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May

Exhibition: ‘In Focus: Los Angeles, 1945 – 1980′ at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Categories: American, american photographers, architecture, Australian artist, black and white photography, documentary photography, exhibition, existence, gallery website, landscape, light, memory, photographic series, photography, photojournalism, portrait, psychological, quotation, space, street photography and time
Tags: American landscape, Americurbana, Anthony Friedkin, Anthony Friedkin Clockwork Malibu, Anthony Friedkin Film Can Library, Anthony Hernandez, Anthony Hernandez Automotive Landscapes #5, Anthony Hernandez Automotive Landscapes #5: Los Angeles, Anthony Hernandez Los Angeles #3, arts, automotive landscapes, Automotive Landscapes #5, Automotive Landscapes #5: Los Angeles, California, cars, Clockwork Malibu, Cocktails with Heinecken, Darryl Curran, Darryl J. Curran Cocktails with Heinecken, Diamond Bar, downtown Los Angeles, Film Can Library Universal Studios, Gary Winogrand, Gary Winogrand Los Angeles, Grant Mudford, Grant Mudford Los Angeles, Grant Mudford Los Angeles (US 257/10a), Henry Wessel, Henry Wessel Jr. Los Angeles, j. paul getty museum, Joe Deal, Joe Deal Backyard Diamond Bar, julius shulman, Lakewood, los angeles, Los Angeles #3, Los Angeles County suburb of Lakewood, Man-Altered Landscape, New Topographics, New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape, Rick Dano, Robert Heinecken, Southern California, Southern California coastline, suburb of Lakewood, surfer Rick Dano, transportation, travel, Universal Studios, urban America, William A. Garnett, William A. Garnett Finished Housing

Exhibition dates: 20th December 2011 – 6th May 2012

I have never particularly liked Los Angeles as a city. There seems to be something unappealing about the place, some energy lurking just beneath the surface that you can’t quite put your finger on. Maybe it is the comparison with the vivacious San Francisco just up the coast, the awful public transport or, more spookily, the lack of people on the street. People never walk anywhere in LA, it’s a car town. When I did walk on the street I felt vulnerable and surveyed with suspicion by people in cars, like a rabbit caught in the headlights.

These photographs confirm this feeling. Unlike the visual acoustics of the architectural photographs of Julius Shulman (photographs that mythologised this urban metropolis and then exported that idealised presence and Californian mid-century design to the rest of the world) these photographs have an unbelievably desolatory nature to them. They seem to be joyless and sorrowful, devoid of warmth, comfort, or hope – as though the human and the city were separated, as if we are separated from a loved one.

The row after row of tinderbox houses, the ubiquitous cars, the sense of emptiness, hopelessness and menace (see Gary Winogrand Los Angeles 1964, below – if looks could kill this would be it, the bandaged broken nose just perfect for the photograph) all paint a picture of despair. Even the supposedly quiet, anticipatory harmony of the photograph of surfer Rick Dano by Anthony Friedkin (1978, below top) is, to me, full of unresolved tension. The mist in the background hanging over the rocks, blocking out the view, the filthy hands and the bandaged little finger of the right hand, the downcast eyes, the impossibly long cigarette handing from his lips and most importantly the empty distance between the figure and the safety of the automobile. The tension in that distance and the downcast eyes says nothing to me of harmony but of isolation, sadness and regret.

Los Angeles is not my favourite city but it is a fascinating place none the less, as these photographs do attest.

Many thankx to the J. Paul Getty Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Anthony Friedkin
Clockwork Malibu
1978
Gelatin silver print
11 15/16 x 18 5/16 in
Gift of Sue and Albert Dorskind
© Anthony Friedkin

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While Anthony Friedkin has documented subjects as diverse as the marginalized gay community of San Francisco, convicts at Folsom Prison, and brothels in New York, it is the Southern California coastline that has remained a recurrent theme throughout his forty-five-year career. The Los Angeles native took up photography about the same time he learned to surf. His images of waves deftly communicate the primordial power and elusive mysteries that he ascribes to the ocean. This photograph of surfer Rick Dano on an early morning drive up the coast conveys a mood of quiet, anticipatory harmony.

Text from Pacific Standard Time at the Getty

Anthony Hernandez
Automotive Landscapes #5: Los Angeles
1978
Gelatin silver print
11 3/4 x 17 1/8 in
Purchased in part with funds provided by the Photographs Council of the J. Paul Getty Museum
© Anthony Hernandez

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Hernandez started photographing what he refers to as “automotive landscapes” in 1977, using a 35mm camera until he realized that a large-format camera loaded with 5 x 7-inch negative film would provide the detail he desired. Taken from a slightly elevated vantage point, Hernandez’s image of an immobilized truck and its lone mechanic in front of a repair shop presents a sobering view of Los Angeles’s car-dominant culture.

Text from Pacific Standard Time at the Getty

Anthony Hernandez
Los Angeles #3
1971
Gelatin silver print
7 3/4 x 11 13/16 in
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Purchased in part with funds provided by the Photographs Council
© Anthony Hernandez

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Following two years of study at East Los Angeles College and two years of service in the U.S. Army, Anthony Hernandez took up photography in earnest around 1970. For this image, he preset his 35mm camera so that objects within a specific range would be in focus. Then, while walking the streets of downtown Los Angeles, he swung the camera to his eye for a fraction of a second to capture fellow pedestrians as well as the ambient mood of a city more typically experienced from the driver’s seat. A native of Los Angeles, Hernandez has continued to photograph the city, addressing issues of community, shelter, and survival in his work.

Text from Pacific Standard Time at the Getty

Gary Winogrand
Los Angeles
1964
Gelatin silver print
9 x 13 7:16 in
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© 1984 The Estate of Gary Winogrand

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This image of a couple seated in a parked convertible in front of a nightclub on Sunset Boulevard simultaneously captures the glamour and seediness associated with Hollywood. Evoking a 1940s or ’50s film noir crime drama, a seeming tough guy and femme fatale continue their heated conversation, apparently oblivious to the traffic around them – and to the photographer observing them. A native of New York City, Winogrand studied painting at Columbia University and photography at the New School for Social Research before doing freelance commercial work. He photographed incessantly, using a 35mm camera to create wide-angled or tilted shots that are densely composed and layered with meaning. More than 2,500 rolls of film remained undeveloped at the time of his death in 1984.

Text from Pacific Standard Time at the Getty

“As part of the region-wide Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A., 1945-1980 initiative, The J. Paul Getty Museum presents In Focus: Los Angeles, 1945 – 1980, an exhibition of photographs from the permanent collection made by artists whose time in Los Angeles inspired them to create memorable images of the city, on view at the Getty Center from December 20, 2011 – May 6, 2012.

“This exhibition features both iconic and relatively unknown work by artists whose careers are defined by their association with Los Angeles, who may have lived in the city for a few influential years, or who might have visited only briefly,” said Virginia Heckert, curator, Department of Photographs, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and curator of the exhibition.

The photographs are loosely grouped around the themes of experimentation, street photography, architectural depictions, and the film and entertainment industry. Works featured in the exhibition are from artists such as Jo Ann Callis, Robert Cumming, Joe Deal, Judy Fiskin, Anthony Friedkin, Robert Heinecken, Anthony Hernandez, Man Ray, Edmund Teske, William Wegman, Garry Winogrand, and Max Yavno. Two of the works in the exhibition by Anthony Hernandez and Henry Wessel Jr. were acquired with funds from the Getty Museum Photographs Council. Drawn from the Museum’s permanent collection, including several recent acquisitions inspired by the Pacific Standard Time initiative, the exhibition offers visitors the opportunity to familiarize themselves with a broad range of approaches to the city of Los Angeles as a subject and to the photographic medium itself.

One of the most well-known works in the exhibition is Garry Winogrand’s photograph of two women walking towards the landmark theme building designed by Charles Luckman and William Pereira that has come to symbolize both Los Angeles International Airport and mid-century modern architecture in popular culture. Though a quintessential New Yorker, Winogrand made some of his most memorable photographs in Los Angeles, where he chose to settle in the final years of his life. Also included in the exhibition is Diane Arbus’ dreamily lit photograph of Sleeping Beauty Castle at Disneyland park in Anaheim. Although technically not located in either the city or the county of Los Angeles, Disneyland – and Arbus’ photograph – continues to capture the notion of entertainment and fantasy that has come to be so intrinsically associated with the city.

Other photographers in the In Focus: Los Angeles exhibition who produced the majority of their most creative work in the city include Edmund Teske, with his experimentation in the darkroom and his complex double solarization process; Robert Heinecken, with images that are equally complex but often incorporate existing printed materials, such as negatives; Anthony Hernandez, whose portraits of Angelenos on the street emphasize the isolation of the individual in an urban environment; and Anthony Friedkin, who combines his passions for surfing and the Southland beaches in his photographs. The inclusion of three photographs from Judy Fiskin’s earliest photographic series, Stucco (1973 – 76), provided the impetus for a monographic presentation of the artist’s complete photographic work by Getty Publications. Entitled Some Aesthetic Decisions: The Photographs of Judy Fiskin and featuring an introductory essay by curator Virginia Heckert, the book will be published concurrently with this exhibition.”

Press release from the J. Paul Getty Museum website

Grant Mudford
Los Angeles (US 257/10a)
negative, 1976; print, 1980
Gelatin silver print
19 1/4 x 13 1/8 in
© Grant Mudford

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After working for ten years as a commercial photographer, Sydney native Grant Mudford received funding from the Australia Council for the Arts, enabling him to travel throughout the United States to pursue personal work. Mudford’s love of architecture – particularly the vernacular, often anonymous structures of urban America – is evident in the photographs he produced. His head-on depictions of the façades of simple commercial buildings are enlivened by signage, the play of light and shade, the placement of doors and windows, or, as in this image, the rich variety of textures.

Text from Pacific Standard Time at the Getty

Joe Deal
Backyard, Diamond Bar, California
1980
Gelatin silver print
11 3/16 x 11 1/4 in
© Joe Deal

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Joe Deal rose to prominence in the mid-1970s when work he made as a graduate student at the University of New Mexico was included in the exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape (1975). From 1976 to 1989, he taught photography at the University of California, Riverside, where he was instrumental in establishing a photography program and developing the university-affiliated California Museum of Photography. His photographs of Diamond Bar feature backyards of this primarily residential suburb located at the junction of the Pomona and Orange freeways in eastern Los Angeles County. Deal’s implementation of a slightly elevated perspective that eliminates the horizon line and provides a view into neighboring yards effectively conveys the close quarters of life in a master-planned community.

Text from Pacific Standard Time at the Getty

Anthony Friedkin
Film Can Library, Universal Studios
1978
Gelatin silver print
12 x 17 11/16 in
Gift of Sue and Albert Dorskind
© Anthony Friedkin

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Anthony Friedkin began taking photographs at a young age and had already published his work by the time he was 16. He nonetheless found it important to study photography seriously and did so at Art Center College of Design and the University of California, Los Angeles. Employment as a still photographer for motion pictures beginning in 1975 undoubtedly prepared him to create a portfolio of images of Universal Studios a few years later. His depiction of row after row of film cans might be viewed as a historical document of a medium that has been replaced by new technology. Friedkin’s continued commitment to shooting black-and-white film that he develops and prints in his own darkroom has become increasingly rare.

