'Paradise', Wound Magazine, Ken Pratt
Uta Koegelsberger's most recent project, ' Paradise ' is drawn from her personal family experience. For many years, her parents, like many other people the world over, strove to make a little private paradise. Over the years, they sought to turn their house in the south of France into the kind of relaxed peaceful sanctuary of which many of us dream. Carefully planting the garden and renovating the house, their project took years until it finally resembled the vision of a shared private paradise. It became one of those places where fortunate invited guests would always comment on the serene and perfect setting; the kind of place that inspired gracious hospitality and the gracious acceptance of hospitality.
Koegelsberger became fascinated with the whole notion of paradise and, more specifically, the way in which human beings have sought to shape the world around them into manifestations of their idyllic visions. She drew organically on the experience of her parents and their vision realized and began to undertake a fairly systematic examination of locales, buildings and, above all, gardens that speak of a human activity aiming to reconfigure the literal landscape into a place congruent with an internal vision of the perfect place.
The still evolving project is vast and sprawling. Koegelsberger has already travelled to locations as diverse as California and the south of France to undertake her research and make the work. The ultimate futuristic playboy's pad and manmade islands; gardens promising the experience of global flora in a small patch of France to a disused Hollywood film back lot donated to an all-faith spiritual group for transformation into an earthly place of serenity.
The art works that she has made in this series have a certain preciseness. Of course, they are staged, but to some extent, less staged and more documentary than one might think at first glance. Look more closely and what becomes obvious is that, compared with her previous works in wild landscapes, here she has taken a more matter-of-fact approach, fully aware that what she wanted to come through is that these are already staged places. Some of her previous works make use of the staging techniques used by the photographer to transform mundane vistas into heightened places: the technical and chemical tricks of photography. But here the same techniques appear to be reigned in to give centre stage to the tricks of the gardener or architect used to create a similarly heightened experience of place.
There is something of an inversion in the relationship with time in these new works. In previous series such as those using night flares or rockets, there is a huge importance on the precision of the tiniest fragments of time. Even matters of seconds relating to exposure play a crucial role in Koegelsberger's own interventions within the landscape she captures as transformed. Yet in the ' Paradise ' works, it is much longer periods of time –the years taken to construct a garden or give a house specific details- that play an essential role in allowing the work to exist. And of course, there is something in this, knowing or unwitting, that relates back to the original prompt for the work.
These paradises that have taken so long to build, so much effort to nurture, can only ever be experienced in a transient, fleeting way. Ultimately, we are all forced to leave the garden at some point.
On a less intuitive or subjective level, we can also approach the work structurally; academically. In its most recent form, the bank of images was presented as a projected slideshow, accompanied by a soundtrack of a recorded conversation between Koegelsberger and the curator Lisa La Feuvre, reflecting on both the project and notions of Paradise. The form that the work takes underscores the embedded notion of transience, the individual images of these constructed idylls available to our eyes just long enough to be absorbed before disappearing.
However, the slideshow also makes it very easy to spot similarities and patterns emerging through the accumulation of hundreds of images. The reoccurrence of similar motifs, structures or garden plantings in locations thousands of miles apart, prompts the question, is there a visual language for Paradise? And, assuming that there is to some extent, where did it come from?
The work immediately makes us conscious of the way in which these manifest versions of a perfect place owe a huge debt to trade, travel and even colonialism. Stolen Japanese forms shape a French garden whilst Indian Buddhism that travelled west informs a Californian meditation centre built on the site of a former film back lot. The appropriated nature of an island is mimicked in a completely manmade pontoon posing as an island whilst gardens in Europe replicate the previously staged versions of Paradise built by classical cultures, something that the confection that is the Getty Museum could not resist in a Californian Postmodernism.
Each of these unique and special paradises also bears remarkable similarities to each other. And, if practical histories of colonialism and trade are one of the things that might inform the vernacular, then perhaps we should also consider the impact of visual traditions from art and design.
