Fugitive Vision

Houston Fotofest Portfolio Review

2011-06-01T23:12:00.000-04:00

It's time to register for the review sessions of Houston Fotofest, one of the premier portfolio review sessions anywhere. I'm proud to report that I'll be a reviewer in sessions 1 and 2. I look forward to re-connecting with old friends and seeing some great work.

A re-Post

2011-05-27T00:32:00.000-04:00

I posted about this photo award some months ago, but, apparently, the website wasn't quite ready yet. The Poznan school is one of the finest, if not the finest, school for art in Poland. While we don't know so much about them in the US and Western Europe, many of the biggest stars of Polish art went to school there. An award from their new media department would be quite the plum. Check it out. Applications from outside of Poland are encouraged, or so the director has promised me. Go to: www.photodiploma.com.

Pyrotopia: First Annual Festival of Fire Arts Call For Artists

2011-04-19T13:27:00.000-04:00

My new home is in Pittsburgh, PA, and it's my desire to promote and support art events that are indigenous to the area. Check out the event listed below. If you're an artist who wants to apply or an art enthusiast who wants to attend, it could be a cool event. Check it out:

Pyrotopia is seeking visual and performing artists to participate in Pyrotopia: First Annual Festival of Fire Arts, taking place on October 7th and 8th, 2011 at UnSmoke Artspace in Braddock, PA.

We are accepting submissions for a wide range of exhibitions and performances, from meditative and quietly interactive to spectacular, high-tech, explosive or utterly undefinable. We will consider any works of art, performances and other forms of creative expression which either directly incorporate or thematically reference fire or related media, such as electricity and light. We will select the best of these works to showcase at Pyrotopia.

Pyrotopia will occur at UnSmoke Artspace and adjacent grounds. It will be free, family-friendly and open to the public. We expect a large turn-out from Braddock and the greater Pittsburgh area. Programming throughout the day and night will appeal to a wide range of interests and ages. Live fire art and events will occur on Friday and Saturday nights, with workshops, demonstrations and other fire-related programming during the day on Saturday.

Pyrotopia is being organized and produced by a group of Pittsburgh artists with a breadth of experience working with fire in art and performance, producing large scale events and spectacles and teaching fire arts skills. As artists, we love the medium of fire in its wide variety of applications, and we wish to ignite the public’s imagination and appreciation too.

For more information please visit the Pyrotopia website: http://pyrotopia.net/apply/index.html

Thanks and please forward this along.

Musings on 2011 Armory Week

2011-03-24T11:01:00.000-04:00

I've been invite by the acclaimed Polish photo magazine, Fotografia, to contribute an article about some of the photography I saw during Armory week in NYC. An upgraded version which is much more specific and illustrated will appear in the forthcoming edition of the magazine. Check out their website for my article and other timely writing on photography both in Poland and internationally. In the meantime, here's a blog version of the article including some non-photographic work I found particularly noteworthy:

The first week of March is art fair week in New York City. At the center is the Armory Show, held on two huge, adjacent piers on the Hudson River, which are the temporary home for over 270 international galleries. The press for the last few editions of the Armory has not been the best, so there have been a few other fairs storming the castle making attempts at what they perceive to be a weakened throne. While there have always been other satellite fairs during Armory week, the newer ones are notable for their quality and spirit of innovation. But none of them match the Armory for sheer size. The Armory Show is the largest in New York City and, with Art Basel/Miami Beach in December, the largest in the US. Art Basel in the summer is the largest of all of them, but fairs like Art Hong Kong are making inroads both in quality and size. The other fairs in New York during Armory week are The Independent, ADAA (Art Dealers Association of America), Volta, Scope, Pulse, Pool, Verge Art Brooklyn, Red Dot, Fountain and this year’s newbie, the Dependent. I managed to visit all of them save Red Dot, Fountain, Dependent, and Pool.

It used to be that one could get a good overview of the current art scene by visiting a big, prestigious art fair like the Armory. No more. Plenty of important galleries don’t go to fairs, some don’t come to New York, and the ones that do go don’t always show their most forward-thinking artists. Roberta Smith writes in the New York Times, “Art fairs occur because hundreds of art dealers have decided that these temporary confabs help them raise their profiles and make it easier to find one buyer each for a certain number of artworks. While the dealers seek those individual matches of art and buyer, the rest of us are free, in a sense, to watch: to absorb the art and learn from it, which is another kind of possession.”

And that is exactly what I do. I look, ask questions, take notes, and try to see if there are patterns or trends worth noting in addition to scouting for artists that may be worth watching. There is much written online and in print giving general surveys of the various fairs, so I will confine myself (mostly) to works of photographic interest. Unfortunately, if we leave out the big names or at least the well-known names, there isn’t much to discuss. It goes without saying that one can see examples of Marina Abramovic, Olafur Eliasson, Anne Collier, and various exponents of the Düsseldorf School. Readers of this article will be familiar with them all. I would prefer to concentrate on the names that may not be quite so familiar, or at least not familiar yet.

Let’s start at what I thought was the best of the fairs, The Independent (http://www.independentnewyork.com/2011/). Last year was the inaugural year for the Independent, but it has quickly established itself as the fair to watch and the one with the most personality. As one noted curator I know said as he left the Independent, “You know an art fair is good if, when you’re leaving, you don’t hate art.” I’m not exactly sure how independent the Independent is - it’s chock full of big-name, established galleries – but the quality can’t be denied. Again quoting from the New York Times, Karen Rosenberg said, “The inaugural Independent attracted a lot of attention, critical and commercial, for its don’t-fence-me-in installation and well-edited mix of contemporary art. The fair’s cachet was such that it managed to poach a couple of dealers from the Armory, the city’s biggest art fair, including Wallspace and Harris Lieberman (www.harrislieberman.com), for this year’s edition.” And Harris Lieberman had one of the most talked about photographic artists in his booth, Lisa Oppenheim. Her photograms of flowers, which explored Victorian symbolism and alternative languages, are not my favorite from this artist, but she is an undeniable talent. Absolutely check out some of her other projects. http://www.lisaopp.net/images.html

My favorite photo “discovery” of the week, Erica Baum, was across the room from Harris Lieberman at Bureau Gallery (www.bureau-inc.com). On view were straight on but eye-bending shots of splayed open books, which successfully challenge our notion of what we see when we see a book. Though the work has a collage or photoshop feel when first seen that resolve quickly into the reality of what they are, the cropped words and images glimpsed in the open pages combine beautifully into a concrete-poetic tableau. Be sure to look up previous projects by this talented mid-career artist.http://ubu.com/contemp/baum/index.html

Last on the photo front at Independent was a super example of Anne Collier’s conceptual brilliance at Anton Kern Gallery (www.antonkerngallery.com). While other works by Ms Collier were to be seen at other fairs, Mr. Kern had a particularly fine example here shown to beautiful effect.

A dozen blocks uptown was the Volta fair. Volta has a relationship with the Armory show, presenting itself as the smaller, hipper nephew of the big, wealthy uncle. As part of their push for innovation, they have an on-line catalog that is quite satisfying to navigate (http://volta.artlog.org/) The philosophic conceit of Volta is that it requires galleries to present single artist booths. This strategy has its strengths and weaknesses. As a viewer, it makes the apprehension of a booth that much simpler; you know all the work in a booth is by one artist no matter how disparate. On the other hand, if that artist’s work doesn’t speak to you, there’s nothing the gallery can do to hold you in their booth to explore other aspects of its program. I confess, Volta is always a mixed bag for me, and this year was no exception. While I did see a few stand-out booths, most of the fair was forgettable.

On the photographic front, the best booth was not quite photographic. Madder139 (http://www.madder139.com/) had graphite drawings by Paul Chiappe which were dead-on re-creations of fuzzy snapshots and yearbook photos. From the technical mastery of the medium through to the sharpshooter focus of the emotional tone, these were great works.

Also at Volta, Marx and Zavaterro Gallery from SanFrancisco (http://www.marxzav.com/) had the multimedia work of Bradley Castellanos. Working in a combination of oil, acrylic, photo collage, and resin, Castellanos’ complex, layered pieces address man’s relationship to the environment and world ecosystems. I heard about the work form a curator I know and trust. She said Mr. Castellanos is quite hot and being acquired by some notable collections and institutions, but my first impression was quite negative. I found the work cluttered and unappealing. But based on her strong recommendation, I did some more research and looked at more examples online. I can’t say I’m a total convert, but I’m beginning to see the appeal of the work. The technical command is unassailable, and he instantly presents a distinctive visual style.

Pulse Fair was, as usual, filled with some exciting work though most of it was not photographic. Galeria Havana (http://www.galerihabana.com/) had some lightboxes and pin/thread photos by Cuban superstar Carlos Garaicoa, but the standouts in the booth were sculptures by Ivan Capote and Giselle Léon. Von Lintel Gallery (http://www.vonlintel.com/) had some dramatic examples by personal favorite Marco Breuer as well as some stunning typewriter pieces by Allyson Strafella (also shown at the Gallery Joe booth). Kudlek van der Grinten from Köln (http://kudlek-vandergrinten.de/) unfortunately didn’t bring any Thomas Böing photographs, but I love the drawings by Lucie Beppler that they did bring (again, also at Gallery Joe).

And finally, the main fair: The Armory Show. What can I say? Even with hundreds of galleries present, there wasn’t that much photography to see much less to talk about. Seventeen Gallery from London (www.seventeengallery.com) once again presented the work of Abigail Reynolds. Ms Reynolds looks for multiple images of a single location from book plates and travel brochures which she then combines in origami-like photo constructions. The booth sold out last year so one can understand why they brought more this year.

Moyra Davey is an artist who has stayed under the radar for most of her career. That may be changing. Her smart, pithy writing, and her cool, conceptual photographs are just now coming into wider view. Copperheads is her most well-known series which her gallery, Murray Guy (www.murrayguy.com) showed last year. The complete series is about to go up at an exhibition at the Met. This year, my favorite work, 16 Photographs from Paris, was in a box under a table which you had to ask to see. I hope more people got to see it, it’s a super project.

Ingleby Gallery (www.inglebygallery.com) was showing newer work by Susan Derges. As much as I admire the work, it was not breaking new ground. Last year I really admired the graphite and photogram pieces by Iran Do Espirito Santo at Sean Kelly (www.skny.com), but the ones this year looked to be exactly the ones they brought last year. I didn’t ask. Over on Pier 92, Bruce Silverstein (www.brucesilverstein.com) had the deeply gestural work of Shinichi Maruyama. When I was introduced to this work a few years ago, I was worried that it would be gimmick-y and mono-dimensional. I’m pleased to say Mr. Maruyama has beaten my pessimistic expectations by continuing to grow and vary his output while remaining true to a central visual idea.

Perhaps the most original work I saw during Armory week was not to be found at a fair. Sam Falls’ show at the not-to-be-missed gallery, Higher Pictures (http://higherpictures.com/), was a model of forward-looking photography that was satisfying on every level. In his current show, Mr. Falls engages the past and future of photography-as-visual-representation by layering acrylic, watercolor, pastel and digital “painting” over a digital photo. Hand-painted photographs have existed since the very beginning of the art, of course, but Falls’ use of the technique asks us to look forward as well as back. His process uses camera as machine, computer as camera, computer as painter, and, finally, the hand of the artist using old-fashioned paint. The result touches on centuries of tradition while taking a firm step forward. Roberta Smith in the NYTimes says, "The thoroughly ambiguous, lushly radiant, slightly hallucinatory results have a reverberant push-pull energy that evokes Hans Hofmann, Richard Prince, Gerhard Richter and James Rosenquist while mining a social-retinal terrain all their own." Take a look at this promising young artist. I think we’ll be hearing more about him soon.

Katarzyna Majak

2011-03-13T16:07:00.001-04:00

Readers of this blog will remember that I mentioned Katarzyna Majak in my recent posts about my trip to Poland. My first encounter with this artist was as a juror in an online photocompetition created by Jessica Porter at her Gallery, Raandesk. Ms Majak won first prize and now has her work on display at the gallery. Check it out. She is also giving a talk at B and H Photo about her work. Details of the event and a short bio are below. If you're in NYC this week and are curious about what's happening in the extremely vital Polish art scene, I suggest you register to go. Recommended.

Katarzyna Majak "An Artist On The Move"

Tuesday, March 15, 2011 | 11:00 AM - 1:00 PM

Speakers: Katarzyna Majak

Event Type: Photography

Katarzyna Majak is a fine art photographer from Poland, an Ex-Soviet Bloc country, who has lived through a period of many changes; economic, societal, and cultural. She will present several projects, both completed and in progress to bring insight about her very personal path to becoming a photographic artist. Katarzyna's story is one of a woman who finds freedom creating art and whose work reflects the themes of change, self-awareness, rites of passage, archetypes, personal freedom, and shamanism. She believes this personal search for freedom through art echoes a greater universal impulse.

Katarzyna Majak

Has recently defended her PhD on how clothing constitutes identity in selected photographic projects at Multimedia Communication Department of University of Fine Arts in Poznan (Poland). Is an active visual artist, a writer, a photography lecturer; member of editorial board and a regular contributor to Kwartalnik Fotografia (‘Fotografia Quarterly' - a high-end Polish photography magazine), cooperates with 1000 Words Photography Magazine. Awarded a scholarship by Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Colorado and the Ministry of Culture in Poland; an associate artist at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in Florida. Has written for exhibition catalogues, is an author of an introduction to 4 Photography Biennial in Poznan and ‘LAB EAST' - a book on 30 Eastern European photographers. Curated and coordinated shows both in Poland and abroad. Participates on photo juries and reviews portfolios at photo festivals all over Europe. Her work has just been included in The Collector's Guide to New Art Photography Vol. 2. Represented by Ego Gallery and Zderzak Gallery.Her work can be seen at: http://www.katarzynamajak.com
Link to BandH website page for registration: http://www.bhphotovideo.com/find/eventDetails.jsp/id/925

"The Sundays of Life" by Bela Doka (with an essay by Evan Mirapaul)

2011-01-11T03:15:00.000-05:00

I'm thrilled to report that I have an essay in a new book by Hungarian artist, Bela Doka, called "The Sundays of Life". Bela asked me to publish a letter he wrote asking for support of the book through a limited edition and signed copies. His letter is below. Check it out and let me know what you think of the essay:

Dear friends, dear friends of photo books,

I am very pleased to share the news that German publishing house , Kehrer would like to publish my limited edition photographic album, "The Sundays of Life", as a trade edition, with worldwide distribution.

I need to contribute printing costs toward the edition, which I would like to cover with the sales of the remaining copies of the original limited edition (series of 250).

Each book in the limited edition is handmade, in hard cover and cloth binding, numbered and signed.

In addition, there is a deluxe, boxed edition (Edition of 50) : the book is bound in white goatskin, in a handmade box. If you purchase a volume from this edition on my website, you can select an original Lambda print (24x30 cm) of any photograph, as a token of my appreciation, together with the book.

Every purchase is a contribution towards the next publication. If you are interested in further details, please contact me on my private e-mail address: beladoka@gmail.com. You can also contact me to purchase a copy of the book directly from me, and I am happy to sign with a personal inscription.

wishing you beautiful Sundays,

Bela

Poland, part 3

2010-12-13T23:13:00.001-05:00

Belatedly, here is part 3 of the account of my recent Polish art trip.

A name that should be mentioned in any discussion on Polish photography is Karolina Lewandowska. Ms Lewandowska was a curator at the National Gallery where, among other shows, she was responsible for an exhibition with a related catalog about the history of female documentary photographers in Poland. It is a shame that this book is not distributed in the US as it would have a significant audience across a wide spectrum of the photo world. Her focus now is in a foundation, Archeologia Fotografii, which is devoted to historical Polish photography. The foundation is doing important work to preserve whole archives of Polish photographers often rescued from family members or institutions who don't have the knowledge or facilities to care for them. They do this on a shoestring budget that would shock even a US non-profit. She confided to me that they lacked the funds to by a bigger cold storage unit needed to house a growing collection of archival negatives. When I asked how much was needed, I was astounded to learn that the figure was $1500! Philanthropically minded folks out there, you could have a significant impact on the preservation of a photographic culture for under 5 figures! Where else could you have such an effect for so little. Think about supporting them.

A related but separate entity is Galeria Asymetria run my Karolina's husband, Rafał Lewandowski. Asymetria is also concerned with historical Polish photographers - and shares a few names with Archeologia - but unlike the foundation they have works for sale and feature some artists not in the foundation. Their publishing program is also worth a look.

I was treated to a personal guided tour or Yours Gallery, one of the most high profile galleries in Warsaw. Yours has a dual mission of representing Polish photographers as well as introducing non-Polish artists to the Polish art scene. On the Polish side of the roster, I was particularly intrigued by a one-name artist called Bownik who is working on a series of portraits about online gamers. Some of the work is a little too beholden to Avedon's American West aesthetic, but overall it's a strong body of work which explores a particularly contemporary population. Check it out.

The strangest piece of serendipity evolved around my introduction to Katarzyna Majak. While I was in Bratislava, I met my Hungarian friend, Lilla Szasz, who wanted to introduce me to a friend of hers who was a reviewer at the Bratislava Photomonth portfolio reviews. When she asked me if I had ever heard of Katarzyna Majak, the answer was yes but from an unlikely source. I had just finished acting as a judge in Raandesk Gallery's online photo competition, and my fellow juror and I had just awarded Ms Majak with first place! I had the pleasure of informing Ms Majak that she had won the competition, and we made plans to meet in Warsaw in the coming days. Ms Majak wears many hats in the Polish art scene. She has a complex, multimedia art practice, curates shows, teaches, and writes for the only Polish photo magazine, Fotografia. By all means check out her work. I send thanks to her as her guidance and stewardship were invaluable to my trip.

In part 4, a visit with a photo-reportage collective called NAPO and an all-too-brief visit to Poznan.

A brief Poland report-related detour

2010-12-08T00:27:00.000-05:00

Yes, parts 3 and 4 of my Polish trip are coming, as well as posts about my weekend in Berlin and Paris Photo. But in the meantime, I want to plug an exhibit curated by Martha Kirszenbaum. I met Martha in Warsaw where she's completing a curatorial residency at the Center for Contomporary Art. She has a Project coming up in Brooklyn, NY the 11th and 12th of December that sounds exciting and intriguing called The Missing Link. Check out the website here. Check out her amazing bio here. More Poland on the way soon.

Poland, part 2

2010-11-15T19:42:00.000-05:00

It's not like Poland doesn't have books and printed material ready to go. One of the first things that struck me when I started snooping around museum bookstores in Warsaw was that there are already quite a few scholarly anthologies in print, many of them in bilingual editions. Monographs, too, are in abundance and not just for the big names. But there is absolutely no distribution system for these books, and actually kind of a hidebound bureaucracy in place that resists sending the books out of Poland! I asked everyone I met if they knew this was the case and what they thought about it. For most of those I spoke with, it was not news that the books didn't get out but they were surprised that there was a ready and eager market for it if they did. More on that to come. But happily, one book did reach me a few years ago, a slim volume by Nicholas Grospierre. I'd been impressed by what I'd seen -- I even had him on a roster for a show I was considering -- but I just assumed he was French. It turns out Nicholas is half Polish and has spent much of his adult life in Warsaw. When Jan said this was going to be the first stop on the first day, I was pleasantly surprised that it was an artist I knew of and had been curious about for years. Nicholas has a number of satisfying and exciting projects, but I think the best are his explorations of how photography can be sculptural. His installations in 1:1 ratios of the original object, such as "The Library", are equal parts essay, sculpture, and photo. I'm less excited by his documentary work, but all of it is of a consistently high quality. He has a solid, well-developed body of work that is just waiting for some smart US gallery to snap him up.

The Centre for Contemporary Art is a beacon in the Warsaw art scene. Situated in a former castle overlooking the city, it is one of the few institutions dedicated to contemporary art. From my perspective, it is significant because it is the first Polish art institution to name a full-time curator of Photography. (Photography is still the poor cousin in the mind of the Polish art establishment. It is under-recognized, under-funded, not well researched, and often poorly archived.) The curator of photography at the CCA is Adam Mazur. Adam is an articulate and intense advocate for all things photographic in Poland. He's keenly aware of the deficit of information about the history of Polish photography both inside and outside of Polish borders. He's published a number of books and has curated numerous well-regarded shows highlighting Polish work. Here's a link with Adam talking about his book, "The Histories of Photography in Poland 1839–2009", from Krakow Month of Photography site. And another link with details about his exhibition of 21st Century Polish Photography, "The Red Eye Effect", which also had a published catalog. He's virtually alone in his position in Polish photography. Definitely someone to watch; he's smart, ambitious, and ready for prime-time.

