February 26 to April 30, 2016
523 West 24 Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, (212) 243-0200

Many of Ellsworth Kelly’s photographs, shown here in an exhibition of 31 gelatin silver prints, ingeniously feature the kind of geometric shapes that distinguish the late artist’s painting and sculpture: the triangle, trapezoid, rhombus, rectangle, curve and plank. Several prints are suggestive of the artist’s virtuosic plant drawings. The prints were produced under Kelly’s supervision just months before his death in 2015, and they were shot between 1950 to 1982. Over this long period, a singular attention to abstract elements in the everyday world remained constant whether the location was overseas or the US. In an essay from 1991 reprinted for the exhibition catalog, Kelly noted,

Two things interest me in particular; one is the way a frame — a window, an aperture — changes what you see. You can focus on things differently and frame them differently; your vision becomes fragmented. The other aspect is stereoptics — the fact that we have two eyes, and that we see things differently out of each. It’s very mysterious, but we tend to take that aspect of vision for granted.

Although the artist wasn’t referring to photography per se in this comment, his references to aperture, framing, and optics do relate to special things the camera can do, as well as to human vision. But no matter the tools or techniques, Kelly sought to study the world by cultivating his powers of observation. With regard to photography, he remarked,

Photography is for me a way of seeing things from another angle. I like the idea of the interplay of two or three dimensions. My photographs are simply records of my vision, how I see things. My ideas develop from seeing, not from photographs.

Kelly often noticed physical shapes in proximity to their shadows, or to voids. He made inventive use of camera optics and framing devices to translate ephemeral situations into enduring compositions. For example, the weathered, closed barn doors at the left of Barn, Southampton appear to be painted white, while the matching doors at right were folded open when the image was taken, so that the absence of light inside the barn printed black in the photo. Viewed across a wheat field, the barn’s middle gray tones offset this pair of white and black rectangles under a triangular roof. It may take a moment to register the roof and rectangles as abstract shapes within the scenery. But once you do, you’ve got your Ellsworth Kelly goggles on straight. As Kelly himself remarked: “Photography is about seeing in three dimensions and trying to bring it into two dimensions in a way that recalls the third. The process takes place in the mind.”

This comment is also pertinent to Doorway Shadow, Spencertown. A rhombus-shaped shadow falls from peaked boards onto a plywood sheet, where knots and grain gleam as if hand-polished. Their indexical texture is at odds with the flat black angle that dives to center. Seeing the world through the mind’s eye of Kelly’s camera offers an opportunity to understand a great artist’s work more fully.

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March 12 to April 18, 2015
210 Tenth Avenue, 6th Floor (between 24th and 25th streets)
New York City, 212 691 6565

In her resplendent second solo show with Edward Thorp, of paintings made in the last two years, Judith Simonian demonstrates a genius for color, texture, and the exploration of spatial conundrums. Twenty canvases, worked in acrylic, range in size from a mere eight by ten inches to as much as six foot by five with subject matter that cycles between categories of comparable breadth. There are what I’d describe as optical-illusion still lifes, domestic interiors, travel theme — on earth and in space, and nature studies. It’s a roomy, mixed bag of themes.

In Snow Cone (2014), a good-sized work at 46 x 64 inches, figure-ground elements add up to the representational suggestion of a cake wedge — an illusion enhanced by a bright triangle of frosting at image center, behind which a brightly hued, roughly textured yellow background seems to throw the cake’s decorated layers, and the lower third of the painting, into shadow. The pedestal of a cake stand can also be discerned, where its elliptical silver platter appears to hover over a tabletop. This metaphor of the cake wedge simultaneously alludes to “slicing” and “layers,” terms familiar to most anyone who works with imagery in the online environment. In the physical studio, Simonian often employs collage, in techniques where “slicing” and “layers” are quite literal.

Collage can be seen to contribute to the optical illusions of Fruit on Blue Table (2013). Both paintings, along with others such as In the Rapids and Red Fish Bowl, while accomplished works in themselves, come across as studies where the artist hones her craft for more ambitious undertakings, such, for instance, as Patio Lounge Chairs (2014), a gorgeous tour-de-force of abstraction and illusion. A deep pool where goldfish swim dominates the foreground, while the eponymous chairs, in brilliant vermillion, there are almost hidden behind a black umbrella, which decently shields from view a couple enjoying the tropical ambience of a summer afternoon. The evocation of plant life, a humid atmosphere, and a cooling body of water all induce the viewer to read much more into the painter’s marks than might actually be there.

“Fleshy Pink Room” (2014) is a six-foot-high painting whose lighting effects, layering, and pink and green tones bring to my mind the mannerist master Jacopo Pontormo. A forbidding foreground barrier keeps us from walking straight in; instead, we must find a way to float over a lime green tongue in its groove on our way to the room’s pink flesh, as it basks in the glow of a far blue entryway. This painting exemplifies Simonian’s well-justified reputation as an intuitive painter. To quote from the press release, the artist enjoys turning “colorful scraps of trash” into pictorial compositions that approach “near collapse.” In fact, the bombardment of sensory data that we continuously take in from the world would collapse us without the mind’s capacity to knit it together. Simonian’s paintings suggest the contradictory resilience and fallibility of this process. In so doing, they knit luscious pictorial fields that tease cognition, along with the senses.

