Encirclement | Art Blart

Posts Tagged ‘Encirclement

May

Exhibition: ‘VALIE EXPORT – The Photographs’ at the Fotomuseum Winterthur, Zurich, Switzerland

Categories: black and white photography, exhibition, existence, film, gallery website, intimacy, light, photographic series, photography, portrait, psychological, quotation, reality, space, street photography and time
Tags: Abrundung I, Action Pants: Genital Panic, Actionists, Anfügung, Aus der Mappe der Hundigkeit, Austrian art, Austrian artist, avant-garde artist, body and gaze, Body Art, Body Configurations, BODY SIGN B, deconstructing the photographic gaze, depiction and representation, Die Geburtenmadonna, die unfähigeit, DIVIDE ET IMPERA!, Einkreisung, Encirclement, European avant-garde art, European feminist art, expanded cinema, femaleness and representation, feminist art, feminist artist, feminist avant-garde artist, feminist body art, Fotomuseum Winterthur, From the Geometric Sketchbook of Nature, installation art, interface of film video art drawing and body art, intersection of performance sculpture and portraiture, Körperkonfigurationen, Martin Schongauer The Holy Family, media art, multimedia installations, Nachfügung, Naomi Entreating Ruth and Orpah to Return to the Land of Moab, performance art, performance artist, performance photography, performative art, Peter Weibel, Petri / fikation, pioneer of performance art, Portfolio of Doggedness, relationship between subject and space, rhetoric of the pose, Tap and Touch Cinema, Tapp und Tastkino, the body performance and photography, The Inability to Express Oneself Through Facial Expression, Train II, Tree Triangle, VALIE EXPORT, VALIE EXPORT Abrundung I, VALIE EXPORT Action Pants: Genital Panic, VALIE EXPORT Anfügung, VALIE EXPORT ASEMIE, VALIE EXPORT Attachment, VALIE EXPORT Aus der Mappe der Hundigkeit, VALIE EXPORT – SMART EXPORT, VALIE EXPORT – The Photographs, VALIE EXPORT Body Configurations, VALIE EXPORT BODY SIGN B, VALIE EXPORT Crossing, VALIE EXPORT Die Geburtenmadonna, VALIE EXPORT die unfähigeit, VALIE EXPORT DIVIDE ET IMPERA!, VALIE EXPORT Einkreisung, VALIE EXPORT Elongation, VALIE EXPORT Encirclement, VALIE EXPORT From the Geometric Sketchbook of Nature, VALIE EXPORT Körperkonfigurationen, VALIE EXPORT Nachfügung, VALIE EXPORT Petri / fikation, VALIE EXPORT Portfolio of Doggedness, VALIE EXPORT Rounding I, VALIE EXPORT Supplement, Valie Export Tap and Touch Cinema, VALIE EXPORT Tapp und Tastkino, VALIE EXPORT Train II, VALIE EXPORT Tree Triangle, VALIE EXPORT Verkreuzung, VALIE EXPORT Verletzungen I, Verkreuzung, Verletzungen I, video art, William Blake Naomi Entreating Ruth and Orpah to Return to the Land of Moab

Exhibition dates: 25th February – 29th May 2023

Curator: Walter Moser

VALIE EXPORT (Austrian, b. 1941)
Portfolio of Doggedness (VALIE EXPORT, own words, conversation with Elisabeth Lebovici), in cooperation with Peter Weibel
1968
Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac and the artist
© VALIE EXPORT, 2022, ProLitteris, Zurich
Photo: Joseph Tandl

I would really like to meet this artist.

Recent postings have hit a rich vein with exhibitions on artists and concepts which challenge the patriarchal, hegemonic status quo… through an exploration of diversity and the enunciation of different points of view. Postings have included exhibitions on the femme fatale, queer lives and Ukranian modernist painting and artists such as Samuel Fosso, Jimmy DeSana, and Andy Warhol.

Upcoming postings continue the theme with exhibitions by Ming Smith, Ernest Cole, Hannah Villiger, Dawoud Bey and Carrie Mae Weems, and Lucinda Devlin.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Installation view VALIE EXPORT – The Photographs, Fotomuseum Winterthur
© Fotomuseum Winterthur / Conradin Frei

VALIE EXPORT (Austrian, b. 1941)
TAPP und TASTKINO (TAP and TOUCH CINEMA)
1968
Albertina, Wien – The ESSL Collection
© VALIE EXPORT, 2022, ProLitteris, Zurich, photo: Werner Schulz

“As usual, the film is ‘shown’ in the dark. But the cinema has shrunk somewhat – only two hands fit inside it. To see (i.e. feel, touch) the film, the viewer (user) has to stretch his hands through the entrance to the cinema. At last, the curtain which formerly rose only for the eyes now rises for both hands. The tactile reception is the opposite of the deceit of voyeurism. For as long as the citizen is satisfied with the reproduced copy of sexual freedom, the state is spared the sexual revolution. Tap and Touch Cinema is an example of how re-interpretation can activate the public.”

