|
John Coplans was born in London in 1920. He moved to San Francisco
in 1960 and has lived in the USA ever since. He has had a multi-faceted
career as a teacher, painter, exhibition curator, museum director,
art critic and writer. In 1962 he helped to found the magazine
Artforum, and became its editor in chief in 1971.
In 1979 John Coplans decided to devote himself entirely to
photography. His photographs were first exhibited in 1981, but
it was only after experimenting for a number of years that he
found his own personal style in the mid-1980's. Since 1984 he
has concentrated on photographing his own body in a series of
self portraits. He then enlarges the black and white photographs
to gigantic sizes, sometimes having a height of three to four
metres, which further increases their weighty impression and
impact.
These colossal photographs, often divided into sections, show
a man's aging, hairy body, always displayed against a neutral
white background. Even if it is John Coplans' own body that we
see in these monumental black and white photographs, they are
not self portraits in the traditional sense, not least because
the head is consistently excluded. Instead, the pictures appear
to be without gender and with a universal applicability. Sometimes
they are more reminiscent of animals or a landscape than of a
human body. Despite the fact that Coplans poses in the nude,
the pictures cannot be described as erotic in any conventional
sense of the word; his body meets the observer as it actually
is, with nothing corrected or beautified. Every crack, every
discolouration and unevenness in the nails, every birthmark,
every fold and flabbiness in the skin are included. The resulting
impression is one of profound humanity. It is these "flaws"
which Coplans plays with to produce unexpected shapes and associations
in his pictures. In this way, his chest and stomach become a
face in which the nipples are the eyes, the navel is the mouth,
and a loose fold of skin forms the nose. In another picture,
two fingers placed between Coplans' thighs become a woman's genital
area just underneath his own.
Coplans' photographs are in the widest sense both universal
and classical; they emit both strength and vulnerability, austere
symmetrical composition and playfulness, and they awaken the
viewer's fantasy in a way all their own. They make one think
of Michelangelo and Ruben, but Coplans' pictures also find their
counterparts in classical and baroque sculpture, and, perhaps
above all, in Auguste Rodin's modelling of the monument to Balzac,
his most magnificent and daring creation.
SHIRIN NESHAT
"Turbulent"
Shirin Neshat was born in 1957 in Qazvin, Iran and educated at
the University of California at Berkeley. She has lived and worked
in New York for many years. Her works were most recently shown
at this year's Venice Biennial.
From her years in New York, Shirin Neshat looks back with
great insight to a land filled with contradictions, a land to
which she is still strongly tied. Central to her work is the
figure of the Iranian woman. With the aid of still photographs
and video films she conveys powerful, telling portraits of eastern
feminism. Her pictures describe the fate, social roles and complex
conditions which govern the lives of women in fundamentalist
Iran. At the heart of this society, which is a melting-pot of
ancient traditions and cultures, a society where nothing is what
it appears to be, she shows us an entirely different and personal
women's world. This is where her strength lies, in the ability
to make visible these women's hidden struggle and tears. Through
this self-critical dialogue about Islamic society and culture,
she embodies in her photographs themes of feminism and violence,
martyrdom and terrorism, submission and pride.
Shirin Neshat often adds texts to her photographs. The texts
reveal the negative, stereotypical picture of Iranian women and
the discrimination they suffer. Many of the texts are excerpts
of poetry by Iranian poets, whilst others are of a religious
nature. The final portraits of the women are made stronger by
the texts and are very different from those we see in the news
media.
This winter the Malmö Konsthall will be showing the video
"Turbulent". Two television monitors are placed facing
each other at opposite ends of a room. Black and white films
are shown on the screens. On one screen, the Iranian-Kurdish
singer Shahram Nazeri presents with her warm voice an interpretation
of a thirteenth-century verse written by Jalal ed-Din Rumi. The
public consists entirely of men, who applaud for a long time.
On the opposite screen is a woman alone. We hear her singing
a wordless song in a voice filled with passion and pain. The
fact that women in Iran are forbidden to sing in public shows
us one more dimension of women's isolated solitude.
Shirin Neshat's films show us a world full of metaphors, a
world where everything can suddenly turn into its opposite. She
achieves a spellbinding effect by placing each monitor in its
own part of the room. In this way the viewers and their sympathies
are torn between one side and the other.
|