Many thankx to Fundació Foto Colectania for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photograph for a larger version of the image.
Foundation Foto Colectania presents for the first time in Barcelona the famous series Women Are Beautiful by Garry Winogrand.
Garry Winogrand is considered one of the greatest innovators of photography of the twentieth-century in America. He knew like no other how to capture the social transformation of females in the 60’s and 70’s through his portraits of women who stand as an allegory of women’s emancipation and their new role in society. The Foundation Foto Colectania presents his series Women Are Beautiful, including 85 photographs taken between 1960 and 1975 and collected in the book with the same title by the legendary director of photography at the MoMA, John Szarkowski. The exhibition from the collection of Lola Garrido, is part of the programming line of the foundation which is dedicated to authors who changed the course of the history of photography. The exhibition can be seen in Barcelona until June 4, 2011. In the 60’s ended the era of big images as symbols of timeless truths, by the devastating influence first from Walker Evans, and later from Robert Frank and William Klein. The pictures are focused on the reflection of reality, no retouching or other ideas added. Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander represent “the new American style” which broke new ground in the so-called Street Photography.
Winogrand combines spontaneity with an apparent confusion, which is more than aware of the complexity of the photography world: “I photograph to see what the world looks like in photographs.” The presence of human beings, contrasting with the crowds and the streets in his photographs reveals a new way of looking, in which the anarchy results in a wealth of shapes and structures. The biased and cold style of Winogrand is associated with Abstract Expressionism and its sharp diagonals are similar to paint brush strokes of those years. If the photographer Robert Frank was critical of the 50’s, Garry Winogrand is one of the largest photographers of the 60’s.
Press release from the Fundació Foto Colectania website
Many thankx to the Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
As an actress Margarita Broich is one of the big names, but it may come as a surprise to many that she is also a photographer. For the first time the Martin-Gropius-Bau is showing an exhibition of her work consisting of over 60 portraits of her fellow artists, including Ben Becker, Kate Winslet, Veronika Ferres, Klaus Maria Brandauer, Christoph Schlingensief, Thomas Quasthoff and many more. Margarita Broich has captured those fleeting moments when the actor sheds the role in the intervals or a few minutes after the end of a performance. The role can still be discerned on the features of the players when they are still surrounded by the world of scenery and mirrors but not acting any more. They have been sought out in changing rooms, theatre foyers, or with the make-up artist, taking off their make-up while still surrounded by the tools of their transformation.
Broich portrays the artists with the instinct of a colleague. Her photographs capture famous artists from her circle of acquaintances at those moments when they are returning from the stage after playing their role. However matter-of-fact the situation of the subject may occasionally appear, each photograph has its own charm. The beholder is granted glimpses of scenes that must be among the most intimate in show business: whether they show Martin Wuttke with a blonde, Andy Warhol mane and his poodle, Taxi, smoking a cigarette after a performance of “Gretchens Faust”, or Klaus Maria Brandauer at the end of a 10-hour Wallenstein epic, sitting on a stool with a bottle of beer, the snapshots are full of tension.
Born in Neuwied in 1960, Margarita Broich initially studied photo design in Dortmund and worked as a theatrical photographer at the Bochum Schauspielhaus (Theatre) under Claus Peymann, before studying dramatic art herself at Berlin’s College of Arts. Since then she has appeared in numerous German-language stage performances and television dramas, working with such directors as Claus Peymann, Robert Wilson and, earlier, with Christoph Schlingensief.
Text from the Martin-Gropius-Bau website [Online] Cited 26/05/2011 no longer available online
Candida Höfer (German, b. 1944) Ballettzentrum Hamburg III 2000 Chromogenic print Courtesy of Sonnabend Gallery
Inspired curating conjoins the monumental, classicist purity of Höfer with the picturesque, dystopian (dis)quietude of Gaillard in an exhibition that investigates our relationship to buildings and their environments and their relationship to us – the ‘i’ in our histor-i-city.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Carnegie 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.
Candida Höfer (German, b. 1944) Fundação Bienal de São Paulo XI 2005 Chromogenic print 81 3/8 x 71 7/8 in. Courtesy of Sonnabend Gallery
Carnegie Museum of Art presents the powerful work of two contemporary artists – Candida Höfer and Cyprien Gaillard – who explore architectural environments and how they influence experiences and perceptions of the world.
