Wednesday, 22 January 2014

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Top: Van Gogh- 'Starry Night' (1889)
Bottom: Lee Kyu Hak 'Starry Night'

'The Chair' 'The Chair'
Van Gogh (1888) Lee Kyu Hak

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'Mona Lisa' 'L.H.O.O.Q'
Leonardo Da Vinci Marcel Duchamp
(1503-1517) (1919)

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'Alabama Cotton Tenant 'After Walker Evans'
Farmer Wife' Sherrie Levine
Walker Evans (1936) (1979)

Tom Hunter- Essay: 'Under The Influence'

BBC Radio 3, March 2011

In this essay I will try to describe the driving influence behind my art, in the work of Johannes Vermeer, who lived in 17th century Holland. This came as a complete surprise to me when I was a young upstart, striving for social justice in a squat in Hackney. While looking for a radical approach to my art, I found a revolutionary artist working in the most traditional of art forms.

I first came across the work of Vermeer in the library at the London College of Printing, where I was doing my photography degree back in 94. I had just finished making ‘The Ghetto’ for my degree show. This is a 3D photographic model of a squatted street in Hackney, that had been home to me and around 100 others, for as long as 10 years. At the time we were trying to save our street from demolition, and ourselves from becoming homeless.

In the making of this work I began taking photographs on a large format camera, which produced 5-inch by 4-inch transparencies. These transparencies changed my whole notion of photography. When I placed them on the light box they became small windows of colour and I was completely transfixed. It was as if I were a peasant from the dark and distant past, transported from the fields of rural England into a cathedral, to be mesmerised by the sunlight pouring through the stained glass windows. Colour and light became key to the way I looked at my neighbourhood, seducing me and drawing me into contemplation of my life, my way of living and the culture that surrounded me. Once these transparencies were installed in the model, which was lit from within, my street became a kind of cathedral, and our neighbourhood its diocese.

When I showed ‘The Ghetto’ to my tutors for the first time it struck a chord and they suggested I look at the work of the golden age of Dutch painting. At school I was not considered capable of O’levels and I left at 15 with just one CSE. I went to work on farms and building sites, for the Forestry Commission and eventually as a tree surgeon in Regents Park. But at this point, aged 29, I was at college – and an incredibly keen student. I went straight to the library to investigate the golden age of Dutch painting. After looking at many books I came across Vermeer and it all clicked into place. I was transfixed again, by his use of light and colour, and taken again into that magical state of meditation. The more I read about this artist, the more intrigued and inspired I became by his life and his art.

I wrote my appraisal of my degree show, quoting the golden age of Dutch painting as an influence on my own approach. The paper was consigned to a cupboard in a squatted house in east London. This could have been the end of a fleeting insight into another artist’s life and work. My life took another turn and I set out on a double-decker bus to Europe, putting on free parties and festivals and revelling in the chaos of techno music and open roads. I had an intense couple of years living on my wits, as part of a travelling convoy, pedalling alternative culture and preaching the doctrines of free parties, no rules or regulations.

But the impulse to create kept calling, beckoning me back to London and the Royal College of Art. In a disused warehouse in Berlin I sold the double decker to ‘2000 Dirty Squatters’, a Welsh punk band. I set off back to London in an overladen estate car and limped into Hackney, returning to my long term squatting neighbourhood and resuming my residency in Ellingfort Road. But soon after my education at the Royal College began, my neighbours and I once again became the recipients of legal notices issued by the High Court of Justice, addressing Persons Unknown from The Mayor and the London Borough of Hackney in order to recover land and premises.

