New York Times Friday January 5 2018 Arts Section
Torbjorn Rodland's Puzzling Photos Are Unsettling and Arousing
BERLIN — Ane of the well-nigh hit images in the new retrospective of Torbjorn Rodland's photographs currently on display at C/O Berlin greets visitors as they enter the exhibition. It is a picture of a young adult female, lit from the side past a powerful red lite, with dearest streaming downwardly her cheeks onto her mentum. Similar many of Mr. Rodland'south works, the prototype — titled "Goldene Tränen," or "Gold Tears" — looks like the kind of high-gloss photograph that might appear on a billboard or in a magazine advertisement, only information technology is unsettling in a way that tin can be hard to pin down.
Sitting on a windowsill in the gallery, Mr. Rodland explained that the photo was meant to arouse a diversity of reactions depending on a viewer'southward cultural interests. An art historian, he said, might encounter it every bit a reference to the weeping Virgin Mary, while a 22-year-old consumer of online pornography would run across something more obscene. "If there's only 1 possible reading of a photograph, then I'm less interested," Mr. Rodland added. "The photographs are reading you lot if you're reading them."
Last year was a banner year for Mr. Rodland, who is 47 and spent the early part of his life in Stavanger, a city on the southwestern coast of Norway, but now mostly makes his home in Los Angeles. In the autumn, the Serpentine Galleries in London hosted a retrospective of his piece of work and, with the C/O Berlin exhibition, he has his first institutional testify in Germany. "He is currently a shooting star," said Ann-Christin Bertrand, the curator of the C/O show. "He is a mirror for how we interact with photography today."
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Mr. Rodland'southward work has fatigued admirers on both sides of the Atlantic for his ability to utilise the linguistic communication of commercial photography to create formally beautiful works that also point to something darker. "We are permanently surrounded by advertisement, whether it'south production photography, or old genres, like portrait photography or landscapes," Ms. Bertrand said. "He takes up these genres and quotes them, but manages to create something completely cool and surreal."
Mr. Rodland, a soft-spoken man with graying hair and a well-kept beard, tends to punctuate his conversations with long silences and looping digressions about theory and pop culture. He described his work equally "one-third Nordic melancholia, i-third Japanese cuteness and one-third American vulgarity."
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The exhibition in Berlin showcases the breadth of Mr. Rodland's work. It features some of his more recognizable works, similar "Trichotillomania" (2010), a sensual photograph of oranges arranged on a spotted tablecloth along with tufts of man pilus, and a more recent, untitled photograph of a naked adult female contorting herself in the forest. At first glance, the forest image seems like a straightforward nude, and it's only subsequently a closer expect that viewers will notice the fact that the woman is wearing sneakers on her easily.
"It is on one hand clearly readable, because you meet information technology's a woman bending over, merely these shoes make you lot completely irritated," Ms. Bertrand said. "What I value about his work is that it turns effectually things so that our perception is suddenly tripped upwards."
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David Kordansky, a gallerist in Los Angeles who represents Mr. Rodland, wrote in an email that "Torbjorn is i of the well-nigh important photographers of my generation," whose works "speak to the ubiquity and artificiality of our cyberspace-based image culture." His work'due south intimate however disquisitional relationship with pop civilization in many ways prefigured the rise of social media, and the development of a meme culture congenital on manipulating and remixing images.
When he was growing upwards in Stavanger, Mr. Rodland's parents worked for the post function and had picayune involvement in contemporary art. But the photographer began drawing as a small-scale child, and once he hitting his belatedly teens, he was regularly contributing illustrations and political cartoons to the local newspaper. When he began sending in drawings that were less easily legible, though, the editors turned them downwardly. "I was rethinking everything that the kid Torbjorn believed in," he said. "Then I realized photography was the affair."
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Mr. Rodland went on to study photography at the Bergen National University of the Arts on the west declension of Norway, where he developed the ideas that have come up to motivate much of his work. He said he wanted to produce photographs that depicted the real world but that acknowledged the ways photography had been turned inward by the practices of appropriation, which drew attention to the human activity of taking a picture. He also wanted to reflect his personal relationship with pop civilisation. "My desires take been expressed through the ads I looked at as a child," he said. "It's personal; this is the just iconography we have."
