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May

Exhibition: ‘Yang Fudong: “Estranged Paradise. Works 1993 – 2013″‘ at Kunsthalle Zürich

Categories: black and white photography, colour photography, digital photography, documentary photography, exhibition, existence, film, gallery website, intimacy, landscape, photographic series, photography, portrait, psychological, reality, sculpture, space, time and video
Tags: Cheng shi Zhi guang, Chinese artist, Chinese film maker, Chinese photographer, Chinese photography, City Light, East of Que Village, Estranged Paradise, Estranged Paradise. Works 1993 - 2013, film noir, I love my motherland (wo ai wo de zhu guo), international cinema, International Hotel, International Hotel (1), Kunsthalle Zürich, mo sheng tian tang, Mrs. Huang at M last Night, Shanghai, Shenjia alley, Shenjia alley. Fairy (1), The Evergreen Nature of Romantic Stories, The Fifth Night (Rehearsal), The First Intellectual, Tonight Moon, Yang Fudong, Yang Fudong An Estranged Paradise, Yang Fudong Cheng shi Zhi guang, Yang Fudong City Light, Yang Fudong East of Que Village, Yang Fudong Estranged Paradise, Yang Fudong Estranged Paradise. Works 1993 - 2013, Yang Fudong I love my motherland (wo ai wo de zhu guo), Yang Fudong International Hotel (1), Yang Fudong mo sheng tian tang, Yang Fudong Mrs. Huang at M last Night (8), Yang Fudong Shenjia alley. Fairy (1), Yang Fudong The First Intellectual

Exhibition dates: 6th April – 26th May 2013

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

*PLEASE NOTE THIS POSTING CONTAINS ART PHOTOGRAPHS OF FEMALE NUDITY – IF YOU DO NOT LIKE PLEASE DO NOT LOOK, FAIR WARNING HAS BEEN GIVEN*

Installation views of Yang Fudong: “Estranged Paradise. Works 1993 – 2013″, Kunsthalle Zürich, 2013
© Stefan Altenburger Photography Zurich

Yang Fudong
East of Que Village
2007
Six channel video installation, b&w, with sound
20 minutes 50 seconds
Installation view Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, 2009
Courtesy of the artist; Marian Goodman Gallery, New York / Paris; ShanghART gallery, Shanghai

“Yang Fudong (born 1971 in Beijing, lives and works in Shanghai) is one of the most important figures of China’s contemporary art scene and independent cinema movement. His films and photographic work, often rooted in traditional Chinese painting, examine tensions between urban and rural, history and the present, worldliness and intellectualism. Their a-temporal and dreamlike quality, long and suspended sequences, dividing narratives, as well as multiple relationships and story lines reflect the conundrums of idealism and ideology of a new generation. At the same time, the works address the ideals and anxieties of young people who are struggling to find their place in the fast-paced changes of present-day China. Estranged Paradise. Works 1993 – 2013, curated by Beatrix Ruf and Philippe Pirotte, is Yang Fudong’s first major institutional survey exhibition in Europe, presenting film, installation as well as photography from the late 1990s until today, highlighting the formal aspects of the construction of cinema in the artist’s oeuvre and its resonance in Film Noir aesthetics. Following the exhibition in Zurich, the show will travel to the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (21 August – 1 December 2013).

Yang came to the attention of the Western art world in 2002, when he premiered his film An Estranged Paradise (1997-2002) at Documenta XI. Beginning with a meditation on the composition of space in Chinese painting, the film traces the spiritual instability of Zhuzi, a young intellectual in the legendary city of Hangzhou. The film reflects the artist’s fascination with international cinema, referencing such works as Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise (1984) and Jean-Luc Godard’s À bout de souffle (1960), as well as Shanghai films from the 1920s and 1930s, a place and time in which China was strongly influenced by the West. Using camera, lighting and cinematic space to outline the landscape of Chinese modernity, Yang reveals his love of black and white cinematography. Likewise, the contradictions and discontents raised by a progressive modernity as characteristic themes of Film Noir play a significant role in the artist’s work: an invocation of the past and anxiety about the future, and tensions between indifference and engagement, remembrance and forgetting. Films that embody Film Noir concepts include the single channel videos Backyard – Hey, Sun is Rising! (2001), in which four men engage in a series of simultaneous but isolated rituals: smoking, massage, military exercises in a park; City Light (2000), which functions as a noir detective story with elements of slapstick; Honey (2003) then again, a stylistic reference to spy films and all their clichés, invokes ambiguity of seduction and deceit as the earmark of espionage, but also a sense of heightened anxiety and alienation, reflecting paranoia, possibly a metaphor for an ambivalent situation in contemporary China. More recently, since Yang doesn’t direct his actors anymore, they seem to inhabit plot-less noirs, reflecting the genre more in stylistic ways, as low-key lighting, exaggerated contrasts, a dramatically shadowed lighting, an eroticist style and a psychologically expressive approach to visual composition, or mise-en-sène.

The protagonists of Yang’s works are mostly his contemporaries, young people between the ages of twenty and forty, who have spent most of their lives in a society in transformation. The ideals and anxieties of a new generation, the dignity of the individual in a rapidly developing society still in the process of adjusting to the material conditions of the constantly changing times, are recurring themes. This is most obvious in photographic series like Don’t worry, it will be better (2000) or Mrs. Huang at M last night (2006), both depict a fancy lady and her courtiers, in a hotel room or at a night out, seemingly enjoying the trophies of their material success. The sly glances of the protagonists, leave the audience in a state of uncertainty regarding the actual events and the storyline.

In other works some scenes and settings visually recall the literati paintings of ancient China, made by artists and intellectuals pursuing spiritual freedom living in seclusion. The Evergreen Nature of Romantic Stories (2000), a series of photographs in which young men and women stare at miniature landscapes (constructed landscapes mimicking natural scenery of rocks, hills and rivers), relocates the importance of reflection in traditional Chinese gardens as a metaphor for personal orientation and identity, in the domesticity of modern apartments. In the early video-installation Tonight Moon (2000), men in swimsuits and men in costumes mingle in an Eastern botanical garden. Multiple story lines develop and diverge on small monitors and a large screen, conveying a sense of ambiguity. International Hotel (2010), the recent series of black and white photographs of attractive women in bathing suits dipping into a pool at an Art Deco Hotel, invokes the sentimental and touches upon questions about feminine interiority, imbued with melancholy connotations taking the form of moderation and accommodation.

With the film installation East of Que Village (2007), Yang diverges from the urbanity of his other work, delivering a highly personal film that focuses on the sense of isolation and loss increasingly present in China’s contemporary society as communities are scattered, traditional rural villages dissolved, and the fight for survival takes precedence. The imagery is of a desolate and hostile landscape, the host to a group of wild dogs fighting a merciless life-and-death struggle for survival, with only a sporadic presence of human life and social values.

More and more in recent works, Yang shifts his attention toward a reflection on film production. The Fifth Night (Rehearsal) (2010) is an alternative edition of his seven-screen video installation The Fifth Night (with each screen running ten minutes and thirty-seven seconds, the exact length of a reel of film), including four full takes as well as an earlier rehearsal. The artist used different lenses for each camera, but films everything at the same moment. Yang calls this type of installation a “spatial film” or “multiple views” film, and he compares the technique to a contemporary form of the Chinese hand scroll. We see the itinerant youths who often occupy his films, with their pensive, inhibited expressions. Each screen features one solitary “absolute” protagonist; together they compose a series of distinct and mutually unbeknownst worlds. One screen’s lead character, in turn, becomes another’s extra. The sets and props are Yang’s most elaborate to date, with stages, spiral staircases, and alleyways merging into one. The enclosed courtyard in which the piece was shot comes to resemble a maze, pushing the concept of the narrative spatial possibilities of cinema. This bold experiment, which takes an open, outdoor space as an interior, breaks down a boundary that runs throughout Yang’s other films, which have been shot entirely inside or entirely outside. The “rehearsal” version captures the video output from seven monitors that were connected to seven film cameras and ends in “failure”, as one witnesses that one of the cameras breaks, leaving only six channels, assuming the notion that film is both a medium and a site. Additionally, there are three screens of photo documentation and a documentary. Yang coined it a “preview film” because of its raw-image quality, which included viewfinder frames, contradicting the very slick and refined results of the known version. In this instance, Yang transcended his traditional working process of shooting-editing-screening, and pushed further his theory that “anything which has been filmed can be shown. I found that what attracts me the most, and becomes my material, is the process of filmmaking itself.”

Press release from the Kunsthalle Zürich website

Yang Fudong
Shenjia alley. Fairy (1)
2000
C-print
96 x 150 cm
Courtesy of the artist; Marian Goodman Gallery, New York / Paris; ShanghART gallery, Shanghai

Yang Fudong
East of Que Village
2007
Six channel video installation, b&w, with sound
20 minutes 50 seconds
Courtesy of the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York / Paris, ShanghART gallery, Shanghai

Yang Fudong
Mrs. Huang at M last Night (8)
2006
C-print, b&w
120 x 180 cm
Courtesy of the artist; Marian Goodman Gallery, New York / Paris; ShanghART gallery, Shanghai

Yang Fudong
An Estranged Paradise (mo sheng tian tang)
1997-2002
Five-channel video (35 mm b&w film transferred to DVD), music by Jin Wang
76 minutes
Courtesy of the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York / Paris, ShanghART gallery, Shanghai

Yang Fudong
I love my motherland (wo ai wo de zhu guo)
1999
5-channel b&w video-installation
12 minutes
Courtesy of the artist; Marian Goodman Gallery, New York / Paris; ShanghART gallery, Shanghai

Yang Fudong
City Light (Cheng shi Zhi guang)
2000
Single-channel video, color, with sound
6 minutes
Courtesy of the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York / Paris, ShanghART gallery, Shanghai

Yang Fudong
International Hotel (1)
2010
Inkjet print, b&w
180 x 120 cm
Courtesy of the artist; Marian Goodman Gallery, New York / Paris; ShanghART gallery, Shanghai

Yang Fudong
The First Intellectual
2000
C-print
193 x 127 cm
Courtesy of the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York / Paris, ShanghART gallery, Shanghai

Kunsthalle Zürich
Limmatstrasse 270
CH-8005 Zürich
T: +41 (0) 44 272 15 15

Opening hours:
Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday: 11am – 6pm
Thursday: 11am – 8pm, free admission from 5 – 8pm
Saturday, Sunday, as well as public holidays: 10am – 5pm
Monday closed

Kunsthalle Zürich website

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May

Exhibition: ‘Concrete – Photography and Architecture’ at Fotomuseum Winterthur, Zurich

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: American, american photographers, architecture, beauty, black and white photography, colour photography, designer, digital photography, documentary photography, exhibition, film, gallery website, landscape, light, memory, New York, photographic series, photography, pictorialism, sculpture, space, surrealism, time, video and Walker Evans
Tags: "Op Art" bathing suit by Sinz, #1176 01 29 1997 3:30PM Looking Southeast, 24 Rue Bièvre Paris, Aage Strüwing Arne Jacobsen: Rødovre Town Hall, Anonymous Hardstrasse with Hardbrücke in construction, architectural design, architectural photography, architecture, architecture photography, Arne Jacobsen, Arne Jacobsen: Rødovre Town Hall, arts, beauty, Berlin, Blikkiesdorp, Blikkiesdorp Cape Town, Brutalism, Cambridge, Canadian Embassy Leipziger Platz Berlin, Cape Town, Carlo Scarpa's Tomba Brion, Cathedral of Light, Chandigarh, Charles Marville, Charles Marville 24 Rue Bièvre Paris, Chrysler Building under construction, concrete, Concrete - Photography and Architecture, concrete architecture, Concrete exhibition, design and reality, English photographer, exclusivity, f. c. gundlach, F.C. Gundlach "Op Art" bathing suit by Sinz, Façade of the Secretariat Building, Fotomuseum Winterthur, fragility, French photographer, gelatin silver print, Guido Guidi, Guido Guidi #1176 01 29 1997 3:30PM Looking Southeast, Guido Guidi Carlo Scarpa's Tomba Brion, Hardstrasse with Hardbrücke in construction, Henry Fox Talbot, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Hiroshi Sugimoto Seagram Building, homes and houses, Japanese artist, japanese photographer, Lala Aufsberg, Lala Aufsberg Cathedral of Light, Laurence Bonvin, Laurence Bonvin Blikkiesdorp Cape Town, Le Corbusier, Le Corbusier Façade of the Secretariat Building, Le Vele di Scampia, Leipziger Platz, leipziger platz berlin, Lucien Hervé, Lucien Hervé Le Corbusier: Façade of the Secretariat Building, Michael Wesely, Michael Wesely Canadian Embassy, Migropolis, Moriz Nähr, Moriz Nähr Staircase in the house Stonborough-Wittgenstein, Moriz Nähr Stiegenhaus im Haus Stonborough-Wittgenstein, New York, Nuremberg, photoanimation, Photography and Architecture, photography of architecture, Rødovre Town Hall, Salt print from calotype negative, Schlieren photography, Seagram Building, skyscraper, South Africa, St. John’s College, Staircase in the house Stonborough, Staircase in the house Stonborough-Wittgenstein, Stiegenhaus im Haus Stonborough-Wittgenstein, The Bridge of Sighs, Tobias Zielony, Tobias Zielony Le Vele di Scampia, utopian fantasies, Walker Evans, Walker Evans  Chrysler Building under construction, William Henry Fox Talbot, William Henry Fox Talbot The Bridge of Sighs, Wittgenstein, Wolfgang Scheppe's Migropolis, Zurich

Exhibition dates: 2nd March – 20th May 2013

When creating this blog, so much of my time is spent cleaning up clearly inadequate media images, an example of which can be seen below. I have become very adept at this process and my thoughts are this: would you want to be the artist whose work is displayed to the public in a remarkably decomposed manner, one not up to a standard of any artist who cares about their prints and reputation? I certainly would not. It is a wonder to me that museums and galleries spend thousands of dollars staging exhibitions and producing costly catalogues and yet cannot spend a tiny proportion of time, money and care on their media images to promote artist and said exhibition. I had to spend a lot of time on over half of these images to bring them up to presentable standard.

Having said that, there are some cracking photographs in this posting. The Sugimoto is sublime, Walker Evans so muscular, Lucien Hervé a masterpiece of light and texture, and Moriz Nähr a symphony of light and tone, to name but a few. I hope you enjoy all the effort it takes to bring these images to you.

Marcus

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Many thankx to the Fotomuseum Winterthur, Zurich for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Moriz Nähr
 Stiegenhaus im Haus Stonborough-Wittgenstein [Staircase in the house Stonborough-Wittgenstein] (composite)
1928

Anonymous
Hardstrasse with Hardbrücke in construction
1972
Gelatin-silver print
8,8 x 12,6 cm
Baugeschichtliches Archiv der Stadt Zürich

Michael Wesely
Canadian Embassy, Leipziger Platz, Berlin (5.2.2003 – 28.4.2005)
 C-print
125 x 175 cm
Galerie Fahnemann, Berlin
© Michael Wesely/Courtesy Galerie Fahnemann

William Henry Fox Talbot
The Bridge of Sighs, St. John’s College,  Cambridge
1845
Salt print from calotype negative
16.4 x 20.6 cm
Museum Folkwang Essen

Charles Marville
24, Rue Bièvre, Paris
1865-1869
Albumin print
27.4 x 36.6 cm
Collection Thomas Walther

Lucien Hervé
Le Corbusier: Façade of the Secretariat Building, Chandigarh, 1961
1961
Gelatin-silver print
25.5 x 25.4 cm
Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal
© Estate Lucien Hervé

F.C. Gundlach
“Op Art” bathing suit by Sinz, Vouliagmeni/Greece
1966
Gelatin-silver print
50 x 50 cm
F.C. Gundlach, Hamburg
© F.C. Gundlach

Laurence Bonvin
Blikkiesdorp, Cape Town, South Africa
2009
Inkjet-print
40 x 50 cm
Courtesy the artist
© Laurence Bonvin

“Architectures and cities are both volumes and images alike. We experience them directly, physically and sensually, as well as through pictures. Pictures speak a language of their own. They offer a discourse that is quite unlike the physical experience of architecture. They transform volume into surface; distil matter into forms and signs – rarely, if ever, leaving it as it is. That is probably why so many architects try to get involved in determining the image of their buildings. Concrete – Photography and Architecture seeks to approach the singular and complex relationship between architecture and photography in light-hearted, narrative and dialectical ways. The exhibition explores issues of history and ideology, as well as the specifics of form and material, in the photographic image.

