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Exhibition: ‘Caravaggio and His Followers in Rome’ at the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas

Exhibition dates: 16th October 2011 – 8th January 2012

Simon Vouet (French, 1590-1649)
The Fortune Teller
c. 1620
Oil on canvas
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

Observe if you will:

1/ The treatment of the background behind Boy Bitten by a Lizard (1594-1596)

2/ The tension of the hands in this painting

3/ The pallor of the skin of Sick Bacchus (1593-1594)

4/ The colour of the bunch of grapes in the same painting

5/ The critical distance between the two apricots and the bowed sash resting on the pediment in the same painting

6/ The youthful innocence of the dupe in The Cardsharps (c. 1595)

7/ The deep, foreboding shadows under the eyes of Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness (1604-1605)

8/ The astonishingly beautiful skin tones in Gerrit van Honthorst’s Saint Sebastian (c. 1623) and how the blood from the leg wound at left runs in two directions: one direction when Saint Sebastian was standing up, one when he has slumped down. Inspired.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

“Not since Michelangelo or Raphael had one artist affected so many of his contemporaries and so irrevocably changed the course of European painting. Caravaggio created a new kind of art: dramatic, deeply emotional, grounded in the vivid details of everyday life, and overwhelmingly human. He used live models, sometimes prostitutes and the very poor, who posed in the studio for his powerful religious scenes as if the events were happening on the streets of Rome. Breaking the boundaries between art and life, he overturned the artistic conventions of the day. He played down details of the setting of a scene, focused on the expressive human figure, and invented a brand of stark realism that shocked many of his patrons.”

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Italian, 1571-1610)
Saint Francis in Ecstasy
c. 1594-1595
Oil on canvas
Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut
The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Italian, 1571-1610)
The Gypsy Fortune Teller
c. 1595
Oil on canvas
45 1/4 x 59 in. (115 x 150cm)
Pinacoteca Capitolina, Musei Capitolini, Rome
Public domain

One of the most influential figures in the history of art, Caravaggio (1571-1610) overturned the artistic conventions of the day and created stunningly dramatic paintings, both sacred and secular. This ambitious exhibition explores the profound impact of his work on the wide range of painters of Italian, French, Dutch, Flemish, and Spanish origin who resided in Rome. Arranged by theme, it includes over 50 paintings, with Caravaggio’s compelling images juxtaposed with those he inspired. This is the second largest display of his paintings in North America and only the third Caravaggio exhibition to be held in the United States.

Music and Youth

Many of Caravaggio’s early paintings feature handsome youths, whether singly or in groups. He seems to have used the same favorite models repeatedly – and sometimes his own features, which a contemporary tells us he studied in a mirror. The origins of these novel paintings lay in the types of pictures – portraits, still lifes, and allegories – that were painted in a realistic style in the artist’s native Lombardy, in the north of Italy, although he blurred the boundaries between genres to suggest real-life scenes. Caravaggio’s paintings of musicians would have appealed to Roman collectors who were passionate patrons of music, and likely were created to decorate rooms used for performances. They have a dreamy, slightly melancholy air. If the songs are about love, as we can assume they are, they are surely about the painful side of love rather than its joys. Caravaggio’s early paintings of youths are usually scenes of sensual pleasure but with a built-in warning against indulgence, as when a youth has his finger bitten by a lizard lurking in some fruit. He brings us close to his figures, often having them make eye contact with us, and includes lovingly observed still-life details that enhance the naturalism and immediacy of the scene. Even when there is a visitation from the beyond, like the winged Cupid in The Musicians, he treats this in a matter-of-fact way, attentive always to breaking down the boundaries between the painted world and our own. Caravaggio’s musical paintings caught on throughout Europe in the work of his followers, who brought their own innovations to the genre.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Italian, 1571-1610)
The Musicians
c. 1595
Oil on canvas
36 1/4 x 46 5/8 in (92.1 x 118.4cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Rogers Fund, 1952

In this scene, Caravaggio shows some young musicians preparing for a concert. We are brought very close to the figures, as if we share the same space. Caravaggio breaks down the boundaries between art and life, and our reality and the painted world become entwined. The instruments are modern, but the musicians wear antique-inspired dress. The lute player tunes his instrument, and the horn player (possibly a self-portrait) catches our gaze. Another youth studies the musical score; it is no longer legible, but doubtless featured love madrigals. The winged Cupid with a quiver of arrows who is handling some grapes makes explicit the bond between music and love. Wine, like music, makes the spirits light. This painting belonged to Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, who hosted concerts at his palace and invited musicians to live in his household, along with artists like Caravaggio.

Theodoor Rombouts (Flemish, 1597-1637)
A Lute Player
c. 1620
Oil on canvas
43 7/8 x 39 1/4 in (111.1 x 99.7cm)
Philadelphia Museum of Art. John G. Johnson Collection, 1917

Caravaggio’s paintings of musicians inspired Rombouts’s depiction of a musician tuning his lute. His intense expression suggests that he is both listening to the sound and sizing up the viewer, his audience. The vividly described carpet and still-life objects on the table recall Caravaggio’s similar close-up presentations. However, the colourful treatment of the costume and the robust delineation of the objects place Rombouts’s work within traditions of Flemish and Dutch painting. The still life, like ephemeral music, serves to remind us of the pleasures of life, but also that pleasure is fleeting. The artist also alludes to the five senses: hearing (the lute), taste (the tankard), smell (the pipe), sight (the musical scores), and touch (the knife).

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Italian, 1571-1610)
Boy Bitten by a Lizard
1594-1596
Oil on canvas
25 5/8 x 20 1/2 in (65 x 52cm)
Fondazione di Studi di Storia dell’Arte Roberto Longhi, Florence

One of Caravaggio’s biographers wrote that “he also painted a boy bitten by a lizard emerging from flowers and fruits; you could almost hear the boy scream, and it was done meticulously.” The picture has suggested various interpretations. As an allegory of touch, it provides the basis for a study of how emotion is expressed physically, and arguably Caravaggio alludes to all the five senses (flowers as smell and so on). With the still life of fruits and roses, common emblems of love, he invokes age-old adages – pain can follow pleasure, and love is a rose with thorns that prick. Poets from Petrarch onward played on the similarity of the Italian words for “love” and “bitter” – amore and amaro – to which Caravaggio adds ramarro (lizard), ingeniously enlarging the joke.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Italian, 1571-1610)
Sick Bacchus
1593-1594
Oil on canvas
Galleria Borghese, Rome

Cardsharps and Fortune Tellers

The young Caravaggio introduced another new kind of painting to the Roman art world with his scenes from the seamy side of life, its frauds and ruses. He painted these works on a large scale with half-length figures, and they were among his most widely imitated creations. His followers played countless variations on the same themes, trying various levels of subtlety and buffoonery in the humour and facial expressions. These highly animated compositions conjure up an underworld of wily cardsharps, soldiers of fortune, foolish dupes, sensuous and deceitful gypsy women, pickpockets, and thugs. They are based partly on everyday observations in the streets, partly on the stock characters and improvised comedies of the commedia dell’arte, partly on sheer fantasy. In such works, Caravaggio and his followers developed ingenious ways of involving us in the action. We read these amusingly moralising pictures through gestures and expressions – but to unravel the trickery takes time. Despite being frozen in a static image, the story seems to unfold before our eyes like one of the popular plays that were its inspiration. The artist extends the theme of deception by painting his subjects with such a high level of naturalism that the viewer is duped and astounded by his artistry.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Italian, 1571-1610)
The Cardsharps
c. 1595
Oil on canvas
37 1/8 x 51 5/8 in (94.2 x 130.9cm)
Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth

The players are engaged in a game of primero, a forerunner of poker. Engrossed in his cards, the dupe is unaware that the older cardsharp signals his accomplice, who reaches to pull a hidden card from his breeches. The fingertips of the cheat’s gloved hand are exposed to better feel marked cards. According to an early biographer, Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, a great patron of the arts, took the young Caravaggio into his household soon after purchasing this picture. It hung along with The Gypsy Fortune Teller in his palace. Together they would surely have reminded the cardinal and his guests of the story of the prodigal son, warning about the perils of greed and fraud. Caravaggio has treated this subject not as a caricature of vice but in a fresh way, in which the interaction of gesture and glance evokes the drama of deception and lost innocence in the most human of terms. He structures the picture to allow us to witness everything, implicating us in the trickery.

Saints

Caravaggio grounded his saints in everyday reality, indicating their spiritual states by means of natural phenomena, especially light. In his early painting of Saint Francis, he shows the saint’s ecstasy – his mystic identification with Christ – by directing a strong light upon his figure and the consoling angel. God’s grace is signalled by light in other images of the saints, such as the scene of Mary Magdalene’s conversion from her former life of sin. In paintings of Saints Matthew and Jerome in their studies, much emulated in Caravaggio’s circle, light is a metaphor of divine inspiration. Generally the saints seem to be emerging from darkness into light, which adds drama, symbolism, and also a sense of mass – as if they were sculpted, not merely painted. In a break from Roman and Florentine traditions, Caravaggio rejected the practice of refining his composition through drawings before he began to paint and instead worked directly from a live model in the studio, preserving that model’s particular appearance, never making the features or body conform to an ideal of beauty. The effect, central to Caravaggio’s art and that of many of his followers, was startling. At this time, many people believed that the painting of sacred personages such as saints called for a special, elevated style that set them apart from the mundane reality of the here and now. Caravaggio’s radical departure from this principle brought him much harsh criticism. He was accused of merely copying and so failing to capture a higher truth. But others recognised in his work a new kind of religious art that directly engaged the faithful and made old subjects new and alive.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Italian, 1571-1610)
Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness
1604-1605
Oil on canvas
68 x 52 in (172.7 x 132.1cm)
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Purchase William Rockhill Nelson Trust

Caravaggio’s practice of painting a live model in his studio brings this young, brooding saint to life – as if his image were inhabited by the model’s being. Ottavio Costa, a Roman banker, commissioned this painting for a chapel on a pilgrimage route in the countryside outside of Genoa, where his family had its origins. We can imagine what a powerful experience it would have been to encounter the image of the scarlet-robed saint there, dramatically emerging from the shadows into a strong light. When Caravaggio delivered the painting, Costa decided to keep it and placed a copy in the chapel. But even the copy proved inspiring. An early guide described how it “moves not only the members of the brotherhood but also visitors to penitence.”

