Roadtrip 2013 is the blog of 22 college students from the Department of Cinema & Media Studies at Carleton College [Northfield, Minnesota, USA] traveling with Professor John Schott to Barcelona, Amsterdam and Istanbul for ten weeks in the spring of 2013. We are tracking down new media, photography, cinema and contemporary art.
Barcelona: April 3 - 24 | Independent travel: April 24 - May 1
Amsterdam: May 2 - May 20 | Istanbul: May 21 - June 4
This past week, John encouraged us to visit the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, one of the Netherland’s largest modern and contemporary art museums in the country. After being under construction for almost a decade, the museum reopened this past September shaped like a massive bathtub with a brand new restaurant and store facing the Museum plaza. The museum received a large amount of criticism from Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times, comparing his experience “entering an oversized plumbing fixture to commune with classic modern art [to] hearing Bach played by a man wearing a clown suit” (NY Times, 2012). However, despite the museum’s dubious architectural choices, their permanent collection and traveling exhibitions are unquestionably diverse, rich and impressive.
On the ground floor of the museum, the Stedelijk holds a massive collection of modern and contemporary art and design from 1850 to 1950. Large spacious rooms are dedicated to Vincent van Gogh, Marc Chagall, Henri Matisse, Jackson Pollock, Karen Appel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and more. The rooms are divided by distinct subject matter and time period, showcasing some of the most important art movements in history. Collections focusing on Bauhaus, De Stijl, CobRa, Fauvism, Cubism, Expressionism are all present, as well as an impressive collection of drawings and paintings by Kazimir Malevich. In the center of Stedelijk’s permanent collection hosts a temporary exhibit of large drawings by Jo Baer called In the Land of the Giants, which will end in early September. The exhibition presents six new paintings and a selection of drawings exploring the artist’s interest in our Neolithic past using stone, astronomical alignments, skull cults and ancestor worship as her subject matter. The drawings are playful and imaginative, using strong geomantic lines and a pastel palette to interact with the viewer and allow are eyes to wander to all corners of the frame.
The other side of the ground floor hosts an impressive collection of industrial design, graphic design and applied arts. The collection is divided into three main sections; the development of modernism (1900-1950), postwar modernism (1950-1980, and postmodernism to the present (1980 onward). The installation encompasses posters, glassware, ceramics, jewelry, furniture and textiles, and creates an interesting discussion on the changing relationships among craft, design and technology.
When the viewer is finished with the ground floor, we are invited to ascend the stedelijk’s staircase where Dan Flavin has installed a beautiful neon installation, “Untitled (to Piet Mondrian through his preferred colors, red, yellow, and blue)” and “Untitled (to Piet Mondrian who lacked green)”. The four handrails on this staircase are the only objects left untouched from the old building after the renovation but everything else is completely white, modern and new. A soft hue of pink, green, purple and blue lights glow from various crevices of the entry hall as Rineke Dijkstra’s massive photographic portraits and Jim Dine’s suits beckon from various archways. I found this floor to be much more engaging, hosting a wide variety of styles, mediums and landscapes. One of my favorite pieces was a high voltage painting by Elaine Sturtevant titled “Peinture à Haute Tension” (1965). Sturtevant used a cut out photograph and florescent paint to create a striking portrait of a woman with neon lit lips. Another favorite piece of mine was Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawing #1084. LeWitt drew four massive squares directly onto the wall using vertical, horizontal or diagonal multi colored lines to create a two-dimensional experience. Viewers interacted and engaged with the painting, walking back and forth as their eyes tried to follow the lines spewing in all directions. While many dub the Stedelijk Museum as “the bathtub” after its’ new renovation, the museum is not being drained anytime soon.
- Zoe Cohen
The Netherlands Fotomuseum in Rotterdam
is located on the Maas River in one of the most photogenic places in the city.
The building is an old warehouse in an area that has the best view of
the skyline and Maas River in Rotterdam. The museum displays exhibitions
from well known photographers, as well as new talent and amateur photographers.
The museum also has a permanent digital installation that details the
history of Dutch photography through video installations.
The exhibit that is currently on
display at the Fotomuseum is "From Holland With Love" and
is centered around the theme of love, as one would expect. The exhibit
seamlessly integrates the diverse work of ten photographers and film makers.
The exhibit opens with the work of Paul Kooiker, who photographed women
running from the camera in large open fields. The nude women are out of focus and
printed on watercolor paper. The images begin to resemble paintings and
have an ethereal and nostalgic feeling about them. One of the most well known photographers in the exhibit is Ed van der Elsken, a Dutch photographer and filmmaker. Elsken's street photographs of interesting attractive people and lovers around the world was the starting point for the entire exhibit.
The work of each artist not only range drastically in there content but also in the photographic medium with which they were produced. Each artist's vision displayed through film, found footage, street photography, and others provide an interesting comment on the medium of photography itself. While a photograph of a loved one can be a cherished memoriam displayed in one's home, as shown through the work of Bertien van Manen, it can also be shared online and look exactly like photographs from thousands of other people shared on Flickr, as seen in the work by Useful Photography. The concept of love which is often cliché and over represented was presented in many different interesting art forms and also provided a critical artistic commentary on photography as a medium of art and representation.
It’s no wonder that Foam’s official heading is “All About Photography.” This photography organization and museum, located in the heart of Amsterdam, offers visitors an incredible range of perspectives on photography and design. Aside from housing four distinctive galleries in their tremendous space, Foam also provides workshops for budding photographers and birthday parties if you fall within their unfair 6-12 age bracket.
At street level is the Tuinzalen Gallery, which overlooks the Foam courtyard and garden. Here we saw the exhibit Canary by Japanese ballerina-turned photographer Lieko Shiga. In her art, Shiga injects the supernatural into the everyday, creating often dark, intense images from her own experiences and those of others. For example, to create My Husband, Shiga was inspired by a variety of animal skulls she came across in Australia. Drawing from the forms of the dead, she created her own, massive, pastiche of a skull out of Styrofoam and asked her widowed friend to pose naked on the couch with it as if it were her own husband. The dead, living, supernatural, and real are united seamlessly in this demonstration of Shiga’s distinctive style and approach.
The first floor holds the Voorzalen Gallery, which contained a compilation of works by Turkish-Armenian photographer Maryam Şahinyan. Şahinyan, the first female studio photographer in Turkey, took approximately 200,000 portraits of individuals and families from the late 1930s through the 1970s. These figures and groups were often posed in similar ways, creating a striking collection when juxtaposed. The gallery had a space made up of about twelve raised screens that constantly switched between multiple portraits of similar poses creating exactly this effect. Şahinyan’s extensive archive of people frozen in time serves as a unique study of Turkish history, culture, and sociology.
The second exhibit on the first floor, in the large Fodorzalen Gallery, polarized our group. This collection, by Koos Breukel and Roy Vellevoye, was made up of portraits of the inhabitants of Tí, a hard-to-access village in Papua New Guinea. The models wore Western clothing that included familiar logos and styles of shorts and t-shirts. The photographers intended to show how Tí’s inhabitants were in danger of losing their own culture, but many in our group thought that the photographs comprised an invalid ethnography, focused too much on physicality rather than culture. Nevertheless, Breukel and Vellevoye formed relationships with the people of Tí, journeying there multiple times, gifting all the portraits, and capturing occasional (but few) images of cultural pieces such as canoes and sculptures.
From Japan to Turkey to Tí, these exhibits bring together global ideas and people to form photography from all about; all about photography.
www.foam.org
-Simon Lansberg
Isaac piloting the interactive film history exhibit -Photo: Woody Kaine
This past Monday the road trip headed across the Ij river (pronounced ‘eye’) to visit the cleverly named Eye Film Institute, which sits on the bank of the Ij opposite downtown Amsterdam. The Eye opened last year (leaving its old location right next to our hostel) and serves as a hub for film culture in the Netherlands. In addition to housing four cinemas that screen various classics and new films, the Eye has a permanent interactive exhibit on the history of film, space for temporary exhibits, and a beautiful café with great big windows through which you can eye the Ij and the skyline of the city while enjoying a pre-film drink.
