June 15 to August 12, 2016
487 West 22nd Street (between 9th and 10th avenues)
New York, 212 727 8585

Memory rarely resolves itself with the acuity we might wish for. Our past can never neatly unwind and allow us to recall with precision the where, when, and why of things long gone. It is, as William Faulkner famously noted, not even past, but rather an ever-evolving accumulation that grows, both foreshadowing and changing the present. In this way, the act of remembering is more piecemeal, the skeins never quite unfurling gracefully, but growing and evolving, the story changing each time we stop and pause to recollect.

In the work of the Scottish-born painter Steven MacIver, the presence of the past is acknowledged and questioned, often drawing on both the familiar and hazier areas of memory to explore how these inflections continue to inform and alter the present. With a new work on view in the compact space of Dillon Gallery, MacIver employs the physical geography and his own childhood memories of    his native Orkney, to produce a series of complexly realized drawings. MacIver began with studies of the island’s topography, gradually incorporating the forms of World War II lookout posts, which dot the coast of the United Kingdom. Like the hard-edged geometric paintings of Frank Stella, these works create space out of surface; paint and copper leaf is surgically applied to birch panels, shapes forming their own echo, patterns knitting together and forming the compositions.

In Aspect B (all works 2016), the utilitarian form of the lookout post never entirely emerges from the flawless perspectival space rendered in ethereal white against a moiré of birch. MacIver played in and around these posts as a child, and depicted here, the spaces are partial, skeletal, like the memory of a dream. A pair of panels, Sentinel 1 and Sentinel 2, at first appear as complementary positive and negative variations of each other, with gold lines intersecting one another at acute angles, but on closer inspection, the patterns formed are themselves subtle inversions, their differences yielding a larger harmony. Previously, MacIver has employed similar radiating forms, frequently using geography as a springboard, allowing patterns to emerge from nature through the act of drawing.

This transition, from the three-dimensional spaces of geography to the flat plane of the drawing, is subtle, and upon first glance, one might be inclined to place this work alongside mid-century breezy geometric abstraction, such as the prints of Anni Albers or the films of Len Lye. MacIver’s works share the tensions, the agile tactility that is latent in much of the high-Modernist output, the anxieties that artists faced in a century that constantly riled and upturned precedent. Apprehensiveness runs through MacIver’s work, and while there is an undeniable Minimalist repetition present, a greater debt could be paid to Robert Smithson and his Gordian non-sites in MacIver’s dislocation of place. Smithson’s relocations of the natural into the gallery setting questioned the very strictures of the space; MacIver’s ruptures are less dramatic, but equally assertive in their examination of space.

At a time when the world appears to be taking an inward turn, MacIver’s spatially questioning drawings seem to propose an alternate, more open view; in his expanded topography, both of memory and place, the blunted edges of the past are formed into precise geometries. The geography of memory is not logical, yet it arises from an accretive process, like the erosion of a coastline. Here both are liminal, evanescent spaces. In Strata B, triangular planes cascade down, or perhaps up, forming a larger construction that appears to disperse, colors fusing into the grain of the wood. Spaces are undone in these works, even as they coalesce. While the frictions in this work are many, between memory and geography, the natural and the manipulated, the physical and the abstract, all exist easily at the convergences of its exceptional lines.

The post In the Spaces of Memory, Geometries of Place: Steven MacIver at Dillon Gallery appeared first on artcritical.

February 25 to April 30, 2016
526 West 22 Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 243 0200

Since the dawn of the medium, photography has been described as fleeting, a moment recorded but now lost. Photography’s instantaneity lends itself to fertile moments that could not be otherwise captured; Henri Cartier-Bresson built a cultural empire upon the revelatory instant, seizing the split seconds when visual harmony emerged out of chaos to create his iconic images. The visual stasis of the photograph preserves the past in unexpected ways: cameras are all-seeing, and at times seem to demolish history even while reconstructing it, forever throwing the acuity of our own perceptions into doubt.

Iconic images serve as documents of people, places now gone, whole eras ended, in effect recording time lost. The slicing of life into the fractional fragments of time recorded by cameras can alter the register of reality, bringing dignity to the inconsequential, wringing permanence out of impermanence. Luigi Ghirri worked in the inexhaustible present, his photographs favor neither the passing nor the seemingly fixed, and often allow the two to collide and conflate. In Ghirri’s photographs, timespans shrink and expand, featuring fads of the day as well as the eternal monuments of his native Italy — an original and its reflection, the false coexisting with the real.

