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Exhibition: ‘William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008’ at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Exhibition dates: 7th November, 2008 – 25th January, 2009

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939) 'Untitled' c. 1971-1973 from the exhibition Exhibition: 'William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008' at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Nov 2008 - Jan 2009

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939)
Untitled
c. 1971-1973
From Troubled Waters 1980
Dye-transfer print
© Eggleston Artistic Trust

One of the most influential photographers of the last half-century, William Eggleston has defined the history of colour photography. This exhibition is the artist’s first retrospective in the United States and includes both his colour and black-and-white photographs as well as Stranded in Canton, the artist’s video work from the early 1970s.

William Eggleston’s great achievement in photography can be described in a straightforward way: he captures everyday moments and transforms them into indelible images. William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008 presents a comprehensive selection from nearly fifty years of image-making.

Born in 1939 in Sumner, Mississippi, a small town in the Delta region, Eggleston showed an early interest in cameras and audio technology. While studying at various colleges in the South, he purchased his first camera and came across a copy of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s book The Decisive Moment (1952). In the early 1960s, Eggleston married and moved to Memphis, where he has lived ever since. He first worked in black-and-white, but by the end of the decade began photographing primarily in colour. Internationally acclaimed and widely traveled, Eggleston has spent the past four decades photographing all around the world, conveying intuitive responses to fleeting configurations of cultural signs and moods as specific expressions of local colour. Psychologically complex and casually refined, bordering on kitsch and never conventionally beautiful, these photographs speak principally to the expanse of Eggleston’s imagination and have had a pervasive influence on all aspects of visual culture. By not censoring, rarely editing, and always photographing, Eggleston convinces us of the idea of the democratic camera.

This exhibition was organised by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in association with Haus der Kunst, Munich.

Text from the Whitney Museum of American Art website

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

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939) 'Untitled' 1973 from the exhibition Exhibition: 'William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008' at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Nov 2008 - Jan 2009

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939)
Untitled
1973
Dye-transfer print
© Eggleston Artistic Trust

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939)
Untitled (Baby Doll Cadillac)
1973, printed 1996
From the Los Alamos portfolio
Dye transfer print
11 3/4 × 17 11/16in. (29.8 × 44.9cm)
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Photography Committee
© Eggleston Artistic Trust, courtesy Cheim & Read, NYC

William Eggleston (America, born July 27, 1939) 'Memphis' c. 1970

William Eggleston (America, b. 1939)
Memphis
c. 1970
Dye-transfer print
© Eggleston Artistic Trust

William Eggleston video

“This candid interview with photographer William Eggleston was conducted by film director Michael Almereyda on the occasion of the opening of Eggleston’s retrospective William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. A key figure in American photography, Eggleston is credited almost single-handedly with ushering in the era of colour photography. Eggleston discusses his shift from black and white to colour photography in this video as, “it never was a conscious thing. I had wanted to see a lot of things in colour because the world is in colour”. Also included in this video are Eggleston’s remarks about his personal relationships with the subjects of many of his photographs.”

The Ending of Stranded in Canton

In 1973, photographer William Eggleston picked up a Sony PortaPak and took to documenting the soul of Memphis and New Orleans. Transvestites, geek men biting off chicken heads, classy blues musicians, and crazed men with guns form the backbone of this documentary look at the “Southern Hipsters” of Louisiana and Mississippi.

Stranded in Canton

In 1973, photographer William Eggleston picked up a Sony PortaPak and took to documenting the soul of Memphis and New Orleans.

“These were the Merry Prankster and “Easy Rider” years, when road trips and craziness were cool, and Mr. Eggleston set out on some hard-drinking picture-taking excursions. He also embarked on repeated shorter expeditions closer to home in the form of epic bar crawls, which resulted in the legendary video “Stranded in Canton.”

Originally existing as countless hours of unedited film and recently pared down by the filmmaker Robert Gordon to a manageable 76 minutes, it was shot in various places in 1973 and 1974. (The new version is in the retrospective.) Mr. Eggleston would show up with friends at favourite bars, turn on his Sony Portapak, push the camera into people’s faces and encourage them to carry on.

