Peter Hujar: Lost Downtown at Paul Kasmin
January 28 to February 27, 2016
297 10th Avenue (at 27th Street)
New York, 212 563 4474

“One is not only a little individual, living a little individual life. One is in oneself the whole of mankind, and one’s fate is the fate of the whole of mankind.”
-D.H. Lawrence

Chris Killip and Peter Hujar — in 1976, an ocean apart — photographed a boy and a man, respectively, wearing combat boots. In both photographs, the combat boots are broken in. Leather is scuffed at the toes and sides. Around the ankles, the boots have wrinkled where the laces have been pulled tight, time and again. The rigid soles have softened and worn along the gait. Imprints and residues, scratches and bashes: marks that are on the boundary between body and life.

The geographical separation of these two photographs in 1976 has now, 40 years later, been reduced to a few New York City blocks. It is very easy to be comfortable, insular, and at home in Hujar’s “Lost Downtown” at Paul Kasmin Gallery. Vince Aletti, a critic at the Village Voice, a close friend and subject of Hujar’s, wrote that Hujar “defined Downtown.” Viewing Hujar’s photographs of the intellectual and creative elite, at a time when New York City was at a cultural zenith, could be limited to nostalgia and regret of what New York was and what we have lost. But, in relationship to Killip’s series “In Flagrante Two” at Yossi Milo, both series of photographs metamorphose into universals.

There are other resonances between Killip’s Youth on a Wall, Jarrow, Tyneside and Hujar’s Christopher Street Pier #2 (Crossed Legs). The boots on Killip’s youth seem too large for him. He sits in the crick of a brick wall with his knees drawn to his chest. His face is turned down: his chin tucked and his eyes closed tight like a fist. He pushes his forehead into his hands — hands that are in turn gripped by his knees. His suit jacket with mismatched pants is rumpled and stained. These also seem too big — both in the grown up style and size. Though he fights the collapse, he is being crumpled into a ball. Hujar’s “crossed legs” are laid long: one leg pulled up, the other across his knee, while the torso recedes, back flat. The legs’ length is accentuated by dense, delicate hair bookended by combat boots and denim cutoffs. Two elbows poke from the sides like fins seeming to place his hands behind his head. In Hujar’s photograph, the man balances precariously, on a wooden beam high over the Hudson River. There is little fear, though, in his languid sunbathing. Overwhelmed in clothes and imploding posture, it is Killip’s youth who is more vulnerable.

The solitary figures play with ambivalence. The pose of Killip’s youth is uncertain: what has happened to him? Is he hurt or is he in trouble? The repetitive monotony of the brick wall provides little clue — the photograph feels imprisoning and claustrophobic. For Killip, there is uncertainty in the relationship between the youth and his surroundings; the unknown people and places that define his life. Hujar’s man is confidently at leisure. His surroundings are glimpsed in another seated figure, a large boat, and buildings across the river. Rather, the indecision is contemplation: daydreaming and open to possibility. Ambiguity exists not because of the unknown, but all possibilities are present and imaginable.

Killip’s In Flagrante Two series is being exhibited for the first time in its entirety in America. The series was photographed in the Northeast of England from 1973 to 1985. It features photographs of the largely working class community as it was reacting to the economic turmoil of inflation, recession, challenges to the unions and widespread strikes. Social rebellion, particularly punk rock, rejected the mainstream — punk expressed freedom. In flagrante has a multi-faceted meaning. The term is more typically used in exposing a crime. Here, Killip’s camera is catching people in the act. The photograph becomes a document not of a crime, but of a way of life under threat. Bever’s First Day Out, Skinningrove, North Yorkshire (1982) depicts one man sitting in the driver’s seat of a small car leaning out of the window. Another man throws his body against the car as if to put his arm around the man inside it, instead leaning on the roof. The expression of the standing man’s face is difficult to read. An illegible tattoo slits his throat. His fingernails are short and dirty. Both men look to the left towards a small wedge of ocean. That this is Bever’s first day out is seen in his sallow skin, the squint of his eyes unused to sun, the pucker of his lips in an unfamiliar sigh, and the awkward way he leans against the car. (Though perhaps, Bever is the man in the car, who has yet to get out.) Bever’s pose is of one unfamiliar with a day out, he is attempting the comfort in Hujar’s “crossed legs,” but his body does not quite lay that way.

