A travelling exhibition focuses on history’s silent witnesses, writes Alex Sudheim
The crowd: that swollen, seething animal, comes to life when human beings swarm together in a single unity of desire. As an organism the crowd works its seduction by promising the surrender of individual will to the mass. Individuals, no longer responsible for their actions, become sublimated into a scheme, more epic.
This phenomenon, of the mass in conflict with individual behaviour, is something that obsesses British/Norwegian artist Michael O’Donnell. “The experience of being in a crowd has been described as akin to the feeling which overcomes one just before death by drowning. A sort of tranquil miasma of peace that engulfs the body,” he says.
O’Donnell’s vast and exhaustive photographic installations which make up his Witnesses series – simultaneously on show in Sweden, Finland and Durban’s NSA Gallery – are subtle and profound deconstructions of the very nature of human history.
With his approach grounded in the simple concept of “the witness”, O’Donnell investigates the creation of collective memory through the device of the crowd. Historically significant moments, however epochal they may be, are ultimately functions of the arbitrary, mostly anonymous people who make up the collective of witnesses who ensure the event’s transmission into history.
“An event takes place and you are there. Whether by chance or by design we cannot know; whether or not it was a momentous event we only discover later. But the fact is you were there, a witness on behalf of everyone for our collective heritage,” he explains.
The most fascinating aspect of O’Donnell’s work is his intense focus upon the apparently random, faceless members of the crowd at certain historically crucial events. His scrupulous and enormous portraits of unidentified individuals in the throng are reflective of a lateral shift away from the obvious renown of an event – that is, what famous people were involved – to the nameless participant in the event whose witnessing it makes him an essential element in the formation of that moment of history.
The centrepiece of O’Donnell’s installation in Durban is the gigantic portrait of an anonymous man in the crowd of onlookers at the Berlin Olympic Games in 1936. As Jesse Owens crossed the line to win the 100m dash – the event which caused Adolf Hitler great personal humiliation, for a black man had beaten his Aryan athletes – the man in the trilby hat turned his head away. Isolating this head in the crowd, O’Donnell rephotographed it and painstakingly handprinted the 224 A4 photographs which make up the portrait.
A similar work in the Swedish exhbitions depicts an unidentified man who has just been released from Buchenwald, while in Finland O’Donnell has recreated in large scale the portrait of an unkown black man in the crowd outside Pollsmoor prison when Nelson Mandela was released.
In a separate work in his Durban show, O’Donnell has intriguingly blurred the line between the static and frenzied viewer by dismantling Heinrich Hoffman’s famous photograph of a jubilant crowd in Munich’s Odeonsplatz celebrating the outbreak of World War I on August 14 1914.
By chance, one of the men in the crowd was a young Hitler. Hoffman encircled the head of the future fhrer and sent it to him, which led to Hoffman’s appointment as Hitler’s personal photographer until the Third Reich perished in a Berlin bunker in 1944.
O’Donnell has meticulously re- photographed and hand-printed every single head in the crowd – many just grainy, unrecognisable blurs – and separately recomposed it in a vast installation consisting of over 350 individual prints.
The crowd, which had relieved its members of their individuality to become a single mass, is now forced to fracture that seal. The impact is similar to dropping a frozen block of ice into hot water and watching it violently crack apart.
A cryogenically frozen chunk of the past, pitched protesting into the bubbling torrent of the present: angry, broken, vulnerable and dangerous.