International Visitors on www.bryanhiott.com (March 2009).
Traffic on my website has been increasing steadily every month for the past year. During the month of March 2009, my website has had visitors from 49 countries including:
North & South America: US (42 states), Canada, Argentina, Brazil
Europe: England, France, Luxembourg, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Belgium, Denmark, The Netherlands, Sweeden, Finland, Norway, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Ukraine, Russia
Africa & Middle East: South Africa, Algeria, Benin, Egypt, Turkey, Israel, Iran
Asia: India, Burma, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, China, Hong Kong, North Korea, South Korea, Japan
Abandoned House Near Piedmont, SC. Image: Bryan Hiott.
I’ve been scanning many of my color 4 x 5 negatives shot during the last year mainly along back roads from New York to South Carolina. One of my favorites is this image of an abandoned house near Piedmont, SC. The house was built in the 30s and for as long as I can remember it has been vacant. The advantage of shooting in the 4 x 5 film format is that the images can be printed to a large scale without loss of image sharpness.
I just read the press release for Swimming Pool, an installation by Leandro Erlich currently on view at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City. I’m going to see Erlich’s work as well as the Kenneth Anger retrospective also at P.S. 1. All photographs below are by Matthew Septimus. Text of the press release follows:
Leandro Erlich: Swimming Pool
On view October 19, 2008 – October 5, 2009
P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center presentsLeandro Erlich: Swimming Pool, an extraordinary and visually confounding installation by the Argentine artist Leandro Erlich. Leandro Erlich: Swimming Poolwill be on view in P.S.1’s unique, double-height Duplex gallery from October 19, 2008 through April 13, 2009.
Leandro Erlich is known for installations that seem to defy the basic laws of physics and befuddle the viewer, who is introduced into jarring environments that momentarily threaten a sense of balance or space. For this exhibition, Erlich presents one of his most well-known and critically acclaimed pieces, Swimming Pool. Speaking about the project, Erlich says: “When I first visited P.S.1, I remember thinking how perfect the Duplex space would be for the installation ofSwimming Pool. This space divided the experience of seeing the work perfectly, and in the correct order. Almost ten years since its creation, Swimming Pool is finally in the exhibition space for which I have always felt is so perfectly suited.”
Erlich has constructed a full-size pool, complete with all its trappings, including a deck and a ladder. When approached from the first floor, visitors are confronted with a surreal scene: people, fully clothed, can be seen standing, walking, and breathing beneath the surface of the water. It is only when visitors enter the Duplex gallery from the basement that they recognize that the pool is empty, its construction a visual trick fashioned by the artist. A large, continuous piece of acrylic spans the pool and suspends water above it, creating the illusion of a standard swimming pool that is both disorienting and humorous.
Leandro Erlich (b. 1973, Buenos Aires) has been exhibiting his work internationally for over ten years. He has had solo shows at the Centre d’Art Santa Mònica, Barcelona (2003); MACRO Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Roma (2006), and Le Grand Café, Centre d’Art Contemporain de Saint-Nazaire (2005). He represented Argentina at the 49th Venice Biennale (2001), where he showed Swimming Pool, and was also featured in the Singapore Biennale (2008), the Liverpool Biennial (2008), 7th Havana Biennale (2001), the 7th Istanbul Biennial (2001), the 3rd Shanghai Biennale (2002), the 1st Busan Biennale (2002), and the 26th Bienal de São Paulo (2004). His work will be shown in the upcoming Prospect.1 New Orleans Biennial in 2008. He lives and works in Buenos Aires.
Organized by P.S.1 Director Alanna Heiss.
The exhibition is made possible by David Teiger, Estrellita B. Brodsky and Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros.
I missed the opening of Myoung Ho Lee’s exhibition of large format color photographs at Yossi Milo last night. But I hope to see the work this weekend. The press release and images below are from the gallery website.
Tree #5, Archival Inkjet Print by Myoung Ho Lee (2007)
Tree
March 19 – April 18, 2009
Yossi Milo Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of color photographs by Myoung Ho Lee, entitled Tree. The exhibition will open on Thursday, March 19 and close on Saturday, April 18. This will be the artist’s first solo exhibition in the United States.