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January 7 to February 5, 2012
165 Orchard Street, between Rivington and Stanton streets
New York City, (917) 721 4539

Leor Grady’s solo exhibition at Y Gallery’s intimate Project Room features sculpture, painting, and 2-dimensional works on fabric and paper. Titled “Objects of Affection,” the installation moves between metaphor and symbolism in tones of white and gold. All works were made by hand, a point that underscores the meditative quality of Grady’s practice.

In one key piece, the famous phrase of Hillel’s, “If I’m not for myself, who will be?”  is embroidered in Hebrew characters on a man’s handkerchief. Their spacing is such that the quote might also read as “Without a mother, who will be for me?”.

The single painting in the show is dominated by an amorphous pool of gold enamel that signifies, for the artist, the shimmering surface of the Sea of Galilee. The painting’s motif resonates with an out-sized, gold-painted paper boat nearby, positioned so as to list downward on the gallery’s blind stair. Sagging under its own weight, imperfections at the structural folds add to its poignant condition.

By contrast, the geometry of a concrete “house” on wheels is authoritatively correct. A dense cube topped by a separately cast triangular solid, its diminutive size and reductive form initially suggest the fantasy of stability and safety that a house represents. But inevitably, this work takes on a more specific allusion to the dilemma of settlements on land disputed by Palestine and Israel, partly through the work’s implacable yet moveable aspect, but also because of its proximity to Grady’s embroidered maps of the Dead Sea. In these works on paper, mirrored forms face each other with lashed and dangling threads, knots, and needle-holes. Endlessly combative, warlike and intimate, this is embroidery as existentialism. “If I am not for myself….”

Meanwhile, pillows stacked within a gallery niche simultaneously contrast with the concrete house and connect with the wilting boat. Creating a wall, they block the Project Space’s street entrance and instigate richly contradictory references – to sand bags, bedding, dreams, sexual innuendo. If a military theme lurks within this show, the pillows complicate matters in concert with other works’ allusions to deep time and questions of selfhood.

Grady, who was born in Israel to Yemeni parents, has been New York-based since 1996. As this solo installation and his participation in recent group shows suggests, his approach to conceptual art relates to that of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Zoe Leonard, and Barbara Bloom. Respecting the differences between these artists, a common thread grounds their emphasis on the personal and the political, which unmistakably relates to social activism, yet leaves the viewer utterly free of didacticism.

Grady’s practice also resonates with Gedi Sibony’s in its subtlety and veiled political content. But whereas Sibony is ingeniously subversive, Grady is emotionally engaging, even endearing. One of the most interesting things about “Objects of Affection” is the way Grady’s installation gains momentum toward collective meaning, delivering a velvet punch that is simultaneously forthright and poetically confrontational.

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June 10 – September 2, 2010
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid

New York City endured a near-death experience during the 1960s, and the steep decline of lower Manhattan precipitated the rise of a vibrant underground culture. The City began to acknowledge the pioneering efforts of artists to create live-work spaces or lofts within this wasteland of residential and commercial buildings in the 1970s by rezoning them as “mixed use”, albeit in piecemeal fashion and with much rancor. Within a decade, the empty lots and ruined real estate property that had incubated a wealth of sinewy conceptual art were transmuted into Soho gold.

If “mixed use” as a real estate term inspires this show’s outward theme, it implicitly applies to “artistic practices and strategies” in transition over a four decade period, as well. Curators Lynne Cooke and Douglas Crimp present a considerable array of films, photographs, texts, and sound installations by 40 artists spanning several generations. The city as performance space or experiential sphere of creativity becomes the unifying frame around projects of wildly differing intention, and the show often suggests links between specific works by artists who might otherwise appear to have little in common.

For example, several of Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills from 1978 (#25, #60, #83, #63), hang near Barbara Probst’s Exposure #9, New York City, Grand Central Station, 12.18.01, 1:21 pm from 2001. Probst’s six-part work features a female model, photographed simultaneously from six distinct points of view. Clearly, Sherman’s and Probst’s concerns, conveyed through distinct conceptual and technical approaches to picture-taking and picture-making, are strikingly different and decades apart. Yet the juxtaposition of these selected works highlights a common interest in the instability of photographic verity, set right in the midst of some of New York’s most familiar public spaces.

By contrast, photography as a straightforward accomplice to performance pertains in Babette Mangolte’s Woman Walking Down a Ladder from 1973. The ladder in question is that of a rooftop water tower. Contact sheets reveal a figure descending perpendicular to the ladder with no visible sign of a harness or guide wire. At close range, we see that she wears a nondescript blouse and skirt, while her face is obscured by her hair. At medium distance in profile, her descent appears even more precarious against the void of sky; and she is a mere speck when the photographer pulls back to reveal the full height and might of the building on which the water tower is delicately perched.

New York City’s rooftop water towers are also featured in Bernd and Hilla Becher’s 15-part array of fine black and white photographs from 1988. Echoing a 19th century trend to assemble photographic archives of like things for civic records, the Bechers adopted a similar methodology in the 1960s to make comparative studies of decaying industrial architecture in Europe and the US. Their systematic approach dovetailed with strategies of conceptual art being forged in that era, and the Bechers’ typological studies of water towers, gas tanks, blast furnaces, and other industrial relics have been highly influential.

