This survey of work by London-based, Israeli-born artist Ori Gersht (b. 1967), brought together for the first time, his trilogy of films based on 17th and 18th century still life paintings from 2006 to 2008, along with related still images that he enlarged into photographs (and his first solo exhibition in the western U.S., at Santa Barbara Museum of Art). The exhibition also included his most recent series, Chasing Good Fortune (2010)—large landscapes photographed at the height of cherry blossom season in Japan. Although the two bodies of work are distinctly different in terms of process and emotional effect, they are linked, as the title implies, by their thoughtful exploration of time in photography and Gersht’s stated ambition to make photographs that transcends the informational aspect of the medium to create a rich experience that invites the viewer to return again and again, as with a painting. It is no accident that all the works are presented like paintings: his prints are either displayed in framed light boxes or mounted on aluminum backings that come up to the edge of the frame, without mats or white borders. artes fine arts magazine

Drawing from the exhibition catalogue: Pomegranate (2006), Big Bang II (2007), Falling Bird (2008), and related photographic works featured in the exhibition fused the past with what the artist has called the ‘ultimate present.’ This is achieved through the creation of sublime scenes that become precipitously unsettling through both sudden and gradual obliteration. Each work renders a prolonged moment of suspense through the use of stop-motion photography and slow-motion film. Yet the visceral level on which these works operate most closely mimics that of their inspiration: painting. Referencing historic paintings by Juan Sánchez Cotán (1560-1627), Henri Fantin-Latour (1836-1904), and Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin (1699-1779), among others, these photographs and films provide a meditation on life, loss, destiny, and chance.”

Gersht’s modus operandi for the three films was the same: create a still life based on a earlier painting, violently disrupt it, and record the action with a high speed digital camera at 1600 frames-per-second. When played back, time is drastically slowed so that the moment of impact and its aftermath register as a series of comprehensible images rather than a momentary flash of chaos. To put it in perspective, standard video is shot at about 29 frames-per-second, so 1600 frames packs in a tremendous amount of information below the threshold of normal perception. Each film is about four to six minutes long. It is a method closely related to that of Bill Viola’s Passion series videos from the early 2000s, in which Viola produced extreme slow motion tableaus enacted by costumed actors against simple backdrops, based on medieval and Renaissance paintings. Like Viola’s videos, Gersht has set a static image from centuries ago into motion, inducing a contemplative experience. However, the presence of actors gives Viola’s work the flavor of experimental theatre or modern dance, while Gersht’s – where inanimate objects begin movingwith no visible human intervention – became strange and unsettling.

With the film Big Bang and related photographic series Time After Time (2007), Gersht puts the “freeze” in “freeze frame.” Arranging his own versions of the 17th-century Dutch still life, consisting of flowers in a glass vase against a black background, the artist infuses the set-up with liquid nitrogen and lets the high-speed cameras roll. Soon, the whole floral display—suddenly frozen—is shattered with the aid of pyrotechnics experts, to create a violent explosion which sends fragments of glass, petals and leaves flying through a vaporous fog. This work references traditional Spanish and Dutch still-life painting in which precise arrangements of foods and fruit are shown at their peak, implying the inevitability of decay. These visual metaphors for the brevity of life are termed vanitas.

Right (near): Ori Gersht, Time after Time: Untitled 8, 2007. End Note #4a; (far): Henri Fautin-Latour, Chrysanthemums of Summer (c.1887). End Note #4b. 

Pomegranate (2006) duplicates the composition of Juan Sánchez Cotán’s Quince, Cabbage, Melon and Cucumber (c. 1602), in which the melon and cucumber sit on a windowsill and the cabbage and quince—Gersht substitutes a pomegranate for the latter—are suspended above them by strings against a black background. We watch the tranquil scene for a while until a bullet soundlessly enters from one side, puncturing the pomegranate and causing it to swing in slow motion back and forth, releasing gelatinous fluid and seeds, which in both consistency and color are disturbingly reminiscent of blood and guts.

The great French painter Chardin’s Mallard Duck Hanging on a Wall with a Seville Orange (1720-30) provided the composition for Falling Bird (2008), with a pheasant hung upside down by its foot standing in for the duck, and grapes set on the bench below it instead of an orange. An unseen hand cuts the string holding the bird and it plummets — but extremely slowly — into what we suddenly realize is a pool of water, which splashes, roils and foams until the bird disappears beneath the surface.

Oddly enough, although the wall text and related still photographs inform the viewer what will happen in each film, it doesn’t reduce the impact of watching the action unfold. It’s hard not to flinch at the moment of impact, even when you know what’s coming, and the slow-motion images of gooey red ooze from the pomegranate, the lifeless pheasant swallowed up by black liquid, and the lovely flowers torn apart and falling through a smoky haze and bits of glass, all have a visceral impact. The damage bullets and explosions do to human beings inevitably come to mind, and yet it’s also kind of fun in a childlike way to see the results of these odd experiments—at the moment of impact, I noticed, many visitors giggled. Our curiosity is aroused by a rare opportunity to see phenomena that otherwise takes place at speeds to quick for our perceptions to process, and the surprisingly beautiful arrangements of color, pattern and form that arise.

Catalogue essayist Carol Armstrong asks, “…to blow up the harmless, genteel flower pieces of Fantin-Latour: what else but modernist hostility to the decorums of the aesthetic domain and the pictorial tradition could lead a gentle photographic artist like Gersht to do such a thing?” This poignant question, included in the exhibition catalogue, sums up, perhaps, what is on the viewer’s mind when taking in the artist’s work for the first time. Gersht seemingly answers the inquiry during a gallery talk on separate occasion. “It’s all about pulling tension between the old masters and new technologies…We see a simultaneous moment of destruction and togetherness coincide.” (posted by Joseph Caputo on Smithsonianmag.com, February 25, 2009).