The visual appeal of destroyed or dilapidated buildings is also addressed, as are their powerful demonstrations of power and exclusivity, fragility and beauty. To what extent does photography influence not only the way architecture is perceived, but also the way it is designed? How does an image bring architecture to life, and at what point does it become uncanny? How do settlements develop into cities? Or, in sociological terms: how do work and life interconnect differently in, say, Zurich and Winterthur, as opposed to, say, Calcutta? And how do skyscrapers and living spaces translate into the flat, two-dimensional world of photography?

Concrete – Photography and Architecture is not, however, chronologically arranged. Instead, it is based on compelling positions, counterpositions and thematic fields that connect various concrete, fundamental and historical aspects. Alongside everyday buildings and prestigious architecture, structured by horizontal and vertical axes, alongside homes and houses, utopian fantasies, design and reality, an important aspect of the exhibition is the compelling appeal of architectural decay due to the passage of time, through both natural and deliberate destruction. It is almost as though photography were providing a moral reminder even such magnificence and presence, whether hewn in stone or cast in concrete, has its weaknesses too.

Architecture has always been an important platform for the frequently heated discussion of ideas and views, zeitgeist and weltanschauung, everyday life and aesthetics. Architecture is the bold materialisation of private and public visions, functionality and avant-garde art alike. It is, as Slavoj Žižek puts it, ideology in stone. Photography and architecture both play an undisputed role in our everyday lives. They confront us on a daily basis, often without our even noticing, and they influence how we think, act and live in subliminal and lasting ways. Concrete – Photography and Architecture provides visual answers to the question of what it is that makes up the intimate yet complex relationship between architecture and photography, architect and photographer.

The exhibition presents more than 400 photographs and groups of works from the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, including William Henry Fox Talbot, Domenico Bresolin and Charles Marville as well as Germaine Krull, Lucia Moholy and Julius Shulman, and spanning an arc to contemporary works by Georg Aerni, Iwan Baan, Luisa Lambri and Hiroshi Sugimoto. Projects such as the long-term observations of Schlieren photography or Wolfgang Scheppe’s Migropolis show how the art of photography is playing an increasingly important role as an instrument of research and knowledge. The exhibition is accompanied by a lavishly illustrated book published by Scheidegger & Spiess, with some 300 colour and black-and-white pictures, essays by Jochen Becker, Johannes Binotto, Verena Huber Nievergelt, Michael Jakob, Nicoletta Leonardi, Lorenzo Rocha, Caspar Schärer, Aveek Sen and Urs Stahel as well as a conversation with Annette Gigon, Meret Ernst and Armin Linke.”

Press release from the Fotomuseum Winterthur website

Guido Guidi
#1176 01 29 1997 3:30PM Looking Southeast
From Carlo Scarpa’s Tomba Brion
1997
C-print
19,5 x 24,6 cm
Courtesy the artist
© Guido Guidi

Tobias Zielony
Le Vele di Scampia
2009
Blu Ray photoanimation
8.57 min
Courtesy Koch Oberhuber Wolff, Berlin
© Tobias Zielony/ KOW

Hiroshi Sugimoto
Seagram Building, New York City
1997
Gelatin-silver print
58,4 x 47 cm
Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal
© Hiroshi Sugimoto/Courtesy of Gallery Koyanagi Tokyo

Aage Strüwing
Arne Jacobsen: Rødovre Town Hall
1955
Gelatin-silver print
23,7 x 17 cm
EPFL Archives de la construction moderne, Lausanne
© Estate Strüwing

Moriz Nähr
 Stiegenhaus im Haus Stonborough-Wittgenstein [Staircase in the house Stonborough-Wittgenstein]
1928
Silbergelatine-Abzug
13.8 x 8.9 cm
Albertina, Wien
© Estate Moriz Nähr

Haus Wittgenstein, also known as the Stonborough House and the Wittgenstein House) is a house in the modernist style designed and built on the Kundmanngasse, Vienna, by the Austrian architect Paul Engelmannand the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.

In November 1925, Wittgenstein’s sister Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein commissioned Engelmann to design and build a large townhouse. Margaret also invited her brother to help with the design in part to distract him from an incident that had happened while he had been a primary school teacher: he had hit a boy for getting an answer wrong and the boy had collapsed. The architect was Paul Engelmann, someone Wittgenstein had come to know while training to be an Artillery Officer in Olmutz. Engelmann designed a spare modernist house after the style of Adolf Loos: three rectangular blocks. Wittgenstein showed a great interest in the project and in Engelmann’s plans and poured himself into the project for over two years. He focused on the windows, doors, door knobs, and radiators, demanding that every detail be exactly as he specified, to the point where everyone involved in the project was exhausted. One of the architects, Jacques Groag, wrote in a letter: “I come home very depressed with a headache after a day of the worst quarrels, disputes, vexations, and this happens often. Mostly between me and Wittgenstein.” When the house was nearly finished he had a ceiling raised 30mm so the room had the exact proportions he wanted.

Waugh writes that Margaret eventually refused to pay for the changes Wittgenstein kept demanding, so he bought himself a lottery ticket in the hope of paying for things that way. It took him a year to design the door handles, and another to design the radiators. Each window was covered by a metal screen that weighed 150 kg, moved by a pulley Wittgenstein designed. Bernhard Leitner, author of The Architecture of Ludwig Wittgenstein, said of it that there is barely anything comparable in the history of interior design: “It is as ingenious as it is expensive. A metal curtain that could be lowered into the floor.”

The house was finished by December 1928, and the family gathered there that Christmas to celebrate its completion. Describing the work, Ludwig’s eldest sister, Hermine, wrote: “Even though I admired the house very much, I always knew that I neither wanted to, nor could, live in it myself. It seemed indeed to be much more a dwelling for the gods than for a small mortal like me”. Paul Wittgenstein, Ludwig’s brother, disliked it, and when Margaret’s nephew came to sell it, he reportedly did so on the grounds that she had never liked it either. Wittgenstein himself found the house too austere, saying it had good manners, but no primordial life or health. He nevertheless seemed committed to the idea of becoming an architect: the Vienna City Directory listed him as “Dr Ludwig Wittgenstein, occupation: architect” between 1933 and 1938.

After World War II, the house became a barracks and stables for Russian soldiers. It was owned by Thomas Stonborough, son of Margaret until 1968 when it was sold to a developer for demolition. For two years after this the house was under threat of demolition. The Vienna Landmark Commission saved it – after a campaign by Bernhard Leitner – and made it a national monument in 1971, and since 1975 it has housed the cultural department of the Bulgarian Embassy.

(Text from Wikipedia)

Lala Aufsberg
Cathedral of Light
c. 1937
Gelatin-silver print
24 x 18 cm
Town Archive Nuremberg
© Photo Marburg

Lala Aufsberg (actually, Ida Louise Aufsberg, born 26 February 1907 in Sonthofen, May 18, 1976 ibid) was a well-known art photographer. After attending primary school and six years of school for Higher daughters in Immenstadt she began training for the 1932 photo dealer in Oberstdorf. After completion of the training Lala Aufsberg moved to Nuremberg, where she worked in the photographers’ studios of Seitz and Rosemary. In 1931 she joined the photo club of friends of photography in Nuremberg.

From April 1938 Lala Aufsberg attended the State School of Applied Arts and Crafts in Weimar, Department Lichtbildnerei at Walter Hege. In July 1938, she passed the exam for the master photographer’s craft, and in the same year returned to Sonthofen and opened a photographic studio. In the years 1937 and 1938 she documented the Nazi Party rallies in Nuremberg (see above photograph). She received her first artistic job in the years 1941-1942, in which she photographed the murals in churches and monasteries in Carinthia and Styria. Owned by the University of Marburg “German documentation center for art history” – Bildarchiv Foto Marburg (listed in UNESCO Archives Portal) acquired 1976/1977 and 1996, the Lala-Aufsberg archive with about 46,000 art history, black and white negatives in sizes 6×6 and 9×12 and 103,000 photos.

Walker Evans
 Chrysler Building under construction, New York
1929
Gelatin-silver print
16.8 x 8.3 cm
Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal
© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Fotomuseum Winterthur
Grüzenstrasse 44 + 45 CH-8400
Winterthur (Zürich)

Opening hours:
Tuesday to Sunday 11 am – 6 pm
Wednesday 11 am – 8 pm
Closed on Mondays

Fotomuseum Winterthur website

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Apr

Exhibition: ‘The Shaping of New Visions: Photography, Film, Photobook’ at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York

By Dr Marcus Bunyan 1 Comment

Categories: American, american photographers, black and white photography, documentary photography, exhibition, existence, film, gallery website, intimacy, Japanese artist, landscape, light, Man Ray, memory, New York, Paris, photographic series, photography, photojournalism, portrait, psychological, reality, space, street photography, surrealism, time, video and works on paper
Tags: 100 Boots, A Lightplay: Black White Gray, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Aleksandr Rodchenko Sovetskoe foto, Aleksandr Rodchenko Soviet Photo, arts, Atlas Group, Atlas Group Walid Raad My Neck is Thinner Than a Hair: Engines, August Sander, August Sander Das rechte Auge meiner Tochter Sigrid, August Sander The Right Eye of My Daughter Sigrid, Berenice Abbott, Berenice Abbott Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman, Bringing the War Home, Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful, Chelovek s kinoapparatom, Chromogenic color print, chromolithograph, Claude Cahun, Claude Cahun Untitled 1928, collage, Constructivism, dada, Daido Moriyama, Daido Moriyama Entertainer on Stage, Das rechte Auge meiner Tochter Sigrid, Dziga Vertov, Dziga Vertov Chelovek s kinoapparatom, Dziga Vertov Man with a Movie Camera, Ein Lichtspiel, Ein Lichtspiel: schwarz weiss grau, Einkreisung, Eleanor Antin, Eleanor Antin 100 Boots, Encirclement, Entertainer on Stage Shimizu, experimental photography, film, gelatin silver print, Georges Hugnet, Georges Hugnet Surrealist beach collage, Georges Hugnet Untitled [Surrealist beach collage], Grete Stern Dreams, Grete Stern Sueños, Gun Gun Gun New York, Hands Up/Makeup, Helen Levitt, Helen Levitt in Color, Helen Levitt Projects: Helen Levitt in Color, I Got Up At..., John Baldessari, Josef Albers, Josef Albers Marli Heimann, Josef Albers Marli Heimann Alle während 1 Stunde, László Moholy-Nagy, László Moholy-Nagy A Lightplay, László Moholy-Nagy A Lightplay: Black White Gray, László Moholy-Nagy Ein Lichtspiel, Lebanese civil war, lithograph, Man Ray, Man Ray Rayograph 1922, Man with a Movie Camera, Manhatta, Mariette Althaus, Marilyn 28 Years Old Las Vegas, Marli Heimann All During an Hour, Martha Rosler, Martha Rosler Bringing the War Home, Martha Rosler Hands Up/Makeup, Martha Rosler Red Stripe Kitchen, MOMA, multiple exposures, My Neck is Thinner Than a Hair, My Neck is Thinner Than a Hair: Engines, New Topographics, New Vision, New Vision photography, On Kawara, On Kawara I Got Up At..., Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler Manhatta, performance art, performance photography, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Philip-Lorca diCorcia Marilyn; 28 Years Old, photobook, photobooks, photography, photogravure, photomontage, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman, Projects: Helen Levitt in Color, Raoul Hausmann, Raoul Hausmann Untitled 1931, rayograph, Recto/Verso #2, Red Stripe Kitchen, reversed tonal values, Robert Heinecken, Robert Heinecken Recto/Verso #2, Rodchenko Sovetskoe foto, Russian film, self-published books, Sigmar Polke, Sigmar Polke Mariette Althaus, Sigmar Polke Untitled (Mariette Althaus), Sovetskoe foto, Soviet Photo, Sueños, Surrealist beach collage, The Museum of Modern Art, The Right Eye of My Daughter Sigrid, The Shaping of New Visions, The Shaping of New Visions: Photography Film Photobook, VALIE EXPORT, VALIE EXPORT Einkreisung, VALIE EXPORT Encirclement, Walid Raad, william klein, William Klein Gun Gun Gun

Exhibition dates: 18th April 2012 – 29th April 2013

Another fascinating exhibition and a bumper posting to boot (pardon the pun!)

A panoply of famous photographers along with a few I had never heard of before (such as Georges Hugnet) are represented in this posting. As the press blurb states, through “key photographic projects, experimental films, and photobooks, ‘The Shaping of New Visions’ offers a critical reassessment of photography’s role in the avant-garde and neo-avant-garde movements, and in the development of contemporary artistic practices.”

The large exhibition seems to have a finger in every pie, wandering from the birth of the 20th-century modern metropolis, through ”New Vision” photography in the 1920s, experimental film, Surrealism, Constructivism and New Objectivity, Dada, Rayographs, photographic avant-gardism, photocollages, photomontages, street photography of the 1960s, colour slide projection performance, through New Topographics, self-published books, and conceptual photography, featuring works that reevaluate the material and contextual definitions of photography. “The final gallery showcases major installations by a younger generation of artists whose works address photography’s role in the construction of contemporary history.”

Without actually going to New York to see the exhibition (I wish!!) – from a distance it does seem a lot of ground to cover within 5 galleries even if there are 250 works. You could say this is a “meta” exhibition, drawing together themes and experiments from different areas of photography with rather a long bow. Have a look at the The Shaping of New Visions exhibition checklist to see the full listing of what’s on show and you be the judge. There are some rare and beautiful images that’s for sure. From the photographs in this posting I would have to say the distorted “eyes” have it…

Dr Marcus Bunyan for the Art Blart blog

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

László Moholy-Nagy
Ein Lichtspiel: schwarz weiss grau (A Lightplay: Black White Gray) (excerpt)
1930

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This short film made by László Moholy-Nagy is based on the shadow patterns created by his Light-Space Modulator, an early kinetic sculpture consisting of a variety of curved objects in a carefully choreographed cycle of movements. Created in 1930, the film was originally planned as the sixth and final part of a much longer work depicting the new space-time.

Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler
Manhatta
1921
Film
Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, New York
© Aperture Foundation Inc., Paul Strand Archive

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In 1920 Paul Strand and artist Charles Sheeler collaborated on Manhatta, a short silent film that presents a day in the life of lower Manhattan. Inspired by Walt Whitman’s book Leaves of Grass, the film includes multiple segments that express the character of New York. The sequences display a similar approach to the still photography of both artists. Attracted by the cityscape and its visual design, Strand and Sheeler favored extreme camera angles to capture New York’s dynamic qualities. Although influenced by Romanticism in its view of the urban environment, Manhatta is considered the first American avant-garde film.

