Scans

 

"It seems to me that the modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance

or of any other past culture. Each age find its own technique."                                                                                                                                                      Jackson Pollock        

Link to SCANS book on blurb.     

Art has seen as much experimentation in the last 150 years as the previous 1500 years. This accelerated rate of change occurred in a period of increased scientific knowledge of nature and parallel social developments. The style of figurative realism that emerged in the Renaissance was challenged by the rebellious era of modern art that started at the Salon des Refusés exhibition in Paris in 1863. During the 20th century three methods of image making: photograms, holography and flat-bed scanners, provide insights into the values of modern art. Although recording images without a camera lens, they all share a similarity to photography. As well as recording objects, they subtly transform their appearance, in different ways that are unique to each method.

Photogram by Man Ray

published in Painting 

Photography Film 

(page 77)

Photograms are cameraless photographs created by placing objects directly onto a light-sensitive surface, usually photographic paper, and exposing the composition to light. Unless reversed by copying, photograms are negatives where exposure to light creates darkness. Because a camera lens is not used, images of objects placed on the film or photographic paper are recorded same size. Photograms are as uncanny as images on a pre-digital radar scope, with potentially recognisable white silhouettes emerging from a dark ground. Photograms are the opposite of picturesque. The brooding darkness of their backgrounds suggests a form of 'technological sublime' (1) that is even more explicit in x-ray pictures.

​Photograms have an ambiguous relationship to the cannon of 'serious' photography as they were often used as an introductory exercise for those learning chemistry-based photography. They were the photographic equivalent of learning scales on a piano, with visible tones instead of musical notes, but they also became associated with modern art. Whereas cameras have been designed to imitate the type of perspective associated with Renaissance painting, the distinctive effects made by photograms aligned with the modernist principle of being "truthful to materials" and the older adage "form follows function".

Anyone who has seen an Anglepoise lamp has experienced these ideas made solid. The car designer George Carwardine invented the iconic desk lamp after researching car suspension systems, creating a functional task lamp that was also attractive in the terms of the Bauhaus-inspired ‘machine aesthetic'. Just as the Anglepoise lamp has a stark beauty arising from the expression of mechanical levers and springs, so a photogram is a rather severe image created by the ability of a photographic emulsion to record the beguiling effects of light passing through translucent objects and around the edges of solids but without the more traditionally pleasing effects of chiaroscuro associated with photographs made with a lens. Objects registered as white shadows are uncanny.

​László Moholy-Nagy included photograms made by himself, and the American photographer Man Ray, in his influential book Painting Photography Film published in 1925 (2) in which he postulated an aesthetic and philosophical revolution called "The New Vision" that would unleash the creative potential of society. He described photograms as "light composition, in which light must be sovereignly handled as a new creative means, like colour in paintings and sound in music." Light could create "a new kinetic space-time rendering". (3) Moholy-Nagy derided the "Ruskin-Morris circle" who he accused of ignoring the need to harness machine production to meet the 'biological' needs of society. The New Vision was to be based on technology.

Solar eclipse on 29th May 1919 

photographed by Arthur Eddington. 

The observed deflection of 

starlight by gravity confirmed 

Einstein's theory of relativity 

and was reported enthusiastically 

worldwide.

Moholy-Nagy speculated that novel optical systems such as prismatic lenses and cameras able to view objects from multiple positions could surpass cubist painting, but new forms of sculpture would acknowledge Einstein's theory of relativity. Whereas the pictures of Futurism showed a superimposition of the object in a sequence of linear movement and Cubism rendered the object as if it were rotated in space, Moholy-Nagy wanted to 'paint' with "flowing, oscillating, prismatic light, in lieu of pigments" to "allow us a better approach to the new conception of space-time." (4) He made light/kinetic sculptures for the 1936 film Things to Come, although they were eventually not included in the finished production.

​A complete 'phase transition' of society suggested by the concept of The New Vision (5) never happened, but in 1949 a photographic process capable of exploring Moholy-Nagy's fascination with space/time was proposed. The physicist and engineer Dennis Gabor calculated that combining light reflected from an object with light sent directly to a photographic emulsion would create interference patterns from which a fully three-dimensional image, a hologram, could be reconstructed.

