Andreas Gursky

Looking at the work of Andreas Gursky makes you feel very very small. Thinking that this is the way buildings are made and how contemporary economies develop makes this a great representation. The only problem is that this is too scary when you realise that this sequence of non-individual products and buildings are a perfect map to the postmodern civilised world. Its quite disturbing really. Supermarkets, infinite buildings with loads of windows, docks full of containers, cargo planes, the Hong Kong exchange market are just an example of how business, technology and communications are the new God of the Western world, these are the new religions.
“The vertiginous sublime of globalization”, the subject of Gursky’s work, is the contemporary locus of the sublime: a grand power in the face of which we feel our own smallness. We are in Burke’s words “annihilated”. these words of Axil Ohlin are quite good, she wrote a really good essay to analyse his work.