“We return again and again to look at these fleeting, fetishistic images, to confirm their documentary status, that they do exist – to confirm our pleasure, the scopophilic desire for pleasurable looking.” Dr Marcus Bunyan
Exhibition dates: 9th June – 26th August, 2012
Curator: Thomas Seelig
Participating artists: Lara Almarcegui, Dimitry Astakhov, Sammy Baloji, Walead Beshty, Ursula Biemann, Fernando Brito, Moyra Davey, Lukas Einsele, Cédric Eisenring / Thomas Julier, Michael Elmgreen / Ingar Dragset, Alfredo Jarr, Jérôme Leuba, Market Photo Workshop, Erica Overmeer, Trevor Paglen, Willem Popelier, Gosha Rubchinskiy, Jules Spinatsch, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Fiona Tan, Jonas Unger, Unknown Taliban, Lidwien van de Ven, wearethe99percent
The word status (noun) can mean the position of an individual in relation to another or others, especially in regard to social or professional standing. The word derives from the Latin posture, from stãre to stand. What is the standing of these photographs (as documents)? What does their posturing suggest, when the time of contemporary photographs has become but a series of disconnected presents/presence.
Mike Featherstone observes that, “Postmodern everyday culture is a culture of stylistic diversity and heterogeneity (comprising different parts or qualities), of an overload of imagery and simulations which lead to a loss of the referent or sense of reality. The subsequent fragmentation of time into a series of presents through a lack of capacity to chain signs and images into narrative sequences leads to a schizophrenic emphasis on vivid, immediate, isolated, affect-charged experiences of the presentness of the world – of intensities.“1
It is these intensities that we confront in the (Facebook) frenzy of contemporary photography. It is this schizophrenic inability to sustain a coherent identity that the photographs in this posting address. The words embedded in the media statement give ample latitude for the exploration of these immediacies: complex network, loose associations, immediate relationships, current status, apparent jumps and various themes to name but a few. But Annette Kuhn notes, “The truth / authenticity potential of photography is tied in with the idea that seeing is believing. Photography draws on an ideology of the visible as evidence. The eye of the camera is neutral, it sees the world as it is: we look at a photograph and see a slice of the world. To complete the circuit of recording, visibility and truth set up by the photograph, there has to be someone looking at it …”2 Kuhn continues, “A photograph, however much it may pretend to authenticity, must always in the final instance admit that it is not real, in the sense that what is in the picture is not here, but elsewhere.”3
The photograph evacuates its own meaning, its status as document; its posturing lies elsewhere. This very quality of absence may augment the voyeuristic pleasure of the spectator’s look.4 We return again and again to look at these fleeting, fetishistic images, to confirm their documentary status, that they do exist – to confirm our pleasure, the scopophilic desire for pleasurable looking. In the end we can ask, what do the photographs of a fake Prada shop in the desert, the perfect pink circles of identity / identical absence represent?
What are we really seeing? Do they really exist, do we really exist. Is living really believing?
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Featherstone, Mike. Consumer Culture and Postmodernism. London: Sage Publications, 1991, p. 124 2/ Kuhn, Annette. The Power of the Image: Essays on Representation and Sexuality. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985, pp. 27-28
3/ Ibid., pp. 30-31
4/ Ibid., pp. 30-31
Many thanx to Fotomuseum Winterthur for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photograph for a larger version of the image.
Photographer Willem Popelier (Eindhoven, 1982) found by accident 91 photographs and two films made by two girls on a publicly accessible computer. This was the start of a long-running project in which Popelier researched the role of photography on the internet and in social media. The result is the exhibition, Showroom Girls, an intimate portrait of one of the girls in the form of pictures and texts by her hand that Popelier found online.
Webcam
Whilst working on another project, Showroom, Popelier was looking for showroom computers which visitors use to take pictures of themselves by using the computer’s webcam. He discovered that people leave these pictures on the computer in the shop. Popelier started to collect these images. Photographs of anonymous people who portray themselves in the public domain and upon occasion rather obsessively.
On one particular computer Popelier found almost a hundred pictures made by two girls. After more research he discovered that the girls had produced around two hundred images in almost an hour. A large number of these shots were removed, but the girls had left a number on purpose. One of the girls wore a necklace stating her name. Popelier started to look for her on the internet and found both girls on various websites such as Hyves, Facebook and Twitter. Via the internet Popelier got access to the tweets of one of the girls, but also managed to find her address and even her school results. And all of this he found legally, without hacking into any secret or inaccessible data. With all the collected material he put together the exhibition Showroom Girls.
Text from the Foam website
wearethe99percent.tumblr.com Tumblr website, since August 2011
A few years after the digital turn the shift from analog to digital image production and archiving, Fotomuseum Winterthur explores the current state of the document and the documentary image in the exhibition Status – 24 Contemporary Documents. Whereas the term “status” used to have a thoroughly positive connotation, indicating a confident display of one’s own condition or state, today we ask about the “status” of things almost with a sense of apprehension, knowing full well that situations are often uncertain, precarious, and usually in flux. This uncertainty carries over into the field of photography. The rapid dissemination and availability of images and videos in print media, on the Internet, on social platforms such as Facebook, Google, Twitter, or Flickr have led to new forms of communication through documentary images. Often we do not know who took the picture, nor do we know how the picture has made its way to us. How are these photographic documents to be understood? How do the schemata of seeing, understanding, deleting, and saving function in our contemporary multi-media environment?
The 24 exemplary “documents” selected for this exhibition come together in a complex network of loose associations and immediate relationships, which attempts to capture the current status of the documentary image. The apparent jumps between various themes and media formats, between official press images (Vladimir Putin fishing) and anthropological studies of the family image (the Vox Populi work by Fiona Tan) correspond to our current viewing experience as alternating between high and low, surface and depth. The conquest of unknown territory and the quiet contemplation of a personal theme form two poles of the exhibition. Whereas Trevor Paglen uses meticulous, scientific precision to offer proof of hidden US satellites operating in the night sky, Sammy Baloji, Jérôme Leuba, and Lara Almarcegui rescue removed sites or unusual biographies from oblivion. In 2009 Almarcegui was able to photograph the overgrown lots in East London that have now been built up and will be the sites of the Summer Olympics 2012.
The exhibition Status – 24 Contemporary Documents pursues the traces photography leaves behind, travelling at both analog and digital speeds. Through her video camera, Moyra Davey delves into a volume of photographs that is important to her, Portraits in Life and Death by Peter Hujar, and thereby creates a parable of decelerated reading and looking. Willem Popelier examines the shifting identities and presentations of the self through his work Showroom Girls, which offers an exemplary reflection on a younger generation’s behaviour in social networks. Conceived and realised by Jules Spinatsch, the 24-hour panorama of the trading floor of the German stock exchange in Frankfurt – a site highly familiar from media images – enables us to witness the simultaneous recording, receiving, and saving of information in the form of a 14-meter wall installation, whose individual components will come together at Fotomuseum Winterthur over the course of the opening day of the exhibition on June 8, 2012 and depict a complete calendar day.
The exhibition is organised by Thomas Seelig, curator at Fotomuseum Winterthur.
Press release from the Fotomuseum Winterthur website
Organised by the museum in close collaboration with the William Eggleston Artistic Trust in Memphis
William Eggleston (American, b. 1939) Untitled 1960 Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York and Peder Lund, Oslo Eggleston Artistic Trust Photo Courtesy Vegard Kleven, Oslo
“As these rediscovered prints reveal, the man who made colour photography into an artform worked brilliantly in monochrome – and his eye for unsettling detail is every bit as sharp”
Sean O’Hagan
These are magnificent, intelligent photographs. They are works from the master that show that Eggleston found his own style early on.
His understanding of the “quietness” of space and form within the picture plane is already fully developed and his aesthetic decision to use grainy, black and white high speed film just adds to the stillness and eeriness of the photographs.
His signature style, his unique messianic voice, really shines through in these recently discovered images which could be seen to be BC – before the beginning of colour (photography) as eulogised by the museum establishment.
Highlights in these photographs include:
~ The pose of the women caught mid-stride, about to put the telephone back in its cradle
~ The man and the woman frozen mid-conversation in a minimal hotel lobby(?) with the shroud of a dark man on the plaque behind
~ The barren hotel room with old air conditioner, vinyl chair, floral bedspread and newspapers strewn over the floor (remeniscent of the spaces of so many of his later colour photographs)
~ And my favourite, Untitled (1960, below), the bulk of the heavy car looming out of the murk at the bottom of the picture frame, the intransigent windscreen wipers, the rain and the blurred traffic moving behind. You can almost touch and taste the atmosphere of this moment, in this day, of that year…
The wondrous thing is that Eggleston’s voice transfers beautifully through into the saturation of his later colour dye-transfer prints. His pared down vision of “Southern” life and world become unmistakably his own in the colour photographs.
Unlike the Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama, whose panache in his black and white photographs is matched only by the shallowness of his colour work, here Eggleston lays the ground work for the rest of his monumental career.
Great to see these early photographs. I’m so glad they found them!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Nederlands Fotomuseum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs to view a larger version of the image.
William Eggleston (American, b. 1939) Untitled 1960 Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York and Peder Lund, Oslo Eggleston Artistic Trust Photo Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York
William Eggleston (American, b. 1939) Untitled 1966 Private collection, Oslo. Courtesy Peder Lund Eggleston Artistic Trust Photo Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York
The American photographer William Eggleston (1939) is known as one of the first major pioneers of artistic colour photography. His book William Eggleston’s Guide was one of the most influential photography books of the 20th century and still inspires many today. Eggleston’s black-and-white photographs are less well-known. In Before Color, the Nederlands Fotomuseum highlights this famous photographer’s earliest work, which was only recently discovered. The photographs show that Eggleston found his own style early on. Inspired by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Eggleston used a 35mm camera and fast black-and-white film to photograph the American way of life in the early 1960s. We see his own surroundings: suburban Memphis, with its diners, car parks and supermarkets, as well as the houses and domestic interiors of the people who lived there. Before Color by William Eggleston will be on display from 16 June until 26 August.
