KVT – Jamie’s Garden is very Desirable

KVT – Jamie’s Garden is very Desirable

KVT 201315_At times like these times_JamieMaxtone-Graham

KVT in decoding mood at Manzi

There’s an exhibition at Manzi that’s exquisitely beautiful while at the same time it’s a little exquisitely repulsive….but always exquisitely intellectually engaging.

02_In a way and then not_JamieMaxtone-Graham

It’s by Jamie Maxtone-Graham and is amongst the best photographic work that Hanoi is likely to see. It finishes soon and if you haven’t caught it yet, I definitely recommend it. It’s one of those bodies of work that deserves wide exposure. It had its debut in Bangkok

This personal interpretation of the work comes after I’d spent the last few weeks having my mind invaded by 17th century religious and secular art in southern European churches and art museums. I was glad that this reading wasn’t too remote from the artist’s intent as outlined in his very readable statement- I’ve included at the end  of this piece and which I read after I’d decided on the approach I’d take about his richly luscious photographs.

Immediately I felt right at home with Jamie’s large prints. To me they all have a  distinctive Old and New Testament timbre and all are asking to have their symbols decoded as did 17th century canvasses that hung in smokey alcoves, read by illiterate pilgrims, peasants and expounded upon by priests and philosophers.

Art, then, often was intended to remind the living of the inevitability of death and of the temptations that lie in wait to entrap them in sins of desire . Skulls lay along side saints to remind us of decay and corruption of mortal flesh. Flowers and fruit were painted as both fresh and gorgeous and stinkingly stagnant for the same reason. Still life paintings usually had the same purpose and dead animals and decaying food were left amidst fresh and inviting morsels.

Jamie, like these artists, has inserted symbolic devices that are able to be read and discussed to give added meaning and conjecture to his stunning work.

Like those old masterpieces, Jamie’s scenes have been deliberately staged and the human models are generally gazing expectantly upwards, perhaps with ecstacy or rapture, as they are portrayed in a version of the Garden of Eden in urban Hanoi. The youngest subject radiates innocence and purity though overtures of temptation infiltrate

07_Girl in the garden_JamieMaxtone-Graham

And in the one that, to me, is a crucified Christ,  roots stretch earthwards to set new shoots and trees and myths and to succor the heirachy that spawns them

21_The tree where hope meets at ambition_JamieMaxtone-Graham

A youth, still in the guise of innocence is backed by a school of small dead fish that appear to be disappearing into the cavity of a larger, decaying creature. The purity of the daisies is offset by the suggested debauchery of the anenome like spuming of the rifle flowers. The Christian and literary symbolism of the fish is potent.

09_Small migrations_JamieMaxtone-Graham

As they are in the image of the teenager seemingly already seduced by the wiles of a retail and marketing. Note the fish head peering from the foliage above her.

08_The tree where fish dream_JamieMaxtone-Graham

The old oranges and the rotting bamboo shoots indicate that the bride and groom, representative of Adam and Eve, are already doomed to the pleasurable ignomy of original sin. Two used syringes spearing a tree trunk are truly ominous.

06_Ritual_JamieMaxtone-Graham

Throughout, the initial impression is of the inocents being surrounded with temptations or intimations of mortality and the exquisite beauty of locale and flowers is juxtaposed with the exquisite decay of dead flesh in the form of fish, fowl, dog and pig and the image where pig ears are splayed like gigantic moths exactly fits my opening statement

04_In the place of the terrible butterflies_JamieMaxtone-Graham

The pig heads in the image titled ‘Listening at the Tree of Elders’ would lead into an intense discussion of literature, religion and modern social mores with an intelligent class of 16 year olds….but , then, so would the pig trotters shooting from the earth in another like a barricade. And as for the tails slithering along the ground in ‘In the Evening They Return’, I long to get a group discussion inferring their intent…….If the viewer decides to interpret some or all the images from a dream/nightmare perspective, Freudian versus Jungian analysis comes into play almost too deliciously. 

20_Listening at the tree of elders_JamieMaxtone-Graham

19_The far off place nearby_JamieMaxtone-Graham

16_In the evening they return_JamieMaxtone-Graham

One of my favorites is the young woman surrounded by flowers with. animal eye centers. Delighfully and referentially surreal! It makes my mind go into overdrive. In line with my interpretive line I begin with immaculate conception and spin out from there.

02_In a way and then not_JamieMaxtone-Graham

Two prints indicate a sense of imminent violence or threat. One is the young man contemplating a fall from grace and the other the remarkable image of the young man returning to a primitive, menacing state surrounded by chicken claws and spear like bird of paradise blooms. Is it Cain? Discussion possibilities are bedded in fertile soil

13_A place where birds gather_JamieMaxtone-Graham

17_In a place of plenty_JamieMaxtone-Graham

The triple prints of Madonna and Child-which I haven’t included- are truly exquisitely beautiful and take your breath away. I recommend a trip just to encounter them .

Inescapably youth gives way to old age.

03_Wild once and so shall be_JamieMaxtone-Graham

01_At the old tree_JamieMaxtone-Graham

Jamie has as his first references the work of Henri Rousseau.

and his excellent, immediately comprehensible, artist statement expands on this.

