Industrial Arts by Thomas Struth

Thomas Struth
CHEMISTRY FUME CABINET
UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH
2010

Thomas Struth
CURVED WAVE-TANK
UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH
2010

"Unlike, for example, the gritty, dread-inducing paintings of Anselm Kiefer, whose thoughts never seem far from Auschwitz, Struth’s photographs evoke nothing bad. They have a lightness of spirit, you could almost say a sunniness, that is not present in the work of the other major practitioners of the new oversized color photography—Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Jeff Wall, Thomas Ruff among them. Struth is the Sunday child of the lot. His huge photographs—city streets, people looking at paintings in museums, industrial landscapes, factories, laboratories, rain forests, and family groups—are as pleasing as his persona; they seem to be an extension of it. Michael Fried, in his tautly argued book Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (2008), pauses to remark, with apparent (uncharacteristic) irrelevance — but evident intuitive understanding of the force of Struth’s radiance — “A striking fact about Struth’s public career is the almost universally enthusiastic response that his work has received.” 

Thomas Struth
DRYDOCK
DSME SHIPYARD, GEOJE ISLAND, KOREA
2007

Thomas Struth
FIELD-ION MICROSCOPE
UNIVERSITAET, ZURICH
2010

Thomas Struth
PHARMACEUTICAL PACKAGING LABORATORIES
PHOENIX, BUENOS AIRES
2009

"Struth’s photographs taken in factories, laboratories, and nuclear power plants ... look like nothing one has ever seen before. These glimpses into what the critic Benjamin Buchloh calls “the technological sublime” were on view at Marian Goodman last year and constitute some of Struth’s most powerful images. ... The feeling of not understanding what one is seeing, of not knowing the functions of madly tangled wires and tubes and cables and mysterious flanges and pulleys and levers, is brilliantly conveyed by these huge pictures of places few of us have ventured into and on whose products many of us depend. Predictably, the places are not satanic mills but belong to the world of Struth’s benign photographic vision. They reassure even as they baffle. They tell us that the people who are absent from the pictures are back there somewhere and that they know what it all means and know what they are doing."

Thomas Struth
REACTOR PRESSURE VESSEL PHASE-OUT
AKW WUERGASSEN, BEVERUNGEN
2009

Thomas Struth
SEEMLESS TUBE PRODUCTION
TENARIS SIDERCA CAMPANA, BUENOS AIRES
2009

Thomas Struth
SEMI-SUBMERSIBLE RIG
DSME SHIPYARD, GEOJE ISLAND,KOREA
2007

"The picture we had been standing in front of showed a semi-submersible oil rig in a shipyard on Geoje Island, in South Korea—a huge red thing, a colossus on four legs on a platform afloat near the shore, taut cables anchoring it to the concrete pavement onshore, on which piles of miscellaneous building materials are strewn. The photograph (a hundred and ten by a hundred and thirty-eight inches) magisterially represents what can be called the new optics of the new photography, which sees the world as no human eye does. When you look at these photographs, it is as if you were looking through strange new bifocals that focus on things at a distance at the same moment that they focus on things close up. Everything is equally sharp."

Thomas Struth
SPACE SHUTTLE
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, CAPE CANAVERAL
2008

Thomas Struth
STELLARATOR WENDELSTEIN 7-X DETAIL
MAX PLANCK IPP, GREIFSWALD
2009

Thomas Struth
TOKAMAK ASDEX UPGRADE INTERIOR I
MAX PLANCK IPP, GARCHING
2010

Thomas Struth
TOKAMAK ASDEX UPGRADE PERIPHERY
MAX PLANCK IPP, GARCHING
2009

Thomas Struth
VEHICLE ASSEMBLY BUILDING
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, CAPE CANAVERAL
2008

Thomas Struth
Installation View
2010
Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin

Quoted texts above are from Janet Malcolm's extended New Yorker interview with Thomas Struth published in 2011. This usually-skeptical journalist conveyed the impression that she – like the rest of the art world – felt spontaneously fond of the forthright and ingenuous Struth. Yet their concluding exchange, as reported below, also suggests that she had a few reservations. Malcolm describes herself strolling with Struth through Dresden, talking about the artist's most recent pictures shot at industrial and scientific workplaces. She asked if he felt he was making some sort of "statement" about society with these photographs.

"I think yes," he said, but he added, "Some of the pictures don't show what I was thinking. For instance, when I went to Cape Canaveral as a tourist I was struck with the sense of the space program as an instrument of power. When, as a state, you demonstrate that you are able to do that, it contributes to cultural dominance. I hadn't realized this before. But when I went there to photograph I saw that it is something you cannot put into a photograph."

"Do you feel you need to put large meanings into your work?" I asked.

