ART DEPARTMENT

Daylight magazine, the little documentary photo journal that could, focuses on the human beings behind global commodities. Its topics range from the abundance of guns in Latin American gang and paramilitary culture (photographs by Heidi Schumann) to the torturous route of diamonds from African mining pits to Manhattan's Fifth Avenue (by Kadir van Lohuizen). Michael Wolf's photoessay on Chinese copy artists doesn't rake muck, but it says a lot about the globalization of visual culture and its attendant devaluation of intellectual property.

Wolf, whose engaging Sitting in China documented that country's endlessly improvised chairs, shot portraits of Chinese artists who spend their days knocking off Western artwork. Their meticulous copies are exported for sale here and abroad. Some of the appropriated paintings are predictable; one artist holds his 400-stroke version of Van Gogh's sunflowers ($5.00 US). Another sits on a disjoint bench with a precisely-slashed copy of a Lucio Fontana ($2.25 US); another stands in a narrow back alley with an almost life-sized knock-off of a nude by painter Gerhard Richter (a princely $27.50 US). Other paintings being shown off are more surprising because they are copies of fine-art photographs—one a monochrome of a Becher building study ($18.75 US), another from a child portrait by Loretta Lux (at $43.75 US, the priciest).
The transformation of high art into commodity is interesting enough. For someone who follows photography, though, the odder thing is that a Western buyer—especially one with no awareness of the originals, let alone a sense of the Bechers' trenchant ordinariness or the calculated vacancy of Lux's subjects—would want painted versions of images that seem to us so patently, austerely photographic.

The effect of changing Loretta Lux's photograph into a painting is even a little chilling. The image is a three-quarters portrait of a redheaded girl wearing a pale blue coat that looks (as is typical with Lux's work) a little too small. In translation the photo loses its eery, manipulated charm; the familiar kitsch of the Margaret Keane school of painting is no longer just a reference. The painted Lux has about the same artistic substance as a big-eyed Keane. It's an object lesson in the way contemporary photography's subtle, referential nature thins the line between artful and banal.
Thanks to Russell Hart - http://stateoftheart.popphoto.com/blog/2007/01/art_department.html



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