Florian Maier-Aichen Discusses “Myth-Making” at Apple Store Soho
A still of Florian Maier-Aichen at work from Season 5's "Fantasy" episode
On October 9, over a hundred art fans arrived at the Apple Store Soho to gain insight into the work and life of German-American artist Florian Maier-Aichen. Organized by Art21, the early evening event featured a special advance screening of Season 5’s Fantasy episode, which features Maier-Aichen, and it provided an opportunity for the public to ask the artist about his artistic practice and inspirations.
Introduced by Art21 Manager of Education and Public Programs, Marc Mayer, the event began with the video segment and continued with a Q&A session moderated by Art21 Associate Curator, Wesley Miller.
Ansel Adams, "The Tetons and the Snake River" (1942) (via Wikipedia)
Known for his digitally altered images, Maier-Aichen arrived in Southern California in the mid-1990s as a student to study art at UCLA. During his studies in Los Angeles, he discovered the American photographic tradition of the late 19th- and early 20th-century that popularized the majesty of the American West. He wondered if America’s love of photography, which he said is more respected as an art form here than it is in Germany, is rooted in this historic period when Americans discovered their nation’s natural beauty through the power of the lens. Miller added, to support Maier-Aichen’s point, that the awe most people felt when viewing those same early photographs contributed to the establishment of America’s first national parks.
While Maier-Aichen felt affinities with those early landscape photographers, such as Ansel Adams and Eadweard Muybridge, he says his work shies away from simple landscape images. “I don’t like pure landscape—it is too boring for me. I like the tension between [the city and nature],” he said.
Looking at Los Angeles: Westward Expansion
Florian Maier-Aichen, "Untitled (Dewatered)," 2009. C-print, 71 3/4 x 94 inches (182 x 239 cm framed). Courtesy the Artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, 303 Gallery, New York and Gagosian Gallery, London
In the previous Looking at Los Angeles post, Catherine Wagley explored the still-healing schism of East and West Germany through an Angelino lens. Meanwhile, the premiere last night of Season 5’s Fantasy episode offered us a glimpse of Los Angeles through the eyes of German-born artist Florian Maier-Aichen. Maier-Aichen explains that for him, the landscape of Los Angeles “has a great meaning [because] it’s the end of American pioneerism, it’s the end of the American West.”
Indeed, one could argue that Los Angeles has been an epicenter of creativity, fantasy, and innovation partly because it feels like a perpetual final frontier of the Wild West—the apex of lawless expansion, openness, and freedom. We may be short on some resources, but we’ve got space and we’re not afraid to use it. For a prime example, look to the gallery that discovered Maier-Aichen while he was still an MFA student at UCLA: Blum & Poe.
While galleries around the globe are shuttering or shrinking, native Angelinos Tim Blum and Jeff Poe just moved into a new 21,000-square foot venue–four times the size of their previous space. While they could have opted to open an outpost in another art world hotspot, the gallery decided to focus on expanding within their hometown. In fact, they ended up staying in their home neighborhood and found an ideal property directly across the street from their previous space in Culver City. Blum & Poe is known for being one of the first galleries to set up shop in the since-revitalized Culver City Arts District, which the New York Times backhandedly praised as a “nascent Chelsea” in 2005. When I asked Tim Blum what he liked about Culver City, he highlighted the same feeling of openness and expansiveness that Maier-Aichen alluded to in last night’s Art21 segment, referring to the area as appealingly “airy, flat, and fluid – just the opposite of congested.”
Art:21 Season 5 “Fantasy” Tonite on PBS at 10pm ET!
The premiere of Art:21–Art in the Twenty-First Century Season 5 continues tonight on PBS at 10:00 p.m. ET (check local listings) with the episode Fantasy, featuring Cao Fei, Mary Heilmann, Jeff Koons, and Florian Maier-Aichen.
How might desires and taboos shape our ability to imagine? What role does technology play in wish fulfillment? Fantasy explores these questions in the work of the four featured artists.
Be sure to tune in to PBS every Wednesday at 10:00 p.m. ET throughout this month (check local listings) for more brand new episodes: Transformation, featuring Paul McCarthy, Cindy Sherman, and Yinka Shonibare MBE; and Systems, featuring John Baldessari, Kimsooja, Allan McCollum, and Julie Mehretu.