Black-and-white snapshots
When Eggleston started taking photographs in the early 1960s, he was particularly inspired by the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson and his book The Decisive Moment from 1952. Contrary to the big names in American photography at the time – who were preoccupied with the stunning landscape, like Ansel Adams – Cartier-Bresson took snapshots of everyday life. Eggleston found this approach very appealing. Using a 35mm camera and fast black-and-white film he began photographing his own surroundings. These were predominantly shaped by suburban Memphis, with its diners, car parks and supermarkets, but he also focused on the houses and domestic interiors of the people who lived there.
Breaking a tradition
At the same time Eggleston experimented with colour photography. Together with Joel Meyerowitz, Joel Sternfeld and others, he broke the long tradition of black-and-white photography by working in colour and focusing on subjects from daily life. In 1972 he completed an extensive series of 2,200 photographs entitled Los Alamos, which provided a unique picture of life in America in the ’60s and early ’70s. He discovered the deep and saturated colours of the so-called dye-transfer printing technique, originally a commercial application that he perfected and that would become his international trademark. His first solo exhibition in 1976 was also the first exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art devoted to colour photography. The exhibition was accompanied by what would become the acclaimed and influential book William Eggleston’s Guide.
Before Color
Eggleston would later abandon black-and-white film altogether and his earliest work was forgotten. So it was a surprise when a box of his black-and-white photographs was recently found in the archives of the William Eggleston Artistic Trust in Memphis. The photographs were exhibited for the first time in 2010 at the Cheim & Read Gallery in New York and published in the book Before Color (Steidl, 2010).
Before Color exhibition
This is the first time that Before Color has been exhibited in the Netherlands and includes nearly 40 photographs from William Eggleston’s early career. The images show that Eggleston found his personal style and photographic motifs early on and provide a wonderful picture of the American way.
Press release from the Nederlands Fotomuseum website
William Eggleston (American, b. 1939) Untitled 1960 Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York and Peder Lund, Oslo Eggleston Artistic Trust Photo Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York
William Eggleston (American, b. 1939) Untitled Nd Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York and Peder Lund, Oslo Eggleston Artistic Trust Photo Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York
William Eggleston (American, b. 1939) Untitled Nd Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York and Peder Lund, Oslo Eggleston Artistic Trust Photo Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York
William Eggleston (American, b. 1939) Untitled
Nd
Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York and Peder Lund, Oslo
Eggleston Artistic Trust
Photo Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York
William Eggleston (American, b. 1939) Untitled Nd Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York and Peder Lund, Oslo Eggleston Artistic Trust Photo Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York
William Eggleston (American, b. 1939) Untitled Nd Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York and Peder Lund, Oslo Eggleston Artistic Trust Photo Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York
William Eggleston (American, b. 1939) Untitled Nd Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York and Peder Lund, Oslo Eggleston Artistic Trust Photo Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York
William Eggleston (American, b. 1939) Untitled Nd Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York and Peder Lund, Oslo Eggleston Artistic Trust Photo Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York
The history of the “South” and what it is to be “Southern” cannot easily be separated from its horrific legacy of abject cruelty and malevolence against African Americans… of slavery, lynching, segregation, Jim Crow laws and lasting prejudice…
William Eggleston: Before Color is then surely a tour into this menace and heinous history and into the “Southern” legacy. In fact with the absence of color in this work, it is a significantly stronger embodiment of this history and of this malice. Although 90% of the book is absent of African American subjects, one can’t help but “feel” them in almost all of the pictures. The photographs, mainly consisting of white Memphis residents in the 1950-60’s, and their homes, cars and places, are also then filled by a default and implication with blacks. There is also a palpable undertone and a foreshadowing of the socio-economic decay that will fall on to this city and much of the South. As you look at the pictures, you “see” what “they” have done and the legacy that has been created, what has and what will occur. The atmosphere is dreary and ugly, there is no “Southern charm”. In photographs of newly constructed houses for example, through Eggleston’s gaze, the places are already giving hints to coming decay. It is as if the legacy has become an omen and what has been reaped, for generations now, everyone will sow.
Doug Rickard. “William Eggleston – “Before Color” (2010),” on the ASX website January 12, 2013 [Online] Cited 22/01/2013. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
William Eggleston (American, b. 1939) Untitled 1960 Private collection, Oslo. Courtesy Peder Lund Eggleston Artistic Trust Photo Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York
William Eggleston (American, b. 1939) Untitled 1960 Private collection, Oslo. Courtesy Peder Lund Eggleston Artistic Trust Photo Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York
William Eggleston (American, b. 1939) Untitled c. 1968 William Eggleston/2010 Eggleston Artistic Trust Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York
William Eggleston (American, b. 1939) Untitled c. 1970 William Eggleston/2010 Eggleston Artistic Trust. Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York
William Eggleston (American, b. 1939) Untitled c. 1970 William Eggleston/2010 Eggleston Artistic Trust. Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York
Nederlands Fotomuseum Wilhelminakade 332 3072 AR Rotterdam The Netherlands
Exhibition dates: 27th June – 23rd September, 2012
Curators: Dr. Martin Engler, Head of the Collection of Contemporary Art, with Dr. Jana Baumann serving as co-curator
Installation view of the exhibition Painting in Photography. Strategies of Appropriation at the Städel Museum, Frankfurt showing Victor Burgin’s Office at Night (Red), 1985 (below)
“To understand the production of art at the end of tradition, which in our lifetime means art at the end of modernism, requires, as the postmodern debate has shown, a careful consideration of the idea of history and the notion of ending. Rather than just thinking ending as the arrival of the finality of a fixed chronological moment, it can also be thought as a slow and indecisive process of internal decomposition that leaves in place numerous deposits of us, in us and with us – all with a considerable and complex afterlife. In this context all figuration is prefigured. This is to say that the design element of the production of a work of art, the compositional, now exists prior to the management of form of, and on, the picture plane. Techniques of assemblage, like montage and collage – which not only juxtaposed different aesthetics but also different historical moments, were the precursors of what is now the general condition of production.”
“Art Byting the Dust” Tony Fry 1990 1
They said that photography would be the death of painting. It never happened. Recently they thought that digital photography would be the death of analogue photography. It hasn’t happened for there are people who care enough about analogue photography to keep it going, no matter what.
As the quotation above astutely observes, the digital age has changed the conditions of production updating the techniques of montage and collage for the 21st century. Now through assemblage the composition may be prefigured but that does not mean that there are not echoes, traces and deposits of other technologies, other processes that are not evidenced in contemporary photography.
As photography influenced painting when it first appeared and vice versa (photography went through a period known as Pictorialism where where it imitated Impressionist painting), this exhibition highlights the influence of painting on later photography. Whatever process it takes photography has always been about painting with light – through a pinhole, through a microscope, through a camera lens; using light directly onto photographic paper, using the light of the scanner or the computer screen.
As Paul Virilio observes, no longer is there a horizon line but the horizon square of the computer screen, still a picture plane that evidences the history of art and life. Vestiges of time and technology are somehow always present no matter what medium an artist chooses. They always have a complex afterlife and afterimage.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
PS. I really don’t think it is a decomposition, more like a re/composition or reanimation.
PPS. Notice how Otto Steinert’s Luminogramm (1952, below), is eerily similar to some of Pierre Soulages paintings.
1/ Fry, Tony. “Art Byting the Dust,” in Hayward, Phillip. Culture, Technology and Creativity in the Late Twentieth Century. London: John Libbey and Company, 1990, pp. 169-170
Many thankx to the Städel Musuem for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Victor Burgin (British, b. 1941) Office at Night (Red) 1985
In a conceptual, analytical visual language, Burgin, who originally started out as a painter, refers to Edward Hopper’s painting “Office at Night” from 1940. It shows a New York office at night, in which the boss and secretary are still at work and alone. Burgin’s picture is part of a series about this depiction of a couple by Hopper (and the special role of the female motif in his work). Burgin’s picture consists of three panels, each of which uses a fictional register: letters (word), color (red is traditionally the color for lust and love) and photographic image (secretary).
Installation view of the exhibition Painting in Photography. Strategies of Appropriation at the Städel Museum, Frankfurt showing at left, Thomas Ruff’s Substrat 10 (2002, below)
Installation view of the exhibition Painting in Photography. Strategies of Appropriation at the Städel Museum, Frankfurt showing at centre, Wolfgang Tillmans Paper drop (window) (2006, below)
From 27 June to 23 September 2012, the Städel Museum will show the exhibition “Painting in Photography. Strategies of Appropriation.” The comprehensive presentation will highlight the influence of painting on the imagery produced by contemporary photographic art. Based on the museum’s own collection and including important loans from the DZ Bank Kunstsammlung as well as international private collections and galleries, the exhibition at the Städel will centre on about 60 examples, among them major works by László Moholy-Nagy, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Wolfgang Tillmans, Thomas Ruff, Jeff Wall, and Amelie von Wulffen. Whereas the influence of the medium of photography on the “classic genres of art” has already been the subject of analysis in numerous exhibitions and publications, less attention has been paid to the impact of painting on contemporary photography to date. The show at the Städel explores the reflection of painting in the photographic image by pursuing various artistic strategies of appropriation which have one thing in common: they reject the general expectation held about photography that it will document reality in an authentic way.
