Frank Moore « Hospital », 1992. Oil and silkscreen on wood, in artist’s frame (painted wood and resin). Private collection, Houston. Image: Courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York.

I knew, for sure, that I was home again a few days after my plane landed in New York. Riding the crowded, sweaty subway, beleaguered passengers were suddenly confronted with yet another beggar, a young, strung out white guy in jeans who moaned about the indignity of his situation and then proceeded to tell us (in way too much detail, and way too loudly) why he and his young family were in such dire straits and what we could do to help them. This is, of course, a familiar occurrence in the Big Apple; none of us thought much about it until another passenger, a black woman who obviously rides this particular subway line regularly, began disputing the facts of the beggar’s story by pointing how much he’d embellished or altered it since she heard it the week before. Calmly, the two of them negotiated the details and authenticity of his public “performances,” while the rest of us howled with laughter (and of course, offered him some cash). Only in New York…

The other way I know I’m home, of course, is the overwhelming, daunting task facing me and everyone else interested in keeping up with the sheer quantity and diversity of cultural offerings in this town. When the rentrée begins here, the floodgates open; even though this blog will end in a few weeks, life never stops in the big city. There are some fine gallery shows by well-established artists like Robert Adams (Matthew Marks), Sally Mann (Edwynn Houk), James Welling (David Zwirner), Douglas Gordon (Gagosian), Cedric Nunn (David Krut), Lise Safarti (Yossi Milo) and Richard Misrach (Robert Mann Gallery); retrospective glances at the influences of Warhol (at the Metropolitan Museum) and Conceptual Art (coming to the Brooklyn Museum); group shows like that surveying the Gutai Art Association in Japan (at Hauser and Wirth) and the thought-provoking mélange of objects from diverse cultures called Collectors of Skies (curated by Valérie Rousseau and Barbara Safarova) at the Andrew Edlin Gallery. There was a wonderful reading from, and discussion of, My Poets, the new and surprising book about her personal creative process by writer and scholar Maureen McLane. For this blog post, however, I will single out a few of the things I’ve seen this month that I’ve especially enjoyed.

Frank Moore « Freedom to Share », 1994 Oil and glass beads on canvas mounted on wood. Collection of Thomas H. Lee and Ann Tenenbaum, New York. Image: Courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York

First on my list is the Frank Moore exhibition of paintings, videos, drawings, writings and stage designs, entitled Toxic Beauty, at the Grey Art Gallery and the Fales Library of New York University. An active participant in the Downtown art scene until his early death from AIDS in 2002, Moore’s eccentricity and utter originality shine through in this retrospective of his work about illness, toxicity and the environment. Large scale, almost magic realist paintings, colorful and bizarre, remind viewers immediately of artists like Frida Kahlo, whose image-world was both personal and extremely political in its pain and its naivety. Sometimes based on photographs of models, Moore’s works morph immediately into surreal alternative universes, where hospitals become broken ice floes with patients and doctors stranded in isolation. Thanksgiving dinner is a blood (and not a turkey) fest shared by all races, colors and creeds, and buffalo roam not on the range but on white bed sheets. Hieronymus Bosch-like characters make their way through landscapes littered with medical vials, mice and pills, illuminated by piles of gold coins. In Moore’s reality, every frame is a work in itself: pharmaceuticals, plumbers’ pipes and maps echo and encircle the iconography, breaching the boundaries between art and life so that bizarre and horrific images spill over to implicate those of us seemingly safe in the surrounding space.

Focus, 2001. Digital C-Type print on canvas, hair, silk threads, and cotton threads. Collection of the artist © Lin Tianmiao

I was also enthralled by the retrospective of Lin Tinmiao, one of China’s foremost women artists, at The Asia Society Museum. Surveying her work since 1995, Bound/Unbound is comprised of installations, sculptures and two-dimensional works, many of which have never been seen outside of China. Thread and hair, usually white, link the works in this show, and it is often hard to distinguish between them. Wrapped around objects, obliterating or enhancing photographed faces, morphing into bodies, body decorations or covers, these tangled skeins are sometimes accompanied by video or sound. This is an uneven exhibition; works like The Proliferation of Thread, Bound and Unbound and Focus are very strong statements, while others seem less powerful and more decorative in impact. Most extraordinary, from my point of view, is Here?Or There?, originally produced with her husband Wang GongXin for the 4^th Shanghai Biennale of 2002. A room filled with mannequins, dressed in bizarre and beautiful costumes made by the artist that hover between the traditional and the space-age, opens outward toward video views that flash between old landscapes of China and the new, dissonant cityscapes into which the country is transforming. Watching this extraordinary spectacle, familiar yet foreign, fascinated by a vision of people, of society, of female experience I could perceive but never fully grasp, I was grateful once again for the window onto the world that contemporary art provides.

