Work
Hans-Peter Feldmann is a figure in the conceptual art movement and practitioner in the artist book and multiple formats. Feldmann's approach to art-making is one of collecting, ordering and re-presenting amateur snapshots, print photographic reproductions, toys and trivial works of art. Feldmann reproduces and recontextualizes our reading of them in books, postcards, posters or multiples.
Feldmann made his first series of books between 1968 and 1971. Works from the early 1970s include 70 snapshots depicting All the Clothes of a Woman and four Time Series projects including, for example, a row of 36 pictures of a ship moving along a river. Feldmann's series Photographs Taken From Hotel Room Windows While Traveling clusters 108 nondescript, unframed snapshots of buildings, streets and parking lots. (Like other Feldmann projects, this calls to mind Ed Ruscha's photographic catalogs.) 11 Left Shoes presents 11 shoes borrowed from 303 Gallery employees, in a row on the floor. Que Sera has the words of the song of that title handwritten on the wall. Bed With Photograph simulates part of a hotel room with a slept-in bed, a side table and a framed photograph of a woman in leopard-print pants.
Feldman's photographic essays might have a more intimate singularity in book form. His bookSecret Picturebook (1973) -- is a thick, densely printed, scholarly tome with little pictures of women's torsos in sexy underwear inserted at intervals. It most pointedly embodies the artist's mischievous relationship to high culture. Another book, “1967-1993 Die Toten” reproduces images from newspapers of all of the lives lost due to the violence and terrorism that permeated contemporary German history.
Creating carefully conceived installations from everyday images is what Feldmann is best known for. In 2004-5 MoMA P.S. 1 showed “100 Years,” an exhibition made up of 101 photographic portraits of people ages 8 months to 100 years. And at the International Center of Photography in 2008 he filled a room with the framed front pages of 100 newspapers — from New York, Paris, Dubai, Sydney, Seoul and elsewhere — printed on Sept. 12, 2001.
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Famous quotes containing the word work:
“It is not true that there is dignity in all work. Some jobs are definitely better than others.... People who have good jobs are happy, rich, and well dressed. People who have bad jobs are unhappy, poor and use meat extenders. Those who seek dignity in the type of work that compels them to help hamburgers are certain to be disappointed.”
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“Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing—to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.”
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