Contemporary Art: Constructed Worlds

The theme Constructed Worlds links diverse artistic practice from film and photography to sculpture , and includes the work of artists Rachel Whiteread, James Casebere, Gregory Crewdson, and Matthew Barney.

The artists begin with personal narratives which seem factual, but whose assumed meanings are then subverted. 

Rachel Whiteread’s plaster cast of her basement steps presents, not the steps themselves, but the space around them.  The sculpture is huge, and is bizarrely placed on its side. It creates a paradoxical sense of massive absence.

Photographers such as Thomas Demand and James Casebere build sets of interiors that do not exist but appear ‘real’ in the pictures made of them and consequently suggest possible historical and personal narratives. Similarly, Sarah Anne Johnson takes photographs of real scenarios as well as dioramas with crafted figures that relate to the overall story of her photographic series Tree Planting.

 
 

Thomas Demand Archive 1995

The artists shown within the Constructed Worlds section force us to look into the crevasses found in the formation of personal ‘truths’. Both Thomas Demand and Sarah Anne Johnson fabricate reality. By constructing their own worlds, and photographing them, these artists call into question the veracity of the photographic medium.

Using flimsy materials like paper and cardboard, Thomas Demand fabricates life-size reconstructions of scenes, often ones he comes across originally in photographs, newspapers or magazines. The reconstructed subjects are chosen for their representation of a violent or grim situation. These subjects have included a bombed bureau of the defunct East German secret police, the disputed ballots cast in Palm Beach County during the US Presidential election of November 2000 and Saddam Hussein’s final hiding place. The elaborately constructed sets are then photographed in order to re-cast their real-life subjects in a dubious and deliberately nuanced light. On close inspection of the resulting photograph, the sculptures are not quite perfectly reconstructed, stripped of detail, and always un-peopled. The gap between truth and fiction will always subtly show.

Archive 1995, is a reconstruction of the German film director and photographer Leni Riefenstahl’s archive: an empty room with shelves of identical grey boxes, suspiciously generic and disturbingly unlabeled, perhaps hinting at Riefenstahl’s regimental pageants glorifying the Nazis. At first glance the image seems unexceptional. Yet when the social and historical context is critically examined, the image becomes infinitely more suggestive and sinister. The boxes are all the same monotonous shape, seemingly in endless supply, and cleansed of all reference to individual identity. This monotony evokes erased memories and misplaced evidence.

 
 

Sarah Anne Johnson Tree Planting series 2002-05

While Thomas Demand alludes to the past history of Germany and hints at forgotten and displaced memories in Archive 1995, Sarah Anne Johnson juxtaposes photographs of actual people and events with those of painstakingly composed dioramas.

The sixty-five photographs in Tree Planting chronicle what has become a rite-of-passage for many Canadians, planting trees in deforested areas of Manitoba. The young adults who participate in these conservation trips are paid per sapling planted, but what keeps them returning, says the artist, is the rewarding sense of community and connection to the land that the hard work engenders. Johnson records the ritual with two types of images: photographs of actual people and locales that she took over the course of three summers, and shots of hand-crafted clay dolls and miniature dioramas that she constructed later in her studio. These two sets of images stand in tension, but they also complement one another to present a more complete account of the experience, expressing the mundane, physical realities of the labour – bug bites, bandaged arms, rain-soaked and mud-caked clothes – and, simultaneously, the sublimity of nature and a nostalgic longing for what Johnson calls:

"the closest thing I’ve found to Utopia".

The images in Tree Planting vary in scale and format, and range from portraits to figureless landscapes, giving the overall installation the impression of a private scrapbook. However, Johnson’s intention for the work extends well beyond the merely personal. Her ‘quietly political agenda’ is to persuade others of:

"the empowering emotion born in good old-fashioned hard work for an important cause".

 
 

Middle Years

8.1 Meaning and Messages

8.2 Written Response

Senior Years – VCE Art & VCE Studio Arts

8.3 Conservation and Presentation

8.4 Comparative Research

8.5 Commentaries on Art

8.6 Interpretive Frameworks