Ether, 2008-2011 pigment print on handmade Innova Smooth Cotton Natural White paper mounted to board image © Fazal Sheikh

Speaking of which, there is also the debut show of Fazal Sheikh’s latest work now on view at Pace/MacGill Gallery in midtown Manhattan. Entitled Ether, comprised of over 40 small pigment prints of images taken in the sacred city of Varanasi (Banaras or Banares on the banks of the River Ganges in Northern India), the images focus on sleep, dream, death and birth in the place Hindus consider the auspicious site of the soul’s emancipation from the eternal cycle of reincarnation. Often seen in groupings that juxtapose various bodily states or the five elements, the photographs document – but can never penetrate — the mysteries of the physical body as it enters the world, travels in dreams or is transformed through death into earth, fire, water, air and ether. With these quiet and beautiful images, Sheikh is paradoxically using photography’s descriptive capabilities to highlight the spiritual side of our nature, the ineffable metamorphoses between states of being that can be neither perceived nor described. Like Zoe Leonard, who has created another in a series of site-specific and room-sized camera obscuras in Murray Guy’s Chelsea gallery, Sheikh has decided to look beyond the purely political and ask different, less tangible, questions about sight, subjectivity, culture and interconnectedness.

Ether, 2008-2011 pigment print on handmade Innova Smooth Cotton Natural White paper mounted to board image © Fazal Sheikh

And then, last but not least, there was the revival of Einstein on the Beach at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. This is the third time I’ve seen this magnum opus by Robert Wilson and Philip Glass with choreography by Lucinda Childs (all of whom were in the house for opening night) – and the first time was the original performance at the Metropolitan Opera House in 1976. Einstein, for me, is therefore a homecoming of a different sort, a reminder of a Downtown New York legacy that sometimes seems quaint (there’s a whole scene where a toy space ship traverses the closed grey curtain) but that nevertheless has lost none of its original power. The train and the courtroom, the clocks and the night bus, the sounds and words and gestures endlessly repeated but always new: they were there, they are here, they are luminous. They are icons whose strength lies precisely in coalescing the fugitive visions glimpsed in passing within Leonard’s camera obscura, and making manifest whatever is monumental about our passage through space and time.

Robert Wilson / Philip Glass : « Einstein on the Beach ». Photo : Stephanie Berger

© Shelley Rice, 2012

L’article « Home Again » by Shelley Rice est apparu en premier sur Shelley Rice.

«  Found Memories » (photogramme), 2011, réalisé par Julia Murat

“Found Memories”, un film de Julia Murat, 2011 | Drame | vo portugais st anglais| Distribution Film Movement (www.filmmovement.com)

A sealed cemetery is indeed central to this mesmerizing film, which is about life and death but also, and ultimately, about time. It is set in a fictional village named Jotubaba, in a region of Brazil that bustled with the coffee trade in the 19^th century but is now only a ghost of its former self. Trains have ceased to run on the overgrown tracks; the town is impoverished, cut off and populated only by old people bound together by their land and their daily routines. As the film begins, Madalena (Sonia Guedes) makes bread before dawn (in a darkness illuminated only by Carravagio-esque gas light) and follows the old train tracks to deliver her rolls to Antonio’s (Luiz Serra’s) coffee shop. The two of them drink coffee and banter, go to mass and then break bread with their neighbors. In the afternoon, the men play games and Madalena walks home, to write yet another letter to her dead husband before she goes to sleep.

« Found Memories » (photogramme), 2011, réalisé par Julia Murat

« Found Memories » (photogramme), 2011, réalisé par Julia Murat

L’article “Found Memories”: The Quick and the Still. Directed by Julia Murat, Brazil, 2011 est apparu en premier sur Shelley Rice.

George Dureau, « Ernest Beasley » Courtesy the artist and Higher Pictures

In 1978, Marcuse Pfeifer organized an exhibition in her uptown New York City gallery entitled The Male Nude: A Survey in Photography. Hung salon style, overflowing from floor to ceiling with images by Imogen Cunningham, George Platt Lynes, F.H. Day, Baron von Gloeden, Minor White and many others that had been hidden “in the closet,” the show blew the lid off of American homophobia at around the same time that the Robert Samuel Gallery, devoted to a gay clientele and its interests, opened downtown. I wrote the introduction to the exhibition catalog, and because of this involvement I was privileged to spend months discovering both the hidden archive and the issues – formal, political, conceptual, aesthetic – it articulated.