“We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.” With that simple but profound insight, Winston Churchill conveyed people’s complex relationship to architecture: The physical form of a building is controlled by its designer, but the impact a constructed environment has can be unpredictable, emotional, and even visceral. That dynamic is evident in the upcoming exhibition You Are Here: Architecture and Experience, which brings together the photographs of German artist Candida Höfer and a video and etchings by French artist Cyprien Gaillard. Both artists express the formative power of architecture in different but complementary ways, according to Tracy Myers, curator of architecture at the Heinz Architectural Center and organiser of the exhibition.
Candida Höfer’s lush colour photographs of ornate historical and contemporary interior spaces are usually devoid of humans, yet they reveal details that draw the viewer into a consideration of what each place means. Höfer’s photographs usually focus on spaces of cultural and social activity. Printed very large (from about 4 x 4 feet to a massive 6 x 8 feet), the 17 photographs in You Are Here represent the range of Höfer’s work in terms of scale, point of view, building type, and geographical location.
By contrast, Cyprien Gaillard’s video Desniansky Raion and his meticulously detailed etchings probe the human legacy of Modernist high-rise housing blocks. Constructed after World War II throughout the United States, Europe, and the Eastern Bloc to provide decent housing, these buildings often became warehouses for the poor and incubators of crime and antisocial behaviours.
Named for an administrative district in Kiev, Desniansky Raion poignantly reflects on the gap between the utopian Modernist aspiration for universal housing and the banal reality that instead prevailed. It comprises three parts. In the first section, weekend fight clubs of 50 or 100 people face off against each other in a pugilistic ritual set against the backdrop of housing towers in St. Petersburg, Russia. The second part shows the implosion of a similar tower in Meaux, a small city near Paris; the demolition of the building was treated by the city government as a literal spectacle, with a light show and fireworks preceding the destruction. The final third is a very long panning aerial shot of seemingly endless ranks of virtually identical housing blocks in Kiev, Ukraine. The video is accompanied by a soundtrack composed by Koudlam, a young musician born in the Ivory Coast. Also featured are six etchings by Gaillard, collectively titled Belief in the Age of Disbelief, in which the Modernist housing tower is placed in classic picturesque landscapes.
“Gaillard’s video packs a powerful and direct emotional punch: each time I view it, I experience physically the anticipation that ebbs and flows through the course of the work,” said Myers. “By contrast, Höfer’s photographs embody a kind of quietude that encourages slow, sustained exploration of the meaning that builds through accumulation of detail. But both works are equally affecting and bring the viewer with compelling intensity into the realm of architectural experience. Höfer and Gaillard capture the constant oscillation between what we make of our buildings, and what they make of us.”
Artists’ Biographies
Candida Höfer has been creating photographs for more than 30 years. Born in Eberswalde, Germany, in 1944, she studied with Berndt Becher and is identified with a group of German artists – Thomas Ruff, Andreas Gursky, Axel Hütte, and Thomas Struth – best known for their unsentimental photographs of architecture, landscapes, and urban developments. Höfer has made interiors her focus.
Cyprien Gaillard, born in Paris in 1980 and currently based in Berlin, explores contemporary landscapes and buildings in a variety of media, including video, painting, and etchings. Much of his work is concerned with the legacy and inheritance of buildings and landscapes that are left to us, and the ways in which we interact with them.
Press release from the Carnegie Museum of Art website
Cyprien Gaillard – Desniansky Raion, Part 1, 2008
The video takes place in a parking lot of a drab housing complex in St. Petersburg, Russia, where he witness two large groups of men – one mostly wearing red shirts and the other blue – slowly walking towards each other. Set by Gaillard to the hypnotic electronic beats of French composer Koudlam’s I See you All, the video shows the colour-coordinated groups marching in loose formation, reminiscent of ancient armies confronting each other on some distant battlefield. Suddenly, signal flares billowing smoke arc through the air and the two groups come together, clashing in flurry of fists – a breathtaking display of raw physical violence set against the stark backdrop of the housing block. As the sounds of Koudlam’s pulsing music draw louder and more urgent, the furious hand-to-hand combat intensifies while bodies of the fallen lay strewn on the pavement. Before long, the blue faction beats a hasty retreat, only to regroup moments later on one side of a nearby pedestrian bridge. The two sides come together again, this time clashing on the impossibly narrow span of the footbridge. The blue group is once more chased off, and the victors in red erupt in victorious celebration.