I took this as a challenge to our culture and lifestyle and set out to produce work that might help in our fight with the local authorities. This time the research came before the artistic endeavour, taking me in many directions, looking at different artists and their approaches to social injustice. One of my influences was my tutor at the time, Peter Kennard, who has produced a huge body of work rallying against social injustice and warmongering. What first grabbed my attention was the image Kennard made for a CND campaign in the 1980s, when he took ‘The Hay Wain’ and packed Constable’s iconic image of an English idyll with nuclear warheads. His imagery had a huge impact on me. Art with a social impact, which talked about England, had been a big part of my life from the age of 13 when I first heard this:

‘God Save The Queen’ by the Sex Pistols

God save the queen
The fascist regime
They made you a moron
Potential H-bomb

God save the queen
She ain’t no human being
There is no future
In England’s dreaming

Don’t be told what you want
Don’t be told what you need
There’s no future, no future,
No future for you

God save the queen
We mean it man
We love our queen
God saves

God save the queen
‘Cause tourists are money
And our figurehead
Is not what she seems

Oh God save history
God save your mad parade
Oh Lord God have mercy
All crimes are paid

The Sex Pistols lyrics tore around my teenage head like a steam train ripping up the rural landscape of my Dorset childhood, smashing through the soft easy vistas of fields and forests and laying down the concrete and graffiti of an urban landscape, I had yet to contemplate. But it took a long time for the popular culture of my youth, to find its voice in the creation of art, that made any sense to me. So when Peter talked about making direct references to Vermeer’s work in my own, I was surprised and doubtful. Could the classical old master have any relevance to my life or that of my subjects, my neighbours in the hole-in-the-wall community where we lived?

However, during my renewed exploration of Vermeer I kept on finding details and ‘facts’, which drew me in deeper to this artist’s work. It is very hard to find more than the barest facts about Vermeer as very little was written in his lifetime, so much of what I read is open to interpretation. But I was struck by the belief of some historians that Vermeer used a camera obscura. Professor Philip Steadman, in his book, “Vermeer’s Camera” argues that Vermeer, “used the camera to study optical images and effects; as an instrument with which to set up and adjust his compositional arrangements of sitters and furniture”. This may or may not be true but there is a relationship with photography, realism in his paintings, which drew me to them. One of the attractions of photography for me is this notion of realism, the belief that the camera never lies. Vermeer gave us a window into a real world but also a world imagined through his art. It is exactly this that attracts me to photography. The images are real, yet created by the person manipulating the camera.

Another element of his work I found fascinating was his relationship to his local world. Vermeer worked in Delft, a modest town in the Netherlands, and within this small community he looks even closer, scrutinizing a few characters, creating a series of intimate scenes of small groups and individuals. His paintings focus upon minute details and illuminate his subjects with such devotion that their status is elevated. When Vermeer was painting, such attention to sitters was only afforded to those who could pay for it: wealthy patrons of the arts such as Royals, Generals and Popes. They used their portraits to display their power and dignity as rulers. I believe Vermeer to be more like Michael Caine who said, “I’m more of a social communist, in that I treat everyone equally.” By giving such attention to ordinary events, places and people these scenes are lifted into the extraordinary.

So for me Vermeer was a painter of the people, a revolutionary artist who, by use of realism and social commentary, elevates ordinary folk to a higher status within their time and forever more. I wanted to present my friends, neighbours, lovers and myself to the world in a similar way. People I knew at this time were expecting me to produce the usual stock of black and white images of the victims of society, squatters and travelers, taking drugs and fighting bailiffs; exotic but alien figures from an unimaginable lifestyle, which could be marveled at but never understood. But instead the images I made took direct reference from Vermeer’s compositions, from his use of light, colour and calm contemplation. From this understanding I composed and rendered my photographic work ‘Woman Reading A Possession Order’, which took as its starting point, Vermeer’s ‘A girl reading a letter at an open window’. Vermeer depicts a quiet moment when a woman reads a letter at an open window bathed in soft northern European sunlight. We’ll never know for sure what is in the letter, but some commentators believe it could be a love letter from her fiancÈ fighting for his country in a war of independence against the oppressive rule of colonial Spain. So the work speaks of the struggle of the ordinary people of Delft and their battles, not by explicitly showing the battlefield or the carnage of war but one woman’s meditation on life and her situation, shown with respect, subtlety and beauty. Likewise my reworking shows a girl reading her eviction order. She is given dignity, light, beauty and space, to tell her own story in her own time. The girl in the photograph is shown in a very intimate moment in her struggle with eviction. But we can all identify with her and her suffering, so this becomes a universal moment.

