methods I wouldn’t have thought of on my own. She was scanning images of dried chlorophyll, which got me thinking about the plant material as a natural catalyst. This was key in the creation of my aforementioned carbon-dioxide reactor, which mimics photosynthesis. More broadly, we are both interested in the basic components that make up nature, which we got a chance to speak about, together, at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C.
Ouroboros
LS For me, that talk and exhibition, more than just broadening my understanding of your individual work, underscored the potential our practices have to deepen our relationships. For instance, in Family Matter, I see a parallel between a photographer’s life outside the image and a mother’s life, customarily, but not necessarily, outside of family roughhousing. Marina, do you see infusing your blood into this work as a way of engaging in the activity depicted? MB Yes, it’s my way of saying that a photographer is implicated in the images she creates, even if she is completely outside of the frame, and not engaged in staging the action, and that similarly, a mother is the author of her family. And, my roles as photographer and mother are, furthermore, closely linked to each other in terms of my capacity to see what is happening around me and think critically about it. A photographer is always implied in the images she makes, and visual experience is always embodied. I am a great disbeliever in photographic objectivity. EC I think science is subjective, too, at least in the discovery and invention process. Some scientists box in their thinking in order to be objective, often freezing themselves into an unproductive paradigm. Objectivity is necessary once data needs to be collected, which is what most people associate with “science.” However, the scientists doing the best work are really tinkerers. LS Exactly. I would say experimentation is the lifeblood of any discipline. That’s why I believe interdisciplinary dialogue is so vital; new ideas help us in constructing a more complex understanding of the world. Ancient Greek alchemists studied the arts and the nature of matter, as well as medicine, religion, mathematics, cosmology, and so on. Although all these disciplines evolved into their own fields of study, each can still be more richly understood in relation to the others. %
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TERRES ASTRONOMY 58
WORDS BY CHRISTINA L ABEY
TRIAL 01
Man is a microcosm, or a little world, because he is an extract from all the stars and planets of the whole firmament, from the earth and the elements; and so he is their quintessence.—Paracelsus
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Earthrise, Apollo 8, the first manned mission to the moon, entered lunar orbit on Christmas Eve, Dec. 24, 1968, courtesy of NASA
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Region of the Polar South, Deep Incision in the Polar Sedimentary Strata, LAT: -86.1° LONG: 172.1° From This Is Mars (Aperture, 2013) © NASA/JPL/University of Arizona. The sedimentary strata are mostly composed here of ice from water and not carbonic ice. The fractures that traverse these strata come from strong, seasonal thermal variations that can reach close to 100° C (212° F). —Nicolas Mangold
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Harmakhis Vallis, Part of Which is from a Glacier Flow, LAT: -37.7° LONG: 95.6° From This Is Mars (Aperture, 2013) © NASA/JPL/ University of Arizona. The zones at lower latitudes (between 40° and 60°) contain very large proportions of ice, notably in the form of glaciers. In the present case, the glacier flows toward the lower-left part of the image— as the nearly parallel lines, all running in the same direction, indicate. A detailed viewing allows even smaller lines perpendicular to this direction to be perceived. These are fractures or crevasses similar to the crevasses that are formed on the glaciers of the Alps, notably when the glacier rolls down the sides of the reliefs. —Nicolas Mangold
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The marriage of physical matter and the transcendental in alchemy is analogous to that of the scientific and the spiritual in photography—both are fundamentally technical, but also conjure a sense of the otherworldly. The field of astronomy also belongs here: the study of the cosmos enlightens us about matter and its role in the origin of the universe and Earth itself, in addition to being a space of divine projection and meditation on the unknown. Humans have been gazing at the heavens since the beginning of recorded history, making astronomy the oldest of the natural sciences. Astronomy is closely linked with the early technical development of photography, insofar as both fields are essentially the study of light. It seems appropriate that a physicist and astronomer would be the one to present the invention of the daguerreotype, on behalf of Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, to the public. In 1839, Dominique François Arago introduced the daguerreotype to the French Chamber of Deputies. While he certainly predicted its contributions to the world at large, he also recognized its potential to advance his own field, and predicted that it would “accelerate the progress of one of the sciences [astronomy] which most honors the human spirit.” 1 The Hermetic maxim “as above, so below,” derived from The Emerald Tablet, refers to a material connection between the terrestrial and the celestial, suggesting that humans may better understand themselves by looking upward. Further establishing this correlation is the alchemical affiliation of the seven classical planets with the seven metals of antiquity: the Sun, the Moon, Venus, Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn were directly associated with Gold, Silver, Copper, Mercury, Iron, Tin, and Lead, respectively. The observation of the planets was integral to the advancement of early civilization, just as the seven metals paved the way for modernity. Traces of these elements are also prevalent in the evolution of the photographic process—from the daguerreotype to digital practices. In her essay “The Material Ethereal: Photography and the Alchemical Ancestor,” Laurie Dahlberg suggests that the practice of medieval alchemy was the original source for one of three key components that eventually produced the first photograph. The first two—the camera obscura and light-sensitive compounds—were known well before the nineteenth century. The optical lens dates back to antiquity; however, though it was used in tools such as the camera obscura and the telescope, it offered only a fleeting glimpse at its subjects. In the eighteenth century, a mere hundred years before the first Terrestrial Astronomy
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1 Dominique François Arago, “Report” in Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New Haven: Leete’s Island Books, 1980), 21.