Hujar’s portraits adjoin death. Not long after these were taken, the AIDS epidemic (and subsequent Culture Wars) killed a generation of artists, including Hujar. In “Lost Downtown,” it is the people that are gone. Death is unambiguously referenced in Hujar’s seminal Candy Darling on her Deathbed (1973) and Sydney Faulkner, Hospital (II), from 1981. Hujar explicitly linked life and death in the only book he published in his lifetime, Portraits of Life and Death (1976). The similarities between the reclining postures of many of Hujar’s portraits with Faulkner show the easy mutability between life and death. Faulkner’s eyelids droop. He looks, perhaps, towards Hujar, but the gaze is unfixed. Fine white hairs at his temple and just under his nose, a hard place to shave, are indescribably poignant. Death is ever-present while the body still finds small ways to grow. The contradiction in life and death is of little relevance as the bond of love is constant. Hujar’s death and those in many of the photographs on display could be a memorial of sorts. Downtown maybe lost but the vivid presence of this community, its creative force and impact on American culture, is potent.

The touches between Killip and Hujar are in the individuals they photographed: combat boots, days off, life and death. The specter in their future is for us to define them as lost. This explanation is too trite, and provides us a nice, comfortable distance from which to mourn. It is a stance that does a disservice to Killip, Hujar and those they have portrayed. Their fate is ours.

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Throughout her life, Agnes Martin repeated a reticence to, and even rejection of, biography. Her resistance puts Martin’s biographer in a difficult position. In her biography of Martin, Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art (Thames & Hudson, 2015), Nancy Princenthal masterfully meets the challenge with a sensitive, open and compassionate account. Princenthal presents the confusing and often-contradictory accounts of Martin’s life without judgment. Nonetheless, Princenthal is not ambiguous or dispassionate in her language, and she draws forceful conclusions and opens up rich avenues of inquiry and critical thought about Martin’s art. Martin’s mental illness and sexuality, two tropes that might have easily been sensationalized under less skilled hands, have been thoughtfully written about as a complement to Martin’s work, not a defining presence. Princenthal pulls from a haze of privacy and a smokescreen of mystery someone tangible: Agnes Martin.

Princenthal is upfront in her ever-increasing concerns at writing Martin’s biography, writing that she has “qualms about violating [Martin’s] privacy, which have grown in the writing of this volume.” Martin’s silence, exhorting close friends to guard the details of her life even after her death, was both personal and to protect her art from easy biographical interpretation. Princenthal elucidates: “Martin late in her life elicited pledges from friends that they wouldn’t talk about her after she was gone. Whether or not sworn to secrecy, many have honored her wish—a wish that is also plainly apparent in her deeply reticent work and even more explicit in her writing. Her paramount injunctions, against pride and ego, have continued to shape attempts to bring her life into focus.”

This hesitancy in undertaking the writing of Martin’s biography only increases the tenacity needed to write the book. The roadblocks Princenthal encounters are many and varied, not least is Martin’s injunction to her friends. Martin often and unsentimentally destroyed work that failed her exacting vision. During her first stay in Taos, New Mexico in the 1940s, there was a yearly bonfire: “At Taos I wasn’t satisfied with my paintings and at the end of every year I’d have a big fire and burn them all.” As a result, the evolution of Martin as an artist and painter is difficult, though Princenthal shows, not impossible, to trace.

Among the many forms of protest Martin used against biography, most challenging is her obfuscation of personal history while emphasizing her own mythos. Martin was born in 1912 in frontier Western Canada to Scottish emigrants, Malcolm and Margaret. There are specific confusions concerning Martin’s family, including the circumstances around the departure of Malcolm (when Martin was three years old). Princenthal carefully picks through the evidence of Malcolm Martin’s absence — variously suggested as death in the Boer War or syphilis, or just skipping town — by analyzing court records and Saskatchewan homestead records. Despite this diligence, the “particulars” remain murky.