One of the artists in the Red Eye show is named Wojciech Wilczyk. His website, for some reason I can't explain, doesn't list the book he did, called "There's No Such Thing As An Innocent Eye", which creates a typology of structures in Poland that had been Synagogues or Jewish prayer houses and are now something else. It's a super book, and yet another example of a publication that could sold in a hundred US venues to commercial and critical success.

Raster is an independent art space in Warsaw, established in 2001, exhibiting and representing emerging artists from Poland and abroad. They are one of the most well-known and well-funded of the galleries that consistently show in the West. There is also a Raster Foundation which follows generally the same program as the gallery but doesn't have the commercial component. The program of Raster is not merely focused on visual art but also includes screenings, discussions, literature events, concerts as well as informal meetings focused on the local community. Raster is run by Lukasz Gorczyca and Michal Kaczynski who have been established in the art community for some time due to their dynamic activity as critics and curators.I met with Lukasz and had a lively discussion about the Polish art scene and about the roster of his gallery. He was eager to introduce me to the opus of Aneta Grzeszykowska. I'd seen (and disliked) her "Untitled Film Stills" at Basel Statements 3 years ago, but there are a number of projects which I found satisfying and complex. The best for me is a photo album work which is culled from her actual personal family archives, but in which she has carefully edited out any trace of herself. I also liked her riff on Thomas Ruff portraits made entirely out of manufactured, fictitious physiognomies.

Coming next, more from Warsaw and 24 hours in Poznan.

Poland, part 1

2010-11-14T19:49:00.002-05:00

Poland has been on my mind for a few years now. Asia Zak of Zak/Branicka Gallery in Berlin was the first guide to show me that there were interesting Polish artists beyond the stars we know from the big galleries. Her gallery (originally on her own and then teaming with Polish art scholar Monica Branicka) has become an ambassador for Polish art outside of Poland. Since meeting Asia, I've been keeping an eye out for Polish galleries at fairs and Polish artists showing with Western galleries. The fact that the art I was seeing -- in a variety of media, styles, and perspectives -- was all of a remarkably high standard and complexity, whetted my appetite to know more. I was developing a curiosity about what art I wasn't seeing; what art hadn't found a gallery or was not being taken to fairs. It seemed unlikely that a culture and art scene that had developed so many art stars would have, to use a sports metaphor, no bench.

Of course, there are names that are familiar to many of us through museum shows, art fairs, and high profile gallery affiliations. Paweł Althamer, Wilhelm Sasnal, Monika Sosnowska, Piotr Uklanski, Robert Kuśmirowski, and Paulina Ołowska are to name but a few. Perhaps less well-known to US art consumers are Tomasz Kowalski, Katarzyna Kozyra, Zofia Kulik, and Joanna Rajkowska. Along with Zak/Branicka, there have been a few seminal Polish galleries that have had a presence at the big fairs -- Raster and Foksal, for example -- who have had an impact on the awareness in the West of Polish artists. But despite the high profile of these galleries in Poland and at major art fairs, I'm betting that most US art lovers are unaware of them or are under-informed about their rosters and programs.

Readers of this blog will remember that I visited Krakow a few years ago. That was my first foray within the borders of Poland which yielded, with the help of Galeria Zpaf i s-ka, 3 of the artists that I used in my Camera Club show in September. Zpaf i s-ka may be less off the radar after their participation in Paris Photo next week, but even then you couldn't say that they were unknown. For some years they were organizing Krakow Month of Photography, which (along with Lodz MoP) has been developing a loyal following every May. From Zpaf i s-ka and the gallery scene in Krakow, I was really starting to get a taste that there's more going on in Poland than we see in the US. I was determined to go back and make a more thorough investigation.

Before I really dive into the substance of my week in Poland, I need to say some thanks. Karol Hordziej from Zpaf i s-ka was my primary resource who got me started off with some introductions to galleries and institutions. Artist and curator Katarzyna Majak, who I met through a friend in Bratislava, was also a generous resource and translator. Martha Kierszenbaum, whom I met briefly at an opening at the Contemporary Art Center in Warsaw, is a young curator of French/Polish background who is working now in Poland but has experience in the US at the Whitney and the New Museum. She led me to some galleries and artists I wouldn't have found otherwise, and seems to be someone to watch for on the curatorial scene in the coming years. Her perspective is right on the money.

But my biggest debt of gratitude goes to Jan Dziaczkowski. Jan has been written about a few times on this blog and I included him in my Camera Club show last September. He's a talented and intuitive artist. I simply could not have done this trip without him. He spent whole days with me leading me from gallery to museum, to artist studio, to artist café. Needless to say, my Polish language skills are not, shall we say, fluent, so even if his contribution had only been as translator, I would be in his debt. But he was so much more. Jan is tied into the scene as a relatively recent graduate of the Warsaw Art Academy, so he knows who's doing what and where they're doing it.

Rather than make this an endless, run-on post, I've decided to break Poland up into multiple parts. I'm still struggling to digest all that I saw, so I can't say that I yet have a cohesive, overall impression of what I experienced. Perhaps that will come with time and maybe a few more visits (I'll go back in May for MoP in Krakow and Lodz). For now, I'll tell you about the places I saw and a few of the people I met (mostly with links to explore). Perhaps a picture will develop as I replay the trip for you. As always, I welcome your comments, impressions, and amendments. More to come.....

Bratislava Month of Photography 2010

2010-11-11T18:35:00.000-05:00

Last week was the opening week of the Month of Photography in Bratislava. This is their 20^th anniversary season so I expected big things. When I had been here 2 years ago, the festival had a few really first-rate shows, but the whole operation suffered from some shoddy administration and not a little bit of crony-ism. Still, there seemed to be a different perspective at play in this sleepy post-Soviet appendix of Vienna plus I saw some artists that don’t really get west all that much, so I hoped this anniversary edition would hold some hidden treasures for me. For the most part, no such luck.

Administration was again the principle roadblock. This is not a big festival – much smaller than the likes of Arles or Photo España – so one should be able to take in virtually every exhibit in one, well-planned day. But you can’t. Venues are open sporadically, and even sometimes not open when the schedule said they would be. Also, the festival has a tradition of sequential vernissages, so the whole festival doesn’t open on opening day. You have to wait until the official opening or after – which sometimes happens 3 days after opening day – to see the show. I would follow my trusty festival map, with its address and opening hours clearly printed, only to find the venue locked up tight with no one in sight. Arles gets this part right. All of the exhibits of the Rencontre are accessible from the opening bell, but there are celebratory vernissages spaced out over the course of the first week.

But finding the place when it was closed was, it turns out, a kind of victory. There were 3 venues I never found at all. There was a Witcacy portrait show I really wanted to see which was not exactly in the center of town. But I trekked out to find it and spent an hour hunting to no avail. Then I went back 2 days later with a friend who had more language skills than me. She, too, asked questions, pointed at the map, showed the page in the festival materials. No luck. We never found the show. It’s not like I can’t read a map or find an address in a foreign city. I found galleries in Tokyo, for heaven’s sake, but Bratislava didn’t give up its secrets. I wasted 3 hours, at least, looking for various exhibits, and heard similar complaints about phantom exhibits from other attendees. This is a failure on the part of the festival planners no two ways about it. I don’t think I’m setting the bar too high to expect that I should be able to find the shows using the festival map.

Ok, enough about logistical challenges, what about the art? There were some good shows. The best were three historical shows. The first was a Frantisek Drtikol essay from Czech archives. It really yielded no surprises but it was good to see some vintage prints of images I hadn't seen before along with some quotes by Drtikol and a few biographical details.

The second was a fun assortment of work spanning the years 1840-1950 culled from the Russian State Archives of Literature and Art. The work ranged from early wet collodion glass plate prints made by Russian photographers to 1rst rate constructions and photograms by El Lissitzky. It was an uneven and loosely connected exhibit -- the only real thread was that they are all stored in the same archive -- but a pleasure to see nonetheless.

The best was a super exhibit called “In the Shadow of the Third Reich” which were official photos of the Slovak State from 1939-1945. This was dramatic documentary footage of Slovaks eagerly accepting the Nazi program and forming their own units and paramilitary groups to support the German aggression. The photography was of a very high level and the message packed a wallop.

On a more contemporary front, winners of World Press Photo 10 were predictably moving and powerful. As strong as the pictures were, the indelible image in this show came from the comment of one of the jurors. He stated that even the tens of thousands of images submitted for the competition did not give an adequate sense of the amount of suffering in the world. I am humbled by the thought.

The most contemporary work was part of group shows highlighting work done by students from two Eastern European art schools. The first, celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Institute of Creative Photography at the Silesian University in Opava, yielded little pleasure. But the show from the Poznan Academy of Fine Arts was chock full of exciting and promising work. As I write this, I'm sitting in a hotel room in Poznan looking forward to a meeting tomorrow morning with the director of the Academy. I'd heard that Poznan was the one of the best art schools in Poland (if not the best), so I shouldn't have been surprised by the show. I'll wait to comment on individual artists until I've gotten more background from the director, and I'll weave it into my larger overview of the Polish part of my trip which will be coming soon.

I'm sure I'd have more to talk about if I'd been able to find and see all the exhibits I'd hoped to see. Oh well! You can follow the hyperlink to the festival site to see what was on offer and to perhaps get a sense of what was in the program. I'll take a pass on commenting on the shows I didn't like. Suffice it to say that the problem wasn't that they were bad (for the most part) or provocative, but that they were so bland and predictable as to not inspire comment. I think my disappointment in Bratislava is partly because I feel it could be so much more. I strongly believe in regional differences of style and perspective, a perspective which Bratislava has an opportunity to highlight and celebrate. I know that there are talented and accomplished Slovak artists that are excluded from the Festival, but that quibble is only a fraction of a larger gripe at the curatorial choices of the festival as a whole. Arles is a long way from perfect, but their choice to have a guest Commissaire who lends a guiding principle to each year is perhaps something Bratislava should investigate. In any case, I hope future editions of the show will begin to provide a forum for that which is most important and new in photography especially work which originates from that part of the world. If that could happen, it would be a must-see stop on any curator's itinerary.

Dear Readers:

2010-11-07T21:27:00.000-05:00

It has been some time since my last substantive post. I've had a lot of questions about the value of Fugitive Vision and of blogs in general, so there's been a bit of a moratorium on my contributions here. But I'm at the front end of the kind of trip that inspired Fugitive Vision in the first place; an art excursion that touches spots that many are unable to see themselves. Starting at the opening week of the Month of Photography Festival in Bratislava, I travel in a large counter-clockwise circle touching Warsaw, Poznan, and Berlin before finishing with a week at Paris Photo. It seemed a good time to start the dialogue once again. But before I start my Bratislava report, I'd like to share a few thoughts and questions about the blog itself.

I've spoken with a few of you about why you read Fugitive Vision, but I've failed to come away with a distinct sense of who my readers are and why they visit the site. There's so much content out there, so much information fighting for screentime, what makes Fugitive Vision a destination for you? Ferdinand Brüggemann, of Priska Pasquer gallery says he only posts a few times a year because he views his blog as a kind of archive. He knows that when the artists he writes about come up in searches, people find his blog. As opposed to Twitter and Facebook -- which he characterizes correctly as writing that has, at most, a 24 hour lifespan -- a blog post lives in search engines long after its original publication. Perhaps this is the answer for me. I've noticed that my "hits" numbers don't change much no matter how much or little I post. So perhaps a regular contribution doesn't really add much to the site. Should I email a reader list when I do a new post? Should I only post on, for example, the first day of the month so you know when to check the site? I don't want this site to be an onanistic enterprise (as most blogs are), and I really began to question my goals in writing here.

So I turn the question over to you, dear readers. Please post your comments here telling me what you can about what makes Fugitive Vision useful for you or what you'd like to see in the future. If I can read a consensus in the responses, that will be my path for the future. I'm eager for your input. If you don't want to write publicly or navigate the Blogspot spam filter, you can write to me directly at emirapaul@gmail.com. With luck, the address won't get trampled by spam after I've posted it in an open forum.

Coming soon, a report from Bratislava. I'll post 3-5 entries about this trip after which I trust I'll have some responses from this post. From there, we'll see........

My curatorial debut.

2010-09-03T00:31:00.000-04:00

Press release and link below:

You Can’t Get There From Here
Curated by Evan Mirapaul

Featuring work by:
Stephen Berkman, Marco Citron,
Jan Dziaczkowski and Joanna Rajkowska

September 10 – October 30, 2010
Opening reception: Friday, September 10, 6 – 8pm

CCNY is proud to present You Can’t Get There From Here, an exhibition of four contemporary photographers who challenge our perceptions of time and place. The world as depicted by these photographers may seem familiar and real, but is, in fact, constructed or deliberately out of synch with our expectations. These artists, using a variety of techniques such as collage, antiquarian processes, and color shifts, create a visual reality that seems tangible and real, but is inaccessible to us in every way except our imaginations. Upon closer examination certain elements in these pictures are jarring or anachronistic, forcing viewers to reconsider their preconceptions about each scene, and, by extension, assumptions about how we see the world. You Can’t Get There From Here, is the fourth in a series of guest-curated exhibitions at CCNY.

Stephen Berkman’s work is rooted in another age. As he says, “My objective is to make my photographic works as timely and as relevant to the 19th century as I possibly can. ” Indeed, his portraits seem to be the lost work of a time-traveling tintype or Daguerrotype maker, one who brings his anachronistic modern aesthetic to an antique process. Like many artists in this exhibit, Berkman views history as a plastic and malleable concept.

Jan Dziaczkowski (pronounced: jotch-kov-skee) imagines a different history for Western Europe. What if the Iron Curtain had extended through the UK? How would Western European capitals look if the socialist architecture of the Cold War had taken root across Europe? Jan Dziaczkowski uses period postcards as base material that he collages into cityscapes that look realistic and familiar. These postcards come from a European vacation that didn’t happen, but is easily imaginable.

Marco Citron is also inspired by postcards, notably the Martin Parr collection titled Boring Postcards. Mr. Citron seeks out locations and vantage points in Eastern Europe that seem to have never moved beyond the 1950s or 60s aesthetic, which he then photographs in that periodâ€™s flat postcard style. Artificial coloring is added to heighten the effect of a place suspended in time. Though we could actually visit these places (they are the only photographs in the show that present an unaltered contemporary landscape), Citron’s perspective places them firmly in another era, one unavailable to us photographically, politically, and physically.

In her series Postcards From Switzerland, Joanna Rajkowska (pronounced: rye-kov-ska) uses Photoshop to combine two wildly disparate urban environments. Uniting images from public spaces in Bern, Switzerland with images from places of conflict in the Middle East, the surprise is not how different these places look, but how unnoticeable many of the additions are. The artist says, “Israeli checkpoints and blockades fit almost imperceptibly into a ‘Western European cityscape’. ” Despite how far away and foreign the armed hotspots of the world may seem to us, Ms. Rajkowska shows us how quickly and easily they could be made a part of our own familiar terrain.

Gallery hours: Monday – Saturday 12 - 6 pm

CCNY‘s guest–curated exhibitions are supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.

CCNY is celebrating over 125 years serving the photographic and art community through this and upcoming exhibitions, lectures, and special events. For more information, contact John Stanley at info@cameraclubny.org or by phone at 212–260–9927.

China redux

2010-05-07T22:55:00.000-04:00

Is it possible to tell the difference between Fugitive Vision silence because of my laziness and silence because of internet control? I hope so, because I'm about to leave a period of the former and re-enter a period of the latter. I hope this next 2 week period of silence will not be tallied in the laziness column.

I've just spent the last 2 weeks in Germany and have much to report. I started off at the Berlin Gallery Weekend where, in addition to dozens of gallery openings, I had the pleasure to visit a number of public collections including the inauguration of the Olbricht Collection, the Sammlung Hoffmann, the Düsseldorf School focused de Ganay Collection, Daimler-Chrysler Collection, and Sammlung Roosen-Trinks. All of this will be reported on at a later date.

The reason for the enforced silence is that I am returning to China. As I mentioned a few posts ago, I will be a judge in the Shanghai International Photo Competition starting next week. If my trip last December is any guide, I will not have access to this blog while I'm on mainland China. I have no doubt there will be much to tell once I return from radio silence.

This trip was supposed to be: Berlin, Bratislava, Vienna, Frankfurt, and Shanghai. However, I did a VERY stupid thing. I forgot to get my Chinese visa before I left for Germany. Stupid, right? How could I forget this? The fact has really trashed my last week. I just got my passport back today from the visa expediter I use in NYC. I was without it for a week. Hence I didn't go to Bratislava to do the studio visits I had planned, and I didn't go to Vienna to participate in Vienna Fair with my gallery friends. Bummed. But I have the passport and the visa now, so at least the China portion of the trip has been salvaged. Sigh. It all cost me a bundle plus I really lost out by not going to Vienna and Slovakia.I ended up spending the week in Frankfurt with a day trip to Köln. Köln was especially satisfying including a visit to Schaden Books, Priska Pasquer Gallery, and Kolumba Museum. Reports on all of this and more when I get back. There are even some artist discoveries to make up for the lost Slovakian opportunities (Bratislava artist reviews WILL come at a later date).

Stay tuned and be patient with me. Mid May will see a volcano of blog postings. Flights may have to be canceled..........

Houston Fotofest

2010-04-28T21:10:00.001-04:00

I spent the week of March 22 in Houston as a reviewer for Fotofest. This was my second time at the festival but my first as an official participant. The first time I went, I was bowled over by the abundance of art Houston offered me. Museum of Fine Art Houston, The Menil (which includes the Rothko Chapel and the Twombly Gallery), Houston Center for Photography, not to mention dozens of galleries are all worth a trip by themselves, and we haven't even started to mention the program that Fotofest puts together. Make no mistake, Houston is an art lover's destination.

The Menil Collection is an idyll for an art lover. I was smitten the first time I went, and time hasn't dulled my infatuation. Renzo Piano's building is an oasis for art, and the Menil fills it with examples from antiquity to contemporary that satisfy any thirst. It's my luck that every day I've visited has been a perfect spring day. Ambling along Michael Heizer's land sculpture in the front lawn, gazing at Mark di Suvero's sculpture from a bench under blossoming cherry trees, or simply marveling at how Piano's architecture seamlessly blends with the neighborhood, the experience comes close to perfection. Maurizio Cattelan was a guest curator for the installation that was up while I was there interweaving his own works into the holdings of the collection with wit and intelligence.

Anne Wilkes Tucker has few peers in the photographic museum community. In Houston at the MFA, she has built one of the great collections of photography in the American museum canon. I've had the pleasure of meeting her in a number of cities around the world where I've benefited from her quiet and generous pedagogical spirit, so it's a special treat to be on her home court. I won't labor the details of the exhibit I saw this time, I only mention that this, too, is a Houston treasure worth a special visit.

But the reason we all trek down to Houston every two years is Fotofest itself. And the soul of Fotofest is the portfolio review. Four full-on weeks of them. Hundreds of photographers and dozens upon dozens of reviewers. The sheer quantity of work being looked at boggles the mind. In addition to the official review sessions, photographers roam the lobby of the hotel asking for extra sessions. I'd been warned before I went the first time that I should choose carefully which bathroom to use because one might be asked to look at work mid-stream, so to speak. I wasn't accosted like that, but there many requests for extra time. I figure that's the reason I'm there, so I usually say yes, but it's an exhausting schedule even without the extras. The size of the event, in a funny way, is one of the few disappointments of the festival. Unless you attend the full four weeks, there's no telling what interesting artist you missed in a previous or succeeding week. But that's a quibble. There's plenty of visual nourishment in any given week. Fotofest also mounts exhibitions. They usually contain a mix of established and less seen artists. The lesser known artists are either younger or are from places less well-served by a gallery scene. I count these introductions as highly as the ones I make at the reviewer tables. The following recommendations are a combination of work I saw in the exhibits and work I saw at the official review sessions.