Older methods of stereoscopic photography

Moholy-Nagy would have been fascinated

by holography. In The New Vision - 

Abstract of an Artist he wrote about 

neoplasticism and how constructivist artists 

had sprayed very thin, iridescent layers of

paint on polished surfaces, metals and

synthetic materials "..to which the reflecting

layer underneath gives an ethereal fluctuating

appearance..,.The surface becomes a part of

the atmosphere, of the atmospheric background;

it sucks up light phenomena produced outside

itself...." (Page 39) His description sounds rather

like the experience of viewing a hologram.

create the impression of depth but lack a sense of the roundness of objects. Confusingly, both stereoscopy and holography are often referred to as "3D" pictures. For holography to work it is necessary to use light of a single wavelength which was not fully available until the invention of the laser.​ After the first laser-based hologram was made in 1964 the medium's status as an art form was questioned. The invention of photography between 1825 and 1850 was followed by a similar period of speculation as to whether it could be considered art. For critics in the 20th century the issue of photography was resolved by modernism which valued characteristics that are unique to specific media. For painting, the qualities of flatness and colour were regarded as essential modernist qualities. Paradoxically, the mechanical aspects of photography (as opposed to eye/hand skills) that caused art critics to doubt that it was an art form in the 19th Century allowed the medium to claim a special position within modernism.

​Surrealism and abstraction were important developments in modernism but the ability of photography to record images outside human imagination was equally significant. Both the blurring of objects caused by motion in long exposures and the ultra-sharpness of high-speed photography exceed human perception. Similarly, holography initially only seemed to be a kind of photographic sculpture, but at the University of Nottingham the 1970s Margaret Benyon undertook a fellowship in fine art in the mechanical engineering department where she was able to establish a holography studio and explore a unique feature of the medium.

​

Margaret Benyon's 'hot air' hologram.
Column of rising air appears dark and
flat among rounded objects.

To make a successful hologram, the photographic emulsion must receive light directly from a laser as well as light reflected from the objects being recorded. As the interference pattern created in the emulsion is a very precise record of the interaction of the wavefront from the laser and the wavefront modified by the shapes of objects, nothing in the arrangement should move by more than a fraction of the wavelength of the light in use. Benyon discovered that movement as slight as the drying of bread would cause a loaf to appear as a flat, dark silhouette. Experiments confirmed that holograms can register time as well as three dimensions in a single image, as Moholy-Nagy desired half a century earlier. Benyon's most intriguing images recorded the movement of hot air from a cup as flat, dark plumes. Time compresses three dimensions into two. (6)

​Holography made little impact on the art world, either in the exclusive collectors' art market or the more socially orientated public art sector. Perhaps the exploitation of the ability to register tiny movements of objects as 'non-holograms' was one of the last throws of the dice for modernism. Many of the creative techniques of modernist photography can be thought of as qualified failures in that they are departures from the norms of Renaissance art. Blurring caused by motion, depth of field rendering backgrounds out of focus, the compression of perspective by telephoto lenses and the near spherical perspective of fish-eye lenses are all photographic tropes that make a virtue out of the unconventional. Depiction of movement as a black silhouette in an otherwise three- dimensional field is a uniquely holographic, and modernist, characteristic.

The set up for Margaret Benyon's hot air hologram.

The expectation that artists should use characteristics that are unique to the nature of a particular medium, creating artwork that is as much an expression of its physical properties as any subject, has not spread to popular culture. From the earliest days of cinema, painted backdrops were a common feature of filmed illusions. A current trend is towards the increasing use of computer-generated images in films. Additionally, postmodernism has produced an 'anything goes' culture which influences all media. For artists there is the challenge of deciding what not to include or generate, so great are the possibilities afforded by digital technology.

​Flatbed scanners are associated with digital editing of images and postmodern expectations. For anyone wanting to scan a photograph the software that enables the scanner to operate with a computer presents a preview image and offers the user an opportunity to adjust brightness, contrast and colour before the subsequent image is created. Further digital manipulation can contribute to the elision between photography and illustration, where any departure from visual accuracy is accepted if it is made with sincere and obvious intention. Maps and pictures made for manuals or textbooks are expected to dispense with surplus detail for the sake of clarity. Similarly, the routine surveillance of the Earth by satellites is increasingly undertaken by thematic mapping projects that concentrate of specific geophysical information such as ice-cover or vegetation types. The Earth rotates under them as they orbit from pole to pole, rather like the action of a flatbed scanner.

