Unidentified Photographer, [Part of the crowd near the Drill Hall on the opening day of the Treason Trial], December 19, 1956. Times Media Collection, Museum Africa, Johannesburg.

We must return to the point from which we started: not a return to the longing for origins, to some immutable state of Being, but a return to the point of entanglement…

                                                          Edouard Glissant, “The Known, the Uncertain”

This Glissant quote makes an appearance in Sarah Nuttall’s superb book Entanglements, an examination of contemporary art and literature in South Africa. The blurb on the book jacket fittingly describes Nuttall’s text as an “exploration of post-apartheid South African life worlds.” Committed to illuminating the complex strands of difference and sameness, violence, victimhood and resistance entangling all of her fellow citizens in their web, the author explores a rocky terrain of communication, misunderstanding and mutuality that reveals itself even to transient visitors of this intensely creative nation. My own 2009 visit to South Africa – thanks to an invitation from the Roger Ballen Foundation – was, I must admit, one of the high points of my intellectual life. While participating in a two-day seminar at Wits University with artists, curators, critics and intellectuals from Jo’burg and Cape Town, I was privileged to enter into a profound exchange about the nature and responsibilities of culture. Engaging in an open-ended, dynamic and rich dialogue committed to “returning to the point of entanglement,” the participants were intent on forging an artistic and political future not framed by what Nuttall calls a “persistent apartheid optic.”

This was, and is, a tall order, and a continuing quest. I’m happy to report that another stage in the ongoing discussion is taking place right now in New York City, in the form of two major exhibitions at the Walther Collection and the International Center of Photography. As I mentioned, when visiting Johannesburg I was grateful to participate in a workshop with people who, while living in a social and political environment that continues to be impossibly difficult, try every day to confront and express their problems directly, head on, instead of relying on “persistent optics” or tired ideologies. The complexity of approach that arises from such an intense commitment is evident in both exhibits, albeit in different ways. Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive, curated by Tamar Garb for the Walther Collection, will ultimately be a three part show. On view now, in Part One, are works by Santu Mofokeng and A.M. Duggan-Cronin. Garb sees the African archive as “a contested compilation and collection of artifacts and representations that have accrued over time, and that are open to scrutiny and examination by a new generation of artists and viewers for whom the colonial orthodoxies and truisms that led to its creation are no longer operative or true.” The “contested” part of this assertion becomes clear in the juxtaposition of these two projects, as well as these two exhibitions. A.M. Duggan-Cronin’s Bantu Tribes of South Africa, an 11-volume study published between 1928 and 1954, visualizes an ethnographic vision of indigenous tribes, frozen in an “immutable state of Being” in traditional costumes and ennobled poses in barren and empty landscapes. Hovering somewhere between proud African types and demeaning stereotypes of aboriginal people (depending on your point of view), these Bantu tribes were presented by Duggan-Cronin as representative of an authentic and timeless Africa even as the political struggle for and against apartheid wracked the urban centers of the nation – a struggle extensively described in The Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life, curated by Okwui Enwezor with Rory Bester, on display concurrently at ICP.

A. M. Duggan-Cronin (1874-1954), Ovambo (Ogandjera) Woman, 1936. Courtesy of The Walther Collection

In other words, two distinct South African temporalities are on view in New York: the one, the stasis of the noble black savage who exists in an eternally retrospective state and the other, the quick tempo of enraged and embattled denizens trapped in a modern bureaucratic state that systematically dismantled their human rights after 1948. But even within the Walther exhibition alone, the definition and depiction of what it means to be an African is “at stake,” as Marta Gili would say. Sharing the space with Duggan-Cronin’s project is Santu Mofokeng’s The Black Photo Album: Look at Me, created as a slide show in 1997 (and shown recently at the Jeu de Paume as part of his retrospective exhibition). The pictures (shown in 3 versions: as slides, as the silver gelatin exhibition prints Mofokeng produced from the deteriorating originals, a few of which are also in the gallery) are part of the artist’s personal collection, salvaged from the albums and drawing rooms of neighbors and acquaintances and researched to identify sitters who posed for studio photographers between 1890 and 1950. Co-extensive with Duggan-Cronin’s project (as well as the early days of apartheid), these pictures represent the original studio portraits commissioned, paid for and preserved by Africans who envisioned their ideal selves in modern European-style dress and fancy hats.

Santu Mofokeng, “The Black Photo Album / Look at Me: 1890-1950,” 1997 (Unidentified photographer, South Africa, early twentieth century) © Santu Mofokeng / Courtesy of The Walther Collection and Lunetta Bartz, MAKER, Johannesburg

My colleague Dr. Jennifer Bajorek, who has contributed to this blog and who lectured in conjunction with the exhibition, told her audience that when Mofokeng showed his personal works (black and white documentary pictures describing township life, religion  and land, some of which are simultaneously on view at ICP), his subjects did not like them at all. He began collecting The Black Photo Album pictures in order to discover what types of images his neighbors in fact preferred, and thereafter only exhibited his own photographs interspersed with ones that had been commissioned by people in his community. The differences in the depictions are obvious, of course, but so are the time warps built into the project. Multiple temporalities converge when the records of the original sittings (represented by the faded original prints) jostle with the contemporary vision of an artist interrogating the meaning of his forebears’ photographic experience. Unmoored from personal albums and sequenced within the narrative of Mofokeng’s slide show, the portraits are interspersed with his queries and contestations:  “Are these images evidence of mental colonization or did they serve to challenge prevailing images of “The African” in the western world?” is one of them. Of course there is no answer to this question, the pictures represent neither and both and the question floats into an existential void. This is the complexity – and irresolution – of entanglement. When the viewer understands that the photographs describe distinct, sometimes contradictory “life worlds” co-existing within the same historical time and space, he or she begins to comprehend the hall of mirrors that is South Africa today.

The same dense interactions are evident in The Rise and Fall of Apartheid, although that exhibition gives them a completely different spin. Whereas Distance and Desire is spare and focused on two extended projects, Enwezor and Bester have organized an enormous exhibition with a cast of thousands. Though no one agreed on the precise number of pictures on the walls at the Press Preview, there are at least 500 photographs, which are accompanied by magazines, videos and “overtime” information available on computers in the galleries. At the Preview, Enwezor explained his interest, and excess, by explaining: “We’ve all looked at enough images of D-Day, I wanted people to see something else that was going on around the same time.” Central to the organization of the show is the theme of bureaucracy: the ways in which this horrific system of government was “normalized” within the society through laws, paper trails, housing, transportation and entitlements. Photographic evidence describes how populations forced to live in this increasingly oppressive nightmare internalized (or not) their roles — and developed methods for either maintaining the status quo or fighting back.

Gille de Vlieg, Coffins at the mass funeral held in KwaThema, Gauteng, July 23, 1985. © Gille de Vlieg.

The show is divided into two parts. On the upper level of the museum, the viewer can follow the history of apartheid from 1948 (with the victory of the Afrikaner National Party) until 1994 (the rise of Nelson Mandela). Here we see many, mostly black-and-white documentary photos, accompanied by texts and time lines as well as videos and magazines. The vast majority of the pictures were taken by South African photographers like Peter Magubane, Jurgen Schadeberg and Ernest Cole, but there are also some by outsiders like Margaret Bourke-White and Dan Wiener. The downstairs space focuses mainly on artistic expression, on the responses of creative image-makers to this system of injustice. On display are works by South Africans like Sue Williamson, Jo Ractliffe, Guy Tillim, William Kentridge, David Goldblatt and the collective Afrapix, as well as contributions by foreign supporters like Adrian Piper and Hans Haacke. One of the major premises of the exhibition is that during this historical period, photography was deliberately transformed by its practitioners into an active social instrument. So the duality of the exhibition, its highlighting of both documentary description and artistic interpretation (with lots of links and overlaps between them), is designed to emphasize the multifaceted usage of visual media during an intense period of political struggle.

