One Way Street

from the bus

2012-01-10T15:24:00.000-08:00

Several years ago at ICP I heard Walter Rosenblum lecture. Rosenblum began his lecture with a rhetorical question to the audience, asking who there had gone into debt for an education? & Rosenblum saw that as a problem, that for a photographer, to do that, it put one in a permanently vexed situation: there would always be a debt to repay, and a certain amount of obedience to a paycheck, which would inform any voice that the photographer may have, whether directly or indirectly.

Walter Rosenblum was speaking long before our artificial bubble of prosperity broke. In a certain sense his alarm at the excesses of credit was not dissimilar from what I had heard as a child as a "Depression mentality" which was considered commonplace for the world of my grandparents, & a residual effect for my parents' generation: a distrust of banks, a suspicion of credit, a fear of losing what little there is. In the bright illusory lights of the post WWII boon economy, extended decades further into the excesses of our recent times, this all could sound a bit dour & old-fashioned.

By the same token this could also be perceived as a way to apprehend the world. One of the themes of Robert Frank's The Americans was the contrast between an unreal boosterism almost wholly missing yet still informing the streets & highways traveled in the images: Is it poverty or alienation which is depicted? & whose alienation? In Frank's photos the suggestion that it is a near universal, that there is a shared abjection, behind the godawful illusion of America, which floats like an European colonialist concept of deliverance & domination gone amok, like some sort of cruel deity. (I can hear a line which is repeated in a few of Mike Leigh's films, "We're on the top of the world" which is uttered when that idea seems all too pathetic).

On a visit to the Metropolitan Museum the other day, in the galleries for Drawings, Prints & Photographs, I saw a gorgeous Frank print from his series "On the bus" . But what is beautiful about this? It is a scene from a street, presumably New York City, & the composition is based on chance, randomness, it has no distinct order or scenario, it is fragmentary, it reveals nothing.

On a physical level it occurred to me: Frank isn't shooting through the glass of a window, he could open the bus window. The street is a thoroughfare but it also is not pure moving traffic, either. These people are using the space of the sidewalk differently. It's not just a passage, or a passage which is without anything other than flow. New Yorkers can mention "pedestrian rage" with blitheness: it must have been worse then!

On the other hand, what was lacking then was the systematic planning and design which turn every second in a public sphere into a kind of utility. We live now in a world that is not dissimilar from the futuristic fantasies of total planning, in which every process of being in a place becomes part of a calculated system. Well maybe it's not a new concept at all - the Hausmannization of Paris did this as well, but without the excess of sensory prosthetics which now determine our everyday. All of us, including the wealthy shoppers of Fifth Ave are marching in step now, to the greater order of the official street. Our machines turn us off to the actual world around this, & the camera itself is implicated in this.

Perhaps that is what seems strange & engaged about the Frank photograph, & also the current show at the Jewish Museum, The Radical Camera: New York's Photo League, 1936-1951: what one sees is the camera as a conduit of emotions. There's a sense of commonality in the idea of the photographic image which is social as much as it is personal & particular: it can reflect both & it can be shared.

The Photo League itself was a small scale, grassroots organization, which facilitated the work of people who became professionals as well as those who could be categorized as "hobbyists". As I understand it, there was a lot more ambiguity about the distinctions between such forms - perhaps because of the small paycheck involved. At the Photo League class cost between 4 - 7 dollars & it had no glamour, no sex appeal, & no class - it was there for those who were interested. & in its brief fragile history, one could have encountered the likes of Lewis Hine or Paul Strand - it still boggles my mind that I have met people, like Morris Engel, who learned from them.

At this point in our sordid economic history this now seems implausibly enchanted. While the streets of New York were never far from darkness - never far from the Poe story, The Man of the Crowd, with its conclusion of never-knowing, of pure "modern" chaos incarnate facing us down, it still managed to have a presence, even when it is stylized such as in William Klein's New York book, or the early Stanley Kubrick film Killer's Kiss (filmed in Times Square, Washington Heights, Chelsea), which in our virtual world is now ignored. Attention to the world at hand seems possible in this work.

Nam June Paik's Global Groove at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University

2011-10-23T16:11:00.001-07:00

The proximity of my studio in Olive Tjaden Hall next door to the Johnson Museum of Art has led me to frequent the museum fairly often, whether for getting soup during the week at the 2 Naked Guys Cafe in the lobby, or simply to loiter with or without intent.

The Johnson is a relatively new museum, opening in 1973. Cornell University had no centralized art collection until the organization of the Andrew Dickson White Museum in 1953, which was located in the A.D. White House, now the home of the Society for the Humanities. The A.D. White Museum grew into the Johnson Museum with the support of alumnus Herbert F. Johnson '22. The Johnson is a small but spectacular I.M. Pei design, a small concrete tower on the north end of Libe Slope, with views on all sides. The view north towards Cayuga Lake over the thick trees of Cayuga Heights & beyond being particularly pastoral & picturesque.

I.M. Pei's design is notable on several levels. For a concrete tower, with a bunker-like aspect, it is also paradoxically light & airy. There is a 3-storey sculpture deck on the 2nd floor which floats above Libe Slope, with views towards the Arts Quad & the original buildings of the university: Morrill, McGraw & White Halls. The best views are at the top of the building: the 5th floor Asian galleries which has views on all sides & the 6th floor conference room, which has a wall of window facing north to the lake. The galleries vary considerably in size & proportion, which also influence one's experience of the entire building: it seems much larger than it actually is, there are a lot of different kinds of galleries. Such variety expands one's sense of the place.

With the recent expansion completed, some of the existing spaces have been retrofitted, in particular the Asian galleries on the 5th floor. Included in the Asian galleries is a space for modern & contemporary art, which are currently installed with 2 Nam June Paik videos. Yesterday morning I watched Global Groove (1973) which I hadn't seen in several years.

At the risk of dating myself, I had seen Paik in the past at Anthology Film Archives, and even earlier, once I saw Charlotte Moorman, which was as exciting as when I saw Yma Sumac perform at a tapas bar/piano bar in Chelsea, years & years ago. In our virtual world it now seems kind of impossible - a flesh-&-blood encounter now seems moot, likewise both Paik & Moorman now fall into a purgatory of history. Paik's videos look utopian in what is now our hellish conflation of technology & capitalism aka the internet.

The ebullient silliness of Paik still seems potent to me: What is best about television is the ability to change the channel, randomly, & that is what Global Groove is like - going from one thing to another with a kind of hilarious velocity.

If there is a dark side in Paik, it is in the credits: Global Groove was made in conjunction with an experimental television workshop in Binghamton. Now all that (the idea of experimental television, Binghamton as something more than the depressed town it is now) seems lost. Although we still have the specter of tap dancers, John Cage, Charlotte Moorman, et al to remind us of better things.

Hans-Peter Feldmann: The Hugo Boss Award

2011-06-21T10:52:00.000-07:00

The quote, or more properly, misquote (probably), is from Thomas Bernhard: In one of the books he wrote that getting a prize is society's way of shitting on you. It has been many years since I first encountered what is probably a genuine misread, yet in whatever error it exists in my memory, it has somehow stayed with me, as a call to stoicism contra the capricious vulgarity of any sort of award.

At this point I am from an older generation when awards had a clearer caste system: When Pia Zadora getting the Golden Globe was kitsch both for Zadora AND the Golden Globe, for example (& one could appreciate Pia Zadora even more for being such an ebullient prize winner, but of what?). Awards add luster & validation to the most routine entertainments - my sense is in the future the database of awards will function as a social mirror much in the same way that advertisements can, as embodiments which seem full in their time, & afterwards act more as a graph of lost illusions.

Last week I saw the Hans-Peter Feldmann installation at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, in conjunction with his award of this year's Hugo Boss Award, which comes with a grant of $100,000. Feldmann's installation is lining the walls & posts of the gallery with 100,000 US dollar bills, pinned in even rows, floor to ceiling.

The gallery is large. Before I saw the installation, I had wondered if 100,000 dollar bills covers a little or a lot. There is some overlap involved which makes me think that it did involve some creative geometry to include all the bills. US money is remarkably drab - the neo-classical graphics are lugubrious both in dull, narrow monochromic tones & in all-too-official, historicizing imagery. The sober tonalities line what is otherwise a brilliantly white cube contemporary gallery. The dollars look like some dull reptilian scale. That week, my friend S. whose interests are in the realm of haute couture & what he terms luxe, told me about a $40,000 handbag made of wild crocodile he had seen. Unlike such a luxe handbag (well, at least for some), seeing $100,000 pinned to the walls is extremely static & uninteresting, which is I am guessing, precisely the point, or a point - I think there's a lot going on with this installation.

The Hugo Boss Award is a global art prize: it presupposes a globalized art economy, presumably without national borders. There's a lot of conceit in this: one could still stake out borders within this magical Everywhere. "Global" is for a "global" class which excludes most of the globe. A "global" award functions like any global corporate action. It is not art which is the global Esperanto linking all, but the economy itself, & in things like the Hugo Boss Award, or the Guggenheim franchise (from NYC to Abu Dhabi), it is all luxe decoration, & perhaps not as satisfying as a wild crocodile handbag. One looks sadly for more purpose than that, & come up short. It reminds me of a visual pun in Jacques Tati: an office lined with travel posters for far-flung places of the world, all of which look identical.

The installation was remarkably empty, in fact it was downright peaceful. Other than seeing 2 boys stopped from photographing one another posing with wide-open arms in front of the plenitude of dollars, there isn't much to do in the gallery per se, although I found it remarkably moving, perhaps because of its visual spareness, & that it could function without the existence of any art object. If anything, going into the next gallery, for an installation of post-Impressionist paintings from the Thannhauser Collection, which included, immediately, a spectacular Van Gogh of the mountains of St Remy, & a Gauguin Tahitian fantasy of a near-nude boy with a horse in a jungle, both of which I could describe flippantly as masterpieces, was quite jarring. & if anything, $100,000 could buy a few inches of these paintings at best. & masterpiece quality aside, these paintings looked like psychedelic posters in comparison.

Feldmann's installation made $100,000 look insubstantial, even a bit unreal - excuse the pun, but it just didn't "add up." It was not like seeing the interior of Fort Knox like in Goldfinger - it had nothing precious or prized about it at all. & it was neither cynical or ironic - if anything it reminded me more of simply pulling a few dollars out of my pocket, when that is all there is, rather than any artistic strategy.

There were crowds, mostly of tourists, going into the Guggenheim, most of which was closed for the Lee Ufan show. A well-dressed woman pushed past me in the revolving door saying she was here "FOR THE FELDMANN!" as was I - & I never saw her in the gallery, either. The more show-stopping Van Goghs & Gauguins were mere steps away, after all.

The quietness of Feldmann's gesture of the installation impressed me, as well as the larger issues at hand: the airy symbolism of money, its teetering between worth & worthlessness, its use as a kind of black mirror in which one could see the commodity of art reflected in it. Money has a different presence for those with or without it. Given that almost any thing per se can be used in art-making in a "post-medium" art world (which is also global, of course), it still has a sense of being artless, even with the methodical if not decorative mode of pinning the dollars to the walls. The greenish tones of the dollars made the gallery feel like one were at the bottom of a very still pool.

I think of Feldmann's books & collections of ephemeral images - all of them modestly scaled. One of my secret tests with my professors & colleagues is to see how they react to Feldmann's work - does it have any impact or not? Feldmann is not that well known in the US & the only large-scale show with his involvement that I know of is The Last Picture Show which I saw at the Walker Art Center. I have a few rumpled issues of Ohio Magazine as well - another litmus test. Perhaps in the US the everyday is supposed to be be more special, & it can be jarring to sense that it actually not, visually, or otherwise.

Pumps & Circumstance: Cornell University Commencement 2011

2011-05-30T06:42:00.000-07:00

“When I walk down the street, all I can think of is how angry I am, how I can't stand anything,“ said the photographer Brian Weil, “but when I look through a camera it all becomes extremely interesting.”

Commencement exercises at Cornell, or as the numerous placards clarified, the 143rd Commencement (Cornell was founded in 1865, classes beginning slightly afterwards), embodied both the immediacy of the graduating classes of 2011 and what historian Morris Bishop class of 1913 termed “the Cornell Tradition,” the Tradition seemingly solid & eternal, & monotonously repetitive.

Without going near the main commencement at Schoelkopf Stadium, the normally quiet Arts Quad transformed into a marching ground for the various colleges, the graduates in cap & gown, with school banners held at front. The procession to the stadium is actually rather far: No one commented on the distance to me, which indicates its fixed invisibility, its classical repetition, its inevitability. Circling around the perimeters of the Arts Quad, with the East-West axis of the bronze statues of founders Ezra Cornell & Andrew Dickson White to pass, seemed the most overtly symbolic aspect of the gesture, along with the constant melodies from the McGraw Chimes, in their faux Venetian tower at Uris Library – among the ditties I can recall now, off-hand, were the Ode to Joy and “Give My Regards to Broadway.”

(although no Beatles tunes, which are a common request, or Happy Birthday or O Tannenbaum – evidently good for all seasons here. During Study Week I heard both Danse Macabre & Bali’Hai, which I thought were particularly outstanding).

The secular religiosity of the procession brought to mind that Victorian entrepreneurs and businessmen founded Cornell as a nondenominational school, emphasizing the sciences. Ezra Cornell had made his money with the telegraph, and with what later became Western Union. The waning of the church & the rise of the state and the corporation as ruling bodies, the adoption of ritual forms as a way of (again back to Morris Bishop) transforming the “Cornell Experiment” to the “Cornell Tradition” have a curious charge to them.

At the later, smaller AAP Commencement I described the procession to C, who characterized it as Leni Riefenstahl. I thought of the Ensor painting Christ’s Entry Into Brussels in 1889, at the Getty.

Some of the early films of Robert Altman come to mind too: MASH, Nashville, & Brewster McCloud. The McGraw Chimes resemble the intrusion of pop songs as a kind of pervasive cosmology in MASH. Once last Fall our class had a meeting outside on the lawn of the Arts Quad before Seminar, which we had to take inside, when we were “drowned out” by a particularly impassioned carillon transcription of the Habanera from Carmen. Almost everyone seems to dislike the bells – it almost goes without saying that most find them an irritant. C. told me that when he first came to Cornell, whenever he walked past McGraw Tower, the bells would start to play at that moment – adding an uncanny element to its aural reordering of space.

How the graduates adapt themselves to cap & gown brings up all sorts of differences that simmer in a more unnoticed manner otherwise. There are the students who dress up scrupulously, in Sunday best, with parents and general respectability as an audience. There are those who dress up in a more flamboyant way. & there are those who structure their comfort in the most expedient manner. At the AAP Commencement I saw a boy walk barefoot to the podium to get his diploma. I would like to think there was someone nude underneath one of the gowns (& Ithaca, normally cold & damp, was hot & humid for the afternoon), but there has been no corroboration of this.

I think there is a Reunion Weekend coming up. The Commencement festivities reminded me of the Elliot Erwitt photograph, “Yale’s Oldest Living Graduate.” The Erwitt photo has a resonance of media as a kind of distancing mechanism, which may be more stylistic than theoretical in the image’s particularities, in the clash between intention & effect: the sense of the photographic as a kind of skewed theater that can reflect back on itself somehow, but also in its opacity it can be read as a wholehearted family-of-man sort of social embrace. Erwitt's image, along with its potential satire, can also be looked at without any irony just as easily.

Initially thinking I would stay in my studio, I instead went out looking for the Ithaca equivalent of Yale’s Oldest Living Graduate. There have been glimpses of this kitsch previously: the acapella groups singing outside Willard Straight Hall. The fraternities & sororities out & about en masse, dressed identically. The institutionalized binge-drinking of Slope Day which deserves a proper anthropological treatment (J told me she saw 3 guys walking – one bent over, puked, & then the guys high-fived one another & they continued on their way).

But without a camera, it all seems kind of dreadful. With a camera I think: When am I going to be around this strangeness again? Overall I enjoyed the sass of some of my younger friends. & camera in hand, how often will I have such easy access?

thanks to: Tyler Dennis, Maggie Prendergast, Lauren Valchius, & Jackie Zdrojewski - all class of 2011

The Hellfire Club episode of the Avengers 2011

2011-03-26T15:49:00.000-07:00

The current show of Karen Kilimnik's work at 303 Gallery includes a reconstruction of the installation The Hellfire Club episode of the Avengers, along with some photos of a girl posing a l'Emma Peel, and paintings of more "traditional" subject matter - dogs, landscape, portraits in heroic style (I can hear my Aunt Lucille imitating the movies here, pronouncing it "veddy English"), which relate in a kind of thrift store Anglophilia all around.

I find myself able to relate to it, both in terms of it as an art practice, as well as something (maybe not even art per se) which interfaces with media, with pop culture, which casts the experience as a kind of internalized subjectivity from which there is no discernible awakening. It's like a dream, the nature of which cannot be easily determined. It can be both gorgeous & terrifying. It's as if one's ego is nothing, supplanted by floating images from elsewhere, which are eminently desirable, yet it's awful too, sometimes.

There's a lot of art which deals with media images directly, with celebrity as a kind of mirror of whatever. & I get a sense that there really isn't much irony or depth in some of the work, or that there is meant to be (such as Elizabeth Peyton or Richard Phillips), & I'm not intending to suggest that there has to be. It doesn't mean much to me, but these images have had at least a contemporary resonance, for some. They show in galleries (what does that mean?). What I am intrigued with in the work of Karen Kilimnik, continually, is its morbid, romantic obsessiveness, its attachment to fantasies both grand & cheap. The work has a kind of entropy in its attachments, it is abject, it is kind of falling apart - & as such it resonates with a psychic landscape laid out like copy in a fashion magazine. The work picks up on the invasiveness of media, its aggressions.

But I am missing something here too: a figure like Emma Peel, especially in The Hellfire Club episode, is also a very empowering figure. She's tough, hot & self-possessed. We should all take some lessons from her, this fictional sylph. The photos of the girl posing with images of Emma Peel/Diana Rigg pick up on this, in a very direct way. The photos are wonderfully not-fine. They are simple; if they were in an envelope from a one-hour lab they would seem like someone's ordinary caprice, a scenario of "this is me, like the picture." The "amateur" can be theorized as a hapless consumer, as an absolute in passivity, however it could be seen as a much more complicated interchange. There's a murky deliriousness in the contemplation of these materials. There are intimations of violence - violence in cheap toys & decorations, in tinsel & gilt, in dupey Xeroxes, in not-so-secret yearnings for a world much richer than our own.

Signs on the Road

2011-03-26T14:46:00.000-07:00

Artists often fixate on particular found material (imagery, objects, quotes, fragments of text, etc.) that reveals no direct connection to their practice but that possesses for them an enigmatic, resonant meaning. This material may serve as a beacon for their practice, suggesting an unrealized and indeterminate potential for future work. Perhaps this material is the uncanny of artistic practice.

For this exhibition we collect such material from over a hundred and fifty artists, each invited to submit a single-page digital file to be printed on an 8×10-inch sheet. This small archive will be handed over to three curatorial collectives, each of whom will mount a treatment and exhibition in the diminutive (10-foot by 10-foot) Curatorial Research Lab at Winkleman Gallery. Despite the collection's necessarily small scale, we hope for a different order of insight than can be derived from primary artistic production. What if, for a moment, we treat such secondary material as primary? We are curious to see what tentative and comparative understandings can be drawn regarding a collective sensibility of the moment. Could organizations of this archive serve as signs on the road toward something beyond its constituent parts?

Workroom G is Michael Ashkin, Leslie Brack, and Joshua Geldzahler

Gogue Projects is Matt Freedman & Jude Tallichet

Camel Collective is www.camelcollective.org

Cathouse FUNeral is David Dixon, Karen Miller, Pete Moran

ARTISTS:

David Adamo, Alyson Aliano, Greg Allen, Meredith Allen, Robert Andrade, Mirene Arsanios, Michael Ashkin, David Atkin, Nancy Baker, Conrad Bakker, Michael Ballou, Sarah Bedford, David Benforado, Annie Berman, Eric Ross Bernstein, Roberto Bertoia, Mary Walling Blackburn, Lee Boroson, Leslie Brack, David Brody, Monica Burczyk, Pam Butler, Sharon Butler, Holly Cahill, Zachary Cahill, Tiffany Calvert, Francis Cape, Zhiwan Cheung, Piotr Chizinski, Jennifer Coates, Elisabeth Condon, Anne Connell, Diana Cooper, Daniel Cosentino, Amie Cunat, Elizabeth Dadi, Iftikhar Dadi, Jennifer Dalton, Donna Dennis, David Dixon, Ben Draper, eteam, Julie Evans, Anna Faroqhi, Anoka Faruqee, Renate Ferro, Paul Festa, Matt Freedman, Carolyn Funk, Lee Gainer, Joshua Geldzahler, Benj Gerdes, Lindsey Glover, DeWitt Godfrey, Maximilian Goldfarb, Edward M. Gomez, Anthony Graves, Lisa Hamilton, Shadi Harouni, David Hartt, Kirsten Hassenfeld, Jennifer Hayashida, Eric Heist, Amy Helfand, Alika Herreshoff, Clara Hess, Bob Hewitt, Susan Homer, Bettina Hubby, David Humphrey, Gabriela Jimenez, Christopher Lowry Johnson, Ron Jude, Martine Kaczynski, Efrat Kedem, Christine Kelly, Daren Kendall, Baseera Khan, Elke Krasny, Larry Krone, Lasse Lau, Jill Lear, Ronna Lebo, Diana Seo Hyung Lee, Karen Leo, Jason Livingston, David Lukowski, Pauline M'barek, Rose Marcus, Justin Martin, Mark Masyga, Graham McDougal, Todd McGrain, Doug McLean, Vincent Meessen, Danielle Mericle, Elisabeth Meyer, Andrea Minicozzi, John Monti, Pete Moran, Ray Mortenson, Erik Moskowitz & Amanda Trager, Carrie Moyer, Nicholas Muellner, Chris Nau, Yamini Nayar, Gregor Neuerer, Jennifer Nichols, Meredith Nickie, Marty Ohlin, Chris Oliver, Craig Olson, Ruth Oppenheim, Maria Park, Ahndraya Parlato, Ditte Lyngkaer Pedersen, Liza Phillips, Anna Pinkus, Maggie Prendergast, Johannes Paul Raether, Paul Rajakovics and Barbara Holub, Cuba Ray, Dylan Reid, Thomas Rentmeister, Noah Robbins, Christopher Robinson, Kay Rosen, Douglas Ross, Benjamin Rubloff, Kathleen Rugh, Faride Sakhaeifar, Rachel Salamone, David Scher, Mira Schor, Peter Scott, Dennis Sears, Daniel Seiple, Rachel Selekman, James Sheehan, Buzz Spector, Suzy Spence, Liz Sweibel, Stan Taft, Jude Tallichet, Nick Tobier, Nathan Townes-Anderson, Jeanne Tremel, Lauren Valchuis, Chris Werner, Leslie Wilkes, Sammy Jean Wilson, Karen Yasinsky, Bernard Yenelouis

Unpunished

2011-01-22T12:49:00.000-08:00

PRESS RELEASE

In the Kabinett:
Unpunished, curated by Nayland Blake

January 20 – February 27, 2011
An opening reception will be held on Thursday, January 20 from 6-8pm.

Hello –

I've been asked to curate a small sort of cabinet de curiosité space in New York's Sue Scott Gallery as part of a show that opens on January 20th, 2011. So I've decided to put together a zine of the queer artists whose work I respect, with the title and theme of UNPUNISHED. You're invited to include a piece in the following format: two black and white 8 1/2 x 11 inch pages. Your name should be on one of them somewhere. The idea is that the two will be Xeroxed back to back to form one sheet, and then the copies of all the pages will be displayed in plastic sleeves, available to be compiled by each visitor. If you want your page to be copied onto a specific color paper, please indicate that. The cover will be the image that accompanies this email.

Thematically, I'm thinking Queer, unfettered exuberance, a bit of Juissance in the midst of our postmillennial winter. Don't fear the goofy, the groovy or the grungy. Two pages, so maybe: before and after, above and below, losers and finders, pitchers and catchers, all things bright and beautiful, questions and answers, fast and slow, inside and out and inside out?

Finally I trust your taste, so if there is someone else you think of who would be a good inclusion, feel free to pass this invitation on to them! I really hope you send something in, but thanks for even contemplating it and one last apology - since I haven't coordinated all my contact lists you may get this in a couple of locations, sorry about the duplication.

All the best,

Nayland

Cc: Ronald Abram, Darryl Alvarez, Kim Anno, Chris Bogia, Rob Clarke, Liz Collins, Robert Crouch, Pradeep Dalal, Kerry Downey, Simon English, Bruno Fazzolari, Avram Finkelstein, Amanda Greenberg, , Daphne Gottlieb, Erik Hanson, Lee Harrington, Geoffrey Hendricks, Matthias Hermann, Hermes Payrhubur, Mena Kamel, Arnold Kemp, Daniel Lang Levinsky, Phoebe Legere, Sioban Liddell, Daniel Luedtke, Carlos Motta, Keith Meyerson, Midori, Nanney, Jeanine Oleson, Alice O'Malley, Uzi Parnes, Jennifer Rodewald, Christopher Russell, Gwenaël Rattke, Sue SaintSur, Odanjide Shabaka, Amy Sillman, Marc Swanson, Joshua Thorson, Carmelita Tropicana, Ela Troyano, Joey Veltkamp, Tobaron Waxman, David White, Jim Winters, David Yarritu, Bernard Yenelouis, Quito Ziegler.

For additional information, please contact Steven Stewart at Sue Scott Gallery by calling
212-358-8767, faxing 212-358-8785 or emailing info@suescottgallery.com.

From Here to There: Alec Soth's America

2010-12-29T17:06:00.000-08:00

The Walker Art Center exhibit, From Here to There: Alec Soth's America, is up until January 2nd. I haven't seen the expression used in any of the ephemera from the Walker, but in NY terms this would be a mid-career retrospective - a vague term which isn't meant to be the mid-point of someone's career (or one hopes it isn't). At first I thought the exhibit seemed rather small, but when I tried to make a general count of the images, there's a LOT.

My guess is that the initial minimal effect was the result of deep-seated memories of images from the books Sleeping by the Mississippi & Niagara, which were missing. Although both bodies of work are well represented - less can equal more in this case. & while the books can be the defining forms for groups of images, there are very cogent relations between all the various projects, in discreet mural prints on the white cube walls of the museum.

The writer Marguerite Young would pontificate about the Midwest as a psychic landscape, as being one step away from a great void, on the edge of a sea of nothingness. Civilization is thin and provisional. One is cut off from one's home or past, yet one always in proximity to them.

Marguerite Young comes to mind in looking at Alec Soth's work, as I find it suffused with a great deal of anomie, a sense of dread even, although usually balanced with amazing arrays of resilience. Another title I could give to the work, cribbing from Ken Jacobs, would be Little Stabs at Happiness.

Soth's projects are given provisional geographic barriers. Besides the Mississippi & Niagara work (both sites more prominent in 19th century culture) there is a very sad little book, of 4x6 prints with text, entitled The Loneliest Man in Missouri, which was shot in parking lots, in motels, outside strip bars - the landscape one could find in the Maysles Brothers' film Salesman. In tandem with the book there is also a video of a middle-aged man reading aloud The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, with a stripper next to him, with overlaid sound of a recording by T.S. Eliot (a St. Louis boy after all) reading the poem as well. As absurd as the video is, it still carries a great deal of intensity - that sort of paradox, which can make me laugh as much as sense a great emptiness all around, seems the general theme of the work.

The work is full of a great deal of wit & observation, so perhaps my description of its existential cries can seem ridiculous, but I think the tension between levity & gravity are what inform it.

I was also struck by the language of the ephemera from the museum stressing the "eccentricity" of the "outsiders" portrayed, like the cast in a film. "Different" in the Midwest can be synonymous with wrong or bad or just plain crazy. I guess what seemed odd about that to me as I have always been struck by how deeply ordinary the people in Soth's photographs are - my sense is he just listens better than most people, & he's not interested in people clinging to convention as much as mutating in them. Each person can narrate a different cosmology. There is something very sensitive about how the people are photographed - the photographer is very present in the images, the interactions are apparent. In various interviews Soth describes himself as shy. Which doesn't mean uninvolved. I don't know if any of this means much - institutions like the Walker have to frame their artists in a general way, so the viewer can make a meta-narrative of the excesses of work.

