Michael Lin
Over a dinner of fresh caught lobster and striped bass prepared by my inimitable colleague Trevor Smith, a group of us gathered for dinner last night with the installation artist and painter Michael Lin. Michael and his partner Heidi Voet split their time between Shanghai and Brussels; Michael is here to talk about a possible collaboration with the Peabody Essex Museum curated by Trevor. Michael and I had a long talk on Wednesday about a group of glass-plate negatives he found, taken of his family and their home in Taiwan around 1900-1910. It’s a detective story because no one knows exactly who took the pictures or why. My hunch is they were made by a talented relative – there is such intimacy, warmth, and insight to them. But Michael thinks they may have been made by a local professional photographer who came to know the family well.
Michael is best known for the textile-like paintings he and his assistants make on architectural surfaces. During the Winter Olympics he famously mounted large painted panels on the exterior of the Vancouver Art Gallery. In the image above, a student works to complete a floor in the Hague. The large-flower patterns he often uses have a very specific meaning in Taiwan as they were traditionally given as wedding presents and would have been used to cover the matrimonial bed.
Michael has been visiting the DVD markets in Shanghai looking for rare and interesting films. His most recent discovery: Nagisa Oshima’s 1988 movie Max Mon Amour, starring Charlotte Rampling as a wayward wife cheating on her husband with a chimpanzee. The husband comes to accept the wife/chimp relationship, though he resents the tender touches the chimp gives the woman – the gentle caressing of her cheek, the stroking of her hair. As one would.
Karen Finley as Jackie Kennedy
On Friday we hosted Karen Finley at the Peabody Essex Museum; she performed her one-woman show ‘The Jackie Look’ in which she takes on the persona of Jackie Kennedy (and at times Jackie Onassis) commenting on her (Jackie’s) treatment in the media. Karen focused on photography and the way photographs are viewed, interpreted, and distorted in reproduction, weaving in lots of references to the Avedon | The Kennedys show we have on at the moment. The audience was full and many were on the edge of their seats – it was a powerful performance and Karen has plenty of fans. It was not the sort of shocking, in-your-face material she is best known for – the stuff that got her named ‘Public Enemy Number One’ by the late Jessie Helms. For the ‘Jackie Look’ she stayed fully clothed throughout – none of the honey showers, smeared chocolate, or baked beans that were once her hallmarks. This, after all, is the woman who stripped off and jumped into a display window at JC Penny, squishing her breasts against the glass like some sort of back-talking soft-core mannequin. On Friday she told the audience not to be afraid. ‘I’m a dignified lady,’ she said, channeling Jackie, as she walked up and down the aisles, looking for fancy handbags to coo over.
The night had many highlights – her riff on Caroline Kennedy’s verbal tick ‘you know’ turned into a long, hair-raising primal scream – ‘You? No! You…. know!” But for my money nothing surpassed the dance bit three quarters of the way through. You simply haven’t lived until you’ve seen Karen Finley dressed as Jackie Kennedy dancing to a video of figure skater Johnny Weir shimmying to Lady Gaga’s Poker Face.
George Bernard Shaw, photographer
I am in London today, mainly for meetings with colleagues and to attend events surrounding Tate Modern’s exhibition Exposed: Voyeurism Surveillance and the Camera which opened May 27th. But I carved out a few hours to visit the Library of the London School of Economics and view the George Bernard Shaw photography collection.
Shaw of course is the Nobel Prize winning novelist, playwright, art critic and political agitator best known for writing Pygamalion. But he was an avid amateur photographer who bought his first camera in 1898 and photographed for fifty years. Most of these photographs ended up at the LSE, as did the papers of the Fabian Society, the socialist club he supported. There are a few photographs at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin too, and Shaw’s diaries went to the British Library. But the LSE collection numbers around 7,000 pictures.
Not all of those are Shaw pictures; also included in the collection are pictures by many other photographers, and authorship is not always clear. There are portraits of Shaw by Alvin Langdon Coburn, Madame Yevonde, Yousuf Karsh, and Frederick Evans, along with lesser lights. Shaw was not shy about being photographed and the archive even includes a dozen or so pictures of Shaw sunbathing nude. They are a refreshing change from the trademark tweed jacket and short pants he habitually wore. He was rarely seen in anything else.
Some of the Shaw photographs have been exhibited in the past but this was the first time I had seen the whole unedited collection. There are lots of pictures of his travels in Algeria, South Africa, England, Ireland, and the United States, most featuring family and friends. It’s truly a collection of amateur photographs. Most are not too sharp, some badly discolored, the compositions not always very well thought out, and most are not enlarged. Still there is something magical about them. A series of cloud studies, or a group of pictures of the backs of his hands show him experimenting with the camera and learning to see photographically – there is a sense of discovery about them. They’re the kind of photographs any enthusiast could have made once photography opened up to ordinary people in the 1890s, after the invention of the Kodak camera. There are even Kodak film sleeves and a Zeiss light filter guide in the collection. But how many of his amateur brothers and sisters had access to such an extraordinary group of friends, and how many were able to travel to the four corners of the globe?
Zen and the art of exhibiting photography
In a small side street in Kuramae, on the outskirts of the old neighborhood of Asakusa in Tokyo, is one of the most extraordinary exhibition spaces in the world. Called Ku Ren Boh gallery (Ku=nothingness, Ren=lotus, a symbol of beauty emerging from dirt and muck, Boh=study room), it may be the only photography gallery attached to a Chohuin Buddhist temple. Open since 2006, it is visible strictly by appointment, and just a couple of people can see it at a time. Last week I visited the gallery to see a Lee Friedlander exhibition, “Windows and Mirrors.”