Text from Pacific Standard Time at the Getty

Darryl J. Curran
Cocktails with Heinecken
about 1974
Gelatin silver print
9 1/4 x 14 in
Gift of Darryl J. Curran
© Darryl J. Curran

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After completing his undergraduate degree in design at the University of California, Los Angeles, Darryl Curran entered the school’s newly established photography program, studying with Robert Heinecken, who is positioned toward the center of this image in a black turtleneck. The repeated printing of two frames is typical of Curran’s approach to the photographic medium and the ease with which he employs techniques and strategies derived from his background in printmaking and design. Another form of “mirroring” occurs in the placement of a Heineken beer bottle opposite Heinecken the artist. Curran founded the Department of Photography at California State University, Fullerton, where he taught from 1967 to 2001.

Text from Pacific Standard Time at the Getty

William A. Garnett
Finished Housing, Lakewood, California
1950
Gelatin silver print
7 3/8 x 9 7/16 in
© Estate of William A. Garnett

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The reduced scale and regular spacing of shapes lend a toy-like quality to Garnett’s suite of prints depicting construction phases of tract housing in the Los Angeles County suburb of Lakewood. The deep shadows, overall patterning, and dramatic diagonals that slice through each composition introduce a sophisticated sense of design and abstraction. After studying photography at Art Center College of Design and military service during World War II, William Garnett learned to fly so that he could photograph his subjects from his Cessna 170-B airplane. Although he was hired by developers to document the construction of 17,500 affordable single-family residences in Lakewood, the majority of his aerial photographs depict the beauty of America’s landscape.

Text from Pacific Standard Time at the Getty

Henry Wessel Jr.
Los Angeles
1971
Gelatin silver on Dupont Veragam paper print
7 15/16 x 11 7/8 in
Purchased with funds provided by the Photographs Council of the J. Paul Getty Museum
© Henry Wessel

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Henry Wessel began taking photographs while majoring in psychology at Pennsylvania State University in the mid-1960s. Travel throughout the United States in subsequent years led him to direct his gaze increasingly to details of human interaction with the natural and man-made environment. Wessel’s move to the West Coast in the early 1970s inspired him to incorporate light and climate into his work. His inclusion in the seminal exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape, organized in 1975 by the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, solidified his reputation as a keen observer of the American topography. In this image, electrical and telephone lines tether a row of modest residences to a single utility pole.

Text from Pacific Standard Time at the Getty

The J. Paul Getty Museum
1200 Getty Center Drive
Los Angeles, California 90049

Opening hours:
Tues – Friday 10 – 5.30pm
Saturday 10 – 9pm
Sunday 10 – 9pm
Monday closed

The J. Paul Getty Museum website

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Apr

Exhibition: ‘Berenice Abbott (1898-1991), Photographs’ at Jeu de Paume, Paris

By Dr Marcus Bunyan 1 Comment

Categories: American, american photographers, architecture, black and white photography, documentary photography, exhibition, existence, gallery website, landscape, light, memory, New York, Paris, photographic series, photography, pictorialism, portrait, reality, space, street photography, surrealism and time
Tags: American scene, Atget, Berenice Abbott, Berenice Abbott Blossom Restaurant, Berenice Abbott Broadway to the Battery, Berenice Abbott Changing New York, Berenice Abbott Flat Iron Building, Berenice Abbott Gunsmith and Police Department Headquarters, Berenice Abbott Happy's Refreshment Stand, Berenice Abbott Miner, Berenice Abbott Miner Greenview, Berenice Abbott New York Stock Exchange, Berenice Abbott Route 1, Berenice Abbott Sunoco Station, Berenice Abbott Treasury Building, Berenice Abbott Triborough Bridge, Blossom Restaurant 103 Bowery, Broadway and Fifth Avenue, Broadway to the Battery, Changing New York, Daytona Beach, demolition, Elizabeth McCausland, Eugene Atget, Farm Security Administration, Flat Iron Building Broadway and Fifth Avenue, Florida, FSA, Gaëlle Morel, gelatin silver print, Gunsmith and Police Department Headquarters, Happy's Refreshment Stand, Jeu de Paume, Man Ray, Manhattan, modernism, modernity, Museum of Modern Art, New Deal, New Jersey, New Vision, New Vision aesthetic, New York City, New York Stock Exchange, New York World's Fair, Rayogram, reconstruction, Sunoco Station Trenton New Jersey, the city, Treasury Building New York City, Trenton, Triborough Bridge, Triborough Bridge East 125th Street Approach, urban environments, vanishing instant, West Virginia

Exhibition dates: 21st February – 29th April 2012

It is not her portraits or the road trip photographs, nor her scientific work for which Berenice Abbott will be remembered. Firstly, she will always be remembered as the person who photographed Eugene Atget in 1927 just before he died and who bought the remainder of his negatives (after the French government had bought over 2,000 in 1920 and another 2,000 had been sold after his death). She then tirelessly promoted Atget’s work helping him gain international recognition until her sale of the archive to the Museum of Modern Art in 1968. Secondly, she is remembered for her magnificent photographs of New York City and its urban environs, photographs that show the influence of Atget in their attention to detail and understanding of the placement of the camera, and imaging of old and new parts of the city (much as Atget had photographed old Paris before it was destroyed). However, these photographs are uniquely her own, with their modernist New Vision aesthetic, bold perspectives and use of deep chiaroscuro to enhance form within the photograph. Abbott’s best known project, Changing New York (1935-39) eventually consisted of 305 photographs that document the buildings of Manhattan, some of which are now destroyed. As the text on Wikipedia insightfully notes:

“Abbott’s project was primarily a sociological study imbedded within modernist aesthetic practices. She sought to create a broadly inclusive collection of photographs that together suggest a vital interaction between three aspects of urban life: the diverse people of the city; the places they live, work and play; and their daily activities. It was intended to empower people by making them realize that their environment was a consequence of their collective behavior (and vice versa). Moreover, she avoided the merely pretty in favor of what she described as “fantastic” contrasts between the old and the new, and chose her camera angles and lenses to create compositions that either stabilized a subject (if she approved of it), or destabilized it (if she scorned it).”

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In the text below Gaëlle Morel observes, “Rather than the kind of nostalgic approach often brought to bear on a city’s landmarks and typical sites, this ensemble offers an exploration of the nature of modernity and focuses on the ways in which the past and future are temporarily linked together. Seeking to reinvent the forms and functions of photography in relation to the practice of documentary, Abbott sets out to capture the “disappearance of the moment” by juxtaposing motifs from a city subject to an unprecedented process of demolition and reconstruction.”

While Abbott’s photographs are definitely modernist in nature I believe that today they can also be seen as deeply nostalgic, emerging as they do in the period after the Great Depression when the economy was on the move again, a peaceful time before the oncoming armageddon of the Second World War, closely followed by the fear of nuclear annihilation and the threat of communist indoctrination. They are timeless portraits of a de/reconstructed city. The images seem to float in the air, breathe in the shadows. This is the disappearance of the moment into the enigma of past, present, future – where the photograph becomes eternal, where the best work of both Atget and Abbott resides.

Many thankx to Jeu de Paume for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Berenice Abbott
New York Stock Exchange, New York City
1933
Gelatin silver print
24 x 19 cm
Ronald Kurtz / Commerce Graphics
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd, Inc.

Berenice Abbott
Treasury Building, New York City
1933
Gelatin silver print
51 x 40.5 cm
Ronald Kurtz / Commerce Graphics
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd, Inc.

Architecture

“The tempo of the city is not that of eternity, nor that of time, but that of the ephemeral. That is why recording it is so important, in both documentary and artistic terms.”

“All the photographs of New York took a long time to make, because the camera had to be carefully positioned. There is nothing fortuitous about these photographs.”

The exhibition features a substantial collection from Abbott’s best known project, Changing New York (1935-39). Commissioned by the Roosevelt administration as part of its response to the nationwide economic crisis, Abbott saw this piece of work as both a way of documenting the City and as a personal work of art. Eighty of the 305 photographs taken by Abbott are on show here, along with various documents providing insight into the background of this major photographic undertaking, including posters and views of the exhibition organized by the Museum of the City of New York in 1937, sketches and historical notes made by the team of journalists working with Abbott on the project, and proofs and dummies of the layout made by the photographer before she started work.

Abbott homes in on the contrasts between old and new elements in the City’s structure. Her images alternate between a New Vision aesthetic, characterised by an emphasis on details and bold perspectives, and a more documentary style that is frontal and neutral. Rather than the kind of nostalgic approach often brought to bear on a city’s landmarks and typical sites, this ensemble offers an exploration of the nature of modernity and focuses on the ways in which the past and future are temporarily linked together. Seeking to reinvent the forms and functions of photography in relation to the practice of documentary, Abbott sets out to capture the “disappearance of the moment” by juxtaposing motifs from a city subject to an unprecedented process of demolition and reconstruction.

In 1938, hoping to take advantage of the fifty million visitors expected at the New York World’s Fair of 1939, the publisher, E.P. Dutton, offered to bring out a selection of one hundred images from the project accompanied by a text by the renowned art critic Elizabeth McCausland, who also happened to be Abbott’s companion and staunch supporter. Going against the women’s original ideas for an art book, Dutton produced a more standard tourist guide, breaking the City down into a series of tours, from south to north and from the centre outwards. The text, too, was shorn of its poetic and pedagogical dimensions, leaving only informative entries about the buildings in the pictures.

In the exhibition, this set of architectural photographs is rounded out by a selection of pictures of vernacular architecture taken by Abbott during a journey in the southern states of the US in the 1930s and when she was travelling along Route 1 in the 1950s. Here, portraits of farmers and wooden houses alternate with pictures of streets and local events.

Berenice Abbott
Triborough Bridge, East 125th Street Approach, New York City, June 29, 1937
1937
Gelatin silver print
24.5 x 19 cm
Museum of the City of New York. Gift of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd, Inc.

Berenice Abbott
Broadway to the Battery, New York City, May 4, 1938
1938
Gelatin silver print
17.5 x 24 cm
Museum of the City of New York
Museum Purchase with funds from the Mrs. Elon Hooker Acquisition Fund
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd, Inc.

Berenice Abbott
Flat Iron Building, Broadway and Fifth Avenue, New York City
1938
Gelatin silver print
101.5 x 76 cm
Ronald Kurtz / Commerce Graphics
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd, Inc.

Berenice Abbott Petit Journal

With over 120 photographs, plus a selection of books and documents never shown before, this is the first exhibition in France to cover the many different facets of the American photographer Berenice Abbott (1898–1991), who is also famous for her international advocacy of Eugène Atget. She came to Paris in 1921 where she learnt her craft from Man Ray before opening her own studio and embarking on a successful career as a portraitist. Returning to New York City in 1929, she conceived what remains her best‑known project, Changing New York (1935-39). This was financed by the Works Progress Administration as part of its response to the economic crisis sweeping the country. The photographs she took in 1954 when travelling along the US East Coast on Route 1 (the exhibition presents a previously unseen selection of these images) reflect her ambition to represent the whole of what she called the “American scene.” Furthermore, in the 1950s, she also worked on a set of images for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) designed to illustrate the principles of mechanics and light for educational purposes.