~ Valie Export

At age twenty-eight, Waltraud Hollinger changed her name to VALIE EXPORT, in all uppercase letters, to announce her presence in the Viennese art scene. Eager to counter the male – dominated group of artists known as the Vienna Actionists – including Günter Brus, Otto Mühl, Hermann Nitsch, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler – she sought a new identity that was not bound by her father’s name (Lehner) or her former husband’s name (Hollinger). Export was the name of a popular cigarette brand. This act of provocation would characterise her future performances, especially TAPP und TASTKINO (TOUCH and TAP Cinema) and Aktionhose: Genitalpanik (Action Pants: Genital Panic). Challenging the public to engage with a real woman instead of with images on a screen, in these works she illustrated her notion of “expanded cinema,” in which film is produced without celluloid; instead the artist’s body activates the live context of watching. Born of the 1968 revolt against modern consumer and technical society, her defiant feminist action was memorialised in a picture taken the following year by the photographer Peter Hassmann in Vienna. VALIE EXPORT had the image screen printed in a large edition and fly-posted it in public spaces.

Gallery label from Transmissions: Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America, 1960-1980, September 5, 2015 – January 3, 2016 from the MoMA website Nd [Online] Cited 05/05/2023

VALIE EXPORT’s multimedia work eludes any simplistic categorisation or definition. As a pioneer of performance art, installation art and video art, EXPORT has consistently broken through the boundaries separating media genres, while using her own body as an artistic medium. Photography has always played a key role in her practice – be it for documentary or experimental purposes, as an element in multimedia installations or as art in its own right. EXPORT has had a constant awareness of the importance of visually recording her performances. Back in 1968 two of her best-known performances, “TAPP und TASTKINO” and the action “Aus der Mappe der Hundigkeit”, were attended by photographers and filmmakers. For the performance “TAPP und TASTKINO”, a request was put out by megaphone asking spectators and passers-by to touch EXPORT’s breasts, which were covered by a box inspired by a cinema auditorium with a curtain that the artist wore like a garment. Participants had to maintain eye contact with EXPORT for a defined period of time while touching her, with the artist thereby reversing the voyeuristic male gaze, a typical feature of cinema. For “Aus der Mappe der Hundigkeit”, EXPORT took artist Peter Weibel through the centre of Vienna on a lead, with him crawling on all fours, provocatively drawing attention to the prevailing gender relations and power dynamics by reversing them. Photography was not merely used to make a complete document of EXPORT’s work. Rather, action and photography entered into a dialogue, creating a mutual dependency between them: on the one hand, actions were recorded (and ultimately communicated too) by means of photography; on the other, by virtue of their production, publication and reception – especially of key moments such as the interaction between artist and participants in “TAPP und TASTKINO” and their switch of perspective – EXPORT’s action photos acquired a status that was independent of the performances. EXPORT’s focus on the critical examination of mechanisms of representation dates right back to the start of her career, when she began dealing with the different characteristics of the photographic image and imaging media, questioning the way they worked and subjecting photography to conceptual analysis by lifting the lid on the conditions governing the technical processes of image-making. Deconstructing the photographic gaze and its implicit power structures were of key importance here.

Dimitris Lempesis. “VALIE EXPORT – The Photographs,” on the Dream Idea Machine website Nd [Online] Cited 04/05/2023

VALIE EXPORT (Austrian, b. 1941)
Action Pants: Genital Panic
1969
Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac and the artist
© VALIE EXPORT, 2022, ProLitteris, Zurich
Photo: Peter Hassmann

VALIE EXPORT (Austrian, b. 1941)
BODY SIGN B
1970
Albertina, Wien – The ESSL Collection
© VALIE EXPORT, 2022, ProLitteris, Zurich
Photo: Gertraud Wolfschwenger

VALIE EXPORT (Austrian, b. 1941)
VALIE EXPORT – SMART EXPORT, self-portrait
1970
Albertina, Wien – The ESSL Collection
© VALIE EXPORT, 2022, ProLitteris, Zurich
Photo: Gertraud Wolfschwenger

VALIE EXPORT – The Photographs is the first exhibition to focus on the photographic oeuvre of the artist VALIE EXPORT (b. 1940), whose at times provocative performances and experimental installations have been a source of controversy. The show examines EXPORT’s use of photography as a critical exploration of processes of depiction and representation. At the interface of film, video art, drawing and body art the photographs offer a new perspective on her creative oeuvre. VALIE EXPORT’s multimedia work eludes any simplistic categorisation or definition. As a pioneer of performance art, installation art and video art, EXPORT has consistently broken through the boundaries separating media genres, while using her own body as an artistic medium. Photography has always played a key role in her practice – be it for documentary or experimental purposes, as an element in multimedia installations or as art in its own right.

EXPORT has had a constant awareness of the importance of visually recording her performances. Back in 1968 two of her best-known performances, TAPP und TASTKINO and the action Aus der Mappe der Hundigkeit, were attended by photographers (and filmmakers). For the performance TAPP und TASTKINO, a request was put out by megaphone asking spectators and passers-by to touch EXPORT’s breasts, which were covered by a box inspired by a cinema auditorium with a curtain that the artist wore like a garment. Participants had to maintain eye contact with EXPORT for a defined period of time while touching her, with the artist thereby reversing the voyeuristic male gaze, a typical feature of cinema. For Aus der Mappe der Hundigkeit, EXPORT took artist Peter Weibel through the centre of Vienna on a lead, with him crawling on all fours, provocatively drawing attention to the prevailing gender relations and power dynamics by reversing them.