Dziga Vertov
Chelovek s kinoapparatom (Man with a Movie Camera)
1929
Film
1 hr 6 mins 49 secs

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Excerpt from a camera operators diary
ATTENTION VIEWERS:
This film is an experiment in cinematic communication of real events
Without the help of Intertitles
Without the help of a story
Without the help of theatre
This experimental work aims at creating a truly international language of cinema based on its absolute separation from the language of theatre and literature

Eleanor Antin
100 Boots
1971 – 1973
Photographed by Philip Steinmetz
Halftone reproductions on 51 cards
4 ½ x 7 in. each
Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York
© Eleanor Antin

Josef Albers
Marli Heimann, Alle während 1 Stunde (Marli Heimann, All During an Hour)
1931
Twelve gelatin silver prints
Overall 11 11/16 x 16 7/16″ (29.7 x 41.8 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of The Josef Albers Foundation, Inc.
© 2012 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

August Sander
Das rechte Auge meiner Tochter Sigrid (The Right Eye of My Daughter Sigrid)
1928
Gelatin silver print
7 1/16 x 9″ (17.9 x 22.9 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the photographer
© 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

Dziga Vertov
Chelovek s kinoapparatom (Man with a Movie Camera) (still)
1929
35mm film
65 min ( black and white, silent)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Department of Film

Man Ray
Rayograph
1922
Gelatin silver print (photogram)
9 3/8 x 11 3/4″ (23.9 x 29.9 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of James Thrall Soby
© 2012 Man Ray Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

William Klein (American, born 1928)
Gun, Gun, Gun, New York
1955
Gelatin silver print
10 1/4 x 13 5/8″ (26 x 34.6 cm)
Gift of Arthur and Marilyn Penn

Georges Hugnet (French, 1906-1974)
Untitled [Surrealist beach collage]
c. 1935
Collage of photogravure, lithograph, chromolithograph and gelatin silver prints on gelatin silver print
11 7/8 x 9 7/16″ (30.2 x 24 cm)
Gift of Timothy Baum in memory of Harry H. Lunn, Jr.

Martha Rosler
Red Stripe Kitchen
1967-1972
From the series Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful
Pigmented inkjet print, printed 2011
23 3/4 x 18 1/8″ (60.3 x 46 cm)
Purchase and The Modern Women’s Fund

“The Museum of Modern Art draws from its collection to present the exhibition The Shaping of New Visions: Photography, Film, Photobook on view from April 18, 2012, to April 29, 2013. Filling the third-floor Edward Steichen Photography Galleries, this installation presents more than 250 works by approximately 90 artists, with a focus on new acquisitions and groundbreaking projects by Man Ray, László Moholy-Nagy, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Germaine Krull, Dziga Vertov, Gerhard Rühm, Helen Levitt, Robert Frank, Daido Moriyama, Robert Heinecken, Edward Ruscha, Martha Rosler, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Paul Graham, and The Atlas Group/Walid Raad. The exhibition is organized by Roxana Marcoci, Curator, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art.

Punctuated by key photographic projects, experimental films, and photobooks, The Shaping of New Visions offers a critical reassessment of photography’s role in the avant-garde and neo-avant-garde movements, and in the development of contemporary artistic practices. The shaping of what came to be known as “new vision” photography in the 1920s bore the obvious influence of “lens-based” and “time-based” works. The first gallery begins with photographs capturing the birth of the 20th-century modern metropolis by Berenice Abbott, Edward Steichen, and Alfred Stieglitz, presented next to the avant-garde film Manhatta (1921), a collaboration between Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler.

The 1920s were a period of landmark constructions and scientific discoveries all related to light – from Thomas Edison’s development of incandescent light to Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity and light speed. Man Ray began experimenting with photograms (pictures made by exposing objects placed on photosensitive paper to light) – which he renamed “rayographs” after himself – in which light was both the subject and medium of his work. This exhibition presents Man Ray’s most exquisite rayographs, alongside his first short experimental film, Le Retour à la raison (Return to Reason, 1923), in which he extended the technique to moving images.

In 1925, two years after he joined the faculty of the Bauhaus school in Weimar Germany, László Moholy-Nagy published his influential book Malerei, Fotografie, Film (Painting, Photography, Film) – part of a series that he coedited with Bauhaus director Walter Gropius – in which he asserted that photography and cinema are heralding a “culture of light” that has overtaken the most innovative aspects of painting. Moholy-Nagy extolled photography and, by extension, film as the quintessential medium of the future. Moholy-Nagy’s interest in the movement of objects and light through space led him to construct Light-Space Modulator, the subject of his only abstract film, Ein Lichtspiel: schwarz weiss grau (A Lightplay: Black White Gray, 1930), which is presented in the exhibition next to his own photographs and those of Florence Henri.

The rise of photographic avant-gardism from the 1920s to the 1940s is traced in the second gallery primarily through the work of European artists. A section on Constructivism and New Objectivity features works by Paul Citroën, Raoul Hausmann, Florence Henri, Germaine Krull, El Lissitzky, Albert Renger-Patzsch, and August Sander. A special focus on Aleksandr Rodchenko underscores his engagement with the illustrated press through collaborations with Vladimir Mayakovsky and Sergei Tretyakov on the covers and layouts of Novyi LEF, the Soviet avant-garde journal of the “Left Front of the Arts,” which popularized the idea of “factography,” or the manufacture of innovative aesthetic facts through photomechanical processes. Alongside Rodchenko, film director Dziga Vertov redefined the medium of still and motion-picture photography with the concept of kino-glaz (cine-eye), according to which the perfectible lens of the camera led to the creation of a novel perception of the world. The exhibition features the final clip of Vertov’s 1929 experimental film Chelovek s kinoapparatom (Man with a Movie Camera), in which the eye is superimposed on the camera lens to form an indivisible apparatus fit to view, process, and convey reality, all at once. This gallery also features a selection of Dada and Surrealist works, including rarely seen photographs, photocollages, and photomontages by Hans Bellmer, Claude Cahun, George Hugnet, André Kertész, Jan Lukas, and Grete Stern, alongside such avant-garde publications as Documents and Littérature.

The third gallery features artists exploring the social world of the postwar period. On view for the first time is a group of erotic and political typo-collages by Gerhard Rühm, a founder of the Wiener Gruppe (1959-60), an informal group of Vienna-based writers and artists who engaged in radical visual dialogues between pictures and texts. The rebels of street photography – Robert Frank, William Klein, Daido Moriyama, and Garry Winogrand – are represented with a selection of works that refute the then prevailing rules of photography, offering instead elliptical, off-kilter styles that are as personal and controversial as are their unsparing views of postwar society. A highlight of this section is the pioneering slide show Projects: Helen Levitt in Color (1971-74). Capturing the lively beat, humor, and drama of New York’s street theater, Levitt’s slide projection is shown for the first time at MoMA since its original presentation at the Museum in 1974.

Photography’s tradition in the postwar period continues in the fourth gallery, which is divided into two sections. One section features “new topographic” works by Robert Adams, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Stephen Shore, and Joel Sternfeld, along with a selection of Edward Ruscha’s self-published books, in which the use of photography as mapmaking signals a conceptual thrust. This section introduces notable works from the 1970s by artists who embraced photography not just as a way of describing experience, but as a conceptual tool. Examples include Eleanor Antin’s 100 Boots (1971-73), Mel Bochner’s Misunderstandings (A theory of photography) (1970), VALIE EXPORT’s Einkreisung (Encirclement) (1976), On Kawara’s I Got Up… (1977), and Gordon Matta-Clark’s Splitting (1974), all works that reevaluate the material and contextual definitions of photography. The other section features two major and highly experimental recent acquisitions: Martha Rosler’s political magnum opus Bringing the War Home (1967-72), developed in the context of her anti-war and feminist activism, for which the artist spliced together images of domestic bliss clipped from the pages of House Beautiful with grim pictures of the war in Vietnam taken from Life magazine; and Sigmar Polke’s early 1970s experiments with multiple exposures, reversed tonal values, and under-and-over exposures, which underscore the artist’s idea that “a negative is never finished.” The unmistakably cinematic turn that photography takes in the 1980s and early 1990s is represented with a selection of innovative works ranging from Robert Heinecken’s Recto/Verso (1988) to Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s breakthrough Hustler series (1990-92).

The final gallery showcases major installations by a younger generation of artists whose works address photography’s role in the construction of contemporary history. Tapping into forms of archival reconstitution, The Atlas Group/Walid Raad is represented with My Neck Is Thinner Than a Hair: Engines (1996-2004), an installation of 100 pictures of car-bomb blasts in Beirut during the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990) that provokes questions about the factual nature of existing records, the traces of war, and the symptoms of trauma. A selection from Harrell Fletcher’s The American War (2005) brings together bootlegged photojournalistic pictures of the U.S. military involvement in Southeast Asia, throwing into sharp focus photography’s role as a documentary and propagandistic medium in the shaping of historical memory. Jules Spinatsch’s Panorama: World Economic Forum, Davos (2003), made of thousands of still images and three surveillance video works, chronicles the preparations for the 2003 World Economic Forum, when the entire Davos valley was temporarily transformed into a high security zone. A selection of Paul Graham’s photographs from his major photobook project a shimmer of possibility (2007), consisting of filmic haikus about everyday life in today’s America, concludes the exhibition.”

Press release from the MOMA website
Online slideshow of images

On Kawara
I Got Up At…
1974-75
(Ninety postcards with printed rubber stamps)
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The semi autobiographical I Got Up At… by On Kawara is a series of postcards sent to John Baldessari. Each card was sent from his location that morning detailing the time he got up. The time marked on each card varies drastically from day to day, the time stamped on each card is the time he left his bed as opposed to actually waking up. Kawara’s work often acts to document his existence in time, giving a material form to which is formally immaterial. The series has been repeated frequently sending the cards to a variety of friends and colleagues.

Philip-Lorca diCorcia
Marilyn; 28 Years Old; Las Vegas, Nevada; $30
1990-92
Chromogenic color print
24 x 35 15/16″ (61 x 91.4 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. E.T. Harmax Foundation Fund
© 2012 Philip-Lorca diCorcia, courtesy David Zwirner, New York

Helen Levitt
Projects: Helen Levitt in Color (detail)
1971-74
40 color slides shown in continuous projection
Originally presented at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, September 26-October 20, 1974

Atlas Group, Walid Raad
My Neck is Thinner Than a Hair: Engines (detail)
1996-2004
100 pigmented inkjet prints
9 7/16 x 13 3/8″ (24 x 34 cm) each
Fund for the Twenty-First Century

Daido Moriyama
Entertainer on Stage, Shimizu
1967
Gelatin silver print
18 7/8 x 28″ (48.0 x 71.2 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the photographer
© 2012 Daido Moriyama

VALIE EXPORT
Einkreisung (Encirclement)
1976
From the series Körperkonfigurationen (Body Configurations)
Gelatin silver print with red ink
14 x 23 7/16″ (35.5 x 59.6 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Carl Jacobs Fund
© 2012 VALIE EXPORT / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VBK, Austria

Grete Stern
No. 1 from the series Sueños (Dreams)
1949
Gelatin silver print
10 1/2 x 9″ (26.6 x 22.9 cm)
Latin American and Caribbean Fund through gift of Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis in honor of Adriana Cisneros de Griffin
© 2012 Horacio Coppola

Sigmar Polke
Untitled (Mariette Althaus)
c. 1975
Gelatin silver print (red toned)
9 1/4 x 11 13/16″ (23.5 x 30 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Acquired through the generosity of Edgar Wachenheim III and Ronald S. Lauder
© 2012 Estate of Sigmar Polke / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Germany

Martha Rosler
Hands Up / Makeup
1967-1972
From the series Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful
Pigmented inkjet print, printed 2011
23 3/4 x 13 15/16″ (60.4 x 35.4 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase and The Modern Women’s Fund
© 2012 Martha Rosler

Robert Heinecken
Recto/Verso #2
1988
Silver dye bleach print
8 5/8 x 7 7/8″ (21.9 x 20 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Mr. and Mrs. Clark Winter Fund
© 2012 The Robert Heinecken Trust

Berenice Abbott
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman
Negative c. 1930/Distortion c. 1950
Gelatin silver print, 12 3/4 x 10 1/8″ (32.6 x 25.7 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Frances Keech Fund in honor of Monroe Wheeler
© 2012 Berenice Abbott/Commerce Graphics

Raoul Hausmann
Untitled
February 1931
Gelatin silver print
5 3/8 x 4 7/16″ (13.6 x 11.2 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther
© 2012 Raoul Hausmann / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

Claude Cahun
Untitled
c. 1928
Gelatin silver print
4 9/16 x 3 1/2″ (10 x 7.6 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase and anonymous promised gift
© 2012 Estate of Claude Cahun

Aleksandr Rodchenko
Sovetskoe foto (Soviet Photo) No. 10
October 1927
Letterpress
10 3/8 x 7 1/4″ (26.3 x 18.4 cm)
Publisher: Ogonek, Moscow
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the Judith Rothschild Foundation

The Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53 Street
New York, NY 10019
T: (212) 708-9400

Opening hours:
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Friday, 10.30 am – 8.00 pm
Closed Tuesday

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Jan

Exhibition: ‘Bob Mizer: ARTIFACTS’ at Invisible-Exports, New York

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: American, american photographers, beauty, black and white photography, colour photography, exhibition, existence, film, gallery website, intimacy, light, Marcus Bunyan, memory, photographic series, photography, portrait, space and time
Tags: 1950s physique magazines, Al Urban, Alfred Kinsey, Athletic Model Guild, Baron von Gloeden photographs in The Kinsey Institute, Beau Rouge, Beau Rouge Los Angeles, beefcake magazines, Bill Holland Los Angeles, Bob Mizer, Bob Mizer Beau Rouge, Bob Mizer Bill Holland, Bob Mizer Jim Carroll, Bob Mizer John Benninghoff, Bob Mizer Production still from "Boy Factory", Bob Mizer Rick Gordon, Bob Mizer Unknown, Bob Mizer Unknown Handstand, Bob Mizer Unknown on Platform, Bob Mizer Unknown Woman, Bob Mizer Unknown Woman Lifting, Bob Mizer: ARTIFACTS, Bruce of Los Angeles, Charles Renslow, David Hockney, Dick Falcon, Douglas: Detroit, George Platt Lynes, George Platt Lynes photographs in the Kinsey Institute, improvised ethnography, Jim Carroll bodybuilder, Jim Carroll Los Angeles, John Benninghoff, Karl Eller, Kinsey Institute collection, Kris studio, Lon of New York, los angeles, male body, male homosexual catalogue photographs, male homosexual photographs, male nude, male-on-male gaze, male2male sex photographs, Marcus Bunyan Pressing the Flesh, Marcus Bunyan Pressing the Flesh: Sex Body Image and the Gay Male, masculine iconography, Melan, nude, Physique Culture, Physique Culture and Early Homosexual Magazines, physique magazines, Physique Pictorial, posing straps, Pressing the Flesh: Sex Body Image and the Gay Male, Quaintance, Rick Gordon rooftop studio Los Angeles, Russ Warner, Santa Monica, Sex Body Image and the Gay Male, the female body, The Kinsey Institute, The Kinsey physique photographs, the male body, the male nude, the nude, Tom of Finland, typology of desire, Unknown on Platform Santa Monica, Unknown Woman Lifting Santa Monica

Exhibition dates: 14th December 2012 – 27th January 27 2013

** Warning this posting contains male nudity – oh no! **

There are some appealing but relatively tame photographs from one of the doyens of male physique photography from the 1950s-1970s in this posting. More interesting to me are the photographs that never get published or shown in a gallery. While visiting The Kinsey Institute in Bloomington, Indiana as part of my PhD research Pressing the Flesh: Sex, Body Image and the Gay Male in 2001 I made a list of all the physique photographers present in their collection, as well as annotated notes on the photographs of Baron von Gloeden, George Platt Lynes, male homosexual catalogue photographs, male homosexual photographs and male2male sex photographs. Unfortunately almost nothing of this amazing collection of photographs at The Kinsey has ever been published, mainly I suspect due to the prudish nature of American society.