The most anomalous image is of William Eggleston at home - anomalous in his fame, that is - Eggleston is also at home in Memphis, on the Mississippi, after all. Given the various celebrity treatments of Eggleston, this is immaculately composed, but shot from the shadows, behind French doors, almost like a surveillance image. It shows us an Eggleston who is very elegant, but not there to engage with the viewer or to enact himself for the camera. It reminds me of the last line of Touch of Evil: What can you say about a man? He was some kind of a man.

The last body of work is for the upcoming book Broken Manual. The images are not geographically bound, but all involve an idea of leaving society, going to the woods, running away, for contemplation, safety, disappearance. Monks. Conspiracy Theorists. A nude guy w/ a swastika tattooed on his shoulder. Treehouses. Graffiti. The books will be small books concealed inside large books, hidden, like their subjects, like contraband.

If I think about what is in the show - isolation, anguish, boredom, frustration, depression, rebellion, destruction, aversion to the social or the status quo; all are dealt with in a contemplative manner which give it all a curious lightness.

I've been isolated for the past 4 months, high above Cayuga's waters. Happy am I to have found this show.

greetings from Ithaca, NY

2010-12-04T16:46:00.000-08:00

What hath God wrought? was the message Samuel Morse telegraphed between Washington DC & Baltimore in 1844 to demonstrate the efficacy of the technology. The telegraph lines were built by Ezra Cornell, who built a great fortune from such construction, which, in turn, funded the university where I will reside for 2 years.

RIP Christoph Schlingensief

2010-08-22T06:38:00.000-07:00

22.08.2010
Germany mourns loss of director Christoph Schlingensief

A day after the passing of divisive and provocative German director Christoph Schlingensief, the country's art and culture communities continue to mourn the loss of a truly innovative artist.
The eclectic and influential theater and opera director Christoph Schlingensief died on Saturday, August 21, at the age of 49, after a two-year battle with lung cancer.

Schlingensief directed numerous movies, plays and operas, including an internationally recognized production of "Parsifal" for the Wagner summer festival in the southern German city of Bayreuth in 2004.

He was a star of Germany's state-funded theater world who gained a name for himself with guerrilla-style performance art on city streets by his own acting troupe that puzzled shoppers.

Complex artist

The divisive figure often sought out controversy in his works, and was considered "one of the most important artists in the country," according to the director of the Museum for Modern Art in Frankfurt, Susanne Gaensheimer.

Germany's state commissioner for culture, Bernd Neumann, also recognized Schlingensief as among the most multi-faceted and innovative artists on the country's culture scene. He said that Schlingensief had had an immense influence on German-language film and theater.

"Provocation was not a rare part of his stylistic device," Neumann said. "With this he sought to trigger controversy and irritation."

Berlin's mayor Klaus Wowereit said on Saturday that "a major talent in theater has left the stage."

Works remembered

Meanwhile, the Berlin Academy of the Arts, which recently assumed control of Schlingeneif's archived works and was planning a public exhibition with the artist, has spoken of the loss of a man who wove together the many fabrics of German society.

Schlingensief contained an "immensely explosive force, artistically and politically," said the academy's president, Klaus Staeck.

"In all his works, beginning with his first cinematic attempts right up to his great opera stagings, it was about the exploration of the relationship between politics, art and society," Staeck said. "And so we are now responsible for his archive, which has found a place in our academy."

Life dedicated to controversy

Schlingensief made headlines after casting neo-Nazi skinhead amateur actors in his rendition of Shakespeare's "Hamlet," burning an effigy of former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, and wearing a placard with the message "Kill Helmut Kohl," in reference to the former German chancellor.

In Vienna, Schlingensief created a television show called "Auslaender Raus!" ("Foreigners Out!") which denounced the rise of populism and racism.

The program was a send-up of the Big Brother reality TV show in which asylum seekers lived inside containers similar to those that deported Jews during World War II. Every week the public would vote to evict an asylum seeker not from the show, but from the country.

In 1998, Schlingensief founded the political party "Opportunity 2000" and took part in national elections, asking people to vote for themselves.

He also invited people to join an anti-chancellor swim in the then-chancellor Helmut Kohl's holiday retreat in Lake Wolfgang in Austria. His aim was to cause the lake to overflow with six million people in it, the number representing Germany's unemployed at the time.

Author: Darren Mara (AFP/dpa)
Editor: Toma Tasovac
DW-WORLD.DEPrint

| www.dw-world.de | © Deutsche Welle.

Leon Levinstein at the Metropolitan Museum

2010-07-23T17:19:00.000-07:00

A gift of a large collection of prints by Leon Levinstein is the basis for a very intriguing summer show in the Howard Gilman Galleries at the Metropolitan Museum. Levinstein's images appear in anthologies about Coney Island, or vintage (post WWII) street photography in New York, but never in a way that foregrounds his work. One image in particular, a very modernist composition of the back of handball players in the Lower East Side, which has an almost Bauhaus formality to it seems to be the most reproduced, but it gives little indication of the salty character studies which distinguish his images, primarily. The modernist compositions can seem related to the lightning-reflexes of someone like Henri Cartier-Bresson, also the sense of the image passing into a scarily iconic passage which can also border on morbid caricature. & yet unlike Cartier-Bresson in which the remarkable composition seemingly unearthed by the camera has a redemptive, essentialist "Family of Man" aspect - the same skill set in Levinstein's hands reveals a much more misanthropic & isolated social perspective.

Levinstein is much closer to the likes of the Poe story The Man of the Street: looking at others in puzzlement which leads to a journey which reveals nothing, ultimately. A wild goose chase into unknowing. This kind of forlorn &, in 20th century terms, existential confrontation with other-ness is perhaps the ultimate theme of most post WWII street photography. The chaos of the streets, the lack of solution, as it were, for what seems random, endless & jarring, is both the horror & appeal of such work. The closest equivalent I can think of is the work of William Klein, but even Klein has an ecstatic aspect in his expressive printing methods & his dynamic book designs, whereas Leon Levinstein presents a portfolio which reverberates with loneliness & despair, with little redemption beyond that. Perhaps a torso or butt which may excite some erotic intrigue, somewhat. The most appealing (if one needs the images to be appealing) aspects border on figures which may or not be of a somewhat outlaw nature. Levinstein worked from the 1950s through the 1970s & one can see social aspects which are almost nonexistent in pre-1968 street photography: hippies, bag ladies (one of the sickest moments in 1970s pop culture were the cretins who made postcards of NYC bag ladies as comical gross figures), inter-racial relations which would have had a different emphasis before the civil rights movement, figures outside any normative formations - no one in his images is ordinary looking yet all seem utterly an everyman or everywoman.

One can see a pre-gentrified New York City in Levinstein's images which now can read as much nostalgic as they could be conceived of as harsh. Glimpses of this can be seen in films such as The Panic in Needle Park (which was at 72nd & Broadway!) & Serpico. This "olde" New York is always in black-&-white. It reached its apogee in William Klein, Diane Arbus, Sid Grossman, Weegee, Peter Sekaer, Rudy Burckhardt, Helen Levitt, Walker Evans, That's such a small list - there have been recent historical shows such as "The Women of the Photo League" exhibit put together by Kim Bouros at Higher Pictures last year which reveal much wider practices at hand, & a future task for the photo historian.

Housed at the Alice Austen House

2010-07-15T09:29:00.001-07:00

The Alice Austen House in Staten Island is the former home of the Victorian photographer Alice Austen (1866-1952), which had belonged to her family & which bears the name Clear Comfort. The house was built initially in the 17th century but was updated through the mid-19th century. It is a "gothic cottage" on a lawn sloping down to New York Bay, just north of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, which links Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, with Staten Island.

The Austen house is absurdly pastoral & quaint in a city not usually known for such aspects. I walked from the ferry terminal in St. George, which took about an hour, & passed through different communities as well as strip malls, industrial areas & areas of such oblique nature I was reminded of the Rem Koolhaas essay "Junkspace."

At the end of long lonely industrial street I walked there was a short fence & sloping lawns & trees & in the midst there sits the white clapboard house, smaller than I expected. The ceilings are low, & the rooms are kept as a museum of Alice Austen's everyday, although Austen in her lifetime lost her family money in the 1929 stock market crash & died in 1952 in a poor house, called the Staten Island Farm Colony. Austen lived with her companion Gertrude Tate (1871-1962) in the house from 1917 until they were forced to move.

The discreet tact of the term "companionship" between Austen & Tate, the impossibility of knowing its exact nature, yet seeming quite clear as a loving relationship (unconsummated old maids? or a Boston Marriage?) informs a very sweet small show of photographs in the house for the summer, entitled Housed, curated by Joseph Maida & Katie Murray. The two key images in the show are a modern print of an Austen image of 2 girls in masks, lighting a cigarette together, dressed in underwear, which is next to a contemporary image by Catherine Opie of a drawing of a house with 2 stick figure women outside it, cut into her back.

There are thousands of negatives extant from the Austen estate. Many of the images are reportage of Staten Island & New York City. Austen also photographed private events. The images are a curious window into times past & unknown social circles. The images are remarkably candid. I find the party images the most interesting as they show a great deal of spontaneity & also a very direct engagement w/ the camera as a thing, as part of a social practice. Most fascinating of all are her staged images, which the masked girls could be considered part of, as well as a series of Austen & her girl friends dressed as men & posing as such. These are remarkably earthy & casual & seem much more modern than studio portraiture or art photography of that time.

The very subtle exhibit, Housed, touches on the idea of the "home" as a kind of private theater of shifting identities & perimeters. In addition to the Austen & Opie images, the other resonant image for me in construing a theme for the show is one of Peter Garfield's images of a destroyed house flying in the air (falling, I am assuming, like the house in The Wizard of Oz - or in the context of the show, a conventional house rent from its foundation, spinning in the ether). Or perhaps it is Peter Stanglmayr's fashion photo of a "girlie-boy" - a very pretty androgynous boy posing for a knitwear company's catalog. These images all show both a sense of an imposed social order & its transformation, for whatever needs that may arise (& these can remain oblique even if they seem very apparent). This is an invigorating show in a truly wonderful setting. All of us at the opening, sitting on the porch w/ a cooler of chilled rose (thanks to Peter Stanglmayr), with people playing badminton & croquet on the lawns, while ships passed in & out of the bay, below - we all commented that we wanted to live there. The Austen house is truly cozy. I found the house such a generous site & so lovely. It's something to think about. A refuge in the general storm of life.

The simultaneous visibility & invisibility of the Austen/Tate household reminded me of other such examples in the realm of photography. There are remarkable images of the actress Charlotte Cushman by Matthew Brady and Southworth & Hawes which are of remarkable gravity & presence, as strong as any of the other "great Americans" photographed by either firm. What is also apparent is Cushman's self-possession & lack of "feminine" mask. & in the 20th century, while working as a portrait photographer in Paris, Berenice Abbott photographed a remarkable array of "Sapphic" characters from the upper classes & artistic spheres. Abbott herself would not associate herself with lesbian feminist groups in the 1970s when approached for support (& also a sense of historical continuity) - despite her long-term household with the photo historian Elizabeth McCausland. I have heard the same of Djuna Barnes, who is the same generation as Abbott, & also a subject of remarkable photographs by Abbott taken in Paris in the 1920s. & the writer I knew in the 1980s, Marguerite Young, by then elderly & outspoken, would nevertheless deliberately obscure her sexual orientation & in fact criticize others (I recall a conversation in which Iris Murdoch was referred to as a bull-dyke, in an emphatically pejorative moment, & she would use the term fairies to describe some men, while always surrounded by a coterie of gay friends).

My former student L., who defines herself emphatically as a "butch dyke," would say "My kind are invisible, but it's not like we're not there." While not quite a contradiction of the inequalities & prejudices of the world we live in, the Alice Austen Houses of the world show us a much more diverse planet, nevertheless.

flower power

2010-07-08T12:23:00.000-07:00

(in memory of Susan Kleckner, July 5 1941 - July 7 2010)

One evening in the mid to late 1980s (I cannot date it any more precisely than 1986-1989)w/ my friend L., we went out w/ her childhood friend, Andy Sherwood, visiting town. L. & Andy had gone to the Grace Church School & the Friends Seminary on E. 17th St. Andy had moved in Paris where he taught harpsichord & also did some photography. He knew my friend C. in Paris. C. left NYC for Nicaragua in 1985, returning to Paris, where she was from, in 1986. Andy detested C. & told me so in emphatic tones, which is how the evening began.

Andy took L. & me to a loft on Washington St. in the West Village where a couple, the Harris' lived. They had a theatrical background. Hung on the wall was a post for The Angels of Light, which was a troupe led by their late son George. The poster for The Angels of Light was from a small theater in Paris, the Theatre Campagne-Premiere, which by coincidence had been owned by C.'s father, Andre. George & Ann Harris mentioned that they were owed money by the proprietor of the theater, which, after the circumstances of my earlier conversation regarding C., I did not mention my connection, however tenuous, to them.

Also framed on the wall was a photo I had seen somewhere or thought I did, of a boy inserting a carnation into the barrel of a rifle held by a National Guardsman. The boy in the photo was the Harris' son George in 1967, outside the Pentagon at an anti-war rally, before he relocated to San Francisco & incarnated himself as the performer Hibiscus.

My memory is rough about this, but I think George may have modeled at some point. There were numerous photos by L.'s friend Andy of him in house as well.

I hadn't thought of the photo in quite a while, but it came to mind reading the blog Amber Waves of Brain.

& then, today, 2 days later, Phyllis Levine, "Communications Director" at ICP, where I work, brought in a really luscious print of the Pentagon photo from her archive (the photographer's name is Bernie Boston) for possible identification as no one in Exhibitions knew it. The image is not obscure by any means - it was a nominee for a Pulitzer Prize after it was published in a newspaper (the Washington Star), but it is not common either. & it brings to mind others that have been seen, such as a similar image by Marc Riboud.

While I do not have a belief in a greater significance to coincidence or of a secret cosmic order, these immediate serendipities were still somewhat reassuring: I can appreciate an apparent trace of order in what usually seems random & disconnected. It brought back lives I & others have lived, lost worlds & fragile connections.

& it brings to mind the weird potency of photography, how it embodies both the known & the unknown it its stimuli; it shows us something we didn't see & will never be able to see directly, except as a photograph, & yet that experience can permeate our memories, or as Siegfried Kracauer would term it, replace them.

Outside of such harsh reckonings, I can admit a kind of succor in such technological fantasies - found in blogs, websites, magazines, newspapers & paper archives as much as my memories. & while I cannot cite Hibiscus with any authority, what a splendid figure to invoke this week.

My friend S. died this week after 6 years of struggling with cancer. S. was a rebellious character - in the hospital her sister said, "I don't know why she didn't teach fighting - she was certainly good at it - " in lieu of S.' past as filmmaker, photographer, performance artist, writer, teacher, & even a non-denominational minister (I'm not quite sure what that means). I think of S. as primarily a teacher & her relentlessness in it - she also taught up until a few weeks ago. S. made the daily papers in 1987 when she climbed the Berlin Wall & took photographs from that vantage point, getting arrested by the East Germans for an "international incident." I first saw her in the mid 1980s when I worked at Film Forum when it was on Watts St. & S. spent a year living in the window at Sohozat which was 2 blocks away on West Broadway, just above Canal. I didn't know her then - we met years later. I recall joking to another friend, in crisis about looking for a place to live, that maybe when the window at Sohozat was unoccupied . . .

In the hospital the other day, while S. lay in a coma, a minister came into the room for last rites. The minister was shooed away & a friend of S. enacted a ritual w/ healing waters, which we all passed to one another in a circle, making faint streaks on the palms of each other's hands.

Climbing the Berlin Wall does not seem dissimilar to the carnation stuffed in a rifle. How lucky we are to have photos of such acts & to have had any encounter w/ those who would do such things.

Marjorie Cameron

2010-07-04T12:58:00.000-07:00

Marjorie Cameron's appearance in Kenneth Anger's film Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome as Kali, as the many incarnations of Isis, is a great cinematic presence. One cannot say precisely what she looks like - prominent eyes, prominent nose, prominent lips. In the film given the excesses of make-up, wigs & costumes, the hair color is confused, the the specificities of age are rendered moot. There is a nervous tension which marks her on-camera presence - it does not have the serenity of other stars of the silver screen. Cameron dominates the film, upstaging the excesses of Samson de Brier, who plays Osiris, as well as the various deities portrayed in the film - all of whom convene in a drunken orgy in which the young gorgeous Pan, played by Paul Mathison (sp?) is ultimately torn apart in the frenzy. There is a remarkable passage in the diary of Anais Nin about the making of the film, which also invokes Nin's consternation about being upstaged by Cameron, who remains an enigmatic cipher (& ultimately still having the final last non-word) in Nin's florid account of the film - Nin sees Cameron as a kind of negative to Nin's own glorious positive, shunt aside by the perversities of Anger.

As presences go, Cameron could retire after her performance in Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, which was filmed in Samson de Brier's modest but flamboyantly colored Hollywood apartment. The film is a curious convocation of various gods meeting, or as my friend K. quoted one of her students writing about The Bacchae, partying in the woods. Anger is a curiosity in his allegiances: Ostensibly a follower of Aleister Crowley & the OTO, he is also strangely iconoclastic about the role playing & the seriousness of what must have been a rather tiresome practice, more difficult than the protocols of any organized church. There is always a sense of mockery & kitsch overriding the "rituals" of Anger's films, which perhaps gives them more credence than if they were party platforms for Satanism, Inc. Anger's films instead cavort in utter deliriousness. Their unruliness is what gives them a charge.

Cameron was no stranger to the world of organized Satanism, being the wife of Jack Parsons, who was one of the inventors of rocket fuel, one of the founders of the Jet Propulsion Lab, & also an active leader of the OTO in Pasadena CA. Parsons & his colleague L. Ron Hubbard conduced a series of experiments to invoke "Babalon" - the mythic red-headed Whore of Babylon, at which point Parsons met Cameron & they got together immediately. While Parsons may have regarded Cameron as a semi-deity & also a product of his own sorcery, the fact is she was with us until her death in 1995. Cameron painted, drew, wrote & she appeared in 2 films by Curtis Harrington, The Wormwood Star, & his feature film Night Tide.

In Night Tide Cameron has a small & highly mysterious role as a vaguely European femme fatale of occult-ish origins who addresses the female lead, Moyra, a carnival sideshow mermaid who may possibly be an actual mermaid, living under a curse of her dark ancestry. The scene is cribbed from Jacques Tourneur's Cat People, in which the cat-woman Simone Simon is addressed in a restaurant by an oversexed, fur-clad, exotic woman speaking an unknown language (Serbian? Simone Simon plays a Serbian in the film) as "my sister." A member of the same species addressing her. In both Cat People & Night Tide the female protagonist is fighting an overpowering sexuality. In Cat People it is embodied literally in the transformation into a killer cat, whereas in Night Tide it is revealed to be a hoax, but a hoax w/ fatal consequences, for the hapless mermaid. Cameron makes two appearances in Night Tide - in her Cat People-esque nightclub scene, addressing her "sister" & later, the Dennis Hopper character follows her to the sordid labyrinth of Venice CA (before gentrification), losing her. At the end of the film Hopper inquires about the Cameron figure, of whom no one knows anything - mystery unsolved!

A photograph of Cameron appeared on the cover of the first issue of Wallace Berman's magazine Semina. In Semina 1 there is a rather extravagant drawing of a female figure being fucked doggie-style which had the distinction of being confiscated by the LAPD as obscene material when exhibited at the Ferus Gallery. Given the impossible demands of being "Babalon," (talk about a tall order to execute!) Cameron appears most natural as it were as a bohemian artist, with or without occult trappings. I have a catalog from 2007 from the Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery of Cameron's drawings & watercolors. There is a withdrawn, decadent tone to the work, which touches on both Symbolist themes as well as experimental work such as the drawings that the poet Henri Michaux did under the influence of mescaline, which are more process-oriented.

I am reminded of the art historian Philippe Jullian's writings about symbolism & decadence, of themes incarnating in various forms. One can see these in both high & low art forms. From Gustave Moreau to Barbarella. The yearnings are what matter more so than the manifestations.

Sigmar Polke, 1941-2010

2010-06-12T08:39:00.000-07:00

Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, NYC

2010-06-10T16:07:00.001-07:00

Photographic history is still such a fresh topic, less than 100 years old, basically, that to survey it seems downright capricious, even as it has merited some truly fascinating chroniclers. What is it? Is it a technology? Its economic underpinnings reveal quite a bit about industrialization, & also how industry intersects & affects daily life. Or is it an art? Various attempts to define its formal qualities have also illuminated its visual impact in modern society. What is this weird thing which has made imaging a daily practice, seemingly without a script? A gesture we all do. & yet many of us don't. Is it special or ordinary? Or both? What a paradoxical instrument.

The Museum of Modern Art has been exemplary in collecting & exhibiting photography throughout its history. Along with the publication of texts by Beaumont Newhall & John Szarkowski, as well as that consummate bestseller, The Family of Man, it gave an institutional imprimatur to otherwise disparate materials. Without being hyperbolic, I would suggest that MoMA created the official artistic careers of Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander & Garry Winogrand (the 3 participants in MoMA's "New Documents" exhibition in 1967). Another exemplary show & publication were the POP reprints of the unknown E.J. Bellocq by Lee Friedlander - another truly extraordinary gesture. & then going back to the 1930s - there is the truly seminal publication by Walker Evans, American Photographs.

What an outrageous claim for any museum: It basically created its own subject.

The current installation of the permanent collection http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/1041 is an attempt to make a revisionist outline if the very history it wrote initially, but using examples only by women photographers. As a teacher of photo history I have often made fanciful allusions to such a narrative- also stating that it would be curious to make a trajectory out of Black, or gay photographers - or changing continents entirely - a narrative based on Asian or African photographers, as opposed to the French-British-US monopoly of such an imperial timeline. This was a caprice on my part & I was very curious to see the MoMA reinstallation, which will be up for a year. MoMA has truly enviable, deep collections. What would they do w/ such a prospect?

I don't know if the collections show anything we haven't seen before & there is little narrative disjuncture from any previous history, but again, one can see such fine work on display. Among the 19th century work there are examples by Anna Atkins, Clementina Lady Hawarden & Julia Margaret Cameron. Lady Hawarden in particular has emerged in more recent times w/ what were considered private "artistic" views of her lovely daughters, to instead be looked at as a somewhat radical, intense image-maker - is she a dilletantish aristocrat or someone who made distnctly unsettling & proto-expressionistic photography? Part of the fascination of photography is its blurring between professional & amateur skill sets & results. In the long history of criticism this also distinguished Julia Margaret Cameron - often viewed primarily as an eccentric, as opposed to someone who very consciously played w/ the craft of wet collodion negatives & albumen printing, utilizing chance (irregular surfaces, uneven printing, the effects of "accident" in the process) which would be overlooked as an artistic strategy until Diane Arbus began to exhibit prints w/ stains & uneven borders in the 1960s & 1970s. This aspect to Arbus' printing is often overlooked in lieu of her strong subject matter, but is I think integral to its conceptual power - an almost Brechtian sense of the print as itself a kind of meaning. One is always aware that the print is a kind of screen - the image is not direct, although one sees perhaps too much.

My greatest delight may have been in an album by Gertrude Kasebier, who I would regard as among the greatest Pictorialist photographers. Kasebier was both pragmatic & aesthetic, working professionally as well as in an artistic sphere. Kasebier, along w/ Cameron & Hawarden came to photography as a middle-aged person. One could cite that much of her work follows the visual schemata of that time, but I would point out its very tactile sensuality as a transcendence of any convention, & there are some images of a Native American model, Zitkala-Sa, which are amazingly contemporary looking. Consider the source: a middle-aged woman in Brooklyn, working for cash money. Kasebier's resources are so ordinary, but look what she did. MoMA includes a portrait of the self-styled "Baron" de Meyer, born Adolf Meyer - himself an excessively fey, elegant self-creation, looking quite chic & other-worldly, years prior to when he would adopt the spiritualist name "Gayne."

The 20th century view of "women photographers" is much more extensive & includes: Dora Maar, Lee Miller, Helen Levitt, Diane Arbus, & Nan Goldin. I placed these names in a chronological order. Maar & Miller were overshadowed by their romantic affiliations in their lifetimes, but both have done photographic work which merits attention. Maar is often viewed visually as the prototype for Pablo Picasso's "weeping woman" of the 1930s, most prominently appearing in the painting Guernica but also appearing in innumerable other images.Picasso may be the ultimate male artist who besides having "periods" of styles, could also make a timeline of his career using his various lovers as calendars. In any literature, Dora Maar, emerges as a very strange, troubled character, who went from being a member of Breton's surrealists to following the Catholic Church. As someone whose partial education was by French communists who were also devout Catholics (merci, Mme Tool et aussi Sylvie Carduner), I can understand this, although I would say it perplexes me somewhat. Maar's photographs have been seen primarily since the 1980s exhibition of surrealist photography at the Corcoran Gallery curated by Rosalind Krauss & Jane Livingston, "L'amour fou." One cannot locate a distinct style in the images, or a consistency between them, but they can be quite compelling to look at. Maar had been trained as a commercial photographer - regardless of the skill set involved, there is a lively & strong visual intelligence to the work

Also in terms of writing history, I would say history is rewritten, not written - it is a continual process of reinvention & "the history" of photography made by women is but one prism of a multi-faceted crystal.

For sheer extravagance the career of Lee Miller warrants the various books & exhibitions that have been made of it. Miller would be known simply by the many gorgeous photographs made of her, primarily by Man Ray, as well as her presence in the Jean Cocteau film Blood of the Poet.. A girl from Nyack, NY, she had been a fashion model before becoming involved in the Parisian demimonde in the 1920s. While one could cite her role as an artists' model as her primary achievement, a look at her photography, which as a war correspondent in WWII was fairly extensive, shows a very distinctive presence.

War photography is so strange: how does one judge it? by formal qualities? Does that suffice? The gravity of most war photography is very intentional - it has an agenda & it was for a particular publishing purpose. If one were to look at possibly more eccentric examples wherein graphic qualities are brought in - I would cite the work of both Cecil Beaton & Lee Miller. Beaton as a kind of aesthete managed to make highly beautiful pictures of the UK military, as well as ultimately becoming a kind of in-house portraitist for the House of Windsor. Beaton's soldiers are hot - their asses are round & delicious. One gets distracted by their exoticism & their eroticism. Beaton's images are about erotic & aesthetic possibility - his colonialism is as erotic as it is military.

Lee Miller made what is in my estimation one of the greatest photographs ever: her self-portrait, taking a bath in Hitler's bathtub, after his death, in his bunker. Visually it isn't so much, but the absolute weirdness & egotism of it are I think a truly special moment. It is pure concept. & it intersects w/ a global history - most of us feel quite shy about such things. Who enters such a sphere of power via the bathroom? & then treats it as a photo op?

The photo ops of various governments (such as that used by the various Bush administrations) can't hold a candle to this, although they warrant their own study. Lee Miller distinguished herself w/ a social aplomb I cannot imagine (nor do I expect to ever be in proximity to Hitler's bathtub or its equivalent, in my time).

I am curious to see how the years reveal Diane Arbus, now that her archives are at the Metropolitan Museum (which also houses the archives of Walker Evans). My sense is that there is much more work there than one would expect. Arbus was a working magazine photographer, with constant deadlines. The 2 official documents of her work - the 1972 MoMA catalog, & the Met publication Revelations are 2 very discontinuous books. The MoMA catalog is one of the seminal photographic publications & events of the late 20th century. Contemporary students seem a bit unimpressed, but I would cite its publication as one of the truly important moments of photographic history - for my generation (already too young, a full generation later) it was one of the most provocative photographic occurrences available. Lucky are we to have it. Given the potential tediousness of most photography books, this was so skewed, so in depth & so incorrect (outlining all sorts of visual taboos) & it offered no way out - it was entirely unredemptive! LIfe is miserable & strange & if you're lucky, you're retarded! I hate to put it in such bald terms but when I think of what is important about it, is its absolute lack of propriety.