The key significance of photography within contemporary art and its incorporation into the collection of the Städel Museum offer an occasion to fathom the relationship between painting and photography in an exhibition. While painting dealt with the use of photography in the mass media in the 1960s, today’s photographic art shows itself seriously concerned with the conditions of painting. Again and again, photography reflects, thematises, or represents the traditional pictorial medium, maintaining an ambivalent relationship between appropriation and detachment.
Numerous works presented in the Städel’s exhibition return to the painterly abstractions of the prewar and postwar avant-gardes, translate them into the medium of photography, and thus avoid a reproduction of reality. Early examples for the adaption of techniques of painting in photography are László Moholy-Nagy’s (1895-1946) photograms dating from the 1920s. For his photographs shot without a camera, the Hungarian artist and Bauhaus teacher arranged objects on a sensitised paper; these objects left concrete marks as supposedly abstract forms under the influence of direct sunlight. In Otto Steinert’s (1915-1978) non-representational light drawings or “luminigrams,” the photographer’s movement inscribed itself directly into the sensitised film. The pictures correlate with the gestural painting of Jackson Pollock’s Abstract Expressionism. A product of random operations during the exposure and development of the photographic paper, Wolfgang Tillmans’ (b. 1968) work “Freischwimmer 54” (2004) is equally far from representing the external world. It is the pictures’ fictitious depth, transparency, and dynamics that lend Thomas Ruff’s photographic series “Substrat” its extraordinary painterly quality recalling colour field paintings or Informel works. For his series “Seascapes” the Japanese artist Hiroshi Sugimoto (b. 1948) seems to have “emptied” the motif through a long exposure time: the sublime pictures of the surface of the sea and the sky – which either blur or are set off against each other – seem to transcend time and space.
In addition to the photographs mentioned, the exhibition “Painting in Photography” includes works by artists who directly draw on the history of painting in their choice of motifs. The mise-en-scène piece “Picture for Women” (1979) by the Canadian photo artist Jeff Wall (b. 1946), which relates to Édouard Manet’s famous painting “Un Bar aux Folies-Bergère” from 1882, may be cited as an example for this approach. The camera positioned in the centre of the picture reveals the mirrored scene and turns into the eye of the beholder. The fictitious landscape pictures by Beate Gütschow (b. 1970), which consist of digitally assembled fragments, recall ideal Arcadian sceneries of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The photographs taken by Italian Luigi Ghirri (1943-1992) in the studio of Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964) “copy” Morandi’s still lifes by representing the real objects in the painter’s studio instead of his paintings.
Another appropriative strategy sees the artist actually becoming active as a painter, transforming either the object he has photographed or its photographic representation. Oliver Boberg’s, Richard Hamilton’s, Georges Rousse’s and Amelie von Wulffen’s works rank in this category. For her series “Stadtcollagen” (1998-1999) Amelie von Wulffen (b. 1966) assembled drawing, photography, and painting to arrive at the montage of a new reality. The artist’s recollections merge with imaginary spaces offering the viewer’s fantasy an opportunity for his or her own associations.
The exhibition also encompasses positions of photography for which painting is the object represented in the picture. The most prominent examples in this section come from Sherrie Levine (b. 1947) and Louise Lawler (b. 1947), both representatives of US Appropriation Art. From the late 1970s on, Levine and Lawler have photographically appropriated originals from art history. Levine uses reproductions of paintings from a catalogue published in the 1920s: she photographs them and makes lithographs of her pictures. Lawler photographs works of art in private rooms, museums, and galleries and thus rather elucidates the works’ art world context than the works as such.
Beate Gütschow (German, b. 1970) PN #1 2000 C-Print, mounted on aluminium dibond Acquired in 2013, property of Städelscher Museums-Verein e.V. Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main, Eigentum des Städelschen Museums-Vereins e.V.
… these images do not evoke a sense of the sublime. On closer inspection, not only is the virginity of nature lost forever, but the innocence of perception is also denied. The natural realms presented here are simply too beautiful to be true. The beauty, wildness, and potentially threatening aspects of nature have been skillfully merged into a decorative whole, as they were in landscape painting from the 17th through to the 19th century. Beate Gütschow’s photographic works reproduce traditional patterns of depiction, incorporating landscape elements that recall compositions by Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665), Jacob van Ruisdael (1628-1682), Claude Lorrain (1600-1682), John Constable (1776-1837), and Philipp Otto Runge (1777-1810). The subjects portrayed by these landscape painters were based on an idealised worldview, the construction of which reflected the dominant philosophical ethos of their time. The artists themselves, however, presented this ideal in a manner bordering on the absolute. …
Beate Gütschow photographs landscapes with a medium-format analog camera, then converts the images into digital files. From this archived material she then constructs new landscapes in Photoshop, basing their spatial arrangements and compositional structures on the principles of landscape painting. As part of this subsequent editing process, she adjusts the light and colours in the images, applying lighting techniques from the realm of painting to her photographs. Because Gütschow uses only the retouching tool and other traditional darkroom techniques offered by Photoshop, not its painting tools, the photographic surface is preserved and the joins between the component parts are not immediately visible. These digital tools make it possible to employ a painterly method without the resulting picture being a painting. The viewer is given the impression that this is a completely normal photograph. When, however, an ideal landscape is presented in the form of a photograph, it appears more unnatural than the painted version of the same view. In this way, Gütschow’s work explores concepts of representation, colour, and light – the formal attributes of painting and photography – as well as the distinctions between documentation and staging.
Extract from Gebbers, Anna-Catharina. “Larger than Life,” in Beate Gütschow: ZISLS. Heidelberg, 2016, pp. 8-17. Translated by Jacqueline Todd [Online] Cited 23/08/2022. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Luigi Ghirri (Italian, 1943-1992) L’atelier de Giorgio Morandi, Bologne 1989
Luigi Ghirri (5 January 1943 – 14 February 1992) was an Italian artist and photographer who gained a far-reaching reputation as a pioneer and master of contemporary photography, with particular reference to its relationship between fiction and reality.
Amelie von Wulffen (German, b. 1966) Untitled (City Collages, VIII) 1998 Oil paint, photographs on paper 42 x 59.7cm Acquired in 2009 with funds from the Städelkomitee 21. Jahrhundert, property of Städelscher Museums-Verein e.V. Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main, Eigentum des Städelschen Museums-Vereins e.V.
The starting point for Amelie von Wulffen’s city collages is the urban architecture which she has photographed herself. These photographs are affixed to a surface and then processed pictorially: the artist alienates the perspective, adds abstract patterns and confronts the scene with quirky objects. The painted forms and unreal connections intervene in the relationship to reality of the supposedly objective photograph. The combination of photograph and painting is accompanied by a reflection on the characteristics of the medium concerned. The photographic reproduction of a situation which has been experienced may adequately record the place but not necessarily the memory. With this in mind, the artist sees painting as a suitable medium to equip photography with an authentic means of expression. During the chemical process of photography, real objects are registered on the light-sensitive material, just as the mood of the place and the memory of the artist are translated into the painting process. With regard to form, Wulffen reveals a wealth of references to Constructivism, Surrealism and Dadaism.
In our “Art after 1945” series, artists introduce their artworks in the Städel collection. In this episode Amelie von Wulffen explains her series “Stadtcollagen”.
Jeff Wall (Canadian, b. 1946) Picture for Women 1979 Cibachrome transparency in lightbox 204.5 × 142.5cm (80.5 in × 56.1 in)
Picture for Women is a photographic work by Canadian artist Jeff Wall. Produced in 1979, Picture for Women is a key early work in Wall’s career and exemplifies a number of conceptual, material and visual concerns found in his art throughout the 1980s and 1990s. An influential photographic work, Picture for Women is a response to Édouard Manet’s Un bar aux Folies Bergère and is a key photograph in the shift from small-scale black and white photographs to large-scale colour that took place in the 1980s in art photography and museum exhibitions. …
Picture for Women is a 142.5 by 204.5 cm Cibachrome transparency mounted on a lightbox. Along with The Destroyed Room (1978), Wall considers Picture for Women to be his first success in challenging photographic tradition. According to Tate Modern, this success allows Wall to reference “both popular culture (the illuminated signs of cinema and advertising hoardings) and the sense of scale he admires in classical painting. As three-dimensional objects, the lightboxes take on a sculptural presence, impacting on the viewer’s physical sense of orientation in relationship to the work.”
The “Beast III” has a Chrysler Hemi engine and was the fastest single-engine car in America in 1952. It was the first car to have its body designed in a wind tunnel.
Continuing my fascination with the design of the automobile, here are another selection of classics!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Utah Museum of Fine Arts for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photograph for a larger version of the image.
The “Mormon Meteor III,” the last Duesenberg built, set more long-distance land-speed records than any other car in history. It has a handcrafted Curtis Conqueror aircraft V12 engine.
Racing into town this summer, Speed: The Art of the Performance Automobile will be on display at the University of Utah on the first-floor galleries of the Utah Museum of Fine Arts in the Marcia and John Price Museum Building from June 2 – September 16. The exhibition comprises 19 of the world’s finest automobiles and was organised by automotive historian, museum consultant and guest curator Ken Gross.
Speed will showcase a century of automobiles that exemplify premier aerodynamics, engineering, art and design of their eras. The cars range from the menacing 1952 “Beast III” Bonneville racer to the ultra-cool 1957 Jaguar XK-SS Roadster, once owned by Steve McQueen. The cars are on loan from some of the country’s top automobile collections, including the Price Museum of Speed; National Automobile Museum; Petersen Automotive Museum; Bruce Meyer; Peter and Merle Mullin; Jon and Mary Shirley; and the Larry H. Miller Family.
