Photograph, c-print on paper
Tate Collection
Works with images
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<a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/luke-fowler-9061" aria-label="More by Luke Fowler" data-gtm-name="header_link_artist" data-gtm-destination="page--artist">Luke Fowler</a>
LIstituzione BlueBlack Negative
Presented by the Tate Americas Foundation, courtesy of Andrea Rosen 2022
<p><span>L’Istituzione Blue-Black Negative </span>2010 is a colour photograph that combines two images in one frame, separated by a thick black vertical line. On the left is a close-up of the rain-soaked seat of a folding chair on wooden decking; on the right is part of a laptop screen, displaying an image, or film still, of the cover of a book. Behind the laptop screen is a window through which green trees appear out of focus against a grey sky. The eye is drawn to the title of the book printed in bold black type: <span>L’Istituzione Negata</span> – (The Institution Denied) by the influential Italian psychiatrist and neurologist Franco Basaglia, famous for his campaign to abolish psychiatric hospitals. The focus on this publication links <span>L’Istituzione Blue-Black Negative</span> to Fowler’s subsequent work <span>All Divided Selves </span>2011, a 16mm feature-length portrait of radical Glasgow-born psychiatrist R.D. Laing, who was Franco Basaglia’s counterpart. The film – for which Fowler was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2012 – was in production at the time the photograph was taken.</p>
paper print photograph c-print
L’Istituzione Blue-Black Negative
support: 640 × 640 mm
Presented by the Tate Americas Foundation, courtesy of Andrea Rosen 2022
<div class="text">
<p>
<i>L’Istituzione Blue-Black Negative </i>2010 is a colour photograph that combines two images in one frame, separated by a thick black vertical line. On the left is a close-up of the rain-soaked seat of a folding chair on wooden decking; on the right is part of a laptop screen, displaying an image, or film still, of the cover of a book. Behind the laptop screen is a window through which green trees appear out of focus against a grey sky. The eye is drawn to the title of the book printed in bold black type: <i>L’Istituzione Negata</i> – (The Institution Denied) by the influential Italian psychiatrist and neurologist Franco Basaglia, famous for his campaign to abolish psychiatric hospitals. The focus on this publication links <i>L’Istituzione Blue-Black Negative</i> to Fowler’s subsequent work <i>All Divided Selves </i>2011, a 16mm feature-length portrait of radical Glasgow-born psychiatrist R.D. Laing, who was Franco Basaglia’s counterpart. The film – for which Fowler was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2012 – was in production at the time the photograph was taken. </p>
<p>
<i>L’Istituzione Blue-Black Negative </i>belongs to a series of c-prints Fowler made between 2006 and 2012 collectively titled <i>Two-Frame Films</i>. It exists in an edition of three – of which Tate’s is the second – with three artist’s proofs. The work appears in an artist’s book of the same title published by Mack in 2012 in which the series of fifty photographs is reproduced in full. The photographs were made using a half-frame camera whose obsolescent, vertically-split format forces the printing of two juxtaposed images together in one standard 35mm frame. Each image in the pairs is a snapshot of a scene from everyday life, intended to trigger threads of consciousness and personal association in the viewer. </p>
<p>The <i>Two-Frame Films</i> photographs offer an important insight into the artist’s relationship with image making. <i>L’Istituzione Blue-Black Negative</i> negates the logic of the diptych as two parts of the same, or related, image. The two juxtaposed photographs escape linear narrative hinting instead at the richness of preconceptual awareness. In combining two disjunctive focal points in a single photograph, as well as two languages in his title, Fowler invites the viewer to become aware of the act of looking itself. In this respect the still-images of <i>L’Istituzione Blue-Black Negative</i> are inextricably linked to the principles of montage central to Fowler’s work in filmmaking. In both still and moving image, Fowler considers how an event might be abstracted by the camera apparatus in a subjective ordering of reality. The photographs are a means of personally testing the ability of the camera to authentically bear witness to an event, highlighting its fallibility as a medium of representation. He has explained: ‘I’m striving to create a set of experiences, views or fragments that resist becoming a neatly packaged and mediated experience … but instead struggle to question the complex and contradictory accounts that together make up “collective representations”, that attempt to realize the potential for film to embrace the complexities and contradictions of lived experience and shared histories.’ (Luke Fowler in conversation with Stuart Comer, in Ruf, Peyton-Jones and Obrist 2009, p.32.) </p>
<p>
<b>Further reading</b>
<br/>Beatrix Ruf, Julia Peyton-Jones, Hans Ulrich-Obrist (eds.), <i>Luke Fowler</i>, Zurich 2009. <br/>
<i>Luke Fowler: Two-Frame Films, 2006–2012</i>, London 2014. </p>
<p>Isabella Maidment<br/>April 2019</p>
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Summary
2023-09-29T00:00:00
summary
SHORT_TEXT