In another example, the tantalizing yet baffling conflation between biography and myth is seen after Martin’s graduation from high school in Vancouver. For unclear reasons, Martin relocated to Bellingham, WA, arriving south of the border for the first time. Ostensibly, Martin said she had come to Bellingham to help her sister Maribel during a difficult pregnancy, though Princenthal is unconvinced by this reason: “It is an odd explanation, with conspicuous holes. (Where was Glen Sires, whom Maribel married in 1930? How precisely could Agnes, still a teenager, have been of help?)” Moreover, and this is where the story becomes stranger, while in Bellingham, Martin somehow ended up in California:

“At some point in 1930 or 1931, she took a job in Los Angeles offered by an employment agency—in another version of the story, she saw a sign offering a position while on a bus back to Vancouver—as household cook to a woman named Rhea Gore, and she wound up serving as a driver for Gore’s roughly 25-year-old son, John Huston. Soon to become a famous film director, Huston was then a budding screenwriter and miscreant (he’d been arrested for drunk driving a few times). Having been involved in a fatal car accident that was ‘something of a scandal,’ according to his son, Tony Huston—he’d struck a pedestrian—John Huston’s license was suspended, and during the trial that ensued, Martin drove him to court each day.”

Princenthal again and again makes clear discrepancies and ambiguities within Martin’s biography and the difficulties in writing that life. But the potential confusions nevertheless serve to sharpen Princenthal’s portrait. The “shape of myth,” a phrase Princenthal uses, provides scaffolding through which she builds Martin’s life.

Martin was a teacher in small towns throughout the Pacific Northwest and came to New York City to Teacher’s College (though she said Columbia) in 1941. She moved repeatedly during the next 15 years, including stints in Taos, the Pacific Northwest, Delaware and New York City. In 1957, she came back to New York City, and established a studio in Coenties Slip, with neighbors who “included Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Indiana, and Jasper Johns…” Martin was in her 40s when she began to work with the grids she is so well known for and, more importantly, “that, she felt, represented her true vision.”

Through evocative and spare language, Princenthal skillfully evokes Martin’s paintings, particularly the dependence of the work “on the observer’s response.” Princenthal’s account of viewing The Tree (1964) is the lived experience of one of Martin’s paintings: a symbiotic and mercurial relationship. The Tree was the first Martin painting Princenthal saw, and “has stayed with [her] ever since.” However, when Princenthal returned to the painting as she wrote this biography, she was disappointed to find it “static and coldly white.” “It was a dismaying moment; I sat on a bench with pad and pen in hand and saw nothing but pencil lines and paint.” Princenthal felt she was “failing” the painting. During another visit, her response shifted again:

It was again an image of nature sublimated into the radiance of geometry. Like the majestic pump that a big tree is, sucking water from the earth and moving it toward sunlight, the painting once more seemed to breathe visibly, with its biaxial double-stroke of inspiration and exhalation. A painting can create an updraft and take you with it. It can also be a buffer for the kind of shattering, screaming beauty that may swallow you whole, as I believe Martin often felt her sensorium threatened to do. The business of response is a delicate, willed operation, a deep but unstable joy even when it succeeds.

Princenthal wrote to Martin when she was an undergraduate at Hunter College. Martin’s letter in response exhorts Princenthal to “Write your true response.” Princenthal does just that in her mutating responses to The Tree; a formal description would have been meaningless. Princenthal’s biography of Martin could have had the same tenor as a formal description of one of Martin’s paintings, and would have been as disposable. Instead, Princenthal writes a “true response” to the art and life of Agnes Martin: a whole yet tenuous biography with myths and obscurities, intimacies and challenges. Moreover, it is most crucially that Princenthal’s “true response” aids our own such observations of Martin’s work.

Princenthal, Nancy. Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art. (New York and London: Thames & Hudson, 2015). ISBN-13: 978-0500093900, 320 pages, $39.95

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February 5 to March 21, 2015
521 West 26th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 888 6007

“Stratographs” is Benrubi Gallery’s inaugural exhibition in its Chelsea space. Here, Simon Norfolk presents two bodies of work recording the passage of time. In one, he photographed certain places in Afghanistan’s Bamiyan Valley for over a year between 2013 and 2014. In an adjacent gallery are photographs taken at Kenya’s Lewis Glacier. Norfolk marked the boundary of the glacier, according to maps and GPS, from various years (including 1934, 1963, 1987, 2004) by walking the border with a burning torch. He captured his progression using a long-exposure. Norfolk is hidden behind his action — he is a flickering, twisting line of fire. While, the Lewis glacier is an ever-present monolith in the background. In addition to the photographs, there are two films of Norfolk in Afghanistan and Kenya, and a wall text written by him.