Photography was not merely used to make a complete document of EXPORT’s work. Rather, action and photography entered into a dialogue, creating a mutual dependency between them: on the one hand, actions were recorded (and ultimately communicated too) by means of photography; on the other, by virtue of their production, publication and reception – especially of key moments such as the interaction between artist and participants in TAPP und TASTKINO and their switch of perspective – EXPORT’s action photos acquired a status that was independent of the performances.

EXPORT’s focus on the critical examination of mechanisms of representation dates right back to the start of her career, when she began dealing with the different characteristics of the photographic image and imaging media, questioning the way they worked and subjecting photography to conceptual analysis by lifting the lid on the conditions governing the technical processes of image-making. Deconstructing the photographic gaze and its implicit power structures were of key importance here.

For EXPORT, the critical analysis of systems of representation invariably went hand in hand, in the context of both media and society, with a questioning of the male gaze directed at a body viewed as female. Making reference to her own body, she repeatedly probed the role of the woman, the artist and the subject in patriarchal sociopolitical structures. In 1970, for example, EXPORT had a garter tattooed on her thigh for Body Sign Action to give visible expression to the woman’s status as a sexual object and projection surface for male fantasies. Besides capturing the act of being tattooed, EXPORT also took photographs of the tattoo itself. The work expresses the pain involved – quite literally – in having patriarchal norms inscribed on a body that is seen as female. With her series Body Configurations (1972–1982), EXPORT investigates the relationships between the subject and power-political structures through body postures too. She explicitly couches her critique of the processes of depiction and representation in feminist terms: her work centres on the relationship between subject and space, body and gaze, femaleness and representation.

The exhibition VALIE EXPORT – The Photographs, which was devised in close collaboration with the artist, focuses on the impact that photography has had on her creative output. However, following the logic of EXPORT’s work, the exhibition not only presents photographs but also juxtaposes different media and works created between 1968 and 2007.

About VALIE EXPORT

VALIE EXPORT was born in 1940 in Linz, Austria, and now lives and works in Vienna. She is one of the pioneers of performance art and conceptual art. In 1967, in what was a radical gesture at the time, she gave up her father’s and her ex-husband’s names and laid claim to a new identity, VALIE EXPORT. Her works have been shown worldwide as part of numerous solo and group exhibitions. EXPORT has taught at various international institutions and was a professor for performance and multimedia at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne from 1995 to 2005. The VALIE EXPORT Center Linz was established through the acquisition of the artist’s estate in 2015, thus laying the foundations for an international research centre to foster artistic and academic engagement with media art and performance art.

Press release from Fotomuseum Winterthur

VALIE EXPORT (Austrian, b. 1941)
Verletzungen I (Injuries I)
1972
Wien – The ESSL Collection
© VALIE EXPORT, 2022, ProLitteris, Zurich
Photo: Hermann Hendrich

VALIE EXPORT (Austrian, b. 1941)
Train II
1972
Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac and the artist
© VALIE EXPORT, 2022, ProLitteris, Zurich

VALIE EXPORT (Austrian, b. 1940)
Verkreuzung (Crossing)
1972, printed 1980
Black and white silver gelatin print on baryta paper laid on chip board
Each board 165 x 200cm (64.96 x 78.74 in)
Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac and the artist
© VALIE EXPORT, 2022, ProLitteris, Zurich

VALIE EXPORT (Austrian, b. 1941)
ASEMIE – The Inability to Express Oneself Through Facial Expression
1973
Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac and the artist
© VALIE EXPORT, 2022, ProLitteris, Zurich
Photo: Alfred Damm

die unfähigeit = the inability

VALIE EXPORT (Austrian, b. 1941)
From the Geometric Sketchbook of Nature, Tree Triangle
1973
Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac and the artist
© VALIE EXPORT, 2022, ProLitteris, Zurich

VALIE EXPORT (Austrian, b. 1941)
Nachfügung (Supplement)
1974
Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac and the artist
© VALIE EXPORT, 2022, ProLitteris, Zurich
Photo: Eric Timmermann

VALIE EXPORT (Austrian, b. 1940)
Petri / fikation (after: William Blake, Naomi Entreating Ruth and Orpah to Return to the Land of Moab, 1795)
1976, printed 1980
Black and white silver gelatin print on baryta paper laid on chip board
139.5 x 99.5cm
Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac and the artist
© VALIE EXPORT, 2022, ProLitteris, Zurich

VALIE EXPORT (Austrian, b. 1940)
Petri / fikation (after: William Blake, Naomi Entreating Ruth and Orpah to Return to the Land of Moab, 1795)
1976, printed 1980
Black and white silver gelatin print on baryta paper laid on chip board
140 x 100cm
Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac and the artist
© VALIE EXPORT, 2022, ProLitteris, Zurich

VALIE EXPORT (Austrian, b. 1940)
Die Geburtenmadonna
1976, printed 1980
Black and white silver gelatin print on baryta paper laid on chip board
Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac and the artist
© VALIE EXPORT, 2022, ProLitteris, Zurich

VALIE EXPORT (Austrian, b. 1941)
DIVIDE ET IMPERA! after: Martin Schongauer, The Holy Family, 1475-1480
1976
Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac and the artist
© VALIE EXPORT, 2022, ProLitteris, Zurich

Divide et impera! = divide and rule!