The front of the complex is pretty non-descript; other than the wide open front gate and the extremely beautiful Japanese garden in the courtyard, you wouldn’t know you’re in the right place. In the back of the courtyard is a small entryway and a doorbell. Pressing the bell calls the Temple’s priest and curator, Akiyoshi Taniguchi. He is a terrific photographer himself, though he never exhibits his own work and his books are only displayed discretely in the entryway. Mr. Taniguchi does exhibit works from his own private collection though, which is extensive. If I remember correctly two of the works in the Friedlander exhibition came from his collection. The rest were borrowed from Friedlander, who is Mr. Taniguchi’s friend.
After he receives you, Mr. Taniguchi opens the temple itself, which is a house-sized building with a gleaming altar in one corner of the courtyard. The gallery is in a separate building adjacent to the garden. At first it’s not clear you’re looking at a gallery as Mr. Taniguchi points to a sliding black metal door about 4’ tall in the side of a white wall. Slide the door he says, walk down the corridor, and please remove your shoes.
The door slides, you duck your head and arrive in a narrow corridor with a smooth floor of gray rounded stones. At the end is a little ledge for shoes, and two pairs of wooden sandals to change into. Another duck through a low doorway to the side and you arrive in the gallery. It’s a silent, minimalist white cube, about 8’ square, with a circular straw mat placed in the center for kneeling meditation. The walls, ceiling, and floor all have rounded corners so there are no right angles in the gallery. This, Mr. Taniguchi later explains, is according to his interpretation of ‘Ku’ – he wanted to create a gallery with no beginning and no end.
There are only 8 photographs in the center gallery – 4 pairs of pictures. Each combines a single Friedlander stem picture (a series he did of flower stems in water, seen through glass vases) with a recent self portrait. The combination is stunning. The aging artist is shown dressed plainly with an absent look on his face, looking back towards the camera, holding a shutter release. The self portraits are frank and unglamorous, giving the stem pictures a special potency.
In a small (2-1/2’ wide?) adjacent gallery there is a single chair facing a wall with an older, 1970s vintage Friedlander of a shop window under a tiny skylight. On the adjacent walls there are several other pictures from the self portraits and stems series.
Seeing pictures in such an amazing place is unforgettable. The intimacy of the gallery and its design make pictures gives the pictures special importance. It makes the visitor slow down and think, heightening awareness.
Every few months Mr. Taniguchi changes the show. Last year he did an exhibition of Naoya Hatakeyama’s ‘Blast’ photos of a bird flying away from a mining explosion. Next year he is planning to show photographs by the British photographer Susan Derges.
The opening of each exhibition is accompanied by a Buddhist ceremony and teaching. For some shows he might have members of the temple debate the meaning of the photographs, for others he arranges small performances. Recently he has created a ceremony for all the shows in which he burns an original photograph, reflecting the fragility of works on paper, and the ephemerality of the things captured in photographs.
Everything about the gallery is inspired. There are precedents for the Buddhist contemplation of photographs, for example at the Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts outside Tokyo which is maintained by a Buddhist sect and directed by the famous photographer Eikoh Hosoe. Still, Ku Ren Boh is in a class of its own. Mr. Taniguchi likens his gallery to a tea ceremony space. The leap of intellect involved in harnessing modern picture-making to the pursuit of ancient traditions is impressive. As Mr. Taniguchi writes: “The gallery aims to calm the mind of the visitor, to enable him or her to concentrate entirely on the art at hand, to wander mentally within the universe of the artist, and through this, to have a little of the kind of transcendent experience that, following another path, people have sought to reach through the disciplines of Buddhist meditative practice. “
The gallery is completely non-commercial. Among the artists who have shown here are Adam Fuss, Daido Moriyama, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Hiroshi Sugimoto. The temple has become a magnet for Japanese artists and the community is growing.
Avedon | The Kennedys
On April 17th I opened The Kennedys | Portrait of a Family, Photographs by Richard Avedon in the main special exhibitions galleries at the Peabody Essex Museum. We’ve been getting terrific press such as this review from the Boston Globe’s Pulitzer Prize winning critic, Mark Feeney, and attendance has been excellent. Between Avedon and the concurrent exhibition Maya and the Mythic Sea, visitation at the museum is up 50% on the previous year.
The Avedon exhibition features final prints and enlarged contact sheets from a single session Avedon had with the Kennedy family on January 3, 1961 — after JFK’s election but before his inauguration. The pictures are all vintage and were commissioned by Harper’s Bazaar magazine — a copy of the issue the images appeared in is included in the display. To give a flavor of the times we copied the typewriter-style font that Harper’s used in 1961 in all the exhibition graphics. And to give the show a period, Modernist look we used white walls with gray highlights, and hung the pictures with very regular spacing. I’ve never installed a show like this before but I think it works well.
What’s great about the exhibition, and the reason I wanted to do it in the first place, is that it shows how important editing is in the photographic process. The Kennedys were interesting in their own right and any photographs made in this period would be worth seeing. But considering the rarity of the images (they were the only formal pictures made between the election and inauguration), the high-profile publication that commissioned them, and how famous Avedon was at the time, they have a real weight of history about them. Shooting with a 2-1/4 x 2-1/4″ Rolleiflex, Avedon got 11-12 shots per roll of film. The exhibition shows them all, from the ones that were published to the ones that landed on the cutting room floor. The pictures that weren’t used were often pretty wonderful in their own right, but Avedon chose the pictures that most closely matched the way he thought the new first family should be seen. Sometimes the differences between frames are very subtle, like a slightly different position of the hands or tilt of the head. But Avedon knew exactly which ones he wanted. Visitors can also see cropping, retouching, and burning and dodging that went into making the final prints.
The exhibition is on loan to us from the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institution. It will be on display at PEM from April 17 to July 18, 2010.
