September 16 to October 24, 2015
525 West 19th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212 727 2070

Clothes cascading from a washing machine, with the compositional grace of court drapery.The world upside down from the perspective of a baby held by a man with a beer in his other hand, her arms and legs flared out in joy. Men’s limbs packed abstractly into a picture frame as a hand rummages inside red shorts.

The imagery of Wolfgang Tillmans is deceptively artless. There are over 100 new works in his show and most could be shown with his work of 20 years ago with no break in style. Within his parameters, however, he constantly tests ideas about photography all the while documenting friends and his immediate environment one moment, activist and gay subcultures the next. In times like our own when lifestyles and personas are so carefully mediated and “curated”, all awkwardness edited out, Tillmans’ quiet insistence in framing content that is gritty, quotidian, or overlooked becomes a bulwark against slick image control.

Tillmans’ first published photographs, of Hamburg nightlife, came out in the British magazine i-D in 1988, a moment when hierarchies of art world, fashion and magazine cultures were being redefined. (Damien Hirst’s Freeze exhibition also happened in 1988, for instance, as artists sought to sidestep the art establishment). i-D magazine was started by former Vogue art director Terry Jones; intrigued by the punk scene, he wanted a forum that reflected street fashion and genuine youth culture. i-D’s acknowledgement of diversity and idiosyncratic beauty were expressed through its photography and design choices and it became a precursor to European ‘anti-fashion’ magazines such as Purple Prose and, in their early years, Self Service and The Face. This ‘realist’ aesthetic was refined by photographers Corinne Day, Jurgen Teller, Terry Richardson, David Sims, and Nigel Shafran, many emboldened by the fearless work of Nan Goldin and Larry Clark in the US and Araki in Japan.

Though Tillmans had been influenced earlier by northern British bands and the sophisticated album covers of Peter Saville, the new ‘realism’ had seeped into music and magazine culture as Tillmans night clubbed and studied at the Bournemouth and Poole College of Art and Design in the UK between 1990-1992. It is significant after only eight years he became the first photographer and non-British artist to win the prestigious Turner Prize.

Tillmans understood early the need for the avoidance of closure. Each image is a result of micro decisions, from “how would I take a picture of this?” to making a final edit that is not too easy or familiar, and appears to contribute to his hidden compositions that often have a slow reveal. He restlessly recontextualizes his work, each installation constituting, in itself, a separate art piece, the exhibition a labor of relationships between architectural space, images and scale. At his Zwirner show there is a photograph of presentation in progress, studio still life, a, 2013, with large prints covering walls, but then unexpectedly smaller pictures high, creeping up to the ceiling en masse like a colonizing army of ants. Tillman’s makes no distinction between his work appearing in a magazine spread, commercial gallery or fine art museum. Prints are unframed, taped or pinned to the walls. From the outset he used context as a tool for his own ends, ignoring preset rules about how photographic work should be presented or given value. His career has also straddled the divide between analogue and digital photography with remarkable integrity and grace, which this show now emphasizes.

Tillmans lives and works between London and Berlin, and the sensibilities of both cities inform his vocabulary. Tender, candid, intimate portraits of friends and their abstracted body parts, still lives of fruits, or activists in gritty streetscapes are all shot frankly, often in overcast, northern light. But he works hard to make the audience work too. With Patti Smith, Glastonbury, 2015, we see domed camping tents under the grey festival sky and it takes time to figure out that the distant angled projector screens filled with Smith’s face are her oblique portraits.

In Simon, Sebastian Street, 2013, is a portrait of one of his closest friends whose knowing gaze is directed at the camera. The image is so low key it is hard to figure out what the pull is, why it is compelling. Only a study of the elements around him reveal that the lights above his head and the lines of the table radiate from a vanishing point that ends at the eyes, giving the compositional aura of a Renaissance saint. We revisit other old friends of the artist, Alex and Lutz, who in another i-D magazine story from 1992 appeared refreshingly raw and liberated sitting semi-naked in trees with long, open PVC coats. Twenty-three years later they look at us in Alex and Lutz, Hindenmithstrass, 2012, with the same unabashed matter-of-factness and close cropped hair, the past co-existing seamlessly with the present.

Different from Tillmans portraits are the exploratory and process driven ‘Silver’ series, which reveal his imaginatively technical side. These are experiments with the alchemy of photography where residue and silver particles are re-photographed, or alternatively left physically on top of the image, expanding concepts of photography as image or object. His photograph as object would have sat nicely alongside work in Peter Bunnell’s 1970 landmark show ‘Photography Into Sculpture’ at MoMa, with exquisite work by late ’60s and early ’70s artists such as hugely influential UCLA teacher Robert Heinecken, who worked outside traditional ideas of photography; Richard Jackson,who used negatives as sculptural forms; and the young Ellen Brooks who re-mixed photography and other materials into new objects.

