Barbara Kasten: out of the Box”, Ocula, 7 August, 2020
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Bailey, Stephanie. “Barbara Kasten: Out of the Box”, Ocula, 7 August, 2020. [online] [ill.] Barbara Kasten: Out of the Box Barbara Kasten. Exhibition view: Parallels, Philara Collection, Düsseldorf (2 February–18 March 2018). Courtesy the artist. Photo: Susanne Diesner. When Barbara Kasten: Stages opened in 2015 at the Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, it was noted how overdue this first major museum survey was. The show unfolded five impressive decades of Kasten’s practice, from early 1970s sculptures handwoven from heavy ropes sourced from the ports of Gdansk, the ‘Photogenic Paintings’ (1974– 1976) photograms that represent her first photographic works, toAxis (2015), a 30-foot-high site- specific video installation that projected spinning shapes on the corner walls of a spacious gallery. Five years later, Barbara Kasten: Works at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (21 March–8 November 2020) marks Kasten’s first museum exhibition in Europe. Some of Kasten’s most recognisable images come from the ‘Constructs’ (1979–1986) series, which were created by building compositions in studio using materials like mirrors, architectural glass blocks, and an array of cones, cubes, and spheres. The arrangement would fit into the view of a set-up camera, and once all components were balanced in place (nothing was ever stuck down), lighting (plus gels and screens) activated shadows, highlights, reflections, and colours. Caught on film are rich geometric abstractions and surreal dreamscapes built from intersecting perspectives and dimensions. Construct XI A (1981) shows a mirror with a circle cut out of it propped up by black trestle frame, its reflection cut up by two parallel mirrors laid out in front of it; while Construct NYC 12 (1984) feels like a de Chirico-meets-Sottsass acid trip: a landscape bathed in blood orange, acid green, and fuchsia shades, in which a Grecian column lies in front of an elegant arch, before which an ornate, black corbel rests on a white cube sitting on a flat black ladder. The results are stunning and ahead of their time: images conjuring digital effects with analogue means, blending influences of the Bauhaus, in particular the photographic experiments of László Moholy-Nagy and the stage designs of Oskar Schlemmer, and Russian constructivism—think Lissitzky, Kandinsky, Popova—with an utterly contemporary tone, both in terms of the digitised 21st century and the time when Kasten developed the work. Having lived in California in the 1960s and 70s, she cites West Coast minimalism, Finish Fetish, and Light and Space as influences: in particular James Turrell’s projections, Craig Kauffman’s and Helen Pashgian’s experiments with plastic, John McCracken’s finished surfaces, not to mention the paintings of Agnes Martin and the colour field painters. ‘I felt free to incorporate any of these concepts into my thinking’, Kasten notes on her development, having taken only one photography class at college. ‘I wasn’t breaking rules; I was actually making up my own.’ Barbara Kasten, Architectural Site 17, August 29, 1988 (1988). Cibachrome. 127 x 152.5 cm. © Barbara Kasten. Courtesy the artist, Bortolami Gallery, New York; Thomas Dane Gallery, and Kadel Willborn Gallery, Düsseldorf. What came next was even more remarkable. In 1986, Kasten produced a series of images to accompany a Vanity Fair article on the entrance lobbies of New York’s postmodern structures. With a professional cinematic lighting crew, she staged night-long shoots in spaces like the World Financial Center, where a circular mirror capturing a decorative ceiling appears like a ball in Architectural Site 6, July 14, 1986 (1986). Pre-planned sets with mirrors and powerful lighting rendered each space unsettled, and the series continued to develop beyond NYC and the Vanity Fair commission. Architectural Site 17, August 29, 1988 (1988) shows an interior view of the Richard Meier-designed High Museum of Art in Atlanta lit up in hot pink, yellow, and Prussian blue, its features rendered into multi-dimensional shapes and lines. Cutting across the scene, a triangular mirror appears like a window thanks to one sculpture’s reflection: a woman seemingly transfixed by the drama. ‘Architecture has always been with me, which is understandable because of my love of geometric forms’, Kasten has said. This geometry feeds into a practice that integrates photography with other disciplines so that it becomes something else altogether, like sculpture, installation, and painting, whose concerns deeply inform Kasten’s approach. The interdisciplinarity of the Bauhaus runs through this investigation. In 1985, Kasten collaborated with choreographer Margaret Jenkins to design the sets, costumes, and work on lighting design