Just like Thomas Ruff's well-known portraits, Hein-kuhn Oh's Cosmetic Girls asks the viewer to try to look beyond make-up, poses, and photographic conventions. Also, don't miss the older, b/w, work!]]>
Just like Thomas Ruff's well-known portraits, Hein-kuhn Oh's Cosmetic Girls asks the viewer to try to look beyond make-up, poses, and photographic conventions. Also, don't miss the older, b/w, work!
Regular readers of this blog I'm sure will be familiar with Lydia Panas' work (if not, find my conversation with Lydia here). The Mark of Abel work is now on view at Foley Gallery (until April 20, 2010; click on the image above for a larger view).It is tempting to think that differences in size and/or between an image that reflects light and one that is backlit are responsible for whatever it is that creates that experience. But it seems to me that trying to pin down the reason(s) ultimately is a futile endeavour, and certainly one that is taking away a lot of the essence of the experience. Or maybe I'm just not that kind of critic.
Maybe talking about photography and its qualities is a bit like talking about wine and trying to describe it, adding some sort of rating to it. Does anyone really know what the following means? "It has a dark garnet color and a complex nose of boysenberry, truffles, wild game, soy and black pepper. On the palate, the wine has a silky mouthfeel and an elegant, long finish with a slight tannic grip." (source - picked at random) Fruit mixed with wild animals (which might or might not have antlers) and some sort of insanely expensive mushroom, plus soy - hmmmmmm, sounds delicious. And what does the difference between a wine rated 91 and 93 mean? But phrases like "silky mouthfeel" (I had no idea "mouthfeel" was a word!) - is that so far from what we see in a lot of art reviews?
When I go to an art gallery what I typically watch out for is the combination of what you could call my gut reaction and my intellectual response. This, I need to add, puts a handicap on work I know: while my gut reaction will respond directly to the work, my intellectual response works against the background of all the various thoughts I've had in my head before I went through the gallery's door. My gut typically is as opinionated as my brain (no surprise there, I suppose), and I've had many exciting experiences when they clashed (they always end up on good terms, so there's never any need to worry), and plenty of not-so exciting ones when they just agreed with each other.
But so much of art viewing is based on what we expect, isn't it? Maybe I'm not following debates carefully enough, but people never seem to admit the following: they expected something, and they got it confirmed. Maybe that's because writing "I went to the show by XY thinking it must surely suck, and boy, it did!" makes you sound like a total jerk - even though in reality, it could be really insightful! Just think about it! A critic thinks about a show and has some reasons to think a show must be bad, and then it is (that) bad. Doesn't this mean that the critic is very perceptive? And, in contrast, to read that a critic was really looking forward to a show, to then find that, yes, it was a good show - is that necessarily such a good thing? I can think of lots of cases where it's a good thing, but there are other cases where it might just point to intellectual laziness (at best!).
I personally usually don't go to a show thinking/expecting that it will suck or be great (even though it happens occasionally). In Lydia's case, my predominant feeling was one of curiosity. How would something I had seen online, something I had come to appreciate in not necessarily the most straightforward way, look like on the walls? I had come to like Lydia's portraits mostly through a couple of them, which - for me - had really stood out, and I had then spent time with the rest, to discover a rich vista.
Seeing the show added flourishes to the vista, with unexpected discoveries here and there, some of which, alas, might really only make sense for me I'm afraid (what kind of useless review is this you might wonder now, and I won't blame you). But I think that a critic ultimately will fail when she or he is trying to explain everything, because there has got to be some wiggle space left. Writing a review of a show should not be confused with smothering someone with a pillow (again, that's just me again; I'm sure lots of people will disagree).
I was slightly surprised by the sizes of the prints; somehow I had thought they would be a little bit smaller. I don't know why I would even think I'd know about the print size. That said, while at first I thought they were slightly overwhelming, they ended up working very well for me.