Eli Weinberg, Nelson Mandela portrait wearing traditional beads and a bed spread. Hiding out from the police during his period as the “black pimpernel,” 1961. Courtesy of IDAFSA.

Another level of intricacy, however, is evident in the choice of subjects covered in the show. Enwezor has made no secret over the years of his disdain for the “persistent optic” of Afro-pessimism: the media’s insistence on seeing the continent and its inhabitants as unmitigated disasters, mired only in violence, poverty and corruption. This exhibition gives a much more nuanced picture of daily life under apartheid, and both blacks and whites are visualized in multiple ways that are not exclusively political. Along with documentary records of government meetings and political figures, protests, violent encounters and hardship, there are pictures of everyday life in both the African and the Afrikaner communities: living conditions, education, religion, parties, music (Miriam Makeba!) and magazines like Drum. Though separate within the context of the show (and the apartheid system), these social manifestations have an equivalent weight here. Their presence does not allow any South African, black or white, to become “stuck” in the political stereotype of victim or aggressor. From Nelson Mandela and the thrill of victory in the 1990s, to the disappointment of the current social malaises and divides expressed by young photographers, we are left not with a fairy tale but with a complicated evolution of many intertwined histories: their triumphs and failures, their possibilities and disappointments as well as their aftershocks and legacies.

Life Worlds will be the last article in my series for the Jeu de Paume. As I said during the video interview posted in the museum’s online magazine, I accepted Marta Gili’s challenge in order to revitalize the language of my contemporary responses to global art. During my travels, I’ve met no people more committed to the complexities of this language than South Africans. As I say goodbye to the Blog and its readers, I am pleased that these artists and writers are front and center. My hat is off to them for all they’ve taught me – and all they continue to teach me in exhibitions like these, enriched with insight about every “entangled” contemporary society wrestling with difficult questions that have few, if any, easy answers.

© Shelley Rice 2012

By the way, after publishing this Post I received at least five phone calls and letters suggesting that I see the movie “Searching for Sugarman.” My friends and students were right: don’t miss it. The story — about a Mexican-American singer unknown in my country and a rock star in South Africa for decades — is incredible.

L’article « Life Worlds » by Shelley Rice est apparu en premier sur Shelley Rice.

Paul Robeson Rutgers Football Team c. 1917. Daily Worker/Daily World Photographs Collection, Tamiment Library, New York University. May not be republished without the consent of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA).

« The View From Left Field »
on view in the Department of Photography & Imaging
New York University
721 Broadway, 8th floor
New York, USA
September 4 – November 17, 2012
Opening Reception – September 14, 5 – 7 PM

This Blog Post is an adaptation of the wall text and a sampling of photographs from an exhibition on view in the New York University Department of Photography and Imaging Galleries from September 4 through November 17. All photographs are from the Daily Worker/Daily World Photographs Collection, part of the archives of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) at New York University’s Tamiment Library. These photos may not be republished without the consent of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA).

The View from Left Field was the name of a sports page of the Daily Worker, the official newspaper of the American Communist Party. New York University’s Tamiment Library, under the direction of Mike Nash, acquired the archives of the Party in 2006. Included in this acquisition, among the records, documents and publications that date from the 1910s to the end of the 20^th century, was the photo morgue of both the Daily Worker and its successor, The People’s Daily World. The estimated 500,000 images in the morgue, filed away in boxes with written documents and currently being digitized for use by the public, include approximately 25,000 prints, 85,000 negatives and 165,000 wire service images, as well as 25 boxes of large format photographs produced for display purposes. The Worker and World photograph morgue and the larger Communist Party archive are widely recognized as a nationally important collection, certainly the most important that the Tamiment Library has acquired in the past 25 years.

Far Eastern Whaler Alexei Glagoley Rests in a Finback Whale’s Mandible by Yu. Muravin/Fotokhronika, TASS 1960. Daily Worker/Daily World Photographs Collection, Tamiment Library, New York University. May not be republished without the consent of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA).

One of the most significant special collections in the United States documenting the history of the American Left and the labor movement, the Tamiment Library substantially enhanced its visual holdings with the addition of this repository of images documenting Communist Party history, the Cold War and all of the 20^th century movements for progressive social change that shaped American society. The original photography in the archive represents the work of staff and freelance photographers associated with the newspapers. Documentary images, they depict people at work, social conditions, factories, strikes, parades, farms, fields, struggles for civil rights and liberties, wars and revolutions. The fight for racial equality, whether by Paul Robeson, soldiers in the Spanish Civil War, or baseball players in America, runs throughout the visual narrative. Images of Soviet society and conditions in Eastern Europe during the 20^thcentury, rarely seen by Western audiences, are also an important component of the archive.

Czech Miners Receiving UV Treatment during the Winter Months, n.d.. Daily Worker/Daily World Photographs Collection, Tamiment Library, New York University. May not be republished without the consent of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA).

Throughout the Fall 2011 semester, students in my Toward a Critical Vocabulary seminar systematically examined a selection of 12-14 boxes randomly pulled for this purpose by Michael Nash. Each box has one or more themes, whether that is the Vietnam War, agriculture in Czechoslovakia, May Day Parades, student protests, sports heroes or the Civil Rights Movement, and that theme is developed in folders filled with both photographs and printed, handwritten or typed documents. The students’ goal was to select images of exceptional interest – in form and/or content — that could be scanned, printed and exhibited in the 719 Broadway Gallery of the Photography and Imaging Department of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. After choosing the pictures, the students worked on related research papers with Professor Nash, who filled them in not only on 20^thcentury history but also on the ideology of the party, thus helping them to understand the complex social history behind the images taken, collected and ultimately selected for publication in the Party’s newspapers.

Anti-Vietnam War Paris Protests May 1972. Daily Worker/Daily World Photographs Collection, Tamiment Library, New York University. May not be republished without the consent of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA).

This is, in other words, a project designed as a learning experience. It is not the definitive research exhibit on this material. It is a student sampling of available resources, an assemblage of amazingly interesting and relevant pictures, and not a comprehensive survey of the Tamiment’s archive. There are notable subjects missing from this show that are, of course, part of the library’s collection: pictures of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, records of major union strikes, demonstrations and negotiations of the 20^th century and documents of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade that fought against Franco during the Spanish Civil War, among them. Students worked with and studied the material Nash chose for them, and often made decisions based on visual rather than strictly chronological or historical criteria. They were impressed with the quality of the images, and disturbed by something else that was missing: the lack of attribution. These pictures might have been taken by members of the Photo League who worked free-lance for the Daily Worker, or unknown talents, or perhaps by known artists and photojournalists living in New York at the time — but until we study this further we will never know. Much more research needs to be done to establish authorship, and this exhibition is designed to both celebrate wonderful material and to stimulate continued engagement.

Iranian Basiji Woman Shoulders a Russian-made Rocket Launcher during Woman’s Day in Shiroudi Stadium, Tehran, Nov. 1987. Daily Worker/Daily World Photographs Collection, Tamiment Library, New York University. May not be republished without the consent of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA).