Although I have not repeated, directly referencing Vermeer, in my work since my series of photographs ‘Persons Unknown’, I always keep his approach at the core of all my work. Whether I’m taking photographs of the residents of condemned tower blocks, shopkeepers or the terminally ill of the local hospice, this way of looking has shaped nearly every photograph I have taken since this time. Like Vermeer I have concentrated on my local area, Hackney, the place I’ve called home now for 25 years. I’ve tried to paint a landscape of my neighbourhood that explores its people, buildings, cultures and life to reveal its dignity and beauty.

My latest project, a film commissioned by the Serpentine Gallery and Age Concern is called ‘A Palace for Us’. It tells the story of ordinary people living their lives in a council estate, from its initial concept as the estate of the future providing ‘homes for heroes’ to the present day. Each subject is presented with warmth and respect and the film celebrates these lives against the background of social degradation. This is not to say that Hackney is special in any sort of hierarchical way, it’s just that any neighbourhood that is studied and highlighted, in the manner of Vermeer, becomes magical and amazing.

Vermeer may have never left letters or great text regarding his reasons and the methodology of his artwork but his paintings stand as a testament, to a profound understanding of the universality that connects us all as human beings to one another by the small details of everyday life. This makes his works timeless and relevant to every generation of artists and viewers. For me he has created a template for artists wanting to show the dignity of the ordinary people involved in their daily lives, lifting the ordinary into the extraordinary. Whether the medium is painting, photography or film the aims stand as a testament to a honourable tradition of equality and social justice, through attention to detail and a rendition of beauty in the ordinary.

My last thought takes me back to Vermeer and the Delft School exhibition at the National Gallery, London of 2001. Up until this point I had only seen reproductions of Vermeer’s paintings in books. I had never felt a compelling desire to see the ‘real thing’ but seeing ‘The Milkmaid’ up close, I was transported to another place. The illusion created by the detail in the gleam of milk pouring from the jug was totally captivating, as if looking at a high gloss fashion photograph in Vogue, and as real as a photograph, where the camera never lies. It was as if the woman was in a soviet social realist poster of the heroic worker; proud, strong and dignified set in an austere humble dwelling. Raquel Laneri writes, “The Milkmaid elevates the drudgery of housework and servitude to virtuous, even heroic, levels.”

That idea remains with me. Lets try to lift the people with our art, whatever the art form and however the people.

Author: Tom Hunter

Tom Hunter: 'Performative Portraits' - Point 8 Forum

Tom Hunter: Performative Portraits

Tom Hunter creates contemplative photographs that often depict the travelers and squatters inhabiting his community of Hackney, a borough within East London. Utilizing the sprawling post-industrial relics of Hackney—its untamed landscape, abandoned dwellings and warehouses—Hunter creates striking images that reference historical paintings, including those by 17th-century Dutch master Johannes Vermeer and 19th-century Pre-Raphaelites such as John Everett Millais, among many others. In the winter of 2005, Hunter was invited to present his photographs in London’s National Gallery of Art, a distinctive invitation offered to few contemporary artists.

Girl Writing an Affidavit, 1997 24 x 20″ Cibachrome print Yancey Richardson Gallery

Hunter began to receive acclaim in 1997 for his series Persons Unknown; thereafter, he created three more series:Travellers, Life and Death in Hackney, and the most recent Headlines project. His enticing images illustrate or extend a narrative, allowing the viewer to further contemplate the story contained within these carefully staged compositions. He appropriates images from art historical paintings, like many Postmodernist artists, but uses this strategy to bring attention to the inhabitants of Hackney, where his still resides. Though there may be humor in some of his photographs, Hunter avoids smug insider jokes that can make some appropriated images so cloying.