In recent years, Ghirri’s stature has grown exponentially; a collection of his essays is forthcoming, while his work is being widely exhibited with a large touring retrospective planned for 2018. While well known internationally, in the United States Ghirri did not live to achieve the fame of many of his peers, dying in 1992 at the age of only 49. The American representative of Ghirri’s estate, Matthew Marks gallery, has mounted its third exhibition of carefully selected photographs, all vintage chromogenic and Cibachrome prints, allowing for further reevaluation of works long unseen.

A sunbather lounges by a public pool, face masked by an Italian newspaper; in the background, blurred by a shallow depth of field, azure water is punctuated by startlingly vivid towels of yellow, teal and red, draped over railings. A man dressed in a brown suit, his back to the camera, surveys a public garden near the Colosseum in Rome, the composition nearly swallowed by a large planting. In these photographs, Modena (1972-74), from the series “Fotografie del periodo iniziale,” and Roma (1979), from the series “Diaframma 11, 1/125 luce naturale,” respectively, what is being shown? Ghirri’s work shares, at times, the snapshot simplicity of William Christenberry, another prolific autobiographical documenter who for decades photographed and re-photographed his childhood home of Hale County, Alabama. Like another of better-known his contemporaries, William Eggleston, in Ghirri’s photographs, the personal is elusive: places and subjects are revisited, but other than the obvious love for the environments he frequents, little is fixed or concretely familial.

There is great precision to these photographs, and in their consideration of their subjects, there is sometimes startling intimacy. In Ghirri’s images our gaze is often stymied and redirected; while tangible markers exist (the logo of Italian Coke appears several times) specificity persistently slips, a fading away of traditional indication and hierarchy. In Modena (1971-73), from the series “Kodachrome,” a view of a cherry blossom tree is sheared by a concrete wall, pasted with a peeling fragment of a poster depicting lemon trees. At times, Ghirri’s images are filled with images of their own, or we see through glass, or into reflections and other optical abstractions; these are mediations of signs of all sorts, those intended to gain our attention, as well as repel it. Often, there is a reveal, a literal exposure of the constructed or the simulated, and yet there is never judgment rendered in these observations. The palette of the prints skews warm, a result of color photographic paper’s instability, creating tones that seem curiously outmoded to eyes now accustomed to computer-generated perfection. In these photographs, the rosy glow of the past becomes tangible, chemically induced reality.

In one image, Untitled (1975-78), from the series “Kodachrome,” a horizon is bisected by the fading contrail of jet engines, the view partially blocked by boulders stacked, not quite naturally, revealing the drilled blasting marks drilled through them. The picture presents dueling manipulations of the environment, both the rocks cleaved in half for construction and the vapor trailing in sky are alterations to our landscape that largely go unfelt and unnoticed but do have consequences. Ghirri’s vistas are marked by cracks in meaning that so often remain unarticulated, they comfortably reside in the space between the fictional and the documentary that all photography skirts, yet they reconcile little. These photographs are aggregates of the familiar and the strange that our days amount to, in each is a love of the moment and an acknowledgement of the knotted past that accompanies it, always linked in the plurality of time.

The post Revisiting the Never-Ending Now: Luigi Ghirri at Matthew Marks appeared first on artcritical.

Curated by Barry Blinderman
January 23 to March 12, 2016
1916 Race Street (at N 20th Street)
Philadelphia, 215 965 4000

These are images that we have seen before: paintings of desire, fear, and pain, or even dreams. A perfectly presented entree, concocted in a corporate culinary laboratory, packed and frozen, to offer quantified flavor with glossy convenience. Or, perhaps, a fastidiously folded flannel shirt, with one sleeve arranged to emphasize the pattern. These are images that, in one way or another, sell: beauty, leisure, vitality, and freedom, all available at cost. Walter Robinson has painted many of the things we want to buy, over the course of several decades, expropriating both the Panglossian ideal of commercial product photography as well as the roughly hewn yearnings captured from the illustrated covers of pulp novels. Since the dissolution of Artnet magazine, where he served as editor 16 years, Robinson has been able to fully devote himself to painting once more, some of the recent results of which are on display in his first traveling retrospective, organized by Barry Blinderman, former gallerist and director of the University Galleries of Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois, the first venue of the show.

