September 2004 Archives
Joerg over at Conscientious has dug up some outstanding color photographs from World War I at Der Stern. The color is wonderfully subtle, not so garish as is often seen in World War II-era color photography. Particularly interesting are the images of French children playing war. The range of subjects and locations makes me wonder about the source(s) of these images and, of course, want to see more.
I didn't go to the first one and unfortunately I won't have time tonight, either, but if you've got the time and inclination, head down to the Apple Store in SoHo for New York City Photobloggers 2. I'm not entirely sure what the presentation will be, but I would take a guess that there will be some good photography shown. Eliot Shepard of slower.net will be among the blogger crew presenting and he's been posting some great work lately, particularly his party pics. I even noticed some of the pics make appearances in New York magazine a week or too back. Who said blogging would never get you anywhere?
NYC Photobloggers 2
Apple Store SoHo
103 Prince St (at Greene)
6pm Thursday, Sept. 30th
John Perreault at Artopia has written up his weekend in the Chelsea gallery district. Much better than the Wash. Post article I referenced below. I found both articles interesting because for me, as a relatively new gallery visitor, Chelsea has always been the destination for seeing new photography. Apparently, this is a development of just the past 6-8 years - exactly contemporary with my move to the city. John's musings on the development of industry-specific ghettos and strategies for planning a gallery crawl are particularly interesting (and familiar).
A bunch of us art bloggers, headed by Todd Gibson over at From the Floor, are running a short survey of our readers to find out a little about your reading/surfing/art preferences. While the consolidated survey results will be shared with the participating blogs, your indivual answers will remain confidential, so if you've got a spare ten minutes, go fill out the survey.
Set aside for a moment the humor of someone down in the Beltway ascertaining whether Chelsea has "arrived" as a suitable art mecca. Blake Gopnik's review of the neighbohood is mostly just a series of gallery reviews, but it contains a good review of An-My Le's "29 Palms" at Murray Guy. (registration required)
Jim Lewis has an interesting article over at Slate about assertions that the early 20th Cent. child-phenom photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue was maybe not exactly the prodigy he made himself out to be. The new book Jacques Henri Lartigue: The Invention of an Artist claims he was not an amateur artist and was actually well versed in contemporary photography technique and themes when he made his earliest work at the age of 6 (or 8). Lewis discusses whether this really matters or not when assessing the value of the work. Though I'm only familiar with a smattering of Lartigue's photographs, I say it doesn't matter. The images stand on their own. Lewis writes:
Taking pictures is, in many ways, a kind of performance, and a camera is more like a musical instrument than a paintbrush or a pen. So, looking at a Lartigue print is very much like beholding, say, one of those brilliant child soul singers who come along every so often. You know they can't possibly have the wisdom that their work suggests, but it doesn't seem to matter.
Via Conscientious
If you're down Chelsea way this weekend, you may want to poke your head in to see Tim Lehmacher's show at Daniel Cooney Fine Art. Lehmacher's not your typical German photographer in the vein of Struth or Gursky. In almost direct opposition to those guys, his images focus on simplifcation and isolation rather than overwhelming detail and activity. A more formal take on something Misrach was doing earlier this year, perhaps.
Daniel Cooney Fine Art
511 West 25th Street, #506
(212) 255-8158
Wed.-Sat.,
Gallery Hopper received its first instance of comment spam this morning, so I must be doing something right.
I noticed in my referral logs a new art-related site called Gallery Driver. One of my fellow New Yorkers has put this site together to aggregate the
syndication feeds of art-related blogs, like Gallery Hopper, into one, easy-to-use site. From what I can tell, it also hosts micro-sites for individual artists and/or galleries.
Lastly, if you are using a blog aggregator, either offline or online, you can subscribe to the Gallery Hopper xml feed using the syndication link near the bottom of the right-hand column of links. If you use Bloglines as your online aggregator, there is also a handy link to add a Bloglines subscription, as well.
My company has a meeting at the Hilton on 42nd St. today. Last time I was there I noticed the business center was decorated with photographs from two series of photographs by Hiroshi Sugimoto. The first (shown above) is the theater series of long exposure shots of movie theaters while a film is running, rendering the screen shock white. There are also a handful of formal portraits of wax figures representing early film stars such as Rudolph Valentino and Mae West, for example. It's weird what you'll find socked away in a hotel lobby ten floors up.
Apparently, people like to trawl through Hiroshi's trash for discarded prints.
On cue, everyone else has begun posting their initial surveys of the new gallery season. The commentary seems to be a mixed lot, with a fair bit of criticism for New York’s early offerings. My knee jerk reaction is to defend our stuff (as if it was our stuff) but seeing as I haven’t been able to get out and see anything yet, that’d be premature. And to be fair to the NYC scene, a lot of shows have yet to open. This weekend the bulk of stuff will be out, but I’ll be traveling next weekend and unable to get down to the neighborhoods until the last weekend of September.