Key to the effectiveness of Hunter’s art is his exceptional sensitivity to landscape and place. His time spent outdoors, observing the effects of light and the seasons, has had a profound effect on his ability to create such compelling photographs that are reliant upon natural light. “At 21 I escaped to London and became a tree surgeon for the Royal Parks,” writes Hunter. “During this time I became a squatter in Hackney with little income; it became the only way of living in London at the time.” A number of the squatters and travelers whom Hunter depicts in his photographs are people he has befriended: artists, students, and performers who choose a modest lifestyle, enabling them to practice their craft. Through his Persons Unknown (1997) and Travellers (1996-1998) series, Hunter sought to present a more positive representation of their way of life.

Woman Reading a Possession Order, 1997 24 x 20″ Cibachrome print

Hunter’s Woman reading a Possession Order (1997), for example, has a striking resemblance to Vermeer’s Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window (1657, Gemäldegalerie, Dresden). Both the painting and photograph depict young women standing before windows, immersed in reading papers held in their hands. Like Vermeer, Hunter captures a particular empathy for the subject and utilizes subtlety of tones and richness of color: “Vermeer was one of the first painters to deal with ordinary life and people rather than the royal court paintings; his paintings lifted the way the Dutch were viewed, at a time when Holland was ruled by Spain.” Also, according to Hunter, “I wanted to raise the image of our community at a time when we were under siege from the national and local government.”

Hunter’s photograph differs from Vermeer’s painting in that it includes an infant bathed in late-afternoon light and resting on a crocheted blanket. The baby’s vulnerable presence heightens the plight of the young mother, who is being notified that she is to be evicted from her home.

Tom Hunter’s subsequent series, Life and Death in Hackney (1999-2001), ventures out from contained interiors to the expansive landscape of Hackney, with its warehouses and abandoned spaces that border the urban landscape and the countryside.

The landscape in Hunter’s photographs shows signs of being overtaken by wilderness once again. It is a place inhabited by individuals willing to reside close to nature, such as the two young women shown sitting before a campfire at dusk in Vale of Rest (1999-2001). Hunter’s The Way Home (1999-2001) is a direct reference to Ophelia (1852), John Everett Millais’ portrait of Hamlet’s scorned lover as she is about to experience a “watery death.”

The Way Home, 1999-2001 50 x 60″ Cibachrome print Collection of Heather and Tony Podesta

While all of Hunter’s photographs imply a narrative, his most recent Headlinesseries (2002- ) is gleaned from headlines featured in the local paper, theHackney Gazette. This publication contains direct reportage about crimes within the neighborhood and contains sensationalized details of the underside of society. Bringing into question the boundary between reality and fiction, the scenarios playing out within these staged photographs seem to be more voyeuristic and cinematic. They are closely aligned to historical paintings and theatrical compositions, staged in a manner to convey narratives and significant events from the past. Hunter recreates acts of violence reported in the paper, as in Road Rage Thug jailed for Attack on Priest, in which an imposing man is about to pummel a priest who is lying on the ground beside his car. This photograph has compositional similarities to Guercino’s (1591-1666) The Dead Christ mourned by Two Angels, c. 1617-18 (The National Gallery, London).

Bounding Buddhist rushes to the Rescue of Neighbor’s Pets (2005) is a visually rich composition, depicting a young monk protecting a rabbit from a vicious fox. The fox has already claimed one victim, as evidenced by a lifeless, mangled carcass on the grass. The composition of this photograph was inspired by a Ludovico Carracci (1555-1619) painting depicting St. Francis of Assisi meeting Mary and the infant Jesus (_The Vision of Saint Francis_, c. 1583-86, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam). St. Francis is reputed to have had a special connection with animals and nature, so it is fitting that Hunter’s more contemporary interpretation depicts an animal being sheltered from danger. In all four of his series, Tom Hunter masterfully reveals how contemporary art can refer to the past in order to illuminate the present. His sensuous photographs function on a variety of levels; they are meticulously composed vignettes that also convey a message about community and place. The compelling and open-ended narratives that Hunter creates engage the viewer and invite further contemplation of the story that is unfolding.

