Joachim Schmid, Other People's Photographs

Alice O'Malley, Community of Elsewheres

Alice O'Malley lectured at ICP last week, showing work she has done since around 1990, which seems not so long ago, albeit it's almost 20 years. Alice's early work is from the Clit Club & other nightclub venues downtown, but her main body of work is a series of black-&-white portraits, a tiny portion of which have been published in the book Community of Elsewheres.

The portraits are done simply - frontal, centered, collaborative with the subjects. Many of the subjects are performers and artists & as such have some public existence, such as Antony of Antony & the Johnsons, or Kembra Pfaler. However what I find of interest is the great attention & regard O'Malley brings to her subjects. I am not convinced one has to know anything about the sitters to find them thoroughly alluring. The photos are dandyish & witty. The photos are an excellent guide to the low-rent talents of downtown NYC & all that has been great about living in NY, even as it seems a kind of diminishing world, at the mercy of landlords & mortality. O'Malley uses the camera as a kind of memory guide, citing, among others, the photographs of Peter Hujar & the paintings of Romaine Brooks.

Some artists need never cite any other artists in their presentations; I am struck by O'Malley's citations (also she mentions Cecil Beaton & the salons of Natalie Barney) as indicative of her seriousness, as well as her consciousness in making a kind of history, which would potentially be ignored otherwise, which is queer & lush & fabulous.

O'Malley cites Peter Hujar as an influence. I would also include another photographic portraitist, David Armstrong, who likewise makes seductive, compelling images. The portrait, as a form, flirts with utility & function: it has a job to do. It needs to be recognizable as a portrait to be understood. & it revels in its illusionism: we have to believe it for it to exist. I think of Hujar, Armstrong, & O'Malley as being almost like Victorians, in their dedication to portraiture. While each has been depicting their immediate social orbit, a bigger picture emerges in this endeavor & how fortunate we are to get a glimpse of it.

Another aspect which comes to mind is that in these portfolios there is also a sense of loss - from AIDS, drugs, the vagaries of time. We can see how much preciousness has slipped through our fingers, as it were, leaving us with these shadows of what had once been.

Looking In: Robert Frank's The Americans

One of the difficulties of looking at photographic oeuvres in recent retrospectives is the presence of the photographer him or her self, whether as a live presence or the active involvement of an estate. I don't find this remarked upon at all which I find problematic. I have been disappointed in exhibitions of truly great photographers such as Lee Friedlander, Diane Arbus & William Eggleston, primarily by the exhibits having a hagiographic aspect which avoided the nature of the work itself in deference to a museum-mausoleum solemnity of tedious seriousness.

Curiously, the current exhibition of Robert Frank's work for the book The Americans which originated at the National Gallery in DC avoids such institutional tedium, perhaps by virtue of its focus on a particular book & body of work. That the exhibit is about a publication, rather than a more general body of work, is remarkable too, although in some ways the book, in its various editions & incarnations, still appears somewhat peripheral to the images, which are shown in remarkably lush exhibition prints. Highlights of the show for me are a wall of work prints, which are in poor shape & unimpressive technically, as well as a vitrine of various editions of the book which is at the exit of the show. Both show a Robert Frank in process, as it were, as opposed to a grand old man of the medium. It seems unfair to lionize Frank or historicize his work, as what distinguishes it is its ambivalence about imagery & meaning, its intense tension in contemplating the visual. Frank's ambivalence seems young to me & unfinished, unresolved. Seeing such gorgeous prints obscures the work somehow. Perhaps my happiest encounter w/ Frank is in the Tod Papageorge book about Frank & Walker Evans - reading, study seem to be proper forms for looking at Frank. Or I think of the photos of the poet Allen Ginsberg, which can seem unexceptional except for his captions, but what captions they can be! I have yet to see Frank contextualized say in terms of the St Marks Poetry Project, or downtown NY once upon a time.

The Americans is a strange powerful book. Given its ambitious title it is remarkably unspecific about "America" except as a last resort, a vague & difficult window onto troubling opportunities, if at all. The title promises a travelog which never happens except in the most abject manner. Unheroic, crummy, stupid, boring - this is what is revealed stretching from sea to shining sea.

Empirical Experience: The Artist, Information, and the Book

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2009 THE NY ART BOOK FAIR - PS1, LIC, QUEENS

This session explores the use of data in the construction of artists’ books: The accumulation of information, its management, and concurrently its potential mismanagement, have been templates for artistic interrogations of the perimeters of the real, the document. In the age of the internet, with more than 1,001 wikis of unstable veracity ready at one’s fingertips for any conceivable topic, the artist’s book, exploring and mimicking the book form as a vessel of knowledge, becomes a rich counter-consciousness of existing cultural forms. Jacqueline Hassink and William E. Jones, two artists that visually communicate data-gathering activities, present their information and evidence in conversation with like-minded moderator Bernard Yenelouis.
Matthew Carson, organizer
Bernard Yenelouis, moderator
Jacqueline Hassink
William E. Jones

Peter Hujar - Photographs 1956-1958

The current show of Peter Hujar's early photographs, dated 1956-1958, at Matthew Marks Gallery, convinces me (not that I really needed to be convinced) that Peter Hujar is one of truly great photographers of our time. "Our time" may be a bit porous - these images are now over 50 years old, & Hujar died in 1987, but perhaps his "time" is now & in the future. My suspicion is that there is much work that has never been seen, like the images in the show, which I do not think have had much circulation.

