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IC w11 "Das Bild stellt sich vor das, was es vorstellt."

  • HildeMaassen
  • Apr 10, 2020
  • 9 min read

Updated: Aug 15, 2020

"Das Bild stellt sich vor das, was es vorstellt." -Vilém Flusser



I sent my drift essay to some people an got some feedback from Paul


  1. Good to see that intent at the beginning, so well done.

  2. Is there a good critical quote that you can use as well here to really locate your practice?

  3. There is good reference to other practitioners but now it is time to explore this research in more depth to get a real understanding of how these practitioners are deploying photographic language and content to establish a narrative or metaphor.

  4. It would also be of benefit for you to also criticality appraise your work as you clearly identify images that you feel are successful, but you should also ask which images are less successful for you and how would you specifically improve your own work. This will help you to keep developing your practice and it will also make the links clearer in the relationship between your own practice and the other visual and conceptual ideas which inform it.

  5. Although you have to use Harvard Referencing, it is the system we use at Falmouth as you are using a variety of reference styles!

And not in he feedback but in one of the live moments was the idea to make a reference separate from the bibliography.

For point 4,

and a post on selections with also images that don't fit ino the series:

a brief resume of both those posts would be good to include in my critical review of practice

For point 5 reference:

I new my referencing was not yet complet, I have to take some time to find all my researches. Go through al my posts to make them better. If I learned one thing this time, I should immediately take the time to do the referencing at every post.


3, In depth research other practitioners:


In my essay I have a reference several practitioners:


  1. Jan Dibbets,

  2. Vik Muniz,

  3. Michiel van Bakel,

  4. Richard Misrach, (in relations to Stieglitz and Muniz)

  5. Alfred Stieglitz,

  6. Zuiderwijk and Vergouwe


Explore them in more depth will give a problem; already I have over 2000 words.



I start with 2 people that I find interesting because both are very much about the process, the research and less about the product. The work is also diverse in both, although it can be traced back to a certain general theme: Jan Dibbits and Vik Muniz.


Vik Muniz



He examines the relationship, transformation between what is real and imagination, fantazy. The goal is quite self-centered, narcissistic; he wants to feel better and making art is doing that Helping other people he also feels better. That brings a certain kind of guilt because he takes more than he gives. This was good to hear because I often catch myself with a form of narcissism and he just says that every artist does.


What to see?


Muniz's wants to show the world to the viewer in an honest, enlightening way. The process of discovering ways to say things that transform from the real to the imaginary by showing apparently familial works that at second glance do not turn out to be what you thought it was. That feeling is quite effective in creating a lasting impression and starts a conversation where the vierwer gets involved and asks questions about the way one looks at something. This is the kind of interaction Muniz want his works with the viewer to have.


So his work is very much about looking, experiencing the world through the gaze. And by showing, represent things that initially seems recognizable, to which the viewer can refer to offer some kind of safety. An then after a double-take recognize that what is being shown is not quite what the viewer thought he saw. He always portraying things that represent other things and things that exist just for a limited amount of time.


There I see an agreement with my work. I take pictures of clouds, that are different the next minute. They are transformed into images that resemble ice floes, mountains, topographic maps, 3D surf maps, all of them, initially familiair shapes that when you find out that they are made of clouds, they provoke wonder, questions and hopefully discussion.


What is very different from my work is that Muniz often refers to other work through a reaction, the appropriation, a look-alike.


In the series Earthworks Muniz tries to define his relationship with the earth by mapping the boundaries. Earth being the repository for all human activities and ideas that are reflected in the traces left behind.


In my work I try to make the traces that man leaves behind in the clouds, figuratively, by presenting them in an alienating way.

Being an artist, according to Muniz Retention of a kind of child's quality. I think by that he means that one must remain open to view the world. From a kind of childlike innocence and experimentation. I certainly recognize myself in that.


FIG. Vik Muniz, Clouds - 2001


About the images above by Muniz

With the idea of ​​making clouds that look like clouds, he let planes fly in the sky that made those drawn clouds. He photographed this himself from the ground.


Jan Dibbets

I already wrote about Dibbets this module


I went to the same high school that Dibbets had been before. He was the most famous person who had ever been there. Drawing and art history were part of my exam package and as such Dibbets, as a local greatness, was mentioned a lot.


Dibbets was famous abroad but inland he was criticized al lot. That made him some kind of geuze hero. Especially since the split between the south, Catholic Netherlands under the rivers and the Protestant north above, always played a role under the surface.


In the Netherlands there is a strong friend policy and you shouldn't put your head above the ground. (Be good at something). He didn't care, he didn't go to the right parties, and he also criticized the crowd favorites if what he said was not art. Moreover, he earned the most and hung in major museums around the world.


Perception is an important theme in the artist's work. An example of this are the "perspective corrections" in which he invariably misleads the viewer. A bit similar to Eschers drawings.


Left: M.C. Escher, Relativity -1953

Right: Jan Dibbets, perspectiefcorreties - ca 1968.