Since The View from Left Field is being shown in a Photography Department Gallery, my colleagues wanted the exhibited images to look their best. All of the original pictures were, therefore, beautifully scanned and reprinted by Jonno Rattman, a student in the class, and then matted and framed by Karl Peterson and the rest of the gallery staff. Needless to say, this is not how the “working” photographs look in the Daily Worker archive. There they are of diverse sizes and materials; technically, they run the gamut and are in wildly variable conditions. Some are original black and white prints, some are post cards, some are wire service transmissions or clippings from other newspapers and many are torn or faded or covered with publishing marks. As a historian, I personally prefer to see the pictures in their “real” rather than their “ideal” state, so we have compromised, and composed an archival e-book of the original images, front and back, with their captions and marks, to accompany the show. This makes it possible for historical researchers to get a better sense of the actual state of images now stored in folders and boxes.

We are hoping that this sampling of what I call “the world in a box” will help to inform photographers, the NYU community, historians and the general public about the archival treasures stashed away in the university’s library, a major resource soon to be made available online. The study of this collection will add a lot to our understanding of photographic history, American history, the history of journalism, and international relations (among other things), and it is a visual feast chock full of information about the daily lives of humans on earth during both the quiet and the tumultuous moments of the 20^thcentury.

Shelley Rice’s Students in the Tamiment Library CPA Archive, Fall 2011, photo by Shelley Rice

The View From Left Field is dedicated to the memory of Michael Nash, who left us in July 2012. He didn’t make it to the opening he was so anticipating, but we know he is with us in spirit.

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All rights reserved: Grasset

This is a Post-Card from Paris. I’m sitting in an apartment rented from a friend on the Left Bank and reading yet another book purchased at La Hune. (The French publishing industry anticipates an economic upturn the minute I arrive in town.) This time the book is Anne Sinclair’s 21, rue La Boétie (Bernard Grasset, Paris, 2012), a memoir chronicling her research into the history of her family and especially her grandfather, the famous art dealer Paul Rosenberg. Interweaving family stories with political atrocities and deceptions, Sinclair describes the lives and relationships of gallery artists and the fate of their works under (and after) the Nazi occupation. Rosenberg’s fight to preserve his family, his collection and his business interests under impossible circumstances is set against personal stories of war, exile, disappointment and love. Sinclair is a clear, impassioned writer and an experienced journalist, so her cautionary tales of prejudice, cruelty and deceit keep wiggling out of the past tense and surfacing into the murky political waters of the present.

A historian of modern art first and foremost, I am of course interested in the subject of Sinclair’s book, especially since Rosenberg’s influence as an art dealer — of Picasso, Braque and Matisse, among others — spanned two continents and substantially impacted taste, the market and collections in the United States. A champion of the continuity between the past and the present, historical masters and the avant-garde, he fought to establish contemporary art in the highest precincts of American culture. His presence in New York after 1940, of course, was not simply a life style choice, but an imperative dictated by the murderous anti-Semitism of the era. This same imperative dictated that Sinclair would be born of French parents not in Paris but in the Big Apple, a few years after the end of the war and a few years before me.

My family arrived at Ellis Island from Europe — Eastern Europe, mainly Romania it seems — a long time ago (in American terms, which means the 19th century). All four of my grandparents were born in the United States, making me the Jewish equivalent of a Native American, or a Daughter of the American Revolution. By the time I was born in the Bronx, the family history beyond the Port of New York was fuzzy indeed — though ironically it was a famous Jewish art dealer who provided me with much additional information when I was in my late 20s. While I was studying art history, Leonard Hutton was revered for his collection of German Expressionist and Russian Revolutionary paintings. I spent a lot of time in his gallery on the Upper East Side of Manhattan during my student days, not yet aware of his personal history or our family ties. Hutton was born Leonard Hutschnecker in Germany. Like Paul Rosenberg, he too fled Hitler, and arrived in New York Harbor in the 1940s with a minimum of money, no friends and nowhere to stay. Thinking fast, he grabbed a phone book, and found only one Hutschnecker listed in the whole city. He called that number, explained his problem, and asked if perhaps the New York Hutschneckers might be willing to help him get started since the odds were that they were his relatives. The family in question agreed, and helped him get settled in America. He, in turn, swore he would construct a geneology, a family tree to honor everyone from the bloodline that had saved his life.

Which is, oddly, where I come in to this story. I was reading an article in the New York Times one day during the late 1970s; it was about Arnold Hutschnecker, a famous psychiatrist who treated, among others, Richard Nixon. My maiden name was Shelley Hutch, but my father was born Harold Hutschnecker. He changed his name to Hutch before his marriage, around the same time (and for the same reason) that Anne Sinclair’s father changed his name from Schwartz to Sinclair. Seeing the article about Richard Hutschnecker, I had exactly the same impulse as Leonard had years before. I called the psychiatrist’s office, and announced that I certainly must be his relative. To my shock, the nurse called the famous doctor to the phone and he arrived breathless, saying he had in fact been waiting to hear from me. He and his brother knew my grandfather, and knew about my father. They had been hoping that they would be able to learn more about — and meet — the latest generation of the Hutch family. But, Richard said, he wasn’t the one who kept the records of the family — I really needed to call his brother, the art dealer Leonard Hutton! He told me that Leonard would be thrilled to hear from me. My visit would allow him to fill in the gaps left in the family archive.

So in the late 1970s my family expanded to include the amazing (and now deceased) Leonard Hutton Hutschnecker (along with his wife Ingrid), who around that time had decided to re-adopt the family name shed during and after World War II. Indeed, it was true, Leonard had kept his promise: he had constructed a huge family tree, tracing Hutschneckers all over the world, as far as Russia, Switzerland and even South Africa. He was thrilled but not surprised to have found an art critic in the family. At the time I was writing columns for newspapers like the Village Voice and magazines like Artforum under the married name I still use. Considering that everyone else in my immediate family was an accountant, I seemed like a black sheep. But in the family as a whole, the global family, creative people (especially theatre people and interior designers) have predominated. What a relief!

I am recounting this story not only because it is a good one but also to make clear — yet again, and in a personal way — the tremendous impact the Nazis and the Second World War had on the circulation and the future of art, artists and intellectuals. This is precisely the general theme of Sinclair’s enlightening book, the tight lines between the personal, the cultural and the political, and the ways in which these various threads continue to surface (for better or worse) in contemporary life. She is strongest on her family history, and in describing (and sometimes questioning) her grandfather’s efforts on behalf of art, artists and social justice; she is weakest when discussing New York and its cultural history, which Rosenberg entered in mid-stream, hardly a pioneer. Picasso was shown in the city by Alfred Stieglitz before the Armory Show of 1913 and World War I; he didn’t need to wait for Paul Rosenberg to give him his first exhibition in the Big Apple around the middle of the 20th century, even though Sinclair’s grandfather certainly helped to solidify the European modernists’ acceptance and placement in major institutions and collections. This is one of the curious anomalies of the new book. As she admits, Anne Sinclair initially saw New York through the eyes of a child. In 21, rue La Boétie, she has attempted to retain her youthful enchantment with the city while telling a very grown-up story — a balancing act that doesn’t always ring true, especially since she herself mentions the ordeal of 2011, when her husband DSK had no choice but to remain in NYC while officials decided whether to pursue (eventually abandoned) criminal charges against him for the sexual assault of a hotel maid.

