Struth questions the demands of art

By TERENCE J. HANNUM
Thomas Struth

Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art
Through Sept. 28

This exhibition of photographs by German photographer Thomas Struth at the Museum of Contemporary Art is a near death experience. It does not exactly proclaim, “fFom today, painting is dead!” the way French history painter Paul Delaroche famously did — which contentiously is but myth — but even Delaroche, who wrote an enthusiastic report on the invention of the Daguerreotype to the French government in 1839, could not have predicted the photographs of Thomas Struth.

Delaroche described the Daguerreotype as something that would assist painters and as an invention that fulfilled all the “demands of art” (whatever they are). Maybe Delaroche said this upon seeing the Daguerreotype, and plenty of others likewise recant it when faced with difficult or just plain bad paintings, a result of postmodern shifts towards the prevalence of installation art and a complete distance from the historical origin of “the death of painting.”

So what happens when Struth presents us with monolithic shots of people looking at paintings? (However, there are not just people looking at paintings — for example, in the “Pergamom Museum” series there are people observing classical architecture, and in “Milan Cathedral” tourists look at the architecture and paintings while others worship.)

But there is this curious quality in these massive photographs, in massive frames, and their shift of the subject of painting between the other subjects of architecture, banal family portraiture, and flowers. They translate as incredibly naive, natural and unnatural landscapes. Given Struth’s subjects — scenarios in museums and collections of paintings — these photographs yearn to be experienced as their subject. Here is where they fall short of the masterpieces they’re trying to emulate and begin necropsy.

Earlier in his career, Struth found it difficult to escape the influence of the work of his professors at the Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf Bernd and Hilla Becher, who also instructed Struth’s fellow photographers Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, and Thomas Ruff. Work from this period exhibited here, like the black and white architectural exterior photos from the 1970s, are more modest in scale and reflect a lack of seriality that defined the work of the Bechers. Though there is a return to the serial in the later “South Lake Apartment” series (Struth would return to architecture as a subject off and on as in all of his subjects), these black and white architectural works are composed with overbearing diagonals dragging the eye along and off the frame. A prime example of this is in “Le Lignon.”

Perhaps it is Gerhard Richter’s pedagogical influence over Struth that brings to the surface the arbitrariness of subject garnished with essential detachments. According to Richter’s interviews, his influence contained little instruction, as he was frustrated with teaching at the Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf (he not only “taught” very little but didn’t teach very long). Gone are the throngs that enliven Gursky’s photographs, gone are the digital touches of Ruff as well as Gursky, and gone is the illumination that infuses Höfer’s institutional photos.

The body of work that holds the most interest is the “Paradise” series. Overrun forests from all over the world crowd the frame; it is this amorphia that provides more freedom for the movement of the viewer. They also don’t depict nature like sacchrine-sweet Thomas Kinkade in Struth’s nature scene, “Garden on the Lindberg,” rightfully exhibited in the botanical stage of photographs. Yet the “Paradise” series pales in comparison to Yannick Demmerle’s work at Vedanta Gallery in Chicago last May, which was more interesting, though conscious of compositions that established a mythological realm in their depictions of German and French forests. Struth, in “Paradise,” has a body of work composed over an extended period of time, that in their lack of composition complicate themselves into a coagulated natural and simultaneously unnatural worthy experience.

Roland Barthes, in Camera Lucida — which is quoted excessively especially when dealing with photography — says when looking at a photo of himself that the form (eidos) of photography is death. This partially contributes to the exhibition translating into a near death experience. There were works like the “Paradise” series and some of the museum/cathedral interiors that feigned inquiry into the nature of photography and its function. More so it questioned its own placement in the MCA’s lineup of expensive architectural photography shows like those by Andreas Gursky and Hiroshi Sugimoto. Instead of a jejune follow-up, perhaps the Struth exhibition would have been better as an introduction for a public now made weary by the brow-beatings of particular photographic aesthetics at the MCA. Overall, their scale and breadth lusts to be historical (past event and dead time) images in the likeness of Vermeer but rest in their white caves unsure, cynical and cold as the storage waiting for them..