Myoung Ho Lee photographs solitary trees framed against white canvas backdrops in the middle of natural landscapes. To install the large canvases, which span approximately 60 by 45 feet, the artist enlists a production crew and heavy cranes. Minor components of the canvas support system, such as ropes or bars, are later removed from the photograph through minimal digital retouching, creating the illusion that the backdrop is floating behind the tree.
Tree #2, Archival Inkjet Print by Myoung Ho Lee (2006)
The series includes diverse species of trees photographed with a 4×5 camera in a variety of seasons and at different times of day. Mr. Lee allows the tree’s natural surroundings to fill the frame around the canvas, transforming the backdrop into an integral part of the subject. Centered in the graphic compositions, the canvas defines the form of the tree and separates it from the environment. By creating a partial, temporary outdoor studio for each tree, Mr. Lee’s “portraits” of trees play with ideas of scale and perception while referencing traditional painting and the history of photography.
Myoung Ho Lee is the recipient of awards including the first Young Photographer’s Award from the Photo Artist’s Society of Korea in 2005, Korea’s Photography Critics Award in 2006 and a grant from the Culture and Art Fund from the Arts Council of Korea in 2007. Mr. Lee was born in Daejon, South Korea in 1975 and currently lives and works in Seoul, South Korea.
In this lecture hosted by Aperture and presented by Parsons The New School,Geoffrey Batchen will discuss the topic Perplexity and Embarrassment: Photography as Work. Batchen is a professor of art history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he specializes in the history of photography. He is currently working on an exhibition about the careers of Richard Beard and Antoine Claudet, due to open at the Yale Center for British Art in October 2011. Batchen’s books include Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (The MIT Press, 1997); Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History (The MIT Press, 2001); Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance (Van Gogh Museum & Princeton Architectural Press, 2004); and William Henry Fox Talbot (Phaidon, 2008).
FREE
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
6:30 pm
Aperture Gallery
547 West 27th Street
New York, New York
(212) 505-5555
This 1/4 plate alumitype was my first attempt at using UV lighting indoors with the wet plate collodion process. Thanks to Quinn Jacobson and Jason Miguel of the Collodion.com Forum for their advice on a basic set up: three 100 watt compact fluroescent bulbs (5500 K for approximating daylight). I used a reproduction 19th century E. & H.T. Anthony tailboard camera with bellows and shot with a brass barrel Dallmeyer rapid rectilinear lens (c. 1891).
Exposure time on the plate was long (3 min. 20 sec.). Two factors contributed: 1) the f 7 Dallmeyer lens was not ideal for shooting indoors and 2) the dated collodion was not as light sensitive as it once was. I need to mix a new batch. Overall, the results of the plate are encouraging and have given me ideas about future set up and how to improve lighting. As you can see, the top of the plate goes darker because the light is falling off. What I needed was perhaps another compact fluorescent overhead. I was using only one bulb overhead plus one on each side. Using reflectors would have helped.
For this shot, I had the camera positioned about 3 1/2 feet from the metronome, which was the close as I could get and still focus the image; and that distance may have added to the light fall off. Quinn Jacoson also suggested that the dark areas at top of the plate might be from the collodion beginning to dry during the exposure. Cutting the exposure time is key, which I could half by using 6 bulbs (1 min. 40 sec.). I have also heard of some people using a bank of twelve 6500K UV bulbs and getting the exposure down to seconds. Of course, having a little faster lens is another way to go at it.
Note: I said in an MFA seminar at Parsons that art – as it exists in the market now – is not a necessity for living, but a cultural luxury that presumes a certain high standard of living. Given a choice between eating or buying art, I’d just as soon eat and wonder what place in my life art might have filled. Most of the people in the room dissented. With the economy in tatters, I wonder if they might be revising their thoughts.
_____________________________
Art As We Know It Is Dead
By Jonathan Jones
The Guardian
The economic collapse has destroyed the flashy art of the last two decades. In its place, we need something new.
