Shanghai Cubism: Isidro Blasco builds some photographs
In his Brooklyn studio, artist Isidro Blasco is building Shanghai. Or rather, a small fractured version of it. He will exhibit several such views in the city itself, at the Contrasts Gallery of art dealer and design maven Pearl Lam. Blasco’s Chinese metropolis is a wood construction standing on easel-like legs and supporting forty-five irregularly shaped photographic panels, each one depicting a facet of a wide-angle view of the city. This photo construction, like the others he is realizing, makes the city appear as though caught in the midst of a silent explosion, a perfect metaphor for Shanghai. Blasco, who was born in Madrid, has devised a means to convey the dynamism of urban transformation in a way that goes beyond the two-dimensional spectacle of most contemporary photography.
Architecture and photography have been on converging paths for the past few decades, the former becoming more visually theatrical and dependent on theories of representation for its rationales, and the latter becoming increasingly obsessed with the built environment, with its sociopolitical and environmental implications and sheer gigantism. A number of artists—most prominently Mary Miss—have used photography to visually fragment architectural structures and put them back together again in collages; Blasco seems at just such a meeting point, but his inspiration comes from outside either photography or architecture—from cubism.
“Cubism’s goal,” he says, “was to comprehend all that can be perceived, from every angle, in a specific moment. My constructions are an invitation to a similar type of simultaneity, but in not quite three dimensions.” In a two-month visit to China last year at Lam’s invitation—she sponsors an international residency program for artists—Blasco took sequences of photographs of everything he could see standing at specific locations around Shanghai. These locations ranged from the interiors of apartments to the streets of fast-disappearing old neighborhoods to skyscraper rooftops, to which he had no trouble gaining access. He then used these sequences to begin building maquettes for several constructions, including one that is currently installed at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Milwaukee and several that he has assembled for Lam’s exhibition. Although all his constructions (even the early, comparatively simple renditions of his Queens apartment building) have a similar fractured appearance that is almost comical; each is singular and none can be exactly reproduced. As he builds them, Blasco makes spontaneous choices about shape and arrangement that change from piece to piece. “You come to understand how cubism was not a system but a series of intuitive decisions,” he adds.
The carved-up photographs, pieces of wood, and the carpet of screws on the floor of Blasco’s studio testify to his Rube Goldbergian love of the handmade. Looking at the backside of these works and seeing the pattern of joints, planes, and screws is almost as engaging as facing them head-on. (Both his parents were ceramicists, and Blasco himself was trained as a sculptor.) But the intricacies of the pieces extend beyond the level of craft to that of representation. Blasco is extremely precise in how he facets these images, locating the seams in the comprehensive view, opening fissures that convey a vortexlike depth or a centripetal acceleration, and altering the images digitally. In one of the Shanghai series, for example, he added a barely noticeable swarm of locusts; in another, water seeps through the streets. It’s not just the overwhelming energy of development that Blasco seeks to convey but an apocalyptic sense of the price we pay, psychically, socially, and environmentally, living in such a place. This might be the art of a fun house, but the fun house teeters on the brink of catastrophe.
The result of Blasco’s brand of almost 3-D cubism is a paradoxical experience: visual collages that put us at the center of a photographic view, surrounding us but receding at the same time. Each is a vertiginous antipanorama that seems to turn photographer and viewer alike from all-powerful voyeurs to helpless, dizzy visitors. “Many photographers today who work on a large scale want to turn photography into a clone of painting,” says the artist, “to bestow on it the weight of history. I want to convey what it is like to be there.”