The young Robert Mapplethorpe was included in The Male Nude show – it was one of his early exhibits. This was the first glimpse I had of him, and it was around the same time that I saw works by artists like Joel-Peter Witkin, Lynn Davis and George Dureau. Davis and Dureau were big influences on Mapplethorpe, whose subsequent notoriety and success have obscured the very real context from which his pictures grew. As the press release of Black, a small but stunning exhibition of black and white photographs by Dureau from 1973-1986, makes clear, the two men were friends in the early 1970s. Born in New Orleans in 1930 (where he still lives at age 81), Dureau was already known as a painter by the time he met the young photographer; he had originally picked up the camera as an extension of his primary expressive medium, but his powerful pictures soon developed a life and a following of their own. One of his admirers was Robert Mapplethorpe, and a comparison of their works is useful for understanding not only the similarities and differences of their oeuvres but also the language of the body that was current during this breakthrough historical moment.

George Dureau, « John Hilton » Courtesy the artist and Higher Pictures

Both of these men were attracted to the black body, and the exhibition focuses mainly on this aspect of Dureau’s work. And both were obsessed with the relationship between timeless, classical beauty and the documentary particularities of photography – a relationship that also was central to the photographic aesthetics of Walker Evans, Lisette Model, Aaron Siskind and others working around this time. For Mapplethorpe, these poles were perceived through the lens of Edward Weston. Transformed into  “quintessential” forms, decontextualized and monumentalized, Weston’s sitters morphed into absolutes, into formal essences that linked their limbs to the “universal rhythms” of nature, technology and the clouds. Sensual rather than sexual, focused most often on the female rather than the male body, Weston’s example provided the hurdle over which the militantly gay Mapplethorpe could jump. Stark, sexual, filled with the promise of power, his sitters wrested themselves from the natural continuum of time and space to become iconic containers of male desire, abstractions both stylized and impersonal. Real people, frozen by the camera’s click, retreated into a cool classicism implied not only by their physical perfection but also by their transcendence of particularity.

George Dureau, « Wilbert Hines » Courtesy the artist and Higher Pictures

Dureau, on the other hand, was a people person, not an aesthete like either Mapplethorpe or Weston. His pictures breathe, they pulse, they are hot with the blood and sweat of the sitters who joined him in his apartment on Esplanade Street in the city where he was born, and sometimes posed with props that were part of his personal effects. Edward Lucie-Smith, who wrote a fine introduction to a book of Dureau’s photographs published in the 1980s, compared the artist’s ability to transform these autobiographical encounters into photographically classical pictures with the writing strategies of Baudelaire, most notably in the Tableaux Parisiens of Les Fleurs du Mal. Like the poet, Dureau sought out the seamy underbelly of city life, and stared at its personification through the lens of a Hasselblad camera. His subjects are often street people, dressed or nude friends, handicapped or deformed men who might inhabit the dark side of the New Orleans scene. Whereas Baudelaire could take a poor girl, a bum, an old woman or a melancholy clown and transform these figures into archetypes of the forsaken, elevating them to myth through the language of lyric poetry, Dureau’s eye stared so lovingly, with so much intimacy, respect, empathy and desire, at the people – white or black, fat or thin, beautiful or deformed – who inhabited his daily landscape that their portraits now glow with what James Agee once called “the cruel radiance of what is.”  All of the intensity of psychological and emotional experience – not abstract or mythic truth but subjective, personal, particular truth – pours into the timeless formality of these poses, to spectacular effect.

Higher Pictures’ press release points out that this is the first New York solo exhibition of this extraordinary body of work by this extraordinary artist. What on earth have we been waiting for?

SR
© Shelley Rice, 2012

L’article Just (a few more) Kids: George Dureau, Robert Mapplethorpe and Company est apparu en premier sur Shelley Rice.

Lorraine O'Grady "The Fir-Palm", 1991/2012, Silver gelatin print (Photomontage) Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York, NY

Lorraine O’Grady has been around a long time. An active and avid feminist, a conceptual artist, photographer, writer, performer and video artist, she has been at the forefront of discussions about African Americans and their relationships to the multiple pasts of our complex postcolonial society. I first came across her art in New York around 1980, when she pioneered ideas that would resonate with the groundbreaking works of women like Adrian Piper and, later, Carrie Mae Weems, Deb Willis and Lorna Simpson. Juxtaposing two black and white images, the faces of contemporary African American acquaintances next to reproductions of sculptural portraits carved in ancient Egypt, she put forth the evidence of genealogy. Like writer Martin Bernal, the author of the book Black Athena, O’Grady claimed the African heritage of that shining civilization, a pedigree written into the genetic traces of her race and made visible centuries later by the medium of photography.