Goldblatt sweet and angry
My colleague Trevor Smith goes way back with the South African photographer David Goldblatt. In 1998, when Trevor was still at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, he invited David on a visit that resulted in him visiting the blue asbestos mines at Wittenoom, a project that helped sparked David’s interest in color photography. Or to be more precise, his interest in color photography for exhibition – as David pointed out, he has photographed in color throughout his career, though previously only for commercial work. I (but mostly Trevor) hosted David and his wife Lily at the museum this last weekend, and this afternoon he gave an informal talk to museum staff. David is one of those people who speaks with such intelligence and clarity of purpose, it is hard not to be moved by his words or affected by his work.
David believes a culture expresses its values in the structures it builds and the way it alters the landscape. The consumption of land in South Africa followed a unique trajectory, and David explained this is never far from his thoughts when making landscape photographs. During the Apartheid years he never felt free to photograph as Edward Weston did – making beautiful pictures of nature regardless of who owned the land it was situated on. Places were always politically charged, and ownership of the means of production was one of the supporting pillars of the Apartheid regime that David railed against.
Describing his work over the years, David said that in his opinion, black and white is better for expressing anger than color is, at least for his purposes. When I asked him what he meant by that, he explained that there is a kind of separation from reality, an abstraction, that happens in black and white that lends pictures a special vibrancy. Color, he said, has a tendency to be a little sweet, or at least, there is a sweetness in color photography that one can never fully escape. He went on to explain that South Africa has ‘Kodachrome skies,’ but that he doesn’t see it that way. So in his color prints he alters the balance to make the skies a little dirtier.
When I asked David if working in color meant he wasn’t angry any more, he said that in fact there is a lot he is still angry about. He is angry about the mining concerns in South Africa that he says murdered hundreds of thousands of people over the last century. He is angry about corruption in his country and failure to basic deliver services to the people who need them. He is angry about people who are still failing to get good educations. And he is angry about crime.
Though he joked with me that he would soon be ‘approaching his dotage,’ David clearly hasn’t mellowed much with time. Trevor and I are working on plans for an exhibition with David at the Peabody Essex Museum. When asked about his favorite photographers, David mentioned two in particular – Robert Adams, whom David described as ‘confronting many of the same questions and making similar decisions,’ and Ray Metzker, hugely underappreciated in his view, but who David pointed out, works in a completely different style.
WINk magazine interview
The newest edition of WINk Magazine has an interview with me about my book Darwin’s Camera. The interview runs from pages 53-56. The writer, Charlie Fish, had some interesting questions that no one else has ever asked me. For example, Charlie wondered if Rejlander made any money working for Darwin. I was sorry to tell him that even though Rejlander was one of the best known and most respected artists of his day, he died a painful death just two years after finishing his project with Darwin (probably from a form of diabetes), and without a penny to his name. Darwin paid him for his work of course, and later gave him some money to help him out, but Rejlander was deeply in debt and donations had to be raised to pay for his funeral. Some people also tried to raise money for his widow Mary, who was left with nothing except a set of her late husband’s photographs. When she exhibited them in London, Peter Henry Emerson, one of the great photographers of the next generation, wrote a scathing review. Emerson was nothing if not opinionated. In any case if that isn’t a cautionary tale, I don’t know what is. Rejlander was hugely influential, widely celebrated, and he worked with great people like Charles Darwin, Julia Margaret Cameron, and Lewis Carroll. But some people always hated his work, and he lived in abject poverty.
Darwin’s Camera was published at the end of 2009 and has been getting great reviews, including being mentioned as one the best art and architecture books of the year by the New York Times. WINk is a new quarterly magazine that showcases cutting edge and alternative photography. It’s well worth checking out, and not just because I’m in it.
@ at MoMA
I have been thinking about what I should acquire for the PEM photography collection since the Museum of Modern Art announced it has acquired the ‘@’ symbol for its permanent collection. Not just any ‘@’ symbol by the way, but all of them. Or to be exact, the concept of ‘@’ symbols. It’s a great idea! I wonder if PEM couldn’t acquire the ‘f’ stop? Or something bigger – ‘the camera,’ or ‘the negative’ maybe? How about seeing itself?
Maybe I’m just jealous. Sure MoMA’s acquisition is a PR stunt, but there is a serious point too. Creating a symbol to stand for an idea is a design exercise, and ‘@’ is a great symbol. Design surrounds us and appears in unexpected places. Since the MoMA design collection is a place where great designs are kept, the ‘@’ symbol belongs.
Charming MoMA architecture and design curator Paola Antonelli is the spokesperson for the move, and she appeared on National Public Radio the other day to explain. The acquisition was made in recognition of the importance of the @ symbol in the development of the internet, specifically Ray Tomlinson’s decision to use it to economize computer keystrokes (in the 1960s?). MoMA didn’t acquire a particular ‘@,’ but the idea of it. And though this is pretty bold in theory, in its formal announcement the museum retrenched a bit, noting that the @ symbol they’ve chosen to display on the web is the closest approximation they could come up with for the @’s on Model 33 Teletype machines – the kind Tomlinson used. Which suggests they value certain @’s over others, so maybe they are collecting typography after all. Are they only interested in modern-looking @’s?
Antonelli and the MoMA website are full of interesting information about the @ symbol and how important it is. I don’t disagree with any of it. It is a great symbol and the internet has embraced it. Fair enough.
But I worry that the acquisition has had unforeseen consequences. First, there was confusion about what was actually done. Some people assumed that MoMA acquired copyright for ‘@’ symbols, which made it sound like they were going to license its use and profit accordingly. Of course that’s not what happened at all, but there were angry posts on the MoMA website and elsewhere, so in that way it backfired.
As a curator I’m constantly fighting the idea that art museums are disconnected from reality, and that we do things that don’t make sense to ordinary people. On that level the @ acquisition is a bad idea. Using a leap of conceptual logic to justify the theoretical acquisition of something as obtuse as a symbol makes it sound like all of us in the museum world live on a different planet.
And then there’s the issue of whether @ is actually Modern design. The symbol is known from Medieval European times and elements predate that. Does the appropriation and creative reuse of an ancient symbol constitute Modern art?
