CIEL VARIABLE 77 - Cultural Tourism
EDITORIAL - A redesign of the magazine for its twenty years
By Jacques Doyon
Ciel variable is twenty years old! Over the years, the magazine has undergone several metamorphoses in order to better reflect the evolution in photographic practice, the broadening of its field of application, its recognition by the art world, and changes in its institutional environment.
PORTFOLIO - Antoni Muntadas, On Translation: I Giardini
On Translation is an all-encompassing site-specific series of projects that Spanish artist Antoni Muntadas has been exhibiting since 1995. The 2005 instalment of the project – On Translation: I Giardini – was composed of a central interactive installation work, as well as photographic, video, and Web-based components.
The Currency of Time : Muntadas and I Giardini
Before
Would anyone line up to see Antoni Muntadas’s art? I doubt it. Although he is well established and highly regarded, he is not a star of the art world, his exhibitions are far too cerebral and time-consuming, and, more often than not, his images neither celebrate nor seduce.
PORTFOLIO - Jana Sterbak, Waiting for High Water
Produced in 2005–06, Waiting For High Water is the latest instalment of Jana Sterbak’s video projects with Stanley as camera-dog. Through a canine view of Venice, this work suggests a completely new perspective on this pre-eminent tourist destination.
Jana Sterbak, Trompe-l’œil in Venice
The videograms reproduced here are excerpted from Waiting for High Water. Let’s start with a clear, succinct description of the piece by Catherine Bédard, curator of the exhibition:
PORTFOLIO - Jessica Auer, Re-creational Spaces
Popular sites and tourism fascinate Jessica Auer. She has produced a series of photographic works that were shot in North and South America in which landscapes and architecture have been preserved, renovated, altered, or built from scratch for the benefit of tourism.
Ways Out of the Labyrinth: The Works of Jessica Auer
At one point or another, we’ve all played the role of the tourist. When standing on the threshold of a sight that is truly breathtaking – for either its natural beauty or its spectacular urban construction – each of us has also perhaps been guilty of just standing and looking, without ever deeply exploring the sites that we have travelled so far to see. As Lucy Lippard notes:
Photographic Projects for the Web: Site Recognition
An awareness of geography has never been totally absent from the Web. At first, however, it tended to be obscured behind utopian discourses on planetary connectivity. As the early enthusiasm about the Internet developed, regional places and specificities tended to become blurred.
TWENTY YEARS OF CIEL VARIABLE: Twenty Years of Photography
By Jacques Doyon
This is the first part of our review of twenty years of Ciel variable.
It offers an overview of the metamorphoses that the magazine has had over the years as photographic practices evolved, their field of application broadened, they were increasingly recognized by the art world, and their institutional environment changed.
VOICES - Interview with Vik Muniz
My job as an artist is to test the validity
of illusions and expose their after effects,
to build a very wobbly bridge between image and object.