The physique photographers include artists such as Russ Warner, Al Urban, Lon of New York (who began their careers in the late 1930′s), Bob Mizer (started Athletic Model Guild (AMG) in 1945 and later, on his own, Physique Pictorial), Charles Renslow (started Kris studio in 1954), Bruce of Los Angeles, Douglas: Detroit, Dick Falcon, Melan, Karl Eller and Physique Culture and Early Homosexual Magazines. Read my notes from The Kinsey on these photographers.

Bob Mizer set up AMG in 1945 to photograph male bodybuilders and it is now the oldest male model photography studio in the United States of America. All models in the photographs that I studied were well built, smooth, toned. Lots of outdoor shots! Models are usually quite young (18-22 approx.) Tiny waists and v shaped. For example Image No. 51820. 3 studio portraits of one smooth boy featuring twisted back, arms and torso to great effect. Total V shape. Lots of erotic wrestling photographs from AMG as well.

Although not showing nudes in publications such as Physique Pictorial, private photographs by Bob Mizer heavily feature nudity. Wide use made of projected backdrops – abstracts, leaves, mountains, ships, classical Roman ruins. 4″ x 5″ prints are much better than the 8″ x 10″ enlargements. The Annotations on back of both size images tell of the models jobs and sexual orientation and what they will or will not do sexually if known. It is interesting to note that these annotations are usually the only thing that places the physical bodies in a social context. The studio shots really have no context while the outdoor shots have slightly more context. The annotations helps define the social and sexual structures within which the models circulated.

What surprised me the most in The Kinsey Institute collection were the black and white and colour photographs of the beefcake models with erect penis and having full on male2male sex out in the open. These photographs are never seen, never published or exhibited but these prurient texts provide an important touchstone when trying to understand the more sexually and aesthetically passive work. It is a pity that the viewer cannot make an informed decision on the development of an artist’s oeuvre without immorality raising its ugly head.

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Many thankx to Invisible Exports for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting.

Bob Mizer
John Benninghoff
1991
Vintage color transparency
Cibachrome print
7 x 10.5 inches
Edition of 5
Printed 2012

Bob Mizer
Rick Gordon, rooftop studio, Los Angeles
1972
Vintage color transparency
Cibachrome print
10.5 x 10.5 inches
Edition of 5
Printed in 2012

Bob Mizer
Unknown, Los Angeles
1972
Vintage color transparency
Cibachrome print
10.5 x 10.5 inches
Edition of 5
Printed in 2012

Bob Mizer
Production still from “Boy Factory”
1969
Vintage large-format black and white negative
Silver gelatin print
16 x 20 inches
Edition of 3
Printed in 2012

“Most widely known as a photographer-filmmaker, independent publisher, and midcentury iconoclast, Bob Mizer (1922-1992) was an erotic auteur and a lyrical chronicler of the pre-Stonewall demimonde. In his meticulously staged idiosyncratic private work, Mizer revealed himself as a conscientious artist of intimacy and depth, a visionary stylist of the male-on-male gaze as it was refracted through a culture suffused with masculine iconography, which yet stymied and redirected the vectors of desire. The objects and photographs here show Mizer to be the progenitor of a new kind of devotional work that honors the kaleidoscopic typology of desire in the final stages of the underground era, while approaching it simultaneously as an improvised and mesmerizing ethnography.

Mizer founded the Athletic Model Guild studio in 1945 when American censorship laws permitted women, but not men, to be photographed partially nude, so long as the result was “artistic” in nature. In 1947 he was wrongly accused of having sex with a minor and subsequently served a year-long prison sentence at a desert work camp in Saugus, California. But his career was catapulted into infamy in 1954 when he was convicted of the unlawful distribution of obscene material through the US mail. The material in question was a series of black and white photographs, taken by Mizer, of young bodybuilders wearing what were known as posing straps – a precursor to the G-string.

Upon his release from prison, he continued working undeterred, founding the groundbreaking magazine Physique Pictorial in 1951, which also debuted the work of artists such as Tom of Finland, Quaintance and many others. Models included future Andy Warhol superstar Joe Dallesandro, actors Glenn Corbett, Alan Ladd, Susan Hayward, Victor Mature, and actor-politician Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Throughout his long career he produced a dizzying array of intimate and idiosyncratic imagery, some flattened of explicit content but bathed nevertheless in an unmistakable erotic glow – tributes to the varieties of desire. Although Mizer’s studio was successful, his influence on artists ranging from David Hockney (who moved from England to California in part to seek out Mizer), Robert Mapplethorpe, Francis Bacon, Jack Smith, Andy Warhol and many others is only now beginning to be more widely appreciated.

The works collected in Bob Mizer: ARTIFACTS include a rare selection of staged tableux, images of California subcultures and an intimate collection of objects from various private sessions – preserved by Mizer along with photographs, films, videos and an ever-expanding catalog of props which over time evolved into a haphazard private museum and a natural history of American desire.”

Press release from the Invisible-Exports website

Bob Mizer
Jim Carroll, Los Angeles
c. 1951
Vintage large-format black and white negative
Silver gelatin print
10.5 x 8.4 inches
Edition of 5
Printed in 2012

Bob Mizer
Bill Holland, Los Angeles
c. 1951
Vintage large-format black and white negative
Silver gelatin print
10.5 x 8.4 inches
Edition of 5
Printed in 2012

Bob Mizer
Beau Rouge, Los Angeles
c. 1954
Vintage large-format black and white negative
Silver gelatin print
10.5 x 8.4 inches
Edition of 5
Printed in 2012

Bob Mizer
Unknown, Handstand, Santa Monica
1945
Vintage large-format black and white negative
Silver gelatin print
10.5 x 8.4 inches
Edition of 5
Printed in 2012

Bob Mizer
Unknown Woman Lifting, Santa Monica
c. 1951
Vintage large-format black and white negative
Silver gelatin print
10.5 x 8.4 inches
Edition of 5
Printed in 2012

Bob Mizer
Unknown Woman, Los Angeles
c. 1951
Vintage large-format black and white negatives
Silver gelatin print
10.5 x 8.4 inches
Edition of 5
Printed in 2012

Bob Mizer
Unknown on Platform, Santa Monica
c. 1945
Vintage large-format black and white negative
Silver gelatin print
10.5 x 8.4 inches
Edition of 5
Printed in 2012

Invisible-Exports
14A Orchard Street, Lower East Side
New York City

Opening hours:
Wednesday – Sunday, 11am – 6pm

Invisible-Exports website

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Jan

Exhibition: ‘William Klein + Daido Moriyama’ at the Tate Modern, London

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: American, american photographers, black and white photography, colour photography, digital photography, documentary photography, exhibition, existence, film, gallery website, London, memory, New York, photographic series, photography, photojournalism, portrait, psychological, reality, space, street photography, surrealism and time
Tags: Another Country in New York, avant-garde photography, Bikini Moscow, Candy Store New York, Daido Moriyama, Daido Moriyama Another Country in New York, Daido Moriyama Misawa, Daido Moriyama Tokyo, grainy style of photography, Gun 1 New York, Japanese art, Japanese artist, japanese photographer, Japanese photography, Misawa, New York and Tokyo, photo-book, polaroid, Polaroid images, Polaroid photographs, Polaroid/Polaroid, Pray + Sin New York, Provoke, Provoke magazine, Provoke movement, retrospective, Sayonara Photography, street photography, Tate Modern, the cities of New York and Tokyo, the photo book, tokyo, william klein, William Klein + Daido Moriyama, William Klein Bikini Moscow, William Klein Candy Store New York, William Klein Gun 1 New York, William Klein Piazza di Spagna Rome, William Klein Pray + Sin New York

Exhibition dates: 10th October 2012 – 20th January 2013

Many thankx to the Tate Modern for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. More Daido Moriyama photographs can be found on my 2012 posting Fracture: Daido Moriyama at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and 2009 posting Daido Moriyama: Tokyo Photographs at Philadelphia Museum of Art.

William Klein
Candy Store, New York
1955
© William Klein

William Klein
Pray + Sin, New York
1954
© William Klein

William Klein
Bikini, Moscow
1959
© William Klein

William Klein
Piazza di Spagna, Rome
1960
© William Klein

William Klein
Gun 1, New York
1955
© William Klein

“Explore modern urban life in New York and Tokyo through the photographs of William Klein and Daido Moriyama. This is the first exhibition to look at the relationship between the work of influential photographer and filmmaker Klein, and that of Moriyama, the most celebrated photographer to emerge from the Japanese Provoke movement of the 1960s. With work from the 1950s to the present day, the exhibition demonstrates the visual affinity between their urgent, blurred and grainy style of photography and also their shared desire to convey street life and political protest, from anti-war demonstrations and gay pride marches to the effects of globalisation and urban deprivation. Taking as its central theme the cities of New York and Tokyo, William Klein + Daido Moriyama explores both artists’ celebrated depictions of modern urban life.

The exhibition is formed of two retrospectives side by side, bringing together over 300 works, including vintage prints, contact sheets, film stills, photographic installations and archival material. The influence of Klein’s seminal 1956 publication Life is Good & Good for You in New York, Trance Witness Revels, as well as his later books Tokyo 1964 and Rome: The City and Its People 1959, is traced through Moriyama’s radical depictions of post-war Tokyo in Sayonara Photography and The Hunter 1972. The juxtaposition of these artists not only demonstrates the visual affinity between their urgent, blurred and grainy style of photography, but also their shared desire to convey street life and political protest, from anti-war demonstrations and student protests to the effects of globalisation and urban deprivation.

This exhibition also considers the medium and dissemination of photography itself, exploring the central role of the photo-book in avant-garde photography and the pioneering use of graphic design within these publications. As well the issues of Provoke magazine in which Moriyama and his contemporaries showcased their work, the exhibition includes fashion photography from Klein’s work with Vogue and installations relating to his satirical films Mister Freedom and Who Are You Polly Maggoo? New ways of presenting photography are also demonstrated by Moriyama’s installation Polaroid/Polaroid 1997, which recreates his studio interior through a meticulous arrangement of Polaroid images.”

Press release from the Tate Modern website

William Klein + Daido Moriyama exhibition banner

Daido Moriyama
Misawa
1971
© Daido Moriyama

Daido Moriyama
Tokyo
2011
Courtesy Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation
© Daido Moriyama

Daido Moriyama
Another Country in New York
1971
Tokyo Polytechnic University
© Daido Moriyama

Tate Modern
Bankside
London SE1 9TG

Opening hours:
Sunday – Thursday, 10.00 – 18.00
Friday – Saturday, 10.00 – 22.00

Tate Modern website

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Jan

Exhibition: ‘Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974′ at Haus der Kunst, Munich

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: quotation, photographic series, documentary photography, american photographers, American, sculpture, English artist, gallery website, installation art, exhibition, photography, film, reality, time, space, black and white photography, beauty, landscape, memory, psychological, photojournalism and light
Tags: 8 Natural Handstands, Alice Aycock, Alice Aycock Clay #2, American art, american artist, American Land Art, American sculptural phenomenon, Arte povera, Atmospheres: Duration Performances, Charles Eames, Charles Eames Ray Eames, Charles Eames Ray Eames Powers of Ten, Charles Simonds, Charles Simonds BodyEarth, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Christo and Jeanne-Claude's Wrapped Coast, Clay #2, Conceptual Art, Cosmic View, desire to engage the land. working with the earth, Documentation of Today's Art Tendency”, Earth Art, Earthworks, Eliel Saarinen, Eliel Saarinen scale, Ends of the Earth, Ends of the Earth and Back, Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974, Gerry Schum Fernsehgalerie, Gustav Obermann, Happenings, Haus der Kunst, Heinz Mack, Heinz Mack Sahara Project, Heinz Mack Tele-Mack, Homage to Gustav Obermann, Hommage à New York, John Kaldor, Judy Chicago, Judy Chicago Atmospheres: Duration Performances, Kaldor Public Art Projects, Kees Boeke, Kees Boeke Cosmic View, Keith Arnatt, Keith Arnatt Liverpool Beach Burial, Keith Arnatt Self-Burial, Kristjan Gudmundsson, Kristjan Gudmundsson Painting of the specific gravity of the planet Earth, La Région Centrale, Land art, Laying Napkins, Laying Napkins Near Sudomer, Les Levine, Les Levine Systems Burnoff X Residual Software, Little Bay Sydney Australia, Liverpool Beach Burial, Michael Snow, Michael Snow La Région Centrale, Minimal Art, minimalism, Minimalism and Postminimalism, Miwon Kwon, MOCA, Munich, Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, Niki de Saint Phalle, nuclear testing Heinz Mack, Paricutin Project, Patricia Johanson, Patricia Johanson Stephen Long, performance art, Peter Hutchinson, Peter Hutchinson Paricutin Project, Philipp Kaiser, planet earth, Planetary Reliefs, Postminimalism, Powers of Ten, rail transportation, Ray Eames, Robert Kinmont, Robert Kinmont 8 Natural Handstands, Robert Smithson Spiral Jetty, sculpture, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972, Sudomer, Systems Burnoff X Residual Software, Tele-Mack, this tortured earth, Tinguely Hommage à New York, Wrapped Coast, Yves Klein Planetary Reliefs, Zorka Saglova, Zorka Saglova Homage to Gustav Obermann, Zorka Saglova Laying Napkins, Zorka Saglova Laying Napkins Near Sudomer

Exhibition dates: 11th November 2012 – 20th January 2013

“Not taking Land art as a given the exhibition revisits various milieus and networks of heterogeneous practices around the world where the desire to engage the land or to work with the earth followed diverse artistic objectives and impulses. In researching this diversity, we found that the dominant art historical interpretation of Land art – as fundamentally an American sculptural phenomenon that developed out of Minimalism and Postminimalism, expanding into the “field” beyond art spaces to occupy or to become one with vast landscapes like the deserts of the Southwestern United States – accounts for only a limited number of artists’ works.”

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Philipp Kaiser and Miwon Kwon. Ends of the Earth and Back catalogue essay, p.18

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This posting continues the theme of land/(e)scape, combining as it does performance, site, nonsite, language, film and earth. It is such a pity that the documentation of these early Land Art events in the form of photographs tends to be so poor. The paucity and quality of the visual evidence adds to the ephemeral, transient nature of the art while undermining the works cultural significance. As Robert Smithson notes in his commentary on the piece Spiral Jetty (1970), if the work occupies a “site” and the essay and the film are Nonsites where language (the essay), photographic images (the film), and earth (the jetty) are viewed as material equals – in other words, each is given equal weight within the project – then on the evidence of these images as a lasting artefacts of an action, the photographs seem to me to be just shorthand notes, cursory artefacts like a smudged fingerprint at a crime scene.

