Andreas Gursky
at Millennium Park, through September 15
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Part supertourists, part millennial encyclopedists–Gursky says he shoots “icons of our time,” and Arthus-Bertrand says he’s a “witness of our time”–the pair target different audiences. Gursky’s pristine prints appear in austere white-walled galleries while Arthus-Bertrand exhibits only in free-admission, open-air venues. They have rather different backgrounds too. Before Arthus-Bertrand became a photojournalist and started selling his pictures to National Geographic, Life, Geo, Stern, and Paris-Match, he piloted hot-air balloons for tourists over Kenyan savannas. Gursky, the son and grandson of commercial photographers, pondered suicide in 1978 when he failed to break into the German magazine market. (Eleven years later, he made the highway bridge that was to have been his jumping-off point the subject of a landscape photograph, Ruhr Valley, 1989.) Instead of leaping, Gursky enrolled in the State Art Academy in Dusseldorf; his first exhibit, a study of security guards in office lobbies, was hung in the Dusseldorf airport in 1987.
Gursky labels his images with terse titles that usually identify a city, building, or event, followed by the year. Contrary to usual museum practice, he omits the medium and dimensions. (I got dimensions from the curator’s checklist.) Seven Gursky works are untitled. Specks of telling text are legible in many pieces, however, if you peer into the throng. Among some 1,300 Dortmund rock fans (I estimated their number) in Tote Hosen, 2000 is one wearing a T-shirt that says “terror.” In the 6-by-16-foot May Day IV, 2000, picturing more than 800 Germans, one can see a T-shirt that reads “Losing Is Nature’s Way of Saying You Suck.”
Where Arthus-Bertrand makes dramatic leaps from abstraction to commentary, Gursky’s abstracted images are insular. The wintry cityscape of Arthus-Bertrand’s Abandoned City of Pripiat is as pretty as any other until you read the caption, which reveals that the town is near Chernobyl and has been deserted since the 1986 nuclear-reactor accident. His Patchwork of Carpets in Marrakech, Morocco is a visual treat, if not quite a transparent indictment of Moroccan labor practices. When Gursky aims his lens at a carpet, it’s to document the minimalist texture of the gray flooring at his local arts center in Untitled I, 1993 (which Galassi straight-facedly lauds as “a picture of radical emptiness”). When Gursky visited the futuristic city of Brasilia, he pointed his camera up at an orange ceiling to capture another abstract pattern in Brasilia, General Assembly I, 1994.
caption accompanying “Patchwork of Carpets in Marrakech, Morrocco” by Yann Arthus-Bertrand:
