French version
LES INCANTATIONS
How to resist the beauty of the nudes from
Virgil Brill's series 'Les Incantations'
from which above that paradisiacal image and below that
marvellous torso?
No traditional nude here, staying or lying supine, exhibiting itself in an often artificial pose before the eyes of the beholder. When we see it in full view, it appears to be a walking nude, that comes nearer, passes before our eyes and moves away:
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It is underway, only furtively crosses our path, just like the girl
in Baudelaire's 'A une passante':
Un
éclair...puis la nuit! – Fugitive beauté Dont le regard m’a fait soudainement renaître, Ne te verrai-je plus que dans l’éternité? |
Although, with Brill, it is not a furtive glance that lights up amidst
the mass of passers-by, but a ripe body that appears, enveloped in an
abundant mane of hair. And although we are not submerged in the buoyant
jazz of the city, but in the timeless space of an intimate space
pervaded with a shimmering mist, out of which the nude looms up like an
apparition, only to dissolve in it again.
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Disappearing and disappearing: not only in the literal sense. For, what - equally on the literal level - is merely a kind of mist, is often condensed into something that can only be named in terms of (the absence of) light as such: into a dark grey, out of which looms up something that equally cannot but be described in terms of (the absence of) light as such: a dark spot - the saturated suggestion of a more than benevolent body:
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And that reminds us of the fact that Brill does more than merely stage
the appearance and disappearance of a woman. He is also mesmerised with
the fathoming of that other, nearly related mystery: the appearing and
disappearing of the visual world. In full light, we all too easily take
the appearance of visual object for granted. Only by mitigating the
violence of the light can we penetrate the twilight zone between being
visible and being invisible, where appearing is not only lighting up,
but can also be the protrusion of a dark shadow from a nearly dark
background: the mystery of becoming visible, of being visible as such.
Thus, the appearance and disappearance of woman and the visible are one
another's metaphor. We will come back on that topic below. We first should explore the 'literal' dimension to some greater length.
FAËRIE
The being underway
of the nude is echoed in the being underway of the
group. The group: as opposed to the nude not a worn out topic, but a
largely unexplored territory. With increasing enthusiasm, Virgil Brill
dedicated many series to the theme. Let us first explore that remarkable
series 'Faërie':
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Nude men, women and children are wandering around in little groups
across the woods, under a roof of foliage, where they are not exposed to
the violence of sunlight on the open plain, under an open sky. The
tension with what is there outside and above the woods is kept alive
through the often fairy-like light, that envelopes the figures in the
dark of a backlight, whether they are moving away or towards the light.
Above the sheltering woods is the open sky, and outside them the open
plain. Sometimes, when the light is tempered through a shimmering mist
and the sun is not too high, they venture to enter the open space or the beach.
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This series is pervaded by the atmosphere of idyllic primeval times. And that impression is only enhanced when the night falls. The group stops wandering then and comes to rest in the dance in a circle; the ritual feast in the dark of the night, nearly lighted by the shine of the moon.
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After the night, the bodies
resurrect in the mystic light of break of day
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LES MIGRATIONS
A totally different
atmosphere is conjured up in those most remarkable series 'Migrations'
and 'Nouvelles Migrations'. No longer quasi idyllic primeval times here,
but rather a generalised,
indeterminate present. No longer small groups, but rather often massive anonymous masses. Anonymous, because they laid off
their clothes and with them every indication of gender and generation.
The fairy-like, sheltered world is replaced with an empty open space,
wherein they seem to hang around without purpose
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or wandering around, although it is not clear where they are going to or
whence they come.
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The open spaces in which these masses wander about are no longer
extending under an open sky: a sometimes dense mist hides from view any
horizon that could delimit and determine.
To grasp the specific
nature of these masses, it pays to compare them with images of other masses.
Of course, photos of the deportation of Jews - who certainly are coming
from somewhere and going somewhere - impose themselves:
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Or we are reminded of the
dense masses of Antony Gormley, which are not underway at all, but standing still, staring with wide open eyes to some invisible leader in front of
them, as in the detail of 'European field' below:
antony gormley |
And
we realise at once that Virgil Brill's masses are totally different.
Even when underway and together, they do not close their ranks:
they only share their destination. And also when standing still, they do not
even think of coming closer to each other. In
that respect, they resemble the
figures of Giacometti, especially when grouped together in an ensemble.
giacometti |
But even when hundreds of Giacometti's sculptures
were summoned up, they would never stop
being self-contained individuals, but rather the endless variation of one
and the same individual. And that holds especially of dispositions like
'Another Place' of Antony
Gormley, where we are dealing with the literal repetition of
hundreds of identical casts, spread over the beach in their frozen
posture:
antony gormley |
But we do not read
Gormley's repetition as the multiplication of one and the same person as
with Giacometti: rather as a feeling of identity in many different persons, as
with soldiers in an army. Virgil Brill's masses are not of that
'uniform' kind. Even when the differences between his silhouettes are
nearly discernable, we deliberately experience his figures as individual
persons. The focus is not on the separate figures, nor on what all the
individuals have in common, but on the individual as an
integral, organic part of a group.
In 'Another place', all
the figures are staring at the North and in 'European field' at an
invisible leader: these masses are structured around on organising
principle. Such unificatory principle can also proceed from within the
group, as in 'Quarto
stato' of Fabrizio Pellizza de Volpedo (known
from Bertolucci's 'Novecento')
where the self-conscious mass is marching shoulder to shoulder behind
three figures that are not so much their leaders as their
representatives.
de volpedo |
Not so in Virgil Brill's masses. Even when there are many people
together here, they are not together because they searched each other's
company. Even when they are heading towards some common destination or
seem to be fascinated by the same phenomenon, they nevertheless do not
like to get involved with each other. We cannot help being reminded of
the mass from which Baudelaire's passante was looming up:
the loose individuals in the shopping streets of our cities, or their
transposition on the beaches, where Virgil Brill has photographed them.
Although one and the same invisible hand seems to have driven them
together on one and the same place, they all maintain a safe distance
between each other. This kind of group did not originate in the need to
bundle the power of separate individuals against an inimical group.
Rather are we dealing with individuals that keep each other at a
distance, while the group itself is not more than the ever expandable
addition of individual atoms. Such addition
is not at all the pre-social primeval condition of man wherein Hobbes' 'bellum
omnes contra omnes' is waged. Such is rather the kind of organically
structured group that Virgil
Brill staged in his 'Faërie'. The mass of individuals repelling each
other at a distance, on the other hand, is a late product of human
history: we find it only when aggression and exploitation have become
the invisible and anonymous work of abstract money relations, leaving
the real bodies somewhat soulless and relationless behind.
THE MASS IN THE IMAGE
From the walking nude, over the group wandering about, we have ended
up in the mass. The mass in an image: that cannot surprise us enough!
For, while the nudehas from way back played a crucial role in the visual arts,
the mass is almost completely absent.
And that is remarkable. For, even when man's mind might be preoccupied
by the
nude in the first place, the appearance of the group cannot fail
to leave a deep impression on the soul. From primeval times onward, man
wanders about in hunting and gathering hordes that gradually conquered
the entire surface of the earth. Those rather small hordes develop into
larger groups or masses as soon as man becomes sedentary: as a consequence of the development of agriculture, the group can steadily
increase in size. Those increasing numbers are no longer only spread
over the fields, they are increasingly concentrating in larger and
larger cities. The paradox is that precisely when man has become
sedentary, greater and greater masses are wandering about the earth's
surface. Ever more goods have to be gathered on market-places where
people are streaming together from far and wide, or they are supplied by
caravans that begin to travel back and forth between the cities. Also
ever larger armies begin to conquer city after city and concentrating
their riches in the capitals of Empires. After victories, or on occasion
of religious festivals for the new upper-gods, ever larger crowds are
gathering on the large squares in the big cities. And, excluded as they
feel from the riches in the imperial cities in the civilised world,
barbarians from the periphery come to flood the civilised centres. Or it
is more pacific individuals that concentrate in ever denser trains to
the big religious centres of the world unified under one emperor or God.
Of all those groups and masses and crowds, nothing can be seen in the
image.
There are scarce exceptions. the Greeks and the Romans used to delight
in the depiction of orgiastic communities. There are also some
depictions of armies and battles. But in the West we find the mass mostly under the guise of the
resurrected of the Last Day:from the Roman and Gothic portals -
the elongated tympani of which seem to prefigure Brill formats - to the
most impressive mass ever depicted: Rubens' 'Fall of the Angels' in the Alte Pinakothek
in München.
It appears that only the humiliated, the defeated, the enemies are apt
to be depicted in the image.
In the Ancien Régime, the people as such is summarised and represented in
the one and single person of the ruler. That is why the clash of the
warring masses on the battle field is often condensed into the duel
between two inimical rulers. But that is bestowing to much honour onto
the enemy: far more stronger is the contrast between the one and only mighty ruler
and the impotent mass of the humiliated and chased enemy. Ever since the
industrial revolution (and the corollary French Revolution) the masses,
that, due to the development of new means of transport are becoming
increasingly larger, begin to play an ever more important role. We
should expect them to appear in the image accordingly. But the images of
soldiers in barracks or on the battle-fields, of workers in the
factories, of consumers in the shopping streets and shopping centres,
the tourists on the beaches, the streams of migrants and fugitives remain scarce exceptions.
To be sure, there are the scenes from the Napoleonic wars, but there,
the masses are reduced to the mere decor of the appearance of Napoleon.
The mass as 'le
non-représenté', hence.
It would be all too easy to invoke the character of the immobile image
to explain such absence of the masses. No doubt, the moving image is far
more appropriate to render some aspects of the masses - it
suffices to refer to Eisensteins' Potemkin'. But the argument is not
quite convincing. That is plainly apparent from the examples above:
Rubens knows to convincingly conjure up a chased mass within the
confines of a simple rectangle! And also a elongated rectangle is an
obvious way out, as is shown by the freezes of the Greeks, the Medieval
timpani, not the mention the photographs of Virgil Brill.
The paradox that, precisely in the age of the masses, the mass seems to be
excluded from the image has everything to do, hence, with something
quite different: with the rejection of 'mimesis' - content. For,
together with
the concrete mass, also concrete political relations have to be introduced in
the image, as used to be the case when the mass was shortened into the
figure of the ruler. Add to this that the mass as such is likely to evoke
rather
negative feelings. Its existence is merely periodic, and the phase of
that periodicity only increases when money relations are invisibly fulfilling many an action that used to be the privilege of the
mass. When the mass is constituted nevertheless, on a now ever increasing scale, the
effect of that emergence is only enhanced through the contrast with the
ever increasing isolation of the atomised individual. And what the mass
performs is, finally, not always memorable. That holds equally true for the aims
it pretended to pursue: it is not only the revolution that devours its
own children, so that many a former member of many a mass is not always
willing to remember his action on the barricades, the battle-fields, the razzias and the massacres...
Only
in music is the mass amply and impressively represented, especially
since the 19e century: think only of the finale of Beethoven's ninth,
the impressive choirs in many an opera and a symphony of the nineteenth
and twentieth century, but above all of that most remarkable phenomenon
of the 'Requiem' - think of Mozart, Berlioz, Fauré, Ligeti, just to mention the most impressive examples. And it cannot be
by accident that, not otherwise than in
the image, it is the resurrection of the death that seems to be natural
habitat of the mass in music.
In that sense, Virgil Brill is entering virginal territory with his
photography of the mass. And precisely therefore, the instinctual certitude
with which he knew to develop this
theme can only surprise us.
Let us have a closer look at the kind of mass that Virgil Brill tries to
catch in the image. It is immediately apparent, then, that our
description of his masses as the post-industrial mass of individualised
atoms is only a rough first approach. For, even when this description
matches many a photo of Virgil Brill, on other photos the atoms are
joining to more organic wholes: couples, triads and even quadruplets
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And once initiated, the movement cannot be stopped. In the sextet below, a new élan is pervading the previously isolated atoms:
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It is as if angels, driven by some ardent inner fire, are setting out
for some holy mission. Even when they do not touch each other, the
shared élan transforms them in some superindividual organism. Such quasi
messianistic élan strongly contrasts with the rather 'Atlantic'
melancholy that hovers over the series 'Faërie'.
THE FIGURES OF THE MASS (2)
By zooming in on these emergent formations, the rest of the group seems
to be driven out of the image. And that makes us conscious of the fact
that Virgil Brill approaches the group from ever changing points of view.
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While Brill does not refrain from zooming in to the point where the mass threatens to dissolve into a single pair, he cannot zoom out so far that we get the entire mass in view. it continues to extend far beyond the already stretched edges of the image, and also in the depth there will always loom up new members, how far the camera might penetrate it.
We seem to get a somewhat better grip on the group when the camera takes a bird's eye view. But only now do we fully realise, not only how far to the left and the right, but also how far forward and backward this mass is extending.
Far away or nearby, we always have the feeling that we are standing
outside the group, that we are excluded from it: were the image able to
render sound, it would seem as if we did understand nothing from the far
away murmur, and from what there is to be seen, we only see the vague
contours. We will come back to that aspect.
Thus, the mass continues to transcend the image, whatever position the
camera might take. And that is how Virgil Brill knows to visualise a
further aspect of the mass: it is like a kind of ether wherein the
isolated individuals are from the beginning embedded and to which they
are bound with an indissoluble tie. The limitless size of the mass is a
kind of prefiguration of the only and one encompassing group wherein
mankind sooner or later has to dissolve. For, this is no longer the
horde as it was staged in Faërie. No longer is the world the sum of
countless small groups, relying on themselves and delineating themselves
form other groups that they preferably wish as remote as possible -
groups as inhabited spheres secluded from the extended no-man's-land in
between them. Such defensive structure - figure of scarcity - has
fallen apart in the already described 'primeval soup', wherein the loose
atoms gradually join to new molecules.
In order to grow to such infinite proportions, the group had first to
fall apart in separate atoms. And that falling apart seems to heavily
burden the poor atoms....
THE FIGURES OF THE MASS (3)
For, no doubt, the most impressive thing about Brill's masses is that
atmosphere of doom and gloom that is hovering over them.
Already the titles are drenched with it. There is sacrifice and crime in
the air: 'L'epreuve du matin', 'Le mal est fait', 'Le silence des frères',
and there will be called into account: 'Revenant de si loin' ''Assemblée d'absents' 'vous serez comptés'.
It seems as if the resurrection of the death is impendent, as if the
call for vengeance for the nameless evil will resound. Although -
bearing Virgil Brills name in mind - we cannot help thinking of a more
heathen descent of times - the transition from the golden, over the
copper and iron, to the leaden age - and above all of the subsequent
return of the second golden age, that makes the circle full: 'returns old Saturn's reign,with a new breed of mensent down from heaven'
(Virgilius,Eclogae,IV).
A new golden age, that can only be an age of peace and harmony between
men, an age of love. And at once we know what shades are hovering there
over Brill's masses: it is the dark shadow of exploitation, repression,
war, condensed in the symbol of murder - the nameless evil that mortals
willingly of unwillingly inflict on each other.
And that becomes fully apparent when we leave the titles for what they
are and look at the pictures as such. For, after all, titles are only
the attempts of the artist to catch in words those unspoken - silent -
dramas that seem to be enacted in many of these images. What, for
instance, to think of that solitary figure, standing with its head
inclined, while the rest of the mass seems to ignore what is happening?
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And what do they witness, the members of that group that seems to have isolated itself from the mass, while a last individual seems to hurry away?
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And what is happening in that ominous encounter of two beings with a group that seems to have being awaiting it?:
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And what does the man, followed by two beings and then by a larger group, approach on the photo below?
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On other photos, it is not so much the posture of the otherwise immobile figures that intimates nameless dramas, but rather the movement of the mass as such moving away of hasting towards something. We cannot see from where they come or to where they go. But on some photos, Virgil Brill has replaced the evil fate with a kind of windy rain that swipes their backs - as if they were transformed in wandering Jews .
vous serez comptés |
Or the artist transforms the image so that the goal the group is heading towards is visualised as a light above the horizon, while the entire space on the foreground is transformed in a kind a giant funnel perspectivally leading towards that goal .
Only now do we fully realise
the meaning of that distant perspective: only the distance transforms
these scenes into silent, nameless dramas and thus lends them the
polyvalent character that makes the threatening truth loom up from
behind the innocent figure of the group. and it is also the distance
that makes the gaze susceptible for what all too easily threatens to
disappear behind a nearby surface.
MEMOIRES DU PAYS D'OR
Ihr wandelt droben im Licht
Auf weichem Boden, selige Genien !
Glänzende Götterlüfte
Rühren euch leicht,
Wie die Finger der Künstlerin
Heilige Saiten.
Hölderlin, Hyperions
Schicksalslied
But there is still
more to distance in Virgil Brill's work. In its ambivalence, it is
nearly related to that other element that never fails in Brill's photos:
the hazy, sometimes shimmering mist from which the figures emerge and in
which they dissolve.