Portfolio review is a funny animal. Both artist and reviewer come to the table with expectations and assumptions. Some of these are reasonable and helpful, and others are....well....something else. I'll leave it to a future post to air my (highly subjective) thoughts on review sessions, but suffice it to say I heard about some mind-boggling behavior from both sides of the equation. My philosophy about reviews is that the artist has paid a fee and deserves something back for that fee. Unless the artist specifically asks my opinion about the work, I usually restrict my comments to practical suggestions for career advancement and professional opportunities. That is what most of the artists have paid their fees to receive. Of course, it goes without saying that there's work which speaks to me more personally that others. Below you'll find a list of the work I found most satisfying - both in the reviews and in the shows - with a short description and a website. My apologies to those of you whom I met and are not listed. This is a highly edited and personal list which excludes much very fine work.

Houston Center for Photography had a solo show for Anthony Goicolea. Mr. Goicolea needs no introduction from me, but I wanted to mention him for two reasons. The first reason is that I have underestimated him. I was completely unimpressed with the early series that chronicled teenage boys in metaphorical tableaux, but subsequently I have been won over. The last 2 shows at Postmasters Gallery have been spectacular and unassailable. The second reason is that the HCP show was also a marvel. In particular, the diptychs from the "Related" series are masterpieces. From the artist's website: Goicolea has executed a series of portraits based on old photographs of family members, known and unknown, while they were still living in Cuba. By drawing and painting these portraits, Goicolea creates a reinterpreted, second-generation reproduction of their likenesses. These images are drawn to resemble daguerreotypes and are executed in negative on layered Mylar and glass. After drawing his own negatives, Goicolea then inverts them to create a positive photographic mirror of each drawing.
This is an artist to follow. I am a convert. If you haven't already, check him out. he's the real deal.

Matthew Brandt was included in one of the Fotofest shows highlighting young artists from Southern California. I was impressed by his integrated use of substances taken from the subject of his photograph (lake water, body fluids) and antiquarian processes. http://www.matthewbrandt.com/

Myra Greene has a gorgeously realized and completed project of ambrotype self-portraits that explore the representation of cultural stereotypes in 19th century photo objects. Super. http://www.myragreene.com/

Jason Lazarus and Richard Mosse were part of a Fotofest show, "Whatever Was Splendid: New American Photographs". Mr. Lazarus' use of fictionalized narratives paired with found photos blown up to epic size were new (at least to me) and very effective. Mr. Mosse had eerily beautiful portraits of car carcasses demolished by warfare in Iraq in addition to a terrifying video which united wounded American vets playing violent video games at Walter Reade with video game-like footage of actual airstrikes. Not to be missed. http://www.richardmosse.com/, http://jasonlazarus.com/

Andrew Buurman was showing a fine series highlighting people in positions of worship and devotion while gazing at schedule boards in transit hubs. He's also the creator of a fine book called "Allotments" which is available on Amazon. http://www.buurman.co.uk/

Greta Pratt has a CV which would lead you to believe she's better known than she is. A solo show at the Smithsonian including a catalog, a solo show at MassMoCA, and a Steidl book to count just a few high points. She has a number of finely developed projects -- my favorite is Lincoln portraits -- that are ripe picking for a smart gallery. Collectors take note, too. Prints are available and are inexplicably undersold. http://www.gretapratt.com/

Erika Diettes is a sensitive yet unsentimental Colombian artist who was showing powerful work about the Disappeared Ones from Colombia's drug wars. Ms Diettes understood that many bodies were disposed of in lakes and rivers, so frequently the only way family knew of the loved one's death was when an article of clothing washed ashore. In her "Rio Abajo" series she photographed pieces of the found clothing submerged in water, then mounted the photo to a body-sized glass panel which is suspended from the ceiling. Simple and powerful. In some ways it's reminiscent of that other important Colombian artist, Oscar Muñoz (a link she happily admits), but the work stands easily apart and for itself. http://www.erikadiettes.com/

Amy Eckert brought some small, intellectually engaging collages which discussed architecture and our ideas of home. They combine magazine images with her own photographs in a way that left me completely convinced. I plan to buy. http://www.amyeckertphoto.com/

David Rochkind had a compelling documentary series about the effect of the drug trade on rural Mexican cities. By his own admission it's a wok in progress, but worth a look for fans of tough, clear-eyed documentary work. http://www.davidrochkind.com/

Dennis Yermoshin showed an autobiographical/documentary series about his immigrant Azerbaijani family which was solid and compelling. He's young and maybe a tad unseasoned, but he's super talented and one to watch. http://www.yermoshin.com/

I saw Chris Sims' work as a juror for Critical Mass last year. I reviewed it highly there, and I continue to be impressed. The series he showed me here was about faux Iraqi villages built on US Army bases to "acclimate" soldiers to life in a middle eastern combat zone. If they weren't terrifyingly surreal they'd be funny. http://www.chrissimsprojects.com/#/selected-work

I'm in Germany now. Posts from Berlin's Gallery Weekend coming soon.

Yes, I'm overdue for a post......

2010-04-25T00:22:00.000-04:00

Sorry for the month without a post. I'm overdue to do my recap of what I saw while reviewing at Fotofest as well as a few shows in Houston and NYC. Coming soon as well are details from my upcoming trip to Berlin, Bratislava, and Vienna. That trip ends with a 9 day stay in Shanghai. I was invited to be a juror for the 10th International Shanghai Photo Competition. They wrote to me a few days ago to inform me that there were fewer Western artists in the mix this year over last year, and that they would like to spread the word that it's not too late to apply. Check out this link if you're a photographer to see if this is something you'd like to be a part of. As a juror, I'd love to see the greatest diversity possible in the applicant pool. Check it out.

More soon.....

Is Photography Dead? SFMoMA tries to answer....

2010-03-31T21:59:00.000-04:00

San Francisco Museum of Art is hosting a provocative seminar titled "Is Photography Over?". They've assembled an impressive roster of panelists to debate the topic. You can read more about it here:

I mention it here - fully aware that most of us won't be able to go - because of the wise format of the seminar. The topic question has been asked in advance to all of the participants, and their answers are posted online here. It's one of the pithiest collections of photographically themed essays I've read in a long time. Highly recommended. None of them are more than a few paragraphs, and a few are gems. Check it out.

Houston Fotofest report coming soon.....

Evan's AIPAD Overview.

2010-03-19T23:23:00.000-04:00

Better too late than never is an aphorism I've always enjoyed, so here now, too late, are my first impressions of the 2010 edition of the AIPAD show. Perhaps those of you heading to the fair on the weekend will get some benefit from the overview, though I suspect most of my readers have already been at least once and made their own first impressions.

Attendance seems good and the energy was high in the first days. Even during work hours on Thursday and Friday, the aisles were never empty. AIPAD is not the place to find the most cutting edge work in the field, but I was happy to see a few examples of forward thinking art. For example, Stephen Bulger from Toronto was doing brisk business with Alison Rossiter's "lament" series. Ms Rossiter has been working with expired photo paper in a variety of ways over the last few years exploring the material's rich surface as well as damage that has accrued to the paper. Some pieces chart only the damage as she prints the unexposed paper revealing scars from mold, light, and handling. Other paper is put into contact directly with developer chemical by dipping or pouring. The result is a remarkable "photogram" that is achieved without the use of light communicating sadness at the loss of photographic materials that is quite poignant.

On the classic front, there are many more superb examples to illustrate. Charles Schwartz can always be counted on to bring an array of stunning 19th century work. In addition to some intriguing Orientalia, his pride of place went to a fine example of Robert Howlett's portrait of a ship owner from 1857. Another amazing example is at the Met as part of the Gilman Paper Collection.

[Isambard Kingdom Brunel Standing Before the Launching Chains of the Great Eastern]
Robert Howlett (English, 1831–1858)

The Weston Gallery had a marvelous anonymous diptych featuring a cyanotype photogram of a pair of ferns paired with the actual botanical examples used to make the print. I have no idea how these fragile little plants have survived 180 years, but here they are for us to see:

Gary Edwards brought another set of brilliant hand-tinted tintypes and salt prints. Featured were a set of soldiers and another set of African-American portraits. Gorgeous, subtle, and rare. Take a close look.

Moving forward in history a bit, Charles Isaacs had praiseworthy photos both on his walls and in his bins. On the walls, one is treated to a Brancusi portrait of his own iconic scupture, Bird in Space. Though conservation has been done to this print, it's still a stunning object. Details and provenance below:

Constantin Brancusi: Bird in Space. Vintage silver print, 11-1/4 x 8-9/16 in. (287 x 218 mm), c. 1930/1945, unmounted. w1589. Gift of the artist to the photographer Bernhard Moosbrugger in 1955, when he and journalist Gladys Weigner made eight visits to the artist.

Also in the booth at Isaacs' is a solarized nude by Blanc & Demilly. It's already sold, so take a look before it disappears:

In the bins and available upon request are a deceptively modern Pompeii study attributed to Giorgio Sommer, William Larson fax pieces and figure studies, and a Nathan Lerner study in light on paper titled, "Car Light Study #7". It's a vintage silver print from 1939. Lerner (1913-1999) was one of the original students at the New Bauhaus in Chicago, and later became the Head of the Photography Department at the School of Design, and then Dean of Faculty and Students. If you're interested in Chicago School work, ask Chuck to bring it out.

Continuing our march up the photo history timeline, Hemphill Gallery has a wall of vintage William Christenberry Kodak Brownie color landscapes, L. Parker Stephenson has a fun Umbo photogram of stockings (as well as my friend Raphael Dallaporta's Antipersonnel series),

And Paul Hertzmann had a lovely 1935 solarized nude by Osamu Shiiara.

Steven Kasher's booth was full of unexpected pleasures and treasures. Top on my list was a collection of hand-tinted, vernacular portraits of African-Americans from the 60s. Vernacular may be an erroneous term here since the pictures show a sure professional hand, so perhaps anonymous is a more apt description. In any case, I loved their quirky flavor:

Deborah Bell always delivers with great examples from still-under-appreciated Gerard P. Fieret. If I had the cash, I would buy a box of them. I'm confused why they don't catch on:

Laurence Miller also was pitching to my wheelhouse with a striking example of a nude composite from my perennial favorite, Ray K. Metzker along with a wall vintage Helen Levitt that deserves close attention.

Also in Miller's booth were film strip explorations by Barbara Blondeau. Blondeau died young and left us little work to admire, but what she accomplished shows that she would have been a keen contributor to the Chicago legacy along with her Philadelphia compatriots Ray Metzker and William Larson. Sorry for the particularly crappy jpeg:

I was helping Tom Gitterman in his booth this year, so I can't say I'm neutral, but I'm a big fan of his selection of both Kenneth Josephson and Ferenc Berko. There are prime examples on the walls and in the bins.

Last, and not least, is the booth for AXA art insurance. While they were not intentionally displaying artwork, the examples they brought of burned and destroyed art was sublime and beautiful perhaps above anything else I saw at the fair. If you put a wall label of an established artist like Thomas Zipp under either of these works, you could have sold them at last week's Armory fair for high 5 figures. Take a look when you pass by:

More to come. Comments welcome and encouraged......

A plug for my own event

2010-03-16T19:25:00.000-04:00

Here's a quick notice about an interview I'll be doing at the NYPL this Saturday. I thought I'd post it before the madness of AIPAD starts. I'll be busy with dispatches from the fairs over the next few days, so I wanted to be sure I let everyone know about this which I copy from a NYPL press release:

M i d - M a n h a t t a n L i b r a r y

presents

An Artist Dialogue Series Event

Christian Erroi and Evan Mirapaul

Saturday March 20, 2010

2:30 p.m. on the 6th floor

Mid-Manhattan Library

The New York Public Library

40th Street and 5th Avenue

New York , NY 10016

212-340-0871

www.nypl.org

Elevators access the 6th floor after 2p.m.

All events are FREE and subject to last minute change or cancellation.

Evan Mirapaul, contemporary art collector, will join artist Christian Erroi to talk about art and life and to discuss his site-specific Art in the Windows exhibition Leads and Traces .

Christian Erroi is a photographer who lives and works in New York . His wellsprings of inspiration have long been from nature and introspection about his own physiological studies. Since 2001, his personal work has ranged from abstracted landscapes to calligraphic figure studies. He studied at the International Center of Photography in New York. His work was selected for two Art + Commerce Festivals of Emerging Photographers. In 2008, he had his first solo exhibition in the United States, at Poissant Gallery in Houston, as part of Houston Fotofest. He has exhibited his work in numerous group shows in the U.S. and Europe, and also in several solo exhibitions in Switzerland. In 2009 he was a featured artist in the LiShui Photo Festival in China . His work is held in many private collections worldwide, and in the collection of Museum of Modern Art , New York; the George Eastman House, Rochester, New York; the Museo Cantonale di Lugano and the Musee de l'Elysee, Lausanne, Switzerland.

Initiated in 2004, the Artist Dialogues provide a forum for understanding and appreciation of contemporary art. Artists are paired with critics, curators, writers or other artists to converse about art and the potential of new ideas.

Dispatches - 3/12/10

2010-03-13T00:14:00.001-05:00

It seems I've gotten some good response from posting more often even without extensive commentary from me (maybe because of less commentary from me?!). So, I'm trying to keep up the pace for awhile. Thursday, I hit Chelsea for a few hours and then headed uptown for a few openings. In no particular order:

The Frederick Sommer show at Bruce Silverstein remains one of my favorite shows in the current cycle. I was a Sommer fan before, and this exhibit cemented his status for me, as well as introduced me to facets of Sommer's practice of which I was unaware. An artist whose life spanned the century, his work shows dadaist and surrealist influences while maintaining a rigorously personal style. My favorite is a pairing of two of the musical drawings - one is a traditional drawing and the other is a photogram drawn with fixer on photo paper. They encapsulate for me the diverse yet focused practice of a still too unknown artist. Not to be missed.

Rick Wester has a solo exhibit of the work of Sharon Harper's One Month, Weather Permitting. As the press release notes, cameras have turned towards the heavens since the invention of the medium. One recalls Quentin Bajac's show and book, Dans le champ des étoiles - Les photographes et le ciel, 1850-2000 just to name one particularly fine overview. Ms Harper's series is a satisfying addition to the canon as it engages simultaneously the medium itself and the act of taking a picture. Her picture-taking responds both to indexical control as well as the embrace of chance and improvisation. Visually, the work recalls Misrach, Hans-Christian Schink ("One Hour" series), and Chris McCaw. But emotionally and conceptually it stands on its own feet. Ms Harper is an artist who had remarkable success 10 years ago and has fallen somewhat off the radar since then. I hope this show will mark a return of her star on the horizon.

Two shows that disappointed were by marquee artists at high profile galleries: Daido Moriyama at Luhring Augistine and Wolfgang Tillmans at Andrea Rosen. In the case of Moriyama, the older work in the back gallery reminded why he is an important photographer. The large scale b/w prints in the front room seemed emotionally blank to me; a jazz trumpeter riffing on a song he's played too often. Tillmans I sometimes just don't get. I am a fan of the abstract work and assorted other series. But his "slice of life" work that tries to mimic casual, personal photography leaves me flat. While I am engaged by the intellectual intention, I don't find the intention embodied in the pictures. Still from such an important artist, the show's worth a look. You should make up your own mind.

Matthew Marks Gallery has a vintage show of Robert Adams' Summer Nights, Walking project. Mr. Adams revisited the prints from which he chose the original book and decided that less was not more in this case. It's subtle, ephemeral photography -- as we would expect from this artist -- and well worth walking through on a quiet, early spring afternoon.

Back uptown, I stopped in again at 764 Madison for two openings. Higher Pictures had the first US solo exhibit of Japanese master Issei Suda, and Parker Stephenson had the opening of Yuichi Hibi's Shanghai show that I mentioned in a previous post. Both qualify, for different reasons, as work you've probably not seen before. They're wonderful exhibits on their own merits, but for freshness alone they make my must see list.

Last, there is a delightful, quirky show of wallpaper (yes, wallpaper) at the International Print Center of NY. It is not an important show in any way but is a treat to see if you're fan of design, usable art, or the history of printmaking. The link and short press release are below with a sample image. Check it out:

Wallworks:
Contemporary Pictorial Wallpapers

Curated by Sarah Richards

On view: March 11 - April 24, 2010, Tuesday - Saturday, 11 am - 6 pm

International Print Center New York announces the presentation of Wallworks: Contemporary Pictorial Wallpapers, opening on Thursday, March 11th and remaining on view through Saturday, April 24, 2010 in IPCNY’s gallery at 526 West 26th Street, Room 824.

Wallworks contextualizes contemporary wallpaper design by examining its evolution over a period of some two hundred years. Curated by decorative arts specialist Sarah Richards, it will include 35-40 examples of commercially available wallpaper illustrating the intersection of the decorative arts and culture at large. The range of technologies included in the exhibition will illuminate the commercial application of fine art printmaking techniques. Traditional mediums, such as woodcut and screenprint, will be shown along with mechanical reproduction and modern digital techniques.

2 openings and a collection visit

2010-03-10T00:11:00.000-05:00

After a much needed respite from the art fair tsunami last week, I'm back in the water eager to swim through more of the events of an art-packed month of March. Looking back on the profusion of fairs, I see positives and negatives. We've heard the negatives already; fairs are too commercial, boring, crowded, safe, anti-artist, numbing, elitist, etc., etc., etc. It's all true. But there's a positive side, too. I look at fairs as a kind of précis. I can't investigate every work I see, but I can take a visual overview; a summary. One artist I know had a good first impression at one fair he attended, but, as he waded farther into the booths, his view turned sour as he realized much of what he was seeing were versions of better known work he'd seen at other fairs. This aerial picture of a vast collection of art gives us perspectives like this. I think it's a neglected positive view. I lkearn alot from fairs, even when I don't enjoy them. But I digress.....

I started my evening at an ICP sponsored collection visit at the home of Alice Zimet. Ms Zimet is the founder of Arts + Business Partners, and has been a presence in the photography world for a generation. Her collection is eclectic and personal, spanning styles, periods, and genres with ease. From Berenice Abbott to Vik Muniz, from Brassai to Ingvar Krauss, it was a pleasure to see a collection so lovingly assembled.

Next was Ryuji Miyamoto's opening at Amador Gallery. Pardon me while I gush just a bit -- I just love this photographer's work. It's passionate and emotional without a whisper of sentimentality. It's formally precise, yet feels free and spontaneous. The iconic Kyoto earthquake photos are here to be marvelled at as well as brilliantly deceptive photograms of insects that are right up my alley. Definitely a show to see.

Last stop was to see Martin Parr's "Luxury" opening at Janet Borden Gallery. Mr. Parr's signature visual wit was out in force highlighting the anomalies and quirks of the wealthy and their high society events. It's the kind of thing you'll like if you like that sort of thing, as a friend of mine was fond of saying. If you're a fan of smart, witty visual commentary, this show should be high on your list.

Armory week, day 4. Humble Arts, EFA Open Studios, & Scope.

2010-03-07T01:04:00.001-05:00

Ok, I'll admit it. You didn't ask, but I'll tell you anyway: I'm getting a bit grumpy. I don't know if it's because of the Clockwork Orange-like deluge of art I've subjected myself to over the last few days, but I'm definitely feeling a bit snarky. Is it me? Always possible. Is it the art? Well, yes, that's always a possibility, too. There have been highs and lows (I love either extreme for the way they challenge me), but there have been way too many "nothings". No reaction. I get snarky when I see truck load after truck load of art that just leaves me without comment. So maybe it's time to take a breath. Take a pause. Let some of the metaphorical meal digest.

A quick overview of my Saturday:

Scope is a shadow of the fair it once was. It made me sad to walk through. The only ray of light was at Witzenhausen Gallery which was showing Jowhara Alsaud. Aperture Magazine recently featured her work and have released a photo of hers through their print program, so I'm not exactly Paul Revere on this one. Still I like the work. Ms Alsaud's work is also part of a group show at the Camera Club of New York. The revelation for me there was the "Representations" series by Cynthia Greig. Ms Greig whitewashes ordinary, everyday objects, then traces their outlines with marker. The end result is photographed. The end result is not what you would expect from my description and is both delightful and complex (a rare duo). Check out the show and definitely ask Stephen Bulger about her at the upcoming AIPAD show.

I always enjoy making my way through the open studio dates at Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts. I've written about my favorites in the past, so there's no need to revisit them here. Suffice it to say that you should add your name to their mailing list and check it out for yourself. Some great work has come out of that building.

Humble Arts produced a show called "31 Women in Photography" which is on display in the Affirmation Arts building on 37th St. The title is hard to argue with as there are indeed 31 female artists represented in the show. If there is any other trend, interpretation, curatorial position, or overview to be gleaned from the works chosen, it was lost on me. I have always found fault with Humble's choice to show only one example of any artist's work. It is a curatorial practice which shorts both the artist and the viewer. It's like reading the first-line index of a poetry anthology without access to the anthology. But I seem to be in the minority in this view as the organization has been wildly popular. I'm also surprised to see Charlotte Cotton's name connected with the show as I've always found her view of photography to be pithily grounded. I'm curious what her contribution was exactly.