Gerrit van Honthorst (Dutch, 1592-1656)
Saint Sebastian
c. 1623
Oil on canvas
The National Gallery, London

The Sacred Narrative

Caravaggio was a masterful storyteller who could bring home the drama and significance of a biblical event with tremendous power. In his scenes from the Old and New Testaments, he created a new kind of painting – dramatic, even theatrical, yet grounded in the observation of ordinary reality – and it proved infectious among his contemporaries in Rome. His approach was to make the scene clear and simple, with the main actors in the drama seen close-up and caught in mid-action at a decisive moment, embodying the whole meaning of the event. He played down the setting, sometimes to the point that it is a mere pool of darkness from which the figures emerge. It was the actions and states of mind of the characters in the story that counted, and Caravaggio presented these with sometimes shocking directness and intensity, breaking all the rules of decorum that restrained more conventional painters. He mastered the art of concealing art, re-creating a scene with such a flavour of reality that it comes across as an eyewitness account. It was his power to draw viewers into the emotion and importance of a scene that made his work an essential object of study, even for such an independent genius as the great Peter Paul Rubens.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Italian, 1571-1610)
Martha and Mary Magdalene
c. 1598
Oil and tempera on canvas
38 1/2 x 52 1/4 in (97.8 x 132.7cm)
Detroit Institute of Arts. Gift of the Kresge Foundation and Mrs. Edsel B. Ford

Martha’s expressive hands, intensely illuminated, underscore her attempt to convert her sister Mary Magdalene from a life of worldly pleasures to one of spirituality. Several details recall Mary’s life of indulgence: the elegant dress, the ivory comb, the alabaster cosmetic jar. The mirror, a powerful symbol of vanity, becomes here an instrument reflecting the divine light that is penetrating Mary’s soul. Martha’s words seem to have been convincing, and her open mouth signals her amazement as she witnesses Mary’s transformation. The orange blossom in Mary’s right hand and the ring on her left indicate her new status as the blessed bride of Christ.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Italian, 1571-1610)
Sacrifice of Isaac
1602-1603
Oil on canvas
41 x 53 1/8 in (104 x 135cm)
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

Orazio Gentileschi (Italian, 1563-1639)
Saint Francis in Ecstasy
c. 1607
Oil on canvas
49 5/8 x 38 5/8 in. (126 x 98 cm)
Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid

Peter Paul Rubens (Flemish, 1577-1640)
The Entombment
c. 1612-1614
Oil on panel
34 3/4 x 26 1/8 in. (88.3 x 66.5 cm)
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
Purchased 1956
Public domain

Bartolomeo Manfredi (Italian, 1582-1622)
David and Goliath (The Triumph of David)
c. 1615
Oil on canvas
50 3/8 x 38 1/4 in. (128 x 97cm)
Musée du Louvre, Paris
Acquired in 1990

Jusepe de Ribera (Spanish, 1591-1652)
Saints Peter and Paul
c. 1616
Oil on canvas
49 5/8 x 44 1/8 in. (126 x 112cm)
Musée des Beaux-Arts, Strasbourg
Public domain

Valentin de Boulogne (French, 1591-1632)
Fortune Teller with Soldiers
c. 1620
Oil on canvas
58 7/8 x 93 7/8 in. (149.5 x 238.5cm)
Toledo Museum of Art
Purchased with funds from the Libbey Endowment. Gift of Edward Drummond Libbey
Public domain

Valentin de Boulogne (French, 1591-1632)
David with the Head of Goliath and Two Soldiers
1620-1622
Oil on canvas
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
Public domain

Bartolomeo Cavarozzi (Italian, 1587-1625)
The Sorrows of Aminta
c. 1625
Oil on canvas
39 3/8 x 47 1/4 in. (100 x 120cm)
Musée du Louvre, Paris
Gift of Paul Jamot, 1937
Public domain

Kimbell Art Museum
3333 Camp Bowie Boulevard,
Fort Worth, TX 76107

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Sunday 10am – 5pm
Closed Mondays

Kimbell Art Museum website

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

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

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

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

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

Wall text

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

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

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

Wall text

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

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

Wall text

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

In the middle of the 1990’s, diCorcia gained international recognition for his large color photographs of street scenes and passersby. For an earlier series, he traveled to Los Angeles on a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and worked on a part of Santa Monica Boulevard frequented by male prostitutes and drug addicts. For each picture he made there, he carefully composed his setting, then asked young men to pose for him, giving them a small fee (from twenty to fifty dollars) that was negotiated each time.

At that time, NEA support of artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe was highly controversial, and diCorcia had to sign a document stating that he would not produce any “obscene” work while on his fellowship. He set up the whole negotiating procedure as a symbolic way of sharing his grant with people whose behavior would surely have been condemned by the censors. The titles always mention the name, the age and the origin of the model, as well as the amount paid. The staged situation interacts with the raw reality of the exchange of money, blurring the boundaries between documentary and fiction, yet preserving an authentic emotional charge.

Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Philip-Lorca diCorcia (American, b. 1953)
Eddie Anderson, 21 Years Old, from Houston, Texas, $20
1991
Chromogenic print
Image: 39.2 x 57.8 cm (15 7/16 x 22 3/4 in.)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1991
Image courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York
© Philip-Lorca diCorcia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Press release from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Moyra Davey (American born Canada, b. 1958)
Copperhead Grid (detail)
1990
Chromogenic prints
Image: 8 3/4 in. × 6 in. (22.3 × 15.3cm) each
Sheet: 10 × 8 in. (25.4 × 20.3cm) each
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, Vital Projects Fund Inc. Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2011
© Moyra Davey

It was in 1990 – at the height of a worldwide economic recession that also marked the end of the 1980s art bubble – that Davey began photographing the scratched, worn-away surfaces of pennies, the most devalued and lowest form of currency. Her accumulation of one hundred micro-photographic specimens is constructed around the readymade patterns of decay that countless anonymous owners have unconsciously wrought upon their surfaces; their base materiality is incisively contrasted with the most elevated of national symbols. As with all of Davey’s work, there is a melancholic sense of loss that connects subject and form: like pennies, photographs are objects of exchange imprinted by contact with the world around them.

Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website

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

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

Wall text

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

Robert Gober (American, b. 1954)
Page 12 / Untitled (Detail from 1978-2000)
1978-2000
Gelatin silver print
40.6 x 50.8cm (16 x 20 in.)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, Charina Foundation Inc. Gift, 2002
© Robert Gober

Robert Gober works primarily in sculpture, installations, and photography. He is perhaps best known for his delicate, ghostly hand crafted versions of domestic fixtures, such as drains, beds, doors, and sinks. Through these uncanny replicas, Gober invests mass produced objects with personal meaning – the private, unruly desires and memories of the individual. This image appeared in the book (his first in the genre) that Gober created to accompany his installation representing the United States at the 2000 Venice Biennale. In it, the artist interweaves his own journey to New York in 1978 as a young gay man with the toxic fallout of homophobic recrimination that accompanied the murder of the Wyoming college student Matthew Shepard twenty years later.

Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Robert Gober superimposes a man’s hand between two newspaper articles, clipped neatly and placed on a shell-strewn beach. Below his hand, the article refers to Matthew Shepard’s death. Above it, a letter to the editor argues that “Orthodox Jews, conservative Christians and others have a right to speak out against homosexuality without being placed in the category of thuggery.” While the piece obviously precedes Jonathan Rauch’s provocative and important piece in the December issue of the Advocate arguing that gay people should tolerate a certain amount of anti-gay sentiment as a sign that they’re legally and socially secure enough to practice tolerance, it’s a useful encapsulation of the dilemma behind that argument. It’s hard to cast off past threats if you’re not entirely sure they’re past.

Alyssa Rosenberg. “Gay Americans, Censorship, And ‘After The Gold Rush’ At The Metropolitan Museum Of Art,” on the Think Progress website November 28, 2011 [Online] Cited 11/12/2024

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

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

Trevor Paglen (American, b. 1974)
KEYHOLE IMPROVED CRYSTAL from Glacier Point (Optical Reconnaissance Satelltte; USA 186)
2008
Chromogenic print
Image: 95.3 x 76.2cm (37 1/2 x 30 in.)
Frame: 96.5 × 77.5cm (38 × 30 1/2 in.)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, Vital Projects Fund Inc. Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2011
© Trevor Paglen

Trained as a geographer, Paglen is an artist who plots the topography of a new global and celestial space – the “black world” of covert military operations. Examples of his subjects include the supposed sites used for the extraordinary rendition of prisoners, which he shoots with specially designed cameras from up to forty miles away, and the network of private planes used to transport them under the radar. This image shows the ghostly white streak of an American reconnaissance satellite bisecting star trails above Yosemite’s Half Dome, a rock formation photographed in the 1860s by the photographer Carleton Watkins when the West was still being explored. In order to track such spacecraft, Paglen uses a database created by amateur astronomers who were trained by the U.S. government to search the skies for Soviet sputniks but continued their hobby after the end of the Cold War by tracking our own satellites. In this work, the artist brings into one composition two historically disparate moments in geographic and celestial colonisation.

Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website

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

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

Opening hours:
Sunday – Tuesday and Thursday: 10am – 5pm
Friday and Saturday: 10am – 9pm
Closed Wednesday

The Metropolitan Museum of Art website

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Exhibition: ‘Robert Adams: The Place We Live, A Retrospective Selection of Photographs’ at the The Denver Art Museum (DAM)

Exhibition dates: 25th September 2011 – 1st January 2012

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

Robert Adams (American, b. 1937)
Burning oil sludge, north of Denver, Colorado
1973-1974
Gelatin silver print
Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund

Robert Adams (American, b. 1937)
North of Keota, Colorado
1973 printed 1989
Gelatin silver print
Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund

Robert Adams (American, b. 1937)
Mobile home park, north edge of Denver, Colorado
1973-1974
Gelatin silver print
Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund

The Denver Art Museum (DAM) is the first U.S. venue for Robert Adams: The Place We Live, A Retrospective Selection of Photographs. The exhibition features more than 200 black-and-white photos spanning Adams’s 45-year career, showcasing the artistic legacy of the American photographer and his longstanding engagement with the contemporary Western landscape. Adams lived and worked in Colorado for nearly 30 years. Many of his most acclaimed images were taken in the Rocky Mountain region and will strike a familiar chord with visitors. The exhibition, organised by the Yale University Art Gallery, will be on view September 25, 2011 – January 1, 2012 in the museum’s Gallagher Family Gallery.

“We’re excited to host the work of one of the foremost photographers of our time,” said Eric Paddock, the DAM’s curator of photography. “Robert Adams’s striking yet quiet photos provoke thought about current economic, political and environmental issues Westerners confront every day. We think visitors will see something very familiar in his work.”

Since becoming a photographer in the mid-1960s, Adams has been widely regarded as one of the most significant and influential chroniclers of the American West. Adams’s photographs and writing insist that the realities of everyday landscapes are as beautiful as idealised scenes from nature. They ask questions about the ways people change and interact with nature, and what it means to live simply and quietly in today’s world. This commitment earned Adams prominence in photography’s “New Topographics” movement of the late 20th century and lends authority to his ongoing work. His photographs of Colorado suburban growth and clear cut forests in the Pacific Northwest, for example, express shock at mainstream social and economic values.

“The Denver Art Museum is pleased to be the first U.S. venue for The Place We Live, showcasing our continued commitment to our photography program,” said Christoph Heinrich, Frederick and Jan Mayer Director of the DAM. “Colorado has a rich photography history and we’re excited to have visitors engage with these artworks that provide a narrative to the American experience and take a fresh look at their surroundings.”

Featuring more than 200 gelatin silver prints, The Place We Live weaves together four decades of Adam’s work into a cohesive, epic narrative of American experience in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Each of the photographer’s major projects is represented, from early pictures of quiet buildings and monuments erected by prior settlers of his native Colorado to his most recent images of forests and migratory birds in the Pacific Northwest.

Biography

Born in Orange, N.J., in 1937, Robert Adams moved with his family from Madison, Wis., to Denver, Colo., at the age of 15. He earned a doctorate degree from the University of Southern California and, intent on pursuing an academic career, returned to Colorado in 1962 as an assistant professor of English at Colorado College. Disturbed by the rapid transformation of the Colorado Springs and Denver areas, Adams began photographing a landscape transformed by tract housing, highways, strip malls and gas stations. “The pictures record what we purchased, what we paid and what we could not buy,” Adams wrote. “They document a separation from ourselves, and in turn from the natural world that we professed to love.” Since 1997, he has lived and worked in Oregon.”

Press release from The Denver Art Museum

Robert Adams (American, b. 1937)
Lakewood, Colorado
1968-1971
Gelatin silver print
Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund

Robert Adams (American, b. 1937)
In a New Subdivision, Colorado Springs, Colorado
1969
Gelatin silver print
Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund

Robert Adams (American, b. 1937)
Frame for a Tract House, Colorado Springs, Colorado
1969
Gelatin silver print
Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund

Robert Adams (American, b. 1937)
Pikes Peak, Colorado Springs, Colorado
1969
Gelatin silver print
Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund

Robert Adams (American, b. 1937)
Denver, Colorado
c. 1970
Gelatin silver print
Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund

Robert Adams (American, b. 1937)
Longmont, Colorado
1973-1974, printed 2007
Gelatin silver print
Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund

Robert Adams (American, b. 1937)
Eden, Colorado
1968
Gelatin silver print
Yale University Art Gallery
Purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund

Robert Adams (American, b. 1937)
Colorado Springs, Colorado
1968
Gelatin silver print
Yale University Art Gallery
Purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from Trellis Fund, and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund

Robert Adams (American, b. 1937)
Edge of San Timoteo Canyon, looking toward Los Angeles, Redlands, California
1978
Gelatin silver print
Yale University Art Gallery
Purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund

Robert Adams (American, b. 1937)
Quarried Mesa Top, Pueblo County, Colorado
1978
Gelatin silver print
Yale University Art Gallery
Purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from Trellis Fund, and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund

Robert Adams (American, b. 1937)
Longmont, Colorado
1979, printed 1985
Gelatin silver print
Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund

Robert Adams (American, b. 1937)
Santa Ana Wash, Redlands, California
1983, printed 1991
Gelatin silver print
Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund

Robert Adams (American, b. 1937)
Sitka spruce, Cape Blanco State Park, Curry County, Oregon
1999-2000
Gelatin silver print
Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund

The Denver Art Museum
Civic Center Cultural Complex
located on 13th Avenue between Broadway and Bannock in downtown Denver

Opening hours:
Daily 10am – 5pm

The Denver Art Museum website

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melbourne’s magnificent nine 2011

December 2011

Here’s my pick of the nine best exhibitions in Melbourne (with excursions to Bendigo and Hobart thrown in) that appeared on the Art Blart art and cultural archive in 2011. Enjoy!

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Sidney Nolan: Drought Photographs at Australian Galleries, Melbourne, March 2011

Sidney Nolan (Australian, 1917-1992)
Untitled (calf carcass in tree)
1952
archival inkjet print
23.0 cm x 23.0cm

This was a superb exhibition of 61 black and white photographs by Sidney Nolan. The photographs were shot using a medium format camera and are printed in square format from the original 1952 negatives.

The work itself was a joy to behold. The photographs hung together like a symphony, rising and falling, with shape emphasising aspects of form. The images flowed from one to another. The formal composition of the mummified carcasses was exemplary, the resurrected animals (a horse, for example, propped up on a fifth leg) and emaciated corpses like contemporary sculpture. The handling of the tenuous aspects of human existence in this uniquely Australian landscape was also a joy to behold. Through an intimate understanding of how to tension the space between objects within the frame Nolan’s seemingly simple but complex photographs of the landscape are previsualised by the artist in the mind’s eye before he even puts the camera to his face.

2/ Bill Henson at Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne, March – April 2011

This was an exquisite exhibition by one of Australia’s preeminent artists. Like Glenn Gould playing a Bach fugue, Bill Henson is grand master in the performance of narrative, structure, composition, light and atmosphere. The exhibition featured thirteen large colour photographs printed on lustre paper (twelve horizontal and one vertical) – nine figurative of adolescent females, two of crowd scenes in front of Rembrandt paintings in The Hermitage, St. Petersburg (including the stunning photograph that features The return of the prodigal son c. 1662 in the background, see below) and two landscapes taken off the coast of Italy. What a journey this exhibition took you on!

Henson’s photographs have been said by many to be haunting but his images are more haunted than haunting. There is an indescribable element to them (be it the pain of personal suffering, the longing for release, the yearning for lost youth or an understanding of the deprecations of age), a mesmeric quality that is not easily forgotten. The photographs form a kind of afterimage that burns into your consciousness long after the exposure to the original image has ceased. Haunted or haunting they are unforgettable.

Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955)
Untitled
2009/10
CL SH767 N17B
Archival inkjet pigment print
127 x 180cm
Edition of 5

3/ Networks (cells & silos) at Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA), Caulfield, February – April 2011

This was a vibrant and eclectic exhibition at MUMA, one of the best this year in Melbourne. The curator Geraldine Barlow gathered together some impressive, engaging works that were set off to good effect in the new gallery spaces. I spent a long and happy time wandering around the exhibition and came away visually satiated and intellectually stimulated. The exhibition explored “the connections between artistic representation of networks; patterns and structures found in nature; and the rapidly evolving field of network science, communications and human relations.”

Installation photograph of one of the galleries in the exhibition NETWORKS (cells & silos) at the newly opened Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA) with Nick Mangan’s Colony (2005) in the foreground

4/ Monika Tichacek, To all my relations at Karen Woodbury Gallery, Richmond, May 2011

This was a stupendous exhibition by Monika Tichacek, at Karen Woodbury Gallery. One of the highlights of the year, this was a definite must see!