Consumed by the passion of unrequited love, a young woman lies suspended in the dark space of her unrealised dreams in Henry Peach Robinson’s illustration of the Shakespearean verse “She never told her love,/ But let concealment, like a worm i’ the bud,/ Feed on her damask cheek” (Twelfth Night II,iv,111-13). Although this picture was exhibited by Robinson as a discrete work, it also served as a study for the central figure in his most famous photograph, Fading Away, of 1858.
Purportedly showing a young consumptive surrounded by family in her final moments, Fading Away was hotly debated for years. On the one hand, Robinson was criticised for the presumed indelicacy of having invaded the death chamber at the most private of moments. On the other, those who recognised the scene as having been staged and who understood that Robinson had created the picture through combination printing (a technique that utilised several negatives to create a single printed image) accused him of dishonestly using a medium whose chief virtue was its truthfulness.
While addressing the moral and literary themes that Robinson believed crucial if photography were to aspire to high art, this picture makes only restrained use of the cloying sentimentality and showy technical artifice that often characterise this artist’s major exhibition pictures. Perhaps intended to facilitate the process of combination printing, the unnaturally black background serves also to envelop the figure in palpable melancholia.
Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website [Online] Cited 27/01/2020
The historian and art critic, John Ruskin, had a great influence in Great Britain not only on the Pre-Raphaelite movement created in 1848, but on the development of early photography in the 1850s. The leading Pre-Raphaelite painters, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Holman Hunt and Ford Madox Brown and their followers, wished to change the pictorial conventions laid down by the Royal Academy, and in order to demonstrate the transformations in modern life, invented a radically new idiom marked by bright colours and clarity of detail.
Pre-Raphaelite painters and photographers frequently made similar choices of subjects, and the photographers, particularly Julia Margaret Cameron, David Wilkie Wynfield and Lewis Carroll, were often had close links with the painters.
When painting landscapes, the Pre-Raphaelite artists answered Ruskin’s call, meticulously observing nature in order to capture every nuance of detail. For their part, photographers, such as Roger Fenton, Henry White, William J. Stillman and Colonel Henry Stuart Wortley, experimented with the new process of wet plate collodion negatives that allowed much greater image detail, and achieved similar effects. Although highly impressed at first by the daguerreotype, which enabled the eye to see tiny, overlooked details, Ruskin was nonetheless still very critical of landscape photography, which could not reproduce the colours of nature and in particular of the sky. This failing also gave rise to a major debate amongst photography critics.
In portraiture, there were clear links between the painted portraits of Watts and Cameron’s photographic portraits. By using special lenses and photographing her models in close-up, Cameron, achieved, with a glass negative, exactly the opposite effect to the clear image advocated by Ruskin, and her work was distinctive for the breadth of relief and contour, as well as the compositions evoking Raphael’s paintings, also a source of inspiration for Watts.
The painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti repeatedly drew and painted Jane Morris, a model with whom he was infatuated, and he asked Robert Parsons to produce a series of photographs, under his personal direction, which captured the fascinating presence of the young woman as effectively as his own paintings.
Just like the Pre-Raphaelite painters, Victorian photographers would turn to religious or historical subjects, finding a shared inspiration in the poems of Dante, Shakespeare and possibly Byron, and above all in the Arthurian legend made popular once more by Lord Tennyson, the poet laureate. From a formal point of view, Millais’ Ophelia, one of his most successful paintings, was a source for Henry Peach Robinson’s photograph, The Lady of Shalott, even though it had a different theme.
Finally, Pre-Raphaelite painters and Victorian photographers both liked to present scenes from modern life with a moralising undertone: hence She Never Told Her Love, a photograph by Robinson that was very successful when exhibited at the Crystal Palace in 1858, William Holman Hunt’s painting, Awakening of Conscience, and Rossetti’s Found, a painting depicting a countryman who comes across his former sweetheart, now a prostitute in the city.