And why stop at ‘@’ anyway? How about ‘.’ as in ‘.com’ ‘.edu’ and ‘.org’? Why not accession emoticons? And where would the internet be without the alphabet anyway? It is made up of historical symbols like @ that we reuse creatively on a daily basis.
MoMA’s announcement also raises serious questions about what ‘acquiring’ something means. If MoMA really did enter @ into their collection, then according to museum standards their registrars are now obliged to track and catalogue it for all time – until it is deaccessioned. The museum’s curators are likewise obliged to care for the @ symbol too. If they’ve acquired a concept, does this mean they are now its self-appointed custodians? Must they defend it against diminution and abuse, improper use or incorrect execution? Or they only acquiring the @ symbol the way it was used in March of 2010.
These may sound like silly questions, but for museum acquisitions to mean something, such questions are important. If other museums followed MoMA’s lead (none have, so far as I know) it would set a horrible precedent.
MoMA is a heavyweight among museums, and its actions have impact. The ‘@’ announcement caused a few eyebrows to be raised in the art world – the friendliest possible audience for artsy trickery. The rest of the world just shrugged, sighed, and chalked us up as more alien than ever.
Ghosts of Bollywood
The Peabody Essex Museum prepares to celebrate all things Indian this week. So, with the opening of our ‘Sensational India‘ festival, a new Indian exhibition, ‘Faces of Devotion,‘ and a gorgeous new installation of modern Indian paintings from the Herwitz and Ambani collections, I thought it might be fitting to share the work of the young Indian photographer Nandita Raman. Nandita is just beginning her career as an independent photographer, but her pedigree is impressive. From 2007–2009 she worked as an assistant to photographers Robert Polidori, Fazal Sheikh, Kenro Izu, and Joni Sternbach. It is almost as though she has been triangulating on the Peabody Essex – all four of the artists she worked with have shown here in the past.
Nandita has been photographing old movie houses in India, some of which are defunct, others that are still going, for a project she calls ‘Cinema Play House.’ She has a personal connection to the material, as her mother’s family used to own the first talkie cinema in her hometown of Varanasi and some of her earliest memories are of seeing movies there. Nandita photographs all over the theater, in public areas and behind the scenes. There are times that her photographs call to mind the wonderful pictures of movie screens Hiroshi Sugimoto began making in the 1970s – time-lapse photos in which all the light came from the projection of the movie itself. But when Nandita photographs screens, they feel worn and loved – theatrical backdrops for the drama that played out in the seats, rather than the drama on-screen. Her pictures are formally very beautiful, and she is exceptionally good at handling light. The result is pictures that ooze with feeling, capturing the air of mystery that surrounds these places. Her pictures evoke the fading presence of the many people who participated in the life of the cinema, and who ultimately moved on.
Behind the scenes: Valérie Belin
I just received the installation shots above for our current exhibition Valérie Belin: Made Up from our staff photographer, Walter Silver. Both the artist and I were delighted to see them — they perfectly capture the idea behind the show. The gallery we used is two stories, with the second floor open to below. Downstairs are selections from the American art collection, upstairs is Valérie’s exhibition. Because so much of the artist’s work is about categorization, it was important to create a relationship between the exhibition and neighboring works. In these shots you can see the weather vanes that push up into the plane of the second floor gallery from the American art installation, and the George Washington hotel sign hanging just in front of one of Valérie’s mannequin photographs. You also get a sense of the scale of the photographs, which are as tall as the doors. There were interesting parallels between the photo portraits upstairs and the 18th and 19th century American portrait paintings underneath them though it’s hard to see that here.
We used a few tricks to make the gallery seem bigger than it is (although it actually is pretty big). White walls helped make the room seem larger, and we also lit the corners more than usual, so there was less of a drop off visually. We also left the second floor gallery completely uncluttered so there are long sight lines, creating a feeling of distance. This gave the installation a clean, contemporary look. The fruit piece at the top of the stairs is just slightly off-center, making the exhibit feel less contained to people coming up the stairs. We hung the pictures a little lower than normal, and I think it helped. Even though the pictures are large and impressive, they still feel intimate.
Valérie is incredibly meticulous, and her photographs are expertly crafted. Unlike many artists she doesn’t feel confident sequencing and positioning her work so she was happy to let us take charge of the installation. I think it came out well (and the artist really liked it).
The show seems to have gotten under the skin of many of our visitors, and there are comments in the guest book from several people in who say they came repeatedly because it made them think and they wanted to see it again. It’s a great compliment to the artist, because one of the things she’s trying to do is pry apart questions of representation and display. What makes a photograph special? These are questions that invite contemplation.
It was a privilege to have Valérie as one of the first artists in our new photography program. Before showing with us, her last major exhibition was at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. This exhibition reflects my hope that we will increasingly engage serious contemporary artists at the Peabody Essex Museum.
Sex at the Pompidou
The recent exhibition at the Pompidou Center in Paris, La Subversion des images (the Subversion of Images) was one of the biggest photo shows I’ve ever seen. There was no official count of pictures on the walls or in the catalogue, but room after room was full of incredible objects – photos, films, magazines, drawings, and collages. The focus was Surrealism in photography and film, and the curators included just about everyone of merit who worked in the 1920s and 30s. All the stars were on display – Man Ray, Lee Miller, René Magritte, André Breton, Max Ernst, Claude Cahun, Luis Buñuel, Paul Elouard, Salvador Dali – in both famous and rarely seen examples. But there were also great pictures by artists who aren’t widely remembered. It was probably the best presentation Germaine Dulac, Eli Lotar, Georges Sadoul, Georges Hugnet (above), Jindrich Styrsky, and Victor Brauner have ever had. The emphasis – understandably – was on artists based in France. Other countries were well represented too, from the United States to Russia.