The work was glorious in it’s detail, a sensual and visual delight (make sure you click on the photographs to see the close up of the work!). The riotous, bacchanalian density of the work was balanced by a lyrical intimacy, the work exploring the life cycle and our relationship to the world in gouache, pencil & watercolour. Tichacek’s vibrant pink birds, small bugs, flowers and leaves have absolutely delicious colours. The layered and overlaid compositions show complete control by the artist: mottled, blotted, bark-like wings of butterflies meld into trees in a delicate metamorphosis; insects are blurred becoming one with the structure of flowers in a controlled effusion of life.

Monika Tichacek (Australian born Switzerland, b. 1975)
To all my relations (detail)
2011

5/ American Dreams: 20th century photography from George Eastman House at Bendigo Art Gallery, Victoria, April – July 2011

Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971)
Untitled (6)
1971
Gelatin silver print

This was a fabulous survey exhibition of the great artists of 20th century American photography, a rare chance in Australia to see such a large selection of vintage prints from some of the masters of photography. If you had a real interest in the history of photography then you hopefully saw this exhibition, showing as it is just a short hour and a half drive (or train ride) from Melbourne at Bendigo Art Gallery.

6/ Time Machine: Sue Ford at Monash Gallery of Art, Wheelers Hill, Victoria, April – June 2011

Sue Ford (Australian, 1943-2009)
Self-portrait 1976
1976
From the series Self-portrait with camera (1960-2006)
Selenium toned gelatin silver print, printed 2011
24 x 18cm
courtesy Sue Ford Archive

This beautifully hung exhibition flowed like music, interweaving up and down, the photographs framed in thin, black wood frames. It featured examples of Ford’s black and white fashion and street photography; a selection of work from the famous black and white Time series (being bought for their collection by the Art Gallery of New South Wales); a selection of Photographs of Women – modern prints from the Sue Ford archive that are wonderfully composed photographs with deep blacks that portray strong, independent, vulnerable, joyous women (see last four photographs below); and the most interesting work in the exhibition, the posthumous new series Self-portrait with camera (1960-2006) that evidence, through a 47 part investigation using colour prints from Polaroids, silver gelatin prints printed by the artist, prints made from original negatives and prints from scanned images where there was no negative available, a self-portrait of the artist in the process of ageing.

Whether looking down, looking toward or looking inward these fantastic photographs show a strong, independent women with a vital mind, an élan vital, a critical self-organisation and an understanding of the morphogenesis of things that will engage us for years to come. Essential looking.

7/ The Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), Hobart, August 2011

My analogy: you are standing in the half-dark, your chest open, squeezing the beating heart with blood coursing between your fingers while the other hand is up your backside playing with your prostrate gland. I think ringmeister David Walsh would approve. My best friends analogy: a cross between a car park, night club, sex sauna and art gallery.

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

Spectatorship and their attendant erotics has MONA as a form of fetishistic cinema. It is as if what Barthes calls “the eroticism of place” were a modern equivalent of the eighteenth century genius loci, the “genius of the place.” The place is spectacular, the private collection writ large as public institution, the symbolic power of the institution masked through its edifice. The art become autonomous, cut free from its cultural associations, transnational, globalised, experienced through kinaesthetic means; the viewer meandering through the galleries, the anti-museum, as an international flaneur. Go. Experience!

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

8/ John Bodin: Rite of Passage at Anita Traverso Gallery, Richmond, August – September 2011

John Bodin (Australian)
I Was Far Away From Home
2009
Type C print on metallic paper
80 x 110cm

The photographs become the surface of the body, stitched together with lines, markers pointing the way – they are encounters with the things that we see before us but also the things that we carry inside of us. It is the interchange between these two things, how one modulates and informs the other. It is this engagement that holds our attention: the dappled light, ambiguity, unevenness, the winding path that floats and bobs before our eyes looking back at us, as we observe and are observed by the body of these landscapes.

One of the fundamental qualities of the photographs is that they escape our attempts to rationalise them and make them part of our understanding of the world, to quantify our existence in terms of materiality. I have an intimate feeling with regard to these sites of engagement. They are both once familiar and unfamiliar to us; they possess a sense of nowhereness. A sense of groundlessness and groundedness. A collapsing of near and far, looking down, looking along, a collapsing of the constructed world.

Like the road in these photographs there is no self just an infinite time that has no beginning and no end. The time before my birth, the time after my death. We are just in the world, just being somewhere. Life is just a temporary structure on the road from order to disorder. “The road is life,” writes Jack Kerouac in On the Road.

9/ Juan Davila: The Moral Meaning of Wilderness at the Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA), Caulfield, August – October 2011

Simply put, this was one of the best exhibitions I saw in Melbourne this year.

I had a spiritual experience with this work for the paintings promote in the human a state of grace. The non-material, the unconceptualisable, things which are outside all possibility of time and space are made visible. This happens very rarely but when it does you remember, eternally, the time and space of occurrence. I hope you had the same experience.

Juan Davila (Chilean, b. 1946, emigrated Australia 1974)
Wilderness
2010
© Juan Davila, Courtesy Kalli Rolfe Contemporary Art

10/ In camera and in public at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne, September – October 2011

Kohei Yoshiyuki (Japanese, b. 1946)
Untitled
1971
From the series The Park
Gelatin Silver Print
© Kohei Yoshiyuki, Courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York

Curated by Naomi Cass as part of the Melbourne Festival, this was a brilliant exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne. The exhibition explored, “the fraught relationship between the camera and the subject: where the image is stolen, candid or where the unspoken contract between photographer and subject is broken in some way – sometimes to make art, sometimes to do something malevolent.” It examined the promiscuity of gazes in public / private space specifically looking at surveillance, voyeurism, desire, scopophilia, secret photography and self-reflexivity. It investigated the camera and its moral and physical relationship to the unsuspecting subject.

11/ The Mad Square: Modernity in German Art 1910 – 37 at The National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, November 2011 – March 2012

This is one of the best exhibitions this year in Melbourne bar none. Edgy and eclectic the work resonates with the viewer in these days of uncertainty: THIS should have been the Winter Masterpieces exhibition!

The title of the exhibition, The mad square (Der tolle Platz) is taken from Felix Nussbaum’s 1931 painting of the same name where “the ‘mad square’ is both a physical place – the city, represented in so many works in the exhibition, and a reference to the state of turbulence and tension that characterises the period.”The exhibition showcases how artists responded to modern life in Germany in the interwar years, years that were full of murder and mayhem, putsch, revolution, rampant inflation, starvation, the Great Depression and the rise of National Socialism. Portrayed is the dystopian, dark side of modernity (where people are the victims of a morally bankrupt society) as opposed to the utopian avant-garde (the prosperous, the wealthy), where new alliances emerge between art and politics, technology and the mass media. Featuring furniture, decorative arts, painting, sculpture, collage and photography in the sections World War 1 and the Revolution, Dada, Bauhaus, Constructivism and the Machine Aesthetic, Metropolis, New Objectivity and Power and Degenerate Art, it is the collages and photographs that are the strongest elements of the exhibition, particularly the photographs. What a joy they are to see.

Albert Renger-Patzsch (American born Hungary, 1895-1946)
Harbour with crane
c. 1927
Gelatin silver photograph
Printed image 22.7 h x 16.8 w cm
Purchased 1983
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

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Review: ‘Lionel Bawden: Pattern spill’ at Karen Woodbury Gallery, Richmond

Exhibition dates: 23rd November – 17th December 2011

Lionel Bawden (Australian, b. 1974)
Double Vision
2011
Coloured Staedtler pencils, epoxy, incralac on perspex shelf
Form: 23 x 26 x 7cm
Shelf: 7.5 x 30 x 30cm

In the self contained world of commercial “art to go” galleries, this exhibition is the apotheosis of that form. The work is astonishingly beautiful, refined and self contained. Drawing on references to Islamic art, Brancusi (Endless Column), stalactites, wafting sea sponges and the changeable camouflage patterns of sea creatures, the sculptures are perfect in visualisation, creation, contemplation and containment.

Sitting on coloured perspex shelves the patterns spills of coloured Staedtler pencils explore “themes of flux, transformation and repetition as preconditions to our experience of the physical world.” The titles of the work hint at such an exploration: Double Vision, Trance-muter, Secretion, Losing Containment, Pattern Spill.

How I wish, long, crave to own one and I am not alone: on the opening night nearly all the sculptures were already sold! Obviously people recognise the uniqueness and beauty of this work.

And yet …

Part of me

longs
for a
broken
pencil,
a
snapped t/wig,
something
out of place
that puts
pattern to
shame.

For only in mutation is pattern given relevance (and this is what the irregularity of ‘spill’ is supposed to be about). The flow of the Pattern Spill sculptures are the only ones that get close to this mutation and that in a pretty, ordered way.

“What happens in the case of mutation? Consider the example of the genetic code. Mutation normally occurs when some random event (for example, a burst of radiation or a coding error) disrupts an existing pattern and something else is put in its place instead. Although mutation disrupts pattern, it also presupposes a morphological standard against which it can be measured and understood as mutation … Mutation is critical because it names the bifurcation point at which the interplay between pattern and randomness causes the system to evolve in a new direction…

The randomness to which mutation testifies is implicit in the very idea of pattern, for only against the background of nonpattern can pattern emerge. Randomness is the contrasting term that allows pattern to be understood as such.”1

Instead of pattern “something else is put in its place instead.” I don’t get that here. Yes, these are beautiful, contemplative sculptures but one wonders how they will go on revealing themselves over months and years. I yearn for the prick of their imperfection.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Hayles, Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999, pp.30-33.