Norfolk’s photographs are saturated with people, though their bodies are largely absent. There are a handful of photographs where the human form is seen directly. In the background of Time Taken 6, Mid-Winter (2013-14) two blackened, bent figures, their postures paralleled like quotation marks, barely jut up from the ground. They are seen through thin bars of trees. Two people pose for a photograph taken by a third on the back of an abandoned Russian tank in Time Taken 11, Early-Autumn (2013-14). These five figures — their individuality uncaptured — are slight and insignificant. Instead, in Norfolk’s photographs, human presence is not in portrait form, but in people’s actions and remnants from drifts of detritus, tilled fields, dwellings, destruction from war, and climate change.

Norfolk’s photographs insist on close looking. The images from Afghanistan are installed in different-sized groups by location. This installation is the revelation. Making use of the opportunity for open movement within the gallery, Norfolk’s photographs are a non-linear narrative, and through the comparison of subtle details and the accumulation of information a more complex image is seen. Time Taken 1, Mid-Winter (2013-14) is an image of a snow-covered village, framed again by trees, with a cliff face in the distance. It is difficult to see through the gray and obscuring winter air, but square, black caves cover the cliff face. Mid-Winter is paired with Time Taken 1, Late-Winter (2013-14). There is no cloaking snow in the latter image — the cliff is bathed in light. A long oblong arch, almost half the height of the cliff, is underneath the mountain’s peak. Small manmade caves constellate out. The arch sheltered a statue of Buddha with another statue nearby. The Taliban dynamited both in 2001. A hint of the body remains. Opposite this pair, a lone image, Time Taken 10, Early Winter (2013-14), behind the front desk, seems an outlier. A curving, tree-lined road cuts through cultivated fields. A small village leans up against the cliff. Square, irregularly placed caves bore out of a domed rock like a beacon. It is disorienting to be placed between these three photographs. What is their relationship to each other?

Norfolk writes about his difficulty in defining his “fascination.” The correct word eludes him. “Timeliness” is too much associated with punctuality, while “time-ishness… a word crime.” Norfolk’s language roots time into the earth. His fascination is in the: “timey thickness of stuff — in the layery ‘slabness’ of time lain down upon time. And just as a rockslide exposes fossil beds, I want to seek out the landscape’s ‘slippages’ that expose those time slices.” Robert Smithson defines a dialectical landscape: nature is not a “thing-in-itself,” but “a way of seeing things in a manifold of relations, not as isolated objects.”[1] A dialectical landscape is not “one-sided;” it allows for the interplay between man and nature, “the sylvan and the industrial.” For Smithson, it is an authentic expression and forms the crux of his earth works. The content of Norfolk’s photographs of land made fertile through human agriculture or an earthmover partially covered in tarp exemplifies the dialectic. Grouping the photographs adds to this sense of exchange. Much like Smithson’s artworks, Norfolk describes Afghans’ relationship to their land: “Don’t look to Afghan culture and say ‘where are the visual arts, why is there not Afghan opera or sculpture?’ The main creation of Afghan culture is the landscape itself. It is all around, but one has to stop, sit quietly and take Time, to see it at work.”

There is a constant — both for man and nature — in the dialectical landscape: entropy. Despite this saturation by people, Norfolk’s photographs show this all-encompassing force acting. It seems sinister in its indifference.

[1] Robert Smithson, “Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape.”

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October 26 through December 21, 2014
122 Norfolk (between Rivington and Delancey streets)
New York, 212 274 0761

“It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.”

-Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

A torn skin with frayed and curling edges is anonymously titled Image Two Hundred Forty Seven (2014). This rectangular painting looks like a scroll; it is thin and curves out at the top. The surface is pocked and pimpled with slightly raised striations that run the length of the image. To touch, I imagine it would be rubbery and blemished, like the skin of a toad. This tactile surface is contrasted with an institutional, pale blue-grey color: the torn skin is also a piece of linoleum rent from the floor. The connection evoked between skin and linoleum is visual and material, uniting man and manmade. It looks like something on the verge of life, or its opposite, the blush of life just fading.