It’s hard to do the Surrealists justice without showing pictures of naked breasts and bottoms, so it wasn’t at all surprising to see a healthy selection of nudes scattered throughout the galleries. But this was not a show that was content with easy comfort. About half way in, there was a ‘special’ room, separated from the rest by the kind of clear thick vinyl curtain usually used for meat lockers and walk-in refrigerators, with a big red label outside warning adult content within. And when a Parisian museum warns visitors of ‘adult content,’ you know they mean business.
Pushing past the strips of vinyl and elbowing my way into the tiny room it concealed (it was very popular!), my eyes adjusted to a full-on Surrealist celebration (exploration? meditation?) of sex. Here were pictures that curators usually just whisper about. Man Ray’s Seasons, for example, in which the artist and his lover, Kiki of Montparnasse, reveal themselves in four unashamed pornographic poses. (Autumn, apparently, is a very mouthy time of year.) If you ever wondered about the size, shape, or character of Man’s Manhood, or Kiki’s ability to receive it, all questions were answered in the display. Here too was a selection of Hans Bellmer photographs too frank for polite company. The ones made without dolls, such as Je suis Dieu, (I Am God), shot from below, close up and personal between a woman’s legs (and lovingly hand-colored!) referencing Courbet’s celebrated painting l’Origine du monde, but without any of that picture’s romance. Raoul Ubac’s picture of a tear-shaped lump of glass resting on a woman’s pubis was pretty tame by comparison. Lest you think him timid, he was also represented by his notorious Album, a series of seven vignettes of various flavors of coitus, exquisitely gynecological in their detail. For a small room, there was an awful lot to see. As I looked around, visitors were shuffling uneasily from leg to leg, men and women alike, their eyes as big as saucers.
The centerpiece of the section was Man Ray’s ‘cinematic essay’ Two Women. If it had been made in San Fernando – and believe me it could have been – it would have had a much more colorful name. For now I’ll just call it, Two Free-Thinking Nude Women and Their Naughty, Naughty Appliance. I should probably work the word ‘fingers’ in their somewhere too, but you get the idea. I’m not a total letch so I didn’t watch the whole thing (it was pretty long), and besides, there is something weird that happens socially when XXX films are shown in a high-minded museum exhibition. But I saw enough to get the gist of it. There is no plot in the traditional sense. It’s basically just two women going at it – tip to tail, tail to tail, front to bottom, bottom/front, sitting, standing, lying down. Things happen. Vigorously. More than once.
The cynic in me sees this and says, ‘okay, fair play to you Man Ray. You were young and excitable, you convinced two women to “perform” for an “art project” — perfect cover!’ It was Paris, it was the 20s, he was young, they were willing – why not? But the strangest thing happens when you see Man Ray’s film and the other objects in the Pomidou’s Surrealist romper room. It actually starts to make sense.
You might think the pictures would be titillating, erotic, and exciting, but they’re not. Sure, there was bravado involved in breaking social taboos so absolutely, and I don’t doubt they had fun doing it. But there’s a legitimate point too. The stuff really is surreal. There is no sound in Man Ray’s film, the images are in black and white, and the actions are repetitive and more or less mechanical. What could be weirder, more transcendently not-of-this-world, less comprehensible and more unnerving than desensitized images of people engaged in sex acts? It actually works! It’s art.
Re-entering the other galleries after seeing the sex section, everything changed. One of the first things you saw was Jean Painlevé’s fantastic 1927 film of an octopus swimming. It’s just shot after shot of an octopus traveling through water, crawling over rocks, squeezing into crevasses, inching suction cup by sticky suction cup over glass. It’s completely animal – the perfect complement to the sex pictures. Suddenly, everything else felt deeply biological too, humans and other creatures alike, and the show took on a metaphysical dimension. The irrationality of existence, of being, of the bodies we inhabit, of the way we think, feel, behave – everything was thrown into question. It’s not just a matter of tricks of the eye and defeated visual expectations, Surrealism’s calling card. Everything seemed profoundly, deeply strange.
After seeing the sex room, the nudes had a different meaning. They no longer felt like decorative motifs, the way bodies so often do in painting from the Baroque on. They were reductionist, stripped bare, awkward, and liminal. The truth about bodies was clearer. Their silliness, their imperfectness, the way they carry and imprison us.
Not every show needs hardcore porn to make it work, but I can honestly say Subversion des images was better for it. It certainly made me think. I wonder if any of the other folks in the room with me had the same reaction, or if they were aroused by all the ‘erotic’ imagery. If so, that would be pretty surreal too.
Outerbridge book nominated for prize
The American Association of Art Museum Curators announced the nominees for best exhibition catalogue of 2009 today, and Paul Outerbridge: New Color Photographs of Mexico and California, 1948-1955, is on the list. It is a distinguished group of finalists, including publications by the Met, MoMA, Getty, and SFMoMA. The chances of winning are slim, but like they say, ‘it’s an honor just to be nominated!’ Below is the text that accompanied the announcement.
Paul Outerbridge: New Color Photographs of Mexico and California, 1948-1955
Author: Phillip Prodger, Graham Howe, William Ewing
Getty Gallery at Los Angeles Public Library
Explores newly discovered works by one of America’s acknowledged pioneers of color photography; selected from some 500 photographs most of which have never before been reproduced. Provides art historical context and analysis about the beginning of color photography’s acceptance as a fine art medium, enriching our understanding of an important but under-explored aspect of photographic history. Also provides priceless documentation of culture above and below the US/Mexican border.
From Tuva with love
Tuva is one of those extraordinary crossroads where cultures of different continents mix. Located in southern Siberia (it is part of the Russian Republic), bordering Mongolia, and formerly part of China, it is a center of Tibetan Buddhism. Its people blend languages, religion and traditions from central, east, and south Asia and Eastern Europe. From a European or American perspective it is a remote place, mysterious and exoticized, best known through recordings of Tuvan throat singing.