He doesn't like people's documentary photo-graphics, just beautiful pictures. ”It's too often about“ what ”if“ how” would be the interesting question. The perception of space and the Dutch landscape always plays a role in the work of Dibbits. He does not focus on the linguistic aspect. The observable image, form and spatial illusion play the leading role in Dibbets' oeuvre. About what is real / not real, abstract / not abstract, it came together in one machine Often an optical illusion is created, in which it appears that, for example, a square floats freely in space, when in reality only a geometric shape is drawn on the floor or wall. Perspective distortion takes place.


It is not about the work itself, but about the triggered consciousness. You see an image and think: everything is correct, and yet, how and what exactly cannot be interpreted just like that, but something is not correct. "Dibbets has continuously developed a thinking approach to photography. The inherent lie of the photo is of particular importance to him. The fundamental purpose of debunking the apparently obvious role of photography as a legitimate representation of the world and to show how even simple actions can reveal the illusion of photography. - Brain Wallis (ICP, NY)"


Dibbets started as a painter and only later with photography. In 1967 he founded, together with Ger van Elk and Reinier Lucassen, the “Institute for the retraining of artists”. A fictional institute with which they reacted in a fun way to the then fashionable art.


Ger van Elk also often used photo graphics. I am always amazed that people do not know his work while his art has decorated Dutch trains for years. His work is also a lot about horizon and perspectieven, using photograps collage-like.


Ger van Elk, C’est moi qui fait la musique - 1973

Ger van Elk, 3 times Rotterdam, horizon - 2000 and 2001

Ger van Elk, The missing person - 1976


This image of van Elk it is not about what you see, but what happens in your imagination. Of all the guests, the one who is missing is the most present. Not hindered by his physical form, nor by his image, we see him merely as a projection of our performance. Nothing stands between him and us anymore. The censorship of the statue has been lifted.

Dibbets says: Every photo is a lie. It is nothing. Therefore it is both real and abstract. Photography is very easy and at the same time very complicated. It's tricky and this trick is all about fascination. You need a key and if you're lucky enough to find one it's like opening Pandora's Box; tricky and fascinating and dangerous. It is a wonderful world, photography. It is the new painting. Why Dibbets' obsession with the horizon? The horizon has always played an important role in Dutch painting. The unclear transition between sea and land and the ever-changing cloudy skies inspired the painters of the seventeenth century. Mondrian also experimented with the horizon line. Followers Erik Verhagen builds on that cultural tradition at Dibbets. He admires Mondrian and the work of the seventeenth-century painter Pieter Saenredam. Dibbets once said that he wants to 'dress up what Mondrian has undressed'. He tries to continue with his photography from the point where Mondrian stopped his last painting, Broadway Boogie Woogie. But while Mondrian strove to free himself from the horizon to achieve total abstraction, Dibbets wants to explore the possibilities of the horizon in a systematic and mathematical way.


Exhibition La Boîte de Pandore Musée d´Art Moderne in Paris 2016 curator: Jan Dibbets You will not find documentary photography because it is too dubious whether it is photography.

In an article Wilco Versteeg writes: He plays with expectations and forces connections between practices and artists that have never before been shown in such a context. The exhibition shows experiments that hope to show what we cannot see with the naked eye. The work of Eadweard Muybridge, early star photography, NASA photos and a work by Thomas Ruff. La Boîte de Pandore shows that the use of photography in scientific research (from X-ray research to photographing our brain activity or our own movements) automatically opens the door to a radical doubt about our own ability to know and observe. If photos can show something we can't see ourselves, how can we trust the image? Jan Dibbets presents an art historical lecture on the history of photography. It is in art that the future of the reliability of the image is researched and guaranteed. For Dibbets, the future of photography is primarily artistic, and perhaps second, documentary. The more recent the works, the further we get away from works that display a certain freshness and openness. The 20th-century artists in the exhibition are mainly very self-reflective and self-referring, and seem a bit tiring in contrast to 19th-century experiments. They search in challenging ways for the limits of the medium and representation, but the end point is the dead end of relativism, which only an insider can still indulge. Can this end point be a starting point for new experiments?

Draft is dead.

For this exhibition Dibbets left aside the classic books on photography by Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, Walter Benjamin, John Berger when he discovered a philosophy of photography by the Czech philosopher Vilém Flusser. The redundancy of photographs described by Flusser in 1981 manifested itself according to Dibbet's ind hyperinflation of images at this time. "Everything wants to be remembered forever and repeated forever". Flusser wrote, when there was no mention of digital yet. "We should stop shooting for ten years," says Dibets. "Ten years without internet and facebook. Not as a romantic return to the past I know that is not possible, but because we have reached a point of unimaginable superficiality. Depth is dead. We have more potential to think clearly than ever, but every essential reflection is held hostage, suffocated, made impossible "


Vilém Flusser

"das Bild stellt sich vor das, was es vorstellt" - 2015.


Everything I read and listen to from Flusser and Dibbets makes me wonder why I write an essay that tells what my images are about. My photos become illustrations of the text. Where Flusser says it no longer possible to articulate or describe concepts about the world and that this is taken over by new code such as photos.






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© 2019 by Hilde Maassen 

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