Joseph Montgomery’s series of images in “Head, Calves,” at Laurel Gitlen, are all titled Image Two Hundred something. The titles are in some ways inadequate to the visceral and potent paintings they accompany (but more compelling than the common, passive-aggressive Untitled). There are many missing numbers among the two hundreds in the show and the resultant uncertain narrative, coupled with the images they accompany, raises more questions. Montgomery’s paintings are slight and pale from afar — tall and thin (like Two Hundred Forty Seven) or a small point on a large wall. I was alone in the exhibition and the room was calm and quiet: a place of contemplation. I approached the images tentatively. The paintings appeared fragile, as if they might just be a trick of the light hitting some dust and pigment.

These seemingly delicate works do not complacently hang on the white gallery wall. Image Two Hundred Eleven (2008-2013) — one of the small points — is an overstuffed sack of a painting. Though only a forearm’s length, it bursts with the many things used to make it: cedar, paper, canvas, plaster, grout, plastic, sheet metal, MDF, Coroplast. Subtler additions have been made to the painting in ink, oil, wax and lacquer. The materials in Image Two Hundred Eleven are haphazardly conjoined, torn, twisted and layered to become solid and rooted and whole. Whether old paintings or MDF, the component materials appear to be throwaway odds and ends, perhaps even studio scraps, which now become the new construction. Cut canvas and paper introduce color; washes of blue, brushstrokes in red, deep green and salmon pink are among the various colors and effects that have been brought together. A plank of MDF pins the paper and canvas layers to the wall. More strips of painted paper encircle this interior collage. There are divergent layers upon layers: a sawn piece of MDF dangles down the middle of the work while small tears of painted black paper are glued completely to an irregularly shaped white and pink sheet. The collage creates a material abstraction, not just an abstract image. It is a Frankenstein’s monster of a painting, between the bolts of MDF and grout, the dead bodies of paintings, and the electric current of Montgomery’s process, a fascinating painting seems to writhe and convulse.

In Montgomery’s first show at Laurel Gitlen, “Lie lay lain; Lay laid laid,” in 2010, he was titling his images in the fifties and sixties. The works in that show were more akin to Two Hundred Eleven, but flatter, smaller, and more conventionally abstract. As an evolution, the collaged materials in Image Two Hundred Eleven are less seamless and more exaggerated. The fragments that construct the abstract image are not integrated into a single plane, but are still part of a whole. The stitches and sutures of the painting — where dead painting has been fortified by metal and wood — are more exposed. Montgomery’s surgical hand could be seen as less refined and less skilled in these later paintings. However, it is these monstrous distortions that animate and stimulate the work.

Two Hundred Eleven precedes Image Two Hundred Forty Seven. The works are of different types. Two Hundred Forty Seven is made of similar materials to Two Hundred Eleven. But the materials have become a layered paste, almost completely indistinguishable from each other. In contrast to Two Hundred Eleven, the abstraction is so extreme in Two Hundred Forty Seven that Montgomery’s hand is almost non-existent, appearing as a flattened and industrial construction.

Image Two Hundred Sixty Five (2014) is an animation, another progression. A stick figure, made from shims (a recurring material in Montgomery’s paintings) stumbles and twirls across a white screen. The figure’s pointed feet stab the white ground as paint oozes from him. Montgomery has imagined this shim figure as a painter avatar, an alternative to himself. The animation is reminiscent of Hans Namuth’s film of Jackson Pollock dripping paint. There are moments of strange beauty — the figure stumbles in its first steps — but it is lacking something that is in his paintings. The earlier iterations of the shim figures hanging on the gallery walls blink and convulse in their own strange ways that are more compelling. Perhaps Montgomery’s future animation evolutions will be as potent as his paintings are now.

In the pandemic of manmade images, we bond ourselves to them. Through material, action, and now animation, Montgomery fuses himself to the images he makes. Their creation becomes a substitute for himself: Frankenstein made a monster, but soon Frankenstein will be the monster blinking his dull yellow eye. Montgomery’s paintings show the distinction between man and manmade, human and thing, to be arbitrary, a futile act of self-preservation. Man is manmade: our evolution a result of the things we make.