When we visited we were given a guided tour of the facility, including the current exhibition on Dutch documentary filmmaker Johan van der Keuken. It was really cool to learn a bit more about Dutch cinema, a field which we are all woefully ignorant of. However, we had some problems with the design of this particular exhibition; a variety of van der Keuken’s films were chopped up into segments and projected on multiple screens at once, making it impossible to actually watch the films as they were intended to be seen. Furthermore, all of these installations were basically in the same big room so there was a good amount of sound carrying over from one film to the next. This all meant that, while the exhibition looked spectacular, I never really felt like I got any sort of sense of who van der Keuken was as a filmmaker beyond what the little cards posted on the walls told us. According to John exhibitions that are heavier on spectacle than substance are unfortunately prevalent in museum culture, as funding for these types of institutions is based on yearly attendance totals, so program design becomes more about getting people through the door than actually moving them once they are in. This is especially ironic in the case of the van der Keuken exhibition because a central aspect of his films is a critique of the spectacle and manipulativeness of capitalism.
The Eye in all its glory -Photo: Wikipedia
Sadly, this privileging of spectacle was evident in the rest of Eye as well. The building’s unique sloping architecture makes the café the privelged space of the building, not the cinemas or the exhibitions. This means that the building succeeds in being a trendy place to have a drink, fitting in with city leaders’ plans to use the Eye to help revitalize/gentrify the surrounding neighborhood, but if I were designing a temple to film the café would not be the central part of the building, I can tell you that much. The same striking architecture makes the Eye a gem in Amsterdam’s skyline (’skyline‘), but the pragmatist in me can’t help thinking that the space and money and engineering effort could have been used to do much more to spread enthusiasm and appreciation for cinema. That said, the Eye is still a pretty impressive building and the spectacle of it all probably actually ends up bringing in some visitors who would never otherwise visit a film museum, so its certainly better than not having any expensive film temple at all.
The next day some of us returned to the Eye to watch Paul Thomas Anderson’s film The Master and I’m happy to report that the cinema was really well designed with amazingly comfortable seats, the importance of which is often vastly underappreciated in cinema design. The film was actually projected in 4K, which was a first for all of us I think. However, I couldn’t really tell if the film was so visually beautiful because of the 4K or just because of the masterful cinematography, so it still remains to be seen if 4K really will represent a substantive step forward in film technology or if it is just the next in a long line of “must have” features that production and distribution companies try to one up each other with, a la digital projection and 3D and 48 fps. Unfortunately, despite the visual beauty I didn’t like the film, but there was at least something fitting about seeing a beautiful but ultimately (in my opinion) hollow movie in a place like the Eye.
-Woody Kaine
Vincent Van Gough is one of the most notable artists in the world, yet he is often misunderstood and tagged with some sort of joke about him cutting off his ear. During class, however, Mariëtta de Bruïne shed some light on Van gogh’s life, which gave new insight, meaning, and understanding to one of the world’s most recognizable painters.
Vincent Van Gogh- Google Images
Van Gogh was born March 30, 1853 to parents Theodorus and Anna Cornelia Van Gogh, and would be one of six children. Vincent was an introvert as a child, which could not have been helped by the several school switches that were made during a young age. His early schooling was a constant jostling of subjects and interests, which would carry over into his early twenties where he would continue to switch schooling and career paths, taking jobs as a bookkeeper and a miner, and even a brief schooling period to become a pastor for which he studied for in Amsterdam. He was unsuccessful in passing the exam for becoming a pastor, and was again unsuccessful after taking another course in Brussels. Through these failures, however, Van Gogh realized he enjoyed drawing the people and nature around him, and after being urged by his brother Theo, he enrolled in the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in 1880. He was still deeply religious in his art endeavors as he wanted to be an artist of God, "...to try to understand the real significance of what the great artists, the serious masters, tell us in their masterpieces, that leads to God; one man wrote or told in a book; another in a picture."
Having no natural artistic ability no doubt made art school difficult for Van Gogh, but he had gumption. He would buy art manuals and trace what was inside, as well as tracing works by other artists, making sure he learned their techniques.
In 1885, after completing what is considered his first major work, The Potato Eaters, Van Gogh exhibited this painting in Paris, where he would move the following year and live with his brother Theo. Not only would Theo allow Vincent to stay with him, but it would be Theo who would finance many of Van Gogh’s artistic endeavors.
Van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters- Google Images
During his stay in Paris, after seeing Adolphe Joseph Thomas Monticelli's work, Van Gogh was inspired to increase the colorfulness of his paintings, as he often used darker colors. One of his first paintings to use this new palette was 1888’s Seascape at Saintes-Maries.
Van Gogh’s Seascape at Saintes-Maries- Google Images
Van Gogh continued to create bright and vivid paintings and portraits, many of him, but his health was deteriorating. Van Gogh could feel that his mind was not sane and he knew something was wrong. He eventually was checked into a mental health hospital where he was given treatment and was still allowed to paint as it was thought that it would aid him in retaining his sanity. Unfortunately, Van Gogh’s sanity only got worse until the point when he stole a revolver and shot himself in the stomach. He suffered an agonizing 3 days before he died on July 27, 1890.
The world lost a very talented painter, but was left with many beautiful creations, one of the most recognizable being Starry Night. It was no surprise that we, as a class, were to take a trip to the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam in order to break away from the computer projector’s dull screen in order to fully appreciate the color palette and skill of Van Gogh.
The class trip to the Van Gogh museum was a true delight as we were able to view up close the work of Van Gogh. The museum was a 4 floor layout that exhibited Van Gogh’s work from his early years to his last. Many of his early drawings and sketches were exhibited on the first two floors, even some of the materials he used. Working through these exhibits was a challenge as many people were clamoring to see each and every painting, but this only proves the appreciation and love for his work. It was easy to see his transitions in color palette and style from the way the building is set up, which made it feel like we were walking with Van Gogh through his life through his work. I personally felt more an understanding and appreciation for the artwork after learning how hard Van Gogh’s life was, and how much more complicated it became after his illness struck him.
Photo by Giancarlo Danno
- Giancarlo Danno
Since the early 1600s, the Netherlands has utilized wind as
a source of energy. Becoming the first industrial area in the entire world, the
Zaanse region exploited the wind produced by the various canals and rivers
running through Amsterdam to power their windmills. Although nearly one thousand
windmills were built between the 17th and 18th century,
the increasing number of steam factories and urbanization caused many to shut
down and only thirteen remain today. During our time in Amsterdam, we visited
eight of the remaining thirteen windmills in the Zaanse Schans region where
only six are still functional mills. We toured various types of windmills: saw
mills, oil mills, mustard and a dye mill. The windmills’ appearances reflected
the physical look of the Zaanse region during the 17th century
during the time of its industrial boom. Reflecting the prosperity of the area,
the windmills were painted a traditional green with bright orange roofs.
One windmill many of us visited in particular was the dye mill, or paint mill, which is still running and producing beautiful colored dyes. However it was burnt down in the year 1782. Since then, the windmill was rebuilt and restored to perform its original function: create paint dyes from natural substances, such as woods and rocks. This windmill has crushed close to 1600 tropical dye woods. Within its infrastructure, there are two running stones weighing between 5000 and 7000 kg that constantly crushes a cceratin raw material until it reaches pure powder form. These dyes can be utilized in many ways to create a particular type of paint for a certain style of painting or other industrial use. Many have thought there is the possibility that the famous painter, Vincent Van Gogh, used some of these dyes in his paintings.