Read more about Season 5 at PBS, and visit ArtBabble for previews of all Season 5 episodes and artist segments.
Meet the Artist: Florian Maier-Aichen | Ask Your Question Here
Meet the Artist: Florian Maier-Aichen
Friday, October 9, 7:00 p.m.
Apple Store, SoHo
103 Prince Street
FREE
As part of Art21’s Access 09 initiative celebrating Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century Season 5, featured artist Florian Maier-Aichen will share how he uses the computer to manipulate his photography to create stunning digitally abstracted images. The event will feature an advanced screening of Maier-Aichen’s segment from the Art:21 episode Fantasy, along with a moderated discussion and Q & A with Maier-Aichen and Art21 Associate Curator, Wesley Miller. The event is free and open to the public. Seating is provided on a first come, first serve basis.
Florian Maier-Aichen is featured in the Season 5 (2009) episode Fantasy, premiering Wednesday, October 14, 2009 at 10:00 p.m. (ET) on PBS (check local listings).
Preview the Season 5 segment here.
Have a question for Florian Maier-Aichen? Tell us in the comments below for a chance to have it asked at the event. If so, we’ll post his response on this site.
ART:21 SEASON 5 PREMIERES TONITE ON PBS!
The wait is over–Season 5 of Art:21–Art in the Twenty-First Century is here! The new season begins tonight on PBS at 10:00 p.m. ET (check local listings) with the episode Compassion, featuring William Kentridge, Doris Salcedo, and Carrie Mae Weems.
Might a work of art move us to temper our more destructive impulses? In what ways do artists’ feelings of empathy contribute to works that tackle problematic subjects and address the human condition? Compassion explores these questions in the work of the three featured artists.
Be sure to tune in to PBS every Wednesday at 10:00 p.m. throughout October (check local listings) for more brand new episodes: Fantasy, featuring Cao Fei, Mary Heilmann, Jeff Koons, and Florian Maier-Aichen; Transformation, featuring Paul McCarthy, Cindy Sherman, and Yinka Shonibare MBE; and Systems, featuring John Baldessari, Kimsooja, Allan McCollum, and Julie Mehretu.
Read more about Season 5 at PBS, and visit ArtBabble for previews of all Season 5 episodes and artist segments.
What’s Cookin at the Art21 Blog: A Weekly Index
Sports and art are holding hands. Trong Gia Nguyen takes us to first base with that and other news relating to Art21 artists.
Bruce Willis was a pub rocker, Scarlett Johansson an indie vocalist, and Paul McCartney an abstract painter? Ben Street reflects on cross-over artist Steve McQueen’s addition to the Venice Biennale.
What does the Mütter Museum have to show? Guilty pleasures and the off-beat alike from Daniel Fuller.
No Nukes! Get involved with the art of Lisi Raskin.
Yup, it’s hot. It’s August. And it’s never too late to add to your reference archive. A Marlene Dumas exhibit is a source of inspiration for Joe Fusaro.
Imagine what character you would play? An Xiao whispers her secret. (P.S. - Cao Fei’s work is awesome, in the most true sense of the word.)
Photography may “feel visually right” but is factually wrong. What does Season 5 artist Florian Maier Aichen have to say about Fantasy?
Hungry for some Green Pink Caviar or how about a visit to Above June Lake? Catherine Wagley finds that Marilyn Minter brings us in while Florian Maier-Aichen pulls away, yet both professionalize fantasy.
The past as noir and domestic spaces in faraway places? Juan Juarez knocks on the door of artist James Casebere and shares the consequent vintage BOMB interview.
Meet Josiah McElheny’s long time assistant and collaborator Anders Rydstedt in this week’s Exclusive video.
Still hungry? There’s more where that came from. Stay tuned.