The economic collapse is hitting the art world in some surreal ways. Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles has just had to postpone a planned exhibition, by the maverick performance and conceptual artist Chris Burden, that involves the use of 100kg of gold bricks. Gagosian purchased these – wow! How much does 100kg of gold bricks even cost? – from a company called Stanford Coins and Bullion. This company is a subsidiary of Stanford Financial Group, that is, it’s part of the empire of Texas financier Allen Stanford who is now at the centre of a massive fraud investigation. Now, announces Gagosian, “the gallery’s gold has been frozen while the SEC investigates Stanford.”
So the stories are spinning as the marriage of art and money unravels.
Not so long ago the British painter Leon Kossoff held an exhibition at the National Gallery. His drawings after the Old Masters got almost no press attention that I can recall – yet Kossoff is a veteran artist with great achievements to his name. He has painted the life of London’s East End with a sombre honesty and compassion. Artists such as Kossoff, or Frank Auerbach, or Paula Rego are a lot less fashionable today than artists who do things with gold bricks.
Why is that? No, it is not because they are “figurative”. Marc Quinn is figurative; Antony Gormley is figurative. What makes artists such as Kossoff seem out of date? It is their melancholia. The contemporary art world can cope with melancholy as style, but taste revolts at the reality of sad, severe, serious life in these painters’ work. The problem is, you can’t parlay it. You can’t fantasise on it. The authenticity of these artists annoys us because it tells us there are realities that rule us, The world, since the 1980s, has stopped believing in such a thing as reality. Money was unleashed from facts of any kind. Art became its delusive mirror.
Art is fun, it’s a laugh, it’s entertainment, it’s spectacular, it’s cool … art now aspires to be all the things fashion is. And so it cannot accomodate the awkwardness of a Kossoff: cannot be a bone in anyone’s throat. Its success is totally bound up with the same fiction that anything is possible that has inspired banks to lead us all into a looking-glass world.
I’ve tried to resist this fact for a few months, but I’m done with illusion. Art as we know it is finished. It is about to be exposed as nothing more than the decor of an age of mercantile madness. On what bedrock might a new art arise?
My friend, comedian Jeff Kreisler, just posted a funny video on the recent round of corporate mass layoffs. He has an interesting take on severance pay in the recession. This video is also posted to The Huffington Post.
Gen. Custer at Little Big Horn McDonald’s (by Bryan Hiott)
Gen. George Armstrong Custer descends in to an existential crisis, contemplating whether he would like fries with his Quarter Pounder. He was surprised by McDonald’s aggressive trans fat marketing and unsure whether he should use his military training to resolve the issue. His indecisiveness would prove costly.
Pablo Helguera: Committed Explanations in Geography
Press Release: Committed Explanations in Geography, a solo exhibition by New York-based artist Pablo Helguera, is an upcoming show at the School of Art at The Cooper Union that showcases his recent artworks highlighting cultural and linguistic gaps specific to the Americas (January 27-February 21, 2009), curated by Sara Reisman.
Helguera’s four-week, multi-disciplinary exhibition brings together a number of works produced between 2003 and 2009 around the subject of geography, cultural memory and social and political change in the American landscape. The subjects of the works range from works about an enclave of Veneto speakers (an italian dialect) in Puebla, Mexico, the history of the first Shaker settlement in America, the 1916 expedition by General John Pershing through the Sonora desert to kill Pancho Villa, the last speaker of the Eyak language in Alaska, and the life story of Wallace Nutting, the inventor of Americana. Helguera’s artistic practice incorporates pedagogical mechanisms, performance, musical composition, multi-linear narrative techniques and minimalist display strategies. The opening will include the performance of “Manifest Destiny”.
I was at The Museum of Modern Art today and finally got to see Pipilotti Rist’s massive – and much talked about – video installation, “Pour Your Body Out.” Sculptural seating in the center of the atrium encourages the public to linger and, in fact, produces an informal, relaxed environment. Rist’s 25 ft. high projections on three walls are visually stunning and function as surreal dreamscapes of gorgeous color. I’ll have more to say about the work in another post. The third wall of the installation is not visible in my cell phone photos.