​Scanners use LEDs for illumination combined with multiple detectors arranged together on a single moving bar that sweeps the underside of a glass platen on which documents or objects can be placed. Scanners were not designed to record objects, so their traveling perspective produces distortions caused by parallel projections in the resultant image. Depth of field is about one centimetre and unreflected light creates dark backgrounds. The darkness is similar to 'flash falloff' seen in photographs taken by the light of an electronic flashgun. Photograms, holography and scanners record distance as darkness because they project light in a dynamic way without relying on ambient illumination.

​Unlike human vision, the photogram process, holograms and scanners bombard their subjects with photons. The phrase "suffocating darkness" is revealing because light feels like it belongs to the air that we breathe. Looking up at a blue sky, there is no apparent difference between atmosphere and light. When a cloud uncovers the sun, light enters a room like fine dust falling from the air. The disparity between the searchlight of technology and how we see, influences how our attention to nature becomes divided between science and art. 1970s Land Art (originally called Earth Art) came close to reconciling this difference.

Land Art projects, mostly in remote areas of the United States, were 

Double Negative was excavated by Michael
Heizer in 1969. 240,000 tons of rock was
bulldozed from two sides of a valley wall.
The sculpture is a void that demonstrates
the imposition of geometry on the
landscape,and by implication, the whole
of nature.

created in the 1960s and 1970s. The Earth artists individually embarked on a series of diverse sculptural projects, on the scale of civil engineering, using the material of the landscape itself. One of Robert Smithson's early works exhibited mirrors, rock, gravel and sand in an art gallery. The materials were removed from a distant site where mirrors had also been placed and photographed. The methodology resembled a museum exhibit that had resulted from geology fieldwork. Walter De Maria's Lightning Field (1977) almost functions as a science experiment. At a high-altitude site in New Mexico in the United States, De Maria created a one kilometre by one mile array of polished metal poles placed vertically in the ground 67 metres apart. Lightning is said to "sense" the poles when it is within 61 metres of them. (7)

​Land Art seems to have signified an end to the development of landscape art, but it is possible to consider a return of nature to a central position in contemporary art. Imagine a Venn diagram with nature in art at the centre, surrounded by four circles. Firstly, nature that is revealed by science. Secondly, the tradition of landscape art that represents nature as beautiful, sublime or picturesque. Thirdly, climate change, a new mass extinction period and the expansion of the technosphere (the built environment, mining spoil, farming, solar power collectors etc). Fourthly, ambitious plans such as altering plant genomes to enable them to use more atmospheric carbon dioxide, producing 'meat' protein in bioreactors and the duplication of the energy of the sun in thermonuclear power stations. 

(1) Strip mining (2) Contour ploughing (3) The Palm Jumeirah, Dubai - 5.6 square kilometre land reclamation development. 

The expansion of human activity to encompass the majority of the Earth has supported a massive increase in population. This means that there is no simple way back to a pre-industrial world that existed before the Anthropocene. Behind the concept of 'sustainability' lie complicated choices around the degree of artificial management of biological and Earth systems. 

​​The Anthropocene epoch is so called because humans are now a geological force. We cause global climate change, move more material than river erosion, control three quarters of land not under ice and are also influencing the course of evolution. The image of a self-consistent nature depicted in traditional landscape art is not true in the Anthropocene. Some of the Land Art projects of the last century presaged this new situation. A new direction for art as metaphor for the complicated and problematic interface between nature and technology in the 21st century is available. Rather than attempting to create visual equivalents to the complexity of all environmental issues art could be a sensitised surface that provides opportunities for contemplation of artificiality itself.

Wooded Landscape with Figures Walking by a Sandy Bank. 

This painting by Jan Wijnants (active 1643 - 1684)  shows 

the remains of an original coastline resulting from the 

reclamation of land from the sea in Holland. This 

picturesque depiction of one aspect of the technosphere 

may appear to be anachronistic, but the type of cultivated 

landscape familiar from landscape painting is equally 

artificial.

 

(1) Nye, David E. American Technological Sublime. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994.

​(2) (3) (4) Moholy-Nagy, László, Hans Maria. Wingler, and Janet. Seligman. Painting, Photography, Film. London: Lund Humphries, 1967.

(5) Moholy-Nagy, László The New Vision ; and, Abstract of an Artist. New York: Wittenborn, 1947.

(6) Benthall, Jonathan. Science and Technology in Art Today. London: Thames and Hudson, 1972.

(7) Kastner, Jeffrey., and Brian. Wallis. Land and Environmental Art : Themes and Movements. London: Phaidon, 1998.Page 109.

 

Link to SCANS book on blurb