“We are delighted to be presenting ‘Speed: The Art of the Performance Automobile’ and are confident that our visitors will be amazed at the beauty, engineering, and amazing stories of these incredible cars” says Gretchen Dietrich, executive director of the UMFA. “We hope many first time visitors will come to see the exhibition and be introduced to our wonderful museum and collection.”
A number of art museums in America and Europe recently presented popular exhibitions of cars, including Curves of Steel at the Phoenix Art Museum (2007), Allure of the Automobile at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta (2010) and the Portland Art Museum (2011), as well as L’Art de L’Automobile: Chef d’Oeuvres de la Collection Ralph Lauren at the Les Arts Décoratifs in Paris (2011). The first art exhibition of cars was Eight Automobiles, mounted sixty years ago at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City (1951).
The UMFA’s automobile exhibition, however, is the first of its kind. Speed will examine automobiles not only as works of art and design, but as objects of rich racing history. The featured cars were created by legendary engineers, distinguished designers, and storied automobile companies; many are speed record-setters that were owned and raced by famous drivers and other notable people of their time. This is the first and only time these 19 cars have been seen together in one venue.
Many of the cars in Speed: The Art of the Performance Automobile have a special connection to Utah’s famed Bonneville Salt Flats, where racers from all over the world traveled, and continue to travel, in attempts to break land speed records. The “Mormon Meteor III” is perhaps the most famous Bonneville race car. Designed and driven by legendary racer and former Salt Lake City Mayor David Abbott “Ab” Jenkins (1883-1956), the “Mormon Meteor III” set more long distance land speed records than any other automobile in history, and it still holds 12 of them today.
“These 19 special automobiles comprise a remarkable selection of historic racers and high performance cars, spanning more than a century,” notes guest curator Ken Gross. “Unlikely to be repeated, this exhibition represents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see and study these legends on wheels.”
“Mexican documentary photography is imbued with a revolutionary spirit and validated by the investment of the photographer in the subject itself, as though the image ‘is’ the country ‘is’ the photographer.” Dr Marcus Bunyan
Exhibition dates: 10th March – 8th July, 2012
Curator: Jessica S. McDonald, Assistant Curator of Photography at SFMOMA
List of Photographers Included: Katya Brailovsky, Lola Alvarez Bravo, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Manuel Carrillo, Alejandro Cartagena, Eduardo del Valle and Mirta Gomez, Pia Elizondo, Dave Gatley, Oscar Fernando Gomez, Héctor Garcia, Lourdes Grobet, Graciela Iturbide, Geoffrey James, Mark Klett, Pablo Lopez Luz, Elsa Medina, Susan Meiselas, Enrique Metinides, Pedro Meyer, Tina Modotti, Rodrigo Moya, Pablo Ortiz Monasterio, Paolo Pellegrin, Antonio Reynoso, Daniela Rossell, Mark Ruwedel, Victoria Sambunaris, Alec Soth, Paul Strand, Yvonne Venegas, Brett Weston, Edward Weston, and Mariana Yampolsky.
Manuel Alvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1902-2002) Obrero en huelga, asesinado (Striking Worker, Assassinated) 1934 Gelatin silver print 19.2 x 23.8cm
Manuel Alvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1902-2002) La buena fama durmiendo (The Good Reputation Sleeping) 1939 Gelatin silver print 20.3 x 25.4cm
Compilation by Dr Marcus Bunyan
“There is no one ‘Mexican photography,’ but one strand that runs throughout is a synthesis of aesthetics and politics. We see that with Manuel Alvarez Bravo, and we still see it in work made decades later.”
Jessica S. McDonald
One of my early heroes in photography was Manuel Alvarez Bravo whom I rate as one of the best photographers that has ever lived, up there with Atget and Sudek. His photograph Parabola optica (Optical Parable, 1931, below) lays the foundation for an inherent language of Mexican photography: that of a parable, a short allegorical story designed to illustrate or teach some truth, religious principle, or moral lesson. Many Mexican photographs tell such stories based on the mythology of the country: there are elements of the absurd, surrealism, macabre, revolution, political and socio-economic issues, also of death, violence, beauty, youth, sexuality and religion to name but a few – a search for national identity that is balanced in the photographs of Bravo by a sense of inner peace and redemption. This potent mix of issues and emotions is what makes Mexican photography so powerful and substantive. In the “presence” (or present, the awareness of the here and now) of Mexican photography there is a definite calligraphy of the body in space located in most of the work. This handwriting is idiosyncratic and emotive; it draws the viewer into an intimate narrative embrace.
Two famous photographs by Bravo illustrate some of these themes (Apollonian / Dionysian; utopian / dystopian). When placed together they seem to have a strange attraction one to the other (see photographs above).
Unlike most Australian documentary photography where there is an observational distance present in the photographs – a physical space between the camera/photographer and the subject – Mexican documentary photography is imbued with a revolutionary spirit and validated by the investment of the photographer in the subject itself, as though the image is the country is the photographer. There is an essence and energy to the Mexican photographs that seems to turn narrative on its head, unlike the closed loop present in the tradition of Australian story telling. The intimate, swirling narratives of Mexican photography could almost be termed lyrical socio-realist. The halo of the golden child of Yvonne Venegas’ Nirvana (2006, below) menaced by the upturned forks is a perfect example.
Some of the themes mentioned above are evidenced in the photographs in this posting. Not the placid nude or heroic pyramid of Weston but the howl of the masked animal and surrealism of Our Lady of the Iguanas demands our close engagement.I only wish Australian photographers could be as forthright in their investigation of the morals and ethics of this country and our seemingly never ending search for a national identity (other than war, mateship, the beach, sport and the appropriation of Aboriginal painting exported as the Australian art “identity”).
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to SFMoMA for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
From March 10 through July 8, 2012, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) will present the exhibition Photography in Mexico: Selected Works from the Collections of SFMOMA and Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser. Exploring the distinctively rich and diverse tradition of photography in Mexico from the 1920s to the present, the exhibition showcases works by important Mexican photographers as well as major American and European artists who found Mexico to be a place of great artistic inspiration.
Organised by SFMOMA Assistant Curator of Photography Jessica S. McDonald, the selection of more than 150 works draws from SFMOMA’s world-class photography holdings and highlights recent major gifts and loans from collectors Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser. The presentation reflects the collections’ particular strengths, featuring photographs made in Mexico by Tina Modotti, Paul Strand, and Edward Weston, along with works by key Mexican photographers including Lola Alvarez Bravo, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Manuel Carrillo, Héctor Garcia, Lourdes Grobet, Graciela Iturbide, Enrique Metinides, Pedro Meyer, Pablo Ortiz Monasterio, and Mariana Yampolsky.
The exhibition begins with the first artistic flowering of photography in Mexico after the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) and goes on to look at the explosion of the illustrated press at midcentury; the documentary investigations of cultural traditions and urban politics that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s; and more recent considerations of urban life, globalisation, and issues particular to the U.S.-Mexico border region. Rather than attempting to define a national style, the exhibition considers the range of approaches and concerns that photographers in Mexico have pursued over time. As McDonald notes, “There is no one ‘Mexican photography,’ but one strand that runs throughout is a synthesis of aesthetics and politics. We see that with Manuel Alvarez Bravo, and we still see it in work made decades later.”
As arts and culture flourished in Mexico after the Revolution, many European and American artists were drawn to the country. Among them were Edward Weston and Tina Modotti, who arrived in Mexico in 1923. Inspired by what they saw there, Weston and Modotti in turn motivated Mexican photographers to pursue the medium’s artistic possibilities; their influence helped “give Mexican photographers confidence that art photography was a viable path,” says McDonald. Hence, the exhibition opens with a selection of works made in Mexico by Modotti, Weston, his son Brett Weston, and Paul Strand during the 1920s and 1930s.
One of the Mexican photographers encouraged by Modotti and Weston was Manuel Alvarez Bravo, who went on to become one of the most influential photographers and teachers in the country’s history as well as a key figure in the broader international history of the medium. The exhibition features a substantial number of major works by the photographer, many of them donated or loaned to SFMOMA by Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser. In considering Alvarez Bravo’s career, the exhibition illuminates the birth and development of a tradition of art photography in Mexico. The presentation also includes a selection of works by Alvarez Bravo’s first wife, Lola Alvarez Bravo, an important photographer in her own right who established a successful commercial and artistic practice.
In mid-20th-century Mexico, as in the United States and Europe, earning an adequate income as an art photographer was an unlikely proposition. Instead, many photographers made a living through photojournalism, contributing to the numerous illustrated publications in circulation during this period. In the decades following the Revolution, there was great interest in traditional ways of life and in defining what it meant to be Mexican. Some photographers, such as Manuel Carrillo, created images documenting the nation’s traditions and celebrating its common people. Others, like Hector Garcia and Rodrigo Moya, rejected this sentimental approach, focusing instead on contemporary concerns and the political and social turbulence that continued to influence post-revolutionary Mexican life.
The late 1960s and 1970s saw the rise of critical theory and a new interest in investigating the nature of photography as a medium; in Mexico as elsewhere, there were more opportunities to study photography and to pursue noncommercial projects. A number of Mexican photographers, such as Lourdes Grobet, Graciela Iturbide, Pedro Meyer, and Pablo Ortiz Monasterio, created extended documentary series. Iturbide lived among indigenous people and recorded the details of their daily lives; Grobet focused on wrestling and the cultural concept of the mask; Ortiz Monasterio captured gritty, dystopian views of Mexico City. The exhibition draws extensively on gifts from Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser to represent directions in Mexican photography of the 1970s and 1980s.