A committed member of the avant‑garde from the early 1920s, and a staunch opponent of Pictorialism and the school of Alfred Stieglitz, Abbott spent the whole of her career exploring the limits and nature of documentary photography and photographic realism. This exhibition shows the rich array of her interests and conveys both the unity and diversity of her work.

Portraits

Berenice Abbott moved to New York City in the early 1920s and went about becoming a sculptor. Mixing in the bohemian circles of Greenwich Village, she met writers and artists such as Djuna Barnes, Sadakichi Hartmann and Marcel Duchamp. She also posed for Man Ray. Economic hardship at home and the allure of what then seemed the cultural Eldorado of Europe impelled several of these artists to try their luck in Paris, and Abbott herself joined this group of American expatriates in 1921.

In 1923 she became the assistant of Man Ray, who had opened a portrait studio shortly after his arrival in France in 1921. While a fair portion of the studio’s clients were American tourists, Abbott found herself at the heart of the avant-garde scene – especially that of the Surrealists. Between 1923 and 1926 she thus learnt about darkroom techniques and portrait photography while at the same time picking up a broader intellectual and artistic education. She produced her portraits in Man Ray’s studio before opening her own in 1926. Success soon followed. Her clientele was a mixture of French cultural figures and American expatriates, of bourgeois, bohemians and literary types. Her portraits were on occasion manifestly influenced by Surrealism, and more generally show an interest in masquerade, play and disguise, but sometimes even in their use of overprinting and distortion.

The female models express a kind of sexual ambiguity, notably by their masculine haircut or clothes, deliberately exuding a sense of uncertainty with regard to their identity. In composing her portraits, Abbott developed a distinctive aesthetic, far removed from the usual commercial conventions. The absence of a set, with the background usually no more than a plain wall, helped to focus on the sitter and their posture, the position of their body and their facial expression. The use of a tripod and long-focus lenses placed at eye-height allowed her to avoid distorsions and thus heighten the physical presence of the models. In early 1929 Abbott left Paris for New York City. Back in America she continued with the same activities, opening a new portrait studio and taking part in exhibitions of modernist photography, while also promoting the work of Eugène Atget, having bought part of his estate in 1928.

New York City

In the early 1930s, Abbott set about her project for a great documentary portrait of the City of New York, but had no luck when she approached institutions such as the Museum of the City of New York and the New York Historical Society for funding. She assembled her first efforts in an album (eight pages of which are exhibited here) in order to convey the scale of her ambitious undertaking, and in 1934 exhibited her photographs of the City at the Museum of the City of New York in the hope of attracting sponsors. In 1935, support was at last forthcoming from the Federal Art Project, a programme set up to aid artists by the Works Progress Administration as part of the New Deal; she now had the support of a team of researchers who produced an information pack with text and drawings to accompany each image. Entitled Changing New York, she conceived this commission as both a vast documentary record of the City and a personal work of art. Eighty of the 305 photographs constituting this project have been selected for the exhibition. These are accompanied by documents – a poster, exhibition views, sketches and historical notes, proofs, pages from the preparatory album and original editions – that help to convey the concerns and ambitions behind this major photographic undertaking.

Abbott focused on the contrasts and links between old and new in the City’s structure. Her images alternate between a New Vision aesthetic, characterised by an emphasis on details and bold perspectives, and a more documentary style that is frontal and neutral. Rather than the kind of nostalgic approach often brought to bear on a city’s landmarks and typical sites, this ensemble offers an exploration of the nature of modernity and focuses on the ways in which the past and future are temporarily linked together. Seeking to reinvent the forms and functions of photography in relation to the practice of documentary, Abbott sets out to capture the “vanishing instant” by juxtaposing motifs from a city subject to an unprecedented process of demolition and reconstruction.

The upshot of all this work was the publication of a book, Changing New York, in 1939. But there was considerable tension between the publisher, whose concerns were commercial, and the photographer, with her artistic ambitions. In 1938, hoping to take advantage of the fifty million visitors expected at the New York World’s Fair of 1939, the publishing house E.P. Dutton proposed to bring out a selection of one hundred images from the project accompanied by a text from the renowned art critic Elizabeth McCausland, who also happened to be Abbott’s companion and unfailing supporter. Straying far from the project originally envisaged by the two women, Dutton changed the presentation of the photographs and produced what was a standard tourist guide, breaking the City down into a series of tours, from south to north and from the centre outwards. The text, too, was shorn of its poetic and pedagogical dimensions, leaving only information about the buildings in the pictures.

The “American scene”

This set of architectural images is completed by a selection of vernacular photographs. In the summer of 1935, Berenice Abbott went on a road trip down to the Southern US in order to create a portrait of a rural world in crisis. Choosing the kind of documentary style that would be the hallmark of the photographic survey launched by the Farm Security Administration (FSA) that same year, she focused on the modest wooden houses and the farmers. Driving around these states with Elizabeth McCausland, Abbott took some two hundred photographs which the two women saw as part of an ambitious photographic portrait of America in book form, although in the end this was never published. A similar fate befell Abbott’s piece on the small towns and villages along Route 1, which she travelled in 1954. Covering approximately 6,500 kilometres as she followed this road along the East Coast of the US, she took some 2,400 photographs, taking in stalls, shops, portraits of farmers, diners and bars and dance halls. Her photography alternated between the documentary aesthetic and Street Photography. With Route 1, Abbott continued to pursue her ambition of representing the whole of the “American scene.”

Science

Abbott started photographing scientific phenomena in 1939. In 1944 she was recruited by the journal Science Illustrated, where she published some of her own pictures, as head of its photography department. Abbott took a committed, pedagogical approach, seeing her images as a vital bridge between modern science and the general public. In 1957, as a result of the anxiety about national science stirred by the Soviet launch of the Sputnik into outer space, at the height of the Cold War, the National Science Foundation set up a Physical Science Study Committee at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Its role was to develop new textbooks for the teaching of science in schools and to use innovative photographs to illustrate the principles of quantum mechanics. Abbott was hired by MIT to produce photographs for the popularisation and teaching of the sciences. Using abstract forms to visually express complex mechanical concepts and invisible mechanical laws, she used black grounds to reveal principles such as gravity and light waves. The exhibition features a score of Abbott’s scientific and experimental images, as well as some of the books for which they were used. Harking back to the experiments of the avant-gardes, and in particular the rayogram technique, she was able to produce visually attractive and surprising images that were also rich in discovery, thus combining documentary information with a sense of wonder.”

Text by Gaëlle Morel, curator of the exhibition, on the Jeu de Paume website

Berenice Abbott
Blossom Restaurant, 103 Bowery, New York City, October 24, 1935
1935
Gelatin silver print
19 x 24.5 cm
Museum of the City of New York
Gift of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd, Inc.

Berenice Abbott
Sunoco Station, Trenton, New Jersey
1954
Gelatin silver print
19 x 24.5 cm
Ronald Kurtz / Commerce Graphics
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd, Inc.

Berenice Abbott
Gunsmith and Police Department Headquarters, 6 Centre Market Place and 240 Centre Street, New York City, February 4, 1937
1937
Gelatin silver print
19 x 24.5 cm
Museum of the City of New York
Gift of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd, Inc.

Berenice Abbott
Happy’s Refreshment Stand, Daytona Beach, Florida
1954
Gelatin silver print
29.5 x 28 cm
Ronald Kurtz / Commerce Graphics
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd, Inc.

Berenice Abbott
Miner, Greenview, West Virginia
1935
Gelatin silver print
25 x 19 cm
Ronald Kurtz / Commerce Graphics
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd, Inc.

Jeu de Paume
1, place de la Concorde
75008 Paris
métro Concorde
T: 01 47 03 12 50

Opening hours:
Tuesday: 12:00 – 21:00
Wednesday – Friday: 12:00 – 19:00
Saturday and Sunday: 10:00 – 19:00
Closed Monday

Jeu de Paume website

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Apr

Video: New Australian Pavilion for the Venice Biennale by architects Denton Corker Marshall

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: architecture and video
Tags: Australia, Australia Council for the Arts, Australian Pavilion for the Venice Biennale, Denton Corker Marshall, Venice, venice biennale, white cube

Australian Pavilion Venice Flythrough from Australia Council for the Arts

The outside looks vaguely interesting – the aspect of the building within its surroundings and how it fits into the landscape – but really it is just a safe, unthreatening and conformist structure. The inside is the usual white cube. Says it all really that the inside rates about 5 seconds of the whole video!!

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Mar

Exhibition: ‘The Photographs of Brett Weston’ at the The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Exhibition dates: 23rd November 2011 – 25th March 25 2012

Brett Weston’s pictures are ageing well - the decorative aesthetic seems to have more currency today than previously when the values of his father were predominant. Perhaps this has to do with the continuing influence of the Bechers and the exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man Altered Landscape (1975). Although Weston photographs nature there is a beautiful, reductive minimalism to his photographs, an enticing simplicity of light and form that could be seen as decorative but today has taken on more symbolic weight; man and nature under threat, with hints of Atget and Wynn Bullock in the mix as well. Under that seeming simplicity are sophisticated photographs that take a good eye to capture and bring to life – what seems simple isn’t by any means. The light is beautiful, the sensitivity to subject present beyond doubt. His photographs will only gain greater currency in the future.

Many thankx to The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993)
Botanical
ca. 1975
Gelatin silver print
Unframed: 11 x 14 inches (27.94 x 35.56 cm)
Gift from the Christian K. Keesee Collection
© The Brett Weston Archive

Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993)
Lava, Hawaii
ca. 1985
Gelatin silver print
Unframed: 16 x 20 inches (40.64 x 50.8 cm)
Gift from the Christian K. Keesee Collection
© The Brett Weston Archive

Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993)
Water
1970
Gelatin silver print
Unframed: 11 x 14 inches (27.94 x 35.56 cm)
Gift from the Christian K. Keesee Collection
© The Brett Weston Archive

Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993)
Water Reflection, Logging, Alaska
1973
Gelatin silver print
Unframed: 11 x 14 inches (27.94 x 35.56 cm)
Gift from the Christian K. Keesee Collection
© The Brett Weston Archive

“Over his long and prolific career, photographer Brett Weston (1911-1993) exemplified the modernist aesthetic. The son of famed photographer Edward Weston (1886-1958), Brett Weston was a “natural” with the camera: he was still a teenager when he first received high-level, international recognition as a creative artist.

The Photographs of Brett Weston, Nov. 23, 2011, through April 1, 2012, at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, presents a condensed 40-print survey of his long and prolific career. While rare works from the Museum’s Hallmark Photographic Collection are also included, this exhibition celebrates a gift of 260 Weston prints from Christian K. Keesee, owner of the Brett Weston Archive in Oklahoma City.

“This generous gift from Mr. Keesee exemplifies the deep interest in our program on the part of leading collectors and estates across the nation,” said Keith F. Davis, senior curator of photography. “There is also a wonderful symmetry here: this gift of Brett Weston’s work compliments one of the earliest photography gifts to the Museum, when Mr. and Mrs. Milton McGreevy donated 60 Edward Weston prints in 1958.”

