Tufts students, consider yourselves blessed, for the MFA is currently offering not one, but two meditations on regional contemporary art. Just across the room from a selection of bombastic Japanese art sits "Contemporary Outlook: German Photography," an exhibition dedicated to just that: recent developments in a peculiarly cohesive art form.
The wall text for the show states that the "Contemporary Outlook" photography is marked by the influence of new objectivity, a movement emphasizing "rigorous and close observation, [and] bringing a sharply focused, documentary quality to the photographic art."
Visually, this translates to a degree of deadpan realism that viewers may find immediately disengaging. A closer look, however, reveals worlds of social commentary, documentation and creativity.
The exhibition makes use of an interesting mix of modernist-influenced, Bauhaus-era photography and the more sumptuous yet nihilistic pieces ranging from the '90s to today. Werner Mantz's "Apartment Complex" is a standout example of this early Bauhaus style, though the piece is but a small, black and white photo of architecture. At first, this may appear quite boring, but take a closer look.
The architecture in question exemplifies classic international style, pioneered by the German Bauhaus school and Le Corbusier. Mantz attempts to minimize his influence on the photograph; it is strictly oriented along the horizon. One may draw a link between this style of photography and the tenets of international style itself: clear, free of excess ornamentation or flashy stage tricks, focusing on the beauty of proportion and form.
Upon entering the show, an Andreas Gursky picture hangs like a votive on its own wall. Depicting the Bundestag, the interior of the German parliament building, it is a discombobulating mixture of reflections and angles, floors crammed with milling bodies.
What is so interesting about this nigh-cubist piece is that it purports to be from a single angle, a true picture, along the lines of the staid documentary format of the earlier photographers. What the outer surface belies is that Gursky actually uses digital manipulation to create his unified pictures.
Following the ideas of new objectivity, however, Gursky still creates an "archive of the digital world," just as Mantz had, despite his betrayal of the superficial integrity of a picture.
Married artistic team Bernd and Hilla Becher form one of the founding influences of the contemporary branch in the exhibition. Their piece comes across as both polemical and academic, both innovative and bordering on the classical. "Framework Houses" is a group of equally sized photos arranged as a grid. Each piece depicts a piece of traditional German vernacular architecture, the front or rear of a framework house. The fa?§ades of these houses create grids of horizontal, vertical and diagonal beams that come to resemble something like Bauhaus modernism, an abstracted pattern that nevertheless has social impact, for these houses, remnants of past culture, are disappearing in the wake of industrialization. At the same time, the pictures remain cold documents, devoid of artistic mediation and conceptual in nature.
Two of the artists in the show, Candida H?¶fer and Thomas Struth, present a counterpoint to cold realism but retain new objectivity's piercing glance into the heart of human affairs. H?¶fer, working in the large-format camera style like Gursky and Struth, presents one picture as large as a Renaissance history piece showing a head-on view of the General Library of the University of Coimbra.
What at first glance may seem like an artlessly Baroque library devoid of humanity and warmth can be seen as a commentary on Spanish colonization, a suspicious glance at the "grandeur" created by humanity, and a meditation on the harsh geometric order of an architectural design meant to intimidate.
Struth, on the other hand, may be seen as the most sensual artist of the exhibition. His work focuses on photographing visitors in museums: pictures of people looking at pictures, investigating the process of seeing and the place of art in society.
In his "Galleria dell'Accademia, Venice," he depicts a crowd of people rushing around Renaissance-era murals hung on gallery walls, pausing to lean in closer or stopped dead in their tracks by a particular moment of beauty, framed by the painted figures on the wall. It is a lush work, full of color, movement and detail.
This is what "Contemporary Outlook: German Photography" excels at: an immaculately strong conceptual framework supporting a beautiful visual image. It is both intelligent and striking.