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The brain is the king of the organs. The brain’s shape and structure define our humanity, though its method of governance over our bodies and actions remains largely a mystery. In “Belief System” at Soloway Gallery, Munro Galloway bares his brain. It’s not preserved in a jar for our scientific prodding; instead he slowly and intimately reveals it in glimpses, repetitions, and uncertainties. The accumulation of these revelations is confounding. “Belief System” includes works on canvas, drawings and books, with Galloway moving fluidly between different media. The canvases are oil and acrylic, inkjet prints, or some combination of both; the drawings layer collage, ink and gouache. Galloway has built out a low shelf to display three of the canvases and another purpose-built shelf shows the drawings. Interspersed among these drawings are books he has been making for a number of years. The works function together — a system — formed out of Galloway’s actions and use of material. The result is work that tantalizingly hovers between imagination and existence.

A walk through the canvases is a needed precursor to the drawings and books in the back room. The canvases appear graphic and accessible. In 65” x 50” (Lean Over Fat) (2014), abstract, bright yellow squares and lines are painted with a thick brush. Grey and white lines, squares and bell-like shapes are rendered more like sketches. “65”” was jotted down in the top left corner and “50”” in the bottom right. The size, a notation typically found on the back of the work, is put for any to see. The painting is almost stripped bare in its simplicity and openness — Galloway’s process seems clear, just from the title. 65” x 50” are its dimensions. The phrase “lean over fat” reverses a rule of oil painting where “fat” paint (as the name implies, there is a high oil-to-pigment ratio) is applied over “leaner” paint (with a lower oil-to-pigment ratio), as the latter dries more quickly than the former. By applying the oil lean over fat, the surface is more likely to crack. The dimensions on the canvas and the method by which the paint was applied in the title integrates the decisions made by Galloway during painting to the work as it is now apprehended by the viewer. The openness of the canvases insists on being taken at face value, but after looking at the shelf of books and drawings, they change.

The drawings are of brain slices — the shape of two spongy lobes repeats with permutations. All titled Brain Drawing, they are made on a variety of found paper, including color charts, takeout menus and exhibition flyers. Brain Drawing (2014), on the top left shelf, is ink and gouache drawn on ledger paper. The brain shape is drawn in black ink. Inside of this shape are two connected rectangles diagonally bisected by a line with bulbous ends. Galloway loosely applied blotches of black ink and washes of blue that permeate the shapes. More precisely, the black ink of the rectangles has been colored yellow. The identical shape of the yellow rectangles in both 65” x 50” (Lean Over Fat) and Brain Drawing imply a derivation. But, where typically a painting resolves or completes a drawing, after viewing Brain Drawing, 65” x 50” seems less finished. Instead, it looks like a memory or a strong impression of the drawing.

Galloway has made artist’s books for many years. Vessel States (2009) uses an art catalogue as its base. Galloway has left the captions (written in German) alone, but has also placed clunky and ill-fitting paper cutouts over the objects in the images. His collages are reproduced in black and white to make a seamless surface. A bronze or marble hand juts out from behind a paper covering — a bit of toe and a marble plinth are also visible. Again, there is interplay between revelation and mystery. In the books, this interaction forms the story as it unfolds in time as a narrative. The relationship between Brain Drawing and 65” x 50” is also a narrative, not linear as in the books, but circuitous with connections that fire like synapses.

Another Brain Drawing (2014) is drawn on a color chart. Black and red form a field for the white brain shape; there are scrawled nonsensical notations and circles of orange, pink, green, and yellow within the silhouetted organ. Despite these layers, the color chart comes through in different degrees of visibility. In 64” x 48” (Nervous System) (2014), Galloway has enlarged and inkjet-printed the same color chart onto a canvas on which he had already painted a scramble of different colors. It is difficult to tell the difference between paint and inkjet-print on the canvas. Galloway visually connects painting and inkjet-printing in 66.5” x 50.5” (2014). The image is barely a brain. Multi-colored lines jig and stutter like a printer running out of ink, but the canvas is not an inkjet, but a direct monoprint from another painted canvas. There is an increasingly complicated interplay of repetitions through the image of the brain and the use of materials and technology. These repetitions play with expectation — nothing can be assumed despite previous experience with other work in the show.