Typologies abound in Mixed Use, Manhattan. From John Miller’s enigmantic series Clubs for America (1993) to Moyra Davey’s Newstands (1994), the streets of New York are teeming with similar things made unique by happenstance and style as much as wear and tear. The windows of urban buildings are the common denominator for Jennifer Bolande’s Globe series, which features blue metallic orbs with maps that are forever out of date. In a different key, Gordon Matta-Clark’s deadpan, black and white Window Blow-Out from 1973 depicts an abandoned building whose grid of broken windows is animated by a lone dog’s vigil.

The line between typology and series is porous. They synchronize neatly in William Gedney’s 1960s views from his apartment window. Entertaining a play between the static camera and everyday movement in the world beyond, his window is the theme for a set of variations. James Welling employs much the same strategy in Eastern Window #1-24 (1997-2000) except #8, 11, 12, 23. A chair on the neighboring rooftop changes position; light alters the buildings’ forms; the moon changes phase and disappears. Welling’s introduction of occasional color in this black and white world of ideas is mildly startling.

If still photography lends itself easily to urban typologies, photography on the move offers other possibilities. Sound and physical movement predominate in David Hammons’s video Phat Free (1995), in which a hand-held camera follows a performer kicking a can down the street. In David Wojnarowicz’s well-known series, Arthur Rimbaud in New York (1978-1979), a figure wearing a crude paper mask of the poet’s face traverses Coney Island, Chinatown, and the deserted streets of the West Side, enacting the artist’s taste for romantic irony and despair. With less drama, the painter Christopher Wool would photograph streets at night while walking home from his studio, studying incidental marks.

Images of the bygone West Side Piers stir piquant nostalgia for many New Yorkers of a certain age. In all their decrepit glory, the Piers were a magnet for aesthetic prowess as well as sexual trysts. From 1975-1986, Alvin Baltrop photographed their interiors and exteriors, observing cruisers, lovers, and yawning empty space in exquisite detail. When Gordon Matta-Clark cut an enormous, half-moon aperture at the far end of one pier, Baltrop noted its impact on the huge space as sublime cathedral or camera obscura. Peter Hujar’s haunting nocturnes of the Canal St. Piers, from 1983, submerge their secrets in velvet hues of photographic black. What’s left of them in 2010 amounts to jagged rows of decaying piles, as shown in Emily Roysdon’s gray-hued photographs, The Piers, Untitled (#2-5).

In 1971, the Piers were the site of an ambitious series of conceptual art pieces by 27 artists (all male, as it happened). Curated by Willoughby Sharp, photographed by Harry Shrunk and Janos Kender, the consistent format and high quality of the small, gelatin silver photographs establishes a collaborative framework within which each artist had his own word-and-image solo. Because the works were installed in a long corridor of the museum, viewers walking past the sequential imagery might experience it like stills from short silent movies. Vito Acconci, for example, spars with a reputed stranger who threatens to push him off the pier. Besides Acconci, the list of illustrious participants included John Baldessari, Keith Sonnier, Michael Snow, Daniel Buren, George Trakas, and others.

In quite another register, Charles Simonds, Gabriel Orozco, and Bernard Guillot found in the city places for reverie and magical thinking. Simonds, a sculptor, made a 16mm film called Dwellings in 1972. With children as his witnesses in blighted neighborhoods on the Lower East Side, Simonds uses tweezers to move tiny clay bricks into wall crevices. He explains that he’s creating miniature cities for “Little People” who will be moving in soon. (Simonds’s ephemeral archaeology eventually found its way into permanent niches, such as the stairwell of the Whitney Museum). Orozco’s color photograph, Isla en la isla (1993), also plays with changes in the cityscape’s scale. Wooden planks and other debris lean against a traffic barrier in a parking lot beside the Hudson River, mimicking the World Trade Center buildings and piers along the skyline due south. Guillot, in a series of photographs titled Orpheus and Eurydice from 1977, reinvents a mythic tale of tragic love, death, and descent into the underworld as photographic views of forlorn territory on the West Side.

The richness and variety of these projects is daunting. They attest to the elasticity of photographic and cinematic media as co-conspirator to artistic vision, be it performance, conceptual art, architectural intervention, socio-aesthetic political commentary, memento mori, extreme ballet, found object, available view, topographic documentation, lyrical serial existentialist anarchy, rough play. Cumulatively, the show exudes an inviting sense of spontaneity and hard-won freedom. I was particularly moved by Glenn Ligon’s harrowing, 20 wall-panel narrative of his residences, from his youth in the Bronx through a series of legal and illegal sublets early in his career, to, more recently, a stable situation in a condominium. Ligon’s true story is a bracing reminder of the anarchic forces of city real estate and the crucial, double role of the home-studio environment in an artist’s life.

It should be remembered that many of the works in Mixed Use, Manhattan were not seen publicly at the time of their creation. Some of the work on view came to light only through the efforts of dedicated curators and/or the survivors of loved ones. With equanimity and to fascinating effect, the curators have conjoined informal, private, and underknown works with widely known icons. Despite the real estate theme, as I see it this exhibition primarily draws inspiration from artists of the 1960s and 1970s who intentionally kept their work out of mainstream systems, creating alternative avenues for reception and distribution. A long perspective on the sensibility they set in motion can be found here, in disparate works that embrace plurality and resist categorization, revealing quixotic and tantalizing whispers of desire.