Brett Weston was one of photography’s greatest prodigies. After serving as his father’s apprentice, he achieved international recognition at the age of 17 through inclusion in a landmark exhibition in Stuttgart, Germany in 1929.

“Weston’s images are beautifully modulated, unmanipulated black-and-white prints,” said Davis. “He loved sharp lenses and precision cameras, and he applied this “purist” approach to a sustained exploration of the idea of abstraction.”

Weston always sought an energizing balance between fact and form, the objective reality of the world and the purely graphic logic of pictorial shape and structure. In exploring the graphic language of form, Weston aimed to suggest the deeper possibilities, and mysteries, of familiar things.”

Press release from The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art website

Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993)
Botanical
ca. 1985
Gelatin silver print
Unframed: 14 x 11 inches (35.56 x 27.94 cm)
Gift from the Christian K. Keesee Collection
© The Brett Weston Archive

Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993)
Building, Ivy, Tree, Sutton Place, New York
1945
Gelatin silver print
Unframed: 10 x 8 inches (25.4 x 20.32 cm)
Gift from the Christian K. Keesee Collection
© The Brett Weston Archive

Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993)
Broken Window
ca. 1970
Gelatin silver print
Unframed: 11 x 14 inches (27.94 x 35.56 cm)
Gift from the Christian K. Keesee Collection
© The Brett Weston Archive

The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
4525 Oak Street
Kansas City, MO 64111

Opening hours:
Wed, 10 a.m. – 4 p.m.
Thurs, Fri, 10 a.m. – 9 p.m.
Sat, 10 a.m. – 5 p.m.
Sun, Noon – 5 p.m.

The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art website

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Mar

Exhibition: ‘Light Years: Conceptual Art and the Photograph, 1964 – 1977′ at the Art Institute of Chicago

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: American, american photographers, architecture, black and white photography, book, exhibition, gallery website, light, New York, photographic series, photography, portrait, psychological, reality, space, street photography, surrealism, time and works on paper
Tags: 100 Boots, Alighiero Boetti, Alighiero Boetti AW:AB =L:MD, Alighiero Boetti Twins (Gemelli), american artist, andy warhol, Andy Warhol Empire, Annette Messager, architecture, Art Institute of Chicago, arts, Bruce Nauman, Bruce Nauman Light Trap for Henry Moore No. 1, California, Chicago, Conceptual Art, conceptual art movement, contemporary art, Dennis Oppenheim, Dennis Oppenheim Stage 1 and 2, ed ruscha, Eleanor Antin, Eleanor Antin 100 Boots, Giulio Paolini Young Man Looking At Lorenzo Lotto, Italian artist, Jan Dibbets, John Baldessari, John Baldessari The California Map Project Part I, John Baldessari Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line, Light Trap for Henry Moore No. 1, Light Years, Light Years: Conceptual Art and the Photograph, Light Years: Conceptual Art and the Photograph 1964 - 1977, Marcel Duchamp, Marian Goodman Gallery, Marian Goodman Gallery Artists and Photographs, Mel Bochner Surface Dis/Tension: Blowup, photo canvases, photo grids, photobooks, photolithographs, Reading Position for 2nd Degree Burn Long Island. N.Y., The California Map Project Part I, Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line, Twins (Gemelli), VALIE EXPORT, Victor Burgin Photopath

Exhibition dates: 13th December 2011 – 11th March 2012

Many thankx to the Art Institute of Chicago for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

John Baldessari (American, born 1931)
The California Map Project Part I: California
1969, exhibition copy 2011
Twelve inkjet prints of images and a typewritten sheet
Each image, 20.3 x 25.4 cm (8 x 10 in.); sheet, 21.6 x 27.9 cm (8 1/2 x 11 in.)
Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris
© John Baldessar

Eleanor Antin (American, born 1935)
100 Boots
1971-73
Fifty-one photolithographic postcards
Each 11.1 x 17.8 cm (4 3/8 x 7 in.)
The Art Institute of Chicago, Margaret Fisher Endowment, 2000.106.1-51
© Eleanore Antin. Courtesy Ronald Fedlman Fine Arts, New York, NY

John Baldessari (American, born 1931)
Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line (Best of Thirty-Six Attempts)
1973
Portfolio of fourteen photolithographs
Each 24.7 x 32.7 cm (9 11/16 x 12 7/8 in.)
Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago
© John Baldessari

The 1960s and 1970s are recognized as the defining era of the Conceptual Art movement, a period in which centuries held assumptions about the nature of art itself were questioned and dissolved. Until now, the pivotal role that photography played in this movement has never been fully examined. The Art Institute of Chicago has organized the first major survey of influential artists of this period who used photography in ways that went far beyond its traditional definitions as a medium – and succeeded thereby in breaking down the boundaries of all mediums in contemporary art. Light Years: Conceptual Art and the Photograph, 1964-1977 - on view December 13, 2011 through March 11, 2012 - is the first exhibition to explore how artists of this era used photography as a hybrid image field that navigated among painting and sculpture, film, and book arts as well as between fine art and the mass media. More than 140 works by 57 artists will fill the Art Institute’s Regenstein Hall in this major exhibition that will be seen only in Chicago.

Bringing to the fore work from the Italian group Arte Povera as well as artists from Eastern Europe who are rarely shown in the United States, Light Years also includes many pieces that have not been on public display in decades by such major artists as Mel Bochner, Tony Conrad, Michael Heizer, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Emilio Prini. To open the exhibition, the Art Institute has arranged a special outdoor screening of Andy Warhol’s Empire, an eight-hour film of the Empire State Building. In a first for the United States, Warhol’s Empire will be projected from the Modern Wing’s third floor to be seen on the exterior of the Aon Center on Friday, December 9.

The acceptance of photography as fine art was an evolutionary process. Early 20th-century avantgarde movements such as Dada, Surrealism, and Constructivism articulated a new set of standards for art in which photography played a major role. By the 1930s, modernist photography found a small but influential niche in museum exhibitions and the art market, and vernacular forms such as photojournalism and amateur snapshots became a source of artistic inspiration. Engagement with mass media, exemplified in Pop Art, became prominent in the 1950s. Yet only with the advent of Conceptual Art did artists with training in painting, sculpture, and the graphic arts begin to make and exhibit their own photographs or photographic works as fine art.

Some Conceptual artists, such as Bruce Nauman, Ed Ruscha, and Valie Export took up photography seriously only for a few key months or years; others, like Eleanor Antin, John Baldessari, Jan Dibbets, and Annette Messager have worked in photography their entire careers. Photography showed the way forward from Minimal Art, Pop Art, and other movements in painting and sculpture. But it came with its own set of questions that these artists addressed with tremendous innovation. Questions of perspective, sequence, scale, and captioning which have a rich history in photography, were answered in entirely new ways and made into central concerns for art in general.

Photography in these artists’ hands was the antithesis of a separate and definable “medium.” It became instead “unfixed”: photobooks, photolithographs, photo canvases, photo grids, slide and film pieces, and even single prints all counted as valid creative forms. The variety of work showcased in Light Years is crucial to conveying the greatest contribution of the Conceptual era: to turn contemporary art into a field without a medium.

Light Years showcases a great number of works that have not been seen together – or at all – since the years around 1970. Victor Burgin’s Photopath, a lifesize print of a 60-foot stretch of flooring placed directly on top of the floor that it records, has not been shown in more than 20 years and never in the United States. Likewise being shown for the first time in the U.S. are pieces by Italian artists Gilberto Zorio, Emilio Prini, Giulio Paolini, and others associated with the classic postwar movement Arte Povera. Paolini’s early photocanvas Young Man Looking At Lorenzo Lotto (1967), an icon of European conceptualism, has only rarely been shown at all after entering a private collection in the early 1970s. Mel Bochner’s Surface Dis/Tension: Blowup (1969) has not been seen since its presentation at Marian Goodman Gallery in the now legendary 1970 exhibition Artists and Photographs, from which no visual documentation survives. Equally rare and important early works by Laurie Anderson, Marcel Broodthaers, Francesco Clemente, Tony Conrad, Gilbert & George, Dan Graham, Michael Heizer, and many others make the show a revelation for those interested in key figures of new art in the 1960s and ’70s. A special emphasis is placed on artists from Hungary, a center for photoconceptual activity that has long been overlooked in Western Europe and the United States.”

Press release from the Art Institute of Chicago

Alighiero Boetti (Italian, 1940–1994)
AW:AB =L:MD (Andy Warhol: Alighiero Boetti = Leonardo: Marcel Duchamp)
1967
Silk screen print with graphite on paper
58.8 x 58.8 cm (23 5/16 x 23 5/16 in.)
Colombo Collection, Milan. © Artists Rights Society (ARS)

Alighiero Boetti (Italian, 1940–1994)
Twins (Gemelli)
September 1968
Gelatin silver postcard
15.2 x 11.2 cm (6 x 4 3/8 in.)
Private Collection © Artists Rights Society (ARS)

Bruce Nauman (American, born 1941)
Light Trap for Henry Moore No. 1
1967
Gelatin silver print
157.5 x 105.7 cm (62 x 41 5/8 in.)
Glenstone. © Artists Rights Society (ARS).

Dennis Oppenheim (American, 1938-2011)
Stage 1 and 2. Reading Position for 2nd Degree Burn Long Island. N.Y. Material… Solar Energy. Skin Exposure Time. 5 Hours June 1970
1970
Two chromogenic photographic prints, plastic labeling tape, mounted together on green board with graphite annotations
Overall: 81 x 66 cm (31 7/8 x 26 in.)
Top photo: 20.1 x 25.8 cm; bottom photo: 20.2 x 25.5 cm; Image/text area: 41.8 x 25.8 cm
Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection
© Dennis Oppenheim Estate

The Art Institute of Chicago
111 South Michigan Avenue
Chicago, Illinois 60603-6404
T: (312) 443-3600

Opening hours:
Monday – Wednesday, 10.30 – 5.00
Thursday, 10.30 – 8.00 (Free Admission 5.00 – 8.00, member-only access to Matisse)
Friday, 10.30 – 8.00
Saturday – Sunday, 10.00 – 5.00
The museum is closed Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s days.