There was also a replica of a 16th century cheese farm, with sheep roaming around. Having multiple saw mills, wood is obviously a big factor, so they are also known for their making of wooden clog shoes. After our visit, one could really appreciate the individuals who worked daily within the mill. Ascending the steep eighty-degree ladders and personally experiencing the loud cranking noises of the windmill allowed me to gain insight into the daily lives of the windmill’s workers. Although windmills are powered by the wind, the functionality of the mill would not exist without the man power to harness that produced energy.
Braeden
Venice may be the city best known for its canals, but The Netherlands is a nation of canals. In a country whose capital is only 7 feet above sea level, canals have provided a convenient channel for trade since the 17th century. The ten largest cities of The Netherlands all have canals, and since the 1800s, larger canals have been built connecting Amsterdam to neighboring cities and the ocean. After seeing, tasting, smelling, and exercising with Alkmaar's cheeses (see below), we spent the afternoon exploring the town by kayak. Photography trips relying on expensive DSLR cameras and kayak trips are a risky combination, but our friends at IES assured us that in all their student groups in Amsterdam, they had never before had any kayak flip in the canal.
One at a time, bright plastic one and two-seated kayaks were dragged out of Kanoverhuur de Kraak—Kraak Canoe Rental. It was within feet of the loading dock that our first student decided to test the brown, murky waters. Most of us who stayed in our boats followed a two-mile loop around the former moat that surrounds the town center. We ducked through low-ceilinged tunnels, skirted tourist ferries, and dodged middle-schoolers driving motorboats before emerging from the narrow canals of the inner city into the 40-meter wide North Holland Canal.
Alkmaar is 10km inland east of the North Sea. Much of the intermediate space is constituted by nature reserves of dunes and polders. In 1824, the Noordhollandsch Kanaal was completed, connecting Alkmaar with the sea in the North and Amsterdam in the South, and asserting its role as a center of trade for North Holland. Today, the canal's mercantile function has been superseded by the larger North Sea Canal, but residents still take their boats out to tour the northern waterways.
It was windy, but otherwise the weather was great for an afternoon on the water. Some experienced blows to their dignity, but no cameras were harmed. Carleton students varyingly rowed unhurriedly in life-jackets, raced down straightaways and through tunnels, and bumped their kayaks into all manners of obstacles. All in all we concluded that the kayak trip was a nice change of pace, and a great workout.
-Ken Schiller [Photos 1-5: Ken Schiller, Photo 6: Haley Ryan]
Every friday in the town of Alkmaar in Holland, tourists flock to the market square to watch a 400-year-old traditional cheese market take place. It is one of four traditional Dutch cheese markets that are still in existence. It is quite a scene to behold: tourists gather around the outside of an arena to watch while traders and carriers taste and weigh the cheeses. While it is no longer possible to buy and trade cheese at the Alkmaar Cheese Market, the buyers and the sellers still show the ritual system of tasting, clapping each other's hands, and then shouting prices. However, for those who would like to taste the famous cheeses, there are many stalls surrounding the market sampling and selling all different types of local cheese. The most popular in the Alkmaar area are the Edam and Gouda cheeses. While we watched the activties of the market unfold we learned about how the color of the cheeses correspond to the taste and maturedness of each one.
The most exciting spectacle of the entire cheese market is watching the cheese carriers. Two cheese carriers lift nearly 400 pounds of cheese onto a wooden sled that is suspended between their backs. The carriers run with the cheese from the market selling area to the weighing house. In the monumental weigh house there are "scale masters" who weigh the cheese to be sold. Because the cheese market now only runs as a tourist attraction, the job of a cheese carrier is an honorary one. Each carrier is in a carrier guild and given a nickname. The nicknames often refer to the carriers' other profession. The carriers guilds are distinguished by the color of their hats: yellow, red, green, and white. The cheese carriers who wear the white hats have not yet been accepted into the guilds and will be in training for two years, until it is decided that have proven themselves. The carriers are held to very strict codes of conduct, such as they are not allowed to drink and are required to be on time. If these rules are not uphled the carriers are fined and given a mark on a board with their names to tell the rest of the members of the guild of the transgression.
We were lucky enough to not only witness the excitement of the Alkmaar cheese market but to also partipate in the action. Two of our strongest men, Ashanti and Braeden, were asked to carry the cheese with a traditional carrier.
When the cheese market closed, we were given a tour of the Dutch Cheese Museum, founded in 1983. It is located above the Weigh House in the center of the city. We learned how the cheese was traditionally produced in Holland and how it differs in modern times. Most interestingly, the cheese was always produced by women in their homes and then brought to the market to be sold by the men. Now there are factories and machines that can stir and press the cheese and produce thousands of wheels of cheese. The museum had beautiful historical cheese pressers that the wives were given as gifts from their husbands to press the cheese. The musuem also includes historical photographic images and film that illustrate the history of cheese making in Holland.
Going to the Alkmaar Cheese Market was a perfect way to begin our trip to Amsterdam because we were immersed in the Dutch tradition of cheese. The Netherlands is known for its cheese and the Dutch are even referred to as "cheese heads." While the market is now only a tourist attraction, Holland produces over 650 million kilos of cheese every year; a third of which is exported to other countries, making Holland the largest cheese exporter in the world. While the Alkmaar Cheese Market gave us a cultural and historical background of the Netherlands, we also tasted some great cheese and were able to participate in the festivities ourselves.
- Nina Shapiro
John Frederick Anderson, most notably known as Fred, conducted a 6-day photography workshop spaced evenly throughout our time in Barcelona. Originally from Philadelphia, Fred acquired an impressive Australian accent by spending a significant time in The Kimberly as a photographic assistant and working on a cattle Station. He then ventured from Western Australia and traveled to London, India, and Bristol to pursue his photography ventures, finally completing a Master of Arts Degree in Documentary Photography at the University College of Wales, Newport. Today, Fred is based in Barcelona, Spain where he has been living since 2003. In addition to lecturing in various universities on Photography, Fred has many independent photography projects exploring his two favorite themes of time and identity. These projects have allowed him to travel all over the world and provide a colorful and intricate insight into Fred’s unique interpretation of cities, time and space.
Since November of 2012, the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, commonly referred to as
MACBA, has dedicated an entire level of their modern space to a new series in their Critical Episodes collection called Content Becomes Something to be Avoided like a Plague. This series includes works by Art & Language, Raymond Hains, Nigel Henderson, Robert Morris, Robert Rauschenberg and Antoni Tàpies.
The series explored the reactions to art in the mid-twentieth century, when Europe was emerging from a post-war period and Abstract Expressionism was developing in America. Detached from representation of any kind, painting had become a field of perceptual stimuli. However in the sixties, artists, urged on by filmmaker Pere Portabella, began to speak out and challenge the principles and understandings of abstract expressionism. Counterproposals include incorporating objects into the painting surface, using images from advertising and photography, applying an analytical approach to the artworks and exploring their relationship with their exhibition context.
The group toured the exhibit with our guide Aurora and engaged in conversations of concept, craft, art, and social contexts. We first viewed Rober Rauschenburg's Sense titol (1972), and I personally was asked by our guide if I think this is art. The question in conjunction with the piece displayed on the wall, admittedly, left me silent at first. The only answer I could muster would be the fact that the item is within a museum - the fact that MACBA has paid for this piece and that museum-goers paid earned euros to see it and that there is a sense of creation. This answer shaped the entirety of how I viewed the rest of the series. Following Rauschenburg's cardboard construction was another highlight by Raymond Hains which drew on consumer culture. Hain worked with the practice of decollage, tearing off fragments of images on advertising billboards. In this work, we see that the works in the series demand that art could not ignore the social and political changes that were brewing.
The third piece that evoked conversation and attempts at touching the art was Oyvind Fahlstrom's The General (Pinball Machine) (1967-68). It is the largest and most important of pools constructed by Fahlstrom. A major poet-artist, Marcel Broodthaers, noted that the piece exemplified the idea that the institutions that host art must also be overhauled in the new world order. The glimpses of popular icons like Jackie Kennedy and Che Guevara within this untouchable pool of water, for me, was a reminder of the museum infrastructure that houses and creates the label of art and the idea of how images relate to popular culture. Again, we see here like with Rauschenberg and Hains, that art cannot ignore the context that it exists in.