Given the apolitical formalism of much 1960s art, it's emphasis on form, the work of Diane Arbus is like a a kind of mold eating away at any structure. The apartments she looks in in NYC are dirty w/ nicotine residue, they are populated by unhappy sorts. it sucks. NYC is a miserable global city of people who are never quite settled there & are barely in control of themselves. Everyone is in a kind of lumpen hell. If I make may one suggestion, it would be that Arbus' social orbit could be seen as well in the context of the New American Cinema, promoted by Jonas Mekas. The Ken Jacobs film Little Stabs at Happiness may be the most interesting cinematic parallel. But Jacobs & also Jack Smith offer a more holistic vision, & honestly, that's saying something. Neither Jacobs or Smith could be accused of being so hopeful.

There is so much to see in the show. I don't think it realizes any deep revision of photography, but it offers some stunning examples of some great women photographers . . .let's hope that the next history will change history.

Is It Really So Strange?

2010-06-10T09:00:00.000-07:00

A few recent viewings of William E. Jones' documentary about Latino fans of Morrissey have brought to mind: Where was I?

As I try to study Morrissey & The Smiths I realize I let a few decades intervene & any reconstruction of what would have been is perilously provisional. My one justification is that in the period in which The Smiths released albums was also a period of extreme poverty for me & one in which I was establishing myself in New York City, in which I was remote from omnipresent media. How The Smiths would have helped me in such a dire situation is unknown, lost, alas. Listening now to The Smiths/Morrissey is pure nostalgia, for something I didn't experience, in which I can wallow in comfortably. I feel like I missed something wonderful. This would have been a tonic I would have craved.

It also reminded me of how technology has become part of the everyday experience. The soundtracks of our lives may be a different & richer experience than that which is viewed.

William E. Jones' film is fantastically delicate about the subject. It is done in a simple format of mostly talking-heads interviews, w/ an array of subjects from the deeply engrossed to the almost supercilious. As someone who knows zilch about the The Smiths/Morrissey I found it to be fascinating. Those interested in WEJ's films may find it of interest for its anomaly among his film work in being shot by him entirely, as opposed to the use of of appropriated imagery which distinguishes his work.

The film addresses the technological phenomenon of fandom. This is played out as well in tabloids & other venues of junk culture. While it can emphasize the tawdry & the fabricated (I think of Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon books as an example of hateful wish fulfillment in this), what hasn't really been addressed is the potential for mass media being an actual conduit for change, or that there could also be an important message being conveyed (does mass media have to negate any gravity, any importance in its utterances?). In my august aloofness of utter solipsism I would assume it would be impossible, but maybe not.

This is touched on briefly in the Todd Haynes' film Velvet Goldmine, in a scene w/ the middle-class journalist Christian Bale confronting his mother w/ the fact that an emotional fissure in a stable straight life exists in the sensual, extravagant forms of glam rock pop music, confronting her w/ his ambisexual glam-rock music. He screams at her, "this is ME!" How can mass media, in this case, pop music. extend an message both general & unique? In both Todd Haynes' film & WEJ's there is an understanding that a social sea change can actually occur within the utter dross of mass media, that significant messages can leak through an otherwise rigid autocracy of mass media. Beyond any overt propaganda value, there are social values being stated. The everyday can be reconfigured, in rather seductive terms

While pop music now seems so utterly corporate, fascistic & tasteless to the nth degree, I am reminded that there is a potentially redemptive aspect in what is for the most part nasty business. & that it could have incendiary moments regardless of its economic structure.

WEJ's emphasis on the fans of Morrissey, as opposed to Morrissey himself, is an acknowledgement of the richness in each voice included. This is an admirable form of documentary which explores its depths rather than conforming to a schema. Its simplicity & directness could be seen as an essay in the morality of looking at the world & trying to extract meaning from it; documentary as a subject can be mislead by heroic tendencies, by an overreaching attempt to make a big statement, bigger than the subject at hand. WEJ's film is generous & kind, & lucky for us in our technological age in being able to watch it over & over again, which I imagine, for the fans of Morrssey, must seem like old hat. The song played over & over again, the near ritual of such a habit, so common as to be overlooked. Where are we? What does it mean?

Also I have to bring up the queerness of the subject. While there may be normative-heterosexual responses to Morrissey's music, Morrissey still reads as gay as Christmas (to use a very recherchez expression) in his brooding melancholy. I am so so sorry I missed this in my own brooding melancholic past.

In May I was in Los Angeles. One afternoon in Highland Park I stepped into a coffeeshop on York Blvd at 51st (?) to get an iced horchata w/ a shot of espresso (it was recommended). The song This Charming Man (the only song included in Is It Really So Strange?) was playing. I got goosebumps. As ephemeral as the occasion may have been, there was a grace to it altogether lacking, usually, in my estimation of the everyday. The sun was shining brightly, there were college-age girls giggling behind me in line. I thought: as precious as this very ordinary moment is, it is already lost to me. I took some photos but they alas are simply proof of lost time. How can one express happiness beyond its temporality?

Dennis Hopper, 1936-2010

2010-05-30T04:12:00.000-07:00

The cult of actors has been an irritant for me. In the mass media they have been avatars for the exigencies of daily life, surpassing the anonymity of most folks at such a melodramatic height that we're supposed to think it is somehow special. Besides finding it meaningless, it is also a distraction. One forgets one's own position in such a dynamic.

Besides the macabre aspect of actors seen as real as they pantomime reality w/ their reported daily lives, I am also interested in their utter uniqueness in a technological culture - would they exist without tabloids & now the internet? While I can covet the CDVs or cabinet cards of Sarah Bernhardt or Edwin Booth - I can appreciate their reality as a kind of cultural fantasy. & Hollywood as factory of illusions has produced an array of equivalents, along with appropriate shadows, such as Kenneth Anger's volumes of Hollywood Babylon I & 2. But why do I find it otherwise so irritating & useless?

As far as marking the death of the actor Dennis Hopper, what comes to mind primarily for me is his role in the Curtis Harrington film Night Tide, released in 1961. I first saw Night Tide in my adolescent outlet of, under various titles, The Late Late Show, Scream Theater, Thriller Theater, etc on late night TV. Before the advent of cable TV, or into its first years, cheap horror movies found a time equivalent in late nights for the melancholy insomniac, including my teenaged self.

Night Tide, in retrospect, includes a panorama of what would be interests for me: B-movies, lounge & exotica music (a performance by Chaino), the literary supernatural (one could argue the references including both Poe's The Oval Portrait & Goetbe's The New Melusina), allusions to Hollywood satanic cults (the inclusion of Marjorie Cameron in a small but emphatic role), the louche, beatnik culture of LA (keeping in mind the satirical estimations of Caroline Blackwood), the hyperreal aspects to California culture (going to the Madonna Inn in San Luis Obispo followed by a day at the "Hearst Castle" thanks to Umberto Eco & Karen Pinkus), as well as the supreme erotic aspects of young smooth tight Dennis Hopper who may or may not be consumed by a monster from the deep.

Night Tide gave me a taste of what I would encounter later w/ much delight in the formerly tawdry aspects of Coney Island, as well as tolerance for the extremes of the occult (as well as a skepticism of such). In a way not dissimilar from 19th century German romanticism - the cult of the ruin & the fragment, the object which would transverse time & space in an uncanny way, is all too familiar in this cheap B-movie nostalgia.

Speaking of Coney Island, I am reminded of the years I spent reading there. Going to & fro from the subway, & then on the boardwalk. This was a Julio Cortazar phase - translations of The Winners, Hopscotch, & innumerable stories. We Love Glenda So Much comes to mind in the context of the late Dennis Hopper. How lucky I have been in fairly squalid circumstances to nevertheless find myself "one-on-one" w/ the books of Julio Cortazar. There used to be a bar in the BMT station, the Hollywood Bar & Grill, where I would linger before taking the subway back to the Lower East Side.

Thank you, Dennis Hopper, for aiding & abetting my erotic appetites.

Charles Fréger, Empire

2010-05-28T15:44:00.001-07:00

Charles Fréger's work is known in the US primarily through his books, collections of portraits of collective social roles (such as legionnaires, wrestlers, water polo players, majorettes, performers in Chinese opera). To use a term used by dealers & collectors of 19th century photography, Fréger's images would be occupationals - the subjects of the portraits are looked at for what they do. The viewer can see the difference between each face, but the interest is in the repetition of their bearings, not their aberration. Although there is more to be said about that, later, & any fascination which may result.

The book Empire is of various European honor guards (excuse my lack of more precise military terms) in uniforms now so antiquated that they have become exotic kitsch, magnets for tourists, ignorant, like me, of any more precise symbolic meanings. Fréger's photographs are done with a brilliant even lighting of high professional skill, as well as attention to detail in the format, focus & color. This has a bewildering effect in using photography in a very classic descriptive way, which can seem almost retrograde; yet in the intense repetition in the various projects, as well as their unpretentious specificity, I find something which seems different which I would like to explore more.

Fréger's methods which are for the most part frontal, central, posed calls to mind a common technique of commercial photography, as well as serial work by artists such as Rineke Dijkstra, early work by Katy Grannan, or recent work by Deana Lawson. Fréger's subjects are much more distinctly sociological (specific types of athletes or soldiers). Fréger can seem less artistic, more photographic, as a result. But I would argue that that is what gives his work it's particular strength. If looked at as a style only, the subject can seem too heavy, too literal & also weirdly uncanny. This is where my association w/ Deana Lawson comes about as she works with genres which can seem outmoded & highly recognizable & yet the images are so strange to look at & contemplate.

Viewed historically, Fréger's projects bear a strong resemblance to the loose but voluminous archives of August Sander, or the vernacular 19th century portraits of street types & trades, or ethnic types, seen in cartes-de-visites & lantern slides. Such imagery has a pre-photographic history in graphics depicting the same sorts, which was for a cosmopolitan clientele who could view these things from a level of sophistication far from such everyday quaintness.

While the pre-modern "street types" were for an aristocratic audience, the introduction of photography into daily life could emulate the forms yet w/ its unusual emphases on its specificities, it's reality-effect, the photograph would transform a hackneyed social type into something more ambiguous & threatening.

What comes across in the near-taxonomies of Fréger is both a general form & its discrepancies. Any sort of ideal isn't in the person but the trappings which cover or transform him or her. Especially w/ military figures Fréger is unheroic & unsentimental. & yet rather than appearing as meaningless types the subjects have a dignity in their monotonous shells, a kind of nobility that isn't in what they are doing but what they seem to endure.

Judge David Groner's sentencing statement to Kwame Kilpatrick May 25, 2010

2010-05-26T08:53:00.000-07:00

Let it be clear that this entire proceeding was precipitated by the actions of you, Mr. Kilpatrick. You were convicted after pleading guilty to two counts of obstruction of justice and no contest to one count of assaulting and obstructing a police officer, all because you lied under oath about your relationship with your then-chief of staff, Christine Beatty.

That lie at the whistleblower lawsuit was part of a broader attempt to cover up your misdeeds while serving as mayor and which led to the wrongful termination of two police officers who tried to perform their sworn duties.

That lawsuit ultimately cost the City of Detroit $8.4 million when you perpetrated a fraud on the city and its citizens by deceptively inducing the Detroit City Council to accept a settlement offer in the case because of your wrongdoings.

Your inexcusable behavior continued when you assaulted a police officer who was trying to serve a subpoena. Third, you, Mr. Kilpatrick, are the one who initially raised the issue of your inability to pay restitution as prescribed by this court, which led to the restitution hearing, the probation violation hearing and ultimately to today’s sentencing hearing.

To use legal parlance, Mr. Kilpatrick, you opened the door to this issue when you contested the restitution payment schedule. However, during the course of the restitution hearing, when this court sought to get a complete and accurate picture of your financial status, it was met at every turn by your continued attempt to thwart the fact-finding function of this court. To quote from the May 8, 2009, order, quote, “The main goal of the order is to ensure that the defendant complies with the terms and conditions of his probation and makes reasonable payments towards restitution. In the interest of full disclosure in determining defendant’s personal obligations and his ability to pay restitution, the court finds that disclosure of defendant’s assets and those of his spouse, is warranted. Therefore the court will reaffirm its order that defendant make those records available to the probation department.” End quote.

You represented to this court that you were the sole bread-winner and responsible for paying the household expenses and, after covering those expenses, your net monthly income was only $6. You then challenged this court’s authority to examine the finances of your family, including your spouse. You attempted to utilize semantics and exploit technical loopholes in the court orders in order to conceal the fact that you and your wife had received a quote-unquote loan, and I use the term loosely, in the amount of $240,000 and a separate gift of $50,000 from various business leaders here in Detroit. As this court explained, under the law, this court is entitled to examine all aspects of a defendant’s finances in order to ascertain the ability to pay restitution, including any and all assets or obligations of a defendant, a spouse and any dependents.

To this day, you’ve continued to assert that this court violated the law by requiring to disclose those funds and that in any event they were intended to benefit your family and not for restitution. Had the court known about those funds, it would have immediately ordered their application towards the repayment of your restitution. Or, at the least, the court would have ordered that you pay 100% of your after-tax income towards the payment of your restitution. In fact, those funds have still never been accounted for. The broader context of this issue is, of course, that your family living expenses including living in a million-dollar home, driving brand-new Escalades, shopping at high-end designer stores and purchasing elective surgery for your wife. You have made it perfectly clear that now it is more important for you to pacify your wife rather than comply with my court orders. The court doesn’t know what your plans were regarding the restitution, however the court does know that when it determined a reasonable repayment schedule, you balked, feigned poverty and misrepresented your financial status. This contemptible behavior was in clear disregard in both the letter and the spirit of the court’s orders, which sought transparency to comprehensively examine your financial status and determine your ability to pay your restitution obligation to the City of Detroit.

Fourth, under the terms of your probation, you were ordered to comply with various conditions, which you failed to do. If you will recall, at the time of your original sentence, you were forewarned about the consequences of violating the terms of your probation. This court explicitly stated, quote, “You need to consult with your lawyers. They will tell you do not violate my probation, because I take my mandate as judge very seriously. And I will not hesitate to impose the penalty of prison if you violate my probation or any order of this court.” End quote.

In reviewing the pre-sentence investigation report submitted by the probation department, this court does not agree with the sentence recommendation of the Michigan Department of Corrections. Sir, you were trained as a lawyer. You served in the state Legislature, where you were entrusted to make the law. And you were the chief executive of Detroit, a major U.S. city, charged with enforcing and carrying out the law. In this case, the court strongly believes that to allow a defendant situated as you are to blatantly disregard the orders of this court, a defendant who was a former public official who violated his oath of office in an obstruction of justice case, who desecrates the basic tenets of our system of justice and seriously undermines the credibility and legitimacy of our legal system, does not fit within the sentence guideline range.

Mr. Kilpatrick, you have asked not to be treated any differently than any other defendant who appears before this court. The problem is, you are different. You were a public servant, and because of your status as a former high-ranking public official, we expected you to set an example. Yet, despite this, you continued to engage in obfuscation and obstruction. You continued to be defiant. And in your letter to this court, you have failed -- actually it was a letter that was sent to the probation department, which is attached -- you have failed to sincerely accept responsibility for your actions. Frankly, your continued attempt to cast yourself as the victim, your lack of forthrightness, your lack of contriteness and your lack of humility only serve to affirm that you have not learned your lesson. Clearly, rehabilitation has failed. You have not adjusted well under probation. Probation is no longer an option. This court must now sentence you in a manner that assures that justice will be served. The terms of your earlier probation no longer apply. That ship has sailed. That plea deal was negotiated by your attorneys and the prosecutor. I only approved what I thought was a lenient sentence because everyone, not only your lawyers and the prosecutors, but also the City of Detroit, urged this court to accept the deal so the city could move on. The city wants to move on. You want to move on. So today we will move on.

This court is satisfied that there are substantial and compelling reasons for a departure that are objective and verifiable. And those reasons are hereby articulated:

• In the present case, defendant Kilpatrick violated the terms of his probation by failing to pay $79,011 by Feb. 19, 2010, which included defendant specifically failing to provide complete accounting of his family finances, failing to surrender his tax refunds, failing to disclose gifts and benefits, improperly accepting dollars from political funds. Furthermore, one of the most troubling aspects of defendant’s conduct occurred during the restitution hearing. You raised your right hand and swore to tell the truth. But many answers you gave were not truthful. When asked about the nature of your spouse’s employment, you replied that you did not know if she worked. When asked about your rent payment, you feigned ignorance. In the court’s opinion, this lack of candor, while under oath, dangerously approached the very crime for which you were already under sentence for. Moreover, the point of the restitution hearing was to determine defendant’s ability to pay the restitution and to ensure that the citizens of Detroit were compensated – at least to a small degree, for the loss they suffered at the hands of you. During the hearing it was abundantly clear that over the course of your probation, you certainly had the wherewithal to substantially pay down the balance of your restitution, which you failed to do and which you clearly misrepresented to this court.

• Again, this court finds that there are substantial and compelling reasons to depart from the sentencing guidelines. Violation of probation, wherein you failed to comply with the sentence agreement to turn over your tax return. You took gifts without disclosure and deposited into marital accounts and never paid 30% to restitution as ordered. And you accepted funds improperly from the Kilpatrick Civic Fund. You lied in your affidavit to this court that you only had $6 per month after expenses to pay restitution when your bank records indicate you had hundreds of thousands of dollars going through the joint bank account. You violated this court’s order to disclose all your bank records, my signed order. But you redacted and provided incomplete records omitting accounts altogether and the court would never have known of your attempts to mislead the court had the people not issued subpoenas. Your testimony in this courtroom amounted to perjury when you stated, “I don’t know if my wife works. I don’t know the amount of rent. I don’t know who pays the bills.” Most substantially, most compelling, is that you lied to this court. You continued to lie, after pleading guilty to lying in court! Obviously, there has been no rehabilitation. You have not changed. So to continue you on probation is not an option. You must understand your crime and consequences now.

This court is satisfied that the initial 120 days incarceration did nothing to rehabilitate you, Mr. Kilpatrick. Because you have violated probation, you lied in the affidavit, your documents were not fully disclosed, you lied in this courtroom. This court is satisfied that incarceration must now correlate to reflect the above substantial compelling reasons to deviate.

Therefore you will serve a maximum of five years in the Michigan Department of Corrections. Further, you will receive credit for the restitution you have paid and the balance of the restitution, $860,000, shall be paid as a condition of parole. What that means is that your obligation … to pay back the city does not go away with this incarceration.

You will receive 120 days credit on the minimum sentence of one and a half years in the Michigan Department of Corrections.

At this time, Mr. Kilpatrick, I’m going to advise you that you have 42 days in which to file an application for leave to appeal this matter. If you wish to appeal and you can’t afford a lawyer, a lawyer will be appointed to represent you. Are the forms available for the defendant to sign?

Mr. Schwartz … could you assist your client, because otherwise I’ll have him sign it in the back. It’s just an appellate rights form…

Sergeant, could you secure the defendant please and take him in the back. Put your hands behind your back, sir. This concludes the matter.

Graffiti artist Banksy leaves mark on Detroit and ignites firestorm

2010-05-18T12:54:00.000-07:00

BY MARK STRYKER
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER

Banksy was here. But what’s really fascinating is what happened after he left.

The British-born art world celebrity and provocateur, who hides behind a cloak of anonymity and whose graffiti paintings have made headlines from Los Angeles to London, has tagged Detroit -- most prominently a crumbling wall at the derelict Packard plant.

Discovered last weekend, the stenciled work shows a forlorn boy holding a can of red paint next to the words “I remember when all this was trees.” But by Tuesday, artists from the 555 Nonprofit Gallery and Studios, a feisty grassroots group, had excavated the 7-by-8-foot, 1,500-pound cinder block wall with a masonry saw and forklift and moved the piece to their grounds near the foot of the Ambassador Bridge in southwest Detroit.

The move -- a guerilla act on top of Banksy’s initial guerilla act -- has sparked an intense debate about the nature of graffiti art, including complicated questions of meaning, legality, value and ownership. Some say the work should be protected and preserved at all costs. Others say that no one had a right to move it — and that the power and meaning of graffiti art is so intrinsic to its location that to relocate it is to kill it.

Detroit’s unique profile as a kind of laboratory of extreme urban dilapidation and nascent revitalization adds yet another layer of complexity. “This may be unprecedented, because in most other cities, you wouldn’t be able to take a wall home,” said Luis Croquer, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, which specializes in cutting-edge art.

“What does it mean to move a wall? And beyond legality, who does the wall really belong to, and now does the art belong to the gallery? To everybody? To nobody? We’re operating in this space where there’s this lawlessness that opens up possibilities that would be much harder to encounter in other cities.”
Stewards or thieves?

The folks at 555 Gallery and Studios know that not everyone agrees with their decision to move the mural, but they’re adamant they did the right thing. They don’t want to sell it or squirrel it away like a keepsake. They want to protect it and keep it on display for all.

“It’s about preservation for us,” said volunteer executive director and co-founder Carl W. Goines. “We’re watching this beautiful city crumble around us and we can’t do anything to stop it. So with this fine-art piece -- and it’s not just everyday graffiti that you might whiz by -- here was our opportunity to do something. It would have been destroyed if we didn’t make the effort.”

Banksy has become famous for his controversial graffiti works around the globe and stunts like sneaking a parody of the Mona Lisa into the Louvre. Some consider him nothing more than a trespassing vandal and publicity hound with a can of spray paint. Others think he’s a substantive artist, clever satirist and savvy trickster, whose mysterious urban legend persona has become an indivisible part of his aesthetic. Some of his works have sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars at auction or in galleries.

Free Press attempts to contact Banksy have been unsuccessful, but it’s possible that his sweep through town was related to the documentary about him, “Exit Through the Gift Shop,” now showing at the Main Art Theatre in Royal Oak. What appear to be new Banksy pieces have also been found recently in Toronto and Chicago. Arts and culture blogs are speculating that he created as many as four works in metro Detroit, including a signature rat image at 28661 Van Dyke in Warren. But only the Packard plant piece has appeared on his Web site, www.banksy.co.uk.

It’s unclear when it was painted, but the 555 artists were tipped off May 8 by a friend who saw the work on Banksy’s site and recognized Detroit. By Monday, they had assembled a posse of five to 12 workers and began digging out the work. It took two full days to complete the job.

As photos of Banksy’s Detroit handiwork spread through the blogosphere this week, critics began questioning the 555 group’s removal of the Packard plant painting. At the photo blog detroitfunk.com, one commentator called them thieves rather than rescuers and wrote, “Banksy put it there for a reason, for anyone who cared enough to enter the death-trap to see it.”

“It makes me cringe that so many are applauding this,” wrote another commentator. “The point of ‘street art’ is for it to exist in its natural environment. It is by nature temporary. Disappointing when a good piece fades away? Yes. But that’s life.”

These arguments cut to the core of almost any discussion of graffiti art, as well as the legality and ethics of trespassing and defiling private property. There is also the complicated question of ownership. The Packard plant, a massive haven for squatters and scrappers — 3.5 million square feet of almost total urban destruction and decay — has been at the center of an epic legal dispute between the City of Detroit and a land speculator dating back more than a decade. News reports have identified Romel Casab as the owner. He could not be reached for comment Friday.

The artists at 555 who engineered the move call themselves “stewards” of the work, but admit they have little idea of what Banksy would think of their actions. For now, the painting, lovingly encased in a makeshift wooden frame that surrounds the wall, is on display outside the gallery on a gritty stretch of West Vernor Highway in the shadow of I-75.

Staff member Eric Froh said that while the painting’s meaning has shifted outside of the Packard plant, it retains an expressive power akin to Renaissance religious artifacts or antiquities uncovered by archeologists and now seen in museums. He also noted that the controversy has already become part of its accumulated meaning.

“The work can now live on for many years,” said Froh.

Detroit Disassembled by Andrew Moore

2010-04-17T13:18:00.001-07:00

Andrew Moore: Detroit Disassembledis a picture book of Detroit, of the decrepitude which can be found throughout the city: office towers, theaters, factories, schools, houses. The images were all made with an 8x10 camera, with color film, which has been printed digitally, intensifying the color palette. Moore has published books of photographs of Havana and also Governor's Island in New York City (in tandem with Lisa Kereszi) which is an abandoned outpost of the Coast Guard, a once fully developed community, which is the site of numerous plans for redevelopment.

The city book has been a staple of publishing - a casual list off the top of my head would include Berenice Abbott's Atget Photographe de Paris, her own book Changing New York, Bill Brandt's The English at Home, William Klein's Life is Good and Good for You in New York, Daido Moriyama's Shinjuku 19XX-20XX. The camera, the book & cities are intertwined technologically: each one of us can be an armchair flâneur. (I am ignoring the innumerable glossy tourist volumes about which I have nothing to say, except perhaps that they are the most common examples available).

There's a certain charm in realizing that Detroit has become as exotic as place as Havana, enough so to become a subject of a book(Detroit has also been photographed by Robert Polidori, who also published a book of Havana). American Ruins by Camilo Jose Vergara is a less sumptuous, less aesthetic view of the shrinking industrial cities of the US, but offers more sociological analysis, more tangible data-gathering of the canker in the rose of our formerly grand cities. In 1995 Vergara published an article in Metropolis proposing downtown Detroit become a monument like the Acropolis - the remains of an industrial economy, now defunct, an economy of the past. While his proposal shows a certain irony & darkness, a kind of black humor, it informs my own viewing of both Moore & Polidori's images which emphasize a much more sensual unselfconscious rendering of the truly fantastic environment of the city. In his photographs Vergara also revisits sites over a period of years, which in a bald, inartistic way imparts a time-line of continuous decay and/or demolition absent from the work of others.

As poignant as Moore's images can be, as "extreme" as the dereliction can be, the images are so beautiful, that one is compelled to hope they remain as such, somehow. Both Moore & Polidori's images remind me of the view pictures made in Italy in the 17th century by Canaletto and Giovanni Paolo Panini, which included tourist destinations such as St Peter's, or St Mark's, as well as various ruins such as the Coliseum - which were for a clientele of cultivated travelers, as markers of cosmopolitanism & erudition.

Andrew Moore's images (along w/ Polidori & many others) show a remarkably high skill set & an aesthetic view of what for locals is simply the world in which they live. I am reminded of the state motto of Michigan: Si quaeris peninsulam amoenam, circum spice: If you seek a pleasant peninsula, look about you. Indeed! Perhaps we (it may be unfair to include myself) Detroiters are now finding ourselves like the Italians in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun - a last vestige of pastoral peasantry interfacing with a decadent cosmopolitan society which has descended on the city in search of artistic inspiration, a nobility of sensibility inferred in the contemplation of the centuries of ruins in and around Rome.

What also comes to mind is that the photograph, like the stereograph in Oliver Wendell Holmes' essay, replaces the thing itself. In our economy this translates into real estate. As gorgeous as both Moore's & Polidori's views of Havana are, I sense an invidious shadow lurking (not on the part of the photographers themselves but of greater corporate powers, which include publishing) behind such fragile worlds of diminished economies.

In Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity by Edward Dimendberg the destruction of Bunker Hill in downtown Los Angeles haunts (in the future) the use of Bunker Hill in the films Kiss Me Deadly & Joseph Losey's remake of M. One sees a world about to disappear. & that it can be defined as such facilitates its total destruction.

From a distance it may seem as if what has occurred is relatively new, but the upheaval in the city has been an ongoing process for approximately 50 years, at this point. One could cite the development of expressways to Oakland & Macomb counties, beginning in the 1950s, as facilitating an exodus of an emerging middle-class out of the city to new suburbs. The 1967 riot exacerbated the polarities between city & suburb, defining them in terms of race & class. As a child in the 1970s in Oakland County I remember a common bumper-sticker "Visit Detroit - The Murder City." Considering the average dumb-wholesomeness of the average Midwesterner, that's quite a dark message to convey from that beacon of cheap-ass ideology, the car bumper.

