By Ann Thomas

Canadian Centre for Architecture

March 9–May 22, 2005

Ever since Dieter Appelt dedicated his career to making photographs in the early 1970s, he has addressed ontological issues relating to the nature of life, death, and the transmission of experience and memory. He has done this not only by developing complex sequencing structures for his images, but also by integrating into them the imagistic properties of film strips and sound recordings. Often taking his naked body covered with white marble powder as the subject of his photographs, he has enacted performances (“aktions”) under extreme circumstances, such as hanging himself upside down from the limb of a tree, placing himself in a shallow grave, and partly immersing himself in a bath of water for hours on end. Through Appelt’s art, the viewer is transported into an environment of uncommon experience where conventional relationships with time, space, and sound are displaced by alternative constructs. But even when we think we are familiar with his strategies of dislocation, Appelt, through his fertile imagination and intense drive to renew his experience of the external world, is able to confound our expectations. His Forth Bridge-Cinema. Metric Space is a case in point.

Because a large part of Appelt’s oeuvre deals with the relationship between body, structure, and space in a very direct manner – for example, his self-portraits from the early 1970s, Crossing the Moor (1977), the sequence Memory’s Trace (1977–79), and The Mark on the Mirror that Breathing Makes, as well as the many other images that touch on life, death, and decay and share a corporeal quality – the Forth Bridge-Cinema. Metric Space seems at first glance to be contradictory in spirit. Observing a shift in his work as early as the 1980s from a theatrical and emotional approach toward a more mathematical and scientific one, Sylvia Wolf notes, “He built images by making a single work out of multiple pictures and by making multiple exposures on a single sheet of film. Inspired by Futurist works, he integrated motion into his photographs in an effort to challenge the static nature of the still image and imply more than two dimensions in photography.”1

Perhaps it was the structural dynamism of the monumental nineteenth-century cantilevered Forth Bridge that first caught Appelt’s attention in 1976 when he visited Scotland. His initial efforts to translate the Forth Bridge’s massive and complex forms into an image were not successful, however, and the project lay dormant until Appelt returned to the subject in 2002, after Hubertus Amelunxen, senior visiting curator at the Centre for Canadian Architecture, introduced him to the CCA’s archival collection of material relating to the bridge.2 A photographic work composed of eight vertical panels, each made up of three vertical columns and thirteen horizontal rows, resulting in a total of 312 images, Forth Bridge-Cinema. Metric Space shares both formal (non-amplified sound patterns, film-strip projections, and sequencing) and conceptual (architectonic form, space, and time) attributes with earlier works, but it also differs strongly from them in mood and style. Amelunxen describes the process of making Forth Bridge-Cinema. Metric Space as follows: “Dieter Appelt first photographed the complete length of the Forth Bridge according to a numbering system based on the bridge’s railings. He then filmed it, using a 35 mm Arriflex single-frame camera, in individual 1/125-second frames.”3 Although Appelt still responded to the bridge in physical terms – he recently likened its main span to that of a giant spinal column4 – he was clearly searching for a means to express his experience of it in such a way that it would encompass both his sensual and intellectual appreciation of it. Amelunxen’s description of Appelt’s incorporation of the Fibonnaci Sequence, a mathematical formula involving an incremental numbering system, into the photographic work, as well as the influence of Greek composer Iannis Xenakis’s percussion compositions, with their intense alternating rhythms upon it, clarifies how he succeeded in transcending a literal transcription of the bridge.5

Forth Bridge – Cinema.Metric Space (details), tableau of 312 gelatin silver prints, 150 x 400 cm, 2004, collection Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal.©Dieter Appelt

This evolution of Appelt’s work from almost primordial images to sophisticated and epic orchestrations of images into grids raises the question of what the source was for this later structuring and geometricizing aesthetic that we see in Forth Bridge-Cinema. Metric Space. How are we to reconcile it with the earthy, almost tactile imagery of the 1970s, and is there evidence of a conceptual, if not formal, continuum? When asked to explain how his early work connects to the later work, Appelt draws an analogy of the relationship between a satellite and its power station.6 Appelt’s rich repository of evolving ideas about how to express his humanity in the face of life, death, and history, as well as his more immediate empirical experience of the natural and built world, is what appears to define this “power station.”

