“There is another world, but it is in this one,” said Surrealist poet Paul Éluard. In this exhibition, artists look to the future, imagining how we move forward from the tumultuous events of the past year. [read more]
Art in the Plague Year is an online exhibition organized by UCR ARTS: California Museum of Photography and curated by Douglas McCulloh, Nikolay Maslov, and Rita Sobreiro Souther. UCR ARTS’s programs are supported by UCR College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, the City of Riverside, Altura Credit Union, and Anheuser-Busch.
All works in this exhibition are reproduced with permission of the artists/copyright holders. Works (images, video, audio or other content) must not be used or reproduced for any purposes other than fair use without prior consent of the artists.
(b. 1949, Santa Monica, CA. Lives and works Riverside, CA)
In these two photographs, John Divola stages a collision between the romantic sublime and the gritty specific. During the Covid-19 quarantine (and before), the artist made photographs in abandoned housing at George Air Force Base, a closed military airport in California’s high desert. In this case, he downloaded and printed blurred versions of paintings from nineteenth century Romanticism. He posted them in semi-destroyed structures and used his camera—“an indiscriminate collator,” he calls it—to capture the contrast of the iconic and the particular, idealized nature and the decaying works of man.
One of the paintings, the vertical image with a hazy standing figure at center, is regarded as a masterpiece of Romanticism. It is 1818’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich, the German Romantic landscape painter (1774–1840). The painting glorifies the natural world, nature as epitomizing the metaphysical sublime. And it employs the “Rückenfigur”—a person seen from behind, contemplating the view. Behind the Rückenfigur, of course, is Divola: the viewer of the viewer of the view. The topic is exceptionally appropriate during the Covid-19 pandemic—a worldwide example of nature versus man.