This was startling work thirty years ago, and though her latest Chelsea gallery show is quite different, it is still deeply rooted in the experience of the Black female body. The Body/Ground series of photomontages, conceived in 1991 and re-formatted for this exhibition in 2012, uses that body to describe, confront and interrogate the condition of the Western landscape. Born in Boston to Jamaican parents, O’Grady was one of the first artists, along with Ana Mendieta, to articulate the complicated conditions of cultural stability, hybridity and displacement experienced by those who take root in a land not their own. The colonized body, for instance, is the “ground” out of which The Fir-Palm tree (an odd cross between a New England fir and Caribbean palm tree) grows upward against a cloudy sky. “My attitude about hybridity,” the artist has said, “is that it is essential to understanding what is happening here. People’s reluctance to acknowledge it is part of the problem… I’m really advocating for the kind of miscegenated thinking that’s needed to deal with what we’ve already created here.” The landscape which all of us inhabit today is, from her point of view, the amalgamation of the colonized body and the soil to which it has been transplanted.

Lorraine O'Grady "Miscegenated Family Album (A Mother's Kiss)", T: Candace and Devonia; B: Nefertiti and daughter, 1980/1994, Cibachrome Prints, Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York, NY

Landscape (Western Hemisphere) is, in fact, the title of her most recent work, an 18-minute video that once again weaves nature and culture, Africa and the West, into an inextricable web. It is a web, of course, grown from the Black body but inscribed and circumscribed, exoticized and eroticized, by the Others. The dark video resembles a dense forest, a thick underbrush blowing in the wind, accompanied by the chirping of birds and jungle sounds. The luxurious, curvaceous foliage fills the screen, blocking our vision. For almost twenty minutes the camera doesn’t move, the viewpoint is stationery and immobilized, action is described only through the vagaries of sound. The rustle of the winds might turn into a howl; the chatter of the forest grows louder or softer, excited or serene as one stares into what seems like mysterious and impermeable darkness. It takes a long time to realize that the dense undergrowth bending and waving in the wind is, in fact, the artist’s own curly hair.

Lorraine O'Grady "Landscape (Western Hemisphere)", 2011, vidéo 19 Minutes, Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York, NY

The preoccupation with kinky hair is, of course, well known in African-American circles, and has been a fertile theme for contemporary artists as diverse as Betty Saar and the comedian Chris Rock. Straight or curly? For artists concerned with identity politics, the question is hardly naïve. It has instead become the nexus point, indeed the battle ground, for opposing definitions of physical beauty: the choice is between “going natural” or to succumbing to the standards set by the genetic endowments of white Americans. But of course this is not simply a question of style, since the “natural” black woman’s hair – like her body – was constructed by colonialists as the site of the primal, the untamed, the erotic energies of the race.  For Baudelaire, for instance, his mulatto mistress’s hair was “the oasis where I dream, the gourd from which I gulp the wine of memory,” a memory as wild as it was exotic:

For torpid Asia, torrid Africa
-the wilderness I thought a world away-
survive at the heart of this dark continent…
As other souls set sail to music, mine,
O my love! Embarks on your redolent hair.

Charles Baudelaire, The Head of Hair, from The Flowers of Evil
Trans. Richard Howard

Under these circumstances, of course, O’Grady’s identification of her own head, not only with the “dark continent” described by Baudelaire “a world away” but also with the landscapes of the West, becomes charged with both ironies and deep-seated cultural truths that implicate all of us living in the postcolonial environment. As Baudelaire discovered, intimacy and distance have become inseparable. For three decades, the most personal details have morphed to embody and embrace the most political realities in Lorraine O’Grady’s art. She has carved out her own hybrid territory in this Western hemisphere inhabited by strangers who have become neighbors, and who together need to recognize “what we’ve already created here.”

SR
© Shelley Rice, 2012

L’article Lorraine O’Grady: New Worlds est apparu en premier sur Shelley Rice.

Untitled, 1987 - 1988 © Rotimi Fani-Kayode / Courtesy of The Walther Collection and Autograph ABP, London

I’m feeling like men are in need of equal time on this Blog.

They have, as usual, had more than equal time on the walls of New York galleries and museums this month. But I am less interested in numbers than in a confluence I’ve noticed recently: two of the exhibitions by accomplished photographers in Chelsea galleries this spring, one an American and one an African, one living and one dead, use male subjects to embody an edginess, a nihilism even, that tilts the idea of patriarchy wildly off center. Exploring the works of Alec Soth and Rotimi Fani-Kayode together is not a self-evident choice, but I’m thinking that the juxtaposition may yield some insights into the farther reaches of the male psyche during these early years of the 21st century.