My sense is that the hatred of the urban pandemic to the suburbs of Detroit has been a long-term anxiety about more diabolical issues at hand: there has been a continual exploitation of resources, based primarily in the automobile industry, in which obsolescence is always forthcoming. Sustainability & renewal have never been part of an economic equation which has been based in boom-or-bust short term profits. The city government itself has proved itself a kind of thin mask for larger corporate concerns, which ultimately have no specific site. There is no loyalty to place, & the pink slip is just around the corner. The message is: we are expendable.

One of the paradoxes in looking at photos of the "ruins" of Detroit is relative freedom it allows - an ability to experience some solitude, & to look at something in an unguided way. As per Camilo Jose Vergara, one can enter a space built by premises of capitalist expansion of the 20th century, & view it retrospectively, even as it exists still, before us.

It was always dear to me, this solitary hill,
and this hedgerow here, that closes off my view,
from so much of the ultimate horizon.
But sitting here, and watching here,
in thought, I create interminable spaces,
greater than human silences, and deepest
quiet, where the heart barely fails to terrify.
When I hear the wind, blowing among these leaves,
I go on to compare that infinite silence
with this voice, and I remember the eternal
and the dead seasons, and the living present,
and its sound, so that in this immensity
my thoughts are drowned, and shipwreck
seems sweet to me in this sea.
- Giacomo Leopardi

Death, Destruction and . . .

2010-03-27T12:21:00.001-07:00

In conversation w/ D., about the photographing of ruins.

Ruins were common subjects in the first decades of photography: there are exemplary examples of such, as daguerreotype, calotype, wet plate image, etc. As a technical consideration, the immobility of any site, it's stationary aspect, facilitated its imaging by processes which were time-intensive. & in these images one can see a cultural shift in the use of the image to delineate time as a physical residue, residue which can be simultaneously historical & touristic.

We can see the Acropolis or the excavations of Pompeii with the new technological vision of the camera. The sites tend to be much dirtier & unkempt than in our present day, or so it seems - it could be a problem w/ early orthochromatic films. It is as the places do not know how to be seen - how awkward they can seem. Or I think of the views by Roger Fenton of fantastical gothic ruins in England, with tiny figures randomly placed in the overgrown sites. This reminds me of how different it could be to experience such sites, physically, in different times. In Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Tess could run off to Stonehenge in her great solitude, whereas nowadays one would be on a very controlled guided tour.

The photograph also has air of judgement in it's seeming ability to discern what is to be preserved & what is to be discarded. For example, the survey by Charles Marville of Paris before the expansion of the city by Baron Hausmann had obliterated the medieval city is an inventory of what is to be destroyed, after it has been recorded by the camera. This is a concrete manifestation of the assertion by Oliver Wendell Holmes in his article about the stereoscope: Form is henceforth divorced from matter. The image is what is necessary, not the thing itself.

Images of war, as the urgency of the conflict fades from memory, become quaint & fascinating for their visual qualities. From the US Civil War, George Barnard's images following William Tecumseh Sherman's "March to the Sea" have an uncanny solitude, like Pompeii, which in no way imparts the aggressive fury of a military campaign of massive destruction. Such a duality in images - their ability to succor us from the horrors which they represent, is where I want to begin w/ my talk w/ D.

There are 2 photo books out this spring of Detroit - Detroit Disassembled, by Andrew Moore, and The Ruins of Detroit, by Yves Marchand & Romain Meffre. I have my own ongoing photographic project of Detroit, which includes images of the abandoned Michigan Central Station, & Victorian ruins in Brush Park. More on this another time: but is Detroit a "disaster" or the outcome of capitalist logic played out, & played out on home turf? Isn't it about economic obsolescence? An end that is now in sight?

From there the conversation led to Robert Polidori's book of photos of New Orleans, after the flooding of Hurricane Katrina, Robert Polidori: After the Flood.

For D., the viewing of ruins is a romantic activity. & less substantial than, say, the lyrics of Shelley's Ozymandias. No judgement is in the image itself, no (excuse the pun) point of view; the photographer is more a camera operator than an interpreter, with a technological recording at hand. The oblique photograph does not hone one's perspective but instead offers distraction & a puzzlement of meaning. In more general terms, the photograph reduces all to tourism.

Polidori's images of New Orleans are a fairly exhaustive inventory of damages from the hurricane & subsequent flooding, yet do so in a richly pictorial style we know from Polidori's earlier work, with it's sharp focus, rich colors, & intense details. I am partial to Polidori's book of Havana, for example, which although of a poverty on a scale we ignore in the US (& also of a past sumptuousness equally foreign to our more Puritanical shores), does not read necessarily as a kind of victimization except as a manifestation of an Exotic Other (although I suspect it may function as a prospective real estate brochure for those waiting for the fall of communism in Cuba).

The images of New Orleans are structured entirely around the flood; the images also manage to aestheticize the disaster
& have it read as natural. As if it is the high waters & mold lines constitute the issues at hand, rather than the class warfare & bureaucratic neglect which facilitated the true disaster. & this is where the work becomes troubling, in its delectation of a ruined city, for no other purpose than it's aesthetic consumption, in a simplified equation of cause & effect.

That said, I find that the void I sense looking at these images is what compels me to continue to look.

Anthony Hamboussi, Newtown Creek - A Photographic Survey of New York's Industrial Waterway

2010-03-09T12:27:00.000-08:00

Newtown Creek: A Photographic Survey of New York?s Industrial Waterwayby Anthony Hamboussi is a journey around the perimeters of the Newtown Creek in New York City, an industrial canal which separates north Brooklyn from the western perimeters of Queens, flowing westward towards the East River. It is a self-propelled project, which began with Hamboussi's knowledge of the area, beginning in a childhood in nearby Maspeth, Queens. A seemingly casual project became an obsessive chronicle of several years. The images are presented chronologically which suits the essentially private nature of the enterprise, that of Hamboussi's journey into a polluted heart of darkness within New York City limits. Thoroughly researched & plotted, Hamboussi's itinerary also incorporated intuitive aspects, which can be seen in the fitful un-mappings of the area, giving it more the fitful mutability of dreams, in its starts & stops & divergences, while it inventories a large area of mixed industries.

I have been struck by how many New Yorkers do not know where the Newtown Creek is, although it is a ubiquity to those living in Greenpoint, Bushwick, Long Island City, Maspeth. The community with the most unlikely name in such a gray mess is Blissville, which straddles a cemetery & a Best Western Motel, on the Queens side. The creek stinks. It is poisonous. Its most notable landmark is the sewage treatment plant through which flows 3/4 of New York City's waste (& which now features a remarkably innovative park within its facilities). Good friend of mine once lived in Greenpoint, at the end of Manhattan Ave., on the other side of the Pulaski Bridge from the sewage treatment plant, which when the wind blew in a certain manner, mixing with the scents of a nearby scented candle factory, the area would be imbued with odors of intense sweetness & shit, even for those with a high gag threshold. There are now 2 centuries of industry layering its shores, & within it the boundaries have blurred between public & private, as streets mysteriously disappear into the gated confines of corporations, as maps mutate with no reason other than as the residue of decades of corporate aggression homesteading on these filthy borders. Seemingly deserted, it is actually active & dynamic as an economic nerve, sinking below the horizon of freeways, warehouses & factories.

Perhaps the most acute irony I could discover about the area is that in the 18th century, before its industrialization, the Newtown Creek gave its name to the first cultivated apple in the US: the Newtown Pippin. Grassy meadows sloping down to sweet waters, a peaceable kingdom of fish & fowl, a New World . . .

At this point we can only take someone's else's word on this. Hamboussi's photos show a diverse area of industry & infrastructure. While the frontage on the East River is now being developed as a corridor of high-rise apartments, the filthy core of the creek is still a crazy-quilt cross-section of industries & abject histories.

What will happen to the parking lot for the Fink Means Good Bread trucks? What pollutants were left behind by Phelps Dodge, before its site was taken over for the Fresh Direct warehouse? How can National Grid justify legally its prohibition of photography at its perimeter, outside its fenced borders?

Hamboussi looks at the Creek with the eyes of both an insider & an outsider. Given the lugubrious tally of industry & its aftermath at hand, Hamboussi's photography has a contrasting lightness of touch. While I know the work he has put into it, the images flow with their attention to detail, to the ability of Hamboussi to guide us through a landscape which would be so easy to ignore in its harshness, yet which reveals so much about the world we live in.

Herve Guibert, Ghost Image

2010-03-04T06:30:00.001-08:00

Herve Guibert's L'Image fantome was published initially in 1982. The English translation, Ghost Image (Green Integer), by Robert Bononno, I have came out in 1996, from Sun & Moon Press, and is available currently from Green Integer Press. The book is comprised of short written pieces which were published originally in Le Monde. A posthumous volume, La Photo, inéluctablement, was published in 1999, which has not yet appeared in English.

Guibert, known primarily for his books, also photographed. Several years ago I saw an exhibition of his photos at the Cultural Services of the French Embassy, on upper Fifth Ave., just below the Met, & I have a book published by Schirmer/Mosel. From 1993! (It seems so not so long ago).

The pieces in Ghost Image are short, some the length of a paragraph. Although notable photographers are mentioned (Henri Cartier-Bresson, Diane Arbus, August Sander), the pieces discuss photography in the everyday: Family photos, identity photos, album covers, film stills, etc., as well as the acts of photographing, the tensions & disappointments of it. I enjoyed particularly an account of an adolescent infatuation with a still of Terence Stamp in the Fellini film Toby Dammit (in which Guibert mistakenly refers to the Stamp character as the devil, when in fact Stamp is more a Swinging London version of Faust, who has sold his soul). There is a diaristic aspect to the writing - family episodes are recounted, memory is intertwined with photography - and it is public and brief, in a form that is perhaps more familiar to blog readers of today. Truly, it seems prescient of so much web writing now, although with a much more delirious perversity and greater powers of observation:

. . . I recall an incident that made a great impression on me when I was 8 or 9 years old. My sister was 12 or 13 at the time, and her breasts were just beginning to develop; high and firm, we had already seen them at the beach the year before, but that was the last time, because the following year they were covered up by a bra. That morning, it must have been a Sunday, my sister was locked in the bathroom. My father was at the door, camera in hand, trying to get in. He said, without hiding his intention, that he wanted to photograph his daughter's breasts, because at that age, the moment of their initial formation, they are at the height of their beauty, and if they weren't photographed then, that state of perfection would be lost. That was the extent of his argument. At the time, he sadly renounced his failed attempt at appropriation through the image and fought against that limit; he wanted to push back by a notch the phase of abandonment, of renunciation and at the same time, extend his role as a father in order to assume that of a lover within the conventions of voyeurism, for between the father and the lover, desire was probably not very different. . . "Inventory of a Box of Photographs"

Photography, in Guibert's book, is a multiplicity of effects. It is a technological reinforcement of morbid curiosities, it facilitates social controls, it supplants memories, dreams and perceptions, replacing them with its own mediated Olympus of illusions.In "Photographic Writing" Guibert finds photographic aspects in descriptive writings by Goethe and Kafka - looking backward from the perspective of the technological present to a pre-photography concealed in language. Without any direct quotations, I find traces of Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer and Roland Barthes in Guibert's considerations of the social aspects of photography. Barthes makes an appearance as "R.B." in "The Photograph, As Close to Death as Possible" which is an account of Guibert approaching R.B. to photograph him with his ailing mother, who in the interim, died. Guibert presents his own lust for photographing in equivocal terms: it is morbid, it is fetishistic, it is selfish. & the compulsion can be sweet as well.

Written with almost aphoristic brevity, these episodes of photography seem both exceedingly particular & also informed with much larger ideas. To continue with photographic metaphors, these vignettes are like snapshots, fragments which indicate a much larger whole. I last read the book in what must have been 1996-1997, when the translation was published. Rereading it has been as stimulating as I can recall it to have been, with what seems new finds:

A Japanese dancer from the Sankai Juku group dances with a peacock. His entire body is very white, powdered with white clay, and his head is shaved. He wears nothing but a plain linen loincloth tied around his waist and stands out in relief against a wooden backdrop to which varnished fishtails and enormous fins from some cetacean have been attached. He embraces the peacock like a woman in a swoon, and the pattern on the bird's plumage extends his loincloth with a gold-flecked train. We can see that the peacock's thighs and feet are very muscular, like an ostrich, but the dancer keeps them bent, broken at the joints, and immobilized in his left hand, pressed against his side. His right hand encircles the peacock's neck, stretches it, plays with it as if it were a delicate instrument, squeezes it almost to the point of strangling it. Everything is limited to a few contractions, and to the flow of blood, which he must feel and control with his palm: the Japanese dances a kind of slow-motion tango with the peacock, he dances with the peacock's fear, with its vital fear of death. It really is an extraordinary moment, one of great tension, great beauty. But when the dancer releases the terrified peacock, we no longer know where to look, and our eye, which wanders between the dancer and the bird, loses its orientation. The peacock is nothing but a big terrified fowl who scratches around stupidly and snares itself in the cord that restrains its feet. The dancer is nothing but a dancer gesturing slowly. Our fascination has worn off, and rather than be deceived, we prefer to divert our gaze to the empty space between them, where the magic was created, the site of a latent photograph. Morever, when the Sankai Juko group came to Paris, many people, many photographers, returned to the performance with their cameras mounted on tripods. They bought seats in the front row and waited for the appearance of the peacock. They fired away - they were guaranteed beauty. That eminently photographic image, however, doesn't belong to them (what is it that eludes photography here, except the infintesimal movements of contraction of the peacock's neck, which are essential to the dance?), it belongs to the dancer, and he has decided that this will be a dance and not a photograph. And we might reiterate that beauty, like theater, is tied to the ephemeral, and to loss, and can't be captured. Only I would prefer that photographers put more dance (or theater, or cinema) into their pictures, just as the dancer had put photography into his dance. - "Dance"

Robin Graubard, The Hold Up

2010-02-06T08:11:00.000-08:00

Robin Graubard's current exhibition at Participant is an invigorating and expressive exploration of an eclectic range of photographic work. Graubard's images were made both professionally, as a working photojournalist, and photos done for private purposes - one would assume. No information is offered as to the origins of the work, which is one of its great strengths: the photos are displayed in informal groupings, without the linear narrative of a news or personal story. Instead the gallery is more like a box in which photos are kept randomly. We can bring different associations to the images, but they will not explain themselves to us.

The play between recognition and lack of knowledge is a profound aspect to looking at photographs. We see & don't know. Tallies of the contents of the work include: homelessness or squatting, youth culture, music, downtown NYC before gentrification, crime, wars in the Balkans, suburban domesticity, drugs - but making such a list does not reveal much at all. Nor can we know Graubard's involvement - as a paid professional or participant (excuse the pun).

I am impressed with how the show deals with news photography, which in some ways is truly ephemeral. Unattached to a crisis as it occurs in the virtual present tense of media, what is it? We can look at 19th century Civil War photography like the work of Mathew Brady or Alexander Gardner in a comfortable, distanced way, & see it on a museum wall, where it becomes art, as an aesthetic consideration. & likewise at MoMA we can see "iconic" images by W. Eugene Smith of World War II. What becomes imperative in looking at Smith isn't necessarily the situations, but the superlative darkroom technique, the liberal use artistic compositional strategies to make a point.

Looking at Robin Graubard's installation I am struck by what seems to me a very sensitive poignancy in conflating both the "outer" world of media & the "inner" tensions of a private world - it's a model of the shifting levels of consciousness, which we tend to overlook in our overlooked drawers & shoeboxes, of the ephemera we forget but which tells much more than anticipated.

Detroit Experiences, Robert Frank Photographs, 1955

2010-01-31T18:42:00.000-08:00

Following the remarkable exhibition & book from the National Gallery in DC, Looking In: Robert Frank's The Americans, the Detroit Institute of Arts has a remarkable portfolio of Frank's images made in Detroit while on his Guggenheim fellowship, in 1955, which will offer even more insight into Frank's processes, as well as offering a rich (which in this context - excuse the pun) treatment of the city of Detroit as a subject matter. There are both well-known images as well as much more obscure & unpublished images in the group. It will be on view at the end of March.

Images made in Detroit constitute a good 10% of The Americans, & while images made at the Ford Rouge plant may be easily identifiable, there are such iconic images in Frank's work such as of a couple at a rodeo, or the Gratiot Drive-In, which offer a much more complex vision of the post-WWII metropolis. That Frank, a Swiss emigre, in New York, would locate Detroit as a site remarkable for its industry as well as its strip-mall modernity, its decentralization, indicates intuition & critical facility. Frank was friends with the writer Jack Kerouac, who had spent a short time in Detroit, earlier, & who by all accounts had experienced both highs & lows as a result. Perhaps Frank, as a result of his companionship, avoided any unnecessary highs (the Grosse Pointes, "polite" society). The Detroit in Frank's images is a working class world which hovers between the urban & the rural. I can't really term it suburban as what is in the images is not really about that. Suburbia implies progress, change. It's more about a kind of raw land given shape by mass production & cheapness, identity as a kind of blanket statement of commodities.

Growing up in the metro Detroit area in the 1960s & 1970s I have early memories of driving from Royal Oak to Northland, in Southfield, driving on rigorously straight roads (12 Mile, Greenfield, Southfield) through open land, & subsequently such flat tree-less prairie being filled with developments, to the point of un-recognition. As a child of New Deal Democrats I remember a bit of mirth at a street in Southfield momentarily named "Spiro Agnew Drive."

The downtown, which constituted for me most of the city, from the New Center down Woodward Ave. to the river, was an alternative universe of great urbanity.

The Frank images at the DIA constitute both well-known images such as the the Rouge assembly line & the Gratiot Drive-In, as well as images that were part of the series, but never finished, per se. This is a great opportunity to see Frank images in a much earthier manner than the museological pursuits of the NGA. While the depth of the Looking In project, as both publication & exhibition, is remarkable, I think that there's a kind of disjuncture in looking at the truly remarkable final prints, which were produced - finer than the reproductions in The Americans, finer than one would think, of the images. Such prints seem after the fact, as an image , a kind of commodification.

Frank's images of Detroit also engage the social world, unlike the almost contemporaneous work of Harry Callahan, made in Detroit before Callahan's move to Chicago. Frank is always at the tawdrier ends of things. Callahan photographed both weeds & parked cars as formal elements, whereas Frank showed the assembly line as dreary monotony & the nearby pleasures - fast foods at a soda counter, the drive-in movie - as rather disappointing palliatives.

Frank's images of Detroit in The Americans are among the most pungent in the book. For those used to a sense of history & culture in their sense of place, this may seem a bit foreign, but I would say that post-WWII Detroit was an urban sprawl on the edge of nothingness, of flat boring nothing. The hoopla around commodities & a safe sense of a good life could cloak the fence-post between cozy & void. But that's it. The twilight as seen in Frank's Gratiot Drive-In image is the sense of the planet turning, indifferent to the cars & drivers in the shadows below.

film stills

2010-01-25T05:59:00.000-08:00

The film still, considered photographically, has been under the wire as a primary document, a thing without interest in itself, its meaning generated only in consideration of its subject.

In terms of production in Hollywood it was an integral part of the industry. Stills would be used for publicity & continuity. Classic Hollywood stills were produced throughout productions, with the hyperreal optics of a large format camera. Key scenes would be re-staged for the camera. In such a visual theater the exact perimeters of a drama were made evident, formed into a visual icon.

There have been some great collections of film stills. My 2 favorites have been the Marvin Heiferman/Diane Keaton collaboration Still Life, & the John Divola project, Continuity. Subsequently there have been great collections of silent film stills in lavish editions from Twelvetrees Press & Steidl. One could relate these collections as well to books such as Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon I & II, although the Anger books are much more iconoclastic in their devotions to the shadows of the silver screen.

The film still is a curious document. For narrative films it is a document of a fiction. In classic Hollywood tradition it is the delineation of the drama is at its most concentrated. How a narrative would transmute to an image, at its apogee.

The Heiferman/Keaton Still Life was published in the heyday of black-&-white artistic photography, when the images included were at their most suspect in terms of integrity: artificial, staged, commercial, unreal - yet resonant with ideologies, in fact very clear about values & positions, & likewise, strange, in their all too quick obsolescence as a consumable object. The paradoxes of a photograph in a media based society, with its limited shelf-life & yet its ubiquity, presented themselves in glorious technicolor. From Jane Russell to Lassie.

Along with the classic industrialized Hollywood still, there has been its avant-garde shadow, in innumerable images of various louche productions. Disparate productions that come to mind are the Jack Smith book The Beautiful Book, & the various images by the cinematographer Babette Mangolte, which include work by Richard Foreman & Chantal Ackerman, among others. The Metropolitan Museum has collected photos taken of various performances in the 1960s, such as by Claes Oldenburg & Red Grooms - another example of "primary documents" entering the field of fine art as a collectible. Among filmmakers, I would cite the film stills of Ulrike Ottinger, which, more than most, replicate the high production standards of a classic Hollywood studio, & which also surpass any studio in creating images that could exist independently of any project.

Such a lop-sided juncture of fiction & document has always inspired me. I don't collect stills, the way I do stereocards or cartes-de-visite, but among my treasures are:

Dennis Hopper in Nightide

a collaged image from Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome

Harry Baer in Ludwig: Requiem for a Virgin King

Candy Darling in The Death of Maria Malibran

The Corinthians - A Kodachrome Slideshow

2009-12-31T09:10:00.001-08:00

The Corinthians - A Kodachrome Slideshow, edited by Ed Jones & Timothy Prus, published by The Archive of Modern Conflict, is a collection of anonymous Kodachrome slides, dated 1947-1974.

I became aware of the press through another book edited by Jones & Prus, Nein, Onkel, which is also of anonymous material, in this instance, snapshots of Nazi soldiers - material which is a bit more difficult, historically, especially in lieu of its innocuous banality and rich un-self-consciousness (the soldiers being innocuously ordinary, cute, without any distinction). As far as I know, Nein, Onkel is available in the US only through Dashwood Books, & I have never seen a copy of The Corinthians available except through the internet.

While The Corinthians does reference a specific historical conflict like Nein, Onkel, the title is taken from the book of Corinthians in the bible, a series of letters from St Paul which address a decadent society: thus the images hover between being a relic & being an ambiguous indictment. Kodachrome itself is of recent obsolescence, & like much analog film material, now represents its own historical passage in the past tense.

In terms of using the specific materiality of Kodachrome (color transparency, vivid hues with a palette akin to Technicolor)and its anonymous usage, there is Guy Stricherz's book Americans in Kodachrome 1945-1965, which is a much gentler, nostalgic collection. & this is not to diminish the Stricherz collection, either, which has its own fascinations. The title of the Stricherz book also reveals what is often unstated about nostalgia: that nostalgia has national borders, that nostalgia can be used as a technological fantasy of a shared & cohesive history, a Family of Man in lower-case letters. My guess is the images in The Corinthians are primarily from the US, & the sometimes gaudy hues & occasions to photograph are representative of a post-WWII glee, a kind of ascendancy of an ability to observe one's daily life, which over time detaches itself from any context & becomes cryptic. But the shared "American-ness" of the Stricherz book is not apparent in The Corinthians, where instead the images clash, they do not relate to one another, whether by year, region, practice, or taste. What is revealed can seem simultaneously obvious & opaque. What separates the collections of Stricherz and the Archive of Modern Conflict is in the choice of images & their editing. One of the remarkable things about the images in The Corinthians is that they are often uglier than beautiful. The interiors & family scenes can be claustrophobic if not downright unpleasant. This is so against the grain of the fading twilight of nostalgia, in which a partial forgetfulness is often equated w/ sweetness or tenderness, a slight regret along with a letting go - instead the images are jarring, & whether through accident or intent (the difference between we will never know), there is a crudeness, an awkward possessiveness which resonate w/ more craven aspects of the photographic process: the images force the participants into a pantomime of an image-self, as an illusion of what they would be, which is realized w/ an almost violent lack of skills. In this sense The Corinthians reminds me of the vertigo of the images in Wisconsin Death Trip. Vanitas vanitatum.

If one thinks of the billions of snapshots which exist, in utter randomness, the collection of whatever becomes the ad hoc solution to extract any sort of meaning what is otherwise accident & chance. Both The Corinthians & Nein, Onkel posit the amateur photo collection as a kind of black mirror to the past, in a Barthesian sense of lost time, & also in the excesses of detail which add strangeness & confusion to memory.

I would also recommend The Corinthians for it's unusual binding, which reproduces the cardboard mount of a Kodachrome slide, with a window cut in both front & back. This is anterior to the content of the book, but still references the original physical form of the slides. It shows a great deal of concentration to the enterprise, & its tally of vanishing forms.

Ulrike Ottinger - Image Archive

2009-12-28T07:57:00.000-08:00

At the Walker Art Center this week I bought a copy of Image Archive: Photographs 1970-2005 by the filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger. The photographs were taken over a 35 year span & include stills & studies for both Ottinger's experimental narrative films as well has ethnographic work done in Mongolia & China.

Seeing it brought back memories of when I worked at Anthology Film Archives, when in its small gallery there was a show of black-&-white images by Ottinger from her films: immaculate, well-printed, finished objects, which could be independent of the films themselves. The production of film stills is something which has for the most part diminished w/ the decline of the studio system in Hollywood, when stills were integral to publicity as well as continuity purposes. & certainly for experimental work it is often not a priority or something done w/ a great deal of work. I recall the show at Anthology as being a setting for a Halloween party. Also that it would have been circa 1989 - 20 years ago now!

There are almost 600 images in the book, mostly in color, mostly from the documentary work in Asia, but there are generous archives of images from the earlier experimental narratives, such as the spectacular Tabea Blumenschein in Madame X - An Absolute Ruler, & Ticket of No Return, & Magdalena Montezuma in Freak Orlando. & my one-time boss at the Bleecker St. Cinema, Jackie Raynal, as 1/2 of a Siamese twin in Freak Orlando. Among many others.(a nude study of Rosa von Prauheim, Delphine Seyrig as Lady Windemere in Johanna D'Arc of Mongolia, etc.).

Ottinger's images veer from the carefully studied film still images to photographs of a much more casual, "collecting" mode. Nevertheless there is a great deal of economy in Ottinger's diversity. The photographs often function as sketches for the larger work of the films. While not intended as a primary work by Ottinger, the photographs can be looked at as great footnotes to her cinematic oeuvre. & given Ottinger's careful practices, these are a truly fascinating addendum to the films.

Years ago my friend K. spoke about the absence of "women's adventure stories." I have always thought of Ottinger's films as being just that: whether a pirate queen, or a society lady drunk on a fabulous bender (Tabea Blumenschein walking on mirrors & destroying them as she walks into the future), or the meetings of all on the Trans-Siberian express on the steppes of Mongolia, Ottinger has created a hypothetical universe of expanding possibilities.

I am less familiar with the later documentary work, but in tandem w/ the narratives I am struck by the absence of tedium or banality in Ottinger's observations. Everything is about diversity & hybrid forms. The minutae of daily life can become an object of deep focus, as well as manifestations of the truly strange & unusual.

The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll

2009-12-20T16:18:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, browsing at the St. Marks Bookstore, I picked up a copy of Jean Nathan's The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll: The Search for Dare Wright, a biography of Dare Wright, the author of The Lonely Doll. I had had a copy which I had given away & it seemed fortuitous to pick up another copy, hardbound, to replace it.

I was not aware of Dare Wright or her numerous children's books, illustrated with her photographs until well into my adulthood. My good friend K. was the first to mention The Lonely Doll to me, as it had been a beacon for her in her childhood. & then subsequently others I knew mentioned this as well.

I've been rereading The Lonely Doll & other books by Dare Wright. I am struck by how Edith, the lonely doll of the title, encounters & addresses serious issues: isolation, separation, doubt. The appearance of Mr. & Little Bear is a kind of wish fulfillment & also a plateau in which Edith's sensitivities can be played out, in determining her emotional perimeters. Written w/ a laconic sweetness, it is nevertheless resonant w/ indications of trauma - loss, rejection, abjection.