The Art Institute of Chicago website

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Dec

Exhibition: ‘After the Gold Rush: Contemporary Photographs from the Collection’ at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: American, american photographers, architecture, beauty, black and white photography, colour photography, digital photography, documentary photography, exhibition, existence, gallery website, intimacy, landscape, light, memory, New York, painting, photographic series, photography, photorealism, portrait, psychological, reality, space, surrealism and time
Tags: 3 White (DG's Mr. Postman) Fourth Race, Adrian Piper, Adrian Piper Decide Who You Are, After the Gold Rush, American flag, Arizona, Canadian artist, Christopher Williams, Christopher Williams 3 White (DG's Mr. Postman) Fourth Race, Decide Who You Are, Decide Who You Are #24: A Moving Target, dye bleach transparency, German artist, Hans Haacke, Hans Haacke Thank You Paine Webber, James Casebere, James Casebere Landscape with Houses, Jeff Wall, Jeff Wall The Storyteller, Landscape with Houses (Dutchess County, Laurie Simmons, Laurie Simmons Walking Gun, light box, NY) #1, Oriental Pearl, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Philip-Lorca diCorcia Todd M. Brooks, phoenix, Phoenix Greyhound Park, photorealism, Robert Gober 1978 - 2000, Robert Gober Untitled, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Storyteller, Todd M. Brooks, Vancouver, Walking Gun, Wolfgang Tillmans, Wolfgang Tillmans Oriental Pearl

Exhibition dates: 22nd March, 2011 – 2nd January, 2012

Many thankx to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Hans Haacke (German, born 1936)
Thank You, Paine Webber
1979
Gelatin silver print and chromogenic print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Vital Projects Fund Inc. Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2010
© Hans Haacke

Since the early 1970s Haacke has taken on the intertwined political and corporate forces that use cultural patronage as a smokescreen to advance interests that are often antithetical to the vitality of free speech and expression in democracies. Haacke made this work just as the strategy of appropriation – lifting an image out of its original context and re-presenting it in critical fashion - began to make waves in the New York art world of the late 1970s. Like all effective appropriation, it exposes a prior instance of borrowing – in this case, how the investment firm Paine Webber used a documentary photograph to give its annual report the veneer of social concern. The artist then pointedly contrasted it with an image from the same annual report of a beaming trio of executives in a painting-lined gallery. As a counterpoint to the protestor’s signboard, Haacke dropped in text from a different Paine Webber ad campaign to show on whose backs the “risk management” is taking place – a biting indictment, the relevance of which has only increased since the recent economic downturn.
Wall text

Jeff Wall (Canadian, born 1946)
The Storyteller
1986
Silver dye bleach transparency in light box
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Charlene and David Howe, Henry Nias Foundation Inc., Jennifer and Robert Yaffa, Harriet Ames Charitable Trust, and Gary and Sarah Wolkowitz Gifts, 2006
Image courtesy of the artist © Jeff Wall

Wall’s staged tableaux straddle the worlds of the museum and the street. His subjects are scenes of urban and suburban disarray that he witnessed firsthand – the kinds of things anyone might see while wandering around a city and its outskirts. Working like a movie director, he restages the scene using nonprofessionals as actors and presents his photographs as color transparencies in light boxes such as those of large-scale public advertisements found at airports and bus stops. The scale and ambition of his pictures – scenes of everyday life shot through with larger intimations of political struggle – equally evoke the Salon paintings of nineteenth century French painters such as Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet, which were themselves brazen combinations of canonical and contemporary subjects.

The Storyteller is set in a barren, leftover slice of land next to a highway overpass in Vancouver, where the artist lives. Various groupings of modern urban castaways – perhaps descendants of the Native Americans who occupied the land before the arrival of Europeans – are dispersed around the hillside, a mini-catalogue of art-historical reference. Like the upside-down, half-submerged figure of Icarus in the background of Brueghel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, the woman speaking and gesticulating to the two men listening at the lower left becomes the key to unifying the fractured and alienating environment from which Wall’s picture is constructed.
Wall text

Laurie Simmons (American, born 1949)
Walking Gun
1991
Gelatin silver print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Anonymous Gift, 1998
© Laurie Simmons

The early 1990s marked the last moment when a wide swath of women artists responded to the sexism they saw as pervasive in the culture – from the rape trial of William Kennedy Smith to the Supreme Court nomination hearings for Clarence Thomas. A pioneer of set-up photography, Simmons dramatically expanded the scale of her constructed tableaux for a series of spotlighted puppet-like objects perched atop doll legs: revolvers, houses, cameras, and cakes. This armed and dangerous example refers to the old-movie cliché where a man carrying a gun is shown in shadow profile. Here, Simmons offers instead the death-dealing seductress – also familiar from film noir - in monumental miniature, a doll capable of turning on its master at a moment’s notice.
Wall text

Philip-Lorca diCorcia (American, born 1953)
Todd M. Brooks, 22 Years Old, from Denver, Colorado, $40
1991
Chromogenic print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1991
Image courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York
© Philip-Lorca diCorcia

“The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present After the Gold Rush: Contemporary Photographs from the Collection from March 22, 2011, through January 2, 2012, in the Joyce and Robert Menschel Hall for Modern Photography. Drawn entirely from the Museum’s permanent collection, the exhibition features 25 photographs dating from 1979 to the present by 15 contemporary artists.

The exhibition’s title, After the Gold Rush, is taken from a classic 1970 song by Neil Young, whose verses contrast a romanticized past with a present of squandered plenty and an uncertain future. Inspired by the recent political and economic upheavals in America and abroad, this selection juxtaposes new photographs that take the long view of the world’s current condition with prescient works from the 1980s and 1990s that remain startlingly relevant today.

This is the first occasion for the Museum to present recently acquired works by: Gretchen Bender, James Casebere, Moyra Davey, Katy Grannan, Hans Haacke, An-My Lê, Curtis Mann, Trevor Paglen, and Wolfgang Tillmans. Also featured are photographs by: Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Robert Gober, Adrian Piper, Laurie Simmons, Jeff Wall, and Christopher Williams.

After the Gold Rush begins with Hans Haacke’s Thank You, Paine Webber (1979) – the first work by this legendary provocateur of Conceptual art to enter the Metropolitan’s collection. Haacke’s biting photo-diptych is so pertinent to the recent economic downturn that it seems as if it could have been made yesterday. In this work, the artist appropriated images from the investment firm’s annual report to convey his viewpoint that big business provides a veneer of social concern to mask the brutal effects of the “risk management” they offer their clients.

Other works in After the Gold Rush use varying degrees of artifice and photographic realism to reflect on marginalized and repressed voices. Measuring over 14 feet long and presented as a backlit transparency in a light box, The Storyteller (1986) is Jeff Wall’s signature image and is typical of his method. Working from memory, the artist uses nonprofessional actors and real locations to meticulously restage a scene of urban blight that he witnessed in his native Vancouver. Wall plays this photographic verisimilitude against compositions and figural poses indebted to French painters such as Gustave Courbet, Edouard Manet, and Georges Seurat. A comparison of Wall’s Storyteller with Courbet’s Young Ladies of the Village (1852), on view in the Museum’s galleries for Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century European Paintings and Sculpture, reveals parallels: in both, a keenly observed moment of telling social interaction taking place on a sloping landscape. Each artist has combined a daringly modern subject with references to earlier art.

Philip-Lorca diCorcia is another key figure in the development of staged photography. In the early 1990s, the artist created a series of works in response to the political attacks on gays and federal funding of the arts in the U.S. DiCorcia hired male hustlers to pose for their portraits out on the streets – and paid them with grant money he received from the National Endowment for the Arts. At the same moment, a wide swath of women artists addressed issues of sexism and racism: examples of this politically pointed art are represented by Laurie Simmons’ Walking Gun (1991) – a spotlighted puppet of doll legs and a revolver that seems capable of turning on its master at a moment’s notice – and Adrian Piper‘s 1992 work Decide Who You Are #24 (A Moving Target), which includes a childhood image of Anita Hill as part of a blistering meditation in word and image on racial politics. Such works are missives from a time not so long ago when artists regularly commented on present-day politics and culture through their art. (Because of light sensitivity, this work by Adrian Piper will be on view through Sunday, September 26.)

Although the recently made photographs in After the Gold Rush seem at first glance to be less overtly political than their predecessors, they nevertheless address vital issues about contemporary society. James Casebere’s epic vision of America, Landscape with Houses (Dutchess County, NY) #1, (2009), is based on a tabletop model that the artist spent 18 months building. The photograph shows a suburban subdivision of the kind recently ravaged by the foreclosure crisis, and its sunny sense of “Morning in America” comments ironically on the country’s future prospects. An-My Lê’s similarly sweeping five-part photographic piece Suez Canal Transit, USS Dwight Eisenhower, Egypt (2009) will also be featured. Lê is interested in the way in which U.S. armed forces come into contact with the rest of the world. This major new work – which seems at first to be a straightforward panorama of military might overseas – subtly undercuts the viewer’s expectations to question the current position of the U.S. on the global stage.

Trevor Paglen is a young artist whose works plot the “black world” of covert military operations, from telephoto images of predator drones taken from miles away, to software that follows planes used for the extraordinary rendition of suspected terrorists. Paglen’s 2008 photograph KEYHOLE IMPROVED CRYSTAL from Glacier Point (Optical Reconnaissance Satellite; USA 186) shows the ghostly white streak of an American reconnaissance satellite bisecting star trails above Yosemite’s Half Dome, a rock formation photographed in the 1860s by artists including Carleton Watkins. To make these and other photographs, Paglen collaborated with amateur astronomers who were originally trained by the U.S. government to look out for Soviet satellites during the Cold War, but turned their attention to American surveillance in recent years.

The final piece in After the Gold Rush is a suite of five recently acquired photographs from 2007-2009 by the celebrated photographer Wolfgang Tillmans. The grouping shifts focus from macro to micro: from expansive aerial views of Shanghai and Dubai to close ups that suggest the smallest increments of sustenance and regeneration. Taken together, they evoke the interconnectedness of all things and a grounding of the political in the personal as a way for an engaged yet expressive art.”

Press release from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Adrian Piper (American, born 1948)
Decide Who You Are #24: A Moving Target
1992
Photo-mechanical processes on three panels
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Peter Norton Family Foundation, 1994
© Adrian Piper

Piper is an artist and a philosophy professor who works in a variety of media, including performance, video, sound pieces, photography, drawing, and writing. She often explores issues of autobiography, racism, and stereotyping. For her 1992 series Decide Who You Are, the artist used a triptych format in which a different appropriated photograph is flanked by an image of the “three wise monkeys” maxim advocating “See No Evil, Speak No Evil, Hear No Evil” at left, and at right a photograph of a young girl who, though not identified, is Anita Hill – who had recently been thrust into the spotlight for accusing then-nominee for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas of sexual harrassment. The verse in the left panel changes in each individual work in the series, while that on the right is unchanging – what the artist once described as “a comprehensive, textbook compendium of commonly invoked litanies of denial and intimidation, from the bland to the vaguely menacing” and “a must for novices and aspiring leaders in business, politics, and culture.”
Wall text

Christopher Williams (American, born 1956)
3 White (DG’s Mr. Postman) Fourth Race, Phoenix Greyhound Park, Phoenix, Arizona, August 22, 1994
1994
Gelatin silver print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Charina Foundation Inc. and Jennifer and Joseph Duke Gifts, 2003
© Christopher Williams

Robert Gober (American, born 1954)
Untitled (Detail from “1978 – 2000″)
2000
Gelatin silver print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Jennifer and Joseph Duke Gift, 2002
© Robert Gober

James Casebere (American, born 1953)
Landscape with Houses (Dutchess County, NY) #1
2009
Chromogenic print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Alfred Stieglitz Society Gifts, 2011
© James Casebere

Wolfgang Tillmans (German, born 1968)
Oriental Pearl
2009
Inkjet print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Vital Projects Fund Inc. Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2010
Image courtesy the artist and Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York
© Wolfgang Tillmans

The Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street
New York, New York 10028-0198
T: 212-535-7710

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Thursday: 9:30 a.m. – 5:30 p.m.*
Friday and Saturday: 9:30 a.m. – 9:00 p.m.*
Sunday: 9:30 a.m. – 5:30 p.m.*
Closed Monday (except Met Holiday Mondays**), Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Day

The Metropolitan Museum of Art website

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Aug

Exhibition: ‘Hiroshima: Ground Zero 1945′ at the International Center of Photography, New York

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Exhibition dates: 20th May – 28th August, 2011

The “United States Strategic Bombing Survey, Physical Damage Division”. Don’t you just love the irony in this title? The aim of the military group who took these photographs as part of a survey on “strategic bombing” of Hiroshima was to document the physical damage that took place. As if an atomic bomb is anything other than destructive! As if an atomic bomb is anything other than catastrophic! As if an atomic bomb is anything less than death itself!