Rotimi Fani-Kayode, in fact, never made it to this new century: he died of AIDS in England in 1989 at the age of 34. Born in Nigeria to a prominent Yoruba family who fled to the U.K. as political refugees in 1966, he studied in the United States (a B.A. from Georgetown University in D.C. and an M.F.A from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn) and then returned to Britain to live and work. Active in both the Association of Black Photographers and the lively queer culture in England, he saw his photography as both a public and a political act – a suprising perspective, considering that his work consists mainly of male nudes in both black and white and color. “We aim to produce spiritual antibodies to HIV,” he wrote with his partner Alex Hirst. Transforming symbolic gestures into public acts bearing witness for a generation decimated by disease, he responded to imminent death by asserting the power of beauty.

Nothing to Lose IV, 1989 © Rotimi Fani-Kayode / Courtesy of The Walther Collection and Autograph ABP, London

While there are black and white works in this exhibition that can hold their own with Robert Mapplethorpe’s, the large color prints in the Nothing to Lose and Every Moment Counts series express his vision at its greatest intensity. Undressed (or occasionally dressed in African or Biblical robes) and adorned with feathers, fruits, leaves, masks or paints, black men adopt highly ritualized postures and gestures – though, as Kobena Mercer has pointed out, these actions only deepen the enigma of what the ritual might actually be. Christian, Yoruba (the artist’s family members, in their native country, were the keepers of the shrine for Yoruba deities) and other religious icons meet and meld in these works. Mercer calls Fani-Kayode Afro-Modern in his emphasis on the generative possibilities of cross-cultural exchanges and encounters. But the stylized language of the body is what makes these pictures so extraordinary. This is a Dance of Death, a dance to the death, a defiance of shame, fear or anger. Independent of nationality, race, religion or ideology, born of the artist’s displacement (he called himself an outsider in matters of sexuality as well as geographical and cultural dislocation), this ecstatic theatricality shatters the chains of culture to illuminate more profound and ambiguous aspects of the human condition.

Fani-Kayode, in other words, uses the expressive powers of the black male body to assert the transcendent force of the finite, the transient, the mortal. This push beyond the confines of particular civilizations is a leap of faith, an affirmation of the primacy of life beyond bounds. His sitters bite into apples, sprout feathers, cover themselves with plants and berries, uniting their flesh with nature in both its concrete and its metaphorical manifestations. Men also bedeck themselves with flora in the latest works by Alec Soth, but the meaning of the gesture in his photographs is completely different. While Fani-Kayode’s subjects are adorned with leaves, affirmation turns to negation when Soth’s are practically (and willfully) obliterated by them.

ALEC SOTH, 2007_05zl0072 © Alec Soth Courtesy: Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

The Broken Manual exhibition at Sean Kelley Gallery this spring was a curious and hybrid affair, comprised of a number of photographs (black and white and color, most taken between 2006 and 2010), a documentary film and a site- specific installation showcasing the book by the same title. Ostensibly written by Soth’s alter ego, Lester B. Morrison, the book is a how-to survival manual designed to aid others (men, of course) anxious to withdraw from society and build a life in some remote part of the American terrain. The adjective American here is very important. Even though Soth emphasizes that he first became fascinated by hermits when he began studying the life of Trappist monk Thomas Merton, he was moved to begin this project by the story of the Olympic Park bomber Eric Rudolph, who spent years evading police by hiding in the Appalachian Mountains. Alex Soth is, from my point of view, one of the great American storytellers, with an extraordinary sensitivity to the strength and the strangeness of this young and mysterious land and its motley collection of citizens. The Broken Manual exhibition is one of the chapters in his ongoing story, the chapter about a breed of men who never quite emerged from the Wild West into what we so blithely call 21st century life.

ALEC SOTH Utah, 2008 © Alec Soth Courtesy: Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

Whereas Fani-Kayode’s men will themselves beyond specific civilizations and belief systems in order to reaffirm both the ecstatic nature of life and the archetypal rituals that sustain it, Soth’s reject human society and collectivity outright. As the press release says: “These photographs reflect (the artist’s) increasing interest in the mounting anger and frustration that some specifically male Americans feel with societal constraints and their subsequent desire to remove themselves from civilization.” “Primitive” in these pictures does not refer to traditional tribal ancestors, it means shedding the trappings of culture altogether and living in the woods with (and sometimes like) the animals. In this moral universe, one covers oneself with leaves or branches in order to hunt or evade the authorities; one declares one’s allegiance to nature as a way of turning one’s back on the alternative. Soth’s photographs sometimes show the men, and sometimes their living environments – in caves, on or inside mountains, in trucks or dilapidated sheds. It is a testament to the photographer’s extraordinary sensitivity that he was granted access to these guarded people, who maintain both a psychic and a physical distance from his camera but who are, nevertheless, in clear contact with both with him and us. Constantly lurking beneath the surface of these images are the alienation and rage that sustain the hermits’ withdrawal, their “escape.” This is, in other words, not Thoreau’s America; and the Broken Manual, teaching lonely men how to survive on the lam, makes manifest a dark side of American life that keeps threatening to erupt into the national consciousness – and political process.

