NOTEBOOK

Andreas Gursky: Global Photographer

Michael Rustin nently. There are photographs of Niagara Falls, Schipol Airport, people at a mountaintop ski restaurant (these are almost the only human figures seen close up in the show), and distant OMETIMES the essence of a societal mo- lines of skiers in the Alps. There is a memo- ment is well captured by an individual rable photograph of a tiny cable car crossing a artist. Such is the case for German pho- snowfield with hardly a visible support. tographers Andreas Gursky, whose work—dis- Although Gursky does not labor the obvi- played this spring in his first retrospective ous, one does not look long at the photographs (1984-2000) at New York's Museum of Mod- without grasping where power lies in this ern Art (MoMA)—captures much of the con- world. He produces images of stock exchanges, temporary essence of . Whereas vast trading floors, and such architectural icons the forms of modernity seem to be imposed of global finance as the Hong Kong and Shang- forcibly on the world in the work of the pio- hai Bank. There is a stunning diptych of the neers of modernism, they return to us in boards of directors of various German corpo- Gursky's photographs from a world already fully rations seated in line, politburo-style, against modernized. We experience modernity not only the backdrop of a snow-covered mountain. as viewers of these images, but also through Looking up at them from below are the anony- identification with our surrogates—the mostly mous shareholders, seen as if from the back anonymous human subjects—who are de- of a hall. Floating above the board members— picted. more substantial and familiar than their names Gursky's photographs are high-tech produc- or faces—is a line of corporate logos. tions: they are huge, saturated with color, and The economic world is also featured in pho- call to mind a hyper-naturalism reminiscent of tographs of the Siemens factory interior in the heightened reality of cinema. Digital tech- Karlsruhe, the port of Salerno, immense hori- nologies have enabled Gursky to create a van- zontal displays of high-fashion shoes and sneak- tage point that is more comprehensive than ers, and a 99 - cent supermarket interior de- what is available to the unaided human eye, picted in its horrible synthetic colors. Facing both wider in angle and deeper in focus. The billboards that display the Toyota and Toys "R" images combine the artifice of painting with Us logos remind us that images like these need the naturalism of photography. Their formal- nothing else to tell their story. The Olympic ism and coolness of approach avoid confusion logo on an Albertville mountainside makes a with all but the best commercial photography. reflexive point about the image business, as we (Gursky was once a commercial photographer.) immediately infer that the sign was placed They refuse advocacy or direct statement, ex- there for coverage of the events by the world's cept perhaps in some implicit advocacy of the media. art of architecture. Gursky shows an environment dominated Gursky depicts a society of spectacles. Pho- by the large geometrical forms of industrial tographed in vast arenas are a rave, boxing modernism: massive buildings, bridges, a semi- match, rock concert, the Winter Olympics in circular library (whose books, organized by lan- Albertville, and the 2000 Soccer World Cup guage, evoke the globe), soccer fields, high- in . Travel/tourism—now one of the ways, and the Rhine river seen as a semi-ab- world's largest industries—also figures promi- stract horizontal band. One mountain view is

DISSENT / Summer 2001 ■ 97 NOTEBOOK seen through the aluminium slats of a Vene- subordinate within it. They do the things tian blind. The photograph of Salerno's port people do–working on a highway or enjoying a sets vast lots of new cars awaiting shipment, rave–but there is little sense that this world is freight containers, and apartment complexes being created by its human subjects. The pho- against the natural curves and colors of the tographs suggest the opposite: human subjects surrounding mountains. Nature is not faring are being constructed by large, impersonal well in the contest with the modern. forces, in particular by the corporations that are the most visible agencies of power. HE HUMAN world, too, is shown to pos- Indeed, corporations must be among the sess a definite order but of a less geo- few institutions, apart from galleries, able to T metric and mechanical kind. At a rock display photographs so large. One can even de- concert, fans' leaning toward the band on the scribe an institution like MoMA, now engaged stage is like the tropism of plants toward light. in a large expansion, as a corporation, branded The skiers at Engadine drift across the picture and merchandised like any other. in an immense column, but the minute figures As Peter Galassi points out in his informa- within it also gather in small eddies and clus- tive catalogue essay, Gursky's work has moved ters. One is reminded of chaos theory, a char- from the local to the global—from children acteristic intellectual product of the globalized playing soccer on a local field to Holland's na- world. The theory identifies a domain of or- tional team at the World Cup—reflecting his dered complexity lying between the linear de- international success. , New York, terminism of the classical era and mere ran- , Brasilia, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Shang- domness and disorder. In the tropisms that hai, are all global hot spots of different bind his massed crowds together, Gursky kinds. The "other side" of globalization—the seems to have found a visual correlate for the vast agglomerations of the poor in Mexico City, "strange attractors" that give coherence to ap- Bombay, or Johannesburg—is largely missing parent disorder. at this point. Given that Gursky refused mili- Sometimes finding where, if anywhere, or- tary service in his youth and chose to work in- der lies is the problem posed by the photo- stead in health care, one wonders how long this graphs. What exactly happened on the will go on. Amsterdam soccer field, for example, just be- Looking for the "flip side" of global pros- fore the photo was taken? What has the ref- perity might pose problems for Gursky's cool eree with his arm outstretched just decided, aesthetic. It seems important to him above all and how did one player end up injured on the to show the visual power of this world and its ground with no one anywhere near him or com- fascination for us. After all, this is a way of un- ing to his aid? derstanding it. Still, a hint of how he might In the Cairo diptych—which appears to be approach the other task can be seen in the two aerial views of a parking lot taken from the Cairo diptych, which suggests greater confu- same vantage point—there is another visual sion and disorder than any other image in the and temporal puzzle. How long was the inter- show. The viewer might think the two photo- val between the two shots, and why do the dif- graphs depict a disaster of some kind, although ferences in positions of the vehicles and their this does not seem to be the case. Yet they do passengers seem to be so arbitrary and unin- suggest possibilities of representing other kinds telligible? of order and disorder in a globalized world than Where we see more human subjects, as in those to which Andreas Gursky's travels have the ski restaurant at St. Moritz, they appear taken him so far. • comfortable enough. Yet the essence of this world seems to be that its human subjects are MICHAEL RUSTIN is the editor of Soundings.

98 ■ DISSENT / Summer 2001