Tillmans is an outlier, very different from the previous generation of German photographers like Thomas Struth, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff and Candida Höfer, influenced as they were by Bernd and Hilla Becher and their attendant high seriousness. Critics accused him, in the 90s, of photographing shallow, vacuous, unimportant subject matter, but there is no corresponding surface dispassion or lack of depth to his work to accord with this criticism. The random, slightly chaotic nature of his compositions captures meaning and tenderness and accumulates in his oeuvre into a form of romanticism. Tillmans has indeed said that photography was a way to deal with “bearing the meaninglessness of everything”.

A striking, large inkjet print has been given pride of place in one gallery. It shows a common garden weed growing between mossy paving stones. The colors are lush and nuanced as only the best printing can give, with rich dark greens and purples. Caught in a ray of diffused light, the weed is erect, plucky and fragile. It describes perfectly Tillmans concerns, that beauty is there right beneath our noses, unexpected and between the cracks. You just have to look.

The post Right Beneath Our Noses: The Beauty in Wolfgang Tillmans appeared first on artcritical.

September 10 through October 19, 2013
71 Morton Street
New York City, 212-255-7872

The tendency among contemporary artists to move toward an interdisciplinary practice has never been greater. There appears to be an anxiety around the idea of executing works in a singular mode for fear of displaying a one-dimensional identity. Today, young artists, perhaps too primed by a business model of success, aspire to diversify their portfolios, become well-rounded innovators, and disseminate their developed and “branded” personal languages as far and wide as possible. However, there are of course, several strong exceptions to this rule, embodied in the work of individual artists, maintaining a steady focus within the general dialogue of specific media. For example, there is currently a movement in photography that advances the conversation around the medium, partially through a combination of conventional concern for formal and technical expertise with an unconventional approach to the conceptual aspect of image-making. Often cited members of this group include Michele Abeles, Anne Collier, Roe Ethridge, Annette Kelm, Elad Lassry, and Eileen Quinlan, each of whom have been featured in the past five iterations of the Museum of Modern Art’s “New Photography” exhibition series. These photographers each skew their chosen subject matter through an ostensibly “objective” lens.

Another photographer who seemingly fits into this widely expansive and now well-established niche is the Los Angeles-based Norwegian Torbjørn Rødland. Yet despite initial superficial signifiers, Rødland’s cryptic pictures are at once more direct and more off-kilter than many of his contemporaries. Specifically, in his coyly refined debut exhibition at Algus Greenspon, the artist displays an amalgamated aptitude for color and composition, but his uncanny awareness of narrative implications via stinted social associations is what gives these photographs their true allure and authority.

The first photograph one encounters is Narrative Stasis (Studio Kabuki) (2008-13), a deadpan shot of an unidentified person dressed in traditional kabuki accoutrement, their gender and ethnicity not quite clear. The work’s title serves as an ironically fitting introduction to this individual exhibition, as well as the artist’s overarching practice—the stylized story is stabilized through disparate chapters, each given their own peculiar swagger. This is also the first of many works reminiscent of film without being bound to film’s narrative powers. A smiling child in a brightly lit cage, a cropped body wrapped in sausage links like a mummy—absurd, juvenile ideas on paper, yet haunting as the stills of an imaginary movie. These cinematic images are evocative of Chris Marker and William Eggleston, whose work similarly begs the viewer to ask “who” and “why?” However, the surreal displacement of Rødland’s photographs keeps them at a distance from his forebears’ more documentary style of image-making.

In Rødland’s work, conception and perception of imagery is often manipulated with equal parts illusion and allusion, offering an unusual dramatic sense and blurring the line between prescription and coincidence, rarely seen in photography or art in general. This is aptly demonstrated in such conceivably unrelated works as Partner, Bathroom Tiles, The Corner, and Thorns. Partner (2008-13) contains two figures—a young Japanese girl awkwardly hugging a cheap Greek bust, their heads together, her biting her lip and looking away, acting the part of a cute stereotype as if she is endorsing something, except without much charisma or a slogan. Bathroom Tiles (2011-13), at first glance, appears to be an uncomfortably sexy photograph—red toe nail polish, wet feet, sterile environment—though upon closer inspection, the feet are not wet from water and soap lather, but rather some unspecified congealed substance, forcing the woman’s left foot’s toes to spread like Dr. Spock’s fingers, invoking a mood that is less seductive than perplexing. The Corner (2008-13) and Thorns (2011-13) are ghostly, black and white composite interior/exterior photos, giving new meaning to the phrase “mirror image.” These paused and poised moments speak to many of the placid yet unnerving 1970s images taken of forced entries, vandalized homes, or wrecked movie lots by the Los Angeles photographer John Divola. Like Divola’s investigations, Rødland here too attempts to hybridize painting, photography, and sculpture with a performative slant, as well as include still-life, landscape, and arguably portraiture all into one flat picture—a gesture one would think to be ridiculously futile and mildly pretentious, but as is the case with Divola it is jarring in it its instinctive, no frills poetics.