VALIE EXPORT (Austrian, b. 1941)
Anfügung (Attachment)
1976
Albertina, Wien – Familiensammlung Haselsteiner
© VALIE EXPORT, 2022, ProLitteris, Zurich

VALIE EXPORT (Austrian, b. 1940)
Einkreisung (Encirclement)
1976
From the series Körperkonfigurationen (Body Configurations)
Gelatin silver print with red ink
14 x 23 7/16″ (35.5 x 59.6cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Carl Jacobs Fund
© 2012 VALIE EXPORT / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VBK, Austria

In her series Body Configurations, the artist had herself or female colleagues photographed in local streets, stairwells, and alleyways, contorting their bodies to mimic the harsh geometries of the city. Influenced not only by the Actionists but also by the human sculpture of Robert Morris, Export complicates the coolly inhuman systems of Minimalism by reintroducing the human body into abstraction, an intimate yet public gesture that effortlessly transmutes the personal into the political.

VALIE EXPORT (Austrian, b. 1940)
From the series Körperkonfigurationen (Body Configurations)
1972-1976
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac and the artist
© VALIE EXPORT, 2022, ProLitteris, Zurich

VALIE EXPORT (Austrian, b. 1940)
Abrundung I (Rounding I)
1976, printed 1980
Black and white silver gelatin print on baryta paper laid on chip board
80 x 130.5cm
Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac and the artist
© VALIE EXPORT, 2022, ProLitteris, Zurich

VALIE EXPORT (Austrian, b. 1940)
Elongation
1976, printed 1980
Black and white silver gelatin print on baryta paper laid on chip board
80 x 130.5cm
Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac and the artist
© VALIE EXPORT, 2022, ProLitteris, Zurich

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

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

Fotomuseum Winterthur website

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Apr

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

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: American, american photographers, black and white photography, documentary photography, exhibition, existence, film, gallery website, intimacy, Japanese artist, landscape, light, Man Ray, memory, MoMA, New York, Paris, photographic series, photography, photojournalism, portrait, psychological, reality, space, street photography, surrealism, time, video and works on paper
Tags: 100 Boots, A Lightplay: Black White Gray, a negative is never finished, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Aleksandr Rodchenko Sovetskoe foto, Aleksandr Rodchenko Soviet Photo, arts, Atlas Group, Atlas Group Walid Raad My Neck is Thinner Than a Hair: Engines, August Sander, August Sander Das rechte Auge meiner Tochter Sigrid, August Sander The Right Eye of My Daughter Sigrid, Berenice Abbott, Berenice Abbott Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman, Body Configurations, Bringing the War Home, Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful, Chelovek s kinoapparatom, Chromogenic color print, chromolithograph, Claude Cahun, Claude Cahun Untitled 1928, collage, conceptual photography, Constructivism, dada, Daido Moriyama, Daido Moriyama Entertainer on Stage, Das rechte Auge meiner Tochter Sigrid, Dziga Vertov, Dziga Vertov Chelovek s kinoapparatom, Dziga Vertov Man with a Movie Camera, Ein Lichtspiel, Ein Lichtspiel: schwarz weiss grau, Einkreisung, Eleanor Antin, Eleanor Antin 100 Boots, Encirclement, Entertainer on Stage Shimizu, experimental photography, factography, film, gelatin silver print, Georges Hugnet, Georges Hugnet Surrealist beach collage, Georges Hugnet Untitled [Surrealist beach collage], Grete Stern Dreams, Grete Stern Sueños, Gun Gun Gun New York, Hands Up/Makeup, Helen Levitt, Helen Levitt in Color, Helen Levitt Projects: Helen Levitt in Color, I Got Up At..., John Baldessari, Josef Albers, Josef Albers Marli Heimann, Josef Albers Marli Heimann Alle während 1 Stunde, Körperkonfigurationen, kino-glaz, László Moholy-Nagy, László Moholy-Nagy A Lightplay, László Moholy-Nagy A Lightplay: Black White Gray, László Moholy-Nagy Ein Lichtspiel, Lebanese civil war, Left Front of the Arts, Light Space Modulator, lithograph, Man Ray, Man Ray Rayograph 1922, Man with a Movie Camera, Manhatta, Mariette Althaus, Marilyn 28 Years Old Las Vegas, Marli Heimann All During an Hour, Martha Rosler, Martha Rosler Bringing the War Home, Martha Rosler Hands Up/Makeup, Martha Rosler Red Stripe Kitchen, MOMA, multiple exposures, My Neck is Thinner Than a Hair, My Neck is Thinner Than a Hair: Engines, neo-avant-garde movement, New Topographics, New Vision, New Vision photography, Novyi LEF, On Kawara, On Kawara I Got Up At..., Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler Manhatta, performance art, performance photography, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Philip-Lorca diCorcia Marilyn; 28 Years Old, photobook, photobooks, photocollages, photography, photography and the neo-avant-garde movement, photogravure, photomontage, photomontages, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman, Projects: Helen Levitt in Color, Raoul Hausmann, Raoul Hausmann Untitled 1931, rayograph, Recto/Verso #2, Red Stripe Kitchen, reversed tonal values, Robert Heinecken, Robert Heinecken Recto/Verso #2, Rodchenko Sovetskoe foto, Russian film, self-published books, Sigmar Polke, Sigmar Polke Mariette Althaus, Sigmar Polke Untitled (Mariette Althaus), Sovetskoe foto, Soviet avant-garde journal, Soviet Photo, Sueños, Surrealist beach collage, The Museum of Modern Art, The Right Eye of My Daughter Sigrid, The Shaping of New Visions, The Shaping of New Visions: Photography Film Photobook, VALIE EXPORT, VALIE EXPORT Einkreisung, VALIE EXPORT Encirclement, Walid Raad, william klein, William Klein Gun Gun Gun

