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JSP_intro_FIN.indd 4 18.06.10 13:28 JSP_intro_FIN.indd 5 18.06.10 13:28 JSP_intro_FIN.indd 6 18.06.10 13:28 JSP_intro_FIN.indd 7 18.06.10 13:28 JSP_intro_FIN.indd 8 18.06.10 13:28 JSP_intro_FIN.indd 9 18.06.10 13:28 JSP_intro_FIN.indd 10 18.06.10 13:28 JSP_intro_FIN.indd 11 18.06.10 13:28 JSP_intro_FIN.indd 12 18.06.10 13:28 PETRA GILOY-HIRTZ PRESTEL | MUNICH · BERLIN · LONDON · NEW YORK JSP_intro_FIN.indd 13 18.06.10 13:28 Art brings you into the eternal present every time you see it in person. Traditionally, photography is supposed to capture an event that has passed; but that is not what I’m looking for. Photography brings the past into the present when you look at it; it is called art. A photograph that I’m attracted to allows a detail to rise of its own accord. Julian Schnabel RZ_JS_polaroids_rl_mh.indd 10 18.06.10 13:14 RZ_JS_polaroids_rl_mh.indd 11 18.06.10 13:14 JULIAN SCHNABEL . POLAROIDS A RECORDING OF LIFE RZ_JS_polaroids_rl_mh.indd 12 18.06.10 13:14 Julian Schnabel has pictures in his head. The American painter and film director has been taking unique photographs over the past several years using a rare twenty by twenty-four inch Polaroid Land camera made in the 1970s. It produces Polaroids of a dramatic scale, in black-and- white, color, and sepia. They have considerable aesthetic power and an emotional aura. “These photographs happened by lucky coincidence—somebody gave me the camera to use to take a picture for an auction. … I hadn’t thought I was a photographer.” The relationship developed quickly. “I used the camera to record the scale of places and things I was making. It was able to do that.” 1 Schnabel took his first Polaroids in 2002, and in the years that followed a portfolio of more than several hundred works has evolved. Using the camera he captured an immediate picture of himself, his family and friends, his paintings and sculptures in studios and exhibitions—an unusual tableau of images of his life and work. There are charismatic portraits of Lou Reed, Plácido Domingo, Mickey Rourke, and Max von Sydow; private rooms in the Palazzo Chupi in New York, which Schnabel designed and decorated himself; his studios in Brooklyn, Montauk, and Manhattan. He uses it with the experienced eye of the painter he is, with the solid, informal aspirations of a traveler snapping shots of his trip. The Polaroids are pictures for himself . “Recording,” he says, meaning registering, taking down, entering, listing, and documenting a shadow of life. They stem from the desire to hold on to what matters to him. It involves capturing the energy of the moment to keep it from disappearing, becoming fully aware of his biography, and giving structure to life. Highly personal, poetic images result. Their immediacy and warmth account for much of their magic. Some are funny and exuberant; others are sonorous in their view of artwork and where it is made. They are images of friendship, of love, of an engaged life, and of melancholy too. They record the transformaton of life into art. THE PAINTER . THE FILM DIRECTOR We know Julian Schnabel the painter. In 1973—at a time when Minimalism and Conceptual Art banned gestural expression, pathos, memory, and history—painting returned to a quiet corner at 95 Reade Street in New York City, hidden from the rest of the world. Schnabel countered asceticism of form and the rejection of the symbolic with the fascination of the visual, the magical power of the image, a feast for the eyes, ecstasy, and Christ on the Cross. “He seduces the brain, broken of its habits, into an extravagance of paint, material, form and figure, of allusion and cipher: a stimulant of emotions. The effort to sum up everything once again, the whole world, the whole of life, past and present, that which has been irretrievably lost: a summa, a totality in a disparate world.” 2 “I like to paint. I like to be surprised. I needed to find my own set of tools to make art that worked for me.” 3 Julian Schnabel is not only a “seminal painter”— who became famous for his plate paintings in early 1979, exhibited in New York later that year—but has proved inspirational to other 21 st -century artists around the world. His works can now be found in a number of important collections. Schnabel is not just a “a role model, who has pursued his own course in complete freedom for three decades;” 4 he has also prefigured many trends and enduringly influenced the evolution of painting of the younger generation too. 5 “I am a painter. I always paint.” Schnabel is first and foremost a painter. This is true even though he has been producing large sculptures in wood and bronze since 1982; and even though he has directed many award-winning films, winning Best Director both at the Golden