In the 1880s, Pre-Raphaelite painting would be transformed, with artists and writers like William Morris, Burne-Jones, Whistler and Oscar Wilde, into a very different movement concerned only with the cult of beauty and rejecting Ruskin’s concept of art as something moral or useful. British photographers, however, inspired by the Pre-Raphaelites would inspire the Pictorialist movement that flourished in the 1890s, encouraged by the writings of Henry Peach Robinson and Peter Henry Emerson, extolling artistic photography.
Exhibition marking the 100th birthday of Kurt Kranz 19th November 2010 – 29th May 2011
Kurt Kranz (German, 1910-1997) Perspective 1931 Ingrid Kranz / Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau Foto: Lars Lohrisch / Abdruck mit Genehmigung der Kunsthalle
One of the great pleasures of publishing this archive is that I get to research the life of an artist whose work I never knew before. Kurt Kranz is one such artist.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the the Bauhaus Dessau for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photograph for a larger version of the image.
Kurt Kranz (German, 1910-1997) Vereinsamung (Isolation) Dessau 1930 Ingrid Kranz / Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau Leihgeber: Kunsthalle Bremen
Installation photograph of Programming of Beauty by Kurt Kranz at the Bauhaus Dessau
Kurt Kranz (German, 1910-1997) Versinkende (Sinking one) 1931 Ingrid Kranz / Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau
Kurt Kranz (German, 1910-1997) Persischer Garten (Persian garden) 1970 Ingrid Kranz / Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau Foto: Uwe Jacobshagen
The Bauhaus Dessau dedicates a comprehensive exhibition to the painter, graphic designer and photographer Kurt Kranz to mark his 100th birthday. In 1930, the then twenty-year-old lithographer came from Bielefeld to study at the Bauhaus Dessau, where he soon established himself as a pioneer of serial and generative methods. With his avant-garde work, Kranz’s methods anticipated those of later generations.
Inspired by a lecture by László Moholy-Nagy, Kurt Kranz came to the Bauhaus Dessau in April 1930. In Walter Peterhans’s photography class, Kranz began to experiment with photographic techniques and created some of the most striking abstract picture series to emerge from the Bauhaus. Alienated and abstracted faces and hands appear repeatedly in his dynamic picture series. These show Kranz’s early affinity for film as, page for page, the abstract forms interact with one another. Kranz drafted his first concepts for abstract films at the Bauhaus, although he was first able to realise these decades later in 1972.
The exhibition to mark the artist’s 100th birthday shows works from Kranz’s Bauhaus years and his later work as an advertising graphic designer, and focuses on a selection of his large picture cycles. Strikingly diverse leporellos dating from the 1960s onwards take centre stage, as do the so-called “Matrix-und Schiebebilder”
Text from the Bauhaus Dessau website
Kurt Kranz (German, 1910-1997) Selbstporträt en face (objektives Foto) (Self-portrait with face (objective photo)) 1931 Ingrid Kranz / Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau
Kurt Kranz (German, 1910-1997) Rasterfoto (Raster photograph) 1932 Ingrid Kranz / Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau
Kurt Kranz (German, 1910-1997) Schwarz: Weiß (Black: White) 1928-1929 Ingrid Kranz / Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau Privatbesitz
Kurt Kranz (German, 1910-1997) Schwarz: Weiß (Black: White) 1928-1929 Ingrid Kranz / Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau Privatbesitz
Kurt Kranz (German, 1910-1997) Schwarz: Weiß (Black: White) 1928-1929 Ingrid Kranz / Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau Privatbesitz
Kurt Kranz (German, 1910-1997) Schrift Entwurf aus Satzmaterial (Writing draft from sentence material) Dessau 1931 Ingrid Kranz / Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau
Kurt Kranz (German, 1910-1997) Aus der Serie “Sieben Schritte zum symmetrischen Oval” (From the series “Seven steps to the symmetrical Oval”) 1982 Ingrid Kranz / Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau Foto: Uwe Jacobshagen
Many thankx to the Moderna Museet for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
The French photographer Jeanloup Sieff (1933-2000) is a legend in fashion photography and one of the most prominent photographers of his generation. Opening on 19 February, Moderna Museet in Stockholm presents the first Nordic solo exhibition of Jeanloup Sieff.