James Casebere interviewed by Roberto Juarez
Welcome back to BOMB in the Building, where each week we feature a vintage BOMB interview relating to a Season 5 artist or theme. This week we look to the work of James Casebere, who, like Florian Maier-Aichen, has been aggressively pushing the boundaries of what photography is and could be with his tabletop simulations of archetypal institutions. “Casebere’s photographs evoke our deepest fears and longings,” wrote Roberto Juarez, who interviewed the photographer in BOMB 77, Fall 2001. “Perhaps this is because his images captivate our collective imagination, the one ruled by instinct.” Read the full interview here.
James Casebere, "Monticello #3," 2001, digital chromogenic print, 48×60”. Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, NY.
Roberto Juarez: I have my ideas of why you used black-and-white photographs in your earlier work, but tell me—why did you use black and white instead of color?
James Casebere: Black and white had more to do with memory and the past. Color was too much about the present, I associated it with color TV, which was not a part of my past. I wanted the images to be related to a sense of history, let’s say, whether personal or social. And I think black and white adds a certain level of abstraction.
Roberto Juarez: What were the images, in the Penn Station installation?
James Casebere: Most of it was a synthesis between two bodies of work, a combination of domestic space in the foreground with romantic, faraway places in the background. I tried, in part, to simulate the experience of sitting on a train, looking out the window. But the foreground might also be a dining room, or a kitchen, or a café.
Roberto Juarez: How did you create that? Was it a layering of pictures through exposure, or was it from a model that you built?
James Casebere: I built a model. Half the time, there’d be a frame dividing the foreground from the background. The backgrounds were images of the American West, corrals, and also one image of a sinking canoe, and one which was simply an outdoor train platform. There was a mission facade in another image. I was trying to create a sense of wistful reverie.
Roberto Juarez: The West is a very romantic idea in the American psyche. I’ve gotten invitations to submit proposals for light boxes in train stations. It’s become such a fad, or an easy art form for public projects to take on, because it’s not that expensive. But you were early.
James Casebere: I used a light box for a show I did at Franklin Furnace in 1981. It sat in the window, facing the street. I was never interested in the context of a fine art photo gallery. I was really interested in the usefulness of art—in a Constructivist sense, or as in the Bauhaus or de Stijl. What all these movements shared—and they overlapped, of course—was the belief that art should not be broken up into separate disciplines. An artist might make paintings, design buildings, do graphics, photographs and sculpture. It was very multimedia. They also shared the belief that an artist had a purpose, a usefulness within the context of the larger society.
I was looking at how art worked within the larger social world and wanted to place my work where most people see other photographs. So I wanted to put my images into the advertising context, the way conceptual artists like Dan Graham were using pages in a magazine as their art. The magazine is one kind of public space, street signs are another. I wanted to design things that relate to people’s everyday experience. People like Dennis Adams and Jeff Wall began using light boxes at about the same time as myself. Adams actually designed the public spaces, the bus shelters, to show them in. There were Holzer’s broadsides, and Barbara Kruger’s billboards. It was the same impulse. We were all thinking about mass media. One of the first images I shot in New York was of a courtroom which I made into a poster, and put up anonymously around Lower Manhattan. There was that anonymous poster phenomenon going on in the Lower East Side at that time.
Professionalized Fantasy
Florian Maier-Aichen, "Above June Lake," 2005, C-print
If I were to name art’s King and Queen of sleek professionalism, Florian Maier-Aichen and Marilyn Minter would take the crowns. They compliment each other, Maier-Aichen bringing out Minter’s reliance on textured terrain and Minter reminding us that Maier-Aichen works within a bodily lexicon. But the artists belong together because they both obfuscate fact expertly. They produce such seductive pictures of the world (tongues swooshing amidst jewels, landscapes crusted in blood-red soil) that my first reaction is to guilelessly fall into the illusion they’ve fashioned. Yet the illusion is so shallow—really, Maier-Aichen and Minter work only with surfaces—that I can’t fall far. It’s a funny paradox: fantasies have to be carefully manufactured and refined before they become fantastic. Then once presented, glossily produced spin-offs on human desire supposedly let us access our raw, innermost selves, as if looking into what we want leads us to who we are.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t usually work that way. Fantasy is notoriously disinterested in authenticity, which is precisely why I find the story behind Marilyn Minter’s Green Pink Caviar captivating. Apparently (I didn’t hear this account first-hand, but I’ve heard it often enough to embrace it), Minter had been thinking about painting with her tongue when she called up Ford Modeling Agency—who else would you call?—and asked for a long-tongued, full-lipped model. Ford sent Louisa Taadou, a slender girl from Marseilles whose lips are the heaviest feature on her otherwise wispy face. Louisa used her tongue, framed by carefully painted lips, to lick colorful pastries off of a glass surface while a camera watched from below.