And they did. Apart from brief shots of his children and documentary-style filming of musicians, the result is like some extreme form of reality television. Your first thought is: Why do people let themselves be seen like this? Do they know what they look like? You wonder if Mr. Eggleston is deliberately shaping some tragicomic Lower Depths drama or just doing his customary shoot-what’s-there thing, the what’s-there in this case being chemical lunacy. For all the film’s fringy charge there’s something truly creepy and deadly going on, as there is in much of Mr. Eggleston’s art. You might label it Southern Gothic; but whatever it is, it surfaces when a lot of his work is brought together.”

Holland Cotter. “Old South Meets New, in Living Color,” on The New York Times website Nov 6, 2008

William Eggleston (America, b. 1939)
Untitled
c. 1976
From Election Eve
© Eggleston Artistic Trust
Courtesy Cheim & Read Gallery

William Eggleston (American, born 1939)
Untitled (Greenwood, Mississippi)
1980
Dye-transfer print
29.6 x 45.5cm (11 5/8 x 17 15/16 in.)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, Louis V. Bell, Harris Brisbane Dick, Fletcher, and Rogers Funds and Joseph Pulitzer Bequest, and Jennifer and Philip Maritz Gift, 2012
© Eggleston Artistic Trust

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939)
Untitled
Nd
Dye-transfer print
From Los Alamos 1965-1968 and 1972-1974 (published 2003)
© Eggleston Artistic Trust

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939) 'Untitled' c. 1975 (Marcia Hare in Memphis Tennessee) c. 1975

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939)
Untitled (Marcia Hare in Memphis Tennessee)
c. 1975
Dye-transfer print
© Eggleston Artistic Trust

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939) 'Huntsville, Alabama' c. 1971

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939)
Huntsville, Alabama
1971
Dye-transfer print
© Eggleston Artistic Trust

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939)
Untitled (Memphis Tennessee)
1965
Dye-transfer print
© Eggleston Artistic Trust

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939)
Untitled (Memphis)
c. 1969-1971
Dye-transfer print
© Eggleston Artistic Trust
Courtesy Cheim & Read Gallery

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939)
Untitled
1983
From a series of photographs taken at Graceland
Dye-transfer print
© Eggleston Artistic Trust
Courtesy Whitney Museum of American Art

Whitney Museum of American Art
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Exhibition: ‘The Photographs of Homer Page: The Guggenheim Year, New York, 1949-50’ at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City

Exhibition dates: 14th February – 7th June, 2009

Homer Page (American, 1918-1985) 'New York, August 11, 1949 (girl and coal chute)' 1949 from the exhibition 'The Photographs of Homer Page: The Guggenheim Year, New York, 1949-50' at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Feb - June, 2009

Homer Page (American, 1918-1985)
New York, August 11, 1949 (girl and coal chute)
1949
Gelatin silver print

A brilliant but under appreciated American photographer, Homer Page used a Guggenheim fellowship in 1949-1950 to photograph New York City. Included in the 2006 Hallmark Photographic Collection gift to the Nelson-Atkins were some 100 of his vintage black-and-white prints. The Museum is thus in a unique position to celebrate his remarkable artistic achievement: his vision, at once gritty and lyrical, of the face of metropolitan America at mid-century. In recording the city so intently, Page had a larger goal in mind: to suggest nothing less than the emotional tenor of life at that time and place.

From an artistic standpoint, Page’s work represents a “missing link” between the warm, humanistic, and socially motivated documentary photographs of the 1930s and early 1940s in the works of Dorothea Lange, and the tougher, grittier and more existential work of the later 1950s as seen in the images of Robert Frank.

Text from The Nelson-Aitkens Museum of Art website

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

Homer Page (American, 1918-1985) 'The El at 86th, New York' 1949-1950 from the exhibition 'The Photographs of Homer Page: The Guggenheim Year, New York, 1949-50' at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Feb - June, 2009

Homer Page (American, 1918-1985)
The El at 86th, New York
1949-1950
Gelatin silver print

Homer Page (American, 1918-1985)
New York (boys and manikin)
1949
Gelatin silver print
Gift of Hallmark Cards, Inc.,

Homer Page (American, 1918-1985)
New York City
1949
Gelatin silver print

Homer Page (American, 1918-1985)
New York, June 19, 1949
1949
Gelatin silver print

“Page captured both the facts and the feeling of life in post-war New York: commuters in transit to and from their offices, the signs of commercial and consumer culture, leisure pursuits and night life, psychological vignettes of the lonely and dispossessed. His work provides a rich and original vision of 1949 America.