Robinson’s paintings, more often than not, make use of commercial illustrations as source material, while also deriving a great deal of their meaning from them. Over the years, Robinson has spoke of the advertising circulars and mail-order catalogs he often employs as “wanting to be art,” and while his physical re-representations in effect complete this goal, a larger debt is owed to the surreptitious art historical referentiality that laces through our culture. This is a canonical appropriation in which classic forms appear and reappear over various iterations, even as the referent is lost. Robinson plays with these brushes with history and the cultural affectations they have given rise to, while questioning the stability of such representations. There is much to draw on in the calculated Never Never Land of advertising; Robinson enters this world not in search of a barometer of the times, or even the means of their unraveling, but rather to observe, report, and allow viewers to come to their own conclusions.

Recent paintings after Lands’ End catalogs capture the innocuous fashion of inconspicuous clothing — the arrangement of tasteful pastel moccasins (Shoes, 2014) or models reduced to bodies, faces removed to direct attention solely to the swimsuit for sale (Sun, Surf, and Style: the Swim Tee, Ride the Wave, 2014). The space of snug familiarity offered by the mail-order catalog is one that has been nearly displaced by the more immediately gratifying Internet; the catalog is in part a fast-fading lexicon of desire, a place for dreams to be bought, or at least coveted. Seen through this cornerstone of old media, the somewhat dowdy styles offered by Lands’ End can seem nostalgic, a middlebrow vision of predictability and contentment, an unchanging standard confounding a world in constant flux.

The comfort of one’s own home, and the food products one can prepare in it, has provided Robinson with another rich source of raw material since the 1990s: the resplendent surfaces of food photography. In Oriental Beef (1994), sauce congeals in autumnal hues with preternatural fluidity, coating the rice below; the plate is tightly cropped, betraying the boxed origin of the source photograph. In another recent series, Robinson has created a taxonomy of burgers, portraying both the home reconstituted and the take-out. The components of Amy’s Veggie Burger (2012), are elegantly fanned out like a hand of cards, the layers carefully displayed in adamant renunciation of its processed origins, while the earlier Big Mac (2008) is a solitary caloric monolith, the undulating surface of the crowning bun turned into a sesame-seeded lunar surface.

In Robinson’s consumer product still-lifes, branding is both emphasized and deliberately obscured, while subjects are returned to sometimes decades later and re-composed. Honey (2014) is beautifully illegible while the Budweiser logo of Three Beers (1987) fades in and out like a memory of the brand. Johnny Walker bottles merger into liquid reds and golds while Vicks Vapor Rub remains sharp with trademarked clarity. These products remain more than their constituent ingredients, even surpassing intended uses; like the ineffable yet instantly identifiable red of Coca-Cola, these are brands as identities, woven into national myth until the seams become indistinguishable, part and parcel to a corporatized American experience that we are all compelled to enter.

The work that proved name-making for Robinson in the early 1980s, adapted pulp novel covers, is likely the most difficult for the uninitiated to enter into. Each painting is a simplified reworking of an original paperback illustration, with titles taken from the novels themselves. At times, these interpretations appear self-explanatory. In Something of Value (1986), a woman grasps a man for support who is armed for a confrontation, evidently near as he defiantly looks over the horizon toward unseen menacing forces. Society Nurse (2011) remains cryptic, with the presumably titular nurse carrying a tray of surgical instruments with a far off look in her eyes. Robinson begins with images projected directly on his canvases, working in the dark, and his paintings are completed with loose, nearly impressionistic brushwork, never losing detail. These paintings archive images that just as easily could be lost to time, reveling in the melodrama of desire that simmered between the original book’s thin covers, outlasting the armature of the stories themselves, now faded away and left to obscurity.

All is archived in Robinson’s work, in one way or another. The present often has a way of becoming tomorrow’s curiosity, and as a compendium of advertising — some of the most fleeting of images created — it serves as an absorbing document, one that continues to grow. There is a certain Postmodern slickness to the transformation that’s affected, an image shifting from one form to another. But unlike many of his fellow appropriators, Robinson is not attempting to splinter the tropes that both propel and stymie culture; the conversion of one commodity into another is presented succinctly and without great fanfare, belying the potential ennoblement that encompasses such a transaction. Hinted at in this work is a romance latent in all images, the cause and course of representation that dwells in our subconscious. Advertising offers solutions, and in his abstractions of our wants, Robinson counters with questions.