It must be said that much of my knowledge of Anne Sinclair, ironically, dates from this period, when television newscasts showed nightly images of the couple bombarded by reporters on the street when they dared to venture outside of their Tribeca townhouse. That image of her — as stoic and supportive wife — needed some fleshing out, with information about her professional accomplishments and her distinguished lineage, which is why I bought this book in the first place. But I must confess that my initial motivation for writing a Blog post was more concrete and more immediate than these intellectual concerns. I became obsessed by the black and white photograph of the young Sinclair and her grandfather printed on the cover of this memoir. In the picture, Anne is perhaps four years old. Facing the camera in what seems to be a park, she is holding the kind of bucket used in a sandbox and grasping her grandpa’s hand. And, most important for me: she is the spitting image of me in a number of family photographs retrieved from my parents’ haphazard archives and scrapbooks. A cute, chubby cheeked and dark haired girl, she is wearing the same coat and the same beret I wore as a child.

Shelley Rice, 1950s, photo by Harold Hutch

For some reason, this fashion coincidence freaked me out. It was as if I was suddenly faced with a mirror image. The repetitiveness of family snapshots, their conventional structure and style, hit home even across the Atlantic. The shock of recognition, in fact, was almost Barthesian: the photo confronted me head on with what Roland Barthes called the madness of history. There’s a section in Camera Lucida where the author talks about “history” being the time when his mother lived before he was born, without him. Whereas this “historical” time was a void for Barthes, I had the opposite reaction to Sinclair’s image. A plenitude of historical details flooded into my head when I realized the implications of this family snapshot. I don’t know this person, she is French and living a very different life from mine. So how is it that she is wearing my coat, and why do we look so much alike?

It took me a while to realize that while we inhabit different worlds today, by accidents of history Anne Sinclair and I were two well-dressed Jewish girls about the same age during the same historical moment (the early 1950s) in New York City. We surely played in the same parks, perhaps even in the same sandboxes, and obviously both of our families bought into the vogue for safeguarding family memories in snapshots made simple by new technologies. And yes, I probably am not imagining it, our mothers could easily have purchased nearly identical coats for their young (and pampered) daughters. My coat, as I recall, was slightly fuller at the bottom, but the wool tweed and the collar were absolutely the same, and I can never forget that great hat (which I must admit looks as cute on her as it did on me). In the years after this picture was taken, Sinclair would, of course, go back to Paris and make a name and a life for herself in France, while I would do the same in the Big Apple, and there this story might have ended. But the photograph grabbed my attention, and made clear connecting links buried in time, space and family archives — as well as in the annals of commerce. For my mother only bought coats at Russeks, the now defunct Fifth Avenue store owned by the Nemerovs, the family of Diane Arbus. If we did, in fact, wear similar coats, perhaps the Sinclairs shopped there too. It is, indeed, a very small world.

© Shelley Rice 2012

L’article “Anne Sinclair, Diane Arbus and Me” By Shelley Rice est apparu en premier sur Shelley Rice.

"Life in the Panopticon" Photo © PEN American Center/Susan Horgan. All rights reserved.

This year marked the eighth annual World Voices Festival of International Literature, sponsored by PEN America. The Festival was held in venues all around New York City – in libraries, universities, galleries, museums, cafes, poetry clubs, bookstores and concert halls – from April 30 to May 6. I’ve been a member of PEN for at least twenty years, and the organization is one of my favorites; I am proud to be part of this community. Obviously, sharing membership with famous writers like Paul Auster, E.L. Doctorow and Joan Didion is good for the ego, but that’s not really the point. Founded 90 years ago, PEN has branches in 101 different countries, and it takes its mission very seriously. This is precisely why I wanted to devote some space on this blog to the issues that are always raised at PEN meetings, conferences or events where American writers debate, passionately and continuously, the relationship between art and life.

Susan Sontag, who was President of PEN/America, served for years as the public face of the national organization’s commitment to political as well as literary issues. PEN is a watchdog for freedom of expression, and assumes responsibility for the welfare of writers at home and abroad. The organization intervenes globally in cases where authors are imprisoned or suppressed; it has been active in promoting controversial figures for international prizes, and gaining recognition for people writing under conditions of hardship and censorship. Recently, in the New York branch, there has been outreach toward local communities where reading and writing skills are disadvantaged; published authors work with children and adults to promote the telling of tales coming from diverse cultural points of view. The multifaceted relationships between aesthetics and ideology are always hotly debated topics at PEN gatherings, but they’ve been especially pertinent since the attacks of September 11, 2001. The destruction of the World Trade Center forced writers in the USA to re-examine their political responsibilities, and it also pushed PEN to redefine its understanding of the functions of literature. The PEN World Voices Festival was one of the first and most important responses to our collective trauma.

It became clear to everyone, after that day, that American writers had been living in a bubble of isolation, and by 2003 we were becoming increasingly cut off from artists in other parts of the world because of new political realities. The World Voices Festival was established, first and foremost, to reverse this situation by inviting authors from many countries to New York City, showcasing their work, and asking them to interact not only with their American colleagues but also with a large public. Every year there are invited writers who are denied visas, either by their home country or by the US government; every year the organization attempts to diplomatically work out some kind of an arrangement that will make outreach possible. In a similar vein, about ten years ago, PEN decided to place more emphasis on its translation program. It scouts books from all over the world, and gives translation grants that make possible the publication of writings – essays, novels, poems, shorts stories or non-fiction books — coming from countries like Tibet and Iraq as well as national groups like Native Americans. These translations, and the issues surrounding them, play a major role in the World Voices Festival too.

All of this is intended as backdrop to my main point: that the American chapter of PEN has managed to use literature as a way to bring people together, and to ensure that diverse voices – national or international – are heard. Most important, this outreach in itself is perceived as a political act, regardless of the content of the book or poem. Left wing or right wing, politically correct, incorrect or apolitical, writers have a right to be heard and all people must be free to “speak.” The diverse languages and literary traditions that make writing so much less portable than art – visual imagery can of course be more universally understood as it moves from festival to fair, from book to blog, from temporary exhibition to museum than a book written in an unintelligible tongue – have forced writers to think deeply about their social obligations to communicate. Rather than simply critique institutions for their myopia and their closed canons, PEN has decided to open up the floodgates and let the party begin. “In the course of our eight year history, we hope that our mission has become clear: we seek to present the best of national and international literature and by so doing we adamantly focus on reinforcing the importance of the premise that freedom of expression is the foundation of meaningful existence and the essence of brave and great art,” wrote Laszlo Jakab Orsos (Director of the Festival), Salman Rushdie (Chair) and Peter Godwin, President of PEN.

I must admit that this is my kind of politics. Though beautiful in principle, of course, the real question is: how does this utopian idea play out in the context of the festival, which ultimately is a bouillabaisse of meetings, readings, panels, dialogues, concerts and events aimed at expanding knowledge of international literature in the public sphere. Herta Muller, Nobel Prize winning Romanian novelist, was one of the main speakers, reiterating the address she gave in Stockholm upon accepting her award. Salman Rushdie gave the “Arthur Miller Freedom to Write” Lecture; Russian writer Ludmila Ulitskaya, Egyptian born journalist Mona Eltahaway, Irish poet Hugo Hamilton, Swiss writer Noelle Revaz and Japanese author Masatsugu Ono as well as writers from Harlem and the Black Arts Movement gave presentations. Former French Resistance fighter and renowned scholar Edgar Morin was scheduled to speak (but couldn’t make it at the last minute). The Dialogue series included long and excellent interviews with novelists Margaret Atwood and Jennifer Egan as well as playwright Tony Kushner, who was also a featured speaker at the oddest event of the Festival: the opening night at the Metropolitan Museum, which paired a concert by the Kronos Quartet with the words of Kushner, Iranian graphic novelist and filmmaker Marjane Sartrapi and Palestinian journalist Rula Jebreal. Intended to explore the relationships between music and words (there was, in fact, an entire day devoted to John Cage during the Festival too), the strange evening – during the course of which Jebreal complained about Mitt Romney’s politics, Satrapi rejected language and preferred to groove on the peak experience of being seated between an American Jew and a Palestinian in New York City, and only Tony Kushner created and read an amazing poem about loss and absence in time with the music – instead proved how trivial words (no matter how politically diverse and correct the speakers) seemed next to the brilliant “universal” language of the Kronos Quartet.