The Swiss photographer Yann Mingard has traveled to Tuva, with spectacular results. Quiet, poetic, and insistent, his pictures capture the mood of the place – or maybe it is the photographer’s mood – as in the picture at the top of this post. Yann’s work is more than just a series of National Geographic-style records of an unfamiliar land (though those have their own special charm), and it’s interesting to think about how this sort of ‘expressive’ documentary photography differs from the material most often published in magazines.
There is a lot to admire in Yann’s work, but I am particularly drawn to his landscapes. Yann spent several years working as a hoticulturalist before taking up photography formally, and his horizonless color photographs of bare trees, twigs, and grasses, usually shown looking down at the forest floor, are beautiful. The artist has published a number of these in web portfolios – the series ‘Sans Titre’ and ‘Repaire’ include photographs taken closer to home. They reflect a sensibility the artist seems to take with him wherever he goes.
O’Sullivan gets his due
Few photographers were as influential in as Timothy O’Sullivan, and up until now there has never been an exhibition to match the nineteenth-century giant’s stature and importance. Curator Toby Jurovics has remedied that in what has to be the best exhibition of the year so far. His Framing the West, now on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, presents the geological survey photographs O’Sullivan made for the King and Wheeler surveys in the late 1860s and early 1870s.
‘Geological survey’ may sound dry, but O’Sullivan’s photographs were anything but. The idea behind the surveys was to create scientific records of the American west – the areas that had become part of the country after the Louisiana Purchase and the Spanish-American War. The distances covered were vast, and one of the wonders of the exhibition is how O’Sullivan chose to shoot what he did from the thousands of possible vistas. The survey teams covered thousands of miles, which O’Sullivan captured in just a few dozen frames – how did he decide what was worth recording? And then, when his photographs finally made it back east to their intended audience, how did the pictures help viewers understand the poorly mapped and poorly documented center of the country?
The fact that they exist at all is a minor miracle. O’Sullivan photographed with wet-plate collodion, meaning he had to bring raw sheets of glass out into the field with him for preparation on the spot. These were extraordinarily heavy and had to be bought in the city, so a cart and mule team had to be dedicated just to carrying the photographer’s plates. At a time when few roads existed in the west, and considering they were mapping canyons, cliffs, gullies, mountains, and other almost impassable features, this was unimaginably difficult, and it is hardly surprising to note that O’Sullivan lost plates – and mules – when they tumbled down a sheer drop. But transporting the glass was only part of the challenge. To make a picture, he had to set up a darkroom on the spot, coating, exposing, and developing his plates in short order. Conditions were dry, dusty, and often searing hot. Water for washing and mixing was not always convenient.
But what incredible pictures he made under these conditions. O’Sullivan has always been highly regarded for his visual sophistication, and the SAAM exhibition showcases this beautifully. The pictures are so esoteric and expressive, at times it’s hard to imagine they were useful as survey pictures at all. One of O’Sullivan’s signatures was his skies. Working at a time when photographic emulsions were over-sensitive to UV light, the skies in landscape photographs usually came out overexposed. In the final print, this meant they looked blank – the corresponding areas of the negatives were super-saturated and dark. Most photographers of the period responded by composite printing clouds into the skies artificially – combining two negatives to create an effect that looked real even if it was just a simulation. O’Sullivan didn’t do that. He treated the bleached out skies as powerful graphic elements, creating marvelous shapes and layering lights and darks to make pictures that look surprisingly modern. Like Japanese Ukiyo-e prints, they form flat planes of tone that give the works a forward-looking, abstract quality.
The piece de resistance of this work is the sequence O’Sullivan made from the riverbed of Black Cañon of the Colorado River (now flooded by the Hoover Dam), which has influenced generations of landscape photographers. In these, frame after frame contain bold graphic compositions in which sky, sea, and land seemingly collide together in ingenious cascades. In the exhibition, Toby hangs these together as a grid – the effect of seeing a wall of this imaginative and deeply original work is breathtaking.
One of the most poignant passages appears in two parts. O’Sullivan visited and photographed Shoshonee Falls in Idaho twice in his career, the last not long before his death from tuberculosis at age 42. It was clearly a spot that called to him, and the photographs he made on each occasion were keenly seen and acutely felt. In the exhibition, they are installed in separate sections.
As a student, I remember the Victoria & Albert Museum’s senior photo curator Mark Haworth-Booth showing me a letter from Ansel Adams talking about nineteenth-century landscape photographers like O’Sullivan, saying ‘the old boys knew a thing or two about photography.’ I always remember that – it was high praise from him. (Adams was also talking about Camille Silvy, the early French photographer Mark has done so much with.) This exhibition makes clear what Ansel was talking about.
Everything about the show hits the perfect note. It is hard to imagine how the wall colors, selection, spacing, sequencing, text, frames, and the light-handed but meaningful integration of related works by contemporary artists and curators such as Mark Ruwedel, Thomas Joshua Cooper, Edward Ranney, and Terry Toedtemeier could be improved. There is a sensational catalogue available on Yale University Press, with essays by Toby, Glenn Willumson, Carol Johnson, and William Stapp. It is essential reading, but see the show if you can. The original prints, subtle and rich in detail, have to be seen to be believed.
Dos millones casas para Mexico
I saw the Mexican American photographer Livia Corona give a wonderful talk yesterday at the Massachusetts College of Art. Abelardo Morell introduced her, saying ‘she is Mexican, she speaks English, and she’s legal.’ I can only vouch for one of the three. Livia’s work is exceptional, and she speaks with such intelligence and charm it is impossible not to be swept up in her excitement. The centerpiece of the presentation was her project ‘Two Million Homes for Mexico,’ for which she was just awarded a Guggenheim fellowship. It examines the explosion in new housing construction former President Vicente Fox spearheaded during his time in office – he pledged that his government would create 2 million new low-income homes, and they succeeded. The next question, of course, is at what cost?
