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Collected Landscapes
Michael Wesely in THE COLUMNS Art Center for Visual and Performing Arts, Seoul
Michael Wesley seeks places other photographers like to avoid. For example, when he traveled in the late nineties to the Southwest of the United States where pioneers of documentary photography such as Carleton Watkins and Ansel Adams set aesthetic standards; or in 1999 when the Berlin artists went to the Orinoco river and followed the footsteps of Alexander von Humboldt; or two years ago when his photos dealt with those landscapes in the Mark Brandenburg which Caspar David Friedrich had transfigured in his paintings into icons of romanticism. Whoever recaptures such sights with his camera risks comparison, and, in the worst case, mere repetition. It is stunning, though, how Michael Wesely manages to sidestep this danger. The stations he traveled in South Korea last year also show motifs which have been photographed excessively, such as the view from the Unification Observatory and other impressions of the border that divides the country with walls, barbed wire and watchtowers into two halves. But nothing of this is reflected in his large prints at the ¡°Collected Landscapes¡± exhibition. Instead, they depict diffuse colour gradients ranging from a deep earthy brown over a saturated blue to powerful or almost transparent hues of green.
The transformation of landscapes into quasi-picturesque compositions is due to those self-constructed appliances Wesely has worked with for almost two decades: Devices like a kind of camera obscura, which belongs to the primordial instruments of photography. Their use, however, does not reflect a romantic anachronism but is based on certain conceptual decisions, one of which being that state-of-the-art technology does not necessarily generate the best images. Rather, Wesely¡¯s work is about the fundamental conditions of photography, and the question which possibilities are hidden beyond its linear development.
For this reason, he does not equip his devices with the usual round opening through which light can pass evenly, but rather with a slit ? a modification which, instead of producing precise copies, generates compositions that appear picturesque: Vertical streaks that show less, yet preserve every detail.
A visual comparison evinces to what extent the motifs are anchored in reality: Wesely names each work after its place of origin, thus enabling the viewer to identify the original motif at any time. However, he depicts reality as the sum of its impressions, and, in doing so, chooses an access to the motif which, by technical standards, is highly inaccurate. But, paradoxically, it is exactly this reduction which provides an open view, where before every possibility of another perception seemed exhausted.
Christiane Meixner
August 2006
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