"The Kronos Quartet: Exit Strategies" Photo © PEN American Center/Beowulf Sheehan. All rights reserved.

All this being said, the Festival was interesting as it always is. The audience learned about Occupy Wall Street, life in the Panopticon, the impact of the digital world on storytelling, the Arab Spring and always, especially, the creative process of writing: whatever kind the writer might do. One thing that is particularly intriguing to me about PEN is that it does not discriminate for or against various kinds of writing. Playwrights, poets, journalists, graphic novelists, storytellers, translators, critics, essayists and non-fiction specialists (in the humanities as well as science and sports) are all part of the mix.  While Salman Rushdie might fill bigger auditoriums because of his novels, most writers do a number of different things, and while fiction might be a privileged medium within the organization there are still no divisions between “high” and “low” culture like those that exist in the art world (primarily, of course, because of elite venues and commodity prices.) Because these categories were on my mind that week, the experience of the Festival colored my response to the beautiful photographs by Tim Hetherington on view  at Yossi Milo Gallery in Chelsea at the same time.

Tim Hetherington, "Untitled, Liberia", 2005 Digital C-print © Tim Hetherington, Courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York

Hetherington, of course, was a photojournalist, born in Liverpool, who worked mostly in West Africa and the Middle East. He partnered with writers and filmmakers throughout his professional life, which ended tragically last year in Libya. The exhibition highlighted works from Liberia taken during the civil war in 2005 and others depicting American troops stationed in eastern Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley from 2007-8. Intensely focused on human beings in situations of extreme stress, the pictures capture a range of responses to grief, loss, love and betrayal. All of the photographs were originally made within a photojournalistic context, and Hetherington’s archive in fact became part of the Magnum collection after his death. But of course, in the White Box of an art gallery, the digital files he created (because, as he said, “with witnessing comes responsibility”) morph into large, beautiful C prints: the current gold standard of the art world. Transmuted in this way, the images captured by Hetherington – and shown here posthumously in the first major exhibition of Hetherington’s work in the United States — take their place within the “universal” language of art fairs, auctions, festivals and museums. The mobility of photography – its ability to rend both space and time portable – is here expanded by the malleability of the medium’s language, from a journalistic statement into an artistic one, even after the image-maker’s own death.

Tim Hetherington "Specialist Tad Donoho, Korengal Valley, Kunar Province, Afghanistan", 2008 Digital C-print © Tim Hetherington, Courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York

Certainly this is not the first time this transmutation has happened – in fact, such morphing between popular and high art is becoming a trend, as celebrated pictures by French photographer Luc Delahaye can attest. But of course the separation between these modes of communication – between journalistic and aesthetic expression – is something that was promoted by Alfred Stieglitz while establishing modern art in America at the turn of the last century. Intended as a means to separate populist art and mass communication from the elite expressions of his peers, the wall Stieglitz built was never acknowledged or emulated by Europeans. André Kertesz worked for magazines, and showed the same images in galleries; so did Henri Cartier-Bresson, Germaine Krull and others. Those of us in the photo world in the USA might just now be catching up to our European forebears, and to the writers and organizers of PEN.

Tim Hetherington "Untitled, Liberia", 2004 Digital C-print © Tim Hetherington, Courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York

The amazing Tony Kushner, who writes plays, screenplays, essays and poems, insisted during his “Dialogue” at the New School University that he doesn’t confuse art and politics, though he is active in both. Political activism, essay writing and theater are different methods, he asserted. “My power as an artist is an indirect power,” he stated, “The ideas in an art work are riddles that must have a corollary in the human. Theater and democracy both give the gift of empathy, and because of that they both build community.” By virtue of precisely that gift of empathy, the strength of the “human” so deeply perceived in Liberians and American soldiers alike, Tim Hetherington’s photographs, whatever their origins, have earned their place in the Yossi Milo Gallery and wherever else they may travel in the world of art.

Shelley Rice
© Shelley Rice, 2012.

L’article The 2012 PEN World Voices Festival: “Good Literature is Liberating” est apparu en premier sur Shelley Rice.

Paul Graham: "23rd Street, 2nd June 2011, 4.25.14 pm" Two pigment prints, each mounted to Dibond. Diptych from "The Present" © Paul Graham, 2012 Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery and The Pace Gallery, New York

Paul Graham, The Present (Pace Gallery and Pace/MacGill, February 24-April 21, 2012), by Shelley Rice

From my perspective, April 2012 was a momentous photo moment, in a quietly profound sort of way. On 22nd Street in Chelsea last month, there were two exhibitions – one at Pace Gallery by Paul Graham and one at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. by Mitch Epstein – that announced the opening of what Graham (recent winner of the 2012 Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography) has called “a space for photography to work in the world.” He obviously doesn’t mean this literally, since millions of amateurs walk the streets of the 21st century snapping pictures and photographs have all but dominated the art world in recent years. What he means is more subtle, and as I recall I first heard him talk about it at a MOMA Forum a few years ago. These MOMA Forums, first convened by Roxana Marcoci and her colleagues in the Photography Department in February 2010, are a valuable addition to the New York scene. Bringing together a lot of different kinds of people from the community about three times a year, the soirées encourage discussion and debate between artists old and young, curators and critics from the United States and abroad, educators and academics. The viewpoints that swirl around during the two hour Forum (and the informal receptions before and after) pinpoint the differences, similarities, goals and pet peeves of an increasingly diverse and global crowd. One division, however, has been especially clear, mainly because it was so deftly articulated during the early séances by Graham himself: the divergent approaches to the medium that define the practices of those whose formation was strictly photographic as opposed to those who came into the field through conceptual art, performance or postmodernist strategies.

There were, naturally, arguments about this division: younger curators especially seemed to think that such a divide was no longer relevant, while those of us who’ve been in the field for a while (and that does include me) are loathe to simply turn our backs on the classic history of photography in our rush to embrace more contemporary ways of working. But Graham, as I recall, was particularly eloquent that evening in his defense of tradition: the extraordinary power of what Edward Weston called “photographic seeing,” the expressive means invented and honed to perfection by image-makers like Robert Frank, Harry Callahan, Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander. An old fashioned artist, Paul Graham studies the work of his forebears with obvious reverence, understanding the skill and vision that underlie what might seem like a simple image. His latest exhibition, The Present, was his homage to those who have climbed what he calls the “Himalayan range” of New York street photography.

Born in the UK, Graham now lives in the Big Apple, making him one of the latest in a procession of New York photographers — Frank, Lisette Model, Andre Kertesz, Sylvia Plachy among them – who use the camera to describe their adopted rather than their native environment. In a thought provoking interview with Arthur Ou published in Artforum.com in March, the artist described the challenge he faced paying tribute to the legacy of the street photographers from the 1960s and 1970s while moving their genre into a more contemporary place. Graham’s “present” is perceived in dialogue with the past captured and preserved by predecessors like Winogrand and Friedlander. With every picture he takes, of course, his “now” slips into that past, to await the gaze of the future. This inevitable temporal flow defines what Graham describes as “the unique qualities of the medium, and its struggle to deal with time and life. I think those are our materials. Not film, not paper.”