From the MoMA Website
Pipilotti Rist’s lush multimedia installations playfully and provocatively merge fantasy and reality. MoMA commissioned the Swiss artist to create a monumental site-specific installation that immerses the Museum’s Marron Atrium in twenty-five-foot-high moving images. Visitors will be able to experience the work while walking through the space or sitting upon a sculptural seating island designed by the artist.
This clip is from the introduction to William Eggleston: Photographer, a documentary film by German director Reiner Holzemer, which was released last year. In this 30 minute film, Eggleston is more forthcoming about his artistic process and his reaction to critics than ever before. Seeing this reminded me that I need to get myself over to The Whitney Museum for the Eggleston retrospective before it closes on Jan. 25th.
During John Coffer’s wet plate workshop at Camp Tintype last May, he set up his 20 x 24 camera and gave a brief demonstration of how it works. It’s just a really big view camera with some movement (front rise and fall). John mounted the camera on a small wagon chassis in order to move it to nearby locations where he photographs. The most difficult part of using this camera is, of course, pouring collodion on the mammoth 20 x 24 plate. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen any footage online of John pouring a mammoth plate; but many people who have seen him do it speak of his technique with awe.
John Coffer's 20 x 24 Wet Plate Camera
Coffer in Action With Mammoth Plate Holder
The 20 x 24 camera was made by Ray Morgenweck of The Star Camera Company. His calls it ”The Mathew B. Brady 20×24 Majestic Imperial Wetplate Camera.” Morgenweck has been making a wide range of Daguerrotype and wet plate cameras for a number of years. He is in high demand; and there is often a waiting period of several months. So if you order from him, you’ll have to be patient. Oh, and unless you’re John Coffer, don’t even think about asking for the 20 x 24. Ray will just laugh.
Description of The Mathew B. Brady 20×24 Majestic Imperial Wetplate Camera
From The Star Camera Website
All great things are named after significant people, and indeed this camera is worthy of carrying the name of Mathew B. Brady. Possibly the largest wet plate camera available, the Brady is capable of making 20X24 Wetplate or Tintype images. It is built on the pattern of the early 1900′s Cycle cameras, which have a retracting rise and fall lensboard carrier and a front door which folds up and creates a ‘case’ for the camera. This is NOT a camera for those just beginning the process, and indeed this particular camera went to the man I feel who is most able to handle it, Mr. John Coffer of Dundee NY. This camera uses a Dallmayer 30″ Camera Obscura Lens, and future ones will require a lens similar to this in size and focal length. In addition to the rise and fall lensboard, the camera has a bellows tilt adapter on the rear which can carry the plateholder for greater control over the foreground in your images. Available only on SPECIAL ORDER.
The Mathew B. Brady 20x24 Majestic Imperial Wetplate Camera. Asking Price: $8,700.00.
Front Standard Retracts Into Camera Casing.
Closes Up Nicely And You're Ready for the Airport!
I’m a fan of Amy Stein‘s photography blog. It’s one of the best around. Her latest solo show, Domesticated, opened on December 11th at The Print Center in Philadelphia and will be up through February 14, 2009. Amy graduated with an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York and teaches at SVA and Parsons. Not the standard photo background, she received her undergraduate degree (BSc) in Political Science from James Madison University and went on to earn an MSc in Political Science from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.
Watering Hole (from Domesticated) by Amy Stein.
Trash Eaters (from Domesticated) by Amy Stein.
Hillside (from Domesticated) by Amy Stein.
THE PRINT CENTER CONTACT INFO
HOURS:
Free and Open to the Public
11:00 AM – 5:30 PM
Tuesday through Saturday
The Print Center
1614 Latimer Street
Philadelphia, PA 19103
215 735.6090
215 735.5511 fax info@printcenter.org
Excerpt from Alison Nordström’s introduction to Domesticated, a new book of photographs by Amy Stein, published by Photolucida:
“Amy Stein crafts photographic allegories set simultaneously in a number of different liminal spaces. Her sure and realistic color works manifest the place where the human-built meets the wild, but in addition they show us where the factual descriptive image meets fiction. Despite their apparent realism, her images are posed and constructed, sometimes using models and taxidermy props, sometimes using the bodies of dead or living animals to re-create, record and perform actual events that occurred in the small Pennsylvania town of Matamoras, which Stein has claimed as surely as Faulkner invented and limned Yoknapatawpha County. What at first appears to be a series of photojournalistic decisive moments is revealed, at a second look, to be a powerfully imagined vision that establishes its strength through its very artificiality.”