The post “Wanting to be Art”: Buy, Sell and Desire in the Paintings of Walter Robinson appeared first on artcritical.

http://eastmanhouse.org/events/detail.php?title=burley_2014-15
http://robertburley.com/disappearance-of-darkness-2012/

I leave tabs open as reminders to myself — references or links to things I might, could, or should be doing. Often, these sites serve as surrogate memorials, remaining open only so that I can allow myself to feel better by acknowledging that attention is being paid, and that I have a plan. A part of me is invariably trying to forget, to ignore the ignored, and leave behind the burden of everything I cannot or simply will not do.

I track the memory usage of my web browser. My computer is showing its age, and it is usually these unread, unexplored tangents that bog down its ever-shrinking resources. It serves to further remind me of all that I might be doing. For months now, lurking in the background, I have had a tab open to the personal website of the photographer Robert Burley, who for five years documented the demise of analog image making. Burley traveled around the world photographing what amounted to a literal dematerialization of his chosen medium. Captured in his photographs is the corporate contraction experienced by all of the giants of the industry. There is the never-ending stream of building implosions at the Kodak Park in Rochester and the simply deserted factories of the bankrupt Polaroid, companies both decimated by the rapid shift to digital imaging. This shift proved inevitable, and yet, caught so many entirely off guard. Although the finality of the transition was never quite clear while it was unfolding, now, after the buildings have fallen and the thousands of layoffs completed, Burley’s images serve as a succinct summary of this abandonment of the analog.

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about this transformation of technology; I attended art school during the thick of it, to study photography, and watched as it unfolded. At times, I felt like I was being abandoned by my own medium, falling behind in the future I had always embraced. As it no doubt is for many in college, the alchemical thrill of photography was nearly extinguished in me, the sheer magic of watching images emerge from the baths was something that played little role in the work I found myself making. Preoccupation with craft proved to be the undoing of many of my friends, lost in the labs spending hours upon hours in overly complicated modes of printing, making perfect, airless photographs. I fought against such elaborate production in my own work: I wanted something else from my images, a reason for the photography to have occurred. The weight of technicality is a burden not easily shifted in the making of photographs; it’s an inescapable fact of the medium that many can never seem to reconcile their work with. This fundamental problem has, of course, been discussed to no end, always to rear its head every decade or so, critically.

Such are the problems of art school. I never entirely resolved my concerns with craft, and my work most likely reflects this. Perhaps these are the building blocks of many photographers’ educations. I can only speak to my own experience, but I will say that there were many questions that certainly should have been asked of us as students, but were not. All artistic mediums, to varying degrees, contain their own material-based justifications, an inherent logic to their representative ends and uses. Photography obviously has its own, and yet we constantly ask for these once-simple definitions to be expanded and reconsidered.

This compulsion to define the medium is further complicated by our world’s full-scale digitization, and now these conversations often shift toward this electronic inevitability faced by photography. While the allure of the darkroom seems to be something that many fondly remember, few speak of it. Rather, when it is invoked, the analog era is employed as an all-encompassing nostalgia, and merely another emblematic loss of the well-worn past, demolished for a harshly gleaming replacement. In the wake of prolific, all-seeing, skill-less iPhone photography, such an assessment is inevitable, but also understandable in light of the endless of hardware and software upgrades we must all take part in, brought on by corporate-imposed planned obsolescence. The past, as we remember it, was never plagued by such artificial limitations.

There is something both wonderful and deeply depressing about this act of photographing the systems and places central to the development of photography, yet now no longer needed for its practice. Appropriately, the final venue for the current traveling exhibition of Burley’s photographs in the United States is the George Eastman House, named for the founder of the now much diminished Eastman Kodak, and the oldest museum dedicated to photography. In 1932, faced with severe disabilities, Eastman chose to end his own life, leaving behind a legendarily brief suicide note, now viewable in his namesake museum’s permanent collection. “My work is done, why wait?” Eastman wrote; could there be a more chillingly upbeat assessment of death?

The month before I started in art school, Kodak announced the discontinuation of traditional black-and-white photographic paper. The company’s inexorable slide into insolvency over the last decade was a protracted comedy of corporate errors, with each misstep launching several more, a latticework of insurmountable loss forming with each futile restructuring. Following this saga, I found it to be one of the more depressing episodes in the recent history of photography; in Kodak’s unraveling, I see my own failures reflected back at me. Try as I might to justify the upgrade, I know that for my purposes, there is little that a new camera could do that my long-outmoded one cannot. I see in Kodak’s failure of vision the fate of many of the things I care very much about — a broader, dark renunciation of possibility.