Electroshock Reverie
David
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WORDS BY DOMINICA PAIGE
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! Goldes
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Electricity gives life to the lifeless. Victor Frankenstein taught us this lesson. David Goldes’ Electro-graphs appear as though they are leaves torn from the notebook of the mad scientist, a map of his observations and analyses as he prepares for his venture into creation. The figure of Frankenstein fits well in the alchemical tradition if we recognize that Shelley’s fantasy is one of transforming the everyday into the transcendent. Frankenstein found himself capable of the impossible: animating the dead. Goldes’ work provokes the same sort of disbelief, as his images expose the subtlety and the deep significance of the moment of revelation, and draw attention to the dramatic experimental history and the sacrifices of early scientists. His electrified photographs teeter like a scientist on the verge of discovery: full of anticipation and fascination. Until the dawn of the Scientific Revolution, electricity was nearly inconceivable; the ancients attributed the phenomenon to the gods, whose powers were boundless, and they often interpreted lightning as a message from them. It is, after all, quite challenging to imagine, much less make sense of, something that exists, yet holds none of the physical properties of a solid, liquid, or gas; that has no weight or visibility; that claims no territory yet moves tremendous distances at great velocity. And yet, despite these otherworldly characteristics, it is something that is a ubiquitous and elemental part of nature. And here lies still another enigma that must be grappled with: electricity manifests in a variety of ways that have no obvious unity. Lightning has no clear connection to magnetic attraction, which has no distinct affiliation with the aurora borealis, which does not seem to be conspicuously related to static electricity, which has no evident alliance with electric fish; yet all are the result of the same natural occurrence. With a background in biology, chemistry, and molecular genetics, Goldes certainly has more than a rudimentary understanding of natural phenomena and scientific endeavors. Yet in spite of his expertise, he parses complex concepts in straightforward ways. He captures the transitions that occur naturally in the world by demonstrating basic principles in alluring ways, reminding us that in explanation lies astonishment.
Electroshock Reverie
To make his Electro-graphs, Goldes first sketches out expressive and energetic drawings in graphite, a conductor made of carbon atoms, before erasing small segments of the drawings or making thin incisions in them, which will serve to disrupt the circuit. He then attaches the drawings to conductor cables and ignites them with a crackle of electric current. When the current is broken, the invisible charge becomes visible as it dances across the paper’s surface where the circuit has been fractured. Goldes photographs the resulting gold-dappled spectacle. That the gap itself ignites the images is noteworthy—within the rupture lies the magic. With wonderful momentum, the sparks dart to and fro in rapid flashes, chasing each other, alive. They slither across the drawings like electric eels. A notebook page is seared in half by Prometheus; Morse code messages crystallize as the electricity forges a path across a page freckled with fringe-dots; a pencil stands upright and furiously flaunts its etchings in dark, smoke-colored rings. In creating these works, Goldes pays homage to the electric experiments of English chemist Sir Humphry Davy and his assistant, chemist and physicist Michael Faraday. In their lectures at London’s Royal Institution in the early 19th century, they demonstrated how electrical arcs work by passing a current through pointed tips of carbon rods as the rods touched. Sending the current through the rods heats them to the point that the carbon vaporizes. As the rods are drawn apart, the vapor carries the current across the small gap, glowing fiercely as it does so, and rendering electricity visible. This same premise is applied by Goldes to create his Electro-graphs, and likewise, the same reverence is experienced when viewing them. During Davy and Faraday’s era, scientific analysis was not altogether separate from aesthetic admiration. Science and art were not completely divided, and in Goldes’ work, we see the two entangled in a collapsing of history, time, experiment, and spectacle. The Electro-graphs are thick with the stimulating wonder that we imagine the audiences of Davy and Faraday’s demonstrations experienced, and indeed, that Davy and Faraday themselves must have felt before their own findings. Mystery and awe are such powerful driving forces that it seems, no matter how much clarification logic and reason can provide, the lure of the enchanting persists. As Oscar Wilde famously said, “Knowledge would be fatal. It is the uncertainty that charms one. A mist makes things wonderful.” !