Jeanloup Sieff began photographing in the early 1950s, as a contemporary of Helmut Newton and David Bailey, belonging to the generation succeeding Irving Penn. In the course of a long career, his photography spanned from fashion, advertising and portraits to reportage and landscapes. His images are often sensual and elegant, and in the 1960s he was much in demand as a fashion photographer, especially in the USA, where he lived for some years in New York. As a respected fashion photographer, Sieff had assignments for magazines such as Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, Esquire, Glamour and Jardin des Modes. Sieff also engaged in commercial photography, including promotion campaigns for Chanel and Revlon and the first Yves Saint Laurent fragrance.
“In his fashion and advertising photographs the models are characteristically close to the pictorial surface, an effect achieved by using a wide-angle lens. His working method was based on physical and emotional closeness. This lack of distance makes his images exciting and visually interesting,” says Anna Tellgren, curator.
In the course of his career, Jeanloup Sieff took several now classic portraits of prominent fashion icons, including Yves Saint Laurent, Karl Lagerfeld and Jane Birkin. French cultural celebrities such as François Truffaut, Catherine Deneuve and Serge Gainsbourg have also been portrayed by Sieff. Several of these portraits will be featured in the exhibition at Moderna Museet. Jeanloup Sieff was deeply fascinated by dance, another of his frequent subjects. He got to know Rudolf Nureyev just after he had defected to the West, and collaborated with the American dancer and choreographer Carolyn Carlson. The exhibition at Moderna Museet presents a selection of 53 pictures from Sieff’s photographic oeuvre, with an emphasis on his dance photography.
“He was interested in the dancers as artists, and the actual struggle during rehearsal to get their bodies to perform more or less impossible movements. His dance photographs are fascinating because they really convey the smell of sweat and the shuffling sound of dance shoes, which is exactly what he was after,” Anna Tellgren, the curator of the exhibition, commented.
Moderna Museet is ten minutes away from Kungsträdgården, and twenty minutes from T-Centralen or Gamla Stan. Walk past Grand Hotel and Nationalmuseum on Blasieholmen, opposite the Royal Palace. After crossing the bridge to Skeppsholmen, continue up the hill. The entrance to Moderna Museet and Arkitekturmuseet is on the left-hand side.
Opening hours: Tuesday and Friday 10 – 20 Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday 10 – 18 Monday closed
“We are unhealthy, middle-aged, dirty-minded, depressed, cynical, empty, tired-brained, seedy, rotten, dreaming, badly-behaved, ill-mannered, arrogant, intellectual, self-pitying, honest, successful, hard-working, thoughtful, artistic, religious, fascistic, blood-thirsty, teasing, destructive, ambitious, colourful, damned, stubborn, perverted and good. We are artists.”
Gilbert & George, 1980
More from the Jack Freak picture show!
Marcus
Many thankx to Deichtorhallen Hamburg for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
According to the writer Michael Bracewell, “the Jack Freak Pictures are among the most iconic, philosophically astute and visually violent works that Gilbert & George have ever created.” The dominant pictorial element is the Union Jack, itself an internationally familiar, abstract, geometric pattern and a socially and politically charged symbol whose significance spans the cultural spectrum from contemporary fashion to aggressive national pride. Equally prominent, and linking the Jack Freak Pictures to almost every work previously created by the artists, are Gilbert & George themselves in a variety of guises: dancing, gurning, howling, watching, waiting. Sometimes their bodies seem complete; other times they have been fragmented or contorted. Invariably they feature as both subject and object, artwork and artist; they are players in the epic and complex pictorial drama they have created.
