GRAZ.- The exhibition HyperAmerica. Landscape – Image – Reality turns its focus on the notion of the American landscape in the second half of the 20th century and illustrates how, in the painting of Hyperrealism, a romantic American tradition of the depiction of the land has become a kind of glorification that is highly significant for the history and development of our view of landscape.

With this exhibition the Kunsthaus Graz follows the hypothesis that a special kind of interaction with the land has developed in America since the 19th century that differs starkly from the equivalent notion in Europe. As a result of the ‘Manifest Destiny’ of the nation, it was given a different ideological twist to that in Europe, used for propaganda purposes for the conquering of a ‘unique and praised land’. America was depicted once again as an ideal world, as a great project for civilisation – a development that culminated in the photography and film of the 1960s and 1970s, in order then to shift into new forms of treating the landscape.

While, for example, the German Expressionists around the time of the First World War made an essential contribution to de-mythologising the social mainstream, painting in American Hyperrealism, which developed as a counter-trend to abstract art, was noticeably apolitical. The works of Hyperrealists appeared without emotion or meaning, out of date even when they were created, as the real living conditions that the artists lived with receded into the background of the glittering motifs on their pictures. The interest lay not with the motif, but with the surface – in this way, an idealised image of America is conveyed that tells of glamour, wealth and power.

The most important pictorial tool of Hyperrealism was the photographic model, which was meticulously copied. It was not a question of imitating photography as a medium, rather of questioning the claims to reality of that medium, which at this point was certainly not seen as an art form; only from the 1970s did the importance of photography grow. For the Hyperrealists, taking their bearings from the aesthetic of photographs was only a means to an end: that of attempting to comprehend the exaggeration of a reality that could no longer get by without this medium given the triumphal march of popular culture. Examples of this would be Richard Estes, whose glowing, glossily reflecting cityscapes do not come from a single photographic model, but are created rather by superimposing several pictures from the same place.

At the same time that the Hyperrealists were bringing concreteness back to art and dedicating themselves to the shining surfaces that the American dream and values associated with it such as freedom, equality of opportunity and success contained, a handful of photographers turned their lens on the everyday and the banal. ‘The New Topographic Movement’, named after an exhibition in Rochester, New York in 1975 ( New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-altered Landscape) ushered in a paradigm shift in art history through its approach to the documentary function of photography. Landscape (and what the photographers of the ‘New Topographic Movements’, drawing on the landscape scientist John Brinckerhoff Jackson, understood by that) changed not only in terms of motif, but also shifted to the centre of their attention, above all as a mirror of a modern social order.

As much as the deliberately ‘style-less’, non-judgemental photographs of the ‘New Topographics’ and the painting of the Hyperrealists converged on one another in terms of motif – the world-famous photograph of the Chevron gas station by Stephen Shore ( Stand , 1975) can surely be compared in aesthetic, superficially seen, with Ralph Goings’ depictions of coolly parked pick-up trucks in front of various urban settings – just as much did the artistic philosophies of their creators differ. ‘My paintings are about light, about the way things look in their environment and especially about how things look painted. Form, color and space are at the whim of reality, their discovery and organization is the assignment of the realist painter,’ as Ralph Goings formulated the background to his works in 1978. Shore’s picture of the gas station – in colour! Where was abstraction, where the artistic demands? – was a symbol of pure civilisation. While not visible in the foreground, the human is undoubtedly illustrated, her traces ineradicable.

To determine the differences and commonalities of the two currents that have developed side by side, paintings of American Hyperrealists are juxtaposed in the exhibition HyperAmerika with photographs of some ‘New Topographics’ and the positions associated with them. As a sort of reference to these chapters of art history and as a further link between painting and photography, positions flow into the show that accompanied these developments or which preceded them. Above all Ruscha, whose œuvre was pioneering both for painting and for photography, represents another bridge, all the more so as his work Every Building On The Sunset Strip, 1966, is on display in both exhibitions in the Kunsthaus Graz dedicated to ‘landscape’.