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In & Out of Amsterdam: Art & Project Bulletin, 1968-1989
July 15 – November 9, 2009

11 West 53rd Street
New York City, 212 708 9400

Since it emerged in the 1960s, Conceptual art has seldom left viewers on the fence. Detractors are deaf to its dry wit, wary of its subversive cerebral bent.  Often, Conceptual art wasn’t really built to last, but as a movement it most certainly has endured, perhaps because it launched a way of thinking about society, mobility, and culture that subsequently inspired generations of artists. Early proponents foresaw that Conceptual art would alter the status of an art object and impact networks of promotion, distribution, and provenance in the art world at large.

In 2007 MoMA acquired a significant cache of Conceptual art from Geert van Beijeren and Adriaan van Ravesteijn, founders of the Amsterdam gallery Art & Project. Dedicating the gallery to new art of their time, van Beijeren and van Ravesteijn presented exhibitions from 1968 until 2001; they also published the influential Art & Project Bulletin from 1968-1989. Their gift of 230 works to the Modern spans no less than five curatorial departments. Conceptual art thus enters an interesting phase of cross-disciplinary art historical assessment. No doubt this process will burnish the museum’s credibility as one of modern art’s key authorities even as the works themselves add depth to the museum’s holdings.

In & Out of Amsterdam inaugurates MoMA’s 21st-century institutional perspective on Conceptual art.  A two-part exhibition, the 3rd floor Special Exhibitions Gallery features films, photographs, drawings, sculptures, and installations, while the Paul J. Sachs Prints and Illustrated Books Gallery displays the entire run of Art & Project Bulletin. Curator Christophe Cherix, a specialist in printed art of the 1960s and 1970s, joined the museum’s Department of Prints and Illustrated Books in 2007. His judicious choice of works honors the movement’s diverse and combinatory media, including performance.

At the press preview someone asked, Why the focus on artistic activity in Amsterdam?  Cherix, a trim, almost ethereal presence, noted several reasons. Amsterdam had unusually progressive social policies for the times. Government subsidies were available to artists regardless of their nationality. The city itself represented a long tradition of international trade and commerce. But most of all, young artists thrived in an atmosphere of congenial support and inspiration. During the 1960s, Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum collaborated with other museums, notably Moderna Museet in Stockholm, to mount pioneering exhibitions of global trends in innovative art. Following their lead, Art & Project played an increasingly influential role in a network of galleries across Europe and America that showcased the cross-fertilization of artistic ideas shared by Conceptual art, Minimalism, Pop Art, Fluxus, and lesser-known movements.

Indeed, the complexity of the period borders on pandemonium. To sort things out, Cherix highlights Conceptual art’s beginnings by narrowing the curatorial focus to ten European and American artists’ activities in this one crucial location. The artists include Bas Jan Ader; Stanley Brouwn; Hanne Darboven; Jan Dibbets; Ger van Elk; Gilbert & George; Sol LeWitt; Charlotte Posenenske; Allen Ruppersberg; and Lawrence Weiner. Because these artists quite literally sought to depart from traditional studio art and conventional modes of presentation in art institutions, the theme of travel unites their disparate approaches. All of them participated in key exhibitions in Amsterdam during the years from 1960 to 1976, no matter where they were based.

Indicating the centrality of Amsterdam’s location for Conceptual artists’ travel routes, Jan Dibbets’s “Project for Art & Project Bulletin 15” from 1969 features four commercially produced maps marked by the artist in ball point pen. From a local city map to increasingly large portions of the world, Dibbets charts routes within Amsterdam as well as between Amsterdam and major capital cities in Europe, then overseas to the USA (Los Angeles as well as New York). Sol LeWitt created map works as well, cutting an irregular polygon of Amsterdam in “Area of Amsterdam between Leidseplein, Jan Dibbets’s House, and Kunstijsbaan Jaapeden” (September 4, 1976). Stanley Brouwn took inspiration from the simple act of walking through the city. In 1960, a work titled “Steps of Pedestrians on Paper” is just that–drawings formed as someone’s shoe left its mark on pieces of plain paper he scattered on the ground. For his series “This Way Brouwn,” the artist would ask pedestrians to draw directions to a nearby destination, then preserve the artifacts as art.

While such works play on the inherent abstraction of maps and diagrams, they also suggest that travel was a rich metaphor for Conceptual artists. In their quest for an unbounded studio practice, they dissolved restrictions on perspective, gravity, time, and space. Sculpture, released from its pedestal, was unconstrained by any sort of plinth. The entire world surface could serve as a ground for performance and time-based works, for social interactions such as those initiated by Brouwn. Gilbert & George conceived of themselves as living sculpture. Charlotte Posenenske’s six films of the Dutch landscape seen from a moving car suggest an ambient blur of agriculture and infrastructure.

Most poignantly, Bas Jan Ader was lost at sea while completing a multi-part piece titled “In Search of the Miraculous”. One learns of the tragedy via wall text in a small room where eighty faded color slides of a small choir click past, accompanied by sweet voices singing sea shanties. Also on display, a thing I truly coveted, was the invitation card for the ill-fated show – a beautifully distressed photolithograph of the artist on his twelve and a half-foot boat. He attempted to sail this fragile yacht across the Atlantic Ocean.