Since the 1990s, the attention of many Mexican photographers has turned away from cultural traditions and rural landscapes and toward the cities and suburbs where many Mexicans now live. Works by Katya Brailovsky, Alejandro Cartagena, Pablo Lopez Luz, Daniela Rossell, and Yvonne Venegas reflect this interest in the changing social landscape, looking at issues of wealth and class, urbanization and land use, and the effects of the globalised economy. The exhibition closes with contemporary international photographers’ perspectives on U.S.-Mexico border issues. Images by Mark Klett, Victoria Sambunaris, and Alec Soth consider the border as landscape, while works by Elsa Medina, Susan Meiselas, and Paolo Pellegrin document the experiences of migrant workers and people trying, successfully or unsuccessfully, to cross into the United States.
About Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
Based in Los Angeles, Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser have a deep and longstanding interest in Mexican photography, which they have been collecting since 1995. The photography department at SFMOMA has benefited greatly from their generosity: they have donated more than 175 works to the museum over the last six years. Their recent major gift of Mexican work, including over 50 photographs by Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Graciela Iturbide, and others, has created an ideal opportunity for SFMOMA to present this exhibition exploring photography in Mexico.
Hector Garcia Cobo (August 23, 1923 – June 2, 2012) was a Mexican photographer and photojournalist who had a sixty-year career chronicling Mexico’s social classes, Mexico City and various events of the 20th century, such as the 1968 student uprising. He was born poor but discovered photography in his teens and early 20s, deciding to study it seriously after his attempt to photograph the death of a co-worker failed. He was sent to the Academia Mexicana de Artes y Ciencias Cinematográficas by magazine director Edmundo Valdés who recognised García’s talent. Most of García’s career was related to photojournalism, working with publications both inside and outside of Mexico. However, a substantial amount of his work had more artistic and critical qualities. Many of these were exhibited in galleries and museums, with sixty five individual exhibitions during his lifetime. This not only included portraits of artists and intellectuals (including a famous portrait of David Alfaro Siqueiros at Lecumberri Prison) but also portraits of common and poor people. He was also the first photojournalist to explicitly criticise Mexico’s elite, either making fun of them or contrasting them to the very poor.
Lourdes Grobet Argüelles (25 July 1940 – 15 July 2022) was a Mexican contemporary photographer, known for her photographs of Mexican lucha libre wrestlers.
Grobet spent some time as a painter before focussing on photography. Her photography led her to explore lucha libre, and she spent a lot of time getting to know the luchadores (wrestlers). Grobet did some theatre and video, and published several books. Grobet’s work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions, and she received many grants and awards for her work.
Career
Kati Horna introduced Grobet to the world of photography, though the main influences in her early career were Mathias Goeritz, Gilberto Aceves Navarro, El Santo and others. Grobet studied as a painter in Mexico for some time and then took a trip to Paris in 1968; it changed her life and the way that she viewed the art world.
While she was in Paris, Grobet visited many art galleries and discovered kinetic art; because of this, she liked working with multimedia. She spent some time working at a jazz concert, controlling lighting and kinetic projections. When Grobet returned to Mexico, she decided that she wanted to focus on photography; after she got back home, she decided to burn all of her old work and start over.
In 1981 Grobet released her first set of photographs. At the beginning of her career in photography, she was part of a group called Consejo Mexicano de Fotografía (Mexican Council of Photography), formed by Pedro Meyer in 1977. With her participation in this group, she was able to revitalise photography in Mexico,[citation needed] which led to a movement called the Grupos. Grobet was focused on establishing a community-based perspective.
Grobet spent some time with indigenous people during a time of great struggle for them. She took the time to learn more about them and photograph them in a theatrical way. She wanted to relate to indigenous people using her artistic initiative, so they made costumes and scenery of their own and she then took their photos. Later on, Grobet took interest in the Mayan culture. Wanting to learn more about the Mayans she went to the suburbs; while this was not a common thing to do, she wanted to steer clear of any tourists. She wanted to get accurate information about the people she documented and explore an area less traveled. She discovered temples that were made by an unknown civilisation and she decided they were to be called the Olmayazetec.
After her education and her travels, Grobet came back to México City. She once again started to explore her childhood interest of luchadores. She found that there was very little information pertaining to the luchadores, and so she decided that she wanted to make them more known to the world.
Grobet spent thirty years devoted to taking pictures of the luchadores and studying their way of life. She spent time photographing lucha libre wrestlers inside and outside of the ring, both in their masks, but also in their own homes. Grobet wanted to show that they lived normal lives, just like everyone else. She got very close with well known Lucha Libre wrestlers such as: El Santo, Blue Demon, Mil Mascaras, Sagrada, Octagon, Misioneros de la Muerte, Los Perros del Mal, and Los Brazos. Influenced greatly by Mathias Goeritz, the Polish sculptor from Gdańsk, and by Gilberto Aceves Navarro, a Mexican master of art murals, who were her teachers, Grobet worked on pictures of El Santo, one of the most important Mexican wrestlers, and a hero of lucha libre who starred in more than 50 films. Since 1975, she has published more than 11,000 photographs of the sport, including those on the sport in the United States since the 1930s, and as an important part of Mexican popular culture, adopting a sociological attitude. The sport involves many costumes and masks, leading it to a sport-carnival air which is much appreciated by Mexicans.
She also ventured into cinema. In her 2013 movie Bering. Balance and Resistance, Grobet questions the political separation between the Big Diomede Island (Russia) and the Little Diomede Island (USA) in the Bering Strait, a border between the United States and Russia. Showing the consequences of the separation between both Islands. After the American-Soviet conflict of the 21st century, the Beringia region was divided in two, which caused the separation of complete Nanook families and also, paradoxically, separated the place where the first human beings that populated the American continent crossed.
Grobet has had over one hundred exhibitions of her photographs, both group and solo exhibitions. She had her work exhibited at the London Mexfest festival in 2012. She won an award at the Second Biennal in Fine Art Photography. In 1975, for the exhibition Hora y media, she transformed a gallery into a photographic laboratory. She developed the photographs, but without fixing them, and displayed them on three walls. While the public looked at the photographs, the lights from the gallery made it look like they disappeared.
In 1977, Grobet presented Travelling, an exhibition of photography on an escalator. Among her other works were Paisajes pintados, Teatro campesino, Strip Tease.
Mariana Yampolsky (Mexican, 1925–2002) Caricia (Caress) 1989 Gelatin silver print 13 3/8 x 17 1/2 in (34 x 44.5cm) San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Susan Meiselas (American, b. 1948) Shortie on the Bally, Barton, VT 1974 Gelatin silver print
The exhibition closes with contemporary international photographers’ perspectives on U.S.-Mexico border issues. Images by Mark Klett, Victoria Sambunaris, and Alec Soth consider the border as landscape, while works by Elsa Medina, Susan Meiselas, and Paolo Pellegrin document the experiences of migrant workers and people trying, successfully or unsuccessfully, to cross into the United States.
Many thankx to the Seattle Center for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Chihuly Garden and Glass Glasshouse, Pacific Sun and Space Needle 2012
Chihuly Garden and Glass Glasshouse and Garden 2012
Chihuly Garden and Glass Glasshouse
Chihuly Garden and Glass Glasshouse (day) 2012
After just nine months of construction, Chihuly Garden and Glass, an exhibition looking at the career of Northwest artist Dale Chihuly, will open to the public in Seattle at 11am on Monday, May 21. To mark the occasion, Dale Chihuly will dedicate the exhibition’s centrepiece Glasshouse in a brief ceremony, culminating with the artist signing and dating one of the building’s structural beams. The centrepiece of Chihuly Garden and Glass is the Glasshouse. It is the result of Chihuly’s lifelong appreciation for conservatories with a design that draws inspiration from two of his favourite buildings: Sainte-Chapelle in Paris and the Crystal Palace in London. The Glasshouse sculpture is an expansive installation in a colour palette of reds, oranges, yellows and amber. Made of many individual elements, it is one of Chihuly’s largest suspended sculptures.
Dale Chihuly said, “It is every artist’s dream to be able to showcase their work in one place and I am pleased to have this opportunity in my home community. The best works of my career are brought together in this exhibition and I hope everyone likes it.”
Located at the foot of the iconic Space Needle at Seattle Center, the city’s cultural hub, Chihuly Garden and Glass has transformed 1.5 acres of asphalt into a spectacular outdoor garden, a 40-foot-tall Glasshouse and 8 galleries of Chihuly’s art. The exhibition brings together all the elements of Chihuly’s work, including Drawings, signature glass series, large architectural installations and personal collections in a long-term exhibition. The exhibition’s centrepiece Glasshouse features one of the artist’s largest, suspended sculptures created specifically for Chihuly Garden and Glass. In addition to the artworks, the exhibition also features a first look at Chihuly’s extensive personal collections in the Collections Café.
The Exhibition Hall contains eight galleries and two Drawing Walls, offering visitors a comprehensive look at Chihuly’s significant series of work, including:
~ Glass Forest ~ Northwest Room ~ Sealife Room ~ Persian Ceiling ~ Mille Fiori ~ Ikebana and Float Boats ~ Chandeliers ~ Macchia Forest ~ Drawing Walls
Dale Chihuly calls the Pacific Northwest home and supports many arts and civic communities in the region including Hilltop Artists and Pilchuck Glass School, both of which he co-founded. Pilchuck Glass School joins Pratt Fine Arts Center, ArtsFund and Seattle Public Schools as community partners for Chihuly Garden and Glass. Through these organisations Chihuly Garden and Glass supports opportunities for involvement and engagement in the arts, including the creation of a science curriculum based on glass blowing for middle school students in the Public Schools.
