Small but fine – Glass reviews Pin Up! at pavlov’s dog, Berlin

Small but fine – Glass reviews Pin Up! at pavlov’s dog, Berlin

On opening night, it is obvious even from the end of Bergstrasse that something is going on at pavlov’s dog (sic). People are spilling from the pavement into the street, braving near-zero temperatures to attend Pin Up!, the current group exhibition of a photographer’s gallery that has been presenting shows of increasing quality, intrigue and diversity over the last 18 months. Beyond the tiresome battle-lines of fine art and commercial that still, almost beyond belief, confound the techno-luddites surrounding photographic art, pavlov’s dog has thrown away the bell and decided it is altogether preferable moving to their own beat.

Inside, it is that nonsensical German platitude, “klein aber fein”, that comes to mind. Small but fine – a sort of classier adjunct to Berlin’s unofficial motto, “arm aber sexy” (poor but sexy). It is forcefully brought home here while wedged in a crush of people all craning their necks to see artwork in a gallery only slightly larger than a postage stamp for giants. The works hang from low down to high up, in conscious or unconscious homage to the nineteenth-century Salon. There are prints in luscious black and white alongside colours pushed to super-8 saturation next to iPhone images slick as black-market peddlers.

But if that implies a curatorial confusion, it would do a great injustice to a show of collective wit, humour and individualism, precisely because of each work’s cheek-to-jowl proximity to another. In light of the theme, that is more likely part of the plan.

Small but fine Pin Up

The 54 artists involved in this ambitious exhibition have all been invited to contribute their own interpretation to a theme that is older than photography itself: the pin-up, that image – male or female – where inaccessibility, longing, desire and secrecy meet in a glamorous collision, usually in those enclosed spaces where only people with secret codes gain access. In that sense, the tiny environment and floor-to-ceiling presentation is ideal for the kaleidoscopic mixture of men, women and sexual peccadilloes.

Schoolboy locker, prison cell, naval berth, the underside of pillows and barely utterable dreams. These are the provinces of a photographic genre that is at once everywhere and nowhere: what Donald Rumsfeld would perhaps call a known unknown, in the unlikely event that he has such desires to explore.

Rita Hayworth was the first to gain truly worldwide fame in our era of relentless image-making, travelling bodiless in her permanent evening gowns pasted next to soldier’s cots. Before her, however, are the unnamed men and women who appear in a terrain stretching from Parisian demimondes to British seaside postcards with a long historical detour into the mosaics of Herculanaeum. The pin-up, in short, is as old as image-making itself.

This explosive mixture of illicit and glamourous, secret and world-famous, is only the starting point here. There are photographs that explore the personal fetishes of their photographers, and others that gleefully satirise the hackneyed poses of contemporary advertising. Desire and ridicule rub shoulders. Works produced meticulously under studio lights offer a conceptual embrace to those made with compact camera and flashed tit. Some are erotic. Others slapstick. Put together, and you begin to sense the complex figures that art and desire have always been enmeshed within, even if it is only since photographs that their gyrations have been so minutely decanted.

by Ruvi Simmons

Opening Times: Thursday to Saturday from 4 – 8 pm or by appointment
pavlov’s dog,  Bergstrasse 19, 10115 Berlin
Email: iwan@pavlovsdog.org

 

About The Author

Berlin-based writer

Related Posts