Dolls can be quite serious. I can think of such oddities as the doll of Alma Mahler that Oskar Kokoschka made as a kind of effigy, or the mutating poupees of Hans Bellmer, but perhaps more for understanding Dare Wright we should think of the tableaux of Laurie Simmons, or the use of dolls in the Todd Haynes film Superstar - the Karen Carpenter Story. In either case dolls & a doll world are miniatures of an ideological structure which can be apprehended as such in its shrunken state.

Children are anarchists, surrealists, & clairvoyants before the fact: they can see the tree from the woods & then some. The images of The Lonely Doll & its sequels are in a sense quite spare & shocking, given their photographic sources. The amateurishness of the tableaux is more than obvious. As an adult this may seem somewhat paltry, but for children it allows the child to enter in the fiction & finish it, which may be part of the power Dare Wright's books have, in addition to fairy tale aspects of the narratives. The Lonely Doll culminates in a potential trauma in which Edith the doll & Little Bear transgress Mr. Bear with their uncontrolled behavior. Edith fears rejection & the loss of her only friends, which is assuaged in Mr. Bear's forgiveness & a swearing of unconditional love. Given the simplicity of means, this is a remarkably complex situation which addresses primal insecurities. I think I can understand the truly vehement passion of my various friends who have grown up with this book as it touches on the intensity of separation & isolation for a child.

Jean Nathan's biography of Dare Wright is a very sensitive assessment of Wright's life, which was remarkably circumscribed & controlled. In lesser hands maybe there wouldn't seem like anything to write about, or perhaps the macabre aspects would stand out more. Dare Wright's career as a children's book author is almost accidental - she had been an acting student, a model, & then had branched out into photography, all the while living w/ her scarily controlling mother. All her life Dare Wright was like a doll herself, made up in fantastic configurations of impossible, untouchable beauty, except by dear old mom. In terms of The Lonely Doll, here is where some parallels become a bit too disturbing: the doll is named Edith, after the mother, Edith "Edie" Stevenson Wright. The doll Edith wears a wig that is identical to Dare Wright's bangs-&-ponytail hairdo. If anything, the reason to get the hardbound copy of The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll is its cover which features a truly sick contact sheet of 6x6cm images of Dare Wright fidgeting w/ a Hasselblad, until the last frame of Edie, mimicking the same.

Looking at photographs of Dare Wright in her youth & adulthood I am struck by her poise, by what seems a kind of visual self-possession. Her demeanor was urbane, bordering on bohemian, but w/ a backbone of proper. If anything, reading about her life w/ mother, I am reminded of the end of the Hitchcock film Marnie in which the mother screams at her lying, stealing, pathological daughter that she was raised to be "decent." & so was Dare Wright. Or along more pop lines, Dare Wright was raised to be like the Nat King Cole hit "Mona Lisa." Many dreams have been brought to your doorstep/They just lie there and they die there/Are you warm, are you real, Mona Lisa?/Or just a cold and lonely lovely work of art? Beautiful, inscrutable & untouchable. Wright's story is a story about proper manners as a kind of perversion, an ill-fitting mask over psychological oddities. It's all about what wasn't said, what wasn't done & what didn't happen.

After the mother has passed, as Dare Wright entered old age, this became a paradigm of extreme self-destruction. Her later years had been spent in a apt on E. 80th St., & she spent a great deal of time in Central Park, often sleeping there, or bringing people she met there to her home. Ultimately, Dare Wright died in a public hospital on Roosevelt Island.

Given Dare Wright's timeline, I along w/ my friend D., another avid devotee of The Lonely Doll, realized that in her proximity to the Metropolitan Museum, & Central Park, along w/ our own - either one of us could have seen her, potentially often, without knowing it.

(This reminds me of another story involving my friend G., who had worked at both the National Academy of Design & the Guggenheim Museum, on upper 5th Ave. In an apt bldg between the 2 museums there was an older resident my friend dubbed "Baldy" who every day would go into Central Park & bring home black men to his 5 Ave apt., which was apparent to all those working in the National Academy, in the tedium of their workday. My friend G. was also a big fan of the writings of Coleman Dowell, an interest I shared. Ultimately after Dowell's suicide (by leaping off the balcony in said apt bldg) when stories of Dowell's sexual conquests in Central Park emerged, I had to show G. that "Baldy" & Coleman Dowell were one & the same.)

I must give Jean Nathan credit for telling a macabre story in a sensitive, respectful manner, without sensationalism or a sense of spectacle. It could also be perceived as a potentially slight story - ultimately little happened in a very circumscribed life - & again Jean Nathan opens this up to a sense of the profundity of just that. The story is almost Victorian. As a biography it's all sadness, but one must look at the books, the ability to create them, as being the true achievement.

Michelangelo Pistoletto - No To The Increase of the Tram Fare, 1965

2009-12-16T15:09:00.000-08:00

Michelangelo Pistoletto's mirror paintings, while not photography per se, engage the viewer with, for want of better terms, the conditions of photography. I find them meditative in regards to the act of looking in a technological, inexpressive manner, akin to either the snapshot or a news photo. They address the anonymity of photographic images, as a kind of mute recording, and the residue of looking at a photograph, unmoored as it is from its initial exposure, as a kind of after-taste. The mirror-polished steel of the surface, on which drawings from photographs are glued could be conceived as an echo of the daguerreotype, with its brilliant mirrored surface. However that seems much too historicist a reading: Instead what seems germane is the tension between a photograph as an art of both space & time, in which the recording of time is rendered as a 2-dimensional image, and the act of looking at a photograph, which is always a looking at whatever "time" is recorded as that time in the past tense, contrasted with the phenomenon of looking at that time in the here & now. The viewer is necessary to see the image & is complicit in its structure.

On a recent trip to the Detroit Institute of Arts I found a Pistoletto mirror-painting in the permanent collection of which I have no memory. The DIA is a museum I knew well in high school & college, but which I saw little of except in the past few years. The museum was renovated & expanded, re-opening in 2007 & I am just now seeing my way around its changes.

I found the Pistoletto very moving. I realize that Pistoletto's work isn't really suitable for an "emotional" reading per se. While like other examples of Arte Povera it involves a very direct experience in the here & now, it is also suffused w/ enough irony & distance to become a kind of alienated experience, it amplifies the lackings it invokes. Most often in the Pistoletto mirror-paintings it is images of others, but others barely seen, figures turning away, social scenes of no fixity, which put the viewer reflected in the scene into an oblique relation to the scene, never involved enough, not really there, but there. In this oeuvre of anonymity there are also several scenes of political activism, such as the scene in No To The Increase of the Tram Fare. The ambiguity of the relation to a political event, which can evoke both sympathy & distance, seems the ultimate subject. Other examples that come to mind are the woven global maps of Alghieri e Boetti in which the needlepoint contours of countries are filled w/ variations of their flags, or numerous paintings of Gerhard Richter, such as his portraits of leaders, or the suite of paintings of the Red Army Faction taken from news photographs - also w/ Richter, history is as common as the utter banality of the everyday, it is not "different" from more anonymous scenes. It's a kind of queasy relation to history, to politics, existing outside the boundaries of the frame of whatever - photo, weaving, painting.

The DIA has a remarkable mural sequence by Diego Rivera in the center of its original structure, made in 1933 of industry in Detroit which was paid for by Edsel Ford. The subject is primarily the manufacture of automobiles, but it also includes the pharmaceutical industry, shipping, aviation, agriculture. There was controversy about the murals in terms of Rivera being a sworn communist (although kicked out of the CP for his interactions w/ Leon Trotsky), also a communist being paid by an uber-capitalist such as Ford - I think also there was difficulty with the subject matter being a bit too close to home. The automotive money which built the DIA had fairly conservative tastes which was a happy occasion for the museum being able to acquire great Italian, Dutch & Flemish paintings, but not necessarily navigate the sedition of modern art. The Rivera murals are not biased with a specific political viewpoint, except out of sympathy with workers & the conditions of working & work as a fact of daily life. There is a cartoon-like parody of the bourgeoisie in the portrayal of factory visitors to the Rouge Plant, seen on a platform overlooking the assembly line (& looking almost like something from the Fleischer Studios) - then, as now, a feature of Ford. But otherwise any insidious propaganda is lacking, from what I can discern.

The direct engagement between Rivera & the factory is not there in the Pistoletto & his strikers, but I think the sympathy is still at least somewhat extant. But it has become a mediation of a mediation, hanging there mysteriously.

Larry Sultan 1946-2009

2009-12-15T00:14:00.000-08:00

Larry Sultan's work is most familiar to me from books: Evidence, Pictures from Home, and The Valley. The work also exists as gallery prints & has been used in magazines spreads. My personal attachment is to the books & the experience such a form offers: private, on my own time.

Evidence, made with Mike Mandel, is a collection of industrial photographs, which as a collection, leads to a kind of non-sense of imagery. Nothing relates, nothing really means anything, but the viewer is face-to-face with "evidence" of something somehow. There is a dry humor in the residue of corporate imagery, it's utter obscurity & obsolescence, but it is also a kind of psychic downward spiral, a tension between the kitsch of execution & a horror of banality.

Unlike a lot of work which uses vernacular imagery often as a kind of nostalgia, or a collection used to codify forms, Evidence uses imagery which traffics between the institutional & the ridiculous - as archaeology, the imagery is ultimately embarrassing in its weirdness, its cryptic passages between intention & effect.

There is an agitational quality to Sultan's work, an unrest, a meta-critique of the uses of photography which is most apparent in Evidence, in which the imagery is found, but which also informs the 2 long-term projects, Pictures from Home, which deals with the suburban culture of Sultan's parents, and The Valley, which is "behind the scenes" of the adult film industry.

Pictures from Home uses both Sultan's color photographs of his parents, living on the edge of a golf course, in southern CA, along with frame enlargements of home movies made by Sultan's father. The home movies are predictably bucolic & idealized - vacations, fun, high points. Sultan's photographs seem much darker in comparison, although in extremely lush color, in the brilliant SoCal light, in their acute focus & detail (contra the pictorial inexactitude of the home movies). Sultan's parents are used as kind of a test-case of post WWII prosperity & its retirement, figures placed in an artificial new world of synthetics, hovering in an ahistorical constant present. Sultan's parents become the post WWII nuclear family, severed from kith & kin, adrift in a sea of commodities.

In comparison, the images in The Valley seem the most illustrative, juxtaposed with both Evidence & Pictures from Home. The images can be read easily in either magazine or on a gallery wall: the behind-the-scenes of the adult film industry, on location in rented McMansions in the San Fernando Valley. The images concentrate on the absolute clutter of the houses as sites of filmmaking, in terms of the logistics of the set-ups as well as everything that is necessary to sustain the shoot. Also the images deal with the hours of waiting behind any film project - hours of tedium distinguishing the work involved. While it has some of the romantic appeal of a film like Boogie Nights& a general fascination with the adult film industry in our culture (a Puritanical vision of carnality at its most commodified, i.e. sensible form), the real subject seems to be the conformity & dullness of work, any work. The hideous McMansions of the Valley photograph extremely well: settings of baroque vulgarity, impersonal except for the particularities of bad taste from house to house, & even then nothing is ever unique or outstanding. Everything is prefabricated, mass produced, & strangely empty. The models for the films reiterate the alienation of the architecture & decor in their utter displacement from it. Everything looks kind of awful & inexplicably expensive.

Larry Sultan's photographs for The Valley, printed large, fit comfortably in art galleries, wherein large color photographs are a kind of contemporary salon painting. Akin to PL DiCorcia's images of pole dancers, or the more obscure images of porn sets done by Jeff Burton, which seem more about distraction & daydreaming on the job (Burton was also working for various companies). Still, Sultan's images have a kind of distancing & self-consciousness which keeps them from being pure commodity. The images are rehearsals for images, attempts, auditions, lapses, distractions. The models look mechanical & bored. The theme of scientific management seen in the images of Evidence is sublimated but constant throughout The Valley.

From Evidence to The Valley: dealing w/ corporate imagery, the family, suburbia & sex. Such an engaged & challenging use of the camera & the photograph.

Joachim Schmid, Other People's Photographs

2009-11-25T10:01:00.000-08:00

Photography as a medium of originality can be explored in museum collections, from the rough-hewn negatives & positives of the calotype, to the MFA mandated images of today. If one were to consider photography not just as another medium, but as a social phenomenon, its ubiquity as well as its banality must be taken into account. From the introduction of the Kodak camera (& image) in 1888, which created a global amateur market, photography has had a role beyond its aesthetics, in the everyday.

The industrialization of imagery, its crazy ubiquity, as well as its acceptance, indicates a faith which may extend beyond the average. The lowest common denominator may be recognition, if nothing else. A tacit faith in doing something, with a machine, which in its objectivity, denotes a moment, its reality.

I first noticed the books of Joachim Schmid on the shelves at Printed Matter. There is a great deal of humor in Schmid's self-published books, such as Phantome, in which a sort of game is involved, matching up media images of criminals with their crimes. Schmid addresses the absolute & unconscious aspect of photography, the fact that it is accepted without a question, as well as its role in daily life, whether or not that is actually clear. It is simply there.

The books,"Other People's Pictures" are a series of POD books available from Blurb. Culled from flickr, Schmid has created his own taxonomies using appropriate key words, & utilizing the daily excess of on line postings. "Other people's pictures" indicates a willingness to share & to be like others as much as it will show a sense of standing alone. Photography is a lonely but ubiquitous enterprise. I is like others.

Schmid's books interject in a daily electronic culture, a vast every-expanding archive of virtual collections.

The apparent clarity of selected keywords ("Mickey" or "Digits" for example) become strange & exotic. Ostensibly each book ordered from Schmid is itself unique in its selection & editing. No two are exactly alike, yet all are so familiar.

Photography in Schmid's book becomes a shared technology rather than a singular expressive medium. Our fantasies are also someone else's & we can see so, easily. On sites such as flickr this may be the salient detail/ which prompts not only an excess of compiling images, but of circulating them in an efficient & globally open manner.

Alice O'Malley, Community of Elsewheres

2009-11-24T12:13:00.000-08:00

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

2009-10-14T01:17:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-08T06:28:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-23T09:22:00.001-07:00

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

2009-08-23T11:23:00.001-07:00

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

2009-08-23T09:27:00.000-07:00

Richard Avedon

2009-08-21T14:32:00.001-07:00

Given what would be otherwise sympathy & interest in the writings of F. Scott Fitzgerald, one of his more unfortunate statements was to the effect "The rich are different." I balk at this statement, even if it were true. In & of itself the statement isn't so lame, but it is when it is used elsewhere by others, in which case the heaviness of it begins to sound creaky & moribund. One example, & my memory may be incorrect given the lapse of years (my childhood, spent in front of a TV) & the lameness of the source, was on the Merv Griffin Show, in which Merv Griffin asked Truman Capote, by then late & unproductive in his writing, just that question, "Are the rich different?" Truman Capote, by biographical accounts severely alcoholic & socially unacceptable to the "swans" of high society whom Capote had written about in novelistic fragments at this point, said, wittily, "Yes, they are different. They have better vegetables."

Truman Capote was a former collaborator with and later critic of Richard Avedon. Avedon, Capote & Alexei Brodovitch created one of the great photo books of the 20th century, Observations. Ultimately, perhaps, it is Brodovitch who is the great genius behind the book: Avedon's portraits are mixed with Capote's texts, all of which are determined by the graphic design (the first letter of each text must relate visually to the photograph, etc.). At any rate this is a great meeting of great talents meeting on the printed page. The book, Observations, also foreshadows what would be a model of Richard Avedon's presence in books & exhibitions: his portraits, overshadowing his fashion work, which was the bread-&-butter of Avedon's career & also the work which brought him to public attention, initially.

Avedon's portraiture dominates his exhibitions & catalogs. It is ostensibly "editorial portraiture" - no less commercial than the Dior New Look or "The Most Unforgettable Women in the World Wear Revlon" but it has the cachet of being of public figures, of the great & strange of the world, as opposed to the puppet-like world of models & couture. & I don't think anyone would question me on this, Avedon was smart: he had an eye on his posterity, on his skills being seen in a larger cultural sphere than the narrow world of fashion. The exhibits, from the 1977 retrospective at the Metropolitan to the 1995 "Evidence" at the Whitney were demonstrations of the extreme width & depth of Avedon's access to the various powers-that-be in the world along with umpteen & sundry most unforgettable women in the world, too, as more of an afterthought.

My sense of Avedon's separations between his "serious" & commercial work is not a novel observation (excuse the pun). Almost like a mantra, I have heard many people say, "Avedon is great, but I really like his fashion work." Such an idea informed the exhibit curated by Vince Aletti & Carol Squiers at ICP, in conjunction with the Richard Avedon Foundation.

As I understand it, Avedon began destroying vestiges of his commercial fashion past before his death - again, second-guessing posterity. For anyone who came in the remotest proximity of "Dick" & would be instructed to address him as such, this is perhaps not unusual, as a self-made star himself (played in the movies by Fred Astaire, no less, almost 50 years before Avedon's death) with a stronger will-to-power than your average photographer. I think of Avedon as a very conscious heir to the likes of Nadar. Both were self-made, liberal, & occupied a "public" sphere of mass media. Both courted a portrait clientele of great figures. & if anything Avedon's scope was remarkably wide: from artistic characters from the 1950s such as Ezra Pound (which is one of my all-time favorite images ever) & Marianne Moore, to the various characters involved in the Watergate trial. One does indeed see a calvacade of our age's notables. One could question the making of distinctions between his theatrical, somewhat morbid portraiture & his fashion stories. How far is the vanitas portrait of Duke & Duchess of Windsor from, say, any of the images of Dovima, which occupy an even more hermetic sense of grandiose glamor, with a creeping sense of despair somehow in them?

Not to diminish the portraits, but none can approach the serial images of the constantly transforming Suzy Parker in terms of presence, or the mock-elegance of Dovima with the elephants (itself an echo of the Elisofon image of Gloria Swanson reprising her Sunset Boulevard persona in the ruins of the Roxy Theater, a star among faded grandeur). The "Paris by Night" sequence is an elaborate cosmology of a mythic, glamorous, chic, sexy Paris. Such a Paris is the opposite of US Puritanism, with its intimations of gourmet foods, perfumes, & sex, louche nightclubs, physical pleasures, couture . . .

Avedon was also a great pupil of the work of Martin Muncacsi - models run, jump, & laugh, the image is experiential, it contains an element of chance. But in a thoroughly post WWII economic boom kind of way. It's special. It's great. Something (the beauty of the girl? the clothes? the photographic experience itself?) is exclusive & beckons us to want more of such privileged giggles & leaps.

Stephen Shore @ The Factory

2009-06-28T09:24:00.001-07:00

One of the treasures of my library is the 1968 Moderna Museet Warhol catalog. When I use the word "treasure" I am thinking of the pleasures the book has given me: now going through the books about photo books (Andrew Roth, Martin Parr/Gerry Badger)& the prices on bookfinder, I realize that was cast-off when I found it (circa 1990)is now itself a hot commodity on the market, at least hypothetically, in terms of current prices asked.

One of the curiosities of the catalog, besides the great 1960s Warhol work showcased, is that the last 1/3 of the book is 2 portfolios of photographs of Warhol & the various people around him, as assistants, friends, visitors, etc., mostly in Warhol's studio, "the Factory," by Billy Name & Stephen Shore. Shore's "career" at the Factory began when Shore was 17 - the work of a teenager w/ a 35mm camera, who found a subject of interest & stayed there: 35mm black-&-white snapshots, chaotic, social frames, which can seem extremely different from Shore's later work in color with a large-format camera. If one were to try to distinguish the salient qualities of Shore's color work, it would be in its hyperreal, mechanical ("objective") perspective, in which vision floats with a technological perfection outside any viewing body. I have heard Hilla Becher state that Shore's work was of great inspiration for her & Bernd Becher in articulating their own ideas of the uses of a camera. Still, if one considers Shore's retrospective projects, such as American Surfaces, which was done with a 35mm camera & includes more private snapshots, as well as his more recent Mac books, one can see a more eclectic range of work than the "signature style" of the Uncommon Places images.

The Stockholm catalog is printed on cheap acidic paper & the 2 portfolios of Shore & Billy Name are printed in an equally un-fine contrasty manner. Given the predominantly indoor, low artificial light shooting situations, there is an amplification of the decadent hybridization of private & public which distinguished the publicity around Warhol's Factory. The Factory, with an almost proscenium-like theatrical aspect, included myriad projects, assistants, visitors. In an immediate context this seemed an antipode to the solitary studios of the Abstract Expressionists, in which outside of the gestural aspect of painting (which can be seen in Hans Namuth's photographs of Jackson Pollock at work, for example), all other work is invisible, internal, in the heads of the mysterious artists, with utter seriousness. The Factory resembled more a classical atelier in which the artist acted as entrepreneur & brand, & the work would be executed by multiple hands.

The inclusion of the photographs in the museum catalog, of a social scene tangental to the artist's work, is a curious anti-formal excess. The images have no captions which exacerbates a sense of their exclusivity - one gets to see a party to which one was not invited. The art is a pre-text for the real goings-on behind the scenes, of which these are a tantalizing fragment.

I am struck by the purposefulness of the photographs in the catalog as support material. Years after the fact, both the Billy Name & Stephen Shore photos have been published independently of Warhol, as documents of these years, & they have also been used as illustrations in various books about Warhol. In the Stockholm catalog Warhol seems to be beating everyone to the punchline, as it were, & beginning his own visual history, in anticipation. The Shore images have been recently reprinted (in what appears to be digital prints) exhibition-size & sold by his gallery. I found the new prints lacking somewhat - black-&-white digital prints still seem to lack the depth of silver prints, unlike the color reprints of Shore's Uncommon Places and American Surfaces images which are luminous. Perhaps, too, taking the images out of the context of Warhol per se, whether a catalog, memoir or history, & presenting them independently, as art itself, does some disservice to the images, even though it is astonishing how well done the photographs are: "snapshots" - they are nevertheless informed, composed, witty. How precocious Shore must have been.

I think Warhol understood the privileges a photograph can give to daily life. What is recorded becomes the memory of what has been. The photograph acts as evidence of experience & also a kind of trophy, a prize. The inclusion of the Factory portfolios in the Stockholm catalog privilege a social scene which would have been invisible or unknown, mostly, otherwise. Warhol's later snapshots, taken by himself, explore this further: in which Warhol can "collect" the famous, the chic & the louche with his camera. The images from the 1960s are a bit more private & experimental, without the certified pedigrees shown.

Las Vegas Studio - Images from the Archives of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown

2009-06-21T08:56:00.000-07:00

Las Vegas Studio: Images from the Archive of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brownis a catalog for an exhibit at the Museum im Bellpark, Kriens, edited by Hilar Stadler & Martino Stierli, in collaboration with Peter Fischli. The book includes an essay by Stierli, a conversation "Flaneurs in Automobiles" with Peter Fischli, Rem Koolhaas, & Hans Ulrich Obrist, & an essay, "Tableaux," by Stanislaus von Moos. The images are from the archives of the architectural firm of Venturi & Scott Brown, & were made as part of a class they taught at Yale in 1968 in which the sprawl of Las Vegas was studied, resulting in the book Learning from Las Vegas - Revised Edition: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form. The class included prints, slides and films of Las Vegas collected as part of the research, some of which were used as illustrations in the book. The first edition was physically large and included more images, whereas the more commonly known second edition included images which are in miniature on the page, in a sense de-emphasized, but still crucial in the book's role as a kind of manifesto of the strip, of sprawl, of vernacular car culture as a site of learning.

As an amateur in the field of architecture I will refrain from saying much about Venturi & Scott Brown's ideas, but I will say I have always been struck by the images in the 2nd edition, regardless of their miniaturization, & that the catalog of their image archive is a delirious collection of what is now a long-lost world of unconscious automobile excursions (cheap gas, the charm of the highway strip) & "old" Vegas, before it became a place of Disney-scale family entertainment.

The photographs are emphatically not "fine" - they have none of the spectacular aspects of then-contemporary commercial architectural photography (Julius Shulman, Ezra Stoller, Balthasar Korab) & instead are executed in a laconic, amateurish, mechanical manner. It is easy to see parallels between the Venturi & Scott Brown images & the self-produced artists books of Ed Ruscha (Every Building on the Sunset Strip, Some Los Angeles Apartments, Twentysix Gasoline Stations), in scale & lack of visual inflection: & it is noted in the catalog that Venturi & Scott Brown visited the studio of Ruscha in Los Angeles & were well aware of his photographic work, as they began their work! Given the heroic scale of most architectural photography, one can see the images, which as much as they rely on chance, on the aesthetics of the amateur snapshot, as being quite deliberate & intentional. In tandem with the text of Learning from Las Vegas, this reifies a looking at the most common vernacular forms as a place of study. To quote Denise Scott Brown: What environment lies about us, and how is this different from what the media of a dominant culture suggest should be there?

Francis Bacon/John Deakin

2009-06-14T09:49:00.000-07:00

The most profound moment I have had viewing Francis Bacon was not seeing any painting itself, but a brief scene in the Pier Paolo Pasolini film Teorema.

The plot of Teorema is simple: an unnamed visitor (Terence Stamp) comes to the house of of Milanese industrialist for an extended visit. The mysterious stranger sleeps with each member of the household: father, mother, sister, son, maid. This encounter has a profound effect on each, altered by an instance of unconditional love, & each begins to act in a way, for want of better term, less puppet-like than in their previous existences, they become "more themselves" to use pop terminology. The teenage son, formerly undistinguished & "one of the boys" becomes an artist. The boy becomes aware of his singularity, that his emotions & sexuality place him outside polite society, & that the transcendence of his alienation is in his creativity. There is a brief scene in which Terence Stamp sits with the boy & they look at a book of paintings by Francis Bacon, at which point, as the pages turn, there is a brief pause over a painting I know from the Detroit Institute of Arts, Study for a Crouching Nude, from 1952, which is now currently on view in the Bacon centenary exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum.

I should also point out that as sweetly tender as the scene between Terence Stamp & Andres Jose Cruz Soublette is, it is equivocal as well. The "theorem" of the title is stated at the onset of the film: that no matter what, the bourgeoisie is always wrong. The boy's subsequent exploration of his self-expression has a parodic trajectory, wherein the boy uses paint gesturally & finally his own bodily fluids, semen & piss, as his medium. One has to laugh.

With some skepticism regarding "self-expression" through my cinematic dalliance with Pasolini & Bacon in the back of my mind, such self-expression is a bit jarring in its prevalence as a curatorial strategy in the current show at the Met, in the heavily attended guided tours of the paintings, which discuss Bacon's "lifestyle" as part of the aesthetic which shapes the work.

I have been to the show twice now & in each instance I heard the Detroit painting discussed by a guide with a thick notebook, giving, laudably, a very thorough discussion of the painting: citing its visual quotes from Michelangelo, the Eisenstein film Battleship Potemkin (The Ultimate Edition) (2pc) (Full B&W), & the Nazi Nuremberg rallies - an image ostensibly of a classic subject of western painting, the nude, it becomes overshadowed by the physical claustrophobia which such visual references render as a kind of disastrous fate. Also I heard that Bacon drank excessively, had sexual trysts with anonymous sailors & businessmen, that he was a sexual masochist who liked to be whipped, that he treated those near him poorly, especially his lover George Dyer, who committed suicide, etc. These are all biographical details which can be found in the literature about Bacon. Hearing them discussed along w/ formal discussions of paintings, to guided tours of mostly older people (trying to imagine my grandmother hearing this) adds a burlesque element to otherwise somewhat dry material. While there are numerous discussions of Pablo Picasso's mistresses, for example, mostly in terms of identification of the models in the paintings, none have the gravity ascribed to Bacon's vices as a kind of direct channel to the work at hand, & how it is there for us to look at and understand.

I find this curiously offensive. I can't help but think that Bacon's homosexuality & his openness about S/M sex, both socially marginalized aspects to his personality, are assumed to be the direct causes of the rather miserable emotional tenor of the work, as opposed to, say, the physical conditions of Europe after World War II, or the unredeemable atheism of the paintings (from a Catholic country no less - there's an entire gallery of screaming toothsome Popes in the exhibit). This is a conflation of art history, pop psychology & tabloid journalism presented as biographic narrative, explaining the grand masterpiece(s). Why something is what it is, like that.