Page was devoted to the visible facts of his world, but his real goal was something much deeper: the emotional tenor of life at that time and that place. This is a body of work of great passion, intelligence, and artistic integrity – one that is all the more important for having remained essentially unknown to the present day,” Davis (former Hallmark Fine Art Programs Director) said.

Text from the ArtDaily.org website

Homer Page (American, 1918-1985)
New York City
1949
Gelatin silver print

Homer Page (American, 1918-1985)
New York, June 16, 1949
1949
Gelatin silver print

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Opening hours:
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Review: ‘Cindy Sherman’ at Metro Pictures Gallery, New York

Exhibition dates: 15th November – 23rd December, 2008

Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954)
Untitled #466
2008
Chromogenic print
254.3 x 174.6cm

The artist Cindy Sherman is a multifaceted evocation of human identity standing in glorious and subversive Technicolor before the blank canvas of her imagination. Poststructuralist in her physical appearance (there being no one Cindy Sherman, perhaps no Sherman at all) and post-photographic in her placement in constructed environments, Sherman challenges the ritualised notions of the performative act – and destabilises perceived notions of self, status, image and place.

The viewer is left with a sense of displacement when looking at these tableaux. The absence / presence of the artist leads the viewer to the binary opposite of rational / emotional – knowing these personae and places are constructions, distortions of a perceived reality yet emotionally attached to every wrinkle, every fold of the body at once repulsive yet seductive.

They are masterworks in the manner of Rembrandt’s self portraits – deeply personal images that he painted over many years that examined the many identities of his psyche – yet somehow different. Sherman investigates the same territories of the mind and body but with no true author, no authoritative meaning and no one subject at their beating heart. Her goal is subversive.

As Roy Boyne has observed, “The movement from the self as arcanum to the citational self, has, effectively, been welcomed, particularly in the work of Judith Butler, but also in the archetypal sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. There is a powerful logic behind this approbation. When self-identity is no longer seen as, even minimally, a fixed essence, this does not mean that the forces of identity formation can therefore be easily resisted, but it does mean that the necessity for incessant repetition of identity formation by the forces of a disciplinary society creates major opportunities for subversion and appropriation. In the repeated semi-permanences of the citational self, there is more than a little scope for counter-performances marked, for example, by irony and contempt.”1

Counter performances are what Sherman achieves magnificently. She challenges a regularised and constrained repetition of norms and as she becomes her camera (“her extraordinary relationship with her camera”) she subverts its masculine disembodied gaze, the camera’s power to produce normative, powerful bodies.2 As the viewer slips ‘in the frame’ of the photograph they take on a mental process of elision much as Sherman has done when making the images – deviating from the moral rules that are impressed from without3 by living and breathing through every fold, every fingernail, every sequin of their constructed being.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Boyne, Roy. “Citation and Subjectivity: Towards a Return of the Embodied Will,” in Featherstone, Mike (ed.,). Body Modification. London: Sage, 2000, p. 212

2/ “To the extent that the camera figures tacitly as an instrument of transubstantiation, it assumes the place of the phallus, as that which controls the field of signification. The camera thus trades on the masculine privilege of the disembodied gaze, the gaze that has the power to produce bodies, but which itself has no body.”
Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter. New York: Routledge, 1993, p. 136

3/ “Universal human nature is not a very human thing. By acquiring it, the person becomes a kind of construct, built up not from inner psychic propensities but from moral rules that are impressed upon him from without.”
Goffman, Erving. Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behaviour. London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1972, pp. 44-45

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

Rembrandt van Rijn (Dutch, 1606-1669)
Self-portrait as the apostle Paul (left)
1661
Self-portrait as Zeuxis laughing (right)
1662

Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954) 'Untitled #464' 2008 from the exhibition Review: 'Cindy Sherman' at Metro Pictures Gallery, New York, Nov - Dec, 2008

Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954)
Untitled #464
2008
Chromogenic print
214.3 x 152.4cm

For her first exhibition of new work since 2004, Cindy Sherman will show a series of colour photographs that continues her investigation into distorted ideas of beauty, self-image and ageing. Typical of Sherman, these works are at once alarming and amusing, distasteful and poignant.

Working as her own model for more than 30 years, Sherman has developed an extraordinary relationship with her camera. A remarkable performer, subtle distortions of her face and body are captured on camera and leave the artist unrecognisable to the audience. Her ability to drastically manipulate her age or weight, or coax the most delicate expressions from her face, is uncanny. Each image is overloaded with detail, every nuance caught by the artist’s eye. No prosthetic nose or breast, fake fingernail, sequin, wrinkle or bulge goes unnoticed by Sherman.