Throughout the exhibition, there is a proven consistency in both the lighting and staging of the subjects and the slick production (and post-production) of each of the images, mimicking both current art documentation and high-end advertising, namely fashion campaigns and product placement. This approach suggests a serious conceptual tone with a hint of satire. A work such as Twintailed Siren (2011-13), which depicts an empty Starbucks iced beverage cup precariously placed between a young woman’s smooth, clenched butt cheeks certainly would not look out of place in a DIS Magazine spread, but the surrounding works re-contextualize the starkness and cleverness of this gesture and supplement poignancy to the implicit erotic humor.

The final image of the exhibition, Black Ducati (2011-13) brims with subdued stimulation. Two models are centered in the frame, sitting on a black Ducati motorcycle—one is scantily clad, the other is nude; one is staring at the camera, the other is helmeted and looking down. Both seem to be unsure whether to be enticing, intimidating, or dejected—a savvy counterpoint to the stoic Kabuki portrait which prefaces the exhibition. As an artist, Rødland appears to take pleasure in the covert discomfort derived from slight alterations or deviations from recognizable information, and minor nuances and idiosyncrasies within the photographic presentation of said information. By maintaining a constant and restrained manner of working in contrast to the unfettered range of subject matter he presents, Rødland creates a surprising lag between recognition and cognition. In this way, he proves to not only be interested in the advancement of photography as a medium, but one could also argue, the advocating of a relationship shift in viewing and experiencing. Perhaps this notion alone doesn’t set him apart, but the resulting images do.

The post The New Image: Torbjørn Rødland at Algus Greenspon appeared first on artcritical.

Julie Saul Gallery
May 9 to June 29, 2013
535 West 22nd Street, 6th Floor
New York City, 212 627-2410

Slightly graying hair, a brown tee shirt and a phone cradled between his ear and shoulder provide the only clues to the identity of a young man leaning against the inside of a window that secures him from a plunge to the pavement. The window glass reflects a copper-clad architrave on the building across the street, confirming both the photographer’s position and the elevation. Just below this reflection a telling visual pun is created as the man’s shirt stamps a momentary fossil of woven cotton against the window pane, signifying both his domestic insulation and his ignorance of the camera’s attention.

Arne Svenson’s ingeniously cropped digital photos were presented at the Julie Saul Gallery under the sardonic title, The Neighbors, thus admitting the paradoxical relationship between the artist and the unsuspecting souls that wander through his pictures. Captured without their knowledge by means of a telescopic lens, Svenson’s compositions use these partially viewed individuals to add a sense of arrested intimacy to what would have been compelling visual arrangements on their own. Employing the divisions of window mullions to form compositions that seem constructed of altarpiece panels, Svenson brings a detached formality to the mundane activities of his unsuspecting models. This particular framing device reveals images that bear an uncanny resemblance to paintings.

Whether the product of diffused light combined with sharp detail, or the result of a digital zoom’s grainy texture filtered through New York’s floating grime, the effect gives the subject matter, particularly gathered curtains, the appearance of having been painted in oil. Neighbors #26 (2012) maintains the illusion of a softly brushed mien, reminiscent of Caravaggio’s drapery, contradicted only by the unquestionably photographed neck and chin peeking out from below. The viewer is kept teetering between painting’s tactility and the verity of the lens, triggering rather odd instances of art historical déjà vu. In Neighbors #17 (2012) for example, a partially sunlit teenager in a green rocker, holding a teddy bear on her lap, is restricted to the lower right triangle of the picture, while the upper left triangle is a dark void. Its tenebrism suggests Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Marat (1793), while its precision and muted color recalls the eggshell texture of a William Bailey still life. Svenson appropriates these and other incongruent pictorial conventions with an impressive ease.

The real magic of these effects is that they were unplanned. By being open to visual serendipity, the artist achieved a rare form of conceptual opulence. Though contextually reminiscent of Edward Hopper’s through-the-window voyeurism, the formal properties of Svenson’s pictures share more with the ambiguous mise-en-scène of 16th century Mannerism. Hopper keeps to an audience’s proximity to the subject. Svenson maintains his distance. Stalking his subject from a dark and hidden perch, the raw material is then cropped and trimmed with a cold, aesthetic eye that embraces the inevitable banality. Neighbors #5 (2012) is but a head and hand, rising above the back of a sofa, casually twirling a lock of hair in silhouette against the warm glow of a shaded lamp.

