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Published on 5/17/08
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“Jeff Wall” - (light boxes + Vancouver + hordes of tourists) ÷ 2 = “LS/S” might be an exaggeration, but the similarities between the Canadian photographer’s recent Art Institute retrospective and German artist Beate Gütschow’s smaller solo show are striking. Gütschow, like Wall, creates photographs that mine the history of art by combining myriad images in a digital montage. Her results are both less and more interesting.
Gütschow’s “S” series (the S is short for Stadt, or “city”) is an imaginative riff on mid-20th-century architectural and documentary photography. Her framed black-and-white prints fuse dilapidated elements of Chicago; Sarajevo; Kyoto, Japan; and other urban environments into a postapocalyptic Everycity. The monumental concrete structures in S #2 (2005) seem familiar, but the viewer’s inability to recognize them in such bleak and barren surroundings generates an uneasy excitement.
LS (which stands for Landschaft, or “landscape”) was inspired by 17th-century landscape painters such as Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin. Gütschow has left the printing specs on these large, unframed color photographs, and the numbers and abbreviations contrast oddly with her banal depictions of trees, hills, rivers and more trees.
R #1 and R #2 (2006), two videos based on Jacob van Ruisdael’s 1655 painting The Jewish Cemetery, are more engaging. Each largely re-creates Van Ruisdael’s landscape: They contain the same graves and trees, but small differences between them reveal their artifice. Realizing that a “natural” landscape we see in motion, changing over time, is a fictional construction can still be a thrill.
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