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W O R D S BY L I Z S A L E S
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ORDINARY DETRITUS
The connection between Davey’s subject matter and her use of film extends to her mail-art process. Her first mail-art piece was an 11” x 17” exhibition poster— a screen-grab from her video, Fifty Minutes, folded and mailed unpackaged to John Goodwin at Goodwater Gallery in 2007. She fully embraced this strategy as a regular part of her process while living in Paris the following year. She sent prints to New York for an exhibition at Murray Guy, liberating herself from the white-gloved ritual of framing, crating, and shipping art. “Physicality makes this approach appealing,” Davey explains.
1 Arthur Edward Waite, The Hermetic Museum, restored and enlarged: most faithfully instructing all disciples of the Sopho-Spagyric art how that greatest and truest medicine of the philosopher’s stone may be found and held (York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser, 1991), 461-462. Liz Sales is cataloged as a bibliographic item with International Center of Photography Library. A bibliographic item can be any information entity, e.g. books, realia, cartographic materials, or in Liz’s case, Liz.
I was trained to believe a mark or ding on the surface of a photograph ruined it, but these photographs become objects that record the passage of time in space with marks, traces, and bits of colored tape. My body goes into folding each one in half and then down to letter size. I tape and address them, and they go right into the mailbox. Later, they get unfolded, flattened, and pinned directly to the gallery or museum wall. They bear witness to their own manipulation and handling. They’re not pristine. They challenge the photograph as an authoritative object.
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Last year, Davey combined the aforementioned strategies by taking macro-photographs of Lincoln on US pennies and then sending the subsequent prints through the postal service, creating a series of one hundred new images, Copperheads 101-200. The folds and postmarks on these prints amplify the scratches and oxidation on the decaying surfaces of the pennies pictured. Likewise, the indexical nature of Copperheads underscores the photographic qualities in her unique mail-art process. In alchemical terms, this work acknowledges the co-orbital path of transmutation and immortality; these objects are removed from and then returned to time. Her rigorous view of ordinary detritus scattered throughout the everyday reminds us of all we neglect to consider as we move through our daily lives. Moyra Davey challenges us to be more conscious in the present moment by showing us that all matter is aging and collecting dust, that not even a photograph is static. "
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Copperheads 101-200, 2013, 100 c-prints, tape, postage, ink
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Floor, 2003
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Copperhead No. 48, 1990
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Ashes to Ashes, 12 c-prints, tape, postage, ink, 2012
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Shure, 2003 Courtesy of Murray Guy, New York
Divine Potential of Ordinary Detritus
TYPOGRAPHY NOTES
The display type in this issue was developed for Conveyor by Dinamo, the creative collaboration of Johannes Breyer and Fabian Harb. Based on Dinamo’s own typeface Favorit, which they are currently readying for commerical release, the type seen here evolves throughout the issue in a process inspired by the four stages of the magnum opus, an alchemical process for producing the Philosopher’s Stone. This substance, believed by alchemists to turn base metals into gold, was thought to be the essence of perfection and has been sought after for centuries. Though their goals were more modest, Breyer and Harb’s pursuit of typographic excellence was no less rigorous than that of their gold-seeking predecessors. Here, they discuss this process with Elana Schlenker.