Interestingly enough, it seems that the structure of MACBA is engaged in dialogue with it outside - brimming with skateboarders. The museums plaza and essentially its front door are lined with boys and men and wheels and the architectural details of the entrance are caked with wax and adorned by bottles of Fanta. After viewing the Content exhibit, this idea of what constitutes as art led me to think about art that exist outside of museums and how we as new media students and artists can challenge the ideas of the museum system, in a similar way as the aforementioned artists.
CAMS alumni Linnea Bullion, who traveled on the CAMS OCS trip in 2011 and is no stranger to the plaza of MACBA, worked on a photography book about skaters in Barcelona and Copenhagen for her senior comprehensive project. I decided to ask her what she thought of art inside and outside of MACBA. She states, "The plaza itself is just brimming with life, but I feel like modern museums can be a bit stagnant...I entirely associate 'MACBA' now with the square itself [instead of the inside]. I think it's awesome that the museum isn't crotchety about letting people skate the ledges outside but other than that, there's no real connection between the two spaces. They're like venn diagrams - two
intersecting spaces, but the majority of their details lie within the
differences, not the similarities." The photographs outside of MACBA in Bullion's comps is literally art created outside a museum and serves as an interesting supplement to what Content Becomes Something to be Avoided like a Plague and in my opinion, acts as something that can exsist in the middle of the venn diagram.
-Brit Fryer [Photo 1: MACBA Site, Photo 2,3,4,5: Brit Fryer]
“Nowhere but in his own Montserrat will a man find happiness and peace” - Johann Goethe
Montserrat, which is Catalan for “saw mountain,” is home to the Benedictine Abbey Santa Maria de Montserrat and the Virgin of Montserrat. According to the legend, shepherds from the nearby village of Monistrol brought their flocks to graze on the mountainside. At nightfall, they heard heard singing originating from a brilliant light source. After gathering the bishop and townspeople, the group returned to the source of the light to find the sacred image of the Virgin, protected under a rock ledge inside a cave.
They attempted to move the image to the nearest town Manresa, but were unable to transport it down the mountain. They were forced to leave her on a flat, protected part of the mountainside. In the legend, the Virgin chose this as her place to be venerated. Over time, Montserrat’s significance grew. In the eleventh century a monastery was founded, which became an abbey in the fifteenth century. Finally in 1592, the Basilica was officially consecrated. Montserrat is still significant for the faithful and for Catalans. During the Spanish civil war, the Benedictine community of Montserrat became a symbol and a shelter for Catalan culture. To this day, it remains an important pilgrimage destination. Those whose prayers are answered trek to the mountain and leave offerings to the Virgin as thanks.
Montserrat is also home to one of the oldest music schools in Europe, the Escolania of Montserrat. Montserrat’s Benedictine community along with a group of professionals educate and train boys from ages nine to fourteen. Although their primary role is to serve the Sanctuary of the Virgin, the school also embarks sacred music concerts tours across the world. We were lucky enough to watch the boys perform in the Basilica, their voices reverberated through the space to create a heavenly, unforgettable experience.
I don’t think I’ll ever be able to fully articulate how I felt arriving at Montserrat this past friday. We emerged from the bus as the mountain greeted us, its gigantic conglomerate faces lifting us toward the heavens while the mid-morning sun cast light rays over the Catalonian countryside. The remnants of the morning’s dew and mist lingered in the air, immersing us in its majesty. It was fantastical.
As we attempted to digest the sight before us, we proceeded on a walk along the mountain’s ridge, trying to make taking in the landscapes in all directions. Rarely have I been so overwhelmed by a place in nature, yet the beauty and spectacle of Montserrat’s natural form combined with the breathtaking view of the countryside was nearly overpowering. In the middle of the audio-visual exhibit at Montserrat’s museum, there is a quote painted on a wall from Johann Goethe: “Nowhere but in his own Montserrat will a man find happiness and peace.” It’s clear that the mountain’s power similarly affected Goethe. Montserrat is a place of wonder, amazement, inspiration, and more, leaving us with an unforgettable memory and incredible photographs.
-Isaac Burns
Today the library houses over four million documents including maps, manuscripts and of course, books. The mission of the Library of Catalonia today is focused on the Catalonian linguistic area, to look after its conservation, and to spread its bibliographic heritage while maintaining the status of a center for research and consultation. To help with this conservation, the Library of Catalonia is working with Google in a digitization project. This means that any of the books within the library that are in the public domain are being digitized and made available online.
In the Marès museum visitors are able to view documents such as the Catalonian Constitution of 1493, an Arab Devotional, and the tales of Hans Christian Andersen. The Marès museum is full of literary and historical wonders and is a sight to see.
Following the Marès museum, is a room dedicated to Cervantes’ Don Quixote. The shelves in this room are lined with an unfathomable number of copies of Don Quixote. It is quite spectacular, and a Cervantes enthusiasts dream.
In an added special treat, our group was able to examine the Library of Catalunya’s map collection that features maps of Barcelona from the 17th through the 19th century. We were able to see the ways the city has changed from being a military city surrounded by large walls on each side, a transitional period, and the Barcelona we know today. A visit to the Library of Catalonia is steeped in historical facts and interesting tidbits, and is a must for literary scholars.
--Tanwaporn Ohl [Photos: Tanwaporn Ohl]
Getting off the metro, our group entered a grungy, graffiti covered building and rode an open-doored elevator to the sixth floor. The group disembarked and waited in the hall, hesitant to knock on the door. This building seemed out of character as an office space for a design studio. Opinions shifted, however, as soon as we entered the studio itself. We were greeted by José Hernández, Aer Studio's Creative Director and one of its cofounders, and ushered into a sleek, open-plan office space. People maneuvered past a ping-pong table and drum set to grab a space one of several couches. After everyone settled in, José began to talk about his work at Aer Studio and allowed people to ask questions throughout the talk.
Aer Studio is a company that
works in interaction design. José explains this as being similar to
product design for the internet age. The company focuses on digital
interaction design—items such as mobile phone applications or
web-based interfaces—and how to give the consumer the best possible
product while maintaining efficiency and profitability. José uses
the term “minimum viable product” to describe the balance
between providing a desirable product and maintaining a profitable
business. The minimum viable product focuses on the absolute minimum
level at which a product
can be while still being viable if released
to the public. To use an example, Snapchat is a mobile phone
application that allows users to send pictures that disappear after
several seconds.
While it
would be useful for Snapchat to integrate
with the iPhone's camera roll, the minimum viable product principle
states that consumers would still download and use Snapchat with the
application only allowing the user to send a photo taken through
Snapchat. Thus Snapchat does not send photos from a user's in-phone
photos.
The use of the minimum viable product, José explains, is that it allows the designers to shape their product as feedback dictates. This way the designers have more flexibility to create a better product while also keeping initial costs down. A concern with overhead and operational costs punctuated much of José's talk. Aer Studio uses the “lean start up method” to reduce its own costs and maintain maximum flexibility. This method reduces costs through concepts like the minimum viable product and relying on a small core group of people who then contract freelancers when needed. Hiring freelancers allows Aer Studio to reduce costs by growing only when there is enough work to necessitate more employees.
This strategy also gives Aer Studio the advantage of hiring specialized freelancers depending on shifts in the market. Flexibility is important within interaction design as technology continues to evolve. Aer Studio's core staff spends a significant amount of time learning new technology as each new iteration of the iPhone, iPad, etc. necessitates continuing education. Aer Studio's ability to adapt and react to each shift in the market means it has been able to outlast similar startups and grow into the decade old company it is today.