Upon this realisation, the father of the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer, famously quoted the Bhagavad Gita after the detonation of the first bomb on July 16, 1945 in the Trinity test in New Mexico, “Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

In saying that, military jurisprudence, that disciplinary machine of death, becomes not only the recorder of destruction but also the re-ordering of the world, thus re(c)ording the world under Foucault’s Matrix of Practical Reason:

Through the technologies of production, which permit us to produce, transform or manipulate things
Through the technologies of power, which determine the conduct of individuals and submit them to certain ends or domination, an objectivising of the subject.1

.
In short, the military is power; the military subjugates humans; and the military destroys at will.

The strange beauty of the Physical Damage Division photographs is that they simply document what remains. Like the “shadow” of a hand valve wheel on the painted wall of a gas storage tank, Ground Zero is burnt onto the ground glass of the camera.

Like the “shadow” these events are eternally seared into the collective memory never, ever, to be forgotten.

Many thankx to the International Center of Photography for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

United States Strategic Bombing Survey, Physical Damage Division
[Ruins of the Hiroshima Prefectural Commercial Exhibition Hall (A-Bomb Dome)]
October 24, 1945
Gelatin silver print
© International Center of Photography

United States Strategic Bombing Survey, Physical Damage Division
[Distorted steel-frame structure of Odamasa Store, Hiroshima]
November 20, 1945
Gelatin silver print
© International Center of Photography

United States Strategic Bombing Survey, Physical Damage Division
[Ruins of Chugoku Coal Distribution Company or Hiroshima Gas Company]
November 8, 1945
Gelatin silver contact print
© International Center of Photography

United States Strategic Bombing Survey, Physical Damage Division
[Remains of a school building]
November 17, 1945
Gelatin silver contact print
© International Center of Photography

“Once-classified images of atomic destruction at Hiroshima will be displayed in a new exhibition Hiroshima: Ground Zero 1945 at the International Center of Photography (1133 Avenue of the Americas at 43rd Street) from May 20 to August 28, 2011. Drawn from ICP’s permanent collection, the Hiroshima archive includes more than 700 images of absence and annihilation, which formed the basis for civil defense architecture in the United States. These images had been mislaid for over forty years before being acquired by ICP in 2006.

This exhibition will include approximately 60 contact prints and photographs as well as the secret 1947 United States Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS) report, The Effects of the Strategic Bombing on Hiroshima, Japan. It will be accompanied by a catalogue published by ICP/Steidl, with essays by John W. Dower, Adam Harrison Levy, David Monteyne, Philomena Mariani, and Erin Barnett.

After the nuclear attacks in August 1945, President Truman dispatched members of the USSBS to Japan to survey the military, economic, and civilian damage. The Survey’s Physical Damage Division photographed, analyzed, and evaluated the atomic bomb’s impact on the structures surrounding the Hiroshima blast site, designated “Ground Zero.” The findings of the USSBS provided essential information to American architects and civil engineers as they debated the merits of bomb shelters, suburbanization, and revised construction techniques.

The photographs in this exhibition were in the possession of Robert L. Corsbie, an executive officer of the Physical Damage Division who later worked for the Atomic Energy Commission. An architectural engineer and expert on the effects of the atomic bomb, he used what he learned from the structural analyses and these images to promote civil defense architecture in the U.S. The photographs went through a series of unintended moves after Corsbie, his wife and son died in a house fire in 1967.

The U.S., at war with Japan, detonated the world’s first weaponized atomic bomb over Hiroshima, a vast port city of over 350,000 inhabitants, on August 6, 1945. The blast obliterated about 70 percent of the city and caused the deaths of more than 140,000 people. Three days later, the U.S. dropped a second nuclear bomb on Nagasaki, resulting in another 80,000 fatalities. Within a week, Japan announced its surrender to the Allied Powers, effectively ending World War II.

“Once part of a classified cache of government photographs, this archive of haunting images documents the devastating power of the atomic bomb,” said ICP Assistant Curator of Collections Erin Barnett, who organized the exhibition.

Press release from the International Center of Photography website

United States Strategic Bombing Survey, Physical Damage Division
["Shadow" of a hand valve wheel on the painted wall of a gas storage tank; radiant heat instantly burned paint where the heat rays were not
obstructed, Hiroshima]
October 14 - November 26, 1945
Gelatin silver print
© International Center of Photography

United States Strategic Bombing Survey, Physical Damage Division
[Interior of Hiroshima City Hall auditorium with undamaged walls and framing but spalling of plaster and complete destruction of contents by fire]
November 1, 1945
Gelatin silver print
© International Center of Photography

United States Strategic Bombing Survey, Physical Damage Division
[Rooftop view of atomic destruction, looking southwest, Hiroshima]
October 31, 1945
Gelatin silver print
© International Center of Photography

United States Strategic Bombing Survey, Physical Damage Division
[Steel stairs warped by intense heat from burned book stacks of Asano Library, Hiroshima]
November 15, 1945
Gelatin silver contact print
© International Center of Photography

1. Foucault, Michel. “Technologies of the Self,” quoted in Martin, Luther and Gutman, Huck and Hutton, Patrick (eds.,). Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. London: Tavistock Publications, 1988, p.18.

International Center of Photography
1133 Avenue of the Americas at 43rd Street
New York NY 10036
T 212 857 0045

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Wednesday: 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
Thursday – Friday: 10:00 am – 8:00 pm
Saturday – Sunday: 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
Closed: Mondays

International Center of Photography website

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Aug

The Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), Hobart

By Dr Marcus Bunyan 1 Comment

Categories: architecture, Australian artist, Australian writing, beauty, black and white photography, colour photography, digital photography, documentary photography, drawing, existence, Fredrick White, gallery website, landscape, light, memory, painting, photography, portrait, printmaking, psychological, sculpture, space, time, video and works on paper
Tags: Babylonia, Callum Morton, Callum Morton Babylonia, Conrad Shawcross, Conrad Shawcross Loop System Quintet, Erwin Wurm, Erwin Wurm Fat Car, Fat Car, Hobart, Jannis Kounellis, Jannis Kounellis Untitled, Jean-François Lyotard, Loop System Quintet, MONA, MONA Corten Stairwell, MONA Portrait gallery, MONA The Void, Sidney Nolan, Sidney Nolan Snake, Taiyo Kimura, Taiyo Kimura Untitled (stool for guard), tasmania, The Museum of Old and New Art, The O, Victor Burgin, Victor Burgin In/Different Spaces

“Lyotard writes,”We must not begin with transgression, we must immediately go to the very end of cruelty, construct the anatomy of polymorphous perversion, unfold the immense membrane of the libidinal ‘body,’ which is quite the inverse of a system of parts.” Lyotard sees this “membrane” as composed of the most heterogeneous items: human bone and writing paper, steel and glass, syntax and the skin on the inside of the thigh. In the libidinal economy, writes Lyotard: “All of these zones are butted end to end … on a Moebius strip … a moebian skin [an] interminable band of variable geometry (a concavity is necessarily a convexity at the next turn) [with but] a single face, and therefore neither exterior nor interior.”

Jean-François Lyotard quoted in Victor Burgin. In/Different Spaces 1

.

“Taking a walk is also an extremely immediate form of experience. Serge Daney describes the act of perception while taking a walk: ‘Because I am not particularly fond of bravura pieces, I always need a transition from one thing to the next. And I am glad that I can find it through by body and experience of walking…”
The visual memory of the walker/viewer determines the sequence of the pictures. Since the 1960s Marcel Broodthaers has defined the exhibition as a cinematic sequence of pictures and objects, thereby subverting the fixity of the single object through recontextualisation.”

Serge Daney quoted in Hans Obrist. “In the Midst of Things, At the Centre of Nothing.” 2

Libidinal, Moebic MONA

My analogy: you are standing in the half-dark, your chest open, squeezing the beating heart with blood coursing between your fingers while the other hand is up your backside playing with your prostrate gland. I think ringmeister David Walsh would approve.

My best friends analogy: a cross between a car park, night club, sex sauna and art gallery.

Weeks later I am still thinking about the wonderful immersive, sensory experience that is MONA. Peter Timms in an insightful article in Meanjin calls it a post-Google Wunderkammer, or wonder chest.3 It can be seen as a mirabilia – a non-historic installation designed primarily to delight, surprise and in this case shock. The body, sex, death and mortality are hot topics in the cultural arena4 and Walsh’s collection covers all bases. The collection and its display are variously hedonistic, voyeuristic, narcissistic, fetishistic pieces of theatre subsumed within the body of the spectacular museum architecture.

The experience starts with the ferry ride from the wharf in Hobart to the museum – the only way to arrive. During the 20 minutes of the journey mental baggage seems to drop away as you look over the water to the industrial zinc works, pass under bridges and then the museum comes into view. Perched on a promontory of land the museum rises like a rusted ancient temple. After disembarking you climb a colossal staircase to the entrance of the museum, all angles and mirrored surfaces. You enter one of two Roy Grounds listed modernist buildings built in the 1950s – beautiful, crisp white spaces that house the shop and a cafe, cloakroom and inquiry desk where you collect your ‘O’, an iPhone-like device that tracks all the artworks that you look at. The are no didactic text panels in the museum freeing the viewer to just experience, all data such as artists names and educational information and the tit-bit Gonzo text being accessed through the ‘O’. Into the large enclosed forecourt space a spiral staircase with a circular lift in the centre descends into the abyss (an inspired piece of design) and your journey proper has begun. Three levels deep into the ground you travel, the space carved out of solid rock. Impressive.