issue of Conveyor. Can you tell me more about this project? How did it arise and what was the process of developing this complex typographic system? D The idea for Grow derived from a 70s Letraset specimen in which some three-dimensional designs caught our attention. Being opposite to most of our designs, working on a display typeface felt tempting and we started to look deeper into possibilities of layers and combinatorics. The project grew to quite a substantial size, and with the technical help of type engineer Gustavo Ferreira we developed the Grow family into sixty-three possible combinations of its six basic outlines. ES After abandoning Grow as an option for this issue, we started speaking about developing a custom display face using an existing type design as a starting point. You suggested Favorit—tell me about this typeface and its background. D Favorit has coped with a few duties so far: its first bits were drawn as a logo for Sarah O’Sullivan, a textile designer in London—letters with a mechanical feel, but a human touch. We completed the alphabet for an upcoming website for the Berlin-based photographer Joseph Kadow, and then later, Favorit served in the 300-plus-page catalogue we designed for the Brno Biennial. After that field-test, it seemed clear to us that Favorit would provide the solid base we needed to materialize our idea for Conveyor.
Elana How did you begin working together? Dinamo At the time that we met, Johannes was investigating the Zurich school’s heritage, while Fabian trusted in Basel’s reputation. Having both been shaped by a Swiss education, we had similar interests and started a personal exchange based on many of these basic principles. Afterwards, we both lived in the Netherlands for a while, so it felt only natural to start working together—mostly on books and typefaces. ES I first became aware of your work through your Grow typeface—and actually briefly tested it out for this
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ES We initially discussed having you develop an extra glyph set of a dozen or so characters that would reference alchemical processes by undergoing some kind of transformation in their application, potentially through ligature combinations. We explored some initial glyphs in this vein, but you ultimately came back and proposed a series of typefaces. Would you walk through these early explorations and how they led us to where we are now? D We immediately liked the idea of interpreting the alchemy theme as a development, pervading the magazine from front to back. Starting with tests though, we realized that the transformation had to be segregated from the content, rather than provide an additional ingredient. From there, we developed an alchemic magnum opus and re-enacted the shapes of Favorit step by step: the cubic skeleton changes to an angular construction, becomes a quasi-round pixel cluster, then arrives at the smoothly curved Favorit shapes. They all speak the same language, but each in its own vocabulary. ES Did reducing Favorit into base elements produce any interesting revelations about the typeface, or change your relationship with it? D Developing a narrative with four individual voices required precise proportions and relations between both characters and typefaces— leveling this scope sharpened the type’s features the same way it reassured us of Favorit’s overall tone.
ES What’s next for Favorit? When will it be released? D Behind the scenes, Favorit has been expanding to a small family—we’ve completed Light and Bold weights, as well as their Italics. With our friend Jakub Straka, we’re developing a new website for Dinamo on the side—all this grows together, surfacing later this year. The evolution of Conveyor Favorit, from top to bottom: 1 Grow: Illustrating Dinamo’s systematic working method. 2 Conveyor-Levels: First sketches, nodding at original alchemic symbols, without showing them off. 3 Conceptual drawing: Says Dinamo, “Our final solution visualized. A good concept can be drawn by a child.” 4
The final four levels.
I N T E RV I E W BY E L A N A S C H L E N K E R
Conveyor Magazine The Alchemy Issue No. 6 —2014
Founding Editors Christina Labey and Jason Burstein Editors Dominica Paige, Jeremy Haik, and Liz Sales Copy Editor Zach Slanger Design & Layout Elana Schlenker and Christina Labey Editorial Assistants Magali Duzant and Mina Pekovic Intern Lauren Wansker Custom Typeface Conveyor Favorit by Dinamo (Johannes Breyer & Fabian Harb) Printed and Bound at Conveyor Arts in the USA Printed on an HP Indigo in CMYK + Pantone 289C & Pantone 423C. Duotone separations made by Andrew P. Frost. Cover Image EIC, EiAE #1. 2013 Inside Front Cover Image EIC, Untitled EiAE Archive Image (Field Study w/ Prism). 2013 Inside Back Cover Moyra Davey, Valerie Plame, 2013 (c-prints, tape, postage, ink), courtesy of Murray Guy, New York
Contact Conveyor Editions 888 Newark Avenue, No. 491 Jersey City, New Jersey 07306 conveyoreditions.com
Conveyor Editions, 2014 The included photographs are the copyright of the artists. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without permission from the publisher. The views expressed in this publication do not necessarily reflect the views of the writers, artists, or editors of Conveyor. ISBN 978-0-9908016-1-0