ARLES Article - Page #2

ut this year, to the consternation of many, the Arles festival gave evidence that it could be in serious trouble, perhaps even en route to living up to its unfortunate acronym. This year's festival, under the new guidance of Spain's Joan Fontcuberta, proved most substantial from a programmatic standpoint: thematically coherent, consistently solid and provocative in content, manageable in scale, carefully considered on all levels. Fontcuberta, arguably the single most important Spanish figure in photography of the post-Franco years, organized this festival around the themes that have long occupied him in his various roles as photographer, theoretician, educator, historian and curator, as its title --"The Real, The Fictional, The Virtual" -- indicated immediately. The offerings dealt in diverse ways with aspects of photographic illusionism and credibility, and the deconstruction thereof: from the directorial imagery of Joel Peter Witkin and William Wegman to documentation of unidentified flying objects, from the camera-based 1960s optical experiments of Ralph Eugene Meatyard and the photocollages of Grete Stern made in 1948-51, to the contemporary pseudo-science digital imagery parodies of "zoosystemicist" Louis Bec and the surprise hit of the event, the wonderfully deranged, anchovy-flavored lunacy of Finland's Bonk Business Inc. The exhibits interacted provocatively as a group -- a first for Arles; even relatively familiar material (the contents of the small Witkin show or the much larger Nancy Burson retrospective) clearly fitted the context and served as resonant reference points.
next column

o the credit of Fontcuberta and the various curators involved in mounting the 18 shows that comprised the official offerings of the festival this year, younger and/or lesser known figures like the Bonk crowd balanced the bigger names and more obvious choices. People like Canada's Sandra Semchuk and Louis Lussier, Shirin Neshat of Iran, John Stathatos of Greece and numerous others more than hold their own in this company and this context. Arles generated virtually all its own shows this year, emphasizing work that had not previously been seen in France. And the curators involved -- among them Michael Sand of the U.S. Hubertus von Amelunxen of Germany, Jan-Erik Lundstrom of Sweden and others-- obviously intended to contribute meaningfully to the festival's theme, and in general succeeded in doing so. Planned to integrate into the dominant conceptual structure, the outdoor evening audio-visual programs in the Theatre Antique proved less successful. William Wegman's portrait of his Weimaraner Fey Wray in a long red wig served as this year's iconic R.I.P. image, gracing the front cover of the Rencontres handbook. But a Recontres-produced hour and-a-half long Wegman survey made painfully obvious the fundamental thinness of his ideas. By the end of the overblown retrospective, the audience was booing what it had laughed at and cheered for during the first fifteen minutes. And Joel-Peter Witkin's lecture on his own work, which another commitment prevented me from attending, and for which (untypically) a separate cover charge was levied, was not well-received, according to reports.
next page