Carla M. Hanzal Curator of Contemporary Art, The Mint Museums

'Appropriation Art (Or How to Steal Like an Artist)- Grace-Yvette Gemmell

Art 101

Appropriation Art (Or How to Steal Like an Artist)

By Grace-Yvette Gemmell

Nov. 28, 2012

Appropriation Art (Or How to Steal Like an Artist)

Left, detail of Walker Evans's "Alabama Tenant Farmer's Wife" (1936); right, detail from Sherrie Levine's "After Walker Evans" (1980)

While appropriation—borrowing recognizable images from various sources, from advertising to the annals of art history, and using them to create a new work of art—has a long history in modern and contemporary art (think, for instance, of the use of newspaper clippings in Cubist collages, or Duchamp's famous mustachioed Mona Lisa), it took hold as a dominant artistic strategy in the latter half of the 20th century. Unlike copying or forgery, which attempt to trick viewers into believing they are looking at something unique, appropriation hinges on the ability of the viewer to recognize the original source of the image and all of its connotations.

In the 1960s, Pop artists like Andy Warhol, James Rosenquist, and Roy Lichtenstein used familiar, mass-cultural imagery—comic books, advertisements, and celebrity portraits—to comment on America's consumer culture. These artists not only brought the everyday realm of tabloid photographs and grocery store aisles into that of high art, but also redefined the role of the artist: as Warhol and his contemporaries insisted, an artist could be someone who selected a pre-existing image and modified it rather than creating something entirely from scratch.

Appropriation reached its apogee in the 1980s, with artists such as Sherrie Levine, Barbara Kruger, and Richard Prince challenging the notion of artistic originality altogether by emphasizing the act of borrowing existing images itself. In her infamous series After Walker Evans (1980), Levine "re-photographed" works from photographer Walker Evans's landmark book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) and exhibited them as her own work, each titled "After Walker Evans." Similarly, Prince re-photographed advertisements, such as the Marlboro Man cigarette ads, inviting his viewers to examine these ubiquitous, but often overlooked, images and to consider their impact.

The artists of the so-called "Pictures Generation"—first identified by art historian Douglas Crimp in the catalogue essay to his now-seminal 1977 Pictures exhibition at Artists Space, which included artists like Levine, Robert Longo, and Jack Goldstein (and, in a revised version of the essay published in 1980, Cindy Sherman)— adopted a critical attitude towards contemporary visual culture and its bombardment of mass media imagery, simultaneously elevating and undermining it. The 2009 exhibition The Pictures Generation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which included artists from the original 1977 exhibition alongside similarly minded contemporaries like David Salle, Laurie Simmons, and Louise Lawler, solidified the place of appropriation in art history.

Though the foremost institutions of art have given appropriation their nod of approval, the legal system hasn't been quite as forgiving. The use of appropriated imagery in art has been the subject of numerous high-profile lawsuits, most recently, Cariou vs. Prince, in which Richard Prince failed to convince a judge that his series Canal Zone, which employed photographs from Patrick Cariou's book Yes, Rasta, constituted "fair use." (Upon an appeal, however, 25 of the 30 contested works were cleared as within fair use.)

The Face Is Familiar - Tim Adams

The face is familiar ...

Tom Hunter reworks Old Masters to produce modern urban images that evoke waking nightmares

- Tim Adams
- The Observer, Sunday 11 December 2005

Tom Hunter: Living in Hell and Other Stories
National Gallery, London WC2, until 12 March

As the first photograph to be exhibited in the National Gallery, it would be hard to improve on Tom Hunter's Woman Reading a Possession Order. The picture has been around for so long now - it won the John Kobal photographic award in 1998 - that it is threatening to take on the indelible quality of the Vermeer it so perfectly and poignantly references. However many double-takes it inspires, you can't resist just one (or two) more.

That uncanny portrait, and the subtle questions of pathos and aesthetics that it raised, also led Hunter into a career of recreating Old Masters on the streets of east London; this is a comprehensive show of the results. As he explains in the video that accompanies his large-scale photographs, his methods have become entrenched since that first success. His ideas come through the door. He waits for a headline in his local paper, The Hackney Gazette, that seems properly graphic or extreme - 'Hallowe'en Horror: Trick or Treat Thugs Break Mum's Bones', say - and when he has one he lets it settle in his head and find its own painted equivalent.