Set in the East End of London where Gilbert & George have lived and worked for over forty years, the Jack Freak Pictures bring numerous aspects of the modern world to life. Medals, flags, maps, street-signs, graffiti and other less immediately obvious motifs jostle for attention with the brickwork, buildings and even foliage of the contemporary urban environment in works that are densely layered and complexly nuanced to evoke (and sometimes conflate) a sense of past, present and future. They raise fundamental and rudimentary questions about religion, identity, politics, economics, sexuality and death. The Jack Freak Pictures reaffirm Gilbert & George’s status as pre-eminent Modernists and underline Robert Rosenblum’s observation that “of the singularity of their duality in life as art, there is little doubt.” Michael Bracewell’s view that they are “visionary artists in the lineage of William Blake” rings truer now than ever before.
Text from the White Cube website [Online] Cited 12/05/2011 no longer available online
With its major spring show, Deichtorhallen Hamburg is once again bringing stars of the international art world to Hamburg. Gilbert & George (born 1943 and 1942) have long since been acknowledged icons of contemporary art.
The exhibition will present the latest, wide-ranging group of pictures they have ever created. Called the “Jack Freak Pictures”. They will be on display in the cathedral-like setting of the large Deichtorhalle from February 25 to May 22, 2011 for the first time more or less in its entirety – some 120 pictures will be on view.
Gilbert & George’s large-format pictures present decidedly sacred and secular themes. In this case, Gilbert & George have created a group around the British national symbol, the Union Jack, with all its different connotations, from symbol of national pride through to the cult symbol of the British Pop Music world and countercultures. Surrounded by medals and amulets, the streets of London and the red, blue and white design of the British flag, as in their previous art here Gilbert & George are not only the creators of their own world of images, but also act as protagonists in it.
The “Jack Freak Pictures” are among the most symbolic, philosophically most elaborate and visually striking art Gilbert & George have ever created. Within Gilbert & George’s oeuvre as a whole they constitute the powerful concentration of the themes and emotions that the artists have now been exploring in their art for more than 40 years. In these pictures, the artists play the roles of both victim and monster, puppets of a cosmic revue, sleepless guardians of empty big-city streets and crazy-looking talking heads, as Michael Bracewell outlines in his essay in the exhibition catalog. The large pictures, do not address the individual constitution of the two artists but instead point up states of human existence and can be read as a description of the modern world from the artists’ point of view.
The exhibition is being organised by Deichtorhallen Hamburg and the British Council and will move on from Hamburg, albeit it on a smaller scale, to Lentos Kunstmuseum, Linz, Austria. Hatje Cantz Verlag has brought out a catalog with an essay by Michael Bracewell and colour illustrations of all 153 works in the series.
After undertaking an Issues in Art Conservation subject for my Master of Art Curatorship at the University of Melbourne I have become more aware of the fragility of my black and white fibre-based prints and negatives. I have therefore decided to scan my medium format negatives (taken on my trusty Mamiya RZ67) and 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 that surrounded me. As such they form part of life – of Melbourne, of Australia and of humanity in general. The preservation of such moments in time are vital to the continuing enrichment of culture. See more of my early black and white photographs on the Marcus Bunyan black and white archive 1991-1997 page.
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.
Many thankx to the Fotomuseum Winterthur, Zurich for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Curators: Roxana Marcoci, Curator, and Eva Respini, Associate Curator, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art
Many thank to The Museum of Modern 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.
Installation view of the exhibition Staging Action: Performance in Photography Since 1960 at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York showing at right, George Maciunas Performing for Self-Exposing Camera, New York 1966
George Maciunas (American born Lithuania, 1931-1978) George Maciunas Performing for Self-Exposing Camera, New York 1966 Gelatin silver print
Focusing on a wide range of images of performances that were expressly made for the artist’s camera, Staging Action: Performance in Photography Since 1960 draws together approximately 50 works from the Museum’s collection, and is on view from January 28 to May 9, 2011. Though performances are often intended to be experienced live, in real time, with photography playing an ancillary function in recording them, these works function as independent, expressive pictures, often staged in the absence of a public audience. At the center of these pictures is a performer (often the artist), posing or enacting an action conceived for the photographic lens. Among the works on view, approximately half are recent acquisitions by MoMA, including pieces by Laurel Nakadate, Rong Rong, Ai Weiwei, Huang Yan, and La Monte Young. Staging Action is organised by Roxana Marcoci, Curator, and Eva Respini, Associate Curator, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art.
