The Sprawl

What is "The Sprawl" about?

It's a sequence of photos I took at a Sonic Youth concert in Central Park in 2002. I was standing at the side of the stage and watched Kim Gordon dance in a circle and shake her head against the evening sun.

How does this exhibition relate to your previous work?

Although a photo is taken in a fraction of a second, the photos you put in an exhibition will usually be from different points in time. The Punk and Skin exhibition, which is an open and continuous project, covers moments from 1997 up to now. I wanted to see if I could make an exhibition of something that only took seconds. The photos being fragments of seconds, display a moment that was over in seconds.

Where does the title come from?

“The Sprawl” is a song on Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation album. It is named after the massive scale urban-sprawl environment in William Gibson's book Neuromancer and the books that followed it.¹ Although the second verse alludes to the sprawl of the books, it was the first verse that stuck with me over the years. It goes, "To the extent that I wear skirts and cheap nylon slips I've gone native. I wanted to know the exact dimension of hell. Does this sound simple? Fuck you! Are you for sale? Does 'Fuck you' sound simple enough? This was the only part that turned me on but he was candy all over." According to Sonic Youth's biography the lyrics come from a conversation between prostitutes on Eldridge Street in New York that Kim Gordon overheard.² During concerts in 1988, Kim Gordon introduced "The Sprawl" as a song "about shopping..."³ I thought the song, these lines, might give a structure to an exhibition but I soon dropped the idea for fear of just making it an illustration. According to the dictionary, a sprawl is, "The act or an instance of sprawling, of spreading out, and a sprawling posture or arrangement of items."⁴ I thought it a fitting title for the movements displayed in the photos.

Why did you not include the other photos you took of them?

The other photos were taken standing in front of the stage at various concerts during the first three songs, as is the policy. I did the same during this show. As I had to leave after three songs I was standing backstage, which was at the side of the stage, found another angle, and thought, "This is much better!" The shots I had taken before were just of the band with guitars. They were what they were. But they weren't more than that. When I edit I go for something that is more than what it is, has another level to it. I have to betray my original theme. The photo has at the same time to be about something else. I want to not be able to read the photo in its entirety, to not understand it; something must remain hidden, even to me.

These photos are much lighter than the photos you took before.

Many artists, not that I would call myself one, work with emptiness. Sometimes it's a device to isolate the subject, the figure in this case, to make it stand out, to heighten its impact. In Yves Klein's work, one of the few abstract artists that interest me, emptiness itself is the subject. Here I find a bit of both: the isolated figure - Kim Gordon - dissolving in emptiness.

What is emptiness to you?

Gerhard Richter, whose Candle image was used for Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation album cover, tired of figurative painting, let his images run empty, so to speak, and produced a series of grey images. More than the actual work, I like the gesture of ceasing to be figurative, of not wanting to see anymore, of not wanting to show specific people and objects anymore. Painting nothing might give you a break from painting something, like photographing nothing might give you a break from photographing something.

Then there's the figure dissolving in its surrounding, that emptiness, that white sky, which, in correlation with its movements gives it an air of ecstasy. "Beauty will be convulsive or not at all," as Patti Smith once cited André Breton.⁵

And emptiness is connected with what Patti Smith, in her song about Kurt Cobain, calls "the great emptiness", death. In a book on Francis Bacon, I read, “When we represent the living body, or bodily experiences, death is always lurking. I do not simply mean to say that death is always implicated in the representation of a living body (that is, that this body will soon be dead; it is going to die.) Rather, I mean that the intense, concentrated representation of bodily experiences evokes simultaneously the situation of death. Death, then, is not an event which comes after life; it is a situation which lurks within the experience of the body.”⁶

http://www.christianvagt.com/sprawl.html

1 William Gibson: Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Ace, 1984, 1986, 1988
2 David Browne: Goodbye 20th Century: A Biography of Sonic Youth, Da Capo Press, 2008
3 Matthew Stearns: Daydream Nation, Continuum, 2007
4 Collins English Dictionary, HarperCollins Publishers, 1991-2003
5 Patti Smith: Early Work, Norton, 1994
6 Ernst van Alphen: Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self, Reaktion Books, 1992