ALEC SOTH 2008_02zl0173, 2008 © Alec Soth Courtesy: Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

Edgy men also made their appearance in The Utopia of Difference, the first American exhibition by Vibha Galhotra, a young Indian woman living in Delhi. But the edginess in this artist’s work is urban rather than natural. Whereas Soth’s hermits disappear into the camouflage of trees, Galhotra’s sculptural figures wear army-style Neo-Camouflage imprinted with the image of the city dominating the wall behind them. Impossible to visually extricate from the overcrowded geometries of their environment, the mannequins morph into cyborgs whose organic flesh lives to reflect the architectural chaos of their surroundings. Escape from society, in this case, seems impossible. Unlike the empty wilderness that still covers much of the United States, whose existence is essential for the tales Soth tells, the urban jungles of India depicted in Galhotra’s work seem to go on forever. No Exit, as Sartre would say.

Vibha Galhotra Neo Camouflage, 2008 digital print on fabric and vinyl, mannequins, shoes, and belts dimensions variable (site specific). Courtesy of the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York and Gallery Espace, New Delhi

This photographic project set the stage for the exhibition, but much of the work consisted of sculptures and textural wall pieces sewn together with metals and other materials. A hammock swings the image of the world in crystals; a beehive amassed from metallic beads juts out beneath the dark and varnished wood of an old European table. Galhotra is an extremely versatile and inventive artist, practiced at using the media, symbols and metaphors of our newly globalized world in ways that disrupt their accustomed usages and meanings. Organic and inorganic, urban and natural, male and female: these are the parameters continually being tested in her visual expressions. The shimmering brass or copper surface that is a hallmark of her work, for instance, when viewed up close, is constructed of many ghungroos – the small ankle bells worn by Indian women as a musical accompaniment for traditional dance. Once these metal beads are sewn together, en masse, they are capable of morphing not only into hives and ropes or words and cityscapes drawn on fabric but also into large and monstrous animal forms that are like a cross between a Lynda Benglis and a Claes Oldenburg soft sculpture. Part dinosaur with claws, part wheeled vehicle with a crane for a neck, these “monsters” are the artist’s variations on what Gayatri Sinha calls “a collapsed and somehow humanized earth mover.”

Vibha Galhotra Dead Monster, 2011 nickel coated ghungroos, fabric, polyurethane coat, thread, and steel dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York and Gallery Espace, New Delhi

I stared at the Dead Monster for a long time last week, noting the folds of its “skin” flopping over the architectonic body beneath. I then walked home by way of the High Line Park, and stopped to stare down at a construction pit on Gansevoort Street in the West Village. A big, bright yellow CAT earth mover was perched precariously on a huge mound of brown dirt; its “scoop” reached into the earth at odd angles, digging and clutching and swaying with a rhythm that was as mesmerizing as it was disturbing. I knew as I watched that I was, indeed, experiencing Galhotra’s Beast – the one familiar to all of us who have chosen not to escape from the global cities of the 21st century.

SR
© Shelley Rice, 2012

L’article Men on the Edge (and Vibha Galhotra) est apparu en premier sur Shelley Rice.

Juan Downey, "America Is Back Together", 1972

Juan Downey: The Invisible Architect is a dense and highly conceptual exhibition, one that at first hardly seems at home on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx.A lively and active figure in the New York art world from the time he arrived in 1969 until his death in 1993, Downey was born in Santiago, Chile in 1940. He finished a degree in architecture before moving to Paris to study printmaking. By the time he arrived in New York, therefore, this young man had roots in Europe as well as in North and South America. These diverse cultural threads, and his lingering attachments to (and critiques of) them all, are the subjects of the first U.S. survey of his work, which includes video, drawings, paintings, photographs and installation works as well as the artist’s notebooks. His deep connections to Latin America link him to the Bronx Museum, where he exhibited during his lifetime, and to the multicultural neighborhood outside the gallery walls.