For a critic who sat on stoops with street photographers during the 1970s, such talk sounds familiar. I recognize the grappling with time and form and technique, with the metaphoric possibilities of momentary arrest in defining the ebb and flow of the city. Such engagement is not the same as a postmodernist strategy; immersed in time and space, an image-maker like Graham speaks with a different mode of address than a Philip-Lorca diCorcia, a Gregory Crewdson or a Jeff Wall, artists who set up situations or create directorial tableaux and who dominated the scene during the 1990s. Responsive, reactive, a classic street photographer attempts, as Graham describes it, to “dance with the Brownian motion of life,” and in the process to visualize “the world as it is.”

Paul Graham: "34th Street_4th June 2010, 3.12.58 pm" Two pigment prints, each mounted to Dibond. Diptych from "The Present" © Paul Graham, 2012 Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery and The Pace Gallery, New York

“I go out and try to find answers to the question ‘How is the world?’” he explained in an article in The Financial Times. The world described in his exhibition at Pace Gallery consisted of 16 diptych and 2 triptych photographic works taken on New York City streets within the past few years. Twin images separated only by the briefest fraction of time, the “sibling photographs,” as the press release calls them, allowed us to see “life and its doppelganger arrive and depart.” The power and meaning of these large-scale color works (the diptychs measure 12 feet wide and the triptychs more than 18) was reinforced by the installation. Hung a few inches off the floor, the pictures gave the startling impression of a panorama unfolding right in front of and beside the viewer, at his/her height and in his/her continuous physical space.

Drawn into the action in this way, the spectator morphs into a pictorial subject – in the same way, of course, that all flaneurs are simultaneously voyeurs and participants in the spectacle of the city. Graham emphasizes that this is not ordinary black and white, 35 mm street photography. Not only are the pictures in color, but they are deliberately made with shallow focus, which he sees as more true to the way we actually see. The viewer focuses on one pedestrian or sign or gesture, and then passes on to the next detail – or the adjacent picture, where suddenly time and change rearrange and reveal alternate readings or new events. People move out of the picture and disappear, while others remain immobile; sometimes they fall, or fall behind. Policemen appear to investigate legs mysteriously protruding from behind a pole; trucks change position and in the process reveal formerly invisible city streets. Graham said that instead of “ossifying” the world into a singular moment, he sought to “invite time into the work, making it a quality you feel and experience.” He is not the first photographer to use “sibling” images a frame or two apart. Around 1980, Eve Sonneman produced smaller color diptychs, with a range of subjects including still lives, that were a shown at Castelli Graphics. But Sonneman’s work grew out of conceptual art; her slight shifts in time focused on formal affinities and the enigma of photographic stop-time. Graham’s duos, on the other hand, are about perception, about interiority, about the experience of being enveloped by the multiplicity of events in constant motion on city streets. They reanimate the freeze frames of Winogrand, allowing pedestrian traffic to flow like Stieglitz’s clouds, never congealing into narrative form. Graham put it this way: In these pictures, he wrote, “you see how events unfold, not only externally but also internally, from the consciousness-flow as we go about our lives.”

Paul Graham: "Penn Station, 4th April 2010, 2.30.31 pm" two pigment prints, each mounted to Dibond each image and paper, 56 x 74 inches © Paul Graham, 2012 Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery and The Pace Gallery, New York

It’s probably obvious that I am bowled over not only by Graham’s images but also by his words, by the intelligence with which he enacts and then describes a creative process that quite literally updates the classic definitions of street photography – in the process allowing this hallowed form of expression to take its place with dignity among the large scale prints that have dominated museum exhibitions in the past two decades. The Present was a love song to photography, but it was also an announcement that the practitioners of this medium can now dialogue, in full awareness, with artists who use the camera in other ways. As Graham says, he has taken his knowledge of recent photographic practice and “brought it into play with life-as-it-is, and this closes the circle.” Bravo to him, and to his colleague Mitch Epstein, whose exhibition across the street (to be discussed by my colleague Rob Slifkin, an Assistant Professor at NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts) added to my conviction that in fact classic photography is being born anew, right now in front of our eyes, once again.

(This work will travel to Carlier/Gebauer in Berlin in April and Le Bal in Paris in October of 2012.)

Mitch Epstein, Great Trees (Sikkema Jenkins and Co., March 16-April 14), by Rob Slifkin

One of the most captivating capacities of a photograph is its facility in preserving a discrete moment in time. Paradoxically, this instantaneous historization becomes increasingly fascinating the further we are separated from the moment the picture was taken, the passage of time accentuating the differences between those frozen images and the continued existence of what they depict in the ever-changing world, turning every photograph, as Roland Barthes famously remarked, into a premonition of death. While I have likely walked past the towering English Elm that has grown in the northwest corner of Washington Square for over three centuries hundreds of times, and even stopped on occasion to admire its astonishingly wide trunk and wide-ranging canopy, I initially didn’t recognize its portrayal when I saw it from across the gallery in Mitch Epstein’s recent show of large black and white photographs of monumental trees in New York at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. in New York. No doubt much of this has to do with Epstein’s brilliant lens work, which is able to broaden its view to capture an isolated portrait of the tree that no human eye immersed within the typically busting pubic park could even discern. Like almost all of the trees captured by Epstein’s camera, the elm dominates the large print, its extensive and leafless branches determining where the photographer cropped his shot. Confined within one of the world’s most imposing and congested environments, the trees of New York are unfortunately all too often forgotten or ignored. Epstein’s meticulous portraits, in which the shallow patterns of recessed bark and the subtle tonal variations of different leaves are all rendered with a precise but never cold intensity, present these colossal beings as both fragile and awe-inspiring, and worth being concerned about.

Mitch Epstein: "Caucasian Wingnut, Brooklyn Botanic Garden 2011" © Mitch Epstein / Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.

Inspired by a list of 100 great trees assembled by the New York Parks Department, Epstein traveled throughout the five boroughs, the botanical landmarks taking him to neighborhoods and urban territories that are frequently forgotten and rarely represented. Potent symbols of both the endurance of nature and the frequent human folly that attempts to compete with it, Epstein trees extend the photographer’s longstanding interest in mankind’s disruption of our environment. This theme was perhaps most clearly addressed in the justly celebrated series of photographs Epstein took between 2003 and 2007 collected in his book American Power, which documented the way in which the energy industry has affected the landscape of rural and suburban areas throughout the United States with a body of photographs whose resplendent, colorful detail and compositional wit encourage sustained viewing and contemplation. As in the American Power photographs, Epstein in his new work typically addresses this theme of human engagement with nature without recourse to the inclusion of actual people. Instead it is the way the human environment clumsily perches itself upon and amidst the natural world that defines Epstein’s approach to landscape. In the new series, the human artifactual impositions move to the margins, letting nature take center stage. (That said, these photographs, in their human-scale proportions and discrete subjects, are closer to portraits than landscapes, an aspect enhanced by the often anthropomorphic rendering of the trees, presenting some of them empathetically leaning to one side or focusing on their contorted, flesh-like bark and knobby protuberances.) Often Epstein’s subjects, many of which ended up in the city as diplomatic gifts, are portrayed as stoic and noble prisoners, as in a White Oak in the Bronx. A complex tangle of its braches emerge out of a scrubby copse of trees whose own less brawny intertwinings find a geometrical resolution in the windows of a apartment building residing in the distance. Epstein’s uncharacteristic use of black and white further urbanizes his subjects, giving them a tone corresponding to the cement and glass that surrounds them, while at that same time diminishing the clangorous palette of the city so that the trees might be equals if not superior to their environs.