Is it necessary that they be great art? No, because the art was not about ego it was about being there at the actual event. But, other than an overt ability to show the outcomes of the performance, what is necessary from these documentary photographs is that they engage the viewer on a higher level than just ocular observation. While Land Art must be extremely difficult to photograph there is nothing memorable here that will stick in my consciousness, that will trigger a memory of the photograph as “vision” (hallucination, simulation, projection?) of these amazing events, which is a great shame. Rendering shapes of things does not make for memorable art, even as that very (Land) art aimed to investigate higher concepts relating to “this tortured earth.”

Dr Marcus Bunyan for the Art Blart blog

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Many thankx to the Haus der Kunst, Munich for allowing me to publish the text and photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Please also read the accompanying essay, Ends of the Earth and Back by Philipp Kaiser and Miwon Kwon (615kb pdf). See the excellent Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974 MOCA website for more art work and photographs via Google Earth of the original locations of the Land Art.

Alice Aycock
Clay #2
1971/2012
1,500 pounds of clay mixed with water in wood frame
Size: each 121.9 x 121.9 x 15.2 cm
Courtesy of the artist

Zorka Saglova
Laying Napkins Near Sudomer
1970
Six gelatin-silver prints
15 3/4 × 23 5/8 in. (40 × 60 cm) each
collection of Jan Sagl

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For Laying Napkins near Sudomer, the artist laid out approximately 700 napkins to form a triangle in a grass field near Sudomer, the site of a famous Hussite battle in 1420. The action referred to local folklore relating how Hussite women would spread pieces of cloth on a marshy field to snag the spurs of the Roman Catholic cavalrymen as they dismounted, making them easy targets for the Hussite warriors.

Michael Snow
La Région Centrale
1971
16mm film transferred to DVD (blackbox projection), black-andwhite, sound
191 min.
Courtesy of the artist

Robert Kinmont
8 Natural Handstands
1969/2009
Nine gelatine silver prints
Size: each 21.5 x 21.5 cm
Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York

Robert Kinmont
8 Natural Handstands (detail)
1969/2009
Nine gelatine silver prints
Size: each 21.5 x 21.5 cm
Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York

Keith Arnatt
Liverpool Beach Burial
1968 Gelatine silver print
Size: 40.6 x 50.8 cm
Courtesy of the Keith Arnatt Estate and Maureen Paley, London

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Liverpool Beach Burial, which the artist described as a “situational sculpture,” was realized by Arnatt with his students at the Manchester College of Art. It was first exhibited in “Konzeption – Conception: Dokumentation einer heutigen Kunstrichtung/Documentation of Today’s Art Tendency” at the Städtisches Museum, Leverkusen, Germany, in 1969. The artist recorded instructions for its making: “(1) Choosing a site and marking out a straight line. (2) Marking off 4-foot intervals. Each mark representing a digging position for each of the hundred-plus participants. (3) Each participant chose a site on the line and dug his/her own hole. (4) When the holes were deep enough the participants were ‘buried’ by nonparticipants.” (Lucy R. Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997], 50.)

“As the first major museum exhibition on Land Art, Ends of the Earth provides the most comprehensive historical overview of this art movement to date. Land Art used the earth as its material and the land as its medium, thereby creating works beyond the familiar spatial framework of the art system. The time period covered in Ends of the Earth spans the 1960s to 1974, when, in the context of Land Art, movements such as Conceptual Art, Minimal Art, Happenings, Performance Art, and Arte povera, became more distinct and began to diverge.

The nearly 200 works by more than 100 artists from Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, Great Britain, Iceland, Israel, Japan, the Netherlands, the Philippines and Switzerland demonstrate that Land Art was not a predominantly North American phenomenon. The exhibition presents works that are less well known than the canonical works Spiral Jetty, Lightning Field and Double Negative, thereby creating a shift in perspective. By including works of the then participating artists, the show refers to the earlier and pioneering exhibitions Earthworks and Earth Art (New York, 1968 and 1969). Michael Heizer and Walter De Maria are interested in realizations in outside and lend the mediated part within an exhibition only secondary importance. They are, therefore, not included in this presentation.

Even before the emergence of the movement in the 1960s, artists from the most varied locations around the globe were increasingly moved to claim the earth and use land as an artistic medium. In a basic sense, this also included the examination of the nature of the earth as a planet. Yves Klein, for instance, wondered what the earth looked like from space. In 1961, he transformed his vision that the dominant color from this perspective would be blue, and that all man-made boundaries could be overcome with this color, into his series Planetary Reliefs.

Land Art artists often worked under the open sky, making productive use of the fact that the great outdoors posed other conditions for a work’s lifespan than enclosed spaces did. Some works only existed for the short time of their creation, like Judy Chicago’s ephemeral works consisting of colored flames and smoke, which served as references to religious ceremonies and the landscape as a deity. For ten weeks, the cliffs along Little Bay, Sydney, were packed in synthetic fabric and rope for Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Wrapped Coast – One Million Square Feet, which, like many other works of Land Art, was enormous in scale. Another famous work of similar proportions was Spiral Jetty by Robert Smithson; on the Great Salt Lake in Utah, USA, the artist built a 1,500-foot long spiral-shaped jetty made of material found on site.

Land Art artists were fascinated by remote locations like deserts. Hreinn Fridfinnsson constructed a house on an uninhabited lava field near Reykjavik. The inside was made of corrugated sheet metal and the outside was covered in wall paper, because, as wall paper is intended to please the eye, “it is reasonable to have it on the outside, where more people can enjoy it.” Some artists transported the conditions of specific places into exhibition spaces: The Japanese artist group “i” moved four truckloads of gravel on a conveyor belt into an exhibition space and arranged it into a pile there. Alice Aycock fills a minimalistic grid with wet clay. This work will be recreated for the exhibition in Haus der Kunst; the clay will dry out during the run of the exhibition, will crack and gradually come to resemble the land in California’s Death Valley (Clay #2, 1971/2012). With Hog Pasture: Survival Piece #1 (1970-71/2012), not only will new material – in this case a green pasture – make on selected occasions its way into the museum but a live domestic pig as well, which will pasture on the meadow from time to time.

From the earliest days of the movement, collectors, patrons, art dealers, and curators also explored sensitively which works of Land Art could be exhibited in museums and galleries, and how this should be done. In their own way, they helped establish Land Art as a legitimate artistic genre. In the case of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty an art dealer helped funding the production of an accompanying film, and the work was executed in three equally valid versions: as the site-specific headland, as an eponymous essay and as a film.

In general, language, film, and photography played a central role in Land Art’s creation and development. Land Art artists and members of the media established close connections to one another. Magazines and television stations commissioned art works and were the first to publish these. Now legendary is Gerry Schum’s Fernsehgalerie, which was the first exhibition created for television and was broadcast by Sender Freies Berlin on 15 April 1969. For eight consecutive days in October of that same year, the WDR television network interrupted its regularly scheduled programs, at 8:15 pm and 9:15 pm, for a few seconds and presented the eight photographs of Keith Arnatt’s Self-Burial, which depicted the artist gradually sinking into the ground. The television station refrained from accompanying this with an introduction or commentary.

Following the presentation of Tinguely’s self-destructing sculpture Hommage à New York, the NBC television network commissioned the artist to create a work. In collaboration with Niki de Saint-Phalle, Tinguely made a large-scale kinetic sculpture out of waste material he had found in and around Las Vegas. The work was used in choreographed explosions that took place south-west of Las Vegas near a nuclear test site. Tinguely’s spectacle was presented in the same newscast as was a major report about the international nuclear talks, which took place that same week.

Many other works touched on the subject of “this tortured earth”, as Isamu Noguchi described it. Land Art artists examined the wounds and scars that humans inflict on the planet earth, whether by the war machinery (Robert Barry, Isamu Noguchi), dictatorships (Artur Barrio), nuclear testing (Heinz Mack, Jean Tinguely, Adrian Piper) or colonization (Yitzhak Danziger). The media’s intensive coverage of Land Art activities led to unusual and complex contributions. Receptive to Land Art’s demand for a sensitive consciousness regarding the conditions of production, presentation and dissemination of art, they also gave expression to the technological, social and political conditions of the time.

Organized in collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.”

Press release from the Haus der Kunst website

Charles Eames
Ray Eames
Powers of Ten
1977
© 1977 EAMES OFFICE LLC

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Powers of Ten takes us on an adventure in magnitudes. Starting at a picnic by the lakeside in Chicago, this famous film transports us to the outer edges of the universe. Every ten seconds we view the starting point from ten times farther out until our own galaxy is visible only a s a speck of light among many others. Returning to Earth with breathtaking speed, we move inward – into the hand of the sleeping picnicker – with ten times more magnification every ten seconds. Our journey ends inside a proton of a carbon atom within a DNA molecule in a white blood cell.

This film was inspired by the 1957 book Cosmic View by Kees Boeke as well as by architect Eliel Saarinen’s statements about scale. It opens with an overhead shot of a man and a woman lyingon a picnic blanket in a park in Chicago. In an effort to depict the scale of the couple, the planet Earth, and the galaxy relative to one another and to that of the universe, the camera zooms out at a distance of a factor of ten every two seconds, until the galaxy is seen as merely a speckof light among many others. The camera then zooms back in, with ten times the magnification every ten seconds, focusing in the end on the proton of an atom.

Charles Simonds
Body<—>Earth
1974
16mm film transferred to DVD, colour
3 min.
Collection of the artist

Zorka Saglova
Homage to Gustav Obermann
March 1970
Six gelatin-silver prints
15 3/4 × 23 5/8 in. (40 × 60 cm) each
Collection of Jan Sagl; Courtesy Jan Sagl

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Beginning in the late 1960s, Saglova was one of the first artists to work in the landscape outside Prague, carrying out actions with her friends, many of whom were part of the artistic underground in then-Communist Czechoslovakia. For Homage to Gustav Obermann, Saglova arranged twenty-one plastic bags filled with jute and gasoline in Bransoudov (near Humpolec) in a circle during a snowstorm. The bags were set on fire at nightfall. This event was held in memory of a shoe-maker from the town who was said to have protested the German occupation during World War II by walking in the surrounding hills while spitting fire. Two months later, for Laying Napkins near Sudomer, the artist laid out approximately 700 napkins to form a triangle in a grass field near Sudomer, the site of a famous Hussite battle in 1420. The action referred to local folklore relating how Hussite women would spread pieces of cloth on a marshy field to snag the spurs of the Roman Catholic cavalrymen as they dismounted, making them easy targets for the Hussite warriors.

Les Levine
Systems Burnoff X Residual Software
1969/2012
Installation recreation 1,000 copies of 31 photographs (31,000 photographs total) taken by Levine at the March 1969 opening of EARTH ART exhibition in Ithaca, New York
Jello and chewing gum
Courtesy of the artist

Christo and Jeanne-Claude
Wrapped Coast – One Million Square Feet
1968-69
Collages, photographs, model, film
Collection of the artist

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The largest single artwork ever made, Wrapped Coast was mounted in Little Bay, Sydney, Australia, on October 28, 1969, and remained on view for ten weeks. Christo and Jeanne-Claude, with the assistance of 125 students, teachers, professional climbers, and workers and under the supervision of Major Ninian Melville, retired from the Army Corps of Engineers, wrapped approximately one and a half miles of coast, including cliffs up to 85 feet high, using synthetic fabric and rope. This was the first work in the series of Kaldor Public Art Projects initiated by Australian collector John Kaldor. The project was financed by the sale of Christo’s preparatory drawings, collages, models, and lithographs. In the end, all materials used were removed from the bay and recycled. ABC Australia filmed a documentary of the project.

Peter Hutchinson
Paricutin Project
1971
Photo and ink on cardboard and molded bread in object-frame
Size: 40 x 55 cm
Courtesy Galerie Bugdahn und Kaimer, Düsseldorf

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The Paricutin Project was first shown in 1969 at John Gibson Gallery in New York as a model illustrating Hutchinson’s conception of an action to take place on Mt. Paricutin, a volcanoin Michoacán, Mexico. A year later, Time magazine funded Hutchinson’s trip to the site to make the work in exchange for exclusive rights to publish the photographs. In an attempt to produce life in a place generally thought of as lifeless, the artist laid 450 pounds of bread crumbs in a line approximately 250 feet long around the rim of the volcano. Mold appeared after six days, in part because of the heat and steam rising from the earth. Two photographs of the project were published in the June 29, 1970, issue of Time. Later that same year, large-scale photographs of the work, along with text describing the trip, were shown at John Gibson Gallery.

Patricia Johanson
Stephen Long
1968
CBSTV 1968; edited by Joanna Alexander, WNET TV, New York, 1971
16mm film transferred to DVD, colour, sound
5 min.
Courtesy of the artist

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Interested in the physical limitations of sight and in measuring how far the eye can see, Johanson created this 1,600-foot-long by 2-foot-wide sculpture made of plywood planks painted with yellow, red, and blue bands. Sited on a portion of the defunct Boston & Maine Railroad tracks from Buskirk, New York, to Bennington, Vermont, the work is named after Stephen Long, a military officer who became a railroad surveyor and engineer. Both the location of the work and its title emphasize the impact of rail transportation on modern perceptions and experience of the landscape. The work gained considerable local media attention, and John Lindsay, Mayor of New York, invited Johanson to permanently install the piece in the mall at Central Park. As the available space was only 1,300 feet long, the artist, unwilling to alter the work’s length, declined the invitation.

Kristjan Gudmundsson
Painting of the specific gravity of the planet Earth
1972-73
Acrylic on metal
Size: 25.4 x 25.4 cm
Sólveig Magnúsdóttir, Reykjavik

Judy Chicago
Atmospheres: Duration Performances
1967-74
16mm film transferred to DVD, colour, sound
14:12 min.
Courtesy of the artist

Heinz Mack
Tele-Mack
1968
16mm film transferred on DVD, colour, sound
24:35 min.
Production of Saarländischer Rundfunk, author Professor Heinz Mack
Courtesy of Kunst und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland GmbH

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A founding member of Group Zero – an artist collective established in Düsseldorf in 1958 – Mack drafted the final version of his manifesto for Sahara Project in 1959. It was first published in Zero magazine in 1961, and subsequently republished and translated from German into French, Dutch, and English in 1967 for Mackazin, the artist’s journal-catalogue. Sahara Project, made in homage to Yves Klein, proposes placing large-scale sculptural works in remote areas of the world’s deserts, like mirages to be encountered by anyone coming upon them. One such location was the Sahara Desert, which was the main testing site for French nuclear weaponry after 1958. In 1967 Mack went on an expedition to the Sahara with the German public television station Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR), which led to two televised presentations of the project the following year – one for WDR and the other for Saarländischer Rundfunk. The popular weekly German magazine Stern presented the project in a feature spread in 1977.

