The Rules of the Engagement

Naked woman and sofa, 2018 © Richard Ansett 2018

I am again focused on mortal detail working with my muse Ms Beryl Nesbitt very much in line with my image of another great muse and model Geoff transforming from Tina. There is nothing Beryl can do that does not fascinate me, she is my mother alive and dead and her memory of her mother was that she was a bitch. I am continuing a tradition of 'the artist's nude reclining' but photography must be more than pastiche in its insecure demands for recognition and I refuse to present work that purports to be art through mimicry alone. So this is a moment in time either side of the tradition and beyond the frame.

I was concerned that Beryl might die before I could explore her mortal body and capture her extraordinary nature in aspic. I did not want to miss another opportunity to engage with my mother on my terms and Beryl is happy to participate in any role play that in some way satisfies her own needs.

Neue Sachlichkeit is an attempt at an unadulterated response, the world stripped bare of sentimental nostalgia and conventional beauty. Only in recognising the impossibility of the task can we come close to achieving our goal.  A practice still useful now in exposing the contemporary blocks to any successful engagement with the present.

Some rules of Neue Sachlichkeit practice:

1) an image cannot be (or even feel) adulterated. The image and meaning of a subject can only be influenced ‘in camera’ through the manipulation of the world in front of the lens. Authenticity demands a palpable genuineness regardless of and challenging the established rules of aesthetics.

2) The image must be stripped of personal or sympathetic notions both in content and information. #Empathy and #sympathy if any must be left to the observer and the subject #humanity should be exposed at odds to the practice and accentuated through exposure to it. 

3) Presence of the artist as deliberate or accidental protagonist must be declared. No image should imply truthful representation. 

4) Images must be existentially representative of the era in which they are formed, archaic aesthetic notions of nostalgia and beauty must be recognised as crutches for short term gratification distracting from a more honest engagement with the present. Archaic rules seen as established and natural must be challenged and subjugated for a new understanding and a new relationship to the present seen as beautiful. See article for Hunger magazine Film Is Dead.

5) An arbiter of success of any image in the artist's mind is in its legacy and value to an imagined future audience 

6) Any experiment with objectivism must acknowledge the impossibility of objectivism.

August ends in October

The great curation of the collection of August Sander prints as part of the exhibition at Tate Liverpool ended last week. It explored the relationship alongside Otto Dix to the Weimar Republic but was much more than the sum of its parts.

The presentation of the Sander archive in one room reminds me that the deliberate nature of portraiture can existentially challenge established notions of reality. Although Sander is working with a much more conventional creative process, the relentless presentation of the prints had the effect of working as an illustration of 'the rejection of a perceived logic and reason' espoused by the Dada movement of his time. The curators found evidence that Sander wished his work to be viewed and presented along side a timeline of events from the humiliation of Germany through to the rise of National Socialism. Sander's images are so solid and certain in their structure that they interrupt the timeline to create these pastiches of humanity; the subjects captured in amber like mosquitos. 

The 'subject experience' of entering into a contract with an objectivist is to consider our relationship to the world and at a time of extreme political polarisation (sound familiar) there is a documentation of the human response to events in the faces and body language of the sitter. Sander offers us something close to ambivalence, walking a fine line (as does Dix) between acceptance of status quo and mockery. He uses convention to challenge convention and speaks to an esoteric audience in one language that may be read entirely differently by another. The portrait of Dix himself and his wife is without doubt and for no good reason, genius; it is brimming over with powerful, unidentifiable memes as well as acting as a vital record of when both artists were present in the same timeline.

The answer to the argument that it is impossible to be objective is that the artist as objectivist must always be open to that impossibility as part of their practice. As a portraitist I observe and record a subject but I must always keep in mind that I am capturing the sitter as they observe me with the same scrutiny and we see this relationship in the eyes of Sander's subjects. In these formal poses there is evidence of the pressures and fears of the time, which communicate a different historic insight than traditional documentary record.

With the volume of work in his archive, the 'sitter' becomes less relevant than the message..the immediate narrative of 'portrait of farmer' or ''portrait of artist' is an excuse to explore a wider demographic response to the era. There is a reminder of the value of a single human existence equal to each other as the the timeline moves relentlessly towards the worst imaginable outcome.

Today it seems every personal statement by photographic artists discuss the paradox of photography and reality but rather than seeing this as some trite, collective plagiarism, it could be an indication of the constant of 'our' modern times; we find ourselves in a phenomenological existence even if we don’t know what it means.

There is something to be said for the relentlessness of a practice, the dogma is unwavering in the face of encroaching catastrophe. Applying objectivity to the human condition does reveal a truth in the subject relationship to that dogma. I am observing the fearful defiance of the oppressed leftist intellectual and the equal but terrifying self confidence of the far right, they are both responding to the same events. I am standing in front of a portrait of an SS officer and imagining what it might be like to be in the same room as someone who has the power of life and death over me.

As we might consider Mahler as the father of modern music, in terms of photographic portraiture, perhaps we should consider Sander in a similar light.

The Painter Otto Dix and his wife Martha circa 1926-6 August Sander

August Sander at Tate Liverpool