Robert Voit: The Alphabet of New Plants

"This book is at once a sort of archive and index of flowers, but one understands quite quickly in looking at them that there is something wrong about them. The flowers don’t appear to be completely right. Once you look closely you understand that the contours of a stem, for example, are clearly made of plastic, or that the structure is man-made fabric and not really the product of nature. One is prompted immediately to reflect on the dynamics of real and fake in cultural production. The reason I chose this book however is because here again we have an artistic reflection on another book. Voit makes direct reference to an artist book by Karl Blossfeldt, whose original Alphabet of Plants (or Urformen der Kunst in German) published in 1929. Blossfeldt was one of the pioneers of the ‘new objectivity’ movement. This book became a best-seller the time and it’s still a sort of Bible for photographers. Robert Voit studied as a master class student of the renowned photographer Thomas Ruff at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf , and dedicated himself to recurring questions of authenticity and artificiality. “We live in a world in which ‘fake’ has become an important term, surrounded by fakes and imitations of all varieties.” Represented in this book is an entire history of contemporary photography, though Voit is a conceptual photographer who really develops his projects, often to the extent of producing an artist book, which in this case is a close study of these themes which also becomes an historical project. I chose this book because I wanted to include an esteemed contemporary artist, and consider how his work reflects on art. He’s using his inheritance of the new objectivity of the photography from the 20s and considering many of the same themes, only with fake flowers. Where Blossfeldt had done this with naturally occurring plants, an index of natural plants, Voit translates it into a contemporary document with manufactured objects, plastic flowers that may appear rare or precious but which are available to buy just about anywhere. These decorative objects, made in China more often than not, under his lens as represented in these photographs, become something really fascinating and alluring and beautiful, but not straightforwardly so. It’s interesting to reflect that after all that it’s not only the history of art, but the future itself is built out of fragments of the past that we inherit. Artists like Voit recapture the spirit of previous artistic movements and then transform them into something contemporary. We live in a world in which ‘fake’ has become an important term, surrounded by fakes and imitations of all varieties. I chose this book also as an exemplary artist’s book, whereby the bound object becomes a prized cultural artefact in its own right. His is a really careful evaluation of each detail and component of making a book, and how these elements come together so really carefully chosen—from the foreword of the book which references the historic foreword that appeared in Blossfeldt’s original Alphabet of Plants to the tipped-in image on the cover, the beautiful fabric binding and embossing. This really is a beautiful book. It’s exemplary for me how content and form come together in this object."