ART CITIES:Paris-Allan Sekula

Allan Sekula revitalized documentary photography, provided critical foundations for theorizing the relationship between word and image, and was one of the earliest artists to cast a critical eye on globalization as social phenomenon. This archive documents his practice as an artist and writer, serving as a defining resource for researchers interested not only in Sekula but in the transformation of photography as both a medium and an art form in the postwar era.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Michel Rein Gallery Archive

The exhibition “Art Isn’t Fair”  at Michel Rein Gallery in Paris, spans Allan Sekula’s entire career. The very last work Sekula made is the short video which title  purposely borrowed for the entire show is “Art Isn’t Fair” (2012). The work investigates the recent rise of contemporary transnational art fairs. While filming the 2004 Miami-Basel Art Fair, Sekula aimed to expose the utter inequity in the luxe-studded art world. This video meshes probing close shots of an early gathering of Miami Basel with sly language. The title itself makes a crucial pun: “Fair” in English meaning both just or egalitarian and a festive market. For Sekula throughout his life, art might aspire to social justice but should never assume such a difficult achievement. Equally, one should never conflate thoughtful work with the memes exchanged too easily in the marketplace. The “Untitled Slide Sequence” series of photographs of southern California workers leaving the aerospace plant at the end of their shift was one of Sekula’s earliest series and a deliberate homage to the pioneering 1895 film of Lumière employees leaving their factory. Starting in 1972 and for many years after, Sekula presented this sequence as a slide piece. Later recognizing that the slide show was verging on obsolescence, he made a limited print edition of the same series.   The print version is featured here along with a number of “California Stories” he shot in his twenties during the mid 1970s and only printed and exhibited in the last decade of his life.  “California Stories” consists of six photograph plates, each including six or five photographs in archival pigment print, all shot during a journey on Californian highways. Also selected for this show are thematically linked images from diverse series Sekula pursued as a mature artist: “Fish Story” (1989-95), “TITANIC’s wake” (1998-00), “Black Tide” (2002-03), “Polonia and Other Fables” (2007-09), and one production still for “The Forgotten Space” (a 2010  film co-directed with Noël Burch) later reconceived by Sekula as an exceptional enlargement for a lightbox using the famously durable cibachrome transparency. Completed between 1989 and 1995, “Fish Story” saw Allan Sekula’s career-long pursuit of a contemporary ‘critical realism’ reach its most complex articulation. “Fish Story” reconstructed a realist model of photographic representation, while taking a critical stance towards traditional documentary photography. It also marked Sekula’s first sustained exploration of the ocean as a key space of globalisation. A key issue in “Fish Story” is the connection between containerized cargo movement and the growing internationalization of the world industrial economy, with its effects on the actual social space of ports. “Fish Story follows two interwoven strands,” Sekula wrote in 1997, “both of which turn around questions of liminality and flux. First, it is a ‘documentary’ reading of contemporary maritime space. As both sea and land are progressively ‘rationalized’ by increasingly sophisticated industrial methods, does the ‘classic’ relation between terrestrial space and maritime space undergo a reversal? Does the sea become fixed and the land fluid? Second, Fish Story is an ‘art historical’ allegory of the sea as an object  of representation. How does the sea ‘disappear’ from the cognitive and  imaginative horizon of late modernity? Are there broader lessons to  be drawn from this disappearance?”. In “Polonia and Other Fables” the artist explores very personal themes linked to his family’s Polish roots on his father’s side, and to the wider question of emigration, the Chicago Polonia and Polish-American relations in general as they are visible in business or politics. The presentation of this work is accompanied by photographs (shown in the form of slide projections) produced by Sekula during his first visit to Poland, in the winter of 1990 (Walking on Water, 1990/95). These form an important counterpoint to the photos produced in 2009. They show our country at the beginning of the changes which led to Poland’s entry to NATO and to the European Union. Allan Sekula made “The Forgotten Space” after he was invited to create a work in a public space. He thought it important to understand television as such a public space and set out to make a film for national television with his co-director, the Paris-based American film theorist Noël Burch. The idea was to bring popular attention to another space that is often out of sight, or too vast to take in and therefore forgotten, even if it is essential for the running of the world economy. A space where globalization meets the sea: the docklands. Up until his untimely death in 2013, Sekula was a tireless chronicler of the workings of ports, of seafaring, and of the lives affected by the standardization of global production, transport, and trade. Inside galleries and museums, he presented combinations of photographs and texts, slides and sound recordings. But in Noël Burch he found a master of the film form, who helped him translate this vast research into a succinct “film-essay”. At just under two hours long, it can be presented, as it is today, inside the public space of television. The “Forgotten Space” connects far-flung places and people from the ports of Rotterdam, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, and Bilbao to the hinterlands of China and Europe. It is a kind of detective story about the workings of global capital narrated, precisely and poetically, by Sekula himself. This film contains many clues to understanding the current predicament of Athens in the broader global economy. Certainly, the progressive transfer of control over the Port of Piraeus to the China Cosco Holdings Company cannot be fully grasped without watching The Forgotten Space…

Info: Michel Rein Gallery, 42 rue de Turenne, Paris, Duration: 5/11/19-8/1/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, http://michelrein.com