Lawrence Weiner is still one of Conceptual art’s abiding lights. His ubiquitous presence on the international art scene, his bi-continental lifestyle in New York and on his houseboat in Amsterdam, are as legendary as his works. In & Out of Amsterdam features the artist’s ingenious homage to Amsterdam’s open social policies of the 1960s – 1970s. Leading into the exhibition, porthole-like apertures in sheets of opaque mylar are affixed to windows and festooned with the letters “XXX” rendered in the artist’s characteristic graphics. These Xs echo Amsterdam’s ancient logo, the St. Mark’s cross. After Amsterdam legalized the sex industry, “XXX” became indelibly associated with the city’s red light district.

In addition to this installation, Weiner contributes a text “displacement” from 1971. On each of four windows facing East 53rd Street it reads: “IN AND OUT.” “OUT AND IN.” “AND IN AND OUT.” “AND OUT AND IN.” On the acousti-guide, Weiner speaks of this work as an homage to his early life in New York. Viewers of In & Out of Amsterdam should not deny themselves the pleasure of this recording, for Weiner’s voice is deep and hypnotic. The treble-bass purr of his diction adds opulence to his thoughts.

As these mercurial installations, films, and performances indicate, Conceptual art often yielded works of great elegance in novel forms of presentation.  Cherix’s exhibition is eloquent on this point. Sol LeWitt’s subtle “Wall Drawing #109” may evade viewers who pass through the exhibition too quickly. Hanne Darboven’s epic “100 Books 00-00” from 1970 stands out for breadth of conception as well as quiet determination. The nearly blank books, rhythmically opened on plain wooden tabletops supported by sawhorses, allude to forgotten history, landscape, and the mystery of time. Profound or boring? The viewer’s engagement with the work, or not, is the key.

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This film review from June 1, 2009 is artcritical’s TOPICAL PICK FROM THE ARCHIVES in April 2013 to coincide with the exhibition, Ariane Lopez-Huici: PRISCILLE, at Hionas Gallery, 124 Forsyth Street on the Lower East Side of New York, through May 5.

Marilia Destot’s engrossing documentary film on the life and work of Paris- and New York-based, French-born photographer Ariane Lopez-Huici is shot entirely in black and white and structured as a succession of chapters. The Body Close Up offers an in-depth retrospective of Ms. Lopez-Huici’s notable projects from the 1970s to 2008. Ms. Destot, herself a French-born photographer and media artist based in New York, draws a highly personal portrait that succeeds in unveiling sensual and metaphysical currents at the root of the artist’s oeuvre.

The film’s superb editing combines still imagery with Lopez-Huici’s voice-overs, while a specially-composed soundtrack reflects her devotion to music and dance. Initially, the camera pans over a contemporary portrait of the artist seated on a carved African chair. In a confident voice, she attributes her long-standing fascination with art and eros to her upbringing in the Mediterranean, “the cradle of nudity”. She further asserts that she’s proud to be a woman, heir to Mediterranean culture’s focus on the body as the locus of human experience and understanding.

This frank and engaging monologue continues in subsequent chapters. Works described include the early series “Solo Absolu,” “Aviva,” a steamy sequence called “The Lovers,” and numerous other projects carried out in Paris, New York, and Africa. We learn how each project evolved and how viewers responded–elated in some cases, disturbed in others. Imagery is interspersed with critical responses to the work by such luminaries as Arthur Danto, Edmund White, Guy Tosatto, and Carter Ratcliff. Their comments add to the film’s intellectual breadth.

Critics, and Lopez-Huici herself, have associated her imagery with the paintings of Cézanne, Rubens, Ingres; I would add that the artist’s themes of nonconformity and psychology bring Courbet’s nudes to mind, even the late work of John Coplans. But whereas Coplans’s photographs of his own aging body were influenced by a similar fascination with European painting and African sculpture, Lopez-Huici works with non-professional models–people who share her deep regard for the body as a vehicle of the soul’s sensual, transcendent capacity. Cultivating a friendship and a working relationship with her models during the shoot and editing process, sometimes over a period of years, the photographs become a spontaneous record of their artist-performer collaboration.

Thus the film’s live footage of Lopez-Huici and her models at a studio session is important because it brings her working process to life. Having studied film and cinematography early in her career, the photographic series comes naturally. Insight into the relationship between abstraction, the body, and photography drives her to photograph not only what is seen, but also to reveal what is hidden from view. Lopez-Huici belongs to a generation of artists who often placed the body at the center of experimental art forms combining dance, performance art, sculpture, video, and photography. If sexuality and non-conformity are abiding topics in Lopez-Huici’s oeuvre, Destot’s remarkable film asserts that the body’s jubilation, exuberance, and self-acceptance are themes that lie at its heart. It is truly a collaborative documentary.

