One Minute Sculpture. Broom 2017

Elina Brotherus made this photograph, *One Minute Sculpture. Broom,* sometime this century, or maybe late last century! A woman stands on a roof overlooking Paris, dressed in working clothes. She holds a broom out at an angle, it’s like a precarious balancing act. The broom is a visual interruption, it prevents the composition from being just a beautiful vista. There’s a funny tension between the background and the foreground, and between the activity implied and the apparent lack of activity in the image. The muted palette and documentary style give the image an everyday quality, but the staging is very self-conscious, which brings it closer to painting for me. The title, *One Minute Sculpture,* reminds me of the work of Erwin Wurm who makes these absurd performance pieces with everyday objects. Brotherus also takes the everyday and makes it subtly ridiculous, suggesting that a photo can be a sculpture, if only for a moment.