The Wurlitzer Trilogy
Walter Ego
suggests the whirl of the carousel, the pump of the pipe organ, a blur of
music and color and a rollicking good time.
California photographer Arthur Tress has used the company's evocative name
for his huge body of work now showing at the Center for Creative
Photography. The Wurlitzer Trilogy consists of more than 100 color works
whose dense dancing imagery has all the exuberance and pathos of the
carnival. The silver dye bleach photos are divided up into three series that
are as much as about Tress' written text as they are about his lush visuals,
all silver dye bleach photos.
Brooklyn born in 1940 (did he frequent Coney Island?), Tress began the
series in the early 1980s. It's unclear how much of it was planned in
advance, but the way it's unfolded the trilogy neatly divides into themes
and time periods. The first, The Teapot Opera, is photographed entirely
inside an exquisite paper theatre, a child's toy dating from Victorian
times, complete with paper curtains and elaborate backdrops of castles and
snow-covered lands. On the theatre's stage Tress has placed his chatchkas,
goofy thrift-store finds such as a marble Teddy Roosevelt head and a folding
paper sun. The changing chatchkas in the 29 pictures tell the tale visually;
a magical text that could have been lifted from a children's story tells it
literarily.
The story is a romantic narrative about the birth of an idea, presumably an
artistic notion, in the head of a "magician," presumably an artist. "Then
all of a sudden a teapot appeared" begins the tale, in words inscribed under
the picture of a white and pink flowered teapot on the stage. The
unlooked-for teapot--or idea--changes and develops by means of a journey
into fantastic regions, eventually getting contemptuously condemned by a
court and carted off by police. In the end, the crestfallen magician
realizes that "our darkest griefs may hold our brightest hopes. Soon he
departed on another track." This text accompanies a beautiful metaphorical
photograph. The objects on the stage, a stopwatch and tracks, form a
glistening, serene still life. The backdrop is a lovely watercolor of one of
those European train stations with translucent roofs and tracks winding
optimistically off into the distance.
The old-fashioned tale, about the persistence of artists in the face of
failure and rejection, doesn't fail to charm. But the next two portions of
the trilogy deal with more difficult subject matter. Part Two is Fish Tank
Sonata: An Ecological Fantasy in Five Parts, which Tress worked on from 1988
to 1990 with the aid of an NEA grant. Tress' framing device this time
around, instead of the paper theatre, is an old glass aquarium, the kind
that household goldfish regularly live and die in. The 53 pictures in this
section are a present-day meditation on nature, on political and military
tyranny, on man's inhumanity to man and to the earth.
The aquarium's been placed in a variety of gorgeous outdoor settings, on
Catskill lakes, on Adirondack peaks, in meadows and on beaches. There's a
whole new cast too: a huge and threatening German soldier's face, fish
gobbling up tiny plastic humans, a gentle Einstein head gone to flowers.
Often the pictures are beautiful renditions of the land and waters, with
long perspectives into the distance that come as a relief after the small
world of the paper theatre. The lovely final picture has a sailboat in the
shallows at Provincetown, the light glancing off its mast. But in this
section the text is often obscure and demanding.
The final phase, Requiem for a Paperweight, chronicles the rise and fall of
a hapless businessman, an anonymous paper pusher represented by a rigid
plastic figure. The computer-inspired imagery here is futuristic and dreamy,
in contrast to the sharp precision of the little theatre images and the Fish
Tank shots of light in nature. The man is drifting through timeclocks and
elevators in richly colored pictures suffused with found imagery. There are
headlines touting the brave new future of technology and headlines detailing
corporate greed and massive unemployment. Completed between 1991 and 1994,
the work is a troubling essay about the uncertain place of people in a
high-tech future that's already here.
If Tress' work sounds bizarre, well, it is, and its weirdness is heightened
by the display of his little objects on shelves around the gallery. (You can
play a game of locating the real-life junk in the pictures.) Yet it all
works somehow. The ideas that Tress presents are not exactly original. But
what is original is the extraordinary way he's used ordinary lumpen objects
to dissect the most lofty of notions, and transformed them into pictures of
lush beauty."
B y M a r g a r e t R e g a n
--
Phil O'Sophy
____________________________________________________
"il sole splende ? l'erba è verde ? perchè sprecare il tempo sulle cose
ovvie ?"
--
"vedi, alla fine tutti e due pisciamo. siamo simili"
____________________________________________________
--
Filippo M. Caroti
<phi...@tin.it>
<http://giocondo.simplenet.com/iaf/fmcaroti.htm>
<http://members.xoom.it/_XOOM/fbe/ospiti/caroti/filippo.html>
Il Geco.
Fai dei disegnini. :-)
Walter Ego wrote:
> "IT MAY NOT be what the Wurlitzer company had in mind, but its carefree name
> suggests the whirl of the carousel, the pump of the pipe organ, a blur of
> music and color and a rollicking good time.