It is estimated that over 400,000 people a year will come to Seattle from all corners of the world to view this exhibition.
About Chihuly Garden and Glass
Chihuly Garden and Glass provides a look at the career of artist Dale Chihuly. Located at Seattle Center, the exhibition features an Exhibition Hall offering visitors a comprehensive look at Chihuly’s significant series of work. Visitors will also enjoy the centerpiece Glasshouse – a dramatic structure housing a suspended 1,340-piece, 100-foot-long glass sculpture – and the Garden, which is a backdrop for a number of monumental sculptures and other installations.
Press release from the Chihuly Garden and Glass website
Chihuly Garden and Glass Pacific Sun and Glasshouse (evening) 2012
Chihuly Garden and Glass Glasshouse and Pacific Sun (evening) 2012
Chihuly Garden and Glass Glasshouse and Pacific Sun (evening) 2012
Chihuly Garden and Glass Viola Crystal Tower and Glasshouse (night) 2012
Chihuly Garden and Glass Garden
Chihuly Garden and Glass 305 Harrison St Seattle, WA 98109
“The body, her body, has an absent presence as it is pressed into walls and occluded by wallpaper. It passes from view, as did her physical form.” Dr Marcus Bunyan
Exhibition dates: 16th March – 13th June, 2012
Curator: Jennifer Blessing, Senior Curator of Photography at the Guggenheim
In 1981, at the age of twenty-two, she committed suicide. Simple words, profound effect.
The world lost one of its truly unique artists and at such a young age. What we have left is a remarkable body of work compiled in a brief six year period.
These are strong, sensuous photographs of the female body in space. The body, her body, has an absent presence as it is pressed into walls and occluded by wallpaper. It passes from view, as did her physical form.
In small ways the work reminds me of the blurred photographs of Ralph Eugene Meatyard in their gothic Surrealism. But there is nothing quite like a Woodman. As soon as you see one of the photographs you know it is her work instinctively; there is nobody else’s voice like hers.
The work will not soon be passing out of sight, memory, or existence. The light still burns bright for hers was a truly remarkable talent.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to The Guggenheim Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Francesca Woodman, the most comprehensive exhibition of the artist’s work since Woodman’s untimely death in 1981 at the age of 22, will be on view at the Guggenheim Museum from March 16 through June 13, 2012. Spanning the breadth of her production, the exhibition includes more than 120 vintage photographs, artist books, and a selection of recently discovered and rarely seen short videos, presenting a historical reconsideration of Woodman’s brief but extraordinary career.
Francesca Woodman is the first comprehensive survey of the artist’s brief but extraordinary career to be seen in North America. More than thirty years after her death, the moment is ripe for a historical reconsideration of her work and its reception. This retrospective offers an occasion to examine more closely the maturation and expression of a highly subjective and coherent artistic vision. It also presents an important and timely opportunity to reassess the critical developments that took place in the 1970s in American photography and video.
Woodman’s oeuvre represents a remarkably rich and singular exploration of the human body in space and of the genre of self-portraiture in particular. Her interest in female subjectivity, seriality, Conceptualist practice, and photography’s relationship to both literature and performance are also the hallmarks of the heady moment in American photography during which she came of age. This retrospective offers an occasion to examine more closely the maturation and expression of a highly subjective and coherent artistic vision. It also presents an important and timely opportunity to reassess the critical developments that took place in the 1970s in American photography.
Born in 1958 into a family of artists, Woodman began photographing at the age of thirteen. By the time she enrolled at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 1975, she was already an accomplished artist with a remarkably mature and focused approach to her work. During her time at RISD, she spent a year in Rome, a place she had visited as a child, and which proved to be a fertile source of inspiration. After completing her degree, she moved to New York, where she continued to photograph. While making several large-scale personal projects, she also experimented with fashion photography, engaging in the age-old artist’s struggle to reconcile making art and making a living. In 1981, at the age of twenty-two, she committed suicide. Woodman’s tragic death is underscored by the startlingly compelling, complex, and artistically resolved body of work she produced during her short lifetime.
Woodman’s favourite subject was herself. From the very first time she picked up a camera, she used it to thoroughly plumb the genre of self-portraiture. Using a square-format camera, Woodman photographed her body in a variety of spaces. She had an affinity for decaying and decrepit interiors, particularly the richly layered surfaces of walls covered with graffiti or peeling wallpaper. In these settings the body is evanescent, appearing and disappearing behind objects, pressed into cupboards and cabinets, camouflaged against walls, or dissolving into a blur of movement. She frequently included objects within the frame – gloves, eels, mirrors – thereby investing them with a symbolic charge, and often making deliberate allusions to tropes from the Surrealist and gothic fiction she admired.
The presentation at the Guggenheim will comprise approximately 120 vintage photographs, including Woodman’s earliest student experiments at RISD, work from her time spent studying in Rome, her forays into fashion photography upon moving to New York, and the late, large-scale blueprint studies of caryatid-like figures for the ambitious Temple project (1980). The exhibition will include two of her artist books – diaristic collages of her own photographs and writings – which were an important form of expression, particularly at the end of her career. Woodman also experimented with moving images; six recently discovered and rarely seen short videos will be presented in the exhibition.
Francesca Woodman is organised by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). The exhibition has been curated by Corey Keller, Associate Curator of Photography, SFMOMA, where it opened in November 2011. The New York presentation of Francesca Woodman is organised by Jennifer Blessing, Senior Curator, Photography, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
“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?” Dr Marcus Bunyan
Exhibition dates: 26th February – 11th June, 2012
Curators: Eva Respini (Associate Curator) and Lucy Gallun (Curatorial Assistant) from the Department of Photography, MoMA
Installation view of the exhibition Cindy Sherman at MoMA, New York showing at left and centre, Cindy Sherman society portraits (2008)
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 defence 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?
Dr Marcus Bunyan
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.
Installation view of the exhibition Cindy Sherman at MoMA, New York showing Cindy Sherman history portraits (1988-1990)
Installation view of the exhibition Cindy Sherman at MoMA, New York showing Cindy Shermanheadshots (2000-2002)
Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954) Untitled Film Still #21 1978 Gelatin silver print 7 1/2 x 9 1/2″ (19.1 x 24.1cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Horace W. Goldsmith Fund through Robert B. Menschel
Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954) Untitled Film Still #6 1977 Gelatin silver print 9 7/16 x 6 1/2″ (24 x 16.5cm) 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 (American, b. 1954) Untitled Film Still #56 1980 Gelatin silver print 6 3/8 x 9 7/16″ (16.2 x 24cm) 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 encyclopaedic 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 (American, b. 1954) Untitled #137
1984
Chromogenic colour print
70 1/2 x 47 3/4″ (179.1 x 121.3cm)
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Purchased with the Alice Newton Osborn Fund, 1985
Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954) Untitled #458 2007-08 Chromogenic colour print 77 3/8″ x 58 1/4″ (196.5 x 148cm) 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 (American, b. 1954) Untitled #424 2004 Chromogenic colour print 53 3/4 x 54 3/4″ (136.5 x 139.1cm) 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 colour, 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 colours 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 theatres in April. Cindy Sherman is organised 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 encyclopaedic 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 recognisable manufactured stereotypes that loom large in the cultural imagination.
Other series presented in depth include Sherman’s 1981 series of 12-colour 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 Stills evoke 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 ageing 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 head shots 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 ageing 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 (American, b. 1954) Untitled #193 1989 Chromogenic colour print 48 7/8 x 41 15/16″ (124.1 x 106.5cm) The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection
Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954) Untitled #213 1989 Chromogenic colour print 41 1/2 x 33″ (105.4 x 83.8cm) Courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures, New York
Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954) Untitled #216 1989 Chromogenic colour print 87 1/8″ x 56 1/8″ (221.3 x 142.5cm) 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 canonised paintings, creating contemporary artefacts of a bygone era.
Wall text from the exhibition
Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954) Untitled #359 2000 Chromogenic color print 30 x 20″ (76.2 x 50.8cm) 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, expression, 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 (American, b. 1954) Untitled #465 2008 Chromogenic colour print 63 3/4 x 57 1/4″ (161.9 x 145.4cm) Whitney Museum of American Art, New York Purchase, with funds from the Painting and Sculpture Committee and the Photography Committee, 2009
Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954) Untitled #474 2008 Chromogenic colour print 7′ 7″ x 60 1/4″ (231.1 x 153cm) 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 jewellery. The psychological weight of these pictures comes through the unrelenting honesty of their description of ageing, 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 (American, b. 1954) Untitled #475 2008 Chromogenic colour print 86 3/8″ x 71 1/2″ (219.4 x 181.6cm) 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
The Museum of Modern Art 11 West 53 Street New York, NY 10019 Phone: (212) 708-9400
Opening hours: 10.30am – 5.30pm Open seven days a week
Curators: Andrew Perchuk (deputy director) and Rani Singh (senior research associate), with Glenn Phillips (principal project specialist and consulting curator) and Catherine Taft (curatorial associate)
List of artists represented: Peter Alexander, John Altoon, Chuck Arnoldi, John Baldessari, Larry Bell, Billy Al Bengston, Karl Benjamin, Ed Bereal, Tony Berlant, Wallace Berman, Marjorie Cameron, Cameron, Vija Celmins, Judy Chicago, Mary Corse, Ronald Davis, Richard Diebenkorn, Laddie John Dill, Melvin Edwards, Frederick Eversley, Lorser Feitelson, Llyn Foulkes, Sam Francis, Joe Goode, Robert Graham, Frederick Hammersley, George Herms, David Hockney, Stephan von Huene, Craig Kauffman, Edward Kienholz, Helen Lundeberg, John Mason, Allan McCollum, John McLaughlin, Ron Miyashiro, Ed Moses, Lee Mullican, Bruce Nauman, Helen Pashgian, Ken Price, Noah Purifoy, Ed Ruscha, Betye Saar, Henry Takemoto, DeWain Valentine, Gordon Wagner, Norman Zammitt.
