Where is Gursky?
I stood outside of Ekaterina Foundation for about twenty minutes with the other losers. The security was tight and the opening was packed. Everyone was eager to get in. It was an official occasion, a binding confirmation of the art scene’s hierarchy, but without too many artists or intellectuals. Socialites, curators, and collectors were all there, eager to make contact. Nobody knew what Andreas Gursky looks like.
Andreas Gursky, in case you didn’t know, is the most expensive photographer in the world. His most famous work stages sites at the very heart of capital: stock markets, racetracks, carports, hotels, warehouses, and museums. Elaborate half-abstractions, perfect color balances, distorted perspectives, all in epic proportions: these are better than multi-million dollar budget blockbusters, far more luxurious, sophisticated, fine, and compact. They actually redefine how much an image can be, and not only how much it can cost. In this sense, they are golden children of the era of post-production. They successfully reconstitute the aura of a genuine bourgeois art. This is why they look a lot better today than many of the other forgotten icons of the 1990s, whose utopian spirit no longer rings true.
So Gursky’s photos are classics, in a way. And not only because they try to harness so many new imaging technologies, or – as some critics have noted – that they try to reinstate 19th century realism’s central ambition, namely to grasp and describe reality in a total panoramic perspective. But because Gursky has done something to these photos to keep them from spoiling; he has sterilized them like tomatoes irradiated to keep the bacteria away. The result is epic, but at the same time, strangely banal. Gursky’s photographs are optical follies, a big huge “Where is Waldo?” book, only that the audience consists of ultra-rich adults, not innocent kids trying to find life in a space that has been pacified and redacted. This is part of the reason for why people stand there looking at Gursky photos forever; they contemplate and ruminate for much longer than they would look at a painting. They are trying to find something. But what?
What are we looking for when we stand in front of a Gursky? Are we searching for our own (petit) bourgeois reflection in these perfected, sterilized non-places (empty and waiting for their subject like Atget’s Paris streets deserted)? Are we looking for a glimmer of self-consciousness as we trace the lines of this inanimate world? Maybe. Gursky’s photos are ideal reflexive surfaces; they have been polished and sterilized to the point of having enough air and emptiness for just about any projection. They are mirrors. So the ultrarich can see themselves and jubilate. (This, at least in part, is what people were doing at the Gursky opening: “This is MY piece. You know that I am a citizen of Monaco…”). But there is also something else. We are looking for a real contradiction. Gursky’s photos show us the warped, compiled space of the world market, but they fail to show us its flipside, which remains out there in front of the gallery, among the losers, waiting around to be let past the face control.
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