The mixed emotions produce an interesting, layered experience, in which the artist makes room for viewers to have a personal response. Although the wall text suggested some ways to interpret the work — such as a reminder that the European still life tradition Gersht riffs on was in part a meditation on the ephemeral nature of life, or that the pomegranate is a fruit from the artist’s native Israel — the works manage not to be reductive or didactic. Gersht has succeeded in what he set out to do in making photo-based experiences that expand, rather than narrow, the possibilities for interpretation. I’d certainly like to see them again.

The Japanese landscapes, an exploration of symbolism, though related by the curators to the rest of the show under the rubric of time, seemed more like the artist setting aside the process he had perfected over the past several years to try a new approach with different subject matter. They were, we are told, photographed at night with long exposures in Hiroshima and on the grounds of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo and other historic sites. The scenes are a riot of pink and white blossoms, and the method by which they were made causes some of them to glow as if lit from within. In others, the light has been allowed to overexpose the image, so the blossoms appear ghostly.

“The yin and yang of beauty and destruction,” according to museum sources, “carries through in this series, produced in Japan between April and May 2010 […] The cherry blossom has traditionally been the enduring metaphor for the nature of life, but its extreme beauty and quick death has also been associated with mortality. During World War II the flower was used to motivate the Japanese people, to stoke nationalism and militarism among the population. As noted by Michele Robecchi in her essay, Ori Gersht – Breaking the Silence, for the exhibition catalogue, ‘…[the works] have a slightly sinister post-atomic quality. This effect wasn’t completely unintentional. When Gersht visited Hiroshima, his interest in the outdoor was equally split between investigating the lost innocence of cherry blossoms…and how nature flourishes on nuclear-contaminated soil.’ ”

These images, with their all-over patches of color, evoke the paintings of the French Impressionists, who of course were themselves strongly influenced by Japanese prints, and they are quite lovely. However, these photographs don’t pack the punch of the still life series, either in terms of showing us something surprising and unfamiliar, or in the feeling-states they evoke. Wherever Gersht is heading with these, I couldn’t help but feel he’s not quite there yet.

During the period in which Lost in Time was on view, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art is to be commended for programming a still life show from its collection that both contextualized Gersht’s work and may have given its regular visitors a fresh look at works they have seen before. Distilled Moments brought together 20th and 21st century paintings and photographs by American and international artists introduced by a curatorial statement that read in part, “The messages still lifes impart have changed over the centuries, but the genre still offers the artist possibilities for expression – political, spiritual, societal and cultural reflection.” If the name of pioneering scientific photographer Harold Edgerton (1903-1990) didn’t ring a bell to viewers to Lost in Time who were told that he was one of Gersht’s influences, Distilled Moments included Edgerton’s famous image of an apple at the microsecond at which it was pierced by a bullet. E.F. Kitchen’s 1985 photograph of flowers and petals floating in water and Chris Enos’s untitled photograph of a drooping rose on the verge of decay bore obvious relationships to Gersht’s exploding flowers, while Andre Derain’s oil Still Life with Pumpkin (La Citrouille) (1939) show the French artist engaging some 70 years ago with the same tradition emanating from Chardin and his contemporaries that Gersht represented in his films. This kind of coordination between exhibitions enriches all the work on display.

By Helen Glazer, Contributing Writer © 2011

Ori Gerst’s exhibit, Lost in Time was shown at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art during the summer of 2011. To see more, go to www.sbmuseart.org

 
http://youtu.be/0KMsrE3e30k

 End Notes:

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1.Ori Gersht, Time after Time: Untitled 1, 2007. LVT print mounted on aluminum. 16 x 12 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

2.Ori Gersht, Blow Up: Untitled 4, 2007. Lightjet print mounted on aluminum. Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Museum purchase with funds provided by an Anonymous Donor in loving memory of SMD and Tangerine from EAD, 2009.

3. Bill Viola, Emergence, 2002 (video still). From Passion series, based on Masolino de Panacale, Pieta (1424).

4a. Ori Gersht, Time after Time: Untitled 8, 2007. LVT print mounted on aluminum. 14-1/2 x 13-3/8 in. Collection of Manfred and Jennifer Simchowitz.

4b.Henri Fautin-Latour, Chrysanthemums of Summer (c.1887). Collection Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Gift of Mary and Leigh Block.

5. Ori Gersht, Pomegranate, 2006 (video still). The Jewish Museum, New York. Purchase: Nathan and Jacqueline Goldman and Simon Lissim Funds, by exchange, 2008-219.

6.Ori Gersht, Falling Bird: Untitled 5, 2008, LVT print mounted on aluminum, 15-1/4 x 12-3/4 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Angles Gallery, Los Angeles

7. Ori Gersht, Chasing Good Fortune: Imperial Memories, Night Fly 1, Tokyo, Japan, 2010. Archival inkjet print mounted on aluminum. 47-1/4 x 70-3/4 in. Collection of Sandra and Jerry LeWinter.

8.Yoshida, Toshi, Sanbu-Zaki Cherry Blossoms (c.1935), Ukiyo-e print. Private collection.

9. Ori Gersht, Chasing Good Fortune: Against the Tide, Diptych Monks, Nara Region, Japan, 2010. C-type print mounted on aluminum. 2 panels: 60 x 47 in. each. Courtesy of the Artist and Angles Gallery, Los Angeles.

10.Edgerton, Harold, Bullet Piercing Apple (1964). Private collection.