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Marcel Proust begins his novel In Search of Lost Time with a famously long passage in which the Narrator describes sleep, or more properly, the antics of his imagination, while semi-conscious. When I read this passage for the first time, the image that most struck me was that of the Narrator sitting in an armchair reading a book. He is day-dreaming and also falling asleep, dreaming that he has entered into the world of medieval France – the subject of his book. He wakes and can’t be sure that what he dreamed wasn’t what he read  or even that he is really awake. Suddenly, I became acutely aware of my own tendency to daydream while reading; I too drifted between Swann’s Way and my own here and now. As I adjusted to a state of prismatic awareness, the momentum of the Narrator’s voice carried me along unresisting. Proust’s ability to align the Narrator’s hypnotic, multiple states of consciousness with those of the reader is one of his most impressive skills.

Andy Warhol treats the theme of sleep more literally in his long film, Sleep. But in this case, an attitude of “nothingness” is proposed. Warhol’s boredom and Proust’s frivolity are superficially accessible qualities in their work, attractive and repellent. But they hint at deeper currents of cultural experience than one might at first suppose.

An enterprising comparison between Marcel Proust and Andy Warhol unfolds as a critical tour-de-force in David Carrier’s slim volume, Proust/Warhol. The juxtaposition of these two artists, both mavericks of 20th century art, is highly suggestive once proposed. Their biographies have obsessed professionals and other enthusiasts as much as the multi-faceted and gargantuan output that each produced.

Accomplished as a philosopher as well as an art historian and critic, Carrier reveals that many threads in his own life and work prompted the undertaking of Proust/Warhol. There was a wish to engage with Warhol’s daunting critical legacy on one hand, and his personal experience of Proust’s “involuntary memory” on the other. The ideas that tumble forth draw upon Carrier’s considerable erudition and cross-disciplinary way of thinking.  Proust/Warholis the ice wine of many seasons’ thought.

Acknowledging huge differences between Proust and Warhol, Carrier asserts that a comparative study puts each of them in a new light. His underlying premise is that both Proust and Warhol “develop comprehensive aesthetic theories.” (p 1) Carrier is most interested in demonstrating that the relationship between art and life posed an aesthetic dilemma that each artist resolved, inventively and on his own terms. One can appreciate the outlines of Carrier’s philosophical analysis, disagree with almost every argument within it, yet feel exhilarated by the book as a whole. Carrier’s best point is that Proust and Warhol show us how to live well, with style and imagination, provided that the boundary between art and life is kept permeable.

Read this book in a library where the Humanities Division is not separate from a specialized Art Division. If one is familiar with the wide range of Carrier’s references, the effect may be breathtaking; if not, chasing through a forest of endnotes can lead to exasperation without satisfying illumination of the argument. (Chapter Two, all of 14 pages, is accompanied by 113 notes.) The extensive Bibliography is a resource in itself, and represents a fascinating trawl through intellectual history. As a practical matter, a copy editor’s hand should have made the reading easier.

David Carrier Proust/Warhol. American University Studies: New York, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, Oxford, Wien, 2009. 128 pp. ISBN 978-1-4331-0433-6

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336 pages, 280 black & white photographs, 70 color photographs
$69.95

When the findings of history, a discussion of uses and the reconstruction of story blend with criticism, portrait content, I hope, is enlivened. Still, the narratives within it keep on turning, like the expressions on faces, themselves… (p. 11)

Distinguished critic Max Kozloff navigates a fascinating journey through time and imagery in “The Theatre of the Face: Portrait Photography Since 1900” (Phaidon, 2007). Kozloff asserts straightaway, “I fly my own colours here, as a critic…” (p. 11) Fair enough. But let’s be clear that this is an ambitious work. A lot happened in the 20th Century; much of it was photographed and filmed.

The book’s epic scope is streamlined by its focus on portraiture, while the theatrical motif tethers human interactions, and photographic verity, to the suspension of disbelief. The allusive, elusive phrase, “the theatre of the face,” is natively rich. It prompts the storyteller in the critic: he claims to tell “portrait stories.” Kozloff’s style is close to the personal essay. He narrates in a disarming conversational voice that is skeptical and literary; always penetrating in substance. In fact, Kozloff has written a page-turner.

The Theatre of the Face is carefully structured. Each of the six chapters develops a specific theme as the work of a select group of photographers undergoes nuanced analyses. The six themes interlink and gradually arc over the 20th Century. Occasional references to the 19th Century are pointed and revelatory.

The book’s dual thematic-chronological structure is an excellent organizing principle. It provides an armature on to which the protean dimensions of 20th century photographic practice assume intelligible shape, with no loss of complexity.  Kozloff finds room to discuss portraits made by newly-discovered, historically obscure photographers alongside that of familiar stars of the medium, to everyone’s advantage.

Notably, the author draws upon a fascinating variety of sources. His bibliography designates no less than five categories, which assemble critical and scholarly books that treat photographic portraiture, social science, and history from various perspectives. These categories make an interesting list in themselves: “Historical Backgrounds,” “Genres, Influences, and Phases,” “Self-Portraiture,” “Social Sciences,” and “Studies, Criticism and Surveys of Portrait Photography.” (p. 325-326)

The high production values of the publication itself attest to its serious intent. Profuse illustrations, including many color reproductions of prints that predate the era of color photography, are a welcome asset. So is the generous layout, in which images and text keep pace with each other.