Globe Awards and at the Cannes Film Festival in 2007. In 1996 he wrote the screenplay and directed Basquiat , a film about his young artist-friend Jean-Michel Basquiat. Before Night Falls followed in 2000, a film based on the life of the Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas, played by Javier Bardem. RZ_JS_polaroids_rl_mh.indd 13 18.06.10 13:14 In 2007, Schnabel directed The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (nominated for four Oscars), the “moving story, largely shot with a subjective camera,” 6 of French editor Jean-Dominique Bauby’s point of view, who was paralyzed with locked-in syndrome. “It’s almost as if Schnabel has actually found a way to paint with the camera, fragmenting the image with blurry double exposures, gestural swipes and blurry shutter effects.” 7 His new film, Miral , stars Freida Pinto and is scheduled for release in 2010. Julian Schnabel is “a man who has found access to all forms of expression.” 8 In an age of specialization, he is for many a “renaissance artist” whose work is a gesamtkunstwerk . The heart of his work however is painting: “The core of everything that I do comes from being a painter, and probably the reason for whatever qualities my movies have comes from a perspective as a painter—and what that means, probably, is that I can see images without making hierarchal judgements.” 9 And photography? Until now, he has used it only as an objet trouvé . Since 1973 he has integrated historical photographs into his works on paper as pictorial elements. “I think I use photographs in my drawings almost as if they were a mirror. I use them as a non-image. … They are like a blind spot.” 10 Or Schnabel enlarges them using digital printing to create enormous canvases that he overpaints in oil, such as in the portraits of Japanese women from a twentieth-century geisha advertisement ( Untitled [ Japanese Woman ], 2005); in views of Capri, Italy; and in anonymous X-rays. His portraits, whether plate paintings or sealed with resin on canvas, are not mediated by the camera’s eye but painted directly as the artist stands in front of, and looks at the living model without preparatory drawings. THE MAGIC OF THE POLAROID Schnabel doesn’t take pictures so much as make them. He creates objects to realize his ideas, using the tools at hand to build them up and inscribe them. The artist has the image, or the belief in the eventual image, in his head. The large format Polaroid not only exaggerates scale in the most obvious sense but, by means of its crude adjustments, exaggerates its ability to transfer power to the intuitions of the trusting artist. It is uniquely primitive—more like a pinhole camera than a fine instrument (under the shroud the image is upside down, reversed and obscure); the process involves nothing short of gathering light and directing it onto paper. At times it seems to select the light it wants. If cameras are tools for their users this one fits the painter well. If cumbersome and unwieldy in his hands, it nevertheless becomes pliable and supple as an instrument in Schnabel’s mind. Intuitively, he uses it to confirm his sensitivity for objects, for his own physicality, how he stands, how he moves, what form of dialogue he has with the person opposite him. All his affection will express, conceal, or reveal its essence—all of this is palpable in the image. 11 " e objectivity of technical photographs is deceptive, as Vilém Flusser’s Für eine Philosophie der Fotogra# e ( Towards a Philosophy of Photography , 1983) reminds us. Photographs are not windows through which one may observe the symptoms of the world decoded. " ey are not directly “legible,” and their meaning is not automatically reflected on their surface. 12 Yet more than any other art form, photography “offers an immediate presence to the world,” as Roland Barthes writes in his Reflections on Photography .13 Barthes has faith in the “testimony” of photography, in 14 15 its “evidential force” to “attest that what I see has indeed existed,” but by no means in the sense of a “copy” of the real thing but rather as an “emanation of past reality : a magic .” He speaks of his “astonishment” for photography, which perhaps “reaches down in to the religious substance” out of which he is molded. For him photography has something to do with “resurrection.” 14 RZ_JS_polaroids_rl_mh.indd 14 18.06.10 13:14 AFFIRMATION OF LIFE By focusing on his own life in his Polaroids, Schnabel raises fundamental, existential questions: Who am I? Why do I live here and now? They cause us to rethink life and death not only because of the fact that certain protagonists are no longer alive, such as his father (p.67) who died in 2004 or his friend Tucker Geery (p.

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