TRACES: Jan Dibbets

Today is the occasion to bear in mind Jan Dibbets (9/5/1941- ), Initially trained as a painter, in the 1960s Dibbets turned to photography, drawing on the rich tradition of Dutch painting, and its emphases on light, structure, and nature. Dibbets developed a painterly approach to photography, challenging the assumption that photography produces only objective reproductions of reality, and exploring the possibilities for a photograph as an art object. Through documents or interviews, starting with: moments and memories, we reveal out from the past-unknown sides of big personalities, who left their indelible traces in time and history…

By Dimitris Lempesis

Jan Dibbets was born in Weert, Holland, in 1941. He trained as an art teacher at the Tilburg Academy, before studying painting in Eindhoven between 1960-63. Dibbets travelled to London in 1967 and enrolled at Saint Martin’s School of Art with a British Council scholarship. Here he was taught by the late Antony Caro, meeting and working alongside students, George Passmore of Gilbert & George , Barry Flanagan and Richard Long. Dibbets went on to create photographic series such as “Perspective Corrections,” which explored the dichotomy between the illusion the camera creates and the reality that the eye sees, laying the foundation for what eventually became recognized as conceptual art. The works from Dibbets’ structuralist period (1967-1974) demonstrate his interest in conceptualist thinking, along with optics and perception.  In 1967 he began his series of “Perspective Corrections” in which he photographed a trapezoidal form laid on a lawn at a certain angle, such that the trapezoid appears to be a square on the surface of the photograph, thereby subverting the idea that the camera doesn’t lie.  In other photographs from this period, Dibbets developed a serial format in order to document the passage of time. Dibbets took photographs of a landscape horizon at different angles, so that each frame shows slight shifts in the ratio of land to sea. He also did a series of windows, photographing them at fixed intervals of time, so that all the gradations of light over the course of a day were captured on film. Since the early 1970s, Dibbets has photographed geometric patterns occurring in everyday objects, such as floor tiles, Venetian blinds, fallen leaves, and gently rippling water. The images are close views with little figure/ground relationship so that the compositions possess an allover quality and are alive with movement.  In his Color Studies, close-up shots of car exteriors in a wide range of hues allow color to achieve autonomy in its pure visual effect. In the mid-seventies, Dibbets pushed the boundaries of the photographic medium even further, becoming the first artist to recognize large-scale color photography as a legitimate medium. His international reputation was established at the Dutch Pavilion at the 1972 Venice Biennale, and at Documenta in Kassel in 1972, 1977, 1988. His first American retrospective took place in 1987 beginning at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, before travelling to several museums in the US. His body of work entitled “New Horizons” returns to the optical structure that has become his hallmark. As Erik Verhagen says in his recent study of Dibbets’ oeuvre, “The horizon is not a subject like other subjects, for it exists only through and in relation to our sense of sight”. It is objective and subjective, circular and rectilinear, static and mobile. In these photographs, which conjoin different photographs of a landscape and seascape along the line of the horizon, Dibbets channels it as structuring principle, not only determining space and point of view, but also (in a very painterly way) the composition itself. By subordinating the mobility of the camera to the standardization of a straight line, these panoramas create a subtle tension between the seamlessness of the horizon line and the disjunction of land and sea, only further accentuated by the resulting asymmetrical compositions. The new works continue Dibbets’ sentiment when he said “In the whole world what is more beautiful than a straight line? And the horizon is a straight line in three dimensions: it’s an almost incredible phenomenon”. Dibbets has influenced generations of younger photographers both through his own work and his teaching at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, one of the foremost art schools in the world, where his tenure as professor, from 1984 to 2004, coincided with those of Joseph Beuys, Gerhard Richter, and Bernd and Hilla Becher. More recently Dibbets curated “Pandora’s Box: Jan Dibbets on Another Photography”  (25/3-17/7/20160 at the Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris. The exhibition, the first to be curated by Dibbets, offered an innovative and thought-provoking reinterpretation of the entire history of photography, both documentary and artistic.