Adam Fuss - Love

Adam Fuss - Love

Gelatin silver print photograph. 1992.

Frame: 43 1/2 × 33 1/2 in.

(http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/266855)

Adam Fuss, born in 1961, has refined a cameraless technique in his work, relying on the most basic infrastructure of photography: objects, light and light-sensitive material. His work includes photograms of water droplets, smoke, flowers, christening gowns, and birds captured in flight. He is also known for reviving the laborious daguerreotype technique, with breathtaking results.

His work is illustrated in several monographs, among them Adam Fuss and My Ghost. The Fundación Mapfre, Madrid, mounted a comprehensive survey of Fuss’s work in January 2011. His work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among many others.

(https://fraenkelgallery.com/artists/adam-fuss)

With his large-scale color photograms of water, babies, or, in this case, rabbits, Adam Fuss has breathed new life into the cameraless technique that became the hallmark of such modernist photographers as Man Ray and László Moholy-Nagy in the 1920s. Fuss made this image by placing two slaughtered and eviscerated rabbits on a photosensitized sheet of paper and exposing it to light. The spectacular color effects result from the chemical interactions between the rabbits' viscera and the properties of the printing paper. Combining the expansive gestures of Action Painting with the composed symmetry of a heraldic seal, Fuss turns this traditional symbol of fertility into an emblem of the rapturous, often gut-wrenching intertwining of two selves united in love.

(http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/281940)

This piece uses rhythm to create the sense of the blood flowing between the rabbits. They may be dead, but there is still a life-force connection in motion. The texture of the guts give a disturbing yet curiously heart-melding effect.

Adam Fuss here has shown us that even Love can be terrifying! These two creatures teach us a whole new meaning to "Loving each other to death". Or perhaps the reality of what love is not all polka dots and moonbeams as is commonly thought.