The theme-title of Chapter 1 is Retrospection and Clairvoyance: Portraits of the Early Twentieth Century.  Kozloff opens with a fascinating general discussion of technology at the turn of the century. The times situated things – and people – in a fitful equilibrium between old and new ways. In the author’s words, “The more rapidly society was able to produce and distribute its goods, the more it dislocated a general perception of time. In portraiture, this dislocation gave rise to the impression that people were living in different eras, even though they were all contemporaries.” (p. 70)

For example, early 20th century photographers began to document vanishing customs of local communities, whether they were disappearing in Britain, France, the US, or Peru.  Kozloff characterizes examples of this type of group portraiture, by Sir Benjamin Stone in Britain and Frances Benjamin Johnston in the US, as “sculptural.” Their approach retains elements of 19th century rigidity, be it photographic or class-conscious. He then turns to Edward S. Curtis’s monumental oeuvre, The North American Indian. It too was conceived as a documentary project. Yet because it was realized in the lissome style of Internationalist Pictorialism, the sense of time is ambiguous. What constitutes “vanishing customs,” a “local community,” or even a “document” in  Curtis’s project is never resolved.  Kozloff highlights dynamic subtleties that are more apparent from a 21st century perspective.

In this chapter  Kozloff also makes interesting connections between Agustín Víctor Casasola’s progressive news service and archive in Mexico, finely-limned portraits by Ernest Bellocq taken in New Orleans, and photographers with a reformist bent such as Lewis Hine. For  Hine, industrialization did not bode well for the lives of people, particularly children. The deep empathy toward exploited workers that he portrayed in limpid gelatin silver photographs actually helped change the law. Meanwhile,  Kozloff observes that the Pictorialist style was seductive to cultural celebrities of the day. They commissioned its expert practitioners (Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Alvin Langdon Coburn) to burnish their reputations with smoke and mirrors, as it were. As the chapter comes to a close,  Kozloff notes the rise of Freudian psychology during this era.

The amazing self-portraiture of transgender Jewish photographer Claude Cahun (born Lucy Schwob) is featured in Chapter 2, Introversions of the Self: The Author in the Portrait 1900 – 1935. As a lead-in,  Kozloff notes the advent of the photobooth in 1925. The antics of ordinary people, let loose before its anonymous lens, inspire him to warn, “Artistic self-portraiture is photobooth work raised to a new power, not so much to disavow the pictorial report as to misdirect it.” (p 77 – 79)

Futurists, Bauhaus-ians, Lotte Jacobi, André Kertész, Egon Schiele, and other artists who undertook photographic self-portraiture come under  Kozloff’s scrutiny, and round out his discussion of its vagaries and infelicities. He seems mistrustful of artists in their multiple roles of performer, photographer, and author – or rather, “unreliable narrator.” Perhaps he feels that they leave nothing much for him, the critic, to do. At least he acknowledges their bravery near the end of the chapter with the comment, “Of the various psychological ingredients in general portraiture, anxiety sometimes has a share. In self-portraiture, by contrast, that emotion is often escalated into fear.” (p 99) The theme of fear and self-portraiture returns, much amplified, in the last chapter.

Kozloff is an incisive guide to the rise of the mass-produced “public image” during the gravest period of the 20th century. He demonstrates some of the mechanisms of propaganda in Chapter 3, Shades of Valour: Portraiture and the Making of History, 1930 -1945. Photo-illustrated magazines were designed in part to overcome language barriers. Cheap, widely distributed, and eagerly consumed, they helped populations struggling to achieve basic literacy acclimate themselves to modernity’s vast proportions and mechanization. When the worst news of World War II became public, magazines such as Life and even Vogue conveyed the horrors visually through photo-journalism.

While photographic media took on wide utilitarian scope and became a prominent feature of 20th century culture, fine art portraiture continued apace. In Chapter 4, The Sander Effect: Portraiture and the Exposure of the Masquerade,  Kozloff is really at his best. The catalyzing element for this theme is August Sander’s encompassing project, People of the Twentieth Century (Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts), initiated during the 1930s and posthumously completed in 2002.  Kozloff contextualizes this project alongside the work of lesser-known portraitists such as Richard Samuel Roberts and Mike Disfarmer in the US, Jenny de Vasson in France, and acutely observes:

They belonged roughly to the same late-nineteenth century generation. As a matter of course, they took pictures with outdated equipment in conservative locales and were slow to adapt to the twentieth-century environment of fleeting manners and moods. These portrait photographers were in transit between two modes of seeing: the older one which they knew and a more spontaneous approach which they had not mastered… the irresolution lends their imagery… a remarkable pungency. (p 180)

Sander’s approach to portraiture cast a long shadow over 20th century portraits to come. Not only was it quasi-scientific, almost statistical – it was beautiful, mysterious. Irving Penn’s work reflects its influence, as  Kozloff discusses in a commentary that no fan of  Penn should miss. Richard Avedon and Diane Arbus are characterized as distant heirs to  Sander’s portrait style, as well.