But all of that adds up to the kind of snark that I mentioned in paragraph one, and I don't really want to be snarky. I wish success to any artistic endeavor even if their approach is not one that I would choose myself. So, I'll take a few days off, catch my breath, rest my feet, and come back with a fresh view of some of the other events happening around town in this art-filled month of March.

Tomorrow: a walk in the park.

Armory week, day 3. ADAA, Independent, and a couple of galleries.

2010-03-06T02:57:00.001-05:00

I was back out on the pavement early this morning starting with three collection visits in upper Manhattan. I prefer not to gossip about privately held work, so, even though these homes were opened to the public, I will remain silent on thir identities and content. The last collection was on the Upper East Side which made for a convenient bridge to the ADAA show.

In the past, ADAA fair has been a museum-level display of some of the finest examples of 20th century art on the market. The fair had a bit of a musty, private club kind of feel, but there was no doubt that the work was consistently of the first order. I still remember an exquisite, small Rothko I saw at Greenberg van Doren Gallery. I still wish I'd had the million dollars on hand it would have required to take it home with me.

The buzz I'd heard was that ADAA was trying to update their image to include more living artists and to evince a snappier vibe. It did seem a brighter, livelier atmosphere than last year, but perhaps at a price. While there were still fine examples by A-list artists, the sense that one was seeing the best possible examples available was very much absent. But I digress from the photographic. As one would expect, the Princes of the photo gallery world were on hand with some great work in tow. Fraenkel Gallery devoted their booth to Hiroshi Sugimoto making the case yet again why he is an important artist. Howard Greenberg had his usual exemplary examples of mid-century masters. And Hans P. Kraus showed a stunning Taj Mahal diptych by Dr. John Murray showing an albumen print above the 1864 waxed paper negative of the same image. Not cutting edge contemporary work, but a spectacular piece that any photography lover would swoon over.

Across town, things could not have been more different at the Independent Fair. Or....I should say, we were being told by fair organizers that things could not have been more different. As Holland Cotter mentioned in his New York Times review on March 4th, 2010, many of the galleries and much of the art was quite well-known and frequently seen at A-list galleries around town. I am very happy to see works by Roe Etheridge, Eileen Quinlan, and Liz Deschenes any day of the week (they are all personal favorites), but I can and have seen them at Andrew Kreps and Miguel Abreu on a regular basis. I feel misled to find them at a fair billing itself as alternative and edgy. Same deal at McCaffrey Fine Art where I saw more Jiro Takamatsu after his solo show there earlier this year. I love the work, but....

Continuing on a theme, John Stezaker's collages always deserve a look. I've written about them on these pages many times. London gallery "The Approach" had a fine small set. New? A world apart from other fairs?

Ditto Jose Davila from Renwick Gallery:

Somewhat less familiar were the works of Roman Ondak at gb Agency. Worth a look and I wish they'd brought more. Sorry, no pic.

One work at the fair which knocked my socks off was not a photo though it's source was a newspaper photograph. A drawing by Andrea Bowers used densely packed pencil marks to define negative space with obsessive force, leaving the the scene limned in the lower right hand corner to stand out with quiet power.

In between ADAA and Independent, I hit a few Upper East Side Galleries. I had been meaning to see the Sam Falls show at Higher Pictures for weeks. It closes tomorrow, so I just caught it. Owner Kim Bourus stole the show last year at AIPAD with her low-priced, highly reviewed show of Jaimie Warren. Expect Sam Falls work to fly off the walls in the same way. This young MFA candidate at ICP is looking strong in a well-selected group by the gimlet-eyed Ms Bourus. In what is very much a personal visual style, Falls is still ironing out a few stray influences. But have no doubts, the work is very good and will make a splash at the upcoming AIPAD fair.

I also stopped upstairs to preview L. Parker Stephenson's Yuichi Hibi Shanghai series. It looks wonderful. This artist, who has had a vibrant publishing career with 4 highly acclaimed books from Nazraeli Press, has had scant exposure in New York Galleries. Ms Stephenson is looking to change that, and the work argues that we should see much, much more of Hibi's work.

Tomorrow: Humble Arts at Affirmation, EFA studios, and whatever fairs I can make it to that I haven't yet seen.

Armory week, day 2. Volta, Pulse, Verge.

2010-03-05T01:49:00.000-05:00

Feet still aching from 6 hours at the piers yesterday, I slogged back into the belly of the beast, face still black with art soot. Today's art-coalmine schedule would start with Volta, the sister-by-marriage of the Armory Show. Volta, as many of you know, has a solo show philosophy; one artist per booth. This makes for an artist friendly atmosphere, and definitely ramps up the focus on which artist the gallery chooses from their roster. I usually enjoy Volta as an experience, but find it wanting in the art satisfaction department. This year was no different. I find I am usually somewhat in the minority opinion when I poll my art friends about Volta. Again, this year was no different. Many voices I trust found this to be a satisfying, nourishing fair, so take my view with the shaker of salt it deserves.

The day as a whole yielded very little in the way of photography I felt compelled to include here. My favorite of this fair (though not without reservations) was Svätopluk Mikyta at Emannuel Walderdorff Galerie. Mr. Mikyta takes photos from found sources like yearbooks and catalogs then modifies and transforms them with various overlaying techniques. Like David Maljkovic, who I mentioned yesterday, this artist references memory (or the fading thereof) in a distinctly eastern european accent. The artist professes no political bent to the work, but it's hard for me to see them without projecting a Stalin-era veneer on those faces. I will be eager to follow this artist's career. Worth a look.

Also worth a look were Roberto Pellegrinuzzi's layered photo-based works at Pierre-François Ouelette Fine Art. Though I wish this artist would embrace a subject more suited to his layering process than landscapes, I find the work visually stimulating, and I enjoy its tension between obliterated abstraction and simple representation. The work is complex to reproduce, so it's best seen on the gallery's website.

On to Pulse Fair. Baer-Ridgway, who rarely disappoint, had photo collage work from Brion Nuda Rosch. Though they strongly recalled John Stezaker in many ways, the best examples held their own.

My favorite photo-based work at Pulse was by Sam Messenger at Davidson Contemporary.

I loved how the artist has crammed imagery into a space but made it inaccessible in every way except as a promise. This promise would only be important to collectors and galleries which fires this wonderful tension between the images we'll never see and his promise of uniqueness and exclusivity. Great. (Click on the photos to enlarge.)

There were some other galleries at Volta showing photography, but I think you've heard me comment on them before or you've seen them yourself. The same cannot be said of Verge Fair. I have never commented in this blog on anything I saw there, and I suspect you've never seen any of the work on display. This is as it should be. That's all I'll say on the subject. Attend at your own peril.

Tomorrow: ADAA, Independent, and Scope.

Armory week, day 1. All day at the piers.

2010-03-04T02:54:00.000-05:00

Well, we're off and running. As promised, here is installment number 1 of my personal preferences for the photographic work I saw in my 6 hour slog through piers 92 and 94. In no particular order and without much elaboration, definition, or comment from me:

Iran do Espirito Santo had 4 photograms at Sean Kelly which were overlaid with graphite pencil. The photogram was on a mirrored surface, so the silver of the backing referred to the silver of the emulsion, which referred to the silver in the graphite. Very satisfying and a beautiful counterpoint to the mirrored wall constructions next to it by the same artist.

Jack Shainman had his usual spectacular booth. I never tire of seeing new Nick Cave soundsuits or El Anatsui wall hangings. The Rashid Rana photo construction was a bit disappointing, though. We've seen too much of this kind of computer generated photomontage, and Joan Fontcuberta still did it best.

Gallery Sfeier-Semler showed a typology easily mistaken for a Becher grid. But instead of watertowers, we were looking at Israeli watchtowers - heavily armed and fortified - by Palestinian artist, Taysir Batniji. A wonderful political twist on the flat, formal constructions of the Bechers.

I saw some of the photo collage and video of Croat artist David Maljkovic at one of the Berlin Biennials. I was impressed and wrote a brief paragraph here in May of 2008. Galerie Georg Kargl from Vienna has a solid display of new work which continues to explore architecture and it's role in memory. Take a look. My crappy jpegs really don't communicate the work:

London's Corvi-Mora had Anne Collier's ongoing exploration of representations of the eye. The work continues to speak to me and impress.

Zeno-X from Antwerp had a few Dirk Braeckmans. These photos break no new ground, but I always love to see them.

Barbara Probst was the principal photo artist at Murray Guy, but there was also an intriguing series from Moyra Davey(whose work deserves wider play). I have not always been a fan of Probst's work, but she continues to grow within her practice of multiple perspectives from multiple cameras fired simultaneously. I liked these especially:

Galerie Filomena Soares had a few examples from Helena Almeida. I love many of the explorations this artist creates with photos, but this was not high on my list. Still, an artist not seen enough in the US.

Seventeen Gallery was showing Graham Dolphin which is not strictly photographic but a personal favorite. On the photo front, they had Abigail Reynolds' collages; manipulated constructions made of found pages from guide books and atlases. She successfully breaks the 2 dimensional plane of a photograph while simultaneously traversing multiple moments of time. Great work.

If more proof were needed that San Francisco has a vibrant gallery scene, Altman Siegel would be fine evidence. Trevor Paglen's cosmic musings (introduced to me by Becky Smith of the departed Bellwether Gallery) and Matt Keegan's photo deletions were both examples of the excellent program at this gallery. Sorry, no pics.

Last and by no means least I would like to praise Sicardi Gallery from Houston. Year after year this gallery puts together a remarkable booth with spectacular examples from Latin America especially the op-artists. Leon Ferrari, Jesus Rafael Soto, and Carlos Cruz-Diez are particular favorites of mine, but there were others as well. On the photographic front, I was introduced to the modernist work of Geraldo de Barros. The negatives date from the 50s and are made from visually arresting combinations of photogram, negative manipulation, and reflection. Unfortunately, these were not vintage prints, but perhaps this can be forgiven in the cause of wider posthumous distribution for a neglected artist. If I'm the only one who hasn't heard of him (I hope so!), then I'll enjoy my new, personal find. If he's new to you, too, check it out. Great work.

Tomorrow, Volta and whatever other fairs I can cover. Comments and additions welcome.

Calm before the storm....

2010-02-28T21:52:00.000-05:00

The New York art world is gearing up for the gallery tsunami known as Armory Week. There are at least 9 fairs happening next week with 2 more major fairs (ADAA and AIPAD) happening in the succeeding weeks through March. Bill Mindlin of Photograph Magazine created a special broadside issue featuring the myriad events coming to New York in the coming weeks. I'm honored that he highlighted Fugitive Vision in this issue as one of two blogs mentioned to be covering the fairs. You can see the special issue online here: http://www.photographmag.com/photographNYC/.

I've been moving Fugitive Vision more towards an essay blog and away from daily small posts about current shows. But, in light of Mr. Mindlin's support, I will try to report daily on what I'm seeing at the fairs. Expect less in-depth commentary (perhaps to be supplemented at a later date for truly memorable work), and a focus on photographic finds. I'll be thinking of myself as an advance scout sending back dispatches for those with less time to scour every booth at every fair. As usual with Fugitive Vision, I will concentrate on the positive. Check in daily for highlighted favorites and recommendations rather than ranting about pet-peeves or disappointing work.

As always, I welcome comments, additions, and corrections. Below please find a list of the fairs with URLs for each so you can begin to explore your options virtually before the madness of the week begins. See you on the other side.....

The Armory Show March 4-7. Pier 92, 94 at 55th St, Thur-Sat noon-8pm, Sun noon-7pm, thearmoryshow.com.

Pulse NYC March 4-7. 330 West St at W Houston St, Thur-Sat noon-8pm, Sun noon-5pm, pulse-art.com

Scope New York March 4-7. Lincoln Center Damrosch Park, 62nd St and Amsterdam Ave, Thur-Sat noon-8pm, Sun noon-7pm, scope-art.com

Volta NY March 4-7. 7 W 34th St, Thur 2-8pm, Fri-Sun 11am-7pm, voltashow.com

Independent March 4-7. 548 W 22nd St, Thur 4-9pm, Fri-Sat 11am-8pm, Sun noon-4pm, independentnewyork.com

Red Dot New york March 4-7. 500 W 36th St, Thur noon-6pm, Fri-Sat 11am-8pm, Sun 11am-6pm, reddotfair.com

Verge Art Fair March 4-7. Dylan Hotel, 52 E 41st St, Fri-Sat noon-8pm, Sun noon-6pm, vergeartfair.com

Fountain art fair March 5-7. Pier 66 at 26th St, Fri-Sun 11am-7pm, fountainexhibit.com

Pool art fair March 5-7. Gershwin Hotel, 7 E 27th St, Fri-Sun 3-10pm, poolartfair.com

The ADAA art Show March 3-7. Park Avenue Armory, Park Ave at 67th St, Wed-Sat noon-8pm, Sun noon-6pm, artdealers.org

THE AIPAD Photography Show New York March 18-21. Park Avenue Armory at 67th St, Thur-Sat 11am-8pm, Sun 11am-6pm, aipad.com

The cheapest word in an expensive business

2010-02-25T23:51:00.001-05:00

I recently read the article/interview you see below and was struck by the word "curator". In what way was Shaq the curator for the show at Flag Art Foundation? Perhaps the pass/fail multiple-choice parlor game that was the basis for his curatorial debut makes for interesting locker room chat, but it devalues the term when compared to the actual hard work and long hours done by the scholars museums call curators. While some curators I know would be no stranger to the kind of self-aggrandizing, auto-hagiocracy that Mr. O'Neal seems to enjoy, I think most of them would agree that, whatever noun you might want to use to describe his involvement in the Flag Foundation show, curator would not be the word that comes to mind.

Now despite the fact that this article made my snob gland swell, I'm actually all for a big, inclusive tent in the art world. I think that having celebrities like Mr, O'Neal become part of the art process is at worst harmless, and at best good PR which shines more light on a business that can be seen as only for the intellectual elite. He's certainly entitled to his taste, opinions, and all the access that his wealth brings him. I would never for a moment suggest that he should be excluded, and, on the contrary, I respect his eagerness to explore areas outside of the usual wealthy athlete stereotype. But I wonder if the respect is a two way street. What if David Rockefeller, by virtue of his wealth, decided not only to buy a sports team, but to coach it on a daily basis? His players would be forced to call him "coach", but he would not be a real coach for lack of knowledge, experience, and training. He would get lots of help, suggestions, and support, of course, but then he'd fail in every way possible because he's just not qualified. And Shaq would be the first to cry foul.

So how come some rich athlete gets to walk in a gallery, point his finger at 20 art works, and get called "curator"? Isn't there another word that fills the void more accurately? It seems to me that, considering the incredible amount of wealth at play in the art world, some things come cheap.

Art Curator Shaq Is His Own Masterpiece

By Linda Yablonsky

Published Feb 7, 2010

(Photo: Michael Tran/FilmMagic)

Despite holding down a demanding day job, Cleveland Cavaliers center Shaquille O’Neal has published two memoirs, cut six records, acted in seven movies, starred in a reality show, served as a reserve police officer, and studied for a doctorate in “human resource development.” Now he’s curating “Size DOES Matter,” an exhibition opening February 19 at the Flag Art Foundation in Chelsea. Shaq made 66 selections for the show—which features works ranging from the ginormous (Andreas Gursky’s billboard-size photograph Madonna I) to the microscopic (a Shaq portrait by Willard Wigan)—out of over 200 images that founder Glenn Fuhrman and director Stephanie Roach showed him over dinner after a game.

How did you make your choices?
Art is a process of delivering or arranging elements that appeal to the emotions of a person looking at it. It’s what you feel. I picked those things because they were beautiful. The thing about size—if it’s big or small you have to look at it. Because I’m so big you have to look at me. I think of myself as a monument. But sometimes I like to feel small.

Do you ever get time to visit museums?
I used to go a lot with my kids. Donald Trump is a great friend, and he has four or five Picassos on his plane. And that’s where I would look at them. One time, I was at a museum and tried touching a Picasso. You break it, you buy it, they said. I was told it would cost $2 million.

Have you ever tried painting?
No, but I’ve met a lot of artists who wanted to paint me. LeRoy Neiman was one. He did it from a photograph. He made 20,000 copies, and we sold them all. Now I’m working with the greatest artist in the world, Peter Max.

Do you buy art?
I have six kids, and if they ripped something, I’d be devastated. Maybe when they grow up, I’ll buy. I’d like Ron Mueck [whose Untitled: Big Man appears in the show] to do a sculpture of me. I would like to make it twenty feet tall and put it in the middle of a residential neighborhood—make it two stories high and in the head I’d have my office.

You like people looking at you.
Yeah. When I go to New York I like to stand in the street and see what happens. When you look at a painting and try to figure it out—you look at me [the same way]. Everything in the world is art.

Including basketball?
To me, it’s ballet, hip-hop, and kung fu. The ballet is grace, the hip-hop is cool, and the kung fu is kill the opponent.

New edition + new blog

2010-02-22T11:51:00.000-05:00

I was just made aware of a blog which highlights books, editions, and budget-minded prints written by Andrew Phelps called Buffet. I'm adding a link under "blogs I like". The reason I heard about it is because he wrote about a new edition done by my friend Raphael Dallaporta's Domestic Slavery series. Follow the link here for the specific post. Raphael is a fabulous artist, certainly one to watch, and will be the recipient of an Infinity Award from ICP this year in the artist under 30 category. His website: http://www.raphaeldallaporta.com/. Check it out.

Paper!Awesome!

2010-02-17T19:46:00.000-05:00

I've written about newcomer gallery Baer Ridgway before in reference to their excellent nascent editions program. Well, they've come up with a super work on paper show that runs the gamut of work form talented MFAs to well established artists. With more than 100 artists in the show, it's hard to single out any one contributor, but the online exhibit is well worth combing through for pleasure and bargains. Also note that they'll be in NYC in 2 weeks for the Pulse fair. Here's their mini press release for the show and a hyperlink to their site. Check 'em out:

Paper!Awesome

February 20 - March 27, 2010

Baer Ridgway Exhibitions is pleased to present PAPER!AWESOME!, a group exhibition of new works on paper by over 100 artists. Curated by gallery artist Brion Nuda Rosch, this exhibition contains over 300 8.5 x 11 inch brand new works on paper by an incredibly varied group of artists. Works by internationally recognized artists will hang side-by-side with those by artists just emerging, all of whom have been asked to work with the most basic of canvases, an 8.5 x 11 inch piece of paper.

(In)Visible Export

2010-02-14T19:13:00.002-05:00

I recently got an email from Risa Needleman of Invisible Exports Gallery. I like everything about it: it's a direct, honest approach, the art is interesting, and it's a win/win for the artist and the collector. Invisible Exports has been getting solid, consistent reviews for their editions program including their Artist of the Month program. This is a great way to start checking them out. Recommended. Here's the email:

The filmmaker Marie Losier has been filming Genesis for the past four years, working towards her first feature film, a portrait of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, and h/er band Psychic TV. The film, in its current form, was presented at both The Centre George Pompidou in April, and at the Cinemathèque Francaise this past September.

We are trying to help Marie raise the last bit of money she needs to complete the film, so we are offering a limited edition print from her OUTTAKES series created in collaboration with Bernard Yenelouis.
The photograph is an edition of 50, and is available for only $200. All the money from this print goes directly to the completion of the film. You can buy it directly from our website here: http://invisible-exports.com/editions.html

The other works from the OUTTAKES series are available in an edition of 5 and will also go to help Marie. You can view them at this special link here: http://invisible-exports.com/artists/marielosier/marielosier.html

We are offering them first exclusively to friends of the gallery who have expressed interest in Genesis and h/er work, and to people who we think might be interested in adding this wonderful photograph to their collection.