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

Josef Albers (German, 1888-1976)
Marli Heimann, Alle während 1 Stunde (Marli Heimann, All During an Hour)
1931
Twelve gelatin silver prints
Overall 11 11/16 x 16 7/16″ (29.7 x 41.8cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Gift of The Josef Albers Foundation, Inc.
© 2012 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

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

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

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

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

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

László Moholy-Nagy (Hungarian, 1895-1946)
Ein Lichtspiel: schwarz weiss grau (A Lightplay: Black White Gray) (excerpt)
1930

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

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

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

Dziga Vertov (Russian, 1896-1954)
Chelovek s kinoapparatom (Man with a Movie Camera)
1929
Film
1 hr 6 mins 49 secs

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

Eleanor Antin (American, b. 1935)
100 Boots
1971-1973
Photographed by Philip Steinmetz
Halftone reproductions on 51 cards
4 1/2 x 7 in. each
Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York
© Eleanor Antin

August Sander (German, 1876-1964)
Das rechte Auge meiner Tochter Sigrid (The Right Eye of My Daughter Sigrid)
1928
Gelatin silver print
7 1/16 x 9″ (17.9 x 22.9cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Gift of the photographer
© 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

Dziga Vertov (Russian, 1896-1954)
Chelovek s kinoapparatom (Man with a Movie Camera) (still)
1929
35mm film
65 min ( black and white, silent)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Department of Film

Man Ray (American, 1890-1976)
Rayograph
1922
Gelatin silver print (photogram)
9 3/8 x 11 3/4″ (23.9 x 29.9cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Gift of James Thrall Soby
© 2012 Man Ray Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

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

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

Martha Rosler (American, b. 1943)
Red Stripe Kitchen
1967-1972
From the series Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful
Pigmented inkjet print, printed 2011
23 3/4 x 18 1/8″ (60.3 x 46cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Purchase and The Modern Women’s Fund

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

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

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

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

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

The third gallery features artists exploring the social world of the postwar period. On view for the first time is a group of erotic and political typo-collages by Gerhard Rühm, a founder of the Wiener Gruppe (1959-1960), an informal group of Vienna-based writers and artists who engaged in radical visual dialogues between pictures and texts. The rebels of street photography – Robert Frank, William Klein, Daido Moriyama, and Garry Winogrand – are represented with a selection of works that refute the then prevailing rules of photography, offering instead elliptical, off-kilter styles that are as personal and controversial as are their unsparing views of postwar society. A highlight of this section is the pioneering slide show Projects: Helen Levitt in Color (1971-1974). Capturing the lively beat, humour, and drama of New York’s street theatre, Levitt’s slide projection is shown for the first time at MoMA since its original presentation at the Museum in 1974.

Photography’s tradition in the postwar period continues in the fourth gallery, which is divided into two sections. One section features “new topographic” works by Robert Adams, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Stephen Shore, and Joel Sternfeld, along with a selection of Edward Ruscha’s self-published books, in which the use of photography as mapmaking signals a conceptual thrust. This section introduces notable works from the 1970s by artists who embraced photography not just as a way of describing experience, but as a conceptual tool. Examples include Eleanor Antin’s 100 Boots (1971-1973), Mel Bochner’s Misunderstandings (A theory of photography) (1970), VALIE EXPORT’s Einkreisung (Encirclement) (1976), On Kawara’s I Got Up… (1977), and Gordon Matta-Clark’s Splitting (1974), all works that reevaluate the material and contextual definitions of photography. The other section features two major and highly experimental recent acquisitions: Martha Rosler’s political magnum opus Bringing the War Home (1967-72), developed in the context of her anti-war and feminist activism, for which the artist spliced together images of domestic bliss clipped from the pages of House Beautiful with grim pictures of the war in Vietnam taken from Life magazine; and Sigmar Polke’s early 1970s experiments with multiple exposures, reversed tonal values, and under-and-over exposures, which underscore the artist’s idea that “a negative is never finished.” The unmistakably cinematic turn that photography takes in the 1980s and early 1990s is represented with a selection of innovative works ranging from Robert Heinecken’s Recto/Verso (1988) to Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s breakthrough Hustler series (1990-92).

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

Press release from the MoMA website

On Kawara (Japanese, 1932-2014)
I Got Up At…
1974-1975
(Ninety postcards with printed rubber stamps)

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

Philip-Lorca diCorcia (American, b. 1951)
Marilyn; 28 Years Old; Las Vegas, Nevada; $30
1990-1992
Chromogenic colour print
24 x 35 15/16″ (61 x 91.4cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
E.T. Harmax Foundation Fund
© 2012 Philip-Lorca diCorcia, courtesy David Zwirner, New York

Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
Projects: Helen Levitt in Color (detail)
1971-1974
40 colour slides shown in continuous projection
Originally presented at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, September 26-October 20, 1974

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

Daido Moriyama (Japanese, b. 1938)
Entertainer on Stage, Shimizu
1967
Gelatin silver print
18 7/8 x 28″ (48.0 x 71.2cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Gift of the photographer
© 2012 Daido Moriyama