"Well, it's part of my thinking. It's something that stimulates me. To have a narrative is an incentive. If it was only about composition and light and beautiful pictures, I could just photograph flowers."

"Forget the flowers," I said, "Let's stay in the factory. Because there were very beautiful forms there. Wouldn't that be enough for you? If you just found beautiful compositions there, and made beautiful photographic abstractions. You want to do more than that?"

"Yes."

"I'm trying to elicit from you what the more is."

"The more is a desire to melt, like to – how can I say it? – be an antenna for a part of our contemporary life and to give this energy, put that into part of this narrative of the visual, of sort of symbolic visual expression ..."  Struth struggled, and gave up.

I asked him if the fact that SolarWorld's activity had to do with solar energy was part of his interest in photographing there.

He said that it was, and added, "My own personal energy account is very bad, because I fly so often and I can't claim that I'm a good sustainable-energy person. But I've almost always voted for the Green Party, and since it was founded I always thought these subjects were important and are a fascinating challenge for the world."

"How will your pictures show that what is being produced at SolarWorld is good for mankind?"

'"Just by the title."

"So photographs don't speak."

"The picture itself is powerless to show."

Numerous Numerals

This week's warm weather has made the outdoors extra appealing and I have been walking home from the library instead of taking MUNI. Those walks, following different streets on different days, showed me all kinds of splendid numerals on public display that I'd never noticed before. These photos depict a few recent favorites, especially 1027 up at the top, where one set of numbers was (at some point) semi-meticulously centered and positioned on top of an earlier, partly eradicated set.

Roman Hardware

A collection of bits and bobs that I stopped to admire for a few second here and there – spanning the whole two weeks of my stay in Rome. Most of the examples below are doorknockers, but there are a couple of handles also, a fountain head and a floor drain. I kept wondering if there maybe isn't just as much of this great little stuff in San Francisco and my eyes are just less attuned to it. Perhaps so, but I tend to think Rome really is better supplied.

Iambic Quadrameter

Leap Year

In February, in the dark time
From pancakes' smoke to Easter's shine

In Friday's rush, at ten to four,
A driver tapped our workshop door,

Turned to the truck. I heard high wind
Whistle the cliffs of flats behind.

I went to prop our own door wide.
He was a small man, heavy-eyed,

Who spoke of rain, leaned on his truck.
I saw the great steel door blow back,

Sweep at him like a guillotine.
I shouted. He leapt back in time.

'It would have crushed his spine, his head.
He would have died,' my husband said.

Instead, he carried trays of screws,
Drove off inside the roar of news.

I was not sitting on the ground,
Still faint, as sirens mourned and drowned.

The twenty-ninth, the lightless West,
rained on my face. I stood, was blessed.


– Alison Brackenbury
from the TLS




"Alison Brackenbury was born in Lincolnshire in 1953. She now lives in Gloucestershire, where she has worked for almost twenty years in the family metal finishing business."

Buttons to Buzz With

I wonder about those wet red strokes of paint or nail varnish. Maybe they mean nothing, applied by some passing idler who does not even live in the building. Maybe they are a warning, an invitation, a declaration. And if (instead) ornament is intended, which kind of ornament? That kind of ornament that thinks matching red lines will brighten up the two top buttons, creating a pattern of vertical stripes? Or did somebody want to suggest the face of a cat? Things that have no meaning at all are easier to digest than things that have small meanings.

Steiner, Largely

In the afternoon I walked from the Mission to the Fillmore. Rain and sun have been alternating with each other on a daily basis for many days. I noticed as I was setting out that somebody had been sweeping cherry petals into tidy heaps.



Above, an attempt at Mies-like public-housing architecture. This is near Duboce Park. I picture a complex something along these lines, but taller, as the one Ayn Rand's idealistic architect-hero Howard Roark blows up with dynamite in The Fountainhead.

And below, a series of Victorians on Steiner, near Alamo Square. We can guess that Howard Roark would not have liked these much either, but probably would have despised their ornamental fripperies less than the Orthodox Brutalism above.







Exuberant, Victorian-looking weed growing alongside a Victorian house of its own.




Admired the letter-carving on this plaque put in place to mark the founding of the First Friendship Inst. Bapt. Church. It looks like gravestone lettering. Probably they got the local gravestone letter-carver to also carve the Bapt. Church cornerstone.

I recently told a friend that it seemed like interesting-looking numerals were never crossing my path any more, certainly not the way they used to. Then today on Steiner I saw all kinds of them: mossy, spidery, overgrown, and free-hand welded.








I cannot explain this final plastique lady. She heralds 3 buzzers.



This would have been a good moment to be consulting the cloud-identification book my daughter and son-in-law brought me from London last year. But I did not have it handy, and do not now. It is in my office at the library, and that is a useless place to keep it, as I now readily see.