– Alison Nordström is curator of the George Eastman House in Rochester, NY.
Conditional Painting (2008). 18 x 24 Gouache and Graphite on Panel
I came across William Powhida’s work in Art Lies No. 59/Fall 2008. His series of text paintings critiques the power structures of art institutions and their privileged position as arbiters of aesthetic value in the market, while mocking his own desire to be part of that system. Powhida also makes fun of the games and sometimes grandiose notions inherent in the drive toward art world fame. In one of those works, Conditional Painting, he sets forth the criteria which must be met before his painting may be deemed a work of art. He is playing on the same conceptual turf that Robert Morris occupied with Document (1963), a legally notarized letter in which he negated – by mere declaration – all aesthetic value of Litanies, a work he had completed for Philip Johnson and for which he had not yet been paid.
Text from the painting
Dear Museum Types,
This is not a work of art. While it may look like a painting, I assure you it is not. This is a conditional painting that will remain incomplete until certain conditions are met. If these conditions, which I shall propose here, are indeed fulfilled then this will be more than ART. It will be a MAJOR work of staggering implications. If they aren’t met, I retain the right to deny that the object is complete.
The resolution of this painting is contingent on my inclusion in (A) a major museum show, (B) the Venice Bienniale, (C) Documenta, or (D) OK the Whitney Bienniale.* Once I am selected to be in a PRESTIGIOUS institution then this painting will be ‘finished’…by a FAMOUS artist, not merely an art fair sellout. Becoming an institutionally recognized artist will make ALL of my work valuable, but will ONLY complete this painting.
While the recognition is important it doesn’t guarantee continued success. What WILL be remembered is the conditional painting. It is an HISTORIC act that will finally elevate the extremely important role of the curator to producer of meaning. Just imagine the looks of stunned AWE on the faces of museum/biennial/bienniale/Documenta visitors realizing the implications of the PRESENCE of the COMPLETED work of art. It is a beautiful thought.
The only missing party here is a collector (museum) brave enough to purchase an incomplete, conditional painting. Again, I deny that this is ‘art’ until the above conditions are met. The thoughtful person or institution might consider the POTENTIAL value, cultural or otherwise, of this rad BRILLIANT idea. This isn’t my concern, money or recognition. NO, my concern is purely about FINISHING my art. I will wait until I am DEAD which will really increase the value of the object. Please, before everything comes crashing down, help me. I must finish this one.
Sincerely,
William Powhida**
* The biennial cannot suck.
** This doesn’t indicate a finished work. It is a facsimile of a signature. I will leave an authentication with my estate.
From the Museum of Modern Art Website
Litanies by Robert Morris
Each of the twenty–seven keys in Litanies is inscribed with a word from a text by artist Marcel Duchamp (American, born France. 1887–1968), whose emphasis on the ideas presented by a work of art rather than its aesthetic appearance informed much Conceptual art of the 1960s. When Litanies was purchased by architect Philip Johnson, Morris did not receive payment in a timely fashion. He createdDocument in response. The typed and notarized text serves to negate the “aesthetic quality and content of the original work,” which is presented as “Exhibit A” in frontal and profile views. Johnson then purchased Document, thereby accepting the loss of the value of his first acquisition.
Emily Bicht recently showed some of her Ready to Rumble series at Fountain Art Fair in Miami (Dec. 3-7). This mixed media series explores the power dynamics of gender through male vs. female wrestling depictions. Fountain Art Fair is an alternative exhibition venue that is willing to show artists who do not fit the conventional gallery mold and who are willing to take risks with their work.