As students studying new media, this glimpse into the operations of a working design studio proved invaluable. The talk revealed the extent to which technology has reshaped the world of design. One student asked José which ares of study would best prepare someone to enter interaction design. José responded that more and more designers enter with a programming background and that he wished he had a understood programming as his work has become completely web-based. This need for design companies to be programming heavy has been a relatively recent change, and demand continues to grow as smart phones, tablets, and computers become cheaper and more powerful. These changes have happened in a few short years, and who knows how next five years will affect design. As times continue to change, however, Aer Studio stands poised and ready to react to however the market evolves.
-Isaac Werner [Photo 1: Aer Studio Homepage, Photo 2: Isaac Werner]
The group met Natasha Christina and
Ricard Martinez outside of the IES building at 3 o’clock on Sunday afternoon. After
spending the morning recuperating from our attempts at absorbing an authentic Spanish
Saturday night the evening before, we headed down Carrer de Trafalgar on our rephotography
adventure.
Natasha, the Art Director of the
KOWASA Gallery in Barcelona, and Ricard, a photographer and researcher, are two
of the three members of Arqueologia del Punt de Vista. The third member, Isidre Santacreu, was waiting
for us under the Arc de Triumph with multiple cameras wrapped around his body
and his hands filled with drawing supplies. Arqueologia del Punt de Vista is a
trio of artists, researchers and theorists dedicated to the art of
re-photographing old images in the context of contemporary Barcelona. Through
the act of trying to take the exact same photo, the photographer can study and try
to understand the perspective and intent of the original artist. These new
perspectives gained from taking the images give us insight into what the
original artist did and felt when he/she was taking the photos, as well as of other
aspects of life in the earlier time period, such as what buildings existed
outside of the frame and how people moved through and used the city
spaces.
It was a beautiful sunny afternoon,
and the Ciutadella Park was packed with sunbathers, bikers, skaters and
children in face paint. We weaved through the crowds and ended up at a gym. Isidre
instructed us to look for something unusual through the windows of the gym. In
the corner of this indoor basketball court was a piece of the old city wall,
perfectly blended into this contemporary building but still noticeable and
clearly significant to the historians of the group. Isidre, Natasha and Ricard
spoke about the walls that were constructed around what is now the “old part”
of Barcelona. The walls were first made under Roman rule in about 15BCE and
later expanded during the Medieval Ages to include the growing population. The
industrial revolution created another population increase, and in late 19th
and early 20th centuries, the L’Eixample (Catalan for extension),
the gridded neighborhood to the west of the old city, was planned and
constructed. Many of the old city walls were taken down. The wall is significant
because it has been used both to keep people out of the city during the Roman
occupation and the Medieval Ages and also maintain control over the Catalan
people within the city and prevent an uprising against the central Spanish
government in the 18th century.
We finally found ourselves in Placa
Palau, the trading square for the old city of Barcelona and the gateway between
the port and the city. This was the site of our rephotography activity. We
split into small groups and each group was assigned an old photograph. Our goal
was to figure out where the photographer was standing when he/she took the
photograph and then place ourselves in the exact location in order to draw in
the rest of the canvases with current information about the site. The range of
difficulty depended on whether or not the photo contained buildings that still
existed today.
After about one hour of drawing, we
collectively had seven drawings that more-or-less successfully captured the
contemporary scene while incorporating the old photographs.
We learned that the
process of rephotography is not that simple; it sometimes requires standing in
places that are now occupied by buildings or roads and often requires persistence
in order to capture the greatest amount of information in a scene that has
changed greatly over time. Although difficult, it is this process that exposes
a frame into the past, one that is essential to understanding the history of a
place.
-Charlotte Harris [Photo 1: Isidre Santacreu, Photos 2-8: Charlotte Harris]
As CAMS students, we are image makers and image appreciators on a daily basis, but knowing the ins and outs of sharing, displaying, selling and buying images isn't something we can take for granted. On Friday, our group had the great experience of visiting KOWASA Gallery and hearing firsthand from the Art Director, Natasha Christia, some of the considerations that go into running a gallery.
The KOWASA is a bookstore and gallery space dedicated to phtotography, divided into two levels. The first floor is made up of walls and walls of photography books for purchase--from how-to manuals, to massive fashion photography volumes, to photojournalistic collections. The selection is numerous and diverse--we enjoyed perusing new and familiar photographers' work when we spent some time exploring the densely packed shelves. Photography books are great because they allow us to experience photos in a tangible, non digital form, while still catering to an internet-age appetite for images.
Upstairs, there is a gallery where younger, not yet well-known photographers can display their work. Photographers interested in displaying their work will often contact the gallery, but the actualization of an exhibition (in any gallery) goes far beyond an artist just wanting to show their photos--exhibitions are collaborations between artists and galleries, and the more they can both benefit from a show, the better. Natasha outlined some of the processes an artist would go through if they were to show their work in a gallery. For example, one of the most important things a photographer can do when showing their portfolio is focus on the presentation. Physical prints presented neatly and professionally are definitely the way to go, even though digital portfolios have become more and more common in recent years. Galleries (at least the kind Natasha works with) aren't interested in displaying pixels on a screen--why would they be interested in seeing an artist's images on a screen? It is hard to visualize what a digital image would look like on a wall, in the absence of a physical print. Another essential strategy is for the artist to get to know the gallery, because it's all about fit--if the artist's work doesn't 'belong' in a gallery, then no one benefits. Showing interest and knowlege in what the gallery displays regularly and evaluating whether it is compatible with an artist's own work is an intelligent way to demonstrate investment in a possible relationship with the gallery, rather than a one-sided desire to show work anywhere that has wall space. And of course, it would save both parties a lot of time to find out early on if they aren't a good fit for each other.
There are a handful of other decisions that come with working on an exhibition, too, but they don't have 'right' or 'wrong' choices, rather they will be subject to tradeoffs and parameters. Natasha mostly talked about this when it came to making and pricing prints that will be in a show. There are a few key pairs of factors that the artist and gallery have to negotiate:
The size of an edition is inversely proportional to the size of the prints in the edition.
The price of a print is often directly proportional to the size of the print.
The price of a print is inversely proportional to the size of the edition.
Really, the economics of image-selling are based on the same principles of supply and demand that apply to anything else. That doesn't mean that it's a simple thing to figure out, though. Some artists choose to price prints in an edition all the same, and some choose to price later prints in the edition higher and higher than the first--it takes time and experience to figure out which strategies will be most beneficial, because in the end it comes down to "what works" and what is fitting. We were very lucky to learn as much as we did from a professional in the field, and our interactions with galleries and artists in the future are bound to be more informed and productive because of it.
- Haley Ryan [Photo: John Schott]
"I'll trade you this one of my great-uncle Larry with the fake lamb chops for yours with the cat on the couch."
Our visit saturday to the Arxiu Fotografic de Barcelona taught me that, had I been alive during the early 20th century, I could have made that trade for your card of the cat on the couch. And If you proposed the same trade to me today, I would still accept. I mean, are you kidding me? Do you know how difficult it is to get a cat to sit still in front of a camera for that long of an exposure?
Visiting the largest photo archive in Barcelona was much like the sensation of pouring over the shoebox of your dads baseball cards as a kid. It's a magical experience, from the careful handling of cards, to the wonderment of the old faces, styles, stances. Pondering the past is an incredible inner experience that is so incredibly moved by the photograph--even if it may seem silly to us now that 3" x 4" portraits of cats were a thing back then. History through photography is so interesting precisely because it offers us this window into the past, certainly through the photographic subject and content (cat on couch circa 1913), but also into the history of the photograph itself (somebody get this cat to stop moving, I can't capture him on film otherwise).
The importance of the more than 2.5 million images possessed by the Arxiu de Fotografic is expressed by the care with which Natasha and the Director of Photograpy handle the antiques, never without white gloves. We were introduced to such works as a daguerreotype portrait of a woman, old panoramic shots of the city, and the newer interpretations of those landscapes rephotographed by Mark Klett from the exact same spot on Montserrat many years later. The rapidly growing archive has been the result of hard work, generous donations, and the knowledge that the origins of photography and Barcelonian history must be kept alive and studied.