The materiality of the works displayed in “Belief System” is continually undercut by the intricacies of the works within the “system.” Simplicity hides complexity as a raw painting becomes a finished drawing. Abstract fragments are glimpses of an unknown more in a print from a painting. The paper of a drawing repeats as the pigment on a canvas. Art making intimately touches and pushes at something both fundamental and unknown within us: it is imagination mutating into existence and mystery founding belief.

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The words followed a well-worn refrain: “An unarmed, black teenager was shot and killed by police in….” Fill in the place. In this case, it was Ferguson, Missouri on August 9, 2014. Later, we heard his name: Michael Brown, 18. Brown was fatally shot by a white member of the Ferguson police department, Officer Darren Wilson. Brown was unarmed, walking in his own neighborhood, then shot at least six times by Wilson, and his body left in the street for over four hours to be seen by his friends, family and neighbors. Anger flickered into a flare. On the evening following the shooting, protesters coming from a vigil at the site of Brown’s killing were met by police with military weapons. In addition to peaceful protests, rioting and looting did occur off and on over the last month.

The ease and speed with which the police donned military armor and weapons, while supported by military vehicles, to meet fellow citizens is disturbing. These images are a warning to all American citizens. A “militarized police” (a new phrase for the common lexicon) has become a standard police action. Most recently, police used similar military weapons both during the Occupy protests and in the search for the Boston Marathon terror suspects. Lines that should be firm — between protest groups with an agenda; a search for violent, unknown terrorists; and a shocked, angry, and grieving community — have been worryingly shattered.

Before we knew Michael Brown’s name, images appeared on social media. Antonio French, an alderman from St. Louis, posted a photograph on Twitter, on August 9 at 4:55 pm. It is a strange tableau: a row of nearly all-white policemen stand on one side of a tape cordon. Their stance — legs firm, hands on their belt buckles — projects arrogance in its studied nonchalance. A lone black officer stands at the far left edge of the photograph, as if stepping out of it. A handful of black men and women sit and stand on the other side of the cordon. One man faces the police, gesturing; another looks at him with arms crossed; three men sit on the ground with their backs to the police. The monotone deportment of the policemen contrasts with the restless uncertainty among those on the other side of the tape. The contradiction in French’s comment, “Tensions are high, but the scene is peaceful in #Ferguson,” adds to the confused disquiet. David Carson, a St. Louis Post-Dispatch staff photographer, posted a photograph at 5:07 pm. People coming together from different places begin to head in the same direction. Carson writes: “Cops have cleared the scene of shooting in Ferguson upset crowd gathering talking about marching to police station… [sic]” In the forefront of the image a couple and child are talking together. Another woman watches the accumulating crowd. In every place along the road, people’s postures are becoming decisive.

The subsequent images of black protesters and white police are familiar. To see them is to see the marches against segregation in Birmingham, Alabama in the spring of 1963. The police relentlessly attempted to subjugate the marchers with high-pressure hoses, police dogs and arrests. Now-iconic photographs of young African-Americans, with their hands on their heads as they are sprayed with torrents of water or bitten by dogs, galvanized support for the Civil Rights movement. On August 9, 2014, at 9:04 pm, Carson posted a quadriptych: a snarling German Shepherd held back by a policeman; protesters with arms raised; a confusing but clearly agitated interaction between police and protesters; a group all looking at the place where Brown died. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference organized the protests of the Birmingham campaign as a series of deliberate, non-violent actions intended to challenge the laws of segregation, inevitably resulting in black youth in conflict with white police. In contrast, the protests in Ferguson began spontaneously (though they are now planned). Images of the protests first circulated through social media and then were picked up by other media outlets. Much like the protesters themselves, the images stuttered into tremendous activity. In contrast to the photographs of the Civil Rights movement, the effect of the unstructured exchange of images is harder to pinpoint. The glut of images momentarily overwhelms. How does it spur change?