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

Lionel Bawden (Australian, b. 1974)
Trance-muter
2011
Coloured Staedtler pencils, epoxy, incralac on perspex shelf
Form: 32 x 26 x 7.5cm
Shelf: 7.5 x 30 x 30cm

Lionel Bawden (Australian, b. 1974)
Secretion
2011
Coloured Staedtler pencils, epoxy, incralac on perspex shelf
Form: 31 x 25 x 17cm
Shelf: 7.5 x 45 x 30cm

Lionel Bawden (Australian, b. 1974)
Flipside
2011
Coloured Staedtler pencils, epoxy and incralac on perspex shelf
28 x 33 x 13cm
Image courtesy Karen Woodbury Gallery and the artist

Lionel Bawden (Australian, b. 1974)
Crossing the mirror
2011
Coloured Staedtler pencils, epoxy and incralac on perspex shelf
29.8 x 24.7 x 16.5cm
Image courtesy Karen Woodbury Gallery and the artist

Lionel Bawden (Australian, b. 1974)
Losing Containment
2011
Coloured Staedtler pencils, epoxy, incralac on perspex shelf
Form 1: 31.5 x 24 x 12cm
Form 2: 33.5 x 33 x 26cm
Shelf: 15 x 120 x 30cm

Lionel Bawden (Australian, b. 1974)
The caverns of temporal suspension (between two sites)
2011
White Staedtler pencils, epoxy and incralac
45.5 x 63.5 x 8.0cm
Image courtesy Karen Woodbury Gallery and the artist

Lionel Bawden’s exhibition Pattern Spill will comprise of a range of small-scale objects created from vibrantly coloured pencils that are fused and sculpted together. By working with hexagonal coloured pencils as a sculptural material, Bawden is able to reconfigure and carve a range of amorphous shapes that convey movement and process. Bawden explores themes of flux, transformation and repetition as preconditions to our experience of the physical world.

This new body of work deals with ideas of control and collapse, surface and interior and organic patterns and energies through static three-dimensional objects. Bawden’s sculptures explore larger ideas beyond the work and relate to societal and natural systems, cycles and structures. Through his work, Bawden communicates macro ideas through micro detail. The works in Pattern spill become vessels for contemplation.

Alongside the sculptures there will also be a range of small meticulous drawings of vast hexagonal cells included in the exhibition. These drawings will act as companions to the sculptures, assisting to convey Bawden’s oblique explorations and meditations of the human condition.

Text from the Karen Woodbury Gallery website

Lionel Bawden (Australian, b. 1974)
Pattern spill
2014
Coloured Staedtler pencils, epoxy and incralac on perspex shelf
34 x 27 x 29cm
Image courtesy Karen Woodbury Gallery and the artist

Lionel Bawden (Australian, b. 1974)
Pattern Spill
2011
Coloured Staedtler pencils, epoxy, incralac on perspex shelf
Form: 30 x 23.5 x 33cm
Shelf: 15 x 30 x 30cm

Lionel Bawden (Australian, b. 1974)
Patttern Spill III
2011
Coloured Staedtler pencils, epoxy, incralac on perspex shelf
Form: 31 x 23 x 34cm
Shelf: 15 x 30 x 30cm

Lionel Bawden (Australian, b. 1974)
Secretion III
2011
Coloured Staedtler pencils, epoxy, incralac on perspex shelf
Form: 35 x 26.5 x 15cm
Shelf: 15 x 30 x 30cm

Lionel Bawden (Australian, b. 1974)
Elevation
2011
Coloured Staedtler pencils, epoxy, incralac on perspex shelf
Form: 42.5 x 15 x 7cm
Shelf: 7.5 x 30 x 30cm

Karen Woodbury Gallery

This gallery has now closed.

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Exhibition: ‘Bill Henson: early work from the MGA collection’ at the Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art, Adelaide

Exhibition dates: 14th October – 16th December 2011

Many thankx to the Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955)
Untitled 1977/78
1977-1978
From the Untitled sequence 1977/78 series 1977-1978
From a series of 16 gelatin silver print
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection
Donated by James Mollison AO through the
Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program 2008

Untitled 1977 is a series of black-and-white photographs that depict a naked adolescent male seemingly lost in a state of private reverie.

This early series highlights Henson’s interest in states of existence that are
indeterminate or ambiguous, which has remained a central concern of his practice over the years. In this body of work, a slightly androgynous youth seems to float in and out of consciousness. In later work, Henson continues to explore borderline states between night and day, dream and reality, childhood and adulthood.

Henson’s interest in ambiguity is also apparent at a formal level, with his use of lighting. Shadows swallow the figure’s contours and highlights dissolve the details, giving the youth a ghostly quality.

Stephen Zagala and Stella Loftus-Hills. “Bill Henson: early work from the MGA collection Education Resource,” on the University of South Australia website 2010 [Online] Cited 18/12/2024

Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955)
Untitled 1980-82
1980-82
From a series of 220 gelatin silver print
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection

These five works come from a series that includes a total of 220 photographs, which are printed at various sizes. When exhibiting the full series, Henson arranges the works into small groupings that create an overall effect of aberrant movement and fragmentation. From within these bustling clusters of images, individual faces emerge like spectres of
humanity that will once again dissolve into the crowd.

Henson shot this series over several years in different cities around the world, capturing images of individuals, crowds and architectural details, all apparently adrift in the flow of urban life. The people in these images have an anonymity that allows them to represent universal human experiences of alienation, mortality and fatigue. The views of buildings, however, are more specific. They were photographed in Dresden and East Berlin in the 1970s, when Henson travelled to Germany specifically for the purpose of
documenting these world-weary structures. Taken together, the images remind us of how tragically fleeting a sense of belonging can be.

Stephen Zagala and Stella Loftus-Hills. “Bill Henson: early work from the MGA collection Education Resource,” on the University of South Australia website 2010 [Online] Cited 18/12/2024

Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955)
Untitled 1980-82
1980-82
From a series of 220 gelatin silver print
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection

Bill Henson: early work from the MGA collection draws on work from the Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection. MGA holds one of the largest collections of Bill Henson’s photography. With its concentration of work from 1977-92, the collection provides a significant survey of Henson’s early career.

Bill Henson is one of Australia’s best-known artists. Many of us have heard his name. Some of us may also be familiar with his photographs. For many, the experience of Henson’s extraordinary work has probably been through reproduction of it in the media. However, it is important to view Henson’s actual photographs. This offers a much richer visual experience, and a deeper appreciation of his art. Henson printed all of the work in this exhibition in the darkroom by hand, using chemicals and carefully chosen paper stock. The uneven surfaces of the early black-and-white photographs are a result of this wet-printing process, and give the photographs a mysterious, almost alchemic quality. The larger colour photographs display a richness of tone and palette that is an artefact of the artist’s meticulous approach to the printing process. These material properties are not evident in reproductions of Henson’s images.

The other aspect that is lost in reproduction is the physical difficulty of seeing Henson’s pictures clearly. The darkness of Henson’s photographs appeals to the artist’s romantic sensibility. He tends to let shadows obscure visual detail so that enigmas lurk at the threshold of perception. Publishers like to override this quality of Henson’s work by adjusting the contrast and brightness of the images for print. Viewers of this exhibition will find themselves drawn into an inscrutable visual space of shadows and deep, reflective blacks.

Born in 1955, Bill Henson grew up in Glen Waverley, a burgeoning suburb of
Melbourne. From the 1950s to the 1970s the area swelled beyond the termination of the Glen Waverley train line, urged on by the relative affordability, ease and comfort of car travel. Self-serve petrol stations appeared at major intersections, their brightly coloured signage adding their glow to the landscape.

The influence of expanding American suburbia on Australia continued with Glen Waverley becoming home to the first McDonalds restaurant in Victoria (1971). The 1980s saw an expansion of large international chains that offered ‘drive-thru’ services (from fast food to alcohol) favouring prominent roadside locations and large signage to stamp their corporate identities on the landscape.

It is from within this ever changing and expanding landscape, between the end of the train line and country, that Henson’s vision was founded; a place where listless youth claim the vacant lots and preservations between estates as their own private worlds, lost in the evening shadows.

The youth that populate Henson’s images take on a strange, almost hollow look, their eyes becoming dark holes in their ghostly facades. Light and shadow compete to pull their bodies from one plane to the other, Henson seeks to capture this moment, the hovering between child and adult.

These liminal zones, the “intervals in the landscape”1 provided a backdrop for the developing artist. Bill Henson’s early work is undeniably – and perhaps unintentionally – a discussion of the changing landscape of suburbia and in turn the influence of international trends on what it meant to be growing up in Australia at that time. Henson’s early work is significant in Australian photography because of its depiction of this change in both this suburban landscape and the human condition.

1/ Bill Henson as quoted in Dominic Sidhu. “Nocturne: The photographs of Bill Henson (Interview with Bill Henson),” in EGO Magazine, New York, August 29, 2005. No longer available online.

