Ulrik Heltoft’s “The Voynich Botanical Studies and The Origin of Specimen 52v” artworks will be at Andersen’s Contemporary art gallery in Copenhagen over the next few weeks (20.04.2013 to 11.05.2013), and I have to say that they’re really rather… eerie. But in a nice way!
Essentially, what Heltoft and his collaborator Miljohn Ruperto have done is recreate (after a fashion) a number of the Voynich Manuscript’s curious plant drawings. Their manipulated images were then fixed as large silver gelatin prints, lifting the Voynich’s unpindownable unworldliness (and indeed impracticability) to curious new heights. Having said that, I’m not sure what “The Origin of Specimen 52v” specifically refers to (apart from f52v itself, of course). Perhaps it will become obvious as photos of the installation start to appear on the Internet.
Anyway, here’s their 52r plant side by side with the Voynich’s f52r plant:
If you want to see some more, here’s a link to four pretty high-resolution Voynich Botanical Studies images.
But why did they do it? Well, according to this site…
Ulrik Heltoft (b. 1973) graduated from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 1999 and from Yale University in 2001. He is an associate professor of photography at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and has had solo exhibitions at Kirkhoff Contemporary Art, Raucci e Santamaria in Naples and Wilfried Lentz in Rotterdam. His works have also been shown at places such as Participants Inc., New Museum, Anthology Film Archive in New York, and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Heltoft’s artistic activity is characterized by formally rigorous, technically perfect works in which minimal displacements suggest that “something else” is at play.
So basically, Heltoft is a Yale-graduated photography professor specializing in a rigorous-looking, false-historic aesthetic. Really, could there ever have been a flicker of a doubt in anyone’s mind that one day he’d ‘do’ the Voynich? Hmmm… maybe next he’ll do pages from its balneo section, but where every ‘nymph’ is the same model. Or perhaps instead he’ll move on to the Vinland Map? It’s always nice to have a Plan B, right? 😉
Thanks Nick!
His/their folio 56v is amazing.
To see them in full detail, use second link (first requires FB sign-in), and then just for a minute copy the image to a ‘paint’ program or similar. You get an enormous high res image -as big as a Beinecke scan page – and you can see every detail of the gelatin print. Looks almost as if the model to be photographed was made partly of a real plant and partly of wire and paper.
– then, of course, I’d recommend deleting the temp copy –
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