In my researchfor this series, I became quite interested in the paintings by the French Post-Impressionist artist Henri Rousseau, a man who never left France yet created fantastic scenes of jungles whose flora he studied by visiting local botanic gardens in his native country.  Le Douanier’sThe Dream, Sleeping Gypsy and Exotic Landscape are emblematic of his oeuvre – near-surreal imaginings of lush landscapes, animals and people.

I have also long been intrigued by the old carte postal of the colonial period in Indochina; photographs depicting a foreign and oftenexoticized people and culture, depicting customs and costumes and foreign realms of the empire to those back in France.  As a somewhat new technology in a 19th century colony, photography found a seemingly natural partnership in the creation of both myth and empire. Vietnam, and the rest of the region once comprising French Indochina, gradually defined its own existence against this idea of empire and, as history has it, two long and murderous wars eventually freed the Vietnamese people of the burden of foreign administration.

In considering my own work, I was primarily interested in Rousseau’s idea of the fictional forest as a starting point for my own series.  Throughout the course of history and literature there have been many mythological and idealized gardens – the most famous, perhaps, in my own culture is the Garden of Eden.As a boy, I went to church regularly but I also enjoyed reading children’s fairy tales and somehow in reading all of these varied accounts of morality and behavior both in Grimm’s Tales and the Bible, I came to feel that essentially there was not too much difference between them.  Jonah being swallowed by a whale in the Bible was not far from Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother being eaten by the wolf.  Each survived their experience to pass along the lesson of the encounter.

I mention all of this – the Bible and the fairy tales, the city and the country, death and rebirth – because in some active or passive way these inform the work I came to make in 2011 in The Desiring Garden.  I am intrigued by this idea of the garden as a place where, like Eden, man once possessed innocence and an idealized existence but was forced from it (or more perversely makes decisions requiring departure or expulsion) and spends the rest of eternity trying to return to it.  But in this effort to re-enter the utopian state once experienced,equipped with his knowledge and self-awareness, he seems endlessly capable of merely diminishing or destroying the very ideal he seeks.  In my adult life, I have always lived in large metropolitan cities (New York, Los Angeles and Hanoi) and I am constantly appalled and mesmerized by this irony.

My own working process for this series began in these same small public green spaces in Hanoi where I ultimately created a kind of outdoor, public studio – a pseudo ‘natural’ environment – embellishing the existing landscape with fruit, flowers, vegetables and animals (sometimes cooked, but certainly not living) that I purchased in the local markets or from street vendors.  I would start by selecting aspecific location for a working idea, photographing it in its plain state and after returning home, often sketching the frame and deciding what elements to add and where the human subject would fit in the altered environment.  Some days or weeks later I would return with the selected elements bought in the local, open-air markets.  Since I worked over the course of many months, the fruits and flowers changed depending on the season.  April’s offerings were very different from August’s.

It should be emphasized that these installations were made for the most part in very public places.  I would enter a park or the botanic garden (where I seemed to end up working most) with camera, light stand, small strobe and photo umbrella, and bags of vegetables or fruit, perhaps a roasted dog or birds or whole fish, bunches of flowers, wire and small tools and set to work on transforming the area I had selected, basically making an open air studio – all of this in full view of whomever else would be using the park.  I always documented the stages of installing, beginning with an unaltered view of the ‘set’ and proceeding until the last details were put in place and the lighting adjusted to the finished degree necessary to balance the ambient daylight.  Invariably and in essentially every location I also had to remove trash, discarded condoms and, most surprisingly, used syringes.  On occasion, I would leave some of these items in the frame – perhaps subtly subverting the artifice of the natural.  This is, after all, the middle of the city.

When all the elements essential to each particular image were installed the lighting adjusted properly (all of these images are artificially lit) people who were passing by or who stopped to ask what I was doing were invited to step into the setting – to become the indigenous dwellers of this temporary, paradise-found.  This was always the final, unknown element in creating these photographs and was of paramount importance (to me) in making unclear both the intention and result of the images.  These are ultimately portraits of people who at the moment of our initial encounter stepped willingly, curiously, uncertainly into these concocted environments they stopped to inquire about and became recorded within.

Unlike my attempts in my previous portrait series at modifying the power relation between subject and photographer, rather than continue that dismantling, it is the imbalance of that relation that this series overtly employs.  The photographs show people who exist in places that never were.  These are urban dwellers depicted in a lush, and blatantly artificial forest.  Questions about the veracity of place and perspective are not very illusive beneath this illogical surface of beauty and darkness where rural and urban meet.  Somewhere between the projected and the perceived sits the idea of the ‘exotic other’ – the view of the Orient from the vantage point of the West, with suggestions of misconception, myth, Eros, fantasy and prejudice.

Apologies to the artist if I’ve gone too far off track and thanks to Manzi for supplying images and artist’s statement.

Kiem Van Tim is a keen observer of life in general and the Hanoi cultural scene in particular and offers some of these observations to the Grapevine. KVT insists that these observations and opinion pieces are not critical reviews. Please see our Comment Guidelines / Moderation Policy and add your thoughts in the comment field below.

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