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Dec

Exhibitions: ‘Howard Greenberg, Collection’ and ‘Freaks, The Monstrous Parade: Photographs from Enrico Praloran Collection’ at the Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: American, american photographers, black and white photography, Diane Arbus, documentary photography, exhibition, existence, film, gallery website, intimacy, light, memory, photographic series, photography, portrait, psychological, quotation, reality, space and time
Tags: alterations in our values and understandings, American cult film, American director, American film, American film maker, American Girl in Italy, American movie, Cleopatra and freaks, Cleopatra and Hans at the wedding banquet, David Lynch, David Smail Illusion and Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety, David Smail subjective and objective truth, Diane Arbus, dorothea lange, Dorothea Lange Migrant Mother, Dorothea Lange Migratory Cotton Picker, Elizabeth Grosz Intolerable Ambiguity: Freaks as/at the Limit, film, Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, Freaks, Freaks Cleopatra and Hans at the wedding banquet, Freaks cult movie, Freaks God’s children, Freaks shooting the wedding banquet, Freaks Siamese Twins Daisy and Violet Hilton, Freaks The Monstrous Parade, God’s children, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Henri Cartier-Bresson Madrid 1933, Illusion and Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety, Intolerable Ambiguity: Freaks as/at the Limit, Leon Levinstein, Leon Levinstein Fifth Avenue, Migrant Mother Nipomo California, Migratory Cotton Picker, movie, Musée de l'Elysée, Negro Church South Carolina, non-finality of truth, objective truth, Olga Baclanova, Olga Baclanova as Cleopatra, One of Us': Tod Browning's Freaks, Publicity photo for Freaks, Publicity photo for Freaks featuring much of the cast with director Tod Browning, Ruth Orkin, Ruth Orkin American Girl in Italy, Siamese Twins Daisy and Violet Hilton, simple relativity of truths, South Carolina, still photograph, still photographs from movie, subjective and objective truth, subjective and objective truths, subjective truth, The Cinema of Isolation: A History of Physical Disability in the Movies, the freak, The Monstrous Parade, The Monstrous Parade: Photographs from Enrico Praloran Collection, The Musée de l’Elysée, Theatrical poster for Freaks, Tod Browning, Tod Browning Freaks, values and understandings, Walker Evans, Walker Evans Negro Church, We need the freak to confirm our own static bounded identities

Exhibition dates: both 21st September 2012 – 6th January 2013

This is a meta-post where I have brought together photographs from the second exhibition Freaks, The Monstrous Parade: Photographs from Enrico Praloran Collection and all the good quality images of Todd Browning’s cult film Freaks (1932) that were available online, since the museum only provided me with three media images (the first three) on a fascinating subject. By reflection, the photographs from Freaks have a strange correlation to the photographs that appear in the Howard Greenberg, Collection.

There is an interesting discussion by Amanda Ann Klein on her blog (see link below) about her students reaction to the film that she taught as part of her Trash Cinema class. She observes that, “Freaks preaches acceptance and… the belief that we are all “God’s children.” And yet, the film was intended to “out horror” Frankenstein through its fantastic display of disabled bodies…” but that her students did not see it as an exploitation film, in fact they approved of the revenge taken by the freaks on Cleopatra and Hercules at the end of the film, even though this seemed to replicate the very imagery Browning denounced earlier in the film. Klein insightfully notes that “it did prove to be an interesting example of how a film’s reception can change dramatically over time.”

The content of a work of art is never fixed by the author as the context and meaning of the work is never fixed by the viewer. As David Smail notes the truth changes according to, among other things, developments in our values and understandings. There can be many truths depending on our line-of-sight and point-of-view but a subjective non-final truth has to be actively struggled for:

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“Where objective knowing is passive, subjective knowing is active – rather than giving allegiance to a set of methodological rules which are designed to deliver up truth through some kind of automatic process [in this case the image], the subjective knower takes a personal risk in entering into the meaning of the phenomena to be known … Those who have some time for the validity of subjective experience but intellectual qualms about any kind of ‘truth’ which is not ‘objective’, are apt to solve their problem by appealing to some kind of relativity. For example, it might be felt that we all have our own versions of the truth about which we must tolerantly agree to differ. While in some ways this kind of approach represents an advance on the brute domination of ‘objective truth’, it in fact undercuts and betrays the reality of the world given to our subjectivity. Subjective truth has to be actively struggled for: we need the courage to differ until we can agree. Though the truth is not just a matter of personal perspective, neither is it fixed and certain, objectively ‘out there’ and independent of human knowing. ‘The truth’ changes according to, among other things, developments and alterations in our values and understandings … the ‘non-finality’ of truth is not to be confused with a simple relativity of ‘truths’.”

Smail, David. Illusion and Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety. London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1984, pp.152-153

Many thankx to the Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne for allowing me to publish some of the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Dorothea Lange
Migratory Cotton Picker
Eloy, Arizona, 1940
© Library of Congress
Courtesy of Howard Greenberg Collection

Ruth Orkin
American Girl in Italy
1951
© Ruth Orkin
Courtesy of Howard Greenberg Collection

Henri Cartier-Bresson
Madrid
1933
© Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos
Courtesy of Fondation HCB and Howard Greenberg Collection

Walker Evans
Negro Church, South Carolina
1936
© Library of Congress
Courtesy of Howard Greenberg Collection

Dorothea Lange
Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California
1936
© Library of Congress
Courtesy of Howard Greenberg Collection

Leon Levinstein
Fifth Avenue
c. 1959
© Howard Greenberg Gallery
Courtesy of Howard Greenberg Collection

“The Musée de l’Elysée presents different approaches to collecting photography by means of these original exhibitions.

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Howard Greenberg, Collection

Howard Greenberg has been a gallery owner for over thirty years and is considered today one of the pillars of the New York photography scene. While his position as a dealer is well established, little was known of his passion for collecting, presently revealed to the public for the first time. The primary reason to explain why it took so long to discover this collection is because building such a collection demands time. Only in time can the maturity of a collection be measured; the time necessary to smooth trends, confirm the rarity of a print, and in the end, validate the pertinence of a vision.
In an era of immediacy, when new collectors exhibit unachieved projects or create their own foundation, great original collections are rare. Howard Greenberg’s is certainly one of the few still to be discovered.

The quality of a collection does not rely on the sole accumulation of master pieces but can best be assessed through a dialectical movement: a collection is the collector’s oeuvre, a set of images operating a transformation in the perception not only of the photographs, but also of photography. This renewed perception is two-fold in the Greenberg collection; through the surprising combination of two approaches, the experimental practice of photography that questions the medium as such, bringing it to the limits of abstraction on one hand, and on the other, a documentary practice, carried out through its recording function of the real. This apparently irreconcilable duality takes on a particular signification in the Greenberg collection, an investigation of the possibilities offered by photography, a quest for photography itself, questioning what it is.

Howard Greenberg and his collection have largely contributed to the writing of a chapter of history. While contributing to the recognition of long neglected figures of the New York post-war photography scene, filling a gap, as gallery owner, Howard Greenberg, the collector, ensured the preservation of a coherent body by building over that period a unique collection of major photographs.

This collection of over 500 photographs was patiently built over the last thirty years and stands out for the high quality of its prints. A set of some 120 works are exhibited for the first time at the Musée de l’Elysée, revealing different aspects of Howard Greenberg’s interests, from the modernist aesthetics of the 20s and 30s, with works by Edward Steichen, Edward Weston or the Czech School, to contemporary photographers such as Minor White,
Harry Callahan and Robert Frank. Humanist photography is particularly well represented, including among others, Lewis Hine and Henri Cartier-Bresson. An important section is dedicated to the Farm Security Administration’s photographers, such as Walker Evans or Dorothea Lange, witnesses to the Great Depression years of the 30s. Above all, the collection demonstrates the great influence of New York in the history of 20th century photography with the images of Berenice Abbott, Weegee, Leon Levinstein or Lee Friedlander conveying its architecture and urban lifestyle. Commending its work and prominent position, and wishing to make his private collection available to a large audience, Howard Greenberg selected the Musée de l’Elysée to host his collection.

The Musée de l’Elysée and the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson jointly produce this exhibition which, after Lausanne, will subsequently be presented in Paris.”

Press release from the Musée de l’Elysée website

Freaks, The Monstrous Parade: Photographs from Enrico Praloran Collection

American director Tod Browning (1880-1962) has a particular attraction for the uncanny. Freaks, his cult movie shot in 1932, is inspired by a short story written by Clarence Aaron “Tod” Robbins. Set in a circus, the performers are disabled actors. The movie caused a scandal when it was released and Freaks was soon censored, reedited, shortened, sometimes removed from theaters, and in cases banned in some countries. Not until the 60s, when it was presented at the Cannes Festival, was the movie acclaimed to the point of becoming a reference for artists such as Diane Arbus or David Lynch.

The Musée de l’Elysée presents a selection of some fifty vintage black and white silver prints, gathered by Enrico Praloran, a collector based in Zurich. This unique set is the opportunity for an encounter with the movie’s strange protagonists, Johny Eck, the Half Boy, Daisy and Violet Hilton, the Siamese sisters, Martha Morris, the “Armless Marvel”, or the Bearded Lady and the Human Skeleton. They all are artists for real, coming from the Barnum Circus.

The plot is transcribed in images through stills from the movie’s major scenes, completed by set or shooting photographs, taking us behind the scenes, including on the footsteps of Tod Browning himself.”

Press release from the Musée de l’Elysée website

Tod Browning (director)
Freaks (Cleopatra followed by the freaks)
1932
Still photograph
1932
Courtesy of Praloran Collection, Zurich

Tod Browning (director)
Freaks (Johnny Eck)
1932
Still photograph
Courtesy of Praloran Collection, Zurich

Tod Browning (director)
Freaks
1932
Still photograph
Courtesy of Praloran Collection, Zurich

“Freaks centers on an enchanting preformer, Cleopatra, who entices a “midget,” named Hans, into falling in love with her. They were called midgets then, now they are referred to as little people. The “midget” is in fact enaged to another woman who is incedentally, also a “midget,” named Freida. Cleopatra was at first only trying to fool around with Hans and get money from him occasionally. She soon realized that Hans had inherited quite a large amount of money. She devises a plan to marry Hans and later poison him to inherit the money. Arguably, the most famous scene in Freaks is Hans and Cleo’s wedding reception. The “freaks” reluctantly decide to accept her despite her “normality” and chant the notoriously disturbing yet hilarious quote, “We accept you, one of us! Gooble Gobble!” Afterwards, Hans then becomes very ill by Cleo’s hand. He soon figures out her plan and the freaks become offended. They knew she could not be one of them. The film ends with a horrific and disturbing chase in the rain where the “freaks” follow her slowly and Cleo screams for her life. Her and her lover, the “muscle man,” are caught and not killed, but worse. They become freaks themselves. They are mutilated, castrated, and deformed until they are the subject of a freak show. They became one of the “freaks” they hated so much…

One of the most gut-wrenching things about this films is the fact that every “freak” in the film was a real person with the same deformity their characters had. This gives the story a profound sense of reality, making the betrayal of Hans by Cleo all the more tragic. The film was extremely controversial when released and hated by audiences. The scenes where Cleo and the muscle man were mutilated had to be cut from the film in order to be shown in theaters. That footage has since been lost. In a viewing of the film, a sudden jump takes place after the freaks catch Cleo. The audience feels cheated. We have waited so long to see Cleo get her punishment. Part of that dissatisfaction adds to the mystique of this bizzare trip. The film was forgotten about until the mid 1970s where it was rediscovered as a counterculture cult film. A counterculture film runs counter to the the norm of society. Freaks is a great example of fame by taboos and controversy. It explores themes of humanity that are still relatively unexplored today.”

Text from the Cult Films and Cultural Significance website

“Freaks is a tale of love and vengeance in a traveling circus…

In her essay “Intolerable Ambiguity: Freaks as/at the Limit,” Elizabeth Grosz attempts to unpack our fascination with freak shows. She concludes that the individuals most frequently showcased in these spectacles, including Siamese twins, hermaphrodites, “pinheads” (microcephalics), midgets, and bearded ladies “imperil the very definitions we rely on to classify humans, identities and sexes – our most fundamental categories of self-definition and boundaries dividing self from otherness” (57). In other words, while we comfort ourselves by breaking down the world into neat binary oppositions, such as Male/Female, Self/Other, Human/Animal, Child/Adult, “freaks” blur the boundaries between these reassuring oppositions. She concludes, “The freak confirms the viewer as bounded, belonging to a ‘proper’ social category. The viewer’s horror lies in the recognition that this monstrous being is at the heart of his or her identity, for it is all that must be ejected or abjected from self-image to make the bounded, category-obeying self possible” (65). We need the freak to confirm our own static, bounded identities. And yet, I think there is a certain terror that we may not be as bounded as we think. If the hermaphrodite can transcend traditional gender categories, then perhaps our own genders are more fluid. For many that is a truly horrifying thought.

For example, in one of the film’s earliest scenes we witness the “pinheads” Schlitze, Elvira and Jenny Lee dancing and playing in the forest. From a distance they look like innocent, happy children. But as the camera approaches, it is clear that they are neither children, nor are they quite adults either. Thus it is the ambiguity here, rather than the disability itself, which is momentarily disturbing…

Grosz also mentions that “Any discussion of freaks brings back into focus a topic that has had a largely underground existence in contemporary cultural and intellectual life, partly because it is considered below the refined sensibilities of ‘good taste’ and ‘personal politeness’ in a civilized and politically correct milieu” (55).”

Amanda Ann Klein. “Teaching Todd Browning’s Freaks,” on the Judgemental Observer blog
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Grosz, Elizabeth. “Intolerable Ambiguity: Freaks as/at the Limit,” in Rosemarie Garland Thomson (ed.). Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body. New York: New York University Press, 1996, pp.55-68
Hawkins, Joan. ”’One of Us’: Tod Browning’s Freaks,” in Rosemarie Garland Thomson (ed.). Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body. New York: New York University Press, 1996, pp.265-276
Norden, Martin F. The Cinema of Isolation: A History of Physical Disability in the Movies. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994

Tod Browning (director)
Freaks (Cleopatra and freaks)
1932
Still photograph

Tod Browning (director)
Publicity photo for Freaks, featuring much of the cast with director, Tod Browning
1932
Still photograph

Tod Browning (director)
Freaks (with Siamese Twins Daisy and Violet Hilton)
1932
Still photograph

Tod Browning (director)
Freaks
1932
Still photograph

Tod Browning (director)
Freaks (shooting the wedding banquet)
1932
Still photograph

Tod Browning (director)
Freaks (with Cleopatra and Hans at the wedding banquet)
1932
Still photograph

Tod Browning (director)
Freaks (Olga Baclanova as Cleopatra after her transformation into chicken woman)
1932
Still photograph

Theatrical poster for Freaks
1932

The Musée de l’Elysée
18, avenue de l’Elysée
CH – 1014 Lausanne
T: + 41 21 316 99 11

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Sunday, 11am – 6pm
Closed Monday, except for bank holidays

The Musée de l’Elysée website

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Nov

Exhibition: ‘Dark Romanticism. From Goya to Max Ernst’ at the Städel Museum, Frankfurt

