The Beauty Of Compassion: Edward Burtynsky "The China Series" at Nicholas Métivier.

(image from gallery Nicholas Métivier)

He who is too busy doing good finds no time to be good.

(Rabindranath Tagore)

We have committed the Golden Rule to memory; let us now commit it to life.

(Edwin Markham)

A human being is not to be handled as a tool but is to be respected and revered.

(Felix Adler)





You know, this season there's been an incredible quantity of photography
exhibits all over the place, in museums, in galleries, and in festivals (Mois De
La Photo in Montreal). But there is one that was perticularly important and that
I wanted to come back to, which is the recent exhibit of new works
by Edward Burtinsky called "The China Series" at Nicholas Métivier Gallery in Toronto (another selection from these works was shown at Charles Cowles gallery in New York).

This show, and more substantially, the book that it supports, is an instant
landmark both in the artist's career and for contemporary photography,
because it is the first public exposition to the new phenomenon of techno-industrial
societies in China, which, if you ever got an idea of what the term industrial
society meant in the western world back in the old days of Zola, is highly exponential from whatever occured in our soils.


Some of these pictures are so filled with people, in buildings so humongous, that you wonder if the artist didn't use digital tricks to repeat and extend some recorded patterns. I personally never seen documents of people at work of this scale, where instead of focussing on the harshness or work conditions, these earth-from-above photograph seems to want to
demonstrate the amount of people being on utility. And you would have thought
these industries used machines, nowadays ! (note: the images I am linking are all from the Nicholas Metivier website where you can see much more, and buy if you feel like it)


As the artist expressed to Sarah Milroy in a recent article in the Globe And Mail, the idea of going to China came from a desire to move on from his usual past focus on source fields and wastelands: the before-and-afters of human industrialization and consumption. As he was looking to portray the actual act of transformation of industrial matters, he realized that the big industries like those he used to work in when he was younger weren't happening that much here anymore, but that all the big work was now done in Asia and other foreign places. He had already been photographing some self-imposing scenes in Asia of boatship cemeteries, or the broken dams of a river in China, that are now part of his retrospective that travelled everywhere around, and is now playing at the Brooklyn Museum Of Art. So the trip around China probably was the next logical step (actually, read Sarah Millroy and he'll explain you why).




Apparently, the artist was the first to ever receive a chinese government
permission to enter these manufactures. The government, described
by the artist as being a mixture between communist and capitalist,
was somewhat worried about how they were going to be perceived by the outside,
at a moment when China is slowly opening its doors to the rest of the world (thanks to China, we've seen many marvellous exhibits recently, like this one
of dinosaur skeletons that I just saw last week).


Well, here's exactly where we're at: how can I,
being the outside, describe my feeling
towards these pictures ?


Let's get down to it: these pictures speak of an empire being born again. Not exactly Han, more like the rebirth of Qin. You cannot ignore the phenomenon. Socially, these workers all look like clones, like an army of living machines, and from what Burtinsky said , they're also pretty proud of having these jobs. These images of manufacture activity brought back by Burtynsky could as well used the help of entomologists to describe them: they are literally the representation of gargantual, technocratic, hives. (!)




My feeling was this: a vertiginous impression that a cultural clash
was now made visual between the western focus on individualism,
and the representation of a nation that really seems, at least on surface,
to function as one entity. This is of course a sentiment merely conveyed
by aesthetics, and which might not represent the truth at all.


This is the problem with the new work of Burtynsky,
that it treats about humans the same ways that it
does about pieces of crap piled in a landyard
(the exhibit contains a portion of those too, residual terrains from mainland
China). It focusses on layers, geometry, repetition, symmetry,
within an extremely rigid formalism, that turns photography
into an art as eugenistically modern as possible
(a Mondrian turned to life scale...hmm....look
at the interlacing between those gray grids and the blue
dots...beautiful isn't it...). The work is almost more authentic as form play than as documentary (hold your breath, the artist agrees of his contradictions).


We don't get to know these people,
yet even see their faces. The process
is as cold and inhuman as possible.
Here we are interested by the impact of
mass representation. The project is not
about humans, it stands above mankind.
It is about what mankind is doing to the world
with a big W. It's could be as well
a message bottle sent for extraterrestrials.


But to know that Burtynsky refute
the politically inclined position of photojournalism,
but then opt to sell these works in galleries
for a minimum of 15 00 dollars up
to 50 000 $ (!!), somewhere affirming
the elegancy of art's distanciation,
to me pose a serious ethical problem, when
we know the wages of these people are a fraction
of what they would cost in Occident.