Ready To Rumble: The Takedown (Mixed Media on Panel, 24" x 24")
Ready to Rumble: Pieta (Mixed Media on Panel, 24" x 24")
Set against a decorative backdrop, the male and female adversaries in Bicht’s panels occupy a rather compressed space, which intensifies the struggle at hand. After seeing her work online, I recalled attending the Sigmar Polke retrospective at MoMA in 1997. He achieved the same sort of compressed space in his ballpoint pen drawings and paintings from the 60s. One of Polke’s drawings from that retrospective was Damen-Ringkampfe (“Lady Wrestlers”), which assumes the vantage point of the male gaze (looking upon women combatants for entertainment).
Damen-Ringkampfe by Sigmar Polke (1968) Ballpoint Pen, Watercolor and Silver (11 5/8 x 8 1/4)
Bicht’s work is more compelling in that subverts the expectations of the gaze. Male and female are engaged in a contest that is just as much symbolic and psychological as it is physical. Will one gender or the other prevail; or will some equilibrium ultimately be achieved – a draw? Jungian psychology, which has been informed by alchemical texts, suggests that each person’s psyche has both masculine and feminine attributes. We seek balance, which is only achieved after a long struggle of our inner opposites.
Male/Famale Unity: Engraving from an 18th century version of the Rosarium philosophorum.
Ready to Rumble taps into the theme of physical struggle for power that can be dated by millennia, as the depictions below from ancient Egypt and Greece demonstrate.
Egyptian Depiction of Wrestling (2500 B.C.)
Depiction of Wrestling from Greece (500 B.C)
The Greek forms look similar to those in Bicht’s Domestic Wrestling animation below.
Bicht’s work also reminds me of Wrestling Ladies, a theatre piece developed by Tory Vasquez and performed at P.S. 122 back in March 2003. Vasquez received a supporting grant for her project from the Creative Capital Foundation.
Wrestling Ladies Promotional Photograph (2003)
Project Description from the Creative Capital Website
Wrestling Ladies transforms a theatrical venue into a wrestling ring. In a visual style inspired by contemporary underground comics, the work depicts characters as combatants, superheroes, and saints who all struggle to transcend their given and created identities. The audience is witness to both their public battles and private histories. The primary character is an eleven year old girl Chasity a.k.a Devilish Angel who is obsessed with wrestling. The other characters include: Her mother, Maria Elena Vazquez, a ruthless champion; her soon to be stepfather, Louis, manager/coach of the ring; and her friend Lizard, a wrestler who keeps her company and protects her from evil. The action moves fluidly from fight scenes to surreal dances to moments of unexpected tenderness.
Fountain Art Fair Press Release
Fountain Miami, the alternative art exhibition known for presenting cutting-edge and independent art galleries, sets up shop in an industrial warehouse located at 25th Street and North Miami Avenue for its latest installment this December. Fountain is a guerrilla-style art event, dubbed by many as the “Anti Art Fair” for its brash, off-the-wall offerings of non-traditional art exhibitions in the art fair environment.
Recruiting avant-garde galleries who showcase progressive primary-market works, Fountain breathes fresh life into the Miami Beach “Basel Frazzle,” giving gallery-goers and art enthusiasts the opportunity to see new works without traditional booths or selection juries. While most fairs have fallen into the hands of corporate management, Fountain remains independent, and as such presents work in a forward-thinking manner. Unencumbered by the strict presentation guidelines and parameters found at other fairs, Fountain preserves the visions of galleries and dealers to provide an environment reflective of the artists and their works.
Fountain’s venue, a large and dramatic 16000 square-foot complex with both interior and exterior exhibition areas, is adjacent to all the major Wynwood fairs. Participating galleries receive approximately 1200 square feet of exhibition space, so visitors can expect massive installations of contemporary painting, sculpture, performance and new media art.
Artnet – the most widely read art site on the web – describes Fountain: “Likeability and chutzpah used to be what art was about. That, and a little guerrilla mentality, which you had at Fountain in spades. This is the place where you reminisce about the good old days, when you did it yourself, when inspiration and magic struck like a bolt from the blue. Here at Fountain, the artists and dealers are hungry and they welcome all visitors warmly. They are having fun and that’s the vibe. I felt like sitting down, having a beer, and hanging.”
