YESTERDAY'S SUN
Uri Gershuni
10 May – 23 June 2012
Chelouche
Gallery
7 Mazeh
St. Tel Aviv 65213
Tel: 972.3.6200068
Uri Gershuni, Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire, 2012 (courtesy Chelouche Gallery)
Poet
Wisława Szymborska, in an imaginary conversation with Ecclesiastes, challenges
him with cunning shrewdness: "'There's nothing new under the sun': that's
what you wrote, Ecclesiastes. But you yourself were born new under the sun. And
the poem you created is also new under the sun, since no one wrote it down before
you. And all your readers are also new under the sun, since those who lived
before you couldn't read your poem." (1)
The series
of photographs featured in Uri Gershuni's exhibition - in itself, a contemplation
of the notions of newness and sun in their photographic context - lacks the
reconciled innocence underlying Szymborska's statement. It is imbued with an
antithetical despair, and its conclusions transpire on the verge of an abyss,
as it were. Gradually, however, their proximity will be revealed.
The exhibition
seems to be underpinned by the realization that the sun that shines on us is,
in itself, rather ancient, and that in an irreversible process which cannot be
altered, it will evolve within about five billion years to a star unable to
produce warmth and light. Sharp fluctuations in temperature would cause the sun
to shed its outer layers, forming a planetary nebula moving around
the nucleus of the shrinking sun slowly cooling in space. The sun too will
cease to exist.
There is
no artistic medium like photography so inseparably tied with the sun. Its
idiosyncratic language is distinguished by its dependence on natural
astrophysical processes originating in sunlight. When these processes are
imprinted in the chemistry of the photographic paper, the photograph transforms
into a perfect melting pot between the technological and the living, a contact
point between man and the stars, mediated by a light-registering apparatus. The
act of photography is a desperate attempt to fish out something illuminated in
an infinite universe, to leave a hint of our being; the camera as a box for
capturing tiny physical occurrences, the "Pencil of Nature" as per
the ever so accurate title of the book by the pioneer of photography, William
Henry Fox Talbot. (2)
Gershuni's
photographs appear as though they have been created in a world struck by a
process of extinction, under a disappearing sun and its gradually waning light.
His journey to the village of Lacock in Wiltshire, England - Talbot's
hometown - which spawned these photographs, essentially calls to mind worshippers
swarming holy sites on the eve of an apocalypse.
The
photographs in the exhibition document Talbot's habitat as it appears in the
present. Some of them contain objects and places which were the subject of the
first photographs in history. Gershuni's new photographs blend with the memory
of Talbot's photographs - especially the oriel window
at Lacock Abbey, the earliest known surviving example of a photographic negative and a photogenic print - like
a chemical collision between beginning and end. It is as though in Gershuni's
fusion of his photographs with the memory of Talbot's photographs, we witness a
nuclear occurrence, a catastrophe which melts epilogue into prologue, while
everything between them burns and melts away.
Uri Gershuni, Mr. Kronnagel (Bambi), 2009 (courtesy Chelouche Gallery)
Had the
universe suddenly reversed the direction of its expansion, it would have turned
backwards, toward the Big Bang, and disappeared anew into the void. Gershuni
does exactly that: a deep despair with photography's ability to innovate and
excite, as well as thoughts about the dying sun on which photography as a whole
is dependent, have motivated him to embark on a journey back to the starting
point, to the realms of the "Big Bang" that gave rise to the pristine
act of photography, perhaps in an attempt to be swallowed up by it and
disappear into a black hole.
To prove
that only the moment in which things - universes, planets, or human beings - are
born and die has any meaning, Gershuni proposes to erase and destroy everything
ever photographed, except for the first photographs ever taken by man; to try
to assimilate into them so as to experience the sense of revelation embodied in
Talbot's work, which is still concealed in his photographs. Subsequently, one
must die out with the sun, never to photograph again.
Much has
been written about the "devalidation" of the photographic act in this
overly mapped era which is inundated by images. It seems, however, that
Gershuni not only laments the devaluation of photography; he also dares to do
what other photographers don't: to catalyze and to be present at its very
moment of execution, while voicing a great cry of despair.
Gershuni's
journey to Lacock is like a pilgrimage to a shrine to experience or see
something that Talbot saw, before the end comes. A closer look at what Gershuni
saw there in the moments of truth, however, reveals a less terminal answer than
we might have expected. Despite the morbidity and the attraction with cessation
simmering in the black, grainy photographs on view, they secretly emanate a
wonderful yet silent hope. The first photograph in the exhibition features
Talbot's tombstone. While at first sight, it is an image which declares the
death of the inventor of photography, and with him, perhaps, the death of
photography as a whole, and as such - it invokes a sense of bowing to dead
ancestors, on second thought it is also a photograph featuring a sculptural
object made of a durable material which symbolizes the death of a man, while
the stone itself lives on.