Stephen Zagala and Stella Loftus-Hills. “Bill Henson: early work from the MGA collection Education Resource,” on the University of South Australia website 2010 [Online] Cited 18/12/2024

Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955)
Untitled 57
1985-1986
From the series Untitled 1985-86
Chromogenic print
106 x 86cm
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection
Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955)
Untitled 61
1985-1986
From the series Untitled 1985-86
Chromogenic print
128 × 100cm
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection
Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

Monash Gallery of Art (MGA) holds one of the largest collections of photographs by Bill Henson. With its concentration on work made between 1977 and 1992, the MGA collection represents a significant survey of Henson’s early career, from which twenty-nine works have been selected for the Bill Henson: early work from the MGA collection exhibition.

Henson has been described as a ‘passionate and visionary explorer’, and has been exhibited extensively nationally and internationally for over three decades, yet this is the first exhibition dedicated to this major artist’s work to be presented in Adelaide.

Passionate discussion about Henson’s work in the Australian media in recent times, has served to illuminate an important debate about the nature of art. But while many of us may be familiar with Henson’s images through reproduction, to view a museum exhibition of the artist’s photographs offers a much deeper appreciation of his art, and is a rare opportunity for audiences to themselves experience his work first hand.

The ‘in conversation’ event is a highlight to accompany a very special exhibition at the Samstag Museum from one of Australia’s most distinguished artists. Bill Henson: early work from the MGA Collection, with selected recent landscapes offers South Australians a unique opportunity to experience the power and beauty of the work of Bill Henson, Australia’s best-known contemporary photographer. This is the first exhibition dedicated to this major artist’s work ever to be presented in Adelaide.

The exhibition features twenty-nine iconic images from many of Henson’s major series from the 1970s through to the early 1990s, all drawn from the Monash Gallery of Art, who hold one of the largest collections of Henson’s work in the country.

For many, the experience of Henson’s extraordinary work has been through its reproduction in the media. However, it is important to view the actual photographs as this offers a much richer visual experience. All of the early work in the exhibition was printed by hand in the darkroom, and consequently the uneven surfaces of the black and white photographs have a mysterious, alchemic quality not present in reproductions of Henson’s images.

Alongside the MGA Collection exhibition, the Samstag Museum is presenting a selection of recent landscape photographs by Henson. These are works of compelling power and continue the artist’s fascination with a diverse range of subject matter. Through them we explore an island of rocky outcrops, monoliths rising dramatically from the ocean and waterfalls captured in a blaze of light.

Text and press release from the Anne and Gordon Samstag Museum of Art website

Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955)
Untitled 63
1985-1986
From the series Untitled 1985-86
Chromogenic print
106 x 86cm
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection acquired 1991
Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955)
Untitled 72
1985-1986
From the series Untitled 1985-86
Chromogenic print
106 x 86cm
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection acquired 1991
Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

The series Untitled 1985-86 is constructed of 154 photographs that explore the psychological space of Henson’s youth. Henson grew up in Glen Waverley, in Melbourne’s South-east, and he has often spoken about the importance of maintaining a connection with the suburban environment that shaped his sensibilities. This series includes a range of specific references to the streetscapes of the area, often shot at night or dusk,
with fluorescent lights investing the darkness with a wistful glow.

Henson’s emphasis on nocturnal life alludes to his interest in treating real landscape as if it is a dreamscape, an idea that is underscored by the use of sleeping figures in this series. And, by juxtaposing suburbia with photographs of summertime girls and Egyptian temples, Henson takes us into the dreamy imaginings of an adolescent boy living on the outskirts of the city.

Stephen Zagala and Stella Loftus-Hills. “Bill Henson: early work from the MGA collection Education Resource,” on the University of South Australia website 2010 [Online] Cited 18/12/2024

Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955)
Untitled 73
1985-1986
From the series Untitled 1985-86
Chromogenic print
106 x 86cm
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection
Donated by the artist 1989
Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955)
Untitled 137
1985-1986
From the series Untitled 1985-86
Chromogenic print
106 x 86cm
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection
Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955)
Untitled
1990-1991
From the series Paris Opera Project
Type C photograph
130 × 130cm
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection
Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

In 1990 Bill Henson was commissioned to produce a body of work that responded to the world-renown Opéra de Paris. He decided to focus on the audience, and while at the Opéra photographed the faces of people while they sat enveloped in darkness, their features softly illuminated by the reflected glow of stage lighting. The photographs shot in Paris subsequently became Henson’s source material, as he restaged the portraits in his Melbourne studio to accentuate the mood and atmosphere of an evening at the opera.

When the subsequent series of fifty photographs was first exhibited in Melbourne during 1991, they were hung floor-to-ceiling as if to suggest an auditorium of spectators. With their far-away eyes, gazing off toward something that is not revealed in the photographs, these faces express the sublime sensuality of a musical experience. And the atmospheric cloudscapes that punctuate the series allude to the rich horizons being opened up in the imaginations of the audience.

Stephen Zagala and Stella Loftus-Hills. “Bill Henson: early work from the MGA collection Education Resource,” on the University of South Australia website 2010 [Online] Cited 18/12/2024

Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955)
Untitled 1-5 B
1990-1991
From the series Paris Opera Project
Type C photograph
130 × 130cm
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection
Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art
Hawke Building, City West campus
University of South Australia
55 North Terrace, Adelaide
Phone: (08) 8302 0870

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Saturday 10am – 5pm

Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art website

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Exhibition: ‘In Focus: The Sky’ at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center, Los Angeles

Exhibition dates: 26th July – 4th December 2011

Col. Henry Stuart Wortley (British, 1832-1890)
The Day is Done, and the Darkness Falls from the Wings of Night.,
about 1862
Albumen silver print
29.5 x 35.2cm (11 5/8 x 13 7/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

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

With its immensity, immateriality, and variability, the sky has been an enduring subject in art history, fascinating and challenging generations of artists. As soon as the medium of photography was introduced in 1839, photographers attempted to represent the sky and its natural phenomena.

Atmospheric light and its constant mutability have always been hard to capture, but by the 1850s the greater light sensitivity of collodion negatives (compared to the daguerreotype and calotype processes) allowed the spectacles of the sky to be more easily transposed to photography.

With further technical improvements such as the development of instantaneous processes in the 1880s and the advent of Kodachrome colour film around 1935, photographers have continued to explore this theme in diverse and imaginative ways.

Text from the J. Paul Getty Museum website

Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820-1884)
Cloudy Sky – Mediterranean Sea
1857
Albumen silver print
12 1/4 x 16 7/16 in.
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Clouds

The collodion process (in which a syrupy, light-sensitive mixture was applied to glass-plate negatives) was advantageous for its short exposure time and sharpness, but its sensitivity to blue light could also pose a challenge. By the time the camera captured detail in the foreground, the sky was often overexposed and thus printed as blank space.

To create his sweeping seascape, Cloudy Sky – Mediterranean Sea, Gustave Le Gray combined two slightly overlapping negatives: one for the sky and one for the sea.

Text from the J. Paul Getty Museum website

Carleton Watkins (American, 1829-1916)
[Solar Eclipse]
January 1, 1889
Albumen silver print
16.5 × 21.6cm (6 1/2 × 8 1/2 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Standing atop Mount Santa Lucia in northern California at approximately 3.50 p.m. on January 1, 1889, Carleton Watkins was able to make only one exposure during the instant of complete eclipse. Accompanied by professors from the newly created University of California and the United States Naval Observatory, Watkins waited slightly more than an hour for the moon to begin its movement and assume its temporary position directly in front of the sun. The radiating sun, its brilliance hidden by the black moon, lies suspended over a sea of clouds whose rippling waves dominate the sky. Only the inclusion of the treetops in the foreground serves to ground the image in a familiar reality.

Text from the J. Paul Getty Museum website

The J. Paul Getty Museum presents In Focus: The Sky, a thematically-installed exhibition of permanent collection photographs, on view at the Getty Center from July 26 – December 4, 2011.

“The sky has fascinated and challenged photographers since the invention of the medium,” said Anne Lyden, associate curator, Department of Photographs, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and curator of the exhibition. “This exhibition showcases a wide range of approaches to capturing the many moods and effects of the sky – things we usually take for granted.”

The selection of 22 artworks provides visitors with an opportunity to explore the Getty Museum’s world-renowned photographs collection through the pictorial subject of the sky, with the works loosely organised under four different themes: urban skies, clouds, dark skies, and colourful skies.

The exhibition features photographs by artists such as: Ansel Adams, John Divola, André Kertész, Joel Meyerowitz, Alfred Stieglitz, and Carleton Watkins, among others. The Getty’s collection includes exemplary objects that demonstrate both technological and aesthetic innovations in photography. Among the different processes highlighted are daguerreotypes, albumen silver prints, palladium prints, platinum prints, and more contemporary inkjet prints.

One of the most well-known works in the exhibition is Ansel Adams’ Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, (negative made November 1, 1941; printed December 16, 1948). Traveling by car through New Mexico, Adams was inspired by light from the setting sun illuminating crosses in the graveyard at the side of the road. By carefully considering the composition, visualising the printed image before creating the photograph, understanding the required exposure needed in response to the available light, and exerting a certain degree of control in the printing process so that detail and shadows were retained, Adams succeeded in capturing the fleeting moment when the sun was setting and the bright moon appeared in the darkening sky.

The summer sky of Cape Cod features in Meyerowitz’s photograph Fence, Truro, negative 1976; printed 1992. Having recently acquired a large view camera, Meyerowitz spent two summers recording the structures and light of the coastal area that ultimately resulted in the 1978 book, Cape Light. Noting the shifting shadows as they played across the picket fence, his use of colour aptly describes the very subject of light itself.

