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© 2005-2008
Website by D. Maisel
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This series of photographs, The Dialectical Porn Rock, began in 1989 as a practical joke. Yet as often happens with jokes, much had been condensed into a single gesture. Aura Rosenberg was spending the summer in the mountains, away from her studio in New York. A friend, who is a sculptor and an avid fisherman, was also vacationing there. He had been using pornographic photos in his work. She planned to surprise him by planting rocks covered with pictures of naked bodies in his favorite trout stream. Taking rocks from the stream, she pasted on photos torn from magazines, then brushed on a protective layer of polyester resin, and put them back in the water. Struck by the contrast between the altered rocks and their natural setting, she decided to photograph them. Only later, did she appreciate the rocks as objects in themselves and started to arrange them outdoors both in carefully laid out forms and random piles. Rosenberg titled the series of sculptural installations and photographs The Dialectical Porn Rock after Robert Smithson's essay "The Dialectical Landscape", to which she felt an affinity. She photographed the rocks in a variety of urban and rural landscapes throughout New York, California, the Southwest, Germany, Italy and Switzerland. The Salzburger Kunstverein reproduced a selection of these photos and rock piles in their exhibition catalog Real Sex. Grand Street magazine and Jungle World, a German journal for politics and culture, have both published portfolios from this series. Eikon Zeitschrift fuer Fotographie reproduced it in a portfolio of Rosenberg's photos with an essay by Marius Babias. In October 2003, White Columns invited her to recreate an installation she did in one of their White Rooms in 1989. |