Burley’s photographs are laden with the latent potential that compels many to take their own, an analog security that can’t easily be replicated. In one image of a former Agfa film factory storage room, huge master spools of film are stacked upon racks, awaiting their final coating and cutting before being packaged as 35mm rolls. The spools stretch out into a florescent-lit horizon, making clear the incredible capacities once required to supply our unlimited desire to capture images on film. A part of me that pines for unchecked progress can dismiss these documents of a world that is rapidly being lost, and firmly place my faith in the perfected vision of cloud-powered futurity. There is another part, though, that finds such collectivism abhorrent, a terrifying disfiguration of placid continuity. This part longs to know the final destination of those prospective rolls of film, through chemical transformation, and it’s the part that believes in a tangible reality, and discards the well-marketed replacement.

The post For All Digital Futures appeared first on artcritical.

Primetime commercials, glossy print promotions: both flourish through their deployment of the coincidental and the strangely juxtaposed. While satellite up-links long ago collapsed broadcast time, allowing the world to be witnessed in all of its multifarious beauty 24 hours a day, this never-ending present comes with a price. We accept that the voice of a media outlet is so often colored by its corporate owners, but it is the often more-collusive presence of advertising that slips under the radar. Whether it is a preponderance of sponsored editorial content, or a simple overt endorsement, something is presumably being sold to us in some form or another.

Over the course of his long working and teaching life, Robert Heinecken attempted to expose the intrinsic hypocrisies of thinly veiled sexuality that forms so much advertising, while disassembling the latent commerce of images. Heinecken, through an extraordinary array of materials and processes, explored the physical and conceptual limits of photography, often describing himself as a “para-photographer,” as his work typically eluded traditional definitions of the medium. Though a decades-long examination into the foundations of commercial images, Heinecken proved himself to be more attuned to the swiftly shifting slipstream of visual media than many of his arguably better-known contemporaries. Through exceptional manipulation of appropriated photographs and video footage, Heinecken was able to pinpoint the locus of image-mediated attention, while taking aim at our more corrosive manifestations of culture and its pernicious repercussions, felt every time we tune in to our favorite shows.

“Robert Heinecken: Object Matter” is the first comprehensive retrospective of the artist since his death in 2006, allowing for work scarcely seen before to be placed within a career that spanned decades and mediums. The exhibition recently closed at the Museum of Modern Art and has now traveled to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Eva Respini, MoMA’s Chief Curator of Photography, assembled examples from Heinecken’s multiple intersecting bodies of work, allowing the full scope of his evolution as an artist to be seen, and demonstrating the surprising vitality still present in his output, which the passing years have scarcely dulled. The images Heinecken produced have an uncanny prescience, often appearing as examinations of the effects of our present world of multimedia, years before such a notion was conceived of.

Although the products and celebrities featured in Heinecken’s work indelibly link it to the age that bore them, the fickleness of fashion hasn’t voided the assessments they offer. More often than not, the focus of Heinecken’s early work is the media-driven distortions wrought upon women’s bodies. As seen through these appropriated images, women are contorted, reformed and altered again for mass-market consumption. Heinecken followed this universal, ravenous appetite for flesh over the course of his working life, closely following its chic permutations, while always torquing the popular for critical ends.

“Are You Rea” (1964-68), Heinecken’s series of black-and-white photograms, while iconic, still serves to provide a thorough introduction to his mode and method of working. The relatively simple construction of each print yields unusually complex images; unlike the early photograms of Man Ray and other Modernist photographers, Heinecken dispensed with three-dimensional objects and instead used the pages of popular magazines, contact-printing them directly on photographic paper. The thin paper allowed for both sides of each page to be seen at once, creating layers of images out of each ad layout and collapsing photographic space, melding the models and products into a seamless amalgam of commerce. “Are You Rea” is a title that both questions and begs for resolution. “Real” or “Ready,” each applies as the ideal woman stands, frozen in the midst of undressing. The positive and negative exist at once in these images, the standard tonality and formula of advertising, image and copy, broken and reformed into something entirely unimagined. With the commercial signifiers removed, the languid gaze and blithe sensuality so woven into the performance of retail becomes the product itself: sex selling sex.

Much of Heinecken’s early work consists of photographic objects, images incorporated into sculptural forms with varying degrees of success. Several sculptural works, many presented for the first time in this retrospective, are interactive, such as Transitional Figure Sculpture (1965), a tower of stacked sections of photographs, each able to be spun independently, but only ever partially resolving themselves into images of solarized nudes. These works are unique for their often-complex geometric formalism, as well as their participatory aspect. “Are You Rea” marked a distinct shift into the full appropriation of images; Heinecken’s later bodies of work would rarely include original photography.