Such was not only the fate of the nudes with which we began this essay,
but also that of the members of the group on the photo below;
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When they have left the scene, a mysterious void remains wherein no more objects can be seen, no more surfaces separating an outside from an inside and thus creatinga distance space between things. Together with the objects, their surface and their interior, also distance is dissolving - perspective is collapsing - so that everything begins to permeate everything: no longer can before be discriminated from behind, left from right; the horizon as the dividing line between heaven and earth dissappears, so that also above and below dissolve into one single continuum. And after the disappearance of men, we also expect the dwindling of the gloom and doom, the evaporation of the sadness that permeated space, night to give way to the break of day:
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And here we have those marvellous photos from
another magnificent series ofVirgil Brill: 'Mémoires du pays d'or'.
the title is not random: The break of day is like the beginning of a
golden age. In that mystic morning mist we cannot yet discern the
contours of the earth's surface nor the silhouettes of the human beings
that inhabit it. Thus, the break of a new day is merely a promise - or,
as the title suggests: a memory. In the blue morning mist, there are no
people yet - or they have dissolved in it. Thus, that mystic
morning mist is equally the advent of an inner mystic space, widened to
the cosmic dimensions of the world: pure self-perception of the soul,
not confined within the limits of the body and by the presence of other
men. Unbroken beauty, sheer 'promesse de bonheur'.
The theme holdsVirgil Brill
firmly in its grip.
After the peregrinations over 'Migrations', 'Incantations' and 'Faëries'
it surreptitiously returns in a new guise: as a world without confines
breaking through behind a totally opposite world on the foreground. Such
contrast cannot but make the world that breaks through really limitless,
and its epiphany a veritable 'return'.
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DEVELOPMENT
The return to an
old theme: that must remind us of the fact that there is something like
the chronology of the works. All the more since the sequence of the
exposition above does not match the sequence of their origination. the
oldest works are 'Mémoire du pays d'or'
(1992-1995) In the summer of 1995, in 'Human beings', Virgil Brill makes the first strides towards
something that from 1996 onwards will turn out to
be those marvellous 'Migrations',
a series which he is still developing further. From 1999 stems
the series 'Incantations'.
It would lead us too far to
analyse the dynamics of this development. But it is very interesting to
describe the conception of the theme of 'Migrations'. On a hot
summer afternoon, half asleep on the beach, Virgil Brill descries through
the shimmering heat hazes
the silhouettes of bathers. 'Ces braves gens
étaient en vacances et allaient se baigner... Mais, vus de loin,
indistincts, ils avaient l'air de s'être rassemblés pour quelque motif
important et mystérieux'. Such looming up of the mysterious reminds of
the appearance ad disappearance of the woman that we described in the
beginning of this text. Just like the woman out of the mist, just so
looms up from what Brill calls 'cette banalité étrange' the hidden life
of the group. The 'étrangeté' of what becomes
visible then, can easily be tempered by the reconstruction of the 'banalité'
that lies at the roots of it - just like one tries to escape the horror
of the nightmare by waking up and then identificating the banal trifle
that was causing the clairvoyance of the dream: it was but a dream....
Of course we are reminded here of the fantastic landscapes da Vinci
descried in the stain left by throwing a sponge soaked with various
colours against a wall, or of the wooden floors from which
Max Ernst derived the marvels of his
'Histories naturelles'. Here it is the shimmering and the distance that
make the hidden loom up out of the visible.
The appearing and disappearing is repeated in the dark chamber where 'ma fille de
rêve enfouie dans le mystère des gris successivement inversés des
solarisations délirantes et surgissant trompeusement révèlée du dernier
bain'.
And it finally also governs the perception of the image. For, even when
the manipulation in the dark room has revealed the'étrangeté'
in the 'banalité' that Virgil Brill found on the distant beach, also our
gaze has to adjust to become fully susceptible to what is revealed here.
Especially since, sooner or later, we cannot fail to recognise the 'banal'
from which these ominous scenes are derived. And here we are reminded of Dali's
paranoid lecture of the image, in case of 'l'Angélus' of Millet'.
All these contradictory movements under the sign of ambivalence are
nothing less than the embodiment in the image of Virgil Brill's attitude
towards life and the visible.
THE MEDIUM
To work that wonder - to
make visible what threatens to hide from view - all the appropriate
means have to be summoned up. As no other, Virgil Brill has mastered a
whole range of photographic techniques.