Sherman shoots alone in her studio acting as author, director, actor, make-up artist, hairstylist and wardrobe mistress. Each character is shot in front of a “green screen” then digitally inserted onto backgrounds shot separately. Adding to the complexity, Sherman leaves details slightly askew at each point in the process, undermining the narrative and forcing the viewer to confront the staged aspect of the work.

Press release at Metro Pictures Gallery

Installation view of Cindy Sherman exhibition at Metro Pictures Gallery, New York, 2008

Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954)
Untitled
2008
Chromogenic print
148.6 x 146.7cm

Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954)
Untitled
2008
Chromogenic print
177.8 x 161.3cm

Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954)
Untitled #468
2008
Chromogenic colour print
191.8 x 151.1cm

The society portraits made in 2008 portray older women in opulent settings wearing expensive clothes, their faces stretched and enhanced unnaturally, showing signs of cosmetic surgery. These markers point to cultural standards of beauty and wealth, and here signal the failed aspiration to sustained youth. Printed large, presented in decorative and often gilded frames, and depicting figures in formal poses, these works are reminiscent of Sherman’s history portraits and classical portraiture in general. In this way, they remind the viewer that representation is not a new phenomenon, and the cultural implications in all images are tied to long and complex histories. In Untitled #468 the figure stands stoically with arms crossed and mouth slightly agape, wearing a fur, silk scarf, and white gloves, which the artist found at thrift shops. In the background, an ornate building mirrors the elaborate dress of the woman.

The perspective of the building does not align with that of the figure, blatantly breaking the illusion of reality and recalling Sherman’s 1980 series of rear-screen projections. This clear and deliberate artificiality indicates that images, characters, and even our own selves are constructed, not fixed.

Anonymous text. “Untitled #468,” on The Broad website Nd [Online] Cited 09/06/2022

Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954)
Untitled
2008
Chromogenic print
244.5 x 165.7cm

Metro Pictures Gallery

This gallery has now closed

Metro Pictures Gallery website

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Book: Robert Frank ‘The Americans’ (1st Scalo edition)

December 2008

'The Americans. Photographs by Robert Frank' Introduction by Jack Kerouac. Scalo, Zürich/D.A.P., New York, 1993 (1st Scalo edition)

The Americans. Photographs by Robert Frank. Introduction by Jack Kerouac. Scalo, Zürich/D.A.P., New York, 1993.
First Scalo edition. 179 pp. Oblong quarto. Hardbound in photo-illustrated dust jacket. Black-and-white reproductions.

WOW! One of the seminal books of photography and signed as well.

“It was Frank’s The Americans that made the photographic book into an art form in its own right. Frank was following a lead set by [Wright] Morris’ book (The Inhabitants) and, especially, by Evans’ American Photographs, both of which are designed to let pictures play off each other in a way that controls and reinforces their effect on the viewer. Even Klein’s New York book displays this tendency. But Frank’s goes much further, creating a denser, richer, deeper structure of images than any book before it.”

Colin Westerbeck in Michel Frizot, et. al., The New History of Photography.

Estimated: $1200-1400

photoeye auctions

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Opening: ‘Andreas Gursky’ at the National Gallery of Victoria International, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 21st November, 2008 – 22nd February, 2009

Opening: Thursday 21st November 2008

Andreas Gursky banner at NGV International exhibition, Melbourne

A large but plain crowd assembled for the opening of the first exhibition by world renowned German photographer Andreas Gursky at the National Gallery of Victoria in St Kilda Road, Melbourne. After some lively conversation with friends and following the opening speeches we wandered into a large clean gallery space with minimal design elements. The use of space within the gallery allowed the work to speak for itself. It is a minimal hang and the exhibition works all the better for this.

As for the work itself 21 large photographs are presented ranging from landscapes to buildings, race tracks to formula 1 pits, Madonna concerts to the Tour de France. Most work successfully in building a hyperreal vision of the world. We are not sure what is ‘real’ or hyperreal, what is a straight photograph or what has been digitally manipulated and woven together. The colour and sharpness of the images is often intensified: in reproductions of the famous photograph of the 99c supermarket in America the colours seem flat but ‘in the flesh’ the colours are almost fluoro in their saturation and brightness.