Concurrent with “Are You Rea,” Heinecken began an extensive series of manipulated (he dubbed them “compromised”) magazines — cutting, overprinting, and recombining issues of various publications, both destroying the original while tearing apart the inherent fictions of advertising. In these new magazines, fresh narratives are built out of old ones, with many, many familiar characters inserted into unfamiliar roles. Periodical #5 (1971), made from clippings taken from an issue of Living Now, is unaltered save for the addition of a beaming Cambodian solider posing with two severed heads. Taken from an infamous photograph published in Time Magazine, the solider is overprinted on the pages in varying intensities throughout the issue, fading in and out of the original compositions and juxtaposed with pairs of beautiful girls, air conditioner ads, and interior decorating articles. A version of this approach, 150 Years of Photojournalism (1989-90), an altered issue of Time, is a standout; a special edition commemorating the titular milestone, this issue was sponsored solely by Kodak, which is, consequently, the only advertiser featured. The singular, cheery, deep yellow of the Kodak logo bleeds through the pages, further highlighted by Heinecken’s excisions, blending in, merging with the images, endowing the triumphs and tragedies of the century with corporate sponsorship.

Around 1980, Heinecken began working with video, specifically by photographing television screens and manipulating the results. Begun at a time when images were starting the transition away from materiality and into the subspaces of the screen (particularly in the realm of news, with the concurrent launch of CNN), Heinecken’s television-derived work seized upon this moment, transmuting the moving image to print. These works magnify, distort, and above all, play with our relationship to television, mocking and examining celebrity culture while quite seriously investigating the nature of our collective fascination with the medium.

In his early video-centric series, “Inaugural Excerpt Videograms” (1981), Heinecken captured stills from Ronald Reagan’s inauguration speech, writing below each resulting image randomly chosen fragments of either the speech itself or the selected commentary of pundits. To create the photographs, Heinecken utilized the now discontinued Cibachrome positive printing process to print directly off of the CRT screen, holding each sheet of paper onto the glass to expose it, yielding a videogram. The videogram is perhaps the perfect fusion of photography and video, reflecting the dense mediation of not only broadcast television, but also contemporary politics. Heinecken abstracted the production of the work, employing an assistant to make the actual videograms, directing the process over the telephone. This abstraction of production hints at the larger televised theater of the inauguration itself, from the speechwriters and aides engaged to craft the tone of the event, to the carefully orchestrated direction of broadcast. The images that emerge in the videograms are televisual ghosts, seeming to materialize from a fog that, while an artifact of the printing process, upends the careful production, rendering such familiar figures nearly unrecognizable.

While the “Inaugural” videograms highlight the innate complications of televised representation, much of Heinecken’s later video works consider the uniquely contrived nature of the medium itself. Surrealism on TV (1986) consists of three slide projectors, each randomly filled with images directly photographed from the TV screen, divided into rough categories: explosions, aerobic exercises, animals, newscasters, and evangelists. The work is sequenced, one projector advancing at a time, and each presentation is unique, resulting in a classically formulated surrealist narrative. At times, the projected images form strange visual equations, in one iteration, news anchors, always smiling and impeccably coiffed, are paired with a violent static-streaked explosion; later, aerobics demonstrations might bookend a dog, grabbed from a pet food commercial, caught in mid-bark. While the title of the piece makes the broadcast origins of the images clear, its construction — from the durational viewing it demands to the subtle reflections from the glass of the TV screen often captured — serves as a reminder to more cautiously consider the implications of our own passive viewing of television.