Taking group portraiture in yet another direction, the theme of Chapter 5 is Insiders and their Cultures: Portraits of Difference, 1970 – 2000. Once again,  Kozloff excels at sketching a world backdrop. In brief, the Cold War reigned while alienation splintered communities in developing countries as well as industrialized ones, and photographers were witness to the ground level effects on people’s lives. Bill Owens’s observation of domestic suburban life compares well with similar studies by Martin Parr, in California and Britain respectively.  Kozloff highlights the self-mocking undertones of celebrants in Neal Slavin’s portraits of eclectic social clubs in Britain, as well as Cristina García Rodero’s depictions of religious cults in Spain. His longer treatments of Graciela Iturbide and Sebastião Salgado explore themes of estrangement and exile, community and activism, often vividly portrayed as instances of personal resistance. These themes are also germane to  Kozloff’s discussion of portraits by Josef Koudelka and notable lesser-known photographers. Mary Ellen Mark is thoughtfully characterized as a portrait photographer who “turns clichés into quandaries.” (p. 253)

Twentieth-century photographic portraits operated against the backdrop of modernism, a conditioning that was both anti-naturalistic and highly conceptual. (p. 10)

Themes of fear, creativity, and infelicity, which  Kozloff explored in relation to artists’ self-portraiture in Chapter 2, are revived in the penultimate Chapter 6, From Celebrities to Nonentities: Portraiture, Beauty and Death, 1980 to the Present.  Kozloff’s mood does not brighten in this era, one in which the portrait as well as the artist’s self-portrait attained five-alarm intensity. Balancing the enigma of personality against that of photography’s dark box had become a tricky business with high stakes by that point. Works by Peter Hujar, Robert Mapplethorpe, Cindy Sherman, Yasumasa Morimura, Lucas Samaras, Tibor Kalman, Thomas Ruff, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, and others are treated with appropriate urgency and dignity.

Yet  Kozloff is not really on their side. Many of these artist’s portraits create multi-layered syntheses geared for a sophisticated audience fattened on visual culture. They are entertaining in a serious way, drawing upon avant-garde theater, icons of art history, cinema, and performance art simultaneously. Just as the theatrical motif seems to be peaking, Kozloff is unaccountably despairing. His tone becomes almost despondent as he contemplates composite  portraiture by Nancy Burson and William Wegman later in the chapter.

The ambitious scope and human focus of The Theatre of the Face create a memorable journey through 20th century portraiture. As  Kozloff observed in the Introduction:

The interior being or soul of Victorian citizens had been considered, in public at least, as a unified and indivisible consciousness, shaped by class, racial, and ethnic stereotypes… Our modern communication outlets have redefined the personal – and the private – as a kind of spectacle to which unsorted viewers expect access as a matter of course… p 8

As the 19th Century closed, a sea-change in human sensibility coincided with photography’s gradual rise and steady penetration of world culture. For an upcoming generation, photographic media, whether moving or still, creates a collective sense of who exists. Still, faces shine.  Kozloff’s true subject in The Theatre of the Face is the energetic human soul – photography being a beacon of its tilts and whirls through time.

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May 10 – June 16, 2007

Arthur Ou is a Taiwan-born artist whose concerns include the legacy of modernist art and photography’s predominant role in visual culture. Although Mr. Ou earned an MFA in photography at Yale in 2000, he is perhaps best described as a multi-media artist rather than a photographer per se.

The cross-references in Mr. Ou’s current solo exhibition, “To Preserve, To Elevate, To Cancel,” are elusive yet interlocking. The show presents not only black and white photographs, but also a full-scale replica of a fireplace designed by modernist architect Marcel Breuer. Small niches among the white bricks hold four white cast porcelain vessels from the artist’s series “Double China.” From a distance, these delicate sculptures resemble small plumbing fixtures, but they are actually based upon vases and incense pots of various types. As sculpture, the coupled forms intersect at odd angles.

East-west themes are also featured in a series of finely printed photographs depicting landscapes and set-up still-life. Mr. Ou’s largest and most ambitious photographs, measuring 42” x 51” framed, were shot at Mirror Lake in the volcanic caldera zone of Yellowstone National Park. The artist floated small ink paintings of Far Eastern landscapes on the water’s surface. As pictures, they bring the representational systems of eastern drawing and modernist gelatin silver photography together, inconclusively, using the post-darkroom Piezo print process.

Meanwhile, several smaller photographs entitled “Earthworks” depict earth mounded on wooden pedestals. (Inexplicable dark shapes hover in the silvery background.) Mr. Ou, who constructed these tabletop still lifes, makes a titular reference to outdoor Minimalist “Earthworks” sculptures of the 1960s and 1970s. At the same time, they refer to an ancient Far East tradition wherein fantastically shaped rocks were brought from the wild into the studio for contemplation of nature’s forces and forms.

The show also includes a wall relief worked in cut paper, displayed in a plexiglas case. It spells out the exhibition’s title, “To Preserve, To Elevate, To Cancel.” This phrase is an English translation of the German concept “aufheben,” which 20th c. cultural critic Walter Benjamin updated from Hegel’s 19th c. philosophy of history. Out with the old, in with the new – to put it simply. For Benjamin, the burning crucible of modernism in war-torn Europe was a fearsome threshold to an unknown future. His texts survived; he did not.

In retrospect, the dislocation of people and things at the dawn of the 20th c. was a foretaste of globalization. For Mr. Ou, the legacy of modernist art, even with Benjamin’s and Breuer’s help, presents an ambiguous model. Technology, design, and photography are waking dreams in 21st c. daily life. As much as Mr. Ou’s fascinating show explores east-west themes and transitory visions of reality, its enduring message is the migration of ideas through art.

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