On the Web: February 2007 Archives
Two articles of interest in the Sunday NY Times. The cover article of the Magazine is a profile of Jeff Wall, accompanied by a breathless, shocked tone - bewildered that some photographs are staged and require upto 20 extras! In the Saturday paper, Roberta Smith reviewed Wall's show at MoMA, opening tomorrow.
The second is in the Arts section, a review of Justine Kurland's latest work, a bunch of naked mothers and children congregating in nature, being shown at Mitchell-Innes & Nash. The images strike me as having a prehistoric quality. Funny enough, Kurland finds some of her models at health food stores, which is exactly what you'd think. The article also has a nice connection to being a creative parent (her son is the same age as mine).
There probably isn't a photography message board on the Web that doesn't intermittently boil over with accusations of plagiarism for some photograph that treads to carefully to another, either famous or obscure.
Personism picks up on this today, following on the heels of the recent (different) coverage in Slate a little while back.
This topic is the overarching subject of Geoff Dyer's Ongoing Moment, which I read last year. (There's an audio interview with Dyer on KCRW.) Rather than blaming similarities between photographs on plagiarism, Dyer describes a community of artists who are unified in their subject matter, mostly in the absence of any other connection.
One badly-formed comparison in the Slate "article" (it's really just a slide show) is between William Eggleston and Christian Patterson. Christian is described as an "admirer" of Eggleston as if he was some sort of sort of stalker without noting the personal connection between the two.
MAN notes that the New Museum has posted an audio file of the recent panel discussion on "provincialism". It's 11.4MB, so fire up the broadband.
In the early 80s, Jno Cook created "The Robert Frank Coloring Book" as he was analyzing the work and researching an article on Frank's influential book, The Americans. While its creation was incidental to other thought processes, I can't help but think how strange it is to see a coloring book of a black and white work, one that isn't particularly given to strong line work, either. But I can certainly imagine finding this sitting in the children's section of a museum bookstore.
(via Personism)