It is interesting to notice, for example, how the formal orthodoxies of the great European gardens a replicated under the Californian sun, even when it is native species that have been shaped and nurtured to conform with a Romantic landscape garden's contrived representation of wild, untamed forces. At other times, Koegelsberger's camera captures something that is eerily like a re-enactment of the fantastical landscapes of the Flemish Primitives. Often used as a kind of framing device around the central action and figures of a painting, these paintings from very flat countries favoured setting the mythological or religious action in craggy mountainous landscapes with grand cliffs plunging into sweeping bays and exotic botany in abundance.
In some cases a few of the successful talented painters had travelled abroad to Italy, France or Germany to take up lucrative patronages. On the whole, however, it is also widely believed that these non-real landscapes –in addition to the obvious functions of underscoring the action's locus in a mythical space differentiated from the grind of everyday life- are a form of visual 'Chinese Whispers'. Painted from imagination or from another artist's reputedly realistic rendition of the Holy Land or mythical distant realms, the wispy forests clinging to rock or coverage of unnatural plants visually act to further remove the imagery from the daily world. Some of Koegelsberger's photographs of Californian gardens inadvertently tap into this western visual memory. Where the native American flora is planted according to imported orthodoxy, they take on an uncanny likeness to the landscape tableaux painted by painters like Gillis van Coninxloo, in the sixteenth century. Visions of paradise imagined by someone who could never have known even rough images of such plants have strangely evolved under the Californian sun.
Similarly, in her photographs of the ultimate jet-set playboy pad, a Hollywood cat's paradise, it is interesting to see how the influence of Frank Lloyd-Wright on later quintessentially American architecture has evolved into the beautifully brash vernacular that becomes a recipe for a Playboy cocktail: one part science-fiction, two parts expensive materials and two parts a stage set for seduction. Stirred, never shaken and best served in a location with an impressive view.
It is notable how these perfect retreats seem to be commissioned by individuals who have their own take on what Frank Lloyd-Wright’s heritage was really about. Whereas Lloyd-Wright’s work was deeply about engagement with the American landscape, its materials and the forms it assumed naturally or in the hands of indigenous cultures, here we see the same acute angles heading in a distinctly Space Race direction. On the drawing tables of a younger generation of American architects who could make a lucrative living from meeting the needs of wealthy playboys from new money towns like Los Angeles, Lloyd-Wright’s vernacular is modified to enable it to speak of paradise to the men who commissioned. And, their notion of luxury and paradise, it seems is one that is just as informed by the futuristic promise of lean, mean spaceships or a Las Vegas showgirl hang-out room as it is by any understanding of how Lloyd-Wright hoped to develop an early modern way of approaching architecture in a country seeking new ways of doing things, freed from the containment of its European heritage.
The overwhelming experience of Koegelsberger’s disparate visions of paradise realized is that they all, too a greater extent, resort to a pastiche of many sources, implying that all of us have a vision of paradise that is informed by at least more than one source. Often these sources appear to be ones that are very much in keeping with our cultural identity and yet there is almost always at least one influence that comes from outside it. Paradise it seems, is necessarily exotic, imported. Furthermore, in the combination, the bringing together the various elements that inform our vision of a paradise, the actual manifestation almost always assumes some level of remarkable crassness. Paradise manifest is beautiful, alluring and yet, on some level, fairly tasteless or, at least, camp.
Koegelsberger’s starting point for the project to a great degree pre-empts the notion of Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’; builds in the Ozymandias warnings. And, it is almost as if her research, her findings, hold true to an underlying recognition that, in actually making what exists perfectly in our mind’s eye material, it irrefutably transmits into something ultimately less than that, no matter how perfect it is compared with the world beyond its carefully demarcated boundaries.
In a special project, Wound has asked Uta Koegelsberger to construct a précis version of her Paradise project for the magazine, to reduce her observations of manmade Paradise to six images. In keeping with the impetus behind the locations that seek to present a paradise on earth, we have naturally asked her to undertake an impossible task…
Ken Pratt, Wound Magazine 2008