There is a certain hilarity in guided tours being led on a tour of the wild side along w/ cultural information, but it does make me question double-standards in our society, in this supposed example of "frankness."

There have been intimations of deviant sexual practices of Picasso, also Man Ray (Black Dahlia Avenger: The True Storyby Steve Hodel includes accounts of an S/M "ring," possibly imagined, which included Man Ray & the director John Huston, with private parties in a "hidden" room inside Lloyd Wright's Sowden House on Franklin Ave.in Los Angeles in the 1940s) - Man Ray catalogs include images of hooded & chained women, without any charges of perversity accompanying the images, or any morbid kinkiness used to "explain" his practices. Picasso's erotic etchings detail male domination of the female, all of it "classical" enough to weave into the dry continuum of art history.

It's not my intention to detail perversities lurking in standard art histories, but I find the candor used to discuss Bacon in effect further marginalizes him as a kinky drunken fag, regardless if he was one or not, by making him further strange & different.

What interested me most in the exhibit was the use of photographs by John Deakin, as well as other images taken from Bacon's studio, which were all used for paintings (images by Eadweard Muybridge, stills from the Battleship Potemkin, newspaper photos). In the biographic accounts of Bacon, John Deakin (1912-1972) is an irascible figure, perhaps more gin-soaked than Bacon, basically always nearby on a barstool, a perfect sidekick, w/ a drunk's nastiness, & what seems little emotional connection to others. Deakin worked for Vogue, as well as making portraits for Bacon on commission for eventual paintings. Deakin's portraits lack glamor, they do not compliment, yet they have an amazing presence & in their high-contrast black-&-white extremes seem prescient of later photographic work such as William Klein's images of New York, or the portraits of Richard Avedon - all of which have some morbidity to them. The camera image works as a mechanical memento mori - ripeness & rot.

The retrieval of Deakin's prints, from filthy floors & garbage cans, speaks as well of Deakin's apparent apathy to his extraordinary work. His visibility now exists from the scavenging efforts of gallerists & the pungent memories of those who knew him. For me, looking at photos of George Dyer, Muriel Belcher, the Bernard brothers, Isabel Rawsthorne, Henrietta Moraes, Lucian Freud, etc. has more to say about lives in London in the early 1950s, those who didn't believe in much & found each other in various bars, including the Colony Club, run by Muriel Belcher. Photos, memoirs, movies speak more to me than the great paintings themselves.

There are 2 books of photos: John Deakin: Photographs and A Maverick Eye: The Street Photography of John Deakin. Both have an archaeological appeal as no systematic archives were kept & many of the prints are damaged. I doubt Deakin will ever emerge in any histories of photography: he is not stunningly innovative or original, but for the company he kept, but I can't help but think of how profound I find these little bits of a lost world, as despairing or destructive as it might have been, & how pitiful or pathetic it may have been perceived. This is where I would locate any weltschmerz, rather than in any grand artistic gesture.

from the NY Times, last week:

Den Mother to the Louche and Famous

By GEOFFREY WHEATCROFT

LONDON

A VISITOR to the magnificent Francis Bacon exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art might easily pass by an alcove filled with photographs of Bacon’s friends. Among them is a tiny, yellowing snapshot of a striking woman gazing at the camera, taken around 1965. But then few Americans would even recognize the name of Muriel Belcher, or know about the part she played in Bacon’s life, as his den mother of sorts, and about the club she ran as his refuge.

She was the greatest of Soho hostesses, from 1948, when she opened the Colony Room Club on Dean Street here, until her death in 1979. The place we all called Muriel’s was a drinking club, a salon, a little community of its own (and one about which this reporter is regrettably well qualified to write, having spent too much of his early life there). What makes the story more poignant today is that not only have most of the players departed, but also the stage itself is dark. Muriel and Francis are no more, and neither is the Colony.

So we’re left with memories, of the kind novelists convey better: “It is an old timetable now, disintegrating at its folds, and headed ‘This schedule in effect July 5, 1922.’ But I can still read the gray names, and they will give you a better impression than my generalities of those who accepted Gatsby’s hospitality.” On another old timetable I can still read the names of those who drank at Muriel’s in July 1972.

Among them were writers, hustlers, shady politicians, decayed aristocrats and petty criminals, maybe more Anthony Powell than F. Scott Fitzgerald. But you could also find some of the most famous painters of the age, and Muriel’s deserves at least a small footnote in the history of art.

In those days Soho was full of clubs, though very different from the haughty gentlemen’s establishments of St. James’s Street and Pall Mall. They existed partly to refresh thirsty “afternoon men” at a time when the pubs were obliged to shut from 3 to 5:30 p.m., but each had its own character. Gerry’s on Shaftesbury Avenue was for actors (more likely “resting” than working). The Kismet, a k a the Iron Lung, on Cranbourn Street, also in a basement, had two bars for two clienteles. Back in the ’60s, in the more bohemian bar on the left, I briefly met “the Roberts,” the inseparable painters Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde, while in the other bar somber men in raincoats and hats stood drinking and talking quietly: this was the London underworld and the plainclothes police meeting on equal terms.

But Muriel’s was sui generis. You passed through a door beside an Italian restaurant, climbed stairs smelling of damp or worse, and entered a dark green room with a bar to the left. The walls were covered with pictures, from a cartoon of Muriel by the jazz musician Wally Fawkes (a k a Trog) to a conversation piece set in the Colony by the painter Michael Andrews.

Nothing was more striking than the hostess herself, perched birdlike on her stool, drink in one hand and cigarette in the other, with one eye on the door to block unwelcome visitors and the other on customers to make sure they were spending enough. And all the while she kept up her machine-gun chatter: sarcastic, witty, scabrously obscene.

Her family was Birmingham Jewish, or so I believe. She had made her way to London and the demimonde, and during the war opened her first club, the Music Box, whose core membership seems to have been the better sort of homosexual officer in the Brigade of Guards (not as small a constituency as you might think).

Then she moved to that upstairs room on Dean Street. Although Bacon was already making his name, he needed pocket money, and Muriel paid him to bring in rich patrons. If the word isn’t too far-fetched, she became his muse, while he became one of Muriel’s “daughters.” Most men were “she” to Muriel; it could be disconcerting when some elderly major was introduced with the words, “She was a very gallant little lady on the Somme.”

Before long most of what would later be known as the School of London congregated there, including Frank Auerbach and Lucian Freud as well as Bacon and Andrews. That painting by Andrews showed the names on the schedule in effect in the mid-1960s. Clustered around Muriel are her companion Carmel; Jeffrey Bernard (dropout, boozer, wit and later Spectator columnist); Henrietta Moraes (also much painted by Bacon); Lady Rose McClaren (the déclassé sister of the Marquess of Anglesey); and John Deakin, who took the photograph of Muriel, as well as several others in the Bacon exhibition at the Met.

Also Bacon and Mr. Freud, whose friendship had been commemorated years before in another painting, Mr. Freud’s haunting small portrait of Bacon. They could often be seen talking together in the corner, a study in contrasts: Mr. Freud reserved, ironic, abstemious (and conspicuously heterosexual — Muriel’s was very camp, not to say lewd, but far from merely what was then called a “queer club”); Bacon more expansive, especially while the drink flowed.

As it did when he was around. “Champagne for your real friends and real pain for your sham friends” was his favorite Irish toast, and he meant it, both ways. He said superfluously that Muriel’s was “a place where we came to dissolve our inhibitions,” and his were very solvent.

Even after a long drinking session Bacon might still be genial. Though he did once tear open my shirt front, that wasn’t anger, or lust, but simply because he couldn’t quite stand upright and was trying to break his fall.

But obstreperous on occasion veered toward obnoxious. Late one evening he was so truculent that Ian Board, Muriel’s barman asked me to get him out of the Colony, which I did by taking him down the road to a casino where, since he could scarcely tell rouge from noir by then, he lost an enormous sum.

If Bacon was by turns affable and abusive, Muriel herself was “a benevolent witch,” in the words of the writer and musician George Melly. Her humor was certainly distinctive. A friend once surprised us all by getting married and begetting a son. We lunched to celebrate, before climbing the stairs for a postprandial drink and to tell Muriel about this happy event. Her own slightly deflating mode of congratulation was to say, “It’s amazing what a poof can do when she tries.”

Writers and moviemakers as well as painters have portrayed Muriel. Rodney Ackland’s play “The Pink Room” opened in London in 1952, but not for long, since critics were shocked by the frank picture of inebriation and sexual variety in a club very much like the Colony. But the play was revived and televised many years later as “Absolute Hell,” with Judi Dench as the formidable hostess, and very good she was, if too ladylike for Muriel.

In the 1998 biopic “Love Is the Devil,” Bacon is played by Derek Jacobi, his companion George Dyer by Daniel Craig (whose fans can see more of him anatomically here than in his later James Bond films), and our hostess by Tilda Swinton. Although she doesn’t sound anything like Muriel, she looks curiously like her, and the tricksy-arty cinematography through a fisheye lens captures the atmosphere of the Colony rather well.

Not everyone loved Muriel and her club. I once took my friend Shiva Naipaul — younger brother of V. S. Naipaul and a brilliant writer himself, who died suddenly in 1985 at 40 — up to the Colony for a digestif. After a few minutes he said: “Can we please leave? I find this place infinitely depressing.”

But many others were captivated by that room, and not just the people you might expect. The Labor member of Parliament Tom Driberg might be found talking to one of the journalists who liked to look in at Muriel’s, like Peter Jenkins, the liberal columnist, and, more surprisingly, the radical turned conservative Paul Johnson.

Now we can look in no more. Muriel died barely into her 70s, and by the time Bacon died in 1992 he and Mr. Freud had fallen out, quite why I never knew. To make it sadder, that beautiful portrait by Mr. Freud was stolen from an exhibition in Berlin and has never been seen since.

After Muriel died, the Colony was kept going by Mr. Board, and after his death in 1994 by Michael Wojas. But he closed the club some months ago, and sold the contents. Great efforts were made to save the Colony, which had acquired a newer membership, some of them well-known younger artists, and a fund-raiser was held before Christmas, but to no avail. This is not the place to describe the acrimonious and litigious upshot, and although there are some plans to reopen the Colony, almost certainly in some other location, it will not be the same.

Many years ago Jenkins gestured round him, and said fervently he hoped places like this would never vanish. But Muriel’s has, and for some of us Soho today is a place of ghosts, gray names from a green room.

Into the Sunset: Photography's Image of the American West

2009-04-22T14:57:00.000-07:00

Into the Sunset: Photography's Image of the American West at the Museum of Modern Art is primarily a showcase for the riches of MoMA's photography collection, from the 19th century to the present, with a few loans from other institutions (the Getty, the Whitney, the Amon Carter). The exhibit mixes historical & contemporary work. Much of the work is familiar: Timothy O'Sullivan, Carleton Watkins, Ansel Adams, for example. & among more recent & contemporary photographers there is work by Robert Adams & Lewis Baltz - perhaps a bit more dystopic in their vision, but working in black-&-white, in a seeming continuum of practices from mid-century (Adams, Minor White). These are all photographers w/ long associations w/ MoMA. What the exhibit does against the grain of grand old traditions is mix work which is unrelated to these practices, to include work which deals with the West as cultural myth & image, & to include work which is primarily urban & suburban, as opposed to the unmediated serene horizontal landscape associated w/ the photographed West.

Perhaps the idea of the "West" is too vague a concept. Where does it begin? Visitors to the Thomas Jefferson home Monticello in Virginia are told that the view west to the Blue Ridge Mountains represented the West, in the difference between charted & uncharted lands - what can be seen was once a view into absolute wilderness. The Mississippi River is a traditional boundary - what do St. Louis & San Francisco have in common? What do Promontory Point, UT, & Venice, CA, have in common? What does it mean to place the self-conscious work of Cindy Sherman & Richard Prince, which are not geographically specific, in the midst of work wherein the specificity is all-important? One sees the beginnings of an idea but not its culmination. The separate parts do not add up to a whole.

This seems like a very East Coast conceit to me, overall. It is vague platitudes about due west from the Hudson River. The original MoMA stalwarts such as Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, Lewis Baltz, look best in a mish-mosh of banalities mixing exploratory wonderment with world-weary consumption. It bears some similarities for the show I saw last year at the Huntington Library in San Marino, Ca, This Side of Paradise, which dealt with images specifically of Los Angeles, mixing commercial work with artistic endeavors - also images which were not dependent on Los Angeles as contributing to their meaning (here thinking of the work of Lyle Ashton Harris & Laura Aguilar). & as opposed to the MoMA show, I thought the Huntington show rather extraordinary. As heterogeneous as "Los Angeles" may be - it is much more specific than "the West." That's all I can think of, comparing the 2 shows. Also, "Los Angeles" as a sequence of images, has little history, compared to "the West" which has an amazing iconography without it being necessarily photographic. It makes me long for what seems missing rather than what is there.

Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard

2009-03-19T06:06:00.001-07:00

Walker Evans and the Picture Postcardat the Metropolitan Museum explores what has been otherwise a footnote in the surveys of the work of Walker Evans: his postcard collection. & in relation to Evans' own photographic practices.

The premise of the exhibition flirts with kitsch. Evans is the great modernist photographer: as much as one can locate content in his images (the things they are of - Victorian houses, the families in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, detritus of the Great Depression, etc.), the content is subordinate to the framing, the presentation, the bigger project of Evans' work as a whole. From a formalist point of view it all becomes radical composition, a kind of interrupted illustration, illustration aware of itself & pulling back from meaning, from function, but one could also cite it as an archive of relentless curiosity & disengagement. In Evans' work there is no progress, no movement; all is stasis, & without motivation. Avant la lettre, there is an existential repulsion to social engagement or meaning, as well as a relish of the act of doing, nevertheless.

At this point, institutionally, Evans has entered into an unimpeachable canon of Great Artists, which seems to do him disservice, turning him into a patrician expert, when what seems most vital about him could be described as neurotic, alienated, dissatisfied. Compared with other documentary photographers of the 1930s, from the politically motivated work of Ben Shahn to the spectacular magazine work of Margaret Bourke-White, Evans seems unmotivated, depressively aesthetic, unconcerned. & this gives the work a wider valence of sensibilities, a mood as opposed to the thing itself. Evans valiantly defined his work as "documentary style" as opposed to "documentary" which is perhaps a richer statement now, more meaningful, in what I honestly think is the twilight of documentary work as it disappears from mass media & migrates to the realm of museum practices.

There has been a serious amount of writing about Evans: Alan Trachtenberg, Tod Papageorge, John Tagg, are who I think of, but there is much more. Evans' images were appropriated by Sherrie Levine in the early 1980s in one of the great moments of post-modern photography. & there is not just 1 but 2 biographies of him, as well, in a world wherein there are next to no biographies of photographers (I tell my students that's because most photographers had such boring lives, that it's a dull existence & there's not much to say about it), as well as a fairly blunt memoir about Evans' last years before his death. One unspectacular but meaningful book for me has been Walker Evans at Work, which addresses Evans' work practices. There is a racy passage in John Cheever's journals about Evans, which is in dispute (did it really happen?), but indicates, at least, a psychological tension (for both Cheever & Evans) that is more Patricia HIghsmith than Clement Greenberg. How to add such a literature?

The Met, which now possesses the Evans archives, has done a truly meaningful exhibition & book exploring Evans' interest in the common mass-produced picture postcard. Genealogies of Evans' methods have been traced from the Civil War images of Matthew Brady to the extensive archives of Eugene Atget (inartistic images, factual, informational). The Met show shows another genealogy in strictly banal mass-produced imagery. & Evans, with his large collection (1200 or so), seems all the richer for his interplay with such drugstore imagery. Postcard imagery depends on its accessibility, its simplicity, its lack of hierarchy - anything is fit to be a postcard. & it shows the world now, which means postcards become obsolete, they will always need to be updated.

This obsolescence becomes historical artifact in Evans' collection. Say unlike most photojournalism which deals with a "spot news" aspect to history - seeing it as it happens, Evans' work & likewise the voluminous postcard collection, indicate a history only in retrospect. Evans photographed the detritus of happenstance. Postcards are of an unlikely objectivity, things as they are, presented as such, in an utterly dreary, banal way, which as such becomes quite fascinating.

The Met shows some of Evans indexing, his categories - town centers, industry, etc. These are vaguer & more opaque than what can be found at any flea market, but otherwise, just the same.

Painting the Dark Side - Art and the Gothic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America

2009-02-28T07:24:00.000-08:00

Browsing last weekend at Labyrinth books I found Painting the Dark Side: Art and the Gothic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Americaby Sarah Burns, on remainder. Purely by chance.

I bring up the chance aspect as it has been such a rich, fascinating read - I am rather sorry to finish the book, albeit the notes can keep me busy for quite a while too & I think it's an excellent reference for the future. With the exception of a Pittsburgh artist, David Gilmour Blythe, I am familiar with the artists discussed: Thomas Cole, Washington Allston, John Quidor, William Rimmer, Elihu Vedder, Thomas Eakins, and Albert Pinkham Ryder.

Growing up in proximity to the Detroit Institute of Arts, I recall being baffled by the enormous Allston painting Belshazzar's Feast, which is discussed at length in Burns book. Thereabouts I also developed a taste for American romantic painting. The DIA also has the Allston Flight of Florimell, & some paintings by Rimmer - Civil War Scene & Victory, & extravagantly hermetic works by Vedder & Ryder.

In NYC there is the American Wing at the Met, as well as the New-York Historical Society, which has the cycle of Thomas Cole's Course of Empire. Although the Met wing is now being reconfigured, my favorite gallery previously was the "romantic" room which included work by Rembrandt Peale, Raphaelle Peale, Samuel Morse, George Caleb Bingham, Quidor & Allston.

In the worlds of photography & contemporary art this is almost like having a secret - where would I go w/ such enthusiasms?

Bush discusses the art in the context of race, slavery, Civil War, Edgar Allan Poe, pulp literature, temperance, the women's movement, bohemianism, drug use, industry, madness, medicine, poverty. It is varied & speculative.

Looking at Bush's CV at Indiana University I see she teaches the history of photography - I would be very curious to hear her discuss 19th century photography, as outside of its progressive technological & formal histories, I think there is work and practices which are equally haunted.

Berlin Film Festival 2009

2009-02-26T13:02:00.001-08:00

Marie Losier presented "Papal Broken Dance" at the Berlin Film Festival. Our photo of Genesis P. a la the writer Colette as a cat hung above the scopitone, but unlike the Chesire Cat, it did not disappear, as far as I know.

afternoons in Chelsea (NY)

2009-02-22T13:53:00.000-08:00

When I moved to NYC in 1981 the majority of contemporary art galleries were in SoHo. At that time it felt rather bourgeois - large industrial spaces had been stripped - brick walls, new blank walls of drywall, white walls & polished wood floors. High ceilings. Victorian accents (moldings, etc.), tall windows. The not-so-past epoch of an artists district seemed long-gone. I must confess that my 2 earliest artistic encounters in SoHo were 1) going to an opening of faux Pre-Raphaelite paintings (mostly self-portraits I believe) by Norris Church, i.e. Mrs. Norman Mailer, which was high society but not necessarily high art by any means, on West Broadway, & 2) being taken by a friend from Ann Arbor, who had come to NYC the year before, to a loft presided over by (although this meant nothing at the time) Hannah Wilke. All I recall is we had to chew gum & give it back & my friend Deborah later laughed, "she thinks all women are goddesses!" which may or may not have much of anything to it. I thought the paintings of Norris Church rather tacky & I had no sense of Hannah Wilke as a great radical artist. In terms of the latter: my loss!

I bring this up, for if anything, SoHo in 1981 looked remarkably store-bought & fancy & it had the highest concentration of contemporary art galleries in NYC at the time, distinct from the more staid galleries of 57th St., or the Upper East Side (perhaps most vivid fictionally in the film of Portrait of Jenny - an elegant walk-up presided over by Ethel Barrymore - if only it were really like that) - large, flashy, carved out of an industrial past. If anything, my sense of this in terms of scale has nothing to do w/ the excesses of mercantilism which were to follow.

Chelsea followed, like any urban sprawl, further out & bigger, better. Huge galleries became bigger. Some of the area was quite abject & the development of the area included the closure of the 2 leather bars in the city - The Spike & The Eagle, otherwise louche destinations facing the West Side Highway & the Hudson river. One could be edified rather than hit on. The distance from the subway & the distance from most other things are both a hindrance in terms of getting there conveniently & a mark of exclusivity.

W/ a few day off this past week I went to a few shows in Chelsea. The most interesting one was the Thomas Hirschhorn installation "Universal Gym" at the Barbara Gladstone gallery on 21st st. In his customary use of mass-produced generic materials, corrugated cardbord & packing tape, Hirschhorn made the gallery a sick simulacrum of a gym - mirrors, weights, machines - a factory of bodies, fitness, health, sociability. This is quite dark & critical. I also admire Hirschhorn for using thoroughly temporal materials - this is a conservator's nightmare yet o so vivid. I can't help but make a correlation between Hirschhorn's materials & the Wanda Jackson song "The Box It Came Home In" which will be "all satin-lined" - this is about death in life, a pre-purchased lot of nothingness, mass-produced. Existence as nullification.

At Andrew Kreps, a group photo show, w/ a lousy premise/statement, nevertheless had 2 bodies of work which stood out. 1) a print by Liz Deschenes - Liz is one of the great artists working today & her photographs, which confront photographic technologies & visual culture, have so much to say about our interactions with images & the experiences, both physical & historical, & how that occurs. Somewhere I recall reading a statement by Susan Sontag to the effect that the essence of thinking is the word "but" - which is what I think of when I see Liz's photographs. To describe her images does not address their visceral quality - their presence.

The other curious body of work in the show is by Annette Kelm, a triptych of Herbert Tobias album covers. This brings to mind an essay by the late Herve Guibert about record album covers, their tactility & resonance as sensuous objects & their primacy as aethetic experiences. Herbert Tobias was a great German gay photographer in the 1950s & 1960s. His commercial work for Deutsche Grammophon is both kitsch & trendy & meant to be ephemeral, a kind of post-WWII modernism - the subjective photography of Otto Steinert, applied in a commercial field. Kelm's use of the images invokes a historical recovery in seemingly trivial work to reveal a worldview of myth, culture & longing.

Male: From the Collection of Vince Aletti

2009-02-05T15:17:00.000-08:00

Male: From The Collection Of Vince Aletticould be seen as a catalog accompaniment to a show of Vince Aletti's collection shown earlier at White Columns. The book can be viewed independently, as well, & along with an essay by Collier Schorr, it is a fascinating inquiry into the art of collecting.

The collection is distinguished by a general theme, masculinity as a site of desire, as well as what could be described as eclectic, "catholic" taste. Categories of quality or an established canon are second fiddle to a desiring eye which can collect great artist=photographers such as Peter Hujar, Bill Jacobson & Gary Schneider, as well as photographers whose work would be classified as outside an artistic precis, such as the documentarian Danny Lyon or the anthropologist Pierre Verger. The rule of thumb for the collection is a desire that is not necessarily explicit but exists through the eye of the collector. If there is anything to learn it is the anarchy of desire in terms of looking at images. Coexistent w/ any fine art images there is also panoply of beefcake photography - Bob Mizer's Athletic Model Guild, Don Whitman's Western Photography Guild, Bruce of Los Angeles - as well as anonymous porn, amateur snaps, boxing images, an amazing image of Lew Alcinder - I don't want to list any more as there are hundreds of sources.

I find most collections have a death-like aspect in trying to define a subject & contain it. Vince Aletti's collection has a much more dynamic aspect. Is it because it is both older work & contemporary too? High & low subjects? There is something radical & unfinished about the collection which gives it a vibrancy beyond conventional connoisseurship.

Liz Renay

2009-01-31T11:48:00.000-08:00

Somewhere I read that the Surrealists had a guerilla-style method of moviegoing: in which they would enter random movies at random times, with no attention to the title or qualities of the films, & then leave when they found it uninteresting. This has always seemed next to impossible to do in our society. Without following current Hollywood films, the glut of advertising, journalism and tabloid fodder informs even the least attentive. I always have some preconceived idea about entertainments I would never otherwise approach, which I find intrusive & irritating. (One friend dealt with such information by simply taking sides - deciding what was meritorious or bad - without ever bothering to see the actual film, at which point he could argue his case for hours).

Still, at least in my memory, there is one moment where I somehow walked into a midnight movie, while at school, without seeing the title or knowing what it was I was going to see & it was John Waters' Female Trouble. It was both a surprise & such a delirious film, seemingly out of nowhere, that I think of it to this day as one of my formative cinematic experiences. I think of John Waters as comparable to a late 19th century aesthete - he is a keen arbiter of tastes. He is the opposite of a character like Andy Warhol, who valorized banality & consumerism. Waters is about appreciating the special, in whatever form that may take.

Also, reading Waters' book Shock Value, I first learned about Liz Renay (also her book title is cribbed in Female Trouble, when Divine's bandages are removed after having been disfigured with acid by her mother-in-law & someone utters the poetic phrase . . . .), & I found a paperback copy of her first book in a used shop on Woodward Ave. in Royal Oak, My Face for the World to See. This would have been circa 1979, which makes this more or less the 30th anniversary of my initial reading of My Face For The World To See, as well as the last day of the Liz Renay exhibit at Deitch Projects, which I was very happy to attend.

Liz Renay's story is both ubiquitous & unique. Her narrative of dreaming herself out of poverty, the uncannily beautiful daughter of Puritanical holy-rollers, who finds her own in sex, in movies, in dreaming of a better, more interesting life for herself, & being waylaid in strip joints, prison, etc. is ostensibly banal but given her amazing bravado in the face of continual adverse circumstances & her relentless resourcefulness, one sees instead not just a kitsch show-biz narrative, but an attempt to go further, to endow the processes of living something other than a passive acceptance. I think the best show biz narratives are by those on the outside or outskirts of "success." A successful Hollywood actor is a corporate robot who will never express the slightest honesty, The only comparable memoirists w/ Liz Renay would be the very disparate characters such as former silent film vamp Dagmar Godowsky (author, First Person Plural), & actor-turned-true-crime-writer John Gilmore. But both Godowsky & Gilmore had more Hollywood success than Liz Renay. I have seen her one major film role, in A Date With Death, & she is remarkably awful in it. In terms of Hollywood "success" Liz Renay is a remarkable failure, & not according to her memoir of shoulda, woulda, coulda, either. The delusional aspect to her memoir is its strongest kitsch element, yet one can't help but applaud her intrepid pragmatism in dealing with her circumstances.

My copy of My Face For The World To See is still beside my bed, in tatters. I can quote from it at some length, beginning with the opening:

The room spun crazily as I downed another glass of champagne. Oh no, I thought, I better watch out, I'm getting high again . . .

The mention of champagne is remarkable - I have counted at least 69 occurrences of the word in the book. I think semioticians would appreciate the book as pleasure, luxury & ambition are all presented as animated things. The ubiquitous luxurious glass of champagne, for example. Or on her way to a screen test: Banks of ivy lined the drive to Burbank.

The book is about the contradictions of life: fashion model becomes stripper out of immediate monetary need. hopeless romantic, mislead by several men, becomes her own author, as it were, in declaring her own desires & needs. down&out? renay finds a way out. model, actress, stripper, singer, writer, painter - it is all done with such earthy humor & conviviality. Although Renay is remarkably discreet in discussing her association with Mickey Cohen, I appreciate her kiss-&-tell attitude about dating Hollywood actors: on a scale of 1 to 10 Burt Lancaster is a 10 (of course) & Jerry Lewis is 2. & even her time in prison becomes dramatic fodder. Fighting off a bull-dyke's advances, Renay gets the woman to admit the genesis of a life gone bad: from the childhood loss of a pet chicken, Lil'Naked, which was unfortunately served for dinner in a time of need. Amidst chaos, Renay becomes her own heroine.

In her book Renay discusses her painting, which I had never actually seen before. For those looking for inspiration, in the book there's a remarkable passage about painting an entire show in one night - opting to paint abstractions for time-saving, & playing different kinds of music to put her in appropriately varied moods. The work in the show at Deitch is all figurative & shows a great range of fantasies. From Eve offering an apple to Adam to a platinum blond Marie Antoinette. In the book there are mentions of gallery openings on 57th street - I am trying to imagine what that was like.