>
--
I CORRUTTIBILI
LA FORZA DEL PENSIERO A CAVALLO DEL CAOS.
http://utenti.tripod.it/corruttibili
corrut...@hotmail.com
Fahrenheit fine art
stampa b/n
Via Ozanam 10/A
Milano
022049671
Il Geco.
elastico.
Walter Ego wrote:
> Il Geco. <studiofa...@iname.com> wrote in message
> 397B6BD5...@iname.com...
> >
> > Ohhh ma la finisci che non ci capisco un cazzo, rendi universale il
> linguaggio.
> > Fai dei disegnini. :-)
>
> Rendi migliore la tua persona: impara l'inglese.
Walter Ego
397B6BD5...@iname.com...
>
> Ohhh ma la finisci che non ci capisco un cazzo, rendi universale il
linguaggio.
> Fai dei disegnini. :-)
Rendi migliore la tua persona: impara l'inglese.
--
Walter Ego
> Ehhhh lo so caro, ma sono molto svogliato e con un cervello oramai poco
> elastico.
Metti l'antinfeltrente nello shampoo allora.
Giorgio
da 'sto scellerato pazzoide, si è scombussolato un po' i neuroni .... :-))))
Giorgio
> Ohhh ma la finisci che non ci capisco un cazzo, rendi universale il
linguaggio.
> Fai dei disegnini. :-)
>
Walter Ego
8lh53l$1l4$1...@fe2.cs.interbusiness.it...
> Geco, secondo me il Filosofo, a forza di guardarsi uomini nudi fotografati
:-))))
Beh, i neuroni sono molto piů su dei coglioni !
--
Phil O'Sophy
____________________________________________________
"il sole splende ? l'erba č verde ? perchč sprecare il tempo sulle cose
Nicola Prisco
"Giorgio" <fer...@apricastudi.it> ha scritto nel messaggio
news:8lh53l$1l4$1...@fe2.cs.interbusiness.it...
> Geco, secondo me il Filosofo, a forza di guardarsi uomini nudi fotografati
> da 'sto scellerato pazzoide, si č scombussolato un po' i neuroni ....
:-))))
Tu credi, ma allora lo conosci da poco. I neuroni li ha esauriti da tempo.
L'ultima manciata se li č venduti per la Leicaflex, (c'era un emulo del
Lombroso che li voleva per fare alcuni piccoli test (testicoli), ora gli
rimangono solo le sinapsi (scollegate) e non riesce piů a connettere in
italiano (l'ultima cosa che ha letto e sognato č stato Tress e gli si č
impressionato sulla dura madre.... :-)))))))
Walter Ego
8li4tb$g9q$1...@serv1.iunet.it...
>
> gli si č
> impressionato sulla dura madre.... :-)))))))
Dura mater sed mater.
--
Phil O'Sophy
____________________________________________________
"il sole splende ? l'erba č verde ? perchč sprecare il tempo sulle cose
Stalker
"Walter Ego" <phi...@tin.it> ha scritto nel messaggio
news:8lfqck$ltp$1...@fe1.cs.interbusiness.it...> 397B6BD5...@iname.com...
> >
> > Ohhh ma la finisci che non ci capisco un cazzo, rendi universale il
> linguaggio.
> > Fai dei disegnini. :-)
>
e abbassa i prezzi.
Pamina
Stalker <mono...@galactica.it>
wrote in message 8nn41r$268$1...@fe1.cs.interbusiness.it...
parole sante.
quasi quasi mi sei simpatico!
Pamina
__________________________________________________
Liberamente tratto da Stalker:"...bea io lavoro su commissione.
il lavoro su commissione è l'unico vero lavoro "professionale..."
Tranquillamente sottratto a Luther:..." Ricordati che la vita non
è un ROTFL, ma il ROTFL ti fa vivere meglio..."
Senza problemi estratto da Walter Ego: "Non si impara certo a
fotografare scrivendosi con voi, ma si cresce e ci si diverte
parlando con voi. La fotografia è solo uno sfogo secondario."
Con piacere tratto da Enzo Portolano:.."un'opera vive tanto di
quello che l'autore vuol dire, quanto di quello che lo spettatore
vuol vedere..."
Pienamente condiviso con Torquemada: " Sono fatto così,
non riesco a stare a bocca aperta a guardare
qualcosa che mi interessa davvero senza provare almeno
a fare qualcosa di meglio..."
Gentilmente carpito ad Ezio Turus: "...ricordati che la fotografia
nasce molto ma molto prima della "macchina fotografica".
Sinceramente invidiato a Nicola Prisco: "...una giornata
di settembre fresca e luminosa, una distesa senza fine fatta
di morbide curve erbose che si ripetevano contro l'orizzonte,
una cassetta con la VI di Beethoven."
____________________________________________