Having said that the photographs are nearly always unemotional – as though seen from above in the third person, they observe with detachment. The intrigue for the viewer is in the detail, in working out what is going on, but these are not passionate photographs on the surface. It is beneath the surface that the photographs have their psychological effect: the best of the images work on the subconscious of the viewer. Like a fantastical dance the three very wide images of the Formula 1 pits feature pit crews practicing tyre changes, frozen in a choreographed ballet. People in the galleries above stare down; pit lane girls seem to have been inserted digitally into the images, standing at side or behind the pit crews in a seemingly surreal comment on these worlds. These are theatrical tableaux vivant, splashed with teams colours. Fantastic photographs.

In some of the images, such as the Madonna concert or the photograph of the Bahrain Formula 1 racetrack, space seems to have folded in on itself and the viewer is unsure of the structure of the image and of their vantage point in looking at them. Space also collapses in the photograph of the pyramid of Cheops (2006, below), where the depth of field from foreground to background of the image is negligible. Less successful are images of a Jackson Pollock painting and a green grass bank with running river (Rhein II 1996, below), intensified beyond belief so that the river seems almost to be made of liquid silver.

A wonderful exhibition in many aspects, well worth a visit to see one the worlds best photographers at work. The photographs tell detached but psychologically emotional stories about what human beings are doing to the world in which they live. These images are a commentary on the state of this relationship – images of repetition, pattern, construction, use, abuse and fantasy woven into hyperreal visions of an unnatural world.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the National Gallery of Victoria for inviting me to the opening and for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Andreas Gursky (German, b. 1955) 'Bahrain I' 2007 from the exhibition 'Andreas Gursky' at the National Gallery of Victoria International, Melbourne, November, 2008 - February, 2009

Andreas Gursky (German, b. 1955)
Bahrain I
2007
C Print
120 1/2 x 87 1/4 inches
© Andreas Gursky

Andreas Gursky (German, b. 1955) 'Tour de France' 2007 from the exhibition 'Andreas Gursky' at the National Gallery of Victoria International, Melbourne, November, 2008 - February, 2009

Andreas Gursky (German, b. 1955)
Tour de France
2007
C Print
© Andreas Gursky

Andreas Gursky (German, b. 1955) 'Cheops' 2006 from the exhibition 'Andreas Gursky' at the National Gallery of Victoria International, Melbourne, November, 2008 - February, 2009

Andreas Gursky (German, b. 1955)
Cheops
2006
C Print
307 x 217.1cm
© Andreas Gursky

Andreas Gursky (German, b. 1955)
Madonna I
2001
C Print
282.26 x 207.01 x 6.35cm
© Andreas Gursky

Andreas Gursky (German, b. 1955)
Pyongyang I
2007
C Print
307.0 x 215.5 x 6.2cm
© Andreas Gursky

For the first time in Australia, an exhibition by German contemporary photographer Andreas Gursky opened at the National Gallery of Victoria. From the Haus der Kunst in Munich, Andreas Gursky presents 21 major works for which the artist is internationally acclaimed. The photographs range from 1989 to 2007 and include seminal works such as Tokyo Stock Exchange and the diptych 99 cent store. Andreas Gursky is recognised as one of the world’s leading contemporary artists. On view through 22 February, 2009.

Well known for his large-scale (generally measuring an astounding four to five metres) and extraordinarily detailed photographs of contemporary life, Gursky continues the lineage of ‘new objectivity’ in German photography which was brought to contemporary attention by Bernd and Hilla Becher.

In the 1990s, Gursky became inspired by the various manifestations of global capitalism. His interest was piqued looking at a newspaper photograph of the crowded floor of the Tokyo Stock Exchange and he began to photograph its flurry of suited traders, somehow moving according to some inbuilt order.

Dr Gerard Vaughan, Director, NGV said the Andreas Gursky exhibition represented a significant coup for Melbourne: “The National Gallery of Victoria is the only Australian venue for this extraordinary show – the first major exhibition of Gursky’s work ever to be seen in this country. Generously organised by the Haus der Kunst Museum in Munich we are extremely fortunate to have had the works in this show selected for us by Andreas Gursky himself.”

Andreas Gursky was born in 1955 and grew up in Düsseldorf, Germany. In the early 1980s, he studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Germany’s State Art Academy. Whilst there he was heavily influenced by his teachers Bernd and Hilla Becher, who were well known for their methodical black and white photographs of industrial machinery.