Mitch Epstein: "English Elm, Washington Square Park, New York 2012" © Mitch Epstein / Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.

While the tree portraits might appear as a drastic change from Epstein’s previous output, trading in an ostensibly more overt engagement with social issues for an almost romantic appreciation of natural beauty, the social-environmental subject matter that motivated the American Power series is also present in these new works. As battered urban survivors, Epstein’s trees become monuments to the ways in which human history and natural history converge. Most of the trees Epstein chose to depict are over one hundred years old and their survival within the rough and tumble environs of the five boroughs has left its traces on them in myriad ways: gnarled and stunted branches, constricted roots buckling under the stress of pavement, and most disturbing, the scars left by the incisions of countless lovers and vandals. Epstein has noted in a recent interview that traveling abroad has sensitized him to the relative brief history of the United States. By focusing on trees planted in what has been one of the most artificial environments in the United States, many of his subjects can be seen as witnesses to the entire history of European occupation of the New World. One thinks of all the passersby who have crossed under the tree’s shadow in Washington Square (which is, in fact, known as “The Hanging Tree”); or perhaps what the now suburban neighborhood in Staten Island looked like when the giant Eastern Cottonwood tree, which stands over the white clapboard condominiums like Diane Arbus’s Jewish giant over his meek parents, was planted (a question whose historical intrigue is emphasized in the hazy light in which Epstein presents the towering behemoth). Epstein’s new body of work, full of technical mastery and visual intelligence, exemplifies the sort of art being produced today by photographers like and Rineke Dijkstra, Thomas Struth, and Jeff Wall that, while grounded in a fundamental respect and understanding of the medium, stands alongside any other form of artistic production. If Epstein’s work represents this broader apotheosis of photography within the art world these new photographs suggest an eerie premonition of a time when the medium’s hard-won acceptance into the realms of high art might be complicated by the medium’s still-vital documentary capacity. Despite their undeniable beauty and complexity (or perhaps because these qualities seem tinged with a degree of melancholy), I couldn’t help but wonder if there may come a time when these photographs might appear in natural history museums or botanical archives as documents of now extinct species? Photography, it seems, can never wholly escape its vernacular and utilitarian purposes and the best photographs, like those of Epstein, make this burden into a virtue.

L’article “Here is the World:” the New (Old) Art Photography. By Shelley Rice and Rob Slifkin est apparu en premier sur Shelley Rice.

Cindy Sherman. Untitled #463. 2007-08. Chromogenic color print, 68 5/8 x 6″ (174.2 x 182.9 cm).
Courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures, New York © 2012 Cindy Sherman

Francesca Woodman Selected Video Works, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976-78
Half-inch black-and-white open reel video transferred to DVD, with sound, 11 min., 34 sec
Courtesy George and Betty Woodman and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York

Cindy Sherman. Untitled #465. 2008. Chromogenic color print, 63 3/4 x 57 1/4″ (161.9 x 145.4 cm).
Courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures, New York © 2012 Cindy Sherman

Francesca Woodman House #4, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976 Gelatin silver print, 14.6 x 14.6 cm
Courtesy George and Betty Woodman © 2012 George and Betty Woodman

Francesca Woodman Space 2, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976 Gelatin silver print, 13.7 x 13.3 cm
Courtesy George and Betty Woodman © George and Betty Woodman

Francesca Woodman Untitled, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976 Gelatin silver print, 14 x 14.1 cm
Courtesy George and Betty Woodman © George and Betty Woodman

It is important to understand that a number of Woodman’s photographs, especially those created in Providence, Rhode Island, were initially art school assignments. There is evidence, in late work with which I was unfamiliar, that she might have gotten tired of such self-absorption if she had lived, might have one day ceased to focus on the wiggly subjectivity hidden beneath the curves of her youth. Just the very act of photographing obsessively, of transforming movement into stasis, hot flesh into cool 2-dimensional silver, was this young woman’s bid to leave the world’s disorder and inhabit the looking glass realm of art. Her later, large-scale works moved further in this direction; they began transforming her body into stone. In these she became a caryatid, large and forceful, her youthful limbs no longer personal, translucent and weak. Merging with the Ancients, she left the flesh behind and passed into the immortality of Classical Greece.

Francesca Woodman "Caryatid", New York, 1980 Diazotype, 227.3 x 92.1 cm
Courtesy George and Betty Woodman © 2012 George and Betty Woodman

The advantage of Corey Keller’s exhibition is that it begins to breathe life back into Woodman’s oeuvre, to reconnect time and evolution and sociability into her brief and productive time on earth. But I remain fascinated by Woodman’s interest in classicism at the end of her life, and her move to create large scale works in which her body transcends rather than expresses subjective concerns. Caryatids were aspects of public art, not private expression. She was, in other words, moving (four years after the Pictures exhibition, around the time Sherman was making the Centerfolds commissioned by Artforum) in the same direction as the Postmodernists.

Installation view: Francesca Woodman, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, March 16–June 13, 2012
Photo: David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

Cindy Sherman. Untitled Film Still #21. 1978. Gelatin silver print, 7 1/2 x 9 1/2″ (19.1 x 24.1 cm).
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Horace W. Goldsmith Fund
through Robert B. Menschel © 2012 Cindy Sherman

Cindy Sherman. Untitled #466. 2008. Chromogenic color print, 8′ 6″ x 70″ (259.1 x 177.8 cm).
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Acquired through the generosity of
Robert B. Menschel in honor of Jerry I. Speyer. © 2012 Cindy Sherman

Cindy Sherman. Untitled #131. 1983. Chromogenic color print, 7′ 10 3/4″ x 45 1/4″ (240.7 x 114.9 cm).
Courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures, New York © 2012 Cindy Sherman

Further Reading and Links

Shelley Rice (ed.), Inverted Odysseys: Claude Cahun, Maya Deren, Cindy Sherman (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999)
Elisabeth Donnelly, “Mad Women,” New York Times Magazine, March 25, 2012, p.62

L’article On Aging, Absence and Angels est apparu en premier sur Shelley Rice.

Liu Zheng "An Actress of Hebei Opera", Huoshentai, Henan Province, 2000 From the series "The Chinese" Gelatin Silver Print © Liu Zheng, Courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York

I lived in Istanbul off and on during the late 1990s, teaching at Bosphorus University; I was there when Vasif Kortun (now director of the SALT Art Center) arrived back from a stint as director of Bard College’s Museum of the Center for Curatorial Studies in New York, and decided to create a contemporary art hub in this extraordinary metropolis. I experienced the contempt for the arts that were holdovers from military rule at that time; I saw the tensions growing between the religious majorities and the worldly minorities of the privileged class; I worried over the lack of cultural infrastructure that made it necessary for talented artists to leave. I have heard over the last few years that things have changed, that this town is bustling with art spaces, collectors and activities, and I am trying to update my memories by replacing them with this new and shining image. For a jaded New Yorker, who has experienced many vagaries of art and life in the Big Apple, this is not an easy task.

Interestingly enough, I seem to be on the same wavelength as many Turks, who are enjoying their moment in the sun while being aware of the fragile dynamics of their recent success – in exhibitions, in the marketplace and within the international art scene. Yasemin Nur, a 35 year old artist who is a member of AtilKunst, an all female art collective, was quoted as saying that “We’re like girls and boys playing…Now Istanbul has become the hip city, and is chosen as a hip city. The system needs the hip city, and next it will be Beirut, and next somewhere else. This is our time. We will be sad, but the wind will go.”