PS_If you have not seen the new BREYER P-ORRIDGE works at Renwick Gallery, please do. They are absolutely terrific. And mark your calendars: Genesis will be lecturing at MoMA on Monday, March 22, 2010.
------------------------------------
Invisible-Exports, 14a Orchard Street
New York, NY 10002
(212) 226-5447
www.invisible-exports.com
www.artistofthemonthclub.com

Parallels

2010-02-10T21:29:00.001-05:00

Parallel development: the process of creating multiple versions of the same object (or set of objects) concurrently. Typically, multiple users work independently on the same project, or a single user develops multiple, concurrent versions of a project. The parallel development cycle ends when you merge the work together.
Parallel evolution: the development of a similar trait in different not closely related species, but descending from the same ancestor.
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A thought has been banging around in my head for a long time now. I've made notes about it so I could write a blog post though it never seemed to coalesce into a sentient form. But other writers seemed to be having similar thoughts, and reading them has pushed me to do some thinking aloud (or at least as "aloud" as a blog will allow). The thought has to do with originality. When is an idea original? What does plagiarism mean in an artistic context? Where is the border between the collective unconscious and downright cribbing? This blog is certifiably NOT an original idea as I will show. Many others before me have ruminated, debated, and argued similar or identical points. Am I plagiarizing them? Well...

My first push to actually put this post online came from reading Jorg Colberg in his blog, Conscientious. Three years ago, he had written an essay called "When does similar become too similar?", which was followed by a recent update, "On Plagiarism and Similarities". He writes,

"And I think we might want to be a bit careful with the word plagiarism. Even though I realize that it has become very popular to throw around big words and accuse someone of this and that (stealing elections or files online are just obvious examples), proving plagiarism is actually a very tricky business, and given the severeness of the accusation, it does not hurt to be a bit careful. Also, if something is quite similar, that's not already plagiarism - especially if the methods are the same, but not the results. For example, compare the work of Idris Khan and Jason Salavon. Both have used digital superimpositions of images to create new work, with different subject matters. The methods are similar, the results and intentions aren't."

Idris Khan is a name that seems to come up often when I hear discussions about originality. His signature work involving multiple layers of superimposed images taken from a canon of visual information is neither a new idea nor newly presented. But he is by far the most celebrated and remunerated artist practicing the idea. Doug Keyes work from the late 90s, Krzysztof Pruszkowski's work from the early 90s, and the previously mentioned Jason Salavon all easily predate Khan's work.

Photography of Krzysztof Pruszkowski: Photosynthesis

Doug Keyes, Collective Memory

Idris Khan
I don't have an answer for the question of whether Khan's work is a rip-off of Keyes or whether Keyes work is a rip-off of Pruszkowski, and I certainly don't understand why Khan's work is valued at many multiples of the other two, but I do wonder whether it is even the right question. Art that bears more than a surface resemblance to other art is an old, old problem. If it weren't, we wouldn't need experts, authenticators, and appraisers in the way that we do. I remember the 1996 show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art called "Rembrandt/Not Rembrandt" which explored works by the master, his pupils, his imitators, and works previously thought to be by one or the other. The exhibit was posed as a question: who painted these works and why do we care? If a painting was thought for centuries to be a masterpiece, why would the attribution of the artist change our opinion? Of course, photography is a slightly different question. The mechanical nature of the medium blurs and even erases stylistic differences. Suddenly it is possible (not even on purpose!) to make a work startlingly similar to another without any knowledge of the previous work. In the past, imitators acknowledged a master or progenitor. Now, attribution is dubious, slippery, or arcane. And that doesn't even begin to ask the question of whether the "copyist" is aware of the work it's suggested he's copying. I call this Parallel development(PD).

My favorite example of PD is between Vik Muniz and French artist Phillipe Gronon. Mr. Muniz was working on his series "Verso" at exactly the same moment Mr. Gronon was working on his series "Versos". One was in Paris, the other was in New York and Brazil. Mr. Muniz' show opened on EXACTLY the same day in New York as Mr. Gronon's opened in Paris. There is no potential plagiarism here -- both artists were working at the same time in different places -- yet the works are strikingly similar. But despite the fact that they're remarkably alike seen as jpegs on a computer screen, in reality they are divergent works. One is a sculptural exploration and the other is a photographic exploration. But even if they were identical, we see that extremely similar work can be created independently of each other.

Vik Muniz, Verso

Philippe Gronon, Versos

And many other PD examples exist. My second push to get going to write on this topic was in rereading "The Ongoing Moment" by Geoff Dyer. As Dyer brilliantly espouses in his book, photographers have always riffed on certain visual tropes: hats, beggars, signs, fences, blind people, benches, barbershops, hands, roads, and on and on (and this doesn't even begin to address the classic themes like landscape or nudes). Some of the pictures he references look alarmingly alike, others just share a common visual element. It strikes me as a continuing dialog more than replicated model. And yet another example from the PD idea: Tim Davis, Jorma Puranen, Yuji Ono, and Madeline Djerejian. All of these artists created a series that examined the effect of light on a painting when interpreted by a camera. None of these artists invented the idea. It goes back at least as far as Eliott Erwitt's famous photograph of a gallery in Venice from the 60s. Many of you will not have heard of Ms Djerejian. She told me she had worked on a series of photos of paintings in a museum. Just as she was about to show the work, Tim Davis' "Permanent Collection" series was unveiled at a major gallery. She shelved the completed project believing that she would never be able to counter the belief that she had "copied" the work of a more well-known artist. (I don't have reproductions of that series.) Are these works more similar or different? Would we interpret them identically were we to see them together? Does their context change by reading the artist statement?:

Jorma Puranen
Shadows, Reflections and All That Sort of Thing #40

Jorma Puranen
Shadows, Reflections and All That Sort of Thing #37

Tim Davis, Permanent Collection

Tim Davis, Permanent Collection

Yuji Ono, Tableaux from 1999

Yuji Ono, Tableaux from 1999

Or consider the architectural studies of Matthias Hoch, Frank van der Salm, Michael Wolf, and Ola Kolehmainen. I confess that, even though I know the work of each of these artists, I frequently confuse them when I see them in succession at art fairs. Does this negate or degrade each artist's work in any way? I used to think so, but now I'm not so sure. Does it matter which came first? Curators have told me that this is the primary question. So why do we see a museum choose Khan over Keyes? Lalla Essaydi is frequently chided for being "exactly like" Shirin Neshat. Aside from the fact that both artists use some form of Arabic text written across the photo, it seems to me that the art is fundamentally different; they only share a common visual trope. Or consider Silvio Wolf and ZHENG Nong. Mr. Wolf is clearly the more famous artist, and his work predates Mr. Zheng's. Does this automatically make the Chinese work a copy?

ZHENG Nong, Chemical Landscape 化学风景, (2006-07)

There are many factors to consider --process, meaning, context, intent -- but I'm beginning to think that the least of them is who came first. Which leads me to an essay a friend gave to me recently which really forced me to reconsider my thinking on the subject. Titled "The Ecstasy of Influence: a plagiarism" by Jonathan Lethem, first published in Harper's Magazine, February 2007. As I should have realized, the question is not confined to my little corner of the art world, but is a general, pervasive conversation in every creative universe. Mr. Lethem's text it is so cogent and on the money, I find it hard to excerpt, (please do click the hyperlink and read the whole thing), but in a nutshell, he shows how all of the arts have cribbed, borrowed, derived, and been influenced by previous work. Not only is it unavoidable, it's essential. Speaking of Bob Dylan:

Appropriation has always played a key role in Dylan's music. The songwriter has grabbed not only from a panoply of vintage Hollywood films but from Shakespeare and F. Scott Fitzgerald and Junichi Saga's Confessions of a Yakuza. He also nabbed the title of Eric Lott's study of minstrelsy for his 2001 album Love and Theft. One imagines Dylan liked the general resonance of the title, in which emotional misdemeanors stalk the sweetness of love, as they do so often in Dylan's songs. Lott's title is, of course, itself a riff on Leslie Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel, which famously identifies the literary motif of the interdependence of a white man and a dark man, like Huck and Jim or Ishmael and Queequeg—a series of nested references to Dylan's own appropriating, minstrel-boy self. Dylan's art offers a paradox: while it famously urges us not to look back, it also encodes a knowledge of past sources that might otherwise have little home in contemporary culture, like the Civil War poetry of the Confederate bard Henry Timrod, resuscitated in lyrics on Dylan's newest record, Modern Times. Dylan's originality and his appropriations are as one......The same might be said of all art.

Would any of us wish to be without the contribution of Dylan based on a copyright dispute? From my own past, I think of all the classical music compositions that have been used to create popular songs. "Full Moon and Open Arms" was taken from Rachmaninoff's 2nd piano concerto, "Kismet" themes were cribbed from the works of Borodin, and "Never Gonna Fall in Love Again" was "inspired" by the 3rd movement of Rachmaninoff's 2nd symphony (Eric Carmen reached an agreement with the Rachmaninoff estate to share royalties on that one). There are hundreds of other examples. Whether you're afan of these songs or not, would you really argue they shouldn't exist? Again from Mr. Lethem:

Visual, sound, and text collage—which for many centuries were relatively fugitive traditions (a cento here, a folk pastiche there)—became explosively central to a series of movements in the twentieth century: futurism, cubism, Dada, musique concrète, situationism, pop art, and appropriationism. In fact, collage, the common denominator in that list, might be called the art form of the twentieth century, never mind the twenty-first. But forget, for the moment, chronologies, schools, or even centuries. As examples accumulate—Igor Stravinsky's music and Daniel Johnston's, Francis Bacon's paintings and Henry Darger's, the novels of the Oulipo group and of Hannah Crafts (the author who pillaged Dickens's Bleak House to write The Bondwoman's Narrative), as well as cherished texts that become troubling to their admirers after the discovery of their “plagiarized” elements, like Richard Condon's novels or Martin Luther King Jr.'s sermons—it becomes apparent that appropriation, mimicry, quotation, allusion, and sublimated collaboration consist of a kind of sine qua non of the creative act, cutting across all forms and genres in the realm of cultural production.

Any text is woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages, which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony. The citations that go to make up a text are anonymous, untraceable, and yet already read; they are quotations without inverted commas. The kernel, the soul—let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances—is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are secondhand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral caliber and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. Neurological study has lately shown that memory, imagination, and consciousness itself is stitched, quilted, pastiched. If we cut-and-paste our selves, might we not forgive it of our artworks?

There are, without doubt, cheaters and copiers in our midst. There are now and there have ever been. But absent a device that can glean the deepest intentions from every single creative act, I'm more comfortable with the concept of innocent until proven guilty. As with capital punishment, better that a hundred copyists go free so that one Dylan can emerge. Inspiration and creativity are messy processes with no clear form or gestation. Though I've taken a much more hostile and militant stance in the past, I think Lethem's policy of forgiveness makes much more sense. I empathize with artists, not wealthy to begin with, who may feel that food has been taken out of their mouths by a rapacious copier. If it were studied, I suspect that is rarely the case in fact. Just as artists may have PD, collectors and curators, too are likely to be unaware of the parallel art. Is it possible that someone who wanted an Idris Khan but "settled" for a Doug Keyes? Sure, it could happen. Did someone who really wanted a Doug Keyes get seduced by an Idris Khan? Yeah, that could happen, too. But I bet in a vast majority of cases the market for one artist acted independently of the market for the other.

I'm pretty sure this post won't end the discussion on this topic. Perhaps it will even stir up the hornet's nest (I encourage your comments). But I'm completely sure that I haven't said anything that hasn't been said before. Maybe I changed a few things here or a word or two there, but I can't plant a flag on the island of originality. My best hope is that it reaches some new ears or has a slight switch of perspective that makes it look a little new. Or at least, when seen in raking light, I can hope it's different enough to be mine.

China.....and on to Shanghai

2010-01-09T17:12:00.009-05:00

A much delayed and belated post about my time in Shanghai. Since many of you will have either been to the city or will know someone who has, I think I can limit my reporting about the descriptions and impressions of the city itself. On a personal note, I was pretty frustrated by the time I got to Shanghai. I had wasted so much time with transportation problems, and translation problems, and planning problems, and problem problems that I was ready for some simple, big-city exploration. I was armed with names of people to contact and galleries/museums to visit. Alas, all the folks I was meant to meet were out of town that week, and many of the museums were closed for exhibition turnaround. Sigh. I was surprised what a struggle it was for me, thinking of myself as an experienced traveler, to navigate in a major Chinese city. Frustration.

2 things saved the visit for me. First, there were a number of my colleagues from the Lishui festival doing exactly what I was doing by adding some Shanghai sightseeing at the end of their trip. We shared intelligence, transportation, and many meals. I am in debt to these folks as it helped me get my bearings and made the first part of the trip start to work. Second, I had the good fortune to meet Steven Harris, the owner of M97 Gallery. Steven, who, with his wife, Mercedes, have run this photo-centric gallery for about three years But Steven has been in China for about 10. He speaks fluent Mandarin and knows the city inside and out. The city and its charms really started to show themselves to me as Steven started showing me the town. More on that in a bit.

One of the first stops for the post-Lishui crowd was the Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Center. I've always been a sucker for architectural models, so this Shanghai maquette-on-steroids was a huge thrill:

This amazing scale model of the jaw-dropping complexity and density also changed into night views:

Which could almost pass for an actual night view if you have a cheap enough camera like I did:

But the real, daytime panoramic views are even more expansive:

There were other maquettes on a larger scale that demonstrated urban neighborhoods that are being created:

I include this last photo with apologies to my friend, Naoya Hatakeyama, who exploited similar models with infinitely more polish, panache, and content in his "Scales" series:

New York/Tobu World Square, Collection CCA, 2003-2004, copyright Naoya Hatakeyama

Unfortunately, the Urban Planning Exhibition Center was the exception on my list of must-see museums. Shanghai MoCA and every other museum I wanted to see were all in between exhibits. Ok. So, on to the galleries. First on the list, and the doyenne of Shanghai galleries was ShangArt. I was meant to meet Lorenz, the founder and director, but he was in Miami at the art fairs. The show that was up was not too bad, but I was hoping for more of a look at what was in the flatfiles and the remaining gallery staff barely spoke English. I wandered around the current exhibit which was an exploration of camera obscure by an artist named Shao Yi. Using furniture and paint cans as the dark space to exploit for pinhole exposures, Shao Yi chose to display the works in or on the device that was used to make them:

SHAO Yi
Exposure: wardrobes, 2008
x 9 Pieces

The screw holes and keyholes in the drawers and cabinet doors are the pinholes for the photography. as clever as this all was, it didn't add up to much. There was little relationship between medium and content, plus the images themselves were uninspiring no matter how clever the application. I felt like I was seeing a studio visit of a work in progress. A work than would require much more tweaking and toiling before it was ready for a gallery show. But here it was already in the gallery in all of its embryonic glory. I would have preferred a more developed concept.

Next on my list in the M50 complex of galleries was OFoto, owned and run by photographer LUO Yongjin. There was an extensive group show up which was a bit of a hodge-podge thematically and stylistically. I suppose it was meant as an overview of gallery artists. I found the lack of focus to be a detriment to all of the artists represented, but it was good, I guess, to see lots of work without having to ask questions. The standout for me was work by Chu-Chu, whose distorted perspective cityscapes are utterly unsuccessful when seen as a jpeg in thumbnail. I'm not even sure you can tell that they're cityscapes so you'll have to take my word for it. Though I was a bit disappointed by the quality of the digital black and white prints, the work remains in my head two months later. Worth exploring further.

My next stop was to Steven's M97 Gallery. Steven is an effusive and voluble host whether he's in his gallery or out on the town. He seemed to have endless patience to explain and introduce each of his artists to us. A few of his artists were already known to me, Michael Wolf for example, but often he had work by them of which I was unfamiliar. In Wolf's case it was his "China Copy Art" project. Mr. Wolf went to Shenzhen's Dafen art village where millions of copies of art are produced each year. His simple presentation was to show the copied work of art with the artist who painted it with a title that stated the copied artist's name and the price in yuan that work would command. "Andy Warhol, 210 yuan" is one. That's about $3 for those not familiar with the exchange rate. I was used to seeing Mr. Wolf's ubiquitous architectural studies, but this work was a surprise and a treat:

Other work that caught my eye were the portraits of HAN Lei, the pensive interiors of LI Jun, the staged events of LI Wei, and the expansive ecologically bent landscapes of Nadav Kander. Kander's work is included in a book called "Earth" that Steven had on hand. It's the second iteration of a photo prize called Prix Pictet that focuses on ecological issues. The first, called "Water" was surprisingly full of great work, much of it, Susan Derges for example, seemingly unconnected to eco-politics. I added both to my library immediately. Nice little finds if you don't know them already. On Amazon: Earth and Water

Originality is always a point of discussion when mentioning Chinese art. While I found plenty of examples of derivative work everywhere I looked in China, two of M97's artists bear mention for NOT deserving that stamp. Western eyes may see Laura Letinsky in every frame of LI Jun's work but it's really another animal. While Letinsky explores a more formal, art historically inspired world, Li is responding to a particular set of ecological circumstances, namely the omnipresent construction dust that coats everything in Shanghai. ZHENG Nong's abstract work will surely invite comparison's to Silvio Wolf. While there are similarities, Zheng's work predates Wolf's by some years. I don't think you can be pre-derivative. (Look for a future post on seemingly similar work which I will call "parallel development"). Whether online or in person, M97 deserves a look.

Later in the week, Steven treated me to a search for vernacular photos at a paper market one would never find without local help. He combined that with 3-4 meals at haunts that were 150% off the beaten path. One Hunan meal in particular near the gallery was a gem. Ordering in machine gun Mandarin, our table was soon overloaded with beer, tea, and 8 or 9 carefully ordered dishes. When we protested that this might be a tad too much food, we were informed that the whole feast would cost about $30! For 4 people!! If it had only been cheap I wouldn't have cared, but it was yummy. Lots of spice and vegetables I couldn't place. An adventure from beginning to end. Steven, chapeau to you, my friend. You really made the end of my trip memorable and satisfying.

Outside of the M50 district, galleries were more spread out. I was looking forward to seeing what the Chinese outpost of James Cohan had to offer, but they, too, were between exhibits. I checked out Art Labor who are the Shanghai gallery for my friend, Yuichi Hibi. Nice space though I wasn't too excited by the show they had up. Next was 140sqm gallery. Liu Ying Mei, the owner, couldn't have been nicer or more helpful. (She even ran into us the next day and loaned her cell phone and Mandarin when we were hopelessly lost). She seems smart and grounded. The work we saw was interesting, not great. I think she might me a bit hamstrung by finding first-rate artists who aren't already represented, but I would bet on this woman to find her way. I'll be curious to see where she is and who she shows in another year or two. Last was Jean Loh's Beaugeste Gallery. Jean is French born and trained; an advertising guy with a lot of success. He was showing Lu Guang who I spoke about in my first Lishui post. This gallery is impossible to find though worth the effort as one of the few photo-only galleries in the city.

All in all, despite the frustrations, this was a good trip. I feel like I just barely got my sea legs. I'm eager to go back when I can hit the ground running and make a bit more of my time there. I hope I'll get the chance soon.....

Here's Looking At Me....

2010-01-02T14:51:00.009-05:00

I got so much positive feedback from my "camera eye" pictures from Lishui, I thought I'd post all of 'em as a little New Year's treat. I cut many of them out of the original post because I only wanted to use as many as I needed to make my point, but they seem to have found an audience. Well, I'm not one to deny an audience its wishes, so here, without further comment, are a few dozen photos of people taking my photo.....

....and one last, sneaky little over-the-wall shot:
Happy New Year.

China, Lishui part 3. Western photographers

2009-12-28T15:45:00.014-05:00

A quick recap: I was invited by The Lishui Photo Festival to participate as a nominating curator. I was specifically contacted by co-producer Yan Li. Yan and her partner, Wang Zheng, had been reviewers with me at Photolucida in Portland, Oregon this year. Wang, in his role as artistic partner, had invited 30 photographers to participate in the festival. I apologize for the tiny photo, but here is his project statement in the only format in which I can show it to you. Many of Wang's choices came from his review sessions in Portland:

The rules for the nominators were simple. We were asked to propose up to 2 exhibitions, each containing 20-30 photos from an individual artist. The proposed exhibitions would be sent as a hi resolution digital file to be printed in China. Additionally, we were invited to bring one of the artists with us. The risks were clear from the start. We would be sending copyrighted work off to people we didn't know in a country famous for pirate copying to be printed without supervision by the artist. On the plus side, any artist exhibited would have their work seen by a huge new audience, an audience that simply would not be accessed without participating in an event like this. (There were clear promises from the Festival organizers that exhibition prints and digital files would be destroyed after the show. While this would be hard to confirm, it seemed clear that edition-quality copies were not being made. Most artists I spoke to at the end of the exhibition were confidant that their editions would not be compromised.)

