Added Jul 8, 2005
Certain parallels can be drawn between the German-born photographer Juergen Teller and the Austrian-born artist Andre van der Kerkhoff, who was known as Heinz Krautberger before taking his present pseudonym in 1974. Both choose to live and work outside their own countries, Teller in London, England, van der Kerkhoff in Brisbane, Australia. Both have commercial backgrounds, Teller in fashion photography, van der Kerkhoff in graphic design. Both, like Andy Warhol, who was a successful illustrator before turning to fine art, apply their commercial experience auspiciously to the work that they show in galleries. But, above all, both have garnered attention verging on notoriety for work that can seem transgressive at a time when what art historians refer to as ³The Male Gaze² has fallen out of favor with those cultural tastemakers who lobby for political correctness in the area of sexuality. Claiming that most fashion photography has been shaped by a gay male sensibility, Teller has transgressed by deliberately photographing female models from a heterosexual male perspective (which is to say with a raw, sometimes sloppy sensuality) and carrying that tendency over into his gallery work as well. And Van der Kerkhoff has transgressed by defiantly perpetuating the Male Gaze with a vengeance in the frankly erotic photo-derived images of pinup-like female nudes printed on brushed aluminum that he first exhibited in New York in 2007. Even mitigated by strategically placed geometric color areas that, as I observed in a review at that time, create a ³tantalizing tension between hot and cool, eroticism and formalism,² these images have the power to outrage some viewers by virtue of appearing frankly prurient, and even idolatrous, rather than ironic in the manner of Pop art. As Teller said of his own work in a profile in New York magazine, ³frankly, it¹s girls you want to fuck.²
Having each in his own manner graphically made the point that individual heterosexual male artists should be as free to express their own preferences as, say, David Hockney or Robert Mapplethorpe, without being penalized for the one-sidedness of art historical precedent or persecuted by the forces of political correctness, both Teller and van der Kerkhoff have moved on, the former to a series of autobiographical German scenes and autoportraits, the latter to the gritty urban images featured in his new solo exhibition ³Gotham City Blues,² at Artbreak Gallery, 195 Grand Street, in Brooklyn, from February 13 to March 14. (Reception: Friday, February 13, 6 to 10pm)
³I had not picked up a camera in thirty years before I began the series,² van der Kerkhoff, previously known for the landscape paintings he had exhibited throughout Australia, France, Canada, and the U.S., said in an artist statement issued in connection with his first New York solo show of nudes at Jadite Galleries, his Manhattan art dealer, where he will show in October of this year. And digitally enhanced photography continues to be his medium in the new exhibition at Artbreak Gallery. As with his nudes, the cityscapes are all printed on brushed aluminum plates, which not only gives them the heft and ³objectness² of paintings, but imbues his urban imagery with an eerily dreamlike quality, since the areas that would normally be white have a silvery phosphorescence.
Van der Kerkhoff¹s method for creating these pictures is to roam the streets of Manhattan, literally chewing up the scenery, as they say of actors in theater who give a larger-than-life performance and blow everyone else off the stage. (He had some 2500 images to select from for printing after one ³three-day photographic rampage.²) On first visiting the city in 2006, Kerkhoff found it a place that ³symbolically reeked of a nation¹s decay,² and while he subsequently claims to have fallen in love with this Sodom on the Hudson (he had some 2500 images to select from for printing after one three-day photographic orgy), a sense of ambivalence still permeates his pictures. This comes across not only in the title (³Babylon²) of his picture of tall buildings in the financial district of Lower Manhattan, but also in the anthropomorphic aspect that he imparts to these structures, which is reminiscent of the Moloch metaphor for office towers in Allen Ginsberg¹s ³Howl.² Like the late Beat poet, too, albeit in visual terms, he has an unusual ability to eroticize unlikely things. Indeed, in a catalog essay on some of his earlier urban imagery, I observed that ³van der Kerkhoff¹s eye is clearly an erogenous zone, as capable of imparting sensual qualities to pee-smelling streets, with their kinetic collage of lonely crowds and tattered semiotic wonders, as to the naked bodies of beautiful young women.²
Given the innate seductiveness of his vision, that still holds true. But I now also perceive an element of S&M in his love affair with a city where, in his picture, ³Gotham City Nocturne,² the sinisterly made-up face of the star-crossed young actor Heath Ledger, in his last role as ³The Joker² in Batman, decomposes spookily into the clouds above the silhouetted skyline. The Joker¹s face also appears superimposed at billboard-scale over the facades of the midtown buildings near Macy¹s in another print called ³The Power of Hollywood.² Frowning down on the traffic-choked avenue, here the late actor¹s visage seems to symbolize not only the power of filmic fantasy to blot out pedestrian reality, but also its destructive influence on some of those it briefly exalts.
Then again, only in a city as lawlessly various as New York can reality hold its own so handsomely against fantasy by producing a cast of characters who prove that truth can indeed surpass fiction. Perhaps as evidence of this, van der Kerkhoff submits ³Eccentric Spartan Extravagance,² an image of a gaunt-faced citizen sporting dark glasses and a long plume in his tophat whose everyday street persona is as striking as that of any of Batman¹s arch rivals.
Van der Kerkhoff obviously has a gift, rare in a non-native, of focusing in on the incongruous yet telling juxtapositions that make the city a veritable font of found surrealism. One example is his picture of a homeless soul slumbering on a discarded mattress next to an abandoned supermarket delivery cart decorated by the ubiquitous street artist known as De La Vega with his usual Keith Haring-like and the ironically inspirational graffiti slogan for which the image is named: ³Become Your Dream.²
When the irony is not inherent in the subject itself, van der Kerkhoff pinpoints it conceptually with a title such as ³Marlboro Man² for an image of an elderly geezer puffing away on a cigarette as he leans out a tenement window above a smaller structure festooned with floral designs and the phrase ³inner Peace...² In fact, found phrases within some of his pictures constitute a kind of concrete poetry that can often seem more apropos than their actual titles. For example, the title ³In Search for Sponsorship² is amusing enough for his image of a totally nude flasher pulling a blanket draped over his shoulders away from his body to reveal an erection. But the word ³Unisex² on the shop awning above the man¹s head seems even more apt, given his mincing pose and the almost feminine voluptuousness of his flabby physique, which could suggest a horny hermaphrodite. A woman entering the shop as he exits merely glances slightly askance, as though a naked man in the streets of New York is no big deal, nothing to get alarmed about.
Van der Kerkhoff takes such aberrations in stride as well even creates them in some cases through digital means by distorting the image or illuminating some areas in an otherwise monochromatic print with areas of glowing color. For he, too, becomes his dream, as though the island of Manhattan sets loose in him some inner demon that is insatiable to devour its every detail, from the teeming thoroughfares of Chinatown where the graffiti scrawled across the sides of the tenements engages in a funky dialogue with the elegant ideograms on the shop fronts and awnings below to the almost empty side-streets around The Brooklyn Bridge, where squat landmarks of crumbling brick are linked from above by Hart Crane¹s ³choiring strings² of steel.
That Andre van der Kerkhoff finds lyrical beauty, as well as gaud and grunge, in the urban scene should surprise no one who has been following his work from the beginning. For to appreciate a landscape, or the terrain of a woman¹s body, or the streets of a city, are all facets of beauty unadorned, are all aspects of a love never wholly sacred or profane. Like Baudelaire with a camera, van der Kerkhoff just as easily enters into ³a bath of multitude² as he ³populates his solitude,² finding in each extreme a microcosm for the whole. Every one of his pictures is a journey into the self for both the artist and the viewer.
Ed McCormack