I would argue that the links between early and later work are strong and progressive. An evidentiary, if rather obvious, comparison between one of the railing details in Forth Bridge-Cinema. Metric Space and an image from Der Augenturm (1977) sequence, in which Appelt strikes a Vitruvian pose in the crossbars of his wooden tower, reveals an ongoing engagement with the resonant relationship between the human body and the built structure. The fact that the artist’s body does not appear in the dynamic intersections of diagonals in Forth Bridge-Cinema. Metric Space has much to do with the onward intellectual journey that he made from the late 1970s to the late 1990s. During this period, he made a number of seminal images, each of which, while becomesing more formally complex yet aspires, paradoxically, to greater simplicity and a greater wholeness.

Erste Hängung (First Hanging), from Monte Isola (1976) illustrates Appelt’s inverted nude body hanging from a tree branch, an experience that he described as having had a “shattering emotional impact”: “Afterwards I produced pictures as if in a trance, one after another. I didn’t plan anymore. This picture is the beginning.”7 If this work permitted him to think differently about his physical relationship with space, Das Feld (Wiesent River) (1991), composed of thirty images of the surface of eddying water arranged in a grid of five columns by six rows, extended his awareness of time. Capturing an image every sixty seconds, this work addresses a simple state of synchronicity between the moment of image creation and the changing reality of its subject matter. It also shows the artist performing his ritualistic interventions in an increasingly systematized and conceptualized manner. Waldungen: Partitur zur Waldrandabhörung (Forests: Score for listening to the forest) (1987/1994) becomes even more complex in terms of drawing interdisciplinary or intersensory comparisons, as it is a sound/sight equivalency composed of a 27 x 20 grid in which he likens the jagged silhouette of a forest’s treetops to the visual pattern of soundtracks that appear alongside the imagery on a film strip. He describes this piece as one in which you “see what you hear and hear what you see.”8

In Forth Bridge-Cinema. Metric Space, the same concerns regarding the experience of the body in space are evident, the same structuring intelligence is in operation, and the element of ritualistic recording practice is still there. Forth Bridge-Cinema. Metric Space is therefore not so much a departure from Appelt’s initial investigations as it is an expansion of his visual vocabulary in order to satisfy his expressed desire to “avoid being reductive in terms of reality.”9 The signals from the power station are consistent and evolving.

1. Sylvia Wolf, Dieter Appelt (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago and Ars Nicolai, 1994), p. 36.

2. Phyllis Lambert, “Foreword,” in Hubertus von Amelunxen, Louise Désy, and Dieter Appelt, Dieter Appelt. Forth Bridge-Cinema. Metric Space (Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2005), p. 8.

3. H. von Amelunxen, “Tempus Fugit,” p. 28.

4. Dieter Appelt, “Bridging the Firth of Forth,” p. 13.

5. Amelunxen, in Dieter Appelt, p. 28

6. Wolf, in Dieter Appelt, p. 47.

7. Ibid, p. 20.

8. Ibid., p. 36.

9. Appelt, “Bridging the Firth of Forth,” in Dieter Appelt. Forth Bridge-Cinema.

metric space, p. 14.

This text is reproduced with the author's permission. © Ann Thomas

By James D. Campbell

Donald Browne Galery, Montreal

April 19–May 24, 2008

This article was originally published only in French. No translation is available.

Par Manon Gosselin

Centre canadien d’architecture, Montréal

27 septembre 2007  – 3 février 2008

By Jacques Doyon

In this issue, we delve into modern and vernacular architecture in countries, regions, and cities on the margins of the industrialized West. Architecture, the landscape, and the city are captured in a distanced way.

This article was originally published only in French. No translation is available.

Miradors se présente comme un « essai photographique sur l’érosion ». Il est composé en utilisant deux sources : les cuevas, montagnes habitées d’Andalousie, et les villes brésiliennes où les favelas, bidonvilles, côtoient les centres-villes modernes.

This article was originally published only in French. No translation is available. – Read the Abstract

Par André Lamarre

Chacun des grains de cette pierre, chaque éclat minéral de cette montagne pleine de nuit, à lui seul forme un monde.

Albert Camus, Le Mythe de Sisyphe

La photographe parcourt le monde, en quête des traces du changement que subit la matière. Elle trouve le site, attend la lumière, choisit l’angle. Mais ce n’est pas le mouvement qu’elle freine et fige, c’est le temps arrêté qu’elle ravive.