By Dr Marcus Bunyan 3 Comments

Categories: works on paper, painting, gallery website, exhibition, intimacy, photography, film, portrait, existence, surrealism, time, space, black and white photography, beauty, landscape, memory, psychological and light
Tags: André Breton, Antoine Wiertz, Arnold Böcklin, Arnold Böcklin Villa by the Sea, Art Institute of Chicago, Blechen Pater Medardus, Carl Blechen, Caspar David Friedrich, Caspar David Friedrich Kügelgen's Tomb, Dark Romanticism, Dark Romanticism. From Goya to Max Ernst, Delacroix, Deutsches Filmmuseum, Disparate Volante, Dracula, Dream caused by the Flight of a Bee, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Edvard Munch, Edvard Munch Vampire, Ernst Ferdinand Oehme, Ernst Ferdinand Oehme Procession in the Fog, eugene delacroix, Flying Folly, Francisco de Goya, Francisco de Goya Disparate Volante, Francisco de Goya Flying Folly, Frankenstein, Frankfurt, Franz von Stuck, french artist, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Nosferatu, Fuseli The Nightmare, Gabriel von Max, Gabriel von Max The White Woman, Ghost-Hoffmann, good and evil, Goya The Witches’ Flight, graphite, incubus, Johann Heinrich Fuseli, Kügelgen's Grave, Kügelgen's Tomb, Kunsthaus Zürich, La carne la morte e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica, Léon-Paul Fargue, Léon-Paul Fargue Banalité, Louise Vernet the artist's wife on her Deathbed, Love Death and Devil, Max Ernst, Moon Behind Clouds above the Seashore, Musée d'Orsay, Musee du Louvre, Museo del Prado, Neo-Romantics, Nosferatu - A Symphony of Horror, Odilon Redon Closed Eyes, Paul Hippolyte Delaroche, Paul Hippolyte Delaroche Louise Vernet the artist's wife, Paul Klee, Procession in the Fog, René Magritte, René Magritte Sentimental Conversation, Roger Parry, Roger Parry Untitled, Romantic spirit, Romanticism, Royal Academy London, Salvador Dalí, Salvador Dalí Dream caused by the Flight of a Bee, Samuel Colman, Samuel Colman The Edge of Doom, Sentimental Conversation, Ship at Deep Sea with full Sails, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Städel Museum, Surrealist movement, symbolism, Théodore Géricault, the beautiful and the immaculate, the borders between the so-called inner and outer world, The Devil’s Elixirs, The Edge of Doom, The Great Red Dragon, The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun, the grotesque, the real and the imaginary, The White Woman, Victor Hugo, Villa by the Sea, Vision Provoked by the Nocturnal Aspect of the Porte Saint-Denis, voyeur, Watercolor, William Blake, William Blake The Great Red Dragon

Exhibition dates: 26th September 2012 – 20th January, 2013

Many thankx to the Städel Museum for allowing me to publish the reproductions of the artwork in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

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Installation photographs of Dark Romanticism. From Goya to Max Ernstat the Städel Museum, Frankfurt. Photos: Norbert Miguletz

Arnold Böcklin (1827-1901)
Villa by the Sea
1871-1874
Oil on canvas
108 x 154 cm
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main

Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840)
Kügelgen’s Tomb
1821/22
Oil on canvas
41.5 x 55.5 cm
Die Lübecker Museen, Museum Behnhaus Drägerhaus, on loan from private collection

Ernst Ferdinand Oehme (1797-1855)
Procession in the Fog
1828
Oil on canvas
81.5 x 105.5 cm
Galerie Neue Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden

Samuel Colman (1780-1845)
The Edge of Doom
1836-1838
Oil on canvas
137.2 x 199.4 cm
Brooklyn Museum, Bequest of Laura L. Barnes

Salvador Dalí (1904-1989)
Dream caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a Second before Awakening
1944
Oil on wood
51 x 41 cm
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2012

“The Städel Museum’s major special exhibition Dark Romanticism. From Goya to Max Ernst will be on view from September 26th, 2012 until January 20th, 2013. It is the first German exhibition to focus on the dark aspect of Romanticism and its legacy, mainly evident in Symbolism and Surrealism. In the museum’s exhibition house this important exhibition, comprising over 200 paintings, sculptures, graphic works, photographs and films, will present the fascination that many artists felt for the gloomy, the secretive and the evil. Using outstanding works in the museum’s collection on the subject by Francisco de Goya, Eugène Delacroix, Franz von Stuck or Max Ernst as a starting point, the exhibition is also presenting important loans from internationally renowned collections, such as the Musée d’Orsay, the Musée du Louvre, both in Paris, the Museo del Prado in Madrid and the Art Institute of Chicago. The works on display by Goya, Johann Heinrich Fuseli and William Blake, Théodore Géricault and Delacroix, as well as Caspar David Friedrich, convey a Romantic spirit which by the end of the 18th century had taken hold all over Europe. In the 20th century artists such as Salvador Dalí, René Magritte or Paul Klee and Max Ernst continued to think in this vein. The art works speak of loneliness and melancholy, passion and death, of the fascination with horror and the irrationality of dreams. After Frankfurt the exhibition, conceived by the Städel Museum, will travel to the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.

The exhibition’s take on the subject is geographically and chronologically comprehensive, thereby shedding light on the links between different centres of Romanticism, and thus retracing complex iconographic developments of the time. It is conceived to stimulate interest in the sombre aspects of Romanticism and to expand understanding of this movement. Many of the artistic developments and positions presented here emerge from a shattered trust in enlightened and progressive thought, which took hold soon after the French Revolution – initially celebrated as the dawn of a new age – at the end of the 18th century. Bloodstained terror and war brought suffering and eventually caused the social order in large parts of Europe to break down. The disillusionment was as great as the original enthusiasm when the dark aspects of the Enlightenment were revealed in all their harshness. Young literary figures and artists turned to the reverse side of Reason. The horrific, the miraculous and the grotesque challenged the supremacy of the beautiful and the immaculate. The appeal of legends and fairy tales and the fascination with the Middle Ages competed with the ideal of Antiquity. The local countryside became increasingly attractive and was a favoured subject for artists. The bright light of day encountered the fog and mysterious darkness of the night.

The exhibition is divided into seven chapters. It begins with a group of outstanding works by Johann Heinrich Fuseli. The artist had initially studied to be an evangelical preacher in Switzerland. With his painting The Nightmare (Frankfurt Goethe-Museum) he created an icon of dark Romanticism. This work opens the presentation, which extends over two levels of the temporary exhibition space. Fuseli’s contemporaries were deeply disturbed by the presence of the incubus (daemon) and the lecherous horse – elements of popular superstition – enriching a scene set in the present. In addition, the erotic-compulsive and daemonic content, as well as the depressed atmosphere, catered to the needs of the voyeur. The other six works by Fuseli – loans from the Kunsthaus Zürich, the Royal Academy London and the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart – represent the characteristics of his art: the competition between good and evil, suffering and lust, light and darkness. Fuseli’s innovative pictorial language influenced a number of artists – among them William Blake, whose famous water colour The Great Red Dragon from the Brooklyn Museum will be on view in Europe for the first time in ten years.

The second room of the exhibition is dedicated to the Spanish artist Francisco de Goya. The Städel will display six of his works – including masterpieces such as The Witches’ Flight from the Prado in Madrid and the representations of cannibals from Besançon. A large group of works on paper from the Städel’s own collection will be shown, too. The Spaniard blurs the distinction between the real and the imaginary. Perpetrator and victim repeatedly exchange roles. Good and evil, sense and nonsense – much remains enigmatic. Goya’s cryptic pictorial worlds influenced numerous artists in France and Belgium, including Delacroix, Géricault, Victor Hugo and Antoine Wiertz, whose works will be presented in the following room. Atmosphere and passion were more important to these artists than anatomical accuracy.

Among the German artists – who are the focus of the next section of the exhibition – it is Carl Blechen who is especially close to Goya and Delacroix. His paintings are a testimony to his lust for gloom. His soft spot for the controversial author E. T. A. Hoffmann – also known as “Ghost-Hoffmann” in Germany – led Blechen to paint works such as Pater Medardus (Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin) – a portrait of the mad protagonist in The Devil’s Elixirs. The artist was not alone in Germany when it came to a penchant for dark and disturbing subjects. Caspar David Friedrich’s works, too, contain gruesome elements: cemeteries, open graves, abandoned ruins, ships steered by an invisible hand, lonely gorges and forests are pervasive in his oeuvre. One does not only need to look at the scenes of mourning in the sketchbook at the Kunsthalle Mannheim for the omnipresent theme of death. Friedrich is prominently represented in the exhibition with his paintings Moon Behind Clouds above the Seashore from the Hamburger Kunsthalle and Kügelgen’s Grave from the Lübecker Museums, as well as with one of his last privately owned works, Ship at Deep Sea with full Sails.

Friedrich’s paintings are steeped in oppressive silence. This uncompromising attitude anticipates the ideas of Symbolism, which will be considered in the next chapter of the exhibition. These ‘Neo-Romantics’ stylised speechlessness as the ideal mode of human communication, which would lead to fundamental and seminal insights. Odilon Redon’s masterpiece Closed Eyes, a loan from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, impressively encapsulates this notion. Paintings by Arnold Böcklin, James Ensor, Fernand Khnopff or Edvard Munch also embody this idea. However, as with the Romantics, these restrained works are face to face with works where anxiety and repressed passions are brought unrestrainedly to the surface; works that are unsettling in their radicalism even today. While Gustave Moreau, Max Klinger, Franz von Stuck and Alfred Kubin belong to the art historical canon, here the exhibition presents artists who are still to be discovered in Germany: Jean-Joseph Carriès, Paul Dardé, Jean Delville, Julien-Adolphe Duvocelle, Léon Frédéric, Eugène Laermans and Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer.

The presentation concludes with the Surrealist movement, founded by André Breton. He inspired artists such as Ernst, Brassaϊ or Dalí, to create their wondrous pictorial realms from the reservoir of the subconscious and celebrated them as fantasy’s victory over the “factual world”. Max Ernst vehemently called for “the borders between the so-called inner and outer world” to be blurred. He demonstrated this most clearly in his forest paintings, four of which have been assembled for this exhibition, one of them the major work Vision Provoked by the Nocturnal Aspect of the Porte Saint-Denis (private collection). The art historian Carl Einstein considered the Surrealists to be the Romantics’ successors and coined the phrase ‘the Romantic generation’. In spite of this historical link the Surrealists were far from retrospective. On the contrary: no other movement was so open to new media; photography and film were seen as equal to traditional media. Alongside literature, film established itself as the main arena for dark Romanticism in the 20th century. This is where evil, the thrill of fear and the lust for horror and gloom found a new home. In cooperation with the Deutsches Filmmuseum the Städel will for the first time present extracts from classics such as Frankenstein (1931), Dracula (1931), Faust (1926), Vampyr (1931/32) and The Phantom Carriage (1921) within an exhibition.

The exhibition, which presents the Romantic as a mindset that prevailed throughout Europe and remained influential beyond the 19th century, is accompanied by a substantial catalogue. As is true for any designation of an epoch, Romanticism too is nothing more than an auxiliary construction, defined less by the exterior characteristics of an artwork than by the inner sentiment of the artist. The term “dark Romanticism” cannot be traced to its origins, but – as is also valid for Romanticism per se – comes from literary studies. The German term is closely linked to the professor of English Studies Mario Praz and his publication La carne, la morte e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica of 1930, which was published in German in 1963 as Liebe, Tod und Teufel. Die schwarze Romantik (literally: Love, Death and Devil. Dark Romanticism).”

Press release from the Städel Museum website

Francisco de Goya (1746-1828)
Flying Folly (Disparate Volante)
from “The proverbs (Los proverbios)”, plate 5, 1816-1819, 1.
Edition, 1864
Etching and aquatint
21,7 x 32,6 cm
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main

Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau (1888-1931)
Nosferatu – A Symphony of Horror
Germany 1922
Filmstill
Silent film
© Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung

Edvard Munch (1863-1944)
Vampire
1916-1918
Oil on canvas
85 x 110 cm
Collection Würth
Photo: Archiv Würth
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2012

René Magritte (1898-1967)
Sentimental Conversation
1945
Oil on canvas
54 x 65 cm
Private Collection
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2012

Paul Hippolyte Delaroche (1797-1856)
Louise Vernet, the artist’s wife, on her Deathbed
1845-46
Oil on canvas
62 x 74.5 cm
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes
© Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes

Gabriel von Max (1840-1915)
The White Woman
1900
Oil on canvas
100 x 72 cm
Private Collection

William Blake (1757-1827)
The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun
c. 1803-1805
Watercolor, graphite and incised lines
43.7 x 34.8 cm
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of William Augustus White

Roger Parry (1905-1977)
Untitled
1929
Illustration from Léon-Paul Fargue’s “Banalité” (Paris 1930)
Gelatin silver print
21.8 x 16.5 cm
Collection Dietmar Siegert
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2012

Städelsches Kunstinstitut und Städtische Galerie
Schaumainkai 63, 60596 Frankfurt
Tel: +49(0)69-605098-170

Opening hours:
Tuesdays, Fridays to Sundays 10-18 h, Wednesdays and Thursdays 10-21 h

Städel Museum website

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Jul

Exhibition: ‘Romy Schneider: Exposition’ at the Palais des Festivals et des Congrès de Cannes

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Exhibition dates: 2nd July – 2nd September 2012

“Elle est tourmentée, pure, violente, orgueilleuse…”

“She is tormented, pure, violent, proud…”

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Claude Sautet

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Continuing my love affair with the woman that is, eternally, Romy Schneider. J’adore!

Many thankx to the Palais des Festivals et des Congrès de Cannes for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a a larger version of the image.

“Rarely has an actress been both as beautiful and moving. Rarely has an actress made history so young with an aura so accomplished, just looking, driven by a great desire for the absolute, to escape her own legend. Rarely has a star been both blessed by the gods and as much struck by fate. Rarely has a woman been as bright and as turbulent. Rarely has a foreign aura at this point incarnated France …

It is these paradoxes that this exhibition will highlight. Rare documents, personal items, professional memories and unseen photos tell stories because the route of an actress and a woman of passion, well beyond the screen, has touched the heart of audiences while accompanying the story of the century. We want this exhibition to show the height of what was Romy Schneider was, of what she represents. We want visitors to leave uplifted by her grace and beauty, by which life emerges from it despite the tragedies that have struck – by the obviousness of her talent, the wealth of her career and her encounters.”

Jean-Pierre Lavoignat

“She reminds me of those thoroughbreds who prance, hypersensitive, at the slightest glance. They need to be flattered and excited at the same time but as soon as they loose the rein, they are capable of achieving the most breathtaking performance! “

Alberto Bevilacqua

“She is beautiful with a beauty that she has forged itself. A poisonous mixture of charm and virtuous purity. She is as proud as a Mozart concerto and recognises the power of her body and her sensuality.”

Claude Sautet

“An amazing actress, she does not manufacture the emotion, does not fake it. She recreates the very far, very deep as the huge waves that shake the sea. No trick. (…) It goes straight to the point. All the superficial, bookish, theoretical disappears. This game seems lyrical and requires musical comparisons. Sautet talking about Mozart with regard to Romy. Me, I want to talk of Verdi, Mahler … “

Bertrand Tavernier

Palais des Festivals et des Congrès de Cannes
La Croisette CS 30051
06414 Cannes Cedex – France
T: +33(0)4 93 39 01 01

Opening hours:
7 days a week, from 10.00 am – 7.00 pm

Palais des Festivals et des Congrès de Cannes website

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Jun

Exhibition: ‘Cindy Sherman’ at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), New York

By Dr Marcus Bunyan 1 Comment

Exhibition dates: 26th February – 11th June 2012

Ceaselessly inventive, the bodies (literally) of work of Cindy Sherman are a wonder to behold. From film stills to head shots, from history portrait to society portraits, Sherman constantly reinvents herself, her variations of identity exploring “the complexity of representation in a world saturated with images,” her iterations into the construction of femininity and masculinity constantly “provocative, disparaging, empathetic, and mysterious.”

Where to next? Her recent series of digitally altered landscapes and portraits (Cindy Sherman at Metro Pictures, New York, April – June 2012) seem less resolved than her earlier work, becoming almost a pastiche of themselves. Despite their massive size they seem to lack resolution, the great female impersonator of our time relying for effect on Self as feminine earth (m)Other, tricked up in dubious, quasi-ethnic regalia. Sherman is almost sacrosanct with regard to criticism but it’s about time someone said it: these images are pretty awful.