To begin with, he often reduces the full scale from light to dark to one
of is extremes: either the appearance seems on the verge of dissolving
in the very light that makes it visible, or it threatens to be swallowed
by the very dark out of which it looms up:
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Sometimes the reduction is so drastic that the tokens seems to be
inverted: on the photo below, it is as if the black lights up from the
grey:
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When studying these marvellous photos, it comes to dawn on us what the
master means when he writes: ' j'ai été aspiré dans le vertige des gris'.
In another photo the range from dark to light is not so much reduced to
one of its extremes, as rather reduced to a limited number of degrees,
which lends the image an unknown magic, especially in combination with
an enhanced haziness:
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On the photo below Brill
succeeds in conjuring up an unheard of feel of whiteness, which has
something of the tactile sensation of the feathers in the wing of a swan:.
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More akin to the chemical character of photography is the technique of (an often repeated) solarisation
- Brill is talking about an ''enchaînement un peu
délirant de solarisations de plus en plus multiples':
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The same chemical
manipulations lead to effects that remind of sophisticated graphical
techniques:
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The emphasis on grain not
only reminds of certain drawings of Seurat, but foremost of graphical
techniques as the 'mezzotint':
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Sometimes the photos
approach the sensibility of charcoal or grainy paper
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On other photos Brill
succeeds in evocating a nearly ethereal atmosphere, which reminds of the
etchings of Rembrandt:
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It is apparent then, that Virgil Brill is deeply embedded not only in
the rich tradition of photography, but foremost in the broader tradition
of the visual arts as such. That holds true already on the purely
technical level, in as far as, with Brill, the distinction between the
graphical arts their offspring, photography, seems to evaporate.
But it is especially true on the level of 'content'. As we have seen,
there is no trace here of any betrayal of the 'mimetic' tradition that
from way back has been the real backbone of genuine art. While what used to be
the art of painting has, in a self-destructive move, ended up in the
neighbouring domains of design or (pseudo-)philosophy, Brill convincingly
succeeds not only in renewing traditional themes like the nude, but
above all to explore a nearly virginal domain: the theme of the mass. No
doubt: this will be the starting point of a many a new development.
TOWARDS A RENAISSANCE
OF THE IMAGE
That Virgill
Brill's photography is firmly embedded in the development of art
does not mean that he should no longer be a photographer.
No doubt, the share of manipulation of the image is often so strong, that some
might miss the share of 'reality' in Brill's photography, share that is
understood to be typical and decisive of the art of
photography - unjustifiably so, since, as a model or point of departure, reality has always been
an integral part of every visual art. Conversely, Brill's emphasis on
the medium often reminds ofprints or drawings, if not paintings. But Brill is not
at all out at lending his photo's the aura of a drawing or a print.
Rather have the art of drawing and making prints, just like photography,
discovered the possibilities of giving up the smooth transitions of tone
in favour of a grainy structure or of strokes, each in their own way
and with their own techniques. A comparison with the development of
the eye in several unrelated branches of the evolutionary tree imposes
itself. Talking about 'graphic' or 'painterly' techniques when photographers are trying to
achieve a goal that is also pursued by painters and printmakers, would
come down to call an octopus a mammal, just because it also developed an
eye...
Moreover, time has come to reverse the traditional hierarchy of the
arts. Even when the most impressive works of arts
may hitherto have been realised in painting, it suffices to remind of the prints of
Rembrandt and Goya to realise what remarkable works of art have been
realised in the 'minor' branches of art. And in our age, when painting
and sculpting have betrayed there true destiny and dissolved into in
countless forms of non- or extra-artistic creativity, it seems that
precisely the much scorned art of photography has become the very refuge
of the art of making images. We can only hope that Virgil Brill's art
might pave the way
for the so badly needed renaissance of the art of making images - not in
the sense of a retour to a lost golden age, but as a long awaited
rebirth after the past dark age when the mimetic taboo has wrought so
much havoc in the visual arts. For, it will not have escaped the attention of the reader: our
short survey of the iconography of the mass cannot but remind us of the
idleness of the contention that everything has already been painted. The
contrary might be
nearer to the truth: the most important images have still to be made.
And the quality of a painting like that of Rubens' 'Fall of the Angels'
only reminds of the level that still has to be attained.
In view of what he has managed to reveal us in his
images, Brill's contention 'There will be no revelation, because
revelation is impossible' cannot but sound as a
grandiose understatement..
©
Stefan Beyst, June 2004.
see also:
180° imaging
Eyemazing 2007, 2
Charlet Photographies
referrers:
traveling with the ghost