Beginning with Fluxus artists in the 1960s, Staging Action includes the work of George Maciunas, an artist who engaged the production of the self as positional rather than fixed and often played with transvestism. According to personal reminiscences of the American poet Emmett Williams, a friend, Maciunas’s closets were full of prom dresses that he scavenged from the Salvation Army. In his 1966 cross-dressing striptease, George Maciunas Performing for Self-Exposing Camera, New York, he reinforced the active construction of identity through gender indeterminacy. The participation of the camera as accomplice to the artist’s actions was also a constant theme in Vito Acconci’s work of the early 1970s. In Conversions I: Light, Reflections, Self-Control (1970-1971), Acconci tried to feminize his male body by plucking hair from his chest and navel area, pushing his pectorals together to mimic breasts, and hiding his genitals between his legs. Performances that explored gender play were soon embraced by other artists. A few years later, Richard Prince and Cindy Sherman collaborated on a photo shoot in which they sported identical suits and red-haired wigs, each playing androgynous double to the other.
Staging Action continues with artists who experimented with the camera to test the physical and psychological limits of the body. Reacting against the post-World War II repressive sexual and political atmosphere of Austrian society, the group known as the Vienna Actionists – including Günter Brus, Otto Muehl, Herman Nitsch, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler – staged highly provocative actions that were mostly ritualistic, incorporating elements such as wine and animal blood from Dionysian rites and Christian ceremonies in an attempt to free human instincts that had been repressed by society. In the early 1990s, numerous artists living in Beijing’s East Village artist community actively engaged in endurance-based performances. On view is East Village, Beijing No. 22 (1994) by Rong Rong, an iconic picture of the now seminal performance known as 12 Square Meters, which takes its title from the size of the public urinal where the action took place. The artist Zhang Huan covered himself in fish guts and honey and sat motionless for an hour in the heat of a summer day as flies gathered on his body, while the photographer Rong Rong captured the gritty performance.
The face as a site for alteration and extreme expression is of particular interest to several artists in the exhibition. In his five-part work, Studies for Holograms (1970), Bruce Nauman poked, pulled, pinched, and kneaded his mouth, neck, and cheeks in extreme and cartoonish ways. For her 1972 work (Untitled) Facial Cosmetic Variations, Ana Mendieta used tape and make-up to mould and manipulate her face to create, at turns, disturbing and humorous results that reference the cosmetic changes women inflict upon themselves in the name of beauty. Lucas Samaras’s transformations in a series of self-portrait Polaroids from 1969-1971 suggest the plasticity or mutability of identity itself. For these works, the artist utilised an array of wigs, pancake make-up, and props to transform himself into grotesque characters for the camera.
Other performances required a sustained, emotional engagement on the part of the artist. Bas Jan Ader’s particular brand of existential-based Conceptualism is crystallised in I’m too sad to tell you (1970), in which the artist cried in front of the camera. In 1971, Adrian Piper performed a time-lapse piece titled Food for Spirit. Inspired by an assignment to write a text on Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Piper began fasting in order to isolate herself into a state of self-transcendence, and took pictures of herself in front of a mirror to insure reconnaissance of her own body. The ability of the camera to both freeze and extend a moment in time was also instrumental to the Japanese artist Mieko Shiomi. In Disappearing Music for Face (1966), Shiomi sequenced a series of film stills focusing on the mouth of Yoko Ono as her smile intermittently faded into a neutral facial expression. In Laurel Nakadate’s pictures from the Lucky Tiger series that she conceived of in 2009 during a road trip through the American West, the artist is seen riding a horse in a cropped T-shirt, doing a backbend in cowboy boots by the Grand Canyon, and striking a Playboy pose in her “lucky tiger” bikinis, rehashing photographic conventions inspired by 1950s-style “cheesecake” and camera-club pictures. Lorna Simpson’s multi-part work, May, June, July, August ’57 / ’09 (2009) also responds to the photographic conventions of posing for the camera. Simpson turned to the photographic archive as source material, combining found photographs of a young African-American woman who posed for hundreds of pin-up pictures in 1957 in Los Angeles with her own performative self-portraits, in which she replicates every outfit, pose, and setting of the original photographs. Through juxtaposition, repetition, and de-contextualization, a historical fiction arises, whereby the two women, despite the many differences that separate them, seem to be joined through a shared identity.