After so many simulacra, so many layerings and expositions of identity isn’t it about time Sherman got back to basics and ditched these grandiose notions of identity sublime. The sublimation (an unconscious defense mechanism by which consciously unacceptable instinctual drives are expressed in personally and socially acceptable channels) of her/Self, her actual body, the energy of her (non) presence is finally starting to wear thin. Will the real Cindy Sherman (if ever there is such a thing) please stand up and tell us: what do you really stand for, where as a human being, is your spirit really at?

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

Cindy Sherman MOMA installation with photographs from her society portraits (2008) to left and centre

Cindy Sherman MOMA history portraits (1988-90) installation

Cindy Sherman MOMA headshots (2000-2002) installation

Cindy Sherman
Untitled Film Still #21
1978
Gelatin silver print
7 1/2 x 9 1/2″ (19.1 x 24.1 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Horace W. Goldsmith Fund through Robert B. Menschel

Cindy Sherman
Untitled Film Still #6
1977
Gelatin silver print
9 7/16 x 6 1/2″ (24 x 16.5 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Acquired through the generosity of Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder in memory of Eugene M. Schwartz

Cindy Sherman
Untitled Film Still #56
1980
Gelatin silver print
6 3/8 x 9 7/16″ (16.2 x 24 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Acquired through the generosity of Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder in memory of Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd

Gallery 2

In fall 1977, Sherman began making pictures that would eventually become her groundbreaking Untitled Film Stills. Over three years, the series (presented here in its entirety) grew to comprise a total of seventy black-and-white photographs. Taken as a whole, the Untitled Film Stills - resembling publicity pictures made on movie sets – read like an encyclopedic roster of stereotypical female roles inspired by 1950s and 1960s Hollywood, film noir, B movies, and European art-house films. But while the characters and scenarios may seem familiar, Sherman’s Stills are entirely fictitious; they represent clichés (career girl, bombshell, girl on the run, vamp, housewife, and so on) that are deeply embedded in the cultural imagination. While the pictures can be appreciated individually, much of their significance comes in the endless variation of identities from one photograph to the next. As a group they explore the complexity of representation in a world saturated with images, and refer to the cultural filter of images (moving and still) through which we see the world.

Wall text from the exhibition

Cindy Sherman
Untitled #137
1984
Chromogenic color print
70 1/2 x 47 3/4″ (179.1 x 121.3 cm)
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Purchased with the Alice Newton Osborn Fund, 1985

Cindy Sherman
Untitled #458
2007-08
Chromogenic color print
6′ 5 3/8″ x 58 1/4″ (196.5 x 148 cm)
Glenstone

Gallery 3

Fashion – a daily form of masquerade that communicates culture, gender, and class – has been a constant source of inspiration for Sherman and a leading ingredient in the creation of her work. Throughout her career the artist has completed a number of commissions for fashion designers and magazines, and this gallery gathers many of these works. Sherman’s fashion pictures challenge the industry’s conventions of beauty and grace. Her first such commission, made in 1983, parodies typical fashion photography. Rather than projecting glamour, sex, or wealth, the pictures feature characters that are far from desirable – whether goofy, hysterical, angry, or slightly mad. Later commissions resulted in more extreme images of characters with bloodshot eyes, bruises, and scars. These exaggerated figures reached ostentatious heights in a 2007-08 commission, in which fashion victims – including steely fashion editors, PR mavens, assistant buyers, and wannabe fashionistas – wear clothing designed by Balenciaga and ham it up for the camera. Sherman’s interest in the construction of femininity and the mass circulation of images informs much of her work; the projects that take fashion as their subject illustrate the artist’s fascination with fashion images but also her critique of what they represent.

Wall text from the exhibition

Cindy Sherman
Untitled #424
2004
Chromogenic color print
53 3/4 x 54 3/4″ (136.5 x 139.1 cm)
Holzer Family Collection

Gallery 5

Sherman, who photographs alone in her studio, has used a variety of techniques to suggest different locations and imaginary (sometimes impossible) spaces, extending the narrative possibilities of her images. In her first foray into color, in 1980, the artist photographed herself in front of rear-screen projections of various cityscapes and landscapes, evoking films from the 1950s and 1960s that used similar techniques to create the illusion of a change in location. In later series, such as the head shots (2000-2002), clowns (2003-04), and society portraits (2008), the artist used digital tools to create a variety of environments. The garish fluorescent colors in a clown picture contribute to the disturbing quality of the portrait, while a fairy tale forest provides a dreamy backdrop for a well-to-do lady.

Wall text from the exhibition

“The Museum of Modern Art presents the exhibition Cindy Sherman, a retrospective tracing the groundbreaking artist’s career from the mid-1970s to the present, from February 26 to June 11, 2012. The exhibition brings together 171 key photographs from the artist’s significant series – including the complete Untitled Film Stills (1977-80), the critically acclaimed centerfolds (1981), and the celebrated history portraits (1988-90) – plus examples from all of her most important bodies of work, ranging from her fashion photography of the early 1980s to the breakthrough sex pictures of 1992 to her 2003-04 clowns and monumental society portraits from 2008. In addition, the exhibition features the American premiere of her 2010 photographic mural. An exhibition of films drawn from MoMA’s collection selected by Sherman will also be presented in the Museum’s theaters in April. Cindy Sherman is organized by Eva Respini, Associate Curator, with Lucy Gallun, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art.

Cindy Sherman is widely considered to be one of the most important and influential artists of our time and her work is the unchallenged cornerstone of post-modern photography. Masquerading as a myriad of characters in front of her own camera, Sherman creates invented personas and tableaus that examine the construction of identity, the nature of representation, and the artifice of photography. Her works speak to an increasingly image-saturated world, drawing on the unlimited supply of visual material provided by movies, television, magazines, the Internet, and art history.

Ms. Respini says, “To create her photographs, Sherman works unassisted in her studio and assumes multiple roles as photographer, model, art director, make-up artist, hairdresser, and stylist. Whether portraying a career girl or a blond bombshell, a fashion victim or a clown, a French aristocrat or a society lady of a certain age, for over 35 years this relentlessly adventurous artist has created an eloquent and provocative body of work that resonates deeply with our visual culture.”

The American premiere of Sherman’s recent photographic mural (2010) will be installed outside the galleries on the sixth floor. The mural represents the artist’s first foray into transforming space through site-specific fictive environments. In the mural Sherman transforms her face via digital means, exaggerating her features through Photoshop by elongating her nose, narrowing her eyes, or creating smaller lips. The characters, who sport an odd mix of costumes and are taken from daily life, are elevated to larger-than-life status and tower over the viewer. Set against a decorative toile backdrop, her characters seem like protagonists from their own carnivalesque worlds, where fantasy and reality merge. The emphasis on new work presents an opportunity for reassessment in light of the latest developments in Sherman’s oeuvre.

Entering the galleries, the exhibition strays from a chronological narrative typical of retrospectives, and groups photographs thematically to create new and surprising juxtapositions and to suggest common threads across several series. A gallery devoted to her work made for the fashion industry brings together commissions from 1983 to 2011. Sherman’s interest in the construction of femininity and mass circulation of images informs much of the work that takes fashion as its subject, illustrating not only a fascination with fashion images but also a critical stance against what they represent. A gallery exploring themes of the grotesque focuses on bodies of work from the mid-1980s through the mid-1990s, including disasters (1986-89) and sex pictures (1992). Sherman’s investigation of macabre narratives followed a trajectory of the physical disintegration of the body, and features prosthetic parts as a stand-in for the human body. A gallery devoted to Sherman’s exploration of myth, carnival, and fairy tales pairs works from her 2003 clowns with her 1985 fairy tales series. These theatrical pictures revel in their own artificiality, with menacing characters and fantastical narratives.

Galleries devoted to single bodies of work are interspersed among the thematic rooms. Sherman’s seminal series the Untitled Film Stills, comprising 70 black-and-white photographs made between 1977 and 1980, are presented in their entirety (the complete series is in MoMA’s collection). Made to look like publicity pictures taken on movie sets, the Untitled Film Stills read like an encyclopedic roster of female roles inspired by 1950s and 1960s Hollywood, film noir, B movies, and European art-house films. While the characters and scenarios may seem familiar, Sherman’s Stills are entirely fictitious. Her characters represent deeply embedded clichés (career girl, bombshell, girl on the run, housewife, and so on) and rely on the persistence of recognizable manufactured stereotypes that loom large in the cultural imagination.

Other series presented in depth include Sherman’s 1981 series of 12-color photographs known as the centerfolds. Originally commissioned by Artforum magazine, these send-ups of men’s erotic magazine centerfolds depict characters in a variety of emotional states, ranging from terrified to heartbroken to melancholic. With this series, Sherman plays into the male conditioning of looking at photographs of exposed women, but she turns this on its head by taking on the roles of both (assumed) male photographer and female pinup. The history portraits investigate the relationships between painter and model, and are featured in depth in the exhibition. These theatrical portraits borrow from a number of art historical periods, from Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, and Neoclassical. This free-association sampling creates an illusion of familiarity, but not with any one specific era or style (just as the Untitled Film Stillsevoke generic types, not particular films). The subjects (for the first time, many are men) include aristocrats, Madonna and child, clergymen, women of leisure, and milkmaids, who pose with props, elaborate costumes, and obvious prostheses.

Sherman has explored the experience of aging in a youth- and status-obsessed society with several bodies of work made since 2000. For her headshots from 2000-2002 (sometimes called Hollywood/Hamptons), the artist conceived a cast of characters of would-be or has-been actors (in reality secretaries, housewives, or gardeners) posing for headshots to get an acting job. With this series, Sherman underscores the transformative qualities of makeup, hair, expression, and pose, and the recognition of certain stereotypes as powerful transmitters of cultural clichés. Her monumental 2008 society portraits feature women “of a certain age” from the top echelons of society who struggle with today’s impossible standards of beauty. The psychological weight of these pictures comes through in the unrelenting honesty of the description of aging and the small details that belie the attempt to project a certain appearance. In the infinite possibilities of the mutability of identity, these pictures stand out for their ability to be at once provocative, disparaging, empathetic, and mysterious.”

Press release from the MOMA website

Cindy Sherman
Untitled #193
1989
Chromogenic color print
48 7/8 x 41 15/16″ (124.1 x 106.5 cm)
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection

Cindy Sherman
Untitled #213
1989
Chromogenic color print
41 1/2 x 33″ (105.4 x 83.8 cm)
Courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures, New York

Cindy Sherman
Untitled #216
1989
Chromogenic color print
7′ 3 1/8″ x 56 1/8″ (221.3 x 142.5 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Werner and Elaine Dannheisser

Gallery 7

Sherman’s history portraits (1988-90) investigate modes of representation in art history and the relationship between painter and model. These classically composed portraits borrow from a number of art-historical periods – Renaissance, baroque, rococo, Neoclassical – and make allusions to paintings by Raphael, Caravaggio, Fragonard, and Ingres (who, like all the Old Masters, were men). This free-association sampling creates a sense of familiarity, but not of any one specific era or style. The subjects (for the first time for Sherman, many are men) include aristocrats, Madonnas with child, clergymen, women of leisure, and milk-maids, who pose with props, costumes, and obvious prostheses. Theatrical and artificial – full of large noses, bulging bellies, squirting breasts, warts, and unibrows – the history portraits are poised between humorous parody and grotesque caricature.

A handful of Sherman’s portraits were inspired by actual paintings. Untitled #224 was made after Caravaggio’s Sick Bacchus (c. 1593), which is commonly believed to be a self-portrait of the artist as the Roman god of wine. In Sherman’s reinterpretation, the numerous layers of representation – a female artist impersonating a male artist impersonating a pagan divinity – create a sense of remove, pastiche, and criticality. Even where Sherman’s pictures offer a gleam of art-historical recognition, she has inserted her own interpretation of the canonized paintings, creating contemporary artifacts of a bygone era.

Wall text from the exhibition

Cindy Sherman
Untitled #359
2000
Chromogenic color print
30 x 20″ (76.2 x 50.8 cm)
Collection Metro Pictures, New York

Gallery 8

After almost a decade of staging still lifes with dolls and props, in her 2000-2002 head-shots series Sherman returned to a more intimate scale and to using herself as a model. The format recalls ID pictures, head shots, or vanity portraits made in garden-variety portrait studios by professional photographers. First exhibited in Beverly Hills, the series explores the cycle of desire and failed ambition that permeates Hollywood. Sherman conceived a cast of would-be or has-been female actors posing for head shots in order to get acting jobs; later, for an exhibition in New York, she added East Coast types. Whichever part of the country they’re from, we’ve seen these women before – on reality television, in soap operas, or at a PTA meeting. With these pictures, Sherman underscores the transformative qualities of makeup, hair, express-ion, and pose, and the power of stereotypes as transmitters of cultural clichés. She projects well-drawn personas: the enormous pouting lips of the woman in Untitled #360 suggest a yearning for youth, while the glittery makeup and purple iridescent dress worn by the character in Untitled #400 indicate an aspiration to reach a certain social status. In her role as both sitter and photographer, Sherman has disrupted the usual power dynamic between model and photographer and created new avenues through which to explore the very apparatus of portrait photography itself.

Cindy Sherman
Untitled #465
2008
Chromogenic color print
63 3/4 x 57 1/4″ (161.9 x 145.4 cm)
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Purchase, with funds from the Painting and Sculpture Committee and the Photography Committee, 2009

Cindy Sherman
Untitled #466
2008
Chromogenic color print

Cindy Sherman
Untitled #474
2008
Chromogenic color print
7′ 7″ x 60 1/4″ (231.1 x 153 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Acquired through the generosity of an anonymous donor, Michael Lynne, Charles Heilbronn, and the Carol and David Appel Family Fund

Gallery 10

Set against opulent backdrops and presented in ornate frames, the characters in Sherman’s 2008 society portraits seem at once tragic and vulgar. The figures are not based on specific women, but the artist has made them look entirely familiar in their struggle with the impossible standards of beauty that prevail in a youth – and status – obsessed culture. At this large scale, it is easy to decipher the characters’ vulnerability behind the makeup, clothes, and jewelry. The psychological weight of these pictures comes through the unrelenting honesty of their description of aging, the tell-tale signs of cosmetic alteration, and the small details that belie the characters’ attempts to project a polished and elegant appearance. Upon careful viewing, they reveal a dark reality lurking beneath the glossy surface of perfection. As with much of her work, in her society portraits Sherman has demonstrated a remarkable capacity to channel the zeitgeist. These well-heeled divas presaged the financial collapse of 2008, the end of an era of opulence – the size of the photographs alone seems a commentary on an age of excess. Among the numerous iterations of contemporary identity, these pictures stand out as at once provocative, disparaging, empathetic, and mysterious.

Wall text from the exhibition

Cindy Sherman
Untitled #475
2008
Chromogenic color print
7′ 2 3/8″ x 71 1/2″ (219.4 x 181.6 cm)
The Broad Art Foundation, Santa Monica

Gallery 11

Because the majority of Sherman’s pictures feature the artist as model, they showcase a single character. In the 1970s Sherman experimented with cutouts of multiple figures, in her whimsical 1975 stop-motion animated short film Doll Clothes and her rarely seen 1976 collages, which were achieved through a labor-intensive process of cutting and pasting multiple photographs. When Sherman began working digitally in the early 2000s, she was able to more easily incorporate multiple figures in one frame, allowing for a variety of new narrative possibilities. Where the early works chart the movements and gestures of a single character through space, the multiple figures in recent works interact with one another to create tableaus.

Wall text from the exhibition

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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.

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Exhibition: ‘Cindy Sherman’ at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), New York

Exhibition dates: 26th February – 11th June 2012

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