Fountain was launched in March 2006 in New York in an effort to leverage support for independent galleries overlooked by the larger, corporate-sponsored art fairs. The name “Fountain” is a nod to Marcel Duchamp’s controversial sculpture which shook up the art world when it was rejected by the Society of Artists’ exhibition in 1917. Similarly, in defiant contrast with The Armory Show, Art Basel Miami Beach, Pulse, Scope and the numerous other international art fairs, Fountain has received wide public support and critical acclaim for its experimental slant. In form and spirit, the artwork exhibited at Fountain reflects the avant-garde attitude of the Dada art movement, while attracting the attention of the international clientele and top collectors who attend the more traditional fairs.
Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers are delighted to present the first solo exhibition of new work by German artist Thomas Demand in the UK since his acclaimed Serpentine exhibition in summer 2006. Following an invitation from the New York Times, Demand has created a timely and unnerving body of work which examines the literal and metaphorical seat of global power in the twenty-first century – the Oval Office in the White House, Washington, D.C.
The Oval Office, the official workplace of the President of the United States of America, is one of the most instantly recognisable interior locations in the world, its image a symbolic shorthand for the exercise of ideological and geopolitical will. Yet Demand’s photographs, rather than capturing the original Oval Office in all its formal opulence, instead depict a meticulously recreated life-size model, fabricated from paper, cardboard and confetti. Each of the five images of this near-perfect reconstruction of the most powerful room in the world is articulated through a complex compositional language, making the reading of each photograph an aesthetically and conceptually troubling experience.
Demand’s photography has long focussed on painstakingly detailed reenactments of specific and familiar places, public or private sites often loaded with social and political meanings. His models are highly detailed, yet they retain subtle but deliberate flaws and anachronisms to disrupt the viewer’s comfort with the scene. This series also renders an immediately recognisable scene alien through an innovative attention to perspective and formal composition. The oval shape of the Oval Office is not usually a prominent feature of the multiplicity of images of this iconic space, yet in Demand’s rendition, the eye is fascinated by it. Similarly, the viewer’s expectation is that this room will be inhabited, either by politicians or actors pretending to be politicians, and that it will be experienced on a human scale and at eye level. However, Demand’s Oval Office is conspicuous in its human absence, an emptiness that is heightened by the ground-level and bird’s eye perspectives from which the room is viewed.
The effect of Demand’s work has been to challenge any complacent assumptions about photography’s claims to verisimilitude, and to complicate conventional notions of authenticity and artifice. However, in the context of this new body of work, Demand’s practice gains an ever more politicised momentum. Blurring boundaries between believability and pretence in the Oval Office necessarily points to a critique of power as it has been wielded in the White House. Photographing a near-exact replica of the US President’s office suggests intriguing connections between statecraft and stagecraft, and the disposability of the construction materials (each of Demand’s models is destroyed after it has been photographed) undermines any naïve faith in the permanence and unshakeability of American, or indeed any, political authority.
This new exhibition marks a distinctive counterpoint to a number of Demand’s recent major works. Tavern (2006), currently on view at Tate Modern, is, like this body of work, a suite of five images which take a media-saturated location, in this case the site of a horrific murder in Germany, and powerfully evoke a sense of ambivalence and the uncanny in how images of such memorable and familiar places are received. It can also be viewed as a companion piece to Demand’s Embassy, part of his presentation at the Fondazione Prada at Fondazione Giorgio Cini, in Venice in June 2007. Embassy centred on the reproduction, physically then photographically, of Niger’s consulate in Rome, which was the ultimate destination of a trail of political intrigue involving the recent history of nuclear proliferation, and the basis of America’s 2003 invasion of Iraq. These photographs depict a highly politicised and geopolitically significant space, but one which was cluttered, dark, unknown and locked away from view. This contrasts with Demand’s image of the Oval Office – an eerily airy and instantly recognisable political environment which is defined by its public accessibility, and whose image is so widely dispersed it looms ever-present in the collective visual vocabulary of contemporary Western culture. The connection between the two works, in political and aesthetic terms, is confirmed by the presence in these photographs of a framed image of a black figure that appeared in Embassy. Not only does this intervention jar with the viewer’s visual expectation of the Oval Office, but it reifies the problematic ways in which race, history and the Third World might be located within the American political order.
