Scott McFarland's The Granite Bowl in the Berlin Lust Garten

When I visited Regen Projects Gallery in West Hollywood to see Scott McFarland’s Works on Paper this weekend there was one piece that I was particularly drawn to because of the location it depicts, The Granite Bowl in the Berlin Lust Garten (2006). This inkjet type print photograph depicts a famous landmark in the German capitol, at that point a Prussian city, that was installed in 1831. My immediate draw came from my own experience of seeing this bowl during my travels to Europe. Then I remembered a particular painting in Berlin's Nationalgalerie close by, Granite Bowl in the Pleasure Gardens of Berlin by Johann Erdmann Hummel (c. 1831).
At first the photograph appeared to be a simple scene, one of no importance. The two young children, obviously related based on their similar physical features, seemed a bit awkward and posed, but otherwise, I thought it to be a snapshot, much like the one I took of the bowl while in Berlin. Upon learning how McFarland created this and many of his other photographs, I learned how complex of a scene this really is. McFarland uses multiple negatives, often taken over a matter of days, weeks, and even months, and combines them digitally into a seamless print. His interest is in breaking through the concept of a photograph being an image of a single instant in time and space.
A fuller narrative is created as well. With just one negative, there may only be one or two people depicted. We may just have the dog with his owner half shown, or even only half of the brother-sister group. But by overlapping the various negatives, Mr. McFarland manipulates his work into a greater piece. We can now ask ourselves, why are the brother and sister so psychologically distant? Or, who is the small girl with the accordion and where is her mother? Is her mother the woman with the baby carriage? How long has that man been sleeping under the bowl? These are all questions that can be asked together because the negatives are combined that couldn’t be asked if we had just the single frame.
Even Hummel’s scene of the same object is not as crowded. In fact, it is clear by the mere dominance of the bowl in Hummel’s painting, that it is not the figures that are the main subject, but the bowl itself. When the nineteenth-century artist painted the granite bowl, it was before it had actually been lowered. This allowed people to catch their reflection in the underside of the bowl. The bowl was part of a larger civic improvement project and thus was a symbol of civic pride and the power. The stone came from the Fürstenwalde, approximately 72 kilometers away. It was upturned by 100 men, hauled to the Spree, and then transported by boat.
If the bowl is the subject in Hummel’s painting, what is the subject in McFarland’s photograph? I’ve already said that by combining these multiple negatives, McFarland creates a fuller story. But, if we consider who/what is constantly present in every negative, we must conclude that the bowl, which also dominates the McFarland’s composition, is the main subject. The other subject that is present in each negative is the Berliner Dom, also in Hummel’s painting, though it is minimalized by placing it in the background and pushed into a corner in the composition.
Furthermore, in Hummel’s painting the figures have a significant amount of interaction with the bowl, but in McFarland’s photograph, not only do none of the main figures look at the bowl, but none of them look at each other. It is only in the background do we see people interacting with each other. This creates a sense of isolation between the figures. In Hummel’s painting, the bowl draws the citizens to it, unifying them even if it is just in their curiosity. To the people in the photograph, the bowl is nonconsequential, except for maybe the man who seeks it for shade.
It wasn’t until I started to research Scott McFarland and his work in this show that I realized how much more there was than a photograph of a place I had been to. Now I see that it is more than just a snapshot. McFarland’s process results in a photograph of complex relationships and interaction. By contrasting the photograph to Hummel’s painting of almost 200 years earlier, we see this shift in the two major relationships: human/human and human/bowl. Scott McFarland most likely wanted to create a photograph that expanded the concept of time and space in photography, but he got more.