Grete Stern (German-Argentinian, 1904-1999)
No. 1 from the series Sueños (Dreams)
1949
Gelatin silver print
10 1/2 x 9″ (26.6 x 22.9cm)
Latin American and Caribbean Fund through gift of Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis in honor of Adriana Cisneros de Griffin
© 2012 Horacio Coppola

Sigmar Polke (German, 1941-2010)
Untitled (Mariette Althaus)
c. 1975
Gelatin silver print (red toned)
9 1/4 x 11 13/16″ (23.5 x 30cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Acquired through the generosity of Edgar Wachenheim III and Ronald S. Lauder
© 2012 Estate of Sigmar Polke / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Germany

Martha Rosler (American, b. 1943)
Hands Up / Makeup
1967-1972
From the series Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful
Pigmented inkjet print, printed 2011
23 3/4 x 13 15/16″ (60.4 x 35.4cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Purchase and The Modern Women’s Fund
© 2012 Martha Rosler

Robert Heinecken (American, 1931-2006)
Recto/Verso #2
1988
Silver dye bleach print
8 5/8 x 7 7/8″ (21.9 x 20cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Mr. and Mrs. Clark Winter Fund
© 2012 The Robert Heinecken Trust

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman
Negative c. 1930/Distortion c. 1950
Gelatin silver print
12 3/4 x 10 1/8″ (32.6 x 25.7cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Frances Keech Fund in honor of Monroe Wheeler
© 2012 Berenice Abbott/Commerce Graphics

Raoul Hausmann (Austrian, 1886-1971)
Untitled
February 1931
Gelatin silver print
5 3/8 x 4 7/16″ (13.6 x 11.2cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Thomas Walther Collection Gift of Thomas Walther
© 2012 Raoul Hausmann / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954)
Untitled
c. 1928
Gelatin silver print
4 9/16 x 3 1/2″ (10 x 7.6cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Purchase and anonymous promised gift
© 2012 Estate of Claude Cahun

Aleksandr Rodchenko (Russian, 1891-1956)
Sovetskoe foto (Soviet Photo) No. 10
October 1927
Letterpress
10 3/8 x 7 1/4″ (26.3 x 18.4cm)
Publisher: Ogonek, Moscow
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the Judith Rothschild Foundation

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

Opening hours:
10.30am – 5.30pm
Open seven days a week

MoMA website

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Feb

Exhibition: ‘Between Here and There: Passages in Contemporary Photography’ at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: American, american photographers, black and white photography, colour photography, documentary photography, exhibition, existence, gallery website, intimacy, landscape, light, memory, New York, photographic series, photography, pictorialism, portrait, psychological, quotation, reality, space and time
Tags: action of the body, Almerisa, Between Here and There, Between Here and There: Passages in Contemporary Photography, Bird's Eye View: Haikou V, Canal St. Canal No. 3, Contemporary Photography, County Cork, Doug Aitken, Doug Aitken Passenger, elemental form, Encirclement, geometries of the city, how we see ourselves, human sculpture, Ireland, Jeff Wall, Jeff Wall Rainfilled Suitcase, Luc Sante nostalgia, Matthew Buckingham, Matthew Buckingham Canal St. Canal No. 3, minimalism, nostalgia, Picturesque, planes in flight, Rainfilled Suitcase, Richard Long, Richard Long County Cork Ireland, Rineke Dijkstra, Rineke Dijkstra Almerisa Asylum Seekers' Center, site of gesture, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, unfixed existence, VALIE EXPORT, VALIE EXPORT Encirclement, Weng Fen, Weng Fen Bird's Eye View: Haikou V

Exhibition dates: 2nd July 2010 – 3rd February 2011

Many thankx to The Metropolitan 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.

Richard Long (British, b. 1945)
County Cork, Ireland
1967
Gelatin silver print
76.2 x 101.6 cm (30 x 40 in.)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Vital Projects Fund Inc. Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2010
© Richard Long

Long was a key figure in recasting sculpture in two directions: inward toward the gestures of bodies in space and outward toward the creation of ephemeral works made directly in the landscape. A student of the sculptor Anthony Caro at Saint Martins College of Art, Long was well versed in the reductive quality of geometric abstraction but sought to make the form of his works even more elegantly simple and wedded to life. He would go for solitary walks in the English countryside, and at a particular place he would create elemental forms such as a line, an x shape, or a circle by walking over the ground to leave a temporary imprint. A photograph such as County Cork, Ireland – in which the shape seems to hover in the image like a flying saucer – is thus an imprint of an imprint; the form of the work is derived from the holistic relationship between the concept (idea), the action of the body (figure), and the site of his gesture (ground). It is also informed by an astute understanding of the profound links between British culture and the landscape, from prehistoric hill figures through nineteenth-century theories of the Picturesque. (Wall text from the exhibition)

VALIE EXPORT (Austrian, b. 1940)
Encirclement
1976
Gelatin silver print
40.8 x 61cm (16 1/16 x 24 in.)
Promised Gift of Thea Westreich and Ethan Wagner
© VALIE EXPORT, Courtesy Charim Gallery Vienna

Doug Aitken (American, b. 1968)
Passenger
1997
Chromogenic print
100.5 x 122cm (39 9/16 x 48 1/16 in.)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Alfred Stieglitz Society Gifts, 2004
© Doug Aitken

Aitken is best known for multiscreen video installations exploring the ways in which perception and consciousness are transformed by our global, technology-driven existence. Passenger belongs to a group of still photographs made in 1997 showing planes in flight, most of which focus on the faint traceries of takeoffs and landings over desolate airport landscapes. In its emphasis on luminosity and atmosphere, this example reveals Aitken’s debt to older California artists such as James Turrell and Robert Irwin. It is also unabashedly sensual: Aitken’s high production values – reminiscent of Technicolor cinematography and glossy advertising – refer directly to the media images that unavoidably condition our responses to the world.