Included in the exhibition is a selection from John Divola’s Zuma Beach series. In the fall of 1977, after discovering an abandoned lifeguard headquarters at Zuma Beach, California, Divola began visiting the site mornings and evenings to photograph. Bringing paints, using flash, and depending on the Pacific Ocean and the ever-changing sky for a dramatic backdrop, he created spontaneous scenes in this seaside theatre.

Also on view is a small group of three photographs by Alfred Stieglitz. From 1922 to 1934, Stieglitz photographed clouds and created a series of abstract configurations which reflected the fluctuation of his subjective state. By simply titling each piece Equivalent, he invited an open reading of the images and their content.

In Focus: The Sky is the ninth installation of the ongoing In Focus series of exhibitions, thematic presentations of photographs from the Getty’s permanent collection.

Press release from the J. Paul Getty Museum website

Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946)
Songs of the Sky
1924
Gelatin silver print
11.7 x 9.2cm (4 5/8 x 3 5/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© J. Paul Getty Trust

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Cloud, Mexico
1926
Palladium print
14.9 × 24cm (5 7/8 × 9 7/16 in.)
© 1981 Arizona Board of Regents, Center for Creative Photography

The first image with artistic intention that Edward Weston made in Mexico was of a cloud. Stopped in the port of Mazatlan on his way to Mexico City in 1923, Weston, for the first time in his career, was moved to photograph the sky, a theme that would occupy him intermittently throughout his entire sojourn in Mexico. Working with his Graflex, which allowed for greater flexibility than his tripod-mounted eight-by-ten-inch camera, he shot clouds spontaneously and maintained a personal collection of prints that he referred to as his “cloud series.” He noted in his daybook, “Next to the recording of a fugitive expression, or revealing the pathology of some human being, is there anything more elusive to capture than cloud forms! And the Mexican clouds are so swift and ephemeral, one can hardly allow the thought, ‘Is this worth doing?’ or, ‘ls this placed well?’ – for an instant of delay and what was, is not!”

The economy of form achieved in this 1926 image through the isolation of a single strip of stratus clouds oriented diagonally within the frame was not new to Weston’s aesthetic; his 1924 picture of Tina Modotti (1896-1942) nude on the roof of their home (see 86.XM.710.8) employs a remarkably similar composition. If Mexico provided Weston the inspiration to explore and expand the range of his oeuvre, adding clouds, still lifes, and landscapes to his repertoire of portraits and nudes, it simultaneously served as the place where his visual approach to the world was honed. His time in Mexico came to an end the same year he made this picture, but many of the principles he developed there would last him throughout his career.

Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946)
Equivalent
1926
Gelatin silver print
11.6 × 9.1cm (4 9/16 × 3 9/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Georgia O’Keeffe Museum

Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946)
Equivalent
1926
Gelatin silver print
11.7 × 9.2cm (4 5/8 × 3 5/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Sangre de Cristo, New Mexico
1930
Platinum print
9.2 × 11.9cm (3 5/8 × 4 11/16 in.)
© Aperture Foundation

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
[The West Side, Looking North from the Upper 30s / Nightview]
1932
Gelatin silver print
33.8 × 26.8cm (13 5/16 × 10 9/16 in.)
© Estate of Berenice Abbott

“If [photography] is to be utterly honest and direct, it should be related to the pulse of the times – the pulse of today.” ~ Berenice Abbott

Nowhere is Berenice Abbott’s statement better demonstrated than in this photograph of the pulsating vibrancy of New York City, alive at night with thousands of glittering lights. The flashes of illumination perforate the frame, reflecting the dynamism of the world’s fastest-changing city. Abbott set about documenting New York when she returned there in 1929 after nine years spent in Europe. Abbott made this photograph from a high vantage point in the Empire State Building on Fifth Avenue looking north.

Text from the J. Paul Getty Museum website

André Kertész (American born Hungary, 1894-1985)
The Lost Cloud, New York
Negative 1937; print 1970s
Gelatin silver print
24.8 x 16.5cm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Estate of André Kertész

Urban Skies

Soon after arriving in New York in October 1936, André Kertész spent time searching the city streets for fresh material, just as he had done in Paris for a decade. One afternoon he observed a solitary white cloud in a vast blue sky, dwarfed by the monolithic presence of the Rockefeller Center. Kertész later recounted that he was “very touched when he saw the cloud, as it “didn’t know which way to go” (Bela Ugrin, Dialogues with Kertész, ” 1978-1985, the Getty Research Institute) – a sentiment he strongly identified with as a new immigrant.

From the lyrical to the abstract, photography has often been an apt medium with which to capture the fleeting nature of skies.

Text from the J. Paul Getty Museum website

The impenetrable façade of Rockefeller Center in New York dominates the frame of this photograph, filling the lower and right sides of the image with its cold, hard, modern lines. The other third of the composition belongs to the sky, in which a lone puff of white cloud hangs isolated like a cotton ball, holding sway against the force of the skyscraper. The brilliant white form is “lost” in this scene that is otherwise devoid of natural, spirited shapes. The cloud possesses an innate impermanence; it will be gone with the next gust of wind, blown along on its path to some other expanse of sky. Andre Kertész’s juxtaposition of the whimsical cloud and unforgiving architecture seems to emphasise his own sense of isolation; the photograph was made soon after he had emigrated from Europe.

Text from the J. Paul Getty Museum website

Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984)
Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico
Negative November 1, 1941; print December 16, 1948
Gelatin silver print
34.9 × 44cm (13 3/4 × 17 5/16 in.)
© The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust

Arguably Ansel Adams’s most famous image, this photograph is titled Moonrise rather than Sunset, even though the moon technically does not rise in the sky. As a scholar noted: The factuality and, moreover, the meaning of the setting sun were rejected by him in favour of the expressive symbolism of the rising moon; of the shining luminescence ablaze with greatness in its primal mystery, dramatically isolated in the infinity of darkness.

Instead of making an unmanipulated print from the negative, Adams selectively printed the sky black and the foreground dark in order to achieve a particular illumination and spiritual transcendence. The photographer’s skill and vision transformed the tiny town of Hernandez, dotted with glowing white cemetery and church crosses, into a spectral landscape.

Text from the J. Paul Getty Museum website

William A. Garnett (American, 1916-2006)
Smog, Los Angeles
1949
Gelatin silver print
25.2 × 34cm (9 15/16 × 13 3/8 in.)
© Estate of William A. Garnett

An ardent conservationist, Garnett became concerned about land use and air pollution in the early 1940s. He made this photograph in an attempt to raise public awareness. Over the years Garnett came to believe that he was more likely to inspire positive change by pointing out nature’s enduring beauty than by showing the ugliness caused by poor choices.

Text from the J. Paul Getty Museum website

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Full Moon, Southwestern Utah
1953
Gelatin silver print
15.6 x 15.3cm (6 1/8 x 6 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Gift of the John Dixon Collection
© Oakland Museum of California, the City of Oakland

Dorothea Lange suffered health problems in the late 1940s, but she wanted to travel again and be part of the current documentary effort. Since the federal government was no longer funding such projects, this meant working for the thriving picture magazines. Lange proposed to Life that she and Ansel Adams do a project in Utah. They would travel with her son Daniel, who would write text for the article, and her husband, who had a continuing interest in the survival of utopian communities. Their purpose was to record the landscape, built environment and inhabitants of three towns in southwestern Utah settled in the mid-nineteenth century by Mormons. The grandchildren of some of these pioneers were Lange’s subjects during her visit to Gunlock, Toquerville, and St. George in 1953.

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
Fence, Truro
negative 1976; print 1992
Chromogenic print
59.7 x 47.3cm (23 1/2 x 18 5/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Gift of Nancy and Bruce Berman
© Joel Meyerowitz, courtesy Edwynn Houk Gallery, NY

John Divola (American, b. 1949)
Untitled
From the Zuma Beach series
1977
Chromogenic print
24.8 x 30.4cm (9 3/4 x 11 15/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Gift of Michael and Jane Wilson
© John Divola

Skies in Color

In the fall of 1977, after discovering an abandoned lifeguard headquarters at Zuma Beach, California, John Divola began visiting the site to photograph. Painting the walls, incorporating props, using flash, and depending on the Pacific Ocean and the sky for a dramatic backdrop, he created a series of makeshift scenes.

Discussing his work in 1980, Divola said, “These photographs are the product of my involvement with an evolving situation. The house evolving in a primarily linear way toward its ultimate disintegration, the ocean and light evolving and changing in a cyclical and regenerative manner.”

Text from the J. Paul Getty Museum website

John Divola (American, b. 1949)
Untitled
1977
From the Zuma Series
Chromogenic print
24.6 × 30.5cm (9 11/16 × 12 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Gift of Michael and Jane Wilson
© John Divola

Robert Weingarten (American, b. 1941)
6:30 A.M. 10/06/03, #98, Malibu, CA
2003
Inkjet print
76.4 × 76.4cm (30 1/16 × 30 1/16 in.)
© Robert Weingarten
Gift of Alvin and Heidi Toffler

The horizon at dawn, looking southeast over Santa Monica Bay, from the artist’s home in Malibu.