The museum is the body and the artworks are the organs, fragments of the whole exhibition (that of the actual museum). The experience is very kinaesthetic as the body gets lost within the space of the gallery. We wandered like flaneurs among the darkened, cinema-like spaces, almost floating from one area to the next, discovering, feeling disorientated, following underground passages, tunnels and stairs, emerging into light and then descending into the abyss again. Hours passed. Like a Moebius strip there seemed to be no interior/exterior to the body. As Lyotard notes the membrane of the libidinal ‘body’ is composed of the most heterogeneous items: here was rock, steel, shit, bestiality, intestines, brain, touch, burial etc… the curating of the collection within the space “creating a safe space for the appreciation and consideration of seemingly extreme and subversive practices.”5

Into this space of controlled transgression, the carnivalesque mise-en-scène allow the artists to delve into the deeper and darker areas of the human condition: “as Anthony Everitt once said of Damien Hirst [to] ‘open up paths for the viewer into areas of experience which are not anti-moral or amoral but extra-moral… a world where bad taste is driven to the point of elegance and disgust is filtered into delight’.”6

While some of the works were spotlit in the darkened galleries, “this dramatic lighting working to decontextualize the art objects, evoking a crepuscular and “timeless” sense of space, out of which the individual pieces emerged,”7 there also seemed to be an affinity between the building itself and the artworks (relating to the concept of affinity in museum curation). The diversity of installation techniques made an acknowledgement of the institutionalizing processes part of the viewer’s experience of the show, disrupting a unified, totalizing presentation of these objects and their cultures as “exhibition.”8 The intertextual tableaux mixed a Damien Hirst spin painting with Egyptian sculpture, ancient artefacts with Fat Cars. The context of the objects and their relationship to each other and the architecture is how the works are “framed.” This device emphasises the aesthetic rather than information and encourages the viewer to think about the relationship between the artefacts, objects and contemporary works. These inventive arrangements create a meta-narrative that offers the possibility of multiple interpretations to the viewer, multiple truths. All of this undertaken as the body moves through the spaces of the gallery and gets “lost”. As Norman Bryson has observed, “Architecture is sensed primarily through the eye and through bodily movement, and these sensations also play a key role in the way in which the contents of museums make their impact.”9

While the items are not explicitly related in terms of subject, medium or style through unexpected confrontation the works spring to dissonant life. Most of the time. When this process doesn’t work the viewer is left a little flat feeling, and…. so? wandering from piece to piece becoming slightly disenchanted. Little of the work at MONA took me to new spaces; in fact some of it was pretty mediocre, including the very dated Sir Sidney Nolan Snake (1970 to 1972, see below) that is permanent ‘wallpaper’ and takes up a whole, beautiful gallery wall. The tri-screen video by Russian collective AES+F, the works by Anselm Kiefer and the ancient artefacts (most of all) were notable exceptions. The museum is not a place for prolonged concentration and contemplation. This is not really the point of the place. The whole museum is a sensory, immersive surprising experience that cannot be broken down to its parts. David Walsh’s collection does tick all the fashionable boxes: here a Juan Davila, there a Del Kathyrn Barton, now a Howard Arkeley as though his buyers have advised him on just what to buy, but it is his personal vision, his collection. You can’t argue with that.

On of the problems of lumping all of these works together is obvious: “Ancient objects whose meaning is lost to us, medieval utensils, Christian religious images, and art objects made by modern masters were reduced to one meaning – stylistic resemblances providing evidence of the essential nature of humanity.”10 In other words a return to the globalizing view of humanity evidenced by Edward Steichen’s MOMA world touring photographic exhibition of the 1950s ‘The Family of Man’. Conversely, when this strategy works well it promotes for the viewer different modes and levels of ‘interpretation’ through subtle juxtaposition of ‘experience’. As Emma Barker has observed, “we still need a curator to stimulate readings of the collection and to establish those ‘climatic zones’ which can enrich our appreciation and understanding of art… Our aim must be to generate a condition in which visitors can experience a sense of discovery in looking at particular paintings, sculptures or installations in a particular room at a particular moment, rather than find themselves standing on the conveyer belt of history.”11 Within this plastic space experience is paramount, allowing the viewer to develop their own reading without relying on the curatorial interpretation of history, setting new parameters for the relationship between viewer and object. As Barker notes such juxtapositions are a more natural strategy for a private collector than for a museum curator, with exhibitions and displays according to this dialectical principle happening with more frequency.12 The museum looses its fundamental didactic, educational purpose.

Other problems may also become evident. In a museum whose spectacular architecture was specifically designed for David Walsh’s collection it will be interesting to see how outside, touring exhibitions (such as the recently installed Experimenta Utopia Now exhibition) display in the space, especially given the psychosexual nature of his collection and its relationship to the building. If the quality of the temporary exhibitions is overwhelmed by the architecture, if the labyrinthine, enigmatic and layered nature of the space (all those floating bridges and the huge Void that can be seen in the photographs below) engulfs lesser works then it may well fall very flat.

At the end of the day we emerged into the afternoon light, expelled from the museum in a tidal wave of humanity, exhausted, satiated. Where else in Australia could you spend all day at a museum and not have seen enough? On flying home you can log into the MONA website to retrieve your ‘O’ tour, to see what art you liked and what you didn’t; what pieces you saw and all those that somehow you missed! The physical and its remembrance transported into the virtual.

.
Since Laura Mulvey’s essay of 1974 “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” we have been aware of the voyeuristic and fetishistic character of our psychosexual relation to cinema. Engulfed in the dark cube, that psychosexual panorama, the cinematic labyrinth that is MONA has the viewer absenting themselves in front of the art in favour of the Eye and the Spectator.13 Spectatorship and their attendant erotics has MONA as a form of fetishistic cinema. It is as if what Barthes calls “the eroticism of place” were a modern equivalent of the eighteenth century genius loci, the “genius of the place.”
The place is spectacular, the private collection writ large as public institution, the symbolic power of the institution masked through its edifice. The art become autonomous, cut free from its cultural associations, transnational, globalised, experienced through kinaesthetic means; the viewer meandering through the galleries, the anti-museum, as an international flaneur. Go. Experience!

Dr Marcus Bunyan for the Art Blart blog

Many thankx to Delia Nicholls for all her help and to MONA for allowing me to publish most of the photographs in the posting (all except the top two and the one of us inside Babylonia that were taken by Fredrick White). Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Zinc works from the ferry on the way to MONA

MONA exterior, Hobart

3d schematic from the O, showing the levels and nodes indicating art works visited, MONA

The Void
February 2011
Museum of Old and New Art – interior
Photo credit: MONA/Leigh Carmichael
Image Courtesy of MONA Museum of Old and New Art

B1 walkway overlooking The Void
February 2011
Museum of Old and New Art – interior
Photo credit: MONA/Leigh Carmichael
Image Courtesy of MONA Museum of Old and New Art

Loop System Quintet/Untitled (stool for guard)

Left:
Taiyo Kimura (Kamakura, Japan, 1970)
Untitled (stool for guard)
2007
Mixed media, clothes, cd player, speaker

Right:
Conrad Shawcross (London, England, 1977)
Loop System Quintet 
2005
Waxed machined oak, five light bulbs, electric motor and gearbox, drive shafts, cogs, universal joints, flange units, screws, bolts, nuts, washers

Photo credit: MONA/Leigh Carmichael
Image Courtesy of MONA Museum of Old and New Art

Callum Morton (Montreal, Canada, 1965)
Babylonia
2005
Wood, polystyrene, epoxy resin, acrylic paint, light, carpet, mirror and sound
Photo credit: MONA/Leigh Carmichael  Image Courtesy of MONA Museum of Old and New Art

Sculptor Fredrick White and myself inside Callum Morton’s Babylonia wearing the ‘O’

Portrait gallery
Various artworks by various artists
Museum of Old and New Art – interior
Photo credit: MONA/Leigh Carmichael
Image Courtesy of MONA Museum of Old and New Art

Masturbation. It is a source of endless irony to me that when I was young, and desperately in need of endless fucking, no one was interested in helping me out, whereas now, older and slower, I could fill even my desired adolescent quota. What saved me then was my right hand, even though I call myself left-handed. Surely the hand that you wank with (I guess John Holmes was ambidextrous) defines you just as much as the hand you write with? Anyway, who writes anymore? It’s so much easier to type. Mental masturbation allows me to pretend I’m a mental John Holmes, takes both hands. But no brains.

Art. I’m not at all sure that conceptual art and traditional art are the same thing. One can come from muscle memory, from pragma; at its best it’s not at all conscious. The former, though, is so self-aware it’s often targeting its own self-awareness. Check out the Hirst and the Pylypchuk at the other end of the gallery.

David Walsh 2011

Corten Stairwell
February 2011
Museum of Old and New Art – interior
Photo credit: MONA/Leigh Carmichael
Image Courtesy of MONA Museum of Old and New Art

Corten Stairwell & Surrounding Artworks
February 2011
Museum of Old and New Art – interior
Photo credit: MONA/Leigh Carmichael
Image Courtesy of MONA Museum of Old and New Art

The Nolan Gallery

Sir Sidney Nolan (Carlton, Victoria, Australia, 1917-1992)
Snake
1970 to 1972
Mixed media on paper, 1620 sheets

Jannis Kounellis (Piraeus, Greece, 1936)
Untitled 
2002
Jute coffee bags, coal; three parts

Photo credit: MONA/Leigh Carmichael
Image Courtesy of MONA Museum of Old and New Art

Erwin Wurm (Bruck an der Mur, Austria, 1954)
Fat Car
2006
Steel chassis and body; leather interior, with polystyrene and fibreglass
Photo credit: MONA/Leigh Carmichael
Image Courtesy of MONA Museum of Old and New Art

1. Lyotard, Jean-François. Économie Libidinale. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1974, pp.10-11 quoted in Burgin, Victor. In/Different Spaces: Place and Memory in Visual Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995, p.150.

2. Obrist, Hans Ulrich. “In the Midst of Things at the Center of Nothing,” in Harding, Anna (ed.,). Curating: The Contemporary Museum and Beyond, (Art & Design Magazine Profile No. 52), London: A.D., 1997, p.88.

3. Timms, Peter. “A Post-google Wunderkammer: Hobart’s Museum of Old and New Art Redefines the Genre,” in Meanjin, Vol. 70, No. 2, Winter 2011. pp.31-39.

4. Keidan, Lois. “Showtime: Curating Live Art in the 90s,” in Harding, Anna (ed.,). Curating: The Contemporary Museum and Beyond, (Art & Design Magazine Profile No. 52), London: A.D., 1997, p.41.

5. Ibid., p.41.

6. Ibid., p.41.

7. Staniszewski, Mary Anne. The power of display: a history of exhibition installations at the Museum of Modern Art. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998, p.84.

8. Ibid., p.97.

9. Bryson, Norman. “A Walk for a Walk’s Sake,” in De Zegher, Catherine (ed.,). The Stage of Drawing: Gesture and Act. London: Tate, 2003, pp.149-58.

10. Staniszewski, op. cit. p.129.

11. Barker, Emma. “Exhibiting the Canon: The Blockbuster Show,” in Barker, Emma (ed.,). Contemporary Cultures of Display. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999, p.55.

12. Ibid., p.45.

13. O’Neill, Paul. “The Curatorial Turn: From Practice to Discourse,” in Rugg, Judith and Sedgwick, Michèle (eds.,). Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance. Bristol: Intellect, 2007, pp.13-28.

Museum of Old and New Art
655 Main Road Berriedale
Hobart Tasmania 7011, Australia

Opening hours:
Daily 10am – 6pm

MONA website

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Jul

‘Spomenik’ by Jan Kempenaers

By Dr Marcus Bunyan 1 Comment

Three Canons

.

Be still with yourself

Until the object of your attention

Affirms your presence

.

Let the Subject generate its own Composition

.

When the image mirrors the man

And the man mirrors the subject

Something might take over

.