While the preservation of the original artifacts is paramount, the digital preservation of this mass of images is equally so. With the help of Natasha's translation, specialist Jordi Callfell explained the processes by which old photographs were digitized, primarily with the use of a digital camera, scanner, and computer. He showed us some of his current work on a photograph by Jacques Leonard, a man who married into a gypsy community in Montjuïc (France) and took many photographs along the way. Jordi explained that preservation was not simply copy and pasting the past into the present, but also exploring the past so that we may better understand it today. When Leonard printed his version of the image, he had cropped out several elements of the original negative. Jordi believes that reprinting and recovering as much information as possible in situations like these is necessary to truly make the most out of studying these photographs.
Even as everything goes digital, the Arxiu Fotografic staunchly believes that images to be used in expositions should be developed in the traditional darkroom process. We were shown the darkroom, though it is difficult to describe here as…it was pretty dark. But once the eyes adjusted, we were able to admire the two enlargers, one American and one German. According to Jordi, those which have dark room experience are ultimately better off as photographers because they more fully understand the nature of the craft. Get me to a dark room ASAP.
To top off our tour, we were given the exclusive permission to be the first visitors to an exhibit featuring photographs from the early years of the Franco regime. While our hosts were apologetic for the supposedly incomplete exhibit, I was more than satisfied with the opportunity to learn something of an extremely important piece of Spanish history of which I know very little about. One incredible aspect of photography is that we can cheat back into the past with a knowledge of the future. The Arxiu Fotografic was exactly that portal with which we were able to briefly experience the past of Barcelona and of photography itself. And wonder if trading cards of cats will ever become popular again.
-Ben Walsh {Photo 1: Ben Walsh. Photo 2. Ben Walsh. Photo 3: Ben Walsh.}
And the common belief is that cinema and photography have moved off to live and die separate from each other.
Natasha Christia, the Art Director of the KOWASA gallery, talked to us on April 9th and shattered this pervasive illusion. We received what many took as a crash course in Film Theory in a period of no more than four hours. The worlds of photography and cinema are much closer than first appeared.
I personally was most interested in the ways that film and photography have been trying to emulate each other over the years. It seems that they are irreparably different from each other: a photograph is a still, a single frame or moment that is always a past experience. Film, on the other hand, is made up of many frames and moments, creating a “continuous present.”
Conversely there are many movies that try to emulate photography. Besides some commercial films of the late 20th century dubbed “still videos” because they kept the frame and the elements within it very still, Andy Warhol created a famous film titled “Empire”. The movie is eight hours and five minutes of the Empire State Building, from about 8pm to 3am (the film was slowed down slightly so instead of 6 hours it’s 8 hours long). The frame doesn’t really change except the sun over a very long period of time; the change is so gradual that many don’t even notice that it’s happening. However, this is partly why Warhol created the film, to capture all these moments. Again, another example of how cinema and photography have been in dialogue over the years.
Another great example of movies going back to photography is from the Wachowski siblings’ film “The
. For the famous bullet-time sequence, they actually lined up a row of cameras that each took one picture and then strung them together. This goes back to the Muybridge technique of individual stills creating motion, and when viewed in 24 frames per second it looks like the action is slowed while the camera moves at normal speed.
Many people say that photography is dead, but pictures have already died many times. Photography has followed elements of cinema, such as the collected continuity stills in “Evidence of Aggression” to the documentary by a photographer about herself going back to find the people in one of her earliest photos. Cinema as well has reflected back on its roots: the short film “La Jetée” by Chris Marker is composed almost entirely of photographs. Though many feel the time of photography is over, this appears to be far from the case. If anything, photography and cinema will continue to change and evolve as time goes on, never to die out.
- Connor Einarsen [Photo 1: Connor Einarsen. Photo 2: Bing Images. Photo 3: Bing Images.]
“Photography is a cool and fun way to show off your artistic
skills. Photography is linked with life and dream. Photography is fascinating
and very difficult.” These are but 3 of over 3000 meditations on photography
printed on a towering scroll at “From Here On: Post-Photography in the Age of
the Internet and the Mobile Telephone”, an exhibition at Arts Santa Mónica that
we visited on Tuesday. The scroll in question is a work by Mishka Henner titled
Photography Is, originally presented
as a book that pulls quotes out of context in an attempt to reveal what photography
is without ever showing it.
One of the more relevant quotes to be found on the scroll is “Photography is not an art that can grow indefinitely.” This description seems apt in light of the theme of the exhibition. Photography is dead, or at least evolving into something different from anything that came before. In today’s media-saturated world, one where the average person sees more images in a day than their ancestors would have seen in their entire lifetime, what is the point of creating your own images? Better to take some of the billions of photos already floating around on the Internet and make something of those.
We received a guided tour of the exhibition from Pep Vidal, an artist who proved very familiar with the post-photography movement. The three floors of Arts Santa Mónica were full of incredibly varied works that explored new ways of thinking about photography in the digital age. The first floor housed some of the most striking parts of the exhibition. Photo Opportunities, a series by Corinne Vionnet, takes thousands of photos of popular monuments, taken from the same vantage points by hoards of tourists and uploaded to Flickr, and overlays them to create ghostly new images of the landmarks. The work brings up one of the central questions of the post-photography: by taking a picture of something that has been captured countless times before, are you really taking a new picture?
Also on the first floor was an exhibit about Joanna Dark, a photographer who operates not in real life, but inside a video game. The extremely prolific photographer, who holds up to four photo shoots a week, takes all of her pictures inside Playstation Home, a virtual world for Playstation that is similar to Second Life. The game allows her to easily control her “models”, virtual avatars that she runs from multiple computers. She is even able to place lights in various locations for the look and feel of a real photo shoot. Able to dress her models in elaborate costumes and shoot them in a huge variety of landscapes, Joanna has found the perfect outlet for her own brand of fashion photography, outside the confines of real-world photography.
The other standout exhibit from the first floor was a photo
series by Doug Rickard entitled The New
American Picture. Combing through tons of images from Google Street View, a
feature of Google Maps which shows the viewer street level photos of a large
part of American roadways, Rickard has managed to find stunning captures which
show a relatively harsh view of American cities. Beautifully composed, the
photos could easily be the work of a professional photographer, and are made
all the more striking by the fact that they were taken by a Google car.
The second floor of the exhibit housed some more serious works. The most affecting by far was Thinspiration, a series of photos collected from various places on the internet of girls with eating disorders, who posted the photos as a record of their achievements and desires in weight loss. While many of the exhibits were playful, this one offered a more sobering look at Internet culture and the dangers of easy access to such a glut of images. Also affecting was the series Fatescapes, by the Slovak artist Pavel Maria Smejkal. Smejkal took iconic war photographs and precisely Photoshopped out everything but the landscape. The effect was unsettling. While still recognizable due to their iconic status, the photographs seemed ghostly and barren.
The third floor was by far the most absurd of the three. In one exhibit, chickens were kept in an enclosure surrounded by images that they were encouraged to peck at, in an effort to see which images caused more agitation for the chickens. In another, nude self-portraits taken by men and posted online were collected and organized thematically. Though this particular exhibit was titillating for the group at large, it was an interesting look at how the wide availability of cameras has affected both male and female sexuality in the Internet era.
Pep also led us on a tour of Fundació Foto Colectiana, a smaller exhibition space that was also sowing works of post-photography. While some fell a bit flat, others were just as exciting as those at Arts Santa Monica. The most elaborate was Other People’s Photographs, a series of books by Joachim Schmid that collected photos taken from the Internet into a series of themes. Themes included “My First Picture”, “Images”, “Sex”, and many other strange and mundane ideas. Though many of the works we saw with Pep were a bit strange, it was interesting to see a new direction that photography is headed in. As Pep put it, perhaps these exhibitions will mark the end of an old era and the start of a new one. Only time will tell.