I tried to keep myself aloof from the smoke-filled dens, but sometimes the moan & wail of the saxophone got to me, & my heart beat as one to that lowdown, bluesy beat. . .

William Eggleston @ the Whitney

2009-01-30T06:43:00.000-08:00

As much as I admire the work of William Eggleston, I am perplexed at my disappointment in the recent retrospective of his work at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Arranged in a counter-clockwise arrangement on one floor, the work was arranged chronologically by its initial execution, from mid-1960s black-&-white prints, to the images seen in William Eggleston's Guide and Alamos, video work now edited & entitled "Lost in Canton," the 5x7 images recently published & exhibited at Cheim & Read, images from the books Election Eve, the Graceland guide, the Democratic Forest, and most currently some images from Kyoto.

Other than a few vitrines of early catalogs which include images by Eggleston, some less-than-finished c-prints (in contradistinction to the radiant dye transfer prints matted & framed on the walls) & the luxuriant privately published 2-volume Election Eve, there is little acknowledgment of the important role of publishing in Eggleston's artistic trajectory, as well as the role of John Szarkowski & the Museum of Modern Art in establishing Eggleston as a serious artist/photographer. These are mentioned, but in a negligible manner. Instead the viewer was offered a stream of luminous prints - albeit in itself an aesthetic feast - with little notation beyond that. Frankly, the curating of the show seemed minimal at best. Work was simply there, without much context. Also, what was not mentioned is the recent printing & circulation of images initially made in the 1960s & 1970s (the black-&-white prints, the 5x7 images & video). Instead the work was presented as a seamless chronology, without any notation as to the actual circulation of the work, which is much more erratic than such a timeline suggests.

I did get a perverse amusement in the installation of the video of "Stranded in Canton" which is anarchic & meandering & rather dark in its excesses: it is common practice now to bring small unruly uninterested children to museums, evidently to instill a sense of high kulchur in the tykes. & to see the numerous small children watch as a nude guy w/ long hair tries to shove a liquor bottle up his ass while screaming "This is LOOOOVE!" had its own special moment for me.

My guess is that Eggleston, like others of his generation & orbit (Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand) has worked quite a bit, in general, & the organization of the material, it's perimeters as a body of work, comes later. This is a practice outside what is taught in MFA programs, or the expectations of what an artist is supposed to justify in public. In the films of Eggleston he is almost maddeningly oblique in his insistence on the priorities of formal graphic qualities, while to our contemporary eyes, his images are loaded with content: class differences, race relations, commodity culture, history rendered in minutae of home decor, suburbanization, anomie, great introspection & also a sense of withdrawal from a teeming world. By the same token, Eggleston really doesn't have to say anything at all & if anything, he seems all the more refined for not doing so. Aside from his taciturnity in discussing his work, I think there is still a highly sensitive engagement with the images. & Eudora Welty (herself a wonderful photographer) wrote about him: why bother to add on to that?

Perhaps the great Eggleston show will come in future generations when there is no gallery or Eggleston Trust to intercede or dominate in any exhibition. It occurred to me that there was a similar occurrence with the Whitney 1995 retrospective of Richard Avedon, which was dominated by dictates & demands of the Avedon studio, likewise in the later show of Avedon portraits at the Met. Or the recent Met show of Diane Arbus which had a party line of intense hagiography if not downright fetishization of her everyday set-up (including a reconstruction of her darkroom with an eternal enlarger light on). There's something to be said for the non-interference of long-gone artists in terms of organizing shows about him or her. Otherwise it is more advertisement, more spectacle, more hokum for us to swallow, at best.

influences

2009-01-21T14:03:00.001-08:00

Bigger Than Life

2009-01-07T08:38:00.000-08:00

The plot of Bigger Than Life can be read in simple terms: A middle-class family in middle-America. The father becomes ill & his subsequent medication has psychological effects due to his abuse of said medication. Ultimately he collapses as a result.

Made in the 1950s, Bigger Than Life also seems a harbinger of our own contemporary controlled & medicated culture. Science in the home as inevitable future. Bigger Than Life begins with what seems an absurdly pastoral post-WWII domestic landscape of single-family homes & struggles for upward mobility & the values of thrift & education. In a technicolor oddly parallel with the palette of Norman Rockwell illustrations we see a home worked for & "succeeding" in its perfection. From this point on Bigger Than Life negates such a reading & turns such plastic hopes into a private hell resembling German expressionist films more than the pages of the Saturday Evening Post.

First & foremost is the casting of James Mason as a middle-class middle-American schoolteacher. He is an oddly aristocratic choice for such a role & brings to it a tragedy which can be seen in many of his other roles, from Odd Man Out to the remake of A Star is Born (in which he commits suicide!) to Lolita. His sonorous voice is impossible to separate from the darkness of the film - how else to give eloquent voice to the megalomaniacal speeches induced by his cortisone abuse? With his English accent and sophisticated manner Mason is a truly anomalous "everyman" for a middle-American suburbia, a potential for Nietszchian superhuman excess which translates to domestic evil.

The other characters, the dutiful wife, the colleague & best friend gym teacher-neighbor, & the son, look like stock characters, without much depth, in contrast to Mason's tormented character who has a choice of either medicated madness or death. The family house becomes a labyrinth of shadows & kitsch - everything in place & quite ridiculous, & also ultimately terrifying in its indifference, it's mausoleum-like perfection.

Entertainment can function as propaganda as well for dominant values, working as a mirror of ideals & values. How curious that Nicholas Ray could make such a dark film within a Hollywood studio system. My guess is it just seemed weird enough & also the exoticism of gloriously tragic James Mason as schoolteacher (also working part-time as a taxi dispatcher to make ends meet) to get made. There is a "happy ending" which is uncertain & equivocal & seems delusional.

Perhaps, paradoxically, Hollywood,a conglomeration of feudal corporations, in the 1950s could still produce work such as Ray's (Rebel Without A Cause, In A Lonely Place) & Douglas Sirk's Brechtian melodramas, & other films which could be read as subversive of dominant values (Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd, Vicente Minnelli's Home From The Hill), contra our now globalized economy in which movie studios are subsidiaries of larger companies & as such are controlled even more remotely & have the gravity of Coca-Cola.

The Ballad of Sexual Dependency at the Museum of Modern Art

2009-01-05T13:17:00.000-08:00

This morning, under the misapprehension that the holidays were over, I decided, after the gym, to go to MoMA when it opened.

As a working stiff I forget about the nature of holidays for others (students, etc.). January 5 is still not a dull-normal day of the calendar year.

Pushing through the throngs at MoMA I gave up my initial intent, which was to look at the surrealist objects in the collection, simply to browse around where the least crowds were. I am rereading Andre Breton's Nadja - I thought the objects at MoMA would inform my current reading.

Breton's Nadja is a madwoman who offers to the author a quixotic re-arrangement of logic, in which she attains profundity, outside any societal conventions, outside the absolute tedium of the quotidian world. Breton's fascination with Nadja also includes his sectarian collusion with chance & coincidence. The book is illustrated w/ images of Paris, which denote sites & characters in the book: are we in a work of fiction wherein all could be fabricated, or what is this blurring of document & subjectivity?

I initially saw the slide show of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency sometime before it was published - I'm guessing 1983-1984 or so (terrible at years) in the backroom at Maxwell's in Hoboken, a bar across the street from the Maxwell Coffee ("good to the last drop") plant. Friends of mine lived upstairs.

At that point it was a somewhat obscure project. Nan Goldin came with 2 slide projectors, a dissolve unit for the projectors, & a boom box for the soundtrack on cassette. This was very ad hoc & potentially amateurish, which is exactly its strength, as well, as a piece of work.

My memories of the show at Maxwells are vivid but unspecific; the screening this AM at MoMA distorts my fragile, indistinct recollections. One of the curious aspects of The Ballad is that it is open-ended. It is updated periodically. MoMA acquired the Ballad in 2004 - in the credits there is a copyright date of 2006. What I saw today included images not in the initial Ballad, but also later work which can be seen in other books & catalogues, such as The Other Side, Love Streams, Vakat, The Devil's Playground. What I saw more of which I don't remember so well: guns, needles, pregnancies, babies, bodybuilders, famous artists, graves.

One perverse thought to occur was that the images of the empty hotel rooms (seen primarily in Vakat) are the most potent in their repression of the direct human activity in such spaces, which is made evident in the absence of people/characters/actors & yet evident in their lack - a sense that something has happened. This has an uncanny feel to it which is not part of Goldin's usual agenda. One of the simultaneous delightful & disturbing aspects to Goldin's photographs is that they are not meant to be artistic per se - they are very confrontational in terms of addressing issues of visibility, & also complicating it - these are emphatically not glib images which encapsulate existences. There is no decisive moment & no entry into any formula for "what is." The slide shows Goldin creates veer from the vernacular cliche of the family narrative into what is much more extraordinary & special. This is a kind of validation for what is seen, as proof positive of what goes on.

I am on the fence considering the updates & revisions of the Ballad. What was shown initially was a very precocious, tough document of a young person, in which everyone was young & feisty (except for the parents), & acting out a bit. In the update, one can see some of the same characters older, & also many who are not: in the credits I counted 27 names in "In Memory of" which gives the spirit of the initial Ballad a much more melancholic if not despairing tone to what was already an equivocal evaluation of being & relationships. What I remember in my dotage about my initial encounter w/ The Ballad, in the back room of a bar in New Jersey, was its sense of immediacy & its interrogation of the private photo - that there was something to say about need, compulsion, desire, impulse. This is entirely outside the realm of the art world - I think what she deals with in her work is outside gallery rhetoric, even though that is where it resides. One could question whether it becomes repetitive, or whether it could lapse into self parody. & I am curious as to the position of the anonymous viewer in looking at this work: how to evaluate it, how to comprehend it. As prints, or a book, the Ballad exists in a containable, distinct form, whereas as a projection it has a performative time-duration which is much more demanding. The Ballad has been an important interference in the trajectory of modern art/photography. I am curious how it looks to those who have not seen it before - I count myself out on this as I feel as if I have lived with it somehow, in my adult years, in various kinds of familiarity. When it first appeared the general culture was less totalized in media - now there is an endless stream of media in which disclosure & confession are kitsch & meaningless. TV-internet-news-entertainment are always speaking to us privately. Personal drama is now a kind of public performance & as such seems less direct or sincere somehow - it is too coiffed, too poised, too anticipated. During the projection at MoMA there were snickers at times at moments I found peculiar: during the sequence of hypodermic needles, for instance, or images involving various bodily fluids.

The Ballad was published as a book close to the same time that Twin Palms published Ken Schles' book Invisible City, which was also shot mostly in the East Village/Lower East Side of NYC, at approximately the same time as the Ballad, & involving loosely the same age-group as well as locale. Invisible City is made of of full-bleed black-&-white images. The photos are not diaristic per se but involve a journey of introspection - this is as much about the urban as it is the personal. The work is done with great craft & is informed with a great deal of knowledge about photography, photo books, urbanity, & design (which was by Schles). It follows great books such as Robert Frank's The Americans, William Klein's New York, the books of Daido Moriyama. The Ballad followed the publication of Larry Clark's Tulsa & Danny Seymour's A Loud Song, but with its use of color slides, it's machine-like lack of handicraft, it presented a photography informed as much with the home amateur slide show, although it is so unlike such material too.

One of the more curious efforts I have seen by students is to try to imitate Nan Goldin's style - what is usually presented are extremely uninteresting party pictures, about social fun & potentially excessive habits. Side by side w/ Goldin's images one realizes how harsh & emotional her images are, & how strongly they are actually composed. The slides can look haphazard in a projection (the earliest images have what seems to be shifting colors) - as prints they appear much more rigorous & painterly.

On a personal note I must state that I was young & living cheaply in the Lower East Side at the time. For me both books touched on the world around me, even if my experiences were not exactly similar. Both looked familiar.

For All That I Found There - Images of Detroit

2008-11-15T19:34:00.001-08:00

From the onset I must admit a bit of jealousy: Caroline Blackwood's essay "Memories of Ulster," from the book, For All That I Found There, about growing up in Northern Ireland, states more or less what I would ever want to state about growing up in a provincial backwater such as Detroit:

. . . But I still feel surprised whenever I hear Ulster mentioned in the news. It always used to seem like the archetypal place where nothing would, or could ever happen. For as long as I could remember, boredom has seemed to be hanging over Northern Ireland like the grey mists that linger over her loughs. Boredom has seemed to be sweating out of the blackened Victorian buildings of Belfast, running down every tram-line of her dismal streets. Now when Northern Ireland is mentioned, the word 'internment' rattles through every sentence like the shots of a repeating rifle. And yet for years and years so many Ulster people, both Catholic and Protestant, have felt they were 'interned' in Ulster - interned by the gloom of her industrialized provinciality, by her backwaterishness, her bigotry and her tedium . . .

However, contra Blackwood, I would state that in her descriptions of the absolute tedium of Belfast, parallel to that of Detroit, there is none of the partisanship which I as a former (former? does is end?) Detroiter, former Michigander (as opposed to Michiganian - a latter pretentious term), partake. I don't think I am alone in this: in utter nadir, the city nevertheless instills a fierce loyalty if not pride.

In its current state, Detroit is a remarkable victim of globalization: shrinking in population, economy, it is nothing like the weird industrial superpower it was with WWII & its immediate aftermath. Geographically it is a monument to sprawl - the population moving further & further out from the city center, until the center becomes empty. & it has brought back with a vengeance an unapologetic racism into a quotidian dynamic: the city is black, the suburbs are white. What was once one of the wealthiest cities in the US is now on the verge of becoming obsolete. Without going too far into the sociology (the nature of the major industries - the automobile industry) of such effects, I want to discuss how Detroit has been represented in art & photography.

The underdog mentality of the city has been a reigning principle for decades at this point. It is quite unfortunate, but I'd state that it is an important factor to mention. Chicago was formerly the "Second City" - Detroit was a fifth - & is now further down the ladder in terms of size.

As a site for literature, it has a strange, wonderful pedigree. The most literary work may be by Louis-Ferdinand Celine, who writes about being an immigrant, working at the Ford Rouge Plant in Journey to the End of Night. & then there are numerous early novels by Joyce Carol Oates, set in Detroit, dating from her teaching days at the University of Detroit & the University of Windsor. The Garden of Earthly Delights. Expensive People. them. Do With Me What You Will. Oates understood a very salient factor about the social make-up of Detroit - the influx of country folk (Appalachian) to an industrial metropolis between WWI & WWII.

The Dollmaker by Harriet Simpson Arnow is a great novel about the displacement of rural folk into the industrial city. & the most contemporaneous & fabulist of all such work are the novels by Jeffrey Eugenides, both The Virgin Suicides & MIddlesex. Middlesex in particular, given it's "fabulist" structure, of an epic tale of an immigrant family, told by a hermaphrodite, nevertheless has almost documentary-like details in its descriptions of city & suburb.

But how is it seen? Despite my citings of rather cosmopolitan authors - Celine, Oates, Eugenides, Arnow - Detroit has been rather hostile to its representations. This is boosterism coupled with a truly embattled sense of place. It is a violent, embattled society - how to make pretty on this?

As an image Detroit had only marginal representations until its industrial boom in the 20th century. The 2 most important renderings may be the Detroit Industry murals at the Detroit Institute of Arts, & the photographs (done for Ford Times - an in house publication) by Charles Sheeler of the Ford Rouge Plant. The industry murals brought together, harmoniously (unlike the experience Rivera had with his destroyed Rockefeller Center work), in a truly amazing bit of odd-bedfellows, in this case uber-capitalist Edsel Ford, who paid for the murals, & uber-communist Diego Rivera. Much of the culture which exists in Detroit is for a large part indebted to the enthusiasms & financial largesse of Edsel Ford & his extended family. The Rivera murals are truly great work although they were not always perceived as such. Upon their completion there were complaints about Rivera's politics, the merits of the work, as well as the subject matter as inappropriate. Up until the 1970s the court was the smoking lounge of the museum, & was a place for relief, not art, by any means.

The Sheeler photographs were done as publicity & emphasize monumentality over any interpretation. There are also paintings done by Sheeler, of the plant. Sadly, none have made it to the DIA as far as I know. I bring this up as I sense there has been a sort of horror of industry & its culture among the collectors of Detroit - going back to a sense of the "inappropriateness" of Rivera's murals, for example.

The DIA does have a collection of photographs by Robert Frank which were done in Detroit which constitute a curious record of the city. Frank's work while specific in its locales is also not specific per se - his images are about moods, as opposed to information. I believe 4 of Frank's Detroit images were in his book The Americans. Frank's image of the Gratiot Drive-In in Roseville is one of my favorite images ever: it invokes both the industrialization of an urban setting & it's contrast in what had been very recently rural space. Undetailed (compare this w/ O. Winston Link's image of a drive-in), grainy, it invokes a twilight between car & absolute emptiness. This is a Caspar David Friedrich kind of image, positing both the here & now & then an indifferent infinity.

I am not a historian of images of Detroit & I do not know what is being done there now - the DIA, to its credit, in conjunction with a show of photos by Kenro Izu set up a contest on flickr of "sacred spaces" in Detroit which I found articulate & moving. It made me realize that there is potentially a lot of work out there which may or may not be seen.

Perhaps the most intriguing thread I can find in all this begins with images such a Frank's: "unofficial" images, images from a working-class or middle-class background, images coming from displacement, movement, industrialization, modernization. When I see some of the art of Mike Kelley, from Westland, originally, it is near documentary of the middle-class youth culture I grew up in as well, just slightly earlier than my own time. Or the bad-actor theatrics of the Cameron Jamie video "Spookhouse," likewise.

Other work that comes to mind are the photographs of auto show models (Detroit, Paris, Tokyo) by Jacqueline Hassink which make explicit the symbiosis of the car & sexuality, a prosthetic attended to by these dutiful hired maidens. Hassink also made a video "Car Girls" of the spectacle of pretty girls showing off the latest models with gestures & presence.

Detroit as abject space, junk space, dead spectacle - this is when it seems most alive & fascinating.

Detroit was the origin of some great photographers who moved on elsewhere: Harry Callahan, Arthur Siegel, Todd Webb. Some of Callahan's early near-abstract images of natural forms, twigs, water, snow - were done in Detroit - aesthetically removed from the industry & sprawl, in contrast w/ Siegel's fantastic image "The Right of Assembly." The Callahan images bring to mind some of Edward Steichen's earliest pictorial images, of exquisite remove from the quotidian, which were done in Milwaukee!

Walker Evans made a series of images of people walking on the street in Detroit, shot w/ a 2 1/4 camera, at a dutch angle, against a blank wall which I have always found somewhat strange & haunting. Evans' "documentary style" as he termed it is in full force in these images. They seem loaded w/ information yet they deny it too - unpicturesque, the antithesis of the languor of street photography, they emphasize the process of the streets - the street is a conduit of movement, as opposed to a pictorial space.

From the 1970s my only points of reference are of Brad Iverson's images of the Belle Isle Casino's mens room, w/ its lewd graffiti & intimation of illicit sex. These had some local controversy at the time & where are they now? These images are more journalistic than Paul Graham's t-room images exhibited & published as "Paintings" but of comparable import.

Michael Kenna made a series of images of the Rouge Plant which given its louche industrial structure tempers Kenna's amok neo-pictorialism in an interesting way. I am usually indifferent to Kenna's work, but the Rouge work (done ad hoc, unofficially) I find interesting - making pretty of very un-pretty circumstances. 2 other bodies of contemporary work which I found evocative were for magazines: Ken Schles did a series of images of the People Mover downtown which emphasize its dystopic vistas; & there was an assignment for Esquire (I believe) of outlying strips where there was a serial killing of prostitutes, by Stephen Barker, which to my knowledge were never published or shown elsewhere, which are still active in my imagination - I still think of these images, how they deal w/ both the sordid & the dull in an animated, aesthetically informed manner.

& there are of course the vernacular news images of Detroit. Besides the "Work is What I Want" image from the Detroit News, there is also the image of Walter Reuther being attacked at the entrance to the Rouge Plant. & images from the 1967 riot can be truly outrageous.

Urban images tend to emphasize the picturesque - Paris or London or New York. Pretty or interesting or monumental. Just as there have been recent shows of images of Los Angeles, I think Detroit would be another alternative to such surveys.

an occupational tintype

2008-11-15T14:55:00.001-08:00

The term "occupational" for photographs comes from a commercial appellation: a term used by dealers to indicate a portrait in which the subject is presented in terms of work. It is an antique term as well - used for distinguishing the nature of early media such as the daguerreotype, ambrotype, & tintype, for example. This is slightly different than the multitude of ethnic types sold as mass-produced cartes-de-visite (the typical Swiss or Welsh, for example) in that the other processes cited were unique images & were meant to be individual portraits, even if the portrait focused on a more generic social position such as one's trade.

Heaven bless such traders of images, for allowing them to continue to circulate into the present day, without dint of high artistic standards. I cannot help but think of more-or-less contemporaneous images such as those of the US Civil War which persisted because of the extreme ardor of those collecting any ephemeral aspect of the conflict. The numerous books of Matthew Brady's images for example: poorly printed, ignoring the visual qualities of the images in lieu of their historical (non-visual) significance. These all predate the modernist epicureanism of the Photo Dept at the Museum of Modern Art or other such venues in which the subject of the images is subordinate to their formal qualities.

From such "lowly" considerations, there is nevertheless a genuinely fertile & expansive way to consider images outside the scales of aesthetic hierarchies. Revisiting the exhibition at ICP, "America and the Tintype" I find that it has deepened my interest in the tintype, also its permutations. One of the provisional categories in the exhibit is the "occupational portrait" of which there are dozens of examples. For the most part the trades shown are artisanal & in the period in which they were taken they were being made obsolete by industrialization and mass production, The curator, Steven Kasher, makes an argument that such portraits, which would have been commissioned by the subjects, in effect represent a social assertiveness of the little man, the itinerant tradesman, a kind of embodiment of one's skills intertwined with one's identity. Such a synthesis of self, work & image seems impossible in our own media-based but alienated culture. I am not what I do everyday. Who would want to show that?

The occupational portrait has a pre-photographic history in European graphic traditions dating back to the 17th century of representations of itinerant trades. These are generic images - not of individuals but of types. The emphasis on lowly "types" as color - ethnic, geographic, class-based - was a tradition for the upper-middle-classes & aristocracy which functioned as entertainment, and informed later anthropological studies. The itinerant, the poor, are an exotic other in our midst. There is also an erotic element to looking at such abject classes. In Alain Corbin's history of the beach he cites the important erotic allure of working women, with bared feet & ankles seen at the shore - that this would be a revealing of flesh outside the confines of respectability & a powerful image as such. This in turn brings to mind the unstated eroticism of Walter Benjamin's mention of the Hill & Adamson photographs of the Newhaven fishwife in "A Small History of Photography." This is outside the social advocacy which we have seen in much photographic work, yet in terms of formal structures they are remarkably parallel. One could cite an early work such as John Thomsen's Street Types of London as being a rather dour moralistic Victorian reinvention of what had been hitherto a source of laughter & delight for the higher echelons of society - de-emphasizing the charm of such itinerant local color, being too specific & "real" even without individual names & situations cited. The photograph, as a medium, lost any aesthetic disinterested consideration in its emphasis on mechanical appearance - it was a form of industry made visible, as opposed to the mediation of an artist's hand. As an art, following traditions, it looked garish & unseemly. "Occupationals" lack the skill of fancier private portraits: frontal, with a frontal gaze, as opposed to the more aesthetic sideways glance, the beautiful pose which would turn the portrait into a consideration of beauty & poise. Tools in hand. Ready to work.

Kasher's reading of the occupational portrait, of such a portrait, while directed by economy, social strata, class, nevertheless representing an assertion by the subject, is an important re-writing of photographic history. Our so-called "vernacular" photography (& vernacular is a vague word I overuse myself) has so often been seen as a kind of technological determinism - a limited set of qualities which are foisted on the un-thinking subject. Kasher proposes a much more dynamic interaction between the subject & the paltry low-class tintype. & one can elaborate more, with other work, from there.

ICP has had some remarkable exhibitions of vernacular work: "African American Vernacular Photography" from the Daniel Cowin Collection. Geoffrey Batchen's exhibit, "Forget-Me-Not" of photography used as memorials for the dead. & also a small show of E.J. Bellocq, done in conjunction with the George Eastman House for a series of shows "New Histories of Photography." Photography relegated to the art museum denies its social roles & its experiences outside the museum. ICP has done important work in considering the myriad workings of photography in our world & also how it has been written, in the past & now.

vernacular photo of the week

2008-10-01T09:10:00.001-07:00

America and the Tintype

2008-09-21T09:40:00.000-07:00

America and the Tintype is a catalog for the exhibition at the International Center of Photography, curated by Steven Kasher and Brian Wallis, with essays by Kasher, Geoffrey Batchen and Karen Haltunnen. The collection of tintypes was assembled initially by Kasher.

The tintype, a cheap process, with few of the pretensions of more established commercial studio photograph, is overlooked in most histories of photography, except as a footnote as a process which was derivative of the daguerreotype, or the ambrotype, but without any of the retrospective artistry now accorded these other processes: a cheap imitation of something better. It lacks the detail or contrast of the daguerreotype or ambrotype. Also, as a process with little value attached to it, it has survived often in a way similar to the once ubiquitous stereocard - tattered, dirty, & because of its metal base, often bent, the emulsion damaged. The tintype would have been encased in a metal frame, or a cheaper paper frame, & as we see on the scrap heaps of flea markets & junk shops, any supporting armature has been detached, or destroyed, & any personal history has been lost.

Stanley Burns published a rather lavish book of his collection of painted tintypes, The Painted Tintype and the Decorative Frame 1860-1910, which emphasizes the most lavish production of full-plate tintypes: painted over, often obscuring the photographic matrix of the image, and according, equally a value to the remarkable frames which were produced. Such images were "imitation" portrait paintings for the middle-class, which have a formality which can seem both grave & absurd, slightly not "of quality" although quixotically interesting as such. Painted tintypes can often resemble early American portrait painting from the 17th & 18th centuries, in their stiffness - flat, inexpressive, almost uncannily so.

The collection assembled by Kasher emphasizes qualities which are overlooked by the Burns collection, or by other surveys such as Heinz & Bridget Henisch's The Photographic Experience, in their antic, populist humor. The images are smaller (i.e. cheaper) plates, primarily, & involve scenarios of role-playing, posing, earthy jokiness, a sense of the ridiculous, as well as being quite "everyday" - memorial portraits, whether of athletics or deceased children, groups, the photographic moment now part of daily life. These are fragments of obscure but evident lives. It is a medium which has no masters or masterpieces, & which had a "mass audience" as opposed to the celebrity culture which used photographic studios to articulate a public persona - there are no statesmen or theatrical stars portrayed in the tintype, it circulated only in private circles; & as a cheap common medium which still necessitated a professional operator with skills, it was eventually made obsolete by the introduction of the Kodak camera in the late 1880s & George Eastman's accessing and creation of a huge amateur market.

The collection at ICP shows an unruliness & anarchic sense of the photographic image, far from any formal conformity. I think this is a truly admirable way to examine what has been more often considered plain old junk. The writing in the book emphasizes the tintype's place as a hybrid medium that is both artisanal & industrial, in a time of economic & political flux. There is a chapter about the "occupational" portrait which also brings up the growing obsolescence of the trades depicted, in their time. Along the lines of Susan Sontag's statement that all photographs are memento mori, I am also reminded that to photograph something or someone, is also in a sense to relinquish the original to nothingness.

Kasher & Wallis open up the tintype, basically a fairground amusement, as a micro-history of daily life & consciousness.

vernacular photo of the week

2008-09-20T08:12:00.001-07:00

Not quite a "genre", one "type" (for want of better term) of early photographic image which fascinates me is the partial concealment of parent or adult, in supporting baby or small child, in studio portraiture. In my scavenges of flea markets & Ebay I have found 4 so far.