To those unfamiliar with Heinecken’s body of work, the most immediate reaction might be to its thoroughly analog nature. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Heinecken never embraced the more-computerized aspects of the media revolution he was simultaneously documenting and critiquing. At the time that he turned his attention to video as the source for his work, many other artists were seeking to reconcile past formulations of photography and image making with the increasingly pervasive role that mass media takes in our day-to-day life. Drawing upon similar concerns, Gretchen Bender created complexly staged video performance pieces that appropriated the visual vocabulary of commercial television production, and Jack Goldstein painted algorithmically determined views from radio telescopes, taking the very conception of photography to its perceptible limits. The liminal state that photography existed in towards the end of Heinecken’s life did not seem to necessarily hold his interest, but in reviewing his work, it is tempting to ask what he might have made of the never-ending stream of images and videos now uploaded every day to Tumblr and YouTube. This is a conspicuous oversight in an otherwise thorough survey, however when considering work that, despite having little in it to visually connect with the world that we now inhabit, has retained a remarkable currency, the lack of such speculation is more forgivable. There is, at the core of Heinecken’s work, a desire to expand the limits of the image, and to question the relevance of traditional boundaries imposed upon photography. Now as never before, we produce photographs and videos: the micro and macro, the bite-sized and feature length, an endless document that shadows each of our lives. When reflecting upon our world, so enamored with its own representations, we might ask as Heinecken did, Where do our images go?

The post Photo Presence, Video Fantasy: The Life and Work of Robert Heinecken appeared first on artcritical.

These are images that have been seen many times before. Many, seeing them again, will still feel their muscles tense, as the events of that day live again in eternal playback: the weaponized 767 roars through the sky of pure video blue and into the World Trade Center’s south tower. Always to be shown in succession, we see it once more, and now a new angle from another channel. The plane is engulfed in steel rectilinearity, fiery reds and oranges blooming out of 24,000 gallons of fuel. Three minutes after nine, before even the New York Stock Exchange’s opening bell, the catastrophe was well underway.

The aftereffects September 11th continue to ripple outward, in ways few might have foreseen. A calamity of this scale had never been televised; the destruction of the World Trade Center was an unprecedented media event that cut a deep scar across Lower Manhattan. Within hours, myths were both built up and torn asunder, as a formerly impervious beacon of capitalism was annihilated, nearly bringing the financial capital of the world to its knees. An array of unanticipated events happened that day, and just as quickly as blame could be assigned, unexplored intelligence was found, with so many cascading failures leading to colossal disaster. The global military, political, and legal campaigns initiated in the aftermath proved to be an unexpectedly violent beginning for the 21st century, all leading from the heart of a complex once triumphantly declared by its architect to be a shining monument to world peace.

The original towers by Minoru Yamasaki were forced icons of urban renewal, built to specification in a complex that never truly encouraged the public to venture into the unwelcoming plaza that lay at its heart. While undoubtedly a fine place to work, the massive project was, at the core, another attempt to create an airless, high-Modernist utopia for commerce. The new tower is a fortress; those who work there will enter through the securitized and blast-resistant lobby, or one day, through Santiago Calatrava’s nearby skeletal PATH station, years delayed and billions of dollars over budget. The everlasting loss of the site is illustrated in the competition-winning design of architect Michael Arad; his memorial of two yawning cubic pits, which replicate the towers’ immense foundations, are dazzling feats of engineering. Their synthetic waterfalls flow with precise technical choreography, and are sure to be the primary stop on the pilgrimages undertaken by those still unsure that the events of that day did, in fact, occur. This plaza is rigidly patrolled, and codes of conduct are enforced, with the expectation that public grief is to be measured while here.While the luminous One World Trade Center is now present, built to a soaringly patriotic 1,776 feet, it is Arad’s monuments and the adjacent, subterranean 9/11 Memorial Museum that have been tasked with the active remembrance of the events of September 11, 2001. The museum promises more than answers, or even simply the means to navigate a dark and terrible day — in these exhibition spaces, one is promised a direction in which one can focus their grief and sorrow. Now, with its solemn grand opening, the space is finally coalescing into its idealized form. With the surging crowds of summer, it is immediately evident that many of the complaints made against the master plan of the original World Trade Center could be made of this iteration.

The museum offers an involving narrative to follow, to lose oneself in. What awaits each visitor is a thoroughly controlled experience, activated through architecture upon entering the airy aboveground glass and steel pavilion, which seems to collapse in upon itself. On the descent down to the exhibition spaces, lighter woods give way to darker ones. Although the museum is new construction, it is sited in the excavated chasm between the foundations of the twin towers. The path down is revealed to be a ramp, an allusion to the larger one that was formed in the clean up of ground zero and slowly evolved into an emblem of the painstaking rebirth underway. At its terminus, the ramp transforms into a mezzanine, perched above the enormous “Foundation Hall,” which is flanked by the vast original slurry-retaining wall built to contain the Hudson. The wall is now left exposed in what is perhaps the museum’s most dramatic example of loss. The profusion of artifacts begins on the final escalator ride. Throughout, the hall is traversed overhead by the long mezzanine, twisted through the s-curve of the foundations in alignment with the acutely buckled structural columns left standing after the buildings’ monumental collapse. Installed in the center of the vast hall is the museum’s sole commissioned artwork. Spencer Finch’s Trying to Remember the Color on That September Morning (2014) consists of 2,983 attempts to replicate in watercolor the shade of blue of the sky on September 11th, one sheet of paper per life lost.