Thomas Demand studied at the Düsseldorf Academy and Goldsmiths College. Solo exhibitions include the first solo exhibition by a contemporary artist at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, following its reopening in 2005, which was followed by an exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in London in 2006. Recent exhibitions include Fundación Telefónica, Madrid and the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Germany. In 2004 he represented Germany at the São Paulo Biennale. Demand lives in Berlin, and in 2009 he will have a major exhibition at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin.
From the Wet Plate Collodion Forum, I learned that Quinn Jacobson is thinking about holding a wet plate workshop webcast on Skype. This would be geared to those who might not have the time to travel long distances to attend a workshop and would be interactive so that participants may ask questions in real time. You can contact Quinn by email if you’re interested: quinn@studioQ.com or (better) through a form on his website. He moderates the forum as well; but you will need to register and be approved before you can post any comments.
First, the most important thing is that this would be interactive. In other words, participants would be able to ask questions and make comments. I think I can have up to 24 people on a Skype feed.
Secondly, the participants would be able to SEE everything from making chemistry, pouring plates, making exposures, development, varnish, etc. and see all of the equipment and details. I’m even thinking about doing a feed from my dark room or dark box to show development techniques and how to judge properly exposed images.
This would be designed for people who can’t get to a workshop but have access to Skype and a high-speed internet connection. I would offer my workshop guide (PDF) and participants could follow along as I show my techniques on making chemistry, flowing a plate, making an exposure, developing a plate, and varnishing a plate.
So, if you have any interest in something like this, or know someone who does that can’t get to a workshop but wants to see the process and learn how to make the chemistry, please let me know.
I haven’t figured a cost for it yet, but it will be very affordable to “attend”. First things first, in that order, I need to see if there is any interest and secondly, find a good date/time to do something like this. Remember, I’m on Central European Time (CET) and need sun to make images, so it would have to be a Saturday or Sunday beginning at 0800 or 0900 and would probably last several hours.
Just throwing this out there, your thoughts are appreciated.
Yossi Milo, one of my favorite galleries in Manhattan, will participate in the PULSE Miami Contemporary Art Fair (December 3-7). I’ve seen work by two of the artists representing Yossi at the event, Sze Tsung Leong and Loretta Lux. Leong is perhaps the best landscape photographer working today. Last summer, I viewed some of his large format color prints from the gallery’s flat files. Those prints are part of his series History Images, which Steidl published as a book under the same title. The work is a stunning depiction of China during rapid urbanization, as ancient aspects of the culture seemed overwhelmed by contemporary structures. Moving to Lux, the press release for PULSE speaks of her digitally manipulated portraits referencing Velasquez and Goya. Her work could also be seen as a more innocent version of Balthus with a twist of Magritte: generally restrained palette occasionally bursting with bright color, stillness and spare composition, yet with a psychological tension and eerie quality that linger. You will not pass quickly from one of her photographs to the next. They tend to keep you invested. The descriptions below are from the gallery press release.
Shanghai by Sze Tsung Leong
Sze Tsung Leong’s ongoing series of color photographs, titled Cities,depicts urban overviews from around the world. The artist uses repetition in composition and viewpoint to reveal parallels and differences between the disparate constructed environments of various cities. The artist’s book History Images was published by Steidl in 2006, and a catalogue for his ongoing series Horizons was published by the gallery in 2008. Sze Tsung Leong was born in Mexico City in 1970 and currently lives and works in New York.
Loretta Luxcreates imaginary portraits which address the idea of childhood as a paradise lost. The artist utilizes photography, painting and digital imaging to execute her compositions, creating scenarios of isolation and distance that occur in an ambiguous time and space while referencing paintings by Old Masters, such as Bronzino, Velasquez and Goya.
Loretta Lux was awarded the 2005 International Center of Photography’s Infinity Award. Her work is included in numerous museum collections, and a travelling retrospective of her work has been exhibited in venues such as the Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne, Switzerland; Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Monterrey, Monterrey, Mexico; and the Fotomuseum den Haag, The Hague. Loretta Lux was born in Dresden in 1969.