- Max FeldermanThe city of Barcelona contains seven beaches, which constitutes 2.8 miles of coastline along the Mediterranean. The view of the Mediterranean from the beach is breathtaking, and the sound of the waves washing against the shore, contrasted with the sounds of the city to the west offer an uncanny juxtaposition between nature and civilization. Over the course of my first week the beach has provided a place for me to run, burn my skin, and experience some amazing people watching. To be exact, the beach has been my favorite place in Barcelona. However, my opinion of this beach changed during the bike tour our class took with the Fat Tire Bike Tours Company.
I was initially reluctant to spend my afternoon on the tour because nothing screams “tourist” with such exacting efficiency as a bunch of college students on bicycles with cameras following an Australian tour guide. But in retrospect the tour was a wonderful opportunity to explore the city and see some of Barcelona’s most iconic architecture, including the Plaza Del Rei, La Catedral, and the Arc De Triomf.
During the tour the guide gave us an abbreviated lesson on Barcelona’s history within the context of the Catalonian people and their desire for independence. Each location provided a unique history and narrative that helped to better emulate the conflicts between the Spanish and Catalonian peoples. Of the places we stopped, I was most interested in the monument of the Flame on Fossar de les Moreres. It commemorates the people that died during the War of the Spanish Succession in 1713. The flame, which burns eternal, is a constant reminder of the Catalonian people’s failed attempt for independence. I thought it was a beautiful gesture, but I also found it to be problematic as it relates the readings we have done on the philosophy of place.
Specifically, the concept of memorials, as well as the preservation of specific edifices, function as identifiers of a people’s culture and their collective memory. By preserving a specific set of edifices, the city’s government implies that those edifices selected best represent the people of Barcelona, as well as the city’s heritage. Obviously some structures are more important than others when determining the key points of a peoples’ history. Yet just as a curator can never encapsulate the entire spirit of an art movement with select pieces of art, neither can a few buildings emulate the complex and controversial history of Barcelona. Ironically, of the preserved edifices Barcelona offers its tourists, I have only experienced those the Fat Tire Bike Tours Company determined helpful in their abridged history lesson of the city. Thus I am very weary of what I know, and of what I understand as “Barcelona.” Simply, what I understand as “Barcelona” has been regulated by a government and a tour company. So while I appreciated the rather skewed history lesson the Australian gave me, I am conscious of the generalizations I will be forced to make as a result of these structured parameters.
In terms of the eternal Flame memorial, I wonder how a people can strike out for a new, and more prosperous future when the memorials they construct demand that they remember and persevere in the proclamations of their history. It has been 300 years since the Catalonian people last attempted to fight of their independence, yet as it became evident from the countless independence flags that hang from the balconies of the apartments around the city, the War of the Spanish Succession in 1713 is still fresh on the collective conscious of Barcelona. And the eternal Flame will make sure that the Catalan people never forget, and never concede in their endeavor for national freedom. In a sense, the eternal Flame memorial is a microcosm for how edifices can re-define place. But even more, it is a remarkable example of how new buildings can thrust antiquated histories into present day dialogues, and thus serve as tools for social persuasion and revolution.
During the tour we also visited the beach I had become so fond of during our first week in Barcelona. Unfortunately, the guide informed me that each year the government imports sand from Egypt to replenish the beach line. The beach is artificial. It is a human construct, and it was made before the Summer Olympics in Barcelona in 1992 in order to enhance the city’s perception as a tourist destination. Obviously their plan worked. National Geographic ranked Barcelona the best beach city in 2010. But while I experienced the beach, I had thought it was natural, and I believed I was experiencing, on a basic level, the “Barcelona” experience. In reality, I was experiencing the government of Barcelona’s planned perception of their city.
The eternal Flame, as well as the beach I have walked countless time, serve as paragons for constructed perceptions of reality. In both cases a few people determined a course of action that has influenced the external stereotypes and internal perceptions of the Catalonian culture and Barcelona at large: the Flame will burn and remind its people their war is not won, and tourists will continue to flock to the beach, only to return home with photos of Egyptian sand.
-John O'Brien | Photos: Ashanti Soldier, John O'Brien
At around 4 o’clock this past Monday, we all headed to Mercat de Sant Josep, or Mercat de La Boqueria, which is perhaps Barcelona’s best-known market. If you’re ever in Barcelona and looking for a place to treat your senses to a bit of food heaven, I would highly recommend you to go and experience this one-of-a-kind market. To put it simply, you will be blown away by what you will see, smell, and taste.
As soon as we approached the market, our taste buds began to salivate, nostrils flared, and eyes widened as we took in all of the sights and smells. We were instantly taken back by how alive and dense this place was. The layout of this market resembled a labyrinth, with its walls consisting of a plethora of different food vendors. The high number of people in this bazaar and the vigorous rhythm at which they moved took a minute to get used to. Had we not reacted to this pace quickly enough, this tide of motion would have easily tossed us from one end of the market to the other. Although the speed at which the market flowed was quite fast, the energy it produced was invigorating and filled us with an overabundance of excitement.
It was refreshing to see such a high volume of people searching, buying, and tasting at this market as opposed to a chain grocery store. This place harkened back to a time when there were no such things as, for example, Sam’s Club or Cub. Shopping in an open-air market feels right. After seeing where and how the food you buy is kept and packaged, it is hard to not wince when you go into a grocery store and are forced to buy food that has been shipped from who-knows-where and has been kept in a freezer for days, maybe even weeks. Fresh food is the way to go. If you don’t have a chance to make it to Barcelona anytime soon and/or haven’t been to a fresh market, go and check out a local one near you—such as a farmers market. They are a great way to support local farmers, fisherman, and butchers. Trust me, you won’t regret it.
After spending a minute to take in this experience, we made our way through this maze of vendors to the very back of the market where our kitchen was located. As you would imagine, the kitchen was pristine and fully stocked with razor-sharp knives, glimmering pots and pans, and ovens that could fit an entire meal in them. In other words, our classroom was fully stocked and ready for action! The room we cooked in was spacious enough to accommodate our large group, but small enough that it kept us on our toes; there was no room for any unsynchronized movement.
Once we situated ourselves, we met our teachers for the afternoon, Carla and Angela. These two chefs were about as opposite as opposite could get. Carla, or cocinera (Spanish for chef) as she preferred, was tall, intense, and made it very evident to you if your technique was wrong. She was not antagonistic, but she certainly ran a tight ship. Angela was older and a bit shorter than Carla and was quite motherly in the way she instructed. Differences aside, they were a lot of fun to work with.
Before we began to cook, Carla led us on a roughly twenty-five minute tour of the market. She took us to a number of different vendors, teaching us how to pick out quality ingredients. Being that we are in Spain, the land of meat, her most helpful tips were on how to select high-quality cured meat. The vendor that we went to for this part of the tour had three meaty cured pork legs on presentation. Carla explained that when buying fresh, cured pork meat, you want to make sure that the leg from which you’re buying is marbled with just the right amount of fat. You don’t want the meat to be too lean or too fatty.
After receiving a more in-depth look at the market, we returned to the kitchen to begin our lesson. We learned how to cook authentic Spanish zuccinni omelets, potato omelets, calçots, asparagus, bread with a baked tomato spread on top, and a creamy tomato and garlic dipping sauce. Carla divided us up into three groups to prepare different parts of the meal. A third of the group peeled, chopped, and cleaned. Another baked, and the last group prepared and cooked the omelets. As we readied the meal, both Angela and Carla watched over us with keen eyes and provided guidance when needed.
As soon as the last omelet was complete, our feast began. Thanks to the guidance of our chefs, the food tasted fantastic. My favorite dish was the calçots dipped in the tomato and garlic sauce; it was a great combination of flavors. Once we had devoured every last bit of food, we cleaned up and said our goodbyes to Carla and Angela. I doubt any of us will soon forget this wonderful experience.