The exhibition received additional attention when it came to light that the neighbors themselves were none too pleased with Svenson’s intrusion on their privacy. Complaints were made; lawyers consulted. And though it does not appear to be an aspect of the project the artist chose to exploit—to be fair, nearly all of the subject’s activities are harmlessly ordinary—the controversy serves as a parable of art as a communal medium. Svenson expresses no less indifference toward his subjects than his subjects express toward their neighbors, who must consciously avert their eyes from oversized glass prosceniums, framing spaces conventionally understood as private.

The post Painterly Voyeurism: Arne Svenson at Julie Saul appeared first on artcritical.

May 19 to June 21, 2013
124 Forsyth Street
New York City, (212) 219-0326

Between the photographs in To the Friends Who Saved My Life at Callicoon Fine Arts floats an uncanny correspondence. Francesca Woodman, the American photographer famously known for her beautiful and evasive black and white self-portraits, is paired in this show with the lesser-known French photographer and writer Hervé Guibert. Both Woodman and Guibert, who share an affinity for exposing the mortality of their subjects, inform the self-effacing, restrained gazes of the other photographers exhibited in the show. Perhaps this restraint, this desire to hold a body as well as hold back, imbues the photographs with a palpable ambivalence, which is echoed in the title of Guibert’s dispassionate account of his experience living with AIDS, To The Friend Who Did Not Save My Life (1990).

The spectral presence of the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and ‘90s retroactively informs the content of many of the photographs. Figures are captured half-turning or obscured as they silently drift past. In the case of Guibert’s Thierry, Amsterdam (1982), a young man’s back is to the camera, refusing the gaze solicited by the photographer-friend to a powerful effect. Vietnamese-born curator, artist, and recent winner of the Hugo Boss Prize, Danh Vo’s photographs of hands as depicted in Untitled (2013) are grasping, but with a limp grip. When placed next to Moyra Davey’s Bottles 11 and 10 (1998), Vo’s hands (which belong to those of a sculpture, but could also be said to belong to those of a corpse) further suggest the slipperiness of not just the empty glass objects, but the slippery instability of the images themselves. The significance of the actual objects, let alone their representation as images, cannot be confirmed by the viewer anymore than Davey’s Bottles can be apprehended by Vo’s phantom hands.

The result of these juxtapositions is disquieting, for it suggests that part of the queer nature of friendship is that the photographer concedes to its conditions without being fully prepared for what comes after, or, fails to come at all. Such noncommittal gestures are harrowingly echoed in Heinz Peter-Knes’s folio box of 36 images, titled very near sighted; but unspectacled (1990-2008). The box, composed of one unedited roll of film, invites the viewer to witness the bookends of process where, for example, an image of an eager museum crowd becomes dispersed among prints that are flared, grey, or just altogether blank and inconclusive. Like Guibert’s Thierry, the images refuse, but they do so in shades that are considerably muted. Rona Yefman’s Mirror and Legs from the project “My Brother and I” (1996-2010) offers a queer counterpoint to the theme of friendship between photographer and model. Whereas Yefman’s project does not disclose who specifically is the gendered subject of these images, the photographs reveal a lively collaboration between a brother and sister, and challenges the conventions that bind family, intimacy, and friendship.

Despite being in the company of what appears to be the artifacts of so many intimate friends, it’s hard not to feel haunted, surrounded by what Guibert would call so many “ghost images.” Such images, arresting as they may be, provoke a kind of violence in the viewer. In Guibert’s book Ghost Image (1996), a meditation on the relationship between photography, memory, and death, his friends keenly observe that it’s unfair for the photographer to be alone in this dilemma, gesticulating, hesitating “whether to tear up the photograph, or to keep it.” Similarly, Jason Simon’s photographs enact the artist-as-curator’s dilemma in two works from his Polaroid collection from 1990-2000, Michele and Simin; these artifacts reveal the difficult task of building an archive that features family resemblances, be they resemblances between strangers, or friends. In this sense, each artist in his or her own pictorial language strives to reproduce their own set of ghost images, so that like Guibert, they may hold on if only just for a little while longer.

To the Friends Who Saved My Life is a show that daringly exploits the fragility of the photograph in order to address how projects of preservation are unavoidably coupled with the despair and joy that accompanies queer friendship. It’s comforting to know that this fundamental human dynamic remains elusive to even the sharpest intellect; as Jacques Derrida asks in The Politics of Friendship (1997), “Friendship, the being-friend—what is that anyway?”

The post Queering Kinship: Hervé Guibert, Francesca Woodman, and Others at Callicoon appeared first on artcritical.