The exhibition includes both off-the-cuff and staged performative gestures of political dissent. Ai Weiwei’s photographic series Study of Perspective (1995-2003) reveals a spirited irreverence toward national monuments. Traveling to various landmarks – from the Eiffel Tower to Tiananmen Square to the White House – the artist photographed his own arm extended in front of the camera’s lens as he gave each marker the middle finger. Robin Rhode’s pictures, presented sequentially in storyboard format, record situations in which the artist interacts with a set of objects that he has drawn, erased and redrawn in black charcoal on dilapidated walls. Untitled, (Dream House) (2005) comprises a sequence of 28 colour photographs in which Rhode mimics the act of struggling to catch a television set, a chair, and a car that appear to have been thrown at him from above. In reality, these items are drawn in cartoonish lines on an exterior wall. Referencing the South African New Year custom of tossing out old objects, the artist identifies society’s two opposing poles: consumerism and dispossession. Rhode’s pictures, like those of the other artists in Staging Action, attest to the myriad ways in which photography constitutes – not just documents – performance as a conceptual exercise.
Press release from the MoMA website
Installation view of the exhibition Staging Action: Performance in Photography Since 1960 at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York showing at right, Rong Rong’s East Village, Beijing, No. 81 1994
Installation view of the exhibition Staging Action: Performance in Photography Since 1960 at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York showing at left, Ana Mendieta’s Facial Cosmetic Variations 1972; at centre, the work of Rudolf Schwarzkogler; and at right, VALIE EXPORT with Peter Hassmann’s Action Pants: Genital Panic (1969, below)
This series of screenprints relates to a performance in which EXPORT reportedly walked into an experimental art-film house in Munich wearing crotchless trousers and a tight leather jacket, with her hair teased wildly, and roamed through the rows of seated spectators, her exposed genitalia level with their faces. Challenging the public to engage with a “real woman” instead of with images on a screen, she illustrated her notion of “expanded cinema,” in which the artist’s body activates the live context of watching. EXPORT’s defiant feminist action was memorialised in a picture taken the following year by the photographer Peter Hassmann in Vienna. EXPORT had the image, in which she holds a machine gun, screenprinted in a large edition and fly-posted it in public squares and on the street.
Gallery label from From the Collection: 1960-69, March 26, 2016 – March 12, 2017
Installation view of the exhibition Staging Action: Performance in Photography Since 1960 at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York showing at left, Bruce Nauman’s Studies for Holograms (1970); and at right, Lorna Simpson’s May, June, July, August ’57/’09 #8 (2009, below)
Lorna Simpson describes 1957-2009 as “a project that happened kind of by accident.” Since she often works with vintage photographs, advertisements, and magazines, she was on eBay in search of material, when she came across a couple of black-and-white photographs of a young black woman posing alluringly. As it turned out, these were part of a much larger album of photographs, featuring this woman, and, occasionally, a young black man, in attractively staged poses. The sellers offered the entire album to Simpson. Struck by the images, though not yet sure what to do with them, she bought it.
When the album arrived, she hung the photographs in her studio, where they remained for months. Taken in 1957, in modest domestic and outdoor settings, most of them appeared to be inspired by the pin-up, mass-produced images of seductively posed actresses and models, widely circulated in the 1940s and 50s. But the identities of the photographer, the woman, and the man were unknown. Ultimately, Simpson decided to restage these images. Using herself as her model, she mimicked the settings, clothing, hairstyles, and poses of both the woman and the man and photographed herself using black-and-white film. She then paired her own photographs with the originals (for a total of 307 individually framed images) and has displayed them together in various arrangements.
As with much of her work, it is up to viewers to draw their own conclusions about the identities of the subjects of 1957-2009. A feminist and an African American woman, Simpson has been concerned with black female identity since the beginning of her career. By providing little or no information about the people who appear in her images, she poses challenging questions about how we perceive and make assumptions about others based upon their appearance – and upon stereotypes associated with aspects of identity like skin colour, hair, gender, and clothing.
Art Blart _ art and cultural memory archive 
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