What I really would like to stress is the visual richness of the work and the connections these group portraits force upon the viewer. They will pull you in, whether you want it or not, and that certainly is something that any photographer can only wish for. The work is also intensely beautiful.
The Mark of Abel - highly recommended.
No, this is not a painting, or actually the painting. It's a digital recreation, using 700 individual photos, assembled by Hiroyuki Masuyama. For more on the artist and his process check out this page and this one.
Gabriele Basilico is an Armory Show discovery for me. I found two of his images from Beirut, which, I think, is by far his very best work. See more images, plus some text, here.
I'm sure you have seen this already, but just in case you haven't... (via)
Update (9 March 2010): Also see this link.
]]>
for a while, being under the impression that the first edition was actually sold out (I think someone had actually told me it was sold out). This past weekend, I found a copy, a 2009 reissue, in New York. However, having done a little research online, it looks like the original 2001 edition never sold out? And I also couldn't find anything about a 2009 reissue. So regardless, if you're looking for Outland you can simply order it.
The Armory Art Show takes the idea that art isn't a commodity to be sold like the machines and tools on display at the Hannover industrial trade show (that I used to visit as a teenager) and dispenses with it neatly. If any of the Show's objects at some stage were in the presence of an artist toiling over their meaning and worth (I'm not talking about money here), you wouldn't know that once you encountered them at the Piers in New York City. Make no mistake, I had no illusions about the Armory Show before I went. So I did not undergo the kind of shock treatment that someone with romantic ideas about the commercial art world would experience if she or he was exposed to such an abomination of the human spirit for the first time. That said, the Armory Show still was a soul crushing experience, where your soul is not only crushed, it's actually slowly and steadily ground into a fine powder.Experiencing the Armory Show is a bit like going to the mall before Christmas: You know in advance that the experience will suck the life out of you completely, to leave you behind poorer (literally and figuratively), owning a bunch of junk that your loved ones don't really need. But you still end up wondering how every year the combination of crass commercialism and fake happiness can be so toxic. Maybe it's the music? How much canned "holiday" music can one take before resorting to creatively adding some not-so lyrical flourishes ("Oh fucking Tannenbaum")?
Well, the Armory Show doesn't have any music, Christmas or whatever else. Maybe it should? Instead, the atmosphere the day I went (Saturday) was more like a really crowded, run-down second-world airport: Outside a bunch of tremendously ugly concrete. I entered using a very narrow escalator. Inside it was crowded and noisy, it smelled funny, and the VIP lounges contained an odd mix of presumed entitlement, bad free coffee, and overpriced junk food.
Needless to say, the idea that there actually are VIPs in anything art related is revolting. I am fully aware that I am nothing but a sorry egalitarian.
Of course, there is a reason why the Armory Show bothered me so much. There actually is good art on display, and I still want to believe that at least some of the artists who might have toiled over their art are profoundly distressed about seeing it reduced to... yeah, to what?
If you didn't like my comparison with Christmas at the mall, here's another attempt: It's like going to an IKEA, except that IKEA will guide you through the store so that you really look at literally everything they got, regardless of whether you need four hundred dozens cheaply made candles for $5.99 or not. IKEA also doesn't have booths. The Armory Show has booths but no predestined path for its visitors. Still, it's positively IKEAish. The funny thing is that the booths, which, I suppose, are there to divide the space to get things more organized, only add to the visual clutter.
So once you enter the Armory Show your first experience is a bit like opening your closet door and having the entire contents of the upper shelves fall into your face.
I'm glad I did not commit to blogging about the photography at the Armory Show, because the task of having to systematically walk through the aisles and jot down what there is to be seen strikes me as daunting. If you're interested in seeing such a list head over to the DLK Collection blog where they're in the process of publishing just that, in six parts. Very impressive.
What I did do instead was to walk down the various aisles in what I thought was some sort of systematic fashion, looking left and right, and finding quite a bit of noteworthy and even more not so noteworthy photography. I'll talk about some of what I found over the next few days.