Leaving aside questions of environmental impact and corruption, Livia explains that there are huge problems with the social system the houses represent. Though they are affordable, they are often as small as 100 sq ft or so (for a family!), and the architecture is numbingly repetitive, with microscopic front and back yards, and little or no provision made for community needs like supermarkets, restaurants, and basic social services. Part of Livia’s project is recording the spectacle of the dehumanizing grids of buildings that were created. Another is showing how people adapt creatively to such complicated circumstances, what Livia calls their ‘instincts of resilience.’ For example, some of the residents have bought extra homes where they set up makeshift restaurants and even a party center/banquet hall. They also illegally build extra floors into their buildings, or staircases up to the roof to create more space (also illegal). Livia spoke about the lack of cultural stimuli in the developments that have been created – one small boy sat perched in a window like a cat she said, for over two hours. His house is not quite as wide as two cars.
I only knew Livia as a still photographer, but she showed some fantastic new video work. Her new piece ‘El Pan’ (bread) tops out at around 20 minutes, condensed from around 8 hours she spent riding around in an old VW Jetta with a breadseller in one of the ‘two million home’ developments. The vendor drives around with the trunk open, playing synthy renditions of pop songs like ‘New York, New York,’ ‘the Theme from Love Story,’ and mariachi music, all the while calling out ‘Pan!, Pan!’ in an animated patois to attract the attention of customers. Livia explained that the Casiotone quality of the music he plays is a clever way of making himself seem recognizable and familiar in the neighborhoods he serves. The driver pauses now and then, but you never actually see him sell bread. He just goes down street after street of new houses, and countless speed bumps – the bumps make for some interesting visuals, as she shoots simultaneously out of the front and back of the car. It’s quirky and surreal, sweet and poignant – wonderfully haunting work.
Gossage in the zone
I saw John Gossage in Switzerland. Everyone tells me he is on fire right now as a photographer, though I haven’t seen his newest work. He promised to send me some things. He just finished a project for the Rochester Art Center in Rochester Minnesota, the town that hosts the original Mayo Clinic. They came up with a brilliant idea for an exhibition catalogue. Instead of printing a standard book-format publication, they printed all 200+ images in a special 80 page supplement of the Post-Bulletin, the local newspaper. So, for fifty cents, anyone in the community, or farther afield for that matter, could buy a copy. They’re sold out now, but John promised to find me one.
John has been working with Alec Soth lately. I told John that a few years ago I tried to buy a photograph from Alec for the Saint Louis Art Museum that was sold out– every print in the edition was gone – but Alec refused. I admire his integrity, but in the end it was disappointing because I wasn’t able to buy anything at all.
The question of an edition is a little tricky when it comes to museums. Many artists are willing to sell ‘artist’s proofs’ or ‘exhibition proofs’ to museums which are basically outside the edition, knowing that they are never likely to enter the marketplace again so they won’t hurt the artist’s prices. Several artists have done this for me over the years, but others feel they really have to stick to the number of prints they declared to their dealers. Their dealers often have strong feelings about this too – some, desperate to place work in good museums, are eager to bend the rules. Others, committed to preserving the edition, won’t budge.
Chris Ofili in London
The entrance to the Chris Ofili exhibition at Tate Britain has a warning notice telling visitors ‘some people might find some works in this exhibition offensive,’ which is surely an understatement. In reality, pretty much everyone will find a lot of what’s in the show offensive, and that’s the point. Just about every piece rails at one social convention or another, and few of the pictures appear without a proud lump or two of Ofili’s trademark elephant dung (the early paintings all have stands made of varnished and painted dung – nice touch). It’s the anger and disgust that makes it work. Ofili plays with the idea of blacksploitation – he’s always walking the line between rejecting black stereotypes and celebrating black pop culture. Sex is another constant theme, especially exaggerated nudes of black women. Ofili’s ‘Virgin Mary’ (above), the one that got all the press after former mayor Rudy Giuliani complained that elephant dung was included in a picture of the holy mother, also appears in the show. What’s amazing is that the single lump of dung hung at her chest (Jesus, natch) is not nearly the most provocative thing about it, although that gets the most press. Collaged to the surface of the painting are lots of little photographs of spread vaginas, seemingly taken from porno magazines. Hard to see in a scan, but in person the mix is jarring to say the least.
One of the centerpieces of the show is the controversial installation ‘Upper Room,’ which turns out to be a beautiful wooden chamber at the end of a long dark passage. The cost of the wood alone must have been staggering. The interior opens up like a stylized temple from an Indiana Jones movie, with a single gold painted monkey ‘king’ at the end of the chamber, and a dozen smaller multi-colored monkeys on the side walls. It was strangely moving. I spent a while standing and sitting in different spots, trying to figure out why I liked it, and I’m still not sure.
As much as I appreciated the Tate show, my favorite Ofili was across town, in a small exhibition called ‘Thresholds’ that the painter Paula Rego put together for Whitechapel Art Gallery of works from the British Council art collection. It was a fun mix of things, from a Madame Yevonde photograph of a nude doing her ironing to Walter Sickert, Leon Kossuth, David Hockney, Graham Sutherland, Frank Auerbach, Gwen John, and other British greats. But the best for me by far was a tiny canvas of a black man with a huge afro by Ofili, not much more than an inch and a half tall, hung alongside the much bigger works by other artists, and screwed into the wall with security plates. It is a perfect bite-sized moment of subversion in an intriguing show.
