Galleries: October 2004 Archives

I swung by the Robert Mann gallery last weekend to see the new show by Dutch photographer Wijnanda Deroo. Mann's tastes seem to frequently intersect with mine, so shows there are usually a sure bet. Deroo's focus in this show is the ubiquitous "empty room" theme that is so popular this fall. Initially I dismissed the work, but my wife pointed out there is a distinct contrast between the rooms shots in Latin America and the middle American suburban homes. The lower class rooms are inhabited for the long term, with several generations passing through a home, each building up additions to the decoration. The middle American suburban home appears to have been decorated in a single flurry of activitiy, probably by a professional decorator. And they leave you wondering, "someone wanted it to look that way?" Of course, there's an element of exoticism in the Latin American rooms, but still...

Through Nov. 13 at Robert Mann Gallery
210 11th Avenue
(212) 989-7600

Candida Höfer was one the last of the major contemporary German art photographers (Gursky, Struth, Hutte, etc.) I had not seen in person. Thomas Ruff is the other. Last year I'd seen a single photo at the Sonnabend gallery, one of a deep red themed theater and I was eager to see a larger selection of images. Unfortunately, my weekend gallery crawl included a trip to see Hofer's show at Sonnabend was mostly a disappointment. Most of the images are bland and undistinguished rooms in me-to European palaces. The photos lack sharpness I would expect as matter of course. In one photo, Höfer is seen reflected in a mirror shooting these large schale images with a medium format camera mounted on a very high tripod, which may have contributed to the shake. The one room devoted to her tried and true theme of libraries and book collections was the most interesting of the bunch.

Sonnabend is always an interesting place to visit because they've always got a grab bag collection of inventory lying around one room. I was introduced to a stunning photo by Elger Esser today (below). Amazing in person, much darker and, of course, printed in giant size.

The next time I complain that Sonnabend Gallery has no Web site, remind me they're using an artnet site instead of their own domain.

“Why can’t a corpse be beautiful?” asks Japanese fashion photographer Izima Kaoru. He explores the answer in a series of photographs entitled “Landscapes with a Corpse,” currently on display at Von Lintel Gallery. The photos are more striking than I’d expected from such a thin premise, but ultimately the effect Kaoru creates somes off as contrived and, ultimately, unnecessary. Based on the three folios available at the gallery, Kaoru has been mining this empty shaft for quite some time.

The show contains four semi-narratives, each showing a stylishly dress model lying in a position approaching that of mock death, though only successfully in one series. The first room is dominated by several large scale prints centered on the color yellow. The presence of the model seems superfluous. Without her inert presence, staring blankly into the ceiling, I might have thought this guy was an acolyte of Gursky or Burtynsky. The second room presents the other three series in smaller prints, each, again, using a simple, saturated color scheme and models playing dead. Perhaps what makes Kaoru’s work fall short is that his subjects, despite the word “corpse” in the title, aren’t actually dead at all. Of course, that hasn’t stopped others from attempting the same thing, perhaps to better effect. Take David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, for instance. The image of Laura Palmer wrapped in plastic, blue from blood loss and hair seductively wet, was an early 90s icon, particularly in Japan.

The mixture of beauty and death actually has a long history within photography and at least Western culture. Kaoru adds little to the pile. Waaaaay back in the day of daguerreotype and tintype photography, when children died at a much higher rate than today, it was not uncommon for grieving parents to have a portrait made of their dead child as a memento mori. Certainly, for them, there was a sense of beauty in those images of actual corpses, even if they only appeared to be sleeping. It's possible that this practice fell out of favor as families in America shrunk and dispersed, making personal experiences with death rare and more likely to be associated with a grim end. That's just conjecture. There's a whole weird subculture interested in this 19th C. and early 20th C. phenomenon, but also some serious scholarship.

Luc Delahaye's 2001 image "Taliban" poses the question “why can’t a corpse be beautiful” more strikingly. The large scale print was snapped up by major collectors and museums almost as soon as it became available. The image is a large-format picture of a dead Taliban militant lying in a ditch somewhere in Afghanistan. The composition and color are unmistakably meant to bring a refined aesthetic quality to the image, beyond a simple photojournalistic recording of one man’s death. In fact, following the ensuing controversy over this photo, Delahaye has redefined himself as an artist and not a photojournalist. So, why do we feel is okay to treat this person’s death as an object of collecting? What are the factors that turned a dusty corpse into something to hang on the walls of LACMA and generate $90,000 for the “artist.” For an attempt at an explanation, check out the Village Voice, though it strikes me as self-justifying gibberish.

Finally, despite having said all that, it was a thought provoking show, more because of ideas outside the images than inside them, though.

Through Nov. 13 at Von Lintel Gallery
555 West 25th St.
(212) 242-0599

The series is available as a $30, 88 page book, as well.