The Armory Show - or in fact, any other such trade show - is interesting in one aspect: What you get to see is what galleries want you to see. The successful work. The work that they hope or know will sell. So in that sense, the Show gives you an idea of what that work is.
Of course, assuming the last paragraph is correct the flip side of the Show is that if you have followed the photo (or art) scene for a while, there will be few - if any - surprises. The surprises will mainly be at the galleries whose existence you've never heard of before, which, at least for me, means those in places like, for example, Moscow. There has been a lot of talk about how the internet has brought photographers together - but seeing so much work I had never even heard of before made me wonder what I had been doing these past few years. After all, I have been spending what occasionally strikes me as a freakishly large amount of time looking at and/or for photography online.
In any case, here's the thing. You can't really look out for experiences like that, the experiences where you stumble upon the unexpected. As an early 21st Century person living in the Western world you're actually trained to avoid just doing that. Or at least I am. Going to the Armory Show is like going to a very, very big store without a list of things to buy. I don't think the brain is set up to process a huge amount of visual information without running into some serious problems.
Oh, I know, young people are very good at multitasking and video gaming etc., but a lot of those assertions are based on little more than the hype generated by the makers of the various electronic gadgets and websites. How all these people are supposed to leapfrog hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution, to be able to do things that the human brain is not evolved for, I'd still like to see an explanation for.
This all might strike you as tremendously old-fashioned, but just think of the combination of driving and texting or even "just" talking on the phone. Most people are terrible drivers without being on the phone, and adding their friend call in to talk about that cute guy/girl they just met usually does not help very much. I'm just saying.
Of course, I could just be the real exception, and everybody else could have just tremendously enjoyed the Armory Show. Maybe. Maybe not. It is true, there actually were people drooling over the art at the Armory Show. I saw at least two of them. Of course, they both were less than a year old each, so maybe that doesn't mean that much.
Having basically no life force left, I dragged my body's shell over to the art show called SCOPE (Why are they yelling?). I ended up being very positively surprised by SCOPE. I suppose in part that's because it was smaller and less overrun. But all in all, the experience was so much nicer since it didn't come across as such an obvious art-meat market. People seemed to be a bit younger and the art seemed a bit fresher.
I'm sure the New York art scene, where you just got to have an opinion about which show is better than which other show (for reasons which are not entirely obvious to someone like me who lives in the countryside and is thus - hopefully - excused), will have an opinion about me proclaiming that SCOPE was "fresher" than the Armory Show. Be that as it may, SCOPE renewed my faith in the art world a little bit.
One could have long - and probably partly fruitless - debates about art and the gallery world and the pros and cons. You know what, I don't have a problem per se with art being shown in a gallery. It is true, galleries are like hospitals; but all things considered, a good gallery show can be a tremendously exciting and uplifting event. I'm a real sucker for seeing art work on the wall somewhere, and right now, the most likely place to have such an experience is at a gallery (especially since so many museum shows are dedicated to celebrating the 50th anniversary of that body of work or whatever else has been established for a long, long time).
An art fair/show, though... That's one of those supposedly fun things I'll never do again.
Those who can't get enough of typologies will enjoy Eric Tabuchi's website (via).]]>
In Without A Face, Isabella Demavlys portrays the victims of acid attacks in Pakistan. In places like India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and now also Afghanistan, acid attacks have become a common form of violence against women.In Pakistan, new legislation is aimed at preventing such attacks, and hopefully work like Demavlys' can raise more awareness. Demavlys' Saira portrays the life of one victim, a young woman, who is also included in Without A Face.
]]>Update (3 March 2010): Nuit Blanche has much more about it, for example here. (thank you, Tatsu!)
"If Andre LeNotre, the architect of the gardens of Vaux le Vicomte and Versailles would present a design for a garden today, he would most certainly do this with form.z or any other 3-D graphic software. Detailed studies of the various elements might look like these pictures." - Jürgen Bergbauer (via)]]>