In 1984 Gursky began to move away from the Becher style, choosing instead to work in colour. Since then he has travelled across the world to cities such as Tokyo, Cairo, Hong Kong, Stockholm, Singapore and Los Angeles photographing factories, hotels and office buildings – places he considered to be symbols of contemporary culture. His world-view photographs during this period are considered amongst the most original achievements in contemporary photography.

Gursky has been the subject of numerous international exhibitions including the Internationale Foto-Triennale in Esslingen, Germany in 1989 and 1995, the Venice Biennale in 1990, and the Biennale of Sydney in 1996 and 2000. In 2001, Gursky was the subject of an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Press release from the National Gallery of Victoria website

Andreas Gursky (German, b. 1955)
F1 Boxenstopp 1
2007
C Print
© Andreas Gursky

Andreas Gursky (German, b. 1955)
Tokyo Stock Exchange
1990
C Print
205.0 x 260.0 x 6.2cm
© Andreas Gursky

Andreas Gursky (German, b. 1955)
diptych 99 cent store II
2001
C Print
© Andreas Gursky

Andreas Gursky (German, b. 1955)
Rhein II
1996
C print
© Andreas Gursky

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Phone: 03 8620 2222

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National Gallery of Victoria website

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Exhibition: ‘Broken Glass: Photographs of the South Bronx by Ray Mortenson’ at the Museum of the City of New York

Exhibition dates: 14th November, 2008 – 12th April, 2009

Ray Mortenson (American, b. 1944) 'Untitled (7-16-6)' 1984 from the exhibition 'Broken Glass: Photographs of the South Bronx by Ray Mortenson' at the Museum of the City of New York, Nov 2008 - April 2009

Ray Mortenson (American, b. 1944)
Untitled (7-16-6)
1984
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of Janet Borden, Inc.

Documenting the abandoned, burnt out, and razed structures of entire city blocks in the South Bronx in the aftermath of the 1970s, during which this neighbourhood experienced dramatic decline, Broken Glass: Photographs of the South Bronx by Ray Mortenson will be on view at the Museum of the City of New York from November 14, 2008 through March 9, 2009. The 50 black and white cityscapes and interiors on view – five of which are large-scale – were taken between 1982 and 1984, and they vividly illustrate the results of a downslide that began in the Great Depression of the 1930s and accelerated with the construction of the Cross Bronx Expressway in the 1950s and the fiscal crisis of the 1970s. Broken Glass is Mortenson’s first museum exhibition in New York City, and it is the first presentation of the South Bronx photographs.

The 50 photographs on view, all black and white, range in size from the smallest at approximately 11″ by 14″, to the most monumental at 40″ by 60″. Each conveys a devastating silence, serving as a reminder that these city blocks were once the homes of individuals, families, and a large community. Mortenson has written, “The buildings were like tombs – sealed up, broken open and plundered. Inside, stairways with missing steps led up to abandoned apartments. Doors opened into rooms that were once bedrooms or kitchens. Small things left behind hint at who the occupants might have been – a hairbrush, photographs, or bits of clothing.” Ghostly remnants of the once prosperous and thriving neighbourhoods can be glimpsed in his images which document the extent and severity of the urban decline experienced in the South Bronx.

These photographs document an important chapter in the history of a New York City neighbourhood, augmenting their aesthetic power. The decline of the South Bronx began as early as the Great Depression when previously sustained development came to an abrupt halt. After World War II an exodus of New York’s middle class began and continued into the 1970s. This caused a population decline throughout the city, but the effects were particularly hard on the South Bronx as more than 200,000 residents left the community between 1970 and 1980. As entire communities left the city, Robert Moses’ road building and slum clearance, along with other urban renewal initiatives had dramatic effects on the lives of all who remained. In the 1970s New York City faced another economic crisis and virtual bankruptcy. City government was unable to maintain services in the South Bronx and “planned shrinkage” became an unofficial policy as services were slowly withdrawn. With little incentive for landlords to upgrade or even maintain their property, waves of arson and “insurance fires” decimated the by now largely minority community. Astonishingly, some 12,000 fires a year occurred through the 1970s, averaging more than 30 a day.

A successful resurrection of the South Bronx began in the mid-1980s, as grass roots organisations and community development corporations, along with financial reinvestment by the City, sparked its regeneration. The photographs on view stand in starkest contrast to today’s revitalised neighbourhood, which has been the result of the dedication of its citizens combined with government support. The photographs serve as a reminder of the ruins that once dominated the now-vibrant streets and that the balance between prosperity and urban decline can be fragile.

