Asger Jorn & Guy Debord, Fin de Copenhague (1957/2001)

Jack Smith, The Moldy Hell of Men and Women (Film Culture no. 35, Winter 1964-65)

Hans-Peter Feldmann: The Hugo Boss Award

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.

The Corinthians - A Kodachrome Slideshow

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.

Larry Sultan 1946-2009

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

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.

Empirical Experience: The Artist, Information, and the Book

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

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