By Jordan Strom

Given Paul Valery’s belief that architecture could be seen as a process of knowledge that might one day replace philosophy, one wonders what he would have made of the recent photoworks by Arni Haraldsson. Haraldsson is one of several photographers who have, over the past decade and a half, redressed modernism through the “medium of landscape,” and photography through the apertures of architecture.

In parallel to his continuing dozen-year-long project, which addresses the livedness, context, and peculiarities of space in modernist architecture, Haraldsson’s recent photographic works focus on other grounds inherent to modernism, built space, and our relationships to them.

This article was originally published only in French. No translation is available.

La série des Villes génériques s’inscrit à la suite du travail photographique sur les sites urbains en construction que Stéphane Couturier réalise depuis plusieurs années.

This article was originally published only in French. No translation is available. – Read the Abstract

Par Emmanuel Hermange

L’histoire de la photographie, tant iconographique que technique, est intimement liée aux développements de la grande ville et de l’architecture depuis le début du XIXe siècle. Les œuvres qui ont marqué l’ancrage de ce médium dans le vif des formes et des débats artistiques depuis les avant-gardes se sont souvent appuyées sur l’architecture.

This article was originally published only in French. No translation is available. – Read the Abstract

Par André Clément

Je me souviens d’un séjour dans les Rocheuses pendant lequel un artiste albertain avait transformé une pièce complète du Banff Centre en camera obscura.

This article was originally published only in French. No translation is available.

Avec Parages, Alain Paiement conjugue ses préoccupations photographiques, architecturales, picturales et cartographiques pour nous offrir une monumentale représentation spatiotemporelle du bâtiment qu’il habite. Les images, successivement disposées dans l’espace, font littéralement basculer le bâtiment sur le côté.

This article was originally published only in French. No translation is available.

Les photographies de Jean-Philippe Lemay présentent des vues de sites urbains filtrées par des procédés anciens. Il fabrique lui-même des camera obscura aux surfaces courbes, dotées parfois de deux ouvertures ou de miroirs, et utilise des techniques de sensibilisation et d’impression à faible définition.

This article was originally published only in French. No translation is available. – Read the Abstract

Par Mona Hakim

Dans un magnifique ouvrage consacré à un important corpus de l’œuvre d’Alain Paiement, publié à l’occasion de sa récente exposition à la Galerie de l’UQÀM1, l’auteure Anne-Marie Ninacs scrute à la loupe la production d’un artiste animé par un profond besoin d’interpréter l’espace qui l’environne.

tangent e – Alain Paiement is the first exhibition of a series, curated by Hubertus von Amelunxen, Senior Visiting Curator at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, that aims to establish a dialogue with the photography collection of the CCA by the creation of new works. From a selection of some two hundred photographs of the collection proposed by Amelunxen, Alain Paiement pursued his researches on the spatial and temporal nature of the perspective, by focusing on constructions of  vision operated by the architectures of glass and steel. This series will continue with exhibitions by Victor Burgin, Dieter Appelt and Naoya Hatakeyama. CVphoto wishes to thank the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Hubertus von Amelunxen, and Alain Paiement for their collaboration in the publication of this supplement. The exhibition tangent e – Alain Paiement is presented by the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal, from April 23 to November 9, 2003.

Zimmerman attributes to his photographs “an essentially utopian aesthetic with ambivalent understandings.” Humour, nostalgia, and critical deconstruction coexist in his work, as they often do in our responses to totalitarian aesthetics. “Fascinating fascism” shares its allure with the less radically discredited, but equally utopian, architectures of socialism and New Deal social democracy.

By Robin Metcalfe

For those familiar with Carl Zimmerman’s work, there was a moment of déja vu when the first photographs of England’s new Tate Modern appeared.

This article was originally published only in French. No translation is available.  – Read the Summary

Par Céline Mayrand

D’une sensibilité exacerbée, à fleur de peau, Eugénie Schinkle nous entraîne dans le tourbillon d’une énergie fébrile. Aussi, nous amène-t-elle à concevoir l’acte photographique comme une forme de rituel, comme un acte répondant symboliquement à un plaisir sensuel.

There is the moon, the darkness, the ghost of industry. André Jasinski photographs urban remains at night. He highlights their grandeur and lonely poetry. And he sniffs out the scourges that shaped them.