The Original Copy

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York presents an exhibition that showcases the two-centuries-long relationship between photography and sculpture with more than 300 images by some of the most important artists of the Nineteenth and the Twentieth Centuries. Its title, The Original Copy, alludes to the new dimension that the artistic object acquires when it is photographically reproduced. It simply becomes a new original. Works by one hundred artists tell the story of the close relationship between the two art forms since the birth of photography in 1839, a period in which creators such as Man Ray and Bruce Nauman utilized this new technique to reproduce and carry with them the images of sculptural objects that could not otherwise be transported. As André Malraux wrote in 1947, the history of art became "the history of what can be photographed." Roxana Marcoci, the curator of the exhibition at the MoMA, explains that the work by photographers like Williams Fox-Talbot, among other photographers of the same period, helped to explain "in a very creative way" what sculpture truly is. Marcoci particularly centers on the production by authors such as the majority of the members of the Dada Movement "whose sculptures were actually photographs destined to become images that, therefore, could not exist as three-dimensional objects." The exhibition now being shown in New York gathers some of the most representative photographs in history, such as Man Ray's Le Violon d'Ingres (Ingres' Violin, 1924). Another great work included in the MoMA exhibition is Le Saut dans le Vide (Leap into the Void, 1960) by Yves Klein. Bruce Nauman is another of the contemporary masters who has reinterpreted sculpture through photography and ¿ among other works by this artist- the exhibition includes his Self-Portrait as a Fountain, in which that author becomes a living statue. This exhibition on the symbiotic relationship between photography and sculpture will remain open until the beginning of November. It is scheduled to travel across the Atlantic in February to be shown at the Kunsthaus in Zurich.