The photographs are of what are now referred to as "developmentally challenged" children. One of my students, who accompanied me to the show, asked, "Are these special needs students?" These terms are bureaucratic & with all good intentions, more inhuman than any pejorative term in their sentimental but airtight classification. It's language which acts as a placebo for the speaker, absolving the speaker of having to say much else. The Hujar images predate a very well-known body of work by Diane Arbus of the same subject, by about 10 years & have some structural similarities (square format, black-&-white). The Arbus images are rightly famous for their moodiness, their sense of isolation & incarceration. Peter Hujar's images have a very different emotional tenor in what could be seen as ebullience, anarchy & a very deep sweetness. Both bodies of work were done in institutions - institutions for those who would be classified (using the volume titles employed by August Sander for his planned books of portraits) as among "The Last People." Such institutions also function as as a kind of container for society, hiding away its defective members. The intrusion of a photographer in such a setting has many possibilities, such as a journalistic narrative of whatever stripe. What distinguishes both the Arbus & Hujar portfolios is their media-uselessness. Why? What for? The photographer in her/his naked voyeurism shows a curiosity & suspension of judgment which allows for multiple readings of the subjects & their images. We can't look at the photos & know automatically what to think.

Peter Hujar's photographs resonate with me so strongly. Everyone I know thinks he's great, so I feel a bit presumptuous saying this, but he appears neglected in histories & anthologies. His photographs of animals are as strong as his portraits. His photographs of nighttime streets are as erotic as his nudes. Hujar's work is permeated with mortality: I hesitate to describe his work as morbid, despite the many photographs of dead animals, or the photographs of the catacombs in Palermo, or a portfolio I saw once of the tableaux of the long-gone Wax Musee at Coney Island, which was primarily of serial killers in action (I remember Richard Speck strangling a nurse, in particular). Or the portrait of Candy Darling in her hospital bed. Or the portrait of Edwin Denby just before Denby died. Nevertheless in such finely wrought forms I think there's a strong sense of corporeality: Flesh has its own life, whether it is a waddling duck or the enormous cock of a nude boy.

Estimations of mortality are written out of a lot of current photographic discourse. The photographic is understood more in semiotic terms, or as a cultural product. Hujar's photographs are more like a 17th century memento mori image: a Dutch bouquet in which in such splendid beauty there is the beetle & the worm, slightly hidden, the slight but advancing wilt, with their intimations of passing.

I try to discern: what are my favorite Hujar images? The list just extends - it is a useless prospect. I hesitate to use the word "classic photography" to describe his work, which evokes more formal black-&-white images of western landscapes or abstractions of natural forms done with The Zone System, yet Hujar is part of such a former photographic world. Hujar's work can be classified in very traditional terms: portraits, nudes, cityviews & landscapes. But the work is intense & immediate which undermines its great formality. Hujar's work is imbued with a remarkable moral sense: the same level of carefulness goes towards both a woman passed out in his stairwell on 2nd Ave, or a portrait of Miss Peggy Lee. I am also reminded of this in his portraits of the elderly Edwin Denby or Lotte Eisner. I have little reference to Hujar's psychology, except in the work, which is perhaps a more ideal way to contemplate anyone's creative endeavors. One hopes that at some point there is a truly great book of this work, in all its scope.

Dan Graham

I have been to the Dan Graham show now a few times. It isn't a large show per se & as I understand it, he is extremely prolific, but still the work has a peculiar density to it: the film & video work in particular are time-based, as are ostensibly some of the installations of the mirror chambers. But it's not just that: compared to other recent shows of conceptual artists shown at the Whitney, Robert Smithson & Gordon Matta-Clark, the Dan Graham show is remarkably immaterial, it's about questioning situations, space, roles, authority - it is emphatically not about the object but about a physical, social & psychological dynamic.

How curious to think of Dan Graham as immaterial as 1/2 of the show is of his mirror chambers, which are part carnival mirror-labyrinth, part horrifying mall architecture. Both seductive & repellently dystopic. In all their physicality, they are nevertheless about claustrophobia, entrapment, a paranoid sense of totalitarian control - issues not necessarily evident in the glass, wood & steel, per se. There's a sense of humor in the displacement of the senses, the distortion of perceptions, but also there's a deadly serious sense of interrogation, of isolation, of torture to it all, too.

The work by Dan Graham I am most familiar with is the magazine piece Homes for America which was originally published in
Arts Magazine. The layout is on display along with a slideshow of the images & some boards on which images are mounted - a kind of educational presentation. The images, shot in Staten Island & New Jersey, are mock-serious in setting up distinctly formal arrangements of housing developments, which are of a distinctly lowbrow nature. The symmetry or assymetry of doorways & windows. The geometry of cheap materials. The abject non-spaces of fast-food places. In a retrospective manner the images are quite beautiful - but of a chintzy, Las Vegas, cardboard & tinsel kind of sophistication - something promising more than the shit at hand. The images are mounted on boards which are now curling w/ age & humidity.

The cheapness & lack of grandiosity are perhaps what I find most compelling about the work. There is so much to think about in looking at this work.

Slap Your Gondola production stills