Joan Fontcuberta: Landscapes Without Memory [Hardcover]

Geoffrey Batchen (Author), Lesley Martin (Editor), Joan Fontcuberta (Photographer)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 15, 2005

Joan Fontcuberta tries to put the "real" into Dalí's Surrealism. In this first major monograph to be published in the United States by one of Spain's most prominent and innovative artists, Fontcuberta subjects various imaginative landscapes--among them ones by Cézanne, Turner and Weston in addition to Dalí, as well as photographs of his own body--to the manipulation of landscape-rendering software originally designed for the military and scientific communities. The limited visual vocabulary of the programs translates contours (like floppy clocks) into natural elements such as hills, rivers, clouds and the like. The result, actually, looks far from real. As Fontcuberta says, "In a typically surrealistic caper, introducing the critical-paranoid method in the technological heart of the computer, Dalí's dreams become equally impossible landscapes." And, he might have added, gorgeous black-and-white ones.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Spare a thought for Caspar David Friedrich's poor, beleaguered "Wanderer in a Sea of Fog." The classic 1818 depiction of a man trying to have a little quiet time in the mountains is dragged out for reproduction every time anybody—from textbook publisher to tourist bureau decorator—needs a handy symbol for romantic subjectivity or Bavaria. But the final indignity might be its inclusion in this weird book—transformed by scanners and computers into a "landscape" that looks like the background of a video game, only really, really sharp. Artists from Rousseau to Hokusai are given the same inane treatment, and after running out of artists to ruin, Spanish photographer Fontcuberta starts using his body parts. But it doesn't make much difference: the images all look like the covers of techno compilations by groups you've never heard of. Beyond filling the no doubt pressing commercial need for wealthy nerds to have their own Thomas Kinkade, it is hard to know what Fontcuberta intends with this production. The essay by critic Geoffrey Batchen stoutly attempts to find some subversive value in the works' very awfulness, but sometimes kitsch is just kitsch. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

"The Barcelona-born artist fed famous paintings and photos of his own body into Terragen, a shareware program that uses fractals to create imaginary 3-D landscapes. The surreal results appear as if Ansel Adams had ditched his camera and stayed home making fantasy novel covers on his computer." --Seed

"Fontcuberta has applied the software to photographs and even paintings, generating a spectacular, fascinating and somewhat eerie world." -- Ben Brain --Amateur Photographer

"This series of images of mountains, waterfalls and sunsets, contains the realistic elements of landscape but remain spookily generic and unreal." --The British Journal of Photography

Product Details

• Hardcover: 96 pages
• Publisher: Aperture (September 15, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1931788790
• ISBN-13: 978-1931788793
• Product Dimensions: 12 x 8.8 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,957,665 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars What was that? An undergraduate paper?, December 21, 2005

By 

mademoiselle_josephine_clementine_pilgrim (1550 N. Fern Circle) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Joan Fontcuberta (Phaidon 55s) (Phaidon 55s) (Paperback)

It is unfathomable to me that someone so entirely untrained in the appreciation or analysis of 20th c. art was allowed to review this book for Publishers Weekly (Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc.) It is little wonder that the reviewer was too ashamed to sign his/her own name. I don't believe that I have ever read a less-reasoned, more personal attack outside of a pro-Bush anti-"liberal media" Op-Ed piece! Is this the type of review Publisher's Weekly is enlisted to provide? A mere venue to allow uninformed writers to vent their personal hostilities towards works they personally find distasteful or simply don't understand?

The first warning sign is that Caspar David Friedrich's "Wanderer in a Sea of Fog [sic]" (I mean, after all, if he was "in" the fog we couldn't see him could we?!) is characterized as a "depiction of a man trying to have a little quiet time in the mountains". Geez! The writer clearly does not understand the importance of the category of the Sublime for German Romantic painters, following from Kant's observations, and the examination of the place of the individual in Nature. Friedrich's "Wanderer" wasn't just hanging out at the KOA campground before he had to go back to the office!

Certainly the appreciation of artwork(s) is/are subjective--not everyone is aesthetically moved by the same works and/or artistic visions, but there *is* such a thing as reasoned critical analysis that doesn't just launch into full blown ad hominem (ad arte) attack! What kind of "Rape of the Masters" belief in the nature of art has to be blindly accepted such that it can be "ruined" by being referenced in another artist's work/vision? Can Friedrich's painting really be "ruined" by Fontcuberta? Is a hole being poked in its "aura"? What a priori judgment determines the truth of the proposition, "Computer Art Bad. Thomas Kincade Good"?

As if that is not enough, it then turns into a "class" argument! Invectives are flung at "Wealthy nerds" (to have "their own Thomas Kincade")! I am a student, living in a garrett on a meager stipend, in the winter the room is drafty and I have no heat. I do not own a car. I ride my bike everywhere I need to go. That said, the last time I checked I could easily afford this Phaidon 55 book, but could never begin to afford (even should I ever want to), the 1,000-30,000 dollar, DNA-infused, mechanically reproduced and lightly-respackled paintings by Monsieur Kincade, "Painter of Light"!

I'll admit that Fontcuberta is far far far from my favorite artist, although I think some of his 80s work like the cryptozoology installations and the false-scientific documentary work was interesting. I have no desire to personally run out and buy this book. But I am completely flabberghasted that this review was found to be acceptable as a review of the book. I grade over 200 undergraduate papers on art a year, and if any of them based their arguments on their personal distaste for the art, they would receive an "F".