There is something of the sublime in Aitken’s photograph, however, in that it describes the limits of the visible while flooding the eye with colour. Starting from an experience familiar to all air travellers of “two ships passing” in the ether, the artist proposes a more complex statement about the way we perceive reality – namely, that the one thing that we cannot see is ourselves seeing and thus that our understanding of the world is always partial and incomplete. (Wall text from the exhibition)

Themes of dislocation and displacement in contemporary photography will be explored in The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s forthcoming exhibition in the Joyce and Robert Menschel Hall for Modern Photography. Drawn almost entirely from the Museum’s collection, Between Here and There: Passages in Contemporary Photography on view July 2, 2010 through February 13, 2011, will feature 22 artists whose photographic works convey a sense of a rootless or unfixed existence.

In the 1960s and 1970s, photography was often embraced by artists who had abandoned conventional art media and who were more interested in creating a work of art that took place over a period of time, in a serial progression, or in a fleeting gesture. The individual painting or sculpture was deemed insufficient to represent the fragmented experience that characterises the modern world; thus artists showed how a work of art could take the form of a walk (Richard Long), a 20-foot-long book (Ed Ruscha), or a series of postcards outlining the precise time that the artist got up each day (On Kawara). Since the 1980s, however, the more conventional practice of creating a carefully executed, singular photograph has regained prominence in contemporary art. Works by Rineke Dijkstra, Thomas Struth, and Weng Fen embody a belief in photography’s traditional powers of description, while reflecting feelings of dislocation in our newly global society.

The exhibition also will include works by: Vito Acconci, Doug Aitken, Darren Almond, Lothar Baumgarten, Matthew Buckingham, VALIE EXPORT, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Svetlana Kopystiansky, Bruce Nauman, Dennis Oppenheim, Allen Ruppersberg, Fazal Sheikh, Erin Shirreff, Robert Smithson, Anne Turyn, and Jeff Wall.

The first half of the exhibition shows how artists in 1960s and 1970s, working in the context of Minimal and Conceptual art, were drawn to photography for its differences from traditional art media: it was low-tech, easily reproducible, and not considered a valuable art object. Photography was also enlisted to document ephemeral works of art. Bruce Nauman and Vito Acconci, for instance, created performances that focused on the actions and movements of their bodies in space, and captured these works in photographs and videos.

Other artists, such as Robert Smithson, chose to work directly in the landscape – often in distant or inaccessible locations – and their “Earthworks” could generally be seen only through photographs. Smithson is best known for his landmark Spiral Jetty (1970) in the Great Salt Lake, Utah. For an early experiment in his Mirror Displacements series of photographs, Smithson placed small mirrors into snow drifts on the roof of his apartment building. Through dizzying shifts in scale, the artist’s 1969 study transforms a corner of his Manhattan roof into an Alpine landscape.

A student of Anthony Caro, British artist Richard Long was well versed in the reductive quality of geometric abstraction, but sought to make his works even more simple and wedded to life. He would go for solitary walks in the countryside, and at a particular place he would create elemental forms such as a line, X, or circle by walking over the ground to leave a temporary imprint. Long’s photograph County Cork, Ireland (1967) – in which a circle seems to hover over the grass like a flying saucer – is thus an imprint of an imprint, creating a holistic relationship between the concept, the action of the body, and the site of his gesture.

For her series Body Configurations, the Austrian artist VALIE EXPORT had herself and female colleagues photographed in local streets, as they contorted their bodies to mimic the harsh geometries of the city. Encirclement (1976) shows a woman lying in the street, her body elongated and arched to follow the bright red curve the sidewalk. The photograph reintroduces the human body into abstraction in an intimate yet public gesture.

Beginning in the 1980s, there was a renewed interest in photography’s historical genres and recommitment to technical skill and visual fidelity, as seen in Rineke Dijkstra’s portraits. Geopolitical displacement and cultural migration are referenced in one of Dijkstra’s most important bodies of work to date: her photographs of a Bosnian refugee girl, Almerisa. Between Here and There will feature four portraits of Almerisa that Dijkstra made between 1994 and 2000, beginning at an asylum seekers’ center in the Netherlands. Eight photographs from this series of 11 works were acquired recently by the Museum.

In both photographs and films, Doug Aitken explores the ways in which perception is transformed by our global, technology-driven existence. Aitken’s photograph Passenger (1997), taken from the window of an airplane in flight, shows another plane flying in parallel in the remote distance, illuminated by the sun setting on a slanted horizon. Aitken references sensations of being adrift in mid-air and of “two ships passing” – paths that do not quite connect, despite their proximity to each other.

Chinese artist Weng Fen explores a young generation poised at a transitional moment between China’s traditional rural society and a quickly burgeoning urbanism. Bird’s Eye View: Haikou V (2002) shows a woman – perhaps an outsider or a new arrival to the city – perched on an old wall, looking toward the new skyscrapers on the horizon, but not fully occupying the space of the past or the future. This work is part of a group of recent gifts and promised gifts of contemporary Chinese photographs to the Museum.