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

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Friday, Sunday 10am – 5.30pm
Saturday 10am – 8pm
Monday Closed

The J. Paul Getty Museum website

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Exhibition: ‘Bare Witness: Photographs by Gordon Parks’ at the Phoenix Art Museum

Exhibition dates: 20th August – 6th November 2011

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

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Children with Doll (Ella Watson’s Grandchildren)
1942
Gelatin silver print
11 x 14 inches
Lent by The Capitol Group Foundation
© 2006 The Gordon Parks Foundation

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Ingrid Bergman at Stromboli
1949
Gelatin silver print
16 x 20 inches
Lent by The Capitol Group Foundation
© 2006 The Gordon Parks Foundation

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Black Muslim Rally
New York, 1963
Gelatin silver print
16 x 20 inches
Lent by The Capitol Group Foundation
© 2006 The Gordon Parks Foundation

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Alberto Giacometti, Paris
1951
Gelatin silver print
16 x 20 inches
Lent by The Capitol Group Foundation
© 2006 The Gordon Parks Foundation

Gordon Parks spent the majority of his professional career at the crossroads of the glamorous and the ghetto – two extremes the noted photographer knew well. Perhaps best recognised for his works chronicling the African-American experience, Parks was also an accomplished fashion photographer. Bare Witness: Photographs by Gordon Parks provides a revealing look at the diversity and breadth of Parks’s most potent imagery. Featuring 73 works specifically selected by Parks for the photographic collection of the Los Angeles-based Capital Group, Bare Witness divulges heart wrenching images, iconic moments, celebrities and slices of everyday life.

Born in 1912 in Fort Scott, Kansas, Parks, who died in 2006 at age 93, was an African American photographer who began working professionally in the 1930’s. Parks tackled the harsh truth and dignity of the black urban and rural poor in the United States. He photographed aspects of the Civil Rights movements and individuals associated with the Black Panthers and Black Muslims. For nearly 25 years, from 1948 to 1972, he served as staff photographer for Life magazine. He also established himself as a foremost fashion photographer, providing spreads for respected magazines such as Vogue.

Bare Witness features many of Parks’s most memorable images such as “American Gothic.” Taken during Parks’s brief time with the Farm Security Agency, the photograph depicts a black cleaning woman named Ella Watson standing stiffly in front of an American flag, a mop in one hand and a broom in the other. Also included in the exhibition is a series of photos from Parks’s most famous Life magazine essay about Flavio da Silva, a malnourished and asthmatic boy living in a Rio de Janerio slum. Portraits of Muhammad Ali, Duke Ellington, Alexander Calder, Ingrid Bergman, Langston Hughes and Malcolm X among others will also be on view.

“Whether photographing celebrities or common folk, children or the elderly, Harlem gang leaders or fellow artists, Parks brought his straightforward, sympathetic ear and mind to bear witness to late 20th century civilisation,” commented Hilarie Faberman, the Robert M. and Ruth L. Halperin Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at Cantor Arts Center and organiser of the exhibition. “His photographs balance the dichotomies of black and white, rich and poor, revealing his strengths and struggles as an artist and a man.”

In addition to his documentary and fashion photography, Parks was a filmmaker, author, musician and publisher. He was the first black artist to produce and direct a major Hollywood film, “The Learning Tree” in 1969, which was based on his early life experiences. He subsequently directed the popular action films “Shaft” and “Shaft’s Big Score.” He was a founder and editorial director of Essence magazine and wrote several autobiographies, novels and poems. In 1988, he received the National Medal of Arts award and throughout his lifetime was the recipient of 40 honorary doctorates from colleges and universities in the United States and England.

“Parks was a renaissance man whose career embodied the American ideal of equality and whose art was deeply personal. This exhibition is an exciting opportunity for Museum visitors to experience the poignant images he made over five decades,” commented Rebecca Senf, Norton Curator of Photography, Phoenix Art Museum.

The exhibition includes an illustrated catalogue with an essay by photography scholar Maren Stange who writes frequently on modern American culture. This exhibition has already enjoyed a five-venue tour, where the photographs were received with great excitement. The exhibition has been revived for a final showing at the Phoenix Art Museum. Bare Witness: Photographs by Gordon Parks was organised by the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University. The exhibition and its accompanying catalogue are made possible by generous support from The Capital Group Foundation, the Cantor Arts Center’s Hohbach Family Fund, and Cantor Arts Center’s Members.

Press release from the Phoenix Museum of Art website

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
American Gothic
1942
Gelatin silver print
24 x 20 inches
Lent by The Capitol Group Foundation
© 2006 The Gordon Parks Foundation

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Red Jackson, Harlem
1948
Gelatin silver print
Lent by The Capitol Group Foundation
© 2006 The Gordon Parks Foundation

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Mrs. Jefferson, Fort Scott
1949
Gelatin silver print
20 x 16 inches
Lent by The Capitol Group Foundation
© 2006 The Gordon Parks Foundation

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
A Gambling Woman, Caribe Hilton Hotel, San Juan, Puerto Rico
December 1949
Gelatin silver print
20 x 16 inches
Lent by The Capitol Group Foundation
© 2006 The Gordon Parks Foundation

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Mário da Silva, Crying after Being Bitten by Dog, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
1961
Gelatin silver print
14 x 11 inches
Lent by The Capitol Group Foundation
© 2006 The Gordon Parks Foundation

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Malcolm X at Rally, Chicago, Illinois
1963
From the series Chicago Muslim Story (1963)
Gelatin silver print
Lent by The Capitol Group Foundation
© 2006 The Gordon Parks Foundation

Gordon Parks relocated from Minnesota to Chicago’s South Side in 1940, immersing himself in the local art community while operating a portrait studio out of the South Side Community Art Center. In 1941 he was awarded a Rosenwald Fellowship for a portfolio of photographs he created on the South Side; the award gave him the means to move east to Washington, DC. By 1948 Life magazine hired him as its first African American staff photographer.

In 1963 Parks returned to Chicago on assignment for Life to report on the Nation of Islam, newly headquartered in the city. Parks gained unprecedented access to this radical civil rights movement through his friendship with Malcolm X, who arranged a meeting with Elijah Muhammad, the group’s leader, so that Parks could obtain permission to proceed with the story. Parks spent weeks with the Black Muslim community, documenting a range of its activities – from self-defense training to religious services led by Malcolm X.

Parks’s photo-essay ran in the May 31, 1963, issue of Life, along with an essay by Parks that reflects on his dual status as insider and outsider. The text begins with his return to Chicago after nearly a decade and his memories of “the hopelessness that seeped into the black souls of that jungle.” Parks goes on to describe his current position: “I was a Black Man in White Man’s clothing, sent by the very ‘devils’ [Elijah Muhammad] criticized so much… . I wondered whether or not my achievements in the white world had cost me a certain objectivity.” He concludes, “I sympathize with much of what they say, but I also disagree with much of what they say… . Nevertheless, I acknowledge that the circumstance of common struggle has willed us brothers.”

Text from the Art Institute of Chicago website

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Muhammad Ali
c. 1970
Gelatin silver print
24 x 20 inches
Lent by The Capitol Group Foundation
© 2006 The Gordon Parks Foundation

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Muhammad Ali
1970
Cibachrome
20 x 16 inches
Lent by The Capitol Group Foundation
© 2006 The Gordon Parks Foundation

Phoenix Art Museum
McDowell Road & Central Avenue
1625 N. Central Avenue
Phoenix, AZ 85004

Opening hours:
Monday Closed
Tuesday Closed
Wednesday 10am – 9pm
Thursday – Sunday 10am – 5pm

Phoenix Art Museum website

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opening: ‘movement and emotion’ and ‘jodie noble solo’ at arts project australia, melbourne

October 2011

I am opening the exhibitions Movement and Emotion and Jodie Noble Solo at Arts Project Australia, Northcote on Wednesday 19th October 2011 from 6 – 8pm. All welcome, would be great to see you there. Details on the flyer!

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Arts Project Australia website

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Marcus Bunyan black and white archive: portraits 1991-1992

October 2010

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Andrea with long hair
1991-1992
Gelatin silver print

Portraits, South Yarra, Melbourne

I am scanning my negatives made during the years 1991-1997 to preserve them in the form of an online archive as a process of active memory, so that the images are not lost forever. These photographs were images of my life and imagination at the time of their making, the ideas I was thinking about and the people and things that surrounded me.

All images © Marcus Bunyan. Please click the photographs for a larger version of the image; remember these are just straight scans of the negatives !

Photographs are available from this series for purchase. As a guide, a vintage 8″ x 10″ silver gelatin print costs $700 plus tracked and insured shipping. For more information please see my Store web page.

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Andy in the flat, Punt Road, South Yarra
1991-1992
Gelatin silver print

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Fredrick White, Weapon-Maker
1991-1992
Gelatin silver print

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Fredrick White
1991-1992
Gelatin silver print

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Fred smiling in the flat, Punt Road, South Yarra
1991-1992
Gelatin silver print

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Fred’s hands
1991-1992
Gelatin silver print

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Jerry, Bent Metal, Punt Road, South Yarra
1991-1992
Gelatin silver print

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Brent in the backyard
1991-1992
Gelatin silver print

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Lawrence in the kitchen, Punt Road, South Yarra
1991-1992
Gelatin silver print

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Lawrence with strainer
1991-1992
Gelatin silver print

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Portrait of Lawrence
1991-1992
Gelatin silver print

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Fredrick White
1991-1992
Gelatin silver print

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Yvonne Kendall
1991-1992
Gelatin silver print

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Lawrence sleeping
1991-1992
Gelatin silver print

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Untitled (Lawrence clasping his arms to his back)
1991-1992
Gelatin silver print

Marcus Bunyan black and white archive 1991-1997

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