The first gallery contains a slideshow of lives violently ended. The display, called “In Memorium,” consists of a black box theater surrounded by identifying photographs, revealing the analog age that September 11th belongs to. For some of the dead, no images exist, and in their place a memorial oak leaf is displayed, mirroring trees planted on the surface above. Inside the theater, more images and brief biographies of those who died are projected, each name painstakingly read out in metronymic regularity. While the cavalcade of loss and grief extends throughout the museum, in this space it is allowed to pause, one of the few breaks permitted along the planned route.

“September 11th, 2001,” the central exhibition, offers horrors of a kind that one is more accustomed to viewing through the lens of institutionalized history. It is rare that contemporary events are seen under the particular glare that is offered here, as this recent history is still very much with us, it allows a visceral recall not possible with the distant past. As this museum is no doubt expected to serve as a shrine for many, it is appropriate that it contains endless individual altars. Mutilated ID cards, singed cash, tattered snapshots, and illegible memoranda are all cataloged and displayed under vitrines. While the appearance of these items here seems an invasive exposure of private lives, as representatives of the compacted contents of a thousand desk drawers, the inventory has its intended effect, turning the mundane and personal into heroic relics. Tissue dispensers are discreetly placed throughout the galleries of this detailed chronicle of the attacks and their aftermath. Images assault at every turn, staggered, staged, spread across the walls — each gallery offers a salon-style rendering of destruction. We see the horrified faces of onlookers, the firefighter’s climbing the boundless flights of stairs to their death, and the ashen survivors staggering away from the remains of the World Trade Center. The event has been claimed as the most photographed in human history. These images depict the scenes that made the day as dark as it was, but seen in such profusion, they form less detail with each new surface, eventually reducing tragedy to texture. While the pictures may be well known, the audio presented is not. In addition to the sounds of visitors, the galleries are inundated with the looping playback of final desperate voicemails and emergency service dispatchers, some requiring handsets to hear, while others crackle over invisible speakers, often still audible after one has moved along to another gallery. The audiovisual density is confounding — multilayered to a degree that eventually little can truly register. It is this extraordinary bombardment of things that forms the core of the experience.

In a gallery near the exhibition’s end, an original architectural model of the World Trade Center complex is displayed. It is a space dedicated to the era before the buildings’ destruction, filled with postcards and stills from iconic films, the famous skyline seeming oddly historical to eyes now accustomed to seeing its new alignment. The maquette appears the embodiment of breezy period-contemporaneity, with intricately etched sheet metal scaled to the massive planned heights, while models of 1960s vintage cars encircle the plaza, ants next to the towering behemoths of Western capitalism they swarm by. The wistful quotes on the walls from those involved with the project’s conception hearken to a future we have left behind, a mid-century sense of revitalization that most governments have now neither the will nor the finances to implement. As constructed, the museum resembles an eerie simulacrum of the commercial space it memorializes, but in this form it appears to be history for the sake of history, with little attention paid to the context of the original.

We no longer live in the world that existed when the World Trade Center’s master plan was unveiled, where a nation’s aspirations could be shored up in cascading tensile steel. The glittering monumentality of the towers is still present at this site, now re-purposed and rendered through a screen of security measures, the sense of progress once attached to them now long gone. There is scant opportunity to contemplate this, in these spaces, with all attention held captive by the finely structured sea of grief. While the reasons behind the attacks are carefully explained in text and video, they are secondary to the canonization of suffering presented. In every gallery there is a desperate search for an elusive significance to the day’s events, which, of course, often cannot be definitively located. A great deal was lost at the site of this museum, most likely more than we care to acknowledge, and certainly more than any monument could be expected to attest to. The resolutely tasteful gift shop proves to be a surprisingly effective commemoration. The space provides a tactile transport back to a now-lost Before, replete in gleaming warm white lights, a world conjured once more through souvenirs emblazoned with the twin towers’ stark profile. It is a sleight of hand not lost on visitors: a chance to buy the past, a token from what now seems a halcyon age of assurance that, however illusory, is sorely missed.

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