I’ve been scouring the gallery announcements for interesting stuff to see and the slate looks a bit sparse. Here’s a short list of shows to see:
Todd Hido at Julie Saul
Larry Sultan at Janet Borden (Web site hasn't been updated since last winter)
Timothy Greenfield-Sanders at Mary Boone
Wijnanda Deroo at Robert Mann
An-My Lê at Murray Guy
Candida Höfer at Sonnabend and the Goethe Institute
Lynn Davis at Edwynn Houk
Reviews of the new season, from around the Web:
Modern Art Notes
art.blogging.la
From the Floor
I don't mean to sound like a curmudgeon, but my wife says it's inevitable. First, I have to say I did enjoy the day at Dia: Beacon. Much of the work, even that which I found to be ridiculous, was thought provoking in some regard. The trip is worth it just to experience Richard Serra's gargantuan rusty steel plate sculptures. However, as we left the center in mid-afternoon, I had to conclude that the space is just a bobo version of Disneyland.
When I say "bobo" I'm using David Brooks' neologism, a contraction of "bourgeois bohemian". We arrived at the center a half-hour after it opened and the place was already starting to fill up with these types, that is to say, Upper West Siders. While certainly not the level of congestion one finds at the Met on a Saturday mid-afternoon, the center did fill with enough people that you were rarely alone in its 300,000 square feet. And glaringly, after leaving multicolored NYC, the crowd was overwhelmingly white.
Disneyland’s thrill resides in the gut, not the mind, and so does Dia’s. Without a Master’s degree in minimalist art appreciation, you’re left to simple emotional reactions to the installations. And most of the installations are about art itself rather than any aspect of the typical person’s life, such as, say, love or death. It seems that by mid-century art had tired of exploring the human condition and turned to navel gazing. The result is the inanity of Fred Sandback’s string sculptures. As an amusement park attraction they work, forming an imaginary pane you hesitate to walk through. But while I was able to sit and contemplate my own reflection in Gerhard Richter’s Six Gray Mirrors I couldn’t help but be reminded of a funhouse mirror. Most exciting are Serra’s arcing steel behemoths. It’s probably the only gallery or museum visit I’ve made where I heard visitors whistling, listening to the echo off the umber walls. People were having fun! Heaven forbid we see that in a Chelsea gallery.
This later lead me to an observation about the rise of photography in the art world that occurred as the artists featured in Beacon descended from their zenith. Photography, by the function of the camera, requires an outward view. The lens must be trained on something other than itself. Even a self-portrait, when viewed, is a view of someone else. It is very difficult for photography to fall into the same self-indulgent exploration the Dia artists followed. Of course, there is an argument to be made that every photograph makes a self-referential commentary on photography, but I think that argument is made by critics and not photographers.
Project Rebirth is a time-lapse photography project recording the rebuilding efforts at Ground Zero. There are several cameras and locations recording the construction activities from a variety of heights and angles. The NY Times has an article about it today.
The project is also recording ten years in the lives of ten 9/11 survivors, though the character sketches they've posted sound like they were written for a low-budget TV mini-series.
I seem to recall there was going to be a similar time-lapse record made of the construction of the expanded MoMA, but I can't find anything about it online.
My wife and I purchased a new car a week or so ago, and a major to-do for the Labor Day weekend was to drive north up the Hudson to see the Dia: Beacon Riggio Galleries in Beacon, NY. Dia is about an hour and forty-five minutes away from us in Queens, but the drive there on the Palisades Parkway is one long stretch of green until you re-cross the Hudson on the Bear Mountain Bridge just south of Garrison. I thought it was odd that both the Dia center and Yahoo! gave instructions for crossing the Hudson into NJ, up the west side of the river and then back across, but it turned out to the fastest and surely most scenic way in comparison with the way home, through Westchester.
The building itself is a renovated factory with, depending on who's telling, between a quarter and a third of a million square feet of exhibition space. With only two dozen artists, everyone gets plenty of room. The opening space, containing one of the sillier works, The Equal Area Series by Walter De Maria, is immense, stretching on for about 1/2 - 2/3 the total distance of the building. The ceiling lets in plenty of diffuse, natural light through stereotypical factory slanted windows. The day we visited was overcast so the lighting couldn't have been better. I found myself absorbed in imagining the work that must have gone on in the building at one time to have resulted in water stains here, burn marks in the floor there, odd scrapes and chalk marks on the walls. The conical support structures in the basement are reminiscent of Frank Lloyd Wright's dendriform columns used in the SC Johnson corporate headquarters in 1939, though the Dia factory was built 10 years earlier.
Amongst the 24 artists displayed, the Bechers are the lone photographers. Nonetheless, photography plays a crucial role in a number of works, specifically Hanne Darboven and Joseph Beuys (I think.) As I'd seen other examples of the Bechers' typologies (though the images displayed at Dia are somewhat a different tact), I was comparing the Dia displays with last year's "Industrial Landscapes" show at Sonnabend, which was better in my opinion.
I will talk further about specific artists later this week, but I am a bit adrift in trying to bring something interesting to the table beyond my gut reactions. I simply don't have the background and education to full appreciate the connections and effort which went into each of the works shown at Dia: Beacon. Cursory Google research will eventually illuminate some of the corners, but even the densely written gallery essays only scratch the surface of the interconnected meaning that one could draw from a day at the galleries.
More excellent reviews, from Dia: Beacon's opening in 2003, on Artnet, Haber Arts, and New York magazine.