Curated by Valerie Smith, Curator and Head of the Visual Arts, Film and Media at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, the exhibition was organized by the MIT List Visual Arts Center as well as the Bronx Museum. Best known as a video artist for works like the two part The Thinking Eye (on Las Meninas and the idea of reflections in Western art), Downey was engaged in cutting edge conceptual and technical experiments during the 1970s and 1980s. Obsessed with the idea of invisible energies and architectures, he shifted away from material objects and toward performative and interactive works like Plato Now and Fresh Air (with Gordon Matta-Clark). But the eye-openers in this show are his stunning large-scale drawings, many of them engaged with mapping and the idea of shifting geographic boundaries and cultural identities. Much of Downey’s work, especially his series Video Trans Americas (footage of indigenous people observed and encountered throughout his travels in North and South America), is almost contemporary in its search for the self within overlapping cultural, national and political arenas. The slippages and the power plays of nations; the ties that bind races, places and traditions; the trans-cultural usages, hierarchies and vagaries of symbols: these were his themes, and this beautifully organized exhibition allows Downey’s multifaceted and still timely oeuvre to shine in all its complexity.

L’article Juan Downey: The Invisible Architect est apparu en premier sur Shelley Rice.

Milagros de la Torre "Under the Black Sun" 1991-1993 Hand-dyed toned gelatin silver print, Mercurochrome, Pin Variable dimensions; diptych Courtesy of the Artist

Americas Society, Feb. 8- April 14
Curated by Edward J. Sullivan

For me, the most unnerving thing about the Milagros de la Torre exhibition at the Americas Society, with almost 40 photographic works produced since the 1990s (that will be shown simultaneously at the Museo de Arte in Lima, Peru), is its proximity. A constant feature of the work selected for this artist’s first monographic show in New York is that either the artist or the viewer must get close, too close. An example: Fears, a series made in 2004, is based on a survey carried out among residents of Mexico City during a period of six months. De la Torre asked people to describe their deepest fear. No camera was involved in this work; the framed rectangular prints are monochromatic tones of dark or reddish brown. Puzzling over the seeming lack of content, the observer must move closer in order to finally notice small, barely perceptible, texts written in Spanish at the bottom of the picture plane. The texts are one sentence long. Squinting to read them (as if moving in close to hear a whispered confession), the viewer inevitably confounds his/her own reflected image with the fears expressed by the urban dwellers. These citizens are terrified of kidnapping, beating and rape – and so are we, because our face is mirrored in the frame and our breath is clouding its glass surface. Who is the observer, and who the observed; who is the confessor and who has confessed? These distinctions are suddenly unclear.

This transmutation — from viewer to subject — is the power of Milagros de la Torre’ work, and though it operates in different ways it finishes by drawing everyone very close into the circle of the human condition. That condition, in her world, is often violent. Lines and relations between people are in question, and images dissimulate racial and class identities Under the Black Sun of the photographer’s gaze. The most familiar objects become the agents of heinous crimes; beautiful abstract designs, once perceived correctly, are shown to be contusions on the artist’s skin. De la Torre grew up in Lima when terrorism and crime were rampant, and as the daughter of the Chief of the city’s anti-drug military police force, she lived with constant uncertainty about when violence would erupt into her family’s domestic life. Educated in Peru and London, living in Paris, Mexico and New York, working in Spain, she has seen enough to understand that this violence is everywhere, has been everywhere, probably will be everywhere. Though many of her works are based on archival research in specific venues – like The University of Salamanca Library, The Palace of Justice and the Larco Herrera Psychiatric Institution in Lima – their tales of murder, of crime, of insanity, censorship and discrimination multiply and resonate beyond and between countries, continents and historical époques.

There’s a series called Bulletproof, large prints documenting clothing, specifically men’s jackets, on hangers. Seen life size, the garments are high end, fancy or everyday, full of color and decorative patterns. Once again, the viewer is seduced into moving close, this time by the texture of the image; de la Torre chose a cotton paper that is soft and tactile, making one want to reach out and touch (or acquire) this item. But all of these warm and fuzzy fashions are bulletproof, worn by people armoring themselves against a violence foretold. The empty garments hover between expectation and mourning – just as the common personal objects documented in The Lost Steps, familiar things like belts and skirts, wallets and shirts, are torn from their place within the fabric of everyday life when we realize they were submitted as evidence in the trials of felons. There is no safe place in Milagros de la Torre’s universe, and all of us are implicated under the black sun.

Milagros de la Torre — The Lost Steps “Shirt of journalist murdered in the Uchuraccay Massacre, Ayacucho” 1996 Toned gelatin silver print 16 x 16 inches Courtesy of the Artist

L’article Observed: Milagros de la Torre est apparu en premier sur Shelley Rice.

Jerome Liebling, "Butterfly Boy", New York, 1949, gelatin silver print. The Jewish Museum, New York, Purchase: Mimi and Barry J. Alperin Fund. © Estate of Jerome Liebling.