My artists decided to forge ahead, and, as I found out when I arrived, dozens of others had as well. It was not all smooth sailing. A few days before we arrived, we got an email from Yan telling us that the exhibition prints were of a quality level disastrously lower than the test prints she had approved. The festival was now furiously working to reprint all of the work at an acceptable level before the opening day. Unfortunately this meant that many of the directions the artists had sent for printing would need to be set aside. This was specifically directed at the choice of scale since all of the prints would need to be printed the same size to save on paper and time. While this was not good news, I was impressed by Yan's open and forthright approach to the problem. She could have waited until we arrived to tell us of the problem. Instead, she gave a full account of the problem risking many artists pulling out or asking for their work to be withdrawn. To my knowledge, no one pulled out.

I had no expectation of finding fine-art level prints even before the printing problem surfaced, but now my standard had to be shifted to a simple question: was the artist's message still visible in these prints? The results were mixed. On the high end (which I'm happy to say included my two artists), the answer was yes. While color values were not true and scale was not ideal, the pictorial and philosophical content of the images was there to be seen. One the low end....well, perhaps the less said the better. There were some examples where it was simply impossible to see the intention of the artist. It was very unfortunate. I hope (I'm even confidant) that Lishui Festival will do better in the future.

The Western artists were all shown in a concatenation of exhibition spaces in the Baiyun Forest Park Center. It wasn't clear what the usual use is for these period buildings, but it was an idyllic place to look at art. Some illustrations-
The walk up to the entrance gate on opening day:

The Festival banner at the entrance:

The banner showing the roster of exhibitions and their corresponding exhibit halls(Carol McCusker and Stephen Bulger visible):

Detail of that banner showing my listing in a shameless act of self-promotion:

Banner map showing the layout of the exhibition halls in the park:

Picture of exhibition hall entrance where my artists were on view:

Christian Erroi and me at the entrance to our hall #1 in front of the intro to the exhibition:

Detail of that intro in 2nd act of shameless self-promotion:

Poster for Christian's exhibit:

Christian's work as it was displayed:

Christian's show, jammed at the opening:

Cornelia's wall text:

Cornelia's work as it was displayed:

Cornelia's show, jammed at the opening:

An example of the lovely bucolic setting within the park:

I have spoken about both Cornelia Hediger and Christian Erroi extensively in earlier posts, so, rather than write more here, I will simply invite you to visit their websites which are highlighted and hyperlinked.

Other than my own artists, I had a couple of other favorites. At the top of the list was Dutch artist, Petra Stavast. Ms Stavast's work was unfortunately one of the casualties of the printing debacle. Her salvation was in her nominating curator, Marga Zijvanrotteveel. Ms Zijvanrotteveel's essay on "Libero", the project of Ms Stavast, was so compelling, concise, and thoughtful I knew there was more to the work than what I saw on the wall (look for more from this smart, young, independent curator). Fortunately for me, both Mss Zijvanrotteveel and Stavast were in Lishui so I had the chance to discuss the work and learn more.

"Libero" is a story that starts in a derelict house in Calabria and ends in suburban New Jersey. Ms Stavast found photos and remnants of a rich but abandoned life in Italy and decided to follow that evidence to wherever it took her. She tracked down the descendants of the family that had lived in Calabria and reconstructed a family history in a way that is personal and universal. She made her work into a book which I have to say is one of the most compelling publications I've seen this year. I don't think I've ever seen an artist so successfully weave found , vernacular photos with her own personal work. It is unique. It strikes me as some wonderful union of Leigh Ledare, Miyako Ishiuchi, Erik Kessels, and Joachim Schmid. You can read more about it here and you can order a copy here from Roma Press. Also available at Photo-eye. Highly recommended.

Also high on my list of discoveries was Carol McCusker's nomination of Stephen Berkman for his series called "Predicting the Past". Mr. Berkman works exclusively in antiquarian processes, so digital prints of his work are, I'm sure, a shadow of the real thing. But the wit, intelligence, and perspective were clearly evident even in dodgy digital format. Humor is a high-wire act in art as I've discussed before in work like Thorsten Brinkmann's. But when it works it can be a tour-de-force. I'm eager to see actual prints of Mr. Berkman's tintypes and wet plate collodions. The dialog he creates between antique process, antique portraiture, and contemporary staged photography is well worth a look.
Some examples. The first is titled "Mute Debating Society":

and Ms McCusker's paragraph about the show:

I was also taken with Sarah Wilson's work called "Blind Prom". I had seen the work when she had a show at Michael Foley's gallery earlier this year. I was impressed with it then, and it held up well in a second viewing with less than ideal prints. The history of photography is rich with artists who have used photographing those who can't see both as an ironic device and also as a means to take the self consciousness out of portraiture. Ms Wilson's work seems to be an unsentimental but poignant addition to the canon.

Last, I want to mention Mindaugas Kavaliauskas' series, "52 weeks, 52 self portraits". Neither the artist nor his nominator, Kazimieras Linkevicius were in attendance. I was intrigued by the work and wanted to see the whole series. As I said, humor is a high-wire act. I'm not sure if this one stays on its feet, but I'm sure I want to know more. What I saw suggested a fertile visual imagination and a mordant political wit. So far my online investigations have yielded little more information, mostly in websites in Lithuanian. If anyone has more information about this artist, I'd love to hear. I can't find a website either for the artist or the curator. Here are a few examples from the exhibition:

To briefly sum up, this was a wonderful adventure for me. I'm thrilled that I went even with all the challenges and disappointments. I remain a bit confused as to why all of the Western artists and nominators were brought all the way to China, but I'm glad they did. I hope if we're invited again that there will be much, much more interaction with Chinese artists, curators, art lovers, and gallery owners. It seems a shame to have all these American and European voices in China and not use them to communicate with their Chinese counterparts. On the plus side, thousands of Chinese people saw photography they simply would not have seen any other way, and we saw Chinese art that we can take to new corners of the world. And let's not forget that it took a Chinese festival to introduce me to Western work I had never seen before. All in all, a good experience. I'd go again in a heartbeat.

Next: I head to Shanghai.

China, Lishui 2-A: I forgot to mention....

2009-12-28T15:00:00.002-05:00

And one more photographer I forgot. I can't tell you his name, nor the title of the series, nor where to find the work because everything about him was only in Chinese. This was a persistent challenge in the Chinese pavilions. Much of the supplemental text was only in Chinese. It was a particular challenge in this work because there was text printed on the image. Clearly this artist wanted us to have the information. I think it was called "New Family" or "Second Family"...something like that. It showed couples or whole families that had been formed because each spouse had lost their counterpart in the great earthquake. Moved, I suppose, by their shared loss and experience, they sought to find a replacement for the half they lost. Each photo had text written on the photo that described the individual's situation and how the new family came to be formed.

I only had base-level translation for any of this, so I can't vouch for how accurate I'm being about the work. And, as in the post above, context was missing. Was this about loss? About forging into the future despite great setbacks? Were these families "formed" by the government and these photos made against their wishes? I have NO idea. Visually they were strong, and the text seemed moving from what was read to me. I hope at some point I can learn more.

China, Lisui part 2. Chinese photographers.

2009-12-19T10:14:00.010-05:00

I reported in Lishui Part 1 that it seems impossible to summarize or draw conclusions based on a very short visit to a giant country. So I'll proceed here with caution. Even taking into account my restricted, small sampling slice, I'll venture to say that some impressions of general trends peeked through. Though I heartily admit that these observations may be wildly off base, I'm going to just lob them out there anyway. If they spur some heated debate and objections, perhaps it's all to the good.

The Chinese photography I saw on this trip fell into 3 broad categories: classical documentary practice, technically proficient but merely pretty work (calendar art), and work that mimicked Western work in significant ways. I know from experience that there is individual, unique Chinese work out there, but I didn't really see it on this trip. That's not to say that I didn't see very high quality work. I did. But it tended to fall in the documentary category as opposed to highly original art.

Wherever we went during the festival, the Chinese photographers rarely operated outside of a pack. It seemed there was some kind of group pressure to photograph the same thing at the same time. It happened countless times:

The photo above perhaps highlights a differing mindset between the Eastern and Western photographers. This was at Donghu Park. I wrote in the last post about the funny sign that said "Long Term Bosom Understanding".

Well, here's a wider shot of that same scene:

The Chinese photographers are all photographing the the beautiful landscape, and the Americans are photographing a funny sign. Can we draw broad conclusions from this photo? Perhaps not, but it seemed like I could when I was taking the picture.

As I usually do, I'll focus on the work that I liked. There's no need to dwell on the banal or commercial work I saw. The only confusing point was figuring out what was intended to be what. Context and intent were persistent challenges the entire trip from the best work to the worst. Chinese work was displayed in 4 venues: a few of the exhibition halls in the Forest Park (where the Western artists were) were given over to Chinese art, The Oil Pump Factory Buildings, an outdoor makeshift exhibit space near an amusement park, and an outdoor makeshift exhibit that highlighted 2 artists' work from Cuba and Korea. From a contextual point of view, the exhibition space near the amusement park was the most confusing. It was full of really bad, genre, stock image pictures. Was this commercial work? It was displayed as art. Was I confusing a commercial fair section of the festival with other work that was meant to be "gallery" work? I couldn't tell and no one had an answer. I didn't spend much time here.

The best work was at the Oil Pump Factory. I am embarrassed to say that, while I travel the world to look at art, I often miss what is right here in New York City. Two of my Lishui "discoveries" had had major play in New York, and a third had been exhibited internationally as well. I suspect their names will be familiar to many of you even though they were new to me.

The first great work I saw was that of Lu Guang. The fact that he was the winner of the W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography just 2 months ago must have bypassed my radar (I was even invited to the award ceremony, for heaven's sake!). Lu Guang is knee deep in a huge project to photograph the seven major rivers of China and the epic-scaled pollution that is happening in all of them. He has completed three of them, and his dangerous, politically charged work continues. A few examples here and then an even more complete portfolio if you click here.

Next up in my walk of ignorance was the work of A Yin. I was impressed with his sensitive and visually dynamic series about nomadic Mongolian peoples. Apparently the Rubin Museum thought so too since they had a solo show for him here in New York 2 years ago.

Perhaps slightly off the beaten track were the diptychs of Hu Li. The artist shows the same coal mine worker once as he emerges from the mines covered in soot against a white backdrop, and again in his street clothes against a propagandist backdrop. To my eyes this work looks like a statement about the dehumanizing effects of working in the mines. It was sometimes literally impossible to tell that it was the same person in both photographs because the soot had so erased the details of his character. But our old friend "context" rears its head again here. Reading the artist statement on his gallery website, the work seems more intended to be a paean to Hard Work and Progress. Is there irony here? Submerged political defiance? I don't know. I liked the work even without a clear decision from me as to the intent of the artist.
Left side detail:

Right side detail:

Diptych:

Context is everything when evaluating (re-evaluating?) the work of photographers who were employed by the Chinese government as propagandists. Discussion is hot right now about how we should view these works. Sha Fei is one photographer that is right in the center of it. There's a show of his work in January at Ohio State University and various symposia have included his example (see my blog from Houston Fotofest about him). Add to this debate the work of Zheng Weihan. In his Scenes From the Past we see overtly staged propaganda images from the Cultural Revolution. With Western eyes, I can see the work through a filter of other staged photography and ironic views of 60s-70s culture. But that doesn't seem to be what's going on here. A quote from his gallery website:

As older generation artists, Zheng and many "revolutionary photographers" from that era, their "staged" works are as truthful. Zheng has his own personal concepts -- only this concept was hatched out of the “Ideology of the Cultural Revolution.” Zheng lost himself in this truthfulness back then, but because of this "loss",it makes his imagery very "contemporary. "

When I asked his gallery rep, from Inter Gallery in Beijing, she said that the work was very popular among young Beijingnese because this represented what really happened during that period. There was no re-examination of the purpose or factuality of the pictures, she claimed. Maybe. I think the pictures are visually arresting and somewhat alarming. Though many different interpretations are possible, I suspect they will take their place with propaganda posters in the art world, but I will leave it to the scholars to sort that out. My fear is that the reality is more on the order of thinking that old pictures reprinted in a large size will sell in a new market. I hope the truth is more layered than that.

I'll go into more Chinese work that I saw in Shanghai in a later post. By some accounts there was more intriguing work to see at the Oil Pump Factory. Unfortunately, the official schedule left us little time to explore. When we went back for a closer look, the exhibition was already coming down. Everybody's loss.

Next: Western work in Lishui.

China, Lishui part 1

2009-12-14T21:30:00.017-05:00

As I mentioned in a few earlier posts, I was invited to China to take part in the Lishui Photo Festival. While my trip encompassed other cities in China, I'll focus on my time in Lishui since, of the cities I visited, that's the place that is probably unknown to most readers of this blog. Lishui is a city in the Southeast corner of China. It's a few hours inland by car, a little north of Taiwan and a little south of Japan. It's in a picturesque valley surrounded by rolling hills and low mountains. It's just the sort of landscape you imagine when you see fog-shrouded Chinese watercolors and ink drawings. But this is no rural village. The city population is over 250,000, and the population of the prefecture of Lishui is in the millions. It's a small city sort of Albany-sized - or maybe Akron, Ohio - and similar to Albany in that it's on a river, close to some more famous, bigger cities, but has some character and history of its own. For China, it's notably lowrise, but the downtown is bigger than you might first think when arriving in the city. It's a town but not a village. It's the kind of place you probably have heard of but never had a reason to go.

To my surprise, many Chinese people had not heard of it. Many people I met in China simply had no idea where Lishui was. So I guess it was no surprise that, despite its size, the city was relatively remote (no local airport) and unfamiliar with Western faces. We were told that the Western group brought to the festival was the largest group of non-Chinese to ever be in the city. In fact, Westerners are rarely there at all (never more than 10 English speakers in the area at one time), so we were openly stared and pointed at. We were told that staring in Chinese culture is not the hostile act that it can be in the West, but some were still intimidated being treated so conspicuously as the Other. For myself, I found that a quick "hello" in Chinese and a smile broke the staring barrier. The awkward, silent stare dissolved into a huge grin with a returned "hello" every time. People seemed conspicuously delighted that we were there once the gawking barrier was broken. Schoolchildren, perhaps only knowing this one word in English, would call out "hello!" to us, and squeal with pleasure and delight when we responded back with a hello in either English or Chinese. Many participants were offered free food, free cab rides, and other spontaneous acts of generosity I would never expect in a dense metropolitan environment like this. People were simply friendlier and more innocently welcoming than in any other city I've been in my life. It's not fair or honest to make a generalization based on such a short and limited trip, I know. I was constantly aware that I didn't have enough information to fully understand the context of what I was experiencing. I felt like my eyes were wide open, but in fact I was peering at China through a very narrow slit in the curtains; what seemed to me to be a panoramic view was in fact edited and incomplete. That being said, I have never been more welcomed into a community where I was so conspicuously not of that community.

One example will serve well. I was invited to nominate 2 artists for the exhibition and bring one of them with me. I asked my friend, Christian Erroi, to be my companion (Cornelia Hediger was the other artist in the show. More on that in a future post). Christian is half Swiss and half Italian. We were walking around downtown looking for a bite of lunch when we saw a small line of local men taking away steaming buns from a hole-in-the-wall lunch counter. While we were standing there trying to decide if this would be the place, one of the guys in line said, "Come here! It's good! Come!". We were thrilled to hear even a few words of English hoping that we might actually be able to have an effortless transaction, but it became clear that we had just heard his entire English vocabulary.

Christian, when he's in a situation where there is no chance that the person he's speaking with will understand any language he knows, will lapse into Italian. I guess he thinks if tone, not words, is what is most important, he might as well speak in his most expressive language. So, he starts talking to the guy in Italian.....and the guy answers back in Italian! What are the odds in a city that hardly sees a Caucasian face that we'll meet a guy who speaks Italian? My own Italian is rusty but serviceable and Christian is a native speaker, so we launch into a real discussion with this guy. It turns out he's traveled some and spent time in Italy and studied the language. We ask him about the food, what's good, what's in it. he insists on ordering for us and making sure we have drinks and the next order of buns.

And here's where it really falls off the map in terms of my experience. We reach for our wallets to pay for lunch, and this guys says, "No. it's my treat". What? No, we insist, we can pay. We're happy to pay. "No. You are my guests", he replies. "We are so happy to have you in our city, it is my pleasure to invite you to lunch". We're speechless. Did we really just get treated to lunch by a total stranger who couldn't wait to have us sample his favorite pork buns? In Italian? In all my travels in the US and Europe, this was unique. I was humbled by this simple, unexpected, un-asked for act of generosity. Mind you, the buns were maybe 40 cents each, but that's 40 cents to us. I have no idea what the price of lunch represented to him in a country where one could very well earn $50 a month. Beautiful.

And people didn't just stare. We were endlessly photographed. If I ever wanted to have a taste of what celebrities feel in the face of paparazzi, this was my chance. Folks pointed cameras at us singly:

And in groups:

It seemed like any time I would look up, there was a huge lens pointed right at me:

But as with the stares, a simple "ni hau" would dissolve the moment into smiles and hellos:

We also seemed to be the object of touristic interest. Shortly after our bun experience, we were standing in front of a small shrine. A family group saw us and raced to have their picture taken with us in front of the monument:

More hurried to be part of the shot:

Ready?

No, the camera guy wanted to be in the shot, too, so he enlisted yet another guy to take the picture:

Now we're ready:

...and the happy picture:

Clearly, Christian knows a thing or two about posing to be a monument. But seriously, this group was just tickled to make this shot and wouldn't let us go until they got it right. We must have been there for 15 minutes. Not a word of English was exchanged, but Christian made himself well-understood in Italian.

The festival organizers made a point of taking us on some field trips to see the surrounding countryside. This was a mixed blessing. While it was a treat to see parts of China I would likely never see again, it took time away from the festival. I ended up not seeing all of the exhibits and failing to meet many of the Chinese artists. Our first trip was to the Zhutan Mountain Scenic Spot.

After seeing Dinghu Peak, I always referred to the day as "Picnic at Penis Rock" (apologies to Peter Weir).

There were no guides so I never learned much about Dinghu Peak, but I decided it probably wasn't Jewish.
Zhutan Park had my favorite "funny sign" of the trip:

But there were more to follow:

As fun as these were (and there were many), I was inspired to imagine what it would be like if the shoe were on the other foot. Can you imagine what a colossal screw-up it would be if the US were required to sign its national parks in Chinese?! Subways? Street signs? We, too, would be treated to the sight of Chinese people doubled over in laughter pointing at some innocuous sign. No question.

This perspective of asking myself what the equivalent experience in the US would be was constantly on my mind. If a busload of Chinese people who didn't speak any English were dropped off in Knoxville, or Boise, or Indianapolis, what reception would they receive? What if they went into a restaurant where there was not a single word on the menu in a language they could understand (as happened to us countless times)? What customs of ours that we take for granted would seem incomprehensibly strange to them? My pessimist side says that they would encounter a cool, suspicious US though, of course, I can never know. It's a hypothetical. Perhaps they wouldn't be treated poorly, but they could not be treated better than we were treated in Lishui. In a place that was as foreign to me as any place I've ever been, I was constantly welcomed and treated well.

As someone pointed out to me, China is a very old, very big, very complicated country. Any attempt to simplify, reduce, or generalize about one's experience is sure to miss the point or, worse, get it completely wrong. All I can say is that I was in one city for one week as an individual, English speaking man. I hope the microscopic sliver of light that I cast on the place illuminates a view that is somehow illustrative and not too off-the-mark in its assumptions. From street markets:

to the daily fish dinner being purchased:

to vistas that confounded my idea of a city:

To markets that were as I've never seen:

Lishui was an adventure I would not have missed for anything. Like my travels to the USSR and Eastern Europe in the late '80s, these are places in such a rapid state of change that if I came back in even a realtively short amount of time I wouldn't find the same place I visited a few weeks ago.

Coming up will be posts on:
Chinese artists exhibited at the Festival
Western artists exhibited at the Festival
Artists and galleries I saw in Shanghai

Stay tuned.....

....and firewalls there were.

2009-12-11T03:24:00.002-05:00

I'm sitting in Hong Kong airport and I see that I'm able to open Fugitive Vision for the first time since I left for Hongzhou on November 28th. It was nice to actually see the page open after trying without success for 2 weeks. In any case, China experience posts will start very soon as I'm back on the evening of the 11th. More to come!

Firewalls on the horizon?

