Aktiviteter - Billedhuggerskolen Charlottenborg
Billedhuggerskolen Charlottenborg ledes af professor og billedkunstner Simon Dybbroe Møller. På denne side kan du se og læse mere om skolens talks, seminarer, undervisning og meget andet.
When stone-age cave painters made images of animals, they used tallow, blood, bone marrow, egg white, urine, and various colourants ground to powder in mortars made of shoulder bones. An analogue photograph of an animal could be said to be equally materially reflexive. Shot on photographic film covered in gelatin manufactured from animal bones, the photograph carries within its substance the very thing it depicts. Its auto-iconic equivalent today – an image materially bound to what it depicts – would be a photograph of a landscape containing titanium, tungsten, gold, or copper: the so-called rare-earth elements that make up the chips in our photographic machines. Image-making is still crudely material.
The earliest known timekeeping systems – the patterns, tally marks, and sequences of symbols that appeared next to the animal depictions in caves like Lascaux – were most likely organized according to hunting seasons. Before civilization, before self-awareness, we were animals among animals, driven by instinct, untroubled by abstraction. We hunted; we survived. Somewhere along the line, however, we began to see beyond necessity. We did not just kill; we recognized the act. We did not just consume; we considered. A carcass became more than food – it became an image, a threshold between presence and absence. We traced its outline in dust, saw echoes of our own mortality, and in that gap between the world and its representation, image-making was born.
Photography might be more directly linked to the cave than we thought. Archaeo-optical studies suggest that Paleolithic cave paintings may have been made using proto-photographic images projected through tiny holes in animal hides mounted at the entrances of the caves. If this is true, the famous upside-down horse of the Lascaux cave is not, as wishfully speculated by archaeologists, an example of early expressive painting or an emotive depiction of a horse falling into a void. It is instead an image of the very technology that inspired this first figurative art. The cave-camera flipped the image, and the dents in the surface on which the image was projected defined the depiction’s style. As John Berger says,“Apparently art did not begin clumsily.”
When you think of it, this link between photography and the beginnings of image making is not surprising at all. Camera obscura-like scenarios occur all the time. An image appears on a wall when light slips through a small window in a roof or through gaps in curtains and blinds. A tiny clear patch in an otherwise foggy or dirty car window can project a faint, inverted picture of the outside world onto the dashboard. Our eyes are essentially dark chambers with small holes in front that allow light to enter. Passing through a narrow pupil, images are cast upside down on the retina and only later corrected by the brain. Even before people, the small gaps between leaves acted as multiple pinholes, scattering tiny inverted images of the sun across the ground. The camera is not an invention—it is a premise.
When the original Lascaux cave was closed off to preserve its Paleolithic masterpieces from the moist breath of visitors, a replica was commissioned. In 1983, this copy cave opened just 200 meters from the original, offering, it was claimed, an almost identical experience. This coming academic year, Lascaux II is our Prism at the School of Sculpture. It is an image of a space, not the space itself. Lascaux II is exactly like Lascaux, but without its climate, its organic aging, or the presence of millennia-old surfaces touched by prehistoric hands. The air is not the same, the dampness is missing, and the faint traces of human presence, accumulated over thousands of years, are absent. The duplication is not indexical—there is no direct chemical or mechanical transfer, no imprint of light touching surface. And yet the copy insists on standing in for the lost, insists on continuity. It functions as evidence, but of what? It is a reproduction, not a trace. Lascaux II is not Lascaux, but it is also not not Lascaux.
Why Words Now
Why Words Now presents Jason Dodge
Jason Dodge b. 1969 is an artist and publisher/editor living on Møn. Recent solo exhibitions include Tomorrow I walked to a dark black start. MUDAM Luxembourg, Grazer Kunstverein and Cut a Door in the Wolf at MACRO in Rome. In 2012 Dodge founded and edits the poetry imprint Fivehundred places. which has published over 30 small monographic volumes by major and emerging contemporary poets.
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Join us at the School of Sculpture, The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, on October 7, at 6pm.
The event is free, no registration needed, just show up.
The lecture will be in English.
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“Why Words Now” is curated by artist and academy professor Simon Dybbroe Møller. Supported by Ny Carlsbergfondet and Aage og Johanne Louis-Hansen Fonden.
Why Words Now presents Nora Turato
Words matter - but not as much as the implicit intention behind them as we neglect tone and gesture with accelerating speed. For the next event in the ‘Why Words Now’ series, pulling back the curtain on words and demystifying the nonsense of language with Nora Turato.
Nora Turato (b.1991 Zagreb, Croatia) is an artist based in Amsterdam, NL. The breadth of Turato’s work spans across text-based installations, prints, books and performances, placing language as the central anchor of her practice. Turato’s work often weaves in collected language, as well as original text, channeling the constant stream of material into an original narrative she deconstructs and shapes through her multifaceted practice. Working within periodic cycles referred to as ‘pools’, Turato reflects on particular current cultural and societal tendencies, specifically, the language and zeitgeist that define these shifts. Turato’s series of artist books - also titled pools - accompany each cycle, with Turato likening them to ‘annual reports’ of the compiled text and language of that year.
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Join us at the School of Sculpture, The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, on Tuesday, April 29, at 6pm.
The event is free, no registration needed, just show up.
The lecture will be in English.
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“Why Words Now” is curated by artist and academy professor Simon Dybbroe Møller. Supported by Ny Carlsbergfondet.