Ed Ruscha (American, b. 1937) Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas 1963 Oil on Canvas Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire Gift of James Meeker, Class of 1958, in memory of Lee English, Class of 1958, scholar, poet, athlete and friend to all
What a bumper posting – so much to enjoy and something for everyone!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Martin-Gropuis-Bau for allowing me to publish the artwork in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Karl Benjamin (American, 1925-2012) Stage II 1959 Oil on canvas 50 x 70 inches; 127 x 177.8cm
Karl Stanley Benjamin (December 29, 1925 – July 26, 2012) was an American painter of vibrant geometric abstractions, who rose to fame in 1959 as one of four Los Angeles-based Abstract Classicists and subsequently produced a critically acclaimed body of work that explores a vast array of colour relationships. Working quietly at his home in Claremont, California, he developed a rich vocabulary of colours and hard-edge shapes in masterful compositions of tightly balanced repose or high-spirited energy. At once intuitive and systematic, the artist was, in the words of critic Christopher Knight, “a colorist of great wit and inventiveness.”
Judy Chicago (American, b. 1939) Car Hood 1964 Sprayed acrylic and lacquer on car hood 109 x 125 x 11cm
Betye Saar (African-American, b. 1926) The Phrenologer’s Window 1966 Assemblage of two panel wood frame with print and collage Private Collection; courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, LLC, New York, NY
Lee Mullican (American, 1919-1998) Untitled (Venice) 1967 Oil on canvas
Ronald Davis (American, b. 1937) Vector 1968 Polyester Resin and Fiberglass 60 1/2 x 132 inches (shaped) Tate Gallery, London
Ronald “Ron” Davis (born 1937) is an American painter whose work is associated with geometric abstraction, abstract illusionism, lyrical abstraction, hard-edge painting, shaped canvas painting, color field painting, and 3D computer graphics. He is a veteran of nearly seventy solo exhibitions and hundreds of group exhibitions.
Wallace Berman (American, 1926-1976) Semina Cover with Wife (Photograph of Shirley Berman) 1959 Halftone reproduction on cardstock Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA
The exhibition project Pacific Standard Time – Art in Los Angeles, 1950-1980 traces the development of the Los Angeles art scene during the post-war period, when the city on the Pacific hosted an impressively varied and versatile art scene, thus proving that it was more than Hollywood and a sprawling metropolis in the land of sunshine and palm trees. Pacific Standard Time features such internationally esteemed artists as John Baldessari, David Hockney, Edward Kienholz or Ed Ruscha as well as protagonists that are yet to be discovered like the abstract painters Helen Lundeberg and Karl Benjamin, the ceramicists Ken Price and John Mason, and sculptors such as De Wain Valentine.
The mega show – over 60 institutions and galleries in Los Angeles were involved – is taking the two main core exhibitions of the Getty Museum and the Getty Research Institute to Europe. The sole European venue is the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin. The section of the exhibition that was to be seen in Los Angeles’ Getty Museum under the title of Crosscurrents in L.A. – Painting and Sculpture, 1950-1970, presents painting and sculpture. In the second part that was to be seen in Los Angeles under the title of Greetings from L.A. – Artists and Publics, 1950-1980, posters, artists’ catalogues, postcards, invitation cards and other memorabilia are shown which offer a deeper insight into the networks of the Los Angeles art scene at that time. For Berlin the show has been supplemented to include photographs by Julius Shulman, whose architectural shots defined the image of the Californian lifestyle in the 1950s. His incomparable sensibility and intuitive feel for composition and the ‘critical moment’ established him as a master of his craft.
Part One: Crosscurrents
The first part of the Berlin show brings together more than 70 works by over 50 artists and traces the rise of the Southern Californian art scene between 1945 and 1980. The list of names reads like a Who’s Who of today’s internationally esteemed artists, as people like John Baldessari, David Hockney, Edward Kienholz, Bruce Nauman or Ed Ruscha began their careers here.
The entrée into Pacific Standard Time begins with British artist David Hockney’s iconic painting A Bigger Splash from the year 1967. It is one of the key pictures of the exhibition and stands for the hedonistic life under palm trees with permanent sunshine and never-ending parties.
The exhibition is structured both chronologically and thematically, comprising six sections that reflect the entire spectrum of the art trends that sprang up simultaneously in Los Angeles. Abstract works – ceramic sculptures and paintings of bleak clarity – are to be seen in the first section. The second section shows assemblage sculptures and collages by artists like George Herms, Wallace Berman and Ed Bereal, who paved the way for this artistic approach in the 1950s, and their successors, including many African-American artists. The third section documents the rise of Los Angeles to become an important art centre, while the fourth shows paintings by internationally recognised Los Angeles artists as Richard Diebenkorn, David Hockney and Ed Ruscha. It becomes clear that Southern California was one of the leading centres for large-format pop art and abstract painting in the 1960s. The fifth section examines how, at a time when painting was growing in significance on the Atlantic Coast of the USA, artists on the West Coast were beginning to extend their notions of traditional painting and sculpture, with perceptual phenomena and the material processes of artistic production coming to the fore. Here we find works that have arisen out of a collision between art and technology, such as a sculpture by De Wain Valentine, who uses industrial materials like polyester casting resin, or a canvas by Mary Corse, into which the smallest, high-grade reflecting glass microspheres have been worked. We are also introduced to a group of artists whose works show traces of their creation, such as those of Joe Goode, Allan McCollum, Ed Moses and Peter Alexander.
Berlin is supplementing the Getty exhibition by devoting a special room to the early international perception of art in Los Angeles. It will feature the works Berlin Red by Sam Francis, a 8 x 12 metre painting that was commissioned by Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie in 1969, and Volksempfängers (People’s Wireless) by Edward Kienholz. As a DAAD scholar Kienholz often lived in Berlin from 1973 on.
Another distinctive feature of the exhibition are the various room installations, including Stuck Red and Stuck Blue by James Turrell and Four Corner Piece by Bruce Nauman. In 1966 Turrell began working on his Light Room installations. In the work displayed in the Martin-Gropius-Bau that he designed in 1970, he uses light to dissolve the borders of spatial structures and transform them. In his Four Corner Piece from 1971 Bruce Nauman creates a particular spatial experience through the interplay of physical information vs. visual information.
Part Two: Greetings from L. A.
In the second part of the exhibition, elaborated by the Getty Research Institute, the Martin-Gropius-Bau shows over 200 objects – photographs, artists’ catalogues, books, posters, postcards, invitations, letters and artworks, of which many are on public view for the first time. We are given a sense of how Californian artists, through the involvement of a wide audience, brought art into contact with the general public. We also see how intensely the international networks linking groups of artists functioned.
Greetings from L.A. begins with Making the Scene and describes the gallery scene in Los Angeles from the 1950s to the 1970s. We are introduced to art dealers and collectors of the kind who congregated at La Cienega Boulevard – Rolf Nelson, Riko Mizuno and Betty Asher. On this gallery-lined boulevard, which crosses the Sunset Boulevard immortalised by Ed Ruscha, the reputation of Los Angeles as a city of modern and contemporary art was made.
Public Disturbances, the second section of the show, is devoted to three important exhibitions which drew fierce criticism and even led to arrests. Wallace Berman’s 1957 exhibition in the Ferus Gallery was closed down by the police. Violent controversies were triggered by the War Babies exhibition (1961) in the Huysman Gallery. There were also strong differences of opinion between the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors over the inclusion of Kienholz’s installation Back Seat Dodge ’38 (1964) in his grand retrospective of 1966.
The Private Assembly section of the exhibition focuses on the works created by Wallace Berman, George Herms, Charles Brittin and their circle in the 1950s and 1960s. The intimacy of these objects is explained not only by the unmistakable traces of artistic authorship they bear, but also by the fact that they were only accessible to a select, non-public audience. Mainly active outside the commercial gallery scene, this group of assemblage artists concentrated their energies on private artworks, which they handed over personally or sent by mail as a token of friendship.
The fourth section, Mass Media, introduces artists who selected the mass media as a model for their own art. Ed Ruscha, Allen Ruppersberg and Chris Burden occupied themselves with popular culture and mass production as alternative means of production and distribution. They used impersonal forms, such as those of objects or advertising materials commercially produced and sold as consumer goods. By avoiding conventional exhibition rooms, these artists reached a new public. They often exhibited anonymously, thus making the identity of artist and work secondary.
Art School as Audience, the fifth section of the exhibition, sheds light on the important role of art schools in the development of contemporary art forms. They served as the static pole, because in them artists constituted the audience of other fellow artists. The California Institute of the Arts, commonly known as CalArts, and its predecessor, the Chouinard Art Institute, were key venues for important groups of artists, as can be seen from the works of such students as Ed Ruscha and Joe Goode, and such teachers as John Baldessari, Miriam Schapiro and Judy Chicago. Other important forums were the new art faculties that came into existence at the universities and other higher education facilities in Los Angeles County. At the campuses of Irvine or San Diego in particular there was a stimulating audience for the experiments of such artists as Martha Rosler, Barbara Smith and Eleanor Antin.
