Indexical Images by Marco Breuer

http://web.mit.edu/lvac/www/exhibitions/WINTER/2001/breuer.html

Marco Breuer: Circa 1999 will present a solo exhibition of photographs made with non-photographic by this German-born artist who now resides in New York. Breuer subjects photographic papers to all kinds of abuse, attacking them with belt sanders, razor blades, red-hot heater coils, and mold. The subsequent chemistry of the paper meeting the developer results in an indexical image of the event that has happened to the paper, with often startlingly beautiful results.

Breuer¼s work has been recently on view in exhibitions at New York¼s Museum of Modern Art, The Fogg Art Museum at Harvard, and the Ansel Adams Center and the Museum Of Modern Art, both in San Francisco.

The presentation of Circa 1999 is funded in part by Goethe-Institut Boston.

 
https://polli.files.wordpress.com/2006/11/breuer.jpg

Above:

Marco Breuer

Untitled (Alc.) 2000

Marco Breuer: Circa 1999 will present a solo exhibition of photographs made with non-photographic by this German-born artist who now resides in New York. Breuer subjects photographic papers to all kinds of abuse, attacking them with belt sanders, razor blades, red-hot heater coils, and mold. The subsequent chemistry of the paper meeting the developer results in an indexical image of the event that has happened to the paper, with often startlingly beautiful results.

Breuer¼s work has been recently on view in exhibitions at New York¼s Museum of Modern Art, The Fogg Art Museum at Harvard, and the Ansel Adams Center and the Museum Of Modern Art, both in San Francisco.

The presentation of Circa 1999 is funded in part by Goethe-Institut Boston.
http://www.artfacts.net/index.php/pageType/exhibitionInfo/exhibMailMode/1/exhibition/18646

TITLE: Tremors #3
ARTIST: Marco Breuer
WORK DATE: 2000
CATEGORY: Prints
MATERIALS: Silver gelatin paper, burned (unique)
MARKINGS: Signed by artist on verso
SIZE: 18 X 14 inches (paper)
19.75 X 15.75 inches framed
STYLE: Contemporary
PRICE*: Contact Gallery for Price
GALLERY: Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery 212-243-3335 Send Email

http://www.traywick.com/2002/03/marco_breuer.html
Marco Breuer

Errata

Exhibition dates:
March 30 – May 4, 2002

Reception:
Saturday, March 30, 6 to 8 pm

Traywick Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition featuring photographic work by New York artist Marco Breuer. The exhibition opens March 30 and continues through May 4, 2002. There will be a reception for the artist on Saturday, March 30, from 6 to 8 pm.

For Errata, Breuer focuses his attention on the gaps, mistakes, and marginal events that occur in daily life. These photographic sketches are records of lapses and slip-ups, drawing their subject matter from “trivial culture,” the realm of ordinary things, and sentiments.

Breuer’s photography constitutes a stripped down, low-key approach to the medium. Known to draw color out of black and white photographic paper, he introduces new work in color material in this site-specific installation. Color paper is subjected to a range of erosive treatments, both before and after processing, turning photography itself into a physical act in the process. This is Marco Breuer’s third exhibition at the Traywick Gallery.

An essay by San Francisco artist Chris Sullivan will be available.

Marco Breuer has exhibited widely throughout the United States and Europe. His work is in numerous collections including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts; and the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, Germany. He lives and works in New York City.

Space Case
Marco Breuer Investigates Photography’s Outer Limits
by Vince Aletti
March 1 – 7, 2000

This is not nostalgia: Marco Breuer’s Untitled (Again).
Spit, blood, whiskers, and nail clippings. Jello, Windex, a slice of Wonder Bread, a Zippo lighter. Beer, vodka, mold, wallpaper, bottles, kitchen matches, bomb fuses, hot coals, a blowtorch. Photographer Marco Breuer, who has used all these things in the process of creating cameraless photograms, talks about his work as a sort of personal inventory—one that begins with “harvesting” his body and encompasses virtually every element of his immediate world. “I try to ground all the work in my own life,” he says, but Breuer’s modest, improvisatory means don’t begin to account for his sophisticated results. Though often quite literal records of ordinary objects and events, his pictures, now up at Esso Gallery, take off into pure abstraction—a teeming, bottomless unknown, at once utterly enigmatic and simply sublime. Are we peering into deep space or a subatomic stew? A magnetic field or a meteor trail? Like Adam Fuss, Roger Newton, Steven Pippin, and other frequent visitors to photography’s outer limits, Breuer takes us places we’ve never been yet never want to leave.

Breuer, 34, began exploring this territory in the late ’80s while enrolled in Berlin’s Lette-Verein, one of the oldest and most tradition-bound photography schools in Europe. From the beginning, he was drawn to the medium’s firm grounding in technique, if only because it gave him a set of rigid conventions “to rub up against.” Although all Lette-Verein students were given a 4×5 field camera upon enrollment and were expected to use nothing else, they were also taught how to make photograms by exposing photo-sensitive paper directly to light and other materials. Breuer liked the ad hoc nature of the photogram process, one of the earliest in photographic history, and when he moved on to a looser program of studies at Darmstadt, near Frankfurt, he took it up almost exclusively, and began to “unlearn” everything he’d been taught.