Becoming Martin Parr
Last Saturday I had dinner with Joachim Schmid, the Berlin-based artist. Joachim is best known for his work with found photographs, and he runs a wonderful artists collaborative and photo book publishing operation there called ABC Artists’ Book Cooperative. Joachim told me about his recent book, ‘Joachim Schmid is Martin Parr • Martin Parr is Joachim Schmid.’ Apparently Martin had a VIP pass to visit the Berlin Art Forum but he couldn’t attend, so he gave his pass to Joachim and Joachim went to the fair with a ‘Martin Parr’ nametag. Many people thought he actually was Martin Parr, which inspired Joachim to begin photographing things at the fair, imitating Martin’s style. He says finding the ‘triggers’ of a Parr photograph – the subject matter – is pretty easy. The technique is a little harder. He had to learn to get much closer to the subject than he normally would. Later, Martin and Joachim collaborated to make the book – Martin making a selection of found photographs the way Joachim often does.
Recently Joachim has been making books out of other people’s photographs that he grabs from Flickr and other websites. Each is a collection of pictures on a specific subject. The first was a book of sunsets. By the time he finishes, Joachim will have made a set of 100 different books, all self-published, on a different theme. Here are the titles so far:
Airports · Another Self · Bags · Big Fish · Buddies · Coffee · Contents · Currywurst · Digits · Documents · Encounters · First Shots · Flashing · Food · Gathered Together · Happy Birthday · Hotel Rooms · In Motion · Maps · Mickey · Nothing Wrong · November 5th, 2008 · Objects in Mirror · On the Road · Real Estate · Red · Self · Shadow · Sites · Size Matters · Statues · Sunset · Things · Tropic of Capricorn
The revolution will be televised – Beuys
Joachim Schmid and I were talking about Josef Beuys – Joachim knew him, and remembers the magnetic power he had in life. It’s hard to imagine an artist doing today what he did then. For example, Beuys participated in the German art fair Documenta 6 in 1977, the ‘Media Documenta,’ which featured video art. Somehow, the organizers famously got the German national television station to agree to let certain artists take over the airwaves as part of the fair – Bruce Nauman and Nam June Paik were two of the other artists who participated. But instead of a conventional piece, Beuys told the technicians to leave the cameras on and leave the studio, so Beuys could take over completely. Incredibly, they agreed – and Beuys stood facing the camera, telling the nation he thought the country was going in the wrong direction, and what was really needed was a revolution, to overthrow the government, and completely change the way of doing things. The gift of nine minutes of free national airtime has never been repeated.
I saw the publisher Gerhard Steidl over the weekend too. Gerhard worked for Beuys back in the 70s – one of his jobs was to reproduce Beuys’s art so it could be sold. Beuys would sometimes sketch or scribble on a newspaper or magazine, then take it to Gerhard to make multiple copies, which Beuys would then sign. It was not just an important phase in Beuys’s career and the way multiples are used in the art world, it was also the birth of one of the great publishing forces of our time. Steidl now publishes with hundreds of different artists, and his books are among the crème de la crème of art books made today.
Just for fun, here is part of Beuys’s Documenta 6 speech, shamelessly lifted from another web site. ‘Buddha’ has the double meaning of the god Buddha and Nam June Paik, whose piece preceded his:
Ladies and Gentlemen, Dear Children! You have just seen the Buddha. What would that friend of God and humankind, that human being in all his dignity, have to say about art? He would say art should release from itself something so massively hindered by present conditions that art suffers from this obstruction, that humankind suffers from this obstruction, that the entire future of humanity suffers from this obstruction. Would say art should liberate something that would represent a new form of art. Would say this something is the social sculpture, the art-work, art that no longer refers solely to the modern art world, to the artist, but comprehends a notion of art relating to everyone and to very question and problem of the social organism in which people live. Without doubt, such a notion of art would no longer refer exclusively to the specialists within the modern art world but extend to the whole work of humanity. – To refer to the whole work of humanity means to relate to all these fields which a freely made decision shall bring into a form by which they create, by virtue of human strength, a future structure which ought to be based on freedom. For what would art be without the notion of freedom. What would the notion of human creativity signify without the notion of human freedom. Thus, it can only be a matter of developing a notion of culture, a notion of spirituality, that is more comprehensive than the one existing at present.
Thomas Joshua Cooper in Washington
Friday afternoon I met up with Thomas Joshua Cooper over vanilla pudding at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Thomas makes large-format landscape photographs exclusively in black and white, and never makes pictures of people. His deep, rich, abstract, purplish prints are instantly recognizable to those who know his work. He is represented in Europe by Haunch of Venison gallery, and in New York by Pace Wildenstein. He has many ardent fans, including me.
For a number of years now, Thomas has been working on what he calls the Atlantic Basin Project. His aim is to circumnavigate and photograph the Atlantic coast from North and South America to Africa, Europe, Antarctica, and Greenland. He has made incredible progress, and he’s not done yet. He recently finished photographing the north and south poles. His photography often deals with extremes of geography, such as the farthest compass point of a continent or land mass, or the place where two oceans meet. He is especially attracted to locations with historical charge, such as the place where explorers departed or arrived from a voyage. He has been traveling a little less lately, in order to dedicate himself to printing more of his work and teaching at the Glasgow School of Art, where he’s now back in the classroom full time.
Thomas has one work in SAAM’s show, ‘Framing the West’ — an absolutely stunning picture of Shoshonee Falls, inspired by Timothy O’Sullivan, the show’s main attraction. Deeply mindful of the photographers who came before him, Thomas often makes photographs in hommage to 19th-century photographers. O’Sullivan is a particular favorite – over the years he has made a number of pictures with the shared title ‘Message for Timothy O’Sullivan,’ so it was especially appropriate that he be included.
I was fortunate to meet Thomas around fifteen years ago, and he has been something of a mentor to me in my career. It is always inspiring to talk to him, and I’m not sure I’d still be in the field if it weren’t for his clear-headed encouragement. He’s one of those people who has the ability to explain why artists and curators do what they do and why it matters, putting things in perspective with such ease you wonder why you never thought of it yourself. On Friday he told me that he thinks photography is more than just a medium. Some people who work with paints are ‘photographers’ he says – sculptures, computer programmers, folk artists too. To him, photography is a state of mind.