for Inside/Outside: Stages of Light. More recently, she has explored the spatial possibilities of video. In REMIX (2011), shown at Applied Art in Chicago in 2011, light becomes the main performer as it moves through space and surface like a dancer—reflective of an ongoing focus on light and shadow that continues in her photographs, with the ‘Studio Constructs’ series (2007–ongoing) distilled by an absence of colour. In this conversation, Kasten looks at the development of her practice in light of her recent survey shows, discussing the works that have defined her career, the perspectives that constrain it, and projects that have not been widely seen by the public. SB: Works at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg is your first museum show in Europe, a milestone that connects with your first museum survey at ICA Philadelphia in 2015. What impact have these shows had on you? BK: The ICA show was definitely a game changer for me, for so many reasons. By then I was already in my seventies and past that middle point—not young enough to be discovered and not old enough to have attained some recognition, but at least old enough for people to notice that I’d been around for a while! From the very beginning, I straddled two worlds, with galleries that were exclusively focused on photography, and those that focused on contemporary art, like John Weber Gallery, who was an icon in the art world in the sixties and seventies. This led to an interesting mix, because I had already had exposure through the photo world, which led to my being framed by that discipline and an introduction to the art world by association with a well-known art gallery. The ICA show released images and concepts that created an overview of my work beyond the photograph and within a museum context. Ever since then, the perception of my work has expanded because of the young people who saw my show. They had, I think, a different take on what photography could be. They came through an education system that explored photography in a totally different way than the photographers from a generation before. I never studied photography, so I wasn’t caught in the trap either, but the perspective often limits my practice. SB: How would you describe the perspective that limits your work? BK: It’s always seen as being about photography, but it’s really not about photography per se. Certainly it began as a photographic image, but the purpose was never to explore photography. I think it was easier for people to identify me as a photographer because the photograph was evident. If I had been in different circles, I might have been thought of as a conceptual artist who used photography, because after all, what I was examining was not much different than artists working with light and how it reflects off materials. However, I was never included in that realm at that time. There are many factors that contributed to this, including the way photography is taught. It’s also departmentalised in institutions, both educational and in the museum, which all come with particular restrictions, including budgets. That division seems to work itself into everything: the market, the exposure, the perception of the artist as one thing or another, even if people are crossing boundaries all the time. It’s always interesting to me when I’m included in a museum collection that doesn’t have a photography department. Within my practice, I do not research photographic process, photographic history, or anything directly connected to photography. More recently, boundaries have opened up, and that makes a difference. I have to attribute that to the openness of a different generation and a different mindset about art that somehow goes back to the Bauhaus. It’s like we’ve gone through phases and have come back to the essentials. SB: I guess, in a way, you were trying to open up spaces of representation, but always found yourself being put back inside the camera you were working out of. BK: Exactly. That’s really true. Most of what I do is in front of the camera, and in a way, the camera is there to document what I do. In a lot of ways, I was fighting the credentials of a photograph and playing on the illusion. I think from the very onset, my goals were not all aligned with photography. Photographic acceptance now is not as narrow as it was in the sixties and seventies. In art circles, photography can have a wide range of expressions and ways of working. Even now though, I still have friends who know me and my work really well, and they still ask me to recommend cameras, and I’m like, I don’t know cameras except the one I use, which is basically a box camera with a large glass viewing back! SB: It’s interesting how your resistance towards being framed by photography has become part of the practice. The ICA show and the impact it had on younger artists seems to have bolstered this.