Now don't get off your horses,
ethic problem doesn't mean bad art,
and that is where lies all the problem.
These works will obligedly be remembered.
As "art pieces", they are the only
"tableaux" that we've got yet to
compensate for a lack of a more
socially-inclined report on the matter.
They are obviously more an expression
of wonderment than indignation.
Or rather, if noone is ever upholded for using these
photographs to express their indignation, the images
themselves really focus on the scale, the order,
and the majestuosity of these enterprises.
They could as well serve to promote
their success (if we all started to fall for marxism
again and convince ourselves that collectiv work is the true power, etc...).





I am not trying to diminush the fact that the artist
is a politically engaged individual himself. He is,
among other things, involved with the World
Changing website, or at least intend to promote it. And he has plans to promote services of education concerning ecology.


In fact, the simple gesture of wanting
to communicate to the world things that are
happening in some regions and that are not
well communicated is to me a highly political gesture.
Maybe that intention in itself should erase any scrutiny
related to any process or methods used for photography.



His photographs, though lavishly
posed, could after all very well pass for
photojournalism, if we forget an instant
the artistic pretentions of the artist. There is
no need to pull hairs about it: here he is
showing you current China, take it as you see it.



But I am just annoyed by this belief
from the artist that by doing art instead of journalism
he is letting people decide what they want to see.
Art is just as manipulative as photojournalism.
It just doesn't share the same interests.


And there is where I stand: there is more going on in these photographs than art. And by that I really do mean that at some point the pretentions of art start sounding indulgent and irresponsible considering the matters at hand. Like trying to picture you mother on her death bed for a fashion magazine. Something not quite right. You think I'm outstretching? Well, I'm not
sure Burtynsky's art would function that well without all these wonderful
world problems. I think their inherent beauty lies in the spectaculor awe that
they can provide. They play on the oscillation occurring between visual abstraction and what we finally recognize from them, which I think is a fair game when dealing with garbage, but I find a little impertinent when dealing with the lives of other folks. This shouldn't be tableaux that one is willing to spend 20 000 bucks for. It really should've been about information.




Maybe they were some workers in there who
were hoping for more than being presented
like beautiful (legendary?) pink dots in a gigantic techno-futurist
symmetrical scenery. Maybe some hoped that the photos would be received as an outcry. But the outcry here isn't the ultimate subject matter.
It is subdued to form. It hides between the pretext of art:
the audience decides what they want to see in them.
It makes me wonder about the boundary between art and documentary.
Is documentary an art form? Can art serve as a documentary
for an historical event? Or do we call that an artefact?
What would a photograph by Burtynsky be an artefact of?
Of the history of China? The history of the western art world?
An account of the personal life of the artist?



The surface outlook constantly focus on anonimity:
these humans are like lab ratsfor Burtynsky's new art theme or
visual experimentation. The photographer assumes too much that
what he sees might be the society that he is representing.
There is, spurning out from these clinical photographs
as grand and cold as architectural plans,
this condescending argument that existentialism
is an absent notion for these chinese people, when actually
chinese artists are battling to express the contrary,
especially with the new generation of young cineasts. I remember in contrast films like Baraka, or the Qatsi series, which always included their segment of facials
to humanize their content, sometimes to kitsch effect.


But then, to do a social reportage of this
scale, it shouldn't function just like picturing nice objects.
What you leave out is as important as what you put in.
We are speaking human conditions here, and these perticular
ones don't seem quite easy. And to use these working conditions as
an art form (with photography the art is really the subject matter)
is to me taking strange detour with aesthetics, whatever the intentions. The perspective of these photographs certainly do not contradict the powers at play. The only way they are is through their juxtaposition with other images of defunct industries. How was that my mistake to not interprete these juxtapostions more closely?


In the end, I'm only but confused about how to interprete
the new Burtynsky work. I'd feel more comfortable
hearing a debate between photograph and ethic experts
about them.


I just feel like if I had been in China exactly where Burtynsky
was, and had taken the same bird perspectives shots as he did
(how can you help but being astonished by those views),
I don't think I'd have the gut to present that material as art.

I think I would have sell rights to a magazine and that would be
tagged photojournalism. No ambiguity.

And then my only reproach to these otherwise mavellous compositions
is exactly what others embrace in them: their ambivalence.



Thing is: I don't believe in an art bereft of ethics, in which all
is put on the viewer's shoulder and their reactions, and what they
are going to do about it.

I believe art is ethic, and speaks much
more of an artist's way of envisioning the world,
than the one of the viewer, who's merely thrown out
information that's been already filtered by
a wide array of layers (medium, politics, art, "the making of", etc..).



And for someone who had been working in industries himself,
I find Burtynsky to be taking too much of a distance
with the people that are taking part of the downfall or upheavel
he is trying to portray.




Cheers,


Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com




Edward Burtynsky: "China (New Works From The China Series)"
September 29 - October 22
Nicholas Metivier Gallery
451 King Street West