Founded to provide instruction and meeting places for photographers and artists who were often the children of immigrants, The League has been known primarily for its Socialist-oriented, left wing politics and its rejection of the artsy and elitist Salon style of the Pictorialists. Faced with the diversity and the dilemmas of urban life during the Depression, idealistic young people like Walter Rosenblum, Aaron Siskind, Max Yavno, Helen Levitt and Morris Engel chose photography and aimed to follow in the footsteps of supporters like Lewis Hine and Paul Strand. Famous artists and critics – Lisette Model, Berenice Abbott, WeeGee, Edward Weston, Ansel Adams and Elizabeth McCausland for example – counted themselves among its contributors, and artists as far-flung as Edouard Boubat, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Alvarez Bravo were invited speakers. In other words, in spite of its urban emphasis and its general leftist tendencies, the League was a lively, open-ended and global center of photography open (and economically accessible) to everyone.

Sid Grossman, "Coney Island", c. 1947, gelatin silver print. The Jewish Museum, New York, Purchase: The Paul Strand Trust for the benefit of Virginia Stevens Gift. © Howard Greenberg Gallery.

This is significant, and it is also a central tenet of both the exhibition and the excellent book that accompanies it. Most discussions of the League in the past two decades have emphasized either its political ideologies or its “camera club” aspects, and neither of these points of view tell the full story. While many of its members were deeply engaged in documenting the social and political complexities of their surroundings, Grossman’s emphasis was always on the evolution of the photographer in relation to his or her subject – the formation, in other words, of a personal photographic vision that allowed the artist to perceive him/herself within the environment described. The demands of this vision changed over time, as the Depression gave way to World War II and then the unexpected prosperity and political hysteria of the postwar years. The Radical Camera’s greatest triumph is in its ability to trace not only the historical shifts but also the evolving definitions of photography that characterized members of this talented group. The relationship between the objective world and subjective vision, between documentation and art, was constantly being negotiated within the organization. Klein emphasizes that personal interpretation came to the fore in the later years of the League, in a poetic documentary style that was further developed in the works of the more solipsistic New York School artists – Robert Frank and Louis Faurer among them – who came to represent American photography during the 1950s. The complexity of this shifting ideology and aesthetic, the range of expressions set forth within its theoretical and pedagogical arena, are palpable on the walls of the Jewish Museum, embodied in wonderful pictures that continually interrogate the relationship between the world and the image-maker’s eye. It has taken a long time, but this remarkable group of men and women has finally vanquished the blind spot created by their  prejudicial past, and taken their rightful place within the histories of both photography and the city of New York.

L’article The Radical Camera: New York’s Photo League, 1936-1951 est apparu en premier sur Shelley Rice.

DOUG WHEELER “SA MI 75 DZ NY 12 » — 1975/2012 Reinforced fiberglass, LED lights, high intensity fluorescent lights, UV fluorescent lights, quartz halogen lights, DMX control Architecturally modified space, composed of two parts 564 x 702 inches (total space) 1432.6 x 1783.1 cm Photo by Jonathan Smith, courtesy of David Zwirner, New York © 2012 Doug Wheeler

The viewer walked into the brilliant white void of the installation unable to perceive its boundaries; dematerialized, the space of the gallery disappeared. (Those who are familiar with the Tibetan Book of the Dead will surely reference the Great White Light allegedly encountered by the newly deceased in this and other spiritual traditions.) Disoriented, most viewers spent the first few minutes lost, often trying to locate borders or limits before they finally gave in to the shining emptiness. The first thing I noticed was the texture of the bright light, which seemed almost palpable, like a cloud. Wheeler himself called it “a cloud of light in constant flux,…a molecular mist. It comes out of my way of seeing from living in Arizona, and the constant awareness of the landscape and the clouds.”

That heightened awareness made the experience extraordinary, and surprisingly complex. Other viewers wandering in this unmarked arena seemed like dark spots on eternity, existential symbols of themselves unmoored from physical space but beautiful and reassuring in their isolation. After a while most of us settled into a corner (so to speak, since there were none) and just stared into the void, surrendering to the warmth of the light’s embrace. Closing my eyes at a certain point, I panicked and almost lost my balance when I opened them onto the unremitting emptiness. I stayed for a long time, and felt (more than saw) the light fade, disappear and reappear. Both my body and my mind found the subtlety of the experience intense, a meditation accessing levels of consciousness not readily available in The Big Apple. Some art allows us to experience another culture; Doug Wheeler’s installation expedited an extraordinary journey through the porous boundaries between physical space and the landscape of perception.

L’article Doug Wheeler, sa mi 75 dz ny 12 est apparu en premier sur Shelley Rice.