Andreas Gursky: Pyongyang
Originally published in Flash Art, May/June 2007

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London waits for an Andreas Gursky exhibition, and then two come along at once. This spring twelve new works by the German photographer are on display: Nine hanging in Jay Jopling’s monolithic White Cube in Mason’s Yard, with the remaining three forming an inaugurating show at Sprüth Magers’s new gallery on Grafton Street.

Gursky’s latest pin-sharp wide-shots explore his now familiar thematic dichotomies of macro and micro; individual and mass; photographic documentation and abstract formalism. However, they are sufficiently ambitious to keep things interesting, not least in their global sweep of featured locations.

Brazil, France, Germany, Monaco, Turkey, Bahrain, China, Japan – Gursky has scoured the planet for spectacular sites and the resulting images are as arresting as anything in his ouvre. Japan’s Super-K underground water tank appears in Kamiokande as a dazzling gold sci-fi cavern; two small boats reveal its mind-bending scale. In Bahrain I and II tarmac slashes desert sand, creating contemporary near-abstractions reminiscent of painters Frank Nitsche and Dirk Skreber. But perhaps Gursky’s most intrigueing geographic venture is to the “outpost of tyranny” in George Bush’s “axis of evil”: North Korea.

Despite recently agreeing to disable its nuclear facilities, North Korea remains synonimous with secretive political (mis)conduct, excessive militarism, widespread poverty and a damning human-rights record. It is also known for its celebrations of the late communist leader Kim Il-sung in the Arirang Festival ‘mass games’. These are stadium performances involving 50,000 gymnasts and soldiers, backdropped by an equal number of schoolchildren holding coloured panels in the air to form an enormous human video wall. Each child is a well-rehearsed pixel. To western eyes, the overall impression is something between an Olympic opening ceremony and a Nuremberg Rally.

Now Gursky has photographed the Arirang Festival in a series titled Pyongyang, showing at White Cube. His technique is predictably impressive, capturing expansive flattened overviews, digitally manipulated to eerie perfection. In many ways the Arirang Festival seems the perfect subject for Gursky but, unusual among his choices, it is also a work of art in itself. Therefore Gursky becomes appropriator and documentor of a self-contained performance, and this changes everything.

Why? Because Arirang is more Gursky than Gursky. Previously his images of humanity have revealed patterns that our activities collectively and unconsciously form us into. Arirang short-circuits this because the participants know that they are performing a spectacle of mass configuration; the only difference is that Gursky explores the representation of scale, while Arirang performs scale itself. Nothing is revealed by photographing Arirang from a high vantage point, because the performance is directed toward the same birds-eye-view that Gursky pictures it from. Nor does his medium capture what is most compelling about the event – its movement.

But this is not to say the Pyongyang pictures fail. They may be among Gursky’s most interesting photographs, precisely because of the push-pull between author and subject-matter. Two models of artistic practice are present in the work: Arirang epitomising communist culture with its kitsch militarism and emphasis on group dynamics over individual prowess; and Gursky emerging as the individualistic artist under capitalism, single-handedly authoring his vision and submitting it to the market.

Thus it seems apt that the Pyongyang photographs show people facing the camera. Unlike the holiday makers, factory operatives and stock-brokers that Gursky has photographed in the past, the Arirang gymnasts almost return his gaze (and ours). How would Gursky’s art appear to them? Would it be loaded with dubious cultural associations, as their ‘mass games’ are for us? In charting the culture of our increasingly global society Gursky raises such questions, relativising the role of his own work in the world that he depicts.

"Andreas Gursky" is on view at London's White Cube (until May 5) and Monika Spruth Philomene Magers (until May 12).

In the Global Art section of Flash Art, a writer is invited to discuss one work by a contemporary artist.

Image: Pyongyang 1, 2007. C-print, 307 x 215 cm. Courtesy Monika Spruth Philomene Magers, Munich/Cologne/London and Jay Jopling/White Cube, London.