2009-11-26T06:34:00.002-05:00

Sitting in my Hong Kong hotel room a few days away from a departure for Lishui, China, I read with trepidation the post in Jeff Ladd's 5b4 blog about his own Chinese experience:

Hello all. I am currently in China press checking the next Errata Editions books. Like last year I intended to post a daily report about the making of each book but this year it looks like the Great Firewall of China is raining on my parade. Blogger has been blocked. So I will save all my reports and post them the week of my return. My apologies...

Now I'm curious what blog-blocks I might encounter. It has been my intention to write a diary style account of my week at the festival. If you don't see any posts, draw your own conclusions and be confident that I will be following Mr. Ladd's lead by saving my reports and posting when home. I'm keeping fingers crossed that I'll be able to post as usual. We'll see......

Camera Club of New York benefit auction

2009-11-23T20:31:00.002-05:00

A Silent Photo Auction to Benefit
The Camera Club of New York

Wednesday, December 2, 6 – 8pm
Calumet Photographic, 22 West 22nd Street
(between Fifth and Sixth Avenues)

Please join us for our annual silent auction, featuring work of choice emerging photographers, vintage photographs, and exciting works by established photographers.

Participating artists:
Arturo Acosta, Cara Alhadeff Judea, Erica Allen , Mariette Pathy Allen, Merry Alpern, Steve Arnold, Peter Baker, Brett Bell, Leslie Bellsey, Anita Blank, Sam Branman, Timothy Briner, David Brommer, Hunter Brown, Susan Burnstine, Christine Callahan, Eric William Carroll, Sean Carroll, Lindsey Castillo, Jesse Cesario, Jesse Chan, Megan Cump, Pradeep Dalal, Kia Davis, Emile Dubuisson, Rian Dundon, Max Dworkin, David Ebeltoft, Robert Edelman, Amy Elkins, Sean Ellingson, Smith Elliot, Lisa Elmaleh, Jon Feinstein, Hugo Fernandes, Mark Fernandes, Larry Fink, Ryan Foerster, Martine Fougeron, Allen Frame, Anders Goldfarb, Samuel Gottscho, Lorraine Gracey, Robin Graubard, Jasmine Gregory, Lori Grinker, Leonora Hamill, Marissa Herrmann, Henry Horenstein, Meng Ling Hsieh, Joelle Jensen, Charles Johnstone, Jessica M. Kaufman, Salma T. Khalil, Michelle Kloehn, Anne Lai, Erika Larsen, Leigh Ledare, Ed Lee, Sebastian Lemm, Nataly Levich, David Levinthal, Sam Levinthal, Wayne Liu, Colleen Longo, Joseph Maida, Jerome Mallman, Rochelle Marmorek, John Meyers, Dana Miller, Azikiwe Mohammed, Carolyn Monastra, Alex Morel, Santiago Mostyn, Walter Naegle, Kae Newcomb, Lori Nix, Leah Oates, Nadhar Omar, Stuart O'Sullivan, Susan Paulsen, Carissa Pelleteri, Alexander Perrelli, Michael Rauner, Saul Robbins, Francesca Romeo, Caren Rosenblatt, Lynn Saville, Robert A. Schaefer, Abigail Simon, Aaron Siskind, John Stanley, Tema Stauffer, Will Steacy, Amy Stein, Harvey Stein, Joni Sternbach, Patricia Sullivan, Arne Svenson, Diana Teeter, Lucas Thorpe, Christina Thurston, Hugo Tillman, Sally Tosti, Maki Ueno, Wilhelm Von Gloeden, Ellen Wallenstein, Eric Weeks, William Wegman, Susan Wides, Emma Wilcox, Amy Williams, Bernard Yenelouis, Shigeki Yoshida

Benefit Committee:
Mariette Pathy Allen, Paul Amador, Brian Clamp, Daniel Cooney, Michael Foley, Martine Fougeron, Tom Gitterman, Howard Greenberg, Peter Hay Halpert, Henry Horenstein, Michael Mazzeo, Jessica Robinson, Lynn Saville, Spencer Throckmorton

$10 admission. All proceeds go to The Camera Club of New York (CCNY), a non-profit 501(c)3 arts organization that has been nurturing talented photographers since 1884.

Preview works at: http://www.cameraclubny.org/2009auction.html

For further inquires, contact CCNY at info@cameraclubny.org or by phone: 212-260-9927

Please visit us at www.cameraclubny.org

Après Vue Paris Photo

2009-11-22T21:53:00.003-05:00

Paris Photo ended its 5 day run yesterday closing on what organizers could only call a success. The halls of the Carousel du Louvre were jammed day in and day out and notable crowds gathered for the evenings of the vernissage and the finissage in which any unobstructed movement was nearly impossible. But a success for fair organizers and a successful fair for a gallery are two different things. I received diverse reports, perhaps as one might expect since not every gallery had the same caliber of work or could appeal to every sort of client. A few galleries complained of slow or indifferent sales while others claimed to have record-breaking years. Of course, neither complaint nor boast are verifiable so I will confine my thoughts to more subjective matters.

The theme this year was the Arab World and Iranian photography. In theory, I am all for this. I suspect I'm not alone in being rather under-informed when it comes to photography from this part of the world, so any effort on the part of a major art institution like Paris Photo to promote awareness and to foster dialogue is very welcome.

However the reality is, as reality always is, a little more complex. First off, the definition of what is meant by "the Arab world" is unclear at best. Certainly a culture as important and old as this has spread its influence to every corner of the earth. And in our global, "flat" world, what does geography mean to artistic output? Is Hiroshi Sugimoto a Japanese artist? Is Mona Hatoum a Lebanese artist? British? German? Palestinian? None of the above? I found taxonomic questions like these rather unaddressed by the galleries involved. Secondly, given that the definition for what what the "Arab" world describes remains hazy, I was unconvinced that there is enough distinctive work around which to build a thematic foundation. Perhaps there are, but I wasn't moved by the totality with which I was presented here.

But there were notable exceptions. Motive Gallery from the Netherlands had examples from Martine Stig's "Sisters" series. I had admired this work 3 years ago when I saw it for the first time during the FIAC show, and I continue to respect the combination of the political and the graphic in her high contrast shots of covered women. Hamburg/Beirut gallery Sfeir-Semmler had a great example of Walid Raad from his work "I Might Die Before I Get A Rifle". Hans Kraus, as one would expect, brought superb examples of 19th century work featuring Arab sitters and portraits.

I also found some unexpected pleasures in work outside of the theme category. Serge Plantureux was showcasing the work of Rossella Bellusci. I am always intrigued by work at the limits of visibility, so Ms Bellusci's explorations of blown out portraits, objects, and self-portraits caught my eye. I'll be looking to learn more about her work. Galerie Vu had some fine work focusing on the Mexican-American border by under appreciated artist Jeffrey Silverthorne. Too many have only known him for his early morgue-based work neglecting his later output. Take a look. Vu also had a fine self-portrait by Christer Strömholm. I'm pretty familiar with this artist's work, and I've never seen a self-portrait like this. Pretty great. I was completely blown away by some exquisite vintage Raoul Ubac prints at Galerie Thessa Herold. This gallery is new on my radar; I've never seen them at a fair nor heard of them. I found the contemporary work at the booth to be a mixed lot, but the Ubacs were superior in every way. I'll be curious to see more of what this gallery is about.

As I have mentioned in the past, European fairs just seem to draw bigger crowds than North American ones. I don't think this is represented in sales figures, but it I do think it represents a difference in the way culture is consumed in the two locations. Families and couples out for a weekend diversion spend hours at these fairs (FIAC, Art Paris, Paris Photo, etc.) in a way that is simply not found even in New York City. While it makes for uncomfortably packed conditions for the serious collector, I can only see it as a positive thing when looking the society as a whole. Perhaps responding to this, Reed Expositions, the organizer of Paris Photo, inaugurated a VIP morning time on every day of the fair. Instead of the usual practice of having one VIP preview a few hours earlier than the scheduled general opening, Paris Photo had a VIP-only morning period every day from 10:00-11:30. Any collector who needed some quiet face time with a gallery would find the fair at a civilized density each morning. I cannot applaud this innovation loudly enough, and I hope it was enough of a success that it will be copied by every fair on earth.

Outside of the fair, there was an exceptional surrealism show at the Pompidou Center, La Subversion des Images. If you going to Paris anytime before January 11, 2010, just plain don't miss it. I spent hours on 2 visits as did everyone I spoke to about it. It's an exciting, scholarly show that also rewards even a casual visitor. If you're not heading to Paris, the catalog has its own pleasures. It's only in French, but is still worth the $60 tariff. Amazon.com sometimes says it's out of print. Don't believe it. Pompidou bookstores had copies piled to the ceiling. There's also a soft cover bi-lingual "album" that is worth it especially if you don't speak French. Amazon.ca has plenty of copies though the album seems a little harder to find outside of the Pompidou bookstore.

An invitation and a pat on the back

2009-11-22T21:01:00.002-05:00

I got an email a few days ago from the noted curator and writer, Marvin Heiferman. He invited me to take a look at a few new projects he's undertaken at the Smithsonian. Here's what he sent me:

click! photography changes everything (www.click.si.edu) is a provocative rethinking of photography's cultural impact that encourages site visitors to explore the ways photographic images enable us to visualize, comprehend, and interact with the world we live in.

click! features readable and informative short texts commissioned from experts, writers, inventors, public figures, and selected visitors to the website. Each text is illustrated with images chosen by project contributors and selected from the Smithsonian's vast collection of over 13 million images. Stories explore the many ways photography changes who we are, what we do, what we see, where we go, what we want, and what we remember. As digital technology is altering the form, content and transmission of camera imagery. click! photography changes everything provides a unique opportunity to reflect on the history, practice, and power of photography in the past, present, and future.

The second project, THE BIGGER PICTURE (blog.photography.si.edu), is a blog about photography and the Smithsonian. It features photographs from the Smithsonian Institution's archives, news about visual culture, and posts about photography in the digital age.

I took a look and I think it's a broad, inclusive program that deserves a look. I'll add the blog to my blog roll so you can click on the link anytime. The link for "Photography Changes Everything" is above.

On a personal note, I had a sweet little encounter this morning. I was visiting the Paris Photovintage hotel table fair looking for the odd vernacular treasure. I gave my card to the folks at AnamorFose Photo Gallery from Izegem, Belgium. Xavier, the owner, said, "I know you!". "Really? How?", I asked.
"I read your blog", was the reply. I can't tell you how much this warms my heart. My stat counter tell me that tens of people read my blog every day. To know that it is reaching a photo dealer I've never met in a Belgian town I've never heard of just makes me smile and smile. Thank you dear readers.

Lishui Photo Festival

2009-11-05T11:25:00.002-05:00

I've been invited to participate as a nominating curator for a new photo festival in China. It starts at the end of this month in the Southern city of Lishui. I'll be spending a week there promoting the two artists I've nominated, Christian Erroi and Cornelia Hediger, and looking at the work of almost 100 other artists. The work will be a mix of Western artists brought by Western nominators and Chinese work by Chinese nominators. The website (almost entirely in Chinese) is here: http://www.lsphoto.org/syj/. Take a look. I'll file a report as soon as I'm back in mid-December.

More from Berlin, 2009

2009-10-26T12:44:00.008-04:00

A visit to Berlin is not defined by art fairs alone. Though I was introduced to one new and interesting gallery, Feinkost, at Art Forum, Berlin was its usual dependable self in providing a variety of satisfying experiences away from the fairs.

I guess it's no surprise that I had not been to Galerie Feinkost before. The gallery is in a converted convenience store directly across from a northern border of the Berlin Wall quite a distance from any of the standard gallery districts. But their Art Forum booth was one of the true successes for me this year. They showcased two artists, Ignacio Uriarte and Arcangelo Sassolino, to exceptional effect.

Mr. Sassolino makes sculptures that have at their core some kind of mechanical or engineering component. These mechanical components are used to destructive ends, usually interfering with the environment in which they're placed. Noisy and dangerous, I found the work completely engaging. The work at Art Forum was relatively mild for this artist consisting of a 9 bar air cylinder connected via a computer to a small plastic water bottle. The computer directed the cylinder to alternately inflate or deflate the bottle. When inflated it was somehow perfect and unharmed. When deflated, it was always a different, disastrous deformation of itself. One could not imagine how it would re-inflate to its former self. Inflation and deflation was a deafening crackle of plastic.

The gallery invited me to a concurrent exhibition at the only-in-Berlin exhibition space Micamoca:

There I found a more typical example of Mr. Sassolino's in that it existed solely to destroy it's surrounded space:

Detail of it's clawing effect:

The Sassolino work I didn't see was A huge wall of cor-ten steel held in place by a massive magnet. At rare intervals, a computer would tell the magnet to fail allowing the steel wall to fall a few inches to the floor. Over time, the wall would pound deeper and deeper into the floor; a testament to the inexorable march of time and mass.

Ignacio Uriarte was the other artist Feinkost was showing at Art Forum. Mr. Uriarte exploits office materials for his practice. Other artists have plumbed this territory before -- pens, typed pieces, faxes, etc -- but Mr Uriarte explores new corners of the office both with his diverse materials and single-minded practice. I was impressed again and again what this artist achieved with extremely simple materials. At the fair, I was caught by a Sandback-like display made only from folded paper:

Detail:

I bought a typewriter piece that used only the left and right hand quotation marks. If you weren't told how it was made, the mark-making technique of the piece would be a mystery.

This artist also works with office paper, office software, and printer ink among many other media. Take a look.

I always go to Daimler-Chrysler Contemporary when I'm in Berlin. the shows there are always smart and concise. Thios visit didn't disappoint. Continuing with the them of fabulous work acieved with spare or simple materials, I loved Georg Herold's untitled piece using particle board bookshelves and cinderblock bricks. While not as explicitly destructive as the Sassolino pieces, I was mesmerized by how the piece seemed to balance on the point of failure. There was incredible tension in such a static work:

I made a first time visit to the About Change Collection on Museum Island. They had a text heavy group show that was sure to appeal to me. My favorite was a Gonzalez-Torres-like piece by Vincenzo Latronico in which the public is invited to take away parts of the work. Unlike Gonzalez-Torres, in which each piece in the paper pile is identical, each piece of paper in Mr. Latronico's work are unique. Each page you take with you deletes that page from an awesomley varied whole. I quote from the About Change website:

The Italian Vincenzo Latronico explores the various ways of interpreting and composing a text. Beginning with eight text sequences, each comprising five parts, the young author has written down all the possible combinations thereof, yielding a total of 32,768 short stories, or 32,768 variations of a love story—each independent of the other, and utterly unique.
Latronico’s debut novel Ginnastica e Rivoluzione was released in 2008 by the Italian publishers Bompiani. For Next time, perhaps (2009), he drew inspiration from the French author Raymond Queneau (1903–76), who in 1961 published One Hundred Thousand Billion Stories, an experimental ensemble of ten sonnets. Queneau constructed the book so that the fourteen lines of each sonnet can be individually turned over, and consequently combined with the lines of the other sonnets. Thus, potentially, this thin booklet of 14 sonnets contains “one hundred thousand billion poems.”
Whereas Queneau’s one hundred thousand billion combinations and various poems could never be actually seen in its entirety, Vincenzo Latronico sought to render visible the sheer volume of his 32,768 love stories. Each story was printed on a single page, resulting in a total of 32,768 pages which—each containing its own love story—are now stacked in the About Change, Collection . Visitors are also invited to take a page, as a variation of the piece Next time, perhaps. The English version of the work Magari la prossima volta (2009) is now on view for the first time outside Italy, and has been adapted especially by Vincenzo Latronico for the About Change, Collection.

So, despite wan or meager offerings at the fair, Berlin remains a vibrant and eclectic place to see art. Count me in for Gallery Weekend next May.

Dispatch from the Berlin art fairs

2009-10-14T22:08:00.013-04:00

First, apologies for such a long break since my last post. There has been plenty to write about, but I just haven't seemed to find the time. Sorry. There will be plenty of posts in the coming weeks.

As I have for the past 3 years, I went to Berlin for their collection of Fall art fairs. The main event is the Art Forum at the Messe Halle with the usual attendant satellite fairs Berliner Liste, Kunstsalon, and Preview augmented this year by newcomer, Art Berlin Contemporary.

Berlin is famous for its contemporary art scene and artist rich landscape. In past years, this has resulted in a collection of art fairs that rewarded the patient fair-goer with artists and artwork not to be found in the more homogenized fairs of Basel and New York. It seems that this pleasure is reaching the end of some natural cycle. Art Forum was as staid and conservative as many of its sister fairs have become, perhaps in reaction to a tighter market and perhaps just because taste is turning in some ineluctable way. On the other other hand, the satellite fairs are just becoming bad. Where Liste, Kunstsalon, and Preview were once highly uneven yet rewarding experiences, they have morphed into embarrassing collections of I-don't-know-what. Maybe it is my taste that has morphed, but it seems to me that, for example, the Kunstsalon in which I first saw the work of Thorsten Brinkmann has been MIA for some time now.

But I swore when I first starting writing this blog that I would focus on the positive. Of all the fairs, the only one with a frsh perspective and more than a handful of engaging work was the Art Berlin Contemporary (ABC). The full name of the fair was ABC DEF (Defining Emerging Future) which asked of its exhibitors to limit their display to one artist's work which could fit on a standard folding table. In addition, each work should be a model or maquette for a public art work.

This is not exactly a new idea, but it's a new manifestation of the art-fair-as-curated-space idea. Volta Fair's New York incarnation the last year mandated single artist booths and is an example of the trend. While some gallery owners groused about the limitations of only having a table to work with, I, for one, loved the clarity of purpose and attendant power of focus. Certainly there were failures and miscues, but I think this kind of creative fair structure will be the wave of the future. The art-fair-as-supermarket model seems to be having hip and knee pain as it struggles with both size and age. ABC seemed lean and fresh and it's best examples were a delight.

Galerie Krinzinger from Austria showed Werner Reiterer's "Draft for an Altar". It consisted of a halo-shaped ring of neon, a cell phone, and note that read, "back in 5 min, God". I was sold just from that, but I chuckled with evil pleasure when the cell phone would ring for no one in particular every few minutes.

Galerie Albrecht was showing Dennis Oppenheim's "Proposal for a Building Complex". Probably best seen from above:

Galerie Nordenhake had a more challenging display by artist Johan Thurfjell. "Eight Dreams and the places dreamt about" featured a fairly conventional forest diorama complete with cabin, lake, boat launch, etc with colored pins marking certain spots. On the wall, color coded to the pins, were eight "dreams" which allegedly happened in the places described in the diorama. I was taken by the supposed specificity of the work which seemed to show all of its hand, but obviously everything about this work is subject to speculation and interpretation. Apologies for the not-so-great small pictures:

Dominik Lejman was the choice for Berlin's Zak-Branicka Galerie. As one would expect from this clever artist, his video was calculated to display around the mandated table, not on it. This cheeky detail would not have mustered a passing comment at a normal fair. At this one it was high cheek.

As I mentioned above, I see the art fair model that we have lived with for the last few years to be open to change if not actually under attack. Fairs with a unifying theme or raison d'etre seem much more lively and worthwhile than a huge building crammed with as much art as it can hold. Even more timely in my view is to abandon the fair entirely in favor of gallery oriented events that having been gaining favor around the world. For example, Gallery Weekend Berlin has been a go-to weekend for some years now. I went in 2008 and found it to be an extraordinary way to be introduced to the artistic life of a city. Dozens of galleries had new show, museums times their programs for the weekend, and collections and studios opened their doors. This is just like the ancillary activity during a fair except that by going to the galleries themselves, one is introduced to a much more comprehensive view of that gallery's program (or better, the work of an artist in whom you are interested). New York has tried this on for size in the recent 57th St Gallery Night and the upcoming New Yorker Passport to the Arts. While both are smaller in scale and scope to the Berlin weekend, I can easily see the trend moving in that direction. At least for me, I would rather visit the city and an actual gallery rather than an antiseptic convention center ill-suited to show art.

"Emerging". A challenging term not just for the visual arts

2009-09-30T00:01:00.002-04:00

Check out this New York Times article from September 18th talking about a definitional fight over the term in a theater setting. Once again, we see that this term has no core meaning. I vote to submerge the use of the term emerging....

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/18/theater/18award.html

Avedon musings one year later. A reappraisal.