The exhibition comes full circle with a recently acquired video by Erin Shirreff. Roden Crater (2009) takes as its subject artist James Turrell’s legendarily inaccessible and still unfinished celestial observatory carved out of a 400,000-year-old extinct volcano. Shirreff’s mesmerising fixed-camera view of the distant “Earthwork” shows an improbable succession of slow-moving climactic and light effects on the crater, creating a haunting meditation on the never-ending quest for resolution in life and in art.

Between Here and There: Passages in Contemporary Photography is organised by Douglas Eklund, Associate Curator in the Department of Photographs.”

Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Jeff Wall (Canadian, b. 1946)
Rainfilled Suitcase
2001
Transparency in light box
Collection of Jennifer Saul and Stephen Rich, New York
© Jeff Wall

Wall’s tableaux straddle the worlds of the museum and the street. For the last three decades, the artist has created elaborately staged and meticulously rendered scenes of urban and suburban conflict and disorder that he witnessed firsthand, which were then shown as colour transparencies in light boxes reminiscent of backlit advertising images seen in airports and bus stops. About 2000, Wall also began to make smaller, more elliptical photographs – isolating the kinds of details that previously would have been seen in the background of his larger, more programmatic pictures. This grimy half of an abandoned suitcase filled with old clothes and rain seems paradoxically to be both as obsessively arranged as a still life and as randomly disordered as the average flotsam and jetsam on any down-and-out street corner.

Wall text from the exhibition

Matthew Buckingham (American, b. 1963)
Canal St. Canal No. 3
2002
Chromogenic prints
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Vital Projects Fund Inc. Gift, through Joyce and
Robert Menschel, 2010
© Matthew Buckingham

This is the maquette for a postcard that the artist created for the group show “Nostalgia.” The postcard was sold in the shops along Canal Street accompanied by the following text beneath the image:

ABOVE: a section of Canal Street as it might look today if a 1791 proposal to build a “Venetian-style” canal connecting the Hudson and East Rivers across Lower Manhattan had been realised. The canal and an accompanying commercial harbour were meant to replace both a small stream which ran along present-day Canal Street, and the so-called Fresh Water or Collect Pond, a befouled 70-acre swamp that one New York newspaper of the day called a “shocking hole.” Instead, real-estate interests prevailed, and the stream was widened only enough to drain the pool so it could be filled in and developed. Many basements of new buildings on the landfill soon flooded, so the stream was further enlarged to increase drainage – making it, in effect, an open sewer. After much complaint about odour, and despite efforts to beautify the waterway with a tree-lined promenade, it was covered over in 1819. Flaws in this re-design kept Canal Street smelling foul for years. It is rumoured that the natural spring which once fed the Fresh Water Pond still flows deep below Canal Street today.*

Wall text from the exhibition

*Luc Sante defines nostalgia as a state of inarticulate contempt for the present combined with a fear of the future.

Weng Fen (Chinese, b. 1961)
Bird’s Eye View: Haikou V
2002
Chromogenic print
50 x 62.7cm (19 11/16 x 24 11/16 in.)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Ellie Warsh, 2009
© Weng Fen

Weng Fen belongs to a generation of Chinese photographers whose principal subject is a China in the throes of physical, social, economic, and political change. His Bird’s Eye View series focuses on the elevated urbanism of cities such as Haikou, Shanghai, and Shenzhen. Many of these photographs feature schoolgirls with their backs to the camera, perched on a wall or precipice, staring at the landscape – adolescent figures on the threshold of personal transition looking out onto a landscape and a culture at a similarly transformational moment.

Wall text from the exhibition

Rineke Dijkstra (Dutch, b. 1959)
Almerisa, Asylum Seekers’ Center, Leiden, The Netherlands, March 14, 1994
1994
Chromogenic print
120 x 100cm (47 1/4 x 39 3/8 in)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Ellen Kern, 2008
© Rineke Dijkstra

Dijkstra is best known for her portraits of teenage beachgoers in Poland, Croatia, the Ukraine, Belgium, England, and America, which convey the poignant intensity of adolescence with startling eloquence. In all her work, she is particularly drawn to subjects in a state of transition – blood-spattered matadors just minutes after bullfights, women cradling their newborns moments after delivery – and renders them with respect, attentiveness, and compassion.

Between 1994 and 2008 Dijkstra made eleven photographs of a Bosnian refugee girl named Almerisa, from her initial processing at an asylum seekers’ center in the Netherlands to her fully Westernised adulthood and motherhood. Here, the imprint of geopolitical displacement is rendered without cant and that of childhood is captured without nostalgia. Like all great portraitists, Dijkstra extracts an elemental, almost mythic quality from the irreducible individuality of her subject – of the eternal radiating from the everyday. This selection is from a recent gift to the Metropolitan of eight of the eleven portraits of Almerisa.

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

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

The Metropolitan Museum of Art website

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Dr Marcus Bunyan is an Australian artist and writer. His art work explores the boundaries of identity and place. He writes Art Blart, an art and cultural memory archive, which posts mainly photography exhibitions from around the world. He holds a Doctor of Philosophy from RMIT University, Melbourne, a Master of Arts (Fine Art Photography) from RMIT University, and a Master of Art Curatorship from the University of Melbourne.