I think that Nur’s wind was the one on my mind this morning. The breeze in question seems to be a temporal marker, like the arrival of Mary Poppins and her umbrella, pointing the finger of the zeitgeist. Hansen’s article highlights young hipsters who used to live in London or New York and who have chosen to blow in on this latest wave. Mari Spirito, a longtime director of 303 Gallery in New York, recently moved to Turkey. “In New York it feels like the best years are behind us,” she said. “In Istanbul it feels like the best years are yet to come.” Everyone in Manhattan knows what she means, of course; more and more we feel like a passage rather than a place, a conduit for economic exchange rather than a center of creation. Artists and writers (when not talking about real estate) whisper about how boring a city with nothing but rich people must inevitably be; foreign artists who once flocked here in droves are blocked either by prohibitive costs or by visa restrictions imposed since 9/11; neighborhood shops, family businesses and artisans, even our downtown hospital, have fallen by the wayside, replaced by Starbucks, McDonalds, huge drug store chains and infinite numbers of insanely expensive condos being purchased by millionaires from everywhere. An exhibition like the one currently at Pace Gallery on 25th Street, a wonderful show of photographs (by Robert McElroy, Fred McDarragh, Robert Frank and others), art works, videos and audiotapes chronicling the early days of Happenings in the 1960s, seems to describe a place more distant than Johannesburg. Young artists as well as the rest of us gaze in disbelief at black and white documents recording the antics of Allan Kaprow, Red Grooms, Carolee Schneemann, Claes Oldenburg, Simon Forti and others, marveling at the energy, playfulness, spontaneity and community that were hallmarks of a moment when life in the Big Apple was not quite so Darwinian. It is no coincidence that shows like this one, and the Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life exhibition shown at the Grey Art Gallery last fall, are being mounted now in the city. Retro is the new local; looking back, we inhabit a temporal utopia instead of a spatial one.

Lucas Samaras and Allan Kaprow in Allan Kaprow’s Yard, performed in Environments, Situations, Spaces at the Martha Jackson Gallery, May 25–June 23, 1961. © Robert R. McElroy/Licensed by VAGA, New York, New York

Jim Dine and Robert Indiana (lower right) in Jim Dine's Car Crash, performed at the Reuben Gallery, November 1–6, 1960. © Robert R. McElroy/Licensed by VAGA, New York, New York

What intrigues me in all this is the complexity of life on earth in 2012. Being an artist or critic means becoming a meteorologist, figuring out where the winds will be blowing next and grabbing the next train headed in that direction. As Nur said about Vasif Kortun, “he seems to be able to predict where art institutions will go.” The crystal ball no longer reflects the environment of birth or habitation; space is malleable and changeable, and we are all on our own in negotiating the shifting relationships between personal experience, national loyalties and the global marketplace. The irony, however, is that the “incredible lightness of being” (to quote Milan Kundera’s words) brought on by this condition puts a lot of pressure on artists to hunker down and figure out who they are. Hansen writes: “Even as Istanbul artists are merging with the international community, they are also looking backward to discover themselves.” History, psychology, sociology, whatever: one of the conditions of international stature is that artists are required to cultivate an authentic local voice to communicate with the global audience. And in countries whose histories are riddled with violence, dictatorship, repression or colonialism, the nature of such a voice is not self-evident.

Hansen’s article catalogs the usual demands that Turkish art be Turkish and not Orientalist, whether or not the artists in question were taught to imitate Western modernism in school. Creative people and gallerists are often stumped about what “real Turkish” art would look like, or what percentage of Western education and expectations they would have to shed to be considered authentic. The same week that Hansen’s article was published in the New York Times, Chika Okeke-Agulu came to lecture in the Art History Department at New York University about the painter “Ibrahim El Salahi’s Postcolonial Modernism,” and about his impossible struggles in the 1950s and 1960s to accommodate critics who expected him to reject his European education – and his interest in communicating with his international peers – in order to create an authentic Sudanese art. It is easy to see that there’s a pattern here. But in a world where “everything is central and everything is the periphery,” as Sylvia Kouvali (the Greek owner of a hot Turkish Gallery) said, we should stop putting so much irrelevant pressure on artists whose privilege has been to work in the international art world. We should perhaps see ourselves, and the artists who share our experiences, as the messengers who can use the global language of art to describe local experiences, understanding that their authenticity in 2012 might be within the temporal and spatial bouillabaisse of what historian Terry Smith has called “contemporaneity.” Young artists from Istanbul, a privileged few who might have more in common with art students in New York than with the compatriots my friends often referred to as “the locals,” might want to say something about this rather than about their Ottoman past or their essential “Turkishness.”

Probably the most moving commentary in Hansen’s piece came from the artist Kutlug Ataman, who has been negotiating the delicate relationship between his local roots and his international experiences for some time now. He left Turkey after the 1980 military coup and returned to Istanbul 10 years ago. Hansen says that Ataman doesn’t think Turkish artists have confronted the real source of their material. He described a recent incident when a mob of Turkish men attacked gallery goers sipping alcohol on the street in their fashionable clothes. In the center of Istanbul, Turkey’s two worlds came face to face, and Ataman considers this the “real” Turkey. “When I look at artists’ practice in Europe, I am not inspired,” he is quoted as saying, “If the artists here can engage with Turkey, they will be ahead of the rest of the world. Because the world is this. This desert.”

And this, of course, is the point of my essay. I am writing because “the world is this,” and “this” is New York too. I spent the day walking around Chelsea, looking at art in various galleries. There’s a lot of bad or just plain silly stuff out there as usual, but this has been a pretty interesting season. And that’s because Ataman’s “desert” has permeated our town, has invaded the slick expanses of new condos and juice bars and fancy gyms. Some American artists may not be acknowledging the new landscape any more than some Turkish artists, but other voices are speaking loud and clear. Adel Abdessemed, an Algerian who studied in Paris, has a terrifying exhibition of sculptures and drawings entitled Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf? at David Zwirner Gallery. Free-handed sketches of various animals with explosives strapped to their backs are juxtaposed with, among other things, a capsized boat filled with ominously stuffed black garbage bags.

Installation view of Adel Abdessemed Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf at David Zwirner, New YorkFebruary 17 - March 17, 2012Courtesy the artist David Zwirner, New York

Installation view of Adel Abdessemed Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf at David Zwirner, New York February 17 - March 17, 2012 Courtesy the artist David Zwirner, New York

First Look, a group show at Yossi Milo that brings together works by artists whose first New York exhibitions were presented at the gallery, is a powerful assemblage of photographs by South African Pieter Hugo, Norwegian Simen Johan, Chinese Liu Zheng, German Loretta Lux, Japanese Kohei Yoshiyuki and American Alessandra Sanguinetti, among others. These are often grotesque images, filled with explicit and implicit violence against persons, animals and the environment, and together they create a powerful statement about life on earth in the 21st century. The desert winds are, indeed, blowing through our town. We may no longer be the “hip city,” but we are still a place where urgent voices can be heard – and sold.

Pieter Hugo "Naasra Yeti, Agbogbloshie Market, Accra, Ghana", 2009 From the series "Permanent Error

Simen Johan "Untitled #65", 1997 From the series "And Nothing was to be Trusted", Gelatin Silver Print © Simen Johan, Courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York

Alessandra Sanguinetti, Untitled, "From On the Sixth Day", 1996-2004 From the series "On the Sixth Day", Chromogenic Color Print © Alessandra Sanguinetti, Courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York

Links

Slide show “Istambul’s Cultural Rebirth” in The New York Times Magazine

L’article Reflections on the Wind est apparu en premier sur Shelley Rice.