- Sam Eckmeier
Our second portion of class was guided by the accomplished architect, Suzanne Strum. Strum first gave us a lecture on modernisme in Barcelona and then focused in on Gaudi's work and unfluence. Afterward, she took us to La Sagrada Familia for an on-site tour of Gaudi’s La Sagrada Familia. We were very lucky to have Strum as our guide, for she is a working architect, has a Phd in Theory of History and Architecture from the UPC, is a graduate of Columbia University Graduate school of Architecture, Planning and Preservation in New York, and has a masters in the Metropolis Program. She has even written a book called Barcelona Architecture.
Strum's lecture first focused on the Modernisme movement, a local version of Art Nouveau. Modernisme was centered in Barcelona and is often associated with a search for national Catalan identity. This pan-European and American movement took place roughly between 1880 and 1910, marked by the First International Exhibition of Barcelona in 1888 at its start and the death the poet Joan Maragall at the end. As a reaction to industrialism, the movement was the first conscious attempt to make a modern style.
While this movement took place in many countries, it is most associated with Catalonia and Barcelona. The basic features of the architectural movement were that it rejected classical style and instead found inspiration in the natural world. Structural biology, Japanese art, and the use of new materials like glass and steel influenced the architects of the Modernisme movement.
Strum then gave us a more detailed lecture on the life and work of Antoni Gaudi. She shared an anecdote about Gaudi’s graduation that is illuminating of both his work and personality. When he graduated from Barcelona’s School of Architecture in 1878, the director turned to the section of teachers and announced to them, “ Gentlemen, we are here today either in the presence of a genius or a madman.” Perhaps this indicative of what was to come from Gaudi, for his work is both genius and eccentric. Much of his work looks like it is something from the pages of a children’s book. One quirk Gaudi had was that he hated to draw. Instead of drawing out his plans, Gaudi preferred to create 3 dimensional models. Strum told our group that she likes to show her architecture students Gaudi’s drawings because even though they are at best average, he still became a wildly successful architect.
Gaudi’s professional work was largely funded by his patron Eusebi Guell, a Catalan entrepreneur who made his fortune from the industrial revolution. The most famous project that Guell commisioned is Park Guell. Although it was originally meant to be a housing development, only two houses were ever built in the garden complex. There are many eccentricities found in park guell. It is the location of Gaudi’s iconic salamander, which is referred to as “el drac,” meaning the dragon. On the main terrace of the park, there are benches with beautiful mosaic work. Some of the mosaics on the benches have hidden messages in Catalan and Latin hand carved into the tile by Gaudi.
After Strum’s presentation on Modernisme and Gaudi, she lead us to La Sagrada Familia, where we continued our tour through radio headsets to make sure no one missed a word. La Sagrada Familia is an expiatory church, meaning that the church can only be funded by anonymous donations made in penance. Although it is perhaps his most famous work, La Sagrada Familia was originally commissioned to Francisco de Paula del Villar y Lozano, but was given to Gaudi in 1883 because of a dream that the commissioner had. The construction of this church occupied most of Gaudi’s career, as he worked on it from 1883 until his death in 1926.
At the time of Gaudi’s death, the building was less than a fourth finished. While he created the original design, since his death it has been continued by several different architects that attempt to stay true to Gaudi’s style. It is still in construction today and isn’t expected to be finished for another forty years. His designs included eighteen ascending spires; twelve to represent the apostles, four for the Evangelists, one for the Virgin Mary, and the tallest for Jesus Christ. So far however, only eight spires have been built. Gaudi had some unorthodox methods for construction of statues on buildings. He sometimes had his workers and his workers children create body casts of themselves to model the statues after. Because of his dislike of drawing, he made a 1/10th scale model of the Church. He also lived on the construction site of La Sagrada Familia on and off while he was working on it.
After Strum concluded our tour, we were free to roam about the church and museum and photograph Gaudi’s architecture and some of his models.
-Holly Wickham | {Suzanne Strum Photo: Texas A&M University- College of Architecture.}
“Where ever we are, there has always been someone there before us”
-Ricard Martinez
This past Friday, our first real day of activities after the introductory stuff on Thursday, we were visited by two artists/theorists from a group called Arqueologia del Punt de Vista (which means Archaeology of the Viewpoint), Ricard Martinez and Natasha Christia. They talked to us about their work in what is called re-photography. Re-photography encompasses a lot of different techniques, but the most basic involves going to the exact location where a previous photo was taken, typically one that holds some special position within the history of photography or history at large, and taking another photo from the same spot, thereby documenting the changes that have taken place in the interstice. These two photos may then be displayed beside each other, merged using image processing software or otherwise juxtaposed. Re-photography can also be practiced not by going back to the same place but by photographing the same subjects some years later; a particularly interesting example of this that Ricard discussed was a photographer who in the 70’s tracked down and photographed the subjects of Dorothea Lange’s iconic Great Depression photos.
The idea of re-photography presents some very interesting questions to us as we develop our own photography practice, as it in some ways questions a lot of what we think of as essential to photography. After all, photographers are always after what Henri Cartier-Bresson called ‘the decisive moment’, that one point in time where everything aligns just right and a totally unique moment is captured for eternity by the photographer. The re-photographer plays with this by going back to the site where someone else (or themselves at an earlier time, still in a way someone else) previously captured a decisive moment and seeing if they can capture a decisive moment that both is in dialogue with the previous moment and builds upon it. Ricard showed us a particularly interesting image he had captured of the place where Cartier-Bresson captured one of his most famous decisive moments, a photo of a man about to jump into a puddle, his image reflected perfectly in the water in the split-second before he lands and disrupts the surface. When Ricard went to this spot, however, he saw nobody jumping in puddles, just a car blocking his view. Maybe not as interesting aesthetically, but certainly decisive in its own way.
By going to the same exact physical space that an earlier photographer inhabited, the re-photographer explodes the temporal and spatial limits that usually bound the photographic frame. In observing the two photographs, the old and the new, the viewer projects himself into the spot where both photographers stood and imagines how the experience of being in the same place would differ based on when he was there. The re-photographer interacts with the past while also projecting himself into the future, as he may even prompt someone else down the line to come back and photograph the same thing for a third time, a fourth time, on and on. This idea of interacting with the viewer is key to re-photography in general, and to the specific project of Arqueologia del Punt de Vista that Natasha told us about in depth, entitled Represión y Resistencia (Repression and Resistance).
For this project their team looked through thousands of archival photos of Barcelona from the time of the Spanish Civil War (which is widely regarded as when modern photojournalism was born) up through the reign of Franco and the instability that followed his death in the 70’s. They then selected a number of photos and printed out huge versions of them and put them up in the places they were taken so that if a viewer stood in just the right position the picture would fit in perfectly with the real life panorama. One of my favorites of these was a picture from the Spanish Civil War of a building just a few hundred yards from our classroom with a hole blown in its side. The building now houses an Apple Store. Interestingly, these installations elicited public participation beyond how the viewer physically related to the photo, as they eventually became covered with graffiti. The public officials who had funded the project wanted to have the graffiti cleaned off, but Natasha convinced them to leave them up, as the whole goal of the project was to initiate public dialogue about the dark moments of Spain’s recent history that all too often go undiscussed. Just as in America we like to pretend like racism is a thing of the past despite a brutally repressive and prejudiced penal system, Spaniards seem to be hesitant to confront the continued existence of the repressive impulses that empowered Franco. It would be naïve, however, to pretend that fascism in this country disappeared with the death of just that one man. This point was powerfully made by a graffito scrawled upon one of the photo installations; over a black-and-white photo from the 70’s showing a protestor being beaten by police, someone had written in large red letters “TORTURE STILL EXISTS IN SPAIN TODAY.”*
*Off course they wrote it in Spanish, or maybe it was Catalan, and I might not have remembered the wording exactly, but you get the idea.
Woody Kaine
Photos: Woody Kaine