Marilyn Minter, "Green Pink Caviar," 2009
This whole sequence of events evidences capitalism at its most abstract. Minter has an idea, she decides to execute it, and she calls an associate to request the services she needs. Her associate sends over the proper material—a girl who, upon understanding the task at hand, skillfully wills her anatomy to perform. No one questions the props, in this case the meringue and crumbs, lipstick and glass surface; all parties simply do their job. The resulting video and images, called Green Pink Caviar (a title that reveals little about Minter), do the professionalism that enabled them proud. The self-contained works of art co-opt the culturally determined standards of desirability on which they rely (fashion, confections, cosmetics). Cheeks and chins, flattened against glass, play into the rhythm of the crumbs and filling that move across the frame, looking too primordial to be edible. The lips, less hungry than obedient, do their job with requisite relish. Minter gets so close to her subject that it loses its identity and retains only sensuousness.
Marilyn Minter, "Green Pink Caviar," 2009
Here, it would be easy to turn to a conversation about feminism and objectification (a conversation certainly worth having in relation to Minter), but I’m more interested in what it means to fabricate fantasy through expertly co-opting particularities, which is where Florian Maier-Aichen comes in.
Meet the Season 5 Artist: Florian Maier-Aichen
The above video is excerpted from the Season 5 episode Fantasy, premiering on Wednesday, October 14, 2009 at 10pm (ET) on PBS (check local listings). Fantasy presents four artists — Cao Fei, Mary Heilmann, Jeff Koons, and Florian Maier-Aichen — whose hallucinatory, irreverent, and sublime works transport us to imaginary worlds and altered states of consciousness.
Who is Florian Maier-Aichen and what does he have to say about fantasy?
Florian Maier-Aichen was born in 1973 in Stuttgart, Germany; he lives and works in Cologne, Germany and Los Angeles. Alternately romantic, cerebral, and unearthly, Florian Maier-Aichen’s digitally altered photographs are closer to the realm of drawing and fiction than documentation. He embraces difficult techniques, chooses equipment that produces accidents such as light leaks and double exposures, and uses computer enhancements to introduce imperfections and illogical elements into images that paradoxically “feel” visually right, though they are factually wrong. Often employing an elevated viewpoint (the objective but haunting “God’s-eye view” of aerial photography and satellite imaging), Maier-Aichen creates idealized, painterly landscapes that function like old postcards. Interested in places where landscape and cityscape meet, he chooses locations and subjects from the American West and Europe—from his own neighborhoods to vistas of the natural world. Looking backwards for his influences, Maier-Aichen often reenacts or pays homage to the work of the pioneer photographers of the nineteenth century, sometimes even remaking their subject matter from their original standpoints. Always experimenting, he marries digital technologies with traditional processes and films (black-and-white, color, infrared, and tricolor), restoring and reinvigorating the artistry and alchemy of early photography.
On the subject of fantasy in art, Maier-Aichen describes liberties with which artists, including himself, have taken with picturing the American West, using his work The Best General View as a reference (in the forthcoming Season 5 book):
When I look at American landscape painting from the nineteenth century I always have in mind one painting of Yosemite by Albert Bierstadt. Yosemite is already such a theatrical place—almost like a too-drastic landscape—and Bierstadt just added more to it. He turned it into a complete fantasy by getting rid of the facts and enhancing every other aspect of Yosemite. Half Dome is an iconic image, but when I saw that Carleton Watkins had used it in one of his photographs back in the nineteenth century, it became more significant for me. Suddenly I wanted not to remake the same image but to go there and work with the subject.