Brief Biography

Ray Mortenson was born in Wilmington, Delaware in 1944 and studied art at the Carnegie Institute of Technology and the San Francisco Art Institute. In the early 1970s, Mortenson moved to New York and began working with photography. His first significant photographic project was a comprehensive investigation of the industrial landscapes of New Jersey’s Meadowlands (1974-1982). Since then, Mortensen has continued to focus on landscape photography that is often interested in liminal places of transition, set apart from everyday life. His photographs have been accepted into the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago, and the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.

Press release from the Museum of the City of New York website

Ray Mortenson (American, b. 1944) 'Untitled' 1983 from the exhibition 'Broken Glass: Photographs of the South Bronx by Ray Mortenson' at the Museum of the City of New York, Nov 2008 - April 2009

Ray Mortenson (American, b. 1944)
Untitled
1983
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of Janet Borden, Inc.

Ray Mortenson (American, b. 1944)
Untitled
1984
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of Janet Borden, Inc.

Ray Mortenson (American, b. 1944)
Untitled
1983
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of Janet Borden, Inc.

Ray Mortenson (American, b. 1944)
Untitled
1984
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of Janet Borden, Inc.

Museum of the City of New York
1220 Fifth Avenue at 103rd Street
New York, NY 10029
Phone: 212-534-1672

Opening hours:
7 days a week 10.00am – 6.00pm

Museum of the City of New York website

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Opening: ‘Oleh Witer’ at Space 39 Gallery, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 11th November – 22nd November, 2008

Opening: Tuesday 11th November, 2008

Oleh Witer (Australian) 'The Elephant Beetle' 2008 (installation view) from the exhibition 'Oleh Witer' at Space 39 Gallery, Melbourne, Nov 2008

Oleh Witer (Australian)
The Elephant Beetle (installation view)
2008
Oil in linen

A warm and lively crowd was in attendance for the opening of the latest Oleh Witer exhibition at Space 39 in Little Collins Street, Melbourne. Nine paintings are presented in the open space of the gallery and what magical paintings they are.

Two of the main canvases feature rearing beetles in the foreground, almost photo-realistically painted, lit from above while in the background geometric red and blue squares are overlaid by enigmatic shadows – almost as though the shadows were the interior structures of a fantastical light shade.

Other canvases feature a bee and a wasp facing each other with cellular geometric patterns and overlaid shadows in the background. Between these two seeming adversaries is a large canvas of a black skull with candle flickering in the it’s lobotomised top sitting on a spiral shape with geometric shapes and the shadows of an almost tarot like ‘ten of swords’ pattern overlaid to the background.

The strongest work features geometric forms with dark surrealist imagery. These are talismanic images with a strong connection to taoist and shamanic principles. A concern with the connection between all things is evident – archetypal pentagrams, spirals and swords are linked to the principles and proportions of the golden mean equation. Contemplation is required to access the inner meanings of the work but they reward extended looking as their magical phosphorescences are revealed over time. Recommended viewing.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Oleh Witer (Australian) 'The Rhinoceros Beetle' 2008 (installation view)

Oleh Witer (Australian)
Installation view and opening crowd with The Rhinoceros Beetle
2008
Oil on linen

Oleh Witer (Australian)
The Bee (installation view)
2008
Oil on linen

Space 39

This gallery is no longer open

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Quotation: Paul Virilio ‘The Vision Machine’

November 2008

“Empirically acknowledged as tragic, the photographic print was really just that when, at the turn of the century, it became the instrument of the three great authorities over life and death (the law, the army, medicine). This is when it demonstrated its power to reveal the unfolding of a destiny from the word go. As deus ex machina [an unexpected power or event saving a seemingly hopeless situation], it was to become just as ruthless for the criminal, the soldier or the invalid, the conjunction between the immediate and the fatal only becoming more solid, inevitably, with the progress of representation.”

Virilio, Paul. The Vision Machine (trans. Julie Rose). Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994, p. 43.