The recalcitrance of little people in the photo studio, & the transformation of parental figure into armature, inspires a bit of mirth. There are remarkable variations: cloth over the figure to mimic furniture, retouching, radical framing. Meant to be practical & pragmatic, it still seems metaphoric about "the ties that bind" child with parent. This is a reading outside the historical - but one's delight doesn't need to have strict perimeters.

"What's my motivation?" - Leigh Ledare, Jane Hammond, Zoe Beloff

2008-09-14T08:51:00.001-07:00

Leigh Ledare, "You Are Nothing To Me. You Are Like Air."
Rivington Arms

Jane Hammond, Photographs
Galerie Lelong

Zoe Beloff, "The Somnambulists"
Bellwether Gallery

In school, in the late 1970s, in my "hippie college" there was a strong Women's Studies program. I knew a group of students in the program who declared themselves "separatists" which as I understood it, was a short-lived phenomenon, historically, but which was fairly articulate & developed, or so it seemed, at the time. There were houses where no men were allowed. Women were learning carpentry & plumbing to create a new infrastructure. This was a fairly iconoclastic mentality. & what I appreciated most about it was it's utter distance from & questioning of images, of media. Unlike the dull-normal bourgeois world which accepts whatever is there as a false sense of "natural", this was a dynamic, somewhat paranoic, awareness that media exists ultimately as a kind of training, a primer of appearance, of behavior, of role. If I were to continue my questioning of our lesbian separatist sisters I would query whether it was ever really possible to distance oneself from the general culture, especially now in our mediatized world wherein the intrusiveness of media is so omnipresent as to NOT seem present, as if we are all walking around inside our heads, even as the insides of our heads seem to resemble CNN, MTV, etc.

Such reactions came to mind the other day on my gallery-hopping Saturday, going from the Leigh Ledare show in the lower east side, to Chelsea, to the Jane Hammond show, & then Zoe Beloff at Bellwether.

The Leigh Ledare show, provocatively entitled, "You are nothing to me. You are like air." (what a great dis) involves more work done with his mother Tina, seen earlier in the year at Andrew Roth which also involved the publication of a book. Both the Roth show & the book are an extensive exploration of the artist's relationship with his mother, who is by all appearances an extremely complex, possibly difficult presence, & also rather provocative. In our all too Puritanical world, for a parental figure to embody any form of sexuality seems dark & dysfunctional, & in Ledare's work the mother is a fully sexualized figure. This has perhaps obscured Ledare's work, which is extremely sensitive yet also extravagant: this is a kind of baroque riff of what we see in something like John Cassevetes films, which are about revealing very uncontained, unruly emotional states. Emotional states which do not follow rules of decorum or social propriety. The show at Rivington Arms is much smaller & much more oblique than the show at Roth. It also includes 2 videos which are as interesting as the photos or the book. Both are loops. In one there is a view of a watercolor of one of Ludwig II's castles (w/ "Mack the Knife" playing) then scenes of the mother & her boyfriend in what seems rehearsals for a skit of some sort - the boyfriend in a tux, the mother in an evening gown. The mother is spanked by the boyfriend, lines are forgotten or mixed up. It is fragmentary & anti-climactic. The mother receives lascivious directions about her performance for the camera, sucking on rhinestone jewelry, told, "Kiss it like it's a cock." & so on. In both this & the other video in which the mother cries stage tears, one is more face-to-face w/ her has a presence & I must say, she seems like quite a character & very provocative (& not at all in terms of the roles that are being enacted). I found all this very humorous & also very moving. We live in a culture of too much "revealing", too much confession, which ultimately means nothing, & despite the seeming transgressive aspects of Ledare's portrayal of his overly-sexualized mother, it is really much more about discretion, sensitivity & complexity. It's not about sound-bytes about role or behavior.

There are also a remarkable series of self-portraits of Ledare posing as responses to personal ads. This is a curious corollary to the work with the mother - he is role-playing as much as his "subject." Both are implicated in these tableaux.

Such a parallel indicates a kind of trauma - not necessarily a trauma as perceived in a pop-psychological manner, but a general rupture & tension between parent & child. Parents are the first media (as it were) for a child, & offer templates of the world at large.

I must confess I was entirely unfamiliar with the work of Jane Hammond, other than knowing generally that she is an artist, & this was her first exhibition of photographs. & I can't discern whether they are good or not - I have no way to discern quality, but I found them provocative (which isn't so bad is it?). There were separate images, matted, framed, & then also groupings of faux snapshots, memorabilia. Images in which Hammond's face was photoshopped onto whatever figure was in the found image. This is where my memories of the separatist element at the RC came to mind - Hammond's images are not fine or beautiful or particular. She used anonymous snapshots, soft-core porn, stock imagery, all of which are made more ridiculous by the omnipresence of her face. Unlike the modernist Bauhaus experiments w/ collage which deconstruct mechanical images into a new vision, or Surrealist photography which creates a parallel universe of senses, Hammond's images are too prosaic & too pedestrian to be "uplifting" however the humor & mockery presuppose another kind of distancing & relishment of cliche imagery, of the pedestrian, of photo culture in general. These are very sprightly, informed images. Even when some start to look like the complacent fantasies of someone like Jerry Uelsmann, they still are so ridiculous, so silly - it's just impossible to take them "seriously" which seems their real strength. There's a Rene Magritte photo collage of oxen foraging in front of the Paris Opera, which is what comes closest to mind in assessing these images. Hammond uses fairly elaborate means to disguise her artifice - there is painstaking staining, yellowing, tearing, fraying of the images to simulate age. Also in imitation of the genteel deckled edges of old snapshot prints, there is equally painstaking simulation of such conventions of the past. This makes for a certain unease in understanding the pictures. What comes across is an earthy ebullience & mockery, although when exactly is it from?

Zoe Beloff's The Somnambulists consists of 2 rooms of toy theaters outfitted with digital projections. In the front room there are 4 theaters using "Pepper's Ghost" a stage trick of projections used for supernatural effects - using mirrors & scrims the figures appear transparent, ghostly. In each of these figures in loop re-enact filmed hysterics from past medical experiments involving film. In the back room, 2 scenarios, "A Modern Case of Possession" & "History of a Fixed Idea" are based upon case histories written by the French psycho-pathologist Pierre Janet. These are presented as musical entertainments, w/ Janet as a narrator-emcee, & are also done in stereoscopic format, 3-D, seen w/ Polaroid 3-D glasses. The conflation of psychological experiment, theatrical entertainment, & visual technologies (from early i.e. "Pepper's Ghost" to contemporary DVD projection)allows the work to exist in an open, critical manner. It incorporates history, psychology, theater, music, optical toys, film - the theaters themselves have a childlike hand-painted prettiness which offsets the actual "darkness" of the case histories. These are simultaneously childlike & wise, like puppet shows.

The Svengali-like role of Dr. Janet w/ patient baffles a clear distinction between doctor & patient into more of a symbiotic relationship. The observation & diagnosis of the doctor articulate the performance of the patient. Extended to entertainment & mass media, a pathology emerges in the everyday. Beloff has worked with the case histories and photographs of hysteria by Jean-Martin Charcot at Salpetriere Hospital, previously; these are images which now, more than a century later, appear more fantastical & posed than their initial presentation as objective scientific experiment. Both The Invention of Hysteria, by Georges Didi-Huberman, & Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race and Madness, by Sander Gilman, question the culture of science - the Didi-Huberman book deals with Charcot's images in particular, which involve trances, paralysis, involuntary movement, facial grimaces. (One wonders about the pathologies of our own day.)

In 1995 the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts presented a large exhibition, Lost Paradise: Symbolist Europe, which included images of hysteria by Charcot, alongside, the graphics & paintings included in the show. Although never directly cited by the artists shown, the synchronicity of the images both artistic & medical can be uncanny. & in the 19th century, cultivation of illness & morbidity as a mode of aesthetic hauteur, meant hypersensitivity & rarified emotion & thought in a crude, industrial, mass-produced world. In such artistic circles it was also a sign of refinement & (spiritual & hereditary) aristocracy. Beloff's location of a similar estrangement in the even-more disenfranchised poor world of madhouse & cabaret is all the more plaintive.

celebrity

2008-09-09T14:45:00.000-07:00

In my early photographic endeavors I had certain avoidances to what I would do, for want of better term. For instance: I avoided photographing scenes in which automobiles appeared. Cars act like clocks, or calendars, in images: they connote a more or less specific time. One can date, approximately at least, a photo by the cars in it. In my vagueness, I wanted to avoid all signs of a specific time (for no good reason necessarily - this was more a gut instinct rather than an agenda). I wanted my photos to float out of time, somehow.

Celebrity functions like the automobile: each year brings new models. There are those who can identify specific models & years, & others who cannot (I can barely distinguish one car from another, other than by size or color, for instance). What is special once can become laughably obsolete, very quickly.

As a suspicious consumer I feel wary about celebrity, even when I can simultaneously enthralled by it, by its enticements & distractions. It informs my everyday speech, even if only in disdain or mockery (evidence of its persuasive powers). Also, to give media credit - it basically distorts the everyday in a manner not unlike the Catholic Church, with a lot less guilt involved, even when equally repugnant. & its vulgar polytheism changes more quickly than the television seasons, such that today's horrors are forgotten in tomorrow's amnesia. Whatever it is - it will be over quickly. But that's just a knee-jerk reaction.

In The Painter of Modern Life, Charles Baudelaire made a distinction between eternal, "classic" beauty & temporal, contingent beauty. The latter has an infernal modern aspect in its rejection of permanence, "eternity." It speaks to the senses rather than to any intellectual or moral imperatives. It's ideals are of one's day, rather than the cosmos. Eternity itself is a dead perfect thing, outside of life.

While without the hubris of Baudelaire, Andy Warhol's silkscreens of pop "stars" (Elizabeth Taylor, Elvis Presley, Jacqueline Kennedy) elevate media images to an equivocal state which echoes some themes of the essay. The silkscreens can be perceived as transcriptions of existing imagery, as a kind of homage, or a queasy distortion of questionable iconicity (the images flattened by the posterizing silkscreen process, roughly painted in with solid colors). They are recognizable yet different. I have seen students try to copy the method & it invariably appears wrong somehow - the student work tends to be too clean, too well done, too reverential (one of my students made a grid of Anna Nicole Smith, after her untimely death). Even a witty pastiche such as Deborah Kass' images of Barbra Streisand still are a bit more laden with too much meaning - even if that word is a bit warped in this instance. Warhol's images simultaneously elevate & eviscerate what are ultimately all too brief cultural "icons." ("icon" is one of those words which should be expunged from the English language, for our own good.)

Stars as subject has a juvenile aspect: one's self is displaced in a vulgar polytheism of media celebrity, an Olympus of tabloid scandals & product placements. A excellent & vicious guide to the stars are the 2 volumes of Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon. Anger may be the most Baudelairian of our contemporary artists in the extremities of his simultaneous relish & disgust in the wayward ways of Hollywood movie star egoists; monsters who built an oasis of decadence in the former deserts of Los Angeles.

Recently I saw Francesco Vezzoli's video Marlene Redux, which is a very funny "copy" of an E! Hollywood True Story - in this case termed "A Hollywood True Story" which is of the rise & fall of the artist Francesco Vezzoli, a narrative of success, then failure - Vezzoli lost in the sexual bazaar of Hollywood. Such a narrative is so much a cliche & so common in our tabloid culture - what would a parody actually accomplish? How different would it be? Still, it is a very well-crafted reproduction of the dizzying collage of edits & sound/image bytes & it becomes much more what I'd want to see on television - interviews (do such brief statements count as "interviews"?) with male porn stars & male prostitutes & gym trainers (*ahem*) & drag queens. The tale is much more decadent than the puritanical sobbings of US TV. As parodic as it may be, it is also a grandiose idealization of the form.

In a more global sense I'd state that the Vezzoli also reveals how much tabloid narratives have become extremely pervasive, & overlooked, in their ubiquity. They exist w/o question. There's a lot of pop star imagery in the arts which can ironic or not. I think of the paintings of rock stars & royalty by Elizabeth Peyton, which are extremely sincere - these seem quite similar to the work of Constantin Guys, who is the unnamed subject of Baudelaire's essay - both are kinds of elevated fashion illustration, & as such have almost a "documentary" value for the future, irregardless of one's taste for their styles. Will we even know who these people are in a few years? Looking at CDVs of royals & theater stars from the 19th century - who can identify them? Outside of the technologies used, is our world all that different? Celebrity seems most interesting when its obsolescence is acknowledged. (All these potential sequels to Sunset Boulevard. . . )

A more complex reading of our exploding pop inevitable is in the paintings, drawings, videos & installations of Karen Kilimnik. There is a violence & obsessiveness in her treatment of her pretty & cute subjects. Pretty becomes a kind of pathology, & the stars, real & imaginary, (Emma Peel, Leonardo di Caprio, Rudolf Nureyev, various Vogue models) become quite monstrous in their appeal. Kilimnik's work deals a lot w/ the reception of & reaction to media as a kind of invasive species of consciousness.

& in the case of an even more complex & enigmatic artist, Ray Johnson, whose collages & drawings & mail are full of images & names of stars, the stars themselves are internalized & abstracted to a kind of nothingness, as hermetic clues which never reveal themselves, & there is a much louder laughter (of sorts) coming from Johnson: the stars are there & they are nothing but cut paper playthings, filler for nonsense lists & fake meetings. Johnson's art is about sitting on a void & dawdling on it, making games & jokes out of a great big disappearing act.

Andy Warhol - A Boy For Meg

2008-09-04T11:48:00.002-07:00

Now in the collection of the National Gallery in Washington, "A Boy for Meg" was on long-term loan to the Detroit Institute of Arts, where I saw it on numerous occasions as a child. It is one of the first paintings I can recall, distinctly, & as such represents a kind of primal memory (as it were) of aesthetic experience in my childhood. I was not directly aware of tabloid newspapers such as the NY Post, which was the template for the painting, I could recall tabloid "style" - my education was primarily cartoons (Bugs Bunny, Tom & Jerry, Rocky & Bullwinkle) & the Warhol in its own way followed such a suit. Easy to recognize, it seems.

My mother read movie star magazines rather obsessively in these days - Photoplay, etc. which she would hide, like pornography, & I as an inquisitive child, found them & read them cover to cover, before returning them to their hiding-place. Ethel Kennedy's affair with Andy Williams (my mother & I would watch his TV Christmas special together every year), Jackie K becoming Jackie O & as such transforming from Great Widow to Great Whore in the scheme of things, Ted Kennedy's "incident" at Chappaquadick (I think we paid attention to the Kennedys because they were Catholic - I went to a Catholic grade school at one point & my 3rd grade teacher told us all that if a Kennedy was elected, this was before the death of RFK, then God would be in the White House, helping out). for example.

Along with Photoplay, etc. my favorite book at that time was Edith Hamilton's Mythology - Timeless Tales of Gods & Heros. Itself a compendium of (truly) immortal gossip. I would attribute any ability on my part to recall intricacies of connections to these 2 random aspects of my childhood culture. Seeing Renaissance & Baroque tapestries for example I could recognize attributes of Gods unseen to my family: Mercury, Apollo, Aphrodite, etc.

The Warhol somehow fit into the pop mass cultural world around me & also remove itself from the "shelf" as it were - I could recognize the same Campbell soup cans, the Brillo boxes, the ads in the back of comic books, etc. to be found in any supermarket. My aunt Lucille, a secretary at GM Overseas, had taken me to the DIA for an exposure to culture, something neither of my parents would have ever attempted - it meant an exposure to that great entity, "the finer things in life" which from her petit bourgeois world meant also that they were the stuff of museums, others, "not for us." This was not dissimilar from the car rides we did on Lakeshore Drive in the Grosse Pointes to look at the mansions of the Fords, etc. Look but don't touch. But like the illicit photos of Jackie O being stalked, the weirdness & splendor of an art museum was another form of forbidden fruit. & although making no claim at all for any deep illuminations in all this media hubbub, I think I did discover & discovering knowingly, looking at the Warhol, a way to mediate the mediation all around us. & it had humor & spirit - a child could understand its mockery, it camp, & its independence.

Thomas Struth - Making Time

2008-08-30T11:15:00.000-07:00

Thomas Struth: Making Timeis a catalog for a show by Struth at the Prado, as well, with a bit of perversity, a documentation of Struth's show at the Prado. There is some wit in this: the catalog, rather than representing a simultaneity between show & catalog, depicts it in the past tense. The show had to be up, & photographed, for the book to be made. Photographs of the installations become "Struth photographs" along with the existing Struth photographs placed throughout the museum.

When I first saw Struth's museum photographs I found them striking - perhaps mainly because of formal aspects such as color & the luminosity of the printing, which is sober but rich. & also my voyeuristic interest in seeing old master paintings was satisfied. I don't know if my satifactions have been sustained by the work, however.

The work in the Prado, like the Pergamon Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, wherever, has its greatness, its indisputable status as classic. That's not quite the subject of the photos - the photos detail the morgue-like setting of the museums as a site of spectatorship & also a kind of aesthetic enthrallment. I'd say at this point I find myself withdrawing from the work as I can't abide what seems a near single-minded focus of the museum-goers on the art, in a timeless state of contemplation, as a common scenario. The temporal spectator face-to-face with the eternal masterpiece: Vita brevis, longa ars. This seems an idealized, unrealistic assessment of a contemporary museum experience. Even in the thick crowds depicted, which in "reality" would be loud with noise & distraction. Struth's cool, sober formalism shuts out any sociology of a museum experience. I can't help but think that a more satirical & social photographer such as Martin Parr might be an interesting counterpoint in such a situation.

There have been rather silly images of "art-viewing" in the history of photography. The most reproduced one I can think of is the Robert Doisneau image of an older couple looking in the window of a gallery, on the wall there is a painting of a naked lady - the viewer recognizes that the "nude" is really "naked" & there for a prurient gaze from the man. This is a kind of visual joke that was more popular in the world of picture magazines, w/ images by Doisneau, or Elliott Erwitt. Well - maybe the sociology I miss in Struth is actually rather stupid & magazine-like, after all.

Am I positing 2 extremes merely for effect? The mocking vulgarity of the mass culture magazine, in which high culture is meant to be "brought down" a notch or so, as not being quite what it purports to be. Versus the humorless, solemn & all too beautifully pensive images of Struth, wherein the art experience still has an aura of "elevation." Perhaps.

Still, I find myself bristling a bit w/ the Struth museum images in that they hold back any meaning in an opaque formal way. Orson Welles said that one could never believe a (filmed) image of someone praying; likewise I doubt any image of an elevating visual experience. Even if in theory it is a reflective state I seek rather often (I doubt it would look like anything however).

This may be an overstatement. It is intriguing that the Prado, or any museum, would exhibit photographs of its galleries in its galleries. Such "self"-reflexivity (the institution as a kind of self - a little too museum for my comfort) is a kind of reactionary version of something like Daniel Buren's installations in galleries in the 1970s, which baffled the ideologies of galleries by drawing attention to them, and reducing them to generic geometric flows. In the Struth museum images, which can seem a bit marvelous, and offer a lot of seductive visuality, one is unable to understand much beyond just that. While the lack of anecdote or narrative, & the resolute formalism of the images is of interest, and easy to "enter", again my mind wanders to work which is not quite so visually pleasing but of much more interest in looking at art: from the installations of stripes by Buren, to the photographs of art in its settings by Louise Lawler, in which art is a status symbol, a possession, a decoration, an example of taste - in which there is a negation of any metaphysics or inner-experience.

I try to remember first seeing Struth's work in galleries, in the 1980s. It was a different experience than now & I do not believe that is just an example of my own aging. When first seen in NY, for instance, Struth, along w/ Andreas Gursky & other students of Bernd & Hilla Becher, utilized a technological objectivity which initially dated from experimental photography in the 1920s, & which had been reinvigorated by the Bechers, given a conceptual rigor lacking in magazine or artistic photography of the past decades. Still, it is almost shocking how someone like Struth can "cross the street" so effortlessly & go from the avant-garde to the academy, & look quite the same, doing so.

At the risk of sounding too harsh re Struth, I can also state that in the glorious galleries of the Prado, w/ Las Meninas & The Spinners, along w/ other Struth photographs "intervening" among the old masters, there was also one of my very favorite portraits by Struth, of the art historian Giles Robertson (there is also a very great double portrait of Robertson w/ his wife). & that meant something to me somehow - a photo in a photo in a book of a show - these curious mediations we take to see ourselves & our worlds.

Andy Warhol - Portraits and Landscapes

2008-08-29T15:20:00.001-07:00

There is a Sufi story about a group of blind men feeling an elephant, each at a different part of its body, each trying to describe the totality if the animal, from the point at which they touch it. The story being that none fully describe it. Andy Warhol as an artist seems as perplexing as this hypothetical elephant. What did he do? What did he mean? I can think of few artists who can embody so many contradictory practices and tastes - someone held in esteem both by the editorial board of October, & family members of the deposed Shah of Iran.

Depending on what work is seen, a different Warhol appears. If I were to have seen only the installation at the DIA Foundation in Beacon, for example, with its enormous gallery of abstract shadow paintings (which I found rather uninteresting except in the excesses of the installation), it would be different from the more spectacular gallery in the Hamburger Banhof in Berlin, with its enormous Mao, its even larger camouflage painting, & some of the Disaster silkscreens.

Or I think of one of the first paintings I can recall clearly from my childhood, a painting entitled "A Boy For Meg" - a painting of a NY Post headline about Princess Margaret. It is now in the National Gallery in Washington, but was on display at the Detroit Institute of Arts, when I saw it. An early lesson in camp for me.

Or the films, which are wonderfully terrible as drama (Vinyl, Poor Little Rich Girl), & mesmerizing about the "film" experience.

Or the very ambiguous celebrity portraits. Was Warhol a court portraitist to a global power-elite?

To add to the bewilderingly prismatic Warhol bodies of work is a great catalog of a show at the Timothy Taylor Gallery in London of black-&-white photographs which was curated by Steven Bluttal.

"Portraits & Landscapes" is a collection of black-&-white photographs done over an extended period. The title refers to the layout of the images - portrait is vertical, landscape is horizontal. Unlike previous collections of Warhol's photographs which relate to work such as the silkscreens, or were exhibited independently, such as the stitched photographs, the images in the show do not represent any any specific artistic project per se. These are random photographs. The Warhol we see in this is near anonymous - this is the work of an active snapshooter. We look at them because Warhol's name is attached to them. The Warhol we see can baffle us further: a photographer accumulating images, shooting constantly. This is about bulk, much more than a studied delectation. The camera becomes a tool of acquisition.

The design of the book is based on the Ed Ruscha book Every Building on the Sunset Strip. Like the Ruscha it is an accordion book, in a foil-covered slip case. The images are reproduced at the top & bottom of the pages, counting to over 200. It's a genuinely lovely book, well-done. There are other books which parody or emulate Ruscha's self-published books, such as Louisa Van Leer's Fifteen Pornography Companies, which wear a little thin in such recognition. The catalog from Timothy Taylor is both similar & different enough to exist independently as a book, even in the long tall shadow of Ruscha.

Steven Bluttal is also the editor of a book of images of the designer Halston - it is a thick brick of a book of ads, editorial images, & other visual ephemera. Bluttal is bright & sensitive to the fascination of materials which could very easily be overlooked. Given the excesses of what is coming out of the Warhol Museum, one can only hope for more & different work to emerge.

LA Plays Itself by Fred Halsted

2008-08-27T06:30:00.000-07:00

Last night at Light Industry in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, I attended a presentation by William E. Jones of 2 films made by Fred Halsted, Sex Garage and LA Plays Itself. LA Plays Itself is almost a "lost film" in that no fully extant version of it exists currently, except perhaps a film in the film department of MoMA, which does not circulate. Jones has made a provision reconstruction of the film which includes a fisting scene at the end which was removed when the film was transferred to VHS way back when.

Another issue, discussed by Jones after the screening, is the squeamishness on the part of some institutions and individuals in involving themselves with research & reconstruction of a gay porn film. This involves both commercial video companies as well as remaining family & colleagues of the late Fred Halsted. In the commercial film industry, porn exists as a quasi-invisible parallel universe to the corporate fantasies of giant entertainment conglomerates, & as such is kept distant, or ignored, or denied. & if it is gay - one can exponentially increase that disdain.

I had never seen LA Plays Itself. There is a brief excerpt of it in Thom Andersen's Los Angeles Plays Itself - in addition it gave Andersen a title for his film. Made in a span of 3 years, from 1969 - 1971, released in 1972, LA Plays Itself now exists as a kind of archaeological find of gay porn. In photographic terms, I would say it is comparable to looking at the work of Hill & Adamson, early calotypists making portraits in the 1840s, in an exploratory, ad hoc manner, in contradistinction to the later industrialized commercial portrait studios of Paris, London, New York, churning out mass-produced cartes-de-visites.

What is so striking about LA Plays Itself is its affinities to experimental films as well as its raunchy hubris. Kenneth Anger without any occult. Stan Brakhage in a backroom. Discontinuous editing akin to Soviet experiments of the 1920s. I don't know if Halsted had any experience of any of this kind of film, & it doesn't really matter. What is apparent is Halsted's extreme engagement with the material, his radical "focus" (excuse the pun) on desire, lust, carnality, & how that shapes the provisional narrative - that really is the narrative as such. There's also an amazing array of other "things" in the film, scenes of nature in Malibu Canyon, flowers, insects, fish, & the streets of Los Angeles, & also a rather "Pop art" use of billboards, advertising & newspaper headlines to punctuate scenes. This recalls a similar use of billboards & advertising used by William Klein, in his film Muhammad Ali: The Greatest or the advertising copy which becomes party dialogue & also visual commentary in Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le Fou - Criterion Collection ("put a tiger in your tank!"). The newspaper headlines involve the Tate-LoBianca murders & Charles Manson, which become ominous in lieu of the last part of the film which involves an s/M scene between a youth & Fred Halsted in which they are intercut, leading up to the now fragmentary, partially lost fisting scene.

Both Malibu Canyon & the streets of Los Angeles as scenes of cruising, either solitary or in general groups (Selma Ave. was the hustler strip at the time as per Jones) become existential theaters. In daylight they seem still isolated, interior. While the "nature" scenes are lush & fecund, the streets seem infernally shabby. The streets are senseless, cruel, mocking. There is a repetitious Warholian dialogue overlaid on the scenes of street, of Halsted speaking to a young Texan hick, new to LA, telling him to be careful hustling on the streets. There is a sardonic aspect to this as it leads up to the extraordinary 2nd sexual sequence of the film, of a boy being dominated by Halsted - forced to climb stairs on hands & knees, tied to a bed, worked over. At the risk of casting it in negative terms, the film is not joyous about sexuality, although it is certainly obsessed with it.

Contra contemporary porn which has a great deal of polish, a fully illustrative manner in detailing sex acts, routine conventions & a fairly predictable schedule of sequencing, Halsted's films look hand-made. Although made for public consumption, there's a degree of angst to them which in commercial terms is very different from "product". The camera movements are hand held, blurring & obscuring actions. It is often difficult to follow what is going on, or to understand the narrative (jump-cuts a la Antonioni for instance). This can seem intentional, in rendering the sexual violence as truly dangerous. & when it is more oblique, we the viewers are forced into an existential immediacy of consciousness, which seems the true "story" of the film. The images pulsate in & out of near abstraction. In art photography, especially nude "erotic" photography, abstraction is often a kind of visual brake to keep the sexuality of the images contained & controlled, to elevate it to an aesthetic level of "tastefulness". In Halsted's use of abstract framing, with its kinetic force, it instead amplifies a heated voyeurism, or extends the sexuality to that which is not directly sexual or genital related - the lilt of hair, a shoulder, the curve of a back. One could say that this relentless looking of the camera pulls EVERYTHING into a sexualized tension - including the flowers, insects & rocks (& of course the gritty streets): A low-down heated-up frenzy.

Looking at men erotically in our culture has been commercialized so successfully, whether it be a Falcon video, or an Abercrombie & Fitch ad campaign, & so thoroughly identified as such (along with appropriate product placements), it is invigorating to see something like Fred Halsted's films, which are so much more delirious & messy & complex an experience. Our "real" commodified, defined world looks truly shallow in comparison.