Thus, in
his very first photograph here, Gershuni declares the ability of a given
substance to survive long after the materials from which our bodies are made.
The series of images continues. From the dark surfaces of his photographs,
trees, stone paths, ancient gates, bridges, tables, and latticed windows pop
out - an assortment of objects that existed before Talbot's time and continues to
exist years after his death.
Do these
photographs, despite the withering images of mildew and damp and the bubbling,
burnt photographic paper, in fact symbolize survival, subsistence, attesting to
Gershuni's secret belief in the chance to be saved? Perhaps even a belief in a
form of new life after the end of days? If an object, a piece of furniture, a
structure, or a plant, can survive and still leave an indelible impression of
the person who created it or came in contact with it, even after the latter's
death, can not an art work do the same?
Gershuni's
renewed belief in photography's ability to form a memory, a material
incarnation of a former life, erupts from his surprising photographs of a human
figure - Mr. Kronnagel - whose
gaze is penetrating and direct. While observing the photographs depicting
objects - which are akin to an invocation of ghosts, knowing that they are
unaware of our observing them, as if we didn't exist, and that they are
oblivious of us since they will long outlive us - is disconcerting, Mr. Kronnagel is well aware of our
presence; he knows that we breathe on the other side of the camera, hence he
constitutes an image which is all a living, breathing, present presence, much
more than the sacred past around him. Thus he deserves to leave behind
photographic evidence of his existence.
Uri Gershuni, Mr. Kronnagel (Bambi), 2009 (courtesy Chelouche Gallery)
Now behold
the photograph of a vehicle moving swiftly in a field (perhaps it is an
ambulance, hence an image of resuscitation?), implying more life within the
desistence, life moving from here to there, eternally frozen by the camera.
When has a photograph last elicited such basic excitement in its ability to
intervene with the flow of time and treasure life in light?
Talbot and
Gershuni are indeed absent from the photographs, because in their destructive
encounter both have been annihilated, whether physically or metaphorically. But
photographs of other people, akin to survivors from a disaster zone, bespeak a
life found which is yet to be documented, and life yet to be documented is
still a belief in something new under the sun.
Gershuni
has fulfilled the most basic commandment of photography: to offer evidence of
the photographer's journey, whether inward or outward, into the distance; to
constitute proof of the photographer's discoveries and revelations, whose
photographable texture he perpetuated for us. Had every person been given the
unique chance to travel in time, his choice, whether to move forward or back,
would greatly attest to his sources of curiosity, his beliefs, and his hope.
Gershuni chose to travel back in time to the nascent moment of the photographic
medium, which is also the beginning of its expiration, hence a point of
destruction. He plunged into a dark, suicidal crisis of faith that had taken
over him, and looked straight ahead. He experienced within himself powerful
moments of contradiction, a split between the faithful and the heretic within
him: Is there an "afterlife"? Does the photographable imply eternity?
Is there anything left in this expendable world worthy of being photographed?
Is there a merciful Great Father capable of explaining our disappearance from
the world virtually without leaving a trace? And if the moments of birth
and death
are the essence, is it not vital that we meet the propagator, who is supposed
to die before and in front of us, at the moment of his death?
Gershuni's
photographs are like souvenirs from a voyage to the end of the world taken by a
believer who has lost his path and now tries to find it again. He has found it
in the masturbation photograph: Even if it might appear like sacrilege, as
defiance against "wasting
of one's
seed," even if it celebrates the physical, the flesh, the corporeal, the
expendable, this photograph is nevertheless blended with a different spiritual
sanctity, the sanctity of the Blessing of the Sun and Sight, because we are
observing a new man before us, under the sun, in a moment of vitality.
Sometime
in 1839 - a temporal view which is emptied of meaning vis-à-vis infinity - Talbot
exposed a negative to the sun. All of a sudden, light was rendered dark and
black, while darkness transformed into whiteness. This is what Gershuni
discovered under yesterday's sun.
Amir
Kliger
Notes
- Wisława Szymborska, "The Poet and the World: Nobel Lecture 1996," in Poems: New and Collected, trans. Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh (New York: Harcourt, 2001), p. xvii.
- William Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature (1844) (New York: Da Capo Press, 1968).