2009-08-21T23:32:00.009-04:00

A little over a year ago, I wrote a posting on this blog about the Richard Avedon show I saw in Paris at the Jeu de Paume. You can read it here. It was not complimentary. Since then, I have reevaluated and reconsidered what I wrote many times. A friend of mine once said to me, "You learn more from art that you hate than from art that you love", and sure enough, I have learned from Richard Avedon.

I can't say that my arguments have changed too dramatically, but my overarching view of this artist has had a sea change. I attribute that change primarily to curator Carol Squiers and her show of Avedon's fashion work that just closed at ICP. More on this later.

I continue to hold many of the complaints about Avedon's work that I voiced a year ago. For example that Avedon was capricious and often cruel in his treatment of the sitters for his portraits, that his artistic claims didn't match the content of his work, and that his photographs represent a blatant commercial formula than he endlessly reworks still ring true for me. Obviously, others disagree. Geoffrey Dyer in his essay in the book "Avedon 1946-2004"says: "It has also been suggested that the photographs of crumpled, ageing faces were in some way Avedon's revenge on the fashion and glamour business in which he made his name, an explicit rebuke to the claim that his work was all surface and no depth. This opposition cannot long be sustained." And yet the opposition is sustained. Many learned people with whom I've discussed this topic agree with my heterodoxical view. I also found it interesting that Mr. Dyer compares Bill Brandt's portraits to Avedon's using the same quote I did to compare them negatively. He believes that Avedon's portraits positively embody the Brandt challenge that a portrait "physically and morally predicts the subject's entire future". I still believe that Brandt meets his own challenge while Avedon does not.

Perhaps this is a funny, roundabout way of offering a changed mind. Please bear with me. There were a couple of key figures who led me down this path.

The first is a former colleague, Adolfo Bornstein, who had counsel for me when I was about to go to Pittsburgh to take a job under the baton of Lorin Maazel. Adolfo was a well-known conductor basher. We were both working at the time under Charles Dutoit, a conductor who inspired near universal derision from his orchestra. I expected Adolfo to send me off with words of revolution and resistance against Maazel, but I was wrong. He said, "There are figures in the world who have forged an intellectual place for themselves in which their opinion cannot be ignored. It may ultimately be disagreed with, but it cannot be simply dismissed. Their resumé of scholarly discourse or public performance at a certain plane guarantees them a voice that must be listened to". He mentioned Pierre Boulez and Zubin Mehta as other examples of musicians whose intellectual rigor and professional accomplishment demanded respect. Should I apply this lesson to Richard Avedon?

Then I read the Roberta Smith review in the New York Times from May 14, 2009. Ms Smith's gimlet-eyed reviews are not famous for gushing praise so I was somewhat shocked to read:

Avedon’s fashion photographs from the late 1940s to the early ’60s are everything you want great art to be: exhilarating, startlingly new and rich enough with life and form to sustain repeated viewings. Their beauty is joy incarnate and contagious. The best of them are as perfect on their own terms as the best work of Jackson Pollock or Jasper Johns from that era, and as profoundly representative of it.

As with these painters Avedon’s work represents an important turning point and a new kind of self-consciousness of his medium. He makes us aware of its process on different levels, while also questioning its values and deflating its pretensions. His images have a new tautness; you see them as energy-producing wholes in which every detail and bit of surface is articulated. Like Abstract Expressionist painting, they show us an art form learning from and then moving beyond European conventions.

What!? Roberta Smith is comparing Avedon to Jasper Johns and Jackson Pollock? I was deeply challenged by this contention. What could I be missing if a critic famous for her toughness had that kind of praise for the work? My own take on the show was pretty girls in pretty dresses shot in clever ways. Jackson Pollock? I struggled to keep an open mind and continued to question my own assertions and the assertions of my friends who were Avedon devotees.

Full of questions, doubt, skepticism, and pessimism, I went to a curatorial walk-through with Carol Squiers. I should say here that I have endless respect for Ms Squiers. I know her as a consummately informed and scholarly art professional who has had an impact on the art world through her articles, her teaching, and her curatorial practice. I have had the pleasure of many long discussions with her about photography and art; conversations where she has guided me patiently and expertly through ideas and philosophies about art and artists. Despite my respect for her, I have to confess I was on the attack that night. I peppered her with questions challenging the authority of Avedon's reputation from every angle I could think of. I questioned the veracity of his innovations when compared with Munkasci or Penn, I questioned the impact his celebrity has had on his value as an artist, I questioned whether he would be remembered favorably once the sycophantic adulation for his memory had died with the people who knew him personally, I questioned what effect Avedon's endless self promotion and self-aggrandizement had on a curatorial assessment of his work.....I questioned, and questioned, and questioned.

For her part, Carol parried my attacks with calm and patience. Sometimes she disagreed, sometimes she didn't know, sometimes she attacked back with her own well-defended assertions. Clearly I wasn't going to move her position, but she hadn't moved mine either. But just at the end of the tour, as folks were beginning to disperse and the whole thing was winding down, I sent out one last riposte. I don't remember what it was but it was some kind of intellectual assertion that I thought could score a point. Her response ended the attack and changed my mind. She said (if I remember correctly), "Listen, all I know is that I've been looking at these photographs for 30 years and I've never gotten tired of them. Some of them are my favorite photographs in the world and I look at them again and again and again".

Peter Schjeldahl in his June 1, 2009 New Yorker review of the Francis Bacon show said: "It's unseemly to stay mad at an artist whose canonical stature, as graphed by the fervor of intelligent admirers, not to mention market value, has only grown since his death.....". Carol Squiers is the epitome of an intelligent admirer, but it was not her intelligence that carried the day. It was her emotional and personal response to this work that stopped me dead in my tracks. It did feel unseemly in the face of this informed passion to stay mad at the work and at the artist. While the work still leaves me empty in many ways, it doesn't piss me off quite as much as it did before. Perhaps I've been chastened by Ms Squiers and her cadre of intelligent admirers, or perhaps I just can't stay mad at an artist who has inspired a hagiocracy from a population known for its atheism. In the end, I guess none of it matters. The positive result is the debate and discussion the work has generated. Unlike before, I can approach the subject calmly. Who knows? In a year I may be writing about what genius the work is with all the zeal of a convert. Things change.

Tara Donovan at Lever House in NYC

2009-07-30T17:51:00.002-04:00

To those of you who are in New York City or who will visit before the 5th of September, I urge you not to miss the Tara Donovan installation currently installed at Lever House in midtown Manhattan. Lever House is at 390 Park Avenue, between 53rd and 54th Streets.

Like the sculpture of Pedro Cabrita Reis and Alyson Shotz, both of whom I've written about in this blog, Ms Donovan uses quotidian materials to stunning and surprising effect. Her sculpture bends our perceptions in two ways: it transforms the space in which she has placed them, and it bends the space around it when you look through it. This piece rewards multiple viewings as it shifts according to the time of day, the amount of sunlight, and the ratio of sunlight to artificial light. It also rewards multiple perspectives. Up close, the work is a maze of mini kaleidoscopes and restricted vistas. from farther away, the work acts as a distorted lens through which we see a world that is recognizable but seen through a funhouse mirror. That one simple material used in a unique way can yield all of these new ways to see a familiar space points to Ms Donovan's brilliant eye and creative energy.

A must see.

Arles addendum: Guillaume Chauvin & Rémi Hubert

2009-07-27T18:47:00.005-04:00

While in Arles this summer I was introduced to two young men who, with the intention of upsetting the powers that be in French photojournalism, seem to have delivered a smack to that particular wasp's nest. Except it is French photojournalism that appears to be feeling the stings. I wanted to write a short post because it seems that many of my most in-the-know photo friends on this side of the Atlantic have not heard about the story.

Guillaume Chauvin & Rémi Hubert decided to enter the prestigious Grand Prix Paris-Match du Photoreportage Etudiant after being entirely dissatisfied with last year's winners. They felt that photojournalism was limited and full of cliché. They set out to stage a photojournalism "story" using a well-worn style that they felt would be appealing to the judges. It worked. They won.

But when they stepped to the podium to accept the award, they revealed that it had all been a set-up. I think this absolves them of any kind of accusation that this is a fraud. They had a goal to shine a light on a problem that they felt the world was not seeing properly, and revealed their plan as soon as the moment was right. Their point was to be exposed, they weren't waiting to be found out or to steal the prize under false pretenses. This is not the French Jayson Blair of the NYTimes or Janet Cooke winning the Pulitzer with a faked story. In both of those cases, the point was to get away with it. The authors really wanted the prestige of winning the prize. Chauvin and Hubert wanted to mock the prize and the work it was promoting.

I think this project neatly straddles the two worlds of photojournalism and art photography. As photojournalism, it uses visual tools to address a problem that the artists felt needed to be brought to light, which is the very definition of photojournalism. As art, it falls in a grand tradition of contemporary art which creates faux mise-en-scéne in order to illustrate an artistic narrative. I think of An-My Lê, Sherry Levine, and Gregory Crewdsen as examples in this lineage.

Controversy and condemnation have followed the pair since their public admission of the project. I fall on the side that hails the success of the project, that applauds their initiative to alter the status quo, and that sees the project as successful work of art. Others are not so laudatory. They feel that it is "merely" the work of copyists (how many Picture Generation artists have heard that?), that the project was professionally and emotionally dishonest, and that Chauvin and Hubert have no real creativity.

Who knows what will follow for these two? Some of their detractor's questions will be answered in time. Perhaps this was their one-time hit. Perhaps they don't have a grand creative spark. But perhaps they do. I prefer to give them the benefit of the doubt. They hit the bullseye so perfectly with their first arrow, I can't help but be curious to see where a few more arrows will fall. Smart, focused work like this doesn't happen by accident. I, for one, will be curious to follow their trajectory at least for a little while. If you're curious to read more, including some opposing views, and to see some photos, here are some links:

Jinphoto blog

thisphotothat blog

horses think blog

Kate Day's blog at the Telegraph.uk

Guillaume Chauvin's website (In french)

Rémi Hubert's website (In french)

Studio Visit, Bela Kasa

2009-07-15T11:04:00.002-04:00

I discovered Bela Kasa (pronounced Kasha) when I was browsing through a Hungarian online photo auction. I didn't feel quite adventurous enough to bid online, but I did want to learn more about the artist. I asked around to my Hungarian photographer friends, and I was lucky to find that Balazs Turay knows him. Since I was going to Budapest to support a show that was the net result of a sale of Capa photos by ICP to the Hungarian government, I thought this would be a great chance to meet the artist in his home and to see more work.

It turns out that Bela does not live in Budapest. He told me in an email that he was about an hour out of town and easily reachable by train. When I told my friends in Budapest where I was going, they likened my trip to "going to New Jersey". Indeed the train trip was not the most scenic I've had in my life, passing many nondescript, rundown suburban villages and some industrial parks, but I was excited by the spirit of adventure. Plus, it was a treat to leave out of the aging, distinctly "eastern" train station where all signs were in Hungarian. I wondered how much I seemed out of place to the local population.

Bela was there to meet me when I arrived in Martonvasar train station. We got in his car to drive the 10 minutes to his much smaller village where he's had a house with his family for decades. The Kasa family has a small, tidy compound in a modest, rural sort of way. After entering through a steel gate, I could see a few small buildings on the right and the main house on the left. This all framed a few dozen acres of lawn, fields, and well-tended garden. We sat down on the patio overlooking the garden and fields and started to get to know one another.

Bela went to school for photography in Germany. He worked for years as an advertising photographer both in Germany and Hungary. He is a trim man with short cropped hair, and intense, deeply focused eyes. He's had an interest in Hungarian/Gypsy folk music for years, and he's a capable musician on a number of instruments. He began traveling to the Hungarian, Romanian, and Transylvanian countryside in the 70s looking for Gypsy musicians to meet, make music with, and to learn about. The resultant photographic essays he's produced document a very personal vision of a world few see, and a world which is quickly disappearing. He noted to me that many of the musicians in his photos are already dead, and that the communities are dispersed or dwindling. You can see some of his images in the book "Hungarian Folk Instruments" by Robert Mandel. Otherwise the printed versions of his work are simply not available.

His perspective is one that is particularly seen from the inside. he knows the the whole story of everyone he photographs; fathers, wives, uncles, cousins, nephews, etc., these are not anonymous portraits. He participates in wedding ceremonies, funerals, village festivals, and more. Some of these, he told me, last for days. For example, the photograph I bought from him shows a wedding band playing after more than a day of festivities. He told me he took the viola from a sleeping band member and joined the other musicians. After a time, he put down his instrument, and took this photo.

Though it's visual syntax doesn't break any new ground photographically, I think it's a remarkable picture. I don't believe there are many vintage copies of his images, but in the case of an artist like Mr. Kasa, I don't think that's the point. His view of this insular and misunderstood culture deserves to be seen and to achieve a wider distribution; probably in the form of some kind of publication. Take a look at his website to see a broad cross section of his work.
Bela Kasa website

After we had looked at a few folders of his work, Bela treated me to a delicious country lunch: chicken sautéed with Hungarian paprika, a loaf of hearty, fresh bread, and a salad composed of vegetables mostly from his garden. The Hungarian style peppers were just coming in. Yum. After lunch, Bela drove me back to Martonvasar to catch the train back to the city. It was a pleasure to have such an intimate introduction to an artist and a place that are so distinctly and beautifully Hungarian. It's what makes the soul of travel worthwhile for me.

Lora Reynolds Gallery show

2009-07-14T21:17:00.003-04:00

I just received an email from artist Graham Dolphin about a show in Austin, Texas he's in. It's at Lora Reynolds Gallery, and while I don't usually comment on shows I can't see in person, this one looked too good to pass up. An excerpt from the gallery press release:

This exhibition brings together works that are concerned with the act of mark-making, including drawing, sculpture, video, cut paper, and painted wood. The show considers the primacy of how the pen or pencil hit the page, how the artists have controlled and exploited the possibilities of their mark, and how a line or curve can
occupy a space.

Artists included in the exhibition who are particularly dear to me and/or included in my collection are: Graham Dolphin, Tara Donovan, Teresita Fernández, Dan Fischer, Ewan Gibbs,
Mitzi Pederson, Ed Ruscha, Fred Sandback, Jim Torok, and Daniel Zeller. Check it out. I would love to see it in person, but it's pretty vibrant even online.

Impressions from Rencontres d'Arles '09

2009-07-14T13:29:00.007-04:00

I must be getting cranky in my old age. After being a complete curmudgeon about last year's installment of the photo festival Les Rencontres d'Arles (RdA), I was looking forward to really enjoying it this year. After all, gone was the dispiriting game show, "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire Curator?", featuring Christian Lacroix as the losing contestant, and in was an all-star crew of former "commissaires" of the festival. What could go wrong?

Somehow, it didn't quite work out as I had hoped. I'm afraid I detect a marked trend in RdA towards the commercial and safe. The evening projections read more and more like ads for the big magazines and agencies or veer towards edgy work from the past that has gained sure-fire approval over time. Sure, they showed Nan Goldin's landmark work, "Ballad of Sexual Dependency" and Duane Michals held court in his usual anti-establishment way, but we've seen this all enough times for it to have lost some of the sting it had 25 years ago.

What was more disturbing than Ms Goldin's document of counterculture excesses was the vanity fair of Vanity Fair's parade of portraiture from it's 300 year history. What? You say VF is not 300 years old? How on earth could they have found THAT many boring pictures in less than 300 years? As I say, I must be getting cranky, but really, do we need to see every single Madonna or Cher cover that has ever been recorded by mankind? The precipitous drop in photoghraphic quality as the covers moved into the 60s, 70s and 80s was dramatic and disheartening. As Dave Barry once quipped, Froot Loops are not part of a complete breakfast, they are adjacent to a complete breakfast. Putting other photographers in the same slideshow as Steichen, Muray, and Horst doesn't make them great photographers, it makes them adjacent to great photographers. But I concede that I have lost this argument. Mark Seliger will have a a retrospective at the Guggenheim before I die, I'm betting the Met will host a VF covers show, and the Liebowitz canonization has already begun.

But all was not lost. There were pockets of pleasure and interest to be found. The retrospective of Duane Michals' work was engaging and smart. Like a perfect Noel Coward number, the surface sarcasm only partially disguises the real emotion underneath. Likewise, the show taken from Nan Goldin's personal collection was a treat. I had almost lost hope of seeing a collection like this - one or two examples by each artist, three at the most - that would make sense to anyone but the owner. Personal collections are often like dreams: only interesting to the one who has them. But Ms Goldin's collection was an exception in the extreme. In every case her choices showed a line of thought, a visual clarity, and intelligence at every turn. It's not that I doubted that she has these qualities, it's just that I think it's even more difficult to represent them in a personal collection. I hope some version of the show will find a place in the US.

Elsewhere I was happy to see Naoya Hatakeyama's "Maquettes" series. While the original work dates back some 10 years, Mr. Hatakeyama has been toiling at perfecting his mode of presenting this work. This was the premiere of the final version. They are light boxes showing manifestations of light in black and white. Somehow the artist has found a way to make the blacks black and the light white even though there is a lightsource behind the work that would tend to make everything go gray. The effect is to create the most luminous, contrast-y black and white abstractions one can imagine. I love them.

In previous years at RdA, the Prix Decouverte had been problematic for me. Not because the work was weak necessarily, but because many of the artists weren't really discoveries. It would be hard for me to argue that Marilyn Minter is an art world unknown, for example. This year, though, I am happy to say I had not heard of a single one of the artists in the Prix Decouverte show. I hope it marks a trend in this part of the festival. It really should be a place of discovery for unrepresented, less well known work.

Among the many choices in the Decouverte show were two that I thought were notable: Yang Yongliang and Magda Stanova.

Yang Yongliang mines familiar territory for contemporary Chinese artists, the ancient ink drawings and scrolls. However, I find that he does so in a notably organic way and one which rises above the mere historic reference. Mr. Yongliang uses photoshop to create distopian landscapes of a future China; one in which there is endless building on top of the remains of previous buildings. The photographs have a remarkable level of detail that recall ink landscapes but are photographic in the extreme. To add to the cross-historical reference, his photos are "stamped" with owner stamps like traditional scrolls. But on further examination one finds that these "stamps" are corporate logos probably relating to the maniacal building projects. I'm not sure if these are works that are staisfying for the long haul -- it's a bit of a one liner -- but it was a treat to be introduced and he seems an artist to watch.

Magda Stanova was nominated by Joan Fontcuberta, so it was no surprise that this was very intellectual, and conceptual work. As a matter of fact, it would be hard to call it photography since the exhibit contained drawings, video, text, and animation. I quote here from the artist's statement:

In the visual essay, titled In the Shadow of Photography, I attempt to answer these questions. The work consists of three chapters. The first is searching for the specifics of photography; the second investigates photographic world; and the third is examining how the behavior and thinking of people has changed since the invention of photography. The work is including topics such as: photography as a time traveling machine; why a person has a stage fright while being photographed; how the present is becoming a stage for the future; or how are we loosing the possibility to get an authentic memory from a photographic attempt to conserve it. These reflections are presented through the mediums of drawing, text, collages, photographs, objects, video and animation.

Definitely Ms Stanova is someone I'd like to watch. It was a compelling debut.

Denis Darzacq was first mentioned in this blog when I met him at Houston Fotofest in March of '08. I have continued to run into him through mutual friends, and to track his career in a casual way. He was part of a group exhibit at La Capitole during the festival. On view was his "Hyper" series showing dancers suspended in space in the isles of big box grocery stores (called Hypers in French). I have always liked this work but I'd only seen work prints and online versions. Mr. Darzacq swore to me that the work was only at its best when viewed in exhibition size, approx. 30x36 prints. I'm very dubious of artists' claims like this. For me big prints are not necessarily better and often artists don't have the best perspective of how their work projects in larger spaces. Well, this time I should have listened to the artist. Mr. Darzacq's prints were a model of kinetic energy which projected the soul of the work in a perfectly well-chosen scale. I don't know why he doesn't have US representation, but this exhibition certainly made the case that he should.

So, in retrospect, maybe I'm not quite as cranky as I thought. While there were distractions and disappointments, there were also plenty of examples of great or thought-provoking work. While I may give the festival a pass for a couple of years in order to come back to the scene with a fresher perspective, there's no doubt that vital, interesting work was on display. Even a cranky guy like me can't quibble with that ratio. And I didn't even cover all of the work I liked. Leigh Ledare, Roni Horn, and a vernacular show called "Without Sanctuary" were all worth noting but which I won't discuss for lack of space. They can all be viewed on the Rencontres d'Arles website.
Check it out.