The last section, The Art of Protest, examines how social and political developments mobilised artists to display their works in the street. In the 1960s Los Angeles became the scene of the first protests led by artists against the Vietnam War. This gave rise in 1966 to the construction of a Peace Tower at the corner of La Cienega and Sunset Boulevards. In the following decade it was feminism that moved many artists to become social activists, as can be seen from the work of Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz-Starus In Mourning and in Rage 1977, a highly esteemed protest performed on the steps of City Hall.
Greetings from L.A. offers a new look at art in Southern California by showing how the artists of this region changed the conventional relations between art and public and developed alternatives for a public role of art and its place in society.
The exhibition affords glimpses into some recently acquired archives, like those of Betty Asher, Hal Glicksman, George Herms, Wolfgang Stoerchle, High Performance magazine, the galleries of Rolf Nelson, Mizuno and Jan Baum as well as of the papers of Charles Brittin and Edmund Teske. These are supplemented by material from archives not normally associated with Southern California, such as the papers of the critics Irving Sandler, Barbara Rose and Lawrence Alloway of New York; of Marcia Tucker, the founder and curator of New York’s New Museum of Contemporary Art; and of the Kasmin Gallery, London.
Part Three: Julius Shulman
The last part of the Berlin exhibition shows over 50 photographs by Julius Shulman – the most important American photographer of architecture in the post-war period. For more than thirty years he photographed Modernist houses – built by Richard Neutra, Frank Lloyd Wright, or Frank Gehry – thus making many of them into architectural icons. The exhibition shows some of his key works.
Curators: committee of traditional leaders and organized by the people of the Pueblo of Isleta
Photographer unknown Albuquerque Indian School Boys with Flags c. 1900 9 x 12cm Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Center
Another glorious, eclectic posting with a couple of knockout photographs, including Sumner Matteson’s Simon Zuni (1900, below) and George Wharton James’s Selling goods along tracks (late 1880s to early 1900s, below).
The latter is a masterpiece of early modernist photography. Observe the spatial construction of the picture: open and yet closed at the same time. What do I mean by this? The image allows the eye to wander, to meander if you like among the structures while always having an escape into the sky, into the distance of the partially blocked vanishing point. The objects flow across the image plane like music; at left the dark shape and its shadow falling on the railway tracks hold in that side of the image. If the shape wasn’t there your eye would fall out of that side of the photograph, it would not be enclosed. It is this enclosure which forces your gaze into the distance. An asymmetrical balance is achieved with the train car at right, this time with the added punctum of the limply hanging flag to hold the viewer’s attention.
Most stunning of all is the composition in the centre, with changes in scale, orientation and direction – frontal, angled, away – and the commensurate shadows thrown from a setting sun. Reinforcing this flow is the chiaroscuro of the people selling goods – the white of the dress and the dark of the shawl, with the wonderfully raised arm breaking up the vanishing point / vertical composition. The shape of the dog lopping away parallel to the train tracks would normally lead us to an empty vista, the vanishing point on the horizon line of the image. Partially it still does, but the photographers skill in orientating his camera, in previsualising this tableaux (which must have been seen in a split second) is that the box car denies the eye an easy exit point. A series of telegraph poles at left hint at further human encroachment into the landscape, while at right the eye can finally leave the ground an ascend into the sky and escape into the beyond.
This is quite the most exquisite photograph I have seen in a long time.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the National Museum of the American Indian, New York for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Charles Lummis (American, 1859-1928) Cacique Bautista Chivira, with his wife and daughter Lupe Chivira and Rafaelita Chivira Charles September 21, 1892 30.5 x 48cm Courtesy of the Autry National Center/Southwest Museum, Los Angeles
Charles Lummis (American, 1859-1928) Group portrait c. 1890’s 15.425 x 24cm Courtesy of the Autry National Center/Southwest Museum, Los Angeles
(Left)
Charles Lummis (American, 1859-1928) Photograph of an Isleta girl winnowing beans, Isleta Pueblo, New Mexico 1890 Cyanotype 8 in x 5 in. Courtesy of the Braun Research Library Collection, Autry Museum of the American West
(Right)
Charles Lummis (American, 1859-1928) Photograph of three Isleta boys with bows and arrows, Isleta Pueblo, New Mexico 1894 Cyanotype 8 in x 5 in. Courtesy of the Braun Research Library Collection, Autry Museum of the American West
Charles Lummis (American, 1859-1928) Photograph of a Pueblo couple (probably Isleta or Taos), New Mexico April 27, 1896 5 in x 7 in. Courtesy of the Braun Research Library Collection, Autry Museum of the American West
Charles Lummis (American, 1859-1928) Photograph of spectators watching races, Isleta Pueblo, New Mexico April 19, 1896 5 in x 7 in. Courtesy of the Braun Research Library Collection, Autry Museum of the American West
Charles Lummis (American, 1859-1928) Cyanotype photograph album: Bits of New Mexico and Arizona, Vol. 2 Nd 5.25″ x 9.25″ Courtesy of the Autry National Center/Southwest Museum, Los Angeles
The rapid changes forced on the Native American peoples of the American southwest are documented in Time Exposures: Picturing a History of Isleta Pueblo in the 19th Century. With more than 80 images and objects that detail life on the Isleta Pueblo Reservation after the arrival of the railroads in 1881, the exhibition opens Saturday, Sept. 17, at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in New York, the George Gustav Heye Center, and continues through Sunday, June 10, 2012.
In 1881, the railroad companies forcibly took land in the centre of Isleta Pueblo in the Rio Grande Valley and the rail lines built there brought scores of tourists. Prominent non-Native artists and photographers, such as Edward Curtis and Ben Wittick, traveled there to capture everyday Pueblo life. Organised by the people of Isleta Pueblo, Time Exposures portrays their lives before the arrival of tourists and other visitors, the changes imposed over the following decades and the ways in which the people of Isleta Pueblo worked to preserve their way of life.
Time Exposures is divided into three parts. In the first section, the cycle of the Isleta traditional year as it was observed in the mid-19th century is detailed. The second section describes the arrival of the Americans and the how this disrupted the Isleta way of living. In the third section, the exhibit examines the photos themselves as products of an outside culture. While exploring the underlying ideas and values of the photos, the exhibition questions their portrayal of Isleta people and ways. “In this exhibition, Native people respond to the stereotypical images of their lives that have been circulated by outsiders for centuries,” said Kevin Gover (Pawnee), director of the museum. “It is an opportunity for us all to learn the realities behind some of these popular and enduring photographs.”
“These photographs tell such an important story,” said John Haworth (Cherokee), director of the Heye Center. “The people of Isleta Pueblo fought to maintain their traditions despite radical and dramatic disruptions.”
Included in the exhibition are images by photographers Edward Curtis, A.C. Vroman, Karl Moon, John Hillers, Charles Lummis, Carlos Vierra, Sumner Matteson, Albert Sweeney, Josef Imhof and Ben Wittick. Time Exposures: Picturing a History of Isleta Pueblo in the 19th Century was organised by the people of the Pueblo of Isleta. A committee of Isleta Pueblo traditional leaders oversaw the development, writing and design of the exhibition. Time Exposures originally appeared at the Albuquerque Museum of Art and History in New Mexico.
Press release from the National Museum of the American Indian, New York website
George Wharton James (American, 1858-1923) Selling goods along tracks Late 1880s to early 1900s 40 x 27cm Courtesy of the Autry National Center/Southwest Museum, Los Angeles
Sumner Matteson (American, 1867-1920) Simon Zuni 1900 46 x 33 cm Photograph Courtesy of the Milwaukee Public Museum, Sumner W. Sumner Matteson Collection
In Time Exposures, we the people of Isleta Pueblo, a Native American community in New Mexico, tell our own story about this time and its lasting effects on our life today. Using a selection of over 300 historic photographs and an array of artefacts, the exhibit portrays our lives before the arrival of the Americans, the changes imposed over the following decades, and the ways in which our people worked to preserve our way of life. Through this process, the exhibit explains how we came to be who we are today.
The exhibit is divided into three parts. In the first section, we describe the cycle of our traditional year as it was observed in the mid-19th century. As a community, our lives were organised according to the seasons, farming, hunting and gathering practices and a regular sequence of ceremonies and rituals. Much has changed for us, but the cycles described here still define the contours of a parallel life we live today.
The second section of the exhibition describes the arrival of the Americans and the many ways in which this influx disrupted our way of living. The new authority took our lands and waters, prohibited hunts, and severely limited our access to plants and other resources. The exhibit shows how our people fought these changes and how we learned to become members of America on our own terms.
In the third section of the show, the exhibit examines the photographs themselves as products of white culture. The exhibit explores the underlying ideas and values of the photos, and asks what kind of record they truly represent of our people and our ways.
Text from the Time Exposures exhibition catalogue
Unknown photographer Jose S. Abeita, bronco buster, in Magdalena c. 1920 25 x 40cm Courtesy of the Autry National Center/Southwest Museum, Los Angeles
Charles Lummis (American, 1859-1928) Young Isleta Girl Nd Cabinet card Courtesy of the Library of Congress
Charles Lummis (American, 1859-1928) Isleta hunter, Juan Diego 1890 Courtesy of the Autry National Center/Southwest Museum, Los Angeles
Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian The George Gustav Heye Center One Bowling Green, Battery Park, New York City Phone: (212) 514-3700
Opening hours: Every day from 10am – 5pm Thursdays until 8pm
![Oliver Boberg (German, b. 1965) 'Unterführung' [Underpass] 1997](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/r_p_oliver-boberg-unterfuehrungdruckbar-web.jpg "Oliver Boberg (German, b. 1965) 'Unterführung' [Underpass] 1997")
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