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Review: ‘Disintegration’ by Robbie Rowlands at Place Gallery, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 22nd October – 15th November, 2008

Robbie Rowlands (Australian, b. 1968)
Scored
2008
Goal post, steel
160cm x 130cm x 50cm
Photograph: Christian Capurro

“The philosopher Martin Heidegger argued that objects are often invisible to us gathered up as they are within a context of functionality and use. It is only when things break down that we become aware of them, seeing them with fresh eyes. In many ways Heidegger’s observation could form the basis of an approach to Robbie Rowlands’ work. Rowlands takes objects that are often forgotten, invisible or transparent to us, objects that exist on the verge of disappearance, and stages a kind of ‘breakdown’, inviting us to rediscover the object, poised somewhere between what it was and what it might become.”

Simon Cooper. Catalogue essay

Sitting in pools of light in the elegant modern space of Place Gallery in Richmond, six theatrically lit sculptures are presented by artist Robbie Rowlands. Made of everyday objects (a boom gate, desk, chair, single bed, electricity pole, desk and footy goalpost) they have been de/constructed by the artist and reformed into curved objects. With ironic titles such as Down for the felled electricity pole and Collapse for the dismembered chair Rowland’s work hovers between one fixed state and an’other’ transformative state of being.

While the catalogue essay by Simon Cooper suggests that all of these objects are abandoned or nearly forgotten sharing a context of quasi-obsolescence, this is not the case. These were objects of purpose and form, the acts of ritualised production of a consumer society that contained signs that symbolised their status. In his creativity Rowland has used these technologies of production, which permit us to produce, transform or manipulate things to create new sensual forms of life. Some of the sculptures such as Boom (the boom gate; 2008, below) and Scored (the goal post; 2008, above) remind me of creatures emerging from the recesses of the unconscious, curling and rearing up like monsters from the deep. One of the most beautiful forms is the constructed white chair where the function of the object has collapsed into the essence of the form, like the surreal spatiality of a poetic Miro. As Gaston Bachelard reminds use in The Poetics of Space:

“The grace of a curve is an invitation to remain. We cannot break away from it without hoping to return. For the beloved curve has nest-like powers; it incites us to possession, it is a curved corner, inhabited geometry.”1

Cooper suggests that the curved forms that Rowland creates were “already there in the original object, even as it was sat on, written on, or passed by on the way to work.” He rightly notes that the process used contains a certain violence, but that we remember and reconstruct the old form even as we respond to the new construction. For these sculptures are a construction not, I believe, inherent in the original form. This can be seen in the sculpture Boom (2008, below) for example, where Rowland has used additional pieces of metal to hold the curve of the boom gate in place. Without this skilfully added, hidden sub-structure the transformative shape would collapse onto the floor. Rowland inhabits and possesses his new geometry with as much technology as the original but not in such an obvious form.

At their best these sculptures are both poetic palimpsest and heterotopic objects of otherness that are neither here nor there. The work would have been stronger if only four pieces were presented in the gallery space – the sculptures needed more room to breathe (understanding the dictum that less is more). The sculptures themselves also needed greater thematic cohesiveness perhaps using the colour white as the unifying theme. But they are sensual and beautiful gestures and deserve the attention of your visit.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon, 1969 [originally 1958] p. 146

Robbie Rowlands (Australian, b. 1968)
Boom
2008
Rail boom gate, wooden
160cm x 160cm x 130cm
Photograph: Wren

Place Gallery
120 Collins Street
Melbourne VIC 3000
Phone: (03) 9527 6378

Opening hours:
Daily: 9.30am – 6.00pm
Sunday & Holidays: Closed

Robbie Rowlands website

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Photographer: Alec Soth

November 2008

Alec Soth (American, b. 1969)
Two Towels
2004
From the series Niagara (2006)

Minneapolis-based photographer Alec Soth has attained international recognition for his photographic series. Notable are the two series Sleeping by the Mississippi (1999-2004) portraying the river and the life along it’s banks and Niagara (2006) where Soth focuses his large format camera on the hotels, residents loves and lives and the environs around Niagara Falls.

His work is firmly rooted in the documentary traditions of Walker Evans and Robert Frank but pushes the documentary form. Whereas Frank used a foreigners eye and ‘snapshot’ photography to challenge traditional notions of American culture in his seminal book The Americans (1958), Soth photographs everyday events of American life – home, romance, religion, bliss, heartbreak and agony – and constructs his vision of the land and people in poetic form. His use of handwritten notes is especially poignant.

His view of America is both narrative, truth and epic construction. Working in a serial form, Soth builds the themes within his series. The connections between people living their lives and facing their plight together – with dignity – becomes fully evident.

Dr Marcus Bunyan