I couldn’t access Watkins’s standpoint anymore because it was overgrown, so I used Glacier Point which is next door. It’s the most generic vista or viewpoint that you can get in Yosemite. It wasn’t a perfect day when I took the photograph, and I didn’t mind because it was just a starting point. I drew in the entire background with the blue sky and the clouds, and I brought in the bushes to make some foreground space. So in the end the image, except for Half Dome, is not really the way it looked when I took the picture.
What happens in Maier-Aichen’s segment in Fantasy this October?
“Photography used to be like alchemy back in the nineteenth century,” says Florian Maier-Aichen, who uses the computer to introduce imperfections and detach his photographs from reality, bringing them closer to the realm of drawing. Shown capturing his source images with a traditional large-format camera, the artist introduces painterly touches to his photographs with the aid of a digital stylus and tablet. “Illustration is just another level of abstracting,” he says, “it lifts you to another layer that is not necessarily linked to realism and it opens up your own world or your own myth-making.”
Inspired by the idealized quality of postcards and maps, the segment shows how the artist remakes images of landscapes, from a nostalgic nighttime scene of Stralsund in GDR times to epic vistas such as a pass in the Swiss Alps, ski slopes in the Sierras, Half Dome in Yosemite, and the failed St. Francis Dam near Santa Clarita (all works 2005-09). “Photography grew together with the discovery of the American West,” explains Maier-Aichen at his home and studio in Los Angeles, anchoring his fascination with the surrounding landscape to a romantic notion in Germany of California as “the end of the world.”
Florian Maier-Aichen. "Untitled," 2005. C-print, 72 x 90 1/2 inches. © Florian Maier-Aichen, courtesy Blum & Poe, Los Angeles and 303 Gallery, New York.
What else has Maier-Aichen done?
Florain Maier-Aichen studied at Högskolan för Fotografi och Film, Göteborg, Sweden; the University of Essen, Germany; and earned an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles. Maier-Aichen’s work has appeared in recent major exhibitions at Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, Spain (2008); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2007); Yvon Lambert, New York (2007); and the Whitney Biennial (2006).
Where can I see more of Maier-Aichen’s work between now and the Art21 premiere this October?
Maier-Aichen is represented by Blum & Poe gallery in Los Angeles and 303 Gallery in New York.
What’s your take on Maier-Aichen’s inclusion in Season 5?
Tell us what you think by leaving a comment below!
New Flash Points Topic: Fantasy
Cao Fei, "A Mirage (COSPlayers Series)," 2004. Digital c-print, 29 1/4 x 39 1/4 inches. © Cao Fei. Courtesy the Artist and Lombard-Freid Projects, New York.
In celebration of the fifth season of Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century, premiering this fall on PBS, the current round of Flash Points topics correspond to our upcoming four thematic episodes: Compassion, Fantasy, Transformation, and Systems.
After a few weeks of Compassion, up next is Fantasy. The signature question for this topic is:
Does art expand our ability to imagine?
Additional questions to ponder include:
- How might personal dreams and cultural taboos shape our vision?
- How does our desire for perfection control us?
- What role does technology play in wish fulfillment?
Throughout this time, we’ll publish in-depth posts about the artists profiled in the forthcoming Fantasy episode — Cao Fei, Mary Heilmann, Jeff Koons, and Florian Maier-Aichen — as well as feature musings from our roster of guest writers, extending the theme beyond the series to real world correlations, questions, and perhaps even discomforts.
Help us start the conversation by leaving a comment below. Feel free to note other artists whose work addresses the theme of fantasy — we’d love to collectively envision a broader landscape of how it is considered in contemporary art practice. And save the date for the Fantasy episode which debuts nationwide October 14, 2009 on PBS!
Mary Heilmann, "Go Ask Alice," 2006. Oil on canvas, 36 x 48 inches. Photo by John Berens, © Mary Heilmann. Courtesy the Artist, 303 Gallery, New York and Hauser & Wirth Zurich London.
(L) Jeff Koons, "Bear and Policeman," 1988. Polychromed wood, 85 x 43 x 37 inches. © Jeff Koons. Courtesy the Artist; (R) Florian Maier-Aichen, "Untitled," 2007. C-print, 91 x 72 2/5 inches. © Florian Maier-Aichen. Courtesy Blum & Poe, Los Angeles and 303 Gallery, New York.