"'Lord of the Rings' or 'Star Wars' or 'Harry Potter,' or whatever, all of these large successes grow out of and carry these mythic truths or worldviews," Mr. Rodland explained. "It's role of being human."
The first photographs Mr. Rodland felt comfortable exhibiting in public depicted him walking through the Norwegian mural carrying a plastic bag. "I was a romantic wanderer trying to have a subjective experience despite the feeling that it was too late, despite the whole postmodern revolution," he said. After graduating, he spent over a decade moving between cities, including Melbourne, Australia; Oslo; Tallinn, Republic of estonia; and Tokyo, producing a huge number of photographs, always using picture and without digital manipulation.
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His work was included in the 1999 Venice Biennale and he had his first retrospective at the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art in Oslo in 2003. After that, he branched out into black-and-white photography and also made half-dozen films and several photography books. He has been exhibited at MoMA PS1, in the roving Manifesta biennial (Manifesta xi in Zurich) and in the Berlin Biennale.
In 2016, the Whitney Museum chose Mr. Rodland to accept function in a public fine art installation on the outside of 95 Horatio Street, across from its new edifice. The museum'south curators and Mr. Rodland selected "Blue Portrait (Nokia N82)," a photograph of a mitt, set confronting a properties of yellow fall foliage, holding an outdated cellphone with an image of Anne Frank on it.
The photograph is ane of a number of works Mr. Rodland has fabricated that allude to World War II. As with the religious and pop-cultural imagery that appears in some of his piece of work, his interest in the topic, he explained, stems from his fascination with the myths that shape gimmicky society. In his view, the war has replaced the New Attestation as society's vehicle for understanding skilful and evil. "The Holocaust," Mr. Rodland explained, is "the main mythical story of our culture." He said this explained why "movies dealing with that story are seen as University Awards contenders, while ones dealing with biblical stories are laughable."
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"I am interested in the older stories, and in the modern and contemporary ones," Mr. Rodland added.
For the last seven years Mr. Rodland has mostly made his home in the Laurel Canyon neighborhood of Los Angeles. As he put it, "It makes sense to me to be in a place where the main industry is mythmaking, and where these images are beingness constructed, and scrutinized and believed in." He said he doesn't scout Idiot box, because he is addicted to the medium — "like these alcoholics who can't take a glass of wine" — but that he enjoys movies and has been recently drawing inspiration from original recordings of Broadway musicals.
David Ducaruge, a Berlin-based musician who performs nether the proper noun Andrew Claristidge and who has known Mr. Rodland for over a decade, said there were three words to describe the photographer: "very quiet person." The two met in 2005, later on Mr. Rodland heard a piece of music by Mr. Ducaruge'southward quondam band, Sexual practice in Dallas, and asked the musician and his collaborators to create an original score for his film "132 BPM."
"He has a very clear idea of what he likes and what he doesn't similar," Mr. Ducaruge said. He explained that Mr. Rodland is a private person, and that, in real life every bit in his photographs, the stranger aspects of his personality remain just under the surface. "All of us accept our deviance, and a lot of people have pride in showing their deviance to everybody, simply he doesn't need to bear witness it," Mr. Ducaruge said.
This year Mr. Rodland's Serpentine show will motion to Fondazione Prada in Milan, and he has solo shows slated for the Bergen Kunsthall and Mr. Kordansky'due south gallery in Los Angeles. Mr. Rodland'southward current popularity might be a reflection of the way his work has managed to predict the evolution of online visual civilization. In recent years, Mr. Rodland argued, memes take shifted from the irony that characterized the LOLcats — an online joke in which silly text was superimposed over images of cats — toward something more than personal and sincere, and more alike to his work.
"Memes now are nigh seeing yourself in the ridiculous imagery online," he said. "It's all about this represents me — this is my spirit fauna, this is my mood — and so information technology's not about disquisitional distance, it's virtually seeing this is the only language I have."
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/05/arts/design/torbjorn-rodland-photography.html
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