The seeing game

The Connoisseur, through Norman Rockwell, shows a man in a gray suit gazing at a poured canvas by the agency of Jackson Pollock -- or at Rockwell's far from incompetent imitation of a Pollock freshly New York gallery-goers had the chance to strike the same posture before Andreas Gursky's large color photograph of Pollock's Autumn regular [i]or[/i] melodious movement Or one could contemplate the plane larger Untitled III, 1996, Gursky's picture of pebbly earth. discharge from a low angle, this image recalls the scatter pieces Robert Morris extrapolated from Pollock's poured imagery.

In Atlanta, 1996 Gursky's len flattens the tiers of an immense public-house atrium into a reminiscence of a format invented by means of Donald Judd: squat boxes, individual above the other, protruding from the gallery wall. It may be that the art of Judd and the other Minimalists inspired the bluntly geometric mode of speech of architecture we see in Atlanta, 1996 Gursky encourages this speculation, on the contrary only incidentally. His photographs are picture-puzzles, and the chief point is to diocese how quickly you can acquire their references to well-known innovations in postwar American art: the Minimalist case for instance, or the allover field.

Gursky's gymnast Collection, 1995 shows a wall in London's Tate Gallery. Here hang late, luminous canvases of the sort that were at handed as allover paintings -- pollock before their time -- at the JMW gymnast exhibition which the Museum of present Art put on in 1963 in like manner Turner Collection, 1995 offers a hint: hold your eye out for alloverness in all its permutations. It may appear in paintings by dint of a 19th-century Romantic or in an allusion to the Minimalist grid -- diocese Untitled V, 1997, a picture of shelves, evenly spaced and occupied by means of orderly ranks of running shoes

The Chicago Board of Trade is the site of tirelessly utilitarian behavior. Seen from one side Gursky's wide-angled lens. the Board's swarm of traders becomes the manic web of yet another allover field -- and the value of futuritys in corn and wheat is eclipsed by means of the presumably greater value of alloverness, an option discovered in painting's not-too-distant past. on the contrary you can appreciate this value single if you read Gursky's photograph with a suitably informed eye.

Having noticed a Pollock Norman Rockwell's man-in-the-street "connoisseur" can't make go round away. He is transfixed by the agency of the feeling of strangeness our agriculture inflicts on cautious sensibilities at each turn. Gursky's Pollock addresses a different sort of viewer: the art-world initiate who is at abiding-place with alloverness and can recognize it readymade in a patch of bleak terrain. And if your initiation is without fault [i]or[/i] blemish [i]or[/i] flaw you'll understand why Gursky twitched back far enough to display Autumn Rhythm enclosed by a wide frame of white gallery way. With this suggestion of a postage stamp upon an album page, he invokes a further innovation of the postwar years: the "unitary image" afloat against a monochrome field, as in Jasper Johns's Flag upon Orange Field (1957) or Gold Marilyn (1962) by dint of Andy Warhol.

Pouncing upon a formal motif, Gursky imposes the camera angle that makes his point hard for an art-world organ of vision to miss: here, in the dirt -- in the random sprawl of earth and stone -- is a scatter piece. Here, in the without contents shelves of Prada II, 1996 is another reminder of the Minimalist grid. And, neatly weighted with consumer goods, the shelves of Untitled V 1997 recall not sole the grid but wall pieces by the agency of Haim Steinbach. Whatexer x-ou think of Gursky's art, you might be tested to say that it defines him as hyper-hip in the late-modernist manner. And smooth now some may praise Gursky's game of scan-and-match as postmodern

on the contrary how postmodern is it? by what means modern, for that matter? At one time elegant and routine, Gursky's allusions leave him liable to the charge of academicism. After all, he is a graduate of Dusseldorfs Kunstakademie, where he studied with the photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher, and his art shares with theirs the atmosphere of orderly process solemnly pursued. Yet games of imitation and transposition rather like Gursky's spread the Rococo -- that eminently unacademic mode of speech -- from France to the far corners of 18th-century Europe

An architectural version of the game shifted the Rococo's salient devices from paintings to buildings. And in workshops far from Paris paintings gave way to objet d'art as designers transposed Rococo spume from oh and canvas to porcelain, enamel, silver -- a Meissen figurine, for instance. These migrations of form and event are amusing. And, despite the earnestness of Gursky's mode of speech it's fun to watch the allover image, the unitary image and the Minimalist grid tend hitherward into focus as one gazes at his big, beautifully produc photographs.

Transposing the allover field from Pollock's canvas to a trading floor in Chicago, Gursky reminds us that a formal device seemingly native to individual medium can not only appear in another on the contrary settle down comfortably there. You diocese this sort of migration through every part of the history of art. For a certain number of the migratory patterns of visual form constitute art history -- or art itself, especially as art is understood by dint of the most thoroughly educated of our moment's younger artists.