The high-resolution media images of the interactions between police, protesters, and looters differ from the amateur images coming out of Ferguson. The saturated colors and sharp details produced by professionals have a sense of stability and act as part of a narrative. Scott Olson, a photographer for Getty Images, was arrested for photographing outside the designated media area. This restriction seems to violate first amendment press protections and appears completely arbitrary considering the ubiquitous presence of cellphone cameras and social media. Olson’s photograph of August 11 shows a dozen police officers in army fatigues, gas masks, and Kevlar tactical body armor, aiming rifles at a single protester with his hands over his head. Someone has graffitied, “Fuck the police” on a mailbox. The gross disparity in force is unjust in the extreme and a cause for distrust. By contrast, cellphone images bring action on the fringe into the heart. The images of looting on a loop — nighttime, fire, masked, tear gas, at the QuikTrip or Shoe Carnival — are bewildering in their daily repetition and indeterminacy. The impression, it is only that, is of indistinct violence. Cellphone photographs and films are blurred, raw, shaky and unexpected. They catch the act as it is occurring and as quickly pass it on. Chaos and panic are echoed in rapid movements, grainy stills and spontaneous utterances. The iconic images of the social media era will not have the visual clarity of Olson’s photographs, or those of Birmingham. As the ease of production and access to images increases, the idea of a single iconic photograph as an agent of change will no longer exist. Instead, it is the exchange of imagery — tweet, retweet, like, favorite — as the galvanizing action.

Of all the images to come out of Ferguson, pictures of Michael Brown himself are those that most need to be seen and valued. In a haunting video, Piaget Crenshaw, a witness to the shooting from her apartment, captured the immediate moments after Wilson shot Brown. Wilson stands, shoulders slumped, looking at Michael Brown’s body. No details can be seen clearly, heightening the shocking simplicity and tension in the aftermath of the encounter between the man and the teenage boy. However, the sequence’s broadcast on CNN distracts from its poignancy. Michaela Pereira interviews Crenshaw, sitting with her lawyer. As it played on CNN’s program New Day, the video, shot on the cellphone vertically, has to be adapted to fit the horizontal aspect ratio of the television. In the central third, Wilson paces with Brown’s blurred body. On either side, the two pillar boxes are distorted echoes. The effect is like tunnel vision. The faces of Pereira and Crenshaw join the looping film on screen to discuss what Crenshaw saw. In its raw form the video pierces; mediated by CNN (as such videos were on other cable news shows) it is surreal, even grotesque.

A much-circulated photograph of Michael Brown shows him in green and red robes for his recent high school graduation. He has a little smile and a little facial hair, both in keeping for a boy of his age. His posture is tall and straight. Officer Wilson did not see the Brown in that photograph when he shot him. Instead of an unarmed teenager, he probably “saw” someone much like the looter photographed by Carson for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. That man’s face is covered and a gun sticks out of his belt. He is anonymous and threatening. Hilton Als, in his essay, “GWTW,” which addresses photographs of lynching, writes, “So much care, so much care is taken not to scare white people simply with my existence.”[1] He recounts crossing the street to avoid frightening white women, not coming up behind a neighbor at his front door, and more than one encounter with the police where he is surrounded with guns pointing at him.

Wanted (a collaboration between Harlem youth, Dread Scott, No Longer Empty, Stop Mass Incarceration Network, Kevin Blythe Sampson, and Street Attack) tackles the misperception of Black and Latino youth as criminals. Wanted posters, featuring individuals rendered anonymous except for race, were included as part of an exhibition organized by No Longer Empty, “If You Build It,” at Sugar Hill Apartments in Harlem that ran from June 25 to August 10, 2014. The posters continue to be displayed on sidewalk sheds and storefronts throughout Harlem, drawing crowds, unsure of what they are seeing at first, looking closely and reading the details. Using bureaucratic, police-like reports of “suspicious behavior,” such as walking or gesturing, they account the systemic view of Black and Latino teenagers: they are threats and they are disavowed as individuals. They are anonymous — until death. On too many occasions and in too many places, unarmed black teenagers have been threatened and/or killed by the police and armed civilians. The widespread dis-recognition of teenagers like Michael Brown is a profound social crisis and must end.

[1]Hilton Als, “GWTW,” Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Santa Fe: Twin Palms Publishers, 2000), 42.

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