reviews thE DRoStE EffECt
Every burst of the flash adds another image, as the camera moves
through the darkness of the unlit sculpture galleries in New York’s
Metropolitan Museum. Masks and figures on pedestals and in
showcases appear for a split second, then fade back to the total
darkness, forming a continuous series of stills in the otherwise black
sequence of the film. Rosalind Nashashibi and Lucy Skaer’s Flash
in the Metropolitan (2006) is a compelling study on the relation
of film, movement and the single frame; a noncontinuous film of
staggered individual images, with a subtext on the perception of
museum artefacts and historic narratives, and an underlying sense
of unauthorised and clandestine activity. Each image provides
further visual information, but each is also taken out of context – we
will never see all.
It’s not often that a commercial gallery presents a noteworthy
themed exhibition with none of the gallery’s usual artists. The Droste
Effect, curated by Robert Meijer and Henrikke Nielsen, is named
after a Dutch brand of cocoa, the box of which features a recursive
image of a nun holding the same box of cocoa, again and again.
The Droste Effect is a thoroughly curated show on the essence of
photography, on issues of representation and documentation, on
traces and images.
Valentin Carron’s painting Négatif (2006), apparently
drawing on the motif of a Swiss advertising campaign from the
1950s, is a multiple diagram of focusing an object through a lens, the
basis of all photography. Ryan Gander’s Cork Association A, I Had a
Terrible Dream Last Night (2006) presents the very immediate result
of the action of light. The 16 individual corkboards were originally
used as a pinboard for Gander’s research notes, which left negative
imprints as the sun bleached the uncovered parts. In due course
the rectangular patterns in the organic material will fade and all
the Droste effect
traces vanish. In comparison, Wolfgang Tillmans’s photographs in
comparison are more solid. The images from the Paper Drop series
ESthER SChiPPER, BERLiN (2004) depict the curve of exposed photographic paper as it hangs
6 JuLy – 15 SEPtEm BER over the edge of a table; a focus on the medium of photography that
is itself spoiled by overexposure.
In The Magic Mirror of John Dee (2006) Joachim Koester
explores an object which in the sixteenth century was used by a
medium to pick up images from the otherworld. His photograph
of this black mirror, which resides in the collection of the British
Museum, shows a scratched and dusty dark surface. Together with
the glass of the frame, it becomes a kind of looking glass reflecting
its surroundings and viewers, an effect far from the original intention.
Anne Collier’s photograph January 1974 / January 1981 (2006) depicts
two ARTnews coverportraits of Berenice Abbott and Georgia
O’Keeffe – the image of a media image of image producers at the
height of their careers – while Mario Garcia Torres’s 11 Years Later
Rosalind Nashashibi and
(2007) recreates the artistic output of a fictional character, Augie
Lucy Skaer, Flash in
the Metropolitan, 2006
Wren, from a story by Paul Auster. Wren takes a picture of the same
(installation view),
street corner at exactly the same time every day, and the images
16mm, 3 min 25 sec. Photo:
Carsten Eisfeld. Courtesy
projected in the gallery form part of a multilayered narrative that
Doggerfisher, Edinburgh, and
Esther Schipper, Berlin develops through fiction, restaging and recreation. Axel Lapp
Artreview 198
November_REVIEWS.indd 198 26/9/07 13:34:57
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