Breuer treats his medium as an investigative tool, a means of discovery. “I try to use photography and figure things out as I work with it,” he says. “The idea is that I create a setup that is very controlled: It’s happening in my darkroom; I determine the materials. But then there’s always an element of chance—a moment where I do give up control and I let, very often, a destructive force come in and actually determine the outcome of the image.” He discovered the limits and rewards of this method with his 1992 thesis project, “100 Days,” for the duration of which he lived alone in a tiny East German village and produced a visual diary. By deliberately isolating himself from both people and influences (no TV, no newspapers), Breuer hoped to work out all preexisting ideas and start again with a tabula rasa.

Since he frequently commuted to New York (where he moved for good in 1993), Breuer had been working in various easily transportable book formats, and he spent his 100 days filling these “virtual spaces”—making daily photos for a notebook-size, ring-bound chronicle. The preparation for that work—maintaining his studio, his darkroom, and himself—often took up all of his other time. Gradually, he says, “the lines between all these things started to blur completely. I was cooking and printing at the same time, and when it got cold, I started to use the heater to expose paper. Everything became part of everything else. And I think that really stuck with me.”Certainly, no one’s written instructions for Breuer’s methods. For a 1996 show at the Drawing Center, he set lit bomb fuses on photographic paper, let them slowly sputter out, and printed the results, which looked something like a sparkler in negative: a constellation of tiny sparks, each with its own flight path, around a wormlike, rust-colored spine. (Although Breuer always works with black-and-white paper, heat brings out a range of red-orange colors in the paper.) For a 1998 series of abrasion pieces called “Next to Nothing” at Gina Fiore, he sanded large sheets of photo paper for nearly an hour each, occasionally wearing right through. When printed, the effect was close to drawing: dense nets of fine black lines created the illusion of infinite depth, suggesting cosmic cobwebs or the layering of a hundred star maps.

In his show at Esso, there’s a piece that Breuer made after cutting himself on one of the glass plates he was using for his negatives. Instead of wasting the fluid, he coated a plate with blood and let it dry. Even though most of the blood flaked off, when placed in an enlarger and projected onto photo paper, the glass plate produced an image that looks like cracked paint in extreme close-up. Another image at Esso is the result of glass cleaner sprayed on a glass plate. The negative, such as it is, remains constantly in motion as bubbles pop and rearrange, so the photo appears out of focus, like a liquifying, hallucinogenic sponge. And for the Breuer piece that’s included in “Photography About Photography” at Andrew Kreps, he set a piece of cloth on fire, essentially allowing the fabric to take its own photo by providing the necessary light. “What happens,” Breuer explains, “is that I record that transformation from the object to the image. Once the cloth is burned up, it’s gone. It had to be destroyed for that image to be recorded, but what is recorded at the same time is that process of destruction.”

The immediacy and sponteneity of Breuer’s photographic process brings it close to performance; each piece is direct evidence of the artist at work. To underline that performance, Breuer’s included several actual photos of himself alongside the photograms at Esso. Typically, the artist’s presence is ephemeral and, as in previous series where he’s been his own subject, not at all about self-portraiture. “It’s really more about working with oneself as a way of figuring things out about yourself in the process,” he says. “I go back to using myself in front of the camera the same way I use myself in interacting with the paper—that’s just who’s there. I really consider this a solitary exercise. So I like the idea of working by myself and using myself and whatever’s at hand.” Bring on the lighter fluid.

“For Now,” Breuer’s show at Esso, 191 Chrystie Street, continues through March 11. Pattern and Practice, a book of his photograms, is due out in May from Rosenfeld Publishing in Munich, Germany.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2479/is_6_27/ai_63193066/pg_2
Certainly one of the most exciting panels concerning photography was “Mediating History: Photographs as Art, Evidence, Instrument,” moderated by Patricia Johnston and Joanne Lukitsh. In “Becoming Photography: Towards a Vernacular History,” Geoffrey Batchen called for an inquiry into a vernacular semiology of the photographic, or what he termed “photogrammatology.” He used the example of a nineteenth-century locket with a photograph and a lock of hair to show the importance of the indexical presence of both the image and the actual hair. By interacting with the locket and its contents, the viewer engages with its physical and functional attributes. Such photo-objects, and the interaction between the physicality of the photograph and its relationship to touch that they demand, are distinctly different from the kind of photographs that have been the subject of the traditional history of photography and are a needed addition to the critical work of the field….Caught between the monumentality of the ’20s and ’30s New Vision and the deflated modernist ideals and through the act of obsessive aestheticization, the work holds a dual position of both liberating and mourning the loss of the adherence of a work of art to past history. In “The Look of Information” Martha Buskirk discussed how digital technology expands the field of photography and showed work by photographers who have been particularly attentive to the physical and coded value of the photographic process, from the 1960s work of John Baldessari and Robert Rauschenberg to Sherrie Levine’s mid-80s “Meltdown” series and the recent photograms of Marco Breuer. She suggested that digital technology used by Andreas Gursky intercedes the construction between artifice and reality, likening photography to a decision-making process akin to drawing. The binary code of digital information appears as a radical departure from what constitutes a photograph, but can also be seen as the ultimate moment of destabilization that has been practiced for over 40 years.