Joseph Maida, New Natives (Hawai'i)

Years ago at the Swann auction house I looked through an album that came from a Duke's castle in England. The album came with an embossed view of the Duke's estate, representing his title and his property, which was impressive enough for its exoticism in mercantile New York, although the contents of the album were what drew me to it: dozens of images of Sicilian youths by Wilhelm von Gloeden. Gorgeous peasant youths in classical and not-so-classical tableaux, semi-nude or nude, erotic but just enough within a refined aristocratic European sensibility to hold onto the edges of acceptable culture. In contemporary terms this would be for a "niche market" enterprise for men who wanted to look at other men, and the archaic tableaux would be a kind of drag contrivance of art: shabby, maudlin, a masquerade which shows its obvious seams. This was for "them" meaning "us" - meaning it's just for us and as such it is still marginalized in a broader ostensibly asexual i.e. heteronormative social sphere, which isn't necessarily all bad.

Looking through the Duke's album, the last pages do a curious shift, from the antique pastiche of von Gloeden, the last pages were a collection of black-&-white ethnographic images of men in Africa, which could pass for early National Geographic images, artless, images used as identification, for classification. 

The marvelousness of the Duke's album is that it links two intense bogeys that can be found in photography: a move towards an excess of fantasy and sexuality, along with a colonizing need to classify and in effect control the scope of the subject. The camera is not an innocent technology: it limits the scope of our perceptions with neat bifurcations between fantasy and reality, enforcing techno-cratic limits to each, along with its flattening of the subject into identifiable terms. This is this. That is that. 

The queasiness of photography as a technological phantasm-cum-order comes to mind in looking at Joseph Maida's photographs titled New Natives (Hawai'i). The texts from Maida's website and from his gallery show lay out a neutral scenario: The men in the images are models in Hawai'i, contacted through social media, who pose for the the photographer in their own chosen way, so there is a collaboration rather than an imposed tableau or role for the model. 

While I would not dispute this scenario at all, I think that part of the uncanny richness of Maida's images is its connection to the weirdness of photography, which can be embodied in fetishism (the fetishism of physicality, of race), and the difference between photographer and subject. The most direct correlation between ethnography and these images is in the captions which list the many mixed races of the models ("Hawaiian, Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, Filipino"etc.). Maida brings up a potential sea-change for hegemonic White America in the election of Barack Obama as indicative of a blurring of ethnic identity, and without saying so directly, the hybridity of new generations born after the passing of legalities regarding miscegenation. In Maida's photographs there is a tension between the idea of a portrait (what the ruling classes use to represent themselves, as a fully embodied presence) and classification (what happens to everyone else). 

The neat sociological explanations of the project, if anything, underscore the semiotic excess of the images. In Flesh of My Flesh Kaja Silverman makes reference to an imaginary camera that exists for us now, for which we comport ourselves, as if for the world. Or in contradistinction to the Decadent paradox of a mask that tells the truth, we now have masks which present masks, and there is nothing else. These are very lush images, with very interesting looking boys in them, yet if I had to locate what it is that moves me in them, it is not as an apotheosis of my sexual urges but a weird twilight instead. The landscape seems like the end of a world somehow, a liminal place. Hawaii looks kind of cold even when it reads simultaneously as a great place with a laundry list of great things to be found. Arcadia looks like an artificial backdrop. The cool tone to the images pushes them out of any easy reading towards questions - the enterprise of photography, the looking at others, sex, self-presentation, self-perception - which gives them a curious existential presence. 

Detroit Disassembled by Andrew Moore

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 . . .

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

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.

Dan Graham

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

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

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

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

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

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?

William Eggleston @ the Whitney

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.

The Ballad of Sexual Dependency at the Museum of Modern Art

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.

Stan Douglas "Detroit Pictures" @ Hamburger Bahnhof

Berlin - May 6 @ the Hamburger Bahnhof. A selection from the Flick Collection: Bernd & Hilla Becher, their students Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff, Candida Hofer, Axel Hutte; from Vancouver, Jeff Wall, Rodney Graham & Stan Douglas; also Sigmar Polke, Fischli/Weiss, David Claerbout.

What an interesting group of images to contemplate. Both T. & I were most enthusiastic about an early (1969) 8-piece grid of a single building, by the Bechers - seen methodically from 8 no doubt equidistant vantage points, encircling it. There were also early works by Struth (including the photo of the intersection of Crosby/Spring in lower Manhattan, which I often show students, pointing out the future locations of Balthasar & Starbucks), Ruff (interiors in an apartment building - each image identified by its room number - I wondered if this was student work, it seemed slightly more photographic than I would associate w/ him). & a series of vague, un-fixed images of Turkey by Polke. Overall a stunning show.

T. had recommended I look at the Stan Douglas Detroit pictures. I had seen them briefly in 1998 at David Zwirner & had a somewhat different memory. The images date from 1997-1998. Both T. & I remembered most distinctly the image at the top of the parking structure in the former Michigan Theater (also used in the film 8 Mile). When I saw the image initially it was a period when I had not been in Detroit for a few years & was out of touch as to the then current topography. The Douglas pictures were taken at the onset of construction of Ford Field & Comerica Park, which displaced a large area of downtown. 2 distinctive structures, the Gem Theater & the Elwood Diner were moved, for preservation purposed, & can be seen in transit. The scenes in the photos are both well-known places or buildings, mixed in with some much more anonymous sites. My sense is that a fair amount of research went into the choices, measured with enough freedom from a didactic agenda. If anything the Detroit photos remind us that without a specific context, photographs float in a kind of suspended animation, absent from specific meaning. One can see that the attention is mostly to the entropic decay of the city (perhaps more glamorous to outsiders than residents), however, there is none of the didactic recordings of a sociologist such as Camilo Jose Vergara. Is Stan Douglas being an aesthete of urban decay? There is that possibility; however it is a relief as well to not have explanations, statistics, facts, purposes - it becomes a bit formal perhaps, dealing with the phenomenology of technological images - which may or may not seem deceptively simple. The images are all color, varying in sizes & shapes. One can see the great icons of urban abandonment in downtown Detroit, the empty Michigan Central Depot (also seen in the film True Romance) & the until recently ruinous Book Cadillac Hotel (I have photos from the same intersection at Michigan Ave & Shelby). & there are some not so well known locales such as the perfectly monotonous, gray, abandoned Idlewild Motel (a great example of roadside readymade), & one perverse excursion into wealthy suburbia - a perfect green lawn in Grosse Pointe Farms, at the shore of beautiful Lake St. Clair, with a hanging loveseat facing out towards the placid water. An image of suburban private back yard splendor.

There is also an anomalous image of the Mies Van Der Rohe development, Lafayette Park, which is not in decrepitude, unlike what seems most of the city. Or at least this is anomalous in the structure of a journalistic essay, which the photos are NOT. This is an illuminating example of the different structures & necessities of journalism and art. Also curious to a former Detroiter adrift in Berlin, the signage for the Mies development & one of the Idlewild images were switched. A meaningless mistake, but of note to a former local such as myself & sweetly bizarre (one a cracker shack, the other a modernist epiphany). Also an image of a gas station is labelled "Paradise Valley" which officially no longer exists - it was torn down for a freeway long long ago.

To a Detroiter this portfolio may seem incomplete - but what could really be complete with such a project? There's a certain amount of beauty in these images which seems important too - a kind of golden twilight light. They are quite silent, still, contemplative. They seem of similar cast to the videos of sawmills by Douglas, as well - the contemplation of industry & its residue.