Minor White 1968

Gone is the modernist tenet of authorship in which everything in a photograph depends and can be traced to a single photographer acting in isolation. In its place, White supposes a relationship with subject that is a two way street: by granting the world some role in its own representation we create a photograph that is not so much a product solely of individual actions as it is the result of a negotiation in which the world and all its subjects might participate.

Vince Leo

These are beautiful photographs; there is no fuss, no histrionics here. The use of light and the framing of subject are wonderful. The photographer has let the subject generate its own composition meaning that the sculptures speak for themselves: something takes over – an ethereal evocation of space and place.

The sculptures occupy a representational space appropriated by the imagination. “Lefebvre writes that it [representational space] “overlays physical space, making symbolic use of its objects” and is predominantly non-verbal in nature.”1 The photographs and their representational space offer the viewer the possibility of drifting (Guy Debord’s dérive) encouraging “an unplanned journey through a landscape… where an individual travels where the subtle aesthetic contours of the surrounding architecture and geography subconsciously direct them with the ultimate goal of encountering an entirely new and authentic experience.”2

I find the photographs truly authentic. I immerse myself in their presence: I embrace them because they are in my imagination, creatures of the deep recesses of the mind.

Many thankx to Jan Kempenaers for allowing me to publish the photographs and text in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. All photographs © Jan Kempenaers and courtesy of the artist.

Buy the book; support the artist!

1. Burgin, Victor. In/Different Spaces: Place and Memory in Visual Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995, p.27.

2. Anon. “Dérive,” on Wikipedia [Online] Cited 28/06/2011. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dérive

Jan Kempenaers information

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Jun

Exhibition: ‘Vienna – Art & Design’ at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: architecture, beauty, black and white photography, designer, documentary photography, exhibition, existence, film, gallery website, intimacy, jewellery, landscape, light, Melbourne, memory, National Gallery of Victoria, painting, photography, portrait, sculpture, space, time and works on paper
Tags: Adolf Loos, Adolf Loos Sideboard, art, Austria, Chair for Dr Karl Lueger, Charles Robert Ashbee, Charles Robert Ashbee Standing cup and cover, Dagobert Peche, design, Die Zeit, Egon Schiele, Egon Schiele Portrait of a boy, Emilie Flöge, Ferdinand Andri, Ferdinand Andri The Gallia children, Fritza Riedler, Gustave Klimt, Gustave Klimt Beethoven Frieze, Gustave Klimt Emilie Flöge, Gustave Klimt Fritza Riedler, Gustave Klimt Portrait of Hermine Gallia, Gustave Klimt The Park, Herbert Rainer, Josef Hoffmann, Josef Hoffmann Collapsible library steps, Josef Hoffmann Sports Trophy, Josef Hoffmann Tea and coffee service, Josef Hoffmann Tea service, Koloman Moser, Koloman Moser Armchair, Max Klinger, Max Klinger Beethoven, Otto Wagner, Otto Wagner Chair for Dr Karl Lueger, Otto Wagner Reconstruction of facade for Die Zeit, Portrait of Herbert Rainer aged approximately six, Portrait of Hermine Gallia, Reconstruction of facade for Die Zeit, The Gallia children, The Park, Vienna, Vienna - Art & Design, Vienna Municipal Ball, Wilhelm Gause, Wilhelm Gause Vienna Municipal Ball, Wilhelm Otto List, Wilhelm Otto List Young lady in black and white, Young lady in black and white

Exhibition dates: 18th June – 9th October 2011

A subtle pleasure

The delicate paintings are smaller with a flatness of texture and a sombreness that I had not imagined; magnificent in their subtlety. The real stars of this wonderful exhibition, however, are the design pieces. Whether silver, wood, ceramic, glass or jewellery the designs are balanced by a glorious aesthetic. Never has a tea service looked so ravishing or decadent.

This is not a wham bang show like Dali or that other King of some fame showing elsewhere. This is for a discerning audience – one that can take time (between pots of tea) to study and go ooh and aah!

Many thankx to the National Gallery of Victoria for inviting me and for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. All photographs © Marcus Bunyan 2011 except the photographs of the full paintings which come from the NGV press CD ROM.

Media preview for ‘Vienna – Art & Design’ at the National Gallery of Victoria

I just couldn’t help myself!

Installation view of first room

At right

Wilhelm GAUSE
Germany 1853 – 1916
Vienna Municipal Ball
1904
watercolour and oil on cardboard
62.0 x 88.0 cm
Wien Museum, Vienna
Commissioned by the City of Vienna, 1904

Otto WAGNER (designer)
Austria 1841 – 1918
Alexander ALBERT (manufacturer)
Austria active c.1904
Chair for Dr Karl Lueger
1904
Rosewood (Dalbergia sp.), mother-of-pearl, leather
98.5 x 63 x 59.5 cm
Wien Museum, Vienna
Estate of Karl Lueger, 1910

Otto WAGNER (architect)
Austria 1841 – 1918
Reconstruction of facade for Die Zeit
1902 designed, 1985 made
iron, aluminium, nickel-plated iron, glass
450.0 x 332.0 cm
Wien Museum, Vienna
Commissioned by the Historisches Museum der Stadt Wien, 1985

Otto WAGNER (architect)
Austria 1841 – 1918
Reconstruction of facade for Die Zeit (detail)
1902 designed, 1985 made
iron, aluminium, nickel-plated iron, glass
450.0 x 332.0 cm
Wien Museum, Vienna
Commissioned by the Historisches Museum der Stadt Wien, 1985

Various Otto Wagner objects including shelving, stool, chair and hot air blower (rear)

Gustave Klimt
The Park (detail)
1909
oil on canvas

Installation view part of the second room

Wilhelm Otto List
Young lady in black and white (detail)
1904
oil on canvas

Charles Robert Ashbee (designer)
Standing cup and cover
1901
silver, turqoise

Josef Hoffmann (designer)
Sports Trophy
1902
silver, gilt, malachite

Josef HOFFMANN (designer)
Austria-Hungary 1870 – 1956
WIENER WERKSTÄTTE, Vienna (manufacturer) Austria-Hungary 1903 – 32
Tea service
c. 1909 – 1911
silver-gilt, wood
(1.A-E) 21.5 x 29.0 x 26.8 cm (overall) (kettle, stand and burner)
(2) 10.8 x 15.4 x 20.2 cm (teapot)
(3.A-B) 8.7 x 8.8 x 6.8 cm (overall) (sugar basin and lid)
(4) 4.8 x 8.5 x 15.6 cm (milk jug)
(5) 3.4 x 36.3 x 29.9 cm (tray)
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Purchased, 1985

Installation view of room three showing part of Gustave Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze: Central wall 1901 – 02 (detail at top)

Max Klinger
Beethoven
c.1902
plaster

Installation view of room four

Gustav KLIMT
Austria 1862 – 1918
Emilie Flöge
1902
oil on canvas
178.0 x 80.0 cm
Wien Museum, Vienna

Gustav KLIMT
Austria 1862 – 1918
Emilie Flöge (detail)
1902
oil on canvas
178.0 x 80.0 cm
Wien Museum, Vienna

Installation view of room five

At right

Koloman Moser (designer)
Armchair
1903
Painted Beech

Second right

Josef Hoffmann (designer)
Collapsible library steps
1905

Gustav KLIMT
Austria 1862 – 1918
Fritza Riedler (detail)
1906
oil on canvas

Gustav KLIMT
Austria 1862 – 1918
Fritza Riedler
1906
oil on canvas
152.0 x 134.0 cm
Belvedere, Vienna

Installation views of room six

Josef Hoffmann
Tea and coffee service
1909
Silver, ivory

Installation view of room seven with, against the wall,

Adolf LOOS (designer)
Austria 1870 – 1933
Sideboard, from the Langer apartment
1903
Mahogany (Swietenia sp.), mirror, brass

Installation view of room seven

Ferdinand Andri
The Gallia children
1901
oil on canvas

with Josef Hoffmann furniture in the foreground

Gustave Klimt
Portrait of Hermine Gallia (detail)
1904
oil on canvas

Various pieces of Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Mosser silver. Love the reflected light!

Installation views of room eight

Various objects by Dagobert Peche (left, right and second right) and Josef Hoffmann

Egon SCHIELE
Austria 1890 – 1918
Portrait of a boy (Portrait of Herbert Rainer aged approximately six) (detail)
1910
oil on canvas

Egon SCHIELE
Austria 1890 – 1918
Portrait of a boy (Portrait of Herbert Rainer aged approximately six)
1910
oil on canvas
101.0 x 101.5 cm
Belvedere, Vienna

NGV International
180 St Kilda Road

Opening hours
10am – 5pm. Closed Tuesdays.

National Gallery of Victoria website

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Marcus Bunyan website – please click on images to view new series ‘Vertical’ 2011

NEW BODY OF WORK: 'Vertical' 2011

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'Entre Nous: The Art of Claude Cahun' at Art Institute of Chicago artblart.com #sexuality #gay #lesbian #love #partnership #portrait 2 days ago
'Entre Nous: The Art of Claude Cahun' at Art Institute of Chicago artblart.com #Entre_Nous #Claude_Cahun #Cahun #identity #gender 2 days ago

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Dr Marcus Bunyan is an Australian artist and writer. His work explores the boundaries of identity and place. He writes the Art Blart blog which reviews exhibitions in Melbourne, Australia and posts exhibitions from around the world. He has a Dr of Philosophy from RMIT University, Melbourne and is currently studying a Master of Art Curatorship at The University of Melbourne.

AUSTRALIAN ARTISTS AND EXHIBITIONS BY NAME AND POSTING AT THIS LINK

INTERNATIONAL ARTISTS AND EXHIBITIONS BY NAME AND POSTING AT THIS LINK

Art Blart

Archive for the 'architecture' Category

Exhibition: ‘In Focus: Los Angeles, 1945 – 1980′ at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Exhibition dates: 20th December 2011 – 6th May 2012

Exhibition: ‘Berenice Abbott (1898-1991), Photographs’ at Jeu de Paume, Paris

Exhibition dates: 21st February – 29th April 2012

Architecture

Berenice Abbott Petit Journal

Video: New Australian Pavilion for the Venice Biennale by architects Denton Corker Marshall

Exhibition: ‘The Photographs of Brett Weston’ at the The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City

Exhibition dates: 23rd November 2011 – 25th March 25 2012

Exhibition: ‘Light Years: Conceptual Art and the Photograph, 1964 – 1977′ at the Art Institute of Chicago

Exhibition dates: 13th December 2011 – 11th March 2012

Exhibition: ‘After the Gold Rush: Contemporary Photographs from the Collection’ at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Exhibition dates: 22nd March, 2011 – 2nd January, 2012

Exhibition: ‘Hiroshima: Ground Zero 1945′ at the International Center of Photography, New York

Exhibition dates: 20th May – 28th August, 2011

The Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), Hobart

Libidinal, Moebic MONA

‘Spomenik’ by Jan Kempenaers

Three Canons

Exhibition: ‘Vienna – Art & Design’ at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 18th June – 9th October 2011

A subtle pleasure

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Marcus Bunyan website – please click on images to view new series ‘Vertical’ 2011

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