Part of the fun of this is the guessing game of which photo refers to which painting (the answers are given in postcard-sized reproductions beside the pictures). Some are easy enough. A burnt-out car on a piece of industrial wasteland stands in for Millais's country graveyard in The Vale of Rest; the two nuns are replaced by a couple of travellers round a bonfire. Sometimes it is more of a stretch. It's a long way, say, from a boy fishing where a man's body floats - a gangland murder victim - to Constable's Stratford Mill

The pictures deal with rape and suicide and drunkenness and they invite voyeurism, as tabloid headlines do. The transforming trick is in the tonal and structural ghosts of their original inspiration, something resolutely beautiful retouching something grim. That balance seems properly purposeful in the Vermeer recreation, although by repetition it becomes more troubling.

In Ye Olde Axe, a stripper in a low-rent pub thrusts her bum with its strap of thong towards Hunter's camera, while observing herself in a mirror. An impatient line of her colleagues wait their turn on the floor. The composition is a clear pastiche of Velazquez's Rokeby Venus, although the power relations involving the sitter are changed. In place of a mischievous cherub we a have a suited punter with an earring and shades on a bar stool, and instead of reclining on the artist's bed, the subject is flat out on a beery carpeted floor, wondering how she got here.

In The Dolphin, another of Hackney's strip-and-sawdust pubs, a barmaid with a look out of Manet's At the Bar of the Folies-Bergeres stares at Hunter's camera, with much of the glazed contempt that another stripper in the background reserves for her client, as she removes a feather boa. The gaze of the artist feels as exploitative as that of the client - the boredom of a woman being sized up by a man working in a place that exists for just that purpose. (This one really makes you want to return to the Manet and think again about the look that inspired it.)

Hunter is adamant that the intent of his pictures remains the same as for the original light-drenched Possession Order. In an interview last week he suggested that he wanted the viewer to wonder if 'there is something quite magical going on there, and universal?' He has earned the right to look at the crises and horrors of his neighbours in this aesthetic way, he suggests, because he has lived in Hackney for so long, first as a squatter. He is fixedly local. Vermeer, who hardly ever left Delft, and who painted his own friends and neighbours and made them universal with his use of light, seemed absolutely right for this kind of appropriation; it is harder to see how other inspirations, Poussin or Piero di Cosimo, fit Hunter's project.

There is something uncomfortably stagey in this respect about, say, For Batter or Worse, a wedding fight outside Hackney Town Hall between family groups of redheaded Irish and Vietnamese locals, which is asked to be reminiscent of Di Cosimo's The Fight between the Lapiths and the Centaurs. It's too much of a put-up job. The picture offers neither emotional documentary or clever art history but falls flat in between.

The most problematic portrait in this sense is the title piece Living in Hell, which uses as its triangulation point Four Figures at a Table, a 17th century painting by the Le Nain brothers, of a family apparently resigned to their poverty. Hunter makes the scene even more terrible, removing the family from around the seated old woman, adding the infestation of vermin - he stuck several hundred dead cockroaches to the wall of a friend's flat and arranged a few more on a half-eaten pizza. There is anger in this, but you can't help feeling a photograph of the reality would be much more affecting. As a protest picture, it has far less force than those family snaps of Richard Billingham, say, or Graham Smith's Middlesbrough pub drinkers.

In among the arc lights and colour saturation, Hunter is capable of genuine shock, though. There are nightmarish scenes here, graphically realised. A sex assault by three drunks at a bandstand in the park, in which a pale flash of the victim's flesh is exposed like a side of meat in the twilight is the most invasive of images. There is violence of one sort or another in almost every picture, and Hunter will not have you looking away.

His point, I suppose, is that all human life (and death) is just outside your door, particularly in Hackney. There is nothing that you can find in all the collected imaginations of the National Gallery that you cannot find in your local freesheet. As art criticism, his best photos make Old Masters look like front-page news. At the very least the juxtaposition makes you want to run off to the gallery's four corners and look again at the real thing.

Research Project- Poster.

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